Winter at Death's Hotel (10 page)

She was writing on a lap desk provided by the management—she thought that Carver probably wanted her to have it in case she was ready to sign his paper.
Oh, Louisa, don't be cynical. Cynicism is so cheap.
She was sitting in an armchair by a window.

She was surprised at how commercial the street seemed to her now. It was jarring that this elegant hotel would be across from a men's haberdashery, a knickknack shop, and a dealer in “fur findings,” whatever they were. Directly opposite her at her own level were a furniture store of rather low quality and a large window on which the words CUSTOM GENTS DUDS were hideously prominent. Above these were other display windows with large signs that advertised jewelry and something called Fashion Frocks and fabrics by the bolt. How, she wondered, were New Yorkers to see the signs? Were they really expected to walk along with their heads back and a crick in their necks? The only pedestrians she could see seemed to have their eyes on their own shoes, moving far too fast and with far too much purpose to be bothered with things two and three stories above them.

She tried to concentrate on her letter, but her thoughts wandered.

That
poor
woman.

Arthur
will
need
warmer
underwear
when
he
gets
to
Minnesota, but that's still a week away.

What
is
Mr. Roosevelt doing? Will he visit me personally to thank me?

“A Miss Corelli, madame.”

“Oh, dear.” Her first thought was to say she didn't want to see anyone. Her second was that she didn't know a Miss Corelli, corrected at once to memory of a woman—one of many—whom Mrs. Simmons didn't like. Her third was to wonder why Arthur disapproved of her. But Arthur's disapproval suggested possibilities. “Show her in, Ethel.”

She straightened herself, fluffed her hair, and hoped that Miss Corelli would be exotic and outrageously worldly.

“Ah, Mrs. Doyle, you poor thing!”

Marie Corelli was fortyish, handsome, dominating, and about as exotic as the Houses of Parliament. She was, however, quite stylish.

“Miss Corelli, how nice of you to visit me. Thank you so much for your flowers.”

“Oh, flowers, they're easy, aren't they.” Miss Corelli sat down and looked at Louisa as if she were an article she was considering buying. She said, “I feel as if we've known each other ever so long—I think perhaps we were friends in another life. Don't you believe that we've had other lives? I love your bedjacket.”

“My husband tells me you are a novelist, Miss Corelli.”

“Actually, I didn't set out to be an authoress; I set out to be a singer, which is why my name isn't the real one. If one is going to be a singer, one ought to be Italian. Do you mind if I smoke? So I took Corelli, after the composer, of course, and Marie. And then when I was Marie Corelli and dyed my hair black, it turned out I hadn't the
push
to succeed with the materialistic demands of managers and that lot. So I took up writing. Just like your husband.” She had taken a cigarette from a shagreen case, which she now offered.

Louisa thought she was, if not exotic, at least odd, and she was going to say no to the cigarettes, but part of her rather liked Marie Corelli, so she said, “Yes, please.”

“Lucky you, staying in bed,” the woman said. “I just go and go and go. Yesterday I was in Boston. Tomorrow I go to Baltimore—three days. If it weren't for this hotel, I'd go back to Paris.” She exhaled, looked around the room, said, “I was educated in Paris—a convent. I live there now. I think in French.”

“My husband's on a lecture tour, too.”
Convent
was tinkling in her brain; Mrs. Simmons had said something about Catholicism. Heavens—a Papist! That was rather exotic in itself.

“Yes, well, mine isn't lectures and it isn't a tour, because I told them if I couldn't stay in one place, I wouldn't come, so I stay here and go out and come back, you see?
Bon
. Because of the hotel. This hotel keeps me sane. It has
emanations
.” She inhaled again on the cigarette. “Are you
spirituelle
? I am a sensitive. I knew the instant I walked in the front door that there were many, many really old souls here. Did you know that the American Indians were the Lost Tribes of Israel? It's been proven. In print. They landed here and I think they built a temple right on this spot to one of the deities they'd acquired in their travels, because they'd fallen away from Jehovah, just like the ones who worshipped the golden calf. Not that we should be concerned with a narrow-minded idea of the one God.” She exhaled smoke. “I sense the name Azul here.” She took a book from a large handbag. “I've brought you a copy of my
Romance
of
Two
Worlds
, which will clarify for you my cosmology. As you will see, Azul is a figure of great importance.”

Louisa, familiar with authors and their affection for their own works, made appropriate sounds. She opened the book, looked into it, as she knew she should—words, a great many words.

Marie Corelli was marching on. “And it isn't only the
sense
of Azul that holds me here. There are
sounds
, you know. The sounds are, of course, Azul's entourage. For those who have ears to hear, this place is full of a divine music.”

Trying to be polite, Louisa said, “Is Azul a spirit?”

“Most people who use that word mean ghosts or some other such rubbish. The idea that the dead wish to hang about this dreary world and try to get into touch with living beings whom they didn't much care for when they were alive is nonsensical. No, Azul is more on the order of what is called an archangel. He is an emanation of the One, you understand.”

“With wings?”

“I depicted him with wings in my book, but I shan't really
know
until I have seen him and bathed in his effulgence. As I hope to do in this hotel. I feel him so strongly here!”

Louisa, a bit fuddled by the cigarette, said that it was nice that Miss Corelli liked the hotel, but what a shame she had to leave it every other day to give lectures, or whatever they were.

“One has to touch one's readers. One has often to explain one's philosophy. One has to listen to know what it is they want from one.”

“I think my husband believes that he should be the one to decide that.”

“That's the way men think, isn't it?”

“I supposed it's the way authors think.”

