FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  After all, his stock in trade was smoke and magnifying glasses!

  I stood among a jostling crowd of greeters, watching humanity flood down the gangplank amid shouts and huzzahs.

  Had he really come? Had I tempted him with enough blood and beauty under siege to stir his deficient gallantry?

  Although, when I considered it, I believed Mr. Holmes’s gallantry was of the mental, not of the physical kind found in that unusual Englishman, Quentin Stanhope, and the equally unusual Godfrey Norton, Irene’s better half, and indeed, the ideal husband for any modern woman who was still so backward as to deign to take a husband.

  I mentally viewed the Englishmen I had encountered during my European adventures: Mr. Holmes, of course, thorny, eccentric, and horribly smart in a non-fashionable way. Irene’s husband Godfrey, a Daniel come to judgment among barristers, handsome and equable, if one likes that type.

  Finally there was that elusive rascal Quentin Stanhope—mousy Nell Huxleigh’s would-be beau, of all things!—and my favorite Englishman, being adventuresome, gallant, and somehow distant from everything but faraway lands ruled by savage men and subservient women.

  I liked to imagine that had I ever been so unfortunate to be sold as a concubine in the piratical Mediterranean, I should have ended up a sultana. There is historical precedent for such a spectacular rise, and I like to think of myself as spectacularly rising, if nothing else.

  I rose on my toes at the moment, seeking to peer over the sea of heads in various hats and caps, to my quarry.

  He wore country clothes no doubt suitable for the deck of a steamship: a long checked coat with a short cape attached, and a plaid billed cap with ear flaps tied on top, rather silly sporting attire that only an Englishman could wear with dignity. Despite this being his maiden voyage to these shores, from what I knew, he showed no need or anxiety to find a welcoming face. Despite knowing that I would be among the welcomers, he sauntered through the madding crowd, a figure uniquely serene in his composure and keen survey of the general scene.

  In fact, the great detective did not deign to notice me, though surely he must have spied me, but required me to battle my way through the crowds to seek his side.

  “Mr. Holmes!”

  He paused at my call, took his pipe from his lips, and waited for me to win my way forward.

  “Miss Cochrane,” he acknowledged me when I stood panting beside him, my hat leaning slipshod over my left temple. “I do not see Madam Adler Norton.”

  “She is not here. Nor would she be. She has no idea you’re in New York.”

  “And no idea, I see, that I am here on her behalf at your behest. I fear that ‘invitation’ is far too bland a word for your doings, Miss Cochrane.” He eyed the crowded, noisy dock with more than disapproval. “It was not your wire, nor the possible presence of Mrs. Norton that brought me here. Would you care to guess what other inducement was involved?”

  Well, here I had one of the most talked-about Englishmen of the day at my fingertips, and he would have nothing to do with either fingertips or past acquaintance not forgot, or even a passing association with that paragon of song and story, Irene Adler Norton.

  “Then why are you here?” I shouted over the blathering throng.

  “As you deduced in your cable, Miss Cochrane, I have been thinking about Krafft-Ebing. In fact, I recently went to Germany to meet the man and report on the incredible case of the resurrected Ripper. Krafft-Ebing was quite insistent that such serial crimes are common, not an exception, and that I should investigate any instance of possible multiple murder to add to his catalog of such crimes. I agreed with Krafft-Ebing that it might be instructive. He is a man worth listening to.”

  “As no woman is or ever could be,” I returned.

  He bent his cool silvery gaze upon me. It was as icy as the mid-Atlantic when a storm is thinking about lashing out. “A few women are, or could be. Luckily, it is not my task to search out these worthy exceptions.”

  “Perhaps you do not need to search very far.”

  “Oh, that which is truly valuable is always at a distance,” he replied, bending a pointed and not entirely humorless look upon myself.

  I was quite certain he intended to snub me in favor of more removed females, such as Irene Adler Norton. I couldn’t see why, but didn’t say so.

