And then, I could wait no more!

I stroke out from my hiding place, across the damp, faintly lit street smelling of horse manure and human urine.

What wretched place was this? No place to leave a child unattended. No place to leave a friend alone. No place to leave anyone!

I rushed along the building, my gloved hands pulling over each other against the brick like sailors drawing on a line, beyond my control, my hands and not my hands.

The stench of the broad alley between the backs of tenements met me like a wall of revulsion. I felt along the jagged bricks until my leather-padded fingertips found the indentation of a door.

It gave to my impetuous weight like a curtain.

I was inside, and smelled the stale aftertaste of corned beef and cabbage from before.

The room would be to my left now. The sinister side. Did I interrupt the unholy trio? If so, I would stutter an apology in the deepest croak I could manage and ask for Mrs. Kelly. I knew the landlady's name. I could make myself seem a resident of this miserable place. I could make myself seem a resident of hell, if necessary.

The doors gave way before me, all unlocked, unguarded.

What a dire sign this was, but I was too overwrought to realize it.

The room I entered felt familiar, but the gaslights gleamed faintly against the walls. I saw a wardrobe I recognized, thrown half askew. A dark hole that had once been a fireplace.

I rushed to kneel before it on crushed stone, amid scattered bricks. The hiding place that had held Lola's diary was empty. My forged replacement had found a home!

I rose and went to the wardrobe, pulling a twisted door open. Irene's mad plan had worked.

It was empty. Utterly empty.

I was alone in the room. No diary, no three shadowed men. No Irene.

40.

SHAKEN BY . . .

How nice it would be to be a man. She fancied she was one until she felt her body grow strong and hard. . . . She felt the great freedom opened to her; no place shut off from her, the long chain broken, all work possible for her, no law to say this and this is for woman.

-REBEKAH IN FROM MAN TO MAN, BY OLIVE SCHREINER

My pockets were heavy with the coins Irene had insisted I take along. Weighty pockets, she had said as we had set out (only hours before!), are a hallmark of the man at large on a city street. You will walk more convincingly with coins to spend.

I managed to hail my first cab with an imperious wave and a gold coin pinched between leather-clad thumb and forefinger.

The equipage stopped, to my astonishment. I leaped inside, thanking God that I remembered that name of the hotel to which Irene had sent messages to Quentin. "The Fifth Avenue Hotel at Madison Square, and a dollar tip if you be quick about it."

He lashed the horses, as I cringed inside. I didn't think he'd hurt anything-and then I didn't think, but felt the wind lashing through the open windows I didn't know how to raise. I held my cap down over my ears and thought furiously.

At the hotel, I gave gold for speed and the horses' poor sweating flanks. "Rest them for an hour," I muttered in a croak I regarded as masculine.

Inside the lobby, evening gaslights glared down on my poor figure like disapproving dowagers. I strode forward as best I could, and asked the clerk for Quentin's room.

"Mr. Stanhope is out," he said, with a supercilious glance at the tower of key cubby-holes behind his back. "He has been out all day. And night"

I stared. "He can't be!"

"He is, and it is his business."

"How much his business?" I demanded in my best imitation of Irene out in her walking-out clothes.

"I can't say." A smirk. "A lady was involved."

"Brown hair? Extravagant hat? Tiny waist?"

He smirked again. "The gentleman is correct I can take a note for Mr. Stanhope and give it to him . . . in the morning."

Who he thought I was I can't say. The lady's brother. A rival. He took me for a man and there was nothing to do but depart in that guise.

I stood on the dark street outside, watching the slower traffic of the city at night clop by.

Irene was gone. Quentin was . . . gone.

My composure was gone. How long I could range the streets in my decidedly pathetic guise, I didn't know.

I thought of Nellie Bly, and wracked my brains to remember the address at which she resided with her mother. Her mother. She had one. I did not. Irene did not.

I lifted a weary arm and waved at a hack. He came over as if I held sugar for his weary horse.

I got in and told him where to go.

Forever after that awful night, the sound of horses' hooves will be linked to the pounding of a Spanish dancer's nail-studded shoe heels and toes in my mind.

