Lola Montez and the Poisoned Nom de Plume

by Kit Brennan

  “How old…?”

  “Blandine is nine, Cosima eight.”

  My heart clenched as I thought of nine-year-old Emma, pictured her trusting face. The only thing she had of me was the pair of peridot earbobs I’d sent her in a moment of terrible guilt.

  “Ah well,” he went on. “That is not for you to bear.” I almost told him, but then did not. What would have been the point? He might have hated me for deserting my child, he who did everything for his own. Peering at the letter, he read aloud, “‘Beneath the French veneer you have managed to don, one still finds in you the Hungarian peasant.’ Mm. Her barbs sting more unerringly each time. I blame myself. I tour, I work, I leave her on her own; she has borne me three children in a very short period of time. What else can I expect?” He put the letter down, removed his glasses, and gave me a sad, lingering kiss. “What has happened between us, Lola… I ask you to keep it to yourself, always. Can you do that, I wonder?”

  “I can. I will.”

  “Sleep well, my dear. Life goes on.” He turned onto his side, and in a few minutes was asleep.

  I lay awake, staring into the darkness for quite a long time. Does it? Mostly, while with Franz, I had managed to forget the throbbing heartache of my lost love—except in the depths of night, in the dark. General Diego de Léon… Lithe and compact, a small, cat-like man with brown, hot skin, and a magical mustache… During my year in Spain, I’d begun so well… I’d danced and played Cupid in a musical play, in Madrid. But, with Diego, I’d become entangled in a kidnapping attempt for the moderados cause, trying to return the two little Spanish princesses to their waiting mamá, the ex-regent María Cristina, in Paris. It had gone badly wrong. Diego and his fellow general, Manuel de la Concha, had been captured and shockingly executed—by firing squad, at dawn!—with unseemly haste and without a trial, by order of the prime minister, Baldomero Espartero, a vengeful former commander during the Carlist War.

  Curled up grimly, muffling all sounds with both hands, I began juddering again with grief—shaking the mattress with it. Useless grief. It would never bring Diego back. He’d been silenced forever with six bullets to the heart. His strong and courageous heart. I’d been so young… At twenty-two, I’d no idea that love could be so swiftly extinguished, that fate could go so badly awry. That joy is given in the moment and promised for the future, but the world never stops moving, and before you know it, everything shifts.

  My nights with Franz had helped salve the ache, but not entirely, oh, not at all. And soon I was to be cast adrift again, back into a loveless world where evil lurked, ready to tear fierce bites out of you. I lay there, awake for hours, trying not to move, curled into the small of Franz’s back, breathing in the warm scent of his long, sleeping body.

  *

  And then, two things occurred that turned everything upside down.

  The following evening, I went with Franz to a new opera by a cash-strapped young acquaintance of his named Richard Wagner, an ugly, earnest man with a thick, gobbling sort of accent. Franz had kissed me and told me that we would have fun; he didn’t think to warn me that the event, titled Rienzi, was five hours in length. Dios mío! I was going insane by the second hour, and it was without intermission until almost the third. No one’s writing or composing warrants that interminableness! After the interval, I swear, Franz had to use his sweetest, mildest words to convince me to re-enter the plushy chamber of tedium. During the fourth and fifth hour, I stood in our box and did leg exercises, not caring a fart what anyone thought. Conceited, overblown twit of a composer—I wanted to strangle him. I remember thinking that George would probably love the piece of shite, since it was about a populist figure who defeats the nobles and champions the people, but I chafed and jerked, flinging myself about with boredom, and then I fell asleep. When I woke, I cheered—loudly—when I realized that the populace had turned against Rienzi and was burning the Capitol, because at least it meant the bloody thing would be over.

  Backstage, I guessed that Wagner’s eyes had been glued to Liszt’s every reaction from wherever he’d been sitting (like a toad in its hole). He glared at me with a squinched-up face, though Franz told him nice, complimentary things. As we turned away, I could hear the ugly fellow mutter, “Heartless, demonic being.”

  I rounded upon him. “Who, me?” (¡Bastardo! ¡Cabrón!)

  Franz placed a hand on my arm.

