Femme Fatale (63 page)

The young man writhed in the iron custody of the two beefy New York lawmen.

“You know nothing of it,” he said contemptuously to Sherlock Holmes. His next words were for Irene. “And you needn’t discuss me in the third person, Rena, as if I were no longer here.”

She immediately responded. “I’m sorry. Sometimes the answer to a crime is so hard to face that it makes the criminal into a nonentity. I did know you from our earliest years, Tim. Why would you kill for Mina?”

“I didn’t kill for
her
. I killed for Pet, and myself, and maybe for Mina finally, because there was no one else left.”

He shook his head as Messrs. Conroy and Holly drew him upright and then pulled his hands behind his back to apply the
manacles. He groaned as his joints were twisted into the unnatural position.

“Can’t you manacle his hands in front?” Irene asked, seeing to his obvious agony. “Surely he can’t escape you both.”

Tim grimaced his relief as the men loosed their hold and brought his wrists forward as the heavy iron bonds were snapped shut around them.

Mr. Holmes seconded the decision. “Now that Mina is dead, he won’t run. In fact, I should watch his cell for an attempt on his own life.”

“You’ve got that right,” Tim told Mr. Holmes. “There’s been little to live for since Pet destroyed herself, and our child with her.”

“Ever since then?” Irene cried, amazed. “All those years? That was thirteen or fourteen years ago.”

“The blink of an eye to me. Why shouldn’t my life revolve around Pet’s death ever after? You screamed yourself silent at the sight of her dead body, and she was only a sister performer to you. She was my . . . love.”

“Why didn’t you two elope then?” Irene demanded in frustration, growing as upset as he now that they examined the single horror they shared yet had never discussed. “No one need have died then, not even the baby.”

“Her mother needed the novelty of both girls, the ‘twins,’ to flaunt before her upper-crust gentlemen friends. That woman’s life was built on charm, and hers were fading.”

“So she sold her daughters into the most sordid sort of society?”

“Can’t blame the girls,” Tim muttered. “They were young, like you and me. And they found the high life tempting. Pet and me, we shouldn’t have done what we done, but it was more honest than anything she encountered on Fifth Avenue. And . . . a rich old man was set on actually marrying her. Her mother wanted that. Part of Pet even wanted that. She didn’t ask me for nothing. She didn’t tell me how bad she felt, wanting and not
wanting the baby we made. Didn’t ask me. I wanted it. I wanted her. Mina said that when Madame Restell told Pet she was too far gone to stop or undo, she didn’t talk to no one. Just went home and stopped it herself. Stopped herself.”

Irene put a hand on his bound forearm. “I’m so sorry, Tim. She would have been better off with you.”

“Not to her mind, at that terrible moment, anyway.”

“So why didn’t you move on and forget?” Sherlock Holmes asked, eyeing Tim as if he were a very interesting and talkative bug.

He obviously didn’t know the first thing about losing true loves! But . . . did I? I blushed, grateful that no one regarded me during this inquisition. Even Pink chose to remain silent, and take notes, as Tim’s story emerged under Irene’s sympathetic prodding.

“Once Pet had died like that—” Tim shook his head. His hair was lank and fine. He still seemed a tall, gangly boy, not a killer or a madman. “I couldn’t help it. The only person who grieved as hard as I did was her twin, Wilhelmina. Pansy, Mina, whatever she called herself, we’d been together since toddlerhood.” He glanced at Irene. “You were off with the maestro singing scales, and once you got your voice back you seemed to forget all about what had happened to Pet, or what was happening to Mina and me. So we made a pair of it.”

Irene bit her lip brutally. I could see the self-blame forming in her mind, when it was not her fault that the maestro’s mesmerism had blurred the painful past for her, separating her from her theatrical family at such a crucial time. Their ignorance of her own sorrow and unnatural evolution made them think she’d escaped their pain somehow, that she had spurned them. It made Mina hate her with even more than girlish envy, for there was no one else to blame for Pet’s death but Tim, perhaps, and their own mother, for certain.

“We became allies,” Tim said. “She looked just like Pet. Exactly. Sometimes, much later, she’d let me—”

Everyone in the room had become an audience to this long-delayed denouement. Not one of the theater folk here spoke, or breathed. All had borne witness, but had never understood what they saw.

No one asked what Mina had let Tim do.

Even I thought I understood. Mina had been the living likeness of his dead love. Mina too had consulted Madame Restell and come away once with a mourned lost baby and a second time with a living child forsworn and then frantically wished back. Finally she had faced the fact of having no child at all.

Once started though, Tim couldn’t stop.

“Mina let me . . . The old man wanted an heir and she couldn’t oblige him. She let me . . . but it wasn’t the same. Nothing happened. In a way I was glad. It was as if Pet had never had her . . . problem. But it changed Mina. She knew the difficulty lay in herself now and maybe because of what she’d done with Madame Restell before, ’cuz Pet and me, we managed it. Then that reporter . . .
her
!”

He pointed at Pink, who looked up from her notes, her heart obviously in her throat.

