Chapel Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Irene had the grace to look a trifle sheepish. “We are traveling in society, Nell, and society is often hypocritical. Wealth and power always corrupt.”

  “Bram Stoker is not wealthy and not particularly powerful,” I retorted. “And . . . I have always liked him.”

  Irene exchanged chairs to sit close to me and give my shoulders a bracing hug. “You may still like him, Nell! Bram is one of the most likeable men in London, after all, and I daresay Paris, too! Remember the Testament warns us, ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged.’

  Irene quoting Scripture was just one step up from Lucifer the cat doing so. I laughed, shakily. “But how can one judge how not to be judgmental when those famed in fortune and men’s eyes lead secret lives that betray their wives and encourage every woman they meet to compromise herself, or at best, merely pretend to!”

  “Not every man, Nell. The Prince of Wales is an acknowledged rake. After all, what else has been left for him to do? His mother seems likely to live into her hundreds, yet allows him no role in government.”

  “You make excuses for him.”

  “Because every one of us has reason for what we do, bad or good.”

  “Even Jack the Ripper?”

  “Even Jack the Ripper.”

  “It is like solving a crime then, to detect the circumstances that turn a man mad.”

  “Indeed. As for Bram, you will remember that I told you years ago that I found the fair Florence a trifle chilly. No doubt Bram has, too.”

  When I frowned, she continued in an undertone that promised confidences, “Many women marry, produce a child or two, then no longer fulfill the marital role. You do comprehend, Nell?”

  I had to think about it. “Florence Stoker—”

  “—may likely be one of those. Henry Irving keeps her genial husband absorbed all hours of the day and night with his theatrical enterprise. Florence must rely for male escort on a man less taxed by work, William Gilbert.”

  “No! Gilbert is the womanizing cad who hosted the dinner party with all the D’Oyley Cart female chorus singers present for the Prince of Wales . . . where you mesmerized Bertie into falsely believing that he had indeed had his way with you!”

  Irene nodded. “I doubt that the relationship between Gilbert and Florence is of that sort. She would not wish it, for one thing.”

  “Then why does he bother?”

  “Gilbert keeps up his reputation as a ladies’ man by being seen with a handsome woman on his arm. Florence gets out and about as she would not if she waited for her husband to ever be free of an evening, and can bask in her beauty being praised without having to deal with men who wish to possess her. It is an ideal arrangement.”

  “And Mr. Stoker?”

  Irene smiled enigmatically. “That is the real mystery, now that he has been discovered in a Paris brothel. Was he merely caught by happenstance? It is his role to go everywhere, to associate with the high-and-mighty so as to lobby in Irving’s behalf. Or has he turned to seeking elsewhere what his wife won’t give him? I admit that I am not sure of the facts in his case. If Florence is a wife in name only, as I suspect, he would be free to seek satisfaction elsewhere without worrying about bringing dread diseases home, although such contamination is always a risk for the adventurous.”

  “As well it should be! Really, Irene, I cannot believe that we are talking about people we know in this vulgar way. I don’t wish to think about it.”

  “Then don’t. But you must understand that most people wear armor of a sort, sometimes many different suits of it. In different places and at different times, they behave as different people. None of them are solely what role they play on any one occasion.”

  “But you are talking about theatrical people, like that odious popinjay Oscar Wilde. Oh! Don’t tell me that he is deserting his lovely wife Constance for other women?”

  An unreadable expression crossed Irene’s fair countenance. “No, I think it is safe to say that Oscar is not unfaithful with other women.”

  “Amazing! That one so puffed up with himself, so artificial should actually be faithful to his wife!”

  “You are reacting to the armor that Oscar has carefully shaped and donned to protect himself because he is too sensitive. Then there is Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Him! He is too arrogant to adopt a pose.”

  “So he thinks, but he does. Man of Logic. Man Who Stands Alone. Man Who Does Not Need Woman. At least I believe that I can guarantee that you will not find Sherlock Holmes in a maison de tolérance, Nell. Unless he is in disguise and in the pursuit of a criminal.”

