Femme Fatale (64 page)

It was odd to encounter such citified things as streets and avenues when we were about to enter a City of the Dead. The
gatehouse offered two pointed-arch openings, one to come by and one to go by. With its three stone spires it looked like the very top of some massive European cathedral, cut off and set down at ground level. To either side stretched one-story wings that had the steep gables and dignified air of a churchyard manse.

Irene left the carriage to enter one of the side buildings, and returned in a few minutes with a folded paper. Several unfoldings revealed the map of a magnificent park full of circling drives that wound through groves and past ponds and streams and places bearing names like Hyacinth Lake and Vista Hill.

“No wonder we need a map,” I said when I saw the sheer scope of the place. “Where are we going?”

Irene pointed to a site far into the maze of roads and monuments.

She showed the same spot to our driver, who tipped his hat as she mounted the carriage seat again. We kept the map open over our laps. The driver knew the way, so we could observe our progress.

This felt a bit like a treasure hunt in heaven. Over every rise stood a handsome grove of trees in formal array. Small white-marble mausoleums crowned each hill and lofty white plinths lay scattered about like pieces from several gigantic chess sets.

“I have never seen a cemetery that has so little gloom about it,” I commented. “Perhaps I shouldn’t approve, but it is enormously comforting. One can almost hear the dead murmuring along with the breeze through the trees.”

“A much more honest ‘ectoplasm’ than the kind produced at a séance,” Irene agreed, spinning her parasol handle so its reflected shade made a kind of monotone rainbow over her features. “If I indeed had a mother who is dead, I could not wish for a better place for her to be buried.”

“Since you doubt Madame Restell was your mother, why are we making this pilgrimage to her grave?”

“I cannot be certain, can I? And besides, the poor woman was
marked for eternity as a suicide when she actually had been murdered. She did not die in cowardice or despair, but faithful to her beliefs, however true or false, and to her client’s privacy, to the end. I want
someone
who knows the truth about her death to stand over her at last.”

“Pink would have been happy to join us.”

“And equally happy to write a sensational story about Madame Restell and Mina for the
World
to see and gossip about again. No. I say let her rest in peace. No one knew better than Madame Restell that she was born to be misunderstood. Being a murder victim would not restore her reputation. She will always be known as ‘the wickedest woman in New York.’ ”

I said nothing, for I didn’t feel qualified to judge. This was unusual for me, who had been reared to believe in certain absolutes, but it is the beginning of true peace on earth, I had discovered, and one will not find peace in death unless one first sues for it in life.

“Do you regret that we answered Pink’s call to New York?” I asked after several pleasant minutes of mutual silence.

“No. I have met some people I used to know well, have perhaps saved some of them from perishing, and mostly I have become reacquainted with a lost part of myself. Now you know my humble and eccentric beginnings. Do you regret learning that?”

“Not at all! Like Pink, I may become one to see great opportunity in other people’s misfortunes. Perhaps I shall write a sensational novel,
Ten Days in a Vaudeville Theater
.”

Irene playfully jousted parasols with me. “You will do no such thing, or I will reveal the pig thief in your past.”

“Heavens! Then I am silenced forever.”

And so we were laughing when the driver drew our carriage to a stop by a small rise sectioned into squares by hedges and trees.

It struck me that two laughing women
not
in need of her services would be a fine set of final visitors for the late Madame Restell, for I doubted anyone visited her grave.

We ambled up the hill, weaving our way among monuments tall and modest. The sun warmed without overheating us. Irene and I had not shared such a pleasant, unhurried,
unpursued
time together in ages.

“Here,” she said finally, stopping in front of a headstone.

How odd it was to read the inscription:
ANN TROW LOHMAN MAY
6, 1811–
APRIL
1, 1878. “Madame Restell” and all her works judged both good and bad had vanished. No mention here of a fiend or murderer or “bat” woman or a freethinker or a martyr.

“How many people still would be alive,” I remarked, “if that one child had not been given for adoption with no trace of to whom or where.”

