Castle Rouge

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  My pen chokes at recording the exact mispronunciations he offered with the warming liquid, but it was good to hear an honest English voice, no matter how garbled.

  “How long have you served our hostess?” Godfrey asked affably. (No one was more affable than Godfrey when he wanted to know something without letting the subject know that he wanted it.)

  The stunted creature was eyeing my wild hair with alarming approval. “Summer last. Quite a traveler, milady, to some strange plaices, but the grub is good and the pay is foine. ’Ave a good cupful, Miss. It’ll straighten the hefforts of yer curlin’ iron, all roight.”

  “I do not resort to such implements as curling irons,” I said indignantly.

  “Natural, is it? Quite a wonder.”

  And he winked. Only men of the lower orders wink at women, so I turned away without answering and sipped the warm drink, which slid down my parched throat like heated honey.

  The fire (and the dwarf) at our backs, our goblets clutched at our fronts like weapons, Godfrey and I surveyed the persons in the room.

  They ignored us, which was rather disconcerting.

  Tatyana herself sat in the high-backed chair at the far end of the library table, although it was rude to sit at a dinner table before the guests were summoned.

  She wore a gown with a high starched halo of gilt lace around the bared shoulders, her yellow-red hair piled into coarse clouds atop her head. She reminded me of portraits of Queen Elizabeth: richly and exotically garbed in an embroidered fabric dripping jewels the size of dewdrops, imperious.

  Behind her chair stood a rude servitor, and with a start I realized I had glimpsed him before, during Irene’s midnight confrontation with this very woman at her hotel in Prague, when we had visited there but a year before.

  He seemed to be wearing the very same dusty, dingy blue peasant blouse, with its set of buttons on the single shoulder and the waist belted in by a scuffed brown leather belt. I was sure that equally dingy pantaloons were below the blouse, stuffed into equally scuffed brown leather boots.

  The international cast of characters for this charade amazed me: a French maid, an English dwarf, this Russian oaf, the Gypsy caravan, the hungry Russian peasants guarding the kitchen, the Bohemian soldiers gaming in the solarium…and of course Godfrey and myself, fresh from London and Paris save for diversions to Bohemia and a portable coffin.

  Tatyana was talking with a new figure, a tall, cadaverous man in a narrow black robe, rather like that effected by Mr. Sherlock Holmes when he impersonated a French clergyman. I can think of no more odious combination on earth than that of Sherlock Holmes and a French clergyman. Luckily, it was a disguise and temporary.

  “A village elder, I gather,” Godfrey leaned inward to whisper to me. “I doubt he speaks English, but I know some German. If you will divert our hostess, I will try to get him aside and see what I can learn…see what he thinks Tatyana and this castle are all about. He seems to be the only local guest here.”

  “Divert our hostess! Godfrey, that would require me to speak to the monster.”

  “It would be a great help if you could manage it,” he suggested gently.

  I sighed until my shoulders were squared with determination. “I can’t imagine how I shall chitchat with the woman.”

  “Just pretend that she is Sarah Bernhardt.”

  “Another person with whom I have nothing in common. Very well.”

  Together Godfrey and I approached that end of the table.

  I needn’t have worried. Like Sarah Bernhardt, and sometimes like my great and good friend Irene Adler, it seemed Tatyana was most taken with appearances.

  “Why, Miss Huxleigh, you look quite…Serbian in that old gown of mine.”

  I wasn’t sure what a Serbian was, probably a breed of dog, but I was quite sure it was far below a Russian.

  Pretend that she is Sarah Bernhardt. Godfrey was an adept diplomat indeed. The Divine Sarah, my friend Irene, and this woman had one thing in common: all were performers, or former performers. As long as I played their game—as Our Great Bard so perfectly put it, that assumption that all the world’s a stage—we should get on famously.

  I did a mocking little curtsy like Mignon. “Serbian?” I said. “I would think that I was more Shavian.”

  “Ah. You like your Socialist Englishman?”

  I detested Shaw almost as much as I detested Wilde, but the play’s the thing.

