Spider Dance (68 page)

We again wore the cheap wedding rings I’d found, but I felt no more sure of him than any wise bride should be of a real bridegroom.

What grim business, buying babies. Quentin’s face matched the enterprise.

“You’ll have people from the foundling home there to meet us when we purchase each one?” he asked.

“Don’t worry. You won’t be required to handle even one infant. Just dole out the money.”

“I suppose that’s what many a real husband is told on receiving custody of an infant he has no idea is a bartered baby. You have to admit that the unfortunate Hamilton is to
be commended for at least attempting to do the right thing.”

“Perhaps. Yet how could he have accepted his harlot of a mistress as a wife?”

“He meant well, Pink. He tried to be honorable. Few gentlemen of his class would have even considered that. Don’t ridicule him for being deceived. Perhaps he saw this as his last chance at fatherhood.”

“That is so untypical.”

“What? That women can be bad mothers, and men good fathers?”

“That isn’t the way I’ve experienced it.”

Quentin shook his head. “I wonder when you’ll see that all your campaigns for stories are an attempt to redeem your personal past.”

“What a strange thing to say! I’ve never been an overworked shopgirl, or mad, or abducted into white slavery. I’ve never sold a child.”

“But you could have been any of those.” His eyes softened for the first time as he regarded me. “That you aren’t is purely to your credit alone.”

“Alone. I’ve been alone, yes.”

After that, there didn’t seem to be much more to say, or to be said.

But I thought over his words, and wondered if the ills I chased on the streets of New York could be the phantoms of the downtrodden past I’d almost had.

Mother Hubbard held out a scrap of tattered yellow blanket and the red-faced scrap of humanity bawling inside it. Poor mite, the weave was rough on that as-yet-unblemished skin.

Mother Hubbard in her black bonnet and cape seemed a grandmother born, smiling under her white waves of hair.

“That’ll be twelve dollars and not a penny less.”

A wave of strange nausea prevented me from speaking for an instant

During that moment, Quentin counted out the price in two-dollar bills.

The child bawled, sputtered, and coughed in my arms, until I feared it would expire on the spot.

I was aware of an alien helpless feeling. Not that I hadn’t tended and held my several younger siblings, but none had seemed as scrawny and demanding as this.

Quentin surprised me by lifting the featherweight burden from my arms.

“You’d better have your hands free for making notes,” he said softly as we left Mother Hubbard’s crib.

Children . . . dirty, barefoot, rag-clad children, screamed and ran rings around us, reclaiming each cobblestone of the street we left vacant behind us for their crude playground.

“Where are the foundling-home people?” Quentin asked.

I looked around. That eternal screaming and the incessant barking dogs were bringing on the headache.

After we passed the intersection, I recognized a bonneted face quite like Mother Hubbard’s: old, wrinkled, dressed in the fashions of a decade or more past.

“Miss Bly?” she asked, hurrying to relieve Quentin of his ridiculously small burden. “This is one of the sold ones? We’ll keep track of the lot, so you may write of their progress.”

“Write of their progress?” I asked, confused.

This elderly angel in widow’s black smiled. Sadly. “Whether they live or not.”

I gazed at the worn cloth and the already-worn little bud of a face inside it. Red, bawling. Hungry? Or dying?

Quentin pressed a bill into her gloved hand, the face of Franklin. Fifty dollars. “For the child’s care.”

Would it make a difference, that princely donation? Neither of us would likely know.

As the good woman left, I leaned against the dusty red brick of a tenement. “Three more to buy.”

“It’s not the buying,” he said. “It’s the cost of selling. If it’s any comfort, it’s done all over the world.”

It was no comfort.

[The widowed Kate Warne was] a slender, brown-haired
woman, graceful in her movements and self-possessed. Her features,
although not what could be called handsome, were decidedly
of an intellectual cast . . . her face was honest, which would cause
one in distress instinctively to select her as a confidante
.
—AMERICA’S FIRST FEMALE DETECTIVE, 1856,
ALLEN PINKERTON, REMINISCENCES

“Godfrey,” Irene welcomed her spouse when he returned to our suite late that afternoon. “Nell and I are so cross and cross-eyed from reading about people long dead. Where can you take us to dine tonight that will be fresh and interesting?”

“Where can I best win your favor . . . so that you two will ask the favor of me that you have in mind, after your cross afternoon of reading about people long dead?”

Irene’s delighted laughter echoed up to the electric light chandelier.

“Always one step ahead of us poor plodding females. What do you have in mind, husband, dear? After all, it’s
your
brain we’ll be picking at, even if it isn’t on the menu.”

“Irene!” I remonstrated, but I was ignored.

“You aren’t strangers to Delmonico’s, I gather,” he said, including me in the glance he cast around. “I’ve had a talk with Belmont this afternoon. What about the Maison D’Orée? It’s not as famed as Delmonico’s, but more elegant”

“Whatever you say,” Irene said.

Hmmm.

So I found myself considering B. Altman’s best readymade tea gown for dinner that night. We would be a foursome: Irene and Godfrey, and myself. And this Belmont man.

