Femme Fatale (13 page)

“Oh, dear me!” I exclaimed. “It sounds so like a situation from a Jane Austen novel.
Sense and Sensibility
, if I recall correctly. I had no idea the laws and customs of America could be so . . . English.”

Mr. Conroy frowned at me. “Right.” Obviously, he had understood not a word I had uttered. “Thank you, miss,” he added with a certain rough, frontier courtesy that I had detected in Buffalo Bill and even Red Tomahawk during our last, er, case. Really, being elevated to an inquiry agent was much more exciting
than my former professions of governess, yard-goods clerk, and typewriter-girl.

I subsided.

Mr. Conroy licked the end of his pencil out of habit—a habit that made my governess’s soul cringe—and continued. “Put out lock, stock and single milk-cow, they were: the widow and five hungry kids. No wonder that Missus Cochrane soon fetched up married to one Jack Ford.”

“Ah.” Irene sipped a centimeter of her sherry. She drank spirits as she smoked the small cigars she favored, delicately. She had not produced any smoking paraphernalia tonight. I suspect such an act would have scandalized our crude American colleague, and she didn’t wish to distract him. “That is why she remarried so unsuitably.”

“You know of the rotter, ma’am?”

“Yes. Some of our research will overlap, but I prefer to hear the whole report entire from you, Mr. Conroy, so please continue.”

“ ‘Rotter’ was too good a word for Jack Ford. Drunk. Wife-beater. Debtor would do better. Nasty goods. The kind you like to grind facedown on the cobbles when you finally catch him at his dirty work. Turns out the rampages and such got too much. Missus Cochrane, the late judge’s wife, takes the bounder to court for divorce, and little someday-Nellie is her main witness to the man’s transgressions. She had spirit. That young Cochrane girl, I mean.”

“Still does, Mr. Conroy. Have you any information on how she became a girl reporter?”

“No. That stuff is not on record, as scandalous divorce cases are. Nellie turned up in the columns of the
Dispatch
before she was twenty, and her first story was about divorce.”

“Cheeky of her.”

“That’s for certain! A girl writing about such scandalous stuff. And that was just the beginning. Before you knew it ‘Nellie Bly’ was taking a train with her mother to Mexico and reporting on
distressing conditions there, though I don’t expect nothing but distressing conditions across the border. Anyway, it was news to the readers of the
Dispatch
, as was the idea of such a young American girl going down there cool as you please. And there was the stunt after she came to New York when she acted like a madwoman and got the goods on the Blackwell’s Island insane asylum, which I would shake in me hobnails before visitin’ meself, for fear they’d never let me out.

“There isn’t much this gal won’t do, and I must say that where she goes and what she sees and tells opens people’s eyes. This world is not a fair or just place, but neither was the Old World, which my forebears fled as they would an infestation of fleas, so there you have it. Nellie Bly is a name around New York now, along with her sisterhood, and they are all stirring up things and crying for justice for the poor and mute. Nothing much changes, though, ’cept the daredevil reporters get courted by the rich and famous and the poor and mute pretty much stay that way.”

“Mr. Conroy. I didn’t expect such an astute and philosophical summary! And what is the state of Miss Bly’s private life now?”

“She doesn’t much have one. The rival newspapers are arguing the truth in her stories and sending other young ladies to outdo her for daring, which is a bit of a challenge. There’s no dirt to dig up on her private life, though you’re saying she posed as a woman of ill repute in Paris. That would sully the page a little, but she already got a book out about
Ten Days in a Brothel
here, not to mention a pretty raw novel last year,
The Mystery of Central Park
, based on her story about a stableman who’d pick up naïve girls in Central Park and set them to brothel work. It was supposed to be a series, from the cover, but appears to be a series of one, and not a peep about that French brothel escapade has hit print here. She lives quietly with her mother in a cozy little flat on Thirty-fifth Street, when she is not out scandalizing folk and putting the fear of exposure into the slum landlords and
others of that sort who deserve the fear of something more than most.”

“Lives with her mother? Apparently the elder woman has never been particularly independent?”

“She has not been a good judge of men’s character. Her daughter has benefited from the mother’s bad example to the point that there are no men to dig up in her past, save the mostly gray dinosaurs who employ her at the newspaper. If you’re looking for dirt on Nellie Bly you are not alone, but you are just as unsuccessful as the girl reporters at the rival papers.”

“Well done, Mr. Conroy!” Irene sat back, her sherry still mostly intact. “You make me proud to have been a Pinkerton. Is the Female Department still going strong?”

“No. Mr. Pinkerton was alone in his insistence on such an idea, and once he died in ’eighty-four, no time was lost in abolishing the practice. I admit that I am sorry to see the notion fade, but at least I have had occasion to meet yourself.”

He stood, stuffing his homely notepad into his sagging coat pocket. “I take it you had been up to a few stunts in your day, ma’am, that would make Miss Nellie Bly pale to puce by comparison. Mr. Pinkerton spoke of you often, with great regret, in that Europe and the performing stage had stolen away the best female agent he ever had.”

Irene stood also. “I am honored to be so remembered. Thank you for your assistance.”

“If you need anything more—”

“I will not hesitate to call upon you.”

With that our unexpected visitor picked up his sorry derby and departed.

