Castle Rouge

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “This will take much time, Nell.”

  “Leave me the candelabra, and I will begin tonight. You will see that it will go faster than you think.”

  Any practitioner of the needle arts knows that one stitch, in time, will amount to thousands.

  Godfrey had left me for the night—whistling, I noticed, after the door leading to his rooms had closed. Men, I had concluded, were simply large boys: deny them exercise and derring-do and they become quite ungovernable. Allow them their boyish enthusiasms, with suitable strictures, and everyone will be happy.

  Of course it takes a clever woman to allow them enough rope, so to speak, without them breaking their necks.

  So now I allowed myself to consider the enormity of my self-appointed task. The linens were large, but exceedingly tough. The worst part of the process was creating the strips; braiding them was simple.

  I felt a bit like a trio of fairy tale heroines: the poor girl left overnight to spin straw into gold; the loyal sister who wove nettles into shirts to turn her seven brothers from swans into men again; and Rapunzel whose infamously long locks sufficed to make a ladder to and from a prison tower.

  I pulled the first sheet from my bed. Every fabric has a way it will resist tearing and a way it will more easily rip. Finding the weaker weave in this fabric was a puzzle. My tiny embroidery scissors nibbled at the hemmed edges until they had parted enough for me to grab the fabric with both hands and pull with all my might. The sides of my small fingers were abraded raw, and the candle wicks were swimming in the last pools of liquid wax before I gritted my teeth and gave a mighty, Samsonlike pull…at last the tightly woven cloth came rending apart with a shriek like a cat having its tail stepped on.

  I stared, panting, at the single yard of separated fabric.

  Rolling my fists into the fabric where the rent ended, I gave another mighty tug. And another yard of fabric finally gave up the ghost. Again. And Again.

  By dawn my arms and back and sorely tried ribs were aching, but I had a mound of two-inch-wide strips high enough to hide a yearling sheep. These I bundled back into the bed and spread out to resemble disarranged linens. The entire outer sides of my hands were raw and oozing, and I had no ointment. I used part of one sheet strip to bind both of my hands around the palms, so Godfrey should not see the damage, then admonished myself for being the silliest goose from Shropshire! Of course I should have used “mittens” during my previous tearing work. Certainly I would from now on, and spare my skin.

  I surveyed my room and my deception, weary but proud.

  I had little doubt that the few servants I had glimpsed in this vast, deserted castle would be the last souls to go probing around in my bed linens.

  And the rats and cats would not care what nests I made, if only I would share them!

  I quieted a shudder. Better rats and cats for company than devil worshipers.

  21.

  The Queen and I

  When a charming young lady comes into your office and smilingly announces she wants to ask you a few questions regarding the possibility of improving New York’s moral tone, don’t stop to parley. Just say ‘Excuse me, Nellie Bly,’ and shin down the fire escape.

  —PUCK MAGAZINE, 1888

  FROM A JOURNAL

  “How is it you are called ‘Pink?’” the Queen asked.

  We sat in another lavishly painted and gilded withdrawing room, the Queen and I. She presided over a porcelain tea set as intricate as a miniature city. In fact, I began to see that the significant pieces were covered in bas-relief landscapes of local Prague scenes.

  “First,” I returned, “how is it that you speak English?” Here, she blushed, instantly endearing herself to me. “Madame Irene encouraged me to learn Bohemian and English and French to aid my husband the King in his enterprises. Forgive me, but your bluntness in asking reminds me of my dear Miss Huxleigh.”

  My warming sense of endearment chilled. Irene had not mentioned her friend’s dire circumstances, and I could see why. The King barely registered the Admirable Nell’s existence, but the Queen was seriously attached. How had such a situation come about? Ah. The Queen had not always been the Queen. Perhaps Irene and Nell knew the King previously to Clotilde’s entrance on the scene. But then the King should know Nell very well. What a mystery!

  “I believe my bluntness, as you call it, is American energy, not British bluster.”

