“It may be painful to both of us, but we will be the better for it.”
“Yes, Nell.”
“And first and foremost, I wish that when you wake, you will never say ‘Yes, Nell’ again.”
“No, Nell.”
“I must ask this. You have always astounded me because you have never used your beauty to win roles or men. Is that because you witnessed Pet’s awful end, and saw that the wages of sin is death?”
“Not sin, but senselessness. I can condemn no one, but I can mourn those who condemn themselves. She was lovely and so uncertain. She sought false regard, and destroyed her own regard. She was doomed, for being human, and vain, and for letting someone else’s regard destroy her own. So she destroyed another with herself. I see no way out of it. Was I one of these burdens worth dying for, rather than acknowledging?”
“We are none of us worth dying for, except on stage or in Scriptures. Now. You wish to remember. What happened after Pet’s dreadful end? Did the police declare her death a suicide, or could it have been murder?”
“I was not told. We all wished to forget Pet and what happened to her. All those who knew me wished me to forget her fate. It was as if I had glimpsed the terrible end that awaited a girl of my history and looks and talent. Until then I had felt these gifts to be an asset. Once Pet was dead, I saw them to be liabilities. I was too easily like her, save I did not have a mother to introduce me to the circle of wealthy men in which such women seek salvation and so often find doom.”
“The opera was an elevated art form. Such singers need not compromise themselves.”
“Yes! That’s why they all wished me to pursue that art above all others. Yet even opera singers are not proof against seduction. Still, they are all Valkyries at heart, whether they have the voice for that role or not. The discipline is so demanding, and they aren’t easily lured to the ease of immorality. Opera is hard work.”
“Hard work has always stood women in good stead,” I asserted. “And so has a long memory. I . . . suggest . . . command . . . you to remember what others would have you forget. You must be able to choose for yourself what you remember and forget. It may be an imprecise process, but it should be your own choice. I, Nell . . . um . . . so decree. Wake up. Have you? Did you hear anything I said? Irene? Oh . . . this is a most disconcerting process! Do say something!”
“Nell?”
“I hope so.”
“It is amazing. I feel as if a wind has blown through my head.”
“That sounds a most unhappy sensation.”
She sat up and shook herself, claiming her watch from my slack grip.
“What did I say?” she demanded, eyeing me suspiciously.
“This and that. I believe that you’ll be able to remember what you wish now. Whether you’ll like it or not is another matter.”
Irene shook herself into a shudder. “I will never idly mesmerize another, now that I know I have been a victim of it. You are certain that you loosed all matters that may have been bound up?”
“I tried my best. Perhaps you will recall that I noted that you have had a stout band of advocates throughout your youth. Even the maestro sought only to repair and strengthen you.”
“As if I were some bruised Pinocchio! It is not pleasant to reconstruct whole years of one’s youth, Nell.”
“No, but it was not all a loss. Your shock at Pet’s death determined your own course. You owe her your integrity.”
“The cost was too high. I see it all so clearly now. Such a young girl, and no evil in her, simply . . . a desire to please her mother. Do you know, I envied her that mother? A mother who seemed like a glamorous fairy godmother who would whisk a young girl away to the balls on Fifth Avenue, where Prince Charmings wore white tie and tails, and owned whole blocks of Manhattan, and yachts, and theaters, where one might perform, if one performed well . . . I never could do that, and even if my heart had wished to, I was never quite right for the role, like my impossible-to-categorize voice.”
“Thank goodness, or I would not have been here to play Mesmerist.”
Irene stood, stretched, then froze in that catlike position, her face mirroring an entire spectrum of memories, then clearly a new set of speculations, and then, finally and only: horror.
She at last tore her focus from some invisible scene and met my eyes.
“Dear God in heaven. I think I see it now. I know who is dealing us all death, and I think I begin to see why.”
43.
Double Death
So far Restell, superb in black silk or velvet and conveyed
aristocratically in her carriage, had maintained a remarkable
composure in court, having only on one occasion betrayed even
a hint of anxiety.
