“But he denies attacking the young woman just outside of it?”
“Of course. There’s not a Ripper suspect we’ve had in hand that did not deny everything.”
“And does he admit to a state of drunkenness?”
“Admit? He is proud of it.”
Holmes peered deep into the jar. “He claims to have emptied this jug by himself?”
“Absolutely. It is rarely attained here in England, being a popular village brew all over Russia. He claims to have wandered the streets all night, intending to drink until he could not stand.”
“And these chips along the bottle’s lip, could he explain them?”
“I happened to have noticed that very thing, Mr. Holmes,” Lestrade said with a ferrety grin at me. “Looks as though the bottle might have been used as a bludgeon, although that poor woman was not struck with anything but a blade. So I asked him about that, through the interpreter, who said that men in his village used to gather in the forest and beat these jars against a tree trunk until the sealing fell off and they could drink. And that is how the chips came to be.”
Holmes set the jar away from himself at the center of the desk, with the air of a cat tiring of a dead mouse. “Russia is a brutally large land, filled with peasants who follow peasant pursuits. I understand their miserable lots make them prodigious drinkers, especially of a potent distillation of rye. No doubt the spirit in this jar was that brew so common in Russia and yet so rare here.”
“Given the fellow’s condition when you ran him down, I can only hope it will continue to be rare here.”
Holmes nodded, and stood.
“I say, Mr. Holmes, do you not wish to see this man for yourself? He is sober now, and we have retained the translator.”
Holmes didn’t hesitate. “That is most kind and prescient of you, Inspector Lestrade, but I have no need to interview the man. There is no doubt he attacked the woman we found, as you could have proved had not your fellow policemen trampled the ground about her body until all traces of a bootprint missing a large nail were erased. I suggest you examine the bottom of Chernyshev’s boots, but it will only show the futility of prosecuting him. For want of a nail…Still, I would keep an eye on him.”
“But Mr. Holmes! This man may be the Ripper! Have you no interest in pursuing the matter?”
“No. He is all yours, I am happy to say. I’ll bid you good day.”
It was not often that I was as shocked as Inspector Lestrade by Holmes’s unpredictable approaches to crime solving.
I finally scrambled out of my chair, nodded farewell to the stunned inspector, and hastened after Holmes.
15.
The Wild East Show
Wild Magyar horsemen tumbled down the Carpathian passes in the late ninth century….
—THOMAS REIMER, A GERMAN HUNGARIAN HISTORIAN
FROM A JOURNAL
Our train had pushed beyond Frankfurt toward Vienna when I first spied the riders.
They came at a distant angle at first, then soon galloped alongside us. The horses’ ribbon-caparisoned halters, reins, and saddles fluttered with rainbow motion, but the riders’ full-sleeved and trousered garb was no less colorful.
“I see why Colonel Cody hails the horsemen of the world in his show,” I noted, standing on the shuddering train to look out the window with my nose pressed against the glass. “Who or what are these wild men?”
“Magyars,” Irene says, leaning forward to regard them. “Cousins and mortal enemies of Turks and Huns. Hundreds of years of mounted battle beat beneath the hooves of their steeds.”
Her voice took on the thrilling tone of a melodrama, or an endless Sarah Bernhardt death scene. She is like Bram Stoker: if it is a cast of hundreds and cost thousands, it is Theater, even if it is real. Perhaps especially if it is real.
“Bandits do this,” I said, breathless myself as I sat to pull out my journal and began scribbling penciled notes. “In the American West. They run down trains and stop them dead, then rob the passengers.”
“Bandits operate worldwide.” Irene reached into the side pocket of the “surprise” dress that carried something Nell never would have when she wore it: a small black pistol. “We move into mountainous country. That is where civilization loosens its grip and the Old Ways win out again.”
“Do those men really mean to stop our train and rob us?”
Irene shook her head. “I don’t think so. They are showing off. They are a mere distraction.”
“A distraction for what?”
