FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Hear, hear,” Irene rejoined. “A fine speech. I seem to recall that Nell and myself have done just that for some years. Yet by calling yourself an ‘orphan’ when you weren’t one, you undercut your argument that women deserve meaningful work. You make work into an act of charity, not a deserved occupation.”

  Irene leaned across the table, her voice now as soft as a lullaby, her eyes glittering with sudden sympathy.

  “Why did you call yourself an orphan, Pink?”

  “I . . . I—Really, Irene, that was so long ago!”

  “How long?”

  “Oh, four years, but so much has happened since. I had to use a false name. No decent woman allows her true name to appear in print—”

  “Unless she is married or buried, didn’t someone once say?”

  “I don’t know, but that’s about it. That phrase was simply something I scribbled down on the spur of the moment.”

  “But you did have a mother, and a father, Pink, and he wasn’t that dreadful man Jack Ford you told us about, that brute who forced your mother to seek a divorce when you were fourteen. You want to unearth my mother. Perhaps you owe it to me to tell me about your father. Your real father.”

  Pink pushed her fork into the candied fruit that comprised our dessert. The gesture was sudden, as if she were stabbing something other than a glazed apricot.

  “He was a fine and cultured man, very kind. I often used to sit on his lap and he gave me hard candy. We lived in a town called Apollo, in a beautiful house with four high white pillars and a pediment in front of it. I remember playing and looking up at it and thinking that must be how the mansions in heaven look. . . . There was no heaven, except for him, if you believe that sort of thing. He . . . what would you say? Collapsed one day. Couldn’t move or speak. He was soon dead.”

  “How old were you, Pink?”

  “Six. I had just turned six.”

  “I’m sorry,” Irene said, sitting back. “You must have loved him dearly at that age, and remembered why, more’s the pity.”

  “Indeed. Then the house was gone, and my mother was left with five children and no way to support them. It soon was up to me.”

  “Had you no older brothers or sisters?”

  “My brothers married and started their own families. There was some pittance left, but my ‘guardian’ seemed to run short of it awfully soon. I had to leave normal school and make my way as best I could. I tutored, played the nanny—”

  “Oh, I did, too,” I put in at mention of a common fate.

  Pink glanced unhappily at me, unencouraged by our shared history. “As soon as I turned twenty-one, I sued that guardian in court.”

  “Did you win?” Irene asked.

  “He was proven to be a very poor accountant, but the case took two years. I guess I exposed him in public, and that’s enough.”

  “So that’s what you do now,” Irene said, smiling, “you expose other wrongdoers in public. What has made me a target for such a campaign?”

  “I mean you no harm! You should be happy to find a lost relative. I defended my mother. I have supported my mother. Even now I live with her. A woman of that generation did not have the choices we have today. We owe them respect and love. I couldn’t help running across . . . traces of you as a child, and what a fascinating child you were!”

  “How fascinating?” I said, interrupting.

  “Not as fascinating as the child Pink,” Irene said quickly, keeping her attention on Nellie Bly. “So you learned where I grew up, and with whom. That still does not presume a mother in the woodwork. Besides, Pink, who cares who my mother was or was not? Not I. Not the public.”

  “I can’t believe you wouldn’t care, but I won’t argue that. The public will care if someone is trying to kill a woman who is actually your mother, and this may not be the first murder in your former theatrical circle, for all we know. A whole clan of women surrounded you when you were a child.”

  “Ah. My mother was not absent, but merely incognito. And your claim of maternal danger is merely the opening to the real mystery. Murder. Murders plural, I think, else you would not see the pattern of a ‘circle.’ You have hooked me, Pink, even though you don’t discern the reason why. Let’s get down to it, then. Who has been murdered? That is what must be established before anyone supposes who might be murdered next, and to whom the next victim ‘might’ be related.”

  “You have taken on a lot of British airs since you have lived abroad, do you know that?”

  “I do, and I like it. ‘British airs’ embody manners and civility, something my former native land and its products could use more of.”

