No Job for a Lady Read online

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  MICHELLE MASHOKE-ANDERSON

  a beautiful soul … warm heart … and very caring lady

  you gave me hope in all aspects of my life

  thank you

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With writing the Nellie Bly mysteries I have been able to meet many wonderful and fabulous people. But the BEST and most wonderful surprise was to be reconnected to my Very First Best Friend … Pam Percy … I never felt so lucky and happy to have her back in my life! It was the best gift Nellie could have ever given me.

  And speaking of other beautiful gifts I’ve received …

  The most fabulous girls to work out with in the world! Take a bow ladies … Sheila, Edie, and Darlene.

  And I want to thank the girls at my favorite place, Underground Café, for always being so friendly and warm to me: Kacie Van Norman, Miranda Usselman, and Kasey Flewelling, and there is no way I can forget Carol DeCost, a Very Special Lady —thank you, girls!

  An enormous thank-you to all the people who have picked up my books. I hope Nellie has inspired you.

  And last, but not least in any manner, for this book would not be if it wasn’t for Kelly Quinn, editor at Tor/Forge … thank you for being in my corner and watching my back. You are the best!

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Frontispiece

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Epigraph

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epigraph

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epigraph

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epigraph

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Illustration: Mexico City grand carriage

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Illustration: Mexican Family

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Illustration: Aztec God

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Illustration: The Floating Gardens

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Cast of Characters

  Photograph: Gertrude Bell

  Photograph: Lily Langtry

  Illustration: Frederic Gebhard

  Photograph: Butch Cassidy, Sundance Kid, and others

  Note from the Editors

  Forge Books by Carol McCleary

  About the Author

  Copyright

  NELLIE BLY (1886)

  The treasure which you think not worth taking trouble and pains to find, this one alone is the real treasure you are longing for all your life. The glittering treasure you are hunting for day and night lies buried on the other side of that hill yonder.

  —B. TRAVEN, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

  PROLOGUE

  1886

  Teotihuacán, Mexico

  The City of the Gods. A place so haunted by the bloodthirsty deities of ancient Mexico that the 200,000 people who populated it disappeared without a trace and no one dared take their place. The mighty Aztec emperors so feared its fierce spirits that they came once a year to offer a sacrifice in blood.

  When I first saw the city, I stared in awe at the enormous stone ruins and towering pyramids, among the largest structures ever built by human hands, yet even in these modern times they call the Victorian era, no one lives here. Local villagers who come to an archaeological dig to work will not even spend the night. They call the main thoroughfare—a broad boulevard often wider than a football field, which runs over a mile through the heart of the city of stone and ghosts—the Avenue of the Dead.

  Now I fear I know why.

  Smothered by darkness, I stand in a netherworld beneath the ancient ruins, unable to move a muscle. Strange figures dart by as clawlike hands grope my body, pulling at my clothes. Try as I might, I don’t have the strength to push them off. They dig into my flesh and I cry out in pain.

  A sticky, smelly hand covers my mouth, suppressing any chance for help.

  Chattery voices surround me, speaking in a strange tongue, as I’m being moved deeper and deeper into a void I fear I will never escape. Cold, damp, unstirred air embraces me. I feel as if I’m being prepared for sacrifice and there’s nothing I can do.

  As a murky black mist swirls around, my whole being feels as if it’s suspended in a violent, twisting maelstrom. I have no control of my body—it is attached to me but not mine.

  The hand leaves my mouth, but I don’t scream. Something inside me warns not to let them know my fear.

  The chatty voices disappear like ghosts fleeing in the night.

  My eyes hurt as my vision starts to come back, blurred at first, then darting around as a wild animal trapped and looking for a way of escape. But there is no escape. I’m in a chamber that’s coffin-black without a speck of light, not even the twinkle of a star. I can’t see or hear anything.

  I’m alone. Afraid to move.

  I have been brought from the tepid night outside to a cool place that smells like earth. A cave. I’m sure of it. I don’t dare take a step because I don’t know what’s around me. It’s too dark to see anything. Not even my hand in front of my face. Am I at the edge of a cliff? Where would a step take me?

  I feel as if I’m suspended in midair, but my feet tell me I’m on solid ground. I put my hands out to see if I can feel a wall, but I feel nothing. I wait, my heart in my throat, my mouth dry, breathing shallowly, in a place darker than night and quieter than a crypt.

  Now I understand why the Aztecs feared the city built before the time of Christ and why the local villagers still do.

