Femme Fatale (38 page)

29.

The Woman in Black

Young man, you took to your bosom the image of purity, a
thing upon which you think the stamp of God has been
printed. . . . Not so; Madame Restell’s Preventive Powders
have counterfeited the hand writing of Nature: you have not a
medal, fresh from the mint, of sure metal; but a base,
lacquered counter, that has undergone the sweaty
contamination of a hundred palms
. . . .
—GEORGE W. DIXON, EDITOR OF THE
NEW YORK POLYANTHOS, 1841

“You must tell me,” I said.

Irene and I had returned to the hotel in silence. She had smoked dark cigarette after dark cigarette in the gurney on the way back and smoked still now.

“Tell you what?”

“What that little woman was talking about. Who was the woman in black who visited and danced with you? Why were you two abandoned as children?”

Irene shook her head as if tossing a hat veil back from her face. She stubbed the cigarette out in a crystal tray, then regarded the ashes. Next she regarded me.

“I am sorry, Nell. I lead you into darker and darker coils. I wish I were you. How I do! I wish . . . I did not have to be the one to disappoint you.”

“Disappoint me in what?”

“The world. Myself. My history.”

“Irene, I would never be disappointed in you, no matter your history.”

“You cannot know.”

“No, I cannot, because no one will tell me! If I’d had known . . . things that I now know, however unhappily, I would have never . . . Quentin and I . . . it would all be so different . . . and I wish—”

“Shhh,” Irene said, taking my hands like a nursemaid soothing a charge. “Don’t wish yet. You don’t know enough yet to make a sensibly extravagant wish, for all wishes should be extravagant.”

She shook my hands fondly. “I will tell you a tale. It’s not a fairy tale, with pixies, and lost princesses, and kindly old magicians and dwarves—”

“But Professor Marvel and Phoebe are in it?”

“Yes, and mermaids and dancing ladies.”

I settled back to listen, and Irene dropped my hands.

“I hardly know where it begins, except that it must begin with me, because I am the teller of the tale. Phoebe was right. She and I were orphans of the storm. The ‘storm’ was what happened to women, and girls, who were mothers too soon, or not in the approved manner.”

“They were not married.”

“Exactly. They were mothers, or would be, but they were not married. Enter the fairy godmother.”

“She helped Cinderella go to the ball.”

“This fairy godmother helped Cinderella after the ball was over.”

I stared at Irene, trying to appear as if I understood. “How—?”

“There were prince’s wives who desperately wanted babies.”

“Like poor Queen Clotilde.”

“Like poor Queen Clotilde, but these wives couldn’t have babies.”

“That’s possible?”

“Sometimes. Yet other women have babies they don’t want.”

I nodded. “There were cases even in our village, but no one talked about them. Openly.”

Irene shrugged. “So. Between the married women who want babies, and the unmarried women who are having unwanted babies . . . who stands?”

“The fairy godmother.”

Irene nodded. “She makes unwanted babies into wanted ones.”

“Unwanted? Who could not want such a marvelous thing as a baby?”

“My mother, for one,” Irene said, unflinching.

I should have flinched to be forced to say such a thing. My mother died having me. Surely she had wanted me. Or would she have, had she known the price? Of course not. No. No rational person would give up her life for a baby. Except a mother. I was more confused than ever, and Irene saw it.

“There is so much pain and confusion about this whole matter, having babies, or not, that it’s impossible to judge. Whatever the case, Phoebe and myself were . . . found other positions.”

“You make being an infant sound like being a servant.”

“And what is even the most wanted, beloved infant but a servant of other people’s needs and wants and confusions? Babies can’t control who they’re born to, or what those they’re born to decide to do with them.”

“I don’t want to hear this.” I clapped my hands over my ears, hard.

Irene tugged to pull those hands free. I heard her voice as if through earmuffs.

Yes, you do, Nell. Listen to me. I have to accept myself as the result of my history.

“So who was the woman in black? She wasn’t a fairy godmother?”

“Maybe she was, in her own eyes. Maybe she saw that Phoebe and I were . . . placed somewhere where we could forge our own futures, for we certainly had none before.”

“She cared for you?”

“As our mothers could not.”

“Who was she?”

