Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “We must dash out,” Irene was saying, leading her husband by the politely crooked arm. “I desperately need a quantity of hat pins and a new shirtwaist. We’ll meet again for dinner here.”

  I never wanted to eat again.

  They were gone before I could assemble my senses or my objections.

  I sank onto our parlor sofa and tried to assemble myself at least. How could Irene allow me to be thrust into such a humiliating situation? She’d seen me in the throes of mal de mer. She couldn’t possibly believe I’d want any other living soul, even Godfrey, to see me thus.

  And now, Quentin—?

  While my mind erected several atrocious shipboard scenes involving my utter humiliation and despair, some unsuspecting soul was knocking on the door to our room.

  A mere hat pin would not do to skewer anyone who dared cross my path at that moment. Were it a mob of Ultramontanes, I would savage them with my bare hands . . . .

  I rose and went to the door, eager to dispense my wrath on whoever dared to disturb me at the most dreadful moment of my life, when what should be joy was despair.

  The door opened, however, on the very object of my concern.

  “Quentin!”

  “Didn’t Irene and Godfrey tell you I was coming for dinner?”

  “No. And they didn’t tell me you were coming for dinner for seven more nights in a row until just now.”

  He grinned, the pitiless demon. “I’m going back with you.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  His head tilted sideways to study my face, which felt frozen. “You’re not pleased?”

  “No! Yes! I’m glad you’re free of the toils of Nellie Bly, of course. But I shan’t see you aboard.”

  “You’re . . . not staying on in New York?”

  “Of course not. But I shall be unfit to be seen. I suffer horribly from seasickness.”

  “Oh.” He stepped inside the room, driving me back from my inhospitable position barring the door. “I’d heard something about that”

  “Heard? You can’t have heard the half of it. Irene can skip all up and down the decks and never turn a hair. I turn several shades of green at the merest waft of motion.”

  “You were fine on the steamboat to Coney Island.”

  “That wasn’t the Atlantic. Oh, don’t even make me think of it!”

  “Nell—” He seized my wrists.

  I pulled them away. I was tired of being seized for the day, even by one who made my pulses leap with a strange combination of anticipation and dread.

  “Look. I’ve brought you a present.”

  And from his pocket he produced a bit of folded tissue. His unwrapping fingers revealed a length of carved ivory, quite exquisite.

  He held it up, a circle, not a length.

  “What on earth?”

  “A cure for seasickness from the Indian Ocean. A bracelet.”

  “A bracelet? For me?”

  “Two,” Quentin said, grinning like a street conjuror as he produced a twin to the first.

  “Quite lovely, but—”

  His fingers spread to fan the ivory squares wide. They were threaded on two lines of elastic. “Try them on.”

  He’d taken my hand despite my objections and was slipping one bracelet over my fingers onto my wrist.

  “Goodness! They snap as tight as a sleeve-band.”

  “Exactly. The gentle pressure cures seasickness on the Indian Ocean. It can do no differently on the Atlantic.”

  “You’re sure of this?” I asked as he installed the second bracelet on my other wrist.

  “I’ve seen it work. You just wear them for the duration of the voyage.”

  I frowned. “They may attract attention.”

  “What do you care if you can take the air on deck and eat dinner at the captain’s table?”

  “Those two activities have never been among my ambitions.”

  “But I’m rather shallow and will enjoy it. I’d rather you enjoy it with me.”

  I had only one thought: What would Nellie Bly do?

  “I’d be delighted,” I said.

  And was.

  The next day, in late afternoon, we all stood on the deck of the Alsatia and watched the crowds on the dock dwindle into a waving gray mass. Lady Liberty in the harbor grew smaller and smaller.

  Irene and Godfrey leaned against each other at the rail, silent and smiling, happy to be heading home and in each other’s company after a long separation.

  My gloved hands rested on the rail, the ivory bracelets both pinching and peeking out of my jacket sleeves.

  The wind was intense, but one of the dozen new hat pins Irene had bought me anchored my hat, my Nellie Bly–broad-brimmed hat.

