Lola Montez Conquers the Spaniards (41 page)

Another shrill noise cuts the air. I can't place it, high-pitched and strange. I spy a small, filthy alleyway and bolt down it, pray it's not a cul-de-sac, but he's still with me, the limp very pronounced but not slowing him down at all. God, God! I'm dead! At any second I expect to feel the hair ripped from my head, the knife flung with great force between my shoulder blades—some horrible form of painful death. Another quick frantic check, searching about for a side alley, a landmark, anything at all! And then—wham! I fall to the ground, winded; so does the immovable object I've crashed into. A very big man in a funny hat.

“My God, look out!” I scream.

The man turns to look.

With the last of my breath, I wail, “He's a killer! Oh God, he's the killer of women! He's been preying on women! But he'll kill you too!”

Then, from out of nowhere, like some glorious
deus ex machina
duo, two other burly men charge, converging upon the hurtling priest. The Jesuit snarls and lashes out, and one of the men falls to the ground, blood gushing from an arm. The first big man and the third now converge, one grabbing the priest's knife arm while the other punches him hard. The flick knife is kicked away, Miguel's arms dragged behind his back and tied, then the biggest one sits on him. The other blows his whistle repeatedly while scrambling to the aid of their fallen companion, yanking a length of clean cloth from an inner pocket and applying a tourniquet to the gushing arm.

“Are you well, miss?” the big one says gently, as if he isn't sitting upon a madman's heaving body. “Has he hurt you?”

Policemen. The shrill noise—I can place it now. Their lovely whistles.

“No. No, thank God. And thank you.”
London
policemen, thank God and bless them! If I was going to keep crashing into men, let them all be policemen!

“But your foot? There's a lot of blood, miss.”

My foot? I barely noticed. “Will be fine, I trust. What about your comrade?”

“Can't tell yet. You must come with us, to aid our inquiries.”

I don't want to stay anywhere near that depraved Spanish lunatic, whose head is twisting and writhing, whose torso is trapped beneath the large policeman's buttocks. “Do all women a favour,” I say, unable to look any longer at the devil incarnate.

“And what would that be, miss?”

“If you can't kill it, incarcerate this thing in the deepest of dungeons, and throw away the key.”

“After what he's done to the officer here, that might be fairly easy. And that's the only good thing about this whole sorry business, miss.” Miguel turns his loathsome head to try to speak or snarl or spit, and the officer thumps it. The priest appears to have fainted.

“Oh dear,” says the policeman. “Sometimes I don't know my own strength. Shame.”

Almost before he's finished speaking, a police wagon drives up at speed. The unconscious priest is loaded in unceremoniously, with several more unnecessary, but hugely satisfying, thumps. The wounded officer is helped up to sit by the driver, looking pale but strong. My large friend turns to me and says, “We need you to accompany us, miss, but, as you can see, this conveyance hasn't the room for yourself. We'll send another.”

“Send it to Her Majesty's Theatre, then. It's a cold night,” I tell them, thinking fast. “I need to retrieve my cloak and belongings first.”

“Right you are. We'll leave Thompson as escort. These are mean streets, as you no doubt know. Another wee thing snuffed out, only yesterday evening. Though we'd like to hope we've caught the man now, a young woman can never be too safe.”

“That is too true, officer.”

He turns to go, then, bashfully, turns back. “So you're with the theatre?”

“I'm a dancer.”

“Is that a costume, then? With no . . . shoes or . . . ?”

“It is.”

The big man is flummoxed, but perennially polite. “Very good, miss. May we be permitted to offer you the assistance of a pair of our boots?” We look down at his enormous footwear, then at the shiny black appendages on the other men—possibly even more immense—and look back at each other. I shake my head.

“But I'm grateful, I assure you.”

As the police turn to step up onto the wagon, I stoop and grab the Jesuit's switchblade. It's small and deadly, about four inches of razor sharp steel. I flick it closed, and slip it into my waistband.

