Femme Fatale (51 page)

The minx was even mimicking my use of an artist’s folio in Paris, and also my attire of choice: a checked coatdress that bespoke a woman of business and not of frivolity.

“Was she truly wicked?” Irene asked. “Or simply unlucky?”

“Oh, you have hit the motherlode in her,” Pink said. “I owe you a great deal of thanks. I was born too late to know of her long career and the chaos it caused. She is the Lucretia Borgia of America, if you ask me. And quite businesslike about it. Talk about enterprise! I can’t quite figure her out.”

“Perhaps,” Irene suggested, “she believed in what she was doing. Allan Pinkerton, for instance, was a religious dissenter in Scotland before he immigrated to the United States. He was an advanced-thinking man, which may be why he fought for a female force against the judgment of all his male employees. They won by outliving him, but I think his philosophy will win out in the end, should we all live to glimpse it.”

“If only I had been born twenty years earlier!” Pink exclaimed. “I could have gone West and recorded the Indian wars. Or . . . I don’t know! I am fascinated by this Madame Restell now that you’ve directed my attention to her. Why are you so interested? Why do you study her?”

“Marat, dead in his bathtub in the famous painting of the excesses of the French Revolution, is immortal. Madame Restell died in a like, liquid manner, save by her own hand, yet she is forgotten in her own country. Such figures always interest me. Perhaps I see an opera in them.”

“An opera! A great American opera! It has all the drama, but I doubt that an abortionist makes much of a tragic heroine.”

“You are right.” Irene lit another lucifer, then a fresh small cigar. “Obviously a faithless Spanish cigarette girl is a far better subject for tragedy and, thus, grand opera.”

Pink frowned, suspecting that she was being satirized, but not sure how.

I smiled to see her confusion. She had decided to engage Irene hand to hand and did not understand that even Sherlock Holmes could not be sure of the outcome of such a duel.

Well, he had his Watson, and Irene had me. I may not be an educated professional woman, like a doctor, but I was as loyal as any man and not one to be swayed by sensational personal histories. At least, not lately.

So Pink produced this Madame Restell’s history from her collection of newspaper clippings, and we pored over perhaps the most lurid documents I have ever seen.

I kept mostly still, although I made copious mental notes for my diaries. It was fortunate that I had apprenticed a barrister and had learned to carry a notepad in my head for later transcription.

Despite the sights and sins we had glimpsed in our springtime pursuit of Jack the Ripper, I was now seeing more than I wished of such misdeeds on the female front. I discovered that my own sex could be as cruel and bloody and merciless as any man.

“Ah, here Nell,” Irene said. “You know from seeing the Jack the Ripper reports how much newspapers revel in grisly details. This article makes plain how Madame Restell died. The weapon was an eight-inch ebony-handled carving knife, very sharp, from the kitchen.”

“Yet all those Ripper reports emphasized the brute strength it took cut another’s throat. It would require both mental and physical power to abuse one’s own.”

“It says right here. The coroner found two incisions on the right side. Obviously, she hesitated, but the second slash was made with such great force that it severed the right carotid artery and both jugular veins. She must have been half-mad with desperation.”

“Still . . . Someone could have come in and done it.”

“And a robber would not have brought his own knife or pistol? The house had a burglar alarm, so any intruder would have triggered ringing bells throughout the place, which thronged with servants. Besides, the coroner had to remove three diamond rings and her diamond earrings from the body, and—this will shake your frugal soul, Nell—the diamond studs on her nightgown, which lay on a chair beside the bathtub.”

“I am indeed shocked. That carries excess too far. And diamond studs would be very uncomfortable to roll over on during the night.”

But as we read on about the decades of public argument and denouncement of Madame Restell and her works, I began to see why Irene had said that Restell’s possible involvement as the
woman in black in Irene’s past opened untold possibilities for murder and revenge brutal enough to match the mutual wartime atrocities of the Red man and the White.

