FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “He is the writer of the moment, isn’t he? But editor of The Woman’s World . . . I’m not sure that my sort of thing is his sort of thing.”

  “Nonsense, Watson! I may immodestly say that my cases, suitably fictionalized and based upon your maiden effort, make most interesting reading.”

  “I have another manuscript I call ‘A Scandal in Bohemia.’ ”

  “I have heard you brandish that annoying little title before and suggest you look farther. That case was much ado about nothing, and I did not exit it in glory, since the lady evaded me.”

  “But she is dead: perished in that dreadful Alpine train crash while fleeing London with her new husband. She can hardly bring any sort of case against me if I were to present her unhappy history in fiction.”

  “I sincerely hope not, Watson. Still, I advise you to look farther afield for your second, and perhaps more important effort, for every debut must prove itself with the unquestioned quality of its successor. What about that gruesome affair involving the murder at Pondicherry Lodge and the Agra treasure? It has all that the modern reader yearns for: lost riches, betrayal, a rousing river-borne chase, sudden death, and a charming touch of romance in the stalwart doctor’s wooing of the consulting detective’s charming young client, Miss Mary Morstan, now Mrs. John H. Watson. That is the sort of thing that appeals to the public.”

  “Given your praise of Mary, I am surprised that the consulting detective did not rival the doctor for her hand.”

  “Ah, Watson, the married man! You are speaking to one who can report that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for murdering three small children for their insurance money. Women are not entirely to be trusted, not even the best of them.”

  “I thought you found Irene Adler the most winning of them of all. That is why you call her ‘the’ woman and keep her photograph on the mantel, although it seems you would like others to think that I am her most fervent admirer. I’m afraid her death has destroyed your sole opportunity to find an admirable woman.”

  “I am afraid so also, Watson, but I have my diversions.”

  I knew he referred to the thrice daily seven-percent solution of cocaine he resorted to when life offered no puzzles to challenge his restless intellect. The reference saddened me, for he had as much as admitted that Irene Adler might possibly have been diversion enough for a man and a mind such as his, had she lived, and had she not wed another.

  “And I have my diversions,” I said, hoping that talk of my stories would lure him from the needle case for a while. “You may be right, Holmes, about the Agra treasure affair, but it would require some length.”

  “So much the better! Substance, that is the thing.”

  Speaking of substance, Mrs. Hudson knocked on the door with her knuckles, her hands laden with a tray bearing our late-night supper.

  “Indeed,” Holmes greeted her, whisking the heavy tray into his custody. “And what culinary confabulation have you prepared for us, Mrs. Hudson? No, let us find this undiscovered country for ourselves. Thank you and good night.”

  After seeing her out, Holmes hovered over the tray, rubbing his hands together in expectation before plucking off a napkin like a stage magician revealing a rabbit. Indeed, the dish beneath was Welsh rarebit, soft and steaming. I quite forgot about Wilde and Stoker and the late Irene Adler and Bohemia in order to apply myself with deserving gusto to the treat before us.

  I also chewed on Holmes’s literary advice: a longer, bloodier fictional piece that might more likely find an audience than royal scandals and operatic shenanigans in Eastern Europe.

  Perhaps he had a point.

  5.

  Maiden Voyage

  DEAR Q.O.—I AM OFF TO NEW YORK.

  LOOK OUT FOR ME. BLY.

  —FAREWELL NOTE TO A COLUMNIST FRIEND ON THE PITTSBURG

  DISPATCH, WHERE SHE FELT HER WORK WAS UNDERVALUED, 1887

  From that day in the peaceful garden at Neuilly, I was in short order delivered into the most heinous interim in my life.

  I refer to what is called an “Atlantic crossing.” It is accomplished by steamship, by a great seven-deck liner as large as a cathedral but far less anchored.

  I cannot speak much about the experience, as I spent it confined to our cabin in the depths of mal de mer, which is a pretty French phrase for the most unspeakable, relentless nonfatal illness known to man, or woman, or child.

