Femme Fatale (34 page)

I had no doubt that the edifice we faced was costly beyond belief, but it was also as four-square as a prison, looming as it did five stories over the surrounding trees and more modest two-story buildings. All brownstone, it was a great architecturally undifferentiated dark stone mass pierced by enormous rounded-top windows draped in luxurious fabrics. The way the pale draperies swagged to right and left reminded me of lily-of-the-valley flowers, an oddly delicate comparison for such a formidable mansion.

The flat roof was topped with as many chimneys as a factory, thick enough to resemble stovepipe hats for giants. Some spindly-by-comparison stone finials at front and back were the only decorative relief from the severe and even foreboding architecture.

We stared at it, taken aback, for I was reminded of Jane Eyre’s oppressive school, when our coachman leaned his face near the trap to take Irene’s coins.

“Awesome, ain’t it, ladies? The wickedest woman in New York built it, but she’s long gone to her just reward, though some will say they see mysterious veiled ladies coming and going through
the side basement door to this day. There was death done within,” he added with a leer.

“Ghosts?” I asked in all-too-obvious dismay even though I realized that the hack driver simply wished to thrill obvious visitors to this shore with unsavory stories.

“So much the better,” Irene said briskly, shutting the inside trap door so I could hear no more ghoulish tales. “We are pursuing the ghosts of my past. I would be delighted to interrogate a ghost from the right era, but doubt we shall encounter a one, even from the wrong era.”

Irene adjusted her pale cream gloves after we descended from the hansom’s foot-and-a-half step down, met by a liveried valet’s own white-gloved hand supporting our arrival and preventing us from making an entrance that resembled the exit of leaping lemmings.

Irene, ever a master of social nuance when she wanted to be, nodded graciously at the man without quite looking at him.

“Ah,” she murmured, surveying the imposing façade. “It reminds a bit of dear Monte, save that the stone is not white, but . . . brown.”

Save
, I thought ungenerously,
that Monte Carlo is a sunny Mediterranean city of green palms and white stone . . . and New York is a mousy gray-brown metropolis populated by stunted trees and foraging goats in some neighborhoods!

“I wired Mrs. Gilfoyle yesterday. She is expecting me.” At this Irene opened her magnificent cigarette case, the diamond “I” winking in the exceptionally broad daylight of the famous avenue, and extracted a visiting card. It was on thick cream linen, featuring a beautiful cursive script and was quite lovely, save that it was written entirely in French!

I watched the valet’s eyes flick respect at the blue enameled case with its proud initial “I” of diamonds, yet blanch a bit at the French flowing over the calling card’s prim surface.

“This way, Madam Adler Norton. Madam,” he added with a
bow to me, leading us up a long, broad set of steps to a pair of entry doors that would have done honor to a cathedral.

We passed through a palatial hall of tessellated marble and were ushered into a side parlor that more resembled a royal funeral parlor in terms of sober magnificence. There we were to wait.

Irene and I perched on black-satin-upholstered chairs, catching glimpses of our multiple selves reflected in the mirror-fitted and gilt-framed wainscoting.

I couldn’t help blessing Monsieur Worth, the English-born founder of French couturier, for making Irene his
mannequin de ville
. This arrangement had swelled her wardrobe with the latest Worth creations, to wear for a season and return, the point being that her beauty and cachet in Paris made her a subtle walking advertisement for the “man-milliner’s” priceless wares.

Today she wore the charming black lace fichu wrap that barely took any packing space and exquisitely dressed up any ensemble. It was a delicate sleeveless and ruffled tunic caught tight at the waist and ended in a peplum both front and back. Through its tracery peeked a pale Persian blue gown with brocaded hem and three-quarter-length sleeves. Her hat was black straw chosen for the fact that she could match its trim to any of the four gowns she had packed for the voyage.

I had been persuaded to don one of the unconstructed Liberty silk gowns Irene had taken the liberty of ordering for me without my knowledge in London. It could hardly compete with any Worth costume, but it was new and fashionable and I was given to understand that the society women of New York coveted anything of that nature from London and Paris. My source was Irene, of course.

“I am glad we dressed to kill,” I confessed in a whisper that the room’s hard surfaces turned into a small echo. “I feel as if I’m visiting Napoleon’s tomb!”

