Femme Fatale (49 page)

“If you have any reservations, Nell—” he was saying.

And that settled it. For one day I would be a woman without any reservations, as Irene had been at Delmonico’s when she had bullied her way in and we had found Pink and Quentin together.

Somehow I must be as brave as Irene, as Pink.

I gazed at the great circle in the sky. Once on, I could not get off until let off. I would have no control over anything. I would be a prisoner, only this time of my own choosing.

I nodded, and Quentin bought the tickets.

From that moment regrets nagged me like demons.
Why had I agreed to this?
Look. Other people, other couples were waiting their turns to ride, laughing. It was nothing. Or it was fun. But I couldn’t get off! The seats were open to the air.
It was like a locked box!
Quentin would be with me.
I would still be alone!

And then we were handed into one of the swinging boxes with a kind of bar across our laps. I pushed my reticule strings up to the crook of my elbow and braced my parasol between the bottom of the car and my hip.

Our car jerked upward, then stopped, then repeated the process until all the cars were full. We had paused, swinging pleasantly at the top of the wheel. The whole island lay visible beneath us again and I actually was coming to relish this bird’s-eye view, this sense of distance and knowledge of the true proportion of things, of the world and the people in it.

Then, like the train, the wheel plunged over the edge of the world and I truly feared I would fly off it, forever, either to smash against the earth below or vanish into the sky above.

I screamed, only stopping when I saw the apparatus on the
ground level loom into focus . . . and vanish behind us . . . then we were again pointed at pure sky . . . and tumbling over the edge of the air again, as off an invisible cliff, my stomach still a half-turn behind me, my hat lifting from my head.

I clapped a hand to my hat, but thereby lost my grip on the bar and slid on the seat, almost slid out of the seat.

Quentin’s arm on my shoulders clamped me back down in the seat. I caught my breath and screamed. My hat flapped like a giant blue bat before my eyes, falling . . .

He caught it and thrust it into the bottom of the car, one foot stamping the brim edge to the floor.

Again the ground rushed up at us, and again we flew away. I screamed.

Quentin clasped me tighter than I believed possible.

Over the top
yet again
, and no stop in sight!

I screamed.

And Quentin held me tighter.

I screamed again and turned my face into the dark of his shoulder.

The world turned, and us with it. I whirled, around and around. I stopped screaming. Somewhere, sometime, I began laughing. And screaming.

Because nothing horrible happened. I didn’t leave my seat or the earth. The ride had a rhythm, and every time I came over the terrifying top and plunged down, I knew I was safe and I had to laugh even as I had to scream.

And finally, the pace slowed, and stopped, and we hung there swinging, then jerked down again, and swung some more.

I opened my eyes. It was still daylight, but the sun was riding low in the west. As we neared the ground I saw the shadow of our car thrown long and thin.

I had no screams left.

Quentin’s grip on me eased, and my breath sighed out instead of being gulped in.

I stood up, both Quentin and the ride operator extending hands to help me out. The man handed my parasol out after me.

I stood on the gritty ground and blinked. I had screamed and screamed, as I had never done so many times during my terrifying odyssey of last spring when I could have. Then, to scream would have been to surrender. Here, it had rinsed me free of all the stored fear of that awful time. I was . . . empty. Free. Free to begin again.

Quentin kept an arm around my shoulders as he guided me away from the Ferris wheel.

“Are you all right? Was the ride too much for you?” He sounded very worried.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry. It’s supposed to be fun.”

“Was it for you?”

He smiled. “Yes.”

“Even though I screamed like a banshee?”

“You’re supposed to scream like a banshee.”

“Well, if I must scream, I’d rather it be like something terrifying.”

He eyed me carefully. “You’re sure you’re all right?”

“Remarkably all right.”

“Then you’re able to stay for the band and the fireworks?”

“Band?”

“Sousa.”

“I’ve heard of him.”

“And I suppose you’ve heard of fireworks too?” he teased me.

“Yes.”

In the tepid, fading sunlight, we walked among the crowds. Quentin had forgotten to let go of me, but there were so many other . . . couples like us I hardly noticed.