“Watch and see,” she said with an irritating smile. It was not that the smile was irritating; it was the fact that she smiled at such an uneasy time that was irritating.
I saw that despite the drawn pistol, she was not afraid, not even were Billy the Kid to board our train.
Then neither should I be!
Our train did not stop, but the engine did jerk and spit up a long grade like a balky mount.
Not long after that I heard bootheels pounding down the passage.
At our door they stopped.
A fierce, mustachioed face peered in at us through the frosted glass.
The door sprung wide. A man in high-heeled boots of mad design and a military uniform trellised in gold braid invaded our compartment.
He strode at once to the window, tapping upon it with a long-barreled pistol that was as gilded as his uniform.
The riders came galloping alongside, men whose foot-long mustaches whipped back like their mounts’ long black tails. They lifted sleeves as ruffled as a seventeenth-century English cavalier’s and flourished rifles before they careened away at the same diagonal with which they had intercepted us. I watched the black manes of their pale gray mounts grow small and become as wispy as storm clouds on the horizon.
“What magnificent beasts!” I exclaimed.
“The horses, or the men?” Irene asked, turning from me to our guest—our invader—before I could, in all honesty, choose. “Well met, Bassanio.”
“This is no Rialto.” The officer sat without invitation, doffing his savage bearskin helmet.
I eyed his slanted black mustaches and eyebrows, his flushed, swarthy face. Surely a distant descendant of Genghis Khan or…
“Thanks for the cabled warning, Quentin,” Irene said. “Kelly was seen in Neunkirchen. We are on the right trail.”
He nodded, still catching his breath.
“Will you not lose your horse?” I interjected.
“It was borrowed.” He tossed me a glance as a soldier might unleash a grenade.
I flushed. The horses were stage props, no more. As perhaps I was.
He glanced back, observed my high color, and made a brisk bow. “I am sorry my unannounced appearance startled you, Miss Pink.”
“No more so than the Ripper,” I replied as tartly as Nell might have.
At the same instant the expression in his eyes recognized, welcomed, and then blanched at my evocation.
I was surprised at myself as well. It was as if Nell accompanied us in some unseen way. Like Irene, I was unexpectedly taking on her coloration. Had this meek nonentity really had such an effect on us, on all of us?
From the sudden silence on the dashing Quentin Stanhope’s part, apparently so.
“What have you learned?” Irene asked.
“Gypsies, of course, travel east. And west.”
“You have learned nothing more of them?”
He lounged back in the velvet upholstery, the spurs on his bright leatherwork boots chiming. “I have found the horse with the misshapen shoe.”
“Are you sure?”
“The American Indian’s description was Johnny-on-the-spot: a mark like a mare’s-tail cloud in the sky. Almost like a tilde to my eye.”
“And—?” Irene was breathless with impatience.
“The caravan it pulled is heading east, accompanied by the usual packs of dogs and children walking alongside.”
“And?”
“Nothing else. No passengers but Gypsies. No fleeing Engli
sh upholsterer, no hooded devil worshipers. Just Gypsies: close-mouthed, grimy, proud.”
“Then our party has all transferred to trains.”
“Perhaps not.”
Irene and I regarded Quentin Stanhope with intense interest.
“No one unusual has passed through the stations that lie behind you, or ahead of you,” he said. “There is no trace of an abducted woman, of a madman, or of a group of peasant foreigners.”
“The only trace,” Irene pointed out bitterly, “is the dead girl at Neunkirchen.”
Quentin nodded. “I find the fact that there is no trail most sinister of all. It tells me that they are good at this, at being invisible when they want to be.”
Irene fell back into the seat. “Then you don’t doubt that they exist?”
“No. And I have learned that there is something rotten in Prague. Something no one will talk about, but that everyone suspects like an unacknowledged nightmare. A nightmare too terrible to tell anyone about. The Rothschild agents, of course, will be more forthcoming, but I left them for you. I didn’t want to blunder into matters I only half grasp.”
