Femme Fatale (42 page)

“I’m going to be—” I muttered.

“No, you are not,” Irene insisted. “We are on solid land now, Nell, and you will not be sick. Granted, I don’t like the view, but we will not give
anyone
the satisfaction of either of us being sick. We will go back to the hotel and regroup.” “Regroup.” I laughed queasily. “We are hardly a group.”

So swiftly had Irene retraced our steps that we were out in the overlit evening air in no time. I suddenly felt a deep sigh escaping me and I could breathe again.

“You wanted to say something to Pink,” I pointed out, rather feebly.

“At this point it is best that I say nothing to anyone. Oh, Nell! Nell.” She stopped to face me, her eyes shining suspiciously. “I have miscalculated so abysmally! And the worst of it is I have dragged you into this . . . maelstrom with no idea of what we really faced. If my own accursed past had not been involved, I might have seen . . . I might have spared you. I would give anything to have spared you—”

At that moment, a man overtook us.

“Nell! Irene! Nell! I don’t understand. Why are you here?”

Irene rounded on Quentin Stanhope like a fishwife, but she said not a word. He stood looking back and forth from her gorgeous Medusa glare to my own evasive eyes with an air of utter confusion.

“You are right,” Irene said. “We were not supposed to be here.”

“If you won’t stay, at least let me escort you back to your hotel.”

“No. We wouldn’t want your baked Alaska to melt,” she said in tones as icy as the dessert’s name. I admit that even in my desperate straits I felt a wistful desire to know just what a “baked Alaska” was.

“I can’t let you leave like this. Let me at least find you a cab.”

“We found one to get here and we can find one to leave.”

“Please.” He was looking at me. I looked away. “I’m quite at sea. I had no idea you were here in America. You two. At least tell me where you’re staying.”

Irene considered. Her cheeks held round circles of rouge that were far too obvious to be painted there by anything but strong emotion. I had never seen her so furious, and that it was on my behalf almost made me dissolve into the tears I would rather die than release.

“You may call on
me
at the Astor House,” she said finally. “I may receive you.”

“Irene!” He cast another, mute appealing glance at me, but dared not say my name.

The intensity of his look made me turn away, and that in turn revived Irene’s anger. She grasped my forearm and drew me with her to the curbside. We walked along the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue, which thronged with fashionable, merrymaking pedestrians alongside a frothing river of vehicles and horses of every description.

“Is he—?” I asked at length.

“Gone back inside. A gentleman does not desert a lady at table.”

“Does not desert . . . dessert,” I added, hiccoughing and laughing and crying at once.

“Are you still going to be sick?”

“Possibly.”

“If I hail a cab will that make it worse?”

“Possibly.”

“What will make it better?”

“Nothing.”

“Then I might as well hail a cab.”

I could not object to that, so we were soon jolting back to our hotel, Irene’s forearm twined around mine as if she would never let go.

“I was just so surprised,” I finally said. “I thought—”

“So we both thought, but I should have known better. I am a stupid vain creature to think that Sherlock Holmes would cross a puddle in Cheapside to meddle in my puny affairs, much less the Atlantic Ocean.”

“I assumed the same, and I am not vain, though I have been known to be stupid, especially lately.”

“Oh, Nell, we are neither of us stupid, only angry at ourselves because we are so angry at others. I would smoke, but that would make you sicker.”

“Actually, the scent of sulphur is bracing. I rather like it.”

“Then I shall light lucifers until we get home.”

“How often a hotel has been our home. Perhaps we travel too much.”

A scratch sounded in the demidark of the hansom cab, and then the tiny flare of a flame and the sharp smell of the devil’s sulphur.

“You looked like a Fury back there,” I said.

“I felt like one. I don’t like to be surprised, and I don’t like you to be shocked, especially by other people. That is my job.”

“You do it well.”

“Thank you, Nell. A demanding audience drives a performer to her highest levels.”

“He calls her Pink.”

“So do many people. It means nothing.”

“Being in New York means something.”

“We are here and it means nothing yet.”

“Only because you have not figured out what it means, but you will.”

“Not at this rate. Nell, I am so sorry I did not anticipate this.”

I was silent for a while. “But I did, you know. Oh, not this particular instance, but the general . . . situation.”

To that she had no answer, this glibbest of women. We descended our cab, moved through the Astor House’s crowded reception rooms and took an elevator to our floor without me even noticing how crushingly close such conveyances were. We said little more that evening, being both exhausted and disappointed, perhaps for slightly different reasons.

It was barely nine o’clock the next morning when a bellman brought up a card. Quentin’s.

Irene tossed it on the nearest table and stalked to the window. I retrieved it. I didn’t know that Quentin had a card. I wondered what it would say. Very little. Q
UENTIN
S
TANHOPE
, it read, B
EL-GRAVE
S
QUARE
, L
ONDON
, E
NGLAND
.

“I doubt he still lives in London,” I noted.

“Nor do we.”

“Such an address is not on your card.”

“I am not a
spy
,” she hissed exactly like one of Sarah Bernhardt’s pet snakes. “A spy who turns on friends.”

I couldn’t defend him. It was not that I wouldn’t, even now, only I couldn’t think of a reason.

“Did you sleep, last night?” she asked.

“Some.”

She snorted, but I had no heart to correct her. “I was awake half the night myself, asking why he was here and what Pink’s true game is.”

“A sensational story, you said it yourself.”

She turned from the windows, the wine velvet draperies resembling a stage curtain behind her. “If so, I am not the sole subject of it. I am hardly well known enough that my foggy origins should raise a stir anywhere. Pink believes a murderer stalks my past. That must be her goal, unmasking the murderer. My past is incidental.”

