Femme Fatale (41 page)

“Well.” She exhaled a bit of smugness with her cigarette smoke. “He did in one respect. I can read lips, did you know? A most handy facility for an actress or singer who must not miss an entrance cue. Sometimes orchestras will try to drown out the superior instrument, the singers.”

“You understood what he whispered to me! And never said anything from that day to this?”

“I never had reason to correct your assertions before. Usually you cut truth as fine as a mouse hair.”

“I’d forgotten about the pig thief,” I said, “even if you had not. Irene, what will you do, anyway, if you find Pink and Mr. Holmes dining together? There is no law against such a thing.”

“There is an unwritten law, Nell, that someone who masquerades
as a friend, or at least an ally, should refrain from conducting secret business behind one’s back.”

“Granted,” I said, “but I have never mistaken Elizabeth Cochrane, or Nellie Bly, or Pink, for a friend, or even an ally.”

“Is it because of Quentin?” she asked quietly. Carefully. Her mad dashing urgency of the past hour was suddenly becalmed.

I didn’t bother to deny her underlying assumption. “No. I mistrusted her almost as soon as we met her in Paris. Everything about her was so
convenient
. I found that implausible.”

“Brava, Nell. Your instincts exceeded mine on that score. I can see, from her newshound viewpoint, that our matters and necessities cheated her of the prize she seeks as others covet gold: the glister of exposure and renown. She has not considered that finding my origins might distress me beyond words. She sees me as impervious and my personal history is like a treasure quest to her. And I suppose there is some revenge in it, revenge for my allowing her to trail along on our Ripper hunt, then preventing her from revealing the unthinkable answer to the world.”

“Sherlock Holmes was as adamant about that as you, perhaps even more so.”

“Yet she enlists him to delve into my past like a miner digging for gold in the West. Why would he bother? Why would he even come to America at the beck and call of a sensation-seeking reporter like herself? Unless he is . . . enamored of her!” Irene shook her head into a veil of her own created smoke. “Impossible! I have never known a man more immune to women.”

I remained silent, bearing the heavy knowledge that her assessment was true . . . except possibly in her own case. I had seen the written evidence of it, and could not forget it. “To Sherlock Holmes, she was always ‘
the
’ woman.”

Sometimes my ever-so-astute friend was infuriatingly blind.

With a lurch that nearly tossed us over the half-doors that enclosed us in the hansom, our driver stopped and thrust a grimy face through the trapdoor above us. “Two dollars, ma’am, and
my greetings to Boss Tweed if you get to hell before me, as I’m sure you will at the rate you travel.”

She passed him three coins, I saw, and smiled tersely.

We stepped out into an electric-lit fairyland on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 26th Street. The four-story restaurant occupied the corner location and featured an excessive number of striped awnings on the first three-stories of frontage.

Irene’s sudden and relentless rush had ended. “We are just opposite the lower end of Union Square, Nell, where I performed so often as a child. This I recall. Why not other things?”

“Performing was like doing lessons for you. This was . . . a holiday.”

“I remember standing here—I must have been . . . what, twenty?—when Edison lit up Broadway with arc lights on twenty-foot-high cast-iron posts from here to Madison Square to demonstrate the power and future of his electric lights. These very posts remain, but the lights have expanded like the stars. That spectacular event I remember as clearly as yesterday. It was astounding.”

The brilliantly lit corner was astounding even today. In my natural state (that is, alone). I should never dare approach so intimidating an establishment as Delmonico’s, much less pass the handsome decorative iron railings that created a barricade around the building within which summer dinners ate al fresco.

Yet Irene’s bracing presence was always an “open sesame.” Her stage experience allowed her to seem at home in any environment, no matter how new or strange or even supercilious.

She approached this exclusive place like an actress entering on a cue, in a persona that brooked no obstacles. Now, once again she called upon years of theatrical bluster to broach the most blueblooded restaurant in New York without a reservation, and without reservation.

A large man in formal dress awaited our bold-faced approach at the doors. (Irene was bold-faced, I was hoping to be invisible and remain so.)

“Madam?” he inquired. “May I help you?”

Irene gazed past him, going on tiptoe, craning her neck in the most refined, delicate manner I have ever seen so unladylike a gesture essayed.

“I fear you may not help me,” she said at last, turning a liquid eye and voice upon her unsuspecting prey. “For we are late, dreadfully late.”

Of course telling him from the first that he could do nothing immediately gave him a prideful stake in proving her wrong.

“It was a dreadful omnibus wreck on Broadway,” she went on. “Why will they drive in that breakneck fashion?”

“I can’t say, madam, but do you mean that you are late for a reservation?”

“Even worse,” Irene said, looking distraught enough to have lost a dear friend in the fictional omnibus collision. “We are late in meeting our friends, and the gentleman came all the way from England. I am
desolée
.”

Her resorting to the French word made her into the tragedienne Rachel for a moment. Really, had I been the girl’s governess I would have nipped these thespian tendencies firmly in the bud.

The maitre d’, however, was more easily impressed. “From England you say?”

“Yes, have you seen him?” She glanced hastily over her shoulder at me and lowered her voice. “There has been a long separation, and my dearest friend, well, this meeting is quite crucial.”

Here I almost overcame my natural reticence and shouted out my objections like a barrister before the criminal Crown Court at the Old Bailey. Irene, my dearest friend, was making me out to be a romantic interest of Sherlock Holmes! Had I not been anticipating the tart comeuppance she would shortly be giving him and our erstwhile associate Pink, I could never have held my tongue at being a party to such a travesty.

The maitre d’ honored me with an inquiring, yet not unsympathetic
glance. He appeared quite taken by my quiet dress and modest demeanor, for his gaze grew as kindly as a bachelor uncle’s: utterly mistaken but well-meaning.

