“I hardly know where it begins, except that it must begin with me, because I am the teller of the tale. Phoebe was right. She and I were orphans of the storm. The ‘storm’ was what happened to women, and girls, who were mothers too soon, or not in the approved manner.”
“They were not married.”
“Exactly. They were mothers, or would be, but they were not married. Enter the fairy godmother.”
“She helped Cinderella go to the ball.”
“This fairy godmother helped Cinderella after the ball was over.”
I stared at Irene, trying to appear as if I understood. “How—?”
“There were prince’s wives who desperately wanted babies.”
“Like poor Queen Clotilde.”
“Like poor Queen Clotilde, but these wives couldn’t have babies.”
“That’s possible?”
“Sometimes. Yet other women have babies they don’t want.”
I nodded. “There were cases even in our village, but no one talked about them. Openly.”
Irene shrugged. “So. Between the married women who want babies, and the unmarried women who are having unwanted babies . . . who stands?”
“The fairy godmother.”
Irene nodded. “She makes unwanted babies into wanted ones.”
“Unwanted? Who could not want such a marvelous thing as a baby?”
“My mother, for one,” Irene said, unflinching.
I should have flinched to be forced to say such a thing. My mother died having me. Surely she had wanted me. Or would she have, had she known the price? Of course not. No. No rational person would give up her life for a baby. Except a mother. I was more confused than ever, and Irene saw it.
“There is so much pain and confusion about this whole matter, having babies, or not, that it’s impossible to judge. Whatever the case, Phoebe and myself were . . . found other positions.”
“You make being an infant sound like being a servant.”
“And what is even the most wanted, beloved infant but a servant of other people’s needs and wants and confusions? Babies can’t control who they’re born to, or what those they’re born to decide to do with them.”
“I don’t want to hear this.” I clapped my hands over my ears, hard.
Irene tugged to pull those hands free. I heard her voice as if through earmuffs.
Yes, you do, Nell. Listen to me. I have to accept myself as the result of my history.
“So who was the woman in black? She wasn’t a fairy godmother?”
“Maybe she was, in her own eyes. Maybe she saw that Phoebe and I were . . . placed somewhere where we could forge our own futures, for we certainly had none before.”
“She cared for you?”
“As our mothers could not.”
“Who was she?”
“I don’t know, but I must know. I must follow her trail as far as it leads, for as long as it takes. We may pass a long time on these shores, more than you expected or I would wish. Do you need to go back home?”
“Back home? You still feel only a visitor here?”
“Yes.”
“As I am.”
“Yes.”
“You will go back home no matter what you find here?”
Irene sighed and nodded her head at one and the same time. “How can I not? Godfrey is there.”
I swallowed hard and said what I thought. “And Quentin.”
Irene held her hand out to me. It was a pact.
I took it, both of us charged at that moment to follow her past West to its American wellsprings, and yet both of us turning our faces away from the East and our hearts’ desires.
“If only I had known you, Nell,” Irene said, “when I was a child.”
If only I had known you, I thought, when I was a governess.
30.
Perfidy in New Jersey
Nellie Bly, although neither highly educated, cultured nor
accomplished, is a woman of intellectual power, high aims, and
a pure and unblemished career.
—SKETCH IN THE EPOCH MAGAZINE, 1899
We returned to the hunt the next day, and in a most annoying way.
Although I was relieved there were no more visits to the bizarre souls who had performed on the vaudeville stages with the infant Irene, I cannot say that I welcomed an interlude among the record-keepers.
For a full two days Irene and I pored over the birth records of New Jersey and New York City in the years 1857 through 1859, and I never want to see another American birth certificate penned in spidery Copperplate in my life.
Finally a gray-haired clerk holding on her aquiline nose with a pince-nez and wearing a tucked shirtwaist-front as starched as her manner took pity on us.
“You are searching for a child christened Irene Adler,” she asked, or perhaps, told us.
“Yes,” Irene agreed warily. She had kept the object of our search very quiet.
“I couldn’t help notice the years of the records you were searching. You are not the first to request such records, and only recently.”
“Not the first? What a . . . coincidence. Perhaps our efforts are redundant,” Irene smiled wryly. “Oh, dear, and we have come all the way from New York City, and my companion from Paris, in fact.”
For once Irene’s prevarications in the service of worming information out of some helpless clerk were not prevarications, but they produced results.
“Paris?” The lady regarded me dubiously. Apparently I did not look Parisian. “I fear that your search may indeed be redundant. A gentleman asked me to produce these very records only days ago.”
“A gentleman?” Irene repeated still wary.
“Indeed.”
“And how would I recognize this gentleman?” Irene asked in the deceptively serene tone that always put my nerves on edge.
“Very well dressed. Top hat, striped trousers, cutaway coat . . . no lounge suit for him, like the mashers wear!”
“What a relief,” I put in faintly.
The lady clerk gave me a bracing nod. “Exactly! I won’t have mashers at my counter. Anyway, the gentleman asked for the very same years and locations. I couldn’t help but be struck by the coincidence. That and the accent.”
“Accent?” Irene inquired.
The woman nodded at me as if identifying a thief. “Just like hers. Foreign.”
