Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  I slithered out of bed and tiptoed over to the bureau. From a drawer that I opened by careful quarter inches, I withdrew the small coded book Irene and I had unearthed at the very thoroughly late Madame Restell’s house.

  This prize Irene had not wanted Sherlock Holmes to have, but I much doubt he cared about illegitimate births among New York City society families more than thirty years ago.

  I, on the other hand, had skimmed some of Miss Pink’s “Nellie Bly” newspaper stories in the World since we had arrived here. She did not always write the “shocker” stories she was famed for, such as getting herself arrested and then reporting the unspeakable indignities suffered by women inmates.

  She had recently also discussed her adventures riding a newfangled bicycle, and had visited the pugilist John L. Sullivan at his training camp to pester him with such impertinent (and trivial) questions as Do you take cold showers and How much money do you make?

  (I must admit that I find pugilists fascinating for no reason I can name, although I have never confessed this to anyone and would be loath to think that I shared any interests in common with our Miss Pink. Other than Quentin, I suppose.)

  At any rate, in following the journalistic adventures of our former associate, I’d noticed that she had recently been dispatched to the fashionable resorts of Newport and Narragansett as well as Bar Harbor and Saratoga Springs to report “the gay goings-on” of people whose money is their sole claim to fame.

  Such place names meant little to me, save that they were patronized by the rich, apparently serving as the American equivalent of Bath. Surely Miss Pink would pursue a scandal among them . . . could I but find one, a nice juicy one involving persons long dead so no real harm could be done in the present. That would be the very thing to divert her from our affairs.

  But first I must decipher this blasted book . . . or at least appear to. The paraffin lamp flickered in the darkness, barely lighting the pages of tangled letters and numbers squirming like worms on the cramped pages before me.

  Irene had said I was clever with patterns. Could I be as clever at unweaving patterns?

  I set to work with a will.

  19

  A BOOKISH SORTIE

  Agosto Brentano, a Sicilian immigrant, had for years run a

  newspaper stand in front of the New York Hotel . . .

  After amassing capital selling foreign and domestic papers,

  he branched into books and play scripts, opening

  Brentano’s Literary Emporium in 1876. It became a

  popular rendezvous for the theatrical elite.

  —GOTHAM: A HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY TO 1898

  If by night I intended to unravel the mysteries of Madame Restell’s book of secret births (and the more shocking prevention of them) thirty to fifty years ago, it soon became clear that by day Irene and I would be hard on the trail of Lola Montez and her scandalous history.

  I had at first supposed it spoke to Irene’s moral sense that she was not so much searching for a forebear as being determined to prove this particular woman could not possibly be any relation to her. But, no, Irene was driven by other concerns.

  This became clear when we hied the next day to the newsstands and bookshops at the “Rialto,” the theatrical district clustered around Union and Madison Squares.

  Mrs. Eliza Gilbert was completely unknown there, but Lola Montez was everywhere. At Brentano’s Literary Emporium, a shop that stocked the London and Paris papers among many other foreign journals, we found the clerk ecstatic to guide us to the full complement of written material relating to Miss Montez. Or perhaps I should say, La Montez.

  This young man, possessed of a snowy celluloid collar, shirtsleeves, and rather loud suspenders, radiated the incessant energy native to this large and exhausting city.

  “Lola Montez? You have found a gold mine, ladies, speaking of which we also have many volumes about the Gold Rush of ’49 in which she figures as a minor but always colorful character. And Brentano’s Literary Emporium, with our situation in the heart of the theatrical district, has many actual play scripts for sale, including several relating to the acting career of the lady you mention.”

  “Really.” Irene sounded as icy as a dowager duchess. “I didn’t think she acted.”

  “Oh, in many plays, ma’am, including the one of her own life, which was most popular in the olden days.” He stopped his patter long enough to regard Irene’s expressionless face. “Oh, I see. You have been reading the critics! I fear we don’t have newspapers old enough to contain reviews of Lola Montez on the stage, but the books quote lavishly from the journals of the day, and you will find all you need here at Brentano’s, I promise you.