  “A man who is not willing,” he went on, “to be the student of everything all his life, will never be the master of anything. So I am here to learn, and began by booking the hotel you recommended.”

  “Count on the humble female to know when there is no place like home,” I muttered.

  He pretended not to have heard me. “I would be delighted if you would join me there tonight for whatever respectable repast the house might offer. You can outline your suspicions then.”

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” I said, almost mesmerized by his lofty presence.

  Think what one will of the man, he is clearly expert.

  “Nor can my associate, Dr. Watson.”

  “Dr. Watson did not come? Such a pity! I had obtained a copy of A Study in Scarlet and wished to discuss it with him. I have penned some accounts of my undercover work in a madhouse and also a mystery story set in Central Park right here in New York City.”

  Mr. Holmes regarded me as if my literary efforts had dragged me even lower in his imagination.

  “I hope, unlike poor old Watson, you did not burden your accounts with sensational elements that detracted from the sheer logic and science of the cases.”

  “No, I fear that Dr. Watson and I have one thing in common: we like to tell a ripping good story that people will want to read. Does he not accompany you everywhere, rather like Nell Huxleigh does Irene, to record your every movement for future publication?”

  “No! Future publication means nothing to me, and I tolerate Watson’s little romances because they do at least give a glimpse of the scientific method at work. Besides,” he added, and I detected a very faint twinkle in his collected expression, “it is always most intriguing to have Watson wondering what I am up to. A pity that I dare not hope that Mrs. Norton is also so engaged.”

  “Perhaps so,” I answered blithely. “If you want to reveal yourself, so be it. Irene will be quite furious with you, I imagine.”

  “And with you as well, no doubt. I would say that you presume, but it is useless pointing out such obvious truths to the enterprising American.”

  He ended this speech with a smile so shadowy that it charmed me into uncustomary silence. When Sherlock Holmes chose to be amenable, he became formidable indeed.

  We made our way without further comment to the curb, where Mr. Holmes whistled a hansom up for us like a native New Yorker.

  “What do you think of our Queen City?” I asked as he handed me in.

  “Not so pretty as Paris and therefore a fine and festering hole for crime. Ha! These high-storied row houses look as apt a breeding ground for infamy as I have ever seen.”

  “We enter the city via its lowliest neighborhoods. The buildings are called tenements. They house, in conditions of untold filth and crowding, immigrant families from the world over. The poverty is unimaginable, and the variety and viciousness of the crime is as diverse as the many native tongues that wag here.”

  “Yet this is not the site of the bizarre murders you mentioned.”

  “That is farther north on the island and much more respectable, though not as gracious as Millionaires’ Row up in the fifties.”

  “Respectability breeds boredom, at least for the student of human aberration and crime.”

  “Certainly Jack the Ripper plied his ghastly trade in the slums of Whitechapel and, later, the Paris underground. A pity I could not report the amazing conclusion to his bloody reign.”

  “Nothing is ended, Miss Cochrane, until the principal parties are dead and buried, in this case people other than his victims.”

  “You don’t still pursue the case?”

  “As I said, nothing is ended without the
finality of death.”

  I mulled this over in silence, listening to the lulling racket of horses’ hooves and street shouts all around us.

  At the hotel he paid the driver to take me on to my destination and stepped out of the hansom. “Dinner at eight, shall we say?”

  I could only agree, annoyed at learning so little of his plans during the ride from the docks.

  “You needn’t have wasted your time meeting my ship,” he added, as if discerning my frustration. “I can get around quite splendidly on my own in cities the world over. I fear I have kept you from more pressing work.”

  “Not at all,” I managed to say before the driver slapped his reins on the horse’s hindquarters and my cab pulled away with a jerk.

  I couldn’t help feeling that I had been sent off like so much unwelcome baggage.

  11.

  Old Lang Syne

  She suffered the penalty paid by all sensation-writers of being

  compelled to hazard more and more theatric feats.

