“Nothing so exotic.” Holmes was seated in the damask chair, puffing away on his disgusting pipe like a London chimney. “Although his barefoot state was rather apelike. Let Mrs. Norton tell us about him.”
“I think you know.” Irene told him as her filthy fingers screwed a cigarette into her elegant enamel-and-diamond holder.
In fact, they all resembled a lot of chimney sweeps, a state I could hardly hold against them or savor, for I had the same, smudged appearance. And the odors that clung to us all from that unused slaughterhouse! For once I welcomed the stink of sulphur and smoke.
Godfrey brought Irene the first glass of brandy. She sipped, then set it aside. She had lost her man’s fedora somewhere, and her hairpins, tresses flowing like a girl’s, as Miss Bristol had described her. Nor had she been wearing gloves.
“I suppose I should explain myself,” Irene agreed.
“You could start with the hypnotism.” Holmes’s tone treaded on a sneer.
How nice, actually, to see him back in fine form. I’d guessed that his situation had been dire before Quentin and Godfrey forced his captors to turn their attention elsewhere.
“Hypnotism?” Irene shrugged. “No, more a pretense of hypnotism than the real thing. Those of us versed in stage illusions know how to appear as if from nowhere.” She eyed Holmes significantly. “We know how to command attention, and how to put people off guard with the startling things we might say.” Her eyes never left him. “So I wouldn’t call it hypnotism, would you, Mr. Holmes?”
He refused to rise to her bait and answer, so I did.
“You charmed them. Like a . . . lady leprechaun.”
“I may be Irish by birth, after all,” she said, pleating the folds of her skirt in the manner of a schoolroom miss who has been up to mischief and is not one bit sorry.
Godfrey looked a bit alarmed by the declaration, and sat up in the armchair where he had lounged to cosset his brandy glass.
Holmes, I noticed, still left his glass untouched, as I had mine. At least he was abstemious with spirits.
“Irene,” Godfrey said. “Is it true? You’ve discovered your family origins?”
Her hand extended across the small space that separated their chairs and Godfrey met it with his own.
“Who knows?” Irene told him, and only him. “I’ve discovered a great deal, but nothing is certain when it comes to my family tree.”
I looked away. In all the rush and excitement, Irene and Godfrey hadn’t had time or privacy for a marital reunion. This reaching of their hands seemed to bridge an ocean and several weeks, as well as the few feet in a room.
So I looked away, and found myself looking at Sherlock Holmes looking away also. He appeared as I’d never seen him before, embarrassed.
“I suppose you know everything that’s about to be revealed,” I told him. Tartly.
This stirred up his annoying arrogance. “Indeed. But you might be better amused if the stage performer among us tells it in her own melodramatic way.”
Irene roused herself and took another sip of brandy.
“Let’s see. We leave our heroine on a surreptitious mission to visit an empty room, unaware of three sinister men on her trail.”
“Were you really unaware of them, Irene?” I asked.
“Absolutely. However, I’d finished my mission in the room and was on the back steps when I heard the terrible trio coming along the side of the boardinghouse.”
“Were they tenors?” Holmes asked suddenly.
“Tenors?” Even Irene was surprised by the question.
“If we’re to make a grand opera of it, I’d like the voices assigned, at least.”
She laughed. “Two bass baritones and a . . . basso. Hearing their approach, I flattened myself against a convenient arras—the other side of the boardinghouse to you who don’t know opera.”
“Naturally you overheard them,” Holmes pressed.
“Naturally.”
“And followed them. I saw the footprints.”
“And followed them. They were expecting to follow, which makes one careless about being followed.”
“Yes,” Holmes said, puffing away like a steamship stack, “I recall that error.”
Irene didn’t press her advantage in evoking the time when she had followed him home in man’s guise and he had been in such single-minded pursuit of her that he hadn’t realized that until it was too late.
Instead she smiled at Godfrey.
“They walked back to Broadway, during which time I overheard their plans to abduct the young Vanderbilt girl.”
“And?” Godfrey asked. “I’m afraid I know your conclusion.”
