Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

  “‘The new cathedral,’ of our age,” I said. “Towers of Babel erected to industry.”

  “I for one like an eagle’s-eye view, but we are concerned here and now with the mite’s-eye view. Can you make anything of the writing on these papers?” Irene asked, refusing to debate slackening modern standards any further.

  “The handwriting style is bold, although the execution is weak, as one would expect from an invalid. Time has sadly faded the ink. Nothing in the penmanship is the least like yours.”

  “Why would it be? She and I attended quite different schools.”

  “You went to no school at all!! At least Eliza Gilbert had a thorough education for her time, although it seemed to have made little impression on her.”

  “I graduated from the University of Varietal Knowledge,” Irene said with mock indignation. “I’ll have you know I was taught calligraphy by the Amazing Annabel, a lady who simultaneously wrote with her hands, feet, and mouth to the astonishment of all Europe and the eastern half of the United States. She was quite a taxing teacher and fiercely demanded proper-shaped letters. She always said that I should be ashamed to do not as well with my hands as she could do with her feet.”

  “Your penmanship is admirably clear,” I admitted, “if extravagant. I fear these new papers will be nearly as hard to decipher as Madame Restell’s codebook, but I see some references to Scripture as well as other matters, so it may be helpful if I pore over it long enough.”

  “Imagine.” Irene rose to reclaim her teacup, which no doubt was cold from neglect. We had kept the tea things well away from the table on which we laid our hard-won documents. “These sheets of paper, combined with Madame Restell’s code book, must contain the untold tales of many unhappy women’s lives three decades ago. And only you can interpret these remnants.”

  “They are hardly Holy Scripture, Irene. I expect to find a good deal of sin in these pages.”

  “And so one does in Scripture, I am told. I hope you discover some good, Nell. No one is irredeemable.”

  “No,” I admitted reluctantly. Not even Pink, I supposed. “How, or why,” I asked, “did Eliza-Maria-Lola-Mrs. James-Mrs. Heald-Mrs. Hull-Mrs. Gilbert conceal her last papers in the fireplace bricks?”

  “A good question. She knew she was dying. She had seen and rejected her mother. She had signed a document leaving anything that came to her via Bavaria after her death to Mrs. Buchanan, thus forestalling her mother from any future windfall inheritance.”

  “How she must have hated her mother!”

  “Why not? Lola blamed her mother’s neglect and ill use for forcing her into an unwise elopement and then onto the stage to support herself as a result. I am not a great believer of ‘forgive and forget’ either, but Lola had gone so far as to embrace the Church and leave a sizable donation to a group for fallen women. With the rest of her means, she paid the debts for her care. She would seem to have had her house in order, what was left of it. Why hide her spiritual diary?”

  “Indeed, it could have inspired others like herself to repent”

  Irene paced around the room, consuming American “cookies” and cold tea. At least she had so far refrained from smoking.

  She paused at the window, gazed out, then whirled to face me.

  “I submit, Nell, that Lola Montez did not conceal these papers.”

  I looked up from my close work, my eyes blinking in puzzlement and at the swift change of focus. “Who else would have done it?”

  “Father Hawks. He was there at the last. During the hasty arrangements for her burial and resulting chaos, he could easily have dislodged a few bricks in the fireplace and concealed the papers. The use of oilcloth suggests he wanted to preserve them and he anticipated some long period of concealment.”

  “Wouldn’t the fires have destroyed them?”

  “The niche was far enough behind the surface bricks to protect them. What he didn’t anticipate was that time would render the fireplace redundant.”

  “Then he had expected to use them sooner.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “He wanted to preserve evidence of Lola’s conversion, to make a case for her sainthood.”

  “Possibly. Since he is dead, Nell, we can’t know. But we have to wonder if he died preserving the secret resting place of these very papers.”

  “No!” I lifted my hands away from the worn pages under my care. “Father Hawks was the saint, then, a martyr certainly. What could be in here worth suffering such a brutal death to protect?”

  “We won’t know until we study them, or find whoever wanted to possess them so badly.”

