Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

  I saw now that Irene would not, could not, be turned from this investigation in view of the high personal stakes.

  I saw now that I could not, would not, be turned from this quest in view of the high personal stakes.

  The means most in my power were the two hidden documents from two vastly different sources—and even periods of time—that Irene had unearthed during our three weeks in New York City. One was the faded, almost illegible scrawls presumably written in Lola’s hand, found in the modest boardinghouse where she died in early 1861. The other was the coded client book of the society abortionist and secret adoption arranger, Madame Restell, found in the imposing Fifth Avenue mansion she had built across from Vanderbilt Row, where she so spectacularly left this earth in 1877.

  I arose, lit my bedside lamp, and studied both documents until my vision blurred. Lola’s papers offered some clear passages. The Restell book listed columns and columns of abbreviated words and numbers that seemed vaguely familiar, yet I could still make no sense of them whatsoever. Time and persistence was the only hope here. Meanwhile, I needed my wits for the morning.

  I said a quick but fervent prayer that Lola Montez was not the woman she had been reputed to be by her worst enemies.

  And then I made a vow that I would find out the truth about Lola, and that not even the beasts who had tormented Father Hawks would stop me.

  Oh, and I said a prayer for Quentin, and what it was is not even the business of my own diary.

  36

  AND BABY MAKES THREE

  The notion of combining the exploitation of crime, scandal,

  or shocking circumstance with the spirit of a crusade, delivered

  into words by a clever and talented writer who donned disguise

  to get the story was sensationalist in character and

  something altogether new in the field.

  —BROOKE KROEGER, NELLIE BLY

  FROM NELLIE BLY’S JOURNAL

  I told Quentin to get some new clothes at a department store.

  Off he went, whistling.

  That man was determined not to writhe under my thumb. I returned and also went shopping, at a street market, where I found a mended wool shawl, once fine, and some slightly worn women’s clothing, including the ugliest straw hat I have ever seen. When it comes to women’s dress, the hat is the most important piece, for it sits atop the face, and whatever message it gives underlines the veracity of the face beneath. I was going for a “poor but honesf’ impression.

  Quentin, once out of his London-tailored garb and into American department-store goods, would do for my slightly well set-up new husband.

  We met at my brownstone on Eighty-sixth Street, under the watchful eye of my mother.

  “Mrs. Cochrane,” he said with one of those bows the Brits do so well. “I’m delighted to meet the woman who has reared the formidable Nellie Bly.”

  “Oh, go on, Mr. Stanhope! Pink tells me you are quite the swell fellow, and it’s very good of you to aid her in her latest venture. Mind you, not that anyone would be stopping my Pink.”

  “I have seen her grit and grace exercised on two continents, madam,” he said, managing not to sound utterly smarmy, which was a miracle.”It’s a privilege to assist her.”

  So with the maternal blessing we sallied forth on another of my masquerades.

  He eyed my attire with a respectful eye. “Quite plain and even frumpy, my dear Pink. You show deep dedication to your work.”

  I surveyed him back. “The store-bought clothes underline your air of Johnny-come-lately petty bourgeoisie. If only you spoke the president’s English.”

  “But I do, dear heart,” said he, immediately assuming a Yankee accent so authentic it had me blinking. “Blending into any environment is the chief virtue of a spy. If I can speak Urdu, I can certainly master the American ‘twang.’”

  “All right.” I would never admit I was pleasantly surprised that my plan to humiliate Nell and her swain would work so well to my own purposes. I stopped and pulled off my darned cotton glove, slightly gray at the fingertips. “You can put on this last prop.”

  He gazed at the plain gold ring I had bought at the flea market. It was probably ten-karat gold, and much nicked, although it had been sold as fourteen.

  Quentin frowned. “I would have done better than this.”

  “I am a woman who has hooked a man slightly above her station. I’m content with less. The real money will go to buying the infant.”