  “Is everyone a fraud then? I am not!”

  “Why, Nell, you have several roles you rotate regularly.”

  “Roles? What roles?”

  “Parson’s Daughter.” Irene mimed simpering rectitude so aptly that I laughed despite myself. “Indignant Governess.” Again, her expression and attitude became both humble and proud at once, like the heroine of a melodrama, and utterly amusing. “Innocent Spinster.” She lifted a pair of invisible spectacles to her blinking eyelashes. While I laughed, she added, “or is that . . . Ignorant Spinster.”

  As my face sobered, trying to decide whether to show offense, she added, “and I am Prima Donna. Woman of the World. Frustrated Artiste. Married Woman. Adventuress. Solver of Enigmas.”

  “Is there anyone we know then, who is not encased in false fronts?”

  My question had truly given her pause. For a moment she gazed blankly at the far wall. Then she smiled like the Mona Lisa and turned that fabled expression of enigmatic satisfaction on me.

  “Why, yes, Nell. There is one.”

  “Who?”

  “Godfrey,” she said simply, opening her hands to show the emptiness of any other answer. “Godfrey.”

  While I sat stunned at the undeniable truth of her choice, Elizabeth returned to the room, and I was forced to subside into my role of Ignorant Spinster. Irene was right; roles did prove useful.

  22.

  The Judgment of Paris

  By all accounts, Florence was an enchanting hostess and made a comfortable home for her husband and his friends, when they were there. In every way, she was a social asset. By Victorian standards the marriage, although lacking

  passion, was successful.

  —BARBARA BELFORD, BRAM STOKER

  Within ten minutes another knock sounded at our door. As Irene swept it open, I saw Mr. Stoker’s tall, imposing figure, his red beard and mustache immaculately trimmed, and his gray eyes serious.

  Given his usual energetic yet amiable nature, he seemed rather dampened. I suspected he dreaded this meeting as much as I did, whatever pretext Irene had put upon it.

  In fact, as he crossed the threshold he glanced from her to Elizabeth to me, and I sensed something I had never glimpsed in him before, reticence, and also a strange excitement.

  “Such a bevy of beautiful ladies.” He tried to boom out the greeting in his old hearty manner, as he doffed his hat like Sir Francis Drake for Queen Elizabeth. He was ever gallant with the female sex, though his gentlemanly attentions could never be taken awry for forwardness.

  Now as he glanced around at us, I understood that his bonhomie might be a pose, and he might be intimidated by us, that we three exercised a certain classical power over him, like muses or furies.

  I studied we three from his point of view. Irene was of course exquisite in a pale blue silk skirt surmounted by a frilly breakfast jacket of pale pique edged in lace scallops and tied extravagantly at the neck, waist, and wrists by royal blue satin ribbons. Elizabeth, I realized, was a remarkably pretty girl and certainly knew how to gown herself to remind gentlemen of that fact by wearing a rosewood and cream-plaid wool gown with a broad girlish sash at the waist. A wide white collar at the neck and deep cuffs on the sleeves added a casual air. Perhaps even I had been elevated to a higher level of attractiveness by the showier surrounding flowers. My day gown was of saffron-colored jersey trimmed with neat pleats, innumerable tiny buttons, and
copper-colored cord at neck, waist, and bodice.

  At any rate, Mr. Stoker blushed and bowed as if he had never spent half his life in the company of glamorous women of the theater.

  Perhaps my “catching” him in the bordello two evenings ago had made him too conscious of the presence of any kind of women, even respectable women such as ourselves. Mostly. He must not have encountered Miss Pink at the place, for he treated her with the courtesy a well-bred girl deserved.

  Yet there was an undeniable nervousness in his manner, and he seemed to tilt like a top first to one of us, then another, as if we all were at once equally irresistible and intimidating.

  How strange to see such a man of the world off-balance. I could now understand why Irene insisted on my presence while banishing Elizabeth, who excused herself and departed the room even as I entertained the thought. I, like she, had met him years ago, when he was closer to thirty than to forty and he was not yet the world traveler and raconteur. We would be able to judge any change in his manner or personality.

