At that he withdrew like the gentleman he was, leaving me to take inventory of my truly lamentable state and to wonder where on earth we were and among what unutterably savage monsters that cats and rats should seem finer housemates than human beings.
17.
Sterner Stuff
Our sons are made of sterner stuff, but less winning are their caresses.
—EURIPEDES, THE SUPPLIANTS
FROM A JOURNAL
“First, Quentin,” Irene told our new and quite illegal fellow passenger, “I believe you need to explain to Pink your current garb and headlong method of boarding trains.”
“Really, no!” I demurred. Quentin Stanhope did not look like a man who was pleased to explain himself to anybody.
At the moment, however, he was engaged in deeply regarding me. Taken aback, I closed my journal and inserted my pencil in the silver tube mechanism that was both its holder and a lock for the book.
“It’s simple,” he said at last, stretching his booted legs toward the empty side of the seat opposite where Irene sat alone. He had chosen to sit alongside me, perhaps the better to discourse with Irene across the compartment. I found his presence most oppressive.
“This eastern part of Europe is a string of petty principalities, some long ago knuckled under to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, some maintaining a precarious independence. Each duchy has its officious tyrant, and the tyrants in turn have their gaudy military forces. My current guise combines the features of a dozen overbearing uniforms common to the region. Wherever I go, I am taken for a pompous, garlanded popinjay from the neighboring satrapy. So I go unchallenged but not much respected, an ideal position for a spy.”
“In addition,” Irene said, having long before returned her pistol to Nell’s innocuous pocket, “you may leap upon any operetta stage in Europe and melt into the chorus at an instant’s notice.”
Mr. Stanhope stroked his false mustaches, perhaps horsehair, and smiled. “On occasion the best disguise is the most extravagant, a lesson you learned long ago, Madam Diva.”
I could not restrain comment. “Then I must stick out like a sore thumb in my checked wool cloth and cap.”
“A charming ensemble,” he said with a bow. “I wish I could wear something as lightweight, neat, and practical.”
Somehow those words did not cheer me.
“Pink’s garb is more than practical,” Irene put in. “It resembles the clothing Nell was wearing when last seen. We have but to use her as a living reference point if we wish to question persons along the way.”
“I chose this myself, at Le Bon Marché.”
“And a brilliant ploy it was.” Irene went on while I reflected that I had all unthinking managed to duplicate Nell’s manner of dress. “We are also equipped with a cabinet sketch of James Kelly, the demon upholsterer of the Rue Caron. Its presence has already borne fruit.”
“Then this mad upholsterer is responsible for the sad death behind us?” he demanded.
Irene nodded. “The ticketmaster identified him as a man lacking money for passage…and returning later with the fare in fistfuls of coppers.”
Quentin frowned as if he would like to have James Kelly in his own fists.
“Such a death as met the flower girl at Neunkirchen,” Irene said as gently as she would address a child, “was merciful compared to what the victims in London and Paris faced, when the killer had more time and less obvious motive.”
“Tell me about that,” he said. “Tell me about Nell.”
Irene stirred uneasily on the plush train upholstery. I thought she would produce her smoking case and lucifers, but she didn’t.
“Godfrey was abroad,” she began, “on Rothschild business. Had he been in Paris, would Baron de Rothschild have called upon him instead of me? I don’t know. However, murder is not beyond my ken, and murder is what needed investigating: two women at a bordello patronized by the leading men of Europe. Inspector le Villard of the Paris police, whom I know, came to fetch me, along with his superior, the Prefect himself.”
“You could hardly refuse such a summons.”
“I never would refuse such a summons. Unfortunately, Nell insisted on accompanying me, despite the demurs of two very insistent police authorities.”
“There is no one as adamant as an English governess.”
“As a former governess,” Irene corrected. “And she had been a shop girl and typewriter girl by then, as well as an instructress of a foulmouthed parrot and my shadow at two death scenes. But what we found at that maison de rendezvous was brutal beyond anything we two could ever have imagined.”