  “I should think that you are the heartless being,” I snapped, “keeping us entrapped like that for so long!” Having delivered myself of this, I vowed to say no more, though the toad was looking me up and down with undisguised malice.

  “Good evening, then, Richard,” Franz said with a bow.

  “Her eyes are insolent.”

  “Her eyes see more than you and me,” Franz rejoined. He took my arm and urged me away through the departing crowds and then through the streets, back to our hotel.

  I was exhausted, it was two o’clock in the morning and Franz was as pale as milk, but I had to ask.

  “What did you mean by that, Franz? It sounded lovely, but what did it mean?”

  He was lying back upon the bed, without a stitch of clothing, and without desire. “Not tonight, Lola, it’s far too late.”

  I lay beside him, also naked. “Your friend, the composer. I’m sorry I said that, I really am. It’s just… It reminded me of—I get testy when…”

  “When what, my dear?”

  “When I’m treated dismissively. In Paris, another theatre man insulted me, just because he could, and I don’t think men should get away with that.”

  “I don’t either,” Franz said mildly, eyes closed.

  “It was Alexandre Dumas, a hippopotamus with a swelled head, a—”

  “Alexandre is a good fellow, Lola.”

  “What? You know him?”

  “He’s a large-hearted soul.”

  “Pooh! He is not.”

  Two years earlier, I’d been introduced to Dumas in Paris by the impresario Juan de Grimaldi, a man who’d seemed so willing to help my theatrical ambitions. Grimaldi turned out to be a government agent—yes, a spy—for exiled Spanish royalty. He was the one who had gotten me into the whole Spanish mess in the first place.

  “Alexandre Dumas is finally beginning to enjoy the success he deserves,” Franz was saying. “It’s been a long time coming, and he’s worked very hard.”

  “Hmph. What’s the success, yet another woman-belittling play?”

  “No, something else. Novels. In serialized form. A new thing, apparently, and it’s caught on. Marie is very interested in this. She’s dabbling, has friends in the business who attend her salons. She tells me that Alexandre is at the edge of a precipice of wild accomplishment.”

  I was disgusted: more adulation for that insatiable appetite in the shape of a man. I retorted hotly, “The last time I saw Dumas was at the funeral of a young girl who’d been murdered. He was unutterably rude and in a foul mood, completely absorbed with himself.”

  “He’s a writer,” Franz said.

  “That’s no excuse! I stood up in the church and in front of everyone, I challenged Alexandre Dumas to a duel!”

  Liszt’s eyes opened. He turned his head to look at me, a smile upon his lips. “You didn’t.”

  “I did.”

  His eyes closed again, and the grin spread. “Incorrigible.” And his prick began to rise.

  *

  I awoke the next morning to find that Franz was not in the bed. I could hear him moving around in the other room. A loud, repeated knocking at the door was probably what had woken me. “I’m coming,” I heard him say, then he turned to look back into the bedroom. “I’ll close you in, sleepy one, and get rid of whoever this is.” Tightening the sash of his smoking jacket, he gently shut the door.

  I lay back again, replaying images of passion from the night before. Every muscle in my body felt tired, but elated. I wondered what we’d do later that day, and I yawned voluptuously. Outside the bedroom, a little clatter as Franz opened the
door of Number 17, followed by a deep rumble of unknown words as he spoke to whoever was standing there. Then suddenly, a woman’s curt voice.

  “So this is where you’ve been hiding. Very luxurious, I’m sure, and very expensive. Will you let me in, or must I stand out here like one of your admirers?”

  Lusty images fled—I bolted upright, covering my breasts with the rumpled sheets. The woman spoke in French, with traces of a German accent.

  “Marie, my dear, what are you doing in Dresden? I thought you were not well—”

  “True, thanks to you I am very unwell, but that doesn’t mean I should never go anywhere.” The woman—Countess Marie d’Agoult, it must be—was walking back and forth around the outer room in an agitated manner. “I decided to visit my people in Frankfurt, if it’s any business of yours—and then, since I’d come so far, to come along and see what you’ve been doing with yourself. Performing your tricks for anyone who’ll pay to listen. Have you been having fun?” Her voice was brittle and angry.

