FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  I heard the scratch of a lucifer and smelled sulphur and smoke. The crisis was over. I tried frantically to think of a way to idly enter the scene. Alas, I am no actress, and could only remain frozen by the door.

  “And . . . Nell?” he asked as if treading on crystal. “How did she take the voyage over? I believe this was her first oceangoing journey.”

  I held my breath again.

  “Splendidly,” Irene lied through her teeth. “Quite the sailor.”

  “Is she—?”

  “Tending to some domestic matters in the adjoining room. Now that I’m speaking to you again, Quentin, I’ll fetch her.”

  By the time Irene finished her sentence she was sweeping my door open in a grand stage gesture, which unfortunately nearly knocked me over.

  She shut the door behind her. “Gracious, Nell! You must be nimble on your feet when you eavesdrop. Are you all right?”

  I rubbed my mashed nose. “I shall have to say I have a catarrh. Oh. Now he might assume that I have been weeping! What do you think? Is he truly in your good graces again?”

  “I think he is not telling me the full story, but that is a given with the spy trade. I think he means us no harm, but he may be used to deal ill with us nonetheless. And I think that if you deign to show yourself and be your charming self, we shall have him wholeheartedly in our camp.”

  “My last attempt to charm a gentleman to our camp was disastrous, as you recall.”

  Irene smiled in memory of the full ironic implications of the incident to which I referred. “No, it was embarrassing to you, but quite advantageous to the larger rescue effort underway. If you can manage to flirt with a Gypsy who speaks no English, who does not speak at all, I daresay you can do wonders with Quentin, who is much more personable, not to mention accessible.”

  “Flirt! With Quentin? I could not.”

  “Why not? Pink can.”

  “How odious of you to point that out, Irene! I do not need reminding how that minx does not hesitate to ingratiate herself with unsuspecting gentlemen.”

  “Have you not heard the American expression, ‘to fight fire with fire?’ You have a perfect opportunity now, and, in all honesty, I think you have the upper hand over Pink here, if you will deign to use it.”

  “I?”

  “You.” With that she whirled to my rear and pushed me out the door into our parlor. Nor did she follow immediately after me. Quentin and I were, for the moment, alone in the room.

  “Nell!” He had turned from the window to greet me.

  There he stood, an ordinary gentlemen in ordinary clothes, not muffled by one of his exotic disguises. He looked as he had when I had first met him a decade before in Berkley Square, where our roles were strictly assigned: I was the untried young governess and he was the mistress’s dashing younger brother.

  I was wrong, though. This I saw as I approached the window and the daylight revealed the seams a life in eastern wastelands had etched as finely as acid at the edges of his features. He was as I had never seen him before, clean-shaven (a state I much prefer in the modern man) and both younger and older than I remembered.

  “I’m sorry if my presence in New York last night shocked you so,” he said, “and now I see why you felt so upset. I’ve apologized to Irene for being an unwitting tool of Nellie Bly, but I must also apologize to you. I know you would resent my conspiring against your dearest friend in any way. I don’t blame you in the slightest for cutting me at Delmonico’s. I see now how bad things looked.”

  That is what he thought it was? That I had nobly snubbed him in public on my friend’s behalf? That this was a mere social misunderstanding? Could he have failed to see that my distress was purely for my own selfish reasons, that I was appalled by the simple fact that he was in the company of that brash American girl? That I was a childish, jealous fool with no reason to object to his being anywhere with anyone?

  While I reeled from the blessed blindness of the man, I realized that the last time we had been alone together we also had stood by a window, far away and in far different circumstances. The memory warmed my cheeks.

  “You are not still angry with me?” he asked anxiously.

  “No. I wasn’t angry, just shocked. You met Pink midway through our last . . . adventure, and I suppose a man of military bent who has been exiled in savage and distant lands cannot be expected to know the wiles of a woman who has made her way in such a cutthroat metropolis as New York City. Pink has always been Nellie Bly, first and foremost. A wise woman, and man, would do well to realize that.”

  “Then we are friends again?” He took my hand.

  He had taken far more venturesome liberties when last we met, but that had ended badly. A hand seemed to bridge past and present safely and quite nicely for now. “The past is prologue,” Irene had quoted so elevated a source as Shakespeare only yesterday. And a prologue implied a future.

  I found myself smiling, my fingers relaxing in his easy, comradely custody.

  “We have been allies far longer than even you and Irene,” he added, instantly invoking our ancient pairing in a schoolroom game of Blind Man’s Buff. Then I had been the blinded one.

  This time I frankly blushed. He regarded this embarrassing symptom with what I could only describe as relief, and a certain satisfaction in his hazel eyes that only embarrassed me further, for I couldn’t explain it, but suspected that I would be completely startled if I could.

  “I am glad to see you again, Nell, and to see you smiling again. Dare I hope that I am partly responsible?”

  “Perhaps. The events of last spring were earthshaking to me.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder, but this is summer and autumn fast approaches. Perhaps we could create kinder memories here. A visit to Coney Island?”

  “How long are you to stay?”

  “I don’t know. It depends what penance Irene has in mind for me.” His smile turned wry.