“Oh, come now!” I couldn’t keep from saying. “I was the first one to spy out that scene, and stomach-turning as it was, Nell was not the unprepared innocent you portray. She’d followed the newspaper reports of the Ripper case last autumn like a three-year-old overdosing on sweets before Christmas, as she herself confessed. ‘Had a weakness for ghost stories as a child.’ Was as bloodthirsty as a little Apache, more like it. I’m sorry, but it won’t do her any good being painted as a swooning ninny. I don’t see why you two always have to tread on eggs about her.”
While I believe in plainspeaking, I’m not at all surprised when it’s not well received.
Quentin Stanhope regarded me as coldly as only an Englishman can, but I had withstood the icy eye of Sherlock Holmes when he was ordering me what to do and that was a chillier regard than any I had met on earth thus far.
“Who is this woman?” he asked Irene in a way meant to put me in my place: nonexistent.
Irene joined him in discussing me as if I were a butterfly pinned in a specimen box and quite deaf, not to mention dead.
“She is a blunt, American newspaper reporter who goes by the pen name of Nellie Bly. She has masqueraded as an inmate in sweatshops, madhouses, and brothels. She is a brave woman but perhaps has forgotten that reading about murderous thrills and chills is quite different from encountering them personally. Yet she is right in one thing, Quentin: Nell, the most peaceful and domestic of female souls, has always had a great interest in the gory, the frightful, the sensational. It was she who quickly educated me to the depredations of Jack the Ripper in London, down to the disembowelings.”
“Nell?” He remained smugly disbelieving. “You’ll forgive me, Irene, but a child may pretend to a certain swagger as a matter of self-protection. You should not have allowed her to follow you along this brutal path, particularly these—what do you call them now?”
“Lust-murders. And it is not I who named them, but a certain German aristocrat, Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing.”
“Lust-murders.” Quentin Stanhope’s frown became a glower, and given his current costume, he truly looked as ferocious as a Hun. “It would be like exposing my dear niece Allegra to a tour of Bluebeard’s castle. I can’t condone it.”
“She insisted! You know how adamant Nell can be.”
Again I intervened. “I recall she was quite boastful about having visited the Paris Morgue before, when you found the drowned man.”
“Drowned man?” Quentin’s alert gaze bored into Irene’s face again. “I’d not heard of that.”
“You’ve not heard of many of Nell’s and my adventures, perhaps because you never stay in one place long enough for a good storytelling session. Nell is not the sheltered miss you knew in London more than ten years ago, Quentin, any more than you are the coddled young gentleman-about-town. You know that there are stories of your life on the steppes and in the Hindu Kush that would whiten our hair to hear. Give us poor sheltered European ladies credit for having a few adventures of our own.”
“American!” I put in. “You and I are American, and I have never been sheltered.”
Quentin Stanhope ended the discussion by lifting his gauntleted hands in a gesture that was both surrender and a command for peace.
“We should not argue when dear lives are in the balance. I had thought one reason I was facing those maddening brutalities in the far corners of the
world was to keep the wolves from the doors at home. But Saucy Jack and his ilk have clearly broken down the barriers.” He glanced at me. “You can’t realize what a shock it is to see Irene traveling hand-in-glove with a woman not Nell.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” I reassured him with a grin. “We are far from hand-in-glove. It is more like hand-in-shackle.”
My bitter undertone made him raise his eyebrows at Irene, but he didn’t pursue the subject, at least not while I was present.
“What you both are saying,” he summed up, “is that Nell is made of sterner stuff than I think. That may be some comfort as we fumble our way to finding her, and Godfrey, but how are we to be sure that following the killer of these women in London, Paris, and now Neunkirchen will lead to our companions?”
“Exactly!” I put in.
“I don’t doubt it from what you told me of the deviltry afoot in those two great cities,” he told her. “Still, it goads me to be but a step behind such a killer. And there is more troubling news.”