  “And how much will that be?” he asked, producing an admirably scarred brown leather wallet. Apparently he had visited his own flea market.

  “I won’t know until we try.”

  “And where do we try?”

  “The poorer quarters on the Lower East Side. I have some villains’ names to bandy about We’ll see where they lead.”

  “What are the names? I should know them as well as you, perhaps better.”

  “Joshua Mann and his so-called ‘mother,’ Mrs. T. Anna Swinton.”

  “T. Anna’? What kind of name is that for a woman?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t care. But that was the old harridan who helped Eva Hamilton produce her rotating cast of infant children. I think her odious son, Joshua, had been Eva’s pimp in her early days. They were the ‘family’ of swindlers, not foolish Robert Roy Hamilton, who was hoodwinked into making an honest woman of his mistress when she started pleading pregnancy.”

  “He must have been simple-minded.”

  “Especially since his Eva had several so-called ‘husbands’ in her past, and stints in brothels in Philadelphia and even New York.”

  “So the first baby ‘produced’ died. Why?’

  “One would hope little Eva wished her brat to survive.”

  “And this woman bought another baby, who also died?”

  “Again, we come back to a simple-minded Robert Roy.” I sighed, not wanting to face more than the bare facts, for the individual fates of the infants were heartbreaking. “I imagine these babies’ mothers were poor and desperate, half-starving, and their infants as well. None of them had half a chance.”

  “Babies are sold the world over,” he assured me in acid tones, “and into situations far worse than the Hamilton household.”

  “The third baby didn’t look enough like the first one. That tells me it was bought sight unseen, or by Mann or Swinton.”

  “And the fourth one?”

  “Passed muster with Hamilton, but not the nursemaid.”

  “She was a brave woman.”

  “And paid for it.”

  “Where are the happy couple now . . . meaning this Mann person and his mother, Mrs. Swinton?”

  “Out on bail, charged with fraudulent production of an infant under false pretenses. It’s so strange, Quentin. I can understand why Hamilton wanted to move his unconventional family away from gossip to California, but they were both unhappy in the West and he moved back East post haste, bringing Mann and Mrs. Swinton along to Atlantic City! Then they again engaged the same nurse who had seen the third child who’d been given away. Why did that obnoxious trio expect to diddle the nurse as well?”

  “It might have made the husband suspicious if she had not been rehired. And . . . she counted for nothing. Mere hired help is expected to be invisible. Perhaps the miscreants thought their ploys would be as invisible to her as to her master.”

  “The wife herself is a maze of contradictions. She goes on trial as Eva Hamilton alias Steele alias Parsons alias Mann—”

  “Then this Mann was more than her pimp, he was her husband.”

  “Among a certain class, that’s usually the case.”

  “It makes one long for uncivilized climes, where slavery is open.”

  “Pooh, surely you know that the major cities traffic in anything and anybody.”

  “I do. But I didn’t know that you did.”

  “Do you think that I have made my reputation by blinking at abomination, and swooning?”

  “My dear Pink, I don�
�t contemplate your reputation at all.”

  “Perhaps you should. You might stop underestimating me.”

  “I doubt it.”

  I realized that was as much concession as I would ever get from this cucumber-cool Englishman.

  “Are you ready to embark on a charade of baby-seeking?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be. Where do we go for such a thing?”

  “At least we’ll avoid an area in the Forties and Sixties on the West Side from Eighth to Twelfth Avenue known as Hell’s Kitchen.”

  “Sounds even hotter than upper Fifth Avenue. And far too close to Millionaires’ Row for comfort.”

  “Oh, it is. But there’s another area on the Lower East Side where poor women will do anything for a slab of bread or a cot to sleep on. That’s where babies are to be had, by the droves.”

  He extended his elbow. Trust an Englishman to walk into hell in polite precision.

  I took the proffered arm. I was an ordinary wife now, desperate for issue, ready to beg, borrow, or steal the needed infant . . . or to buy it if necessary. A henchman husband only added to the credibility of the masquerade. I was sure Joshua and mother had done the baby-hunting for Eva.