  “She doesn’t show it, but she is horribly disturbed by this recent probing into her past. Pink”—I nearly choked on the name but still he focused only on me, on my expression, on what I might say next—“is determined to solve the mysteries she believes she has found, no matter how much it may hurt Irene. Or me.”

  “A newspaper reporter is like a policeman these days, forever exposing people’s secrets. For myself, my calling is to preserve secrets. I will do what I can, but—”

  His fingers tightened on mine, far more than convention allowed.

  “You must understand, Nell. To some extent, it is my assignment to placate Nellie Bly. The Foreign Office wants not a syllable of last spring’s conclusions slipping out into the public consciousness. My superiors consider Miss Bly dangerous, and I must confess that I’m glad to find her on the trail of another story now, even if it brushes too close to Irene and you. I hesitate to say what a great government might do if it considered one individual too serious a threat to world stability.”

  “You—” I breathed.

  “No. not I. I prevent mayhem. That’s why I’m here. To prove she is no threat. If that necessity should run counter to Irene’s interests . . .” He shook his head. “I will do all I can to see that it doesn’t, but it would be better not to let Irene know.”

  “Not tell Irene?”

  “Do you tell Irene everything?” he asked softly.

  “Almost everything.”

  “But not all.”

  The lower his tone had grown the closer his head bent over mine.

  “No.” I spoke even more softly, so he had to bend his head further to hear me.

  At my answer he brought my hand to his lips.

  I had been right! He was very good at it indeed.

  The door to the bedchamber cracked open.

  We turned to find Irene watching us.

  34.

  Inhuman Nature

  Save for her hoggish face she is perfectly formed. . . .

  This prodigy of nature is the general topic of conversation

  in the metropolis.
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  —JOHN FAIRBURN, 1815

  I slept like the dead that night, exhausted by my previous worries, dreaming I was a compass point fixed upon a hand, spinning round and round, as in a waltz.

  Irene always ordered breakfast in our room when we traveled. It was frightfully extravagant, but her own highly rewarded “cases,” and Godfrey’s increasing Rothschild commissions, made all possible. I was finding the habit of lavish breakfasts amenable myself. The custom bowed to Irene’s former theatrical life, when she stayed up until three and rose at ten, then spent an hour or so nibbling on breakfast foods and sipping cups of bitter, strong coffee sweetened with cream and sugar over the daily newspapers, railing or purring at reviews, and preparing her toilette for the day.

  Even Godfrey, industrious barrister that he was, always up with the swallows when I had worked for him years ago, had converted to Irene’s luxurious habit of morning lethargy. Seeing her lounging like a lazy cat in her lace-frothed combing gown, her auburn-gold hair coiling loose and tied back with a soft chiffon bow the color of ripe peaches, I could understand why Godfrey was often loath most mornings to leave for his new office in Paris.

  Today she had been busy too; half of the New York Sun spread over our table like a figured cloth.

  “I had so dearly hoped,” she said as soon as she saw me, her forefinger triumphantly spearing a column of fine print. “Just see! ‘Just desserts’ indeed!”

  Her mood was so markedly improved that I immediately dashed over to read the cause.

  DAREDEVIL DARLING

  “DESSERTED” AT DELMONICO’S

  ENGLISH LORD LEAVES

  NELLIE BLY IN THE LURCH

  TUTTI FRUTTI-FOR-ALL

  “The rival newspaper to Pink’s World, I presume,” Irene announced.

  “Quentin isn’t an English lord!”

  “To Americans every decently dressed Englishman is a lord. Quentin is certainly a gentleman, for he returned to her table. He would never let a lady languish.”

  “Pink, or Nellie Bly, I should say, is not a lady.”

  “Nor am I!” Irene said. She knew better than to declare that I was a lady, for the title must be conferred by blood in my land. “Or you, apparently. You haven’t read how we are described in the article.”

  “Good heavens! We are mentioned?”

  “About as accurately as Quentin.”

  I read through three paragraphs of exceedingly tiny type, my nose up against it so closely that I sneezed from the rank odor of fresh ink and had to turn my head away.

  “A French countess! You!”

  “I am from Paris,” she shrugged. “I could have been a queen. I am desolée that these New World hack writers did not at least mistake me for a duchesse.” She laughed like a schoolgirl.

  “And . . . ‘her British secretary’?”

  “They could have at least declared you an ‘Honorable.’ ”

  “I am quite happy to remain common, and, in fact, I have in the past acted as secretary to both you and Godfrey, so I am not misrepresented at all in the article.”

  “No? Read further.”

  I could see that my righteous attitude irritated Irene, as it always did, which was why I adopted it. I read further, as instructed.

  “I? Slap Quentin’s face!? Never. Well, perhaps had he been a schoolroom charge of mine and misbehaved so badly.”

  “Quite the little scandal-mongering firebrand when you travel abroad, Nell. I shall have to reconsider associating with you in future.”

  “It’s all . . . a pack of lies.”

  “Of course. It’s in the newspaper. I think Pink will be fulminating over this very article this morning. Perhaps she will think twice in future about considering me as a means and an opportunity for furthering her career.”