  —ON NELLIE BLY, WALT MCDOUGALL, NEW YORK WORLD ILLUSTRATOR,

  1889

  “I cannot believe,” I told Irene when we were back in our hotel room and had some privacy, “that Pink—Miss Elizabeth Jane Cochrane . . . Nellie Bly, the girl wonder—would call you from Europe on such slim pretext. As if the murder of a medium by that disgustingly unhygienic method would have anything to do with you . . . or with any mother you might or might not have had.”

  “I knew him, Nell.”

  “Him? There is no ‘him’ in this case! Unless you refer to the medium’s absent confederate who stayed hidden after the death, most suspiciously, and whom one may suppose to have been a man. Confederates usually are.”

  “Tiny Tim.”

  “Tiny Tim? Everyone who has read Dickens knows Tiny Tim, wretched little tearjerker that he is.”

  Irene gazed at me, astounded. “You are upset, Nell, to heap such abuse on a figure of such universal sympathy. No, the Tiny Tim I knew was the strapping fellow at the séance.”

  “Oh, the child prodigy, although Pink didn’t say at exactly what he was prodigious.”

  “Drumming, with great precision at unbelievable speed, from the age of two.”

  “Why would anyone find that to be a prodigious feat? Young children are noisy and undisciplined by nature.”

  “Except that Tiny Tim was as good at it as any adult. Anyway, he was quite the sensation for a while, and then, like all sensations, faded.”

  “And you knew this young banger on drums? Where? When?”

  “Here. In this country. When I was a child.”

  “Oh.” It was my turn to sit down and contemplate the rather dull decor of our sitting room. Perhaps that was what made me feel the city was ponderous. The hotel furniture was all rosewood and marble, burl and black walnut.

  “I knew LaMar, also known as Professor Marvel, the Walking, Talking Encyclopedia, too,” she added, confessing past sins like a Papist.

  “When he was a child?”

  Irene laughed as if welcoming an opportunity that might not present itself again soon. “Heavens, no! He must be in his seventies now. When I was a child.”

  “And he was at the fatal séance with this Tiny Tim who is now large? How odd.”

  “Too odd to suit mere coincidence, Nell.”

  “And why is Pink convinced that your mother is in danger?”

  Irene took a deep breath and turned to face me. “I don’t know. Obviously, she knows more than she’s telling me. And she won’t tell me as long as she hopes to startle some information from me. In fact, I dearly wish that I could startle some information from me! I find myself embarrassingly ignorant about far too many aspects of my past, especially before I began to seriously study singing and to work for the Pinkertons. My puzzling memory loss extends beyond my childhood into my girlhood.”

  “We all of us have great holes in our memories of growing up. What remains vivid is often the worst of it . . . the childish faux pas we all make.”

  “ ‘All of us’ don’t have a famously relentless reporter like Nellie Bly rummaging through every paper and personage of their pasts!”

  “No, but Irene, there’s something else that bothers you. You almost remember something, don’t you? Something . . . unseemly or disturbing.”

  “What! Now my dear personal ‘Nell’ is becoming a Nellie Bly of my own? You also believe that some lurid scandal lurks in my past?”

  “I believe you’re right to resent a virtual stranger treating you like a, a criminal who deserves investigating. I am very disappointed in Pink, whom I took at first for a sweet and well-bred young woman even if her reputation was in shreds. Now I find out that her reputation is impeccable but she is not at all the well-meaning soul I took her for. I am almost angry enough to stop speaking to her!”

  “Well, I don’t want to deal with Pink again until I know more than I’m telling her . . . and that will take lashing my lame memory into better form. Until then I may unwittingly give her just the clues she’s hunting for.”

  “What information could she want from you? For what purpose?”

  “What for? For the ever-needed sensational story. I know you haven’t been reading the New York newspapers since we arrived—”

  “They are hardly worth the effort. Their lurid subject matter makes the London Illustrated News look duller than dispatches from Whitehall.”

