FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  While I fell into uneasy silence, Irene was only the more intrigued. “What can Pink have to tell me that is urgent enough to require a transatlantic wire? Give me the thing, Godfrey! You have teased me quite enough to make it interesting.”

  She snatched at the envelope in his hand, winning a prize she immediately took to the lamp on the piano, the better to read it as twilight stole across our garden and shadowed the interior of the house.

  That same shadow fell over my heart.

  Pink Cochrane had burst into our lives and enterprises uninvited, and I confess that her energy and astounding cheek, either an American characteristic or a journalistic one, seemed to sap me of will and hope, especially when I discovered that in my absence she had made quite an impression on a special friend of mine, indeed, one of the very few good friends of mine, Quentin Stanhope.

  While I stewed with my eyes glued to my embroidery so no one should notice my distraction, Irene was being strangely quiet by the piano.

  “Well?” Godfrey asked at last. He was loosening his collar and obviously ached to go upstairs to change into less formal and thus more comfortable clothing for the evening.

  Irene said nothing.

  She simply sat there, haloed by the lamp that grew brighter behind her as the daylight faded, staring at the folded yellow paper the envelope had contained.

  She certainly was well able to read the message, yet her eyes remained fixed on the page. She was deaf to Godfrey’s voice, and blind to our presence, though we were growing more mystified by the moment.

  “Irene?” I said.

  I could have been asking the Guarneri for an answer.

  Godfrey leaned forward, peering at her. “Irene? Irene! Good God, what is it?”

  I stood, forgetting to set aside my embroidery work. Lucifer dashed from under the piano and immediately snagged it for a plaything. So bizarre had the atmosphere in the room become that Casanova the parrot shifted feet on his perch and began whistling a dirge!

  “Irene!” Godfrey repeated, standing as well.

  She finally looked up, as if surprised to find that we were still there and then further startled to see us on our feet. Clearly she had heard nothing for the past few minutes.

  “Something has happened,” Godfrey said.

  She looked around, as if seeking an explanation. Her eye fell on the piano top. “That old violin that was left with me. It is a Guarneri. I had no idea.”

  “Guarneri? What is a Guarneri?” Godfrey glanced at the instrument in its shabby case with true incomprehension. “I didn’t know you had a violin. Did it arrive today? With that Holmes fellow? Is that it?”

  His tone had definitely become as suspicious as mine would have been when discussing Sherlock Holmes.

  While I was pleased to see Godfrey extending the man some of the same animosity I felt toward him, I could not see even he falsely accused.

  “The violin is Irene’s,” I explained. “She’d kept it at the bottom of that old trunk all these years. She merely showed it to Mr. Holmes, who being the expert he is on all minutiae, immediately declared it an apparently rare and valuable Guarneri.”

  “So it is worth something?” Godfrey asked.

  “I suspect a great deal, when it is restored.”

  His regard fixed on Irene again. “That is not cause for this. Irene adores finding lost treasures. She is as bad as a nine-year-old in her fever to find things. She should be pounding celebratory mazurkas into those old keys, not mooning over a telegram from Nellie Bly.” He moved toward his wife. “I must read this for myself.”

  She snatched it away, not playfully as he had earlier, but with a gesture of unconsidered protectiveness.

  “Irene!” I admonished.

  I could not help it. The governess instinct becomes ingrained, even though I only held such positions for a year or two. At the moment, my friend and mentor was acting like a sullen child. Although as a former operatic diva she had her share of temperament, this was not a display of that. This was a worrisome state of shock.

  Godfrey glanced at me, then lowered his tone into a soothing one. “Irene, we can’t . . . help you if you won’t share the contents of the message that has so upset you. Please.”

  At that, the voice of reason, and I must say that Godfrey before the bar was always the most attractive representative of the Voice of Reason in all the Inns of Court, Irene literally shook off her strange state.

