Femme Fatale (46 page)

“She cannot be very infamous, for I have never heard of her. The name sounds French,” I added with a sniff, though my heart wasn’t in it. “That is a recommendation only for all that is trivial.”

After living so long near Paris, I fear my determination to dislike those of that nationality who had enjoyed such a long enmity with the English was becoming corrupted.

“Hardly trivial, Nell.” Irene began plodding down in the dark, clinging to the wall and whatever filth it might host. “I may have forgotten much of the middle years of my childhood, but I remember that Madame Restell was loathed as ‘the wickedest woman in New York.’ ”

“Wicked! One hardly hears that word any more. She must be a hideous old soul.”

“No more. She died horribly two or three years before I left New York for the Old World, by her own hand.”

By then we had reached the ground floor. The pale spill of electric lights finally allowed us to see our surroundings, and each other.

“Cobwebs!” I cried, batting at the stringy veiling that had attached itself to my hat like spidery ectoplasm.

Irene quickly brushed the threads away, using her undonned gloves as a sort of broom, but her face remained stony and distracted.

“Surely this wicked, dead woman cannot cause us hurt now,” I insisted. “I am not afraid of anyone dead.”

Her smile was tepid. “Then ghosts would not alarm you. Perhaps I can produce a figure that will. If Madame Restell is involved in whatever sad history has caused these vile current events, we have no time to waste in learning the worst. There is only one way to do that speedily, and that is to swallow our pride and call on Pink and all the resources that a newspaperwoman like Nellie Bly would have.”

“Go begging to Pink! After that night at Delmonico’s? Never!”

“Then I will handle it myself.”

Irene suited deed to word by pushing through the old wooden doors and tripping down the stairs to the street to hunt up a hansom.

Well, I needs must follow, wondering if I would more dread learning about the wicked Madame Restell or confronting the treacherous Pink again.

36.

The French Conjuction

Is it not but too well known that the families of the married
often increase beyond [what] the happiness of those who give
them birth would dictate? . . . Is it desirable, then, is it moral
for parents to increase their families, regardless of
consequences to themselves, of the well being of their offspring,
when a simple, easy, healthy, and certain remedy is within our
control? (Introduced by the celebrated midwife and female
physician, Mrs. Restell, the grandmother of the advertiser.)

—ADVERTISEMENT,
NEW YORK SUN
, 1839

Irene sent a message to Pink’s residence from the lobby of our hotel. Then we retired to our rooms to dampen and brush our abused clothing. We had packed hurriedly for a transatlantic voyage with one trunk apiece. Nothing we had brought with us was expendable.

Irene then lit and smoked a small cigar, pacing rapidly in long, carpet-swallowing strides, so as to spread the dreadful smoke even more democratically throughout the room.

I coughed diplomatically, then frantically, but she seemed deaf and blind to anything but her own dark and murky thoughts.

Finally she stopped and stubbed out the last of the cigar in a crystal tray she had imported from the bedroom dressing table.

“I suppose we must eat. The hotel dining room is respectable.”

I didn’t even bother to protest that it likely was not. I had to know more about this demonic woman whose very name struck terror into my usually too-brave companion.

So we adjourned to dinner, where the only smoke I had to contend with, at least while Irene was eating, was from the many gentlemen in the room puffing away on cigars the size of piccolos.

Several women were sprinkled among the tables, including a pair or two like us, who were without male escort. New York seemed a very fast city indeed.

“It was quite improper for Pink to dine alone with a man she hardly knew,” I observed when the main course was but a memory, for we were both ravenous for some reason.

“Not in New York, as social customs go here, but it was more than improper for her to meet secretly with Quentin behind our backs. I won’t trust her again soon.”

“Then why do we need her?”

“Because my own memories of Madame Restell are quite casual, and the newspaper files record every arrest, every trial, every mudslinging exchange of letters to the editor, every death, every jail term, and finally her demise. I must know what she was doing in eighteen fifty-eight and in the immediate years afterward, when the ‘lady in black’ visited my troupe of child performers.”

“This creature sounds wholly possessed of an utterly black heart,” I said, shocked by Irene’s recital of such melodrama staples as arrests, trials, jail terms, unnatural deaths and vituperative verbal duels in letters to the editor.

“There were even rumors, at the time of her suicide in the late seventies, that she had not really perished, but merely escaped the authorities to pursue her lurid career elsewhere.”

“If even you speak in such condemnatory terms, this woman was a monster!”

Irene paused to light a post-dinner cigarette. I glanced around to see, with shock, that she was not the only woman in the room wielding a costly cigarette holder, although Irene’s was the most exquisite of all, with its diamond-set golden serpent twining the mother-of-pearl length like a precious swirl of smoke.

She had ordered brandy, like a man. I watched every male eye pause on her figure, then register surprise and a certain uneasy envy.

She took no more note of them than she would have a dust mote.

“What was this creature?” I pressed. “A modern Medusa, whose very look could turn a man to stone? Some American femme fatale who drove men to distraction and destruction?”

