Femme Fatale (57 page)

I supposed she was naked. I supposed a naked woman in a bath should have shocked us, unrelated man and women that we were.

Instead it awed us.

And then she stirred, this corpse.

A languid hand lifted from the other side of the tub. It bore a pistol.

She lifted the hand until we saw the scarlet threads running down the wrist toward her elbow, streaking low into the water, thin as embroidery silk, slow yet certain.

“Don’t move,” she said, breathed. “I didn’t expect company, but kept this ready for any servants who dared to defy my orders to leave.” She squinted at us, as if her vision were as clouded as bathwater. “Who are you? I have so many servants . . . I don’t know you all.” Her expression smoothed, going from wizened to demonic in an instant. “You! My endless nightmare. I have heard you screaming in my dreams. You haunt me more than Her even.”

She braced the pistol barrel on the curved edge of the bathtub.

It stared at us, that Cyclops eye of empty steel, waiting to wink death at one or more of us. She stared at Irene, saw only her, addressed only her.

“You don’t remember, do you?” Her languid eyes, and now the core of the pistol stared at Irene too.

“I do remember now,” Irene said softly. “I’ve only now learned that I was made to forget.”

“Oh, could I be made to forget! Then so much would not have happened. So many wouldn’t have needed to die. ‘You were made to forget.’ How convenient, Rena! For me, anyway.” Her focus blurred and the pistol barrel swayed on its impromptu support. “Do you remember how you advised me against it all, both me and Pet? ‘Don’t go out walking with gentlemen in slick suits.’ ‘Don’t believe they care for anything about you other than your compliance.’ ‘Don’t believe you are young and beautiful, and desired for yourself alone.’ ”

“I don’t remember saying any of that.”

“But you did! Every time we were the belles of the ball at our mother’s house. And do you know what was the most irritating thing? You were right.”

“Right in what way?”

“They were liars, those men. They turned our heads and turned us upside down and inside out, and suddenly we realized we were ruined. Our monthlies had deserted us, and so had the men who could not resist us, as we couldn’t resist them. Before we knew it, we were coming here, to this very house, not as belles of the ball but as fallen women. We ‘lost’ our babies here.”

“You mean they were aborted,” Irene said, wanting to make sure.

“How it hurt! Oh, God in heaven,
how it hurt
. That small dark room, the man with the tongs, the bit of wire.

“We came back, rinsed in the blood of the Lamb, born again, almost virgin again. We told you nothing, and yet, you knew. Do you remember what you told us? We were still two.”

I watched Irene ransack her newborn memory, the memory reclaimed through the maestro’s confession and my inept attempt at mesmerism.

“I had found a gentleman,” the bleeding woman prodded Irene with words as well as the aim of her pistol. “He offered me wealth, protection. But you said . . .”

“I said what you didn’t want to hear.” Irene nodded with the abrupt surety of woman who remembers her own deeds and her own past. “I told you his offers were hollow, that there was no honor or truth in them. He merely said what was necessary to seduce a young girl.”

“Even our mother urged me to the alliance. He was rich. What else was there to consider? Yet, despite all precautions, I was again with child. Children are always inconvenient, as Pet and I were for our mother, which is why she sent us to the only place unconcerned with pedigrees, the theater.”

Irene seemed to absorb this statement as bitter gall. Had her mother been such a heartless pragmatist as well?

I caught my breath at my next thought. Was their mother
her
mother also?

“So you were right.” Mina stirred in her shroud of clouded water, rallying her failing energy to strike at Irene with some bitterness. “He did not want children who could not be ‘heirs.’ I was told to rid myself of the problem, as I had done before.”

“Let us help you out of the bath while we talk,” Irene suggested. “The water must be lukewarm by now.”

Her attempt to disarm with kindness only caused Mina to wave the pistol across all of us.

“I had ‘lost’ one baby. Another would be like . . . killing twins. Like Pet and myself. Madame Restell was there, as always, sympathetic but needing money for her services. I had money. For a while. His. Madame suggested a solution. We would wait until my condition was too pronounced to conceal. Then I would go to her, and she would tell him the operation had been successful, but that I was weak and ill from the aftermath. I would be sent to a secret place to recover and ‘regain my figure.’ In fact, there I would have my child and there it would be taken from me to be
reared in some other place by other people. I was never to know where, and everything would be all right.”

