FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “No, but it was sorry enough in parts.” Irene gazed at the wallpaper as if it were a painting worth studying. “If you find me odd in not wishing to trace my antecedents, it’s because I know that all families have secrets. Family secrets are the most dangerous of all, and we are always the sorrier for finding them out. I don’t relish unearthing mine.”

  I kept silent, meditating upon the one matter I kept from Irene at all costs. I could only be thankful that a dogged investigator like Nellie Bly had not the slightest interest in unveiling my secrets.

  8.

  Maternal Musings

  You can live as many lives in NewYork as you have

  money to pay for.

  —THE DESTRUCTION OF GOTHAM, 1886

  The city of New York was in those days the bustling, expanding, towering monument to American enterprise typified by the Statue of Liberty thrusting her torch into the very vault of Heaven itself.

  I reminded myself that it had taken the French to install so blatant a symbol in New York harbor, and then I was less intimidated by the city itself. The French are far more intimidating than anybody.

  In fact, that city reminded me more of Mother London than of Grande Dame Paris, for it was crowded, noisy, and noxiously fumed, while Paris was open, airy, and impossibly French.

  The first most distressing impact of New York City life was the fact that most city streets were numbered rather than named. And such a hubris of numbers! I understood that humble first and seventh and twentieth streets soon vaulted into the eighties and nineties and beyond. The city reminded me of a Scots plaid, for the north-south avenues that crossed the east-west streets were also numbered, Fifth and Seventh being the most notable.

  Pink and her mother resided in “midtown” at 120 West 35th Street.

  There Irene and I took ourselves the next afternoon, by horse-drawn tram.

  Such noise! Not only the clatter of hooves and wheels, but the yammering of the numerous street vendors, who were not confined to certain areas of the city but poured into all the main streets hawking their dubious wares.

  In London one saw essentially two classes on the streets: gentlemen of business and Those Others; in New York everyone poured out of the towering buildings . . . urchins, hucksters, businessmen, and women of all sorts, many of them suspect, as well as others too obviously poor to be suspect of anything but starvation.

  I could not guess into which category of women Irene and myself would be assigned by passersby, save that Irene seemed sublimely disinterested in how we would be regarded by others at all.

  She had always had this distressful attitude, but in New York City it was more obvious than elsewhere. I reflected that how women on the street were regarded by others—that is, passing gentlemen—was the hallmark of a civilization, and I must admit that the French exceeded the English in this regard.

  “I see,” Irene remarked, “that Paris is rising in your estimation even as Manhattan Island is sinking like a barge in the East River.”

  “How can you see anything of the sort?” I demanded.

  “Your glances give you away. You have been frowning at the crowds since we left the hotel. And you hold up your hems as if you expect some unknown man in Oriental robes to collapse at your boot toes at any moment, muttering the immortal phrase, ‘Miss Huxleigh?’ ” Irene chuckled. “That Paris street scene smacked of Stanley finding Livingstone in the jungles of darkest Africa: ‘Miss Huxleigh, I presume?’ ”

  I would not allow her to trivialize my dramatic encounter with Quentin Stanhope in Paris, that had led us all—Irene, Godfrey, and myself—into serial danger and travels to foreign and ancient lands.

  “You cast me as Livingstone?”

  “Well, like you, he was religious. Stanley was merely a newspaper reporter, a Welsh-born American reporter for the New York Herald who did what no man on earth had been able to accomplish: track down the goodly doctor and incidentally confirm the source of the Nile.”

  “Are you trying to give American newspaper reporters some sort of pedigree?”

  “Not at all. I merely point that the historical meeting was when—?”

  “In the eighteen-fifties.”

  “So there is precedence for American reporters combining travel and derring-do and finding impossibly lost persons.”

  “Miss Pink is an amateur compared to Mr. Stanley. And Dr. Livingstone was a godly missionary. Finding him was worth the effort.”

  “Whereas finding my mother—?”