Thompson accompanies me to the theatre to retrieve my pile of possessions. I'm thinking hard the whole way. I'm sure that de la Vega
has
killed, while waiting to find me—two more young women, snuffed out to sate his lust. If the police believe the Jesuit is the murderer of the women, will they really need my testimony? The priest has the look, the smell, the
feel
of a killer. He doesn't even look like a priest—he's wearing evening clothes, a glittering tiepin. Surely they'll manage to make a conviction stick. The last thing I want, after everything that has happened, after all the betrayals I've suffered, is to go to a police station to “aid their inquiries” and be held there myself on some trumped up charge of who knows what. Indecency? Adultery? Being a divorced woman? Sleeping with members of Parliament? Consorting with spies? Using a false name? Oh my God! Any one of these will sink me!

A hundred yards from the backstage door, I stop. Actors and singers are still entering for the evening's upcoming performance; stagehands stand about, smoking. They may recognize me and spill the beans that I've been released from my dancing engagement.

“May I ask you, officer, to kindly go around to the lobby and fetch an important envelope that is waiting for me there? Name of Lola Montez.”

“But—”

“I do not wish my public to see me. It would cause too much of a stir.”

He scratches his ear, no doubt thinking, Theatre people, they're a right odd lot. But he lumbers off down the alley. I can see him burling his way through the crowd on the main street, and then he's out of sight.

Mind whirling, I grab my cloak from where it lies in the street. I'm thinking: The night may be cold, but England's too hot for me. What to do, where to go. I have no home, nowhere I belong; I can't even narrow it down to one country. Nowhere. At this exact moment, outside the stage door in the dark unsafe alley, I feel more alone than I've ever been before in a lifetime of lonely wandering. I walk down the alley towards the street, look over at the glittering mob clustering at the front entrance, jostling and laughing, the mob which was mine the previous night, all mine. They'd never seen anything like me, and now? Well, it's as if they don't know, or care. I turn away, in the opposite direction, move down the street, hugging my cloak around my shoulders.

Hooves clatter by, and a carriage. I hear the clanking of bridle bit, the creak of reins. There is a face at the window as the carriage is passing. At first I think: a stranger, staring at a woman, sizing me up, wondering if I'm a lady of the night.
¡Hijo de puta!
Why must they always think this! I'm ready to spit curses when I recognize the face. “Heinrich?” I call up to it. “Heinrich the seventy-second?”

“Indeed,” comes the stammered answer, then, “Stop the horses.” He goggles at me, says, “I had to miss your opening last night, Señora, so I came tonight instead. I've been told you are cancelled. I was so disappointed, because I am leaving for my homeland in two days. The newspapers are stupid,
nein?
I hope you're not paying attention to what they wrote. But what are you doing out here, in the cold?”

The door is pushed open. I hesitate about three seconds. Then I hop in.

The horses are whipped up. I lean back against the cushions, let the man burble on excitedly. My mind racing in all directions: Emma, my dear little unknown girl. I made a promise to myself last night that if I got out of this safely, I would go to her. But if I go to her, I'll be Eliza Gilbert again. And then there's the madman! Will I be forced to appear, to
testify against him? As Eliza Gilbert again. I'm still shuddering with fear and revulsion, the need to put distance between myself and that loathsome creature.
Significant
distance. Which leads me to another thing. I also told myself, when the Cockney and the little shit first left me in that damnable room, that if I ever got out, I would go to America, land of liberty, assertiveness, and impulsiveness! Americans are not afraid of a woman like me, with an excess of verve and a crack shot with a pistol! Lola will survive. Lola must seek fame and fortune in a new land, a bright and wild frontier! Even if she must first escape to—to the German countryside? Someplace like Lowersbum-Bovinehoof? Why not?

I close my eyes, sit very still. Emma, I'm so sorry. Some day I'll make you understand, I promise that. Your Aunt Eliza will come home, famous and rich, and whisk you up into the life of your dreams.

Think about that later. I'll just rest a minute. Just to catch my breath.

Carefully, slowly, wiggling my bare toes, curling my fingers like soft paws, Heinrich the seventy-second's reedy voice riffling along on the edges of my consciousness. England is a backwater; London a rat trap. I must seek my fame and fortune elsewhere. Leave them behind, the lot of them. They've used me, cruelly. Now I will use the world, in its freest sense.

I allow myself to be seduced, by this. By sleep.

H
ISTORY BOOKS AND BIOGRAPHIES
are silent on the hows and whys of Lola's sudden transformation, as was she herself. This deficiency of facts, of course, gave me plenty of room to imagine something big for her to journey into and through, as fiction. Perhaps some readers will be interested in discovering which is which; if so, you might enjoy consulting the books mentioned below.