“I don’t know, but I must know. I must follow her trail as far as it leads, for as long as it takes. We may pass a long time on these shores, more than you expected or I would wish. Do you need to go back home?”

“Back home? You still feel only a visitor here?”

“Yes.”

“As I am.”

“Yes.”

“You will go back home no matter what you find here?”

Irene sighed and nodded her head at one and the same time. “How can I not? Godfrey is there.”

I swallowed hard and said what I thought. “And Quentin.”

Irene held her hand out to me. It was a pact.

I took it, both of us charged at that moment to follow her past West to its American wellsprings, and yet both of us turning our faces away from the East and our hearts’ desires.

“If only I had known you, Nell,” Irene said, “when I was a child.”

If only I had known you, I thought, when I was a governess
.

30.

Perfidy in New Jersey

Nellie Bly, although neither highly educated, cultured nor
accomplished, is a woman of intellectual power, high aims, and
a pure and unblemished career
.

—SKETCH IN
THE EPOCH
MAGAZINE, 1899

We returned to the hunt the next day, and in a most annoying way.

Although I was relieved there were no more visits to the bizarre souls who had performed on the vaudeville stages with the infant Irene, I cannot say that I welcomed an interlude among the record-keepers.

For a full two days Irene and I pored over the birth records of New Jersey and New York City in the years 1857 through 1859, and I never want to see another American birth certificate penned in spidery Copperplate in my life.

Finally a gray-haired clerk holding on her aquiline nose with a pince-nez and wearing a tucked shirtwaist-front as starched as her manner took pity on us.

“You are searching for a child christened Irene Adler,” she asked, or perhaps, told us.

“Yes,” Irene agreed warily. She had kept the object of our search very quiet.

“I couldn’t help notice the years of the records you were searching. You are not the first to request such records, and only recently.”

“Not the first? What a . . . coincidence. Perhaps our efforts are redundant,” Irene smiled wryly. “Oh, dear, and we have come all the way from New York City, and my companion from Paris, in fact.”

For once Irene’s prevarications in the service of worming information out of some helpless clerk were not prevarications, but they produced results.

“Paris?” The lady regarded me dubiously. Apparently I did not look Parisian. “I fear that your search may indeed be redundant. A gentleman asked me to produce these very records only days ago.”

“A gentleman?” Irene repeated still wary.

“Indeed.”

“And how would I recognize this gentleman?” Irene asked in the deceptively serene tone that always put my nerves on edge.

“Very well dressed. Top hat, striped trousers, cutaway coat . . . no lounge suit for him, like the mashers wear!”

“What a relief,” I put in faintly.

The lady clerk gave me a bracing nod. “Exactly! I won’t have mashers at my counter. Anyway, the gentleman asked for the very same years and locations. I couldn’t help but be struck by the coincidence. That and the accent.”

“Accent?” Irene inquired.

The woman nodded at me as if identifying a thief. “Just like hers. Foreign.”

Irene turned to regard me with great interest. “ ‘Foreign,’ indeed. English, then?”

“I didn’t ask.” The woman’s tone implied that neither should Irene. “The gentleman was obviously unmarried and I didn’t wish to give him the wrong impression.”

I considered that she had little worry on that score, but then neither did I, and I was decades younger.

“How . . . obviously unmarried?” Irene asked carefully.

“Well, he wore no ring, only a watch on a chain with some gold frippery dangling from it, the only ostentatious trinket on his person, I might add, which was how I knew that he was English. Besides the accent. Like hers.”

Again Irene turned to regard me as if I were a curiosity she had never noticed before.

“Gold frippery?” she repeated. “He must be from California, then.”

“Not that kind of gold. Nothing so crude as nuggets.” The lady clerk snorted delicately through the thin gold nose-pieces of her pince-nez. “Foreign coins, perhaps. I didn’t notice, not liking to stare at a gentleman’s midsection.”

I could sympathize with her reluctance.

“Perhaps an English sovereign,” Irene said.

“Or a French sou,” I added primly, more for Irene’s benefit than the clerk’s.

“I don’t know what kind of coin! Or even that it was a coin. I only know that the gentleman was searching the same records you ladies have requested. Do you know him?”

“No!” I burst out.

“No,” Irene said with a tiny, very French shrug. “Perhaps he knows us.”