“All monsters, particularly when they are women, are misunderstood. Do you wish me to confuse you, Nell? I could tell you she was a self-appointed physician, a benefactor whose name held a sacred and secret place in the hearts of many women, even as it publicly became the very emblem of brutality.”

“You do confuse me!”

“And then I would tell you that she was English, not French.”

“No!”

Irene smiled.

“Restell was a name she adopted because to some people, believe it or not, a French origin conveys a certain automatic respectability and cachet that few other nationalities can. If one is French, if one’s wares are French, if one’s training and methods are French, all civilized people suspect that they may be superior.”

“You did say that Sherlock Holmes claimed a French connection through Madame Worth, née Vernet. And he certainly acts superior enough for three men, even if they are English.”

“Like many on these shores, Madame Restell immigrated here. When I heard of her, she was so well established that all New York knew her trade. Some blessed her for it. Others condemned her.”

“She was not just another notorious mistress, then?”

“She was no mistress but a long-married woman, and a mother.”

“Then how could she have become so disgraced?”

Irene twirled the dark cigarette in its pale rococo holder between her fingers, watching a quarter inch of ash fall off and disintegrate into a dish apparently placed on the dining table for this very obnoxious act of smoking.

“I must wait, impatiently, until Pink arrives tomorrow with more solid facts about the woman than my memory.”

“You seem to remember more about her than you do about your own entire childhood.”

“That was because I had set aside the things of a child by then. I was training daily for the opera, auditioning for singing assignments and working for the Pinkertons. It’s only my girlhood that I see through a veil, darkly. And the papers were full of her, the entire city then was intensely aware of Madame Restell, and especially a young woman of my age and . . . condition.”

I was not sure to what “condition” Irene referred, only that I did not wish to inquire too deeply into it. I returned to the subject of our speculation.

I pulled the triangle of wafer impaled in the mound of my vanilla ice cream dessert and nibbled meditatively on it. This
was
my after-dinner “cigarette.” It was not Delmonico’s famed “baked Alaska,” but it was a divinely civil sort of occupation for a parson’s daughter.

This Madame Restell was a conundrum, a construction of opposites in the public mind. Yet she dallied with Irene and her young fellow and sister performers.

“She must have loved children,” I said. “Are you sure she wasn’t childless perhaps?”

“She had one daughter. And some thought she loved children to the point of sacrificing herself that they might live happy lives. And some thought that she hated children to the point of slaughtering them.”

“Slaughter!” My ice cream suddenly tasted like sawdust. “Innocents died?”

“Innocents always die, particularly the innocents in ourselves,” Irene remarked as grimly as I had ever heard her speak. Her eyes met mine, full of import. “Nell, thanks to your association with me, you have seen some of the worst excesses of the human mind and heart. I refer particularly to our last . . . crusade. I know that Parson Huxleigh would be most shocked by where I have led his only, orphan daughter.”

“He was a good man, even a holy man. But country life can be harsh and he saw humanity in all its frailty as well as its strength. He did, however, wish that I would never know as much as he.” I smiled ruefully. “I am finding that ignorance is not bliss, as the saying goes, but then neither is knowledge.”

“No.” She looked down at the white linen tablecloth, then up at me again. “I am always the instrument of your disillusionment, Nell. Believe me, I would wish it otherwise. But the world and its ugliness will intrude into every life these days. Madame Restell was a new kind of femme fatale, as you call her. She was a woman who aided other women in dealing with the mysteries, and miseries, of being female and human. Sometimes that involved interrupting the begetting of children.”

“Oh. This has to do with marriage?”

“Or not.”

Irene picked up her elegant holder and screwed another dark cigarette into it. Light and dark. The image resonated in my mind, as if my mind wished to concentrate on such abstractions instead of the concrete facts behind her words.

She gazed at me through a new veil of smoke, her eyes as old and regretful as the Sphinx’s in Egypt.

I realized that I again had no idea of how the world really worked, and that if I should have such an idea, I would not like it. At all.

Yet I knew a certain irritated prickling: that it was unfair that
Irene . . . and Pink . . . and Quentin . . . and possibly even Sherlock Holmes! . . . should know what I did not.

Irene waited for my response. I understood that she had trusted me with the truth, and there is no greater confidence than that.

“What did Madame Restell do that merited jail and trials and imprisonment and, perhaps, if I understand what you have
not
said, martyrdom?”

“She was an abortionist, Nell. She kept babies from coming into a world where no one welcomed their presence. To do so, she offered potions and even procedures that prevented this. She was the wickedest woman in New York, and the one most secretly blessed and publicly cursed. I myself do not know how I feel about her, save that if she was indeed present in my early childhood scenery, the implications are almost more than I can bear, and, as you know, I can bear a good deal.”

Children
, I wondered.
Can you bear children? Were you a client of Madame Restell, a beneficiary? Or a victim?

I understood what she meant by something, some fact, some possibility being almost more than one could bear.