  Stupid! I had been warned that, like Egypt, ancient Mexico has a history of mystery and magic, that its pantheon of violent gods were the most bloodthirsty of any that ever existed, possessing a bloodlust satisfied only by their worshipers ripping
out hearts and draining the blood of sacrifice victims to satisfy the covenant with the gods.

  Am I to be the next sacrifice to their gods?

  My insistence on foolishly delving into ancient secrets that have been buried for more than a millennium have brought me to this place that must be underneath the city. The ancients who built Teotihuacán created colossal towering edifices aboveground, taller than a skyscraper, so there’s no reason to believe they didn’t put tunnels under their city. And this is where I’ve been taken.

  But the blood covenant with the gods, shape-changing from man to beast to create terrifying creatures of the night, and barbaric cannibalism are just a very small part of the dangers I am about to face; besides the ancient evils, there is a darkness of heart that permits even murder by “civilized” men who lust for ancient treasure.

  To understand how I got into haunted caverns below a stone city that once rivaled ancient Rome in size and sophistication, I need to explain what took me from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Mexico against the advice of just about everyone close and dear to me.

  My name is Nellie Bly. That’s not my birth name, of course. I was christened Elizabeth Cochran but had to change my name when I got a job as a newspaper reporter, because reporting the news is not considered a ladylike career for a respectable young woman.

  Not that I am in any way embarrassed by working in a profession with men who are considered uncouth by bankers and tradesmen. To the contrary, my own “profession” before a bit of audacious penmanship got me a reporting job was that of a factory girl. And I was lucky to work in a factory and earn my bread, because we live in an age where the only “careers” for “well-bred young women” are to be sent to finishing school by well-heeled parents so they can learn how to manage a house and please a husband.

  Of course, if you were raised by a widowed mother along with a houseful of siblings, a woman’s options, beyond the marriage bed, would be to obtain a job working in a factory at half the wages paid the man working next to you, or selling your body on the street until the Big Pox or some other noxious disease blessed you with an early death.

  Getting a desk with the “boys” in the newsroom, those vulgar, mouthy denizens of the free press who dug out and reported the news, brought me five dollars a week, more money than I was making laboring long hours in a factory in a grimy city that has so many places of manufacture, you can get black lung from the sooty air.

  I felt like Cinderella when Mr. Madden, the editor of The Pittsburgh Dispatch, told me that he wanted me to come to work at the paper after reading my letter to the paper objecting to an article that said women were fit only to be the helpmates of men.

  Unfortunately, I soon learned that newspapers are not financed by what reporters write, but by the ads placed by businesses. An article in which I pointed out the sad state of workers—men and women—who toiled long hours for pay so low that they could hardly keep food on the table raised the ire of advertisers who employed such workers! I was immediately assigned to the society page to report on weddings, teas, and the doings of people with more money than the good sense the good Lord gave them.

  Chomping at the bit to do real reporting after I’d had an overdose of silly gossip, I asked my editor to give me a chance to be a foreign correspondent.

  Heavens! I thought poor Mr. Madden was going to have a coronary. Being a foreign correspondent is “no job for a lady,” he told me flatly.

  My rebuttal that neither was reporting silly gossip did not impress him. Which left me with a dilemma. I could either do society twaddle or find a man to support me in return for serving him in the kitchen and marriage bed. Neither option was acceptable.

  I have always had the feeling that nothing is impossible if one applies a certain amount of energy in the right direction. If you want to do it, you can do it. You just have to work hard and smart.

  Since the newspaper would not let me try my hand at reporting from a foreign place, I left my job and set out to tackle an assignment. I chose Mexico for the place from which I would send my dispatches because, as my librarian pointed out, it’s not just a place that’s wild and untamed, with sagebrush and bandidos, that borders our country, but a thousand miles south in the tropics are the remains of civilizations with striking similarities to ancient Egypt, from pyramids to hieroglyphics.

  God help me!

  Materializing out of the darkness like a wraith in the haunted cavern, Aztecs gods with huge eyes, gaping jaws, ugly, twisted, even demented features stand staring back at me. Each one is adorned in its own tall headpiece, cloaks of bright feathers, and shields befitting Aztec warrior kings. The feathers are long and brilliant—reds, greens, yellows, purples, oranges.

  Only one of the inanimate creatures is not in feathers, and I stare at him with my heart racing. His back is to me, but I can still tell it is a man, not a god. He’s almost naked, with strange gray skin that strikes me as dead—cold dead as gray marble, but without the shine and luster of polished stone.