“Ah!” Irene pushed her fists into her whaleboned waist and took a deep breath after he had gone.

“We already knew a good deal of Pink’s family history,” I pointed out.

“Yes, but from her alone. I find it intriguing that she still lives with—supports—her mother.”

“Intriguing? It is only daughterly duty. Had I a mother still living—”

“Yes, I know, Nell. You’d be a paragon of devotion. I can only thank fate that you were orphaned and available to provide such sterling devotion to my causes. Pink, though, is from a different tradition. She is young, modern, notorious, celebrated, and even more impressively, making inroads on her society. Why is she not courted? Why has she not a fistful of suitors? Why does she live, at the ripe old age of twenty-five, with her mother?”

“Not every woman,” I pointed out, “is so fortunate as to find a Godfrey.”

“But every woman in such a position would have at least found a Crown Prince of Bohemia or two, even if he were only a merchant prince in this most democratic land.”

Irene paced, then paused to extract her pistol from the silken evening bag and install it in the desk drawer. Only then did she root in the reticule and withdraw the elegant blue enamel case that held her tiny cigarettes and the lucifers that lit them.

“And why is she so intrigued by the notion of my forgotten mother?”

“Obviously her mother was more important to her than yours was to you.”

“For which she does not forgive me. One often requires others to respect the same obligations that oneself is tied to. Yet I must believe that there is more to this matter than a trifling disagreement about the importance of mothers.”

“What can we do to discover what it is?”

“For starters, we must meet
her
mother . . . and then I suppose we must contrive to meet mine.”

She grinned at me with an insouciance I would be sore put to summon were I about to meet my long-dead and utterly unknown mother.

“You could hardly think, Nell, that I would arrive here on an expedition into the most hidden areas of my past called by Nellie Bly without investigating
her
private affairs. You will recall her impassioned defense of her mother, testifying against her vicious stepfather at the age of fourteen. Perhaps it’s not so surprising that she supports and lives with her mother more than ten years later, or that the subjects of her newspaper stunts are the brutal lives of sweatshop girls and fallen women.”

“Yet her own life cannot have been that sordid.”

“No, but it was sorry enough in parts.” Irene gazed at the wallpaper as if it were a painting worth studying. “If you find me odd in not wishing to trace my antecedents, it’s because I know that all families have secrets. Family secrets are the most dangerous of all, and we are always the sorrier for finding them out. I don’t relish unearthing mine.”

I kept silent, meditating upon the one matter I kept from Irene at all costs. I could only be thankful that a dogged investigator like Nellie Bly had not the slightest interest in unveiling my secrets.

8.

Maternal Musings

You can live as many lives in NewYork as you have
money to pay for
.

—
THE DESTRUCTION OF GOTHAM
, 1886

The city of New York was in those days the bustling, expanding, towering monument to American enterprise typified by the Statue of Liberty thrusting her torch into the very vault of Heaven itself.

I reminded myself that it had taken the French to install so blatant a symbol in New York harbor, and then I was less intimidated by the city itself. The French are far more intimidating than anybody.

In fact, that city reminded me more of Mother London than of Grande Dame Paris, for it was crowded, noisy, and noxiously fumed, while Paris was open, airy, and impossibly French.

The first most distressing impact of New York City life was the fact that most city streets were numbered rather than named. And such a hubris of numbers! I understood that humble first and seventh and twentieth streets soon vaulted into the eighties and nineties and beyond. The city reminded me of a Scots plaid,
for the north-south avenues that crossed the east-west streets were also numbered, Fifth and Seventh being the most notable.

Pink and her mother resided in “midtown” at 120 West 35th Street.

There Irene and I took ourselves the next afternoon, by horse-drawn tram.

Such noise! Not only the clatter of hooves and wheels, but the yammering of the numerous street vendors, who were not confined to certain areas of the city but poured into all the main streets hawking their dubious wares.

In London one saw essentially two classes on the streets: gentlemen of business and Those Others; in New York everyone poured out of the towering buildings . . . urchins, hucksters, businessmen, and women of all sorts, many of them suspect, as well as others too obviously poor to be suspect of anything but starvation.

I could not guess into which category of women Irene and myself would be assigned by passersby, save that Irene seemed sublimely disinterested in how we would be regarded by others at all.

She had always had this distressful attitude, but in New York City it was more obvious than elsewhere. I reflected that how women on the street were regarded by others—that is, passing gentlemen—was the hallmark of a civilization, and I must admit that the French exceeded the English in this regard.

“I see,” Irene remarked, “that Paris is rising in your estimation even as Manhattan Island is sinking like a barge in the East River.”

“How can you see anything of the sort?” I demanded.

“Your glances give you away. You have been frowning at the crowds since we left the hotel. And you hold up your hems as if you expect some unknown man in Oriental robes to collapse at your boot toes at any moment, muttering the immortal phrase, ‘Miss Huxleigh?’ ” Irene chuckled. “That Paris street scene
smacked of Stanley finding Livingstone in the jungles of darkest Africa: ‘Miss Huxleigh, I presume?’ ”

I would not allow her to trivialize my dramatic encounter with Quentin Stanhope in Paris, that had led us all—Irene, Godfrey, and myself—into serial danger and travels to foreign and ancient lands.