“Such things have been done that way for hundreds of years, and still are today. An unwed mother forfeits her child, and all knowledge of its disposition.” Irene stared down at the headstone. “I don’t doubt for a moment that she knew where the child had gone. However she is judged, she did what she believed best, whether it was preventing or ending a pregnancy, or arranging a child adoption that could never be undone.”

“You mean that she refused to tell, with a butcher knife to her neck?”

Irene nodded slowly. “I believe so, Nell. A woman who would drive out daily in broad daylight when even grateful clients denied using her twilight services was not about to kowtow to the cutting edge of a blade if she believed it was for the child’s good.”

“How awful! Did she guess that such a death would label her a coward and a suicide?”

“She never thought of herself, or history, only the present. She must have been accustomed to handling hysterical women, and men. She was not one to back down.”

“I will pray that she was as right as she believed herself to be.”

I bent my head and did so, while Irene waited. I don’t think she prayed, but she felt great sorrow at the waste of lives we had
witnessed these past two weeks, including that of this woman’s murderer, who herself was a true suicide now.

“How ironic,” I said when I lifted my head to the glorious day again. “Wilhelmina’s madness led her to actually enact the self-inflicted death that had wrongly been assigned to her victim. Poetic justice, don’t you think?”

“Murder is an ironic occupation, at best,” said a familiar voice behind us.

I whirled to face Sherlock Holmes. Irene did nothing of the sort.

He had followed us up the hill, and stood on the incline, top hat in hand, the wind actually stirring that smooth dark hair of his as well as lifting the tail of his cutaway city suit. His formal dress amid all this lushly cultivated countryside reminded me of an undertaker. Perhaps it was an apt comparison for a detective.

When Irene kept her back to him he came abreast of us to gaze down on the last words said about Madame Restell.

“Both murderer and victim,” he noted, “evaded answering to a court of law. And perhaps such crimes as they stood accused of should be judged in other than earthly courts. Madam.”

Irene regarded him at last.

He held a folded paper out to her.

“There is another headstone here that I believe you would be obliged to visit. Like this one, the writing etched on the marble’s surface is but a small hint of the true story that lies beneath.”

Irene’s lips parted with surprise.

“We have played at being opponents across half of Europe, Madam,” he observed. “Now we both stand in a New World—a brave New World my friend Watson would imagine I know nothing of—with a vast unsettled continent yawning around us.

“Regard this map. Regard the name penciled beside that headstone.”

“Mrs. Eliza Gilbert. The name means nothing to me.”

“Neither did it to her, I think. It might merit tracing to its origins, however.”

“Mrs. Eliza Gilbert is dead. I am not. You apparently know what that name means, but won’t say more.”

“You have often complained that I meddle in your private business. So the meaning here is all yours, should you choose to pursue it.”

“And you will not help?”

“I will,” I heard myself saying.

Irene turned to me with a blinding smile. She eyed Mr. Holmes again. “I have my Watson, it seems.”

He shrugged. “I could wager my Watson against yours.”

“It is not a contest.”

“All life is a contest.” He shrugged again. “There are other matters to attend to here, including the arcane matter of the Astor chess board. Our paths may yet cross again.”

“I can’t decide whether to regard that as a threat or a promise.”

“It is a possibility, which is what I deal in, and what awaits me now.”

He bowed to us, donned his top hat again, and began walking over the uneven ground, suspiciously soft in some places, to the curving driveway.

“What makes him think we will linger here, in this cemetery or this country?” I asked.

“One always lingers when contemplating death.” Irene’s attention had deserted Madame Restell’s headstone and was now focused on the map. “This other monument is only . . . across that road and overlooking the section centered around the white marble pool, here.”

“You aren’t going to actually follow his advice?”

“Of course not, Nell. What I will do is accept his challenge. Come! We are not about to be stopped by one more puzzling
headstone. The dead may be ‘but sleeping,’ yet I don’t expect any of them to wake up.”

