Femme Fatale (58 page)

44.

Maidenhair

A bloody ending to a bloody life
.

—ANDREW COMSTOCK, SECRETARY, THE SOCIETY FOR THE
PREVENTION OF VICE, CLOSING ANN LOHMAN’S FILE, 1879

I couldn’t help myself.

I gasped and peered around Irene to see the face of that wretched, wicked creature killing herself by inches in the bathtub and still threatening to take someone living with her, simply because that other breathed and she herself could no longer stand to.

The dilated eyes moved to me. And so did the pistol barrel.

Unlike Irene, I was honored with a knowledge of the mother who bore me, with her name and indubitable reality. I thought how she had given her life to give me mine.

I believed I owed her something extraordinary for that extraordinary sacrifice. Her name had been Alice.

I pushed Irene aside like a sheaf of wheat at a reaping, and stepped forward to face that woman in the lethal bath, and her unhappy history and her weapon.

“No! No,
Nell
!” Irene’s deep, primitive bellow was a vocal
command a mastiff (or even a basso playing the Devil) would have heeded.

Unfortunately, I was nothing so powerful. I was a Shropshire lass and a parson’s daughter and no one to trifle with when roused.

I stepped toward the bloody bathtub . . . and slipped on the wet tiles. As I fell a great dark spider and its entire, vast crimson web came crashing down on us all. Now I knew I was as mad as Mina. Irene had seized my elbow too late to stop my plummet, and she skidded to the floor with me in a helpless tangle.

A wave of noxious water splashed us with life’s blood and some scented soap. I began to choke and almost retch, as if I were sea-borne again.

Irene pounded me on the back. “It’s all right, Nell. Look!”

My soggy lashes opened to see the pistol once in Mina’s death grasp, swooped up from the floor by another’s hand. Who—?

I gazed up at the tub’s curved copper profile. Nothing human surfaced above its lip. I thought of Merlinda the Mermaid breathing blood for the entertainment of ignorant audiences. All audiences are ignorant. That is the magic of the stage and the tragedy of life.

While I coughed and blinked, Irene pulled me to my feet.

“I could strangle you,” she hissed under her breath, fondly.

“I don’t believe you have any ectoplasm conveniently at hand. What was that thing?”

Before she could answer, Sherlock Holmes straightened from behind the bathtub. If he was a spider, he had caught a creature in his web. A cocoon of red velvet curtain lay on the black and white tiled floor, soaking up water and oozing an interior red.

He pulled a flaccid wrist from the imprisoning fabric and counted a pulse no one on earth would ever hear again, apparently, for he shook his head. “She was very near death all this time, but great hatred can delay the inevitable.”

“How . . . how did you—?” I asked. Sputtered.

“He went exploring, Nell, when she was so focused on us.” Irene glanced to the ceiling high above us and the half-moon window now bare of its curtain and framing a black avenue of night. “Are you all right?” she asked him. “That was quite a leap.”

“Her hatred was finally failing with her life’s blood,” he answered, eyeing the bundle on the floor that lay there like a large, richly swaddled infant. “She didn’t slay anyone herself, except Madame Restell.”

“That’s why she didn’t slit her own throat!” I said. “Such sudden ends were due only an old enemy, or the ‘mother’ she felt had betrayed her. She had depended upon the Madame, who had served Mina’s infant child as was thought best at the time. Poor mad thing.” I wasn’t quite sure whom I was referring to.

Irene barely listened, although she was rhythmically patting my back. “Do you have a mother, Mr. Holmes?”

“So my father told me,” he answered.

“He has a brother!” I pointed, “so there must be a mother in there somewhere.”

“There is always a mother there somewhere,” he announced, rising to his own damp, yet imperious height. “And in this case, a plot that overarches more than thirty years.” He bowed suddenly, to Irene. “I beg your pardon. Am I betraying a feminine confidence?”

“I admit to being past thirty, and relish every year of it. Vanity is sometimes useful, but it is never to be trusted in important matters. And are you vain enough to keep the things you have learned from us? I think we have earned the right to knowledge.”

“Indeed you have. I will call at your hotel later. Meanwhile, I suggest you leave this place while I summon the authorities. There is sure to be a telephone in such a mansion.”

Irene said nothing, but allowed him to escort us to the reception rooms below, where he left us while he returned to attend to the dead woman above.

“Quick, Nell! This mausoleum must have a library! Where? Do you think?”