  “I like the gown,” I said, diverting her again to her play and the part I was to act within it.

  I realized my role now: she was queen, I was courtier. But there is much conspiracy in royal courts. I noticed that Godfrey had edged next to the cadaverous figure in black and was directing his attention to the elaborate sterling silver centerpiece as big as a barrel, representing a battlement besieged by warriors on horseback.

  Tatyana was watching him out of the corner of her eye, always, but she leaned her rouged cheek on her beringed fist and commented, “You do not look English any longer.”

  “I have traveled far from home, and in…rough company.”

  “Nor do you look Romany, as you did this afternoon.” She laughed and quaffed from a metal goblet like Godfrey and I held, only I guessed it held something cold and searing, not hot like our cider.

  I sipped, savoring cinnamon and other less-known spices, not sure what to say.

  “We wait dinner upon one last guest,” she announced. “Mr. Norton!” Her voice rang out like a challenge. “You will sit at my right hand.”

  Godfrey remained very still. I could see him debating obedience.

  “And you, Miss Huxleigh, will sit opposite, to the right of the seat at the table’s other end.”

  I glanced down at the other empty, high-backed chair, fit for a queen, or a head of household. Who was to occupy it? Not Godfrey. Surely not the dwarf?

  I heard the crack of a door in the anterooms, almost felt the slight inrush of chill night air.

  “Ah. Our party is complete.” Tatyana stood before her throne, lifted her glass. “He is here at last. My dear…guests, my loyal servants, what can I say? Enter the Tiger.”

  We all turned as we had been programmed to do, like supernumeraries in the Lyceum Theater production of Macbeth, to welcome the leading man into our midst.

  In walked another Englishman in evening dress: sturdy, bald, mustachioed, completely at home among this international circus of characters; a man I had last seen gripped in a death-lock with Quentin Stanhope above the Thames on Hammersmith Bridge. This was the heavy game hunter and spy and mortal enemy to Quentin, Godfrey, Irene and myself, and to Mr. Sherlock Holmes…Colonel Sebastian Moran.

  I wondered if Godfrey would consider swooning a sufficient diversion under the circumstances.

  30.

  Digging Deeper

  Decadent literature spread perfumes too dark and heady, its exuberant blood-flowers breathe suffocating air.

  —FRANTIEK XAVER ALDA ON PRAGUE’S HAUNTING FIN DE SIÈCLE MYSTIQUE

  FROM A JOURNAL

  We gathered again that night in our hotel room: Irene and myself, Quentin Stanhope, and Bram Stoker.

  We were all garbed in black, as agreed. Irene and I wore the men’s clothing we had donned during one expedition in Paris and that she had resurrected for herself during our visit to the fortune-teller. Bram’s frockcoat did not button quite high enough to obscure his white shirt front, but Irene ringed his neck with a dark muffler to finish the job.

  Quentin’s clothing made him into one solid charcoal stroke on a piece of white paper. He affected the same black jersey beneath the jacket that Irene had, as well as a soft, dark cap pulled low, muffler and black leather gloves like a coachman.

  He even produced a pot of bootblack in case we should wish to darken our faces, but Irene felt that hats and scarves would be sufficient.

  We assembled in that humble hotel room like a slink of burglars, surrounding the table clothed in a map of the streets of Prague that would soon be our stalking gr
ound.

  “No police, no Rothschild representatives?” Bram Stoker asked, eyeing our unconventional party a bit nervously.

  For all his great size, the writer of lurid tales and theatrical manager preferred a cast of dozens for the battle scenes. He hadn’t realized we were mounting a new production of Joan of Arc with the leading lady and her understudy playing half the invading force.

  Irene produced her revolver from a pocket. “We are better armed than we look.” Quentin, nodding, allowed the butt-end of a pistol that Buffalo Bill Cody would be proud to flourish to emerge from one pocket.

  Naturally Bram Stoker looked to me and my jacket pocket.

  Firearms were not in my armament, so instead I hefted Godfrey’s sword-stick from its resting place against the bureau and withdrew enough of the haft to show a grin of bared steel. I felt rather like Jean LaFitte the pirate.