  Quentin anchored me also. I could feel him behind me, see his hands bracketing mine on the rail.

  I felt quite well in one way, but full of fluttering butterflies in another.

  A week. Onboard. Alone with Quentin, for obviously Irene and Godfrey intended this voyage as a second honeymoon.

  “’Twas a consummation devoutly to be wished. . . .” And feared. I had been deserted even by my infirmity, seasickness. I was on my own, with Quentin.

  What would come of it, I couldn’t say, but I was not the woman in the square before Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris who had almost swooned at being familiarly addressed by a strange man in alien garb two years ago. Quentin.

  Oddly enough, I recalled Lola Montez at that moment, and with some throb of sympathy I’d never expected to feel for such a notorious woman.

  How many times had she stood at the railing of a departing or arriving ship in her life, hopeful or fretful? How often had she fallen in love on shipboard, and lost love on shore?

  What had she thought when seeing New York and its hubris of high-rise buildings for the first time? The last? She’d resolved to live out her life here, and only her hated mother came to help her bid adieu to it. Not one man came who had toasted her, feted her, admired her, loved her, lost her . . . in life.

  What had she really felt, when all was said and done?

  I would never really know. Nor would Irene. But we would always wonder, and in that way alone Lola lived on.

  CODA:

  Sex, Lies, and Obfuscation

  We believe that many overtures have been made to draw the celebrated Countess of Landsfeld from her retirement in GrassValley, and exhibit her once more upon the stage in this city, but thus far, they seem to have failed . . . . We may therefore give up all hopes of seeing the celebrated ‘spider dance’ for some time.

  —PATRICK HULL, EX-HUSBAND, IN DAILY TOWN TALK, 1855

  Pity the scrupulous academic who tries to untangle the history of Eliza Rosana Maria Dolores Gilbert James Heald Hull, better known for half of her life as Lola Montez.

  Copious printed materials from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about this larger-than-life figure abound. In addition there’s the testimony of her own autobiography, lectures, play, and book on beauty. Still, the truth about Lola remains as elusive as the phantom arachnids she pursued through her petticoats over thirteen years and three continents in her infamous “spider dance.”

  She is supposed to have inspired the old saw that became the title of a Broadway musical song a hundred years after her death: “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.”

  Her play, Lola Montez in Bavaria, was very likely the first “docudrama” and the first play in which the principal actor was also the subject. Years later, Buffalo Bill Cody would start his performing career by enacting his own very different adventures in the same way.

  As for information about Lola found with the Huxleigh diaries, along with fragments from other sources of the time, including Nellie Bly and, most interestingly Sherlock Holmes, the truth of many of these facts, including her late-life religious conversion, has been recorded by history.

  (Lola Montez did indeed visit the Magdalen Asylum, a refuge for “fallen women” that was more enlightened than many. Bishop Henry Codman Potter was a soci
al and political reformer dedicated to improving the lot of the poor. On the Lower East Side he instituted missions, workingmen’s clubs, day nurseries, kindergartens, and even sought to “uplift” the saloon environment.)

  The only new documentation are the musings from the “Dangerous Woman” herself. These present a provocative revision of Lola’s interaction with Cornelius Vanderbilt. Whether fortunes in gold had been transported from California to the Vanderbilt burial vault or kept there, no source can verify this. What has been historically documented is that Pinkerton guards kept twenty-four-hour watch on the Vanderbilt mausoleum for fifty years. In light of the events related in this book, one has to wonder why, if not for some secret and literally subterranean reason.

  Just four years after the time of these events, the U. S. government faced economic collapse. It was only saved by the enormous gold reserves of certain prominent financiers, such as J. P. Morgan. And the Vanderbilts? Perhaps.

  Within five years, Alva would divorce William Kissam Vanderbilt, charging adultery. Shortly after marrying Consuelo to the English duke mama selected for her, Alva remarried. Her second husband was Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, son of August Belmont and a divorced man himself. Rumors even before the events shown in this book linked Alva and the younger Belmont. Willie Vanderbilt had been in the papers even earlier for maintaining a mistress abroad. The mayor of New York had to unite Alva and Oliver, as no clergyman then would marry a pair of divorced persons.