  Merde, and triple fuck! What in God’s name was I going to do? My heart had leapt into my throat with a sickening bound. I’d never been the culprit in this dreadful, clichéd situation, and I wished devoutly that I could melt into the mattress, disappear, hear nothing more! Definitely not to be a major player in this (no doubt) swiftly approaching scene.

  “I hear that George is here,” the woman’s voice continued. “Frédéric has been complaining bitterly that she’s abandoned him. I know the feeling.”

  “My dear Marie—”

  “I hope you haven’t decided to bed my best friend. I know she’d love it, if only for the experience, and to be able to talk about it to everyone and anyone, then write it down in one of her sordid little novels.”

  “Please, stop, don’t say such things—”

  “Well, one of these days she’ll laugh out of the wrong side of her face. I’ve put things in motion, I’ve been meeting with de Girardin at La Presse and he’s very interested in an idea that I’ve had. Are you? I think not.”

  “What idea? Marie? Sit for a moment, you seem rather—”

  “I’ve been sitting for hours; I don’t feel like sitting, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Very well. How are the children?”

  Her voice rose another octave—if that was possible. “Always the children! Have you asked after me, how I am? Do you care?”

  “I wish you to come outside with me, Marie; let us go to the garden just downstairs, it’s peaceful…” Franz’s voice sounded steady and sad; I imagined him trying to catch her arm and perhaps hold her in both of his own, but it seemed as if she’d flung herself away again. I couldn’t move, couldn’t bear to think what could happen at any second; my eyes were fastened upon the door handle, willing it to remain as it was, closed and still. An image of myself on the other side of this same situation flashed across my mind: I’d caught an earlier lover, George Lennox (the cad), bouncing the fat, white ass of a third-rate actress named Angel, and could picture the creature again in my mind’s eye, scuttling away, naked, across the parquet. Oh my God, was I now such an appalling, thoughtless thing as that? What to do, what to do!

  “I’ve come this far; you’ll not turn me aside so easily, Franz. Mein Gott, to leave me month after month, when you know how ill and melancholy I am! Where is George, anyway? She’s not at the Hotel de Saxe, too, I hope? You tell me you’ve never slept with her, but I’m not convinced you haven’t slept with others—these actresses and singers you seem to keep company with. And what about this Spanish one?”

  Oh dear saints and apostles, and other celestials of any sodding stripe! This was terrible.

  “You’ll catch the morbus gallicus, Franz,” she hissed, “and then you’ll be sorry. Don’t come crying to me when you’re ill and bits of you are falling off!”

  His equable voice remonstrated, “You know that you’re the one who asked me for a permission d’infidélité—in writing, remember? For that Bulwer-Lytton fellow? A few years back?”

  “Don’t you fling that in my face!”

  “You know I would have written it for you, if that’s what you’d really wanted. I’ve told you the way I look at this sort of thing, Marie. The facts, the deeds, are nothing. It’s the shades of meaning, of—”

  “Shut up!”

  My mouth had dropped open, my heartbeat pounded in my ears, I was—oh, I can’t find a word for it. How I wished I wasn’t hearing these intimate things. And what would happen if—no, when! Because she wasn’t leaving.

  “Marie, I want you always to have complete freedom; I wish you would understand that.”

  “You turn my words around.” Her high voice had gone quieter, angrier. “You try to push me to the side of your life, but you will be nothing without me. I made you, Franz.” From the sound, I thought she must be over by the window, looking down at the street. Come on, Franz, I prayed. Help her to the garden, I’ll dress very fast and then slip down the back staircase. What will happen then, I have no idea. By this point, I was standing beside the bed, holding the sheet up against me, trembling.

  “So let us see where the illustrious composer has been laying his head,” and with those words, she strode to the bedroom door and flung it open—oh, Jesús! Tall, thin, aristocratic, beautiful blonde hair braided and piled on the top of her head, dressed impeccably in a dove-grey satin, with a jewel at her throat. Fuckity fuck! There I stood, like a gutted steer hanging from its hook, nowhere to go, nothing to say.

  Her creamy complexion went suddenly as red as a beet-root, and then just as quickly drained back into the palest of pales; her blue eyes flared, then narrowed. I expected screams, expected her to leap at me, clawing (God knows I would have done so). She simply stood there, eyes proud, face carved in stone. Franz came up to her—still calmer than I could believe—and said,

  “The Spanish lady. Lola Montez.”

