“I can’t say the gender,” she added. “Come back tomorrow with the money and ’tis all yours.”
“Will she . . . he . . . it be healthy?”
“You’re buying a milk cow, are you? I can’t say. I suppose you’ll be able to keep it alive if you take decent care. The mothers of these young rapscallions here breed like rabbits and there’s always one desperate enough to replace a hungry new mourn with the wherewithal to feed what’s already here.
“I tell her a barren couple is desperate to give her babe a good home, and she’s quick to believe it’s for the best.” She eyed us up and down. “You look a respectable sort. I’d not trade a baby to you otherwise, but I won’t take a penny less than eighteen.”
We nodded eagerly and took our leave.
In the crowded, reeking summer street outside we breathed deeply despite everything and took stock.
“Philomena?” I demanded.
“An unusual name smells authentic. All-purpose names like John and Mary smack of deceit before the syllables peel off our lips.” Quentin frowned and spoke again. “And how will we deal with collecting the baby and Mother Hubbard’s school for scandal?”
“I’ll alert the police. That’s all I can do, that and print the truth in the newspaper.”
“And the baby she produces?”
“It will go to an orphanage, which may be more merciful than being on the open market”
“But you can’t guarantee that?”
“I can guarantee that I will expose a shocking trade in infant lives. I can’t guarantee to succor every victim! I have my mother to support, and my idle brothers and their families. I can’t do it all.”
“Hmmm,” was all he said in that irritating British way of his, and of Sherlock Holmes’s. And of Nell Huxleigh’s.
“Are you willing to abet me further in this investigation or not?”
He nodded.
“We must try another route. I must build a case that infants are easily available on the street to anyone who comes inquiring, no questions asked.”
“What will happen to the fourth Hamilton infant?”
“An orphanage, I imagine. Robert Roy certainly won’t want it. And can anyone blame him?”
“Life, and death, are cheap all over the globe, Pink. In some places the unwanted newborn are left out to die in the elements. Nature is the chosen form of execution so human hands rest easy. New York City is no worse than anywhere else.”
“But why can’t it be better?”
“Perhaps it will be, when you publish your story.”
“Maybe. For a while. Here. But the world won’t change.”
“Maybe it will. For a while. Here. And there. That is what we hope for, we spies, knowing we often hope in vain.”
Nodding, I felt it was odd to feel triumphant that I’d found Mother Hubbard and her link to infant lives. To do good I had to expose evil. Not change it, just expose it. Perhaps that wasn’t enough.
I arranged to meet Quentin again for another foray into the buying of babies.
I needed to show a pattern in order to shock the public into indignation.
I wondered if I was very much different from Jack the Ripper in that.
MEMOIRS OR A DANGEROUS WOMAN:
Fields of Gold
I see she’s having squabbles in the New World as in the Old.
She finds no peace in either. . . . It would be better if she
would stay in the fourth or fifth continent. . . . The memory
of her stay in Bavaria brings her so much income but . . .
gold doesn’t stay with her.
—KING LUDWIG I ON HEARING OF LOLA’S
AMERICAN ADVENTURES, 1852
Two things had my long tour of Australia taught me: I no longer had the stamina for my brand of tempestuous dance nor for younger lovers.
Perhaps I was prescient when I made a will before I left California, for I’d made a quantity of money in quartz mining and other gold-field enterprises. The legacy of Dujarier’s investment on my behalf proved valuable in the long run, though his own run was cut tragically short. I still mourned him.
But I knew none of this and so was in my native good humor when I left Grass Valley and the West for the open Pacific and the new performer’s Gold Coast, Australia.
First came the long two months’ voyage from San Francisco to Sydney. Then the endless overland treks from town to town in yet another vast and unsettled continent. And the inevitable contentions within the performing company.
Also the inevitable “whipping contests” with my male detractors among the local newspapers and mining towns, for who had not heard of the speed and sting of both my temper and my whip?
