Chapel Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Your theories are most intriguing,” the Baron was saying. “Anything further I can do is yours to command.”

  Irene murmured thanks as she took me by the elbow and we left the formalities of the box and its occupants.

  “What do you think of Bram Stoker now that you have seen him again?” she asked me, as we walked away.

  “The nicest Englishman I have ever met, even barring the Prince, who’s all right for an heir to the throne.”

  “You haven’t met Godfrey yet,” she said with the contented smile of a relatively new wife. I was dubious, having seen my mother’s travails in the institution of marriage. “But I was asking if you thought Bram might be a habituee, as the French put it, of brothels?”

  I considered my answer for a long time. “If he is, he would be a welcome one.”

  Irene was still laughing at my response when the gentleman in question, truly as innocent as a lamb on this occasion, rejoined us to lead us behind the arena to the vast area that housed the show.

  An entire tent city thrust its homely peaks into the pungent air. People and beasts bustled back and forth in thick array, every one of them out of the ordinary as far as metropolitan life goes, except for the horses.

  Outside a massive tent that Mr. Stoker identified as the dining chamber for the company he paused, while Red Indians with faces painted white, black, green, and red passed us, feathers and braids upon their heads. Mr. Stoker excused himself to go in to find the famous Indian fighter and showman.

  Now I would have to be truly on my toes! It isn’t as if I hadn’t seen a Buffalo Bill production a few times. Yet Irene Adler Norton was clearly new to the whole venture. She eyed the massive tent from a distance at first, almost childlike in her amazement and curiosity.

  “I was forced to miss attending this spectacle when I lived in London,” she said finally.

  “Forced? I cannot imagine you being forced into, or away from, anything.”

  “Oh, my dear Pink! We are all forced one way or another all of our lives. We simply do not notice who is doing the forcing, especially if they are in the four estates.”

  “The four estates. That means the aristocracy, the clergy, the professions and are the . . . newspapers the fourth estate?”

  “I think you deserve high marks for that answer.” She eyed me sideways. “Here in Paris the four estates are a bit different, as everything is in Paree: the boulevards or café society; the press; the artists, and the morgue. There you have it: Society, Sensation, Imagination, and Death. You notice that the Paris press is the second estate. The Anglo-Saxon ‘old order’ of churchman, tradesman, journalist quite literally applies only to England and the United States.”

  “But we do not have an aristocracy in America,” I objected.

  Mr. Stoker had returned just in time to overhear my opinion.

  “Of course you do, Miss Cochrane. They are called nabobs and captains of industry. They are elevated by virtue of black ink rather than blue blood. Some call it a plutocracy, but I say it’s a Midasocracy.”

  “I like that word,” I said.

  “That is because there is not much blue blood among us three, or among this company of rough riders,” Irene said.

  I looked around at what resembled a camp of ragtag soldiers without uniforms. “This is an out-of-doors stage play but it commemorates the shedding of much red blood not too long past.”

  “How it fascinates me,” Mr. Stoker confessed, turning to examine the huge assemblage of tents, with massive animals being led to and fro and numerous handlers rushing between the tents. “I believed the Lyceum had mounted some stupendous spectacles. Act Four of Faust alone employed 250 warlocks, demons, imps, and goblins. But this . . . importing a hundred animal actors as well as hundreds of human performers and stagehands across oceans. Amazing! I’m delighted, Irene, that you have given me the opportunity to further my acquaintance with Colonel Cody,” he added with a deep bow to her. “Henry Irving and Ellen Terry were among the welcoming committee when his Wild West Show played in London last year, but I fear I was overlooked among the likes of the Oscar Wildes and other notables. So I relish the opportunity to see his operations. I can learn a thing or two from Buffalo Bill about herding actors, props, and supernumeraries at the Lyceum. And here he comes now.”

  “Stoker,” cried a tall extravagant figure that was descending upon us like a poster come to startling life.

