The child bawled, sputtered, and coughed in my arms, until I feared it would expire on the spot.

I was aware of an alien helpless feeling. Not that I hadn't tended and held my several younger siblings, but none had seemed as scrawny and demanding as this.

Quentin surprised me by lifting the featherweight burden from my arms.

"You'd better have your hands free for making notes," he said softly as we left Mother Hubbard's crib.

Children . . . dirty, barefoot, rag-clad children, screamed and ran rings around us, reclaiming each cobblestone of the street we left vacant behind us for their crude playground.

"Where are the foundling-home people?" Quentin asked.

I looked around. That eternal screaming and the incessant barking dogs were bringing on the headache.

After we passed the intersection, I recognized a bonneted face quite like Mother Hubbard's: old, wrinkled, dressed in the fashions of a decade or more past.

"Miss Bly?" she asked, hurrying to relieve Quentin of his ridiculously small burden. "This is one of the sold ones? We'll keep track of the lot, so you may write of their progress."

"Write of their progress?" I asked, confused.

This elderly angel in widow's black smiled. Sadly. "Whether they live or not."

I gazed at the worn cloth and the already-worn little bud of a face inside it. Red, bawling. Hungry? Or dying?

Quentin pressed a bill into her gloved hand, the face of Franklin. Fifty dollars. "For the child's care."

Would it make a difference, that princely donation? Neither of us would likely know.

As the good woman left, I leaned against the dusty red brick of a tenement. "Three more to buy."

"It's not the buying," he said. "It's the cost of selling. If it's any comfort, it's done all over the world."

It was no comfort.

57.

THE BELMONT STAKES.

[The widowed Kate Warne was] a slender, brown-haired

woman, graceful in her movements and self-possessed. Her features,

although not what could be called handsome, were decidedly

of an intellectual cast . . . her face was honest, which would cause

one in distress instinctively to select her as a confidante.

-AMERICA'S FIRST FEMALE DETECTIVE, 1856,

ALLEN PINKERTON, REMINISCENCES.

"Godfrey," Irene welcomed her spouse when he returned to our suite late that afternoon. "Nell and I are so cross and cross-eyed from reading about people long dead. Where can you take us to dine tonight that will be fresh and interesting?"

"Where can I best win your favor . . . so that you two will ask the favor of me that you have in mind, after your cross afternoon of reading about people long dead?"

Irene's delighted laughter echoed up to the electric light chandelier.

"Always one step ahead of us poor plodding females. What do you have in mind, husband, dear? After all, it's your brain we'll be picking at, even if it isn't on the menu."

"Irene!" I remonstrated, but I was ignored.

"You aren't strangers to Delmonico's, I gather," he said, including me in the glance he cast around. "I've had a talk with Belmont this afternoon. What about the Maison D'Oree? It's not as famed as Delmonico's, but more elegant"

"Whatever you say," Irene said.

Hmmm.

So I found myself considering B. Altman's best readymade tea gown for dinner that night. We would be a foursome: Irene and Godfrey, and myself. And this Belmont man.

I now realized he was the Rothschild agent here in New York, and thus a colleague of Godfrey's. I also realized that I was the odd woman out, and would have to serve as Mr. Belmont's . . . dinner partner.

Ordinarily, I'd have been quite undone by having to make small talk with a figure of old New York society, one of the enormously wealthy Belmonts.

However, tonight I felt more than up to it. In fact, I asked Irene to lend me, for the occasion the one Worth gown she had brought on this voyage, despite my earnest arguments against it.

If Pink wouldn't stop at luring Quentin to aid her in journalistic enterprises of a mysterious nature, who was I to snub a Belmont?

The gown was fashioned in a spectacular lavenderlight green shot silk, velvet-dotted with lilac, with falls of blond lace at the three-quarter-length sleeves and the V-shaped low bodice. Since I had deigned to wear Worth, Irene decided that I must live up to my gown. She lavished all her theatrical effects upon my coiffure and accessories, so I returned to the parlor as Cinderella with a fairy godmother who had an open account at Maison Worth in Paris.

"My goodness, Nell," Godfrey said, rising in his city-formal black lounge suit at my entrance.

"Your goodness had nothing to do with it," I sniffed. "I owe it all to Irene's good credit at Maison Worth."

He smiled ruefully. "And her good credit it is. Repeatedly. My dear."

He kissed her cheek as Irene appeared in my blue Liberty of London gown, which she had bought for me.

Irene looked charming in the flowing girlish elegance of a Liberty gown, which relied more on fabric than corseted fit for its effect, rather like a Kate Greenaway drawing of children's dress. I, however, looked . . . goodness . . . formidable. At least I was debauched enough to notice.

Irene laid her swansdown cape over my puff-sleeved shoulders. "Mr. Belmont is the key, Nell," she whispered. "Only he can overcome the advantage Sherlock Holmes has in this situation. He must become sympathetic to our cause. Godfrey he already has much in common with. A feminine persuasion may make all the difference in the rest."

Perhaps I'd been reading too much about Lola Montez.

I'd actually come to think I possessed a bit of feminine persuasion myself.

This was a night made in fairy land. Godfrey had a Gurney waiting for us: two seats facing each other. We rattled off under the festive line of electric lights bracketing Broadway.

