Femme Fatale (8 page)

He said nothing as he held the message under the milk-glass globe of the lamp to read.

He still said nothing.

Now
he
simply stood there, frowning down at the paper and reading what was obviously only two or three lines over and over.

Had two such brilliant and independent adults ever behaved so much like schoolroom ninnies? I marched over to Godfrey, snatched the impertinent paper, and read it.

Read it again.

Stared at the typed words as I had once regarded my own work when I had become one of the first typewriter-girls in London.

Well.

What to say?

Something.

Someone must.

I would.

“Irene, this . . . communication—it says that Pink believes that someone is trying to murder your mother. A shocking revelation indeed. Well, if anyone is equipped to deal with such an atrocious situation, who else would it be but a former Pinkerton inquiry agent like yourself?”

“Who else indeed, Nell? Except that I don’t
have
a mother. I have never been known to have a mother . . . to murder, or not.”

“Oh, Irene! Please! Everyone has a mother.”

“You don’t.”

“I did. She died at my birth. I definitely had one, as she had me.”

“Well, I don’t,” Irene declared with rising animation, as if released from a stage hypnotist’s spell. “I have never had a mother, and I don’t intend to have one now.”

“One’s wishes or demands don’t have much to do with the facts in such a case,” Godfrey said.

“Perhaps not in a court of law,” she told him, “but I speak only the truth. I have never had a mother.”

“Come, Irene!” Now he was pacing as though in court. “You cannot claim that you were birthed like Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and war, as a massive headache emerging from the forehead of her father Zeus! Although I can picture you giving anyone who had the temerity to bear you a migraine or two. You are a remarkable woman, and I agree that wisdom and war are not unknown to you, but not that remarkable.”

I couldn’t resist adding my twopence. “Oh, I don’t know, Godfrey. I can indeed imagine Irene giving the king of the gods a royal headache. She has been known to give a king or two of our day the migraine.”

“Most amusing, Nell,” she answered. “If you know your classical gods, you would know that ‘Irene’ is the goddess of peace. I admit that I could use a little peace on this subject. Even those who claim to have mothers may not know them well. You hardly knew your mother yourself,” she pointed out—gently—to Godfrey.

“No. I was”—he glanced at me, then steeled himself for the next words—“a bastard.”

I gasped, and Casanova mocked me with a perfect imitation.

“But I knew
who
my mother was, if not my father for some time,” Godfrey added quickly.

“How?” Irene asked.

I was shocked to realize that they had never discussed this between them. Although I was a permanent member of their household, I should not be present while they explored such painful and personal revelations.

I bent to retrieve my fallen embroidery hoop and steal away when Godfrey spoke again.

“How interesting. That all of us, all three of us, should have never known a mother’s care from an early age.”

He glanced at me and I glanced at Irene, who stared at him and then turned her gaze on me.

“Nell’s mother died,” she said at last. “You must have seen a daguerreotype or a photograph of her?”

I nodded.

“And she had a father. You, Godfrey, had a notorious mother who apparently did not acknowledge you publicly, though someone reared you and paid for your education. You also had a purported father you despised for what he did to your mother, although you never knew him either.”

“That’s true. Roughly,” he admitted. “I will not go into the particulars now, because my past is somewhat known, but yours has always been a cipher from the first.”

“Because I never knew a mother or father! I have no names, no photographs. No memories.” She lifted and weighed the flimsy cablegram paper on her palms as if it were made of lead. “This assertion must be false. It is impossible. I cannot imagine why Pink would make such an absurd statement, except that she is sadly misled.”

“But if she is not,” I couldn’t help saying. “Murder—”

“Why murder a woman who does not exist?!” Irene’s shoulders shrugged so violently that her fingers almost tore the message in twain. “And what is it to me if someone does?”

We shared a mutual silence, Godfrey and I. Such callous sentiments were unlike Irene.

She sat suddenly at the piano and crashed a resounding, atonal chord into the keys.

“It is a fraud,” she said, “or a delusion. Let Miss Nellie Bly stew in her suspicions. I will have no part in it.”

Godfrey flicked the upsetting message onto my side table.

“You are quite right. One can never trust what independent American wenches may get up to.”

Irene laughed over her shoulder at him, her hands sweeping into the lush chords of a Viennese waltz.

The melody, one of Strauss’s, was irresistible. Casanova ducked his poly-colored head in time to the notes and swayed from side to side. Lucifer twitched his tail in time like a furry black metronome.

Godfrey bowed before me and swept me into a waltz for the length of time it took us to spin over the threshold into the hall, where he bowed again and left me.

In instants he was thumping up the stairs, undoing his tie, and whistling quite in tune.

I stood by the portal, my head spinning from the sudden turn of events this afternoon.

A Viennese waltz. I had never been to Vienna, but Irene and Godfrey had. After our second unfortunate adventure in Prague, they had packed me home to Paris on a train . . . and left for a second honeymoon in Vienna.

The incessant, thrilling chords of Strauss played on, while my memory waltzed back to that long train trip across most of Europe, with a dashing gentleman my unexpected escort. Quentin. Five days of utter sequestration. Stories, but not waltzes. Moments, not years.