  “Oh,” she said, massaging one temple with her free hand. “I think it must be a bit of mischief engineered by that imp of international interference, Pink.” She held the paper out to Godfrey with a rueful smile. “Forgive me, but you will see that the contents are nonsensical enough to strike Casanova mute.”

  He said nothing as he held the message under the milk-glass globe of the lamp to read.

  He still said nothing.

  Now he simply stood there, frowning down at the paper and reading what was obviously only two or three lines over and over.

  Had two such brilliant and independent adults ever behaved so much like schoolroom ninnies? I marched over to Godfrey, snatched the impertinent paper, and read it.

  Read it again.

  Stared at the typed words as I had once regarded my own work when I had become one of the first typewriter-girls in London.

  Well.

  What to say?

  Something.

  Someone must.

  I would.

  “Irene, this . . . communication—it says that Pink believes that someone is trying to murder your mother. A shocking revelation indeed. Well, if anyone is equipped to deal with such an atrocious situation, who else would it be but a former Pinkerton inquiry agent like yourself?”

  “Who else indeed, Nell? Except that I don’t have a mother. I have never been known to have a mother . . . to murder, or not.”

  “Oh, Irene! Please! Everyone has a mother.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I did. She died at my birth. I definitely had one, as she had me.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Irene declared with rising animation, as if released from a stage hypnotist’s spell. “I have never had a mother, and I don’t intend to have one now.”

  “One’s wishes or demands don’t have much to do with the facts in such a case,” Godfrey said.

  “Perhaps not in a court of law,” she told him, “but I speak only the truth. I have never had a mother.”

  “Come, Irene!” Now he was pacing as though in court. “You cannot claim that you were birthed like Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and war, as a massive headache emerging from the forehead of her father Zeus! Although I can picture you giving anyone who had the temerity to bear you a migraine or two. You are a remarkable woman, and I agree that wisdom and war are not unknown to you, but not that remarkable.”

  I couldn’t resist adding my twopence. “Oh, I don’t know, Godfrey. I can indeed imagine Irene giving the king of the gods a royal headache. She has been known to give a king or two of our day the migraine.”

  “Most amusing, Nell,” she answered. “If you know your classical gods, you would know that ‘Irene’ is the goddess of peace. I admit that I could use a little peace on this subject. Even those who claim to have mothers may not know them well. You hardly knew your mother yourself,” she pointed out—gently—to Godfrey.

  “No. I was”—he glanced at me, then steeled himself for the next words—“a bastard.”

  I gasped, and Casanova mocked me with a perfect imitation.

  “But I knew who my mother was, if not my father for some time,” Godfrey added quickly.

  “How?” Irene asked.

  I was shocked to realize that they had never discussed this between them. Although I was a permanent member of their household, I should not be present while they explored such painful and personal revelations.

  I bent to retrieve my fallen embroidery hoop and steal away when Godfrey spoke again.

  “How interesting. That all of us, all three of us, should
have never known a mother’s care from an early age.”

  He glanced at me and I glanced at Irene, who stared at him and then turned her gaze on me.

  “Nell’s mother died,” she said at last. “You must have seen a daguerreotype or a photograph of her?”

  I nodded.

  “And she had a father. You, Godfrey, had a notorious mother who apparently did not acknowledge you publicly, though someone reared you and paid for your education. You also had a purported father you despised for what he did to your mother, although you never knew him either.”

  “That’s true. Roughly,” he admitted. “I will not go into the particulars now, because my past is somewhat known, but yours has always been a cipher from the first.”

  “Because I never knew a mother or father! I have no names, no photographs. No memories.” She lifted and weighed the flimsy cablegram paper on her palms as if it were made of lead. “This assertion must be false. It is impossible. I cannot imagine why Pink would make such an absurd statement, except that she is sadly misled.”

  “But if she is not,” I couldn’t help saying. “Murder—”

  “Why murder a woman who does not exist?!” Irene’s shoulders shrugged so violently that her fingers almost tore the message in twain. “And what is it to me if someone does?”

