Lola Montez and the Poisoned Nom de Plume Read online

  We were barrelling along. The sky was darkening, becoming dusk. Just at that moment, my eyes registered the snowy landscape beyond the glass and I saw—not twenty yards off—a frozen river, upon which a large, grey wolf with its hackles raised was moving towards a terrified deer, downed upon the ice. The deer, in fleeing from its predator, must have slipped. Its delicate front legs had splayed beneath it, almost certainly breaking them. It waited, immobile, propped on its chest. The wolf was circling slowly, fangs revealed. Languidly, with an almost obscene pleasure, it seemed to be weighing the merits of the final approach. As we galloped past, the last thing I saw was the deer, its innocent muzzle resting on the ice, being savagely ripped apart from the haunches up. Other grey shadows were loping out of the trees to join their brother in the feasting and the live dismemberment. Our horses, obviously aware of the feral scene, took off wildly, charging down the road, sleigh lurching and passengers crying out in sudden consternation. I could hear shouts from the driver as he struggled to bring the horses back under control. Nauseated by the sight, I touched my fingers to the front of my waistband, feeling for the closed flick knife I carry embedded there. It is four inches of very thin blade, like a stiletto, sharp as a razor, folded into itself. Yes, pistols are fabulous, but can be unreliable in the heat of the moment (as I’d learned to my cost in Spain): I never go anywhere now without the cold reassurance of that little switchblade. Not that such a small knife could have stopped a hungry wolf, I thought, gulping—how could it? I could hardly breathe.

  Oh God. The unbearable fear that I had been pushing down and out of sight with all of my strength had just loped out into the open and bared its fangs for me to face.

  That big wolf, now filling itself with live meat, was the animal double of the human predator who’d stalked and very nearly devoured me. Eyes tightly closed but tears leaking through, I mourned for that poor deer. The violence and indifference of nature—that’s what I’d encountered in Spain. Fleeing, and falling, then ripped apart. My strength and confidence had been eaten away, and they were qualities I desperately needed to survive. I’d had them in spades: where had they gone?

  I came to with a jolt as I heard the driver hollering in a commanding voice, “Whoa now, whoa there!” Not long thereafter, the vehicle began slowing. The burghers in the coach with me began straining to peer out the windows. Sausage-breath was pushing me into the upholstery—¡hijo de puta!—his hand nearing my breast in a scrabbling manner. “Atento!” I snarled, jabbing him savagely with my elbow. He retreated, slightly, and I took the opportunity to look out. There were lights, not many, but a few, dotting the night. Unbelievable, but we seemed to have reached some half-assed town. Suddenly, there was a street—with shops, by God. All closed, since it was late—but still, an actual street. People! Lights! Activity! ¡Fabulosa, por favor! The team of horses were brought to a halt in front of a coaching house; I heard them snorting and stamping their hooves in the snow, lathered and perturbed, needing attention. Several of the burghers immediately tried to jostle their way out, two men getting jammed in the doorway together in their sudden haste to be gone. The woman I’d kicked was staring at me belligerently, as if daring me to do so again. Instead, I got up and poked my head out, then called to the driver in my rudimentary German, “Are we staying long?”

  “Changing horses, Fräulein.”

  Oh, gracias por todo. The stableboys would groom and settle the horses, soothe their fears. Also—hurray and huzzah—this interval meant I could get out and smoke. Another unladylike indulgence that creates quite a stir when I do it, so I do it whenever possible.

  Stepping down, I tried to unkink my legs, feeling like a woman of eighty. Limping my way over to the post house, I went inside. It was mayhem in there, but warm. I wandered around, smoking happily and using every facility necessary; also, I was keeping an eye on the driver, who was knocking back a colourless liquid of some description and yammering away at his pals. I encouraged myself with a few hopeful thoughts: now that I recognize the rampant instinct spurring my erratic travels—flee for your life!—perhaps I can calm down, stop failing. I can curtail the bouts of anger which keep bursting forth at inappropriate moments. There and then I made a new vow to return to a happier, former version of myself, that of a strong young woman who can rise from the ashes, create herself all over again if need be, and emerge triumphant—a Venus on the half-shell, with attitude!