And the inevitable romance with my leading actor, a tall and comely comic/romantic lead named Frank Folland. He supported an estranged wife and two children in Cincinnati, but his heart was fancy free, and his fancy soon became me.
Yet something unseen was dragging at my body and spirit. Not only could I not sustain encores during the long Australian tour but on some nights I grew faint both on and off the stage. Headaches fandangoed around my brain like whips.
As in my beloved California, Australia was awash with gold fever. The mining camps clamored for me. I won them over with my plays and the Spider Dance, which they found far less scandalous than reputed, and they ofttimes complained of that fact.
Still, it was a highly lucrative tour. When Frank and I booked the three-masted American schooner June A. Faldkenberg to return home, I took its Germanic last name as an omen of my changing fortunes, for Bavaria had been both home and cradle and cross for me.
Our ways might part, Frank and I knew. Ambition and something new warred within my bosom. I could tour the exotic Far East. I could retire to Grass Valley again. Frank considered rejoining his family in New York City, or even reconciling with his wife in Cincinnati.
Nothing had been set in stone; we had the endless voyage ahead of us in which to decide.
Then, it was decided for us.
Our alliance was ending. He was twenty-nine to my thirty-five (though of course I said I was but thirty). I no longer quite looked it, said my mirror. Something was draining me.
After a stop in Honolulu on July 7 for a belated Fourth of July celebration, the ship sailed on. A dinner that night honored Frank’s twenty-ninth birthday. Champagne flowed like ambrosia on Mount Olympus.
Frank went to the deck to clear his head, a young man in his prime standing under a waning crescent moon, gazing at the myriad moons reflected in the whitecaps, his mind mellow with fine wine and celebration.
The ship lurched in the dancing waves. He was not seen again on that deck or this earth.
I wailed. I raged. I beat my breast until I fell gasping to the floor. So quick. So invisibly done! So unseen. So unthinkable.
Not all the letters to the editor in the world would undo the fatal fact of it. I went quite mad for a while. What else was there to do, cooped up on that endless voyage? I called to God to take me too. He didn’t answer. I loathed myself, my selfish self. I had many long days and nights alone to contemplate my failings.
Eighteen days later the Golden Gate came looming out of the San Francisco fog, looking like a prison door opening to swallow my heart.
I could think only of notifying Frank’s parents and estranged wife, of providing for that poor woman and her children.
All that I had loved in California and Grass Valley seemed dust in view of the death of this one young, high-hearted man on his very own birthday.
I tried to go on. I rented a house, hired a maid, found my beloved dog Gip and a few other needy ones of his kind. Only the dogs cheered me. How they tilted their heads and gawked at my chatty white cockatoo from Australia, and the gorgeously feathered lyre bird whose tail was a musical instrument complete.
But even my beloved pets couldn’t console me. Why was I so shaken, so unhappy with myself?
I performed, as expected, but my heart wasn’t in it. My heart wasn’t in
me any longer. In two weeks, I made more than $4,000. And my heart wasn’t in it.
Sacramento clamored for me, heart in it or not. Before I steamed upriver, I hired Duncan and Company, an auction firm. Mr. Duncan had a niece, he told me, who danced a little, named Isadora.
This I considered a happy omen, for I’d always been superstitious, like most theatrical folk.
I consigned all my jewelry, the glittering landmarks of my life and travels and travails, my successes and triumphs, for the benefit of Frank’s two young children.
I had no children of my own, save in my heart. Save Lotta and some other young performers.
The power of my name created a sensation. One newspaper said my collection was “probably not surpassed by and possessed by a single individual in the United States.” It was expected to bring $20,000 to $30,000. Five thousand souls trooped into the Duncan showrooms to gawk at my diamonds, rubies, and gold.
My heart warmed at what my past could deliver to Frank’s children’s future, the only children I would ever benefit, besides Lotta, through my tutoring.
Eighty-nine lots of my life went up for auction in San Francisco, yet the proceeds were under $10,000.
