Fair Lady, Masked

By Maggie MacKeever

An actress in her time plays many parts. This may be Delia's last.

New York, 1890. If no one what they seem?

Delia Ross has freed herself from society’s expectations. Luke Kelly has not. The emancipated actress and the disapproving police detective set out for Saratoga in pursuit of a fugitive jewel thief. Along the way they will encounter collusions and contrivances, diabolical double-dealings, a talented table-turner and a murderer and, maybe, a very irritated ghost.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Belgrave House
• Release date: Jul 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780989519731

Book preview

1

Perdition! Delia stifled a sneeze. A wiser woman would have come better prepared to pass time in a closet crammed with brooms and buckets and pungent cleaning supplies. Would have brought a pillow for her knees and a clothespin for her nose.

A wiser woman, or better informed. Delia had been told of the closet, but not what it contained.

At last, approaching voices. She peered through the keyhole. A portly, balding gentleman strode into the office, trailed by a businesslike young woman clutching pencil and notepad.

Mr. Phineas Pfeiffer, president of New York City’s Hoffman Banking House, was a forward-looking fellow. He had hired the establishment’s first female employee, a secretary skilled in Pitman shorthand.

Delia’s own current employer was considerably less broad-minded. Mr. Pfeiffer’s wife referred to the bank’s first female employee as ‘that Jezebel’.

The banker settled in his chair.

The stenographer closed the outer door.

Voices murmured, clothing rustled. The desk chair creaked.

Banker Pfeiffer was wearing a gray coat and matching vest, dark trousers and striped linen drawers. When confronting a cheating spouse, these minor details mattered. Delia knew this from experience, having confronted cheating spouses of her own.

Groans, gasps, a climactic grunt. She consulted her enamel pendant watch.

Not five minutes had elapsed.

Delia’s most recent cheating spouse hadn’t been so cavalier about such engagements.

Damn his fine brown eyes.

Banker Pfeiffer buttoned his trousers, heaved himself out of his chair, stomped toward the office door and flung it open. In regard to our conversation of Thursday last—

The stenographer snatched up her notepad. Scribbling furiously, she trotted after him into the hall.

Delia straightened, wincing. In her opinion, the Hoffman Banking House’s first female employee deserved a swift boot to the backside.

Her own backside hovered in uncomfortable proximity to a mop handle. She nudged the mop away. After several moments — let it never again be said she was impulsive — she opened the closet door.

Banker Pfeiffer kept a tidy office. Only his desk chair was out of place. Delia shook out the skirts of her gown, a sober black bombazine garment fashioned with minimally full skirts and modestly puffed sleeves, its bodice fitted tightly to her figure and buttoned down the front.

Fitted almost too tightly in some areas. Delia tugged the fabric into place. She made a final adjustment to her bonnet, an extravagant confection of inky feathers and flowers adorned with a large stuffed blackbird, pulled down her veil and eased into the hall.

Located off Union Square, the Hoffman Banking House was an imposing yellow sandstone structure built in the Gothic style. Delia swept down the wide marble staircase, through the mosaic tiled lobby. The uniformed policeman standing guard at the Bank’s entrance blinked. Women might own property in the enlightened state of New York, but most of them relied on a male representative to handle their financial affairs.

The policeman’s gaze drifted from Delia’s bonnet to her bosom.

She passed unhindered through the revolving door and into the street.

Broughams and victorias and landaus jammed the roadway. Pedestrians swarmed the sidewalks, scurried in and out of stately shops with gleaming glass windows and cast iron arcades. Elevated trains rattled overhead, showering soot on everything below.

Delia snapped open her parasol, plunged into the parade of passersby.

As she neared a literary emporium, her footsteps slowed. On the side of the building, half-buried among brightly colored advertisements, hung a faded theatrical poster promoting a reprisal of Jesse Brown, or, The Relief of Lucknow. Surrounded by a horde of horse soldiers, the heroine gazed heavenward as if listening to the far-off bagpipes of a Scottish regiment.

She was innocence personified.

Delia barely recognized herself.

