Castle Rouge

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “I no longer wish Irene to rescue us,” I announced as soon as my burning cheeks had cooled a bit.

  “No?” He seemed amazed.

  “I could not bear to be seen like this.”

  “I think it rather charming.”

  “You have been alone too much in a deserted castle,” I admonished him in my best governess declaration.

  Godfrey cast off the bedcover like a cocoon and stood. He was wearing only his shirtsleeves, most irregular for a gentleman in the presence of a lady, even if she is got up to look like a milkmaid.

  “The clamor in the courtyard has died down. I’d a mind to try out your climbing rope tonight.”

  I turned to regard the bathtub with its burden of twisted linen. Would my braided ropes hold?

  I rose also, forsaking the warmth of my brocade tent, and went to study the yards and yards of pale coils like a headless snake in the bathtub.

  “Will they be strong enough?” I wondered aloud.

  “That depends on the knot we fashion at the turret window. A pity that the bed linens weren’t filthy.”

  “A pity! Not for us.”

  “I meant that this white rope will be very evident against castle walls.”

  The flaw in my scheme came home to me like a knife in the ribs. My vaunted safety line was a betraying trap should anyone observe his expedition.

  Imagine feeling deprived because one has only clean sheets to work with! While I stood there gaping at my handiwork, I heard Godfrey rustling and scraping behind me like a giant rat.

  A giant rat. It was possible that what I heard was not Godfrey, but exactly such a creature the size of a Shropshire calf. I turned, afraid of what I would see.

  Godfrey was on his knees by the still-crackling fire, digging ashes up like a dog.

  His mad actions had covered his shirt in a pall of gray, and his hair and face as well.

  He looked up at me, laughing. “If you dry the stew bowls, we can carry the ashes to the bathtub.”

  “Have you gone mad? Bathing requires water, not ashes.”

  Godfrey rose, his cupped hands filled with ashes that he carried to the bathtub and emptied atop my lovely, white-linen ropes. It was as if a storm cloud had opened above them, raining gray.

  After that we shuttled to and fro with our empty wooden dinner bowls until the ropes were the dull color of a moonless night.

  Our evening’s labors were hardly begun.

  Godfrey coiled the gray loops over both shoulders and still there were uncounted coils left in the tub. I had no idea that I was being so industrious during my long, sleepless nights.

  I looped what I could over my arms and trailed him to the window, still open, as it always had been. That open window was the one element that kept my mind from turning on itself during these endless idle days and nights. That and the act of tearing and braiding.

  Now my labors were to meet their test, and Godfrey’s life would be the proof of the pudding.

  He leaned perilously far out of the window to loop one end twice around the stone support in the window’s center. Then he made a series of mighty knots the size of fists.

  “Would I had been a seafaring man,” he noted with a shrug, wrapping his hands in linen bandages as I had done when working.

  I tied them off.

  Godfrey had left a long tail of rope free. This he now knotted in turn around the legs of a trestle table we both wrestled to the window.

  “Would I had been a mountaineering man. If my knots slip,” Godfrey added, “the table will crash into the window. Being too wide to pass through, it should act as a stopgap. If the wooden boards don’t give.”

  “And if my braidwork gives?”

  “On that score I have no fears.” Godfrey jumped up on the window frame and balanced there like a large monkey, certainly a seafaring man’s trick. “The knots are the key to success, and they are all my doing, not yours, Nell. Remember that.”

  “Do take care, Godfrey. It is quite chill out there at night without a coat.”

  He nodded and occupied himself with inching down the wall on my line.

  I leaned over the sill. A waxing moon cast light like caps of snow on the high point of every brutal rock littering the sharply sloped meadow far below.

  The air beyond the open frame was surprisingly icy. My huge fireplace had done more to warm that cavernous room than I credited it with. Wind tugged at my entwined braids and chapped my cheeks.

  “Where are you going?” I finally thought to ask. The goal of being able to go somewhere had obscured what could be gained from it.

