FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Not at all! Like Pink, I may become one to see great opportunity in other people’s misfortunes. Perhaps I shall write a sensational novel, Ten Days in a Vaudeville Theater.”

  Irene playfully jousted parasols with me. “You will do no such thing, or I will reveal the pig thief in your past.”

  “Heavens! Then I am silenced forever.”

  And so we were laughing when the driver drew our carriage to a stop by a small rise sectioned into squares by hedges and trees.

  It struck me that two laughing women not in need of her services would be a fine set of final visitors for the late Madame Restell, for I doubted anyone visited her grave.

  We ambled up the hill, weaving our way among monuments tall and modest. The sun warmed without overheating us. Irene and I had not shared such a pleasant, unhurried, unpursued time together in ages.

  “Here,” she said finally, stopping in front of a headstone.

  How odd it was to read the inscription: ANN TROW LOHMAN MAY 6, 1811–APRIL 1, 1878. “Madame Restell” and all her works judged both good and bad had vanished. No mention here of a fiend or murderer or “bat” woman or a freethinker or a martyr.

  “How many people still would be alive,” I remarked, “if that one child had not been given for adoption with no trace of to whom or where.”

  “Such things have been done that way for hundreds of years, and still are today. An unwed mother forfeits her child, and all knowledge of its disposition.” Irene stared down at the headstone. “I don’t doubt for a moment that she knew where the child had gone. However she is judged, she did what she believed best, whether it was preventing or ending a pregnancy, or arranging a child adoption that could never be undone.”

  “You mean that she refused to tell, with a butcher knife to her neck?”

  Irene nodded slowly. “I believe so, Nell. A woman who would drive out daily in broad daylight when even grateful clients denied using her twilight services was not about to kowtow to the cutting edge of a blade if she believed it was for the child’s good.”

  “How awful! Did she guess that such a death would label her a coward and a suicide?”

  “She never thought of herself, or history, only the present. She must have been accustomed to handling hysterical women, and men. She was not one to back down.”

  “I will pray that she was as right as she believed herself to be.”

  I bent my head and did so, while Irene waited. I don’t think she prayed, but she felt great sorrow at the waste of lives we had witnessed these past two weeks, including that of this woman’s murderer, who herself was a true suicide now.

  “How ironic,” I said when I lifted my head to the glorious day again. “Wilhelmina’s madness led her to actually enact the self-inflicted death that had wrongly been assigned to her victim. Poetic justice, don’t you think?”

  “Murder is an ironic occupation, at best,” said a familiar voice behind us.

  I whirled to face Sherlock Holmes. Irene did nothing of the sort.

  He had followed us up the hill, and stood on the incline, top hat in hand, the wind actually stirring that smooth dark hair of his as well as lifting the tail of his cutaway city suit. His formal dress amid all this lushly cultivated countryside reminded me of an undertaker. Perhaps it was an apt comparison for a detective.

  When Irene kept her back to him he came abreast of us to gaze down on the last words said about Madame Restell.

  “Both murderer and victim,” he noted, “evaded answering to a court of law. And perhaps such crimes as they stood accused of should be judged in other than earthly courts. Madam.”

  Irene regarded him at last.

  He held a folded paper out to her.

  “There is another headstone here that I believe you would be obliged to visit. Like this one, the writing etched on the marble’s surface is but a small hint of the true story that lies beneath.”

  Irene’s lips parted with surprise.

  “We have played at being opponents across half of Europe, Madam,” he observed. “Now we both stand in a New World—a brave New World my friend Watson would imagine I know nothing of—with a vast unsettled continent yawning around us.

  “Regard this map. Regard the name penciled beside that headstone.”

  “Mrs. Eliza Gilbert. The name means nothing to me.”

  “Neither did it to her, I think. It might merit tracing to its origins, however.”

  “Mrs. Eliza Gilbert is dead. I am not. You apparently know what that name means, but won’t say more.”

  “You have often complained that I meddle in your private business. So the meaning here is all yours, should you choose to pursue it.”

