Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  When I returned to the table Mr. Holmes was moving the books and papers on Lola Montez around the table. “Norton,” he asked idly, “could there be a plot afoot in Bavaria to overthrow the regency?”

  “There are always rumors, but that’s impossible! No progeny of the two demonstrably mad brothers would be tolerated. The Wittalsbach line ends with them.”

  Holmes lifted the cartoon of Lola springing nimbly from Europe to the New World in a swan-prowed little boat

  “Unless King Ludwig the First had a third child, an unsuspected third child by a woman with untainted blood. Perhaps that’s why someone is so interested in Madam Norton’s inquiries and also why the same forces might wish to abstract gold and gems from the Vanderbilts.”

  “But what would the Vanderbilts have to do with Bavaria, or Lola, for that matter?” Godfrey wondered.

  “I don’t see that thread of the web clearly yet,” Holmes admitted. “Perhaps it’s not Lola that these schemers are interested in but the offspring of Lola. Perhaps they seek a puppet of their own to replace the incarcerated Otto and his regent, Luitpold.”

  “That would mean a lost heir,” I said, “possibly morganatic.”

  “Or,” said Holmes, elevating another image of Lola, “an heiress.”

  Oh, my sainted father! Then Irene might indeed be a candidate for queen of a European principality. Queen of Bavaria!

  I wondered how the king of Bohemia would like that!?

  44

  BABES IN ARMS

  I could still hear Nellie Bly, who had accompanied him during

  the last leg of the rescue mission, calling him “my dear Quentin”

  not an hour after our disastrous reunion, a reunion that was only

  disastrous after certain, unforgettable . . . passages between us.

  —PENELOPE HUXLEIGH, 1889 DIARY, IN FEEME FATALE,

  CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

  FROM NELLIE BLY’S JOURNAL

  How interesting it is to watch a foreign agent become a domestic spy.

  “Why is it necessary,” Quentin asked, “for us to ‘buy’ so many babies?”

  “I need to demonstrate how shockingly easy such an act is, and that anyone can acquire unwanted infants, for any purpose.”

  “This has not been an ‘easy’ assignment,” he pointed out.

  Dawn was just now warming the East River as we watched from the Battery.

  “We pursued the rumor of an available infant from tenement to saloon to brothel to tenement,” he said.

  “But this last one was just ten dollars, an even more shocking sum. Don’t worry, Quentin. I’ll have someone from the foundling home meet us there later today when we finish the deal. Even an orphanage would be better than the conditions that poor baby has the ill luck to be born into.”

  “No doubt you see why two of the Hamilton infants died. Most of these children are already ill. I suppose the more misery you can document, the more shocking your story will be.”

  “And the more likely to raise public indignation so something is done about this shameless trade in babies. I must look for more available infants because I hope to find where all four Hamilton babies came from. Surely we may cross the path of someone who had been contacted previously by the lovely Mrs. T. Anna Swinton and her son, Joshua Mann. Only one person may have sold them all four infants. These wretched mothers are too sick or deprived to keep their children.”

  “Your own mother might have resorted to such a thing, after your father died and his first wife’s children inherited everything but some furniture and a cow.”

  “We were never that badly off. I saw to that.”

  “You began supporting your family at an early age?”

  “And why not? I was in my later teens. No one else would. My older brothers thought only about establishing new families for themselves.”

  “Is that why you aren’t married, but live with your mother?”

  “No. I’m not married because I have no need to be. And I live with my mother because she is a more interesting and less taxing companion than any man I have met so far.”

  “How are we men so taxing?”

  “You won’t let us women be. Be free, be what we want to be, which is not wives, if all of us would think about it. Not even Nell Huxleigh wants to be a wife.”

  “Why do you say ‘even?’”

  “Well, she is horribly traditional, isn’t she?”

  “Hardly. You don’t know her at all.”

  “Do you?”

  He paused to consider it, then smiled. A most irritating sort of smile. “Not really.”

  “It’s the unknowability of Nell that attracts you,” I said.