  “I am not armed,” Mr. Stoker said regretfully. “I travel with nothing more lethal than a walking staff for the moors and mountains, and have never encountered trouble or troublemakers.”

  “Your size alone is a weapon,” Irene said. “And I hope that we won’t need any of our ‘equalizers.’ At this point, I am only looking for a trail, not the ones who made it.”

  “Ones,” Quentin pounced. “Then you are not trailing the Ripper. Or do you believe he has partners in crime?”

  “I don’t know,” Irene admitted. “I only know that if we can find some pattern here in Prague, we will have half a chance of understanding why Nell and Godfrey are missing.”

  Quentin pulled something out of his other pocket…an innocent scrap of paper.

  “I’ve noted the locations of the murdered women found recently in the city, at least the ones that are made public. I find it rather interesting that the Whitechapel murders are news the world over but that these Prague killings and the more recent but no less horrific slaughters in Paris remain a well-kept official secret.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Irene said. “The London panic taught the authorities discretion. Public furor only made the task of tracking the killer harder. And,” she added, “no sensible government wishes to unleash the anti-Jewish sentiment that always lurks beneath the surface of European civil unrest.”

  I put in my professional opinion. “Certainly the repetition of the Goulston Street graffito in Paris would have raised a few international eyebrows, discretion or not. I wonder if you and Godfrey have been used throughout this latest outbreak to obscure the truth, rather than seek it out.”

  I had expected to unleash operatic fireworks of denial at my implication that the Rothschild motives might be self-seeking. Instead Irene merely nodded.

  “There is always that danger in accepting work from people with power, Pink. Isn’t that true, Quentin?”

  “The trick is to be of use in a good cause without being used to advance a bad one,” he agreed. “I take nothing for granted. It is even possible that Godfrey was abducted by the Rothschilds for some larger purpose of their own that he had ceased to serve, especially if his investigations into the Prague murders led in the wrong direction.”

  “It is also possible,” Irene added, “that the Paris murders were orchestrated to divert attention from the Whitechapel killings. If so, some faction may be angry that the officials have so successfully kept them out of the public press.”

  “Then maybe,” I said quickly, “the public press is exactly where they should be.”

  Again Irene surprised me by nodding agreement. “Such a sensational revelation would best be made public in an uninvolved country.”

  I admit my heart began beating with a vision of what might very soon be. I had known, and resented, that I was accompanying Irene because she wanted to control me and perhaps to somewhat replace Nell. Now I saw that she might at any moment find it useful for me to wire the whole sordid Paris episode to my newspaper, just to keep the powerful people for whom she sometimes worked from totally obscuring the truth for their own safety.

  My initial admiration for her, dampened by recent uncertainties, came roaring back. Like myself, she ultimately served what some might call the public interest. Of course, it was necessary to see somewhat to one’s own interest so as to be properly positioned to rise in defense of the public good at the exactly right time….

  “Anyway,” Quentin went on, “I can’t offer the tidy illustrations you…and Nell have marshaled for London and Paris.” He waved a gloved hand over the map of Prague. “Like London and Paris and most great cities of the world, Prague is bisected by a river. Unlike the much larger capitals, Prague is lopsided, with only the smaller Mala Strana and Prague Castle districts sitting across the river from the sprawling districts of the city’s western and southern sections.”

  We stared at the areas he indicated, and nodded sagely at the obvious.

  “The Whitechapel murders,” Irene said, “were confined to a very small area of a notorious but quite small site within the equally notorious East End of London. In Paris, the murders kept to the right bank, but involved the entire city on that side.”

  “Here they do not cross the river either,” Quentin said, “only here the river is not the Seine, but the Vltava. And they have so far been confined to the crowded section in the crook of the river, northeast from the Joseph Quarter in the Old Town to the New Town Hall district, and southwest from the Old New Synagogue to the museum. These streets are dense and old, narrow and dirty, easy to disappear into…and out of.”

  “Like Whitechapel,” I said.