  We shared a mutual silence, Godfrey and I. Such callous sentiments were unlike Irene.

  She sat suddenly at the piano and crashed a resounding, atonal chord into the keys.

  “It is a fraud,” she said, “or a delusion. Let Miss Nellie Bly stew in her suspicions. I will have no part in it.”

  Godfrey flicked the upsetting message onto my side table.

  “You are quite right. One can never trust what independent American wenches may get up to.”

  Irene laughed over her shoulder at him, her hands sweeping into the lush chords of a Viennese waltz.

  The melody, one of Strauss’s, was irresistible. Casanova ducked his poly-colored head in time to the notes and swayed from side to side. Lucifer twitched his tail in time like a furry black metronome.

  Godfrey bowed before me and swept me into a waltz for the length of time it took us to spin over the threshold into the hall, where he bowed again and left me.

  In instants he was thumping up the stairs, undoing his tie, and whistling quite in tune.

  I stood by the portal, my head spinning from the sudden turn of events this afternoon.

  A Viennese waltz. I had never been to Vienna, but Irene and Godfrey had. After our second unfortunate adventure in Prague, they had packed me home to Paris on a train . . . and left for a second honeymoon in Vienna.

  The incessant, thrilling chords of Strauss played on, while my memory waltzed back to that long train trip across most of Europe, with a dashing gentleman my unexpected escort. Quentin. Five days of utter sequestration. Stories, but not waltzes. Moments, not years.

  And now . . . I recalled Quentin in a more recent light, part of a rescue party that had saved Godfrey and myself from vile hands in a godforsaken part of the world. Quentin, Irene’s trusty ally in finding and saving her husband and her dearest friend, both of them abetted by that American upstart, Nellie Bly!

  Quentin, hand-in-glove with that bold young woman who did not even go in the world under her own rightful name, Elizabeth Jane Cochrane.

  And now this miserable girl wanted to draw Irene back to her mother country, all because of fancied danger to a maternal figure Irene had never known.

  Nellie Bly.

  She was impertinent and shameless. Everything that a proper woman should not be. Yet she had carved inroads into the hearts of everyone I held dear.

  Irene pantomimed her carefree moments at the piano, but I was not deceived. Trouble had encroached upon her today . . . in the form of the man from Baker Street, in the wire from the girl from New York City.

  We could not allow that, Godfrey and I. We had striven too hard to survive the unthinkable to cede our loved ones to the bold and the beautiful. Well, Nellie Bly was beautiful, somewhat. Sherlock Holmes was not.

  Godfrey would know what to do. He had already turned Irene back to her satisfying recent past, from what I could gather had transpired in Vienna and could guess, perhaps a little, from what had happened, and not happened, during my closeting with Quentin for five days in a train compartment from Prague to Paris.

  Godfrey and I had been fellow prisoners and now we were fellow conspirators. Our loved one would not succumb to foreign influences!

  Our . . . loved ones.

  Lucifer attacked my ball of crochet twine and drove it to surrender against the fireplace fender.

  Exactly, my feline friend. It shall be tooth and claw to the end.

  3.

  Foreign Assignment

  A fair young English girl of the past, who is neither bold in

  bearing nor masculine in mind.

  —MRS. LYNN LINTON, 1868

  “She did not sleep a wink last night.”

  Godfrey’s voice startled me while I was in the garden the next morning, intermittently throwing Messy the mongoose some grapes that had grown puckered in Casanova’s cage.

  The evil bird himself was enjoying the late summer sunlight on the series of perches André, our coachman and carpenter par excellence, had made for him. The parrot’s multicolored feathers comprised a blooming garden on their own, though the real flora was fading as the autumn season advanced. Casanova was tethered by one leg to a long leather leash, so he could do everything but fly away.

  “Off with her head!” he suggested, opening up a rainbow of wings and beating them on the air, and incidentally mixing up the snippet of “Royal Wives, Royal Lives” Irene had been playing with bits of Alice in Wonderland that I had read aloud in the past.

