Castle Rouge

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “A theory! In the face of primitive nature? That is why the weaklings of the West will never resist the power of the East. If you have researched my darling boy’s homeland, you must know that it has spawned dozens of brutal halfling children from the forcible rape of paganism by Christianity, sects, if you will, that the Orthodox church persecutes. His people retreated to caves and cellars and underground chapels in the icy climate, to fires and communal celebration…and then communal copulation and from there it was but a half-step to communal blood sacrifice. Today, in this day and age, it is still happening, this impulse that will not be quenched, that civilized men cannot explain and proper women cannot resist. It is the spirit of primitive man that will not be denied. Torture. Whipping. Slavery. Rape. Castration. Killing. It is in the blood and the blood demands to shed and be shed. The blood is the life.”

  Mr. Holmes cut through her gruesome rhetoric to pluck out the fact that answered his question. “So Paris, with its subterranean catacombs and cellars and sewers, was the very evocation of Siberia. What of the religious elements, the graffiti invoking the Jews?”

  “The Jews! That was my idea. They are leaving Russia like rats and no more welcome anywhere else. How easy to point the finger at them. And the Christian signs and symbols? They are Christian, these magnificent Siberian savages. Devoutly so, though twisted like ancient olive trees into such a divine and original obscenity of the Christian doctrine.

  “Do you know, did you learn in your ‘investigations’ that a Siberian peasant, hearing of an official census, took it as the arrival of the anti-Christ. He buried mother, wife, and children alive, inspiring his village to beseech his services for their own families, killing twenty before he succumbed to suicide.

  “Some men did likewise to their own families, counting on their leader to slit their throats as the coup de grace. Wherever there are sheep to be led, leaders will rise up to slaughter them. Religion is the distraction of the people from their poverty. Some peculiarities of faith in Siberia are less violent but no less odd. Some sects worship the sky through a hole in the roof, others a tree or a river, but most often there is a strain of such astounding excess, a combination of the licentious and the puritanical. The Khlysty date back at least two centuries and engendered, though that may be the wrong word in this case, the skopstys, who believed that the Disciples were castrated and that the Holy Spirit comes by fire, not the water of Baptism. That explains some of the self-torture and mutilation their rituals involve.”

  “They are not devil worshipers?” I couldn’t help asking.

  “Not at all. Like so many Christians, they claim their rituals offer the one and only true path. They seek spiritual purity. However, such acts of devotion as their religion demands requires the celebrants to be dulled by drink to their own pain. So they commit drunkenness in the search for holiness. They also manage, by a convoluted form of thinking that would do a politician proud, to conclude that the path to abstinence is overindulgence. To be pure one must first be impure. Especially their leaders are allowed every imaginable excess.

  “My dear Medved calls it using sin to drive out sin.”

  Irene stared at her. “You have no religion but yourself. You thrive on chaos. International. Political. Religious. Personal. Why?”

  “The blood is the life,” she answered coldly. “People who make history are not afraid to shed it.”

  “She is right in this much,” Sherlock Holmes commented when we stood outside the chamber that held Tatyana and far down the hall from the guards. “It would be better if the authorities executed her and this young Russian at once.”

  “Without trial?” Irene did not so much ask, as express disgust.

  “I suppose that my observation is a heresy the Khlystys with their illogical goal of finding purity by committing sin would endorse: sometimes justice is best served by circumventing justice. But never fear, this region boasts enough obscure but impregnable fortresses to contain and hide Napoleon and his legions for decades. These two misbegotten souls will disappear into the bowels of such a place, never to be heard from again.”

  “And you are convinced that Medved—Grigorii—is Jack the Ripper?”

  “He is by far the most likely candidate. I found sites in Whitechapel where cult members had met, littered with the same wax from the vodka bottles and cork from ordinary wine bottles, which the non-Russian of the cultists drank instead. Your companions have witnessed his incredible capacity for drink. In such a state, a man like him could do anything.”