  Irene, of course, was as at home on the swaying bosom of Mother Ocean as she was on the stablest stage in Christendom.

  She returned frequently to my miserable bunk, both by day and night, with hot broths and cold compresses, neither of which helped.

  Often at night she sang to me, not so much words as lulling syllables, the best palliative for a wracked body and drifting mind. It was criminal, I thought hotly under that tuneful spell, how the King of Bohemia’s pursuit had forced Irene to accept the anonymity of presumed death and kept her from the concert stage for almost two years. Sometimes I believed I detected the wretched wailing of a violin behind her voice. Sometimes my heavy eyes saw the shadow of Sherlock Holmes looming behind her. At other times I fancied I saw a wildly white-haired old man sawing away like a Gypsy fiddler in Transylvania. The “maestro” became a malign figure I feared. Hadn’t his long-buried instrument resurrected Irene’s memories, bringing us both on this miserable journey into her past? Perhaps we would be dreadfully sorry for it. I know I was, already!

  “Poor Nell! Darling Nell!” she would croon, then mutter to herself, “It is my fault! I should have considered the effect of an Atlantic crossing on one who has only sailed the Channel between England and the Continent.”

  I was too weak to agree with her, or even flutter my eyelids in sign that I had heard. And then the soothing trills of her voice mesmerized me, bore me away on a tide of maternal memories . . . not of the dead mother I had never known, but of my own frail attempted lullabies when my schoolroom charges were ill and feverish. I was indeed fortunate to be as sick as a beached seal with a prima donna for a nursemaid.

  Smoking was not permitted belowdecks, so even during the night Irene would desert me for a short while. And, often, when she thought me asleep, she paced as she was wont to do only when smoking and puzzling out a conundrum. Now, however, her thoughts rather than tobacco drove her fevered stalking, and she berated herself even more.

  “This journey was folly. Folly! Nell is no better for it, but worse, and I . . . my past is checkered, to say the least, and will certainly shock Nell, even though I cannot remember the half of it! Why? Why! I can master the libretto of a four-hour score in a foreign language in no time! I am a nine-day’s wonder of a quick study. Why do I only have fleeting mental pictures of most of my childhood, with familiar but unnamed faces looking on? And something . . . something awful that I almost seem to recall but, maddeningly, cannot quite grasp. What is that mystery looming ever since I unearthed the violin and memories of the maestro! Everything before England is blurred, as through a misted window. Everything after is clear as crystal. Why!”

  Her words passed over me like ocean waves, agitated at the onset, but soon drawing away into the shallows of my mind like some ebbing eiderdown quilt.

  Later in the voyage, Irene brought back lively reports about that segment of the human race that is impervious to the act of bouncing endlessly in the deep vales and steep hills of saltwater. Somehow she expected that commentary on others’ seaboard amusements would cheer me up.

  During the day she leaned over me, her expression unnaturally cheerful while she regaled me with tales of promenades on the ladies’ deck and her unauthorized excursion to the gentlemen’s billiard room, where she won a round and smoked a cigar—Irene would be Irene on Noah’s Ark, I swear!

  I learned of rattan deck chairs and breezes so lively the women’s skirts hoisted like sails. (Our swift and modern steamship only flew a couple of pennants, she explained, and sported two black smokestacks billowing dark clouds.) Of deck-side games of shuffleboard and s
omething called “bull,” which did not make me pine to be up and about.

  She very considerately brought me no reports on the ship’s menu. And she emptied my slop pail with the dash of a milkmaid in an operetta performing an entirely quaint and graceful chore, for which I was most grateful. I had never before considered that a gifted actress’s dissembling could be an act of charity.

  “I have been asked to sing,” she told me once, greatly excited. I cannot say when, for there was no night or day for me in my floating bed of pain and disorientation. “At the Captain’s gala. He well remembers Buffalo Bill’s mind-reading act from a previous crossing. Imagine Buffalo Bill as a mind-reader. It is too amusing.”

  I muttered something that was not amusing.