  “This may be amusing to you, Irene, but I doubt Pink has learned a thing.”

  “And you. What have you learned recently?”

  I sighed as I returned her piercing gaze. “Quentin is cultivating Pink because her reporting instincts are dangerous to the Foreign Office. That is why he’s here.”

  “That is one reason why he’s here,” Irene added airily, doing something that had amazed me for as long as I had known her: sipping coffee without making a face.

  I could say nothing, of course.

  “What did you think of his report on the birth records for New Jersey?”

  “That you do not appear to have been born there, or that no sooner were you born than you were given a pseudonym.”

  “Either instance is provocative, since one of the very few facts I can remember from my early years is that I was born in New Jersey. As soon as I decamped to England, I was endlessly asked where I was born, as if that made any difference in America. And I always said New Jersey. I always thought I was born in New Jersey. And everybody English I met said, “Oh, and the county is named after our isle of Jersey, is it not?”

  “And I said it was a state, which is what we have over here and they are like very large counties. And some people, usually other sopranos, were unkind enough to mention that ‘Jersey’ was also a breed of cow.”

  I was, of course, laughing into my scones at this recital, for that is exactly what I thought, and every bit of it, when I had first met Irene and heard of ‘New Jersey.’ And I was not even a soprano. I could not even sing a note worth listening to.

  “Are we English really so dreadfully literal-minded as that?”

  “With Americans, you are. After all, it’s barely more than a hundred years since you were forced to turn us out the back gate and let us go our own way.”

  “And that way was ‘up,’ as I see from New York City.”

  “Astounding, isn’t it? The pigs were still grazing on Broadway when I left, and now look at it.”

  “Pigs are very astute creatures,” I said from my vast store of animal husbandry observations during my Shropshire youth. “I would beware of any place they rejected.”

  She laughed again. Somehow this breakfast, reminiscent of many such mornings at Neuilly, and repairing the misunderstanding with Quentin last night had eased both of our minds. Or, I thought, perhaps getting the better of Pink was the cause. Either way, I felt wonderful. Irene and I were undivided allies again after our long enforced separation last spring that had compelled Irene to forge a new alliance with the stranger, Pink.

  As much as the young American reminded me of Quentin’s charming niece Allegra, she was no sheltered and green girl, but a headstrong woman who had supported both herself and her widowed mother on her earnings as a newspaper reporter. If such a history was admirable, it also made for someone with a self-interest stronger than any common needs of Irene and myself.

  I can’t say that I was sorry that Pink had proved herself to be so treacherous, only that Quentin had been a key element in that revelation.

  While I was mulling over the immediate past, it soon became evident that Irene’s mind was on the future, and her own mysteriously distant past.

  “I will have to take your word on the indisputable intelligence of pigs,” she said finally, blowing out a sinuous wreath from her post-breakfast cigarette that would from now on remind me of deadly ectoplasm. “You are, after all, the country-bred woman. It is time, I think, to visit a person Professor Marvel mentioned to me and who is quite apropos to your upbringing and also to my vaunted but perhaps false, or concealed, origins. I refer to the Pig Lady of Hoboken, New Jersey.”

  35.

  A Sinister Surname

  “That blackguard Svengali!”

  “That’s the man! His real name isAdler; his mother was a

  Polish singer.”

  —TRILBY, GEORGE DU MAURIER, 1894

  Our trip to New Jersey would have been a holiday outing were not so much in question. We took a ferry, which brazenly advertised itself as the first in the United States . . . at some laughably recent date in the early part of the century. In England there are rowboats older than that lumbering ferry boat! Once across the Hudson Riv
er, we would be in the quaint hamlet of Hoboken.

  “You must understand, Nell,” Irene told me while we stood at the ferry boat’s eastern rail to watch the tall profile of Manhattan Island slip behind us, “that some of the people who perform on the popular stage are . . . uniquely gifted. They are not merely singers and dancers.”

  “What you mean is that their talents tend to the peculiar, like Professor Marvel’s immense grasp of trivia.”

  “Yes. And I also mean that a good many of them, like Thumbelina, have turned curses into talents, have made seeming marvels from what ordinarily would be considered great misfortune.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I merely warn you that the Pig Lady, whom I remember quite clearly despite my admittedly fuzzy recollection in other matters, followed a profession she was born to, as I was to singing. Only her career was shaped by what most people would consider tragic abnormalities. The important thing to keep in mind is that she found a place in the world despite these handicaps.”

  “You mean that she is deformed, that she really does resemble a pig?”

  “I am one who considers what people may do, or have done to them, can deform their characters in far worse ways than what nature may have done to deform their features or limbs. Anna Bryant is the kindest woman I ever knew. She never for a moment held my looks against me, which is more than I can say for some women blessed with beauty but determined to claim it all.”

  “You warn me so that I don’t embarrass her.”

  “I warn you so that you don’t embarrass yourself. I see now that I grew up among quite unique people and yet took their variety and odd camaraderie for granted. Children will do that. You must understand that some of them overcame enormous odds and changed handicaps into assets, however bizarre.”

  “How did you remain so . . . so—?”