Femme Fatale (35 page)

Irene had never referred to her and Godfrey’s hopes for parenthood, or the lack of them. They were two supremely individual people and it was hard to imagine them fixated on something other than each other. But then, they were still newly married, and perhaps did not require an outside diversion. Unless it was a mystery, or myself. Or perhaps I was a mystery to them. And to myself.

Irene waited, then spoke softly, in a voice almost like a lullaby. “Is your own mother still alive?”

“No,” the woman answered in a dead voice. “I ultimately was . . . abandoned to whomever would take me, like you.”

“And you never knew of anyone, any woman, with an interest in me?”

“They were all interested in you!” she burst out, her face twisted with deep emotion. “Why do you need a mother? Why does anyone? Or need a child? But I do. Here. And now.” She sighed, rested her face upon the spread fingers of one white hand. “There was,” she said slowly, “a woman who came around to see us. When we were very young things. Dressed all in black. Like a widow. She rode in a coach with four white horses. Do you suppose she was our lost mother? Do you suppose we were . . . sisters?”

Her slightly sinister singsong tone sent goose bumps up my arms. I sensed a sorrow deeper than the Atlantic ocean that had tossed me upon it like a wayward seagull and I detected something more. A taunt almost.

Irene’s voice softened even more in response. “No. True answers are never so symmetrical as that. And you
had
a twin sister. What more can one want? A woman in black, a black widow. I will . . . look for her. And if I find a trace of your own origins—”

“Forget them!” Mrs. Gilfoyle pushed herself upright by the
arms of her chair, shaking off her mood of a moment before as a woman might dislodge a suddenly discovered spider in her skirts. Her white-knuckled hands looked as chill and hard as alabaster on the richly colored upholstery. “Forget me. Forget your past, if you want my advice. Don’t call on me again.”

She finally stood on her own two feet, stiffened, and left the room, leaving the doors flung wide, like windows meant to let birds out of cages.

Irene took my elbow. “Well, we’ve learned that there is something to learn, I suppose. Come. Let’s leave this palatial hothouse. There is a black spot on the resident rose that I don’t want to catch. Remind me never to envy wealth and privilege.”

“You never did,” I pointed out as she hustled me down the extravagant staircase like a fairy godmother dragging Cinderella away from the ball and a certain eligible prince. I couldn’t resist looking wistfully back, for . . . whom?

“Remind me to remember my own advice,” she muttered as we whisked past the butler and the valet and out onto the crowded, crude New York City streets.

“Ah.” Irene inhaled deeply of horse manure. “Fresh air.”

27.

Small Luck

Thumbelina, Thumbelina, Tiny little thing
Thumbelina dance, Thumbelina sing
. . . .

We returned to Professor Marvel, who professed to know everything, again.

“I am always ready to welcome lovely ladies,” he said gallantly, “but I don’t recall the name or identity of this woman in black. Of course the theater is full of overly dramatic women, and we veterans learn to overlook almost any eccentricity. I believe only another woman would have noticed such a visitor, and with Sophie and Salamandra gone . . . they were your stage mothers, little Irene, so much as you ever required one. You were hardly ever a child, you know, merely a small independent person. That is why it was so odd when you abruptly left the stage to study with the maestro. None of us could imagine how you kept body and soul together while you committed to developing your voice, although we did soon learn when that voice of yours took you abroad.”

Irene thought for a moment. “I worked for the Pinkertons at
that time, I remember. The founder was alive then and he was eager to maintain a female detective branch. Such work suited me, for it came and went, fast and then slow, and there was plenty of time to schedule lessons between assignments.”

“I imagine,” he said with a twinkle, “that the detective work suited you because you were as clever as a vixen fox and a mighty fine all-around actress by then. But now who is still plying these old stages who would have been older than you, and therefore remember more than you about your own past, yet would notice this mystery woman in black? I assure you that this poor man’s Queen Victoria would not normally draw much curiosity around a theater, not when we have sword-swallowers and rope dancers and all sorts of exotic women to pay attention to. Let me think.”

He rose from his deep armchair and went to a bureau, from which he drew a sheaf of playbills.

“Ah, these go back a good ways, and that’s what is required, something to jog the memory, even that of a world-famous mentalist. Missing mothers were hardly my onstage speciality.”

He wet his forefinger as if about to test the wind, then began paging through the yellowing pile.

“H
mmmm
. Madame DeSoto. No. Too old. Ah. The Mazeppa of Manhattan. No, that was a trick riding act and those who work with animals seldom notice mere humans coming and going. But she had a fine figure . . . a shame to bind it to a horse’s back every night. And Little Dollie Doiley was too young at the time to notice anything, especially a quiet figure like a woman in black. So many wore mourning then anyway. When were you born?”

“I was told ’fifty-eight.”