  “Poor Nell!” She sat beside me glittering like the Diamond Horseshoe of an American opera house in her evening dress, passing a limp cold compress over my hellishly hot forehead. “Had I any idea that you were prone to seasickness I’d have never allowed you to come.”

  I muttered something not translatable.

  “Even toast and tea can’t answer. Well, at least you will land with a waist as narrow as Nellie Bly’s!”

  On that note, she left me. And I felt much better about feeling so bad, as I had once heard the wasp-waisted Nellie Bly so ungrammatically put it in her bold American way, of which I was soon to see much more, unfortunately. . . .

  What can I say about our being tugged into New York harbor like a large, dignified matron being dragged somewhere by a determined child?

  In this case, Irene was the child, grown, and the mystery of her mother was tugging her back to the land of her birth, and me with her.

  What a busy shore that was! Steamships and smaller vessels thronged the harbor, old-fashioned ships with gleaming ranks of sails like seagull wings and flat, ugly ferries conveying immigrants to Ellis Island. All were drifting by the towering figure France had sent America only a few years ago. The Statue of Liberty stood on a pedestal almost as looming as she was, with her sculpted metal robes like a giant curtain opening on Manhattan Island and her torch lifted high. It stood taller than one of the ancient world’s Seven Wonders, the male figure of the Colossus of Rhodes. Somehow the gigantic female figure seemed to suit this upstart nation, and it had been commissioned to honor the United States surviving its bitter Civil War.

  The scenery beyond the statue loomed as large as Lady Liberty herself did. Buildings did not unfurl in five-story rank and file, but shot up unexpectedly, some perhaps ten or even twelve stories high.

  Such metropolitan hubris was unknown to me.

  Still green of complexion, I leaned against the deck rail, inhaling air composed of smoke and seagulls and salt and oil.

  At least I was standing, now that the Atlantic waves had dwindled into the ripplings of a protected bay and series of inlets.

  “The New World,” I said.

  “The Old World, to me,” Irene answered. “I had hoped to put it behind me forever once.”

  The only things we put behind us now were everything we knew and valued, as we tended to the tasks of getting ourselves and our luggage ashore and to our hotel.

  Seagulls shrieked over our heads during the long process of debarking so many hundreds of people. The scent of salt and fish was as overbearing as the press of passengers eager to be on land. I almost became seasick again on the long, canted gangplank.

  Luckily, we traveled with one trunk each, a record for Irene, and small ones, too, dictated by the White Star Line to no more than three feet long and a foot or so deep. After two hours we were reunited with the proper trunks and found a four-wheeler waiting at the pier to take us to the Astor House hotel, which Pink had recommended.

  This hostelry was not far from the harbor, lying across Broadway from a fine, green park at Barclay Street. It was a four-square, five-story building and remarkable for being an entire fifty-some years old, Irene told me, imagine that. There are peddlers’ carts in London older than this!

  It was a relief to register in the echoing reception rooms and, after a disquieting ride in an elevator, find ourselves and our trunks installed in a decent enough suite of rooms. Godfrey had insisted that we travel in comfort, and had wired ahead so that American funds should be available to us. Clearly his work on the international front had made him only more thoughtful, able, and useful than ever.

  Yet accomplishing all these duties of arrival in a another land ended in no welcome respite, I knew, for Irene had already arranged by telegram to dine with Pink Cochrane this very evening.

  If I did manage to swallow a few bites of supper by the evening, I doubted that I could swallow anything our American acquaintance had to offer.

  6.

  Motherland

  My age is 14 years. I live with my mother. I was present

  when mother was married to J. J. Ford. . . . The first time I

  seen Ford take hold of mother in an angry manner,

  he attempted to choke her.

  —DIVORCE COURT TESTIMONY OF PINKEY E. J. COCHRANE, 1879

  “Now, what is this nonsense about my mother?” Irene asked directly after dinner.

  “I do not deal in ‘nonsense,’ ” Pink responded indignantly.

  Irene smiled at this forceful reaction. “I only mean that I do not have a mother. I have never been known to have a mother. Thus I am mightily curious exactly whom you are going to produce for this role.”

