Castle Rouge

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  I can see by the drooping of the inspector’s very disciplined mustaches that he had not known of the Prince’s presence in the house of sin and death, nor the fact that the…device upon which two women died had been commissioned especially for His Royal Highness. Being French and worldly, the inspector would not condemn the perverse intention, only the murderous turn its use had taken.

  “Kelly possessed a certain religious mania,” Irene muses for the benefit of her friends and suspects.

  I began to wonder if even the inspector and I are excepted from the suspect category, for of course I, too, had been present that night and had found the butchered bodies. Probably we are not. I am beginning to see that, like Sherlock Holmes, Irene is relentless in the pursuit of truth, though her approach is far less direct than his.

  I also begin to see that she arranges scenes like a playwright. First she assembles the dramatis personae, then she lets them speak among each other and thus speak the truth to her, all unknowing.

  It’s a theatrical approach that requires much patience and rehearsal before any denouement can be expected.

  “Nothing in Jack the Ripper’s London murders indicated a religious mania,” the Prince says finally, after long mulling over Irene’s comment.

  The inspector answers for her. “Allow me, Your Highness. I have studied the case most avidly. In all such murders of fallen women a religious mania is suspected. As the purported billet-doux from the Ripper said, ‘I am down on whores.’ Usually such reactions are moral. I believe that it is the frustration of the natural instincts that creates such madmen. In Paris, in France, we have made houses of prostitution legal for decades and inspect the women to ensure good health. It has eliminated much unnecessary disease and is the only reasonable approach to the situation. England and London are not so enlightened. Men who have contracted foul diseases from whores become murderously infuriated. It is no wonder that these Ripper slayings, and others that frequently occur in this Whitechapel district, are more common to England than to France.”

  “Until now,” Irene notes.

  The inspector flashes her an impatient look. “What? Two women at a reputable house?”

  I shudder to think what Nell would have to say about the very French notion of a “reputable” whorehouse were she here to ride scout on the discussion.

  The inspector natters on. “The third woman was either an unlucky laundress or one of the lone unfortunates, femmes isloée, who plies the streets on her own.”

  “You have not addressed,” Irene says, “the strange subterranean aspect of these Paris killings. That is another aspect purely Parisian: cellars, sewers, catacombs. Even the morgue and the wax museum were used to display the bodies in some bizarre manner.”

  The inspector shrugs, a classic French response to the mystery of life.

  “The Musée Grévin,” he says grandly, “is far more than a wax museum, especially during l’Exposition universelle and the inauguration of La Tour Eiffel. It is a landmark of Paris. Might not even a madman wish to pay tribute to the attractions of the City of Light in planning his crimes?”

  “The Ripper managed to keep to obscure and hidden ways in London,” Irene points out.

  “London!” The inspector barely restrains himself from spitting. “Whitechapel. Paris has no such sinkhole as this. It is no mystery that the Paris murders involve a finer sort of victim.”

  “Then the Ripper has moved to Paris and grown nice.”

  Bram Stoker speaks up at long last. “The bloody rites I heard of in the cavern beneath the fairgrounds don’t sound very refined. Were I to write such a scene, I’d be accused of sensation-mongering. I agree with what the man in the street said during the Ripper attacks last autumn. No Englishman would do it.”

  “Nor any Frenchman!” the inspector shouts, his mustaches twitching like cockroach feelers.

  Amazing how no nationality on earth would spawn a Ripper so long as any man of that race is present.

  “The Jews,” the Baron says quietly, “are often accused, and falsely, of atrocities toward Christians. Oddly enough, the facts prove the atrocities are inevitably committed against them. Us,” he adds.

  “That is the trouble!” When the Prince of Wales finally speaks again, he does so passionately. “There are all sorts of political scapegoats abounding that one faction or the other would like to accuse of the Ripper’s crimes, including members of England’s royal family! I have been repeatedly criticized for consorting with Jews and merchants and jockeys and, er, women.”