—THE WICKEDEST WOMAN IN NEW YORK, CLIFFORD BROWDER
“Why will they not let me die in my own house, and not want
to send me to prison? I have never wronged anyone!”
—MADAME RESTELL, 67, THE NIGHT BEFORE HER TRIAL, 1878
Irene stood in the racing hansom cab, rapping on the ceiling trapdoor with the butt of her revolver.
“Faster!” she boomed in the dark and deep soprano voice that had carried once to the back row of the Warsaw Imperial Opera House like a burning arrow of sheer, splendid sound. “It’s a matter of life and death.”
I heard the crack of a whip as sharp as a pistol report, and cringed for the poor horse’s back, but a sudden spurt of speed pushed Irene back down into the seat.
“They whip the air, most times,” Irene said, amazingly aware of my small concern in the face of a much bigger one. “I’ll pay him enough when we arrive to treat his horse like Caligula’s famous equine counselor for a year, on that condition. The deaths have slowed, perhaps ended. Oh! We may be too late, Nell. An hour and eleven years too late. We may never know.”
She held the pistol on her lap, one leather-gloved fist caught between her teeth, as if she did not trust herself to speak or wait the amount of time it would take for ordinary means to bear us to our goal.
“I don’t understand what has galvanized you, Irene. You are like that annoying man, Holmes, three steps ahead of your own mind, and mystifying everyone around you who pays for the privilege of knowing you with eternal ignorance in the face of your enigmatic genius.”
“Would that I were Sherlock Holmes! He would not have been so slow to discern the truth, to disarm the poison contained in the glorious outer package worthy of a czarina. There is a man in it, has always been, but if she dies . . . everything I need to know about myself dies with her. If we are too late—”
“Would contacting the authorities—?”
“Authorities! We deal with matters the ‘authorities’ have never been able to face. Nor most of society. Faster! Please. Faster.”
Our hansom careened around a corner on what seemed like two wheels. Hooves struck sparks from the cobblestones. I saw their blue fire from my window.
“We just passed Forty-eighth Street.”
“Faster.”
And then we came to a stop, pushed backwards and forward against the tufted leather seats smelling of tobacco and perspiration and a little vomit. A former governess well knows that aroma.
“It is worse than the Atlantic steamship,” I murmured.
“Don’t lose your backbone now, Nell. I need you.”
She sprang out of the hansom and threw several large gold coins up at the driver. “Treat your horse like the King of Siam, for he has raced the wind and death tonight.”
The man’s long face gaped longer, thanks to his open mouth, which closed shortly as he bit down on the first gold coin and nearly cracked a tooth.
“The nag’s me next of kin,” he cried out, but Irene was already storming the stairs to the great mansion’s entry, the pistol still in plain view.
She pounded on the closed double doors with the pistol butt.
Well, I would have been hard pressed to deny her entrance so accoutered, but no one cam
e to answer that imperious racket.
The hansom clattered away behind us at a sedate pace.
We were alone in the dark of night, on the threshold of a great house that was locked and barred.
Irene turned to regard the quiet street. It was after midnight, and this was the most respectable address in Manhattan. Only strolling policemen would prowl these elegant precincts, and Irene did not want them.
“There must be another entrance,” she said, speaking more to herself than me. “Where the poor desperate women came, less observed by the passing public.”
“I don’t understand,” I ventured to admit.
She focused on my face, as if I were a stranger. “Oh, Nell. I’m sorry. Don’t you see what I only now discovered, perhaps too late? Don’t you recognize this house?”
“We were here recently, to meet the one member of your theatrical set who rose to respectability in the world. Mina Gilfoyle.”
“That was a week ago. That was before I had learned how I had lost my past to the wave of a hypnotist’s hand. That was before I knew that this address had belonged to Madame Restell, before I saw the news stories on her death that mentioned a palatial house at Fifty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. Before I knew that she had died here in her bloody bathtub in eighteen seventy-eight.”
“Oh. Good gracious! And what do you suspect?”
“That there are only coincidences in melodramas, Nell.”
