Lola Montez Conquers the Spaniards (4 page)

“Do you teach the stamping step? I'm sorry, but I don't know the name.”

“All of that,” he answered eagerly. “Boleros, and cachuchas, fandangos. Refined versions, for the English palate. Not quite so . . . scandalous?” Why was he leering in that dreadful manner? “You have a mysterious past, Miss Gilbert,” he continued. “There is something that you are running from?”

He was almost hissing the words now, his smooth accent making it all the more sinister. How did he know?

“And—may I say—you have the acquaintance of a particular aristocrat, a gentleman who has been more than kind to you in your hours of need?”

The little shit had been spying on me! I could think of no other explanation. He pointed his toes again, one after the other, with a mincing hop in between.

“I am like the English raven, Miss Gilbert. I keep my eyes open, and I fly very swiftly to deliver the news.”

I really didn't like the sound of this. And Miss Kelly had effectively handed me over to this tiny dago, wiping her hands of me in an instant.

“Mr. Hernandez, I do not think that I am interested in your proposal.”

“Miss Gilbert, I think that you must be. I shall teach you everything I know about the cachucha and flamenco, and in return you will meet a man who will introduce you to your destiny.” He spoke in such an odd, affected way, and God knows his words were to prove both prophetic and dangerous. “What do you have to lose?”

I should have said “Everything” and run away as swiftly as I could. But I didn't. Truthfully, I didn't know what else to do, since my lessons in acting had ended so abruptly. And he'd made me the slightest bit curious—always a weakness. “Very well,” I agreed with a haughty sniff. “I shall come to one lesson, and then I'll decide.”

“
¡Maravilloso! ¡Buena fortuna!
”

By this time it was late July, and my trial date was approaching steadily. I could have cried with exasperation at the money and time lost with Miss Kelly. Instead I sat down to enumerate my skills and talents, and the earl helped me lengthen this list when he arrived with a lovely set of peridot earbobs.

“Maybe this is what I am, in my natural state—a dancer.” I was sitting up in bed, naked, eating a currant bun, wearing the earbobs and trying out the idea. My lovely earl had set me up in a tiny apartment near the theatre district and had spared no expenses on the softness of the mattress. Was I a kept woman? I tried not to think about that.

All things Spanish had become quite à la mode because of the recent Carlist skirmishes, and I certainly approved when the earl presented me with a long-fringed shawl and a cunning pair of fashionable shoes.
I went to my first dancing lesson wearing them proudly. Hernandez made me take both off at once. I was given an old, dingy pair with steel heels, which clicked alarmingly when I walked. He also had a flounced skirt that he made me wear instead of my own, and we spent a good deal of this first lesson swinging those flounces just so. This turned out to be part of the stamping step, as I had called it—an integral element of flamenco. To my surprise, I enjoyed the whole thing a great deal because he encouraged me to rush around in circles, or click my heels up and down in an increasing rhythm and work up a passion, to not hold back and be ladylike. By the end of the session, I was using the fan liberally, not as a gesture but as a cooling agent, and I had begun to answer Hernandez's excited exclamations with a few of my own. “
¡Fabulosa!
” he'd squeak, and “
¡Deliciosa!
” I'd gasp back.

Several lessons and two weeks later, Hernandez seemed to have something on his mind. We proceeded as usual for the first thirty minutes, rushing around the front room in his second-floor apartment (which had been cleared of furniture, the better to teach his pupils in, I assumed). Then he asked me to take a
café solo
with him. We sat looking out his window at the street below while a diminutive young woman served us the thick, black coffee. “Your daughter?” I asked, once she had left us. “Wife,” he corrected sternly. I still didn't like him very much, so I did not feel too humiliated by my blunder.

“Miss Gilbert,” he finally said, “I have something to tell you which you may find of great interest.” My mind raced: A theatre manager had heard of me already and was hoping to sign me? A person unknown had died and left me a huge sum of cash? Hernandez corkscrewed his legs and then unscrewed them immediately. “I have now heard from my superior in France, and, as I guessed, he is very concerned to see you face-to-face. He is a generous man; he will pay for your expenses to France, where he will instruct tell you what he wishes you to do.”

“Your superior? Wants me in France? Whatever for?”

“You are a very promising student of the Spanish dances, Miss Gilbert. You have the fire and the light in your eyes. I think you could be very successful,
sí?
”

This sounded exciting, and though I didn't quite trust him, I was intrigued.

“I also do not think you have much money.” He placed his little wrinkled hand on mine. “My superior will—how do I say—
sponsor
your travel to Paris. He is not interested in you as a woman, let me assure you. Or . . . not only as a woman. As an associate.”

How curious. How devilish. What on earth could he mean?

He went on to tell me that if the meeting were successful, this man would cover my further expenses to Spain, where I would live and study the language, the dances, and the customs, for as long as I wished to be there. “Or,” he concluded, “to put it another way—for as long as you
need
to be absent from England.” He thrust out his foot in its soft small shoe, examining the instep as he said, “Especially with August almost upon us. At His Majesty's Court of Arches?”

He knew about my divorce date! He knew when and where it would take place! This was terrible! Did he also know how fervently I longed to skip out, ignore it, run away? “I
really
have no idea what you are talking about, Monsieur Hernandez. Good day to you!” As I clattered down the steep flight of stairs to the street, still in his dingy steel-heeled shoes, my heart was greatly distressed. I looked up at the window and he twinkled his fingers in a secretive wave. I flew straight home, sending word to the earl at the House of Commons, where I knew he was in session: “Please come immediately. Dastardly plot. ERG.”

