Spider Dance (9 page)

“I’ve slipped the address and telephone number of my hotel into your pocket, in case you should need me.”

“My pocket?” My hand went to the folds of my skirt. “When? How?” I was beginning to blush.

“Espionage begets many skills. Irene is not quite herself, and after the personal strains she has been under, I can understand why. You should have someone else to call upon.”

“It’s this maddening quest for her mother. She cared nothing about it until Nellie Bly started making such a false fuss about it, and now . . . I’m afraid a hornet’s nest has been unearthed. And that miserable Sherlock Holmes has only fed the flames. I wish we had never seen either of them.”

Quentin wisely did not comment on my two bete noirs, nor my abominably mixed metaphors, but donned his hat and gloves and nodded good-bye.

I slipped back into the room to find Irene still seated on the chair and frowning into the distance.

“What’s the matter?”

She visibly shook herself out of her pondering mood. Her palms lifted and struck the arms of her chair with fresh resolve. “I must concentrate on attending to the unfinished business started by Nellie Bly, that’s all there is to it.”

“I’ve been afraid of that very thing.” I sank onto the sofa so recently vacated by Quentin. “You are never one to let well enough alone.”

“And what is well enough?” Irene responded indignantly.

“You know what I mean,” I answered, drawing some fancy work from the bag beside the sofa and proceeding to untangle threads. That I would not watch her aggravated Irene even more. Persuasion depended on the full impact of her person.

She stood, the better to pace back and forth and wear out the Astor House’s fine Turkey carpets. It was a pity there was no operatic score for
The Merchant of Venice
, for Irene was very fond of lapsing into what I called the Portia role.

It was also a pity women today were still not allowed to be barristers, for at such times Irene quite rivaled or even surpassed Godfrey for fire and eloquence in court. The greatest pity was that it was wasted on an unswayable audience as myself.

“The fact is, Nell, that we have been issued a challenge on two fronts.”

“We?”

“You are here, aren’t you? With me? What shall you do if you disapprove of my actions? Take a steamer—a great, huge, wave-wallowing, endlessly rocking, seasick-making ocean steamer—back to France? Swim?”

“I merely suggested that I am not an indispensable element. Besides, I saw only one challenge issued, and that was more of a taunt, if you ask me,” I said.

“You refer to Sherlock Holmes’s behavior by the old grave in Green-Wood Cemetery.”

“I refer to him
following
us to Green-Wood Cemetery.”

“And
I
refer to him then telling us the grave site we visited
first
could not possibly contain my lost mother. Is that not extraordinary behavior?”

“For an ordinary person, yes, I grant you. It is the kind of rude meddling
I
expect of the man. To then lead us on an unconscionably long trek through the graveyard to another headstone was even more of an imposition.”

“He implied that this Eliza Gilbert was more likely to be my mother. What am I to do? Let the implication lie there like forty pounds of memorial marble? Is Sherlock Holmes to know more of my antecedents than I do?”

“Really, Irene. You are being most immature. When Nellie Bly’s cable to Neuilly a few weeks ago first raised the ghost of your mother, you insisted you had never known a mother and had no wish to do so now. Yet you ended by uprooting me and condemning us both to a week’s sentence on the heaving Atlantic.”

“Nellie Bly also cried bloody murder.”

“And there was indeed murder afoot, both past and present. But at the end of it you learned that your childhood was exactly as you’d thought: you’d been reared as an orphan by theatrical folk. For a while it looked as though ‘the wickedest woman in New York’ at midcentury might be your mother. I almost think that you’re disappointed now that she may
not
be. And you are thus convinced by what? On the word, nay hint, of whom? Mr. Sherlock Holmes? Hardly a trusted boon companion.”

“Not like yourself,” Irene murmured. Slyly.

If she knew, as I did, of
the
man’s secret admiration for her she would realize how little he was to be trusted. They had first crossed swords in London two years ago over the King of Bohemia’s claim upon one of Irene’s possessions, if no longer on her heart. It was later that I glimpsed some fatuous unpublished scribblings by his physician friend, John H. Watson, purporting to tell the tale of “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Never would I wish Irene to know how much her wit and beauty had touched this heartless detecting machine, an unrepentant drug and tobacco fiend as well as one with no natural liking for women, to read the doctor’s story.

Now we were marooned on this wild continent of America, she and I, her stalwart husband, Godfrey, in Bavaria on urgent business for the international Rothschild banking interests. Marooned here with Sherlock Holmes. Never had my self-assigned role of chaperon been more needed, even though Irene was a married woman and I was still a spinster. My unwedded state did not mean that I was unable to harbor strong suspicions.

