Castle Rouge

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Bram roared like an angry bear behind me. I felt his cloak whip my shoulder as it was torn away and then I heard a shriek that almost sounded joyous.

  One of the Gypsy women came tearing through the circle of men, knocking into their arms and shoulders left and right with some object in her hand.

  She pushed past me, and as I turned to follow her impetuous progress, I saw Godfrey pressed against the wall only a yard’s width behind me. If we survived this, I would have to speak with him about his lamentable and very unbarristerlike tendency to attract strange and fanatical women….

  Then I heard a voice shout “Godfrey!” It was the only voice in the world anyone could have heard in that chaos: one trained to shake the back walls of an opera house.

  “Irene!” I cried, my own voice lost in the whirlwind, as a second Gypsy woman came in her wake, flailing right and left with a cane.

  I had no trouble glimpsing Godfrey now, for Irene had cast herself upon him in an embrace so encompassing and with a kiss so ferocious that I looked away blushing.

  My shoulders were suddenly taken in someone’s hands and shaken.

  “Nell! Can this be you?”

  I stared into the astonished blue-gray eyes of Elizabeth Jane, also known as Pink, equally astounded that she was so uncertain of my identity and then very pleased indeed.

  I had not long to bask, for Irene had somehow managed to relinquish Godfrey and leaped upon me like an unmannerly dog. “Nell? Are you sure, Pink? Nell?” She petted my braids and my full sleeves and regarded me with the greatest amazement and delight, glancing over her shoulder to Godfrey every other instant as if she dared not let either of us out of her sight.

  “And Bram!” she exclaimed, for he had managed to fight his way to join us. Her entering our prison circle had made it into a charmed one. The Gypsy men gave way like courtiers, suddenly less keepers and more guards.

  Another man crashed through the ring of Gypsies, as brown of face as they and also wearing a strange medley of clothing from here and there, which I could hardly criticize given my equally unconventional attire.

  “They are safe?” he demanded of Irene, blinking to take in Godfrey and Bram, who looked quite ordinary divested of their sinister robes.

  He looked right over my braided head.

  “Yes, both. All!” Irene caroled, her voice carrying over the screams and chaos all around us.

  “But, Nell. Where is Nell?” Quentin shouted.

  I could not speak. I could certainly not make myself heard as they did.

  Irene shook me slightly, as if pinching a dream to make sure that it is real. “Here she is.” She whirled to claim Godfrey again, leaving me to face Quentin alone.

  Can one be alone in a milling mob of madmen and six tribes of assembling Gypsies? Can two be alone in such a circumstance?

  Quentin looked so different, but then he always did. I imagine I did too, and I never did. He stared at me, at my eyes, my face, my hair, my clothes, as if he did not know me and he feared he might never know me again. I saw not joy on his face but worry relieved and new worry as quickly born. Where Irene and Pink had pulled me into their commanding orbits as if we had been separated for a mere three weeks, which we indeed had been, Quentin regarded me across a chasm as wide as three years, or thirty. True, we had not seen each other in months. The cavern had become as quiet as a compartment on a train, though I could hear the dull roar of the entire world through which our isolated (and imaginary) railway car rolled.

  His lips mouthed my name, but I could not hear the word.

  I heard another voice, high-pitched with command and even a bit peevish. “Yes, ‘journeys end in lovers’ meetings,’ but we’ve work to do in this abattoir of the Carpathians. I assume these are your trained Gypsies, Madam Norton. I need to direct them.”

  She took in the man’s disguise in an instant, then without hesitation she pulled a large playing card from the gathered fullness of her borrowed Gypsy sleeve and presented it to Sherlock Holmes.

  “The Tarot,” he observed with a sigh. “And blood on the swords? Is that not a bit melodramatic even for a prima donna?”

  “It always works in the operettas,” she answered with an ecstatic grin, linking her arm through Godfrey’s.

  “I am translator,” Quentin said, not yet taking his eyes off of me. “I will go with you.”