“She started it all, poking around after Mr. Bishop’s death. Asking questions about his death, asking about Rena . . . Merlinda. You.” He looked back at Irene as if not recognizing her. “You were gone. For so long. And then you came back, and Pet . . . Pansy . . . uh, Mina. She was even more frantic. It was as if you were the person who had taken everything from her, although she had more than most. I don’t know. She told me the women we knew, the girls who were just a few years older than we were, they were all ‘graduates’ of Madame Restell’s and they’d told Pet, advised Pet, to see that murderous woman and then they told her . . . when that didn’t help, they told her that hot baths . . . and she died in a hot bath, and it didn’t help, didn’t help Pet, or me. Or anybody. So they deserved to die. They’d
gone on and Pet hadn’t. Don’t you see? Mina did. And I did what Mina wanted. It was all I had left of Pet.”

A silence held as years of unsuspected anguish and sin and twisted vengeance lay revealed in all its sordid madness.

I felt exhausted, as if I had sat through a very long Greek tragedy I only half understood.

Pink finally stood and came over to join us.

“I was right,” she said, “there was a story here, and this one I can report, every last bit of it.”

Sherlock Holmes, Irene, and myself exchanged an unwelcome, but conspiratory, glance.

The truly sensational story, the truth about the death of Madame Restell, her murder, would never become public.

Sherlock Holmes moved away, taking his annoying pipe with him, as he left to acquaint the police with the final facts in the case. The pathetic Tiny Tim was taken away as well, Pink was off after him, hot on the trail of crime and punishment and journalistic fame.

That left Irene and me gazing together at an unspoken truth we alone shared: the birth book of the notorious abortionist, Madame Restell, the wickedest woman in New York.

I truly believed now that she had a rival for that title, albeit it a very recently dead one.

Irene glanced around the elegant table, which had fallen into silence.

“We still owe our lost friends tribute,” she told them. “They would be very happy to see us all together and to share our reunion. I know I am.”

“Even Mina?” Phoebe asked gruffly. Everyone glanced at the commotion as Mrs. McGillicuddy returned to install Edith onto the pillowed chair next to Phoebe. Apparently the departing group had suggested the child could rejoin the company. The two who sat side by side—middle-aged dwarf and child—looked like
odd sisters bracketed by the Pig Lady and the professor. I was sure that Phoebe, Edith, and her mother would be looked after by their fellow performers, now sobered by the loss of Sophie and Salamandra.

No one answered Phoebe’s question. From report, Mina had been headstrong and selfish as a young girl, earning no friends. Those same petty and childish flaws had turned lethal when tragedy struck her sister and herself.

“We can toast small Wilhelmina and her sister Winifred, at least,” Irene said after consideration. “And Tiny Tim, the little drummer boy.” She held up a wine glass. “And let us toast each other, our shared pasts, and our unknown futures. And . . . I would like to salute one mystery that may never be solved, the Lady in Black who came to be kind to all of us orphaned theatrical children, and aren’t we all theatrical orphans, whatever our ages, unless we band together?”

“Hear, hear,” they cried, glasses and hopes raised.

Even I drank a hearty toast to their happier and reunited future after surviving such shocking losses of people and beliefs from their past.

47.

Women in Black

She was an illegitimate child, and early deserted by her
mother. She had talents and decided to make use of them to
get on in the world. . . . She had some money, $300 of which
she left to the Magdalen Society, the remainder, after paying
off just debts, is to go to charitable objects
.

—
THE NEW YORK HERALD
, 1861

Green-Wood Cemetery is a short ferry ride south from the very tip of Manhattan Island across New York harbor to North Brooklyn. A brief carriage drive bypasses the busy piers of Upper New York Bay to arrive at an earthly paradise of rolling hills. From there one can overlook the distant ships on the bay and is in turn overlooked by wheeling seagulls with white angel’s wings whose haunting cries evoke the lost and the gone.

My experience of graveyards is not extensive, as I have had few relatives to see interred. My father lies with my unremembered mother past a small lych-gate beside his Shropshire church. Both church and headstones are made of gray stone, which looks
sober against the green growth of spring and summer, and grim during autumn and winter.

I have seen London’s great Gothic Westminster Abbey and its indoor Poet’s Corner, where one can trod on the final resting place of some of the greatest names in English letters and history. I have visited Pere La Chaise cemetery in Paris, an old, vast assemblage of monuments to many famous names, which reminds one of a cathedral in the open air. I have visited, twice, under perilous conditions, the ancient Jewish cemetery in Prague, where generations lie twelve-deep atop each other like residents in some afterlife tenement, the short, skewed headstones a sad, visible comment upon the press of urban life, and the constrictions of ghetto death.

But if I could choose before I die where I would finally rest for eternity, I believe that I would desert country and continent, and ask to be laid down in Green-Wood cemetery in Brooklyn, U.S.A.

It comes as close to paradise as any place on earth I have seen, even though, like all cemeteries, saints and sinners lie side by side, and only Judgment Day can truly say which is which.

It’s impossible to visit a cemetery without contemplation. It was impossible that late summer day, so warm and sunny that the seagulls sparkled as if they had just risen to the air from the white marble monuments below, to avoid considering one’s own demise.

We had hired an open carriage at the dock, for the weather was so fine we had purchased black parasols at Macy’s department store for our outing. Despite the weather, we wore black. Watching the two bay horses that drew us, I recalled Madame Restell’s famous four-horse-drawn equipage that was the talk of Broadway. Now, no one remembered her.

Irene ordered our bowler-hatted driver to pause before we passed through the Gothic gatehouse on the avenue opposite 25th Street.