  “Ah. You do not like the British.”

  “Not very much.”

  “And have you met Godfrey?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “He does not bluster.”

  “Then he is an exception.”

  “Oh, yes,” said the Queen, with a small sigh that made me raise my eyebrows figuratively. “My husband is not British, but he can bluster. However, I am learning to…direct it.”

  “Did you direct it just recently into the grande promenade our…associates are taking together at this moment?”

  She blushed again. “I am obligated to Madame Norton for a great personal service she did me. Part of it was learning to be diplomatic, which most distresses me because it seems that dissembling is a key part of diplomacy.”

  “It is indeed,” I said with a smile as I sipped tea from a Meissen cup as fragile as a newborn’s fingernail. “I am not very diplomatic I fear, though I can dissemble in a good cause.”

  “And what do you consider a good cause, Miss…Pink?”

  “Why on behalf of the poor and the weak, the meek and mild, the women, the children, the workers, the lost.”

  “Gracious! You sound like an anarchist.”

  “No, like an American reformer. We are all over the place over there, and quite harmless, as no one ever much listens to us.”

  “I suspect they listen to you,” Clotilde answered with a shrewd sky-blue glance over the eggshell lip of her cup.

  Strange thing about delicate porcelain: it can hold boiling water and not shatter. I figured Clotilde might be one of those types. And I guessed that I was not the first American woman she had consulted.

  “They called me Pink as a child,” I admitted suddenly, “because I blushed so much. It stuck, the nickname.”

  “‘Nickname.’ What a word. It means an endearment?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Then may I call you ‘Pink,’ since my dear Miss Huxleigh is not here? I would never dare to call Miss Huxleigh by her given name, I cannot say why.”

  I found myself speechless for a spell. It was not my intention to usurp Nell in anyone’s regard, and I found it rather sad that the people who most genuinely liked Nell called her Miss Huxleigh.

  “You may call me Pink,” I said finally, “but I will call you Your Highness, as I am an American and not used to titles and will forget if I don’t use them, and besides, we Americans are secretly knocked sideways by them, so my calling you Your Highness is akin to your calling me Pink.”

  Clotilde sat still for a moment as she translated this speech both literally and emotionally.

  “How refreshing you Americans are! No wonder Willie…well, that is the past. But you must promise to give me a ‘nickname’ someday. I would dearly like one.”

  “No one has ever used a diminutive for you?”

  “I was a Princess Royal born. No one dared.”

  “Well, I will dub thee one. Let’s see. It will be American, I warn you.”

  Clotilde laughed and clapped her hands. “You cannot guess how much I would like a touch of the American about me. I am already half-French, thanks to the gowns of Monsieur Worth.”

  “But he is English, I hear.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “All right. Clotilde. Tilde. That’s an accent mark, but it’s not right for you. I know! Matilda. Very American and with a French twist: ma Tilde, you see?”

  “Ma-til-dah?”

  “Great American frontier name. You could wear gingham and buckskin with that name.”

  “Ging-ham?”

  “A cotton checked ma
terial. Very practical.”

  “No one has ever called me practical. I like it! Er, checked?”

  “Like my coatdress. Checked and practical.”

  “And American?”

  I hated to admit that I had adopted the style from Nell. “And a bit British.”

  “Then I shall be a little like all my friends.”

  It made me sad to think she thought I was her friend. A reporter can be friendly, but she daren’t start thinking of her subjects as her friends because she has to tell the truth about them. Odd; I had subjects, just as Queen Clotilde did, come to think of it.

  “Well, Matilda, now that we are on nickname terms, you must tell me about how you got to be Queen of Bohemia and met Irene and Nell and all that.”

  “How I got to be Queen of Bohemia was destiny. Willie and I were betrothed when we were eleven.”

  I nearly swallowed the Meissen cup with my last gulp of tea.

  “But how I met Irene and Nell and what we three did afterward is quite a tale.”