I blushed to think of Sherlock Holmes overhearing such intimate female matters. I glanced to him—for surely the woman in the bath had never fully registered his presence, nor mine. Her eyes and her hatred were all for Irene. He was gone! As if he had never entered the room.

In one way I was deeply relieved. Such matters were never meant for men’s ears. In another, I felt abandoned, for the pistol still pointed at Irene, and the woman, although weak, was still completely mad.

“But the story has a happy ending,” Mina said, reviving. Her strength was tidal, ebbing and flowing; her hatred had only one current, deep and hard and eternal. “I left that man a few months later, and found another, even wealthier, and considerably more malleable. He worshiped the ground I walked on.” Her smile grew ironic. “He married me without a whimper, and wanted me to have a child.”

“Don’t tell me,” Irene said, with the certainty of a mind reader who has received an undeniable message. “You couldn’t have one.”

“He wanted me to have a child. My impeccably aristocratic in-laws wanted me to have a child. I wanted to have a child. He took me to Europe . . . Marienbad, Baden-Baden, every spa with every sort of mineral water. I drank it like wine, I bathed in it, my skin grew wrinkled in it and still . . . nothing.

“Finally, I thought of the lost little one. I went to Madame Restell. I begged her tell me where that one had gone. By then my husband was so desperate he would have accepted any child, told any story to justify the arrival of a toddler when an infant was expected.”

“But the baby was gone forever,” Irene guessed.

“As if it had never been . . . what so many clients of Madame Restell desired more than anything, was what I had come to regret more than anything.”

She lifted her left wrist from the cloudy bathwater, which had slowly grown pink. “Blood dissipates like a veil, doesn’t it? It won’t tell, it will merely trickle away into water.” Her free hand touched her throat. A mixture of blood and water trailed over her chest like a necklace of pale garnets. “I only slit my wrists, north and south. I didn’t slit my throat, east and west. I will fade slowly, and my finger will never leave the trigger. Should I shoot you?” she asked Irene dreamily. “You didn’t make the mistakes I did, you argued against them. That is so . . . infuriating. And Madame Restell, she refused to tell me where my child had gone. She said it would have been unethical, against the good of the child, who had a new family who wanted and welcomed it. As if its own mother would not, now that she had decided she could!

“She kept a book. I know she did. I tried to make her tell me where it was, but she didn’t. She had hidden it well.”

“In this house?” Irene asked.

“In this house. I convinced my first husband to buy this house after her death, everyone thought for the magnificence of it, but I wanted to be able to search it at my leisure. I have probed every corner. I have looked for eleven years. The old man has died, childless, and I have remarried and kept this house and I have looked.”

“How can you be sure that there was a book listing the children sent to new homes?”

“Because I found the one listing her abortion clients! Do you realize what a document like that is worth? Were one to need money? Which I never did, not again.

“I should kill you,” she added apropos of nothing in her most recent discourse.

“Why?” Irene asked.

“Because you escaped it all . . . the lovers’ betrayals, the humiliations, the pain, the loss, the wealthy husbands who had become only means, not ends. You never paid the price all the women who
went to Madame Restell did, that my sister and I did! You went abroad and sang opera. You are wed, you said.”

“Yes,” Irene said uneasily, unsure what word or thought might spur that trigger finger to press death into service again.

“To whom or what?”

“A barrister.”

“Only a barrister?”

“Better than a false king.”

“I knew I should kill you, but then I thought there might be crueler fates.”

“Why kill me? I only tried to offer you advice you now admit was good.”

“I should kill you for knowing better than I, for escaping what Winnie and I ran to like fools. For all that we did wrong and you did right.”

Such petty envy seemed strangely unreal in that room of nearing death . . . of double death, I realized, for this must be the very same bathtub in which Madame Restell had committed suicide.