  Godfrey nodded to a point at the left and below. “A trio of window arches. I thought I’d start small and close to home.”

  At that he pushed his feet against the stones and swung sideways like an ape. When his feet touched stone again, he was at least a story lower than before, had this towering castle anything so modest as mere stories.

  I grew quite dizzy from following the arc of his descent and was forced to draw back inside. The quiet countryside so far below looked as peaceful as an eiderdown comforter. I almost cherished the illusion I could fly, that I could lean out and waft featherlike below to the cool snow banks waiting to cushion my fall.

  Delusion! I had eaten too much Gypsy stew for too long. It was bad enough that Godfrey was bouncing from stone to stone like a monkey on a string. Barristers should never let their feet leave the ground. How could I ever tell Irene that Godfrey had hung by a thread of my construction?

  I leaned against the cold stone wall and shut my eyes and listened for the inevitable sounds of disaster.

  I awoke sitting on the floor, my limbs so stiff that I had to unbend them by inches and wait for the fires of Hell to desist burning before I could unbend another inch.

  The actual fire across the room had become a shadow of itself, as if a mastiff had shrunk into a Pomeranian.

  The moonlight had shifted to cast silver pathways on the stone floor and the threadbare carpets.

  I finally forced myself upright against the stones and leaned to peer out the open window.

  A great gray loop of braided rope disappeared into the castle wall a dreadful distance below. Except for a tremor in the wind, it sagged motionless, a pendulum without a weight.

  Godfrey was gone!

  24.

  Irene and the Gypsy Queen

  She could not detach herself from the idea that the supernatural played a part in all her doings, and she clung to the use of gestures and passes and words in the exercise of her art….

  —UNORNA IN F. MARION CRAWFORD’S THE WITCH OF PRAGUE, 1891

  FROM A JOURNAL

  “How soon will we meet with the Rothschild agents? Tonight?”

  Irene and I had been established at the hostelry of her choice, an ancient inn near what was called the Old Town, for half the day.

  I presumed we were so near the Jewish quarter because of her Rothschild connections.

  But I was wrong.

  “Tonight we will seek a fortune-teller,” she pronounced, as if just making up her mind.

  “A fortune-teller? If I wanted to expose such a fraud I could have stayed in New York City. Is this why we’re not enjoying a grand hotel near the Charles Bridge?”

  “We are not enjoying a grand hotel near the Charles Bridge because there is nothing to learn there.”

  “And there is something to learn from a Prague fortune-teller?”

  “Given that she predicted my marriage to Godfrey and my getting a tattoo that I have not yet acquired, yes.”

  “A tattoo? You wouldn’t!”

  “Apparently I will.”

  “Where?”

  She withdrew from the cupboard into which she was hanging her sparse pieces of clothing to stare at me. “Where?”

  “Where will you get that tattoo?”

  “In Tibet.”

  I found myself momentarily speechless. I didn’t recognize a portion of the anatomy known as “Tibet.”

  “And she
correctly predicted that you would marry Godfrey?” I repeated.

  “The allusion was veiled, to be understood afterward, but, yes, which was remarkable, as I despised him at the time.”

  “You despised Godfrey at one time?”

  “Well, he was an Englishman.”

  “You don’t like the English?”

  “Ummm, sometimes.”

  “You are surrounded by them!”

  “As Buffalo Bill once was by Indians, but they all get along now.”

  “Maybe.”

  Irene paused in folding delicacies into drawers. “Why do you so dislike the English, Pink?”

  “They act so superior.”

  “Well, they are. They are our mother race. We are mere offshoots and upstarts. Interesting offshoots and upstarts, I grant you, but—”

  “Nonsense! We Americans are coming up in the world. We don’t need the Old World. The New World is better, brighter, richer, smarter.”

  Irene shrugged. “The Old World still has its influence. We pursue the Ripper through the dark heart of it. You cannot underestimate it. You make the same mistake they did about us once.”