  “I now believe,” I put in, “that the crazed figure who came rushing toward me in the Paris panorama building just before I succumbed to the chloroform was not Kelly, but Medved. He was…pawing at the buttons on my bodice,” I admitted with both shame and disgust.

  “That is indeed a damning link,” Irene said. “What of James Kelly?” she asked Mr. Holmes.

  “It’s possible he committed a murder or two along the way in imitation of his Master, but not in London. His swift departure after Mary Jane Kelly’s slaughter was no doubt a vain attempt to catch up with the absconding Tatyana and Medved. Even she must have realized after that atrocity that things had gone too far. Certainly they could not count on the cover provided by the tangled byways of Whitechapel any longer.”

  “It does make sense,” I said, speaking mostly to Irene. “When you consider the Chi-Rhos scratched into the meeting sites and the fact that all the murders we know of form a Chi-Rho upon the map of each particular city.”

  “Chi-Rho?” Mr. Holmes echoed me, sounding alarmed. “What nonsense is this?”

  “Mere speculation,” Irene answered quite disingenuously. “The Chi-Rho is the Greek symbol for Christ: an ‘X’ intersected by a figure that resembles the English letter ‘P.’ We noticed a certain pattern to the killings that duplicated the extreme points of the Chi-Rho on the maps of Whitechapel, Paris, and Prague.”

  “I must have copies of those maps…and Madam Tatyana’s yellow book that she was writing in when we confronted her.”

  “Oh, that. I gave it to Quentin, since he will be reaching civilization before us.”

  “Gave it to Stanhope! I must read it.”

  “It is written in Russian.”

  “I will have it translated.”

  “I was planning on doing that. It does, after all, document matters that intimately affect me and mine.”

  “We will certainly get no more out of Madam Tatyana than she chooses to tell us, and Medved is too uneducated to provide any enlightenment except on the nature of his delusions. I must see that diary.”

  “Perhaps I can provide you with a copy of the translation.”

  A Gypsy scowl is fearsome to see when it is powered by an irritated Englishman. “You had better do so. And I will not leave without copies of the maps Miss Huxleigh mentioned. This theory of yours sounds far-fetched, but I am willing to review it and give my opinion of its relevance.”

  Irene laughed. “A fair exchange. Your professional opinion of a series of maps that are moot now, as they too must be buried to history forever, and a translation of Sable’s record of Grigorii’s religious mania. I suspect the maps will be much easier reading than the contents of that yellow book.” Irene glanced at me. “And the mouse-size scribblings in Nell’s miniature chatelaine notebook. You shall have to copy it all out in normal size.”

  “I will,” I said, rather glumly.

  Not only was Quentin galloping away from me, but I did not know when, or if, I would ever see him again, or dare to.

  Meanwhile, from the discussion here, it was all too obvious that we three would meet again in not too long a time to exchange artifacts and opinions on a case of such excess and cruelty that I could wish to fall asleep and awake having forgotten every speck of it.

  It was indeed a cruel world when Quentin was a mystery I might never see again or solve, and Mr. Sherlock Holmes had become a reluctant associate we would have occasion to see again all too soon.

  And then I recall
ed the most vivid memory among all the mayhem I had so reluctantly witnessed, events that had changed me forever.

  It was Irene’s marvelous voice lifted a capella in that murderous cavern singing the simple old hymn of conversion written by a former slave trader, “Amazing Grace.”

  I could only hope that some amazing grace would shed its light on me as time led us all far from our descent into the hell to be found in twisted hearts and minds.

  Afterword

  In this drink-sodden, low-class intrique there were reefs that Rasputin did not see…. For Europe. Rasputin was an anecdote, not a fact. For us, however, he was not only a fact. He was an epoch.

  —ALEXANDER YABLONSKY IN ONE OF RASPUTIN’S 1916

  OBITUARIES

  At last my painstaking piecework is done, and I can quote freely from Tatyana’s yellow casebook without fear of betraying the astounding truth, for now it lies open to be read, and perhaps debated, by the entire world.