“I hired the Pinkertons. Yes, isn’t that ironic? Even there you anticipated me. I know canny inquiries are being made, and some damned English detective has been treading disturbingly close to present truths. I know my revels now are ended. It is like giving birth,” she said, glancing at the water, “dying this way, except there is no pain. Only a slow ebbing of strength and will. One feels very light-headed. But this pistol is too heavy to forget, so keep your distance,” she chided Irene, her attention and strength rallying again.

“You’re probably in the lost book, you know. The one I couldn’t find. The one that recorded children taken from their mothers. If you could find it, you might find out who your mother was. Aren’t you curious?”

“Who my mother
was
?”

“Oh, she’s surely dead by now, don’t you think? It’s been more
than thirty years. Certainly she’s never tried to find
you
, as I hunted my child. My daughter. And if your mother wasn’t dead then, she surely is now.”

Irene took an involuntary step toward her. The pistol lifted and aimed, the vague eyes behind it now black burning holes in her parchment-white face.

“What have you done?” Irene asked.

“It was that newspaper girl, coming around, prying. She only wanted to know about
you
! About our life together when we were child performers, about who our relatives were. She seemed to think
you
were somebody, can you imagine that, and that the world would be interested in your antecedents? We had no antecedents but air, my mother and sister and I, and my one living known kin, my daughter, was missing forever. I had Madame Restell’s book. I knew who her clients were. Perhaps one of those was your mother, someone who had ended a first pregnancy, but had reconsidered and kept the results of a second one, yet still remained hidden. Those women of the stage, why did they raise you? Why did they never seem to question where you came from? They were mothers! Mothers who lost children one way or the other and never tried to reclaim them, as I did my daughter. So they adopted you.”

Irene had moved subtly during this speech, so minutely that even I had not noticed that she had placed herself between me and the woman in the bathtub. I realized that I saw only a bent bare elbow edged in blood, and Irene’s straight, cape-clad back.

I also realized that to move in any way, to draw the woman’s attention to either Irene or myself any more than it was focused at the moment, would be folly.

“You killed them,” Irene accused calmly, as if describing what brand of tea had been served.

“I? No. I don’t kill anything but myself, or you before I go.”

Silence. “Why?” Irene finally asked.

I wished I could see her face, for her voice was as emotionless as an eel.

Mina seemed to understand what question Irene wanted answered. “Maybe one of them had birthed my sister and myself. Maybe one of them had birthed
you
. I find that last notion the likeliest, the way those old biddies doted on
you
, always
you
. I decided that if my daughter could not have a mother, a mother who wanted her desperately and had searched so long and hard and fruitlessly for her, then it was deep injustice that you should find a mother after all these years. That Nellie Bly was bound and determined that she should do this very thing, for what reason I don’t know. So you’re half right.”

“You killed them. Sophie and Salamandra. Abyssinia, first, perhaps? Simply because of who they
might
be?”

“Not so simply. They were listed in Madame Restell’s book of clients.”

I tried to edge around Irene, but my clothing rustled. I heard the languid water stir and watched Irene’s back stiffen even more. I was doing her no favor, although what I’d do if I heard that pistol fire and saw Irene crumple, I didn’t know. It would not be anything sane.

That was the worst thing about the woman in the bathtub’s serene insanity. It goaded others into the same mania.

“They’d given up children, killed them in the womb, don’t you see? They didn’t deserve to live. You are shocked. Angry. You hate me. It’s too late for any of that. What’s done is done. Dead is dead. Gone is gone.”

Her voice faded until I could barely decipher her words. I dread saying it, but hope flared in my heart at the possibility of her imminent death. If Irene was right, she was responsible for many innocent deaths. Yet . . . I could not quite see how.

“Maybe Madame Restell herself was your mother,” Mina crooned maliciously. “There is always that possibility. You are the daughter of the wickedest woman in New York, ever.”

“No,” Irene said. I recognized from the firmness of her tone that she was done accepting this situation, whatever rebellion would bring. “
You
are the wickedest woman in New York, and you secretly claimed that title long ago, eleven years ago, when you killed Madame Restell yourself.”