“No more dead bodies on this trip, Nell, please,” Irene whispered back.

“And what is this ‘calling card’? You never used such a thing in Paris.”

“It is an improvisation, Nell. One cannot visit a society matron like Mrs. Gilfoyle without the usual ceremonials.”

“Very impressive, but I doubt she reads French! What on earth does it say?”

“It, um, gives my name and an introductory phrase, ‘
Les six femmes d’Henri VIII
.’ ”

I thought deeply to translate the three, key words. “Irene! You have had cards printed up for that loathsome closet opera foisted upon us by that dreadful detective! When on earth did you do so? There was no time before we left Paris to print such a frivolity.”

“What I handed over was a sample I wrote myself on the ship on the way over. There was much time to waste.”

“I must say I am impressed by your penmanship under the strains of being tossed upon the butter-churn of the Deep. It looked like the finest copperplate printing. Where did you learn such a skill?”

She shrugged. “It must have been at the New Jersey and New York ‘Schools for Scandal,’ the vaudeville stage. There was a woman, I now recall, who could write simultaneously with her fingers and toes and also her mouth.”

“Good gracious! She couldn’t have done that unless she appeared on stage
unshod!
”

“So she did. I do distinctly recall the long wands with pens attached sticking up from between her toes and fingers like reeds.”

“Is there nothing people will not do on stage?”

“Nothing less than they will do offstage.”

“
Mesdames
.”

A man in evening dress, in other words, the butler, bowed from the threshold. We rose and followed him up a staircase grander than the Paris Opera’s, and that is saying something to anyone who has ever traversed that ocher and russet marble-lined
passage to perhaps the most elaborate performance building in the world.

When the staircase forked at the first story before a statue of some Renaissance figure, we took the right bank to another richly carpeted passage wide enough for the Cossack cavalry and Buffalo Bill’s envisioned Rough Riders to perform quadrilles in.

At last we were ushered into what passed for a private chamber in this mausoleum, a sitting room. Sitting in it was a woman of about our age wearing a Worth receiving gown. I was appalled to find myself developing such a keen eye for the frivolity of fashion.

She stood to rustle forward three steps, no more. “Madam Norton?” she addressed me, thus guaranteeing my shocked silence for at least twenty seconds. During it, her eyes shifted and finally settled on Irene. “I do not know your name, but you look vaguely familiar.”

“We were schoolmates,” Irene said smoothly.

Confusion clouded that cool white brow with the russet hair waved richly back from it like fur from ivory.

“Indeed?” our hostess said. “I cannot contest you, for my memory of names and faces is abominable. All my friends and family know my failing, though it might seem rude to an . . . acquaintance.”

We had not yet been asked to sit and we were not about to be.

Irene glided across the Aubusson carpet to perch uninvited upon a tapestry-upholstered Louis XIVth armchair.

“I should say,” she said while seating herself, which required a great deal of flaunting the luxurious folds of Maison Worth around her erect figure, “that we were mates at the school of tiny thespians, rope-dancers, and assorted marvels of physical and mental oddities.”

“And you are from France?” Mrs. Gilfoyle demanded, a touch of fishwife in her oh-so-cultivated drawing-room drawl, as she glanced again to me.

“Paris,” Irene corrected her. “My friend Miss Huxleigh and myself were called to the States by our enterprising acquaintance, the reporter Nellie Bly.”

Again that confusion rippled over our hostess’s countenance and then the truly outrageous thing Irene had said finally registered on her face. Where “Irene Adler” was forgotten, the name of “Nellie Bly” made Mrs. Gilfoyle stiffen. “Nellie Bly! Such a low, common name, and not her real one either. She is one of those sensation-seeking hoydens, always exposing the ugly side of life.”

“Exactly. That’s why she called us here. She is currently exploring the arena in which you and I both grew up, I’m told. Surely you remember Rena the Ballerina and Merlinda the Mermaid? I seem to recall twin-sister performers called Wilhelmina and Winifred.”

Mrs. Gilfoyle turned her back on us (and a lavishly laced and bowed back it was, a thoroughgoing Worth) to move as briskly as her heavy skirts would allow to the door.

“Turning tail and running,” Irene murmured to me in a broad American twang. “My, my.”