  “So you’ve come all the way across the Atlantic to tell me I’ve got a cold story?”

  I could not resist joining the conversation, now that I could sit upright and nibble at food again. “Oh, you have some story, no doubt, Pink. You ‘daredevil girl reporters’ are always up to something.”

  “I did nothing to find this story,” Pink replied as hotly as I had hoped. “It came to me, as the best ones always do. It’s knowing what’s smart to follow up on that counts in the newspaper business.”

  “And it is a . . . business,” Irene noted with a mere jot of British snobbery, which I, as a Briton, could appreciate and applaud. “What right does your ‘business’ have in meddling in my personal affairs?”

  “Because you are news, that’s why. Local girl makes good; just as I have.”

  “Local?” Irene’s tone dripped disbelief.

  “New Jersey is pretty close to New York City.”

  “I have never denied that I was born in New Jersey.”

  “But that’s just it. You weren’t.”

  “I ought to know.”

  “Really? You were a bit young at the time.”

  At this point it was a match. It struck me that young Pink was holding forth with the same irritating prescience that Mr. Sherlock Holmes employed all too often. Know-it-alls, both of them, though as different from each other as peas from potatoes.

  Irene and I, being far from home and our clothing wardrobes, were neatly attired in shirtwaists and skirts and short jackets. Pink, on her own ground, dressed far more grandly. She seemed to indulge in wide-brimmed hats as sweeping as a musketeer’s, with silk and velvet flowers nestled along one side instead of the extravagant plume called a panache, which represented the cavalier’s honor. I doubted that Miss Pink would wear her honor on her hat, or her heart on her sleeve, for all her admirable reporting of society’s wrongs had been done in feigned guise, like a thief or an inquiry agent. I doubted she would ever don men’s garb again, as Irene had done in her Pinkerton days and even did today, despite the Paris outing we three had made last spring so scandalously attired.

  She was simply too feminine to forgo her charms, a slim young woman with a waist small enough for a garter snake to encompass. She wore her hair in soft curls high on her forehead and pulled close behind her ears, which emphasized the perfect oval of her features. She looked as demure as a schoolroom miss, which was doubtless why her masquerades on the seamy side of life worked so well.

  Irene absently rearranged her silverware as one would adjust pawns upon a chessboard. I wondered whethe
r she would respond to Pink’s challenge with the olive branch of a teaspoon, the genteel prod of a fork, or the stab of the steak knife.

  Irene spoke at last. “It was not mention of a ‘mother’ that brought me back to these shores. It was mention of murder. And, of course, the utter impossibility of someone attempting to murder my mother. I am, as I’m sure you know, an orphan.”

  An orphan! I gazed at Irene in dismay.

  As hard as it had been for Godfrey to admit that he was . . . well, a word beginning with “b” applied to children “born on the wrong side of the blanket,” meaning that he was of, er, illegitimate descent—which meant either that his father was likely a rake like Bertie, or his mother was far worse than she should be—I could only imagine how hard it was for Irene to admit to origins that were the stuff of far too many melodramas. She had been a grand opera diva, and the grand opera regarded itself as far above melodrama even while it purveyed buckets of the same lurid yet sentimental drivel in high-sounding arias.

  That is my opinion, anyway.

  Irene smiled at Pink’s sudden silence. “Even you once signed yourself ‘Lonely Orphan Girl,’ you told me. That letter and self-deprecating signature interested an editor at the Pittsburg Dispatch, and the rest is newspaper history, or will be, if you have your way, Nellie Bly. And you were not ever an ‘orphan girl,’ by any means, were you?”

  “Nor are you! I myself suspect several women of being your mother.”

  “Ah, now I have a surfeit of mothers! Suspect! Only in your imagination. Perhaps ‘lonely orphan girls’ develop highly unreliable imaginations.”

  “I used that signature to let that annoying Dispatch columnist know that women work not just to challenge his sense of woman’s place, but because they have no man to support them. Many women are ‘orphans’ in the sense that they must look after themselves and should not be abused for it.”