  They were gone and we five were left alone against a dirty dark stone wall, watching from the sidelines. I realized that it had become quiet in our corner for some time.

  Irene, her arm still linked with Godfrey, linked her free arm with mine. She was smiling though her eyes were bright with tears. Bram Stoker grinned and pulled my free arm through his and patted my hand before he reached out to link arms with Pink. We stood, absolutely content in our own company bought at such cost, and watched.

  Before us, the Gypsy troops, and that’s what they indeed were, rounded up the poor deluded souls who had already punished themselves for their sins.

  Mr. Holmes and Quentin were leading a party of ten to storm the monsters’ gallery above the cavern floor and collect the bound prisoners.

  Behind the mighty bonfire, which the Gypsies were beating with unburnt logs, scattering the great burning pieces of wood, sending up showers of sparks, pushing it all apart to burn down in small brush fires here and there, another knot of Gypsies were struggling.

  From my vantage point they appeared to be squabbling among themselves, as if they were gathered around a game of dice and disagreed. I was reminded of the Roman soldiers gambling for the cloak of Christ after the Crucifixion.

  I couldn’t imagine what made me think of that, except that the great crossed logs against the far wall recalled the X-shaped crosses on which some of the Disciples were crucified, and the Chi-Rho of course.

  And then a struggling, half-naked figure reared up against that awful black X-shape, throwing off the Gypsies as if they were children.

  His naked upper torso was streaked with sweat and charcoal and drops of other people’s blood. I was certain I was looking on the anti-Christ, and it was Tatyana’s Medved, the leader of this demented ceremony.

  Again the Gypsies rushed to hold him down. Again he exploded upright among them, not a tall man, but a powerful man, a man of almost superhuman strength. His nudity, his dreadful condition, were so evocative of the suffering of Christ that I stood transfixed by him despite myself, as I had been frozen by his burning ice-blue eyes in my room not long before. What if we were wrong? What if there was some divinity in all this? Good Christians should suffer meekly…was this not what this congregation was doing, walking in the tortured footsteps of Our Lord? I had heard of flagellants in the early church, in the Roman Church, of hideously tortured saints, even among the missionaries to the American Indians. Was what happened here any worse than what the Church would have us read about and revere in the martyrs? Did we not see the truth here?

  I confess to confusion as I watched more pagan Gypsies converge on the lone struggling figure and finally bear it to the ground to be bound.

  All the celebrants of the cellar chapel were subdued now and being herded to the castle’s upper areas. I saw Mr. Holmes and Quentin moving among the Gypsy guards.

  We five were too exhausted to do anything but watch numbly and savor our reunion.

  Then as the sounds of riot gave way to the weeping and sighing and moaning of prisoners, Irene began to sing. It was nothing operatic, but it was, to my everlasting surprise, a hymn.

  “Amazing Grace.”

  What was most amazing was how the rock chamber amplified and magnified her voice, as pure as a mountain stream as the simple English words echoed off of hard stone and fell on our ears like warm rain.

  Even Medved, upright and still struggling in his bonds, paused and lifted his shaggy head like a dog scenting something rare and held still.

  Sherlock Holmes stopped halfway up the stairs, Colonel Moran and Tatyana at pistol point ahead of him.

  At the first not
e, Tatyana’s head of ungoverned hair snapped up and back, as if she had been shot. I could not see her face and didn’t want to. I didn’t even look at Irene, but merely swayed slowly left and right with my comrades as the music bade us. I wanted only to hear those healing syllables and notes, to let anguish and worry and fear of the past and the future rinse away like the road dust from a long and very arduous journey.

  “Journeys end in lovers’ meetings.” It had sounded like a jibe from the lips of Sherlock Holmes, but I wondered if a trace of envy flavored it. It was from Shakespeare. I would have to look up the play when we were back in Paris and I had time.

  Meanwhile, Irene sang like a benediction.