Jessie Brown had run just a few nights, despite tom-toms and pipes and all the mingled paraphernalia of an East India spectacle. The New York Tribune critic had written that the villain, Nena Sahib, boasted a pair of magnificent mustachios that unfortunately failed to make up for his profound ignorance of the art of acting. The same critic praised Delia for playing her part with earnestness and abandon and a passion perhaps partially inspired by Nena Sahib’s tendency to forget his lines.

Delia had also drunk a bottle of ink due to the nincompoop.

Shaking off her memories, she hurried toward the El.

The elevated railroad was built on rows of pillars, iron columns connected by sturdy girders set in concrete along the outer edge of the sidewalk. Delia climbed the stairway to the station, which was constructed of ornamental iron; purchased her ticket, deposited it in the box at the gate, joined the crowd waiting on the narrow platform.

The train rumbled into the station. Its engine was a handsome brown, glistening with varnish, touched with gold.

With an ear-splitting shriek of metal wheels grinding against metal tracks, the locomotive shuddered to a halt, hissing out plumes of flame-shot steam.

The waiting mob surged forward. Delia elbowed her way into a car. Cushioned seats were placed two by two in the center of the compartment and lengthwise across the end. She slipped around a gray-bearded workman and into the last vacant space.

He called her a rude name.

A whistle shrilled. Bells clanged. Steam hissed. Delia braced herself against the swaying of the train. Around her people talked, read their newspapers, stared blankly into space.

Through the smeared glass window, she watched the world below pass by. Fashionable shops and theaters changed places with pawnbrokers and brothels and dance halls, taverns where waiter girls in short dresses and red tasseled boots served five-cent mugs of beer, cheap theaters where female performers peeled down to their tights.

Delia brushed soot off her glove.

There were worse things than drinking Nena Sahib’s ink.

The train screeched to a stop at the Chatham Square station. Delia made her way out onto the platform and down the metal stairs to the Bowery’s broken cobblestones. Her ears rang with voices babbling in a dozen different tongues.

A grubby hand reached toward her. She whacked it smartly with the carved handle of her parasol.

Respectable women rarely ventured into this neighborhood of patterers and pushcart peddlers, prostitutes and pickpockets and the desperate poor.

The air stank of manure and rotting garbage and clogged drains.

Delia swept her skirts to one side, raising her hem above the muck; picked her way through cinders and coal dust. She nipped around a pig rooting through kitchen slops thrown out on the sidewalk; hurried past a lotto parlor, a shooting gallery, a dime museum featuring a Chamber of Horrors, a four-legged chicken, and several wild men of Borneo; arrived finally at a shabby structure distinguished from the surrounding shabby structures by the painted transparency of a female Mephistopheles advertising the Palace of Illusions on the bottom floor.

The most impressive illusion being that a patron might retain possession of his wallet. Delia pushed open the front door.

On the second floor were several offices. A lady dentist. An electric belt doctor. A manufacturer of chromolithographs. Due to the constrictions of her corset, Delia was out of breath by the time she arrived at the top of the stairs.

The upper hallway was silent save for the muffled clacking of a typewriting machine, its occasional return bell. She tapped on an unmarked wooden door.

The typewriter fell silent. The door swung open to reveal a short, stout, graying female wearing a high-collared shirtwaist dress.

Delia tucked back her veil. Good afternoon, Mrs. Murphy. I’m expected, I believe.

The older woman stepped aside. Delia entered a small, windowless chamber furnished with a worn carpet, ancient cabinets, and a decrepit desk. In one dusty corner, an aspidistra languished in a cracked clay pot.

It was hardly the sort of setting in which a person might expect to find the most powerful men in the city.

Which was, of course, the point.

From an inner office came a low hum of conversation. The door was ajar. Through it Delia saw, seated at a long scarred walnut table, a wiry clean-shaven man with unruly auburn hair. He wore a brown tweed suit. On the far side of the table, in front of the window, stood an imposing barrel-chested figure with heavy jowls and bushy brows and a receding hairline. Like Banker Pfeiffer had been, he was dressed in gray and black. Tell me I didn’t hear you say you mean to employ a female, protested an unfamiliar voice.

A person might think you don’t like females, Kelly, the auburn-haired man observed.

I don’t like this new breed of mushy-headed suffragists who think they should leave off their corsets and work side by side with men, the unseen speaker growled.

