Femme Fatale (12 page)

She was simply too feminine to forgo her charms, a slim young woman with a waist small enough for a garter snake to encompass. She wore her hair in soft curls high on her forehead and pulled close
behind her ears, which emphasized the perfect oval of her features. She looked as demure as a schoolroom miss, which was doubtless why her masquerades on the seamy side of life worked so well.

Irene absently rearranged her silverware as one would adjust pawns upon a chessboard. I wondered whether she would respond to Pink’s challenge with the olive branch of a teaspoon, the genteel prod of a fork, or the stab of the steak knife.

Irene spoke at last. “It was not mention of a ‘mother’ that brought me back to these shores. It was mention of murder. And, of course, the utter impossibility of someone attempting to murder my mother. I am, as I’m sure you know, an orphan.”

An orphan! I gazed at Irene in dismay.

As hard as it had been for Godfrey to admit that he was . . . well, a word beginning with “b” applied to children “born on the wrong side of the blanket,” meaning that he was of, er, illegitimate descent—which meant either that his father was likely a rake like Bertie, or his mother was far worse than she should be—I could only imagine how hard it was for Irene to admit to origins that were the stuff of far too many melodramas. She had been a grand opera diva, and the grand opera regarded itself as far above melodrama even while it purveyed buckets of the same lurid yet sentimental drivel in high-sounding arias.

That is my opinion, anyway.

Irene smiled at Pink’s sudden silence. “Even you once signed yourself ‘Lonely Orphan Girl,’ you told me. That letter and self-deprecating signature interested an editor at the
Pittsburg Dispatch
, and the rest is newspaper history, or will be, if you have your way, Nellie Bly. And you were not ever an ‘orphan girl,’ by any means, were you?”

“Nor are you! I myself suspect several women of being your mother.”

“Ah, now I have a surfeit of mothers! Suspect! Only in your imagination. Perhaps ‘lonely orphan girls’ develop highly unreliable imaginations.”

“I used that signature to let that annoying
Dispatch
columnist know that women work not just to challenge his sense of woman’s place, but because they have no man to support them. Many women are ‘orphans’ in the sense that they must look after themselves and should not be abused for it.”

“Hear, hear,” Irene rejoined. “A fine speech. I seem to recall that Nell and myself have done just that for some years. Yet by calling yourself an ‘orphan’ when you weren’t one, you undercut your argument that women deserve meaningful work. You make work into an act of charity, not a deserved occupation.”

Irene leaned across the table, her voice now as soft as a lullaby, her eyes glittering with sudden sympathy.

“Why did you call yourself an orphan, Pink?”

“I . . . I—Really, Irene, that was so long ago!”

“How long?”

“Oh, four years, but so much has happened since. I had to use a false name. No decent woman allows her true name to appear in print—”

“Unless she is married or buried, didn’t someone once say?”

“I don’t know, but that’s about it. That phrase was simply something I scribbled down on the spur of the moment.”

“But you did have a mother, and a father, Pink, and he wasn’t that dreadful man Jack Ford you told us about, that brute who forced your mother to seek a divorce when you were fourteen. You want to unearth my mother. Perhaps you owe it to me to tell me about your father. Your real father.”

Pink pushed her fork into the candied fruit that comprised our dessert. The gesture was sudden, as if she were stabbing something other than a glazed apricot.

“He was a fine and cultured man, very kind. I often used to sit on his lap and he gave me hard candy. We lived in a town called Apollo, in a beautiful house with four high white pillars and a pediment in front of it. I remember playing and looking up at it and thinking that must be how the mansions in heaven look. . . .
There was no heaven, except for him, if you believe that sort of thing. He . . . what would you say? Collapsed one day. Couldn’t move or speak. He was soon dead.”

“How old were you, Pink?”

“Six. I had just turned six.”

“I’m sorry,” Irene said, sitting back. “You must have loved him dearly at that age, and remembered why, more’s the pity.”

“Indeed. Then the house was gone, and my mother was left with five children and no way to support them. It soon was up to me.”

“Had you no older brothers or sisters?”

“My brothers married and started their own families. There was some pittance left, but my ‘guardian’ seemed to run short of it awfully soon. I had to leave normal school and make my way as best I could. I tutored, played the nanny—”

“Oh, I did, too,” I put in at mention of a common fate.

Pink glanced unhappily at me, unencouraged by our shared history. “As soon as I turned twenty-one, I sued that guardian in court.”

“Did you win?” Irene asked.

“He was proven to be a very poor accountant, but the case took two years. I guess I exposed him in public, and that’s enough.”

“So that’s what you do now,” Irene said, smiling, “you expose other wrongdoers in public. What has made me a target for such a campaign?”

“I mean you no harm! You should be happy to find a lost relative. I defended my mother. I have supported my mother. Even now I live with her. A woman of that generation did not have the choices we have today. We owe them respect and love. I couldn’t help running across . . . traces of you as a child, and what a fascinating child you were!”

“How fascinating?” I said, interrupting.

“Not as fascinating as the child Pink,” Irene said quickly,
keeping her attention on Nellie Bly. “So you learned where I grew up, and with whom. That still does not presume a mother in the woodwork. Besides, Pink, who cares who my mother was or was not? Not I. Not the public.”