  “I am like an ewer, all ears,” I said.

  So she told me, more than she should have of course, but it was all very useful.

  Et tu, Pink.

  22.

  Lone Wolf

  But there are a great many James Kellys who no doubt are committed for similar offences and there may possibly be a mistake.

  —JOHN MOLLER, COUSIN OF JAMES KELLY

  FROM A YELLOW BOOK

  It was well to forsake the train, as we had the caravan, and let my other minions see the baggage to its final resting place.

  My beast and I travel on together, on horseback with a rogue band of Gypsy men who are half-Magyar, half-Cossack, and all animal. We have joined a different and far less visible train.

  So much for our enemies in pursuit.

  Oh, the traveling is far rougher: the nights raw and the food barely edible, and then barely cooked. No silk and no sherbet, no star, that is for certain.

  But Gypsies travel in packs, like wolves and dogs, and he craves the society of others. I cannot say that he craves the society of “his fellows,” for there are none like him.

  This he seems to have known from a very early age. I sometimes wonder if he seeks crowds so that he may assert his natural place above them.

  Yet he is a man of the people still. He wolfs down the abominable food along with the strange, strong liquor the Gypsies find for him somewhere.

  I am tolerated in their midst, a freak with moneybags. I pay for their missions to the caravans and other camps, from which they return with haunches of raw meat (whose source it is best not to ask) and the heavy pottery bottles that look as old as the Crusades.

  They offer my beast first taste.

  He drinks down half of the first jug in one endless draught, his head thrown back like a wolf howling, only this beast swallows the howl, again and again.

  They would never offer me to drink from that vessel, and I don’t protest. I do not wish to see the beast in myself, but in others. One’s own beast is always too predictable.

  The violins moan like a woman in heat, and the great bonfire in their midst sizzles like burning skin.

  The night is chill. The violins skitter up and down the scale of tortuous sound. Smells of spilt wine and vomit conjoin into a strange Gypsy sacrament. At night we momentarily link with the passing caravans. Then the women and girls join us to stamp their bare feet on the icy ground, at one with grime. The gold coins on their wrist and ankle bracelets spatter like grease on a hot skillet.

  Swarthy faces grin in the ebbing and flowing firelight. Eyes are ebony set in mother-of-pearl.

  His eyes, though, are aspic-clear, a pale, eerily bloodless silver-blue.

  Remarkable that one so dark should have eyes so light.

  Opposites war in him more openly than they do in the rest of mankind.

  I am rapt in it, the crude and the exalted, the holy and the inhumane. Perhaps it is my heritage from a harsh land that also spawned great wealth and beauty. I am bound to my earth, my dirt, my mortality. My feet are peasants, but my soul soars like royalty. My shod feet can’t feel the hard earth, but I sense its slow, icy heart beating beneath my slightly numbing toes. It reminds me of other music, other dances.

  I could sit here. Turn to stone. Grow deaf to the cacophony, blind to the raucous stew of sights, cries, and smells. I could become a mountain, an Alp or a Caucasus, a Hindu Kush. I could become a graven image, a god. I could become a monument.

  Once I so aspired. I masqueraded as an artist then, and all artists are mad. Or should be. I know this Woman. And I do not know her. She was an artist once, but lost that rank, like a deposed queen. She lost her kingdom. Can a Queen lose a Kingdom? In a just world, yes. But there is no just world, only many worlds that can be twisted and spun and tossed from universe to universe like balls.

  So I have become a Juggler. And sometimes I toss lives instead of balls.

  Hmmm, balls.

  Quite a metaphor. Our world but a ball. A celebration but a ball. A manhood…but a ball, or two.

  It can all come tumbling down if the Juggler wills it: the world, the glitter, the power.

  I sit here, a supportive player. The King in disguise. The Queen in retrograde. Everything burns with cold. Skin and illusion peel away.

  Play, Gypsies, play! The music defines the dance, the dance the play, the play the climax.