  I flexed my ring finger, left hand. It would be a cold day in hell when I would wear such a symbol of submissiveness in real life, but in my quest for justice and front-page news, I would suffer any indignity, even if it came attached with an arrogant, albeit good-looking, Englishman.

  37

  MOTHER HUBBARD’S CUPBOARD

  MARGARET BROWN, alias YOUNG, alias HASKINS,

  alias oLD MOTHER HUBBARD

  Sixty-one years old in 1889. Born in Ireland. Weight,

  120 pounds. Height 5 feet, 3 inches. Gray hair, gray eyes,

  light complexion. Generally wears a long cloak when stealing.

  —1886 PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS OF AMERICA,

  INSPECTOR THOMAS BYRNES

  FROM NELLIE BLY’S JOURNAL

  “Good God,” said Quentin Stanhope, “this is as unsettling as parts of Bombay, India.”

  After dismissing our hack at Broadway in lower Manhattan, we had penetrated darkest New York City on foot. I was interested to hear that one as well traveled as he found the tenement areas as oppressive as any overcrowded, poor quarter on earth.

  Odors of food and filth mixed into that peculiar potpourri that grinding daily want produces. I had smelled as bad or worse in the madhouse, but here the inmates were free to run around and populate and they did. The streets rang with the cries of hordes of dirty, ragged, barefoot children, not the happy cries of a park but wails and screams, and even these littlest residents of Tenement Hell preyed on each other in a dozen tongues.

  “Do we simply inquire after any spare infants from one of the street peddlers?” Quentin asked.

  “I’ve been given a name by one of my liaisons in the area. We are looking for Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard.”

  “You’re joking!”

  “This is another New York here, and certain people are known on the streets as if they lived in a village instead of a mighty metropolis.”

  “In that case—” Quentin’s arm shot out to snag a youth who was running by and dragoon him into our service.

  Filth and freckles hid most of the skin color on his face. A dingy checked cap thankfully hid what condition his hair might be in. His fingertips were oily and raw, and open sores festered on his dingy neck.

  “A dime if you tell us what we want to know,” Quentin offered in a passable American accent

  The word “dime” caught the ears of several running boys. They surrounded us with the smell of damp cloth and rank sewers.

  “We want Mother Hubbard’s.”

  “Coppers?”

  “Hardly,” said I. “We’ve . . . lost a child and heard she could help.”

  “She’ll help ya right into Blackwell’s Island, all right. A dime?”

  “Two!”

  “Two.”

  The boy hitched a shoulder toward the row of soot- darkened brick buildings. “Middle one. Ground floor. Runs a school, she does, so you’d better mind your p’s and q’s.”

  The other boys snickered, so I didn’t ask exactly what he meant. Such boys’ mouths were as filthy as their skins. And several were eyeing me with the hungry looks of wolves, only with a disturbing human hunger.

  Quentin tossed the boy his two dimes, something of an overcharge for a location but forty paces away, and threw a handful of nickels at the rest of the mob.

  We left them scrambling to rob each other of the coins.

  The street din rose with the addition of their squeals and at the second-story window a woman leaned out and hollered for them to be quiet.

  “I’ve got a colicky baby who needs sleep,” she shouted.

  But no one heeded, or cared, and she withdrew back into the dark interior.

  The heat inside must have been awful, for the cries of irritable infants streamed from every building.

  “What becomes of them?” Quentin asked.

  “Who? The children? If they survive the first years and their mother doesn’t get sick or the family evicted, they grow up to join the mongrels scrabbling in the street If they survive that, they grow up to get jobs on the docks. Some get drunk on their pay and kill each other in saloons. A few, I imagine, earn their pay and marry and have children of their own and fight to move into a building a little closer to the respectable parts of the city.