  Not even scandal could sink the S. S. Alva, although the enormous yacht her first husband had named in her honor did indeed sink after being hit by a passing freighter shortly before their marriage finally foundered. After her divorce, Alva reported that “society was by turns stunned, horrified, and then savage.” The friends who cut her dead came around in the end. “I always do everything first,” Alva said. “I was the first girl of my ‘set’ to marry a Vanderbilt. I was the first society woman to ask for a divorce . . . . Within a year ever so many others had followed my example. They had not dared to do it until I showed them the way.”

  She also showed them the way to snaring blue bloods abroad. She was implacably determined to marry her daughter Consuelo to Charles Spencer-Churchill, the young duke of Marlborough, to further her own social ambitions. In that way she matched Eliza Gilbert’s mother and her actions of roughly sixty years before. Consuelo Vanderbilt’s eighteen-year-old heart belonged to a New York society man, but Alva kept her daughter prisoner at home, denied mail as well as visitors. Alva even shammed a heart attack and blamed Consuelo, also threatening to shoot the American suitor dead if Consuelo attempted to contact him.

  The arranged marriage was bitterly unhappy from the first; the duke also had given up a “true love” for the injection of American money that would save his immense Blenheim Palace. After two children and ten years the couple separated.

  Alva Vanderbilt Belmont later became a leader of the women’s suffrage movement. When Consuelo sought an annulment of her loveless marriage to Marlborough twenty-five years later to make a love match with a Catholic man, Alva testified that she’d used threats of suicide and murder to force Consuelo into her first marriage and won her daughter’s annulment. Consuelo remarried happily.

  History has always dismissed Lola’s anger against the Jesuits and her frequent public charges that their vengeance pursued her the rest of her life. When she was a prime influence on King Ludwig in Bavaria, though, she did persuade him to make liberal reforms. Her advice encouraged him to dismiss the Jesuit clerics among his cabinet and advisors, to grant freedom of the press, and to support a more secular form of government that was, in fact, the wave of the future in Europe.

  So the foes seen here still pursuing Lola after her death bear out that enmity, and reflect the Bavarian populace’s anger at the huge sums of money King Ludwig lavished on his Lolitta’s residence, furnishings, and wardrobe. Compared to what his grandson spent obsessively building immense and lavish castles, Ludwig’s generosity to Lola was a pittance. Latterday Bavarians longed for the days of Ludwig I, so it’s not impossible to think that a by-blow heir less likely to be tainted by madness might appeal to some . . . especially as a shadow ruler for the ousted Ultramontanes.

  Both the king and Lola denied that she was ever his mistress. Despite the romantic and sexual nature of their letters, Lola’s most recent and thorough biographer, Bruce Seymour, could find evidence that the king and Lola were physically intimate only twice. The king was sixty when they met, and Lola was passing herself off as in her early rather than late twenties. Both seemed to enjoy drama more than anything.

  Those who wish to study the facts for themselves can find numerous biographies and reference books about Lola Montez, and even more contradictions.

  Fiona Witherspoon, Ph.D., FIA*

  November 5, 2003

  *Friends of Irene Adler

  Perhaps it has taken until the end of this century for an author

  like Douglas to be able to imagine a female protagonist who

  could be called ‘the’ woman by Sherlock Holmes.

  —GROUNDS FOR MURDER, 1991

  To encourage the reading and discussion of Carole Nelson Douglas’s acclaimed novels examining the Victorian world from the viewpoint of one of the most mysterious woman in literature, the following descriptions and discussion topics are offered. The author interview, biography, and bibliography will aid discussion as well.