  Allowing my cramped shoulders to unclench, I wandered, thawing slowly, mingling with sweaty, loud and smelly humanity. I cautiously urged my heart to open: to crack, to let repressed longings bubble up—for love (perhaps), for the return of ambitious dreams, to be known for something stupendous. I wanted it so badly. And I’d come so close… No! Don’t look back. Gazing about, then, for something to spark my interest or someone young to talk to, my eye caught sight of a newspaper abandoned on a table, so—starved for reading material and longing for diversion—I picked it up.

  Inside was the usual rubbish, the doom-laden chatter that sells papers: beware the coming crop failures, so-and-so is a rising menace to the civilized world, ladies’ button boots at such and such a price. I was about to place the newspaper down when another notice jumped straight out at me.

  “Franz Liszt,” it said, “is beginning a new series of concert hall performances.” Like everyone else, I’d heard of this man—he was the new idol of Europe. Over the past few years, he’d become an absolute sensation. Apparently, his female admirers purchased trinkets with his likeness and wore them everywhere; they devoured cakes in the shape of his piano. They would faint dead away at the actual sight and sound of him, playing his music, or even in passing. His phenomenal success as a pianist and the furor of his celebrity was being referred to as “Lisztomania.” What kind of man could he be, to cause such turmoil? Interest piqued, I read on, holding the paper into the light. The likeness revealed him to be angular, thin, with long hair. Not particularly handsome but—so it seemed—overwhelmingly charismatic. Everybody said so. “He will play in Köthen on Saturday, 24 February, and at Dessau on Sunday, 25 February,” the notice declared, then gave the concert hall addresses and other details.

  It was as if a large bell suddenly tolled in my head, violently clanging. I did a rapid calculation—forget Hamburg: Dessau is near Dresden, is it not?—then rushed over to speak to the driver. There and then I decided that, no matter what damage it would do to my dwindling funds, I, Lola Montez, must meet this god who had captured and conquered the headstrong runaway called Fame. Whatever it took, I would learn its secrets from him—and whatever else I could get.

  Lisztomania

  Mon Dieu, the man could play! Sitting in the audience, hardly able to believe that I’d managed to get myself there in time, I let the cascading notes from the piano rejuvenate my spirit. Franz Liszt, in profile, was a demon of intensity; I had never heard anything like the sounds and emotion that he could produce from that inert-looking instrument. His long body was mostly still and concentrated, except for the vibrations of strength and power I could sense emanating from his spine. Occasionally his entire body would burst into action, like watching a kind of spontaneous combustion, then it would calm again, barely rippling, simply vibrating with the sounds he was creating. His hands were spellbinding, as the fingers danced and ripped across the keys with breath-taking speed.

  What was this man before me made of? Alive to every second of cascading sound, I reviewed what I’d managed to glean: he’d been a child prodigy, born to simple Hungarian parents; had played every day of his life from the age of three or something astonishing; he’d performed before royalty many times. As a child, he’d even met Beethoven, when the composer was ill, deaf and about to die. Liszt had begun touring extensively in recent years, some papers reporting that it was to escape from a souring relationship with the mother of his children, Countess Marie d’Agoult. They were not married; this was a well-known source of scandal, but an old tale by now. Other reports claimed that Liszt gave many of his phenom
enal earnings to various charities in the cities in which he played. Why on earth would he do that, I asked myself? Men, it’s true, have a longer shelf life—they can go on with their art form even if their attractiveness in body and face has left them. In our day and age, women are not generally granted such leniency.

  As the music’s intensity increased, Liszt threw his mane of fair hair back with a swift lift and twist of his chin. He appeared to be in his early thirties, though his face was careworn and full of lines across the brow.

  In order to examine him more closely, I wiggled my chair slightly further to the left, bumping it up against that of a crusty-looking dowager with large brown eyes, who raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. I smiled at her, then pinned my gaze back to the elevated platform and its two pianos.