If ever she had heard an entrance cue—

Delia walked into the room.

2

The auburn-haired man raised his eyebrows. His heavyset companion frowned. The stranger standing by the window stared at Delia as if she was a genie popped out of a brass lamp.

Specifically, he stared at her chest.

She didn't know what it was about. Good afternoon, Inspector O’Neill.

The stranger’s lean cheeks reddened. The Chief of the New York City Police Department Detective Bureau hurried forward, his own jowls faintly pink. It’s good of you to join us, Mrs. Ross.

As if she had a choice, thought Delia.

A bully was a bully, more so when he carried a badge.

The auburn-haired man got to his feet. Sure and herself is a sight to light up a dreary afternoon.

Delia moved closer to the table. Sure and himself had kissed the Blarney Stone.

Mick Flanagan had shined shoes and peddled newspapers and worked his way up to foreman of the volunteer firefighters in Hose Company No. 50, along the way acquiring enough capital to open his first saloon. Today he owned several saloons, along with vaudeville theaters and heaven knew what else. He also owned a seat in the state government, having won his first political position as state assemblyman at the tender age of twenty-four. By rights, he should have been in Albany at that very moment, representing his slice of the Tammany Hall pie.

Something of the shoeshine boy still lingered, for all the man was fast approaching forty-five.

Delia had passed that particular milestone several months past.

Inspector O’Neill pulled out a chair for her. Flanagan, you already know. That surly fellow is Detective Kelly. Luke, say hello to Mrs. Ross.

Delia inclined her head. Detective Kelly remained at the window, arms folded across his chest. He was a man in his mid-thirties, of athletic build and more than average height, with chiseled features and close-cut chestnut hair. His jacket was dark, his trousers narrow and his shirt in need of a hot iron. Wire-rimmed eyeglasses perched on the bridge of a bold and slightly crooked nose.

That nose had been broken, more than once. His knuckles were scarred. This man, Delia decided, wouldn’t hesitate to use his fists.

She seated herself with a flash of black silk stockings.

The detective glowered.

Mick Flanagan settled back in his chair.

The Chief Inspector remained standing. "Mrs. Ross is an actress, Kelly. She recently appeared in a revival of Comin’ Thro’ The Rye at Tony Pastor’s 14th Street Theater."

‘Gin a body meet a body comin’ thro’ the rye,’ Mick crooned. "Any time you want to show off more than your ankles, macushla—"

Delia curled her lip. In your dreams, my lad.

Inspector O’Neill added, Mrs. Ross occasionally acts as a private inquiry agent. She has done excellent work for the department in the past.

A muscle twitched in Detective Kelly’s jaw.

Delia addressed the Chief Inspector. I assume my excellent work is the reason you summoned me here?

You may recall an exhibit of precious jewels that was displayed at the American Museum of Natural History about five years ago, he said. Among them were a huge purple diamond with a classic cushion cut and a 563 carat gray-blue star sapphire.

I was otherwise occupied five years ago, Delia replied. With tom-toms and horse soldiers and magnificent mustachios.

The Chief Inspector took a turn around the table. A collection of priceless pigeon-blood rubies belonging to a minor member of the House of Savoy was to be included in the exhibit. The rubies were stolen en route. The culprit is believed to be a jewel thief by name of Max Temple, who wound up in prison not long after on an unrelated matter. To date, there’s been no sign of the Mogok rubies on the underground market, and no indication they’ve been cut down and sold.

Mick snapped his fingers. Poof! Vanished into thin air. Despite it being almost magic how O’Neill here can usually put his thumb on a sparkler a day after it’s pinched. Temple has proven close-lipped as a clam on the subject of those rubies. Despite various efforts to pry open his jaw.

Thumbscrews? The Iron Maiden? The Rack? Delia almost pitied the thief. Fascinating, but what has this to do with me?

Two days ago Temple escaped from Sing Sing’s rock quarry by way of a culvert and a tugboat, after which he too disappeared, said Mick.

Inspector O’Neill flicked him an irritated glance. Temple has a cousin, by name of Sophie Yarrow. A table-turner who’s made quite a name for herself.

The detective snorted. Ectoplasm and floating trumpets and ghostly voices issuing from the ceiling. Claptrap.