I now realized he was the Rothschild agent here in New York, and thus a colleague of Godfrey’s. I also realized that I was the odd woman out, and would have to serve as Mr. Belmont’s . . . dinner partner.

Ordinarily, I’d have been quite undone by having to make small talk with a figure of old New York society, one of the enormously wealthy Belmonts.

However, tonight I felt more than up to it. In fact, I asked Irene to lend me, for the occasion the one Worth gown she had brought on this voyage, despite my earnest arguments against it.

If Pink wouldn’t stop at luring Quentin to aid her in journalistic enterprises of a mysterious nature, who was I to snub a Belmont?

The gown was fashioned in a spectacular lavender–light green shot silk, velvet-dotted with lilac, with falls of blond lace at the three-quarter-length sleeves and the V-shaped low bodice. Since I had deigned to wear Worth, Irene decided that I must live up to my gown. She lavished all her theatrical effects upon my coiffure and accessories, so I returned to the parlor as Cinderella with a fairy godmother who had an open account at Maison Worth in Paris.

“My goodness, Nell,” Godfrey said, rising in his city-formal black lounge suit at my entrance.

“Your goodness had nothing to do with it,” I sniffed. “I owe it all to Irene’s good credit at Maison Worth.”

He smiled ruefully. “And her good credit it is. Repeatedly. My dear.”

He kissed her cheek as Irene appeared in my blue Liberty of London gown, which she had bought for me.

Irene looked charming in the flowing girlish elegance of a Liberty gown, which relied more on fabric than corseted fit
for its effect, rather like a Kate Greenaway drawing of children’s dress. I, however, looked . . . goodness . . . formidable. At least I was debauched enough to notice.

Irene laid her swansdown cape over my puff-sleeved shoulders. “Mr. Belmont is the key, Nell,” she whispered. “Only he can overcome the advantage Sherlock Holmes has in this situation. He must become sympathetic to our cause. Godfrey he already has much in common with. A feminine persuasion may make all the difference in the rest.”

Perhaps I’d been reading too much about Lola Montez.

I’d actually come to think I possessed a bit of feminine persuasion myself.

This was a night made in fairy land. Godfrey had a Gurney waiting for us: two seats facing each other. We rattled off under the festive line of electric lights bracketing Broadway.

By the time we picked up Mr. Belmont on Fifth Avenue, we had been chattering like children, catching up on each other’s adventures worlds apart.

We grew sober when Mr. Belmont joined us, but by the time we reached Maison D’Orée, we were a festive party again. He was such an urbane and amusing man, though old enough to be my father. Indeed, his son Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont was the man about town in the family now, he said, and quite the favorite at all the society balls and soirees.

He naturally attended to me as we left the carriage for the restaurant, with such discreet aplomb that I was at once both completely at ease and completely myself.

The dining room gleamed like a cabochon ruby. Polished exotic woods of red and purple hue, damask tablecloths, candlelight everywhere. And the food, though exceedingly strange to me, was also wonderfully flavored. Quentin was right. American cuisine surpassed the English and, in my lone and lowly opinion, the French.

After dinner there were exquisite ices. My dining partners resorted to coffee, brandy, and cigars to ruin the enchanting aftertaste, but I was used to such silliness.

Mr. Belmont frowned for the first time that night as he exhaled
a stream of cigar smoke toward the candlelit chandelier above us.

“It’s good that you were here, Godfrey, during that nasty business involving little Miss Vanderbilt.” He glanced at Irene. “And one might even say providential that your wife was responsible for foiling the abduction.”

“Well, obviously,” I said. “It was intolerable that a child be subjected to such an ordeal.”

He smiled at me. “Your protective zeal does you much honor, Miss Huxleigh, but, less obviously, you and your friends’ role in this affair also enhances the Rothschild interests we all have served in our time.”

I was not used to being put on an equal footing with Godfrey and Irene in their Rothschild assignments . . . and with a man like August Belmont! So I said nothing, as I was quite speechless.

“How so, Mr. Belmont?” Irene asked, tapping the ash from the end of her petite cigar with a gesture of exquisite delicacy. “I can’t see that we’ve done anything out of the usual here.”

He laughed at that. “Of course not. Nothing unusual for you! That’s the wonder of it. Many’s the time in Paris I’ve heard Baron Alphonse boast over a glass of brandy, extolling his foresight in winning you three to his service. He is always relating some amazing escapade that you have engineered.”

Irene and Godfrey and I exchanged glances. We had no idea we had so entertained the Baron de Rothschild.

“And now I see why,” Mr. Belmont said, leaning forward. “It’s quite amazing. Mrs. Norton and Miss Huxleigh are in New York and happen to stumble upon a plot to kidnap the daughter of the wealthiest man in America. And you, Godfrey, assigned to godforsaken Bavaria on a matter of necessary but tedious political fence-mending . . . you sense at once—at once!—that you are needed in America and arrive in the nick of time to convince Vanderbilt to trust the matter of his daughter’s kidnapping to you and yours. And then you promptly rescue her. If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed
it.” He eyed us all, eyes brimming with bemusement and laughter. “And the most astounding part is that you think nothing of what you’ve accomplished.”