  “Did I say I was attracted?”

  “Well, you’re not attracted to me.”

  “Ergo, I must be attracted to someone else. You’re an odd contradiction, Nellie Bly. Half suffragist, half flirt. All reporter.”

  “Aren’t you ‘all spy?’”

  He bowed his head in acknowledgment of my thrust.

  Still, I felt I hadn’t touched him at all. Oh, these Englishmen! So self-sure, so remote. Such challenges.

  “What will you do about the infants we’re offered after the story has appeared in the paper?” he asked next.

  “My job is to reveal, not to heal. If I took personal responsibility for every poor soul I discovered on the streets of the city, I’d soon go mad. I do hope that the revelation of their plight will encourage some of the public to seek to adopt them. What I’d really like, what would end this story with a fine fillip—”

  “Yes?”

  “—would be to find an adult child that was farmed out by Madame Restell to a new family decades ago.”

  “Nell’s told me about Madam Restell and her thriving abortion enterprise for women rich and poor, which also included finding new homes for inconvenient babies too advanced to be aborted.”

  “Nell told you all that!?’

  “Not in so many blunt words.”

  “I’ll be homswaggled! I thought Miss Mealymouth was far too refined to deal with real life.”

  “Not when it touches on her loyalty to Irene.” He turned from watching the water lighten to reflect the forest of masts in the river. “What you really want, Nellie Bly, is to reveal who Irene’s mother was.”

  “That’s impossible. This trip abroad by our Parisian duo has revealed one thing: that Irene Adler was born in a trunk, as they say in theatrical circles, and reared by a committee of freakish but kindly variety performers. I’ve met some of them myself.”

  He just smiled and said nothing.

  “Damn it, Quentin! Do you know something I don’t? You want to keep me quiet about Jack the Ripper. Now you want me to keep quiet about Irene Adler’s origins. Madame Restell’s history is too old to retell, but not if someone sensational is a graduate of her replaced-waif efforts.”

  “Irene is hardly sensational. She doesn’t even perform publicly anymore. There’s more to it than what you say, Pink. You’re irritated with Irene for being first to see and pursue the Ripper, and then the Restell mystery. You want your front-page headlines, all right, and you want to benefit society. But most of all, you want to one-up Irene Adler. I’ll help you with the Hamilton story, gladly, for it’s appalling the way these newborn infants are bought and sold. But I won’t help you embarrass Irene, especially by making public revelations about her personal life.”

  I said nothing. There was enough truth in his annoying little speech that I chose not to answer it. For now.

  “And,” he added, “you do like to irritate Nell by monopolizing my attention.” He smiled his charming smile again. “Not that the pleasure of your company is not engaging, as well as very informative.”

  A new, unwelcome thought stole into my mind with the dawn.

  Why was Quentin Stanhope being so congenial about accompanying me day and night through the worst sections of New York?

  Was he keeping me occupied, so I couldn’t keep an eye on Irene?
>
  “You are truly devious,” I told him. “Now I can’t tell whether you are accommodating me with your company or misleading me.”

  He bowed. “I have never received a more welcome compliment.”

  45

  A FLOCK OF FATHERS

  For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner,

  as all my fathers were.

  —PSALM 39

  Sherlock Holmes’s astounding theory about Irene’s parenthood involved the one forgotten figure in this imbroglio. Her father.

  Could she indeed be the lost daughter of Ludwig the First? Why did such a thing never occur to me? Of course I’d been trained to shy away from scandal.

  I shuffled madly through the piles of material Irene and I had studied.

  “It’s true,” I said as I searched, “that the miserable Lola gadded about the globe, and back and forth between Europe and America. She was rumored to have met King Ludwig secretly, especially just after his abdication. And with her penchant for wearing shawls, and black, she could have concealed a . . . a certain delicate condition. But to have borne Ludwig’s child? And left it to a troupe of performers?”

  “Where better to hide an heir who might be in danger?” Holmes pointed out.

