Spider Dance (72 page)

“Yes,” Irene said, pouting for effect, “he never even got my whole fat packet of letters. They’ve since been forwarded from Bavaria to Paris.”

“So Godfrey won’t have to go back to Bavaria?”

“Hardly. Mr. Vanderbilt told Godfrey that Holmes traced the Bavarian Ultramontanes to a ship departing for Europe yesterday. I imagine the secret services of a number of European nations will be eager to hunt them down. Such remnants of midcentury revolutions are not welcome in any country, including Bavaria.”

“I am certainly glad to have seen the last of them. I doubt they took their Indian companion with them.”

“It’s fearsome what fanatical devotion to a cause, or a religion, can do.”

Irene had been busily sorting the clothes to be left behind into Godfrey’s large carpetbag.

“Let’s take these things to Anna now, before the men return from their last business with August Belmont.”

“What about Sherlock Holmes? Will he be returning to England now, as well?”

“I haven’t the slightest notion. Our paths have thankfully diverged again. It’s good he’s a closemouthed man, for I loathe having my private history known by anyone outside my most intimate circle.”

“You mean Godfrey and myself.”

“Exactly.”

“At least Pink has been mostly kept out of it.”

“Thank God. Are you ready?”

“Just my hat and gloves.” I turned from the mirror near the door. “What was that you just put in the carpetbag?”

“Oh, a small curiosity.” She promptly shut and lifted the bag.

My curiosity was hardly small, but I said nothing, even when Irene refused the services of a baggage boy.

A hansom cab waiting outside soon took us the two dozen blocks to the boardinghouse where Irene’s childhood theatrical acquaintances, those still living, resided. How rigorously New York City was laid out east and west, north and south, except for the great diagonal line of Broadway. London remained a charming maze dating back in places to Shakespeare’s and even Chaucer’s day.

Irene knocked at the ground floor room of Professor Marvel. He opened the door and invited us in, but she said she’d take the clothes up to Anna first.

And that she did, though the full carpetbag bounced against the narrow stair walls all the way up.

Anna’s daughter, Edith, opened the door.

“Mrs. Norton! Miss Huxleigh! Visitors, Mama!”

By the time we’d negotiated the door into the small set of rooms, Anna had come from the back bedroom where a window made her daily sewing a well-lit chore.

I confess that the huge poke bonnet this soft-spoken woman wore still haunted me. It shadowed her features, and coupled with her old performing name of the Pig Lady made me imagine unthinkable deformities.

Edith had grown up with this unusual headdress, however, and took it for granted.

“Wonderful,” Anna exclaimed as she excavated the booty in Irene’s carpet bag. “All new! Of course I can make use of it. Thank you so much.”

She folded the clothes on a rush-seated chair and invited us to sit on a matching pair of the same humble quality.

“If you want tea,” Edith announced, “you’ll have to come down with me to the professor’s. He has the best jams and jellies.”

“I’m sure we can stop there,” Irene said, “for we’re about to leave for Paris.”

“When do you sail?” Anna asked.

“Tomorrow, on the
Alsatia
.”

“Oh, Miss Huxleigh!” Edith tugged on my hand. “I’ll never see you again.”

“Perhaps not.” I never lie to children. “But I can write you, and soon you’ll be able to write me back.”

That seemed to content her. I looked to see that Irene held a small brown book that she’d taken from the now-empty carpetbag.

I knew what the gilt letters on the spine would read:
The Adventures of Lola Montez
. This had been our bible in researching Lola’s life, for the volume contained her autobiography and lectures, as well as a long advertising section in the back for various other books, including some that seemed quite inappropriate.

Irene was paging past the few blank pages in the front to the first one that bore any image and type.

Irene leaned forward to put that page in the center of the bonnet’s direct regard.

“When I was a child around the theater, Anna, a very young child, did you ever see this woman there?”

The image was an engraving made from a photograph of Lola Montez, probably toward the end of her life.

Like most legendary beauties, images of her existed that made one wonder what everyone had been talking about in her day This profile view showed the head and shoulders of a woman with a strong, straight nose and her hair in a curled bob just at ear level and a bit longer in the back. She wore some shapeless gown with a band of elaborate embroidery at the round neckline, not tight against the throat, but certainly not scandalously low. It resembled nothing so much as a nightshirt.