  “Are you ladies planning to pen a volume on this most interesting lady?”

  He looked expectantly from one to the other of us, and I suspect he found the same appalled, even revolted, expression on both of our faces.

  Indefatigable, the young man shrugged. “Someone does a new one every five years or so, so there’s lots to choose from. And we stock her own books, as well.”

  “She wrote books?” Irene sounded as incredulous as I felt.

  “And volumes of letters to the newspapers, usually defending herself from what she called ‘calumny.’ My, they used forty-dollar words in the olden days. She was as fast on the draw with her pen as she was her riding crop.”

  “Why is America so enamored of this Lola Montez?” I asked.

  “She did raise Cain everywhere she went, and we weren’t so cosmopolitan back then,” he explained. “Visiting celebrities from Europe always turned our heads. Why, when that poet fellow Oscar Wilde came through, I was just a boy, but I remember the whole country was in a stir about him from East to West.”

  “He was not from ‘Europe.’” I adopted Irene’s chilly tone. “He was from England. England is an island. It is not part of Europe.”

  “It’s right close, ma’am, and Europe is a pretty big continent. What would England be otherwise, a barrier island?”

  “One could only hope,” I answered, “but unfortunately that was not enough to keep the French away in 1066.”

  He frowned prodigiously. “Are you speaking of an hour or a year, ma’am? Anyway, it’s only ten years or so since Oscar burned a trail down Broadway, and I ’spect we’ll be talking about him and his velvet knickers as long as we have gossiped about Lola and her riding whip.”

  I sighed. Heavily.

  “We will take everything you have available on her,” Irene said in a new tone that I can only describe as martyred.

  He was off without a second glance. That is one thing that I both like and loathe about America: as long as you carry a reticule or a handbag you can enter any establishment and be taken quite seriously. Money tops birth and station.

  A half hour later we left with our pocketbooks considerably lighter of paper bills and coins, but both arms burdened with common paper-wrapped parcels.

  Irene’s expression was grim. “We have our work cut out for us, the size of sailcloth, it appears.”

  “Don’t worry, Irene.” I balanced so many packages I needed my chin as a third hand to hold them together. “A woman this notorious could hardly have sneaked into variety theaters as the Woman in Black.”

  “One would hope. But there are veils. We must hail a cab.”

  “I have no hand, much less an arm free, and besides, they never pay attention to me.”

  “I have part of my right hand free,” Irene said, waggling the gloved fingers in question over the top of a stack of wrapped books she also anchored with her chin.

  One would think a gentleman would observe our quandary and offer assistance, but they all brushed by, as busy as newsboys with fresh editions to hawk.

  Irene put two fingers in her mouth and used her operatic lungs to blow a whistle so loud and shrill that every cab within a hundred yards came to a halt.

  One driver nosed closest to us first, and we leaned in to dump our parcels on the seat first, before
stuffing ourselves in after.

  The ride was spent rearranging the booty into portable piles. There was barely room for us to perch on the edge of the seat, but then there was barely time for us to rearrange ourselves before we were on Broadway again and at the Astor House Hotel entrance.

  Irene probed her reticule. “I have nothing left to pay the driver.”

  At that moment our hack door swept open and brown packages tumbled out toward the doorman’s feet. While I instructed him to fetch a boy to tote the things inside, Irene slipped into the lobby and withdrew some more cash from the hotel safe.

  By the time the cab was emptied, she was back to press a generous dollar into the driver’s grubby glove.

  Our course was set: we would spend the next day or two sequestered with the literary legacy of Lola Montez, apparently the most notorious woman of the century.

  For Irene, it was sure to be a lurid journey into the life and times of the woman who may have birthed her.

  For me, it was a distasteful yet welcome opportunity to make sure that Irene remained as far as possible from Sherlock Holmes, the pretentious Vanderbilt “castle” on Fifth Avenue, and the body in a disgusting state of disrepair that she had spied on the billiard table within.