  The room we were in was pretty, decorated in pale pinks and ivories; the management must have squeezed over four hundred of these chairs into the place, and there were also men standing at the back, mashed in tightly together—perhaps another fifty or sixty. I’d been lucky to talk my way in, for this concert had been oversold for the past week, almost as soon as the announcement had been made. I’d begged and pleaded, telling anyone who would listen that I’d dropped everything to be here, spent a small fortune in travel, and so on and so on, whereupon a kind gentleman waiting in line and now standing at the back had taken pity upon me, allowing me to occupy his seat. Lovely stranger! I’d given him a very thankful kiss upon the cheek, which sent him away blushing and embarrassed, but also rather proud of himself.

  For this final selection, Liszt had moved back to the nearer piano, which, luckily, was exactly opposite me. He’d gone back and forth between the two instruments during the whole concert; at first I’d thought it was so that each side of the room could see him from different angles, but during the previous piece, his roar of sound had actually snapped a piano wire. So here he was, directly before me.

  Such rapturous notes, rippling and frothing, and sometimes shocking the heart rate. This is it, I told myself, this must be it! I couldn’t afford to lose my concentration! I sat up very straight, willing it to happen: something had to happen, I had to make it happen. The music was nearing a crescendo. Liszt’s hands were flying—sustained, crashing waves of sound—and then it came. He looked up, for one second. His eyes fell upon me, mine upon his. I felt the jolt of lightning contact, the explosive flash as our gaze connected. I was sure he’d felt it, too, for his hands raised suddenly above the keyboard for one brief hesitation—hardly noticeable, but I sensed it—before he plunged on into the finale. The woman beside me looked over and I could feel her gaze move up and down me, from hairline to toes. I ignored it in case the pianist would look up to see me again. But no. He finished, rose, bowed and exited! Immediately, three women in the front row leapt towards the platform, snatching up the white gloves he’d thrown under the piano before he’d started to play. They began squabbling, tearing the gloves to shreds in their frenzy to possess a piece of the god of music.

  Had I missed my chance? Was it all over? I couldn’t believe it had come to an end so quickly, and that he’d disappeared.

  “Who are you, my dear?” the dowager beside me asked, touching me on the knee with her closed fan.

  “My name is Lola Montez,” I said, craning to see which exit Liszt had taken and not sure because of the sea of bodies, now standing and chattering. “I am a dancer.”

  “Ah, indeed.” A smile crossed her lips. “Do you know our great friend?”

  “Franz Liszt?”

  “That’s who I mean, yes.”

  “No, to my regret, I do not. Or—not yet.” I was still craning my neck, and it just slipped out.

  “I see.” Would this sad-eyed woman now berate me for voicing what so many other young women probably said? Was I just another fool of a girl, trying to horn her way in to a world that’s beyond her? I raised my chin and looked at the woman defiantly.

  “I wish to meet him. What’s wrong with that?”

  The woman’s mouth pursed again, and then another cat-like curl moved across it. “Not a thing. It’s the most natural reaction to genius, isn’t it? We wish to touch it, to be part of it. Though,” she said, and she looked at me piercingly, “I do not think it would be good for him.”

  Who was she to make such a pronouncement? I rose to my feet—I had to try to find him, and she was preventing it—but she took hold of my wrist as I turned to move away. “Wait.” She dug adeptly into her reticule and, to my surprise, brought forth a nib and a small bottle of ink. “I will take a note backstage. I won’t read it, I promise. I know what you will likely say.” Now her lips were openly smiling. I suppose I looked confused, so she added, “I am his friend. I am going there now, to raise a glass with him as he recovers, but they won’t let you come too. So why not trust me?”

  I didn’t know what to think. This middle-aged person (not perhaps as old as I’d originally assumed) with the large brown eyes of a Guernsey cow, sitting there, speaking with a kind of complacent superiority—was I losing my best chance of meeting the man I had come so far to see?

  “I am Countess Dudevant,” the woman said, putting the ink and nib upon my chair and pulling out a thick ivory calling card. “Write on the back of this, dear.” She folded her hands in her lap, the card upon the chair. Should I believe her? This aristocratic stranger? Would she not simply tear it up, or make a joke of me to her great acquaintance? Just another fanatically emotional young woman, trying to touch the hem of fame. “Though friends call me George,” the woman added, a twinkle and a question in her eyes.