  Set in 1880–1890 London, Paris, Prague, Monaco, and most recently New York City, the Irene Adler novels reinvent the only woman to have outwitted Sherlock Holmes as the complex and compelling protagonist of her own stories. Douglas’s portrayal of “this remarkable heroine and her keen perspective on the male society in which she must make her independent way,” noted The New York Times, recasts her “not as a loose-living adventuress but a woman ahead of her time.” In Douglas’s hands, the fascinating but sketchy American prima donna from “A Scandal in Bohemia” becomes an aspiring opera singer moonlighting as a private inquiry agent. When events force her from the stage into the art of detection, Adler’s exploits rival those of Sherlock Holmes himself as she crosses paths and swords with the day’s leading creative and political figures while sleuthing among the Bad and the Beautiful of Belle Epoque Europe.

  Critics praise the novels’ rich period detail, numerous historical characters, original perspective, wit, and “welcome window on things Victorian.”

  “The private and public escapades of Irene Adler Norton [are] as erratic and unexpected and brilliant as the character herself,” noted Michael Collings in Mystery Scene of Another Scandal in Bohemia (formerly Irene’s Last Waltz), “a long and complex jeu d”esprit, simultaneously modeling itself on and critiquing Doylesque novels of ratiocination coupled with emotional distancing. Here is Sherlock Holmes in skirts, but as a detective with an artistic temperament and the passion to match, with the intellect to penetrate to the heart of a crime and the heart to show compassion for the intellect behind it.”

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  Spider Dance, the eighth Irene Adler novel, opens in New York City in the late summer of 1889. Irene Adler Norton and her biographer-companion, spinster Nell Huxleigh, are still searching for the mysterious “Woman in Black” who may have been Irene’s mother. They continue on their own, missing the third leg of their domestic life in Neuilly, near Paris: Irene’s barrister husband, Godfrey Norton, who is on business in Bavaria for the Rothschild banking family, which often employs one or more of the threesome as its agents.

  This leaves Irene and Nell with a trio of acquaintances in New York City, possible allies, or rivals, in their personal quest. When murder most violent enters the picture, so do Irene and Nell’s uneasy associates in investigation—Sherlock Holmes and the enterprising American “stunt girl” newspaper reporter, Nellie Bly. Quentin Stanhope, an old acquaintance, British agent, and likely romantic interest for Nell, is also in New York. He should be Nell’s and Irene’s staunch ally, but he’s been commissioned
to keep Nellie Bly quiet about their shocking pursuit of Jack the Ripper (after the Whitechapel “horrors”) in Paris the previous spring. This means paying far more court to the vivacious young daredevil reporter than to reserved Nell.

  FOR DISCUSSION

  Related to Spider Dance:

  1. It’s often been noted that protagonists in genre fiction, like mystery, traditionally don’t have parents, or very visible parents, or children. This novel continues the search for a mother Irene Adler may not want to know, much less the father she never knew either. Why is she so adamant about being indifferent to her forebears? Why do you think parents and children might encumber such characters? Certainly Holmes and Watson were parentless as far as readers were concerned. Are there other favorite detectives you can think of who are singularly alone in the world? What kind of parents would you imagine Miss Marple to have had? Nero Wolfe? The only facts Doyle gave about Irene were that she had been born in New Jersey, was therefore American, and had sung grand opera. What history would you invent for her, instead of this one? Why did the author choose to give Adler the background and milieu she is developing in the American-set novels, Femme Fatale and Spider Dance?

  2. Three women with varying personalities and goals are involved in tracing Irene’s history. Sometimes they cooperate and sometimes they compete, as is also the case with all three in relation to Sherlock Holmes. What characteristics do you admire in each of the three women? What don’t you like? Motherhood, real and mentoring, is an element of this novel’s plot and theme. Who were the “good” and “bad” mothers in the book? How did the cultural imperatives of the time distort the mother-daughter relationship? The character most capable of evolving during the novels is Nell Huxleigh. Is she changing during this novel and the others in the series, and does your opinion of her change as well? What is your opinion of Nellie Bly and Nell’s fear of her? The Drood Review of Mystery observed of Chapel Noir. “Douglas wants . . . women fully informed about and capable of action on the mean streets of their world.” How does Spider Dance contribute to this goal?