Lola Montez and the Poisoned Nom de Plume

by Kit Brennan

  I saw George wink at me.

  “And what I wish to give you—is Henri’s, and should be yours. The horses—Magnifique, Enchanté. Please, have them, take them with you wherever you are going.”

  Well, we all began to blubber at that. But with time and another cognac, we sorted out a happy solution. I asked George to please take Enchanté, for Nohant and the Forest of Fontainbleau; a fast, steady riding mare to perhaps replace her girlhood joy, Colette, so long gone. I accepted the gift of Magnifique with warm delight. My own horse, a beautiful creature to love and to care for, a living connection with Henri and symbol of what we’d had together.

  “And where are you going to go, Lola, with Magnifique?” Dumas asked.

  I was vague because I didn’t know. Now, with a horse of my own, my travel plans would have to adapt—not a hardship, but a new development.

  “Will you dance again?”

  I told them I thought I probably would.

  Just before we parted, George took me aside. “I think you’re right about the nom de plume—to abandon it, I mean.”

  “For now,” I said.

  “Not sure you’re a writer. But you are an original.”

  Our hug was tight.

  “Parbleu! Live large, why not?” Dumas proclaimed.

  He saw me back to my apartment, and we arranged for me to be able to go to the stables for Magnifique early in the morning. The grooms would be made aware of the change of ownership; the horse would be ready.

  “Be safe; stay well,” he said, then thumped the roof of the cab he’d hired, and the vehicle moved off, taking him back to the arms of whichever mistress he was currently bedding when staying in the city overnight.

  *

  I was up very early again, relieved and excited to be on my way. Lying in bed in the dark, I’d decided to head east, maybe to the Black Forest. A way to expiate my guilt over the death of the gentle doctor, perhaps? I didn’t know. Not Spain, certainly not, and not England, land of a million cups of tea—so why not a place I’d never yet been? It was reputed to be quiet; I could disappear there for a time.

  Magnifique seemed as excited as I to leave his stable and pursue his fortunes along with me. Giddy with romantic notions such as this, I realized I was eager to see things in the new light of a new day. Henri—my Bon-bon—was so wellborn and so wise. He’d loved me just the way I am, but he’d also given me his best advice: he’d told me not to let anger or envy—or even sorrow—warp me out of all alignment. Enjoy what others have to offer, and tell them that you do. I was glad I’d done so the previous night; I’d expiated a black ball that had sat there, inside my gut. Enjoy life, Bon-bon had said—my darling. Live large, why not?

  I made one quick stop, then cantered to Montmartre Cemetery. It was a strange location for a cemetery, nestled as it is in the crater of an old quarry, and therefore slightly below the roads around it. The place often contained early morning fog, like milk in the bottom of a bowl. It did, on this day.

  I had to search around for the first one. It was such an extensive place with tombs and crypts stretching off into the unseen distance, as well as row upon row of headstones. I rode up and down the cobblestone paths through curling mist, lost as usual, but finally found what I was looking for. An elaborate gravestone and ironwork fence had been erected around it. Fenced even now, I thought to myself. Dismounting, I placed a camellia on Merci’s new grave. Camellias had always been her favourite flowers because they had no scent; she’d surrounded herself with them wherever she was. Rest, sweet one.

  I knew the way to my final stop because I’d been there once before on my own, long after the funeral. Henri’s grave. A clean, spare headstone; he’d been buried to the left of his father’s. It was hard to believe that he was here, that all that was left of him lay under this ground, and would turn back into earth—slowly, too slowly. Burial is an odd, a disquieting ritual, I think. I’d rather be burned, I told myself as I gazed upon the site. The way it’s done in India: a sharp, hot fire, smoke rising into the atmosphere, bones cleaned by heat. The heart burns last because it’s so dense, because it still has so much it wishes to feel and do. Fanciful thought, perhaps. But yes, I’d rather burn.