I followed, grumbling as my boot heels wavered on the thick grass.

Like all predicted short walks, this one proved to be a greater distance that it looked but at last we found the headstone in question.

“Not an insignificant monument,” Irene noted when I caught up to her, “but neither is it rich or showy. What does that tell us?”

I agreed that the stone was modest. An arch-topped rectangle perhaps two or three feet high sat atop two stepped pedestals. The deceased’s name was deeply incised into a horizontal band in dignified capital letters: E
LIZA
G
ILBERT
. Such an ordinary, even modest name. Above the decorative frieze which blazoned the name from side to side of the headstone was the simple title, also capitalized, but incised in more delicate lettering,
MRS
.

“The form of address is improper,” I pointed out. “If she was indeed a ‘Mrs.,’ she should be identified fully by her husband’s name, say Mrs. William Gilbert, with her own given name, Eliza, shown in parentheses.”

“Are you saying, Nell, that this headstone memorializes a divorced woman?”

“Quite possibly. That is not utterly unheard of these days. Consider Pink’s mother, for instance.”

Irene nodded. “And such few clues lie below that plain name:

DIED
JAN. 17, 1861
AGE 42

“Not a terribly young age to have perished in such a harsh country as this, and that was at the beginning of their savage civil war.”

Irene bent to brush a twig off the headstone’s second step.
“An epitaph is such a terse, stingy summary of a life. It quite makes one wonder.”

“How? Someone survived to bury her respectably. What else more is wanted?

“A great deal more information about Mrs. Eliza Gilbert, and Sherlock Holmes knows part of it already.”

“Why won’t he tell us, then?”

“Because I made a such great clamor about how much I resented him prying into my private history. So he has issued a challenge.”

“To investigate this maybe-Mrs. Eliza Gilbert? I should think you’d resent even more his setting you on a cryptic path with no guidance. You don’t seriously think Eliza Gilbert is your mother?”

“I know now that Madame Restell is not, which is quite a relief. Her motives may have been noble and kind, or not anything of the sort, but I really don’t care to be the unacknowledged daughter of ‘the wickedest woman in New York.’ ”

“This Eliza person may be ‘the wickedest woman in Brooklyn,’ for all you know, or even worse!”

“Then again she may be better than anyone knows or thinks. We face a week-long transatlantic buffeting were we to return right now, Nell.”

I grew green-faced at the very notion. The gently rolling hills around us seemed to shimmer with motion: endless, wretched motion.

“Or,” Irene said, “we can stay a bit longer, pick up the stone gauntlet thrown down in Green-Wood Cemetery by Sherlock Holmes, and endeavor to discover who this lady was, and why anyone might think she had some connection to me.”

“I have never heard of her,” I admitted, pleased that we were at least dealing with a modest, forgotten soul, rather like my own dead mother. It would do Irene good to contemplate obscure origins, as most of us must.

“Eliza Gilbert,” Irene read the stone again. “A good name,
solid and trustworthy. I do believe that I would take an ‘Eliza Gilbert’ on faith.

“I agree. It sounds, in fact, British.”

“Do you think so? Many in this land are of that descent, even Madame Restell. Could this woman have been another? Could I have had an English mother?” Irene gazed fondly down at the headstone, around whose occupant she was already busy building a character and a history, as an actor envisioning a part.

I gazed benignly on Mrs. Eliza Gilbert too.

Now at last we could inter the harrowing histories of Madame Restell and her murderer as our attention moved to another woman who had died at a time far distant from this, 1861, when Irene would have been . . . oh . . . three or four. When she had first appeared as a stage orphan, in fact. A very telling fact.

Bless Eliza Gilbert, whoever she may be
! I thought. She already had become the closing curtain on a dark tragedy. I was ready for a new curtain to open in our quest, perhaps this time on a warm, sentimental family drama.

Even if she had been divorced, Mrs. Eliza Gilbert could in no way rival Madame Restell for maternal horror. Could she?

Coda