  What a strange name for a countess, I thought, glancing down at the card. But then returned to the crucial matter in hand—what to say? I mused for a second, nibbling the pen’s tip, before dipping it in the ink and writing, “Our eyes met. Please call on me, so that we may unite our artistic paths. Lola Montez.” I scribbled the name of my hotel on the bottom, then folded the card in half.

  The mysterious friend of Liszt held out her gloved hand, took it, rose and made her way out of the rapidly emptying concert hall. I was broken-hearted—I’d missed my best chance, I was sure, by allowing her to distract me!

  I trailed disconsolately off to my hotel, deflated and anxious. Oh, God, now what? What was I doing there? What was I doing anywhere? My most fervent desire was to be an independent woman who could earn her own money and rely strictly upon herself—so why did it seem so damned difficult?

  I climbed up to my little rented room on the third floor, a dark, dank space with a mattress that sagged depressingly in the middle. How many sad and damaged lives had spent a night there? I didn’t wish to know. Undressing, and slipping beneath the covers, a correspondingly sad thought assailed me: a brief note I’d received from my mother, a missive that had caught up with me before I’d left Warsaw a few months earlier: ‘Craigie dead at forty-four. Nowhere to turn. Where are you, so that I may join you?’

  Craigie was my stepfather, a great and kind man who had loved me as a little girl in India, head-strong though I was, and then loved and cared for me from afar when I’d gotten into terrible trouble at fourteen, at my detested boarding school in Bath. I’d had a baby—little Emma—and my mother never knew. She would have had a fit; neither Craigie nor I would ever have heard the end of the martyred punishment she’d have inflicted upon us. Emma was with Craigie’s sister Catherine and her husband Herbert, in England, being raised as their beloved daughter, and Emma knew nothing of me except as a mysterious relative that she’d never met. I’d held her—once—but I loved her, dearly. She’d be nine years old now… God, oh God… I still couldn’t believe dear Craigie was dead—I hoped he hadn’t suffered—and that my mother was once again a widow. And looking for me? Only fourteen when she’d had me, she’d be thirty-eight now, and I would never—never! Oh, it didn’t bear thinking about. I was lonely and sorrowful, yes, but I would never submit to the kind of misery that she could inflict, or else I would be truly lost.

  I buried my
head beneath the flaccid pillow, trying to silence the jangling chords that were drowning out Liszt’s masterful ones.

  *

  The following morning, just after ten o’clock, there was a knock on my door. When I opened, the maid curtsied and told me that a gentleman had called for me and was in the waiting room downstairs. Did I know, right away? Of course I hoped. Certainly the news sent me into a frenzy of rushing about, wondering whether I’d chosen my best dress, trying to pile my long black tresses even higher, pinching my cheeks and biting my lips to make them full of colour.

  I rifled through my portmanteau, then wrapped myself in my most picturesque Spanish shawl. It had silken fringes that were over a foot in length and swished about my legs with excellent seductiveness. Skewering my twisted-up hair with a gaily-painted comb, a small black lace mantilla was thereby attached. I must look every inch the Spanish lady, I told myself, and ensure that my intonations are full of the sibilances of Andalusia, whatever language I attempt when speaking with Herr Liszt. Nobody knows me or can denounce me here; no one must ever be able to discern my Irish roots. “I repudiate them utterly,” I said aloud, glaring at myself in the mirror that sat above the room’s small mantel. That face stared back, chin lifted and eyes blazing. Deep inside those eyes, the rebellious girl that I had been—kicking and flailing out against my mother, eloping with one of her admirers in order to escape an arranged marriage she’d cooked up for me—that girl was still there, still wild. Somewhat trampled and mangled, perhaps, but still wild. “Never let them know you’re afraid,” I told my reflection. These were the words of my Spanish lover, my darling, dashing General Diego de Léon. He had recognized and celebrated the wildness in me, and urged me to step fully into the woman I wished to become. Play hard, without fear, Bandida: this was Diego’s gambling credo, and now it was mine. I am Doña Maria Dolores de Porris y Montez!