  Out of Marie’s constricted throat, I heard, “I have never objected to being your mistress, Franz. But I do object to being one of your mistresses. You will be sorry for this.” She reached out and slammed the bedroom door powerfully in my face ’til it rang in my ears and I was closed in again, with my shame.

  *

  I have never felt like that before, and I hope to God I never feel like that again. I continued to stand there, a dreadful, sick hollowness in the pit of my stomach. Could I have brazened it out? Should I have? Juan de Grimaldi’s wife, Concepción, would have done so, with a shrill torrent of Spanish imprecations while throwing herself about. At one point, I might have tried to emulate her, but now? It all felt too sordid. And I also knew, very surely, that this was the end between Franz and myself. It was over. His decency would never allow him to treat the mother of his children so badly if there was any way that he could salve the situation. I was dispensable, just for fun. Of course I’d known it, somewhere at the back of my head, but I’d been going along, not worrying about possible endings—and certainly, not this one. The situations from farce are not nearly as amusing in reality as they seem onstage, in a comedy.

  There were sounds of items breaking in the outer room, but no feminine screams or flinging of herself out the window. Liszt’s voice went on and on, low, melodious. After some minutes (which felt like hours), I heard the outer door open and then close, and they were gone. That’s when I started to shake—delayed reaction, I suppose—but somehow I managed to haul myself into my nearest day dress, button my boots, throw all of my belongings into my portmanteau and drag it down the back stairs. I held my head regally upon entering the lobby, requesting one of the valets to call me a cab. Curse them, there was whispering and pointing throughout, and I knew they must have gathered something of the high drama that had taken place upstairs. But they did as I asked, and after some fraught, silent minutes in which I tried to ignore them and they vibrated with repressed gossipmongering, my portmanteau was placed gently beside me in a hansom that had drawn up at the curb, and away I went.

  The rest of the day passed in
a blur. I found myself another hotel (how I’d pay for it, I had no idea). I flung myself down upon the bed and sobbed; I knew I’d miss Franz very much. His solemn expressions, his hot and wiry torso, that long, thin member of his—as well as everything else: his talent, his genius! His quiet relaxation after sex, with his long fingers wrapped by strands of my hair… Then suddenly, overlaying those images, flaring nostrils and a pale visage: the outraged face of the countess. Oh, fuck it, I wept. A society woman with her own salon in Paris—Paris! My target, my goal! Now closed to me? No. But, what will I do now? Where can I go? Why am I always in such an unruly mess?

  I crawled under the bedclothes and felt like a fool, a harlot, a shameful beast… I’d never wanted to be the sort of woman who stole husbands, who stole love. I wanted a love that was freely given and that might even last the test of time. Diego’s murder by firing squad had shattered my vision of that possible world. Beneath the impersonal covers, shivering (what was I doing, trying to hide from myself?), a tidal wave of regret and memories engulfed me again, rolling me under and dragging me back into a riptide of dread.

  In Spain, unbeknownst to myself or Diego, there was a killer loose, and dangerous. We’d thought he was a Cristino, but he was a Carlist, and he was party to Diego’s summary execution—I don’t know how, but I’m sure of it. In the frightening aftermath, desperate to escape the wrath of Prime Minister Espartero, who knew I’d been involved in Diego’s plans, I’d galloped north from Madrid. I’d been followed by this killer: Father Miguel de la Vega, Jesuit priest, spy and double agent. He was an acolyte of a secret cult, and dangerously insane. He’d slit the throat of the woman guiding me out of the country, smothered her baby, then captured me. He’d been taking me to Pamplona, to the headquarters of the Society of the Exterminating Angel, where they would have tortured and destroyed me like that brotherhood of wolves I’d seen demolishing the deer. As he’d hauled me onwards, the priest had bragged about his infernal society. It was a terrorist sect, vowing to reinstate the Inquisition, to exterminate liberalism—and as many females as possible. De la Vega deeply feared and detested anything female, wished to eradicate the sex completely. He’d tricked everyone who knew him. He wasn’t human, couldn’t possibly be considered human. He was a serial killer who relished the work.