Irene turned to regard me with great interest. “ ‘Foreign,’ indeed. English, then?”
“I didn’t ask.” The woman’s tone implied that neither should Irene. “The gentleman was obviously unmarried and I didn’t wish to give him the wrong impression.”
I considered that she had little worry on that score, but then neither did I, and I was decades younger.
“How . . . obviously unmarried?” Irene asked carefully.
“Well, he wore no ring, only a watch on a chain with some gold frippery dangling from it, the only ostentatious trinket on his person, I might add, which was how I knew that he was English. Besides the accent. Like hers.”
Again Irene turned to regard me as if I were a curiosity she had never noticed before.
“Gold frippery?” she repeated. “He must be from California, then.”
“Not that kind of gold. Nothing so crude as nuggets.” The lady clerk snorted delicately through the thin gold nose-pieces of her pince-nez. “Foreign coins, perhaps. I didn’t notice, not liking to stare at a gentleman’s midsection.”
I could sympathize with her reluctance.
“Perhaps an English sovereign,” Irene said.
“Or a French sou,” I added primly, more for Irene’s benefit than the clerk’s.
“I don’t know what kind of coin! Or even that it was a coin. I only know that the gentleman was searching the same records you ladies have requested. Do you know him?”
“No!” I burst out.
“No,” Irene said with a tiny, very French shrug. “Perhaps he knows us.”
“He found nothing.”
“He left.”
So did we.
“Hmmmm.” Irene became distracted as we left the officious clerk far behind us.
“It cannot be . . . he!”
“Oh, there is scant doubt of that. I do wonder if he indeed found nothing, or merely allowed that foolish woman to think so.”
“It is not he!”
Irene stopped and turned to regard me with wonder. “Why not?”
“He does not strike me as a man who would cross oceans easily.”
“Neither did you strike me as a woman who would, yet you did.”
“I was atrociously ill all the way.”
“Perhaps he was, too,” Irene speculated with a Cheshire cat smile. Then she frowned, severely. “What would bring Sherlock Holmes to the birth registries of the New World, hunting down my history?”
I bit my tongue. Never would I reveal what I and no other knew, except that deluded Paddington doctor who cherished literary ambitions and had left a betraying manuscript carelessly lying around in a locked desk drawer: Sherlock Holmes was invulnerable to women, an admirable trait among the male sex, I must admit, and he was invulnerable to all women save one: Irene herself.
Did he indeed cherish a strong and secret fondness for my friend, he would not be overjoyed to now overhear how the news of his possible proximity affected her.
We returned to our hotel room, where she promptly lit a cigarette, brought out her petite pistol, and stalked back and forth, huffing and puffing and waving her weapon about like a fan.
“I am most disturbed to learn of that man’s actual presence on these shores, Nell,” she announced, as if I had not already realized (and applauded) that reaction.
“Indeed you should be,” I answered, devoting myself to the tea things she had forsaken for small cigar and petite pistol.
“So Pink hinted, but she has dealt so rudely with us that I was not inclined to believe her. I will not have intruders running roughshod over my own history!”
“No, indeed, but I doubt that Mr. Holmes wears hobnail boots. His footprints, I suspect, will be very faint. If that woman had not seen fit to remark upon him, I doubt we should have been certain of his presence.”
“Exactly!” She whirled like a dervish to confront my innocent face, now absorbed in consuming some really wonderful scones and cucumber sandwiches.
“You know who is responsible for his unwanted presence on these shores?”
“Er . . . Baron von Krafft-Ebing?”
She stood as frozen as a statue. “Baron von Krafft-Ebing. Of course. You are brilliant, Nell!”
“No, no,” I murmured through my tea sandwiches. “But exactly how so?”
“That must be the lure she used to bring him over. A series of unexplained deaths. Were there others associated with me before the medium’s, and Mr. Bishop’s and the snake charmer’s? We’ll never know unless she deigns to tell us. So she lured him with multiple murders. With that and his own unhealthy interest in my doings that has plagued him from the first. Why must that man dog my footsteps?!”
I forbore to point out that in many instances she had inadvertently done exactly that to him. I was too much relishing her tantrum on the same subject that had so often driven me to the brink of distraction.
All things come to she who waits.
Well, perhaps not all things, or people, I thought with a pang that quite ruined my girlish appetite.
31.
The Body of Evidence
His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with
every fresh part that he assumed.
—DR. JOHN H. WATSON, “A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA,” 1891,
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
FROM THE CASE NOTES OF
SHERLOCK HOLMES
Although I am far less known outside the narrow circles of crime than my consultant work would merit, I expect that the continuing publication of Watson’s illustrated little stories will change all that. (From the illustrations thus far, however, I am portrayed to resemble a mustachioed Paris gigolo, so my worries may be premature there.)
Still, in future I may have to rely on disguise more than ever, which is what makes a barefaced foray into the American scene such a treat.
I simply hied myself to Macy’s on Broadway and found a loud plaid suit of rather decent quality for a reasonable price. In fact, the louder the plaid, the lower the cost, which suited my purposes admirably.
