Spider Dance (66 page)

Irene’s snarled locks, however, were one smooth dark river again, and their recently smudged skins were pink with cleansing and contentment.

While I had my suspicions, as a former governess I couldn’t but be cheered to consider that cleanliness was indeed cheek by jowl with godliness.

“And what did you do all morning, Nell?” Irene asked as she sipped her cooling coffee.

I could hardly admit I’d spend the morning, and most of the night before it, trying to translate Madame Restell’s diary to prove that Irene did not have an illegitimate connection to the Vanderbilt clan and that Consuelo had only a legitimate claim on the same family. I had determined very little.

“Was Lola acquainted with the Commodore?” Irene asked next, as if recognizing the source of my silence.

I tried to leap ahead of her agile brain. “As you pointed out, he died in ’77, the same year that Madame Restell perished.”

“And that Consuelo was born.”

“And that Consuelo was born. But that can’t mean anything.”

Godfrey begged to differ with me in his polite way. “We like to say in court that there are no coincidences, Nell, just evidence that hasn’t yet been properly linked. It’s suggestive that 1877 was such a busy year of death and birth among these key figures.”

Before I could open my mouth to object to such blatant speculation, someone knocked on the door.

Since my friends had full cups and saucers in their hands, I rose to answer.

I had been hoping for Quentin. I would have been resigned to see Mr. Holmes.

Instead I faced Nellie Bly, as fresh as the daisy nodding over the brim of her yellow straw hat.

“’Morning.” She gazed keenly into the room, then her blue-gray eyes widened. “I see another Norton has honored the U.S. with his presence. Welcome to the New World, Godfrey.”

He was up, politely bowing to the intruder. “You must forgive us, Pink. Irene—”

“Rises late. I know. A theatrical habit.” Pink strolled in past me. “I myself was out late last night, so understand your disinclination to bustle out early this morning. Unfortunately, I have work to do.”

“That can’t be visiting us,” Irene said, smiling to soften the sting.

“Actually, yes.” Pink turned around to survey me as well as the Nortons. “I’m surprised your cohorts aren’t here.”

“Cohorts?” Irene asked.

“Sherlock Holmes, for one, but I’d expect him to be out and about early no matter the case.” She glanced at me. “And Quentin. I’d hoped to catch him here. He’s doing some work for me and we need to finish our investigation.”

“What work?” I demanded.

“Oh, Nell. It’s a secret, of course. He hasn’t gone and hinted anything to you, now, has he?”

“Quentin is discreet.” My answer sounded hedging, but I wasn’t about to admit I had no idea what Quentin would be doing in the company of Pink, or her pseudonym Nellie Bly.

“Glad to hear that we agree about Quentin’s discretion. Well, if he’s not here, I’ll call at his hotel. I can use him on a story I’m doing, if you don’t need him for whatever vague and dark business you’re engaged upon.”

I was quick to retort. “No, he better serves us attending to whatever vague and dark business
you
are engaged upon.”

Pink only laughed. “All I can say is, Nell, that we make a most convincing man and wife.”

Quentin in thrall to Nellie Bly! Quentin at the beck and call of Nellie Bly! Quentin . . . courting Nellie Bly!

Those thoughts sat on the back of my neck like a great, black vulture that afternoon as I moved the papers and books about Lola Montez and Madame Restell’s cryptic diary around the surface of the round table, desperately seeking inspiration.

Godfrey, a man of supernatural good sense, had betaken himself away from our rooms on some such feeble excuse as needing shaving cream because he’d left Bavaria in such a hurry.

What he was in haste to do was escape my black mood, brought on by the shocking audacity of Pink entering our lions’ den to flaunt her claims on Quentin’s time, energy, and attention.

Once already Quentin had been lured from the toils of Pink back into our camp. I must provide reason for him to make that change in obligations permanent!

Irene came over to gaze down upon the pile of confusing documents, then rested an encouraging hand on my shoulder.

I pushed the papers away in a rare fit of temper.

“I can make no sense of it! Lola Montez could have been, or have gone, or have done anything, anywhere. The woman was beyond amazing. An expert shot. Utterly fearless to the point of facing off a maddened mob. A femme fatale. A political idealist. A dreadful dancer. An amazing ‘artiste.’ A harlot. A heroine. She may be the mother of Queen Victoria, or Tiny Tim, for all I know, and for all she claims in her astounding autobiography.”

Irene’s hand never left my right shoulder, which forced the vulture claws to edge a bit to the left.

“She’s a legend; face it, Nell. We’ll never know the entire truth. And I don’t think she would have wanted us to.”

“What would she have wanted!?”

“The peace that she indeed found at the end, and the fight she waged getting there. Take either one away from her, and she is not a whole woman.”

I braced my face on my fists, like a spoiled child. “Call me not a whole woman, but I can’t stand Pink lording it over us, and Quentin.”

“She’s had a bitter pill to swallow: smothering a story of international sensation. It goes against her grain.”

“Pink goes against
my
grain.”

“Quentin chafes as much. Why do you think he was so eager to join in our risky expedition to the slaughter yards in search of rogue Jesuits?”

“That’s another thing! Even Lola’s invective against the Jesuits rings false. Yes, they were a force in Europe thirty years ago, but nowadays—?”

“Quite true. These greedy, brutal creatures here in New York seem to be the demented remnants of men fighting a long-lost cause. All of those whose faces I saw—and there were more whose faces I didn’t see, for they weren’t all at
the slaughterhouse that night—were sixty years old or more.”

“Goodness, they were doddering!”

