Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

  “We’re thinking of writing a new biography.”

  The “we’re” caused him to glance in my direction, then quickly away again. I suspect I was not a candidate for the cancan in his mind.

  He chuckled and leaned back in his chair. “Lola Montez. Now, there’s a woman who couldn’t have too many biographies. As if taking old New York by storm in the early ’50s wasn’t enough, she had to dash off to the gold fields of California, and later Australia.”

  “The gold fields offered many opportunities to entertainers in those days,” Irene said. “The exclusively male society of miners made for a rough, violent life. Many longed for influences of the softer sort. I hear they threw bags of gold dust and nuggets at the performers’ feet, especially the children.”

  “There was plenty of gold to throw around in those days. But New York is not the place to inquire into Gold Rush Days.”

  “No,” Irene agreed. “I just wondered if when Lola first hit New York . . . first appeared here, if she encountered other prominent men of your father’s era.”

  “Lord, yes!” He leaned back in his golden oak office chair, grinning. “All of ’em. Meeting prominent men was her God-given talent.”

  “And was the Commodore among them?”

  “The Commodore? You mean old Cornelius the First? Of course. He was of my father’s generation. Rich as Croesus, whoever that was, and a randy old goat with pockets lined in solid gold. The old fellow was not one to miss pinching a garter of Miss Lola’s.”

  The word “randy” was unknown to me, but it didn’t make Irene blink an eyelash. She stood hastily, though, as Mr. Bennett’s hands edged across the desk towards hers.

  “Thank you so much, Mr. Bennett. Biography is such a demanding art form. I appreciate your candor.”

  “And I appreciate your . . . interest.”

  He would have risen to see us out, but Irene left in a whirlwind of skirts and hat brim, with me fast on her retreat.

  “What a strange, oblique man,” I said when were we once again in the smoke-choked outer office. “Yet this is the second time we’ve encountered a second-generation heir of a family tradition here. The other was the second Bishop Potter.”

  “This is the second Mr. Bennett the newspaper man, all right, and not an improvement on the first. A playboy,” Irene declared. “Why do you think he lives in Europe? Too hot for New York. And despite what he implies, far more profligate than his upright founding father or even the Commodore, who I imagine was more inference than action.”

  “Oh. I read in one of the news articles about a Bennett who drove a coach and four, well, naked up Riverside Drive and was horsewhipped on the steps of the public library.”

  “Were the four horses naked, or Mr. Bennett? It makes quite a difference.” Irene smiled. “And one wonders if the whipper was Lola. I suppose not. Those incidents might have done to send him abroad, all right. But it’s not his father I’m interested in.”

  ’If it’s Commodore Vanderbilt, he sounds almost as bad as Bennett the Younger.”

  “The Vanderbilt founding father was a crude old coot, as we say in America.”

  “That doesn’t sound at all respectful, Irene.”

  “Why do you think it took until the third Vanderbilt generation and daughter-in-law Alva, that steely southern belle, to make the family socially acceptable to the New York Four Hundred? But I rather relish the honest frontier flint of the Commodore that refused to bow to pretension. And so, I think, did Lola Montez.”

  “They knew each other well?”

  “Evidently. And I believe that they served each other well.”

  “She was his mistress . . . and you think you’re their daughter!?”

  “No. Even better! I think she was his means, and that I shall be their unexpected progeny of opportunity. They both would love it, I’m sure.”

  Irene winked at me as we waited for the cab she’d “whistled up” to reach the curb.

  “We must stop at Brentano’s again, Nell, and read up on the late Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. You will be kind to the young clerk who was so taken with you the other day? I know you pooh-pooh such advantages, but I’m never one to let a promising lead slip past me . . . .”

  Irene continued to muse about these unpleasant subjects without consulting my state of mind as we established ourselves in the hansom’s cozy boxed compartment.

  “Ah, Nell,” she said finally with a sigh as she settled in. “Pink will be purple with jealousy when she learns the truth of the story we’ve been pursuing without her. And without Quentin.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, “but what has she been pursuing with Quentin?”