  “I do not mean to impeach your reputed mother, whose existence even you deny! I merely mention that Nellie Bly has made a reputation purely on injecting herself into lurid situations. If she is interested enough to want to produce a mother for you, I, for one, would be very leery of the result.”

  Irene smiled while taking my arm and guiding me around a particularly noxious horse dropping.

  “I have no high hopes of filling in my family tree all the way back to the Magna Carta,” Irene admitted as we stood outside 120 West 35th in what Irene had assured me was the “fashionable” Murray Hill district. “But I do have expectations of being entertained, at the least. Come. We are expected for tea.”

  It struck me that only Americans would begin the pursuit of a person’s probably scandalous origins over a civilized serving of tea.

  The house required us to mount enough stairs to add up to a year, had they been months. Nothing much distinguished this entry, façade, or block of buildings from many others that crowded the walks bracketing New York’s cobblestoned streets.

  The building stone was dark, not from London’s numerous coal-smoke-laden fogs, but due to its very nature. Brownstone, it was called, and it managed to cast a pall on the day without a bit of English fog in the offing.

  The entry was narrow and the door was opened by the former associate we had known only as “Pink,” an American prostitute in Paris, until her true self had come to light: Nellie Bly, another false persona.

  Now we met the girl’s no doubt much-put-upon mother, a woman past sixty with her daughter’s handsomely regular features. Her iron-gray hair was parted in the middle as in the days of her youth, and she seemed a comfortable sort of person and most cheery.

  I must admit that I hoped that such a cozy maternal figure would suit admirably for Irene’s lost mother, or for my own dead one.

  “Do come in,” Mrs. Cochrane urged. “I seldom meet my daughter’s associates. And all the way from England.”

  “Paris,” I corrected.

  “As high a star over my existence as London, my dear. I am a homebody,” said this disinherited widow of a judge, a woman who had subsequently married a monster. I recalled Pink’s stories of her stepfather, Jack Ford, breaking the furniture and ruining the laundry simply to make this mother and her children work harder, so he could undo their efforts all over again.

  “Miss Huxleigh,” she murmured at our introduction. “You do not seem much older than my little Pink . . . nor does Mrs. Norton, yet you are both grand ladies.”

  “Not I! I am as . . . simple as scones.”

  “Scones?”

  “A Scottish delicacy,” Irene explained. “Something like a rather tasteless cookie.”

  By then we had been ushered into a small but well-accoutered parlor, numerous ferns filtering the daylight beyond the bow window.

  “My daughter says that you ladies took her under your wings when she was abroad on newspaper business.”

  Irene and I accepted our teacups from the woman’s hand, so wrinkled and pale she might have been wearing lace gloves.

  (I saw all the ironing turned out on the floor, trampled by muddy boots. “Now, do it again!” the ogre thundered. So came heated irons and the re-pressing of every little pleat, sweat and tendrils braiding down a forehead. I recalled the sweatshop poem called “The Song of the Shirt.”)

  Something made me glance to the archway. Pink stood there making a picture in a frame, wearing a pale summer plaid gown of pink and lavender organdy. She was
neat and wasp-waisted, a slip of girl who looked as if she’d never heard of madhouses or sweatshops or most especially brothels.

  “How charmingly you are dressed,” I couldn’t help remarking. I glanced to her beaming mother. “Is that how she earned her childhood nickname? The color pink truly becomes her hazel eyes and brown hair.”

  Pink flushed at my question, only intensifying the effect I had remarked upon.

  “All the other little girls wore dull black stockings and brown calico,” Mrs. Cochrane said. “I put Pink in white stockings and starched pink dresses. She was as cute as a button and quite the little attention-getter even then.”

  Pink’s face was now scarlet under a hat of lilac straw festooned with rose satin ribbon.

  “Are you ready for our afternoon expedition?” she inquired sharply. Of Irene. At that moment I understood that she wished for both Irene’s approval . . . and her downfall.