  “And does Your Highness deny any of it?” Irene asks, a trifle archly.

  The Prince, like any pampered aristocrat, responds to the coy like a cat to a whisker tickle. That is one thing I grant Sherlock Holmes. He is not pampered and he is not an aristocrat.

  “Well, no,” Bertie says, demonstrating the disarming honesty that makes him tolerated if not beloved. “Drat the fellow! He has caused endless trouble, and I wish they would lock him away.”

  “‘They’ is always us, Your Highness,” Irene says. “And that is why ‘we’ must do something about Jack the Ripper. I take it I have your permission to try.”

  The inspector snorts delicately, being French.

  Irene needs no one’s permission, but she wishes some of the people in this room to see that she has a royal mandate.

  “I would be delighted,” the Prince says, smiling a bow in her direction. Bertie has always enjoyed deferring to women, except his mother. Irene has never underestimated official approval.

  She smiles back. Like a privateer of old, she has won the royal letter of mark.

  She is free to hoist the Jolly Roger and to board and commandeer any ships she chooses.

  Lord help us, she already has the U.S.S. Nellie Bly in her fleet and I shudder to think what freebooters she will add to her armada.

  2.

  Plainsmen in France

  The red man does not wear his heart upon his sleeve for government claws to peck at. One knows what he proposes to do after he has done it. The red man is conspicuously among the things that are not always what they seem.

  —HELEN CODY WELMORE, THE LAST OF THE GREAT SCOUTS, 1899

  FROM A JOURNAL

  There are many things for which I will never forgive Irene Adler Norton, but I guess the one that is least her fault is the thorn that rankles most. The fact is that the Paris Ripper could only be the London Ripper on the move and that the real story had its roots back in London where it all began the previous autumn of 1888.

  So Sherlock Holmes telling me that I owed it to Irene to nursemaid her in Paris didn’t sit well at the time he declared this to be the case, and it especially didn’t go down like butter now that I was tied to a secondary investigation while he was back in Blighty chasing the Real Ripper.

  Irene and I strolled through the now-familiar grounds of l’Exposition universelle, brushing skirt hems with shopgirls and ladies of leisure sharing a holiday spirit and utter ignorance of the horrific and hidden events that had transpired here but two days before.

  Our expedition with that pack of Rothschild agents and Buffalo Bill to hunt down the Paris Ripper had reached such a shocking and savage climax that every man in sight thought I should be spared further discussion of the particulars. I had heard only such snippets from Inspector François le Villard as he regarded necessary for my nursemaiding of Irene or as fit for my foreign and female ears.

  I could hardly prod Irene to dissect the matter in every lurid detail yet, since her long-time companion Nell had vanished at the height of the horrors. The only concrete result of our pursuit of the Paris Ripper was one missing English spinster and a sinister sign later in our hotel room that Irene’s English husband, Godfrey, journeying from Prague to Transylvania on business for the enormously influential Rothschild banking family, was also in unknown but likely hostile hands.

  It had not been a good night for the British.

  If Sherlock Holmes had not as good as threatened me with arrest to keep
me at Irene’s side, I would be off on investigations of my own. I so resented being pent up on the sidelines with the women while the men made history.

  “I suppose,” Irene said, apparently unaware of my irritation, pausing to gaze at the fountains exploding like Old Faithful beneath the pierced iron silhouette of the Eiffel Tower, “that you would like to analyze the crimes that occurred here as they fit into a larger picture.”

  “You bet I would! But I daren’t ask the natural questions any reporter would want to know because of Nell vanishing so abruptly at the height of the atrocities. The last I saw of her was you yelling at her to leave the cavern when that madman James Kelly came rushing at her. Do you suppose he caught up with her? And, if so, why so far away from where we all were? And why did Kelly go for her particularly?”

  Irene’s gaze lowered to meet my eyes. I saw then that they focused on something far different from spectacular fountains or my humble opinions.

