FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  I blushed to think of Sherlock Holmes overhearing such intimate female matters. I glanced to him—for surely the woman in the bath had never fully registered his presence, nor mine. Her eyes and her hatred were all for Irene. He was gone! As if he had never entered the room.

  In one way I was deeply relieved. Such matters were never meant for men’s ears. In another, I felt abandoned, for the pistol still pointed at Irene, and the woman, although weak, was still completely mad.

  “But the story has a happy ending,” Mina said, reviving. Her strength was tidal, ebbing and flowing; her hatred had only one current, deep and hard and eternal. “I left that man a few months later, and found another, even wealthier, and considerably more malleable. He worshiped the ground I walked on.” Her smile grew ironic. “He married me without a whimper, and wanted me to have a child.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Irene said, with the certainty of a mind reader who has received an undeniable message. “You couldn’t have one.”

  “He wanted me to have a child. My impeccably aristocratic in-laws wanted me to have a child. I wanted to have a child. He took me to Europe . . . Marienbad, Baden-Baden, every spa with every sort of mineral water. I drank it like wine, I bathed in it, my skin grew wrinkled in it and still . . . nothing.

  “Finally, I thought of the lost little one. I went to Madame Restell. I begged her tell me where that one had gone. By then my husband was so desperate he would have accepted any child, told any story to justify the arrival of a toddler when an infant was expected.”

  “But the baby was gone forever,” Irene guessed.

  “As if it had never been . . . what so many clients of Madame Restell desired more than anything, was what I had come to regret more than anything.”

  She lifted her left wrist from the cloudy bathwater, which had slowly grown pink. “Blood dissipates like a veil, doesn’t it? It won’t tell, it will merely trickle away into water.” Her free hand touched her throat. A mixture of blood and water trailed over her chest like a necklace of pale garnets. “I only slit my wrists, north and south. I didn’t slit my throat, east and west. I will fade slowly, and my finger will never leave the trigger. Should I shoot you?” she asked Irene dreamily. “You didn’t make the mistakes I did, you argued against them. That is so . . . infuriating. And Madame Restell, she refused to tell me where my child had gone. She said it would have been unethical, against the good of the child, who had a new family who wanted and welcomed it. As if its own mother would not, now that she had decided she could!

  “She kept a book. I know she did. I tried to make her tell me where it was, but she didn’t. She had hidden it well.”

  “In this house?” Irene asked.

  “In this house. I convinced my first husband to buy this house after her death, everyone thought for the magnificence of it, but I wanted to be able to search it at my leisure. I have probed every corner. I have looked for eleven years. The old man has died, childless, and I have remarried and kept this house and I have looked.”

  “How can you be sure that there was a book listing the children sent to new homes?”

  “Because I found the one listing her abortion clients! Do you realize what a document like that is worth? Were one to need money? Which I never did, not again.

  “I should kill you,” she added apropos of nothing in her most recent discourse.

  “Why?” Irene asked.

  “Because you escaped it all . . . the lovers’ betrayals, the humiliations, the pain, the loss, the wealthy husbands who had become only means, not ends. You never paid the price all the women who went to Madame Restell did, that my sister and I did! You went abroad and sang opera. You are wed, you said.”

  “Yes,” Irene said uneasily, unsure what word or thought might spur that trigger finger to press death into service again.

  “To whom or what?”

  “A barrister.”

  “Only a barrister?”

  “Better than a false king.”

  “I knew I should kill you, but then I thought there might be crueler fates.”

  “Why kill me? I only tried to offer you advice you now admit was good.”

  “I should kill you for knowing better than I, for escaping what Winnie and I ran to like fools. For all that we did wrong and you did right.”

  Such petty envy seemed strangely unreal in that room of nearing death . . . of double death, I realized, for this must be the very same bathtub in which Madame Restell had committed suicide.

  “I hired the Pinkertons. Yes, isn’t that ironic? Even there you anticipated me. I know canny inquiries are being made, and some damned English detective has been treading disturbingly close to present truths. I know my revels now are ended. It is like giving birth,” she said, glancing at the water, “dying this way, except there is no pain. Only a slow ebbing of strength and will. One feels very light-headed. But this pistol is too heavy to forget, so keep your distance,” she chided Irene, her attention and strength rallying again.

  “You’re probably in the lost book, you know. The one I couldn’t find. The one that recorded children taken from their mothers. If you could find it, you might find out who your mother was. Aren’t you curious?”

  “Who my mother was?”

  “Oh, she’s surely dead by now, don’t you think? It’s been more than thirty years. Certainly she’s never tried to find you, as I hunted my child. My daughter. And if your mother wasn’t dead then, she surely is now.”

  Irene took an involuntary step toward her. The pistol lifted and aimed, the vague eyes behind it now black burning holes in her parchment-white face.

  “What have you done?” Irene asked.