  I dismounted again, dropping one rein so that Magnifique would know to stand, and approached slowly. A tall, white stone, about as tall as a man. His name engraved upon it, the name I never wished to leave my lips: Henri Dujarier. I remembered the day at Olympe’s salon, when I first realized that he was the one. He’d retrieved the champagne and flowers he’d given to the maid, then turned to face me across the room, in the full flush of young male beauty, and my heart had known. Henri Dujarier. I will never say that name often enough… its heartbreaking moan… Henri Dujarier. I adore you, I will never forget you. I bent and put my lips to the carved letters, but the stone was cold. Blinking back tears, I looked about at this final location. Not the ocean, no sand beach. No salt to curl our hair or sun to brown our skins… But it was a peaceful place, on a balmy spring morning. I’d brought one of his favourite flowers, a variety that has a gorgeous scent, a vase of which had perfumed our bedroom every day in season. Would he know? Was there anything of my Bon-bon here? I bent and gently placed the perfect white rose upon the earth.

  Suddenly, I was shoved from behind with a hard, painful object and thrown to the ground, barely missing cracking my head against the stone. I twisted around, and—oh my God, how my heart flails about with fear—it was Father Miguel de la Vega, bald and quite insane, on his one leg, with two half crutches that he leaned upon like a three-legged spider. He advanced upon me in a trice. With one of the crutches hard against my bodice, he pinned me to the stone.

  “At last,” he said, “at last it comes. I’ve waited far too long for this… expiation.”

  I hardened the muscles beneath my rib cage, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t push any more fiercely or I might faint—a terrible beginning to what I knew would be a terrible end. If I fainted there would be no hope for me—so breathe!

  Should I try to get him talking, distract him? Just looking again at the fearsome devil was making me dizzy—as tall as ever but even thinner, if that was possible. He was wearing a regular coat rather than his priestly robes, but was garbed all in black nonetheless. His concave cheeks were grizzled with a short, greying beard; he’d lost all the hair on his head, which glistened like a slug in the early morning light. How had he grown even paler than before? Dark black eyes glittering in that hateful head, teeth small and sharp in his vile mouth, with its lips like a tiny letterbox into which nothing hopeful would ever be dropped. His white hands with their long, ganga-smelling fingers were curled around his two crutches, one of them poking at me in short, sharp jabs. Thank God the ends of the crutches were finished in knobs, for walking, and not in something pointed. The one leg he stood upon made him look even more like a snake—all one sinuously deadly line of active muscle and venom.

  “Whore!” This was, of course, his leitmotif. As far as I had been able to understand it, the Society of the Exterminating Angel—the cult at which he worshipped—was deeply moved to exterminate all those who stood in the way of conservative, monarch- and church-centred societies. Their particular hatred was for freedom of expression, free styles of living—in which case, Paris and its demi-monde of artists was a natural, a prime feeding ground.

  “Succubus and spawn of Satan!” Its other obsession, as I knew, was the termination of wild women—or any woman, perhaps, who knows? And of course, for de la Vega, the battle against me was an even more prejudiced one.

  Jesús, how could I have let down my guard? How could I have relied for even a moment on the system of justice and its prisons, with all the loop-holes that a smart villain can utilize? Justice—where murderers go free. My trusting, my deadened instincts had tried to warn me… Oh fool, idiot—almost certainly dead fool… My reticule, with Maurice’s pistol, was tucked behind Magnifique’s saddle; the rapier, too. The gelding was standing ten paces away, cropping gr
ass. Occasionally he raised his head to regard us thoughtfully, jaws munching and crunching away, ears swivelling in the skirling mist, as the sun warmed and tried to burn its way through.

  This wouldn’t last long, I thought, this calm before the carnage. Do something, Lola, something smart!

  My hand lashed out and shoved the crutch sideways, away from me. I rolled immediately, as de la Vega staggered, off balance. I kicked at his one leg and—mercies and hallelujah!—it went out from under him, and he fell hard to his knee. Leaping up, I was racing for Magnifique when, from the corner of my eye, I saw the priest pulling at the end of the crutch, and a gleam of metal flashed. Flinging his arm back, he made ready to throw it. “Magnifique!” I yelled. The horse jerked up his head, snorted and cantered off—just as one of the crutches, now revealed as a swordstick, whizzed through the air directly to where the horse’s chest had been but a second before. It thudded into the earth, then swayed on its tip, appearing and disappearing in mist as it rocked.

  The demon was up on his leg in an instant, leaping after me on his one crutch. I was trying to snatch the sword out of the ground, but he was coming too fast, so I decided to run instead—believing that I would be faster than him, that I could catch up with and mount Magnifique before he got near us.