  The identity of Medved, the Russian word for “bear” often used as an affectionate term, a shuddersome notion in this instance, must be plain to even the most casual student of history.

  He is none other than the young Rasputin: Grigorii Efimovich Rasputin. This is the so-called “mad monk” whose influence on the last Czar and Empress of Russia, Nicholas and Alexandra, played a major part in their downfall and deaths.

  In twenty-some years from the events of this narrative, Rasputin’s remarkable and sinister charisma will make him a confidant of the imperial couple because of his apparent ability to arrest the hemophilia that afflicts the young royal heir. He will be the most notorious and powerful man in Russia and a key figure in the violent end of Czarist Russia and the Russian Revolution, that culminating and last great act of a dramatic series that began with the American and French revolutions in the late eighteenth century. That revolution will begin almost eighty years of Soviet socialist rule and the Cold War of the twentieth century.

  The Rasputin of his glory days in St. Petersburg will be an older and more notorious man but no wiser in some matters. His prodigious appetite for liquor and women will remain. He will be able to walk up to aristocratic ladies in broad daylight and public company and begin undressing them. He will persuade women to sleep with him to test his chastity and theirs with predictable results: failure. The enormous size of his manhood will become a matter of such public knowledge that when challenged while drunk and disorderly on the streets, he will unbutton his fly and identify himself by his member. He will consort with gypsies and lose himself in their music, dancing to unconsciousness. His powers as well will deepen with the years, both the strange potency of his personality and his peasant constitutional stamina that made it almost impossible for his assassins to kill him even by a combination of poison, shooting, stabbing, and drowning in December of 1916.

  Regard the oxymoron: Holy Devil. To anyone who knows Rasputin’s unique history that epithet will apply only to him. In his own lifetime an enemy had already titled a book about him just that. He was not a monk, but he followed Christian religious practice and also drew on the more primitive powers of the shaman, for the people of his remote Siberian homeland are not so different from the native American Indians who occupied the frigid lands across the Bering Strait where Russia and Alaska almost touch fingers through the chain of icy islands that both separate and connect them. The Christianity that mixed uneasily with the harsh Siberian society in which captured thieves were beaten to the point of death provoked many strange growths.

  No doubt Tatyana detected Rasputin’s political usefulness and encouraged his excesses, perhaps to give her power over him in later years. Also, it is obvious, she envied his capacity for evil in the name of good. From reading the record of her association with the young Rasputin, like Krafft-Ebing she hoped to learn something of mankind from the acts of its most aberrant members. Unlike Krafft-Ebing, she was not a scientist and a scholar, but a master manipulator and a voyeur.

  She herself is worthy of intense psychological study, but the age of Freud had not yet taken hold and what was done with her was what had been done with a “Lady Dracula” from a house related to Vlad Tepes line. Elizabeth Bathory in the sixteenth century, one of history’s most prolific sadistic serial killers, numbering perhaps six hundred-some victims in her search for young girls’ blood to keep her young, was locked away from the world forever, until she died.

  Some attribute Bram Stoker’s inspiration for Count Dracula, the quintessential vampire in Stoker’s appropriately immortal novel, Dracula, which he began writing in the year following these events and published in 1897, to the incarnadine careers of Vlad and Elizabeth. The evidence, however, points to only a glancing acquaintance with their existence. It is far more likely that the trials he and his associates experienced during the period related here influenced his imagination and the novel that would debut eight years later. Some have found similarities between Dracula and Macbeth: the bloody content and brooding land and castle of both works, sleep-walking scenes, and such parallels as Macbeth’s three witches with Count Dracula’s three brides.

  Some also compare Stoker’s novel to another published in 1894, George du Maurier’s Trilby, which introduced the Jewish mesmerist, Svengali, who hypnotized the eponymous tone-deaf heroine into vocal feats. In Trilby as in Dracula, several Englishmen (and one American) all in love with the same woman (Trilby or Lucy) fight to save her from a predatory foreign male.

