Irene studied the single, abused sheet. It looked decidedly abused, but not aged.

She gazed at me, my haggard expression, my disheveled hairdressing. With one releasing gesture, she let go of the result of two hours' worth of labor. The paper dropped to the carpeted floor.

Her expression became both haughty and commanding. "I believe, Nell," she said, "you need a demonstration of Lola Montez's spider dance, of which we both have read so much."

I admit I was confused.

Irene caught her skirt up on one side and anchored it with her hand on her hip.

Her other hand lifted above her head at a graceful but rather distorted angle.

Her high-heeled embroidered walking boots assumed a balletic position.

"In Spain," she declaimed,"in New York City, spiders are everywhere. Small, unseen, spinning webs. Deadly." She shook her head in a rebellious gesture. Her posture grew instantly vigilant and tempestuous. "I stamp upon them. I shake them loose from their mooring in my petticoats. I crush them beneath my heels."

And thus she began stamping at a furious pace upon my poor paper, twitching her skirts from left to right, her feet thundering until the carpet must have cried out for mercy.

"Irene, what is this madness?"

It's the Spanish tarantella, Nell, so named after the large and fearsome tarantula spider. I see that my skirts and petticoats are infested with these deadly crawlers, and won't stop shaking them loose until every last spider is . . . as still as death."

I recalled with a shudder the false spiders of cork, rubber, and whalebone Lola would shake from her skirts on occasion.

By now a sea of petticoats and skirt were frothing about Irene's knees. Her toes and heels were hitting carpet in such a thundering rhythm that I feared for the folk below, whose ceiling was our floor.

Stamp, stamp, stamp. "Estampa, estampa!" Irene called out "So Lola Montez would serve the floral bouquets tossed to stage in her honor, stamping them into crushed petals and scent . . . Andalusia. Barcelona! Carmen! Ole!"

Irene stopped, hands akimbo on hips, her hems hiked as high as Lotta Crabtree's, and gazed at the ruin beneath her neat boots. "Is the paper sufficiently aged yet?" she inquired.

I gingerly plucked it out from under her bootheels.

"Thirty years' aged," I said. "Quite impressively scored and torn. I suppose you shall have to subdue every page I manufacture in this way. Wherever, whenever did you learn such a savage dance?"

"Carmen," she said shortly. "An opera by Bizet that's well suited to my dark soprano, which I never had the opportunity to sing. But I learned the dance."

"Perhaps you are indeed the bastard daughter of Lola Montez!"

Irene laughed. "This storm of motion was worth it to hear that word from your lips, Nell. And, yes, I understand Lola's art. You see how it must have shocked the Europe of her time, but it is only a folk dance of Spain, that's all."

"It's a fine aging agent for paper," I said, admiring her footwork. "Now I must water down the ink just enough to mimic old age. I'll be sure to request my needed sheets of paper during the midday hours tomorrow, when the guests below are likely to be out and about."

Irene's heels and toes beat a last, scorching drum roll on the floor.

39.

TAKEN BY . . .

I want to wear boys' domes, and will as soon as

I can get other women to join me.

-OLIVE SCHREINER, 1884

By now both Irene and I had read enough about, and by, Lola Montez that I had no difficulty producing many mock pages in her hand and style of expression.

"Wonderful, Nell!" Irene slouched in the chair in her walking-out clothes to study my pages, and hers. When dressed as a man, she quickly assumed the less precise posture of one. "You could have quite a future in the forgery way. Such a shame to thrust these away for inconsiderate villains to find."

"If there are any," I answered. "How can you be sure anyone will find anything?"

"I'll leave a faint trail of soot. Those bricks are still filthy with ashes." She glanced quickly at me. "You needn't come in while I 'salt' our paper mine, but you must wear men's garb while you wait in the street for me to rejoin you."

"You have just your own."

"Not anymore." Irene grinned like a newsboy. Something about men's clothing made even a smile bigger, broader, cruder. "I stopped at a flea market during one of your requests for paper. If you'll take that parcel into your room, you'll soon be ready to go."

I had seen the string-wrapped brown paper bundle, but had hesitated to inquire about it.

Irene laughed, lighting up a small cigar, sans holder. "You regard that package as if it were a sack full of spiders! We are done spider dancing around Lola's diary. Tonight we place it, and then stand back to spring the trap!"

I would have begged off, but half suspected that such a move would please Irene. I picked up the parcel and retreated to my bedchamber.

Although she would have been happy to help me dress, as I had often helped her, I was too annoyed to rely on her at the moment. I released my corset by the speedy method of pushing the stays together so the front hooks separated. Ah! How did Pink breathe with such rigorous lacing? I'm ashamed to say that I had worn gentleman's garb on one or two occasions previously, so was able to dress myself in trousers, shirt, and jacket quite quickly. Irene had purchased a billed, checked cap large enough to swallow up my hair like a boa constrictor a rabbit, and had provided a dingy white silk scarf to conceal my feminine throat, especially once I turned up my coat collar.

I had to roll up the trouser legs once, but the area we visited housed laborers, so my dark serge suit was almost too formal for the location. Impromptu cuffs added a nice touch, I thought. My own black walking boots would merely peep out from the long trouser legs and suffice, since we planned our larcenous expedition for the dark of evening.

"Very nice, Nell!" Irene greeted me, rising to adjust the lay of my collar and scarf and cap, nevertheless. "A pity you don't smoke. A pipe would abet the masquerade. But you have quite the jaunty look of a former newsboy about you, so we shall let you play the young gentleman."

We slunk out the back servants' stairs of the hotel, as usual when up to no good.

The alley reeked as badly behind the Astor House as it did on the Lower East Side.

