Castle Rouge

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  I slipped the nightdress over my arms and left it draped across the foot of the tub. Then I closed my eyes, held my breath, and submerged my head and face, hair and all.

  Milky water closed over me like warm silken sheets. A gentle shroud, it sheltered me from any unkind eye. I surfaced and lathered my sadly tangled hair once, twice, three times, producing a fleecy blanket of bubbles on the surface of the water by the time I finished.

  Examining the floor again, I discovered a large, rough oblong of pale linen. My towel, I supposed.

  This I dabbed at my hair and face, then my arms, until I was able to wrap it around myself, rise to my unsteady feet in the rapidly cooling tub water, and pull the nightgown into service again.

  Not much later I was dripping on the rug but decently covered, and theoretically cleaner. I paced back and forth, hoping the motion would dry me more. In so doing, I discovered a dressing table jammed into a dark corner, with a mirror hung above it.

  The still-stinging wounds aggravated by soap and water tempted me to the mirror. Once before it, I saw the surface glowed with the reflected light of the window. I discreetly elevated first one portion, then another of my gown, examining myself. I gasped to see the red-purple blotches left by the corset stays and huge bruises as gruesome as a bloody sunset all over my body.

  No wonder I ached and burned so!

  Worse than that actual discomfort was the uneasy suspicion that intrusions more foul than mere knocking-about might have been performed upon my unconscious form. I closed my eyes. Behind them a man’s rapacious figure came streaking for me like a bird of prey, all gleaming, focused eyes and reaching talons…who knew what had happened to me during the captivity that was but a blur in my memory?

  James Kelly had held a blade to my throat in his mean lodgings, and I had escaped. But who knew what he had done during all my unremembered days and nights of captivity?

  Someone knew, I told myself with a shudder. Several someones. All of my unknown abductors, for more than one man had participated in my capture.

  When Godfrey knocked at my door an hour or two later, I was mostly dry and sitting with my feet tucked up under me on the bed.

  I had kicked my discarded clothes into a pile beside the cold bathwater.

  “Nell. Good. You look better.”

  He eyed the malodorous pile by the copper tub. “Perhaps we could, er, wash these things in the cooling water.”

  “Godfrey, ‘these things’ are not worth the washing. I do not even want to contemplate what they went through, much less myself. I wish them burned.”

  “But…unlike myself you were not traveling with luggage. What will you wear?”

  I inspected him, aware for the first time of my companion’s dress.

  It was perfectly ordinary: his own tweed lounge suit so suitable for traveling, as my yellow-and-brown checked coatdress had once been….

  “Nell! What is it? Have I said something to upset you?”

  “Nothing. I merely…mourn the much kinder past. I want these things burned.”

  “Possibly the…people who serve here might produce some apparel you could wear, but it would not be…conventional.”

  “Filth is not conventional either. Burn them.”

  I had not meant to sound imperious. Indeed, I had never before sounded imperious in my life but apparently my extreme distaste for any souvenir of my awful captivity had convinced Godfrey. He swept the things into a bundle and deposited it in the head-high hearth on the chamber’s inside wall. A long match soon scratched the stone, and I watched the past week succumb to a slow fire.

  Someone knocked at a door.

  I started and huddled back into the pillows. My bed was huge enough to host Napoleon and most of his marshals. The tapestried curtains hung down like locks from a powdered wig, accented along the fold with pale swathes of dust.

  I sneezed.

  Godfrey went to his bedroom chamber door. I glimpsed a tray supported by bare female arms.

  He spoke, an odd combination of English, German, and a bit of Bohemian, I think. He returned with a silver tray covered with cracked and crude pottery.

  One such piece held a thick sort of soup in which floated a few deep red husks.

  “I’ve eaten here for more than a week, and survived.” Godfrey sat at the foot of my bed to lay the tray before me. “They favor highly spiced fare wherever we are, but it is hearty. I asked for broth, and you see that I have gotten stew.”

  “And dead red worms,” I added, peering at the offending particles.

  “Those are peppers, Nell. Don’t eat them if you don’t fancy fireworks on your tongue. But they appear harmless. If our captors had wanted to poison us, they could have done it by now.”

  “Our captors! Have you any idea who, Godfrey?”

  “Gypsy wagons visit the yard far below, but Gypsies are as common as cows in Poland, Bohemia, Austria, and Transylvania, where I think we now are.”

  “Transylvania? It sounds a pleasant, forested land.”

  “It is a mountainous, remote land, as much of Europe is the farther East it goes. We are almost on the edge of the mysterious East.”

  “There is nothing mysterious about the East except why Englishmen should be enchanted by it.”

  “Not I. I am enchanted by the West. And how is she, our Irene?”

