Spider Dance (14 page)

I remembered these events with a revived resentment as I pictured the elderly innocent Irene had invited into our parlor: fine, snowy hair, a stooped, hesitating posture, spectacles perched precariously on a long, hooked nose.

I eyed the upright, hale man of thirty-five years before me. Had he no shame? Aping a defenseless old man in order to deceive two much-tried women, themselves fleeing for their reputations and even their lives?

Now
his
face grew accusing, and Irene was looking decidedly nervous even holding her own ground.

Why was Sherlock Holmes recalling this incident so far distant in all our pasts?

Irene had twined her fingers in her pale kid gloves, reminding me of Miss Bo-Peep fretting over her lost sheep.

“You have overstepped yourself,” he said.

Irene’s hands became stone-still.

“Not in St. John’s Wood,” he added, “later that night in London. ‘Good night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes’ indeed. Passing my very doorstep in men’s dress, playing the baritone, verifying my identity and risking all for a gesture of pure cheek.”

Irene lowered her hands and lifted her head. “What of it? You were too late to catch me the next morning, in any event, and that is all that mattered.”

He shrugged. “I was never enamored of the chase, or the case. I am under a certain noblesse oblige to honor royal requests, since my own queen has called upon me from time to time. Given the delicate political brink that Europe ever teeters upon, it’s never amiss to extend my reach beyond Mother England.”

“Hence you are here in America. Why?”

“Nothing to do with you, madam.”

“Are you sure? You have had a great deal to do with me since our encounter in St. John’s Wood. Perhaps it has become a habit.”

“Even,” I added sternly, dipping into my secret well of knowledge about the man’s many personal weaknesses, “an addiction.”

At this his sharp eyes finally pricked me directly. I suppose they were gray. I found them so cold and speculative that they might have been the color of water. Iced water, the way Americans like it

“A subject,” he said as icily as he glanced at me, “on which you are no doubt well and personally versed, Miss Huxleigh.”

“I? I have no habits of that nature.”

But he had already turned back to Irene. “Suffice it to say I have just today realized that our positions from two years ago have reversed. You were pursuing
me
, madam, in humble guise, and managed to intrude yourself into a house I occupied and feign a swoon sufficient to acquaint you with what you wished to know. What was that, and why?”

“Nonsense!” I said. “You flatter yourself, sir, even beyond your own usual extremes, if you delude yourself that Irene would deign to follow you in any guise.”

Irene cleared her throat, but I wasn’t done. “Furthermore, you are correct in at least one assumption; there is no readily apparent reason Irene would do any such thing.”

“Ha!” His eagle eye darted from myself to her. “I agree,
Miss Huxleigh, which is why I have taken the time to come here and ask the lady herself. In St. John’s Wood, she eluded me. Here she cannot.”

I was about to order him to “begone” like a melodrama villain when Irene shrugged, spread her forearms and hands in a graceful gesture of utter capitulation, and sat, very prettily, I might mention, on the sofa.

“Nell, if you would kindly order some tea, I believe that Mr. Holmes will be staying to partake.”

“I don’t have time for tea,” said he, still standing.

“Oh, do sit down,” Irene suggested with leading lady aplomb, removing her hat. “You were cheated of your inquisition with me in St. John’s Wood, so you might as well make an afternoon of it now. I am trapped, am I not? In my own hotel rooms. What alternative do I have but to answer your every question?”

This charming capitulation held even
the
man temporarily speechless. Indeed, Irene gazed up at him with such an air of wry innocence that I found myself standing by the awful telephone (thank goodness we had seen some at the American area of Paris Exposition last spring or I should never have been able to contend with it now) to order a round of tea and crumpets. Although Americans only offered tea and something common they called cookies.

Mr. Holmes removed his hat at last, then pinched off his gloves and laid them in the upside-down crown. Once hat and stick were reposing upon the desk near the door, he pulled the occasional chair to face the sofa and sat.

Tea, I saw, was a mere civil excuse to dress up an interrogation. Or perhaps a duel of words, for Irene was looking far too self-possessed to play the meek penitent.