Irene nodded. “I suspected that they were the creatures responsible for the torment and death of poor Father Hawks. I couldn’t stop them alone. So—”
“You joined them!” Holmes summarized, triumphant.
He had always said that the signs showed Irene in command of herself, and apparently her would-be kidnappers also.
“Oh, I didn’t go along without a struggle, but I convinced them eventually that I had motives that made us allies, not antagonists.”
“Which were?” I asked.
Irene sighed and leaned forward to address me. “You have to understand who these men were, Nell. You have to understand that I’d encountered Lola Montez’s worst nightmare.”
“Ultramontanes?” I asked, to Godfrey’s and Holmes’s mystification. How pleasant to be keeping up with Irene when neither man could.
“In a way,” she answered me, “but that’s a geographical and political description of thirty years ago. It always only meant ‘those from over the mountains,’ from the south of southern Germany, from the Italian and Catholic city states.”
“Jesuits!” I suggested next.
Irene nodded slowly, inhaling on her elegant cigarette holder. She exhaled with the relief of one who is home again.
“Perhaps. Perhaps not quite.”
“Who else,” I demanded, “save Ulramontanes and Jesuits would care about pursuing Lola Montez thirty years after her death?”
“Not to mention,” Holmes noted from his own smoky-pipe corner of the room, “Red Indians.”
“A Red Indian,” Irene corrected him. “How did you know?”
“I saw the bare footprints at the boardinghouse. Of course they were all over the slaughterhouse. I imagine such a one would go unnoticed during the hot August weather of a New York summer. All the street urchins are barefoot, and some of the more destitute adults.”
I was aghast. “An Indian? Like Red Tomahawk? An Indian was among these Ultramontanes and Jesuits?”
Quentin, who’d been watching us with sleepy eyes, stirred on the sofa.
“Not so amazing, Nell. I’ve learned something of the entire globe and its peoples in my vagabond existence as an imperial diplomat. The Jesuits have always been the Vatican’s spies and secret agents, boldly going where their Catholic kind faced burning at the stake, from England after Henry the Eighth to a holding action in European principalities like Bohemia and Bavaria. But they’ve also been dedicated and courageous missionaries. They came to America more than two centuries ago to seek converts among the native tribes.”
“Iroquois, Huron, and Mohawk,” Holmes said. “All fierce North American tribes before there was a United States of anything. The Jesuit missionaries were mercilessly tortured for their pains. Martyred.”
“Crucified?” Irene asked, sitting up.
“In a way. The savagery of the West is only equaled by the savagery of the East.”
“And the savagery of the middle, known as the Inquisition,” Godfrey put in, his eyes glittering with courtroom indignation.
“The most savage man I knew,” Holmes put in, “was a butterfly collector. One who would catch, kill, and pin beauty can never be trusted.”
“What do you know about savages?” Irene asked him suspiciously.
Holmes smiled faintly. “I cabled your friend Buffalo Bill in Paris, where his W
ild West Show still enchants visitors to the ongoing World’s Fair there. He and I are fellow ‘campaigners’ now, after the events of last spring. He and his able aide, Red Tomahawk, have answered my question about any links between eastern North American tribes and the Jesuits. As it happens, eight French Jesuits were tormented and ultimately murdered by the tribes they went to convert in the early seventeenth century. The most famous of these was the sainted Isaac Jogues, a French literature student turned Jesuit who had been savagely tortured. His fingers had been literally hacked and chewed off among other gruesome tortures.”
Irene was stunned, but not convinced. “The Indians tortured and killed those long-ago Jesuits. Why should one now do the same in the name of the Jesuits and the Ultramontanes?”
“Reparation for the sins of the fathers,” Holmes answered. “This modern savage is likely a devout convert, seeking to atone for his people’s past.”
“But he repeated it!” Quentin said. “Good God! He ended up torturing priests to death again. For what? Gold, not God.”
Holmes shook his head. “He believes what he’s told. I don’t know how or where these renegades found him, but they’ve made good use of him. The Indians called those early Jesuits Blackrobes. You’ve seen for yourself that this shadowy group has adopted that dress. This Indian may take them for ghosts of the eight martyred Jesuits. Religious belief is a strange, almost hypnotic condition.”