When Howard Harris of Malmesbury arrived, I had worked myself into a lather. I hadn't told the earl about the impending divorce, but he certainly could see that I was shaken. He took a deep breath, retrieved an ice bucket with champagne and two glasses, and attempted to winkle from me the worst of it.

“You know I lived in India when I was a little girl?” Despite my agitation, I needed to tread carefully. I couldn't afford to lose the earl's good opinion. “Then my mother sent me back here, out of her way, to a school in Bath. At any rate, when I was sixteen, she arrived to return me to India to marry an old judge or something.”

I didn't mention the unsavory details: her breaking the news of my impending future with the crustaceous judge, and the way I threw a fit.
Furniture flying, vases smashed, screams and recriminations. I would have done anything to escape the hideous trap I could feel closing around me. My mother's new shipboard acquaintance, who kept hanging about—a certain Lieutenant Thomas James, home from India on convalescent leave—had begun escorting me to my academy and then back at the end of the day. True, he'd seemed initially keen on my married but flirtatious mama, but, well, what can one expect? I was sixteen, she was thirty. When he finally suggested, stammeringly, that we elope, I was ecstatic and said yes with a squeal of delight and the first deepthroated kiss I had ever attempted. It seemed to do the trick.

“I married Lieutenant Thomas James, instead,” I told the earl. “It wasn't a rational thing to have done, and I soon regretted it.”

“You didn't love him?”

“I didn't know what love was. We were cruel to each other—he drank too much and then slept like a boa constrictor. Oh, it was terrible.” Quite a lot of champagne was spilled over the bed linens at this point, as Howard Harris tried to comfort me and I tried to pick and choose carefully the things I would admit to and the things I wouldn't dare reveal.

“Finally, after we'd arrived in India, married, and they could see for themselves, my mother and stepfather realized that the match was a disaster and if they didn't help me I would be forced to do something even more drastic. My stepfather, Major Craigie, gave me a bank draft for one thousand pounds to help me get established, and he and Thomas sent me back to England, to be met by Craigie's sister and taken to their parents in Edinburgh.” Instead, cue the cad George, I thought to myself, but of course didn't say.

“My dear girl. What you have been through.” I arrested the earl's roving hand at this point and tucked it away safely in his lap.

“The point is, you see . . .” I faltered. “I did not go with Aunt Catherine. I stayed in London. I ran through my funds—which is a disease very common to the purses of ladies who have never been taught the value of money—”

“And this is where I found you?”

I nodded plaintively. “Perhaps Thomas has met someone else,” I sniffled, “but I am appalled at the idea of standing up in front of a
judge, of being called a . . . Well, I don't know what. In public! I'm so ashamed—” And I wept stormily.

Certainly divorce is considered a dreadful blot, particularly for a woman. But ashamed? That was not quite true. Perhaps it's my upbringing—boarding schools, distant, uninterested mother, who knows—but it seemed so unfair that a stranger could pronounce judgment on me. Why should I have to stand up and be scolded by some ill-humoured, antique fart in a long wig? None of his business. Pooh on them all.

The earl's eyebrows were creased with concern. “And your dancing teacher . . . has found this out?”

“He wants me to go to France, meet some old duffer for some reason I don't understand, and then go on to Spain. They want me to do a few things for them, which sounds nefarious. He says they will pay all my expenses. But why?”

We mulled this over until Howard Harris became too distracted to be of much further use. When we were quiet again, and over another glass of the now-flat champagne, he said, “I know a fair amount about Spain's recent upheavals, Liza. You must be very careful, should you decide to go. The Spanish are devious and love nothing better than intrigue and revenge. The Neapolitans are the same. Years ago while in Naples I met Spain's then-future Queen Regent, María Cristina. She's still deeply loved in some circles. Do you know much about all of this?”

“Only the minimum.”

His eyes were twinkling. “Cristina was tall, fair, and blue-eyed, and had stayed single until she was twenty-three because she was waiting for a suitor who would make her a queen. But she'd caused her father no end of worry since, like all Bourbons, she was highly coquettish. I was told, in fact, that some of her admirers had found themselves in jail for having too openly admired this royal tease.”

The twinkle made me think he'd been one of those warned away.

“I happened to be there just as the announcement of the impending marriage to King Ferdinand of Spain was being arranged. I was introduced to her, and she truly was bewitching!”

I gave him a smack and he kissed me.

“Now, now. I was presented to her at court, and instead of casting down her eyes, she stared at me boldly, then took hold of one of the buttons on my uniform, to see, as she said, the inscription on it. Her mother, the queen, indignantly called to her to come along, but not before that tug had registered on a lower part of my anatomy and Cristina—the minx—knew it.” That lower part began to rise again, just in memory. She must truly have registered in Malmesbury's imagination to cause such an elevation again so soon.

“The marriage took place, which was a great blow to the upstart brother Carlos's supporters. Cristina immediately became pregnant.”

“What does this have to do with Señor Hernandez's offer?”

Malmesbury laughed and pulled me under the covers. He whispered into my ear, “You're not a political animal, are you, Liza? Cristina's baby was a girl. A few months later she was pregnant again—another girl. Then the king died suddenly of a violent bout of apoplexy, and the stage was set for chaos.”

At this point, we indulged again in a little chaos of our own and emerged ravenous. I brought some comestibles back to the thoroughly destroyed bed and while we ate, the earl mused, “The war is over now, everything is tranquil. Before you turn this opportunity down, Liza, consider all of the amazing things you'd see and hear in Spain. You might have a chance to meet royalty—perhaps even some of the people I've just described. Royalty doesn't have to obey rules as you and I do. It makes them both interesting and dangerous.”