Later, it was said to be too rich a bounty for a frontier city.
My entire life seemed to be worthless now, or worth less than it should have been. I opened in Sacramento to sold-out performances, and the first night of the Spider Dance brought the highest receipts in the history of the Forrest Theater.
My body, my jewels seemed cheaply sold. I returned to Grass Valley, but the town had been leveled by fire while I was in Australia. Now it was a-building anew. And I was not. All was changed. All gone. Ashes, ashes, all fall down.
It was there, in Grass Valley, with my beloved house up for sale, that a most extraordinary gentleman called upon me.
He was as tall and powerful as any frontiersman, and rough of manner, but a woman who had toured the mining camps for years was not to be dismayed by that. Besides, I knew him.
He was also filthy rich. And I knew that.
There in my simple house filled with the glories of European decor, he presented me with my auctioned jewels.
While I gaped and stuttered, he told me that he had bought them back for me, that they were going too cheaply, that a woman as beautiful as I should not give up the things that gave her power.
I explained that I aspired to a higher role in life, and always had, than that of merely a beautiful woman.
He nodded as I spoke, not much marking my words. I think he was a man who did not much respect women. But he respected wealth, and he respected what I had amassed from nothing, as he’d also done.
He wanted one favor of me in return for his rescue of my underpriced jewels. If I did him this one simple favor, he would pay Frank’s children the $10,000 dollars he’d paid for my jewels and let me keep my “pretty baubles.”
It would be a fortune for Frank’s children, and no loss to me, but only if I did him one favor.
Although he chuckled and patted my knee, that was not the favor he required (or one that I would have granted).
No, what he wanted was very simple, and fell in perfectly with my current plans. I was to tell no one he had been in California. I was to tell no one what he asked of me. Ever.
I was melancholy in those days, and a bit hopeless for the first time in my life. What he asked didn’t violate my newfound conscience. It benefited Frank’s children. It preserved the jewels, which had sentimental value far above their monetary worth, from being sold for a song on a tin whistle.
It suited his private purposes very well. And perhaps mine.
I agreed.
He was a major personage in that country and time, and it never hurt to oblige a major personage. As long as one didn’t sell one’s soul. And my soul was feeling as weak as my body then.
My home in Grass Valley had survived the fire. I sold it. I took one last look at my rosebushes, and left. I’m told it still stands today, but it’s far away and I no longer have the heart to chase my own past.
My jewels I still have, thanks to that man’s sagacity and generosity, motives that don’t always fight each other.
All I have to decide is what to do with them, what worthy soul I should leave them to. A soul, I hope, less willful and wild than my own.
Not long after this remarkable visit, I gave my last performance of the Spider Dance at the Metropolitan Theater in San Francisco, under the invitation of its manager, Junius Booth, of the great acting family that included his brothers, Edwin and John Wilkes Booth.
I took my curtain calls and so danced off the California stages forever.
But not before I read in the newspapers of the passing of my former husband, George Heald, twenty-eight, from the “white death” of tuberculosis.
My lungs had always been weak, so I could imagine his agony. In honor of his passing, I considered myself his widow, and used the name “Mrs. Heald” from then on offstage.
I boarded the Pacific Mail steamship Orizaba at San Francisco on November 20, Thanksgiving Day, though I had little to be thankful for except my enterprising benefactor who had settled for squeezing my knee.
The morning paper hailed my departure and estimated that my latest tour had netted $23,000. Money had always been a consequence of what I did, not purely a reason, else I wouldn’t have spent it so freely on myself and others.
The many bags and trunks from my long-ago life in Europe that I had imported to California were now being laded aboard the Orizaba. This was a long, low two-masted ship, with sails fore and aft. A large wheel on her port side kept the tall black stack amidships billowing forth black smoke at a rate that almost matched my own with a cigar or cigarette. As usual, the lading crew hooted and hollered at the number and weight of my trunks. I could not but agree. My whole life seemed a long train that I was dragging behind me, including the jewels my benefactor had returned to me.