  “Or they find us.” I shivered at the idea of facing the unknown monsters who had so maltreated the good father. Then I frowned. “Who is this false father who searched the room before us?”

  “‘False father.’ Interesting turn of phrase, Nell. It does occur to one, that, embarked on a search for a long-lost mother, one should wonder about a long-lost father.”

  I had not thought of that! I had not foreseen that our search for Irene’s mother could turn up a father, but of course it might . . . would. If Lola Montez had been such an unpleasant surprise for us both, what would a father be?

  I looked over at Madame Restell’s book, which shared the table and might hold much information of concealed mothers, and fathers. Could it be that Irene’s father was an even more unlikely, or key, figure than her purportedly notorious mother? For instance, the king of Bavaria, which would make Irene a princess, albeit an illegitimate one? Oh, my goodness, she did not need any more encouragement to royalty than she had flirted with in the past!

  “When do you think you will ferret out the mysteries in those two most different but interesting documents, Nell?” Irene asked from the window.

  I looked up to see that she had at last lit one of her small cigars. Smoke was curling past her silhouetted shoulder at the window like steam from rolls fresh from the oven.

  “I have no idea, Irene. One was designed to frustrate all interpretation, and the other is in a such sorry state of preservation that it is virtually unreadable.”

  “Well. Then I propose we seek out a source that is in a better state of preservation, and readable. As to whether it will frustrate all interpretation, I can’t say until we try.”

  “A source?”

  “Someone who knew Lola.”

  “Mrs. Buchanan, but she may be very hard to find, or even dead.”

  “That’s why I suggest another source first, one very much alive.”

  “Who on earth—?”

  Irene swept past the desk to pluck from the sofa a newspaper section of that day’s Times, in fact, and showed me the quarter page folded to be showcased.

  “Irene, this is the theatrical advertisement section.”

  “Indeed, and you will note one Lotta Crabtree is featured in a play.”

  “Lotta Crabtree? Why is that name familiar?”

  “Remember Lola’s sojourn in the ’50s near the California gold fields, in Grass Valley?”

  “I do. Most atypical for her, except for marrying another man she wasn’t entitled to. Grass Valley was a retreat for her. She ran a salon, such as it could be in the unsettled West, kept a tame bear . . . oh, and tutored a small child who was already performing.”

  “Yes. Lotta Crabtree, who is now the flirtatious queen of the American stage and a ripe forty-two, by my calculations.”

  “What would a child know of Lola Montez?”

  “What she thought of Lola during this very unusual, and serene, time of her life.”

  “Yes, for the flame of three continents, Lola did rather bury herself in that tiny town out West for several years.”

  “She did other things in Grass Valley atypical of her; for instance, playing with children as well as bears, and taking little Lotta Crabtree under her rather tarnished wing.”

  “Ha! You admit at last that she was a Tarnished Woman!”

  “What woman who achieves notice is not tarnished in these
benighted times, Nell?”

  “And what times have not tarnished women who achieve anything?” I riposted. Then paused to examine what I had said.

  “Exactly, my dear Nell. We will make a suffragist of you yet.”

  “Over my dead . . . mongoose. You are hardly a suffragist yourself.”

  “True. Perhaps it is the ‘suffer’ part of the role that makes it unsuitable to me. I don’t think Lola much believed in suffering either, until the end at least, and she must have been quite worn by then, poor thing.”

  “You don’t doubt the sincerity of her conversion.”

  “Not at all. I doubt its necessity.

  “Now,” she added to this astounding statement, “how to approach the most highly paid performer on the Broadway stage?” Irene paced, puffing and tapping off ashes in scattered crystal trays as she went. “Finding her residence will be difficult, for the gentlemen admirers are so ardent they detach the coursers from her carriage and draw her to the theater themselves. She will be sure to keep a secret domicile.”

  Irene sighed. “Had I been allowed to perform a while longer, I might have had gentleman-steeds at my disposal.”

  “And you would have relished that, I suppose.”