  The long yellow fringe on his buckskin shirt and trousers fluttered from the energy of his advance. A pale felt hat, extravagantly brimmed, tilted jauntily on his head. And what a proud, maned head it was, almost larger than life, like the shaggy heads of the buffalo he was famous for hunting nigh unto extinction. Though he sported a mustache and goatee, his long, curling hair rippled down his back like the loosened tresses of a woman.

  But woe to any who would impugn the virility of the showman known the world over as Buffalo Bill. I’d been hearing and reading about him my entire life, thanks to Ned Buntline’s inexhaustible dime novels: wagon train errand boy at twelve, Pony Express rider at fifteen, U.S. Cavalry scout and buffalo hunter at twenty, Winner of the Medal of Honor, hunting guide for Grand Dukes, star of his own stage adventures since the seventies.

  This world-renowned Wild West Show merely memorialized a life that had personally reshaped the future of a continent once black with moving clouds of buffalo. In sixteen years the shaggy beasts and their Indian hunters were virtually gone; cattle and the white men have flooded onto the prairie that once knew more wood than steel. The long, bitter, and brutal Indian battles seemed over now, too. It had been almost fifteen years since William F. Cody had killed Chief Yellow Hand and taken his scalp to avenge Custer and the Seventh Cavalry only weeks after that most famous rout of the Indian Wars. Now Indians were tame entertainers in a traveling show. I had seen Buffalo Bill quoted as saying the Sioux had not massacred Custer, that they were combating skilled fighters for the sakes of their families and their land. The hero had become a healer.

  I admit that a thrill went up my spine at the famous scout’s approach, akin to the chill that had shaken me when Irene and I had visited the undiscovered catacombs under Notre Dame two nights ago.

  But this was a chill of national pride, not of horror. Unlike Irene, I had lived in the States until very recently. Although I had seen his Wild West Show at Madison Square Garden and knew him for a consummate performer and the commanding general of a mighty cast of men, beasts, and a few good women, I had never personally confronted the sheer magnetism of the man. It was considerable. Even Irene stood silent and contemplative in the face of such an apparition.

  This was a Prince of the Prairie in the flesh, and more commanding than the fleshly Prince of Wales.

  His eyes narrowed as Mr. Stoker introduced him to Irene. “You have a feisty look about you, ma’am. Do you shoot?”

  “Only in self-defense.” His brows lifted at her dead-serious tone. “But I fence,” she added.

  “Do you ride?”

  “Not much or well or far, but I . . . walk a great deal.”

  He laughed at that.

  “I fear I am a confirmed city dweller, Colonel Cody, but I have worked for the Pinkertons”—at that word the colonel straightened as if either shocked or about to give a salute—“and I come to you in search of information involving heinous crimes.”

  “You, a Pinkerton agent?”

  “Not recently. Now that I live in Europe I handle private inquiries for my own profit and amusement.” Irene came closer, touched his buckskin-clad arm. “And for persons of substance. Tiffany has been a client. And the”—for some reason she almost choked on the next name before she dropped it, but drop it she did, like a metal medieval gauntlet—“King of Bohemia. And . . . others whom I dare not name.”

  The narrowed eyes that had seen entire species and tribes vanish from the American West took her measure. She did not flinch, or worse, flutter.

  “Well, ma’am.” He doffed his hat with the same pana
che as he took his final bow at the end of four hours of Wild West Show. “If you are a friend of Bram, and say you need my help, I am at your disposal. For half an hour today, at any rate. I am the toast of Paree, you see, and kept running eighteen hours a day to this soiree and that, not to mention rounding up two daily shows.”

  “I am most grateful for your valuable time, and your help.” She took his arm as if they were strolling into supper together at Kensington Palace. I could see that the veteran Indian scout was in the hands of a veteran herder of Homo sapiens.

  “Excuse us, Bram,” he said to our guide, who nodded and remained behind.

  He had not exempted me.

  So I slipped into step behind them, like a child content to be seen and not heard, as they moved into the trampled central arena. I noticed that although Irene was in deep conversation with the showman, she managed to avoid treading on the clumps of animal dung littering their path. Buffalo will be buffalo.