“Somewhere on the first floor,” I suggested, trotting after her. “What are we looking for?

“Where would one hide a book?”

“In a library.”

“Ergo . . .”

We found the chamber in question, a two-story circle of waxed wood shelves and gilt spines, and began ravishing the contents for a clue. Just because a madwoman had found nothing didn’t mean there was nothing to be found. We both ransacked the shelves, aware that when Sherlock Holmes returned and the dead were dealt with he would be able to devote his full attention to this same quest.

“It’s no use, Nell,” Irene finally said from on high, where she clung by one foot and one arm to a library ladder that seemed church-spire tall. “One would need to examine every volume and there must be several thousand here.”

“How many really read, I wonder?”

“If only I could
think
!” she complained while backing down the ladder.

“I believe that we are doing well to be standing upright after that ordeal.”

“Sherlock Holmes,” she said bitterly when once again she was on terra firma, which in this case was a magnificent expanse of black marble, “will probably stroll into this room after we leave, pinpoint a book on the third tier and find the missing volume at once.”

“Possibly, but we need to leave before the police arrive.”

“So we do.” She sighed theatrically and followed me out of the immense chamber to the hall. This was as long and grand as a monarch’s reception room, and from it opened many elegant chambers, including an unexpected solarium, its uncurtained
high, broad windows, admitting moonglow and swaths of the electric lights that surrounded the mansion.

The large exotic plants within cast sinister shadows. We paused as we passed, I feeling as if we were peeking into a nightmare version of Alice’s Wonderland.

Irene seized my forearm. “Nell! What is that?”

I looked where she pointed. “An extremely overgrown maidenhair fern, I should think.”

“And what does it grow out of?”

“A . . . too hard to see in the dimness, but some kind of wicker basket.”

“An exceptionally large wicker basket, quite large enough to contain a coiled cobra, I should think.” Irene said, moving nearer as if mesmerized by the idea.

“A cobra! Not in New York City! We must leave! No time to gawk at giant houseplants!”

“With wheels,” she added, sounding ecstatic. “Of course!”

I had never known Irene to take any interest in plant life, inside or out, nor what containers would hold them.

“Irene,
please
!”

By now she was rooting around beneath the arching fronds like an upper Broadway pig.

“You will ruin your gloves and one of the few gowns you have available on this trip!”

She appeared capable no longer of hearing me, much less heeding me, so I went over, determined to pull her bodily away from her bizarre new enthusiasm for ferns.

She suddenly straightened, her soiled hand hoisting a dark rectangular object.

“The lost book! I’m sure of it.”

“How can you be?” Only a worm would have enjoyed the strong odor of freshly turned earth. “It’s covered in oilcloth, and soil. And possibly ugly wriggling things.”

Irene responded to my distaste by bringing the object to her lips and kissing it.

As I nearly gagged in horror, she laughed. “Don’t you see what this container really is?”

It was a pleasure to look at something other than the filthy fruits of a potting soil. “A wicker basket. On wheels. Which is odd. It’s obviously a decorative device.”

“And from the design, obviously quite old, perhaps mid-century.”

“Design. Oh.” I had been a governess, but never a nursemaid or a nanny. “It’s a perambulator.”

“A very old, somewhat shabby perambulator, perhaps the very one that wheeled around Madame Restell’s only daughter, later converted to a planter. And, even later, deemed a suitable receptacle in which to conceal the very private listing of clients who gave up children for adoption.

“This book has been sitting here, interred, for over a decade. Mina and no one else ever considered that a vehicle for moving infants might conceal a book of ‘moved’ infants.”

“Gracious! Do you think Sherlock Holmes would have discovered this hiding place?”

“Never, my dear Nell, in a million years. Infants and perambulators are yet another area that is outside his bailiwick. He would certainly find the disrupted dirt worth investigating, though. Let’s tidy the area like good little gardeners and whisk away our prize before we court discovery.”

So we left that splendid mansion that had been the death of two women so oddly related. We left dingy but triumphant and in need of baths that had no chance of being fatal to anything but dirt.

45.

Social Secretary

I have oysters and a brace of grouse, with something a little
choice in a white wine—Watson, you have never yet
recognized my abilities as a housekeeper
.

—SHERLOCK HOLMES, “THE SIGN OF FOUR,” 1890
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

“Code!” Irene cried the next morning.