  “Were any of the bodies moved from the place of death to be displayed elsewhere?” Irene wondered.

  “Nobody’s considered that,” Quentin said. “Certainly they were readily found, openly left on the street as in London. Why? Was it different in Paris?”

  “Some of the bodies were moved to the Paris Morgue for identification. Although the Whitechapel bodies also swiftly found their way to city morgues, the Paris Morgue is a showplace as well as an official mortuary. So by the very fact of being killed in Paris, the victims were on display, if anonymously. While one body was held back even from that public acknowledgment, another was deliberately brought into a famous Paris wax museum and substituted for a corpse on display.”

  “Nervy!” Quentin said, almost admiringly. “But you know, perhaps the Whitechapel bodies were also put on display, just less obviously so. Civil murder isn’t my bailiwick, but weren’t the bodies found quite soon after the killings, in the open, stumbled over, in fact, by the usual Whitechapel residents whose jobs start in the wee hours or go past midnight?”

  “Yes,” I said, eager to join the discussion. “Everyone assumed the victims had been dropped in their tracks, but they could have been dragged around a corner into a more public view, at the least. Often a bobby was due to pass by the sites within minutes, or no more than half an hour.”

  Bram Stoker spoke again, as our speculation finally touched on his area of expertise. “You’re saying the Ripper always set the scene, whether on Hanbury Street or under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, much as a stage direction might call for a body to lie by the footlights at the beginning of an act.”

  There was a silence. No one had quite conceived of the Ripper as a stage manager.

  “Quentin,” Irene asked, “where were the bodies found here?”

  His forefinger danced over five points on the east side of the Vltava: “Here, by the New Town Hall and diagonally opposite at the far northeast corner of the Staré Msto district.”

  Irene seized the pen and the ink-stained edge of the cablegram from Mycroft Holmes and drew a line.

  “And here,” he went on, “at the Old Town Square, and diagonally down near the museum.”

  “And that was the order of the crimes?”

  “Yes.” Quentin watched the dark slash of another line intersect the first, forming the telltale “X.”

  As he had said earlier, drawing “X”s on maps was arbitrary child’s play. Finding a Chi-Rho at the heart of them
was harder.

  Irene’s pen point tapped one location on the map, leaving a cluster of black dots. “As we noted, the ancient Joseph Quarter is in many ways a shadow of Whitechapel, an ancient tangle of streets where the poor and the outcast have always huddled. And the spiritual center of the Joseph Quarter is the old Jewish cemetery. Nell, Godfrey, and I found it a useful place to visit once before. That is where we will begin tonight.”

  “At the cemetery?” I asked. “What can dead people tell us?”

  “People go all the time to that cemetery to leave notes on a dead man’s tomb,” she said, “notes full of questions, pleading, prayer.”

  “You speak of Rabbi Loew,” Bram Stoker said eagerly, “the prominent rabbi of Prague who purportedly raised the Golem. But, you know, Irene, that is like most legends, pretty far-fetched. The rabbi was dead two hundred years before those Golem rumors became common in the city.”

  “Two hundred years!” I cried. “Just when did this rabbi die?”

  Irene turned to Bram Stoker, who leaped into the breach like a happy schoolboy with just the right answer when he is called upon.

  First he smiled at me. “You are an American. One hundred years is an aeon in your young country. Europe is older, and the farther east one goes, the older and deeper the roots drive if you can but find them. When did this rabbi die? In the sixteenth century and the Old New Synagogue was already in use then. Yes, even the New Town is very old here. Prague is haunted by some of the most charming legends, including its history as a seat of medieval alchemy.” Mr. Stoker shrugged his massive shoulders. “Some legends are not so charming, and I like those even better as a source for my stories.”

  “Tell us some,” Irene requested. “It’s a bit soon to go prowling.”

  I have heard a few first-class lecturers in my time, including Oscar Wilde and Buffalo Bill Cody, but Bram Stoker could have held his own with anybody. No wonder he had entertained steamship passengers with a magic act during the Atlantic crossing!