  Ever since Irene had been consulted by Bram Stoker years ago about the drowned sailor on his dining room table, she had shown an unnatural curiosity about these ghoulish matters.

  I had hoped the extremely gruesome trail of the Ripper she had followed last spring might possibly have sated this unbecoming curiosity, but I fear that Irene was not one to let convention stop her.

  Already she had one characteristic in common with the despised Lola, not to mention smoking and a stage career. I could only pray that Irene’s real mother had died on her birth-bed, or had been a consumptive and home-bound wife whose bereaved husband had been forced to give up his only daughter to those better equipped to handle an infant. Why those should turn out to be itinerant variety hall performers I have no idea, but stranger things have happened. In fact, had the Vanderbilt family not already figured in a matter involving the odious Sherlock Holmes, I would have been happy to applaud Irene’s operatic hope that she was a lost heir to an American fortune. Being illegitimately born to a Captain of Industry had far more future than being illegitimately born to a Woman with a Past.

  20

  SPIDER DANCER

  Our first feelings always remain our last memories.

  —LOLA MONTEZ

  How could I have dreamed that the hunt for Lola Montez among this landslide of paper would prove to be the most enjoyable time Irene and I spent in New York? Perhaps it only seems so in retrospect because of the cataclysmic events that came later.

  But for this period—the lull before the storm—the intimidating telephone became our newest ally as we ordered first dinner, then breakfast and lunch, picnicking among a sea of books strewing the carpeting, the chair seats, the tabletop.

  There was no help for it but to lounge on the rugs in our dressing gowns like schoolroom girls, each consuming cakes and fruit and wine and sarsaparilla (a nonliquorous soda I was becoming quite fond of) along with great dollops of the impossible life of an impossible woman.

  Irene, I’m happy to say, was always the first to quote aloud some unflattering bit, to the extent that despite myself I found it necessary to soften the damning picture that was assuming almost sentient life in our midst.

  I was the readiest, however, to cast the first and most damning stone.

  “Look here! She was Irish, Irene, not Spanish at all.”

  “Irish? Then she need not apply for the position of my mother.” Irene made a face disavowing her previous words. “I’m sorry, Nell, but I find the Irish a delightful and gritty people. That is no mark against her in my book. You’ll have to search further.”

  “Aha! I have the source of the tombstone name; She was born Elizabeth Rosana Gilbert, but her mother always called her Eliza.”

  “That’s odd. Why should she put that diminutive on her tombstone? This book says she hated her mother for planning to marry her off at age fourteen to a sixty-four-year-old major general who just happened to be her mother’s husband’s commanding officer. I’m afraid I’m solidly on young Eliza’s side here. Her own mama was ‘selling’ her into marriage with her stepfather’s superior officer.”

  “Such a marriage would have had assured Eliza status and security.”

  “Nell! Fourteen and sixty-four? Have you any notion what an unthinkable age difference that is? A child of fourteen—granted, a pretty, precocious child—to a man . . .” figures had never been Irene’s strong point, so she counted on her fingers “. . . ten, twenty, thirty, forty . . . goodness, fifty years her senior? She would remain in her teens while he crept toward seventy! Most unnatural!”

  “I suppose so,” I said, but I was really as shocked as Irene by the notion of a girl so young wedding a man so old. “That is why she ran away with the young soldier.”

  “Even he was almost thirty, twice her age.”

  “She could not have married a fourteen-year-old!”

  “Not unless she’d lived in the Middle Ages when noble children were betrothed from birth. You may not see the peril in such great age differences, but trust me, Nell, superior experience conveys power, and it is never good when a man has that much more knowledge and power than a woman.”

  “But don’t they all?” I asked, thinking of Quentin, who was ever so much more worldly than myself, if not that much older, surely. Just how old was Quentin? I would have to find out.

  “Amen,” Irene said, “or at least that’s the way too many of them would like to keep it.”

  “You sound like a suffragist.”

  “Not I. I have not half the courage.”

  “You? You are the bravest woman I have ever seen.”