  “All rank supposition,” Godfrey objected at last. “We can’t sit here scouring these books of dubious history while Irene is missing. It’s fine to theorize about the past, but we must act in the present, and quickly.”

  I nodded my agreement. Whether Irene was a pretender to the throne of Bavaria was far less vital than where she was now.

  “We have one incontrovertible clue to the matters behind these events,” Holmes summarized.

  Godfrey and I waited, with bated breath. Breaths.

  “The man who was kidnapped from the Episcopal Club by the same villains who were following Mrs. Norton has been raving with fever since I brought him to Bellevue. Some decent medical attention may have cooled his brain. It was he who alerted me to the fact of your wife’s involvement, Mr. Norton.”

  “How?”

  “He mentioned her name, as if he had been trying to keep it from his tormenters. Don’t bestir yourself; I believe he was successful, partly because I interrupted them before they could work the same deviltry they did on poor Father Hawks.”

  Godfrey was standing despite the detective’s reassurances.

  “We must see him at once.” Godfrey checked his watch. “Nine A.M., soon enough for a hospital staff to be stirring.” He turned toward the table by the door that bore his hat, stick, and gloves, as well as Mr. Holmes’s.

  “Coming, Nell?” Godfrey asked.

  I hesitated, glancing at the telephone despite myself.

  The man Holmes leaped into the gap provided by my missish hesitation.

  “Miss Huxleigh should remain here, for the man’s physical state is gruesome. In this instance, she’ll be here in case word comes, or if Mr. Stanhope finally decides to make himself available.”

  That last phrase stiffened my spine as no whalebone appliance ever made could have.

  “I’ll go!” I dashed to the table to retrieve my hat. I pinned it on so swiftly that I nearly pierced two fingertips with six inches of steel hatpin.

  Waiting was no longer a chore I was willing to perform, for anyone.

  Mr. Holmes shrugged, but Godfrey reached out and squeezed my fingers before I could don my gloves. He understood my need for action after a long night of waiting up and wondering.

  And . . . I had seen the poor victim of the Ripper at St. Sulpice Hospital in Paris last spring. Surely this man could not be in a more shocking state of mutilation than that pathetic woman!

  Mr. Holmes strode ahead of us out of the elevator and was soon in the street whistling up a hansom with the confidence of a native.

  I wondered what Godfrey thought about the detective’s leading role in the search for Irene, but there was no time for us to confer.

  The lumbering coach drawn by two horses, called a Gurney, that the detective hailed held all three of us handily. Soon we were jostling toward Bellevue amid the crash and clop and infernal jangle of early-morning New York City traffic. The peddlers’ cries keened like the seagulls wheeling eternally near the port.

  “What do you think of the city?” I asked Godfrey.

  “I’ve not had a moment to notice.” He surveyed the street through the window. “I see that buildings reach higher here than in London or Paris.”

  “Indeed, we’ve read of edifices as high as fifteen or even twenty-some stories being constructed.”

  Of course saying “we” brought everyone’s mind back to the one of our party who was missing. Mr. Holmes slouched against his side of the carriage, packing his pipe with fresh tobacco and scowling at the street.

  “What a contrast in elements this case offers,” he murmured as much to himself as to us. “Old World. New World. Old World jewels. New World gold. Events as fresh as last week, and as stale as forty years ago. Matters of church and state, united by violence and, presumably, greed. Victims in America, violators from Bavaria. And then there is the matter of the Red Indians.”

  Godfrey and I exchanged glances. Mr. Holmes appeared to be raving as senselessly as the man he had placed in Bellevue.

  Our conveyance stopped before an assemblage of buildings numerous and stately enough to be a university.

  Mr. Holmes bounded out of the carriage, leaving Godfrey to assist me down and pay the driver.

  I looked after Holmes’s vanishing figure, the ulster’s shoulder cape hem flapping like gull wings in the haste of his progress.