  In fiction, Dracula is far the more sinister figure than Svengali, but in real life, Gregorii Efimovich Rasputin is the king of predatory foreign males in both the intimate and public arenas. He obviously did not stay incarcerated, though when he may have escaped back to Siberia to resume his grotesque spiritual and political journey to international notoriety is impossible to know.

  Did Tatyana escape with him? Is she known to history after that at all, or by another name? That is a mystery that even Sherlock Holmes may not have been able to solve.

  One thing is certain: Colonel Sebastian Moran was at large and armed again with an air rifle in 1894 when he attempted to assasOsinate Sherlock Holmes.

  Fiona Witherspoon, Ph.D., A.I.A.*

  November 5, 2001

  Castle Rouge

  Reader’s Guide

  “Perhaps it had taken until the end of this century for an author like Douglas to be able to imagine a female protagonist who could be called ‘the’ woman by Sherlock Holmes.”

  —GROUNDS FOR MURDER, 1991

  Reader’s Guide

  To encourage the reading and discussion of Carole Nelson Douglas’s acclaimed novels examining the Victorian world from the viewpoint of one of the most mysterious women in literature, the following descriptions and discussion topics are offered. The author interview, biography, and bibliography will aid discussion as well.

  Set in 1880–1890 London, Paris, Prague, and Monaco, the Irene Adler novels reinvent the only woman to have outwitted Sherlock Holmes as the complex and compelling protagonist of her own stories. Douglas’s portrayal of “this remarkable heroine and her keen perspective on the male society in which she must make her independent way,” noted the New York Times, recasts her “not as a loose-living adventuress but a woman ahead of her time.” In Douglas’s hands, the fascinating but sketchy American prima donna from “A Scandal in Bohemia” becomes an aspiring opera singer moonlighting as a private inquiry agent. When events force her from the stage into the art of detection, Adler’s exploits rival those of Sherlock Holmes himself as she crosses paths and swords with the day’s leading creative and political figures while sleuthing among the Bad and the Beautiful of Belle Epoque Europe.

  Critics praise the novels’ rich period detail, numerous historical characters, original perspective, wit, and “welcome window on things Victorian.”

  “The private and public escapades of Irene Adler Norton [are] as erratic and unexpected and brilliant as the character herself,” noted Mystery Scene of Another Scandal in Bohemia (formerly Irene’s Last
Waltz), “a long and complex jeu d’esprit, simultaneously modeling itself on and critiquing Doylesque novels of ratiocination coupled with emotional distancing. Here is Sherlock Holmes in skirts, but as a detective with an artistic temperament and the passion to match, with the intellect to penetrate to the heart of a crime and the heart to show compassion for the intellect behind it.”

  About This Book

  Castle Rouge, the sixth Irene Adler novel, opens in the Paris of June 1889 with Irene Adler facing two demoralizing disappearances: her husband, English barrister Godfrey Norton, has vanished into the uncharted wilds of Transylvania while on secret business in Bohemia for the Rothschild banking family. And Irene’s longtime companion, Nell Huxleigh, appears to have fallen into the hands of either Jack the Ripper or a sinister cult acting with him in Paris six months after the vile Whitechapel murders. Even Sherlock Holmes, who had crossed paths with Irene and her cohorts in attempting to track the Ripper’s Paris resurrection, has abruptly returned to London to reinvestigate the Whitechapel murders from a new perspective. So the usually indomitable Irene, sadly shaken, must draw on her circle of acquaintances to rescue her loved ones. Despite the proffered financial assistance of Baron de Rothschild and Bertie, Prince of Wales, Irene finds less aristocratic (if not less notorious) but more practical aid from Buffalo Bill and an Indian scout in his Wild West Show playing in Paris. Irene dragoons another American in Paris, Nellie Bly, the daredevil American girl reporter who has been passing as a courtesan named Pink while tracking the Ripper from London to Paris, into her rescue party. And then there’s the famed theatrical manager, Bram Stoker, who’s made a habit of hiking wild and lonely places.