  “Gypsy fortune-teller,” I repeated, sighing and holding my head.

  Irene only laughed. “Come and see, then tell me what you think. ‘There are more things on heaven and earth—’”

  She had sounded quite spooky intoning those words, but I would be darned if I would play Horatia to her Hamlet. So I said nothing, only put my few sparse belongings away and complained of the accommodations no more. I was no Oscar Wilde on tour in the U.S., but meek as a lamb shorn of velvet breeches and lovelocks, just a girl reporter in a checked coat and cap.

  Obviously Irene had intended to test my mettle all along.

  I was awakened around midnight by the flicker of a lantern.

  I almost leaped up from the trundle bed I occupied when I saw a shadow cast large on the opposite wall.

  The soft cap turned out to be my own, borrowed, but the men’s trousers and jacket were hers. The mustache was either an absent animal’s bristles or theatrical crepe hair.

  “It is a good thing that I don’t pack a pistol,” I told her as I dressed hastily in the dark in my one warm gown, my game checks now badly in need of a dampening and brushing. “I might have shot your shadow. You looked exactly like a burglar.”

  “Good,” she said, lighting a small cigar and holding it in her teeth at a jaunty angle. “I am eager to see how my local seeress does predicting my future as a man.”

  We slunk down the inn’s backstairs, feeling our way along the rough plaster walls. Irene used the glowing ember of her cigar as a very faint light. She held her husband’s sword-stick in one of her black-leather gloved hands. I was glad I had worn gloves, and not just because Miss Nell would approve.

  The streets were lit by old-fashioned candle-powered lamps that flickered as if moths were dancing a mazurka around their lights. The cobblestones were rougher than any I had trod in Europe. Despite wearing sensible-heeled boots, my ankles wobbled like unicycle wheels as I walked.

  Irene strode, her boot heels striking the ground hard and accurate. Was she also a wire-walker in her spare moments? I considered another skill I had recently seen her demonstrate, Mesmerism. Was I perhaps being hypnotized into thinking we were taking an outing even now? With so mercurial a companion, one never knew.

  When we arrived at a wider street, she transferred her cane to her left arm and threaded my left arm though her right.

  She was escort. I was…lady.

  The muffler that concealed her delicate chin and neck steamed with a combination of night mist, breath, and smoke.

  Bright rectangular doors into beer parlors fanned open and shut as drinkers came and went. We walked past unhailed and unchallenged. I glimpsed our shadows from time to time. A man and woman. Man and wife? More likely man and paid companion.

  I smiled to myself. A harlot in a demure checked coatdress? Not likely!

  The paving stones grew rougher, the ways darker and narrower. I had not seen the congenial flash of a tavern door opening for some time, and the thick, heady scent of dark beer was only a memory.

  “Will a fortune-teller be working this late?” I whispered, wondering if our outing was doomed.

  “Perhaps not, but she will wake up for us.”

  “Are you always so inconsiderate?”

  “No, but I wish her muddled with sleep. You’ll see. Enough money and she will sing for her supper at 2:00 A.M.”

  “It is surely not that late—early?”

  Irene didn’t answer but paused at an intersection of alleyways to look up. Various signs paraded down the byways in the faint, flickering lamplight, indicating shoemakers, pig-sellers, apothecaries, all the varied small enterprises of a large city.

  “Ah.” She pointed to a large sign of a white hand divided into portions like plots of land, covered with numbers and other arcane symbols.

  “The Sign of the Severed Hand?” I murmured.

  “Sometimes you are as acerbic as Nell.”

  “She has been this way before?”

  “Yes.”

  I wasn’t about to hesitate then. I followed Irene down a narrow, weaving byway smelling of urine and worse.

  I realized that Whitechapel was a good deal like this, narrow, choked, both deserted by turn and crawling with nightlife.

  Behind us I heard the soft trod of footsteps sticking to damp pavement, a sound like octopus suckers pulling loose, I imagined.

  Lights flashed down other alleys.