Irene said nothing to encourage revelations, just watched and listened. It was odd to see her ceding center stage to another. Then I realized that danger had made more or less equals of us all, and she did not have an audience of her betters whose attention and assistance she needed to cajole and command.
“What is it?” she asked quietly.
“My sources among the Rothschild and British government agents, who have given me carte blanche thanks to the hidden aid of persons whose identity and high office I can only guess at, have all found disturbing traces. There was a party ahead of us, ahead of Kelly, all the way from Verdun, with luggage enough that some was loaded into the baggage car, from Verdun to…a final destination. Prague.”
“Prague. I cannot say I am surprised. This was Godfrey’s most recent posting for the Rothschilds.” Irene managed to look both hopeful and troubled.
“So you said,” Quentin pressed. “Do you know what his mission was?”
Irene shook her head as if irritated by her own ignorance. “It was a private commission between him and them. What sort of trusted agent would tell his wife the details, even if she was so thoughtless as to ask? I would no more ask you what your instructions from the Foreign Office were. Are.”
His smile made the dangling mustaches bracketing his mouth into wry parentheses. “Discretion is a rare virtue in a wife.”
“Discretion is a rare virtue in anyone, I have found. However,” Irene added with a raised eyebrow, “I have concluded some things about Godfrey’s assignment.”
“Excellent! Deduction is an established facility in wives.”
I sat forward myself to learn if Irene had withheld matters from me that she would share with an old friend.
“I believe that Godfrey was engaged upon vital but extremely dull matters of international property and political concerns,” she said, most disappointing me. “National alignments in this part of the world shift like chessmen on a board and have for centuries. Godfrey’s approach to any legal entanglements arising from this chronically volatile condition would be an impeccable blend of foresight, tact, and unexpected daring. He adores the red tape and fine points of legal discourse, yet is quite willing to turn them on end for his own purpose, or perhaps for a perceived greater good. I admit that such cerebral skirmishes bore me, but if Godfrey encountered trouble on such a mission, it would be because he was more than certain parties expected.”
“Including the parties for whom he was acting?”
Irene sighed and smiled at the same time. “Especially the parties for whom he was acting. He demands a certain standard of himself, and of his associates. It is, at times, annoying to one and all.”
Quentin Stanhope laughed. “Still, they hire him.”
“As the Foreign Office continues to employ you: they know they can find no more honest agent. Your refusal to accept the official version of events at the disastrous battle of Maiwand eventually exposed two dangerous spies in the region: Tiger and Sable.”
“But only years later, when everyone had forgotten the unnecessary deaths caused that day.”
“The dead remain so. Tiger and Sable remain alive and dangerous.”
He rested his forehead in his hand, stroking his sunburnt brow as if it throbbed. “We’ve heard little from or of them. They may be pretty toothless by now, or dead of their schemes and counter-schemes. Old battles, Irene; hoary foes. I have made an ancient land my home and myself into an anachronism.”
“How lucky, then, that an anachronism is precisely what I need at the moment. Godfrey mentioned a murder in one of his letters, in passing.” She smiled again, ruefully. “To Godfrey bloody murder will always take second place to the thrilling crimes of international appropriations, treaty violations, and legal atrocities involving state seizure of property.”
“These are the matters you think have led him astray into deep personal danger?”
Irene nodded. “What do you think, Pink?”
I was startled from my intense mental recording of this exchange for later entry into my journal.
Nell was so right about one thing, and one thing only! “Think, Pink” indeed! Still, my lowly opinion had been sought, and I would give it, even if it was not what my hostess wanted to hear.
“I think that James Kelly is laying the trail to follow and that the gory murder of a young woman in Prague, as mentioned by Godfrey himself as noteworthy, is the obvious incident to investigate next. As for this Golem man-monster of Prague that is suspected of reviving just in time to do this latest dirty deed, he sounds like a fantastical scapegoat to me. Still, he does remind one of those nasty sayings found in London and Paris about the Jews not being the ones who will be blamed for nothing, or whatever phrase that so contradicted itself. Follow the Ripper and we will find Godfrey, and Nell. If they’re still alive to find. That’s my opinion.”