We stopped once or twice at a shop. He bought a large canvas bag for “New Jersey Shore Salt Water Taffy,” and a box of candy
to go in it. “For Irene,” I said. As the sun went down, he put my parasol in the bag, and then he stopped and pulled the last pin from my hat and that went in the bag too.

We found a table in the twilight and sat just as John Philip Sousa’s baton struck up the band. As a chill came with the dark, I felt something warm close around me and turned my head. Quentin’s coat. I reached in the pockets for my abandoned gloves and donned them, then held the lapels closed and craned to see the stage.

Goodness! We couldn’t see the band from where we were, though we certainly heard it. That stirring music woke up the crowd, yet I remained in a lazy dreamland, sitting here on another continent, amid strangers and stranger sights, feeling all the evil memories of the old World slipping away.

After the concert, we joined the crowd again. Their chatter and laughter and the children’s happy screeches blended with the fading calls of the gulls vanishing into the night.

We managed one last walk, to the fireworks display. By then night had fallen and electric lights had turned the flat landscape into a fallen constellation of bright colors and lights.

Henry Pain’s fireworks display was centered at another elaborately lit building, but it spewed far more decorative constellations into the dark sky over Brooklyn. We saw famous battles reenacted in the sky above us, rockets bursting in air, Catherine wheels spinning into the heavens as I had been so afraid that I would earlier that day. Each new explosion of red, blue, green, yellow, and bright, blinding white seemed to split the dark open and spill out shattered pieces of the rainbow. Oddly enough, a rainbow image ended the display, slowly blinking away into a few sparks in the darkness.

In silence Quentin took my arm and led me back to the Iron Pier, where our steamship and its Catherine wheel of water was ablaze with light for the journey back to Manhattan.

We stood at the rail watching the tiny lights of stars and ships both moving across the dark sea and sky. I was half asleep on my feet, but Quentin held me up. It was as if the hard cold dark box of my almost-coffin had been replaced by a warm, living box of flesh that spoke to me softly sometimes, and stroked my hair.

There was a flutter of cold air and motion as we disembarked and exchanged shipboard for a horse-drawn cab. I remember hearing the horse snort, and feeling Quentin lift me into the cab’s dark interior.

In the hansom cab, Quentin leaned near to pull his coat closer around me.

“It’s not half as warm as you need,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulders. Though he was only clad in shirt sleeves I felt a band of warmth encircle me.

“Why is ‘fun’ so tiring?” I asked, only half serious.

“Because it’s so hard to be ourselves most of the time.”

I liked hearing the sound of his voice, distant yet close, as I was still half asleep from the sea air, so I said, “Why?”

“Because everything in society is designed to make something of us we don’t really want to be.”

That woke me up. “You?”

“Yes. Duty and family. I honor both, but in my own way.”

“You are lucky to have found your own way.”

“I paid dearly for every step of it, Nell. None of us is merely lucky.”

“You? Struggled?”

“Do you think I was meant for the life I have?”

“Do you dislike it?”

He shook his head. “Never.”

“A woman can’t—”

“She can.”

“Not me.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too late.”

“I don’t know. You know how you look just now?”

“An utter disgrace,” I realized suddenly, thinking about seeing Irene, struggling to sit up, putting my bare—again!—hands to my disordered hair, neither of which were at all respectable.

He pulled my hands down. “You look exactly as you did when I saw you, in my niece’s schoolroom with her friends, playing Blind Man’s Buff.”

“Quentin! I was a girl then. That was years ago. Besides, how can you see me at all inside this dark coach?”

“Yes, you were a girl then. That’s what I saw, although you were trying so hard to play at being a governess, being only a handful of years older than your charges. And certain emotions never age. And the streetlights play like fireworks over your features every now and then. And don’t you see me by flashes of light as well?”

“No. Yes. It depends.”

“You never saw me then, that day I stopped by the schoolroom to greet Allegra. You were blindfolded, reaching out for some schoolgirl to identify with the tips of your fingers. You were all laughing, all you beautiful, carefree girls. You can’t imagine what a sight that was for a man back from a bloody, vicious war. For a few moments, I didn’t even realize you were the governess. You were one of them.”