  “It was that newspaper girl, coming around, prying. She only wanted to know about you! About our life together when we were child performers, about who our relatives were. She seemed to think you were somebody, can you imagine that, and that the world would be interested in your antecedents? We had no antecedents but air, my mother and sister and I, and my one living known kin, my daughter, was missing forever. I had Madame Restell’s book. I knew who her clients were. Perhaps one of those was your mother, someone who had ended a first pregnancy, but had reconsidered and kept the results of a second one, yet still remained hidden. Those women of the stage, why did they raise you? Why did they never seem to question where you came from? They were mothers! Mothers who lost children one way or the other and never tried to reclaim them, as I did my daughter. So they adopted you.”

  Irene had moved subtly during this speech, so minutely that even I had not noticed that she had placed herself between me and the woman in the bathtub. I realized that I saw only a bent bare elbow edged in blood, and Irene’s straight, cape-clad back.

  I also realized that to move in any way, to draw the woman’s attention to either Irene or myself any more than it was focused at the moment, would be folly.

  “You killed them,” Irene accused calmly, as if describing what brand of tea had been served.

  “I? No. I don’t kill anything but myself, or you before I go.”

  Silence. “Why?” Irene finally asked.

  I wished I could see her face, for her voice was as emotionless as an eel.

  Mina seemed to understand what question Irene wanted answered. “Maybe one of them had birthed my sister and myself. Maybe one of them had birthed you. I find that last notion the likeliest, the way those old biddies doted on you, always you. I decided that if my daughter could not have a mother, a mother who wanted her desperately and had searched so long and hard and fruitlessly for her, then it was deep injustice that you should find a mother after all these years. That Nellie Bly was bound and determined that she should do this very thing, for what reason I don’t know. So you’re half right.”

  “You killed them. Sophie and Salamandra. Abyssinia, first, perhaps? Simply because of who they might be?”

  “Not so simply. They were listed in Madame Restell’s book of clients.”

  I tried to edge around Irene, but my
clothing rustled. I heard the languid water stir and watched Irene’s back stiffen even more. I was doing her no favor, although what I’d do if I heard that pistol fire and saw Irene crumple, I didn’t know. It would not be anything sane.

  That was the worst thing about the woman in the bathtub’s serene insanity. It goaded others into the same mania.

  “They’d given up children, killed them in the womb, don’t you see? They didn’t deserve to live. You are shocked. Angry. You hate me. It’s too late for any of that. What’s done is done. Dead is dead. Gone is gone.”

  Her voice faded until I could barely decipher her words. I dread saying it, but hope flared in my heart at the possibility of her imminent death. If Irene was right, she was responsible for many innocent deaths. Yet . . . I could not quite see how.

  “Maybe Madame Restell herself was your mother,” Mina crooned maliciously. “There is always that possibility. You are the daughter of the wickedest woman in New York, ever.”

  “No,” Irene said. I recognized from the firmness of her tone that she was done accepting this situation, whatever rebellion would bring. “You are the wickedest woman in New York, and you secretly claimed that title long ago, eleven years ago, when you killed Madame Restell yourself.”

  44.

  Maidenhair

  A bloody ending to a bloody life.

  —ANDREW COMSTOCK, SECRETARY, THE SOCIETY FOR THE

  PREVENTION OF VICE, CLOSING ANN LOHMAN’S FILE, 1879

  I couldn’t help myself.

  I gasped and peered around Irene to see the face of that wretched, wicked creature killing herself by inches in the bathtub and still threatening to take someone living with her, simply because that other breathed and she herself could no longer stand to.

  The dilated eyes moved to me. And so did the pistol barrel.

  Unlike Irene, I was honored with a knowledge of the mother who bore me, with her name and indubitable reality. I thought how she had given her life to give me mine.

  I believed I owed her something extraordinary for that extraordinary sacrifice. Her name had been Alice.

  I pushed Irene aside like a sheaf of wheat at a reaping, and stepped forward to face that woman in the lethal bath, and her unhappy history and her weapon.

  “No! No, Nell!” Irene’s deep, primitive bellow was a vocal command a mastiff (or even a basso playing the Devil) would have heeded.

  Unfortunately, I was nothing so powerful. I was a Shropshire lass and a parson’s daughter and no one to trifle with when roused.

  I stepped toward the bloody bathtub . . . and slipped on the wet tiles. As I fell a great dark spider and its entire, vast crimson web came crashing down on us all. Now I knew I was as mad as Mina. Irene had seized my elbow too late to stop my plummet, and she skidded to the floor with me in a helpless tangle.

  A wave of noxious water splashed us with life’s blood and some scented soap. I began to choke and almost retch, as if I were sea-borne again.

  Irene pounded me on the back. “It’s all right, Nell. Look!”

  My soggy lashes opened to see the pistol once in Mina’s death grasp, swooped up from the floor by another’s hand. Who—?

  I gazed up at the tub’s curved copper profile. Nothing human surfaced above its lip. I thought of Merlinda the Mermaid breathing blood for the entertainment of ignorant audiences. All audiences are ignorant. That is the magic of the stage and the tragedy of life.

  While I coughed and blinked, Irene pulled me to my feet.

  “I could strangle you,” she hissed under her breath, fondly.

  “I don’t believe you have any ectoplasm conveniently at hand. What was that thing?”

  Before she could answer, Sherlock Holmes straightened from behind the bathtub. If he was a spider, he had caught a creature in his web. A cocoon of red velvet curtain lay on the black and white tiled floor, soaking up water and oozing an interior red.