  But I was wrong—Jesus, how that reptile could travel! He hitched and leapt—yanking the sword free from the ground as he came—now on one leg and one crutch, and waving the bared weapon with uncanny ferocity. Perhaps startled by the unorthodox human’s modus operandi, Magnifique galloped off, this time much further away along the cobbled path through the sepulchres. His ears and wide eyes showed that he was deeply uneasy, and an uneasy horse is a horse that can vanish at a moment’s notice.

  Shit on a stick, help! There were a series of tall, and some wide, headstones and vaults in my path—so I ducked and wove among them, hoping to slow the Jesuit down, or perhaps cause him to trip—some tree root? Some heavenly bucket with dead flowers, strategically placed? Why was there nobody else in sight on this fine April morning? Jesus, where were the mourners, was there no new funeral cortège with its priests and its carriages that could come to my rescue? No! There was nothing and nobody. We were all alone in a sunken graveyard, the priest and me, tendrils of fog expanding and separating between our hurtling bodies—with one of us to die and my soul overpowered with dread to think which one it would be.

  With a medium-sized headstone between us, I summoned my courage. “Leave me alone! You’ll never get away with it; just leave me be and I will leave you!” Frail, foolish words when hurled at a madman. But he bared his evil teeth and lashed out with the blade, slashing across the top of the stone. I ducked sideways, ran forwards and yanked at the crutch in his other hand, then ducked away quickly again. Yes, he fell, unbalanced as he was, from the mighty exertion to get at me. And no, he hadn’t slashed me—yet. My yank at the other crutch, though, had revealed that it too was a swordstick. Now he unsheathed and bared it fully.

  The only advantage to this hideous truth was that suddenly he had no crutch—just two razor-sharp swords. Jesus, fuck! I took to my heels. Behind me, a grunt as he flung one of them—destined to land between my shoulder blades, his specialty, the hair on the back of my neck told me so—but I swiftly threw myself sideways onto the ground. The sword hissed past, burying itself into the earth ten feet beyond.

  I skittered across the grass and grabbed it by the knobbed hilt, then jumped to my feet and turned to face the snake—already hopping and leaping on its one leg, swinging the other sword from side to side as it came. This was no human, this was—abominable! Like a tornado, it was upon me and battering me with thrust after thrust, as I parried and gave ground, both of us panting and hissing and grunting; the fury of the insane against the strength of the completely cornered who must—somehow, in some way—defend its small life.

  I darted around a family vault, craving its bulk to hide behind, and then realized that it was so big that I wouldn’t know from which direction de la Vega would come: would he follow after me the same way, or stop and creep round to the other side, to ambush me from there? Damn, oh damnation! I couldn’t hear anything, had no idea where he was. I was so terrified. So I faced away from the vault and raced as fast as my legs would run in a direct line away from the whole thing, shoulder blades clenched with the fear of the sword impaling me between them.

  Instead, I was still running. Then I heard something strange, a whistling kind of sound, a ‘whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo’ coming through the air, but before I could register any more than that, out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed something black at either side of my fleeing legs, with what looked like a stone at each end. Then sharp pain! A final ‘whoo-whoop’, as something else wrapped itself tightly around my legs at the calves. I fell with a horrible crash, knocked off my feet, my legs and skirt bound securely with what I could now see to be leather cords.

  Winded, I lay where I was, desperately trying to breathe and think. A crackly, horrible sound from behind, approaching. It was the priest, laughing.

  “Wonderful invention, aren’t they?” he said, looming over me. “Very helpful to someone in my condition. They use them in the New World, call them ‘bolas’—for rounding up cattle. Cows. Perfect for what I had in mind.” He’d hopped onto the swordstick I’d dropped in the fall, so I couldn’t snatch it up, then jabbed at my skirt with the other sharp blade. “Move away from it. Now.”

  I rolled, then tried to sit.

  “Stand up.”

  I used my arms to help me into a standing position. Then we stood there, facing each other.

  “Very amusing, isn’t it?” he said, picking up the second swordstick while guarding my movements with the other. “Can you see yourself? You look like me. See how easy it is to function on one leg?” Then, exploding with rage, face twisted in a kind of rictus: “You bitch! You succubus! Get over there! There!” And he pointed to another tall headstone.