“Only authors who are men.” She stubbed her cigarette out in a little lidded box and closed it, as if she were saving her cigarette ashes. She stood. “I have fatigued you, I fear. But, if you will permit, we shall meet again, yes?” She moved toward the door, her progress smooth and steady, as if she were on wheels. “I shall bring you more of my books.
Wormwood
would show you how close I am able to come to realism without being guilty of either bad taste or sensationalism. Realism—and materialism—have doomed our civilization.
Au
'voir
.” And she was gone.

Spirits? Materialism? The Lost Tribes of Israel? Louisa wondered why she had associated Marie Corelli with the risqué
—
something Arthur had said? Arthur disliked what he called “lady novelists” in general, those who wrote about what he called S-E-X most of all. He had said of one woman's work that he “wouldn't have such a book in his house,” not knowing that Louisa had a copy in her sewing basket. Had Arthur actually read Marie Corelli? But if he had, he'd have known she wasn't risqué. He'd also have known that she was what Arthur called “incorrect,” meaning that she didn't believe in the same sort of spiritualism that he did.

As a rule, Louisa was indifferent to other people's beliefs, except her husband's, of course. She had to concede, however, that Marie Corelli's spiritualism seemed rather impressive—archangels, effulgences, the One—whereas Arthur's seemed to her an eccentricity that she was to tolerate. And Miss Corelli had good taste in clothes and flowers. And seemed quite kind. Although disappointing because she didn't write about S-E-X.

Louisa was no stranger to S-E-X and had in fact had a precocious knowledge of it even as a child, some of it wrong, some confused, some incomprehensible until later, but by age ten she had known a lot. Her clergyman father had got a church on one of the islands off the west of Scotland; there, Louisa had met little girls who knew all about S-E-X and were eager to educate her. In the summer she had gone with her best friend, Tenny McLean, to the shielings, the remnant, then dying, of an old custom that had women forming their own summer communities where the grazing was good and where they built “shielings,” temporary little houses. Here she learned about penises (
They
look
like
sausage
and
they
get
big
so
they
can
stick
them
into
you
. Shocked, Louisa had said,
Where?
Tenny had been contemptuous.
In
your
hole, ye daft sapskull!
) and kinds of copulation (
Duncan
Moy's been took off to Oban by the polis for topping his ewes
) and other behaviors (
Mrs. McCrae and Mrs. Brown got caught playing with theirselves together in the shieling
).

She learned none of it from her parents: her mother was shy and usually speechless; her father was a distant monarch who showed in every syllable that he had married beneath himself and that his wife had produced children who were beneath him and that his parishioners were beneath him, too. When Louisa had applied what she had learned from Tenny to her mother and father, she had been dumbfounded.

However, all that knowledge had later proved useful.

***

Louisa wrote three long letters to her husband and put them into envelopes addressed to his hotels in Dayton, Ohio, and Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan. She found it tedious writing three letters, because the first letter seemed to exhaust everything she had to say. She had avoided saying anything about the murder; Arthur had not been very understanding about that. Perhaps when there was a happy outcome of her letter to Mr. Roosevelt, she would tell him. Well, of course she would. He would see that she had been right all along, that she could think for herself, and that even though she was in pain, she was living in the world.

“Madame?” Ethel was whispering from the bedroom door.

“Whatever is the matter, Ethel?”

“The police are here.” Ethel looked terrified. “What shall I do?”

“The police?” Like all good people of her class, Louisa had been raised to fear—and of course respect—the police, while at the same time doing everything possible to avoid ever dealing with them. But she thought,
Police—Roosevelt—my letter
.

“
And
Mr. Carver, madame. What shall I do?”

“Well, of course you will show them in, Ethel! I'll see them in the sitting room.” It was very quick work by the New York police, she thought, and showed how seriously she was being taken. Wouldn't Arthur be pleased!

She managed to get out of bed by herself, and she hopped to the clothes cupboard and took down one of the dressing gowns that Ethel had unpacked for her. It was, she thought, quite appropriate and decent, and of course the police would understand that under the circumstances of her injury and their commitment to solving the crime, they must overlook her appearing
en
déshabillée
, as it were. The dressing gown was wool, a rather deep brown, quite nun-like in its cut, with flowing sleeves. Entirely appropriate for police work.

Her crutches had arrived, but she hadn't practiced with them. Better not to take the risk, she thought. Using one of them as a cane, she moved rather clumsily to the bedroom door and stood there looking at the three men who were already in the room until a flustered Ethel got her wits about her and came to help.

“I'm so sorry, I'm rather slow,” Louisa said as she crossed to an armchair. “I had rather a fall.” She sat, one hand on the now-vertical crutch. “Do sit down, please.” She tried not to include Carver in the invitation, as she was still angry with him over the paper he'd wanted her to sign. Anyway, he was hovering near the door as if ready to bolt.

There were two of them. Neither sat. One was very large, as large as her husband. He had what must have started life as an almost handsome Irish face, now rather ruined by pockmarked skin. The other one was smaller, darker, glowering, and wore a remarkable suit. A smell of tobacco and old clothes reached her.

The big one looked at Ethel, then jerked a thumb toward the bedroom. Ethel, apparently frightened, looked at Louisa and, seeing her nod, fled.

“You're Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle?” the big one said.

“Yes, I am.” With a smile and a girlish shake of the head that was supposed to set her curls a-dancing. Or at least charm the socks off the visitors.

“Are you the author of a missive to Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, the President of the Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police of the City of New York?”

“Yes.” She felt a stab of uncertainty. All she knew of the manners of policemen was what her husband had written about made-up London ones, who were even stupider than Watson but always polite to their betters. These two, it seemed to her, were not so polite as they should be. Nor so deferential—or was she simply misjudging American mores?

“Is this the letter?” He held up her note.