  He pulled a flaccid wrist from the imprisoning fabric and counted a pulse no one on earth would ever hear again, apparently, for he shook his head. “She was very near death all this time, but great hatred can delay the inevitable.”

  “How . . . how did you—?” I asked. Sputtered.

  “He went exploring, Nell, when she was so focused on us.” Irene glanced to the ceiling high above us and the half-moon window now bare of its curtain and framing a black avenue of night. “Are you all right?” she asked him. “That was quite a leap.”

  “Her hatred was finally failing with her life’s blood,” he answered, eyeing the bundle on the floor that lay there like a large, richly swaddled infant. “She didn’t slay anyone herself, except Madame Restell.”

  “That’s why she didn’t slit her own throat!” I said. “Such sudden ends were due only an old enemy, or the ‘mother’ she felt had betrayed her. She had depended upon the Madame, who had served Mina’s infant child as was thought best at the time. Poor mad thing.” I wasn’t quite sure whom I was referring to.

  Irene barely listened, although she was rhythmically patting my back. “Do you have a mother, Mr. Holmes?”

  “So my father told me,” he answered.

  “He has a brother!” I pointed, “so there must be a mother in there somewhere.”

  “There is always a mother there somewhere,” he announced, rising to his own damp, yet imperious height. “And in this case, a plot that overarches more than thirty years.” He bowed suddenly, to Irene. “I beg your pardon. Am I betraying a feminine confidence?”

  “I admit to being past thirty, and relish every year of it. Vanity is sometimes useful, but it is never to be trusted in important matters. And are you vain enough to keep the things you have learned from us? I think we have earned the right to knowledge.”

  “Indeed you have. I will call at your hotel later. Meanwhile, I suggest you leave this place while I summon the authorities. There is sure to be a telephone in such a mansion.”

  Irene said nothing, but allowed him to escort us to the reception rooms below, where he left us while he returned to attend to the dead woman above.

  “Quick, Nell! This mausoleum must have a library! Where? Do you think?”

  “Somewhere on the first floor,” I suggested, trotting after her. “What are we looking for?

  “Where would one hide a book?”

  “In a library.”

  “Ergo . . .”

  We found the chamber in question, a two-story circle of waxed wood shelves and gilt spines, and began ravishing the contents for a clue. Just because a madwoman had found nothing didn’t mean there was nothing to be found. We both ransacked the shelves, aware that when Sherlock Holmes returned and the dead were dealt with he would be able to devote his full attention to this same quest.

  “It’s no use, Nell,” Irene finally said from on high, where she clung by one foot and one arm to a library ladder that seemed church-spire tall. “One would need to examine every volume and there must be several thousand here.”

  “How many really read, I wonder?”

  “If only I could think!” she complained while backing down the ladder.

  “I believe that we are doing well to be standing upright after that ordeal.”

  “Sherlock Holmes,” she said bitterly when once again she was on terra firma, which in this case was a magnificent expanse of black marble, “will probably stroll into this room after we leave, pinpoint a book on the third tier and find the missing volume at once.”

  “Possibly, but we need to leave before the police arrive.”

  “So we do.” She sighed theatrically and followed me out of the immense chamber to the hall. This was as long and grand as a monarch’s reception room, and from it opened many elegant chambers, including an unexpected solarium, its uncurtained high, broad windows, admitting moonglow and swaths of the electric lights that surrounded the mansion.

  The large exotic plants within cast sinister shadows. We paused as we passed, I feeling as if we were peeking into a nightmare version of Alice’s Wonderland.


  Irene seized my forearm. “Nell! What is that?”

  I looked where she pointed. “An extremely overgrown maidenhair fern, I should think.”

  “And what does it grow out of?”

  “A . . . too hard to see in the dimness, but some kind of wicker basket.”

  “An exceptionally large wicker basket, quite large enough to contain a coiled cobra, I should think.” Irene said, moving nearer as if mesmerized by the idea.

  “A cobra! Not in New York City! We must leave! No time to gawk at giant houseplants!”

  “With wheels,” she added, sounding ecstatic. “Of course!”

  I had never known Irene to take any interest in plant life, inside or out, nor what containers would hold them.

  “Irene, please!”

  By now she was rooting around beneath the arching fronds like an upper Broadway pig.

  “You will ruin your gloves and one of the few gowns you have available on this trip!”

  She appeared capable no longer of hearing me, much less heeding me, so I went over, determined to pull her bodily away from her bizarre new enthusiasm for ferns.

  She suddenly straightened, her soiled hand hoisting a dark rectangular object.

  “The lost book! I’m sure of it.”

  “How can you be?” Only a worm would have enjoyed the strong odor of freshly turned earth. “It’s covered in oilcloth, and soil. And possibly ugly wriggling things.”

  Irene responded to my distaste by bringing the object to her lips and kissing it.

  As I nearly gagged in horror, she laughed. “Don’t you see what this container really is?”

  It was a pleasure to look at something other than the filthy fruits of a potting soil. “A wicker basket. On wheels. Which is odd. It’s obviously a decorative device.”