  A new thought hit me like a hod carrier’s barrow: as a theatrical manager Bram Stoker kept late and unaccountable hours. Could he be a candidate for the work of the Whitechapel Ripper? If he was a worthy suspect here—and the Paris police apparently thought he was—he would be a suspect there, however unlikely.

  I sat at the large round table that had so recently supported pages of lurid drawings and speculations, where Mr. Stoker had so recently advanced to take my hand while avoiding my eyes. I remembered Mr. Holmes’s comment that suspicion of the Ripper murders had emigrated into the middle and even to the upper classes. I also recalled his reluctance to let his physician friend join the hunt for fear he would be mistaken for the hunted simply because he had surgical skills. If even Sherlock Holmes felt incapable of defending his closest associate from the taint of suspicion, the net must have been flung far wider than the public had heard.

  And if anyone could be the Ripper, then everyone was suspect.

  “That is an inspired idea, Irene!”

  Bram, impresario that he was, had forgotten all recent awkwardness in his enthusiasm.

  He sat on the edge of the petite French chair, Irene’s big basso perched on Miss Muffet’s tuffet, as his large hands smacked his knees with enthusiasm. “It would travel anywhere, such a production, and you would, of course, change gowns with each queen, so it would be quite a fashion parade, which the ladies like. And, in your case, the gentlemen could not help but like it as well. The key is the composer. English, naturally. Perhaps even Sullivan. He fidgets to escape the confines of ditties. Such an enterprise would go over very well in America. Your being a native returning from triumph in Europe would sell newspapers like candy. I heartily endorse the idea, and will do all I can to encourage and promote it.”

  “I am delighted, and grateful,” Irene said, “but I cannot begin immediately. First I must investigate a small matter for an eminent client here in Paris.”

  “You still supplement your income with private inquiry assignments? I thought you had married a successful barrister and had retired from both stage and cloak-and-dagger work.”

  “Once a singer, always a singer,” Irene said lightly, forbearing to add that Godfrey was a successful barrister on foreign soil only because he undertook delicate assignments involving matters that crossed borders and involved bankers and bureaucrats and aristocrats.

  “I am worried,” she added, “on your behalf, Bram.”

  Mr. Stoker’s transparent expression quickly sobered into concern as she went on.

  “You seem to have stepped awry of the Paris police the other night. Have their suspicions lessened?”

  “Who knows?” he said uneasily, rising to pace to the window that overlooked the street, hands in his trouser pockets. “I came to Paris with Florence. She prizes the few shopping expeditions we can take together, since I am so often abroad by myself . . . with the Lyceum company of course, which is hardly by myself. She will never accompany me across the Atlantic again, not after she and Noel nearly perished in the tragedy of the steamship Victoria sinking. That was almost two years ago near Dieppe on her way to Paris, but she will brave the Channel and the North Sea. She has returned with Noel to Ireland. Of course I have my sister Matilde to visit here in Paris. She married a Frenchman, you know.”

  “No, I did not,” Irene said. “No wonder you and Florence visit the City of Light so often.”

  “And Amsterdam and Nuremberg, too. Florence is an urban butterfly, though, and not fond of my walking tours. Those I must take on my own.”

  “Yes, that is right. You are quite an inveterate walker.”

  I recognized that Irene wished me to note down this fact, and so I did. People were used to seeing me taking notes, and used to ignoring me in Irene’s presence. I recognized from long experience that Irene’s most idle observations were quite the opposite.

  She continued her most subtle interrogation of our mutual friend, Mr. Bram Stoker.

  “You must have been marooned in London last year, dear Bram, with that monumental production of Macbeth to stage. I hear that Irving was astounding in the role, that he portrayed the Thane of Cawdor not as an ambitious warrior, but as a craven killer. Quite a bold reinterpretation, but what else does one expect from the inventive Irving? So there you all were, cast and company, shackled to the dread Scottish play in London while Jack the Ripper, another craven killer, stalked Whitechapel.”