“There are several British gentlemen dining here tonight,” he admitted.

“You see, Nell,” Irene tossed comfortingly over her shoulder, “I told you we should find Chauncey here and nowhere else in New York.” She smiled at the maitre d’. “Chauncey is a gentleman of the finest sensibilities and discernment. He is also somewhat over six feet tall and dark-haired.”

“A handsome fellow?”

This gave Irene pause. “Distinguished, rather. And I rather think he is with Miss Nellie Bly.”

“Oh, madam, why didn’t you say so! Of course, though I should not hesitate to call him handsome,” he said with a nauseating smirk in my direction.

I blushed deeply enough to merit our erstwhile friend Pink’s childhood nickname myself.

“They are meeting again after a separation,” Irene confided to the waiter with the beaming pride of a matchmaking maiden aunt.

That was, of course, completely true and conveyed the completely wrong impression. I have never known someone as adept at
not
lying as Irene, and yet as able at achieving the same results as lying.

“I believe I can assist,” the maitre d’ said. “Please follow me, ladies.”

Irene did, and thus I was forced to also.

The rooms before us shone with electric lights glancing off fine china and crystal and ladies’s jewels and men’s spectacles.

I felt distinctly underdressed, but then again I was the lost Chauncey’s country sweetheart and could be expected to be somewhat gauche, as the French so aptly say. I was in a sad state when I could only describe my situation with a French word.
Jejune, also came to me. Apparently the French had many words for awkward women and I had learned every one.

I have never dreaded a meeting as much as I did that one. Though I longed to see Pink disgraced in Irene’s and her own eyes, and possibly even Sherlock Holmes’s, I did not relish seeing Irene confront the one’s treachery and the other’s concealed admiration again.

Both struck me as dangerous, though I could not quite say why.

I saw Pink facing us at a table for four; her small beaded evening reticule lay at one empty place. Her head was tilted in that charming heliotrope velvet hat with the pink taffeta band as she gazed at the gentleman whose erect back faced us like a well-tailored wall.

How odious of Mr. Holmes to be paging through the documents of Irene’s obviously irregular birth! How mean and selfserving of Pink to unleash the London bloodhound on the trail of my American friend’s humble, even scandalous roots. My hands made fists inside my cotton gloves as we approached.

As bold-faced as Irene could be when she had to, I alone understood the sensitive soul of the creative artist beneath. I saw now the tiny child forced upon the stage, alone in life except for a freak show of kindly but eccentric fellow performers. However crude Pink’s own upbringing with her violent stepfather, she had at least had a mother and brothers and sisters. Irene had nothing. Except me, much later. Much too late.

“I’m afraid,” the maitre d’ paused to tell us when we were still out of earshot of the table’s occupants. Why should
he
be afraid? “I’m afraid that the party has already ordered dessert.” He paused to interrogate a passing waiter whose face was as black and shiny as patent leather. “Yes. They’ve ordered dessert already. Baked Alaska, a speciality of the house, for the gentleman, and tuttifrutti, a fresh new ice cream confection for the lady. Would you care to join them?”

“Oh, yes,” said Irene, beginning to pinch off the fingers of her finest white kid gloves with the prissy exactitude of a debutante. “I would definitely order two more tutti-fruttis for us. That will be all.”

He bowed at her dismissal and we were left alone to approach our conspiring betrayers.

Pink saw us first and looked up, shocked. Then she flushed the color of her taffeta ribbon.

“My dear Pink,” Irene said, “or should I say ‘Scarlet’? I understand that you are employing foreign spies in the New Jersey public records department. I can’t say that I’m shocked at your going behind my back. You are, after all, a conscienceless newspaper reporter who purports to be the conscience of the community while selling your acquaintances for the thrill of a headline, but I am shocked that you would attempt, and succeed, at recruiting this gentleman to your vile impertinences.”

Irene’s voice radiated righteous rage. I should not have liked to have been the object of her regard at that moment, but the gentleman at the table turned to face her despite the acid etching her ordinarily mellow voice.

For a moment, I felt pity even for Sherlock Holmes.

The man’s head turned with the slow social arrogance I had observed in him before. I saw his profile.

No. Not his profile. Not his profile.

Another’s
.

I tried to breath in, to draw in the reality my eyes could not deny, but I had no breath. I had stopped like a clock in need of urgent rewinding.

Sounds of clinking china and crystal and sterling silver kept easy enough time all around me. Voices murmured like waves, like the endless sick-making waves of the Atlantic Ocean. I was going to be sick, I was going to, going to . . .

Irene’s gloveless hand seized my wrist and her nails dug into
the bare flesh between glove and sleeve until the pain made my eyes swim in saltwater . . . my own tears.

“We will leave you two to your just desserts,” she said with as much loathing as I had ever heard her use onstage when a role demanded it.

She turned me with a clatter I took for the diners’ silverware all around us, chiming, chiming, but then realized it was only my own suddenly spun chatelaine, given to me by Godfrey, dear Godfrey, who was so distant and whom I so wished to be near me now.

I was being propelled back along our path through the gay and glittering crowd, past waltzing waiters with trays held over their heads like shields, past eyes that glanced up at us and vanished into our wake.

33.

Desserted

She proved to be a slender woman . . . clad in a dark blue cloth dress with a corsage bouquet of red roses, a somewhat stunning hat with a big gilt arrow on the side crowned a face of some regularity of feature and from under the hat to the rear projected that arrangement of women’s hair technically known as the “Psyche twist.”
—A “RATHER PRETTY” NELLIE BLY TESTIFYING BEFORE THE ASSEMBLY
JUDICIARY COMMITTEE,
THE ALBANY ARGUS
, 1889