  “If you had more than glanced at them you would see that Pink is but one of a throng of bold young women trying to make their marks on the journalistic world. A sensational murder case involving an expatriate opera singer might do the trick for a little while.”

  “She would do that, use you?”

  Irene lowered her head, not meeting my eye. “I used her. I needed someone reliable, who was not a suspect, to help me search for you and Godfrey. When that journey was done and you were both safe, when the evildoers were found and named, our other allies prevented her from publishing a word of it. She may feel I ‘owe’ her a story, however she gets it.”

  I could say nothing. In a way, I resented that Irene had drafted Pink for my usual role, but since it was to save Godfrey and me from several fates worse than death, how could I complain of the necessity?

  I couldn’t even twit Irene with the fact that she had brought her present conundrum upon herself. Or that “our vaunted allies” boiled down mostly to Sherlock Holmes and his bothersome brother in the British foreign office, and the Rothschilds, of course, our sometimes employers. Powerful “allies” indeed if they turned into antagonists! No wonder Miss Pink had been effectively silenced for once. Yet I doubted that Irene agreed with them, so it wasn’t her doing.

  “Will you go with me, Nell?” she asked now, contrition forgotten as she drew upon what King Willie had called her “soul of steel.” “I must journey back to places I hoped never to see, or think of, again. I spoke the truth. I don’t have a mother. I don’t know who she is—was—and I don’t really care at this late date. I reared myself. I am not unhappy with the result. I resent being forced back into a past that I spent many hard years escaping. I wish no one to know a particle of it! No one has the right.”

  I admit to quailing in my soul before her present situation. If there were things in her past Irene wished no one to know, I did not wish to be that One. She meant too much to me in the present. I shall never forget hearing her voice in that wretched cavern after witnessing a scene of unthinkable brutality and assuming my own imminent dissolution in that abyssal evil . . . of suddenly hearing her voice, of knowing she was near, of knowing that all would be well because of her.

  And here we were again, on very different ground. Irene was being forced to confront things she had tried to inter. Now she was asking me to bear burdens she wanted no one to know. It was a grave duty. I wanted to shirk it. We often blink at those who know too much about us. I never wanted to see Irene blinking at me and then looking away.

  She seemed to understand how much she was asking.<
br />
  Her hand rested as briefly as a butterfly’s on mine. “It’s all right. I can do it by myself.”

  “I’m sure you can.” My head came up. Maybe I had a soul of—surely not of steel, yet perhaps . . . pewter?

  “But I cannot let you.”

  12.

  Of Freaks and Frauds

  Indian chiefs, dancing dogs, living monkeys and dead

  mermaids mingle in glorious rivalry for . . . enlightened

  approbation. . . . But the wonder of wonders is Mons.

  Chabert, who eats fire with as much gusto as other of his

  countrymen devour frogs.

  —LETTER TO THE LONDON TIMES, 1829

  Irene spent the afternoon studying the small announcement pages in the back of the New York World and the New York Herald.

  Most were miniature versions of the type-crowded playbills one saw posted on every empty alley wall and lamppost in Manhattan.

  I occasionally looked over her shoulder, my eyes startled by the likes of “Mystic Marie” and her “Hypnotic Waltz,” of ladies in flesh-colored tights and corsets and nothing else posing as “human light bulbs,” by equestriennes and wire walkers and porcine “professors” with spectacles perched upon their snouts. Of men who shrank and stretched before one’s very eyes.

  “This is nothing but a freak show,” I observed.

  “So is most of what passes for entertainment in London, or hadn’t you noticed?”

  Heaven forbid that I should cast aspersions upon Irene’s native land!

  “Oh,” I admitted, “traveling curiosity shows even visited Shropshire when I was a lass, but of course I was not allowed to patronize them. They attracted only the lowest class of people.”

  “Which must form the majority of the population, as such shows thrive here and abroad.”