If someone had told me that I would one day journey to New York City in search of my friend Irene Adler Norton's mother . . .

If that same someone had said that in the course of this inquiry I would be obliged to call upon the Episcopal bishop of the city to ask him about the most notorious woman in the world . . .

If that very individual had also asserted that the need to call upon the bishop arose from information found in the "morgue" of a New York City newspaper . . . well, I would have said I knew a liar three times over.

Alas, no one had warned me of these eventualities, so I had no one to blame for this turn of events but myself, or perhaps my shameless companion who would plot herself into any preposterous situation and carry it through on sheer bravado.

We owed this one respectable call of our stay in New York to another expedition to visit the ogre of the New York Herald. He greeted our return to his dingy subterranean domain with a sort of evil glee.

When Irene told him we sought news of a Bishop Potter of the Episcopal Church in 1861, he led us down another confusion of aisles, cackling all the way.

"A bishop you want now? That would be on the churchly aisle, all the denominations together, as they so seldom are in life. In the same pew, so to speak."

When we finally stopped, his mottled hand waved at a row that looked longer than the nave of a major cathedral. My heart sank, and then I sneezed.

"Bless you, ma'am. It's the paper dust. And all the weevils and spiders and that sort down here. Shouldn't wonder if you'd inhaled some dead spider legs. Paper is nasty stuff. The ink smudges and powders. The pages rot and crumble, you know, and attract vermin."

By now I was ready to retch as well as sneeze.

"Not a place for ladies, newspapers, not even in the offices upstairs. And especially not down here."

His voice had risen into the strident tone of an itinerant preacher admonishing a flock.

"The sooner we find what we need the sooner we will be gone," Irene said, and if a soft voice could turn away wrath, hers was warm honey.

"Suppose so. Watch yer hems, they'll be sweeping up mouse and rat droppings."

Thus warned, we were led to the middle of the aisle. "Lucky for you Potter has been a hallowed name hereabouts for thirty-five years; still is."

Our glances met as our hearts leaped up.

"So Bishop Potter is still the prelate here in New York," Irene said.

"Must be," our guide grumbled. "They is always writing about him in the paper."

He's alive, thank the Lord. That is the phrase that came unbidden into my mind. If we had to investigate the life, and death, of this troublesome woman, it would be luck indeed that an honored churchman could add a personal recollection to the lurid stories the newspapers had recorded.

Of course Bishop Potter may not have visited her deathbed personally, but from the accounts of her passing, an Episcopal priest, the reverend Francis Lister Hawks, had been beside her reading from the Good Book at the end. His account of her death brought tears to my eyes.

Irene had sniffed and said that deathbed conversions played well enough on the stage, but that she always mistrusted them in real life.

I do believe that, as much as Irene was mortified by a possible mother who was inept onstage, she was even more embarrassed by a penitent one.

"Here it is." Mr. Wheems pulled an actual file from the shelf. "You ladies know where the table is."

We didn't, not in this maze of glaring electric lights beaming down on us, creating shadows larger than ourselves.

Irene told him so, and he led us back to the rickety table we had used on our first visit. The dust we had left undisturbed still lay there.

This time we had clippings of articles to scan, all in a huge envelope marked "Potter, Bishop."

As soon as Mr. Wheems's departing shuffles had died to a whisper, Irene began drawing out leaves of yellowed paper from the large envelope. I showed my agreement with our guide about the lamentable condition of old newsprint by sneezing several more times.

Irene snatched the papers from my vicinity like a mother saving a child from a fire. "Here's my handkerchief. We don't want the ink to blur."

She sifted through the collection. "These are filed from the most recent dates to years back. Let's see . . . 'Bishop Potter Addresses Episcopalian Club. This spring. Henry Codman Potter Succeeds to Bishopric of New York City. . . ."

"But that announcement is dated only two years ago!" She frowned and eyed me with astonishment.

"How could he be 'Bishop Potter' in the 1861 news report and be made 'Bishop Potter' in 1887? Instead of a cart before the horse that puts a bishop before a priest."

Irene was riffling back through more of the musty clippings. "Ah, here! 'Henry Codman Potter Consecrated Assistant to His Uncle Horatio Potter, Ailing Bishop of New York.'"

I couldn't believe the coincidence. "Irene, there are two Bishop Potters! Horatio must have been the bishop referred to in 1861. So now he's dead, and only two years ago. How unfortunate!"

Irene's toe tapped the rough brick floor, unmindful of any passing vermin she might be sending to their maker.

"Yes, he's dead. But the nephew might be aware of his uncle's . . . what do they call it in churchy circles, Nell? . . . his uncle's reign?"

"Your mind turns too much upon kings and worldly monarchs," I said. "Bishops are elected or appointed, so it would be called a term of office."

"Apparently his nephew was a shoo-in to replace him. Sounds mighty like a dynasty to me. Anyway, according to the newspaper stories, our man . . . the living Bishop Potter, that is . . . is something of a social reformer, a supporter of working men's clubs, missions, kindergartens, improved saloons."

