Spider Dance (25 page)

If I could provide such a
divertissement
, as the French say so prettily, Quentin would no longer be obliged to escort her about New York City.

Whether he would then choose to squire me about, I couldn’t predict, but my greatest wish, and worry, was that he be free to leave Pink to her own devices.

It was, however, highly unlikely that I could produce a sensation sufficiently distracting for a girl who had committed herself to an insane asylum and a bordello before she was five-and-twenty, merely for the sake of a “story.” True,
shocking conditions needed exposing, but these modern “New Women” delighted in making themselves the centerpiece of their “crusades,” and their social consciences came topped with a healthy serving of self-aggrandizement.

I know my limitations, and the sensational is the last thing I would have any skill at invoking, or provoking.

As I twisted in the fine bed linens, twiddling and plotting like a dreaded web-weaver myself, a truly ignoble thought sprang to mind like a pouncing spider.

It was so terribly ignoble that I cried a sharp “Oh!” aloud to myself, then clapped my hands over my traitorous mouth, hoping Irene hadn’t heard. For Irene could never, never hear of this.

I slithered out of bed and tiptoed over to the bureau. From a drawer that I opened by careful quarter inches, I withdrew the small coded book Irene and I had unearthed at the very thoroughly late Madame Restell’s house.

This prize Irene had not wanted Sherlock Holmes to have, but I much doubt he cared about illegitimate births among New York City society families more than thirty years ago.

I, on the other hand, had skimmed some of Miss Pink’s “Nellie Bly” newspaper stories in the
World
since we had arrived here. She did not always write the “shocker” stories she was famed for, such as getting herself arrested and then reporting the unspeakable indignities suffered by women inmates.

She had recently also discussed her adventures riding a newfangled bicycle, and had visited the pugilist John L. Sullivan at his training camp to pester him with such impertinent (and trivial) questions as Do you take cold showers and How much money do you make?

(I must admit that I find pugilists fascinating for no reason I can name, although I have never confessed this to anyone and would be loath to think that I shared any interests in common with our Miss Pink. Other than Quentin, I suppose.)

At any rate, in following the journalistic adventures of our former associate, I’d noticed that she had recently been
dispatched to the fashionable resorts of Newport and Narragansett as well as Bar Harbor and Saratoga Springs to report “the gay goings-on” of people whose money is their sole claim to fame.

Such place names meant little to me, save that they were patronized by the rich, apparently serving as the American equivalent of Bath. Surely Miss Pink would pursue a scandal among them . . . could I but find one, a nice juicy one involving persons long dead so no real harm could be done in the present. That would be the very thing to divert her from our affairs.

But first I must decipher this blasted book . . . or at least appear to. The paraffin lamp flickered in the darkness, barely lighting the pages of tangled letters and numbers squirming like worms on the cramped pages before me.

Irene had said I was clever with patterns. Could I be as clever at unweaving patterns?

I set to work with a will.

Agosto Brentano, a Sicilian immigrant, had for years run a
newspaper stand in front of the New York Hotel . . .
After amassing capital selling foreign and domestic papers,
he branched into books and play scripts, opening
Brentano’s Literary Emporium in 1876. It became a
popular rendezvous for the theatrical elite
.
—
GOTHAM: A HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY TO 1898

If by night I intended to unravel the mysteries of Madame Restell’s book of secret births (and the more shocking prevention of them) thirty to fifty years ago, it soon became clear that by day Irene and I would be hard on the trail of Lola Montez and her scandalous history.

I had at first supposed it spoke to Irene’s moral sense that she was not so much searching for a forebear as being determined to prove this particular woman could not possibly be any relation to her. But, no, Irene was driven by other concerns.

This became clear when we hied the next day to the newsstands and bookshops at the “Rialto,” the theatrical district clustered around Union and Madison Squares.

Mrs. Eliza Gilbert was completely unknown there, but Lola Montez was everywhere. At Brentano’s Literary Emporium, a shop that stocked the London and Paris papers among many other foreign journals, we found the clerk ecstatic to guide us to the full complement of written material
relating to Miss Montez. Or perhaps I should say, La Montez.

This young man, possessed of a snowy celluloid collar, shirtsleeves, and rather loud suspenders, radiated the incessant energy native to this large and exhausting city.

“Lola Montez? You have found a gold mine, ladies, speaking of which we also have many volumes about the Gold Rush of ’49 in which she figures as a minor but always colorful character. And Brentano’s Literary Emporium, with our situation in the heart of the theatrical district, has many actual play scripts for sale, including several relating to the acting career of the lady you mention.”

“Really.” Irene sounded as icy as a dowager duchess. “I didn’t think she acted.”

“Oh, in many plays, ma’am, including the one of her own life, which was most popular in the olden days.” He stopped his patter long enough to regard Irene’s expressionless face. “Oh, I see. You have been reading the critics! I fear we don’t have newspapers old enough to contain reviews of Lola Montez on the stage, but the books quote lavishly from the journals of the day, and you will find all you need here at Brentano’s, I promise you.