And now . . . I recalled Quentin in a more recent light, part of a rescue party that had saved Godfrey and myself from vile hands in a godforsaken part of the world. Quentin, Irene’s trusty ally in finding and saving her husband and her dearest friend, both of them abetted by that American upstart, Nellie Bly!

Quentin, hand-in-glove with that bold young woman who
did not even go in the world under her own rightful name, Elizabeth Jane Cochrane.

And now this miserable girl wanted to draw Irene back to her mother country, all because of fancied danger to a maternal figure Irene had never known.

Nellie Bly.

She was impertinent and shameless. Everything that a proper woman should not be. Yet she had carved inroads into the hearts of everyone I held dear.

Irene pantomimed her carefree moments at the piano, but I was not deceived. Trouble had encroached upon her today . . . in the form of the man from Baker Street, in the wire from the girl from New York City.

We could not allow that, Godfrey and I. We had striven too hard to survive the unthinkable to cede our loved ones to the bold and the beautiful. Well, Nellie Bly was beautiful, somewhat. Sherlock Holmes was not.

Godfrey would know what to do. He had already turned Irene back to her satisfying recent past, from what I could gather had transpired in Vienna and could guess, perhaps a little, from what had happened, and not happened, during my closeting with Quentin for five days in a train compartment from Prague to Paris.

Godfrey and I had been fellow prisoners and now we were fellow conspirators. Our loved one would not succumb to foreign influences!

Our . . . loved ones.

Lucifer attacked my ball of crochet twine and drove it to surrender against the fireplace fender.

Exactly, my feline friend. It shall be tooth and claw to the end.

3.

Foreign Assignment

A fair young English girl of the past, who is neither bold in
bearing nor masculine in mind
.

—MRS. LYNN LINTON, 1868

“She did not sleep a wink last night.”

Godfrey’s voice startled me while I was in the garden the next morning, intermittently throwing Messy the mongoose some grapes that had grown puckered in Casanova’s cage.

The evil bird himself was enjoying the late summer sunlight on the series of perches André, our coachman and carpenter par excellence, had made for him. The parrot’s multicolored feathers comprised a blooming garden on their own, though the real flora was fading as the autumn season advanced. Casanova was tethered by one leg to a long leather leash, so he could do everything but fly away.

“Off with her head!” he suggested, opening up a rainbow of wings and beating them on the air, and incidentally mixing up the snippet of “Royal Wives, Royal Lives” Irene had been playing with bits of
Alice in Wonderland
that I had read aloud in the past.

Godfrey sat beside me and glanced at the embroidery hoop in my hands. I stopped my busywork. I had not slept a wink last night myself.

“Nell.” He said no more.

“You have been thinking,” I accused with the accuracy of one who had once been his typewriter-girl.

“Alas, yes. I have been thinking, and I have been doing something even more difficult: endeavoring to find out what Irene is thinking!”

“I thought husbands and wives were utterly frank with each other.”

He laughed so delightedly that Casanova tried and failed to mock him. “No, Nell. They should be utterly honest with each other, but frankness is different.”

“I cannot see a difference.”

“That is because you are not married. Some matters are better to tiptoe around, and the mystery of Irene’s American origins are such a matter. She is most protective of them, and Pink’s wild cablegram, perhaps coupled with the rediscovery of the violin owned by her former vocal instructor, has stirred up a hornet’s nest of conflicting desires in her. She tries to hide it, but it disturbs me to see her so torn in mind and soul.”

“I thought she was rather flippant about the entire matter, and most definite that she needed no mother, dead or alive.”

“What people are most flippant about is often what galls them the most. I learned that in court. And Irene is a master at pretending to emotions opposite to how she really feels. It was her only defense at one time, I think.”

“Before you knew her, you mean?”

“Before I knew her and loved her.”

“Before even I knew her?”

“Before even you knew her.”

I considered. It seemed as if I had known Irene forever, but we had shared quarters only since ’eighty-one. Eight years. So
established was our bond that shortly after Irene and Godfrey married and moved to France, I was invited for a visit that had become a residency. It did not harm anything that I had met and known Godfrey before Irene had, working for him in the Temple as a typewriter-girl. So, it seemed natural that an orphaned spinster like myself should join them at the cottage in Neuilly. Despite the public roles a barrister and an opera singer may play, Godfrey and Irene were very private about themselves. I rarely glimpsed any marital storms, either disagreeable or . . . too personal to share. They were like extremely civilized parents who yet allowed me the exercise of my own will. Godfrey was a brother to me, and I cannot say enough as to how secure I felt with them both. Which is why I was upset at anything that challenged our tranquility.

“You said you had been thinking,” I reminded Godfrey.

“Oh. What I thought was that you and Irene should go to New York and find out what Nellie Bly is up to.”

“New York? Irene?
I!
?”

“Yes to all three.”

“You actually recommend this course?”

“No. I find it ultimately unavoidable, so rush to embrace it before I am forced to by outside elements.”

“Not so unavoidable, Godfrey. You heard her. She will not go.”

He smiled, ruefully and privately. “She will. And I fear that she needs to, although she won’t admit it. Remembering that old violin again has loosed memories and feelings that she may now be ready to face.”