  Death.

  Death is the greatest choreographer, playwright, scrawler in history.

  He has very pale blue eyes, and He is Mine.

  23.

  Rapunzel in Ash-blond

  15 May—One more have I seen the Count go out in his lizard fashion. He moved downwards in a sidelong way, some hundred feet down, and a good deal to the left. He vanished into some hole or window.

  —JOHNATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL, BRAM STOKER’S DRACUIA

  The brass bathtub so mysteriously imported to my bedchamber also mysteriously remained in place, though empty.

  I began to realize what force Godfrey had exerted to obtain for me an article of a domestic scene far less grand and far more comforting than this vast, mostly unpeopled old castle.

  Since the few servitors the castle boasted only entered Godfrey’s chamber, I took to coiling my lengths of braided linen in the dry, red-gold giant’s bowl of the bathtub.

  Godfrey always brought our meals in to me on the tray by which they were delivered to him. It didn’t matter the hour—morning, noon, or night—we broke fast, supped, and dined on similar dishes: stews that blended unidentifiable meats with unidentifiable vegetables. Our only libation was wine, a dry, sour yellow wine that reminded me of certain wolf leavings in the snow.

  Our nightly entertainment was the distant howl of these wild creatures. Much as I publicly approved Godfrey’s plans to survey our prison with a mind to escaping, I couldn’t imagine fleeing the safety of old stone into the cold teeth of wolf packs.

  We spent our evenings huddled in our heavy tapestry bedcovers by my fireplace. At least wood was plenty, as well as great wooden lucifers as long as tapers.

  “I think the common link is Gypsies,” I often began. “There was a troupe in Paris that disappeared before we discovered the meeting ground below. And you say the courtyard teems with the creatures here.”

  “Sometimes,” Godfrey amended. “At other times the areas surrounding the castle are as deserted as its interior.”

  “But the few people you have seen in the castle are Gypsies.”

  “They are dark-favored and colorfully dressed, but I don’t think that makes them Gypsies in this part of the world. There is one woman, sturdy enough to chop wood should she choose, and two men I have seen. None speak English, although I can make myself understood with a combination of German and English, especially English pantomime, if I work hard enough at it.”

  “How odd it is! That you arrived at that quaint little village as advised and that the moment you took the coach to the castle you became a prisoner.”


  “A tacit prisoner, Nell. I was never bound, simply led to my chamber and locked in. The coachman actually toted up my luggage before lowering the latch on my door from the outside. I didn’t even discover that I was a prisoner until I decided to ‘go down’ for breakfast the next morning.”

  “I wish I had suffered such a genteel abduction.”

  “My dear Nell, so do I! I would have changed places with you a thousand times over. I cannot explain why I was treated so gently. It infuriates me!”

  “Did you do nothing in Prague to irritate the Gypsies?”

  “I think the Gypsies are not an end but a means, Nell. Colorful they may be, but it would be a mistake not to look beyond them.”

  “Or smell beyond them! The food we are afflicted with reminds me of something one would leave out for the castle mastiff.”

  “Given the wolves’ chorus we hear each night, a castle mastiff would be a welcome brute. Still, food means our captors intend to keep us alive.”

  “For what? Another bloody ritual? I would rather be eaten by wolves.”

  “Yes, Miss Riding Hood?” Godfrey leaned across the distance between our two chairs to tug playfully on one of my braids that had come unpinned from atop my head.

  I found myself blushing in the hot halo of the flames. Deprived of even a comb, I had concluded that my unkempt hair could benefit from the same rigorous interweaving that I was accomplishing with the bed linens. So I had braided my hair and coiled it on my head. Godfrey claimed I looked like a Swiss mountain maid, and indeed, the cloudy mirror in the corner revealed a figure from one of Irene’s more cloying operettas. I doubt my own father would have known me, had he returned from the grave to ascertain the doings of his only daughter.