  He turns and comes toward me as I scream and scream.

  Here would be a good field for believers in women’s rights. Let them forego their lecturing and writing and go to work; more work and less talk. Take some girls that have the ability, procure for them situations, start them on their way and by so doing accomplish more than by years of talking.

  —“The Girl Puzzle,” Nellie Bly’s first piece, published January 25, 1885, in The Pittsburgh Dispatch

  1

  El Paso, Texas

  I bite my upper lip, a terrible habit when I’m nervous. This time it’s the long line for tickets at the train station causing the chewing. The ticket counter is an opening in an outside wall of the station house, leaving those of us in line to endure the cool of the evening as night falls. A line this long, this late, isn’t a good sign.

  The insane trip I set out on has already taken more than one wrong turn, and I don’t need anything else to go sour. I spent four days traveling from Pittsburgh to El Paso, sitting and sleeping on hard seats. My body and soul ache at the prospect of hard seats for the final twelve-hundred-mile—three long days and nights—leg to Mexico City.

  I want a Pullman sleeper berth and I am ready to fight for it.

  A compartment all to myself would be even better. I need time to digest the fact that I am going to Mexico alone. I’m hoping that with a good night’s sleep the sunken feeling in the pit of my stomach and overwhelming fear that I’m being quite foolish will go away. But I have a sick feeling that no matter how much rest I get, I won’t be able to keep a bridle on my doubts.

  What was I thinking! Well, as my dear mother says, when I act impulsively, I’m not thinking. For the first time in quite a while I, too, am questioning my good sense. It’s just that when Mr. Madden refused to let me tackle a foreign correspondent assignment on the grounds that it was too dangerous for a woman … well, I became furious. What poppycock!

  Like most men, he has little understanding of what women are capable of doing. And that brought us to butting heads because I’m too impatient to keep tackling the boring reporting assignments given to me solely because I wear petticoats.

  Rebelling from being exiled to the society page, I set out to do something that no other female reporter has ever done: report news from Mexico.

  Why Mexico? I had saved my pennies during my brief sojourn in the newsroom, but what little I had wasn’t enough for reporting from “overseas.” It would pay, however, for the seven days by train it takes to get from Pittsburgh to Mexico City, a journey of close to 2,500 miles.

  Once in the Mexican capital, I would generate enough money to keep me going by sending articles back to the paper. I am certain Mr. Madden will not fail to publish the articles—even if he refused to underwrite the assignment, interesting stories about events in a land far away sent by a young woman of their community will excite the paper’s readers.

  My mother’s elation at my abrupt success at going from laborer to newspaperwoman turned to shock
and disbelief when I told her I would prove myself by reporting from untamed Mexico, a land of endless bloody revolutions, fierce bandidos, and wild Indians on the rampage.

  Even though it is 1886, the West is not yet completely tamed, and I have read that Mexico is decades behind America in its own struggle to civilize itself. This makes the land south of us either fertile ground for exciting stories or a danger zone, depending on whether one is looking at the situation through my rose-colored vision or my mother’s morbid fears.

  I quit the paper, bade my few journalistic friends adieu, packed a bag, grabbed my mother, and set out to prove myself again. And as I said, at my own expense, something else that would never have happened to a man.

  My mother insisted upon coming with me, of course, no doubt planning to poke with a hat pin any bandido who bothered me. She is certain that I will end up being kidnapped and having to make tortillas for a bandido chief—after I endured unspeakable things. And I must admit that her insisting upon accompanying me put the minds of my brothers and my editor a little more at ease, for they, too, were positive that I would be putting myself in harm’s way.

  Nevertheless, all this changed when last night on the train my mother got stomach problems.

  To my dismay, there was no way she could continue. The poor dear had horrible stomachaches. At first, she couldn’t stop throwing up. She was not in a dying state, just an uncomfortable, messy state. We figured she’d eaten something that didn’t agree with her and by morning she’d be better, but she wasn’t. Instead, she had a bit of a fever and just felt that icky, miserable feeling when one is under the weather—not wanting to move, just rest and sleep.

  This left me in a pickle, for I felt responsible for her. A decision had to be made. Either I gave up my trip or I found a place for her to stay while I continued on. My mother hated to see me go on alone, but she knew how important it was that I complete what I had started. If I returned to Pittsburgh without having succeeded at my boast that I was capable of being a foreign correspondent, it would be with my tail between my legs and the only employment opportunity that of begging for my old job at the factory.