“And you were performing by ’sixty-two. Right in the middle of the Civil War, wasn’t it, then? Though daily life went on here in New York, many a mother lost a son or husband to that bloody conflict in the South. I well recall the clusters of black that bloomed during those brutal years and only now are diminishing
as those poor bereft women follow their menfolk to the graveyard.”

“Professor Marvel!” Irene admonished. “We are not here for a lesson on the futility of war, and if I searched among women who lost sons and husbands in the Civil War I should grow gray and wear black, like Mr. Whistler’s mother, myself by then.”

He shrugged and continued to page through the playbills.

I contemplated for a moment the American Civil War, of which I had, of course, heard, but had never regarded as a phenomenon of women in black appearing on the domestic scene and not dying out for more than two decades, long after the idea of a disunited United States seemed ludicrous. Mothers who survived to rear their children, it occurred to me, were in danger of outliving them, and that must be the saddest thing of all time.

Could the woman in black have been one of those doubly bereaved women who had lost children to illness or war or misadventure, visiting the motherless children of a theatrical troupe?

Such a woman was not necessarily the actual mother of any child in the troupe, but merely one seeking to reclaim a lost child in another guise.

“Ah!” Professor Marvel beamed foolishly at a particular playbill he had flourished from the pile. “Thumbelina. Of course! She is retired, but she had a memory like Jumbo the Elephant! Almost like myself. And she lives not far from here.”

He jotted the address down on one of the many slips of paper that populated his rooms. He was a man, I realized, who thought in short bursts, which was what allowed him to remember so many trivial and arcane things.

“Thumbelina.” Irene stared at the figure of a fairylike little creature in ballerina’s tutu. “I remember her!”

Only I understood what a triumph this was, for while I had many recollections of my early years in Shropshire, Irene had proved herself strangely bereft of childhood particulars during her return home to New York.

I had not said anything to her, of course, but as former governess I felt a growing disquiet at the utter lack of childhood memories she demonstrated. Either the theatrical life was so chaotic that it distracted her from the usual sort of things a person would remember . . . or there was something lacking in her own makeup that prevented her from recalling what a child from the most ordinary upbringing might remember.

I had come to look upon Irene as a sort of Wonder of her world, perhaps as Sherlock Holmes was regarded in his. The Irene I knew had confidently inhabited a world that was London and Paris and major cities at points east. I had no doubt that she could have been the operatic performer of her age, had petty kings and circumstances not conspired against her. She was the consummate mistress of stage and self, and, when I had stopped being intimidated by her, I had admired and trusted her as no other.

Now that I had returned westward to the place of her origin, the wonder to me was that from such vague and eccentric and mostly forgotten roots she had grown into the magnificent bloom of a woman that she was.

Something was very wrong, I felt, and it had very little to do with lost mothers. Or perhaps I was missing something vital. It would not be the first time, for I was not a consummate mistress of anything, but I was, at least, exceedingly loyal.

By now Irene had become utterly engrossed in the search for some abiding woman in her past.

She would never admit it, and I would never make her admit it, but there is no doubt that her finger hesitated over the bell of the boardinghouse where Thumbelina resided. Irene never hesitated. It was her greatest strength, and her greatest flaw.

I made so bold as to lift my hand and push her finger down on the button.

Her eyes flicked to mine, startled. I almost never took the lead in anything. At least before Transylvania.

“Now is no time to play the indecisive schoolgirl,” I explained.

“It’s just that I do remember her now, Nell, and I am afraid of what we will find. She was a dwarf, enchanting to everyone while she was a child and a young woman. She must be past forty today, and—from what Professor Marvel said, and did not say—no longer well. I dread seeing what has become of her.”

“The dread becomes you, but you cannot stop now.”

“Why not?”

“Because she has heard the bell ring. You don’t wish to abandon her as if you were a mischievous, cruel child, do you, who comes near only to run away?”

“No! Of course not. The die is cast.”

“Now where did you get that—Caesar crossing the Rubicon—if you were so ill-educated as your background implies?”

“Professor Marvel? He knows everything. Perhaps I am a compilation of quick facts and that is all.”

“Nonsense! You have outwitted Sherlock Holmes and the King of Bohemia, and Jack the Ripper. You are more than a compilation of ‘quick facts.’ ” I took a deep breath that was too determined to be taken for a sigh. “Irene, I know that you stand on foreign ground that is also old to you. You mustn’t let it overwhelm you. We are investigating a puzzle that happens to be your past. It need not be . . . personal.”

At that she laughed. “Look at me! I’m as nervous as a schoolgirl, which is quite absurd, for it’s quite obvious from my history that I never went to school.”

“I disagree,” I replied in my strictest governess tone. “Having met your former associates, it’s clear to me that you did course work with the most eclectic and amazing scholars of your generation. Professor Marvel alone is the sum of at least fourteen Oxford dons.”