The large, flowing signature “Lola Montez” was below the portrait, and then the publisher’s name in minuscule type. (Perhaps Rudd & Carlton of New York were ashamed of their role in purveying an adventuress’s memoirs, although the contents were rather surprisingly learned.)

The bonnet bent over the page until it seemed to consume the image. Then it reared back.

“Her hair was glossy black, and her clothes were black as well, when I saw her.”

“This is the Woman in Black who visited me as a child?”

The bonnet nodded. “She did more than visit.”

“What more?” Irene asked anxiously.

“Why, she taught you your first dance steps when you were just past being able to walk. She always said you had dancer’s legs, though none of us could see it. She took great joy in you, and you in her. Young as you were, you bounced in time to her humming and singing, and stepped forward when you put your tiny hands in hers.”

Anna’s hand patted the page. “A pity this picture doesn’t show her eyes facing forward. She had morning-glory eyes, so blue you blinked.

“She brought you trinkets and ribbons, and I know she left money for your care to the others. Salamandra and her sister. A pity they are no longer alive. They could tell you more.”

We all kept silent then, for the women had died tragically just as Irene had come to America in search of her origins, taking untold secrets with them.

“Was she my mother?” Irene asked. “This woman? Do you think?”

“Oh, my dear girl, I can’t say. She wished she was someone’s mother, that’s certain. I could sense her sadness, and that she wanted to pass on some of her musical joy to those younger, like yourself. She could have been a widow who’d never had children, whose husband had died in the Civil conflict then raging.”

Anna’s blunt fingertip, callused from handling the needle day in and day out, tapped the name under the photo. “‘Lola Montez.’ I didn’t think she was Spanish.”

“You weren’t the only one,” Irene said with an ironic smile.

Obviously, the name meant nothing to her. Lola’s fame was fading, and in a few more decades would be a minor historical curiosity.

Irene rose, and tucked the book back in the empty carpetbag. We embraced Anna farewell. (The bonnet brushed my cheek, fleeting as the brush of a butterfly. I no longer feared it.

Edith accompanied us downstairs, skipping and chattering. How the child had blossomed once removed from the grim tenement in which we found them!

Professor Marvel was waiting behind his door below. While Edith repaired to the small kitchen to produce her decidedly one-note “tea” (jam and jelly and marmalade on whatever would hold them, including American cookies), Irene wandered to his wall of posters and the like. There we had first learned that Lola Montez might be her mother.

I joined her there.

She stared at the handsome print of the beautiful woman in the Cavalier hat and encompassing black velvet cape. This woman I could see as Irene’s mother. The other, not.

“Lola certainly had many faces,” I commented, reviewing the array of painting and photographs we had found behind transparent tissue protectors in the books about her.

“I think we all do, Nell. She just showed more of them than most people do.”

“I can’t say I detect a resemblance.”

“No? And who has been twitting me about ‘unhappy entanglements’ with foreign noblemen, about carrying a pistol and fighting a duel once, about my riding crop incident at the fitting rooms of Worth, or Lola’s essay into men’s dress when she slipped back into Bavaria to see Ludwig after her expulsion? About my smoking!”

I swallowed, hard. “I meant a physical resemblance. Except for this painting.” I indicated the lady in black velvet.

Irene smiled ironically, and I didn’t know why.

“Do you believe she is . . . was your mother?”

“I still don’t know, Nell, but I know that whoever left me with the variety performers did care about me, and that the Woman in Black, who may have been Lola, was kind to me and other children, as Lola was. However mixed the reviews on her dancing, however tempestuous her temper, she had a
wild and generous heart. I’d rather claim relation to that than the cold calculation of Lola’s own miserable mother. Sometimes we may be better off as orphans.”

I didn’t know what to say to that harsh judgment, but Irene quickly added, rather briskly, as if closing a book. “It doesn’t matter. I’m glad I came to know her better than most of the world ever did. She lived a life she made, as you and I must do today, and in that way she is mother to all women, and men, as she herself said in her rather emphatic dedication to
The Arts of Beauty
, ’who dare to stand up in the might of their own individuality.’”