Irene quickly relit her cigar. For once I welcomed the pungent scent of the sulphur on the lucifer, what the Americans call "matches," and the tobacco.

"We'd better walk, but it's only a dozen 'blocks,'" Irene said blithely, and off we set.

My gait was not as practiced as hers, but the trousers pulling at every step forced me to extend my stride. No one gave us a second glance as dusk darkened the city and street lamps came out like large, falling stars someone had stopped only three yards from earth.

Actually, to be abroad at such an hour, ignored, was most refreshing. I almost felt invisible. I almost felt that our bizarre enterprise had a hope of success.

As we turned down Seventeenth Street, the lights became fewer, and I felt an uneasy recall of Whitechapel and what had happened in the dark and murk there less than a year ago.

And yet! We knew the Ripper as no others did, and we knew him to be safely harnessed. He was not here, though others as heartless and vile as he might roam.

I hastened to keep up with Irene by lengthening my stride. And it was odd, these long, loping steps increased my confidence. I felt almost a hound upon a trail, a horse reaching for the end of a race. I had never been one to move at more than a stroll, but suddenly the cooler night air was an intoxicant and I rushed to meet it.

My overlarge leather gloves pinched her rough coat sleeve. "Quentin would have been a better partner tonight."

"Quentin might ask questions I wouldn't want to answer, as Holmes would. I'm not giving up the edge we have in the affairs of Lola Montez unless we have to. She is my mother. Maybe."

With this I couldn't argue. I knew where my mother was buried, as Irene might know, but most of all I knew my mother for a tranquil, loyal, loved parson's wife. As Irene did not. Indeed, it seemed no one had loved Lola Montez as much as she herself had, and therein was truly a tragedy.

After a ten-minute stride (as I thought of our bizarre outing), Irene grabbed my coat sleeve and pulled me into the shelter of a dark doorway. We leaned against some abandoned building, which reminded me that this was a dangerous district.

"Take my cigar," Irene said.

Striding through the streets was one thing; smoking was quite another!

"You don't have to puff upon it. Just hold it. Let the little ember burn. You will look like a loiterer, whom no one will want to approach, and I'll find you easily when I emerge."

My gloved fingers took this loathsome object.

"I'll go in, place the false diary, and hide inside the wardrobe."

"How can you be sure someone will come searching tonight?"

"I can't."

"Then we'll do this again?"

"If we have to."

I had nothing to say to this grim prospect. And so she left me there: lifting my lit cigar before a rickety wooden door. The Statue of Liberty I was not.

While I waited I had much to contemplate. First I watched the shadow that was Irene dart to the side of the boardinghouse and men disappear around the back.

The screaming, milling Street Arabs of the day were at last asleep in their cribs. I suspected they would be up before the dawn, hawking papers, heading for twelve-hour days in the tenement shops and factories, hanging on to their desperate mothers' apron strings if they were less than five or six years old.

As a former governess, I felt the plight of these pathetic creatures as a stab in the heart. It was so easy to view the coddled offspring of the upper classes and dismiss the rest as hopeless guttersnipes. Yet even in the finest houses, a child was expected to answer every adult's need: for quiet, for learning what was desired despite the child's aptitude, for being seen and not heard, as the saying went.

What was one to do? Unguided, the young were little animals. Overguided, they were little automatons. I decided I was very glad that I was no longer a governess, for I wasn't really good at that.

What was I good at? Assisting others, like my father, and then Irene. Being useful, although I was beginning to suspect that I was being useful at rather useless things. I was, according to Irene, a promising forger. I remember being cast alone together with Sherlock Holmes during the last dangerous times. How he had actually allowed me to assist him. And then called me "Huxleigh," like the lowest servant. Or . . . like-? No. The man is too arrogant to give any woman the benefit of the doubt. Except Irene. He has the feet of a chocolate soldier there, all stiff and solid, but that melt at the first lingering touch of sunlight.

I glanced at my leather-gloved hand. The cigar still burned, though I did nothing to encourage it. Its ember was a small red star in the dark, and its scent disguised far more noxious ones.

I stiffened. I'd heard the scrape of shoe leather on stone.

While I watched, a man came down the deserted street.

His strides were long, as mine had been, but his were longer, stronger. And then I saw another man, perhaps twenty feet behind. And a third, another four yards behind the second!

They were strung out, like crows on a fence. Dark of habit, vague of motion. Each moving separately, yet in unison.

My heart began beating, and finding no confining corset to stop it, began thrumming like a Spanish dancer against the false front of my man's jacket.

I sensed the trio noting me.

I didn't move.

They passed on, dismissing me as some midnight lounger, a doorway lurker, an idle smoker.

I watched them take Irene's same path along the side of the boardinghouse.

Despite the cigar, I clasped my gloved hands before me. What should I do? Rush forward to warn her? She was lying in wait for just such a committee. She'd be furious if I disrupted her charade.

But three men. Three dark men striding down the empty street, noticing everything. Had they really dismissed me? Or merely pretended to?

Oh, how I wished for Irene's small lethal pistol . . . and then realized that she must have it with her.

I was so agitated that I actually put the cigar to my lips and breathed in. Nothing happened. Apparently cigars were for Irene and Lola and Godfrey but not for me.

I bit my lip. How long must I wait? If all went well, this villainous trio would depart with my handiwork clutched to their black hearts.

Well, they'd leave with my falsified diary. Perhaps to them their own hearts were merely gray. Ashen. Like the residue in the walled-up fireplace.

I waited. The cigar burned on, very slowly, as if holding its breath, as I did.

I waited. Was it minutes? Half hours?

No one emerged from the small space between the boardinghouses.

I waited.

As I'd been told to.