“No, these men were quite vigorous still, Nell, and possessed of feverish political passion. Remember, King Ludwig was sixty when he met Lola, and she not yet thirty.”

“He was behaving badly for a man of his maturity as well. Didn’t you learn anything specific about these creatures, during your time among them?”

“Like all conspirators, they’d adapted noms de guerre. They referred to each other by the names of professions or crafts. One was called Woodcutter, another Baker. And one was called Doctor.”

“He must have been an elevated type!” I said derisively, for none of these pseudonyms struck me as apropos. “Butcher,” would have been more like it.

“Of course,” Irene said slowly, “all these names were used in their German form, not English. I found that jogging my memory. It reminded me of someone we’d read or heard about in connection with Lola’s California stay.”

“We heard of dozens such people. I’ll give Lola Montez one thing: she knew everybody there was to know in her day.”

“Something . . . Lotta said.”

“About a woodcutter, a butcher, a baker; they all sound like they’re out of a fairy tale.”

“I was thinking of the Doktor. ‘Herr Doktor,’ they said.”

“Any doctor involved in such atrocities is not worthy of the title!” I was about to fulminate further when I remembered what Irene was trying to recall. “Oh.” Then I had to decide if I wanted to say it, given the awful ramifications.

“What is it, Nell. You’ve remembered something.”

Of course she’d ask until I said something, and I’m not adept at falsehoods.

“Lola’s friend in Grass Valley, after she’d divorced Patrick Hull,” I said sullenly.

“Friend?”

“Well, probably more than that, to be frank! The man she
rode into the mountains with, who never came back. Wasn’t he a German doctor?”

“No!” Irene straightened up. “No. He was German, but he allowed himself to be called Doctor, instead of by his inherited title of baron, which of course meant nothing in American society, especially in the gold fields.” Her voice deepened. “You remember what family name he went by there’

“Adler,” I admitted. “It’s a stupid coincidence.”

Irene sat down, slowly, in an empty chair at the table.

“She seemed to mourn his death, Lotta said, and left Grass Valley not long after. But then I would have been born sooner than I was told . . . . I’m not sure I’m any more ready to admit to my real age than Lola was, if that’s the case.”

“Irene, this is ridiculous! If that man Adler was your father and if the Ultramontanes here in New York are following a leader who goes by the same professional title he used then, he’d have to be . . . oh, my, at least sixty years old.”

“I could have been ‘betraying’ my own father.”

“Did he look anything like you? For you certainly don’t resemble Lola.”

“I don’t know, Nell. Those men wore slouch hats and high-collared long coats. I never bothered trying to see or remember their faces, because they were always obscured . . . by the dark of night, or inside the slaughterhouse.”

She turned to me, her features alight with a flood of new speculations. “If he was the same ‘Dr. Adler’ from Grass Valley, forget the issue of whether he could have fathered me. The fact is, he vanished, supposedly in a hunting accident, was never seen again in Grass Valley. You know what that means?”

“That he didn’t necessarily have to be dead at all. He may have deserted Lola and she reported his ‘accident’ to save face.”

“Exactly. And . . . he may have deserted her because he had followed her there from Germany and had learned what he wished to know, or he could no longer spend the time in such an obscure outpost. If he was indeed a German baron,
he might have been needed back in Bavaria attempting to rein in Ludwig’s errant heir to the throne.”

“He was a spy even then!”

Irene nodded, her lips a thin grim line.

“But what did they want?”

“I said that I think their cause is deluded. That doesn’t mean that what they seek isn’t real, though.”

“What? Lola’s gold and jewels?”

Irene sat opposite me, then nodded seriously.

“Gold and jewels.” The words lingered on her tongue. “Lola’s gold and jewels, all gathered from her time with the king and from the money she made off that notorious liaison for the rest of her life. Where did they go? The jewels sold for nothing in California, say several accounts. But where were Lola’s considerable gold-field investment profits by the end of her life? The biographies are vague, and you haven’t made much headway deciphering Lola’s lost papers. Was the money also gone and lost, worth nothing? Value shifts with time. What’s priceless in one era is pathetic in the next. Yet—could she have invested her holdings through a friend?”

“Friend?”

“She had many prominent and wealthy friends in New York during her glory days, even if they were utterly absent at her end.”

I sat up as if suddenly deposited on a hat pin. “Vanderbilt. The Commodore. The old man. Didn’t he know her?”

“Yes. And that might be what made the Ultramontanes fix their sights on Six-sixty Fifth Avenue and its residents. I have an idea. I only hope Mr. Gordon is still in New York.”

“Mr. Gordon? The absentee owner of the
New York Herald
, a rival paper to Pink’s precious
World
?”

Irene nodded. “Exactly the one. Thank God it isn’t Pink’s paper. We must try to see him again at once.”

“On our own?”

“What else? Would you want Pink along?”

I shook my head.

“Quentin?”

I paused. Not right now. I shook my head.

“Godfrey?”

“Maybe—”

“I agree. He is the most agreeable partner of the lot at the moment. Godfrey, however, being so agreeable, wouldn’t wish to intrude on the investigation we’ve begun, but not finished. However . . . Sherlock Holmes would.”

“Not him, either!”

“Then it is you and me, Nell. I think we can solve this riddle before Holmes reaches his promised and ‘surprising’ denouement. What do you think?”

I gazed at the snarl of papers that encompassed a peripatetic life of forty years and more mysteries and recent gore than would furnish a collection of Edgar Allan Poe tales.

“I think that we have to try.”