"Most refreshing," Irene said, setting down her glass with a final gesture after taking a first sip. "I am right in suspecting that you are familiar with the name of Eliza Gilbert?"

"Indeed." The bishop folded his arms and smiled ruefully. "In fact I heard it again after a long while only a few weeks ago. How did you arrive at the notion that this Mrs. Gilbert was your mother?"

"First," said Irene, "you must understand that no mother reared me. I had in fact become quite accustomed to the idea that I not only had no mother but no chance of learning to whom I had been born, when a rather noted New Yorker known as Nellie Bly cabled me in Paris that she thought she might know who my mother was. After much investigation, it was suggested to me that the apparent candidate can be found under a tombstone in Green-Wood Cemetery under the name of Eliza Gilbert."

"Mrs. Eliza Gilbert," I put in. It would not do for a churchman to think needlessly that Irene was less than a legal offspring.

Bishop Potter nodded thoughtfully. "If you know of the Magdalen Asylum, then you know of the other name this woman went by, shall I say?"

"Lola Montez." Irene let the name roll off her tongue like a fanfare.

"It is 'Mrs. Norton?'" he said, leaning in.

"Yes."

"You are married."

"Indeed. To an English barrister living abroad. Quite respectably."

I saw her fairly bite her tongue to keep from adding that this was the only respectable thing about her.

"A barrister." His repetition implied approval. "Perhaps your barrister husband, Mrs. Norton, were he here, would urge you to forgo this search for a never-known mother. It is hard to be an orphan. It may be even harder to be the daughter of a woman as internationally notorious as Lola Montez."

"A mother," Irene said, quite reversing her opinion of weeks ago, or perhaps merely pretending to, "is a mother, and worth knowing about."

The bishop regarded her intently for moments that quickly became awkward.

"You are a remarkably beautiful woman, Mrs. Norton. So was Lola Montez. I can detect no resemblance."

"You saw her, then?" Irene sat forward eagerly.

"And heard her."

"Heard her? She danced, not sang."

"When she lived in New York in the late '50s-this became her home city in what would be the last few years of her life-she no longer danced. But she did lecture, and quite impressively. I was just a young man, freshly ordained and freshly rector of a Pennsylvania church. I had been elected provincial bishop of New York, so I came to the city occasionally. I admit that I publicly objected to a woman of her reputation lecturing at Hope Chapel, but I was won over completely when Miss Lola Montez's lecture on the Catholic Church caught my eye and I attended. She was quite incensed about my previous position on her, but forgave me, and the lecture was held in the Episcopal Church."

"I understand her dancing was laughable."

"I can only speak to her elocution, Mrs. Norton. She spoke eloquently enough to give a preacher a blush of envy. Her health had not yet begun to fail, at least visibly, and she utterly commanded the podium and that audience. I recall a slender figure with curling dark hair gathered behind her ears, expressive features, and the most unworldly dark blue eyes that radiated light and life. I was, I admit, far more captivated than a cleric should have been."

Irene frowned. This was not the image of Lola Montez the books had painted, although we had not read our way through all of them.

"Your eyes," the bishop pointed out, "are quite lively and vivid as well, but are decidedly brown."

"There was a father involved in the process of my being here," Irene said.

"Are you searching for his identity, is that it? You expect some inheritance perhaps?"

"No. I prefer to owe nothing to any man."

The bishop's eyebrow's lifted with surprise and a bit of personal insult.

"But of course I realize that the assistance of men in the business of this world is invaluable." Irene's most winning smile immediately won over the bishop again. "I am amazed that you found Lola Montez so substantial. I expected, frankly, to trace the path of a trivial, shallow woman given to impetuous affairs and fits of childish temper."

"She spoke well and made good sense, what can I say? That's why I've never quite believed the reports of her excesses. They seem more scandal-ridden than one woman could amass in one fairly brief lifetime, for she was not forty when she died."

"The tombstone," I interjected, "indicated she was forty-two."

"It was wrong, Miss Huxleigh. Father Hawks attended her and fussed mightily about the error. You see how even the most trivial facts can be engraved for eternity. I am no apologist for Lola Montez," he said, turning to Irene again, "but from what I saw of her, once, on a lecture stage, when I was a callow youth of twenty-seven, you should not be ashamed to call her mother."

Irene was stunned. It was as if the bishop had spoken to some hidden fear she had not expressed even to herself.

"Of course . . ." The bishop repressed a smile of recollection. "My uncle regrettably objected to her speaking at the Church of the Good Shepherd, despite my support of the idea, and she was most exercised with indignation at that turn of events. However, when she was mortally ill two years later, it did not stop her in the least from seeking solace from Father Hawks, and she died a member in good standing of the Episcopal Church. Even my uncle was touched by her passing."

"Would you have forbidden her that pulpit if you had been bishop then?"

He gave the question a good minute's consideration. "Probably. The papers can be scurrilous, and one must consider the reputation of the Church. We could welcome her as a member, but not as a cause celebre, hmmm?"