  I heard snatches of voices. Song. Cursing.

  A sudden faint cry of “der Mord!” Which I recognized as “Murder!” in German from skimming Krafft-Ebing’s book.

  Such cries in English had sounded more than once when Mary Jane Kelly was being severed skin from vein from muscle from bone in a tiny Whitechapel rented room unpaid for except in flesh and blood that night.

  “These shouts are common in such quarters the world over.” Irene’s hand tightened on my wrist to reassure me. “Here. One more narrow way to go.”

  We were entering a passage, not a street, that smelled of sauerkraut and beer and something far more exotic.

  We breeched not a door but a heavy damask curtain.

  The room beyond was as chill as the night outside, lit only by the dull flicker of a bowl of live embers making a centerpiece on a rug-covered table.

  A woman’s face hung like a red moon above the low-burning bowl.

  Gold glittered at her ears and forehead and wrists—all I saw…those tinkling, shifting chains of gold coins, as regular as sausages.

  Irene spoke in German, a question.

  “English will do,” the woman said, her voice thick with the taste of another tongue, “for the sake of the girl.”

  Although I had presented myself as nineteen years old only recently, I felt my twenty-five-year-old spine stiffening in resentment.

  “Do not deny yourself,” our hostess told me, “I know you are older than you wish people to think.” She leaned further over the embers until the eerie red light reflected from every crevasse in her time-curdled skin. “Sit.”

  I saw nothing to sit upon, but Irene’s hand upon my arm forced me down until a pile of dusty rugs became my divan. I tried mightily not to sneeze, not sure what such a great wind would do to the embers.

  An ember elevated from the bowl like a reverse comet. It touched a taper end, and we had candlelight.

  Illumination was no kinder to the fortune-teller’s face than utter dark. I can’t say what it did to ours.

  The woman spoke. “I have the crystal that never lies. I have Tarot. I have the future in the palm of your hand. What method do you wish?”

  Odd, the fortune-teller only addressed Irene, perhaps because she took the role of a man.

  “What method speaks to you tonight?” Irene replied in English in the same unnerving basso she had used in German.

  A pair of knotted knuckles intertwined beneath the w
oman’s age-corroded chin. She wore long, heavy, dangling earrings like a girl, but now they seemed anchors pulling every line in her face down to the bottom of a sea where death waited.

  “Palms,” she said.

  At first I didn’t understand the word, not in that goulash-thick accent. Balms, I thought she said, thinking I could use one.

  Instead I saw a claw of hand curving alongside the ember-hot bowl, empty and hungry.

  “Ladies first,” Irene said, her deep voice dipped in irony.

  I removed my glove and placed my bare hand, my right hand, palm up in the woman’s. She immediately began intoning a litany of my life.

  “You offer the hand you make of your life yourself. The left is what history and your parents gave you. You are self-made, and not a fine lady.”

  I nodded.

  “You offer your hand openly, like a friend, but you are not what you seem.”

  “Who is?” I managed to interrupt.

  “Some are. You not. You have traveled a long way to deceive, but you fool yourself most of all. You will live long and not prosper.”

  “Not prosper! Shame on you.” I tried to jerk my hand away. “The Gypsy fortune-teller articles of incorporation must require news of prospering and tall dark men.”

  “You will have bad fortune with men and money. You will stand alone in the world. Your name will be forgotten, but your fame will last forever.”

  “I don’t like this,” I told Irene, again attempting to jerk my hand free of the clawlike vice that held it.

  “You have not paid me yet,” the crone observed, “so I need not tell you lies.”

  “Money buys lies?”

  “Money buys what looks like truth.”

  Irene reached into her coat pocket. I expected the appearance of the third of our party, the pistol. Instead she spread a scimitar of silver coins across the figured cloth.

  The fortune-teller drew my hand nearer.

  “You consider yourself a huntress, but now you are the hunted. You seek fame, but you shall win it in other enterprises than the one you follow now, if you survive to win anything. Your life is in danger.”