Delia clicked her tongue. There are more things in heaven and earth, Detective Kelly. A female medium is considered a better spirit communicator than a male because she is more disposed to metaphysical perfectibility.

‘Metaphysical perfectibility’? he jeered.

Inspector O’Neill cleared his throat. Miss Yarrow has recently arranged to visit Saratoga. Traveling with her will be an assistant who tends to the details of daily life.

Herself, Mick interjected, existing on a more elevated plane.

The woman’s name is Esther Hayes, the Chief Inspector continued. She claims she’s a missus, but there’s no record of a mister to be found.

Delia felt a twinge of interest. You want me to gain the confidence of these women? As Madame Zagnoni, I presume?

Madame Zagnoni? the detective asked.

Not Madame Zagnoni, not this time, Inspector O’Neill said.

Mick leaned back in his chair, fingers interlaced behind his head. Think of this as an opportunity to see what sort of brace game Sophie Yarrow is running. For future reference.

Delia narrowed her eyes. It never being too late for an old dog to learn new tricks?

He smirked. You’ll not be the first grieving widow to try and summon her dear departed back from the beyond.

Widow? Detective Kelly echoed. You can’t mean—

Delia looked him over. I believe it would be easier for me to pass as a widow than you, detective. However, do feel free to try.

Inspector O’Neill rapped his knuckles on the table, drawing everyone’s attention. With your permission, Mrs. Ross, I will alert the newspapers that the Marchesa D’Annunzio has come out of exile and is touring the United States.

A widow was one thing, the Marchesa quite another. Delia said, You jest.

I’ve never been more serious, the Chief Inspector replied.

Who in blue blazes is this Marchesa? Detective Kelly demanded.

The Marchesa has been in mourning for her husband, who died under tragic circumstances several years ago, Inspector O’Neill explained. She is notorious not only for her many love affairs, but also for a nude portrait that was once put on public view.

The detective scowled. "And what if the real Marchesa — I suppose there is a real Marchesa if there’s a portrait — objects?"

Mick Flanagan cracked his knuckles. You may take our word she won’t.

Inspector O’Neill picked up a pasteboard folder, handed it to Delia. Mrs. Murphy will make the travel arrangements. You will receive your usual fee.

Delia retrieved her parasol. On the contrary, I will receive a great deal more, plus my expenses. The Marchesa is hardly a minor role. A period of intense bartering followed, at the end of which Mick Flanagan’s amusement had faded, Detective Kelly looked as if his genie had popped out of its bottle to perform a striptease, and the Chief Inspector had beads of perspiration on his brow.

Mick rose. "The luck of the Irish be with you, macushla. Temple is a slippery customer."

Said the kettle of the pot. Delia moved toward the door.

I’ll see you to the street, Detective Kelly announced.

Just to annoy him, Delia was tempted to refuse.

Instead, she said, Very well.

Whatever he wished to say to her, the man was in no hurry. Silently, they walked down the stairs and emerged into the lengthening shadows of late afternoon.

Vendors were hawking hot corn and fresh oysters served raw with pepper sauce to the crowd outside the building. Farther down the street, a German band was slaughtering a schottische. Near the entrance to the El, an organ grinder abused his instrument while his gaudily dressed monkey held out a tin cup.

Delia glanced up at the detective. The embellishments on her bonnet were level with his nose. Irritably, he brushed aside a posy. He wasn’t wearing gloves.

She grasped his hand, peered at his palm. I see a not-so-long but interesting life ahead of you, filled with new people and new things. You will receive money from an unexpected source.

He jerked his hand from hers. Are you out of your mind? Anyone with half a brain would understand this is no business for a female.

The man’s temper would be his downfall. Sweetly, Delia smiled. "I understand that your understanding is not acute, detective. Tend to your business and leave me to mine."

His fists clenched as if he wished to shake her. Delia stepped into the busy street. An omnibus careened around the corner and headed straight toward her, wild-eyed horses out of control.

Passengers shrieked, drivers shouted, pedestrians scrambled to avoid being crushed under deadly hooves and churning wheels.

Five-and-forty years of living suddenly didn’t seem half long enough. Delia flung