  “We hardly had time to be aware of that Whitechapel business. The play opened December 29, on the very cusp of the New Year. It cost sixty-six thousand pounds and almost a year of unremitting effort.”

  The sum was staggering, but Irene instantly fixed on another figure. “The twenty-ninth,” she murmured, eyeing me.

  Thanks to our morning of study, I recalled that the final murder attributed to Jack the Ripper occurred November 12. Bram Stoker would have been in London throughout the entire run of the Ripper’s starring role on the dark stage of Whitechapel’s narrow, disreputable streets. I jotted down a note to reexamine the times of the murders with the letting out of the Lyceum Theatre in mind, suppressing a small shudder of distaste. I hated suspecting someone we knew.

  Irene eyed Mr. Stoker over the rim of her Meissen teacup.

  She had sent down for a tea table while we awaited Mr. Stoker, and now we all desultorily nibbled at tiny French appetizers and pastries. I thought guiltily of Elizabeth, sconeless in Irene’s bedchamber, but it did not prevent me from trying another delicate sugared cake.

  “And did the Scottish play bring any noteworthy disasters?” Irene asked.

  Even such a theatrical dunce as I knew that uncanny woes so plagued various productions of Macbeth through the centuries that superstitious actors refused to even pronounce the name of the play backstage or in public during a run.

  “Not the slightest,” he said quickly, ever the proud theatrical manager, “other than a dismissive review from George Bernard Shaw, but then what would one expect from that professional curmudgeon?

  “And even Shaw had to praise the scenery of our new painter, Joseph Harker. We had traveled to Scotland to research the play, and I intend to return there on a walking tour.”

  “Yes,” said Irene with a smile. “That is your preferred method of solitary travel.”

  “The theatrical life puts me in the midst of what is essentially controlled pandemonium. I relish occasional solitude and exercise amid those lonely heaths and rugged headlands. Harker’s gloomy set paintings of blackened Scottish castles and battlements and labyrinthine passages superbly evoked the realities of the scene. I helped him lease studio space at Her Majesty’s Theatre, and Irving is set upon using him again. No, the play was an enormous, spectacular success, a fine choice to follow Faust. The research has even inspired me to move from writing my short tales to something a bit longer. I am finishing my first novel.”

  “A novel! Shall we see anything of Jack the Ripper in it?”

  “Oh, my dear lady, no
. I confess myself more inspired by Irving’s masterful enactment of Macbeth than any real-life bloodshed. But there will be treasure and true love, villainy and much of the ancient superstitions of my native Ireland, and perhaps a bit of bloodshed. The public much relishes that. You may know of my latest weird tale, The Squaw, which features a crude American, an iron maiden, and a vengeful mother cat.”

  “I would not want to cross any of those,” Irene said with a mock shudder, “a quintessentially crude American, a death-dealing medieval torture device, or a vengeful mother of any species. The Squaw. Such an American title. It sounds like something Buffalo Bill might write.”

  “Quite a splendid fellow. I met him on a transatlantic voyage. I entertained the passengers with a reading or two, and he read their minds.”

  “Buffalo Bill did a mind-reading act?” Irene was astounded into a fusillade of laughter. “It is not my impression of his expertise.”

  “Oh, his Wild West Show has made him an international showman. There is nothing he would do that would surprise me. Even sophisticated Paris has become enchanted with the sharpshooters and the trick riders and your Red Indians, but that is just so much showmanship, and idealizes a past fast fading. Your America is not the wilderness we Europeans and British like to think.”

  “No. Wilderness is fast becoming hard to find. Even those wilds of Scotland in Macbeth. Perhaps the last wilderness is in our own hearts and minds.”

  “Truly said.”

  A silence followed, during which I could hear the clockwork mechanism of Irene’s mind changing gears.

  “I hope that we did not embarrass you with the Paris police the other night,” she said, leaning forward confidentially.

  “You certainly testified to my worthiness as a citizen.” He glanced differentially at me, the first time in my life anyone had done so. “Especially Miss Huxleigh. I am so dreadfully sorry to have failed to recognize you. The setting was so, so—”

  “Foreign,” Irene finished for him.