I watched them in the mirror as I unfastened my own hat. Hatless, Mr. Holmes looked older. His hairline bared a high prominent forehead and framed his angular face like a hood of black mail. Perhaps it was only my dislike of the man that made his every feature seem so severe. Perhaps it was my association with Godfrey that had made
me prize a temperament formed of good nature and ease of presence.

Still, Mr. Holmes was very good for my posture, for I went to sit as upright as a headstone on the remaining occasional chair, considering myself an odd blend of tea server and referee.

So we sat making inane comments on the weather in England and France as compared with New York City in high summer. Finally a knock at the door signified the arrival of a welcome distraction. I directed the serving man to lay the heavy tea service and assorted serving trays on the high table before the sofa.

“I will pour,” Irene said, sitting forward in a posture to mimic my own.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Oscar Wilde has always said that a tea table is as often the scene of slaughter as a battlefield,” she noted.

“So, I imagine, is a billiard room,” Mr. Holmes commented.

This made Irene hesitate in pouring a cup, but only slightly. “Milk? Sugar?” she inquired of our guest.

“Neither.”

She poured my cup, liberally laced with milk, and selected a sunny slice of clove-implanted lemon for her own sugared serving.

“A billiard room,” Irene mused after a careful sip. “I shall have to mention that idea to Oscar Wilde when we return to Paris. He is always looking for unlikely settings in which to showcase his wit.”

“Speaking of unlikely settings,” Mr. Holmes noted, “why were you at the Willie Vanderbilt house on Fifth Avenue at eleven o’clock this morning?”

“Why were you?” she shot back. “And you must be mistaken. I was rummaging at B. Altman’s at the time, buying assorted fripperies for Nell and myself. The city has filled with thriving new emporiums since I left.”

“You plan to remain in New York for a while, then?”

“Possibly. It has been suggested to us that I might have relatives here to dig up.”

“And that is why you were following me.”

Irene sipped and said nothing, leaving me to defend her honor, or at least her veracity.

“Why would Irene follow you?” I asked.

“She might have thought that my movements here have something to do with her lost family origins.”

Irene interrupted us. “We have not ascertained that I was where Mr. Holmes claims I was.”

He set down his untouched cup on the tea table. “Come now. There is no point in denying it. Once the idea had struck me, I saw the whole sequence of events. Had I not been concentrating on the . . . unfortunate surface of the Vanderbilt billiard table, I would have seen through your imposture then and there.”

“Well, had I not been distracted by the poor unfortunate fallen clergyman outside my door in St. John’s Wood, I would have seen through your ploy to use fire to force me to reveal the location of my hidden safe that very moment, instead of half an hour later.”

I looked from one to the other. “Is Mr. Holmes implying that you were . . . lurking outside the Vanderbilt house after following him there, that you actually entered? The Vanderbilts are the wealthiest family in the country, Irene. Breaking into their home is like . . . sneaking into Windsor Palace. How could you?”

“‘How’ was not difficult for a clever woman.” Mr. Holmes seemed to be enjoying my astonishment and relished enlightening me. He turned back to Irene, in his element. “After you so conveniently swooned and then vanished, I made inquiries belowstairs. The laundry facilities there make a supply of fresh white cuffs, collars, and caps always available, to anyone. You wore black that morning, not in tribute to the Woman in Black who haunted the variety theaters when you were a mere infant but because it’s the easiest way to blend into the landscape of a great house on any continent. The ungoverned mop of curly red hair you had already
adopted, knowing the hordes of Irish in service in this city—two-thirds of all domestic servants, isn’t it? The only thing you had not taken into account was that I had been called in to examine a body on the billiard table, a body with such violence done to it that it rivals the depredations of Jack the Ripper in Whitechapel, and beyond.

“I am curious, madam. Did the sight of that brutalized body indeed cause you a siege of faintness? Or was that another ruse to escape my attention for a moment so you could retreat before I was called out of the room?”

“Those are not
my
questions,” I put in. “Why, Irene, would you follow Mr. Holmes at all?”

He started to answer but Irene’s strong stage voice overrode his. “It’s obvious. He dropped that maddening hint about my mother’s identity at the grave site in Green-Wood Cemetery. Obviously someone he has been talking to in this country has given Mr. Holmes information on the subject that we don’t have yet. I followed him to find out who.”