  My spine straightened as if the Union Jack had been raised over our table. I joined Irene in regarding Pink, christened Elizabeth, presumably by her mother, and renamed Nellie to provide a pseudonym for the newspaper for which she toiled, the Pittsburg Dispatch. Even in America in this ultramodern year of 1889 it was recognized that no respectable woman would write under her own name for the public press.

  New York was decidedly not the World, in my opinion, or anywhere near the center of it. And Irene was not a motherless lamb to be lured by the baaing of a mythological ewe. Or was I thinking of a Judas goat?

  And was that Pink herself?

  7.

  Domestic Disturbances

  Real estate capitalists suddenly discovered that there was

  plenty of room in the air, and that by doubling the height of its

  buildings the same result would be reached as if the island had

  been stretched to twice its present width.

  —BUILDING NEWS, 1883

  What a sad commentary on contemporary mores that I was not surprised when we returned to our hotel rooms after dinner to find a strange and rather unsavory man waiting in our parlor.

  He rose as we let ourselves in, and seemed to regard explaining his presence as quite unnecessary. Since Irene had not drawn the little pistol she always carried in even her smallest dress reticules when she traveled, I assumed that she had expected him.

  “How kind of your superiors to send you,” she said by way of greeting.

  “The office,” he replied with certain formal wariness, “said I was to spare no effort on your behalf.” He blinked at me. “Is this the chit who is blackmailing you?”

  Fortunately, the suggestion rendered me speechless, allowing Irene to create the libretto of her choice. “Not at all. This is Miss Huxleigh, a British . . . inquiry agent who has been working the Continental side of the case.”

  His glance flicked to me and challenged not a jot of that fairy tale. “Good evening, miss. Ma’am.” He nodded at Irene. “I hear you went from an agent to an employer of the Pinkertons on occasion, over in Europe, not that we have many agents working there. Yet.”

  He was a tall, rather beefy man of the Irish persuasion, with a nose that seemed red, bulbous, and long enough to have regularly inhaled the fumes of ale or even whiskey. Still, his eye was sharp and there was an air about him of a military man, however lowly.

  “The case,” Irene said, “that called me home is not precisely blackmail, although the young woman you referred to would not stick at a bit of coercion to win her way. No, the real matter in the case seems to be one of murder.”

  “What case would that be, ma’am?”

  “It’s a mystery,” Irene said roguishly. “The first part of it is that I have been lured to this country by talk of a mother I did not know I had. The second part of it appears to be the notorious stunt reporter, Nellie Bly. Have a seat, Mr.—?”

  “Conroy, ma’am.”

  “And some sherry from the sideboard. Excellent. Then please tell me . . . us, what you have learned.”

  He immediately accepted the delicate glass Irene offered him, although it posed between his large, callused forefinger and thumb like a crystal thimble, and he sat upon a side chair.

  One swallow finished the sipping sherry and then he set the glass on the desk. Next he pulled a cheap and battered no
tepad and a stubby pencil whose lead had been mutilated by some sort of knife from the side pocket of his jacket.

  “She is the cat’s meow when it comes to doings of the journalistic sort,” he began. “Though she goes by Nellie Bly, her real name is Elizabeth Cochrane, but I figger you know that, ma’am.”

  “Indeed I do, but hold nothing back. You have had the advantage of investigating her on her own home soil. We first made her acquaintance abroad, where she was herself investigating matters for a sensation story and posing as a prostitute.”

  His eyebrows rose like grizzled caterpillars about to exchange blows. Not for this blunt American the exquisite, single lofted eyebrow of an Oscar Wilde.

  So I was not surprised when blunt words streamed off his tongue. In London, he would have spoken Cockney. Here it was a less accented but no less lowly form of American English. “What? Playing the harlot? And her a judge’s daughter?”

  “Judge’s daughter?” Irene rustled forward on the padded ottoman she had chosen to sit upon. “She never mentioned that. No wonder she seeks justice so intently.”