  “You almost sound envious of Nell being the Ripper’s target, and indeed it could have as easily been you and not Nell missing now. Perhaps.” Did her soft monotone almost hint that this would be the far, far better thing for all concerned?

  I would not be shamed, not by her. Not again. “Certainly I am better qualified to fend for myself in desperate circumstances than Nell is. I have survived a madhouse, after all, a sweatshop, and brothels on two continents.”

  “If fending for oneself is still an issue.” She turned her gaze again at the plumes of tumbling water.

  “Nell must be alive!”

  “Why?”

  “Why not leave her body at the panorama building where she was apparently abducted, then?”

  “Perhaps he needed her for future…rites.”

  “From what I understand, which is too little, the participants were willing sacrifices. I do not see Nell ever becoming a willing sacrifice.”

  “The people controlling events wished to leave no trail, that much is true,” she said absently. “In that they failed. Nell was able to unclasp her lapel watch, so that it dropped to the floor to mark the spot where she was taken. That clue allowed Red Tomahawk to note the signs they’d left and begin tracking the party immediately.”

  “They left in the gypsy wagon, isn’t that right?”

  “In a gypsy wagon. There may have been more about than the one we observed by the campfire earlier.”

  “‘The one we observed!’ I was allowed to observe very little that night in that mob of people. Observation is my work, my gift, my livelihood. You should have brought me to the forefront. I might have noticed something vital.”

  “Nell would have been incensed if I’d given you preference. It was bad enough you went to the morgue along with me.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake! This petty rivalry has cost us all a pretty penny. You would be only half so distracted if only one of your…associates were missing.”

  “You are saying that I would not take your abduction as seriously as Nell’s?”

  “You know that I can take care of myself.”

  “Nell may do better than you think.”

  “If she is alive.” I had not meant to be brutal, but Irene had pointed out the reality first, after all. Apparently reality was harder to face when it was turned back on one.

  “You’re right. We can’t know that,” she said through tight lips. “Yet I cannot help but suspect that Nell was apprehended in much the same manner and for the same purpose that Godfrey was abducted at about the same time on the opposite side of Europe. What that purpose is, I don’t know, but I intend to find out. And since it is a purpose, I am hopeful that their lives, rather than their deaths, are the key to it.”

  After that, talk seemed as dangerous as dueling. Mutually silent, we made our way to the huge arena prepared for the Wild West Show.

  En route I found myself thinking of Sherlock Holmes again. He already had some repute as a wonder of deduction. Now I wondered where he wandered. In Whitechapel, obviously, returning to the scene of the Ripper crimes with fresh insight into which of dozens of suspects might be the actual killer. Did he track a rogue Red Indian from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show? The great scout and showman had admitted that some of his native warriors had parted company with the cast to remain in London. Long Wolf was the most famous instance, but another man had also jumped ship, so to speak, there.

  Irene, to give her credit, had first brought up the possibility that a Red Man, encountering European society and the thousands of women and girls who plied the prostitute’s trade in such great capitals as London and Paris, might succumb to a barbaric slaughtering. It was not so long ago that those of their tribe, or neighboring ones, had raped, burned, and mutilated settlers of the West. What would such a savage soul make of the poor white women who solicited pennies on the streets of Whitechapel in such numbers?

  Sherlock Holmes was the quintessential Englishman in my view: superior, opinionated, and desperately in need of showing up. It was rather amusing to watch his vaunted logic dither in the presence of the beauteous and bright Irene. He had even admitted within my hearing that she was the only woman ever to have outwitted him.

  I truly did not see what he saw in her, for she seemed sadly disorganized and dependent now, relying upon the kindness of friends, trusting to Indian scouts instead of her own pluck. And the men all kowtowed to her great losses like courtiers to a widowed Queen Victoria!

  This was not where the mystery would unwind. At least Sherlock Holmes had hied to London to reinvestigate the Ripper’s Reign of Terror there. Oh, to be in England now!