I frowned at that last mention. "I don't see how saloons can be improved."

"Neither do I. They have served well as is for centuries."

"I meant that they were too debased to be improved."

"Well, apparently Lola Montez was not, to read the exceedingly treacly narrative of her last hours on earth." Her forefinger stabbed Bishop Potter's name in a current headline. "We shall have to call upon the good bishop."

"How? You can't just ring up and ask for an appointment for no reason."

"I shall have the best of reasons."

"Which is?"

"A donation to one of the bishop's pet projects. I wonder if the Magdalen Asylum is still operative. That would lead nicely into the subject of the late, lamented Lola, for she left a bequest to it."

"Irene, not only is this scheme dishonest and shabby but you would be required to make an actual donation."

She shrugged. "One must sacrifice for the greater good at times, and what else use is that lovely letter to the Rothschild agent in New York? I am sure the charming Mr. Belmont can arrange for my bank in Paris to cable authorization for a few hundred dollars here to New York."

"A few hundred dollars! Irene, that is an immense sum to pay for a chance of speaking to someone who perhaps remembers or more likely knows nothing of importance about Lola Montez."

She whisked the clippings back into their envelope. "It's for a good cause, Nell, in any event. And a paltry donation would not get us an audience with the bishop."

"Us! I will not be present while you hoodwink a prelate of the Church."

"Oh, don't be stuffy, Nell. He isn't even Anglican."

"He isn't?"

"No, they started out that way but now they've become completely Americanized, which is why they're called Episcopalians. It's not like they're Church of England."

"Oh."

"So you wouldn't be mocking the faith of your father, et cetera. Besides, our cause is good."

"What is it?"

Irene did not think long. "We wish to found a New Magdalen Society, inspired by the touching conversion of Lola Montez and . . . and the eloquent detective investigations of Miss Nellie Bly into the sore-tried lot of the working girls and the poor."

Her skirts swished back down the aisle as she returned the compendium of Bishops Potter I and II, to their shelf.

I remained nailed to the spot, contemplating how Irene had managed to transform herself into the fictional emissary for two such divergent persons as Lola Montez and Nellie Bly. It was utterly audacious. On this and this alone, Sherlock Holmes and I were in concord.

Only Irene, and only in New York.

22.

AN AMERICAN ATROCITY.

A good while ago we gave you a tip to investigate Insane Akylum-

you remember-and we suppose that 'Nellie Bly' is the result.

-NOTE TO JOSEPH PULITZER AFTER BLY WROTE

AN EXPOSe OF TEN DAYS SPENT IN A MADHOUSE.

FROM NELLIE BLY'S JOURNAL The Affair at Noll Cottage burst upon the New York scene on August 26 of the summer of 1889 like the Johnstown Flood. Unlike the flood of the preceding spring that leveled thousands, this was an intimate atrocity, but no less devastating.

I will never forget that date. By a stroke of good luck, the shocking event all the city talked about combined the boring society coverage I had been relegated to lately with the elements of the most thundering melodrama on view in the Rialto theatrical district.

A bloodstained dagger!

A wailing infant!

Two hysterical women!

A mistress, a wife, a betraying nursemaid, a socially eminent husband.

Of course the World reported every breathless detail.

Imagine a late summer luncheon at fashionable Noll Cottage in Atlantic City. (Noll Cottage, of course, was as much a true "cottage" as the Vanderbilt, Du Pont, and Astor "cottages" in Newport, Rhode Island.) The guests, men and women attired in the pale shades of late summer, are seating themselves at tables laid out in pastel summer linens, flowers everywhere.

Into this tranquil setting come, from above, a woman's hysterical screams and the crash of fine furnishings smashing to smithereens.

Below, the men in their beige summer suits, the women in their white silks and dimities, are pushing back their chairs, deserting the melon balls and cold cuts and ices to stand, looking upward.

A waiter is the only one to act.

He runs upstairs to the find the nursery is the source of the commotion, to find his employers struggling and bloody.

The husband: Robert Roy Hamilton, yes, those Hamiltons. Grandson of Alexander Hamilton, who himself died in a duel.

The wife: Eva, beautiful as all society wives are beautiful, blond hair disheveled, stabbing at everything within reach with a bloody dagger.

The infant: only six months, wailing and flailing on the bed.

And on the floor, the child's nursemaid: bloodied and unconscious.

Of course I was not allowed to cover a crime story, a front-page news story. I read of this event in the newspapers like everybody else. I was, however, perfectly free to find my own angle on it, and luckily, I'd already been investigating the general subject. I forgot all about Quentin Stanhope's quest to keep me quiet about the Ripper.

I was now on the trail of a true and native American sensation.

The facts baldly stated were scandalous enough. The lies and deceit that underlay them might take weeks to reveal and must be even more sensational.

The World laid every one of those facts bare in the following days, but by then I was following one strand in the web of lies: the infant on the bed was not Hamilton's own child, was not the supposed reason for his marrying Eva, his mistress of some time, and making an honest woman of one who previously had entertained in brothels for years.