  Her head shook. “I might contemplate a hunger strike in the right cause, but I could never face the force-feeding: that awful metal apparatus jammed down one’s throat, the delicate tissues ripped and abraded raw, the vocal cords stretched . . . no, no, I could never do it.”

  “That is because safeguarding your throat has been a professional necessity since before you were twenty, although smoking those foul cigars and cigarettes certainly can’t be good for it. In other matters, I am sure you would match a suffragist for nerve. Even Sherlock Holmes thinks you a wonder of audacity.”

  “He thinks I’m . . . audacious?” She sounded much too flattered for her own good. “How do you know, Nell?”

  Oh, dear. I knew because I had peered into one of Dr. Watson’s unpublished stories about his friend. This I could not admit, so I merely said, “Oh, he may have expressed some such sentiment when we were searching the dungeons for Godfrey and Bram Stoker.”

  “You found time then to pause to discuss my character?”

  “Well, no, matters were rather . . . grave. Oh, I don’t know, Irene. I probably just dreamed it. Look! I have found reference to Lola’s marital quandary in her autobiography: ‘So in flying from that marriage with ghastly and gouty old age, the child lost her mother, and gained what proved to be only the outside shell of a husband, who had neither a brain which she could respect, nor a heart which it was possible for her to love. Runaway matches, like runaway horses, are almost sure to end in a smash-up.’”

  “She obviously wrote that passage from the other end of the telescope,” Irene noted, “when that youthful act was seen small and wee from the vantage of middle age.”

  Irene was less interested in Lola’s youthful escapades and more in her theatrical reputation. She was reading raptly again. “This is more like it. This is the creature I recall hearing about. Listen to this review of her appearance on the Paris Opera stage, the foremost theater in France:

  “‘Mile. Lola Montez is a very beautiful person, who is endowed with a lovely figure and the most beautiful eyes in the world. . . . Unfortunately . . . Mlle. Lola Montez doesn’t know how to dance; she doesn’t know the first e
lements of choreography. Her figure and her eyes which she paraded before the auditorium with martial assurance did not disarm the spectators, who welcomed her with indulgence at her first dance, but who at her second hissed her with such vehemence that it determined the withdrawal of her name from the bills.’”

  “How humiliating!” said I, who could no more imagine appearing on a stage than flying. “I could never have set toe to board again after such a publicly reported failure. Of course, the French are notoriously particular. What was this dance that they found so scandalous?”

  “Something Lola made up, like much of her life history,” Irene replied, paging through our collection of books with eager fingers. “Unbelievable gall. What a glorious fraud! What verve. What nerve! Listen to this, Nell: Before her debut as a dancer, she encountered no less a personage than the earl of Malmesbury on the train from Southampton to London. She represented herself as the widow of a Spanish Republican who had attempted to overthrow Queen Isabella the Second and had been promptly shot.”

  “Why should she want to pose as a traitor’s wife?”

  “Because all London was swooning over the young rebel who’d refused to flee to save his life. Lola claimed to be his penniless widow and ended up selling Spanish veils and fans at a benefit concert arranged for her at the earl’s home. It was the earl who introduced Lola to the impresario of Her Majesty’s Theater in London, where she would debut her Spider Dance, and the impresario, Lumley, who then introduced Lola to the London journalist who would serve as her herald.”

  “You’re saying that because of the mere chance of sharing a train ride with an earl, Lola became the toast of London?”

  “‘Mere chance’ is but Act One in the game of life, Nell. It’s what the enterprising spirit does with ‘mere chance’ that makes all the difference. It was ‘mere chance’ that we met on a London street, after all, and look what has come of that.”

  Luckily, Irene rushed on without giving me opportunity to answer.

  “Do you realize that Lola was doing all this forty years ago! That she was indeed a political force? She didn’t have to aspire to any intellectual life at all, but she was highly informed for a woman of her time. As for her dancing, it’s clear she was judged against the tradition of ballet, when flamenco is a dance of the people. No wonder the critics didn’t know what to make of her, so they tried to make a joke of her.