  “I’d guess there were so many of ’em none took it that serious like. He’d had ten children by his first wife. Miss Elizabeth and her four older and younger siblings came along through her mother, a widow named Mary Jane Cummings, who snagged a man of substance in her second marriage. The judge treated the new kids Nellie’s mother had after the marriage as well as his first family, and all would have been peaches and cream, except when the judge died, the children of his first wife pretty much got it all, and they sold Mrs. Mary Jane’s house right out from under her. She ended up with the furniture, the horse and carriage, the cow, one of the dogs, and no money to keep them.”

  “Oh, dear me!” I exclaimed. “It sounds so like a situation from a Jane Austen novel. Sense and Sensibility, if I recall correctly. I had no idea the laws and customs of America could be so . . . English.”

  Mr. Conroy frowned at me. “Right.” Obviously, he had understood not a word I had uttered. “Thank you, miss,” he added with a certain rough, frontier courtesy that I had detected in Buffalo Bill and even Red Tomahawk during our last, er, case. Really, being elevated to an inquiry agent was much more exciting than my former professions of governess, yard-goods clerk, and typewriter-girl.

  I subsided.

  Mr. Conroy licked the end of his pencil out of habit—a habit that made my governess’s soul cringe—and continued. “Put out lock, stock and single milk-cow, they were: the widow and five hungry kids. No wonder that Missus Cochrane soon fetched up married to one Jack Ford.”

  “Ah.” Irene sipped a centimeter of her sherry. She drank spirits as she smoked the small cigars she favored, delicately. She had not produced any smoking paraphernalia tonight. I suspect such an act would have scandalized our crude American colleague, and she didn’t wish to distract him. “That is why she remarried so unsuitably.”

  “You know of the rotter, ma’am?”

  “Yes. Some of our research will overlap, but I prefer to hear the whole report entire from you, Mr. Conroy, so please continue.”

  “ ‘Rotter’ was too good a word for Jack Ford. Drunk. Wife-beater. Debtor would do better. Nasty goods. The kind you like to grind facedown on the cobbles when you finally catch him at his dirty work. Turns out the rampages and such got too much. Missus Cochrane, the late judge’s wife, takes the bounder to court for divorce, and little someday-Nellie is her main witness to the man’s transgressions. She had spirit. That young Cochrane girl, I mean.”

  “Still does, Mr. Conroy. Have you any information on how she became a girl reporter?”

  “No. That stuff is not on record, as scandalous divorce cases are. Nellie turned up in the columns of the Dispatch before she was twenty, and her first story was about divorce.”

  “Cheeky of her.”

  “That’s for certain! A girl writing about such scandalous stuff. And that was just the beginning. Before you knew it ‘Nellie Bly’ was taking a train with her mother to Mexico and reporting on distressing conditions there, though I don’t expect nothing but distressing conditions across the border. Anyway, it was news to the readers of the Dispatch, as was the idea of such a young American girl going down there cool as you please. And there was the stunt after she came to New York when she acted like a madwoman and got the goods on the Blackwell’s Island insane asylum, which I would shake in me hobnails before visitin’ meself, for fear they’d never let me out.

  “There isn’t much this gal won’t do, and I must say that where she goes and what she sees and tells opens people’s eyes. This world is not a fair or just place, but neither was the Old World, which my forebears fled as they would an infestation of fleas, so there you have it. Nellie Bly is a name around New York now, along with her sisterhood, and they are all stirring up things and crying for justice for the poor and mute. Nothing much changes, though, ’cept the daredevil reporters get courted by the rich and famous and the poor and mute pretty much stay that way.”

  “Mr. Conroy. I didn’t expect such an astute and philosophical summary! And what is the state of Miss Bly’s private life now?”