  Godfrey sat beside me and glanced at the embroidery hoop in my hands. I stopped my busywork. I had not slept a wink last night myself.

  “Nell.” He said no more.

  “You have been thinking,” I accused with the accuracy of one who had once been his typewriter-girl.

  “Alas, yes. I have been thinking, and I have been doing something even more difficult: endeavoring to find out what Irene is thinking!”

  “I thought husbands and wives were utterly frank with each other.”

  He laughed so delightedly that Casanova tried and failed to mock him. “No, Nell. They should be utterly honest with each other, but frankness is different.”

  “I cannot see a difference.”

  “That is because you are not married. Some matters are better to tiptoe around, and the mystery of Irene’s American origins are such a matter. She is most protective of them, and Pink’s wild cablegram, perhaps coupled with the rediscovery of the violin owned by her former vocal instructor, has stirred up a hornet’s nest of conflicting desires in her. She tries to hide it, but it disturbs me to see her so torn in mind and soul.”

  “I thought she was rather flippant about the entire matter, and most definite that she needed no mother, dead or alive.”

  “What people are most flippant about is often what galls them the most. I learned that in court. And Irene is a master at pretending to emotions opposite to how she really feels. It was her only defense at one time, I think.”

  “Before you knew her, you mean?”

  “Before I knew her and loved her.”

  “Before even I knew her?”

  “Before even you knew her.”

  I considered. It seemed as if I had known Irene forever, but we had shared quarters only since ’eighty-one. Eight years. So established was our bond that shortly after Irene and Godfrey married and moved to France, I was invited for a visit that had become a residency. It did not harm anything that I had met and known Godfrey before Irene had, working for him in the Temple as a typewriter-girl. So, it seemed natural that an orphaned spinster like myself should join them at the cottage in Neuilly. Despite the public roles a barrister and an opera singer may play, Godfrey and Irene were very private about them
selves. I rarely glimpsed any marital storms, either disagreeable or . . . too personal to share. They were like extremely civilized parents who yet allowed me the exercise of my own will. Godfrey was a brother to me, and I cannot say enough as to how secure I felt with them both. Which is why I was upset at anything that challenged our tranquility.

  “You said you had been thinking,” I reminded Godfrey.

  “Oh. What I thought was that you and Irene should go to New York and find out what Nellie Bly is up to.”

  “New York? Irene? I!?”

  “Yes to all three.”

  “You actually recommend this course?”

  “No. I find it ultimately unavoidable, so rush to embrace it before I am forced to by outside elements.”

  “Not so unavoidable, Godfrey. You heard her. She will not go.”

  He smiled, ruefully and privately. “She will. And I fear that she needs to, although she won’t admit it. Remembering that old violin again has loosed memories and feelings that she may now be ready to face.”

  “Why now?” I asked.

  “Because of us. She is safe now, Nell. She can rely upon us to stand by her no matter what, as we can rely on her. If that old maestro was all she had of a father, perhaps she needs to be sure that there is still not a lost mother somewhere in America.”

  “Why should anyone need a new mother at this late date?” I grumbled, tossing Messy another grape.

  The clever little creature caught the tidbit in her front paws while standing erect on her hind legs. She was better than catlike in her ways, being much less lazy than Lucifer.

  “You know Irene. What is her greatest strength, and greatest weakness?”

  This time I had to concede. “She cannot leave an incongruity, an unanswered question, a mystery, alone. And, like most people who consider themselves solvers of any of the universe’s conundrums, minor or major, she most enjoys being mysterious herself. I am amazed by the contradictions in the human character and Irene is not immune to any of them. Yet, Godfrey, if there is one area of inquiry in which she has most violently refused all advances—and I have known her longer than you, if not better—it is in the matter of her origins, her own history, her past. I believe not even Sherlock Holmes could make an accurate deduction on that score, although . . . I should really like to see him try.”