  “I don’t know, Godfrey, that is what torments me! I left her surrounded by the Baron de Rothschild’s agents and Buffalo Bill and Red Tomahawk, as well as a coven of the most debased witches and warlocks a good Christian woman could imagine in her worst nightmares.”

  “This is not reassuring, Nell, Rothschild agents or not. ‘Buffalo Bill?’ ‘Red Tomahawk?’”

  “Famous scouts from the American Wild West. They were our allies, fierce as they were, and we sorely needed fierce allies in that place. I will never forget Red Tomahawk’s bloodcurdling war cry as he leapt to his hide-covered feet to hurl his battle-axe across the fire-lit cavern and into the man who was…well, doing something he shouldn’t have been to this poor, demented woman, but then they were all demented and leaping about like demons.”

  “Witches. Warlocks. Demons. Given what I have seen here at this castle, I am more likely to believe in demons than I once was. But try some of this soup, or stew, Nell, before you lose what little appetite you have.”

  “Why do I feel so…lost? I have lost time, memories, some sense of my self—”

  “The drugs they gave you were disorienting. I suspect that you were shipped across half of Europe like so much hard goods.”

  “My head still aches! Everything aches. I have never understood why someone would willingly take such drugs.”

  “What do you know of people willingly taking drugs?”

  “I? Nothing. Only that I have read…things. Oh, my head throbs so! Do not tax me, Godfrey.”

  He responded by lifting a large pot-metal spoon, somewhat dented, to my lips. In its bowl congregated an assortment of alien vegetables and some stringy strands of chicken.

  “You must recover your appetite, Nell, if we are ever to escape.”

  “Escape?” The word so cheered me that I slurped some of the mess into my mouth. It was impossible not to slurp.

  “Indeed. We are kept like a fallen prince and princess in a tower so high and remote we might as well be set like a cap on the widow’s peak of the world.”

  “Oh, dear! And where in the world is this widow’s peak located?”

  “In an obscure chain of mountains known as the Carpathians. They are the barrier that kept the bloody Turk from running rampant over Austria and Germany and Poland and France and even England. I have been using the dusty library shelves in my bedchamber, not having much else to do. There is quite a range of languages, including English. A charming chap named Vlad the Impaler turned the tide by literally crucifying the invading Turks by the thousands.”

  “Oh,” I said, thinking how useful Vlad the Impaler would have been in the cavern under l’Exposition universelle. Or
dinarily I am not in favor of barbarians, but having seen the barbarous acts performed in that cave, I was ready to call up Lucifer Himself to our defense if need be.

  “Irene must be all right,” Godfrey declared.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because Rothschild agents would fall before Irene would fall, and I do not think they did. And you mention how successful the fierce Indian of the American West known as Red Tomahawk was in throwing his axe. You are vague about the misdoings of the barbarous persons in the cavern but I suspect that Wild West fighters, Rothschild agents, and Irene were sufficient to handle them. Did she bring her pistol?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that settles it then.”

  “I must admit that Irene forced me to run from the field of battle and that I did not see its conclusion.”

  “Why did she do that?”

  I shuddered and sipped more soup to warm my courage. “There was a dreadful man we tracked. Mad and a murderer. James Kelly. Irene thinks…we all think, thought, he is…was…Jack the Ripper.”

  “Jack the Ripper!” Godfrey drew back, and withdrew the warming soup as well. “Jack the Ripper. That was in London. Months ago. What has Jack the Ripper to do with you, and Irene, and Paris? And this spring?”

  “Oh, Godfrey, that is such a tale! If James Kelly is truly Jack the Ripper, then I have had his knife-hand at my throat….”

  “Nell! That is not an achievement.”

  The soup was placed upon a bedside table, forgotten. Godfrey’s pale gray eyes were blazing like polished sterling silver. He was the wisest, most handsome, and kindest of men. I had almost forgotten that he, too, could be very fierce.

  “I rather thought it was. I stuck him with my hat pin.”

  “You stuck Jack the Ripper with a hatpin?”

  “If any of those poor women in Whitechapel had been wearing a more fashionable hat as opposed to a mere bonnet that ties on, they would have needed a hatpin and would have been better equipped to defend themselves.”

  “I, er, suppose so. In fact, I wish I had a hatpin here.”

  “We do!”

  “We do?”

  “I fished it out of the tangle that had been made of my hair during my…ah, ablutions.” (“Bath” seemed too forward a word to use with an unrelated male.) “I wore a cap with my coatdress, but it lacked ribbons and was not of a mind to stay put, no matter how jaunty it looked, so I skewered it with my twelve-inch hatpin, on an angle from front visor to back chignon, so it would not be noticeable.”

