Castle Rouge

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  The fellow tucked the visible portion of the handkerchief away and ran his fingertips over the visage of his brother. He may not have liked Holmes’s insight into his family matters, but he couldn’t deny it.

  “What sort of man do you look for?” he asked.

  “Of middle years, perhaps fifty. Not terribly tall but powerfully built. Dressed quietly, as a clerk, but affecting a peaked cap, to hide a lack of hair, I suspect. He would have been seeking quarters some months ago, say last summer.”

  Holmes’s litany had been casual to the extreme. I admired the way he slipped past the fall’s Ripper atrocities to a time when Whitechapel had been calm and mired only in the usual thefts, riots, and odd crimes of passion. I also recognized his method of disarming me when we first met on New Year’s day of 1881 by reciting my personal history to me as if he had read the family Bible just before we met.

  “I am a steward here,” the man admitted. “I do in fact recall another fellow coming in about then, but he didn’t want to rent a room, which of course we wouldn’t have done now, would we, being we are devoted to working Jewish men?”

  “No, this man would not have been Jewish.”

  “How is it Rabbi Barshevich allows you to noise his name about?”

  “He trusts me,” Holmes said simply.

  Our interrogator nodded slowly, then continued. “It was June, I think. And he was interested in an assembly room, he said. Cellar, he wanted. Said they were a religious group and grew loud in their praises of the lord.” He shrugged. “Who am I to judge ways of worship? At Passover we celebrate with the sacrifice of the lamb. Christians do not understand that, yet they worship a sacrificed man.”

  “Religion is indeed a complex matter,” Holmes said. “I assume then that you did not rent the Englishman your cellar for his rites?”

  “No.” He frowned for a moment. “I don’t trust those who descend beneath the earth to worship anything.”

  “So where did you send him?”

  The man’s eyes whipped to Holmes, as if both startled and hoping to startle in return. “Why to the nearest pub. They will take money for anything there.”

  “And that is—?”

  “The Briar and Thistle, one street over.”

  “This Englishman you describe sounds oddly familiar,” I mention as we trudged to the next address.

  “As do most of the Ripper suspects. That is the devilish bit about this business, Watson. All these various suspects are types to be seen about Whitechapel day and night.”

  “So you are convinced an Englishman is the Ripper, after all?”

  “I am convinced of nothing, because I have not seen all the evidence there is to gather. But Whitechapel is a global stew, and I absolve no race or religion from suspicion. Not even,” he added with a rare glint of amusement, “Irish bartenders.”

  And that is exactly what we found at the Briar and Thistle, a pub crowded with the very cast of characters that make up the Ripper suspects and his victims, with an Irish bartender indeed presiding over the chaos.

  “Finn’s the name,” he said. “Thanks be my friend Saul a street over recommended me. Clannish these Jews, but then I come from a clannish sort meself. How can I help you gennelmen?”

  “We seek,” said Holmes, “a private meeting place. I understand that you have a cellar that might accommodate.”

  “Accommodate what, is it?”

  “We are a scientific brotherhood,” Holmes said. “We wish to conduct experiments in the art of electricity as it passes from one body to another. A rather esoteric pursuit, requiring privacy and sequestering.”

  “Sequestering, is it? ’Tis a bit noisy up here, gents.”

  “All the better. We are a bit noisy below.”

  The man shook his head, which was covered in tightly curled red hair like a mop. “Then we should suit each other well.”

  “It is my ardent hope. I understand you have rented this space before, perhaps to an acquaintance of ours. Stout-set chap about fifty. Very sharp eyes.”

  “Aye, blue as the bay off Donegal and just as icy. Quite the businessman.”

  “And what was his business?” Holmes inquired.

  “His business, Sor, as yours…is yours.”

  Holmes asked no more, but offered a pound for the privilege of inspecting the “premises.”

  I could not imagine his aim. All the Ripper’s victims had been slain on the street, down wretched byways and alleys, it is true, but on the public cobblestones, in the open air of night.

  The barman pointed us to the back of the building and a narrow circuitous passage where, even there, the usual commerce of the district was being contracted between drunken men and women.

  A shambles of a door led down into greater darkness and odor.

  From the capacious pocket of his coat, Holmes pulled a small lantern. We paused halfway down the rough stone steps to light it.

  Illumination, no matter how feeble, seemed to intensify our other senses. I inhaled the fetid, dank air, fearing for the wholeness of our lungs. A skittering sound punctuated by the rare drip or squeal below did little to encourage me. I would have brought a club instead of my revolver had I known we would be confronting sewer rats.

  “What do you expect to find down here, Holmes?”

  “A cellar. No doubt the hovels that pass as dwellings in this quarter have no such convenience, but this building is large enough and old enough to support an underground domain.”

  “You almost make it sound like an annex of Hell.”