Next, I visited boardinghouses around the Union Square theaters until I found one where the landlady knew one of the veteran performers on Miss Cochrane-Bly’s list of those who had shared playbills with Madam Adler-Norton during her tender years. (Really, this fashion for women with two last names will soon get out of hand! The great violinist and mistress of the bow, Wilhelmina Norman-Neruda, has no idea what she has started.)
By suppertime I was a new resident at a 14th Street boardinghouse that seemed as tidily run as Mrs. Hudson’s Baker Street establishment, and was introduced as such at dinner.
Here is where the place fell down smartly from the high standards set by Mrs. Hudson and her ever-ready menu to accommodate a detective’s erratic hours.
At seven o’clock “sharp” all boarders were to be present or forfeit food for the night. This policy suited my plans admirably, for I could be assured that at least one former associate of Rena the Ballerina, Little Fanny Frawley, the petite pistolera, or the alluring Merlinda the Mermaid would be present. These American theatrical nomenclatures are worth a monograph of their own.
We were served at one long table, with eight chairs to a side and the usual head and foot. The table’s center was laden with bowls and platters piled with various food stuffs, and it was every man . . . and the occasional woman . . . for himself when it came to claiming portions.
“Shakespeare, is it?” asked a cadaverously thin and tall man when I was presented to the assembly. “Shylock Shakespeare? A bit strong, don’t you think?” he added while reaching an attenuated arm three chairs down the table for a platter of pork chops. “But then you’re a Brit, I suppose.”
“You have the advantage of me, sir,” I said, referring to his reach as well as his identity.
“I’m Bill Heron, the Human Stilt.”
He was certainly not one to cavil about names. “Indeed. I thought I’d try my fortune across the Atlantic.”
“Fine idea,” put in the portly older man who naturally took the head of the table. “That Oscar Wilde fellow set all the country talking a few years ago. You don’t seem the type to wear velvet suits, though,” he added, gazing politely at my obnoxious plaid.
“I’m hoping that my work stands alone.”
“As do we all. I’m Phineas LaMar, better known as Professor Marvel, the Walking, Talking Encyclopedia.”
Eureka!
“And what specialty is your line of work, sir?” he then asked.
“I am a generalist,” I replied.
“I meant, what is your act?”
“Act? I indeed do, on occasion. Ah. I see. You mean my livelihood. You might call me a body reader.”
Professor Marvel nodded sagely. “An excellent variation, somewhat akin to mine, although I suspect that, like a mind reader, you need to work with a confederate and I do not.”
“You have never used a shill in the audience, Professor?”
The older man’s foolish face produced a very wise smile. “If I work it right, one half of the audience is the shill for the other half, without either of them knowing it.”
“Exactly what I aim for, Professor,” I answered with a swift smile.
I entered the dinner-table fray and managed to spear a pork chop the Human Stilt was not quite fast enough to snag. His long face puckered into surprise. The race is not always to the best equipped, but often to the quickest study.
The woman across from me, who was girlish in dress yet matronly in form and face, winked.
I saw that I could cut q
uite a swath in the company, should I choose to.
“I am not coming into your country and company unprepared,” I noted. “I have made a study of various acts through the years. An amazing number of performers began their careers as children. The Hermann and Dixon sisters, the, ah, novelty act of Tiny Tim and Rena the Ballerina—”
“Don’t they do that in England?” the Professor asked.
I had no idea, for I prefer classical music, but fortunately he went on of his own accord.
“Ah, I remember them all well. Many are no longer performing, lost to outgrowing their attraction. I had heard . . . and you may know this, sir, that our little Rena had found a new career singing in Europe.”
“England is not Europe,” I said icily.
“Well, what else is it?” the blowsy female across from me asked in some dudgeon.
“An island, madam, like Manhattan.”
“Manhattan is still New York City, and part of New York State, and therefore part of the United States,” she said rather truculently.
“England is part of the British Isles,” I answered, “including Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. We have nothing to do with Europe, except the geographical accident of being so near it, which has cost us dearly over the centuries.”
Professor Marvel chuckled. “Never call an Englishman a European, Daisy dear. They won’t put up with it. So, Mr. Shakespeare, have you heard of an Irene Adler in your native land? She left us rather thoroughly when she grew up and I have always wondered what she made of her career.”
The wistful tone in the Professor’s voice told me that La Adler had begun her conquests at a very early age indeed. I had not the heart to disappoint the old man.
“A singer of that name appeared in some of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas at the Savoy Theater in London, I recall. Quite beautiful. Her voice, I mean. What happened to her after I cannot say, but I heard she had deserted England for the Continent, and operetta for grand opera.”
“Grand opera really! Then the maestro did not do badly by her, after all. She was a modest little creature, when I knew her, and would not be one to blow her own horn.”
He seemed about to say more, but subsided. I suspected he had seen her again recently, but she had not satisfied him to her performance history. Why should she hide her operatic triumphs in Milan, Warsaw, and Prague . . . especially as they would mean much to her former associates? Perhaps it was because circumstances had silenced her great gift these past two years, and the subject was more tender than one would suspect with such a superficially confident woman. Regrettably, I had played a role in her premature retirement.
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