Irene nodded, glanced at the pistol still in her hand, then shrugged and replaced it in her pocket.
“The last time I was in Prague proved very dangerous,” she said.
“I think the city will not disappoint your expectations,” Quentin responded with a small bow.
“I am glad you are with us.”
He glanced at me, as if annoyed that the “us” included me.
“I will do anything I can,” he said, not looking at Irene, “to see Nell restored to her proper place by your side.”
I suppressed a shiver. Dressed as he was, as some half-wild horseman of the Wild East, I could well believe that he was eager to unseat Nell’s usurper by any means he could find.
Was Godfrey Norton anything like this hard-edged adventurer? Overcivilized Englishmen made my head ache, but uncivilized Englishmen reminded me of wolves.
16.
Nell Ungirds Her Loins
As Lady Russell said, the English conclude if your dress is loose, that your morals are also. In that case I am thoroughly dissolute.
—MRS. SARAH AUSTIN, 1862
“I am afraid you are not at all saved, Nell,” Godfrey told me with deep regret, “but merely join me in the state of needing to be.”
I blinked, not yet being sufficiently revived to understand the fine point of accuracy that barristers are wont to put on their simplest musings as if every sentence were a newly sharpened quill.
Besides, as my senses returned I became aware of various unpleasantries. Foremost among them was the light that glared behind Godfrey, turning him into a mere silhouette of a man. It seared my poor eyes that had been confined to dark and close places for God knew how long.
“Irene,” I murmured.
“She is safe, well?”
“I don’t know!” My voice had become a cronelike croak. “I last glimpsed her by the light of that demonic hellfire with those naked, murderous, mad things dancing around her.”
“Good God, Nell! Where have you two been?”
“To l’Exposition universelle in Paris.”
“L’Exposition universelle—? Your mind must be wandering. The Exposition is a place of wonder and entertainment. Perhaps I should ask when you last saw Irene.”
“Why”—I had to think. I had to think to say anything at the moment—“on Joan of Arc’s birthday, of course.”
“Joan of Arc’s birthday?! Since when do you mark the calendar by Joan of Arc’s birthday?”
“Poor Godfrey. You have sorely lost sense during our separation, having to repeat everything I say like that annoying parrot Casanova. It was actually Joan of Arc’s…feast day. That is it: a French Papist observation alien to Protestant Englishmen: May the thirtieth.”
Godfrey sank away from me, the movement allowing the light behind him to fall upon his pale features. “May the thirtieth! But this is June the sixth, according to my best calculations. What can have happened to Irene since in so long as that?” His worried eyes returned to me. “What can have happened to you?”
“It was horrible!” I began to recall just how awful, despite my muffled, pounding headache. “Two terrible brutes trapped me in the panorama building outside the cavern. A panorama is a peculiarly French attraction, for they are always a circuitous sort. It is a circular building lined with a huge panoramic painting of a crowd scene, only this one turned like a top…not the painting, but the building. It was not open at that early hour of the morning, of course, and shuttered and dark inside, but some villains set the mechanism rotating, so I was quite dizzy and made even more so when a man came out of nowhere from among the wax figures and tried to smother me with a thick, sick-smelling cloth. Then I was crammed into a box—like a coffin—and knocked about for a good long time. Irene had mentioned long ago a ‘vampire box’ they use on stage for trick appearances, but mine was a disappearance.”
Even as I recalled the circumstances of my abduction, I became more fully aware of its physical results. I ached and burned from head to foot. After so long supine in a box, I could barely take a breath deep enough to support more than a few sentences, for my corset felt like the relentless embrace of an Iron Maiden. I also was beginning to detect a ghastly foul smell, and feared that I might be its source.
“Oh, Godfrey! I have spent all that time in these same clothes!”
Most men would have been insensitive to my predicament or outraged sensibility, but Godfrey immediately was moved to action.
“Unthinkable! I’ll return in an instant.”