  “Another concept, like the endlessly agitating heavens, that does not interest the true scientist, Watson. Had you not the rather lurid instincts of a teller of tales blended with your admirable medical precision, you would be more aware of the practical assets of a cellar, rather than their appeal to the gullible souls of the superstitious.”

  “One of the Ripper letters was signed, ‘from Hell.’”

  “Are they called ‘Ripper letters’ because they are proven to be from the uncaught killer of Whitechapel unfortunates, or because they captured the public imagination?”

  “Who else would have sent them?”

  “Cranks, Watson. They sent hundreds and thousands of other missives much less credible and much less…seductive. And perhaps the worst cranks of all, the journalists themselves, sought to stir up news.”

  “That would be utterly irresponsible.”

  “My point exactly. When have you seen any report of my modest efforts in the press that has not been riddled with error?”

  “Well, the press tend to credit the police, above all.”

  “Then it should not be surprising that the police should credit the manipulations of the press. The so-called ‘Ripper’ letters read like a ransom note from one of your fictionalized accounts of my cases, Watson. They not only employ a number of crude ‘Americanisms,’ such as salutations like ‘Dear Boss,’ but the diction and spelling mimic Cockney expressions. Why stoop to the patois of two such different and geographically separated classes?”

  “No reason at all. Unless…the writer was the very opposite of those qualities.”

  “This is my stout friend Watson. On the trail! So this would indicate that the Ripper is—?”

  “An educated Englishman.”

  “Bravo!” Holmes clapped me on the shoulder. “Perhaps now you understand the net of silence that has fallen over the case since the fiendish evisceration and flaying of Mary Jane Kelly in her Miller’s Court chamber on the ninth of November last. All London hopes and holds its breath that the world will hear no more of the Ripper.”

  I had seen my friend Sherlock Holmes throw himself down on study floors to examine the weave of an Oriental rug, fiber by fiber.

  Indeed, I was used to regarding him as a sort of human bloodhound who needed to put his eyes and magnifying glass to the ground. Then I would marvel at the conclusions of great moment he could glean from the smallest mote of evidence, be it a speck of a particular kind of clay or a drop of hi
therto unseen blood.

  But I had never expected to see him perform this investigative ritual upon a filthy cellar floor beneath a raucous public house in Whitechapel.

  “A good thing you are not married, Holmes,” I noted. “A spouse of any sensibility would swoon dead away at the sight of your garments after such an exercise as this.”

  “I am not married, Watson, for other reasons than to prevent the female sex from swooning. Lean a little closer with the lantern…a bit lower and to the right. There, there’s the spot, old fellow! Now for a delicate extraction worthy of any dentist—”

  “I am a fair hand at extractions myself.”

  “I doubt you have ever plumbed such a prize as this.”

  Holmes raised a tweezer into the lantern light. I could just glimpse a translucent curl caught between the tiny steel tongs.

  “Candle wax, Holmes? I imagine a hole the age of this contains pieces of wax going back to the time of Charles II.”

  “I will admit that candle wax is a common remnant on the scene of several crimes possibly attributed to Jack the Ripper in Paris, but this is wax of another sort, Watson, from another country, I believe. I need a container for it,” he announced peevishly, going face down on the packed stone and dirt again, still holding the miserable wisp of “prize” aloft.

  “A container? All I have is a lantern and my pockets, which you would hardly find sanitary enough for a piece of precious evidence.”

  His head came up, turned over his shoulder. He frowned. “Of course you have nothing useful about you, Watson. I quite forgot. Can you be good enough to go up those rickety stairs and ask…er, bribe, the proprietor for…the smallest glasses he might have, Watson. Cordial glasses would do. Two or three. And being clean would help.”

  “I shall have to leave you in the dark for I cannot navigate those stairs without light.”

  “Then be quick about it! I cannot move for fear of crushing these rare flakes of evidence.”

  I mounted the perilous stairs, grumbling to myself. I suppose I should go out and about with empty vials in my pockets, all in case Holmes discovered a flake of tobacco or a dab of beeswax worth preserving.

  This Mr. Finn proved to be a businessman born who found even bribery too much trouble. I was forced to buy a double pint. My request for cordial glasses earned a hearty round of laughter. This was hardly the place to serve the finer liquors meant for such vessels. I explained my need for pocket-size glass containers and threw myself on his mercy. My abject need gave him such a sense of superiority that he ducked down behind the counter and solemnly lined up three tiny open-mouth glass objects on the bar.

  I suppose my gaped-mouth reception of these items was worth his trouble. He explained that he had obtained these from an American who couldn’t pay his bar bill and apparently traveled with his own bizarre set of measuring cups for whiskey. I had to pay him six pence before he handed over the three glasses after first swiping their interiors on his grimy apron on my request. Rather, I had requested that they be clean: the swipe was his interpretation of that condition.

  I apportioned a glass to each of three pockets so they should not rattle and hastened to the pub’s rear, where the scents of ale and elimination combined into a heady brew. Down the dark and shifty stairs again I went, to find my friend still stretched supine, like a corpse, just where I had left him.