  “No. It’s rather silly, but still a great sop to the performer’s self-esteem, something Sarah Bernhardt much enjoys. However, in my case, I don’t think even Godfrey would approve.”

  “Since when do you worry about what Godfrey would approve of?”

  “Since I married him, dear Nell. Luckily”—Irene smiled and screwed another slim cigar into her holder—“Godfrey approves of more than you would imagine.”

  She blew out a thin veil of blue smoke. “I’m afraid I’ll have to resurrect Irene Adler the prima donna for the occasion. Even adored American comediennes are impressed by opera singers. So I’ll need a truly elegant ensemble, as will you.”

  “Why?” I demanded.

  “And Quentin, of course.”

  “Quentin?”

  “There is nothing like a presentable Englishmen for opening American doors, and Quentin is très presentable, is he not?”

  To this string of improbabilities, I could only sputter.

  “Good. I’m glad you agree. Tomorrow night should do nicely. I’ll write Miss Crabtree at her theater and Quentin at his hotel tonight. I do hope the dear fellow has brought black tie and tails on this trip. It will save valuable time. What do you think, Nell?”

  “I’m sure I know nothing about the state of Quentin’s wardrobe.”

  “Ah, but you will, my dear. Very shortly. Won’t that be exciting?”

  28

  UNGOVERNABLE

  I found the gentle Lola in the back garden, having a little game with a couple of pet bears, with whom she seemed to be on terms of playful and endearing familiarity. She was bareheaded, sunburnt almost to the color of a Mexican, and with her hair hanging in rich profusion over her graceful shoulders. Her dress was of the simplest make and of the coarsest material, a common frock. . . .

  —CHARLES WARWICK, AN ACTOR VISITING GRASS VALLEY

  Lola, Lotta, I was becoming ardently sorry I had ever heard of either hussy.

  As soon as Irene had written her notes and tended them to a hotel messenger boy to deliver, along with enough funds to buy an imperial elephant’s howdah, we hied again to Brentano’s Literary Emporium, fountain of all things theatrical.

  Biographies of Lotta Crabtree were a dime a dozen, and appeared to read like dime novels. Again we left laden with parcels of books, along with the script of La Lotta’s latest play.

  The young male clerk, emboldened by a second visit, now displayed an absurd partiality to me.

  “Alas,” Irene mock-complained on our exit, “I am wholly a matron now, a married woman, which must somehow show, for it’s you who are collecting all the tender young swains. So passeth prima donnahood.”

  “Nonsense!” I retorted, though I couldn’t deny that the cleric had displayed an unusual solicitude for my opinion and wants.

  We returned to the hotel for an exercise I pretended to chafe about, but which secretly pleased me enormously. We settled down like schoolgirls again to read our heads off, nibbling on tea-table sweets until our teeth and foreheads ached.

  The foreheads especially ached after Irene imported the sherry decanter to our indoor picnic table and insisted I have some “for thy stomach’s sake.”

  This routine reminded me so much of that first interior “picnic” with Irene and Godfrey and Quentin and myself in London—shortly after Quentin’s and my dramatically unexpected reunion outside Notre Dame in Paris—that I could hardly resist her. So I didn’t.

  We read simultaneously through the various pasteboard-covered books until I was as familiar with this precocious child called Lotta Crabtree from San Francisco of forty years ago as I now was with Irene’s own precocious and bizarre childhood from the New York City of a quarter century ago.

  Lotta, I learned, was short for the more conventional Charlotte. Mignon was her middle name.

  “Goodness,” said I as I read, “her mother was Englishborn, as was Madame Restell, and even Lola Montez was almost English-born—though she did her a-borning in Ireland, benighted country that we own and now deeply regret it. Is everyone in America originally from England?”

  “You did own us for a while, you know.”

  “You Americans are rebel Englishmen and women, yes, but you have been through your own bloody Civil War. I would think by now you would grow your own leading ladies.”

  “Ah, Nell, we can grow apart, but we can never quite lose our British roots.”