  Mothers and daughters, I thought. Mothers and daughters. I had always been the latter, but I had never been the former. Nor had Irene. Were we . . . missing something, then?

  For some reason Godfrey came to mind. I sighed and relaxed. And tensed again. Would we meet a woman who considered herself Irene’s “mother” this afternoon, if Pink was not deceiving us?

  I considered, as we sat there, sipping tea, that Pink had always been her mother’s champion. I saw her then, just over a decade ago, a passionately defensive green girl of fourteen. She had been forced to fight for her family by the merciless laws of inheritance and the eternal tendency of women to seek men for protection even if the men they find are those they need protecting from. I also glimpsed another girl of a decade ago: Irene, perhaps forced to forgo family . . . by what unknowable, unnamable circumstances?

  In some way I felt caught in the middle, particularly as that awful word murder hung over all our maternal musings like an executioner’s axe.

  “My dear child has made me prouder than any mother has a right to feel,” Mrs. Cochrane, formerly Ford the madman’s wife, said. “And what of your mother, Miss Huxleigh?”

  “She died, in having me. This happens more often than one would think. My father—”

  “Yes?” Irene asked. She knew as little of my family upbringing as I knew of hers.

  “My father was a mild and learned man. He taught me more than I—or he—could know. He was both father and mother.” I had never said such things before, but now that I did, I knew them for truth.

  “The judge,” Mrs. Ford said with a hefty sigh.

  How could a good man have died and left them nothing to fend with but memory? Of course, when my own father died, what could I do but become a governess? Become “Huxleigh,” known by my surname like a servant and yet ministering to the most intimate needs of the family’s prized children?

  I shook my head and set ignoble memories aside. “Huxleigh” was half a lifetime ago, as my father’s death almost was. Seventeen years ago. Father.

  I glanced at Irene. If she had never known a mother, had she ever known a father? No. Godfrey was right, in his lawyerly way: Irene came unencumbered—she was there at once, in the here and now, full-grown, full-blown.

  There was only one other person who struck me as having such an utterly unrecorded, lonely history.

  This was Mr. Sherlock Holmes, a man I both loathed and feared, and also, I discovered to my own surprise, was beginning to pity.

  9.

  Crime Seen

  We had strong phenomena from the start, and the medium

  was always groaning, muttering, or talking.

  SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, REPORTING ON A SÉANCE

  We three patronized the luxury of a carriage for the newest journey, the lumbering assemblage called a “gurney,” pulled by two horses, that easily held three people.

  Irene had laughed when I remarked that hansom cabs were not as plentiful in New York as in London or Paris. “They are much more in evidence than when I was last here,” she noted.

  “And when was that?” Pink was quick to inquire.

  “When hansom cabs were not so popular,” Irene replied shortly, then turned to resume her interrupted conversation with me.

  That would teach Miss Pink to respect her elders!

  “There was much resistance to hansoms here several years ago, Nell,” Irene went on. “After all, the step-up is a foot and a half, which makes them difficult for ladies managing skirts. And, I think, the hansom has become the quintessential English city transport. They are the water bugs on the great ocean of London, darting hither and yon with speed and agility. New York is a hasty town, but more ponderous.”

  “That is exactly it, Irene!” I replied. “I’ve been wondering how I would characterize this city to, say Sarah Bernhardt—”

  “How kind of you to consider reporting to Sarah,” Irene said.

  “Not reporting, but she is the person I can best recall who would require descriptions, as if she is always seeking stage directions. Anyway, the city is indeed ponderous. Thick with buildings and populace, crowded with commerce that flows constant and slow, like molasses. If homely London hansoms are water bugs, practical and swift, Paris equipages are . . . dragonflies over a lily pond, elegant and gliding.”

  “And New York’s transport?” Irene prodded with amused attention.

  “New York is humming bumblebees, never silent, always industrious, but . . . ponderous! . . . compared to her British and Continental sisters.”

  “Oh, pooh!” Pink said. “New York is as light on her feet as any world capital, she just doesn’t make a melodrama of it.”