  56

  THE BARTERED BABY

  Bly, in the meantime, was back from her summer of playful

  reporting and ready to claim her piece of the juiciest scandal yet . . .

  with a harrowing report on the baby-buying trade in New York . . . .

  Bly posed as a would-be mother . . . found in at least four

  locations that she could buy a newborn from a broker for anywhere

  from ten to twenty-five dollars with no questions asked.

  —BROOK KROEGER, NELLIE BLY: A LIFE

  FROM NELLIE BLY’S JOURNAL

  “You seem tired,” I commented to Quentin as we took a horsecar to the bottom of the island to finish our loathsome transactions.

  “In the service of milady,” he answered with a little ironic bow.

  We again wore the cheap wedding rings I’d found, but I felt no more sure of him than any wise bride should be of a real bridegroom.

  What grim business, buying babies. Quentin’s face matched the enterprise.

  “You’ll have people from the foundling home there to meet us when we purchase each one?” he asked.

  “Don’t worry. You won’t be required to handle even one infant. Just dole out the money.”

  “I suppose that’s what many a real husband is told on receiving custody of an infant he has no idea is a bartered baby. You have to admit that the unfortunate Hamilton is to be commended for at least attempting to do the right thing.”

  “Perhaps. Yet how could he have accepted his harlot of a mistress as a wife?”

  “He meant well, Pink. He tried to be honorable. Few gentlemen of his class would have even considered that. Don’t ridicule him for being deceived. Perhaps he saw this as his last chance at fatherhood.”

  “That is so untypical.”

  “What? That women can be bad mothers, and men good fathers?”

  “That isn’t the way I’ve experienced it.”

  Quentin shook his head. “I wonder when you’ll see that all your campaigns for stories are an attempt to redeem your personal past.”

  “What a strange thing to say! I’ve never been an overworked shopgirl, or mad, or abducted into white slavery. I’ve never sold a child.”

  “But you could have been any of those.” His eyes softened for the first time as he regarded me. “That you aren’t is purely to your credit alone.”

  “Alone. I’ve been alone, yes.”

  After that, there didn’t seem to be much more to say, or to be said.

  But I thought over his words, and wondered if the ills I chased on the streets of New York could be the phantoms of the downtrodden past I’d almost had.

  Mother Hubbard held out a scrap of tattered yellow blanket and the red-faced scrap of humanity bawling inside it. Poor mite, the weave was rough on that as-yet-unblemished skin.

  Mother Hubbard in her black bonnet and cape seemed a grandmother born, smiling under her white waves of hair.

  “That’ll be twelve dollars and not a penny less.”

  A wave of strange nausea prevented me from speaking for an instant

  During that moment, Quentin counted out the price in two-dollar bills.

  The child bawled, sputtered, and coughed in my arms, until I feared it would expire on the spot.

  I was aware of an alien helpless feeling. Not that I hadn’t
tended and held my several younger siblings, but none had seemed as scrawny and demanding as this.

  Quentin surprised me by lifting the featherweight burden from my arms.

  “You’d better have your hands free for making notes,” he said softly as we left Mother Hubbard’s crib.

  Children . . . dirty, barefoot, rag-clad children, screamed and ran rings around us, reclaiming each cobblestone of the street we left vacant behind us for their crude playground.

  “Where are the foundling-home people?” Quentin asked.

  I looked around. That eternal screaming and the incessant barking dogs were bringing on the headache.

  After we passed the intersection, I recognized a bonneted face quite like Mother Hubbard’s: old, wrinkled, dressed in the fashions of a decade or more past.

  “Miss Bly?” she asked, hurrying to relieve Quentin of his ridiculously small burden. “This is one of the sold ones? We’ll keep track of the lot, so you may write of their progress.”

  “Write of their progress?” I asked, confused.

  This elderly angel in widow’s black smiled. Sadly. “Whether they live or not.”

  I gazed at the worn cloth and the already-worn little bud of a face inside it. Red, bawling. Hungry? Or dying?