By the time we picked up Mr. Belmont on Fifth Avenue, we had been chattering like children, catching up on each other's adventures worlds apart.

We grew sober when Mr. Belmont joined us, but by the time we reached Maison D'Oree, we were a festive party again. He was such an urbane and amusing man, though old enough to be my father. Indeed, his son Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont was the man about town in the family now, he said, and quite the favorite at all the society balls and soirees.

He naturally attended to me as we left the carriage for the restaurant, with such discreet aplomb that I was at once both completely at ease and completely myself.

The dining room gleamed like a cabochon ruby. Polished exotic woods of red and purple hue, damask tablecloths, candlelight everywhere. And the food, though exceedingly strange to me, was also wonderfully flavored. Quentin was right. American cuisine surpassed the English and, in my lone and lowly opinion, the French.

After dinner there were exquisite ices. My dining partners resorted to coffee, brandy, and cigars to ruin the enchanting aftertaste, but I was used to such silliness.

Mr. Belmont frowned for the first time that night as he exhaled a stream of cigar smoke toward the candlelit chandelier above us.

"It's good that you were here, Godfrey, during that nasty business involving little Miss Vanderbilt." He glanced at Irene. "And one might even say providential that your wife was responsible for foiling the abduction."

"Well, obviously," I said. "It was intolerable that a child be subjected to such an ordeal."

He smiled at me. "Your protective zeal does you much honor, Miss Huxleigh, but, less obviously, you and your friends' role in this affair also enhances the Rothschild interests we all have served in our time."

I was not used to being put on an equal footing with Godfrey and Irene in their Rothschild assignments . . . and with a man like August Belmont! So I said nothing, as I was quite speechless.

"How so, Mr. Belmont?" Irene asked, tapping the ash from the end of her petite cigar with a gesture of exquisite delicacy. "I can't see that we've done anything out of the usual here."

He laughed at that. "Of course not. Nothing unusual for you! That's the wonder of it. Many's the time in Paris I've heard Baron Alphonse boast over a glass of brandy, extolling his foresight in winning you three to his service. He is always relating some amazing escapade that you have engineered."

Irene and Godfrey and I exchanged glances. We had no idea we had so entertained the Baron de Rothschild.

"And now I see why," Mr. Belmont said, leaning forward. "It's quite amazing. Mrs. Norton and Miss Huxleigh are in New York and happen to stumble upon a plot to kidnap the daughter of the wealthiest man in America. And you, Godfrey, assigned to godforsaken Bavaria on a matter of necessary but tedious political fence-mending . . . you sense at once-at once!-that you are needed in America and arrive in the nick of time to convince Vanderbilt to trust the matter of his daughter's kidnapping to you and yours. And then you promptly rescue her. If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it." He eyed us all, eyes brimming with bemusement and laughter. "And the most astounding part is that you think nothing of what you've accomplished."

"We did what we must . . . ." Irene began.

"But it was all unexpected. You are all totally surprising. Baron Alphonse can find a dozen men like myself: astute at business, wealthy, well connected. We serve him, and ourselves, well. We try to keep this fractured old world on an even keel, for the affairs of first families in any part of the world go better without chaos. But we're rather predictable. You, on the other hand, make things happen because you are not. I salute you."

With that he lifted his glass. Godfrey and Irene followed suit, and I quickly seized my water goblet.

"To you all," Mr. Belmont said.

"To the Rothschilds," said Godfrey.

"To the unpredictable," Irene said, predictably.

"To . . . Consuelo," said I.

"Indeed," Mr. Belmont said, and downed a swallow of brandy.

We all drank, and then Irene set down her brandy glass and leaned forward. The candlelight played hide and seek in the highlights of her hair and danced off the diamond pin of a key and a musical clef Godfrey had given her, which nestled as a hair jewel near her temple. She looked beautiful enough to tempt an archangel from heaven, and now was the moment she had waited for during the entire evening.

"There is something we need to know," she told Mr. Belmont "Ask anything." He sounded as though he meant it, poor bedazzled man.

"Consuelo's kidnappers wanted something the Vanderbilts have, but we're not sure what. Of course most of their wealth must be in bank vaults, but are you aware of any other places of possible safekeeping?"

He sat back to consider. "Alva has enough jewels to be queen if America ever adopts a royal family. I assume the house Hunt built her on Fifth Avenue must have several internal safes or vaults. One for the silver, of course. And several for her jewels. Is that the kind of thing you meant?"

"Possibly," Irene said. "Do you know of any specifically large private vault?"

"Besides the Vanderbilt bones interred in the family mausoleum built into a hill on Staten Island? Hardly. As for the existence and location of vaults for valuables within another's domicile, that's not the sort of thing one wants known, even among one's own circle. All those Fifth Avenue houses on Vanderbilt Row and surrounding it are palaces and fortresses built by the richest families in the country. Why not just ask Willie Vanderbilt about this?"

"The actual owners take their holdings, and the precautions to safeguard them, for granted," Irene said. "I like testimony from uninvolved sources. Often I glean an intriguing idea."

"Well, all I know is that the Millionaires' Row mansions on Fifth Avenue together must contain dozens of vaults to hold assorted priceless valuables, enough to entice the most accomplished of thieves. You will notice the owners hire security forces to protect their houses."

"Mostly Pinkertons," Godfrey told Irene. "Your former associates."