  “She doesn’t much have one. The rival newspapers are arguing the truth in her stories and sending other young ladies to outdo her for daring, which is a bit of a challenge. There’s no dirt to dig up on her private life, though you’re saying she posed as a woman of ill repute in Paris. That would sully the page a little, but she already got a book out about Ten Days in a Brothel here, not to mention a pretty raw novel last year, The Mystery of Central Park, based on her story about a stableman who’d pick up naïve girls in Central Park and set them to brothel work. It was supposed to be a series, from the cover, but appears to be a series of one, and not a peep about that French brothel escapade has hit print here. She lives quietly with her mother in a cozy little flat on Thirty-fifth Street, when she is not out scandalizing folk and putting the fear of exposure into the slum landlords and others of that sort who deserve the fear of something more than most.”

  “Lives with her mother? Apparently the elder woman has never been particularly independent?”

  “She has not been a good judge of men’s character. Her daughter has benefited from the mother’s bad example to the point that there are no men to dig up in her past, save the mostly gray dinosaurs who employ her at the newspaper. If you’re looking for dirt on Nellie Bly you are not alone, but you are just as unsuccessful as the girl reporters at the rival papers.”

  “Well done, Mr. Conroy!” Irene sat back, her sherry still mostly intact. “You make me proud to have been a Pinkerton. Is the Female Department still going strong?”

  “No. Mr. Pinkerton was alone in his insistence on such an idea, and once he died in ’eighty-four, no time was lost in abolishing the practice. I admit that I am sorry to see the notion fade, but at least I have had occasion to meet yourself.”

  He stood, stuffing his homely notepad into his sagging coat pocket. “I take it you had been up to a few stunts in your day, ma’am, that would make Miss Nellie Bly pale to puce by comparison. Mr. Pinkerton spoke of you often, with great regret, in that Europe and the performing stage had stolen away the best female agent he ever had.”

  Irene stood also. “I am honored to be so remembered. Thank you for your assistance.”

  “If you need anything more—”

  “I will not hesitate to call upon you.”

  With that our unexpected visitor picked up his sorry derby and departed.

  “Ah!” Irene pushed her fists into her whaleboned waist and took a deep breath after he had gone.

  “We already knew a good deal of Pink’s family history,” I pointed out.

  “Yes, but from her alone. I find it intriguing that she still lives with—supports—her mother.”

  “Intriguing? It is only daughterly duty. Had I a mother still living—”

  “Yes, I know, Nell. You’d be a paragon of devotion. I can only thank fate that you were orphaned and availabl
e to provide such sterling devotion to my causes. Pink, though, is from a different tradition. She is young, modern, notorious, celebrated, and even more impressively, making inroads on her society. Why is she not courted? Why has she not a fistful of suitors? Why does she live, at the ripe old age of twenty-five, with her mother?”

  “Not every woman,” I pointed out, “is so fortunate as to find a Godfrey.”

  “But every woman in such a position would have at least found a Crown Prince of Bohemia or two, even if he were only a merchant prince in this most democratic land.”

  Irene paced, then paused to extract her pistol from the silken evening bag and install it in the desk drawer. Only then did she root in the reticule and withdraw the elegant blue enamel case that held her tiny cigarettes and the lucifers that lit them.

  “And why is she so intrigued by the notion of my forgotten mother?”

  “Obviously her mother was more important to her than yours was to you.”

  “For which she does not forgive me. One often requires others to respect the same obligations that oneself is tied to. Yet I must believe that there is more to this matter than a trifling disagreement about the importance of mothers.”

  “What can we do to discover what it is?”

  “For starters, we must meet her mother . . . and then I suppose we must contrive to meet mine.”

  She grinned at me with an insouciance I would be sore put to summon were I about to meet my long-dead and utterly unknown mother.

  “You could hardly think, Nell, that I would arrive here on an expedition into the most hidden areas of my past called by Nellie Bly without investigating her private affairs. You will recall her impassioned defense of her mother, testifying against her vicious stepfather at the age of fourteen. Perhaps it’s not so surprising that she supports and lives with her mother more than ten years later, or that the subjects of her newspaper stunts are the brutal lives of sweatshop girls and fallen women.”

  “Yet her own life cannot have been that sordid.”