  I had to hop. It was immediately exhausting and unbalancing, made me feel so vulnerable, and the impossibility of escape had never loomed larger. What a sight we must have been, had anyone been there to see it—but at that moment, Montmartre Cemetery held only the dead, and the two of us, hopping.

  When I was beside the headstone, he barked, “Stand against it.” My heart was hammering as if it was about to burst, but I did so. I couldn’t think what else to do; I was trussed, couldn’t run. Was this the end? Oh Dios mío, what kind of end?

  He yanked a cord from a pocket and tied me at the waist with one loop of the rope around the stone, jerking it tight. The rope also encompassed my arms, binding them at the elbow. I wished then that I could will myself to die, and if I could have, I would have done so. It was all over for me.

  But not for him. One thing about Father Miguel de la Vega which I’d learned two years before is that he cannot simply kill: first, he has to tell his victim all about it. All about why, and then—if his hatred is particularly roused—about how.

  And so he began.

  “They wanted you to die quickly, as soon as I’d made my way to Paris,” he hissed. “But I promised the society I would find a method of punishing you more than you could bear. To kill you through the heart first, before killing you through the body. In that way I could also punish you for the agony you have inflicted upon me. The bullet wound in the thigh—I’m sure you recall the circumstances? It didn’t heal. When I was captured and taken to prison… it festered. Gangrene set in. The prison surgeons didn’t like me, didn’t care that I knew it. Finally, the leg was sawed off. Not even a stump remains, for they dislocated the femur from the hip joint, like cracking open a chicken. Sawed everything away. No pain killer of any description, fully awake and aware for the entire ordeal.”

  I shuddered at the terrible images he’d painted.

  “So you see, I vowed to myself that I would have the pleasure of killing you twice. That’s why Koreff’s experiment caught my attention and why I agreed. I could do it then, while you were
in the same state that I’d been, when they sawed off my leg: awake, but unable to stop what was happening, what I was going to do. But he’d used a drug, too, and because of that, I didn’t think you would have suffered enough. His simple brethren, as well, were getting in the way. Too sentimental, all of them. Useless to us.”

  He was making small hops, like a crow. It looked painful as well as tiring. But the mad light was in his eyes, and I guessed what was coming. He reached into a pocket again and drew forth his vice: a little cigarette, tightly rolled, containing his drug of choice—ganga. His yellowed fingers reeked of it; his teeth were stained with it. His own, particular painkiller. He sparked a match upon the headstone and sucked the smoke deeply into his lungs.

  “You got away, in Bonn… Somehow you did, yet again. So I told myself, maybe even… Three times,” he said, eyes slitted, the ganga getting into its stride. “Killing you thrice… You deserve it.” He smiled. “Let me tell you how.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “¡Cállate!” he screeched, and slapped me hard across the face. “You are going to know, because that is part of the reparation!”

  My head rang from the blow. I closed my eyes; if I kept looking at him, I wouldn’t survive. Well, I wouldn’t survive anyway—but I couldn’t bear to witness his triumph. At first, this seemed to suit him fine.

  “The first way that I killed you? Let me explain. Cassagnac was deeply in debt; he was easy to convince. He joined because I promised to help him absolve himself from his obligation; the hot-headed brother-in-law was also game. Beauvallon set up the fraudulent motivation for the duel, and Dujarier was gullible enough—honourable enough?—to take the bait. He’d gotten it into his romantic mind that the avenging angel—the note he’d found on the whore—had something to do with first-born sons like Dumas fils, and so he’d been determined to guard that supercilious young man from being struck down.” I could hear de la Vega’s tongue rasp across his dry lips, perhaps aiding a smirk, before the high-pitched recitation began again. “Dujarier knew his Exodus 12, but he didn’t know enough, or else he forgot: that he was a first-born son, too. The avenging wing travelling over the land—yes, it had come for them. But him first. With Dujarier dead, Cassagnac’s debt… disappeared. It was a very satisfying first death—for you.” He came closer, I sensed it, and his voice dropped into a deep whisper. “Did you suffer? I know you did. You who are first-born, too.”