No more Panama for me and mosquitos the size of humming birds. No more mule trains. We were bound for Nicaragua, a country above Panama, where a new railroad built to accommodate gold prospectors would speed passengers across the Central American neck to a steamship waiting on the Atlantic side.
Soldiers of fortune thronged the passenger manifest. Nicaragua was open, unclaimed country. I met a tall, gray-eyed soldier from Tennessee, William Walker, who was determined to rule that land.
Such claims were not unheard of in those days. Once it was bruited about that I was encouraging backers to make me ‘Empress of California.’ Why not? I was Countess of Landsfeld and uncrowned queen of Bavaria, me, a little, lively Irish girl by way of India.
We landed at San Juan del Sur on Nicaragua’s Pacific coast. There New York–bound passengers took a modern coach to Lake Nicaragua and then boats down the San Juan River to the Caribbean coast. All my many, many trunks came with me.
At the coast, the steamship Tennessee awaited at San Juan del Norte. Mr. Walker, the “man of destiny” from Tennessee, stayed behind to conquer Nicaragua.
I moved on, with my trunks and my weight of sorrow. I arrived in New York on December 16, shortly before Christmas, and I wasn’t entirely unexpected. Old friends who represented something new for me, Christian spirituality, awaited me. And my gentleman caller from California. And the family of my lost love, Frank Folland.
How famous some of these would become, and rich, though none as notorious as I. At my age, notoriety was no longer a boast but a burden.
I came to visit New York City. I would try to leave it one last time, but the Statue of Liberty had claimed me as her own, and this Sligo girl would never leave her, nor the hundreds of thousands of starving sons and daughters of Ireland who found refuge there, as did I, finally and forever.
38
FOGERY AFOOT
One of the steps which is called death to the tarantula . . .
is the very poetry of avenging contempt . . . the head lifted
and thrown back, the flashing eye, t
he fierce and protruded foot
which crushed the insect, make a subject for vie painter
which would scarcely be easy to forget.
—THE LONDON MORNING POST ON LOLA’S DANCING DEBUT, 1843
“It would help to find Mrs. Buchanan,” Irene said.
“I presume you are not referring to the former U.S. president’s wife.”
“No, Nell. I wish I were. It would be easier to lay hands on such a public person.”
“And what would you do, could you lay hands on this private Mrs. Buchanan?”
Irene paused in pacing and smoking.
“A fine question. I would like to know if she was a greedy, grasping harpy in the guise of a compassionate friend. Of course it wouldn’t gain me a scintilla of knowledge to phrase it that way. So I would say I was compiling a biography of the late Lola Montez, and required her testimony.”
“How will you find her?”
“Since she and the Episcopal Church were equally involved with Lola at the very end of her life, I’ll see if the bishop can help us again. After all, we are highly valued donors.”
“Perhaps you should call on him at his office rather than at the club.”
She considered my suggestion with a tilted head. “I think not. I suspect the bishop wishes to keep news of Father Hawks’s quest for Lola’s sainthood unofficial. I’m sure it was considered the crotchet of an aging man, but tolerated because it was so crackpot.”
“You are not inclined to Father Hawks’s view of her, then?”
“I believe she became truly contrite for her high-tempered earlier years. She acknowledges that she was a ‘wild, willful child’ from her youngest days. I think time mellowed her, especially her years in Grass Valley, and then her disastrous trip to England to marry such a fraud. In some ways, she was always searching for a man who could take care of her, even as her fiercely independent ways rebuffed their very solicitude. I would describe her at the end of her life as wiser but not necessarily holier.”
An ugly thought reoccurred to me. “Irene, given the fact of her stroke, and the rumors of her neglect and abuse, it would be easy to torment a person in such a weakened state. Do you think someone did, and that’s why no trace of her wealth remains?”
Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance Page 29