“Oh. That may apply to you, but I don’t know that I quite do that.”

“I’m afraid you do, rather emphatically.”

Behind us, the professor cleared his throat. “She was a peerless beauty,” he noted.

Irene turned, her eyes bright with amusement and something else.

“I hate to disappoint you, Professor,” Irene said, “but I’ve studied images of this woman in many versions, and this lovely, tranquil, genteel work isn’t a painting of Lola Montez.”

“Ah. No?” He adjusted his spectacles and stepped close, then eyed the cartoon of La Lola in short dancing skirts leaping across the Atlantic from Europe to America. “I suppose any lady pictured carrying a riding crop could have been misidentified as Lola. Still, she is a pretty thing to look at, and I won’t take her down from my wall.”

He glanced at Irene. “You must send me a photograph of yourself. And Miss Huxleigh.”

“Me? Oh, no.”

“An excellent idea,” Irene said. “We’ll have fresh photos made on our return to Paris. Like the late King Ludwig of Bavaria, you’ll have your own Gallery of Beauties, of which Lola Montez is the most famous.”

“Or was.” He took off his spectacles, polished them on a rather grimy handkerchief, and tucked them away. “Fame doesn’t hold, nor beauty. I prefer to view the world through a blur these days; it’s much kinder to my old eyes that way.”

Edith came back with her tiny plates and cups, so the visit finished with us deferring to our hostess and her precocious childish glee.

“If our journey to New York has accomplished one thing worth doing,” Irene mused as we stood outside the boardinghouse, both feeling, I believe, on the teary verge that farewells threaten to push us over, perhaps even a farewell to the Lola we had found here, despite herself, “it’s rescuing Edith and her mother from such dreary poverty.”

Edith and the professor waved good-bye from his front bay window as we went down the steps to the street.

I admit that I viewed the world through a wavy surface of glassine, thanks to unshed tears. When, if ever, would I see any of these people again? I don’t doubt that Irene was similarly afflicted, for she had some reason to think that she knew the name of her mother at last.

We passed the other pedestrians unseeing, unlooking.

Until two of them barreled right into us—probably our fault—then caught our elbows to steady us . . . and rushed us past the corner of the building down a narrow and refuse-cluttered alleyway!

“No!” Irene was shouting. The tears shook out of my eyes in the rude jostling, and I saw her engaged in a tug of war for the carpetbag with a strange man.

Another man had me by the arm and was pushing me up against the brick wall, keeping me from aiding Irene.

“Let go of me, you cad!” I used my free hand to work loose my steel hat pin. I glanced at Irene. The other man was attempting to hit her with some sort of small club!

I took a deep breath and drove my hat pin into my attacker’s serge-covered upper arm.

He screamed and pulled away from me, taking my best jet hat pin with him.

That left me unarmed.

I heard my chatelaine jingle as I rushed toward Irene and the other robber.

If she’d just let go of the empty carpetbag, we’d be rid of these thieves.

And then I realized . . . Lola’s book was inside. Few copies remained. She’d never relinquish it, and never even stop to think why.

So I fell upon the other villain and kicked him viciously in the ankles. Then I wrenched the small scissors off my chatelaine and began jabbing it into whatever of his skin I could see, which was his hands and neck.

He too began screeching.

Footsteps pounded toward us from the street. Passersby had mistaken the scream of my first victim for a woman’s cry.

I glimpsed several men of the business sort and then they surrounded us.

“Ladies! Are you all right?”

“Here’s your bag, ma’am.”

“The cowardly dastards! They’ve run right through to the other street.”

“We’ll fetch a cab.”

In five minutes we were ensconced in a hansom, my hat on my lap, for it wouldn’t stay on without a pin. Irene had the carpetbag perched on her knees like a child.

Our gallant rescuers had paid the fare back to our hotel.

So many had offered to escort us back in another cab that we would have had a parade arriving at the Astor House Hotel.

The driver slapped his reins and we were trotting back home, which is what one regards a hotel where one has lodged for a matter of weeks rather than days.