“Are you ladies planning to pen a volume on this most interesting lady?”

He looked expectantly from one to the other of us, and I suspect he found the same appalled, even revolted, expression on both of our faces.

Indefatigable, the young man shrugged. “Someone does a new one every five years or so, so there’s lots to choose from. And we stock her own books, as well.”

“She wrote books?” Irene sounded as incredulous as I felt.

“And volumes of letters to the newspapers, usually defending herself from what she called ‘calumny.’ My, they used forty-dollar words in the olden days. She was as fast on the draw with her pen as she was her riding crop.”

“Why is America so enamored of this Lola Montez?” I asked.

“She did raise Cain everywhere she went, and we weren’t so cosmopolitan back then,” he explained. “Visiting celebrities from Europe always turned our heads. Why, when that poet fellow Oscar Wilde came through, I was just a boy, but I remember the whole country was in a stir about him from East to West.”

“He was not from ‘Europe.’” I adopted Irene’s chilly tone. “He was from England. England is an island. It is
not
part of Europe.”

“It’s right close, ma’am, and Europe is a pretty big continent. What would England be otherwise, a barrier island?”

“One could only hope,” I answered, “but unfortunately that was not enough to keep the French away in 1066.”

He frowned prodigiously. “Are you speaking of an hour or a year, ma’am? Anyway, it’s only ten years or so since Oscar burned a trail down Broadway, and I ’spect we’ll be talking about him and his velvet knickers as long as we have gossiped about Lola and her riding whip.”

I sighed. Heavily.

“We will take everything you have available on her,” Irene said in a new tone that I can only describe as martyred.

He was off without a second glance. That is one thing that I both like and loathe about America: as long as you carry a reticule or a handbag you can enter any establishment and be taken quite seriously. Money tops birth and station.

A half hour later we left with our pocketbooks considerably lighter of paper bills and coins, but both arms burdened with common paper-wrapped parcels.

Irene’s expression was grim. “We have our work cut out for us, the size of sailcloth, it appears.”

“Don’t worry, Irene.” I balanced so many packages I needed my chin as a third hand to hold them together. “A woman this notorious could hardly have sneaked into variety theaters as the Woman in Black.”

“One would hope. But there are veils. We must hail a cab.”

“I have no hand, much less an arm free, and besides, they never pay attention to me.”

“I have part of my right hand free,” Irene said, waggling
the gloved fingers in question over the top of a stack of wrapped books she also anchored with her chin.

One would think a gentleman would observe our quandary and offer assistance, but they all brushed by, as busy as newsboys with fresh editions to hawk.

Irene put two fingers in her mouth and used her operatic lungs to blow a whistle so loud and shrill that every cab within a hundred yards came to a halt.

One driver nosed closest to us first, and we leaned in to dump our parcels on the seat first, before stuffing ourselves in after.

The ride was spent rearranging the booty into portable piles. There was barely room for us to perch on the edge of the seat, but then there was barely time for us to rearrange ourselves before we were on Broadway again and at the Astor House Hotel entrance.

Irene probed her reticule. “I have nothing left to pay the driver.”

At that moment our hack door swept open and brown packages tumbled out toward the doorman’s feet. While I instructed him to fetch a boy to tote the things inside, Irene slipped into the lobby and withdrew some more cash from the hotel safe.

By the time the cab was emptied, she was back to press a generous dollar into the driver’s grubby glove.

Our course was set: we would spend the next day or two sequestered with the literary legacy of Lola Montez, apparently the most notorious woman of the century.

For Irene, it was sure to be a lurid journey into the life and times of the woman who may have birthed her.

For me, it was a distasteful yet welcome opportunity to make sure that Irene remained as far as possible from Sherlock Holmes, the pretentious Vanderbilt “castle” on Fifth Avenue, and the body in a disgusting state of disrepair that she had spied on the billiard table within.

Ever since Irene had been consulted by Bram Stoker years ago about the drowned sailor on his dining room table, she had shown an unnatural curiosity about these ghoulish matters.

I had hoped the extremely gruesome trail of the Ripper she had followed last spring might possibly have sated this unbecoming curiosity, but I fear that Irene was not one to let convention stop her.

Already she had one characteristic in common with the despised Lola, not to mention smoking and a stage career. I could only pray that Irene’s real mother had died on her birth-bed, or had been a consumptive and home-bound wife whose bereaved husband had been forced to give up his only daughter to those better equipped to handle an infant. Why those should turn out to be itinerant variety hall performers I have no idea, but stranger things have happened. In fact, had the Vanderbilt family not already figured in a matter involving the odious Sherlock Holmes, I would have been happy to applaud Irene’s operatic hope that she was a lost heir to an American fortune. Being illegitimately born to a Captain of Industry had far more future than being illegitimately born to a Woman with a Past.