“We have Madame Restell’s coded book about who had abortions and who had children given up for adoption,’ Irene
said, switching subjects. “Nellie Bly would give her reporter’s eyeteeth to lay her hands on a listing of all the unwed births or aborted pregnancies of New York society dating from the ’20s to the ’50s of this century.”

“That is old news, Irene, at this late date of 1889.”

“Not when some of the children of society misses were placed secretly in new foster families. Think of the heirs and heiresses today . . . Astors, Belmonts, Vanderbilts . . . who would tremble in their dancing shoes to know an unacknowledged sibling lurked somewhere to share the booty.”

“I know the volume is dangerous. That’s why I believe we should leave it untranslated. And your interest is not really in shaking the foundations of New York society, about which you never did give a fig. You want to see if you yourself are listed there. You, who loudly insisted you neither had nor needed a mother, are now intent on finding her out: the unnamed ‘woman in black’ who came to the theaters to play with you as a child. Besides, if you are to believe Sherlock Holmes, she is already dead and you know her name. Eliza Gilbert.
Mrs
. Eliza Gilbert. Is that not enough?”

Whenever I waxed as eloquent or lengthy as Irene (who was used to delivering whole arias and thus had breath to speak three times as long), she invariably resorted to the cigarettes or small cigars she favored.

By now her soufflé of a chestnut-colored pompadour was wreathed in veils of blue smoke. The scent of sulphur lingered on the air even though the lucifer with which she’d lit her cigarette was ashes in the crystal tray. I wouldn’t doubt that some shadow of Beelzebub lingered in the room, scenting a new Pandora about to open another forbidden box.

“Everything you say is true, Nell. As always. Yet I find that, as little as I cared to know my family past, I as much dislike other people knowing more about it than I do. ‘’Tis a poor thing, but mine own.’”

“Shakespeare was referring to repute, not a past. A reputation is a woman’s only past. And yours will be not be enhanced if your mother proves to be exactly the sort of woman who abandons a child.”

“You forget the ‘Mrs.’ you immediately rhapsodized over on Eliza Gilbert’s headstone when Mr. Holmes led us there.”

“What sort of married woman deserts a child?”

“One driven to it.”

“And leaves a small girl to the keeping of a gypsy assortment of variety performers and freaks?”

“One who may know that people are seldom what they seem to be. From the admittedly haphazard care of those ‘gypsies’ and ‘freaks’ I went on to become the first American diva to establish a performing career in the Old World, on its terms, not as a touring star performer from the States.”

“Oh, they are inoffensive, I suppose, and very careless as to family ties, but well-meaning. If the Woman in Black was able to visit backstage all those many times, why could she not acknowledge you as her daughter?”

Irene paced again. “I don’t know, Nell. That is what I must find out.”

“And how will you do it?”

“It would be fastest to ask Nellie Bly for help. She knows the city like Sherlock Holmes knows London, and would have access to such information.”

“No!” I dropped my lapful of satin threads and immediately snatched them up in a new tangle, only then remembering that our fat Persian cat, Lucifer, was far from interfering with my handiwork. The old black devil was back in Neuilly smacking his whiskers at Casanova in his parrot cage.

Irene paused, inhaled on the hateful cigarette impaled in an elegant holder like dead leaves rolled in a Baccarat crystal vase, and spat out a stream of wispy smoke.

“Well, then. Since the only two people in New York who might know more than we do on this subject are rivals rather than allies, we’d better investigate this ourselves. As usual. It is, after all, my business.”

I felt both dismayed and pleased. Much as I disapproved of Irene’s headstrong determination to solve all riddles, no matter how perilous, I did like her to rely upon me rather than others in pursuit of such foolishness.

Irene finally snuffed out the cigarette. “What, by the way, did Quentin want here?”

“It should be obvious. Tea and talk.” I returned to sorting my slippery little eel’s nest of threads all over again.

“Oh, it is obvious, Nell. All too obvious.”

I ignored Irene’s smile as I vigorously pursued my work.

Find a poor patrician woman who knows
everybody and loves to spend money
.
—
RULE FOUR ON HOW TO BREAK INTO SOCIETY,
THE REV. CHARLES WILBUR DE LYON NICHOLS,
THE ULTRA-EXCLUSIVE PEERAGE OF AMERICA
, 1904

F
ROM THE
C
ASE
N
OTES OF
S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES

“Brandy?” Mr. William Kissam Vanderbilt asked when Wilson escorted me into the library at the front of the house.