  I refrained from comment. I confess I was coming to envy the uniquely American energy and cheek I encountered all too often nowadays. I wondered, oddly enough, how Sherlock Holmes was surviving his similar encounters here.

  Little Lotta Crabtree, performing at the age of six, was dubbed La Petite Lotta of the gold fields. Apparently child performers were the rage in the almost womanless mining towns. So both Lola and Lotta made their very different sort of conquests, Lotta being roughly twenty-six years younger than Lola. Being, in fact, young enough to be her daughter. Hmmm.

  I read the passages about Lola’s tutoring of Lotta with the insight and interest of a former governess. As much as I wished to totally disown Lola Montez as a candidate for the role of Irene’s lost mother, I admit my eyes teared over as I read.

  Never and nowhere else had the creature who had recreated herself into Lola Montez been as happy, productive, and beneficial to others as in Grass Valley, California, in the years 1853–56.

  This crude town, far from the rude urban overindulgences of Gold Rush San Francisco, was a place of flora and fauna, of such constitutional opposites and yet natural allies as flowers and dogs and bears, of adventuresses and servants and children in happy, egalitarian collaboration.

  Liberté, soeurité, egalité?

  Little Lotta, the daughter of a doughty English mother and a self-serving American father whom the mother met in New York City (where else), was set dancing on the stage at as early an age as Irene herself.

  Little Lotta, it appeared, when Irene filled me in on her history and career, had indeed studied at the literal, adorably tiny feet of Lola Montez.

  Now considered New York’s leading comedienne, she was a strawberry-curled, coy, flirtatious piece who was adept, as Irene put it, at the ‘strategically inciting wiggle.’”

  “Her act,” Irene said, “will not last much longer, for at past forty she outgrows both it and the boyish trouser roles that have been her bread-and-butter . . . and caviar.”

  (This last proved prophetic, I add as I censor . . . er, amend these diaries: three years after we saw her, Lotta Crabtree retired from the stage to a quiet life of artistic self-improvement, charity, and animal advocacy in New Jersey. So much for having one’s carriage pulled by adoring young men. One wonders if she would show them as much charity as she did to the hardworking street horses she went around put
ting hats upon in later years. I myself find hats a sufficient indignity to humans that horses should be spared them, come to think of it.)

  Our early morning outing to B. Altman’s the next day produced ready-made evening gowns in pastel shades dripping with lace and flounces and diamante. This was not sufficient for Irene, who next proceeded to the Twenty-sixth Street flea market, where she scooped up great quantities of plumage and jet beading.

  “Monsieur Worth’s trick,” she explained. “The brunette colors in evening dress imply richness and sophistication.”

  We set about sewing the new frivolities into place. By the time Quentin called upon us in the early evening, in black tie and tails as Irene had hoped, we were ready for the Diamond Horseshoe.

  Our seats were in the finest boxes overlooking the stage, courtesy of the phantom Mr. Belmont, whose praises Irene sang in ever increasing arpeggios.

  Quentin looked beyond dashing in his formal garb. For some reason the starched white collar and shirtfront against his adventure-tanned face provided a stunning contrast that had women in neighboring boxes nearly jerking their heads off their necks to further appreciate.

  Irene had decreed that Quentin and I must make a pair, and she led.

  I had been allowed to maintain what she called my “demure English charm.” However, my cheeks had been pinked, my hair padded with “rats” and crimped on hot irons, and my eyelashes darkened by various items in her traveling case of actress’s allure, including burnt cork.

  I had also insisted that she lace me within an inch of my life to Nellie Bly’s strict eighteen inches.

  Quentin quite adeptly played the role of swain to us both, which made me wonder how often in real life he had mastered the same role.

  The play was loud, saucy, and somewhat amusing. Lotta Crabtree, a curly-haired imp, cavorted boyishly in trousers or girlishly short skirts. I could see why critics hailed her as “the eternal child” and “the nation’s darling.”

  Were such a little charmer under my charge, I should have made her march to the tune of discipline, which had obviously never entered the life of a girl who’d had gold nuggets thrown at her feet since the age of five or six.