“Never! I was never a girl like that. I was not of their class, I was not carefree. I was not beautiful.”

“You were to me, that day, all three.”

I swallowed a tiny sob, for I would have loved to believe that fairy tale, and never knew how much until this impossible moment.

“Nell.” His hands found my face, pushed the hair back. “You found me that day, with your blind fingers. You touched and traced my face, and you didn’t stop, not even when your fingers found the moustache.”

“I . . . don’t really like mustaches. It was a game. I had to play it. And . . . I knew who you were.”

“Did you?”

“Of course I had seen you at the house before. From a distance.”

“Had you?”

“It was the game! I had to make sure.”

“And did you?”

“I did.”

“Perhaps I have to make sure too.”

I was too exhausted to be puzzled, but I almost was when I heard him delve in the bag with my parasol and hat. Surely they were not needed now in the dark and out of the wind!

He withdrew something. The souvenir scarf of the elephant hotel.

“Turnabout’s fair play,” he said softly.

“Quentin,” I objected, half understanding, half not.

He drew the silken scarf over my eyes, behind my head.

“
Quentin!
” I was back in the Paris panorama building and felt the cloth with the sickly sweet smell of chloroform cover my face, saw the endless darkness of captivity. I put my hands up to my face.

“
Shhh
. Trust me, Nell. It’s eighteen-eighty and we’re in the attic schoolroom on Berkley Square. Only all the girls are gone now, and it’s my turn.”

His hands pulled mine onto the rough sides of his face; his replaced mine on my overheated cheeks. The scarf pulled as it knotted behind my head, and then his fingertips were on my brow, light as butterfly wings, though I had never felt butterfly wings. I had never felt anything so soft.

“This is wrong,” I said.

His fingers froze.

“
You
should be blindfolded! It’s not a true turnabout.” He laughed soft relief at my nitpicking objection. “I know, but I have to make sure,” he said.

I was too confused to say anything further, and suddenly understood how he had felt, drawn into a game he was not a part of, too polite to object and then . . . captured by the mystery, the featherweight touch of alien fingers, down his brow, over his nose, cheeks, chin, lips.

I felt what he had felt that day and all fear fled. It seemed as if the sun shone on me again, and the peace of the seashore pulled at me like a tide. The terrors of my captivity completely slid away, into the future past. I was a girl again, caught in a game I didn’t understand, which was so very pleasant nevertheless.

“I’d seen you too.” he said. His voice broke into the bubble of sheer feeling around me.

“Where?”

“In the house. From a distance.”

“Berkley Square?”

“Where do you think we are now, Nell?”

“I don’t know.”

His fingers stroked my throat, but his thumbs remained at the corners of my mouth.

Then his mouth was there on my mouth, and the mustache I didn’t like. I could only draw in a deep, startled breath to my very core. He had kissed me before, gently and teasingly, but not like this, and I was that breathless girl on Berkley Square, who had forgotten herself and her place for a few impossibly free moments, as we kissed as we never could have then, as I never could have since then.

When it ended, and I was not sure how it had ended, I bowed my head and found my forehead tight against his slightly sandy chin.

At some moment I couldn’t recall he’d removed the scarf. I had to keep my eyes squeezed closed to keep myself in the dark.

“It cannot be,” I said.

He didn’t answer, and I realized that I could feel the beating of his heart, that we were in a tight embrace.

“You can’t! . . . Not me.”

“Why not?”

“Irene is brave and beautiful. I am timorous and plain.”

“You lie.” And he stopped me with a kiss as fierce as any I believe that woman has felt. “Nell, you must step out of Irene’s shadow. No one wants that more for you than she.”

“Nellie Bly—” I said, when I could catch my breath again.

“Is a fraud. You were there first.”

“I will not be easy, Quentin. I am like Sherlock Holmes in one respect. Irene said—”

“I don’t want to hear about other people. I want to hear about you.”