  I struggled to walk in her pristine footsteps. “I walk a great deal” indeed! No wonder Buffalo Bill had taken a liking to her. She pretended to nothing, but apologized for nothing either.

  I must remember that technique in future.

  “You must forgive me. I have lived in Europe since I was eighteen,” she began.

  “Only a fortnight ago, surely, Madame.”

  “You have been overhearing too many Frenchmen, Colonel.”

  He laughed, but would not let it go. “I deal in herd animals, but I know each one. Each has a scar, a gait, a shape. A hallmark. Pardon me for putting it so plainly, but you have a hallmark like no other. I have seen you before. Not recently. In the East. Can you swear differently to this old scout?”

  She was silent while they walked through the muck as if ambling in a château garden.

  “The late ’seventies, do you think, Colonel?”

  He nodded. “I was performing in my dime-novel plays on the Eastern seaboard then.”

  “Perhaps . . . perhaps you recall Merlinda the Mermaid and the Treasure of Blackbeard.”

  They stopped. Buffalo Bill stared at Irene Adler. Then he doffed his hat, made a deep Cavalier bow, and slapped his befringed leg with the brim so a small, astounded cough of dust rose in the air between them. His laugh was as loud as a thundering herd.

  “I’ll be damned! Held her breath for five minutes in that huge tank of water, hair longer than mine weaving like seaweed, that fancy spangled tail waving like prairie grass in a windstorm. Five minutes underwater, eyes open, in plain view. And hauling up those jeweled gewgaws all the while. I clocked you, Madame Mermaid. It was five minutes. How’d you manage it?”

  “How’d you manage scalping Yellow Hand?”

  “Battle bloodlust.” He sighed. “I don’t deny it, but the West was wild then. Men are capable of more than they think.”

  “Good? Or bad?”

  “Both, ma’am. And women, too, I guess.”

  She nodded, as if he had cleared a hurdle she had set up, and abruptly changed the subject back to the first matter. “I was training to become an opera singer. I needed money for lessons. In opera, breath control is paramount. Merlinda helped me to become one who sang instead of swam for her supper, and the critics have always noted since then that my breath control is peerless.”

  “Grand opera or Wild West roundup. It’s all a show, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is, yet I am now involved in matters that are not a show but all too real. And the bloodlust you mention is being exercised on helpless women.”

  He stopped again. “You’ve shot in self-defense?”

  She nodded, once.

  “Killed anything?”

  “Not yet. But we were shot at the other night, near Notre Dame.”

  He glanced back at me, his eyes unerringly focusing on mine as if hitting a target. He had always known I was there, eavesdropping. He had heard every step and breath I took, I realized. He had never been unaware of me.

  “Two women, out alone, at night?” He sounded skeptical.

  “I was dressed as a man.”

  The silence was deafening.

  “We had been at the Paris Morgue,” Irene added, piling one incongruity atop another.

  “Like no other,” Buffalo Bill quoted himself at last. “You are going after Yellow Hand.”

  “In a sense. But I will take justice instead of a scalp.”

  “Actually, his name was Yellow Hair. The newspapers made it Yellow Hand. Guess they figured an Indian wouldn’t be named Yellow Hair. Oddly appropriate name, given Custer was known for his long yellow hair.”

  I shuddered at the comparison: a dead cavalry colonel known for his yellow hair. The Indian known as Yellow Hair present at the battle, then later killed and scalped by a white scout and buffalo hunter and Indian slayer who now led a world-famous entertainment centered around buffalo and Indians . . .

  “I have lived in Europe for a long time,” Irene repeated, returning to her circuitous introduction of this topic. “I am ignorant of the ways of the frontier that you know so well, that you forged. I need to ask some ignorant questions. Will you forgive me that?”

  “I’ll tell you what. I will, if Merlinda the Mermaid will make an appearance at my command performance for the French president next month.”

  “Colonel Cody, that was a long time ago! I do not even sing opera anymore.”

  “Old skills never die.”

  “I have no costume, no tank.”