  “And you will not help?”

  “I will,” I heard myself saying.

  Irene turned to me with a blinding smile. She eyed Mr. Holmes again. “I have my Watson, it seems.”

  He shrugged. “I could wager my Watson against yours.”

  “It is not a contest.”

  “All life is a contest.” He shrugged again. “There are other matters to attend to here, including the arcane matter of the Astor chess board. Our paths may yet cross again.”

  “I can’t decide whether to regard that as a threat or a promise.”

  “It is a possibility, which is what I deal in, and what awaits me now.”

  He bowed to us, donned his top hat again, and began walking over the uneven ground, suspiciously soft in some places, to the curving driveway.

  “What makes him think we will linger here, in this cemetery or this country?” I asked.

  “One always lingers when contemplating death.” Irene’s attention had deserted Madame Restell’s headstone and was now focused on the map. “This other monument is only . . . across that road and overlooking the section centered around the white marble pool, here.”

  “You aren’t going to actually follow his advice?”

  “Of course not, Nell. What I will do is accept his challenge. Come! We are not about to be stopped by one more puzzling headstone. The dead may be ‘but sleeping,’ yet I don’t expect any of them to wake up.”

  I followed, grumbling as my boot heels wavered on the thick grass.

  Like all predicted short walks, this one proved to be a greater distance that it looked but at last we found the headstone in question.

  “Not an insignificant monument,” Irene noted when I caught up to her, “but neither is it rich or showy. What does that tell us?”

  I agreed that the stone was modest. An arch-topped rectangle perhaps two or three feet high sat atop two stepped pedestals. The deceased’s name was deeply incised into a horizontal band in dignified capital letters: ELIZA GILBERT. Such an ordinary, even modest name. Above the decorative frieze which blazoned the name from side to side of the headstone was the simple title, also capitalized, but incised in more delicate lettering, MRS.

  “The form of address is improper,” I pointed out. “If she was indeed a ‘Mrs.,’ she should be identified fully by her husband’s name, say Mrs. William Gilbert, with her own given name, Eliza, shown in parentheses.”

  “Are you saying, Nell, that this headstone memorializes a divorced woman?”

  “Quite possibly. That is not utterly unheard of these days. Consider Pink’s mother, for instance.”

  Irene nodded. “And such few clues lie below that plain name:

  DIED

  JAN. 17, 1861

  AGE 42

  “Not a terribly young age to have perished in such a harsh country as this, and that was at the beginning of their savage civil war.”

  Irene bent to brush a twig off the headstone’s second step. “An epitaph is such a terse, stingy summary of a life. It quite makes one wonder.”

  “How? Someone survived to bury her respectably. What else more is wanted?

  “A great deal more information about Mrs. Eliza Gilbert, and Sherlock Holmes knows part of it already.”

  “Why won’t he tell us, then?”

  “Because I made
a such great clamor about how much I resented him prying into my private history. So he has issued a challenge.”

  “To investigate this maybe-Mrs. Eliza Gilbert? I should think you’d resent even more his setting you on a cryptic path with no guidance. You don’t seriously think Eliza Gilbert is your mother?”

  “I know now that Madame Restell is not, which is quite a relief. Her motives may have been noble and kind, or not anything of the sort, but I really don’t care to be the unacknowledged daughter of ‘the wickedest woman in New York.’ ”

  “This Eliza person may be ‘the wickedest woman in Brooklyn,’ for all you know, or even worse!”

  “Then again she may be better than anyone knows or thinks. We face a week-long transatlantic buffeting were we to return right now, Nell.”

  I grew green-faced at the very notion. The gently rolling hills around us seemed to shimmer with motion: endless, wretched motion.

  “Or,” Irene said, “we can stay a bit longer, pick up the stone gauntlet thrown down in Green-Wood Cemetery by Sherlock Holmes, and endeavor to discover who this lady was, and why anyone might think she had some connection to me.”