  “Excellent, Watson,” he crowed as I handed over the first glass. “Strange things. What are they?”

  “American shot glasses,” I explained with pardonable smugness. “It appears that Americans seek to control their intake of spirits by using such Lilliputian glasses.”

  “Strange breed, the Americans,” Holmes muttered, utterly disinterested in odd customs as long as they provided what he needed.

  The small steel tongs Holmes had produced from his pocket—a tool I had never known him to carry before, a most suggestive fact—released the pale wax into the first receptacle.

  Holmes’s elbows worked like cricket legs, pulling himself forward.

  “More light,” he ordered.

  I delivered, and in a moment he triumphantly lifted another crumb in the tongs. “Cork this time, Watson. Lovely brown cork. From Portugal, of course.”

  “Wine corks seem rather expected in the cellar of a pub, I should think.”

  “But not French wine in a Spanish bottle sealed with Portuguese cork.”

  “I agree that it does not seem quite English.”

  Holmes was ignoring me, his nose to the ground and literally sniffing. “Red Tomahawk’s foreign firewater,” he muttered to himself, not pausing to explain anything to me. “Scent and yet no scent. Ha! The savage is a connoisseur. But what is this stuff?”

  “Red Tomahawk, Holmes?”

  He waggled dismissive (and filthy) fingers at me from the floor. “Foreign cases make for strange allies, Watson. I have one more sample to find here and…aha! Another vial, noble physician.”

  I produced a second shot glass, feeling rather like the barman at the Officer’s Club in Kandahar. My wounds from Maiwand ached in the damp underground. I unaccountably became wary of cobras in the dark corners beyond the circle of light the lantern threw.

  Holmes sprang up with the combination of energy and utter limberness a youth of seventeen but half his age would have envied.

  His dirty palms dusted off his filthy clothes before he reached for the last of the shot glasses in my hand. Another bit of candle wax drifted to its empty bottom.

  “The way to transport our loot is thus.”

  He bent to retrieve the other shot glasses from the floor and nested them one atop the other. Over the top one he thrust his thumb, and then pushed the whole tower into his coat pocket.

  “It’s back to Baker Street and my laboratory, Watson. I believe the cellar floor here is sufficiently clean.”

  “I’m afraid that all you have accomplished is the transfer of dirt from one surface to another.”

  “Let the microscope be the judge of that, Watson. The microscope is often the judge of us all and will be even more so in the times to come.”

  I left that miserable cellar with Sherlock Holmes as confused as the police. I had no idea why a few cork crumbles and flakes of wax and glass and pottery shards, all things one would expect to find in a cellar that sheltered a modest supply of wine bottles, should excite my friend’s attention.

  We stood on the paving stones outside, breathing less-confined air, although no sweeter.

  “I failed that night, Watson,” Holmes said suddenly, pausing in relighting the old clay pipe. He drew so deeply on the pipe that the end of the bowl burned bloodred. “I need to explore the building’s rear, then our expedition will be over.”

  “I see that my service revolver was unnecessary.”

  “We are not out of Whitechapel yet, Watson.” Holmes marched around the side of the building to where the streetlight cast more shadow than light.

  We had not even turned the second corner to the building’s rear when he stopped. “I cannot credit it! Watson, the lantern!”

  I had taken custody of the light and struggled to pull the shutters fully open to reveal what Holmes had discovered.

  It was most like the crumpled pile of discarded clothes that had announced every Ripper victim last year.

  “Right here, near the very spot. I cannot believe the audacity of the creature! Your diagnosis, Doctor. I will hold the light. And the revolver, though I believe our man is gone.”

  I knelt on the damp cobblestones, felt the neck. It was warm, as was the blood, which was still liquid.

  “Quick, Holmes! Summon a bobby. She’s still alive.”

  He flung back a few words of encouragement as he raced away. “By God, Watson, if you can keep her that way you may be the one man in all England who will be able to bring Jack the Ripper to justice and salve my conscience.”

  After he had vanished, I pressed the neck wound shut, unwinding Mary’s knitted scarf to make a bloody bandage of it.
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  “It’s all right, my dear,” I murmured to ears that might soon be deaf for all time. “Help is coming and you are among friends.”

  7.

  Taking the Air

  PLAYING MAD WOMAN NELLIE BLY TOO SHARP FOR THE ISLAND DOCTORS

  THE SUN FINISHES UP ITS STORY OF THE “PRETTY CRAZY GIRL.”

  She is intelligent, capable and self-reliant, and…has gone about the business of maintaining herself in journalism in a practical, business-like way.

  —THE NEW YORK SUN, 1887

  FROM A JOURNAL

  Irene surprised me the next day by proposing that we visit Notre Dame de Paris.

  “Why?” I demanded.

  “Because it is Paris in the spring?” She paused in pinning on her hat to add with brittle emphasis, “Because it is the first time, the first place, where Our Enemy showed itself.”