  I would so dearly love to beat him to the identity of the Ripper. AMERICAN GIRL BESTS EUROPE’S GREATEST SLEUTH. What headlines that would make on my side of the Atlantic!

  A plain lantern sat on the huge table in Buffalo Bill Cody’s tent, its vivid light painting his long wavy yellow locks into tongues of flame.

  He stood hunched over a map of England, not of the Wild West.

  Hunched beside him was the thrillingly authentic figure of Red Tomahawk, whose nose was as aquiline as any Spanish aristocrat’s, whose earth-colored skin shone like tanned leather, whose figure radiated the sheen of bone and feather and deerskin.

  The scene resembled a lithograph of the Indian Wars, save that we were plunked in the middle of a great fairgrounds in the world’s most civilized city. Once I was done with Paris, France, and London, England, and other points east of the great U.S. of A., I determined to go West some day soon to record the doings there, though the exciting conflicts of yesteryear were over and done with in this advanced year of 1889.

  So I envisioned again the savage scene that we four violently different people gathered here had witnessed on these very holiday grounds: the gathered madmen—and women—leaping and screaming and slinging weapons as if partaking in an Indian war dance, though they were surely the debased product of a half dozen European countries. No doubt the Europeans prided themselves at having evolved beyond savagery, but these demented Gypsies and lowlifes gave such snobbery the lie.

  And the three other witnesses to this murderous scene were an odd blend of New World and Old: the courtly Wild West scout better known by the colorful name of Buffalo Bill instead of William F. Cody. The colorfully garbed Red Man, a sharp shadow of the fierce plains warriors his dead brothers had been, his name and tracking abilities testifying to his proud and violent heritage, Red Tomahawk. The American-born dethroned European diva turned very private detective, Irene Adler.

  They consulted like old warriors, despite their disparity, despite my presence, which they ignored. I began to see that “taking notes,” as Nell had so often done, effectively rendered one invisible.

  I didn’t mind. I was most effective when invisible. Until I chose to be very visible indeed.

  “So you found the horse with the misshapen shoe?” Irene asked Red Tomahawk.

  Her tone was no different than if she had addressed the Baron de Rothschild. Indeed, it was perhaps more respectful, for Red Tomahawk
’s native abilities bordered on the magical in the eyes of whites and Europeans, much as did Sherlock Holmes’s vaunted reading of the smallest signs of evidence.

  He grunted, displaying the admirable taciturn nature of his race. His finger stabbed the map. “From here. To here. To here. The horse with the damaged shoe only took them to the edge of the settlement. Then the wagon went on.”

  “The Gypsy wagon you followed through the exposition grounds earlier?” Buffalo Bill asked.

  Red Tomahawk nodded, setting his feathers atremble. “I followed the trail, east where the sun awakens, to a city they call Verdun.”

  “Verdun! On foot all that way?”

  Red Tomahawk eyed Irene. “All our horses were shot out from under the Red Man. So we walk.”

  She understood that he spoke of not-so-ancient wrongs. “Did no one comment on your appearance?”

  “I wore hat and coat, like Long Wolf in London. Most strange garb. When tracking bear it is well to wear bear hide.”

  “Why only as far as Verdun?” Buffalo Bill asked. He not only had no trouble believing in Red Tomahawk’s startlingly long foot journey; he wondered why it was not wholly epic! Why not Frankfurt or Prague or Vienna or any of the great cities beyond Verdun?

  Red Tomahawk tapped the point on the map again. “No more wagon. Iron Horse.”

  I loved that expression. So apt. The railway engine had indeed been a Trojan horse, an Iron Horse snorting and steaming its way across Indian lands like a giant plow, domesticating the land, making the flesh-and-blood horse obsolete. And the buffalo. And the Red Man.

  “They drove the wagon to a railway station?” Irene asked.

  “Hoofprints lost in boot tracks, in Iron Horse tracks.”

  “Have you no idea where they went from there, Red Tomahawk?” she asked, her voice throbbing with naked hope as only a performer’s can.