  “Thro’ many dangers, toil, and snares, I have already come.

  “’Tis grace has kept me safe thus far, And grace will lead me home.”

  The words and verses were short and simple. The song soon over. The memory of its absolute purity would never die.

  When the last echo of the last note had died, we looked at each other, all petty rivalries or cross-purposes evaporated, all at peace, together.

  This moment could not last, but it could be savored.

  50.

  Found and Lost

  I once was lost, but now am found,

  Was blind, but now I see

  —JOHN NEWTON, AMAZING GRACE, CIRCA 1760–1770

  We returned to our rooms, Godfrey and I, to gather what belongings we had before we left the castle forever.

  Rather, Godfrey retired to his room with Irene, and I retired to mine alone.

  As I lit the candelabra feeling an odd blend of practicality and horror, I heard the mysterious murmurs of a married couple beyond the connecting door. And the mysterious silences.

  I felt a warm flood of security, like a child who knows her parents are in the house. I also felt the cold, hot, empty loneliness of a child who knows she must grow up someday, and then who will take care of her? No one.

  This last rush of feeling was ridiculous. I would return to Neuilly with Irene and Godfrey. All would be as before.

  No! I was not as before.

  I had little to gather in this room. Godfrey’s nightshirt to return, two books Godfrey had fetched me from his explorations. That was all. Everything I had brought with me was destroyed. Except the chatelaine in my pocket.

  At the window, my rope of bed linens lay coiled like a great albino snake. Its head reared as if to strike…the end that Godfrey had looped and knotted around the window’s central post.

  I went to look out on the night, a full moon that shed light and shadow on the mountains and the meadows, gilding everything, making what was harsh and inhospitable lovely.

  Bats reeled against the moon’s fat face, looking like moths drawn to an irresistible flame.

  The night was still…until something scratched at my door.

  Rats and cats? I had never seen much of these supposed denizens. Perhaps only in human form.

  I went to my door, afraid to approach it.

  Another scratch.

  “Yes?”

  “Nell?”

  “Quentin?”

  “May I come in?”

  “Yes, but…I am so used to the door being locked from the outside.”

  “Nothing simpler,” he replied, and I heard the latch lifted.

  “I’m sorry,” he said on entering. “There was so much to manage.”

  “You are Irene’s first lieutenant,” I said, proud of both of them. “I have never seen her so willing to relinquish the leading role. Did you hear her sing?”

  “Who did not? It was…amazing. I’ve always known she had been a singer. I didn’t know that she was a Singer, like a Siren. From now on, when I think of the life I might have had, and regret it, I’ll think of the life she had, and lost, and my regret will look very puny.”

  “Would you really prefer to be still living on Russell Square in London?”

  “Would you really prefer to be living in Shropshire?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Honest Nell. You make hypocrites of us all.”

  “No! I’ve no desire to make anyone feel unhappy, ever.”

  “Sometimes it can’t be helped. Sometimes it’s even good for us.”

  I shrugged.

  He glanced at the window. “So this is the famous rope.”

  “You’ve heard of it?”

  “And you climbed down the castle wall with Godfrey and Bram Stoker.”

  “Between them. They would have caught me if I slipped.”

  “But your rope would have caught them if they slipped.”

  He stepped away in the moonlight, as if to look at me anew. This made me very nervous and a trifle irritated. It was as if he felt he had underestimated me, and if he had, then he didn’t know me at all. And if he didn’t, then my heart should break. And yet…I had been kept in a vampire box for a week and hung by a rope over a chasm since last we had met, and I do not think any part of me would break as easily anymore. And for that I felt very sorry.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “What?”

  He was smiling….I saw his white teeth in the moonlight, like pearls. “This…arrangement.”

  His fingers touched the braids coiled around my head.

  “That is how I got the idea for the rope. My hair was…impossible after a week being shipped across Europe in a box—”

  “Nell,” he murmured.

  But I had not finished explaining myself.