“Oh. And I recall now, from Pink’s endless newspaper clippings, that the veiled ladies—in black, how suggestive that is now!—came and went from a more discreet door. The side of the mansion, perhaps?”
“The side, of course! She may have sent all the servants away, if what I think is happening . . . is happening. Oh, Nell, she will cheat me again, if not death itself! I cannot allow that. I owe it to my mother.”
“Your mother! You know who now?”
“I know who it is not, and that is half the battle.”
We clattered in the dark down the long brownstone steps. Only a distant electric light beamed through the quiet dark. I heard the melancholy clatter of a single hansom cab, and I feared we would walk home from this place, whatever happened.
Around the side was a servant’s entrance on the street level. We barely discerned it in the dark. Arriving there, at the same instant we did, was a tall, dark figure, caped and hatted like a man who had been to the opera.
Irene stopped and leveled her pistol.
My heart simply stopped.
“I can pick the lock,” a voice said. “Can you?”
“I can pick a lock, or your teeth, with a bullet,” Irene answered. “Step aside.”
He laughed. “I understand your urgency, Madam. Let us collaborate, just this once. It is, after all, a matter of life and death.”
He bent to set metal to metal, sounding like a typist.
Sherlock Holmes!
I glanced at Irene. Her face was set and furious and . . . of two minds. “Your meddling inquiries must have alerted the miscreants. Why should I allow you entrée where my history entitles me to go, not yours?”
I put a hand on her pistol arm. “If we are too late, as you say, we could use company. Or a witness.”
“Most sensible,” he murmured. “Keep your pistol foremost, Madam. We broach a desperate villain.”
Oh, didn’t I wish that I knew what or who he meant! Or what Irene had meant all this evening? Am I doomed to be always the assistant, necessary but ignorant? I felt a sudden fellowship with one Dr. John H. Watson, abysmal fictioneer though he may be.
In moments we were inside. The floor beneath our feet was hard stone. We were in the servants’ areas, kitchens and passageways, and perhaps secret passages to where the women were shown.
“Is it she?” I asked. “Madame Restell’s mysterious and vanished only daughter?”
“We are all Madam Restell’s daughters, but She is not,” Irene answered. “She would not lurk in these nether regions. She believes she has surmounted the past, this place, even the woman who died here.”
“And yourself as well,” Sherlock Holmes added. “Let me lead, I have my own pistol, and my own theory to prove. No one here, in America, wishes to kill me. Yet.”
Feat tightened its clutch on my chest. Did someone wish to kill Irene? Let him lead, then.
Irene hesitated.
Clever man, he knew that she would. For my sake, not her own. Never her own.
His footsteps rang up the stone stairs. We followed.
Up and up we wound, like ectoplasm in a seance room. Like so much funereal wrapping around a mummy, a dead thing that is a monument to the dead past.
Finally we reached the upper stories.
Irene defied orders, moving forward to push a bronzed door open with the long steel tongue of her pistol barrel, but Mr. Holmes stepped ahead of us both with one long stride. Irene and I followed him along a wide hall paved in marble, unusual in an upper story. We encountered no servants, when we should have stumbled over several. The house was utterly silent. Its dark and stormy history sat upon it like a stone Medusa, threatening to freeze us in this flagrant act of housebreaking.
A single heavy door, ajar, invited breeching.
Mr. Holmes pushed through the coffered mahogany and repousse surface, then Irene and I.
We were in a large, palatial bath. I sensed thick, rich rugs and a mine of gleaming silver and gilt, but could only see the chamber’s centerpiece.
Steam still rose from the high waters in a deep copper tub. A woman lay there, half-submerged, far less so than Merlinda the Mermaid who had bartered her own breath against death many times.
I supposed she was naked. I supposed a naked woman in a bath should have shocked us, unrelated man and women that we were.
Instead it awed us.
And then she stirred, this corpse.
A languid hand lifted from the other side of the tub. It bore a pistol.