“I can’t believe you wouldn’t care, but I won’t argue that. The public will care if someone is trying to kill a woman who is actually your mother, and this may not be the first murder in your former theatrical circle, for all we know. A whole clan of women surrounded you when you were a child.”

“Ah. My mother was not absent, but merely incognito. And your claim of maternal danger is merely the opening to the real mystery. Murder. Murders plural, I think, else you would not see the pattern of a ‘circle.’ You have hooked me, Pink, even though you don’t discern the reason why. Let’s get down to it, then. Who has been murdered? That is what must be established before anyone supposes who might be murdered next, and to whom the next victim ‘might’ be related.”

“You have taken on a lot of British airs since you have lived abroad, do you know that?”

“I do, and I like it. ‘British airs’ embody manners and civility, something my former native land and its products could use more of.”

My spine straightened as if the Union Jack had been raised over our table. I joined Irene in regarding Pink, christened Elizabeth, presumably by her mother, and renamed Nellie to provide a pseudonym for the newspaper for which she toiled, the
Pittsburg Dispatch
. Even in America in this ultramodern year of 1889 it was recognized that no respectable woman would write under her own name for the public press.

New York was decidedly not the World, in my opinion, or anywhere near the center of it. And Irene was not a motherless lamb to be lured by the
baa
ing of a mythological ewe. Or was I thinking of a Judas goat?

And was that Pink herself?

7.

Domestic Disturbances

Real estate capitalists suddenly discovered that there was
plenty of room in the air, and that by doubling the height of its
buildings the same result would be reached as if the island had
been stretched to twice its present width
.

—
BUILDING NEWS
, 1883

What a sad commentary on contemporary mores that I was not surprised when we returned to our hotel rooms after dinner to find a strange and rather unsavory man waiting in our parlor.

He rose as we let ourselves in, and seemed to regard explaining his presence as quite unnecessary. Since Irene had not drawn the little pistol she always carried in even her smallest dress reticules when she traveled, I assumed that she had expected him.

“How kind of your superiors to send you,” she said by way of greeting.

“The office,” he replied with certain formal wariness, “said I was to spare no effort on your behalf.” He blinked at me. “Is this the chit who is blackmailing you?”

Fortunately, the suggestion rendered me speechless, allowing
Irene to create the libretto of her choice. “Not at all. This is Miss Huxleigh, a British . . . inquiry agent who has been working the Continental side of the case.”

His glance flicked to me and challenged not a jot of that fairy tale. “Good evening, miss. Ma’am.” He nodded at Irene. “I hear you went from an agent to an employer of the Pinkertons on occasion, over in Europe, not that we have many agents working there. Yet.”

He was a tall, rather beefy man of the Irish persuasion, with a nose that seemed red, bulbous, and long enough to have regularly inhaled the fumes of ale or even whiskey. Still, his eye was sharp and there was an air about him of a military man, however lowly.

“The case,” Irene said, “that called me home is not precisely blackmail, although the young woman you referred to would not stick at a bit of coercion to win her way. No, the real matter in the case seems to be one of murder.”

“What case would that be, ma’am?”

“It’s a mystery,” Irene said roguishly. “The first part of it is that I have been lured to this country by talk of a mother I did not know I had. The second part of it appears to be the notorious stunt reporter, Nellie Bly. Have a seat, Mr.—?”

“Conroy, ma’am.”

“And some sherry from the sideboard. Excellent. Then please tell me . . . us, what you have learned.”

He immediately accepted the delicate glass Irene offered him, although it posed between his large, callused forefinger and thumb like a crystal thimble, and he sat upon a side chair.

One swallow finished the sipping sherry and then he set the glass on the desk. Next he pulled a cheap and battered notepad and a stubby pencil whose lead had been mutilated by some sort of knife from the side pocket of his jacket.

“She is the cat’s meow when it comes to doings of the journalistic sort,” he began. “Though she goes by Nellie Bly, her real name is Elizabeth Cochrane, but I figger you know that, ma’am.”

“Indeed I do, but hold nothing back. You have had the advantage of investigating her on her own home soil. We first made her acquaintance abroad, where she was herself investigating matters for a sensation story and posing as a prostitute.”

His eyebrows rose like grizzled caterpillars about to exchange blows. Not for this blunt American the exquisite, single lofted eyebrow of an Oscar Wilde.

So I was not surprised when blunt words streamed off his tongue. In London, he would have spoken Cockney. Here it was a less accented but no less lowly form of American English. “What? Playing the harlot? And her a judge’s daughter?”

“
Judge
’s daughter?” Irene rustled forward on the padded ottoman she had chosen to sit upon. “She never mentioned
that
. No wonder she seeks justice so intently.”

“I’d guess there were so many of ’em none took it that serious like. He’d had ten children by his first wife. Miss Elizabeth and her four older and younger siblings came along through her mother, a widow named Mary Jane Cummings, who snagged a man of substance in her second marriage. The judge treated the new kids Nellie’s mother had after the marriage as well as his first family, and all would have been peaches and cream, except when the judge died, the children of his first wife pretty much got it all, and they sold Mrs. Mary Jane’s house right out from under her. She ended up with the furniture, the horse and carriage, the cow, one of the dogs, and no money to keep them.”