  “I have never heard of her,” I admitted, pleased that we were at least dealing with a modest, forgotten soul, rather like my own dead mother. It would do Irene good to contemplate obscure origins, as most of us must.

  “Eliza Gilbert,” Irene read the stone again. “A good name, solid and trustworthy. I do believe that I would take an ‘Eliza Gilbert’ on faith.

  “I agree. It sounds, in fact, British.”

  “Do you think so? Many in this land are of that descent, even Madame Restell. Could this woman have been another? Could I have had an English mother?” Irene gazed fondly down at the headstone, around whose occupant she was already busy building a character and a history, as an actor envisioning a part.

  I gazed benignly on Mrs. Eliza Gilbert too.

  Now at last we could inter the harrowing histories of Madame Restell and her murderer as our attention moved to another woman who had died at a time far distant from this, 1861, when Irene would have been . . . oh . . . three or four. When she had first appeared as a stage orphan, in fact. A very telling fact.

  Bless Eliza Gilbert, whoever she may be! I thought. She already had become the closing curtain on a dark tragedy. I was ready for a new curtain to open in our quest, perhaps this time on a warm, sentimental family drama.

  Even if she had been divorced, Mrs. Eliza Gilbert could in no way rival Madame Restell for maternal horror. Could she?

  Coda

  Hundreds of fashionable folk quaked when they learned

  Comstock had taken hold of her. They dreaded that when she

  found herself driven to the wall, abandoned by friends who

  were afraid to help her, there would be State’s evidence given

  about their affairs, and all the skeletons in the closets would be

  brought out to public view.

  —A NEW YORK NEWSPAPER ON MADAME RESTELL’S ARREST, 1878

  After more than a decade of reading, studying, and arranging the diaries of Penelope Huxleigh into seven published volumes so far, I have been struck by how many ancillary materials I am finding bundled with the actual diaries as the years progress.

  I’m beginning to suspect that a previous scholar had found Miss Huxleigh’s diaries and had integrated them with supporting materials much more readily available at a much earlier time.

  The most exciting “find” introduced in this volume are three extracts from case notes that Sherlock Holmes apparently kept but never shared with anyone, not even Dr. Watson. These fragments demonstrate, as the published Holmesian material so amply does, that Dr. Watson was the better chronicler of the detective’s adventures. Holmes himself might cavil at his physician friend’s “unscientific” approach to story telling, but there is no doubt that the good doctor was a more compelling writer.

  As usual, my research has proved the portrayal of the personalities and facts in the Huxleigh accounts correct, in so far as they do not involve matters intentionally kept secret, such as Mina’s murder of Madame Restell. It is a pity the Victorian Age deemed so many matters of normal life worthy of concealment. On the other hand, such habits make the Huxleigh diaries an exciting and enlightening window on the hidden aspects of life then.

  Mr. Washington Irving Bishop did indeed perish in the outré manner described in Nell Nelson’s mostly accurate report of his Lambs Club appearance. Madame Restell did indeed service both high society and low in these delicate matters, as depicted by Miss Huxleigh, for much of the middle of the nineteenth century. She was the most noted and notorious of two or three Manhattan abortionists who advertised publicly despite police and court prosecution.

  Certainly this New York episode casts fascinating insight into Irene Adler’s early years and mysterious origins.

  Where it will all lead only the unpublished volumes of Miss Huxleigh’s epic diaries and my assiduous future studies will reveal.

  —Fiona Witherspoon, Ph.D., A.I.A.*

  November 5, 2002

  *Advocates of Irene Adler

  Selected Bibliography

  Belford, Barbara. Bram Stoker. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

  Browder, Clifford. The Wickedest Woman in New York. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1988.

  Bunson, Matthew E. Encyclopedia Sherlockiana. New York: Macmillan, 1994.

  Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

  Coleman, Elizabeth Ann. The Opulent Era. New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1989.

  Crow, Duncan. The Victorian Woman. London: Cox & Wyman, 1971.

  Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes. Various editions.

  Du Maurier, George. Trilby. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

  Homberger, Eric, with Alice Hudson. The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of Nearly 400 Years of New York City’s History. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.

  Jackson, Kenneth T., editor. The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven and London: Yale University, 1995.

  Jay, Ricky. Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women: A History of Unique, Eccentric & Amazing Entertainers. London: Robert Hale, 1987.

  Keller, Allan. Scandalous Lady: The Life and Times of Madame Restell, New York’s Most Notorious Abortionist. New York: Atheneum, 1981.

  Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia Sexualis. London: Velvet Publications, 1997.

  Kroeger, Brooke. Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist. New York: Times Books, 1994.

  Mackay, James. Allan Pinkerton: The Eye Who Never Slept. Edinburgh, Scotland: Mainstream Publishing Co., 1996.

  “Perhaps it has taken until the end of this century for an

  author like Douglas to be able to imagine a female protagonist

  who could be called ‘the’ woman by Sherlock Holmes”

  —GROUNDS FOR MURDER, 1991

  To encourage the reading and discussion of Carole Nelson Douglas’s acclaimed novels examining the Victorian world from the viewpoint of one of the most mysterious women in literature, the following descriptions and discussion topics are offered. The author interview, biography, and bibliography will aid discussion as well.

  Set in 1880–1890 London, Paris, Prague, Monaco, and most recently New York City, the Irene Adler novels reinvent the only woman to have outwitted Sherlock Holmes as the complex and compelling protagonist of her own stories. Douglas’s portrayal of “this remarkable heroine and her keen perspective on the male society in which she must make her independent way,” noted The New York Times, recasts her “not as a loose-living adventuress but a woman ahead of her time.” In Douglas’s hands, the fascinating but sketchy American prima donna from “A Scandal in Bohemia” becomes an aspiring opera singer moonlighting as a private inquiry agent. When events force her from the stage into the art of detection, Adler’s exploits rival those of Sherlock Holmes himself as she cross
es paths and swords with the day’s leading creative and political figures while sleuthing among the Bad and the Beautiful of Belle Epoque Europe.

  Critics praise the novels’ rich period detail, numerous historical characters, original perspective, wit, and “welcome window on things Victorian.”

  “The private and public escapades of Irene Adler Norton [are] as erratic and unexpected and brilliant as the character herself,” noted Mystery Scene of Another Scandal in Bohemia (formerly Irene’s Last Waltz), “a long and complex jeu d’esprit, simultaneously modeling itself on and critiquing Doylesque novels of ratiocination coupled with emotional distancing. Here is Sherlock Holmes in skirts, but as a detective with an artistic temperament and the passion to match, with the intellect to penetrate to the heart of a crime and the heart to show compassion for the intellect behind it.”

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  Femme Fatale, the seventh Irene Adler novel, opens in the Paris in the late summer of 1889. The series’s main characters are all trying to recover from the previous spring’s hunt for Jack the Ripper. The notorious Whitechapel killer of 1888 had decamped to the Continent for more mayhem. But the rival investigators who forged uneasy alliances during that dangerous time—Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler and friends, and the enterprising American newspaper reporter, Nellie Bly—will be forced into action together again.

  Irene Adler’s husband, English barrister Godfrey Norton, has established an office in Paris, leaving Irene and her longtime companion, British spinster Nell Huxleigh, alone at their country cottage in Neuilly-sur Seine (a present-day suburb of Paris). First Sherlock Holmes calls at Neuilly to collect a promised translation of a murderous diary related to the Ripper case. Nell, who has read an unpublished manuscript of Dr. Watson’s version of the first Adler/Holmes encounter, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” loathes and fears Holmes because she knows that “to him” Irene “is always the woman.”

  Then Nellie Bly reaches out from America with tantalizing talk of murder and Irene’s mother to draw Irene, Nell, and Sherlock Holmes to America. There Irene will confront aspects of her unremembered past and origins and there they confront murders new, and old.