  Quentin pressed a bill into her gloved hand, the face of Franklin. Fifty dollars. “For the child’s care.”

  Would it make a difference, that princely donation? Neither of us would likely know.

  As the good woman left, I leaned against the dusty red brick of a tenement. “Three more to buy.”

  “It’s not the buying,” he said. “It’s the cost of selling. If it’s any comfort, it’s done all over the world.”

  It was no comfort.

  57

  THE BELMONT STAKES

  [The widowed Kate Warne was] a slender, brown-haired

  woman, graceful in her movements and self-possessed. Her features,

  although not what could be called handsome, were decidedly

  of an intellectual cast . . . her face was honest, which would cause

  one in distress instinctively to select her as a confidante.

  —AMERICA’S FIRST FEMALE DETECTIVE, 1856,

  ALLEN PINKERTON, REMINISCENCES

  “Godfrey,” Irene welcomed her spouse when he returned to our suite late that afternoon. “Nell and I are so cross and cross-eyed from reading about people long dead. Where can you take us to dine tonight that will be fresh and interesting?”

  “Where can I best win your favor . . . so that you two will ask the favor of me that you have in mind, after your cross afternoon of reading about people long dead?”

  Irene’s delighted laughter echoed up to the electric light chandelier.

  “Always one step ahead of us poor plodding females. What do you have in mind, husband, dear? After all, it’s your brain we’ll be picking at, even if it isn’t on the menu.”

  “Irene!” I remonstrated, but I was ignored.

  “You aren’t strangers to Delmonico’s, I gather,” he said, including me in the glance he cast around. “I’ve had a talk with Belmont this afternoon. What about the Maison D’Orée? It’s not as famed as Delmonico’s, but more elegant”

  “Whatever you say,” Irene said.

  Hmmm.

  So I found myself considering B. Altman’s best readymade tea gown for dinner that night. We would be a foursome: Irene and Godfrey, and myself. And this Belmont man.

  I now realized he was the Rothschild agent here in New York, and thus a colleague of Godfrey’s. I also realized that I was the odd woman out, and would have to serve as Mr. Belmont’s . . . dinner partner.

  Ordinarily, I’d have been quite undone by having to make small talk with a figure of old New York society, one of the enormously wealthy Belmonts.

  However, tonight I felt more than up to it. In fact, I asked Irene to lend me, for the occasion the one Worth gown she had brought on this voyage, despite my earnest arguments against it.

  If Pink wouldn’t stop at luring Quentin to aid her in journalistic enterprises of a mysterious nature, who was I to snub a Belmont?

  The gown was fashioned in a spectacular lavender–light green shot silk, velvet-dotted with lilac, with falls of blond lace at the three-quarter-length sleeves and the V-shaped low bodice. Since I had deigned to wear Worth, Irene decided that I must live up to my gown. She lavished all her theatrical effects upon my coiffure and accessories, so I returned to the parlor as Cinderella with a fairy godmother who had an open account at Maison Worth in Paris.

  “My goodness, Nell,” Godfrey said, rising in his city-formal black lounge suit at my entrance.

  “Your goodness had nothing to do with it,” I sniffed. “I owe it all to Irene’s good credit at Maison Worth.”

  He smiled ruefully. “And her good credit it is. Repeatedly. My dear.”

  He kissed her cheek as Irene appeared in my blue Liberty of London gown, which she had bought for me.

  Irene looked charming in the flowing girlish elegance of a Liberty gown, which relied more on fabric than corseted fit for its effect, rather like a Kate Greenaway drawing of children’s dress. I, however, looked . . . goodness . . . formidable. At least I was debauched enough to notice.

  Irene laid her swansdown cape over my puff-sleeved shoulders. “Mr. Belmont is the key, Nell,” she whispered. “Only he can overcome the advantage Sherlock Holmes has in this situation. He must become sympathetic to our cause. Godfrey he already has much in common with. A feminine persuasion may make all the difference in the rest.”