She lifted the hand until we saw the scarlet threads running down the wrist toward her elbow, streaking low into the water, thin as embroidery silk, slow yet certain.
“Don’t move,” she said, breathed. “I didn’t expect company, but kept this ready for any servants who dared to defy my orders to leave.” She squinted at us, as if her vision were as clouded as bathwater. “Who are you? I have so many servants . . . I don’t know you all.” Her expression smoothed, going from wizened to demonic in an instant. “You! My endless nightmare. I have heard you screaming in my dreams. You haunt me more than Her even.”
She braced the pistol barrel on the curved edge of the bathtub.
It stared at us, that Cyclops eye of empty steel, waiting to wink death at one or more of us. She stared at Irene, saw only her, addressed only her.
“You don’t remember, do you?” Her languid eyes, and now the core of the pistol stared at Irene too.
“I do remember now,” Irene said softly. “I’ve only now learned that I was made to forget.”
“Oh, could I be made to forget! Then so much would not have happened. So many wouldn’t have needed to die. ‘You were made to forget.’ How convenient, Rena! For me, anyway.” Her focus blurred and the pistol barrel swayed on its impromptu support. “Do you remember how you advised me against it all, both me and Pet? ‘Don’t go out walking with gentlemen in slick suits.’ ‘Don’t believe they care for anything about you other than your compliance.’ ‘Don’t believe you are young and beautiful, and desired for yourself alone.’ ”
“I don’t remember saying any of that.”
“But you did! Every time we were the belles of the ball at our mother’s house. And do you know what was the most irritating thing? You were right.”
“Right in what way?”
“They were liars, those men. They turned our heads and turned us upside down and inside out, and suddenly we realized we were ruined. Our monthlies had deserted us, and so had the men who could not resist us, as we couldn’t resist them. Before we knew it, we were coming here, to this v
ery house, not as belles of the ball but as fallen women. We ‘lost’ our babies here.”
“You mean they were aborted,” Irene said, wanting to make sure.
“How it hurt! Oh, God in heaven, how it hurt. That small dark room, the man with the tongs, the bit of wire.
“We came back, rinsed in the blood of the Lamb, born again, almost virgin again. We told you nothing, and yet, you knew. Do you remember what you told us? We were still two.”
I watched Irene ransack her newborn memory, the memory reclaimed through the maestro’s confession and my inept attempt at mesmerism.
“I had found a gentleman,” the bleeding woman prodded Irene with words as well as the aim of her pistol. “He offered me wealth, protection. But you said . . .”
“I said what you didn’t want to hear.” Irene nodded with the abrupt surety of woman who remembers her own deeds and her own past. “I told you his offers were hollow, that there was no honor or truth in them. He merely said what was necessary to seduce a young girl.”
“Even our mother urged me to the alliance. He was rich. What else was there to consider? Yet, despite all precautions, I was again with child. Children are always inconvenient, as Pet and I were for our mother, which is why she sent us to the only place unconcerned with pedigrees, the theater.”
Irene seemed to absorb this statement as bitter gall. Had her mother been such a heartless pragmatist as well?
I caught my breath at my next thought. Was their mother her mother also?
“So you were right.” Mina stirred in her shroud of clouded water, rallying her failing energy to strike at Irene with some bitterness. “He did not want children who could not be ‘heirs.’ I was told to rid myself of the problem, as I had done before.”
“Let us help you out of the bath while we talk,” Irene suggested. “The water must be lukewarm by now.”
Her attempt to disarm with kindness only caused Mina to wave the pistol across all of us.
“I had ‘lost’ one baby. Another would be like . . . killing twins. Like Pet and myself. Madame Restell was there, as always, sympathetic but needing money for her services. I had money. For a while. His. Madame suggested a solution. We would wait until my condition was too pronounced to conceal. Then I would go to her, and she would tell him the operation had been successful, but that I was weak and ill from the aftermath. I would be sent to a secret place to recover and ‘regain my figure.’ In fact, there I would have my child and there it would be taken from me to be reared in some other place by other people. I was never to know where, and everything would be all right.”
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