“She was quite the grande dame of New York society,” Pink summed up as well as any lawyer. Her cheeks were flushed with the excitement of discovery and she looked quite . . . well, enormously attractive and youthful. (Although she was only eight years younger than I and already, at five-and-twenty, on her way to being considered a spinster rather than a marriageable miss.) I could not help picturing each of us through Quentin Stanhope’s eyes, and there was no contest, save I had known him first.

My mental wanderings were interrupted by Irene’s sharp glance: first to my face, than to my belt.

She obviously meant me to take notes. With the greatest of stealth, I slipped the small silver notepad cover and matching automatic pencil, another wonder of the age, from their attachments to my chatelaine.

Simply handling these objects that had been a surprise gift from Godfrey gave me a sort of tranquility. I was no Papist, but I could understand the solace of rosary beads through the fingertips, thanks to this exquisite thing of use and beauty, which was the only gift that I had from any man, save my father’s steadfast support and spiritual guidance.

“I don’t know how you feel about the work of such women as Madame Restell,” Pink was saying, looking from Irene to me and back to Irene.

She clearly did not expect us to have the same opinion as each other, or that she held.

Silence greeted this gauntlet she had hurled down, aggravating the already tender bonds of our relationship.

Irene answered. “How did Madame Restell regard her role in society, in keeping its secrets?”

Pink rustled her papers. “I don’t know. I only know how she was regarded: as either sinner or saint, and at times she looked a
good bit like both.” Then she eyed us. “By being what I am, a ‘stunt’ reporter, I have looked in the face certain realities of life from which most people avert their gaze. I have seen the factory and sweatshop girls with their one day off a week fall prey to the shallowest mashers and pay the price with disease and pregnancy and sometimes even death.”

I winced at her plain speech. Her quick blue-gray gaze fastened on me.

“You see yourself as a governess still, Nell, tending to sheltered green girls from good families. Yet even they, and especially they, and their frantic parents, were clients of Madame Restell in the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies of New York City life.

“I think back on my own family,” she went on. “I think back on the judge’s prodigious progeny—fourteen living children by two wives—and how custom left a mother dead before her children grew up and made second wives and second sets of siblings more common than not. My mother and her children were quite disinherited at his death, and you know the shameful consequences of our helplessness.

“The mere act of birth, once, killed your mother, Nell, and left you without brothers or sisters and ultimately an orphan.”

“ ‘Lonely orphan girl,’ ” Irene quoted the signature to Pink’s first and pivotal letter to the editor that had begun her journalistic career. “That is how you represented yourself, yet you still had mother and siblings.”

“I had mother, yes, and siblings, but they were all children still, and someone had to take care of them. Me. I still do. Then, I was as good as alone. As Nell was. As you were, apparently.”

Irene nodded, acknowledging Nellie Bly’s greatest feat: surviving not only for herself, but for others.

Even I could not dislike her at that moment, despite Quentin and despite her ability to sacrifice anyone to her need to reveal what the world was really like. I wondered how many people truly wanted to know that? And how many people who lapped up other
people’s scandals and pains understood that they were behaving more as hyenas than humans?

There was something admirable in telling the truth at any cost, and something horrible as well.

“So,” Irene asked, “was Madame Restell more sinner or saint?”

“She was arrested four times,” Pink reported. “She served three prison terms. She killed herself with a butcher knife rather than face a fourth. Yet for decades she rode in her coach and four daily along Broadway, wearing silks and diamonds, flaunting her wealth.”

“Four?” I asked. “Four horses?” I remembered someone at the theater saying the Woman in Black had a coach with “four white horses.”

“Two bays, one chestnut, and a gray,” Pink answered, consulting her papers. “She was most precise about that when one newspaper reported the horses’s coloration inaccurately. Imagine splitting hairs on the color of a horse hide, yet finding no harm in seeing that babies were not born.”

“There always,” Irene said, “have been certain women, in the woods surrounding villages and in the alleyways of cities, who know all manner of ways, real or fraudulent, supposed to end a scandalizing pregnancy, and all pregnancies are potentially scandalous.”

“Not to married women,” I put in.

