Femme Fatale (50 page)

“There is no me left. I have always done what was necessary.”

“This is necessary.”

He kissed me again.

Someone knocked harshly on our heads, like a headache one notices has always been there, but only now has become unbearable.

The knock was
over
our heads. The hansom had stopped. We were drawn up in front of the Astor House.

“Wake up in there,” the driver bellowed. “Rise and shine. We’re here.”

I blushed in the dark as Quentin hurriedly thrust far too many coins through the open trapdoor.

He reclaimed his jacket and picked up my bag.

I emerged, blinking in the bright electric glare outside the hotel and sure that every moment in the hansom cab showed upon my face.

The lobby was deserted but blazed with light. My eyes watered from the shock, and Quentin escorted me into the elevator and to the door to our rooms before my eyes had adjusted enough to focus on him. I was afraid to see him in the light.

Just outside the room, he paused, took my elbow.

“Nell.”

He said no more. I stared into his face, his amazing face simply for the fact of being his. We knew each other with a vision beyond seeing now, but it didn’t mean anything was settled. Certainly I had never been so unsettled in my life.

I tried to smile, but I heard the door to our suite cracking open and turned in a rush to make my face ready for Irene.

I sensed Quentin standing behind me with every scintilla of my being.

“A late evening,” Irene observed with the smile of a fond governess welcoming her charges home. “I’m glad you two have had a chance to sample the local landmarks. Nell, come in, you must be exhausted.”

Quentin handed my bag to Irene and bid us a civil good night.

Something soft drifted over my hands just as he left. The scarf.

I walked from the dim light of the hall into our rooms and under Irene’s eagle eye.

My hair was windblown and half-down, my hat and parasol were in the Salt Water Taffy pavilion bag, a souvenir scarf of the Elephant Hotel was wound around my wrist and my heart, and I was shivering from the sudden chill of night now that Quentin’s coat was no longer over my shoulders.

“My dear,” cried Irene as she saw me plainly in the lamplight, “it’s almost one in the morning. You have had a long day. Fun in too large a dose can be as wearing as not having any at all.”

She drew me farther into our rooms and lifted the heavy bag to take it into my bedroom. Then she studied me.

“Your face is very . . . pink” she said.

I ignored the loathsome word. “The sun was very bright.”

“You had a hat.”

“The sea wind was very strong.”

“You looked very tired.”

“I am. There is nothing to do on Coney Island but walk and dine and see fireworks.”

“But was it fun?”

“That is not exactly the word I would use for it.”

“So—?”

I remembered what Quentin had said about her shadow. Irene was the least oppressive person I knew. She deserved an honest answer.

“It was crowded, noisy, full of common people and entertainments, and extremely exhilarating.”

“Exhilarating.”

“Very. And now I must go to bed before I fall asleep standing up, like a horse.”

“Or like an elephant,” she added merrily.

“Elephant?”

“Like the one on that souvenir scarf you’re clutching. It’s nice that you have a remembrance of your outing.”

“Yes,” I said, gathering my bag back into my own custody. “Good night. Oh. Irene!”

I turned back to face her, in obvious distress.

In an instant she looked terribly worried and even guilty. “What is it, Nell? What . . . happened?”

“Oh, Irene! We bought you a cigar as a souvenir, but I’m afraid it’s been left in Quentin’s coat!”

Relief flooded her usually unreadable features. “Then we will just have to see him again and get it,” she said sweetly.

I smiled just as sweetly as I went into my room and closed the door.

38.

Babes in the Woods

About Ann Lohman’s origins only a few sketchy facts are known, for she herself in later years had little reason to dwell on her beginnings, while her notoriety fostered legends as dubious as they were inconsistent
.

—
THE WICKEDEST WOMAN IN NEW YORK
, CLIFFORD BROWDER

We spent the morning at the city library, pursuing Madame Restell through sere yellowed pages in which she always figured as a villain, except for her own defensive letters.

I studied a sketch of the woman who had been born plain Ann Trow in Painswick, England, of all places!

She seemed a stout and socially solid matronly type, no femme fatale in the French sense. But the phrase indicted a “deadly woman,” not one who simply broke men’s hearts but one who “murdered babies.”

“I have never heard this word ‘abortion,’ before,” I told Irene.

“Did a woman in your father’s parish in Shropshire never lose a baby before its birth?”

“Yes. Birth is a perilous occupation. Babies, and mothers like
my own, may die at the end of birth, babies before birth, at birth, and even three or four birthdays into their own lives.”