"And some say the churches are hypocritical."

"You have a bit of fire and brimstone about you also, Mrs. Norton. Let us call it politics rather than hypocrisy."

"You are in good company then. But I don't wish to argue with what happened thirty years ago, I wish to understand it. Do you think it possible she had a child no one knew about, in '58, say?"

"She traveled a good deal, had spent several years in California, then went to and fro from Europe and Australia. Women have their ways of concealing these things. It's possible. Yet she made no mention, no provision, on her deathbed."

"I know. She left twelve hundred dollars-"

"Not a mean sum in those days."

"I know. All of it to charity and the Church. None to her mother."

"It was not a happy connection from very early, I understand."

"None to any of the reputed men in her life."

"None survived her, except her first husband, Lieutenant James, who was utterly estranged. He not only charged her with adultery after they separated but when he sued her for divorce later, he ensured that neither of them was allowed to remarry. Ever. Father Hawks dutifully inquired, you see, who might be her heir, but her first husband obviously had no claims on her. Father Hawks was loath to let her leave all to the Church without due consideration."

"And you know this for a fact?"

"We have talked about it, Father Hawks and I, and . . . I was much taken with her lecture. When she was shortly after leveled by a stroke, I took a personal interest."

This time Irene lifted skeptical eyebrows.

"It shook me. That vibrant personality I witnessed at the lecture podium so soon having that wonderful voice stilled, those expressive limbs fettered, that mind imprisoned. I was young. I didn't yet know the bitter paradoxes of life and death."

"I am strangely impressed by how much she impressed you in so short a time, Bishop. It is not what I expected to learn of her."

"We none of us are always what we are expected to be, I hope."

"No. Not even bishops."

He hesitated before speaking again. "I don't wish to mislead you. She herself felt she had sinned much. Her last few years were spent in good works, and her penitence as death neared so touched Father Hawks that he, well, as he aged he became a bit undone by it."

"What do you mean?"

"He has the notion that her religious repentance at the end was almost . . . saintly."

"St. Lola?!"

"Exactly. You have it, Mrs. Norton. You've heard how even to this day her evil reputation follows her. Almost no one knows of her last months, of her honest religious fervor. So I told Father Hawks, but he was adamant not only on the genuineness of her conversion but insisted that she had amassed jewels from her many admirers that she intended to leave to the Church. He believed they had been stolen after her stroke, and hidden by those greedy enough to counter a dying woman's last wishes. These twin convictions, her saintliness and her lost jewels, became a mania with the poor soul, particularly after age forced him to retire from active service."

"He is alive?" Irene was standing, no longer bothering to soften her commanding personality, blazing like some avenging angel herself.

"Well, yes. Quite elderly, even tetched a bit perhaps, but . . . yes. He was here last week, pestering the members about her beatification, querying them about those people who took her in during her last illness."

"I must see him, meet with him."

"Certainly." Her conviction had drawn the bishop to his feet as well, and he turned to delve in the top drawer of a nearby desk. "Here is his carte de visite, which we clergy leave with congregation members."

I crowded over Irene's shoulder to view the simple rectangle of white the bishop had handed her.

How newfangled everything was becoming. This card included a photograph of its bearer as well as an address and a telephone number for the club.

Irene wove slightly on her feet. I felt it because I stood so close to her. Her face had gone as white as the paper of the carte de visite.

"Thank you, Bishop," she murmured. "This is a most valuable referral. Now we must. . ."

"Go," I said, taking her firmly by the elbow. "Thank you for your courtesy and the, er, ginger snaps."

I led her out of the chamber and down the short hallway to the door. Once we stood at the top of the usual flight of steps, breathing the warm, heavy air of late summer in the city, she shook me off.

"What is the matter, Irene? You looked as if you had seen a ghost."

"I had, Nell, most unfortunately."

"Unfortunate for the ghost, I presume."

"For him, and for our quest." She glanced at me, totally restored to her usual sardonic metal. "And for your peace of mind, I fear. Father Hawks is the poor tortured shell of a man whose body I saw on the Vanderbilt billiard table, with Sherlock Holmes himself in attendance."

"No!"

"Yes. How dreadfully distressing. I'm afraid, in good conscience, we must let Mr. Holmes know immediately. Get a grip on yourself, Nell! You don't wish to swoon at the top of a flight of stairs, not with all the summertime offal of the city of New York awaiting you at the bottom. And while wearing your brand-new ready-made ensemble from B. Altman's. Before Quentin has seen you in it."

Sometimes Irene could outdo a long sniff of smelling salts for bracing effect.

24.

MISSED FORTUNE.

. . . having countless bands of soldiery trained, organized, and

officered as such a soldiery never was before or since; and backed by

an infallibility that defies reason, an inquisition to bend or break the

will, and a confessional to unlock all hearts and master the

profoundest secrets of all consciences. Such has been the mighty

church of Rome, and there it still is.