The real Lola loved to exaggerate and embellish—and with Lola the adventure comes first. In the novel, time is somewhat elastic, even altered—certain events which may factually have happened in 1841 may have ended up in 1842, so that Lola may be part of them.

I am deeply indebted to historians and biographers: To David Thatcher Gies, for his fascinating study, Theatre and politics in nineteenth-century Spain: Juan de Grimaldi as impresario and government agent (Cambridge University Press, 1988). I'm equally grateful to Edgar Holt for The Carlist Wars in Spain (Putnam and Company Ltd., 1967).

For excellent biographies of Lola Montez, I cannot speak highly enough of Bruce Seymour's Lola Montez: A Life (Yale University Press, 1996). His fascination and amused admiration for her is clear in every line; his research is staggering. I also consulted Lola Montez by Amanda Darling (Stein and Day, Incorporated, 1972), for a different perspective.

The aforementioned writers took great care to get the facts straight. A trip through Lola's world would not be complete, however, without reading her own autobiography and her lectures, always in print—a fact that, in itself, would astonish and amuse her, I'm sure (Lectures of Lola Montez Countess of Landsfeld Including Her Autobiography, Kessinger Publishing's Rare Reprints).

From the time of her trip to Spain until her early death in 1860, Lola whirled her way around Europe, America, and Australia, causing heads
to turn and tongues to wag at her audacious exploits with lovers, whips, and pistols. She traveled almost unbelievably far and wide for a woman of that time. She danced in the Paris of Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, and Franz Liszt; she was in Bavaria on the arm of a King during the uprisings and revolutions in Europe in 1848; she followed two gold rushes, one in Australia, the other in California. The place in the world in which Lola seems to have felt most at home was America. She first arrived in 1851 and performed in Manhattan. News of the gold rush in California was beginning to stir things up, and Lola must have felt drawn to the unfolding adventure in the west. By 1853 she was settled in Grass Valley, riding horses astride, keeping up her excellent marksmanship, and playing with a pet bear. The house in which she lived is still known as Lola Montez's cottage. There is even a mountain named in her honour (Mount Lola) in Nevada County, California. She was witty as well as a true raconteuse, so a number of years later, when she began to tour America again as a lecturer, she attracted large audiences to her new venture. She spoke on topics such as
The Art of Beauty
and
Comic Aspects of Love,
and continued to dance, reviving again and again her famous
El Oleano,
or Spider Dance.

From the first moment I read about her, Lola Montez made me laugh. My biggest acknowledgement, then, is to her—a sparky woman who would not be kept down. A million thanks, Lola.

A huge hug to my wonderful partner, Andrew Willmer, for his unflagging enthusiasm over long periods of time, as well as fact checking, map reading, pushing and extending his technological frontiers on my behalf, and miscellaneous research in many crazy directions.
Ti amor!

Many thanks to Astor + Blue Editions, particularly to my publisher, Robert Astle, who was keen on this idea from the beginning, and gave me the encouragement and the push that I needed. To Tony Viardo, thanks for welcoming me aboard. To Ali Bothwell Mancini, enthusiastic and insightful editor,
mucho gracias.
)

I owe a debt of thanks to writer George MacDonald Fraser for the countless hours of reading pleasure I enjoyed—as teenager and then as adult—with his wonderful Flashman series. Inspirational fun!

Other thank yous—to Concordia University for sabbatical leave during which I had the time to research and write the first draft; the following friends and acquaintances for writing time in beautiful places: Keith and Alice Green for Fonte Pecciano in Umbria, Alan and Carole Pearson for Trullo Patrizia in Puglia, Marina Cervelli for Il Bizantino in Venice, Bruce and Kathy Willmer for their cottage in Ontario. Also, thanks to Caroline Davis and her book club in Hilo, Hawaii, for her thorough, early notes and then for their enthusiastic responses to the novel as a book club read; Frances and Michael Corbett in Gioiella, Umbria, for early exuberance; Raymond Lee in Ohio for expert advice on historical firearms—any mistakes (or exaggerations) are undoubtedly my own; Vern Thiessen, for technological advice; and to Helen Heller, for getting me up and running, a big thank you.