“You describe natural hazards. Madame Restell had the means, or claimed to have the means, to produce such results by unnatural means, by the aid of certain herbs, or barriers, or chemicals, or even by painful operations that disrupted the process of growing a baby.”

“Why is it, Irene, that when I join you in the effort of solving some difficult criminal problem I must always learn more of the world than I am ready for?”

“Because there is so little of the real world that anyone is ready for,” she answered wryly. “As these newspaper stories point out, the law has seldom meddled with the begetting of babies before the point of ‘quickening.’ That is the moment that the unborn babe is presumed to be capable of living and breathing on its own, when it becomes a ‘person.’ ”

“When it is delivered into the world, and commences to breathe,” I said.

“Yes. And perhaps no. No one knows when God decides such things, although many have decided they can name the exact instant. And then the law comes into it, and self-certain moral crusaders like Anthony Comstock, who are sure they know better than most what God decided when. It is clear from these articles that Comstock entrapped Madame Restell into yet another trial and possible imprisonment. In her later years, perhaps exhausted by the fight, she chose to direct her own exit from the public stage, and, as the newspapers reported, slit her throat from ear to ear with a butcher knife in the bath rather than go to prison again.”

“How ghastly! A butcher knife! I can’t imagine anyone managing such a brutal self-assault, much less a woman.”

“From all accounts that I read at the time, and my memory may be faulty on the details, she had suddenly realized the likelihood of her conviction and at the age of sixty-seven, could no
longer face incarceration in the Tombs. She had testified in court that she had not performed abortions in twelve years, but that made no difference, and few would have believed her. I agree, Nell, that the manner of death was shocking, so much so that some people believed a patient’s body had been found in the tub and that she had escaped to Canada or Europe, or that wealthy clients had murdered her, fearful of being exposed at her trial. Some newspapers even had kind words for her in their obituaries, but most rejoiced in her death.”

I found the entire subject very troubling. “In Shropshire, there were said to be wise women in remote places who could help a lovelorn village girl win a swain or deal with other mysterious problems. Were they these . . . abortionists?”

“Probably, when they weren’t frauds. Such needs are as old as time, Nell, and such methods. Some work. Some work only to part the petitioner from her money. If you let your eye stray to these newspaper columns reporting arrests you would see a great many men accused of bastardy.”

“That is so unfair! Godfrey cannot help that he was born of a mother who was not married, at least to his father.”

Irene smiled. “The police are not arresting the bastards themselves, Nell, they are arresting men who got unmarried women pregnant, thus producing bastards. Although you’re right. To be known as the product of an unmarried woman condemns the child as well as the mother.”

“Then Madame Restell—”

“Was a heroine to many of these unhappy, desperate women. It was said even when I lived here that though she waxed rich on every daughter or wife of a wealthy family she saved from discovery and disgrace, for poor women she charged far less, and earned their equally heartfelt praise.”

“So was she wicked or simply misunderstood?”

“Always the great question, Nell.”

“You will not tell me what to think?”

“I don’t know myself. A mother unwed is unable to hide, unable to shelter herself or her child from the greatest distress and condemnation. She is Sin Incarnate, walking, and her child is a pariah. What might anyone do to avoid such a fate?”

I couldn’t answer. My father’s public preaching had never addressed such scandalous subjects, and his private opinions on matters I had never even suspected existed were unimaginable to me.

I could only know for sure that neither Irene nor Godfrey deserved to be condemned for their mothers’ actions, or their fathers’. It struck me that the one undeniable fact was that innocent babes paid the price in all these matters.

And I desperately did not want the “innocent babes” I knew as very dear adult human beings and my friends to be exposed for the sins of their parents.

“Must we invite Pink into this matter?” I asked.

“We must,” Irene said grimly, “for she holds the keys to the past: access to the newspaper morgues, and it’s there that these present murders originate. I would stake my good name on it.”

I heard the sarcasm in her voice, and shriveled at her self-disdain. Irene had a good name because of every action she had taken, every talent she had cultivated. Was it to all come down to the conditions of her birth? In England, or France, yes. In America? I hoped not. I so devoutly hoped not.

39.

French Medicine

LADIES IN TROUBLE.
Experienced physician offers certain relief with tried-and
-true French medicine. Not injurious to the health.
Nurses on hand at all times
.

—ADVERTISEMENT, 1851

“Madame Restell,” Pink mused later that afternoon, ostentatiously opening the artist’s portfolio on her knees once again to reveal piles of papers. She seemed quite smug about being invited back into the bosom of our investigation after the contretemps at Delmonico’s.