  “If I can cart my whole show across the Atlantic, I can come up with a few hundred gallons of water in a glass box.” He eyed her as if inspecting a steed. “And I’m willing to bet that your hair is as long and your breath control is as peerless as it ever was. It was the darnedest thing I ever saw.”

  “Very well,” Irene said, “but you won’t like my questions.”

  “Questions never killed a man. But first I’ve got a thing or two to tell, or ask, you.”

  “Yes?”

  “About that shooting near Notre Dame. At night? What? Gaslights still around there? Not electric lights?”

  She nodded.

  “Misty, though, fog thick as mohair coming off of the river?”

  She nodded again.

  “You two were silhouettes in the fog. Not recognizable.”

  “Unless someone knew who we were. . . .”

  “Had followed you from the morgue, you mean. I was taken there. Now that’s a show. They think my outfit celebrates death. Hmmph. This morgue’s at the rear of the cathedral. Quite a system: church and then the morgue at the back door, so to speak. You see anyone following you?”

  Irene shook her head.

  “You look?”

  “As best I could without being overly obvious.”

  He grunted. “Didn’t shoot with a pistol. Revolver. Would have had to have been close enough to spot, and you were looking, right?”

  She nodded, listening hard.

  “Rifle. Only possible weapon. You hear the bullets hit?”

  “Stone. They scored stone. Perhaps I could find the places in daylight, but it would be difficult.”

  “It doesn’t make sense, Madame Mermaid. Not at all. No one could expect to hit a target under those conditions, not even Miss Annie Oakley.”

  “A warning?”

  “You don’t get any warnings on the prairie.”

  “But here?”

  He nodded. “So what kind of critter are you hunting?”

  “You performed in England in 1887?”

  “A triumph, three command performances for Queen Victoria. It’s why we’re here at this World Exposition in Paris now.”

  “And the next year, in 1888?”

  He grinned. “Three hundred years after the Spanish Armada tried to take England, and failed, we had knocked them dead on their own turf and were back in the States, playing along the seaboard where the English lost America a bit over a century ago. History is a lesson and an irony. It was another triumphal tour. Why?”

  “That was the autumn in
which Jack the Ripper was terrorizing Whitechapel in London.”

  “He was a wild one.”

  “But he took no scalps.”

  “Not . . . quite. Took a lot more.”

  “There have been recent deaths in Paris.”

  “Pulled up stakes and moved on, hmmm?”

  She nodded, watching him as narrowly as an American eagle on a poster. “Mutilations. After death. Less . . . anatomical, more gruesome.”

  “Aha.” He buried his goatee in his hand as he thought. “These Indians of mine come from a talent agency. Some are a bit wild to control, but so are the horses and the buffalo, and the cowboys, too, for that matter.”

  “Did any Indians leave your show while you were in England?”

  “You’re following the wrong trail. There’s a lot of rot about the Indians been written. They have their ways and they are not ours. But what is ours? How alike are you and me? Or me and that girl? Or a French count and an Indian chief? Whoever shot at you wasn’t an Indian.”

  “Perhaps not, but it takes nerve to use Paris pedestrians for target practice. Or blithe ignorance. Perhaps someone from another culture, from a savage past, is being used by someone quite civilized.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first or last time.” He thought again. “Was a couple Indians who deserted, only you can’t call absent actors ‘deserters.’ That’s what we all are now. Actors. Like you. Opera. Wild West Shows. A couple Indians didn’t go back to the States with us after that England tour in eighty-seven.”

  “Do you remember their names?”

  “Do I remember my own? Crazy Fox and Long Wolf. Long Wolf was quite the celebrity. Wore a black beaver top hat with his regular regalia. The English folk made quite a fuss over him. He said he had never seen a village so large and that he wished to learn its limits. Crazy Fox was another case. He had a taste for alcohol. Can’t blame him. I do myself.” The veteran scout laughed and shook his head. “You really think Jack the Ripper could be an Indian? What about those letters to the newspapers? They were full of Americanisms, but they weren’t written by any Indian.”