Irene regarded me. “Even to married women. Husbands may be gone for more than nine months, or may be ill, and still the wives wax pregnant. There is nothing more telltale than a pregnancy. No wonder women are so desperate to conceal them one way or another.”

“For all the huge numbers of the men who are arrested for bastardy in New York City,” Pink added, “the testimony falls upon the girl or woman involved, and they are easily labeled liars. That is why I never will marry. The men have all the advantages.”

I found this news most . . . interesting. I had always considered
never marrying a humiliating burden I must suffer in silence. I had not thought that it could be deemed an advantage.

Irene resumed our discussion by taking up the reins, whether they lay over bay, chestnut, or gray backs.

“So Madame Restell was both wealthy and notorious, and quite bald-faced about her profession.”

“Bald-faced? She advertised.” Pink flourished a fan of yellowed newsprint. “I found more advertisements than actual news stories. The fact is that Madame Restell, and her husband, both misrepresented themselves as physicians, yet they seemed honestly committed to the task of advising women on the ways they might circumvent disease, pregnancy, and delivery, if the child was already conceived.”

“But why would such a woman,” I asked, “spend time among the variety performers at—pardon me, Irene—second-rate theatrical venues?”

“I imagine,” Pink said, “that many of her clients came from that class of women.” Before Irene could protest, she continued. “And the fact is that she seemed to have had a kind heart. She charged her clients according to their ability to pay, and sometimes asked nothing at all. In some cases she provided a place to stay for women whose pregnancies were too advanced to end.”

“How could she know that?” I asked. “And what of the law?”

“The law often looks the other way when the wealthy are involved.” Irene answered for Pink and her mound of news clippings. “What was the legal status of her business?”

Pink pursed her lips as she thought before she answered. “Difficult to say, otherwise she and her competitors would not have dared advertise so obviously. From what I read, and there are hundreds of items, abortion was not illegal if it was done before the baby ‘quickened.’ ”

“When exactly is that?” I asked. “I have heard of the ‘quick and the dead’ in prayers, but what does this term mean to a woman bearing a baby?”

Irene shrugged. “Perhaps when the child first stirs in the womb. I hear that they kick sometimes.’

“Kick!” I was amazed; no, horrified. “I knew childbirth was dreadfully painful, but I had no idea the child would try to kick its way . . . er, out.”

“It shifts in the womb sometimes,” Irene said, looking about as enamored of this discussion as I was. “You come from a large family, Pink. What did your mother experience?”

“More than I care to say. The fact is that the term ‘quickened’ was as little understood then as now, which may be why the law is much more strict today. When Madame Restell slit her own throat in eighteen seventy-eight it was the end of an era.” She stared down wistfully at the pile of papers in her lap. “If I’d been there, I’d have known the answers to all your questions.”

I was growing impatient, and perhaps uneasy at this discussion. Such matters were best left unsaid. “Whatever the hairs that could be split over her ministrations, why was she visiting these theatrical folk?”

“Such people are presumed to be loose livers,” Pink said. “Perhaps she was seeking clients.”

“It sounded more like a social call,” I protested.

“Well—” Pink eyed Irene rather as a common garden snake would regard the formidable cobra-slayer, Messalina the mongoose. “Other charges than providing contraception and abortion were brought against Madame Restell, not as often as the first, but often enough.”

“Other charges?” I asked, not sure I’d like the answer.

“Oh, some of the women might have died from the treatment. Madame Restell and her husband were accused of chopping their bodies into pieces and smuggling them out of her building in the dark of night, along with the bodies of aborted babies.”

I put my hand to my chest to keep my gorge from rising. “This is like some horrid gruesome fairy tale.”

“And likely as true,” Irene put in. “What other horrors did this lady stand accused of? I’m sure ‘the wickedest woman in New York’ was capable of more atrocities.”

Irene’s sardonic question helped quiet my imagination.

“Some women were purportedly too far gone to abort, so Madame Restell forced them to stay with her until the birth, then took their babies from them.”

“Her answer?” Irene asked.

“In one case, she said the young woman’s father had insisted she find a home for the infant, and she did.”