“But . . . Irene. You have yourself walked me along upper Fifth Avenue and pointed out Vanderbilt Row, all those high, imposing mansions the family’s many members have built. Am I to understand you masqueraded as a maid at Willie Vanderbilt’s house—only the most palatial of them all? Why on earth would you go inside when you saw that was Mr. Holmes’s destination? His errand could have nothing at all to do with you.”

At that Mr. Holmes gave one of his rare bursts of laughter. “Your logic is impeccable, Miss Huxleigh, but your quarry was not acting on logic, was she? She followed me inside because she thought my business might be
her
business, of course.”

I stared again at Irene, who was momentarily silent and looking studiously away from us both, as Lucifer the cat will do when he’s been caught overturning the cream pitcher to lap up the contents.

“Irene!” I was shocked. “You thought . . . you thought
you
might be . . .
related
to the Vanderbilts?”

“There are an awful lot of them, Nell. The founder, the
Commodore, who never went to sea except in his own yachts, had—what?—nine or ten or a dozen offspring. It’s possible a child might have gotten lost in that lot, particularly if it was a by-blow.”

“Irene, that you would even think such a thing, much less consider acting on it! It makes you look like a fortune-hunter.”

“Ha!” Holmes was observing us like an audience at an entertaining play. “Madam Irene is not unfamiliar with the term ‘adventuress,’” he told me, “but I believe that she would claim only legitimate interest in the estate, although she could no doubt convince what I have seen of Mr. Vanderbilt that she was his long-lost first cousin. Mrs. Vanderbilt, however, would be a different matter.”

’It’s true,” I said, “that Irene is a consummate actress and mimic.”

“Hmmm.” Mr. Holmes savored this assertion, then stood. “I trust then, that I shall not have to be on the look-out for any amateur competition as I conduct my business here in future. I can swear to you upon your mother’s grave, if it is indeed so, that this has nothing, in any respect, to do with you personally.”

Irene snapped her cup onto its saucer to regain our attention. “The question is not what I
could
do, but what I would. And I would never stoop to bilking even the Vanderbilts. Which is why I left as soon as I determined that your business with them was merely another morbid crime.”

“Of course not.” Irene sounded indignant as she stood to see him to the door. “I can assure you that I will not bother myself with your movements now that I know you are merely pursuing another insane murderer. Though it is interesting that the victim so devilishly abused was a man, and an aged one—”

“Not interesting but appalling,” I put in, following them to the door.

“Yes, Nell. Of course.” Irene smiled at me. “We have had enough of the appalling. We remain here in the United States merely for matters of genealogical research. I don’t suppose,
Mr. Holmes, that you so earnestly wish me to find other occupations than following you . . . that you’d now drop a more concrete hint than a name I’ve never heard of written on a headstone?”

He donned gloves and then hat, saying nothing until this parting dictum: “I have your word that you will meddle no more with Vanderbilts?”

Irene nodded. “From what I saw, they’re a rather vulgar family anyway. Nouveau riche. I should not wish to claim a relation even if I could.”

“Then I will suggest to you, and to Miss Huxleigh, that when you sought news of the mysterious ‘Woman in Black’ you primarily, and quite naturally, interrogated the distaff side of your old acquaintances. Perhaps the gentlemen would have taken more, and a different kind of, note of her.”

Irene’s eyes glittered like fool’s gold on hearing this. “How generous of you to share such insight. You could have saved me an unpleasant journey up Fifth Avenue had you told me this at Green-Wood Cemetery.”

“At Green-Wood Cemetery I was not quick enough to anticipate to what lengths you’d go.”

“As you were not in St. John’s Wood. Perhaps there is a lesson here, my dear Mr. Holmes?”

“Oh, there is, but I much doubt that you will learn it, my dear madam. Good day. Miss.”

As soon as Irene shut the door she leaned her back against it and rolled her eyes. Then she clamped a hand over her mouth.

I couldn’t tell if she was furious or amused.

“Well?” I demanded.

She put a quick finger to her lips, then turned her ear against the wood to listen.