His shadowy figure vanished as swiftly as a withdrawn lantern shutter, leaving the blurred white daylight from the window beyond to sear my weakened eyes like live coals.
I shut my eyelids, now welcoming the dark I had feared during all my journey. Perhaps I had imagined Godfrey’s comforting presence. Perhaps I was still in my jolting coffin, my mobile vampire box. No wonder every bone and centimeter of flesh on my body throbbed!
I almost sobbed, save that the breath I caught and held became a girdle of fire around my chest.
“I’m back,” Godfrey announced. “We are in a castle, but all we have for servants are cats and rats.”
“So like a Grimm fairy tale,” I murmured. Perhaps I had awakened in one of those folk parables.
Something like a cloud floated over me.
“This is a fine lawn nightgown, Nell. It will serve as a dressing chamber for you, for no woman you would care to have touch you is available here to assist you. You say you are having trouble breathing?”
“Well, yes, my—” How should I explain my predicament with the corset to Godfrey, who was not even a physician? “I have been cruelly bounced from pillar to post and now you say I am in a castle?”
“A castle of rogues and phantoms, alas, and no very fine place at all. I think I can guess your quandary. Now don’t breathe for a few moments.”
While he had been talking, Godfrey had pulled the voluminous fabric over me like a tent. Then he reached within it, and I felt a strange pressure at my ribs. For an instant my pain multiplied, and I couldn’t restrain a cry. But the wail ended in a relieved sigh as my tortured lungs and bones suddenly expanded, at last unfettered from whalebone and cotton lacing.
I realized that the metal hooks and eyes at the corset front had been pinched together until they burst apart. Only a man’s great strength could accomplish this instant unbinding. I was very glad then that when Godfrey wed Irene he had assumed some of my former duties as ladies’ maid. And I recalled another instance when another man in other circumstances had so loosed me. I would have blushed, but I was too weak to do so.
Every new breath came more deeply, and more painfully, so I felt both relieved and yet more tormented than ever.
“Now.” Godfrey’s fingers were working at the many horn buttons fastening the front of my coatdress. “You must permit me some liberties. You have been cruell
y confined, in every respect, for days.”
Although I trusted the motives and refinement of Godfrey above that of all men on earth, his attack on the buttons reminded me so vividly of the demented creature with the pale, mad eyes pawing at my bodice in the panorama building that it was all I could do to keep still and avoid screaming.
Yet as the heavy wool gown came away like a husk, I again felt such welcome relief that I could not stop myself from weeping.
“If you were taken in Paris,” Godfrey was saying, “and confined to a box, you must have been a prisoner for almost a week and have traveled by coach, boat, and railway train. Did they feed you, give you water?”
“I can’t remember. I don’t know what they did to me, or who they were, save that I was always very sick and a sweetly medicinal smell hovered over me the entire time.”
“Some drug, possibly chloroform. We are at least fed here from time to time. I will try to get you some broth or soup.”
“We?” For an insane moment, I hoped he would tell me that Irene was here with us after all and that it was all a nightmare that was over and the Rothschilds expected us to dinner at eight.
“I am speaking of you and I. There. The dress is off. Perhaps you can manage the other things as you gain strength.”
My arms had not yet fought their way into the nightshirt’s full sleeves. I sought to pull the loosened corset from under my body, but the effort was too taxing.
I became aware then that the sweet, sickly odor which had been my constant companion, almost a guardian angel during my ordeal, was finally fading. In its place rose some extremely impolite odors that I realized to my horror came from me, odors common on the debased streets of a district like Whitechapel, no doubt, but utterly foreign to a decently reared female of any sensibility at all.
After all I had survived, I could have now gladly died on the spot.
“And I will order the makings of a bath from these savages,” Godfrey said. “I cannot provide a maid whose aid you would deign to accept but perhaps after some soup and water, er, soap and water and soup, you will be stronger and can manage to tend to yourself.”
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