  Perhaps I’d been reading too much about Lola Montez.

  I’d actually come to think I possessed a bit of feminine persuasion myself.

  This was a night made in fairy land. Godfrey had a Gurney waiting for us: two seats facing each other. We rattled off under the festive line of electric lights bracketing Broadway.

  By the time we picked up Mr. Belmont on Fifth Avenue, we had been chattering like children, catching up on each other’s adventures worlds apart.

  We grew sober when Mr. Belmont joined us, but by the time we reached Maison D’Orée, we were a festive party again. He was such an urbane and amusing man, though old enough to be my father. Indeed, his son Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont was the man about town in the family now, he said, and quite the favorite at all the society balls and soirees.

  He naturally attended to me as we left the carriage for the restaurant, with such discreet aplomb that I was at once both completely at ease and completely myself.

  The dining room gleamed like a cabochon ruby. Polished exotic woods of red and purple hue, damask tablecloths, candlelight everywhere. And the food, though exceedingly strange to me, was also wonderfully flavored. Quentin was right. American cuisine surpassed the English and, in my lone and lowly opinion, the French.

  After dinner there were exquisite ices. My dining partners resorted to coffee, brandy, and cigars to ruin the enchanting aftertaste, but I was used to such silliness.

  Mr. Belmont frowned for the first time that night as he exhaled a stream of cigar smoke toward the candlelit chandelier above us.

  “It’s good that you were here, Godfrey, during that nasty business involving little Miss Vanderbilt.” He glanced at Irene. “And one might even say providential that your wife was responsible for foiling the abduction.”

  “Well, obviously,” I said. “It was intolerable that a child be subjected to such an ordeal.”

  He smiled at me. “Your protective zeal does you much honor, Miss Huxleigh, but, less obviously, you and your friends’ role in this affair also enhances the Rothschild interests we all have served in our time.”

  I was not used to being put on an equal footing with Godfrey and Irene in their Rothschild assignments . . . and with a man like August Belmont! So I said nothing, as I was quite speechless.

  “How so, Mr. Belmont?” Irene asked, tapping the ash from the end of her petite cigar with a gesture of exquisite delicacy. “I can’t see that we’ve
done anything out of the usual here.”

  He laughed at that. “Of course not. Nothing unusual for you! That’s the wonder of it. Many’s the time in Paris I’ve heard Baron Alphonse boast over a glass of brandy, extolling his foresight in winning you three to his service. He is always relating some amazing escapade that you have engineered.”

  Irene and Godfrey and I exchanged glances. We had no idea we had so entertained the Baron de Rothschild.

  “And now I see why,” Mr. Belmont said, leaning forward. “It’s quite amazing. Mrs. Norton and Miss Huxleigh are in New York and happen to stumble upon a plot to kidnap the daughter of the wealthiest man in America. And you, Godfrey, assigned to godforsaken Bavaria on a matter of necessary but tedious political fence-mending . . . you sense at once—at once!—that you are needed in America and arrive in the nick of time to convince Vanderbilt to trust the matter of his daughter’s kidnapping to you and yours. And then you promptly rescue her. If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it.” He eyed us all, eyes brimming with bemusement and laughter. “And the most astounding part is that you think nothing of what you’ve accomplished.”

  “We did what we must . . . .” Irene began.

  “But it was all unexpected. You are all totally surprising. Baron Alphonse can find a dozen men like myself: astute at business, wealthy, well connected. We serve him, and ourselves, well. We try to keep this fractured old world on an even keel, for the affairs of first families in any part of the world go better without chaos. But we’re rather predictable. You, on the other hand, make things happen because you are not. I salute you.”

  With that he lifted his glass. Godfrey and Irene followed suit, and I quickly seized my water goblet.

  “To you all,” Mr. Belmont said.

  “To the Rothschilds,” said Godfrey.

  “To the unpredictable,” Irene said, predictably.

  “To . . . Consuelo,” said I.

  “Indeed,” Mr. Belmont said, and downed a swallow of brandy.