“We humans can be an angry, vicious lot,” Quentin said, “no matter the clime or the breed. So what were these men really, Irene? Savage-masters? Political malcontents? Murderers? Thieves? And how could you persuade them to trust you?”
“A bit of all that, I think. They wanted to know what I knew. All about Lola. All of this is about Lola, really.”
“She’s dead, Irene!” I objected.
“Dead, but not forgotten. Isn’t that what we’d all want to happen to us?”
“Not I,” said I.
“Nor I,” Godfrey added.
Irene and Mr. Holmes kept amazingly quiet on the subject, and Quentin was too distracted to notice the byplay, perhaps by memories of Pink and her mysterious mission!
“So,” I asked, “who, exactly, were these men who fought so savagely in the slaughterhouse?”
Irene thought for a long while, a purely dramatic effect, I believe. “The heirs of the Ultramontanes, and the Jesuits, and Lola Montez.”
“Now,” said Godfrey, “there’s a union made in hell.”
“How,” Sherlock Holmes asked her, “were you able to communicate with them?”
Irene tapped the ash off her cigarette into a crystal bowl. “In German. Nell will recall that was the court language of Bohemia, if not the native one. It was also the language of Bavaria. I’ve sung in German and can speak it, not beautifully, but sufficiently well.”
“These were Bavarians?” Godfrey asked with some incredulity.
Irene nodded.
He paused to consider. “The current state of Bavaria is delicate, and the country is in great financial and political peril of being utterly consumed by the Austrian Empire. King Otto is confined to a madhouse. Prince Luitpold, the regent, sits uneasily on the throne in Otto’s stead. People respect the late King Ludwig the First, despite his long-ago dalliance with Lola. In fact, they’re quite sentimental about his reign now, more than twenty years after his abdication. Yet the house of Wittalsbach is debased by the latter generations’ madness: Ludwig the Second’s castle-building mania, for instance, and rumors of syphilis behind the insanity. Some Bavarians recall Lola Montez as a liberating force. Others would burn her at the stake as a seductive sorceress. Still, her name has power. What did these so-called Ultramontanes want of her?”
“Money,” Irene said shortly. “They want the wealth they believe she took out of Bavaria and, ultimately, California: jewels and gold. I tried to convince them that the record shows that she auctioned off her jewels before leaving California. As for the gold they’re obsessed about reclaiming, they must mean the money she made in California with what they consider Bavarian capital. But who knows what became of it? Alva Vanderbilt with her balls and Fifth Avenue palaces had nothing on Lola. She spent like a sultan when she had the means, and more so when she didn’t.”
“Jewels and gold.” Sherlock Holmes made a great show of tapping the used tobacco from the bowl of his pipe into a crystal bowl.
Even I could see that something in this recital had struck a chord with him.
“And,” Irene added, “after speaking long with me and learning of my own quest, they were not averse to returning to Bavaria with an untainted heir. Or heiress, rather. One could argue paternal claims on the now-revered Ludwig the First, even if the maternal claims were on the notorious Lola Montez. An honest opera singer, an artiste even, rather than a faux Spanish dancer, held some appeal. The Bavarians were ever a musical people, and perhaps Lola’s lack of talent as much as her lack of morals enraged them.”
I sat bolt upright. “Irene! You let them think you were that heir? You let them think you were the daughter of Lola and Ludwig? That you could produce the jewels and gold of Lola Montez?”
“Neither jewels,” Sherlock Holmes said, “nor gold. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Norton?”
“The jewels were sold—for a song, unfortunately. I found that fact during Nell’s and my day of reading about the many Lives—I should say Lies—of Lola. I can’t go to California and reclaim them from their buyers, even if I could prove a legitimate interest in them. Gold is even more of a challenge. It’s heavy and bulky. It doesn’t travel well. Not by sea, without notice. From California to the East? How? Robbery was a constant threat along the routes to and from California. So. How was all this gold brought out, even presuming Lola had it? These pseudo-Ultramontanes are not Jesuits, from what I learned, but from among the college students who railed against King Ludwig the First and Lola for their liberalizing ways thirty years ago. They’re now latter-day dreamers. That doesn’t make them any less demented or lethal. They aspire to impose their old, long-lost order on today’s Bavaria. Assuredly, they’re responsible for the death of Father Hawks and the torture of Father Edmonds.”