The woman shut the double doors with her own soft white hands, then turned to lean on them as if to hold them shut, or perhaps to hold us in, prisoners in this huge, dark, ugly house that was lined like a costly stone jewel box nevertheless in draperies of extravagant fabric. Like a jewel box, or like a coffin.
Ghosts
, I thought again.

“I am called simply ‘Mina’ now,” our hostess said, but her tone was unfriendly. “Who are you, Madam, and what do you want?” she demanded.

“I am exactly who my card indicates: Irene Adler Norton. I admit that I don’t remember you very well, but we both have changed a great deal since our youth, I imagine, and I have it on good authority that we performed at many of the same theaters, often on the same playbill.”

“And now you’ve learned that I married well and wish to blackmail me with my past.”

There was a pause. Irene put a forefinger to her chin in a stage-coy manner I had never seen before.

“Oh,” said she sweetly. “I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose I could, couldn’t I?”

“I remember you now.” Mrs. Gilfoyle pushed herself off the support of the doors and came stalking back toward us like one of Sarah Bernhardt’s Big Cats, dragging a twitching train of taffeta and brocade behind her like a glamorous tail. “You were that jill-of-all-trades down the playbill from me.”

Irene lifted an eyebrow. She and I had both fanned through our collection of playbills. Irene, whatever her
nom de performance
, had always been listed
above
Miss Wilhelmina Hermann.

However, Irene was not about to debate billing when she had important information to glean.

“Indeed,” she said with winning modesty, “you were always above me. I do remember that. But I remember so little else, and I am on a quest to recapture what I’ve lost. Are you . . . a mother?” Irene put all the hearts and flowers that were in her into the last line.

“No.” Mrs. Gilfoyle stopped in her tracks as if struck by a verbal bullet. “Not . . . yet.”

Irene, never one to miss when she had blundered, rushed on. “Oh, my dear, I have no children myself. Yet. Nor Miss Huxleigh here, although that is to be expected. I suppose. At any rate, I have reached an age—past thirty, I confess, though a young thing like you may not be able to share my concern—when I yearn to know the mother I never did before.”

Mrs. Gilfoyle, despite the blatantly inaccurate flattery as to age Irene had ladled on, grew paler and paler as Irene’s heartfelt speech continued. My actress friend was skillfully plucking every heartstring within fifty feet—indeed, I thought again of my own mother lost so soon after my delivery and felt tears spring to my
eyes—but everything she said, every artful pause, every human wellspring she appealed to, only worsened her case in our hostess’s eyes.

While I was always willing to defer to the sterling theatrical instincts in Irene’s character, I was also more than willing to step in and correct a faulty course.

“Mrs. Gilfoyle,” I said, speaking up for the first time and thus capturing her attention as though I were a Sarah Bernhardt. She who speaks last is listened to first!

“Mrs. Gilfoyle, we are sorry to intrude, and, believe me, any discomfort to you is our last wish, but my dear friend has suddenly realized that she was an orphan tossed upon the stormy bosom of life. Now she belatedly yearns to know something more about the woman who must have borne her. The trail is cold, the facts . . . few. Do you remember, from that time both you and she wish to . . .
must
forget, for you both now enjoy—may I say?—sterling present lives, and my dear Irene is a noted diva on the Continent.”

Here I stumbled and paused, for my last phrase had returned the icy fire to our hostess’s eyes. Somehow I, too, had blundered.

“I appeal to your best nature,” I said, rushing on. “Is there any information, any fact, you can impart about Irene’s dear lost mother? Surely there was some hint—?”

“No.” Mrs. Gilfoyle stalked toward us again like Sarah about to take poison in front of the limelights. There was that kind of dark determination in her. “I’m sorry. I can’t help. I cannot help. I cannot even become a mother myself—”

This last was ripped from her like a breech-birth (which I had attended in my youth). I recognized in those few unwilled syllables an inconsolably awful, breathtaking pain.

She sank onto a chair (all indeed she could do in the convoluted gown she wore, all corsetry and spiraling draperies).

I was instantly reminded of Bernhardtian melodrama. Perhaps the French actress was so acclaimed because she touched the emotions
of her age. She evoked privileged, even powerful women, who were yet denied the power of making another in their own image.