  I said no more, but felt our cumbersome conveyance itself made my point. It more resembled a dray wagon than a sprightly landau.

  “Where are we going?” Irene asked, all practicality again.

  “Union Square, near Park and Fifteenth,” Pink explained. “The theatrical district.”

  The phrase divided our party. At those words I recoiled and Irene frowned. Pink beamed.

  “You see,” she said, “it all started with a most remarkable séance.”

  “Poppycock,” said I.

  “Fraud,” Irene seconded, surprising me no end. She lived and breathed the theatrical and I could think of no more dramatic bit of stage business than a séance.

  “So I thought.” Despite our skepticism, Pink remained unruffled . . . except in the charming lavender frills of her shirtwaist. “And, in a sense, you’re both right, save that even a fraud and a poppycock shouldn’t die for the sin of being suspected.”

  “Die?” Irene asked.

  “Was killed, really, although no one can yet tell why. Or exactly how.”

  Irene sat forward to plumb her reticule, soon producing her signature blue enamel cigarette case, from which she extracted a dark Egyptian wand of brown paper and tobacco.

  She struck me as much relieved by the type of news Pink had for us: the murder of an unknown medium. I had to wonder how our adventurous lives had so upended civility that mention of unnatural death could be a welcome distraction from more sober thoughts.

  Clearly, this entire journey disconcerted Irene, and she would tolerate brushing so near her roots only in the name of some greater mayhem than mere childhood.

  “So.” Irene shook out the flame for the tiny lucifer she had struck against the box’s inner lid. “You go amongst the mediums rather than the filles de joie now.”

  “I went to the séance with an ajar, if not open, mind,” Pink retorted. “I wish you’d offer me such a crack of credibility, Irene. I truly expected nothing extraordinary . . . none of the atmospheric thrills of an authentic Prague Gypsy fortune-teller, certainly.”

  “Prague Gypsy fortune-tellers are no more authentic than any others. Apparently you got more than you hoped for here,” Irene murmured.

  “Oh, indeed, but you must visit the death chamber first. Such an ordinary room. I expect you’ll find something extraordinary in it, though.”

  Irene said nothing, choosing to wait and see before ju
dging. I was not eager to investigate sordid rooms in the city’s theatrical district, but I noticed that Irene seemed no more enamored of our destination than I. That was odd, for the theatrical world had always been her home, at least as long as I had known her.

  Pink had not exaggerated, for once. (Sometimes she thought as breathlessly as the multiple headlines on a sensational news story.)

  Our conveyance came to rest in front of another of those eternal five-story brownstones that line New York streets. This one was no more notable than the rest, and sported the usual middling flight of steps and a single bow window overlooking the street.

  Irene paid the driver after we alighted, as the larger gurney had no convenient ceiling trapdoor. We were down upon the city sidewalks again, lifting our skirts so the street filth shouldn’t decorate our hems.

  Irene looked up to assess the building, perfectly respectable for its kind, save for a crystal ball in one window.

  “This was a murder scene. How is that the police have not secured the premises and we can visit it?”

  Miss Pink Cochrane snorted like a daintily indignant pony. “First, the police scorn such doings as séances and found the testimony of the witnesses, including myself, ‘hysterical.’ Second, almost twenty-five thousand people died in the inhumanely overcrowded tenements on the Lower East Side last year alone. Death often seems the rule, not the exception, in New York City. Third, the city police department is as corrupt as the grave. It takes bribes and influence to get them to investigate a crime, which is why we are here doing it instead. And, fourth, if you do not understand the previous whys and wherefores, I can simply tell you that no one cares . . . except landladies who find the superstitious loath to rent such notorious rooms, which is why they are still vacant almost two weeks after the death.”

  This time when we knocked at a door in New York City it was opened by a stranger, a wizened little woman with a face as leathery as a walnut shell.

  She nodded us in.

  The odor of some heavy incense hung over the dim hallway like a darkened gasolier, and made me cough.