Holmes nodded and exhaled smoke. “Father Hawks, as her deathbed confessor, was the last man alive to share the final moments of Lola Montez. He would be expected to know something of her ‘lost treasure.’”
“How awful!” I said with a shudder. “Innocents tormented for information they never knew.”
“Or perhaps never knew they had,” Holmes said. “Lola may have had more means remaining to her than anyone suspected.”
“Possibly,” Irene said. “She reportedly was eager to keep her mother from claiming any future inheritance. So Lola signed any other future income, beyond the twelve hundred dollars she left to settle debts and to the Magdalen Asylum, to the people of Bavaria.”
Godfrey shook his head. “Too vague to stand up in court.”
“So,” I realized, “these fiends aren’t completely mad to dream of finding or claiming something. Still, to drive dagger blades through men’s hands—”
“Speaking of such horrors,” Irene said to Holmes, “how did you intend to avoid the fate of the fathers?”
I glanced at her, horrified. “They were going to torture a Pinkerton?”
“Indeed. Had you and Godfrey not arrived so fortuitously, and so noisily, we might even now be discussing this with Mr. Holmes in Bellevue.”
I stared aghast at the man serenely puffing away on a pipe. “But . . . you play the violin—though poorly, in my opinion. How could you risk your hands?”
“Apparently such a tragedy would have been a boon to amateur music critics everywhere.” He glanced at Irene. “I was assuming that Mrs. Norton would abandon her impersonation of a greedy pretender to the Bavarian throne in time to avert such an incident”
“And if she had not?” I demanded.
“I assume you lack faith in me, not your boon companion. I also had a trick or two up my sleeves, b
eing alerted early to these madmen’s favorite form of persuasion.”
At that he made the gesture of a gentleman shaking his jacket sleeves down to expose the fineness of his cuffs, a strange act of vanity in one whose thoughts were always so lofty.
His action revealed two sharp steel blades on springs.
Irene laughed and clapped her hands. “You have borrowed a trick from my old tutors the card sharps. And I would have intervened, but was hoping I wouldn’t have to. As long as I appeared to have an interest in being one of them, Consuelo was safe.”
“How so?” I asked.
Irene shrugged modestly, always a dangerous sign. “Once I was accepted as the lost ruler of Bavaria, I told them, I would reveal Consuelo as my daughter, given at birth by Madame Restell to the Vanderbilts. Thus Bavaria would have a legitimately illegitimate claim on the Vanderbilt millions.”
“That’s impossible!” I said.
“Is it, Nell? Madame Restell committed ‘suicide’ in 1877, the year Consuelo was born. Who’s to say madame’s brutal death wasn’t murder, timed to conceal the fact that an infant was sold to the wealthiest family in New York at the same time.”
“Even more preposterous!” I continued.
“Yes,” Irene agreed, “but the mad Bavarian Ultramontanes believed it.” She sighed. “Haven’t we learned, Nell, in our recent investigations, that parenthood is an easy thing to feign?”
“Amen,” Quentin said. “Babies can be bought on the streets of New York for ten dollars and up. When one looks at the mental and moral state of first families here and abroad, one becomes certain that more among us are changelings than we might think.”
“How do you know this, Quentin?” I asked, but Godfrey answered for him.
“Look at Bavaria, Nell, with its reigning family gone to seed and a regent on the throne. Natural decay has brought on this insane attempt to reclaim glory days of three decades ago.”
“Mr. Holmes!” I never dreamed I would be appealing to him. “Surely all this can’t be so?”
“No, it cannot, Miss Huxleigh.” He stood, ready to take his leave. “I will shortly be able to tell you all just how much of it is so.
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