My head was an anvil and each sound of the city a hammer that impressed itself upon my beaten brain. I was dazed beyond sleep by then, and stumbled out of the last cab, giving the driver a princely coin.

Another building to broach, another door to push through. An elevator, which I abhorred, to stand in like a corpse. My lapel watch was back at the Astor House, but it felt as though an aeon had passed since Irene had left me behind and blithely entered the stage set of her construction, the empty former room of Lola Montez.

When the elevator jerked to a pause, I shook myself awake.

The operator parted its accordion of metal bars. I stumbled down a passage, searching for doors. I no longer knew whether I expected Irene to be behind one of them or . . . Jack the Ripper.

At last I knocked on something that seemed faintly familiar.

There was no response.

I knocked again. I really didn't want an answer by now.

Again, I knocked.

A neighboring door opened. A woman with her hair in kid-leather curlers looked out, glaring.

"Young man! Stop that racket! This is a respectable establishment."

I shrugged, too tired to lift my hand to mahogany again.

The door leaned in with me, and I stumbled through, utterly off-balance.

A firm hand grabbed my elbow and reversed my momentum.

I was still upright, to my great amazement.

"Good God. What have we here?"

I wasn't sure.

41.

TAKEN BY STORM . . .

Holmes had, when he liked, a peculiarly ingratiating

way with women.

-WATSON IN "THE GOLDEN PINCE-NEZ"

"Perhaps," said a strangely bracing sardonic voice, "you'd care to explain the burning cigar in your pocket."

I blinked in the light of the paraffin lamp blazing beside me on a side table as I patted my jacket pockets in confusion. My right hand detected a lump. I reached for it dully, like a child roused in the middle of the night whose actions are clumsy and slow.

Another hand pushed mine aside and pulled out . . . not the candy my child self hoped for but Irene's cigar. The lit end still smoldered, a dull red ember.

I regarded it with an odd mixture of disgust and anguish, and then to my eternal shame I burst into tears.

"That will never do," Sherlock Holmes said. "Sit down." He steered me onto the armless chair next to the table that held the lamp. He took several strides away and returned with a glass of water, which I greedily gulped down, only then realizing how terribly thirsty I was from my frantic journey uptown.

Since it was hard to sob and drink at the same time, this act stifled my tears. When I finished the glass, I took off my right glove and wiped at my eyes. All I could see before me was the wavering muted tapestry pattern of the mouse-colored dressing gown Mr. Holmes wore. His voice came from above me, clipped and calm.

"You have been lurking about the lower town area with your partner in crime detection, Madam Irene. You spent some time near the Episcopal Club, and more time in and out of at least two hired hansom cabs on the way here. You stopped at Mr. Stanhope's hotel, but found him out. I'm amazed that you didn't next seek your American ally in dangerous stunts, Miss Nellie Bly."

My sniffles revived at the mere mention of her name.

"Ah, I see," he said after a moment. "The explanation for why you next came to me instead of her is not written on your trouser cuffs but in your face."

"Irene is in terrible danger," I finally managed to say.

"I know." He stepped away again to refill my water glass, which he returned to the table. "Here is a handkerchief. If you can manage to wet your throat and dry your eyes for a few minutes, I shall be ready to return to the Episcopal Club with you."

At that the mouse-colored dressing gown vanished from the outer room's circle of lamplight like a theatrical curtain being drawn away.

I sat and sipped and sniffled as he had recommended. By the time I was composed again, he'd reappeared dressed in a caped ulster and a soft-brimmed city hat, all of it dark.

"You can tell me what happened in the cab," he said, taking my arm to guide me out of the chair and to the door. "Pull your cap down lower and your scarf up higher around your chin. Madam Irene obviously dressed you for the dark. The lights of a hotel lobby will compromise your disguise, which was always unlikely."

I was incapable of taking offense or arguing with him at the moment, so stuffed the handkerchief in the pocket that had held the cigar, which, left behind, now lay in state in a tray next to the paraffin lamp.

"What time did she disappear?" he asked as we awaited the elevator.

"How did you-?"