  “Godfrey was able to convince the Gypsies to get me the makings of a bath. The Gypsies! Can you imagine! Godfrey is a barrister St. Peter at the Gate would have to reckon with. At any rate, I was clean but lacked the simplest wherewithal of good grooming, so I braided my hair and in so doing thought of the rope when Godfrey proposed climbing down the castle walls by himself, which was of course unthinkable.”

  “Unthinkable,” he repeated. His fingers still played in my plaited hair.

  “I planned to undo the braids tonight, but the compression has quite destroyed my hair.”

  “Let me,” he said.

  “Destroy my hair?”

  “Undo your braids.”

  Well, I didn’t think he should. Really. An unrelated male. An unrelated male of a higher position in society. It was almost like undoing corset strings, wasn’t it? Although I wore no corset, not even a corselet since Mr. Holmes had required the lacing to bind Tatyana, though I certainly could not tell Quentin that! Even though he had once most efficiently de-corseted me when I had swooned with shock from his appearance in disguise in a place and at a time I had never expected him to be.

  Such as here. And now.

  In the moonlight. By the window of a castle.

  I had perhaps divided my hair into a dozen or so braids, and I could feel his fingers working at the first.

  There was something comforting and parental about that steady tug, a service I had performed many times for my charges during the two short years I was a governess. For my dear charges. Where were they now, my temporary little ones? His niece Allegra we could certainly find at a moment’s notice, but the others….

  His fingers tugged at another braid.

  “What are we to do now?” I asked.

  “Here? Now?”

  “With all those people.” I started up. “What has become of James Kelly? I don’t remember seeing him once Tatyana and Colonel Moran were subdued.”

  “James Kelly?”

  “Jack the Ripper. Only—Sherlock Holmes implied that he wasn’t. Where is he?”

  “Holmes or Kelly?”

  “Kelly! I certainly don’t care where Sherlock Holmes is.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Ouch! That pulled.”

  “Sorry. If you would calm down and stop agitating yourself…. We’re holding a meeting later downstairs to decide all these issues. But not for a while yet.”

  I leaned back against the wall and let Quentin continue my unraveling.

  Quest
ions pushed to the fore of my mind like nettles, but I bit my tongue and held them back. He was right. This was the first time in three weeks that I need not worry about something.

  Except him.

  He turned me to face away from him and began unbraiding the back of my hair.

  “I wonder that you can do that in the dark,” I said finally.

  “A spy learns to do almost everything in the dark. It’s a soothing facility.”

  “I braided my rope at night, mostly by feel. I had the fire-glow though.”

  “You cheated,” he said, jerking playfully on one of my braids. I had never had anyone to tease me before.

  This was the last one. I felt it unravel strand by strand, and it seemed every fiber of necessity of the past weeks, which was what I had lived on, had fallen away into loose, rolling waves as well.

  Quentin turned me around to face him and combed his fingers through my hair as if admiring his own handiwork.

  I couldn’t breathe, but that didn’t seem to be an unwelcome state.

  His fingers slipped up into my hair at the back of my head and then he was pulling my face to his or pushing his face to mine.

  I felt as if I had been dropped from a rope to hang swinging over a precipice, a feeling both frightening and exhilarating and thus utterly confusing.

  He kissed me, as he had kissed me once before long ago, in front of a window, a light, slight kiss like a moth fanning its wings.

  This was different and before I could even say how it was different Medved reared up before me like a devil summoned from Hell, his fingers clawing into my hair and pushing my face toward the hard, fiery lip of a pottery jar of vodka…and then James Kelly was lurching toward me against the marvelous painting of a spinning seascape, prodding at my bodice, as Medved had, leaving me locked in a dark space, sent spinning and bruising through time in a vampire box…the secret trapdoor in a stage floor which the monster will jump out of when the cue is given…the coffin, the prison, and you are left filthy and battered and alone and not knowing…not knowing even where you have been or what has been done to you in London, in Paris, in Prague, in Transylvania!