“No one’s past is incidental to their present.”

Her smile was broad. “ ‘The past is prologue.’ Antonio. Act Two, Scene One.
The Tempest
. Quite brilliantly said, Nell, although Shakespeare anticipated you by a few hundred years. Why did Henry the Eighth kill so many wives?” she asked out of the blue.

“They were inconvenient to him. And some, he claimed, were unfaithful.”

“Inconvenient and unfaithful? And what is the incontrovertible proof of such behavior?”

I shrugged more casually than I felt. The incontrovertible proof was being caught in the unexpected company of the wrong person. “The evidence of one’s eyes?”

“Sometimes the evidence of one’s eyes is unreliable.” Irene came to take Quentin’s card from my unresisting fingers. “Let’s have the fellow up to explain himself. You can wait in the bedchamber.”

“I suppose I should. That way you would have free rein to question him and I could . . . eavesdrop.”

“Exactly.”

“Eavesdropping is rather unforgivable.”

“Not as unforgivable as secretly consorting.”

“Indeed.” I bustled away and carefully set the chamber door to remain ever so slightly ajar by stuffing a rolled-up stocking in it.

I had some time to wait, but finally a muffled knock sounded on our hall door. Muffled voices drifted across my threshold.

I pressed my ear to the opening.

“. . . insanely inappropriate to call now . . .”

“. . . utterly astounded,” Quentin was saying. “I had no idea you were in New York.”

“Why were you here yourself, then?” Irene was asking.

“Some remaining matters related to the Ripper case.”

“What matters?”

“I am not at liberty to say.”

“Why were you meeting with Pink?”

“She knows New York, and she invited me to do so.”

“And did you visit the New Jersey records departments at her behest?”

A long pause, during which I fought against an overwhelming urge to sneeze, as one always does when it is most crucial not to.

“Yes.”

“That is all the answer you have? There is no other reason why you would spend more than a week crossing an ocean merely to pry into my antecedents, or lack of them?”

“She said something about some present story of hers being related to your origins and that a foreigner wouldn’t attract comment, as he might have ancestors who had emigrated here and be interested in tracing them. It seemed harmless enough, spending a few hours assisting her. She
was
asked to remain mute about the murders of the century, after all.”

“And you felt no guilt about going behind my back?”

“I had no idea I was going behind your back, as you put it, because I had no idea you were on the scene yourself. Irene, she
said some crimes she was considering for a story seemed to involve persons who might have known you as a child. It struck me that I would be doing both of you a favor to perform this trifling task.”

“And why would you be so willing to do Miss Nellie Bly a favor?”

I held my breath.

“Because that was the price of her silence!” he burst out. “Did you think that you and Sherlock Holmes insisting on it would have much effect after she returned to New York? She buttonholed me before I left the castle and demanded that I contact her later. When I did, she called me here. If I would do as she wished, so she could procure this new and, she said, equally appalling story, she would remain silent on what had transpired in Transylvania.”

“Quentin, that is blackmail.”

“It is bargaining, Irene, and I am used to such secret arrangements. I never dreamed it had anything to do with you personally, believe me, or I would never have agreed to it. And even when I arrived here, she said you were purely ‘peripheral’ to the story.”

“Peripheral!” Irene did not like that.

He laughed at her deliberately exaggerated air of wounded vanity. “Of course you are never peripheral to anything you choose to involve yourself in. And I would never had been so reckless as to accommodate Pink had I known she was flying in the face of your personal wishes. She has apparently bent both of us to her damned sensation-mongering.”

I heard the scratch of a lucifer and smelled sulphur and smoke. The crisis was over. I tried frantically to think of a way to idly enter the scene. Alas, I am no actress, and could only remain frozen by the door.

“And . . . Nell?” he asked as if treading on crystal. “How did she take the voyage over? I believe this was her first oceangoing journey.”

I held my breath again.

“Splendidly,” Irene lied through her teeth. “Quite the sailor.”

“Is she—?”

“Tending to some domestic matters in the adjoining room. Now that I’m speaking to you again, Quentin, I’ll fetch her.”

By the time Irene finished her sentence she was sweeping my door open in a grand stage gesture, which unfortunately nearly knocked me over.

She shut the door behind her. “Gracious, Nell! You must be nimble on your feet when you eavesdrop. Are you all right?”

I rubbed my mashed nose. “I shall have to say I have a catarrh. Oh. Now he might assume that I have been weeping! What do you think? Is he truly in your good graces again?”

“I think he is not telling me the full story, but that is a given with the spy trade. I think he means us no harm, but he may be used to deal ill with us nonetheless. And I think that if you deign to show yourself and be your charming self, we shall have him wholeheartedly in our camp.”

“My last attempt to charm a gentleman to our camp was disastrous, as you recall.”

Irene smiled in memory of the full ironic implications of the incident to which I referred. “No, it was embarrassing to you, but quite advantageous to the larger rescue effort underway. If you can manage to flirt with a Gypsy who speaks no English, who does not speak at all, I daresay you can do wonders with Quentin, who is much more personable, not to mention accessible.”

“Flirt! With Quentin? I could not.”

“Why not? Pink can.”

“How odious of you to point that out, Irene! I do not need reminding how that minx does not hesitate to ingratiate herself with unsuspecting gentlemen.”

“Have you not heard the American expression, ‘to fight fire with fire?’ You have a perfect opportunity now, and, in all honesty, I think you have the upper hand over Pink here, if you will deign to use it.”

“I?”

“You.” With that she whirled to my rear and pushed me out the door into our parlor. Nor did she follow immediately after me. Quentin and I were, for the moment, alone in the room.

“Nell!” He had turned from the window to greet me.