  “Maybe their children will get some schooling, and grow up to get better jobs and move out of these slums entirely. But that’s the fairy-tale ending doled out only to the exceptional. Most of the girls get pregnant and they never even progress to being tenement shop workers. They bear children till they die of consumption or one cuff too many from a drunken husband.”

  “There’s a tone of personal umbrage in your voice, Nellie Bly.”

  “I do take it personally. My father was a judge, but my mother was his second wife. When he died she and us kids had to get out with a few goods, and that was it. She married again, a Civil War veteran, but he drank, and was crazy anyway. I finally got my mother free of that brute, and my brothers and sisters too. So I know a bit about what these poor children go through, and that’s what I bring to the readers of The World, what poor people go through.”

  “So whether you commit yourself to a madhouse or to finding some poor waif to buy, you really act as a spy, as I do.”

  “You might say so.”

  He tipped his hat to me. “Let’s find this Mother Hubbard and see what she has hidden in her cupboard.”

  It turned out that Mother Hubbard ran a school for street thieves, all of them under the age of fifteen.

  This New World Fagin had ensconced herself and her larcenous brood in the deserted ground floor of a former factory building.

  Quentin and I approached her discreetly, as the only adult in sight, and tendered our cards: two one-dollar bills.

  We explained our quandary most piteously, recognizing that we were performing for a mistress of the piteous appeal.

  “Mother Hubbard,” said I, as if this ridiculous name were an honored one, “we’re in terrible trouble and heard you might help.”

  She was a sharp-featured old dame dressed all in black like a Dickens grandmother. “How’d d’you hear o’ me?”

  “A friend,” I said quickly. “A friend who you helped previously.” I wasn’t sure if Eva herself had gone baby-shopping, but I was pretty settled that Mrs. T. Anna Swinton had something to do with it. “Mrs. Swinton. An older lady. Quite respectable. She swore . . . oh, dear, perhaps this is the wrong place.” I wrung my hands until the gesture burned and brought tears to my eyes.

  “Now, Philomena,” Quentin said, startling the Hepple-white out of me. Where’d he get that name? “You mustn’t get upset. You know your health is delicate.”

  “Delicate,” I repeated, managing to snivel slightly. “Yes, I . . . I lost our baby. In childbirth. And can never have another, the
doctor says. And . . . and Jefferson’s parents are coming to New York and expecting to see their grandchild!”

  I had now begun to wail like a guttersnipe. Quentin took my wringing hands.

  “And my folks were planning to settle a christening gift upon their grandchild. With all the expenses of the laying-in, not to mention the empty cradle and such, we sorely need their support.”

  “And I want my baby back!” I wailed, quite convincingly, for I had pretended that it was one of my sisters who had died at birth and became quite weepy.

  “Can you help us?” Quentin asked. “And what would it cost?”

  “Depends.” Mother Hubbard was all business, despite her black bonnet and capelet. “What age do you require?”

  We exchanged connubial glances. “Under three months,” I said. “It must be young enough to look like Grandfather Fettlespeed.”

  “Girl or boy?”

  Again we consulted each other.

  “We never said,” Quentin explained. “Once the baby, a girl, died, it seemed best not to get my parents’ expectations up.”

  Mother Hubbard nodded. “But you never said it died, either, or your expectations of a settlement would have gone rock-bottom down.”

  “Well . . . yes,” I admitted, trying to sound more bereft about the baby than the money.

  “How soon d’you need it?”

  We hadn’t decided on this.

  “Two, three days,” Quentin said.

  “And you’ve money on you.”

  “Some,” he admitted stiffly.

  “It’ll be twenty dollars!”

  “Twenty dollars!” The words burst from me unrehearsed. That a child could be bought and sold for little.

  Mother Hubbard’s shrewd eyes darted from Quentin to myself. “Eighteen dollars and not penny less.”

  “We can do that, Philomena,” he assured me with dramatic anxiety. “It’ll be a squeak but—”

  I merely nodded miserably and put my handkerchief to my eyes.