  Godfrey took my elbow and we hurried after him into a building with bars on the windows. This, I feared, was the dreaded mental facility into which Nellie Bly had committed herself last year to get her most famous story, an exposé” on how harshly the mad were treated in America. And everywhere else, I would guess.

  “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” I muttered under my breath.

  “What?” Godfrey asked.

  “Nellie Bly has been here before us. She had herself committed for a newspaper story, then wrote a book about it.”

  “I doubt we’re visiting the madhouse section. Holmes’s man is wounded and fevered, not insane.”

  “I hope.”

  When we caught up with Holmes, it was inside the facility, where he was arguing with a middled-aged woman in a blue-and-white apron and cap.

  “The attending physician is not here,” she said as firmly as I had ever heard a woman address Sherlock Holmes, “I can’t allow you to see the patient without him. You are not kin.”

  “My good woman, I’m the man who brought him here.”

  “That may be, Mr.—”

  “Holmes.”

  “That may be, Mr. Holmes, but I am the day nurse in charge and I can’t have strangers cluttering up my ward.”

  “I’m English, as you may note.”

  “Yes, sir. Indeed so.”

  “And I’ve brought a noted British consulting surgeon to see the patient, Dr. Norton.”

  She gazed at Godfrey and myself with a skepticism I couldn’t blame her for, although Godfrey looked extremely Harley Street in his silk top hat and striped trousers.

  “And also with us is Dr. Norton’s nurse, Miss Huxleigh,” Mr. Holmes went on. “She is a latter-day graduate of Miss Nightingale’s nursing corps, you know.”

  “Miss Nightingale! Well, we are the result of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell’s efforts to advance women in the medical arts here in the United States. Perhaps you’ve heard of her?”

  “Indeed. My medical friends would consider it a great honor if we were permitted to see the patient we are so concerned about; not in the quality of care he has, obviously, but as to his mysterious condition.”

  “Dr. Norton, is it? Miss Poxleigh? Do come along. We welcome inspection by visiting physicians.”

  Well. It was certainly incumbent upon me to display no queasy tendencies now!

  We clattered down the stone-floored passages
, inhaling carbolic acid and other strong odors of medical purification.

  The ward was half filled, and our quarry lay three-quarters of the way down the dreary rows.

  We all approached with brusque efficiency, none of us as brisk or efficient as Sherlock Holmes. I wonder what the blue-striped nurse would think if I told her she was following the lead of a human bloodhound, not a man.

  So we gathered around the plainly covered bed: two men, two women; three imposters, one actual nurse.

  I gazed at the linen-pale face on the flat pillow, and felt the huge room spin, felt my senses reeling in a very unnurselike manner.

  Apparently both men detected my suddenly vaporish state, for a strong hand on either elbow held me upright.

  “Thank you, Sister,” Holmes said, though why he had addressed a nurse as one would an Anglican nun, I can’t say. And I didn’t much care at that chaotic moment. “We’ll examine the patient in our own way.”

  Somehow his high, commanding tone drove her away after a few attempted demurring noises.

  “Nell! What is it?” Godfrey hissed in my ear.

  I had the pleasure of seeing Sherlock Holmes’s complete attention focused on me.

  I inhaled deeply of the attar of carbolic acid and ammonia, which acted as smelling salts to a sensitive nose.

  “I’ve seen this wretched fellow before,” I said.

  “You know his name?” Mr. Holmes’s face was as close to mine as a Mesmerist’s, and as commanding.

  “Not his first name—”

  “Not needed.”

  “It’s . . . Father Edmonds, who received Irene and myself in the bishop’s stead at the Episcopal Club not two days ago. What has happened to his hands? They were quite . . . graceful when he met with us.”

  Mr. Holmes raised his eyebrows more than half-mast. That was the sole satisfaction I had of my surprising statement.

  I did not require actual smelling salts, although I had some in a silver container on the chatelaine that hung around my waist.

  The shock of recognizing Mr. Holmes’s “victim” as someone Irene and I had met by daylight in quite ordinary circumstances wore off as if one veil after another were lifted from before my eyes.