My forthright views may not have won instant seconding, but they certainly silenced Irene and Quentin for some time.
18.
A Lukewarm Baptism
A young German gentleman told her that he had once greatly offenced an important local family by saying the word ‘corset’ in the presence of its ladies.
—MRS. FRANCES TROLLOPE, DOMESTIC MANNERS OF THE AMERICANS, 1832
After Godfrey’s departure, I found myself plunged into a troubled stupor I certainly could not describe as anything so refreshing as “sleep.”
I also found myself starting awake, as though the thought of sleep itself had become a torment. Yet a moment later I would again plummet off the cliff of consciousness into this uneasy waking dream.
In one vague interval someone had come and gone without my noticing. I gazed during one of my instant waking periods at a huge tub that now sat atop the thick turkey rug, steam rising from its rolled copper lips.
I had managed, in my linen-wrapped tossings, to unbutton and work off my petticoats, which now coagulated at my ankles in a gray froth of much-abused ruffles. I still half-lay on the rigid corpse of my split-asunder corset, too weak to work it out from under me. Only such hard goods as my walking boots and the many chains and charms upon my silver chatelaine were salvageable. At some time during the long ordeal, the checked cap that matched the coatdress had been shed like an autumn leaf.
The sight of the steaming tub inspired me to action beyond my current strength. I arranged to slide off the bed, leaving my underclothes behind in an unappetizing pile like a skin-shedding snake. At least I was still shrouded by the nightgown Godfrey had brought me. I remained snakelike despite my dislike for the creatures: I had to crawl rather than walk to the oasis of cleanliness that awaited me like a desert-heated mirage.
I thought of Quentin Stanhope fleeing the slaughter at the battle of Maiwand in Afghanistan, half-conscious, crawling through endless dunes of rock and sand.
With such a stalwart example in mind, I finally came to the warm copper vessel. I knew I needed an attendant, but believed Godfrey when he said that I would not care to
suffer the assistance of anyone native to the place.
The windows, two arched Gothic panels flung wide like an angel’s wings on a vista of heavenly blue sky, told me that my chamber was at some great height only a lizard could escape, else why taunt prisoners with unguarded openings?
Lizards. I shuddered. Why was I thinking of miserable crawling things? Perhaps because I had been reduced to their low animal form of animation myself?
I was able to get to my knees and gratefully inhale the hot clean mists rolling off the water. At least someone had heated it royally.
Finally I trembled my way upright, or half-upright. My lower limbs shook with the effort, and my poor ribs burned as if goaded by hot pokers.
Lifting the gown’s voluminous skirts around my knees, I stepped into the shallow end of the tub. Slowly I immersed myself, arranging the copious folds of my gown over the tub’s edges as a sort of tent.
I would not stand unclothed before those open windows, even if only clouds and hawks could peer in. I felt no security in this aerie of stone and wood, and in this most abysmal moment of my life could bear having no witness, not even a mouse from a hole in the wall.
The water was warm and enveloping. At first it stung my abused skin in a hundred places, but soon it comforted. I glanced at the huge copper ewer intended for rinsing. Beside it on the carpet lay a sharp-edged block of yellow soap, big enough to fill the hand of a giant.
Even from where I sat, I could see a slick of black-edged bubbles on the bar of soap’s surface. Who knew what filthy sort of person had used it before me? Yet my numerous stings and cuts needed cleansing, and the inherited dirt would soon dissipate in the fresh water of my bath. So I leaned over—ouch!—to seize and baptize it in the untainted water.
It rose up cleaner. I began to rub it on my extremities, wincing at the clumsy shape and sharp corners. Soon my once-pristine water was cloudier than the sky outside my window.
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