  “I see,” said Godfrey, who clearly did not. “Apparently it escaped the notice of your captors. Where is this redoubtable hat pin now?”

  I tried to avoid glancing down at my poitrine. (Which is also called a decollétage. Sometimes French words are very useful. But not often.) “This nightgown you provided was quite voluminous, but the front placket was mysteriously…deep. I was forced to affix it into some semblance of modesty with the hatpin.”

  “The placket was designed for a male wearer. So you have a foot-long hatpin holding your nightshirt together?”

  I glanced down at my modestly closed gown. “It works perfectly.”

  “So long as you do not toss and turn in your sleep! Nell, I must have it.”

  “I cannot remain modest and give up my hatpin.”

  “You cannot remain breathing and not.”

  “It is as serious as that?”

  “We are in the hands of Irene’s worst enemies.”

  “Not ours?”

  “We are mere pawns, but the game is deadly. Think of the enormity of arranging the abduction of us both, one in Paris and one traveling from Prague. It took planning. It took patience. And it took nerve.”

  “But why?” I asked, surrendering the pin and clamping the gown together by hand in its place.

  “If we knew why, we’d be on our way out of here. And if Irene knew why, she’d be here, shortly. But we cannot rely on distant aid. We are in the soup together, dear Nell.” He glanced at my crude bowl. “We must first survive, and then we must escape.”

  He finished by stabbing my hatpin through the lining of his jacket where it could not be seen, like an invisible sword in a fabric sheath.

  A sword big enough for an elf, and we would have to fight ogres.

  19.

  Sentimental Journey

  She isn’t much for style, but what she has say she says right out.

  —GEORGE MADDEN, EDITOR OF THE PITTSBURG DISPATCH, 1885

  FROM A JOURNAL

  Quentin Stanhope proved to be less of a traveling companion than a uniformed jack-in-the-box.

  At each stop, he would hasten off the train. While Irene and I availed ourselves of comfort stations and ate lunch—when there was time—or purchased food from station vendors for the journey, Quentin had better business to be about. He sent cablegrams, interrogated station workers, and roamed even farther afield.

  Sometimes he rejoined us in our compartment for the next leg of the journey. Sometimes he did not join us until the next stop, or several.

  Like a lady on a ballroom floor anticipating a waltz, Irene seemed content to allow him to lead. She spent the long hours jolting along the tracks and through the hilly countryside studying Nell’s notes and drawings of the Paris attack sites.

  “Why is Sherlock Holmes so intrigued by cork and wax droppings?” she would mutter. “Obviously spirits were used to excite the—” She glanced up at me. “What shall we call these cave people, Pink? You are the wordsmith. We need something accurate but apropos.”

  “‘Demons’ seems a little excessive.”

  “Nell tends to see things in extremes,” she agreed, “but what else would you call participants in a drunken, dancing, yammering Roman orgy that ends in mutilation and possible death?”

  “Crazy?”

  “Madmen, then. It served for Jack the Ripper. Madman. Then why were women among these crazed…celebrants?”

  “I guess women can go as crazy as men, given half a chance. Maybe more so. When I was in the madhouse, most of the inmates were female.”

  “As are most of the inmates in a brothel, unless the house happens to be among the minority devoted to unnatural acts. From the populations of madhouses and brothels, one could conclude that women are more insane and immoral than men are.”

  “Not me! The women don’t hold the purse strings, that’s the thing. When you don’t have the money, you have to beg, steal, or starve…or sell your work or yourself. And then the poor things, even the sweatshop girls I worked among, what do they do on their rare days off but get drunk and let the mashers have their way with them and then they end up in the homes for fallen women. I also put in some time there in the service of a story.”

  Irene gazed my way, seeing inside me for a change, as if the urgency of her quest had eased off a bit. “How did you become a girl reporter, Pink?”

  “The way all the best things happen. By accident.”

  “That’s an interesting theory of life. How so?”

  “Well, when I was twenty a man who called himself the Quiet Columnist wrote in The Pittsburg Dispatch that girls aren’t good for much of anything but managing a home. Nice work if you can get out of the sweatshops and the boardinghouses and stay away from men who’ll beat you as fast as look at you. He said that a woman ‘outside her sphere’ was a ‘monstrosity.’”

  “A woman’s ‘sphere’ being—?”

  “Married to a man and safe at home. He completely overlooked women who must earn their bread, like my mother and myself. I can quote the worst of it, for I carry a clipping in the front of my journal to remind me always: He wrote that ‘women, who have an insatiate desire to rush into the breaches under the guise of defending their rights, but which is in reality an effort to wrest from a man certain prerogatives bequeathed him by heaven, are usually to a degree disgusting to womanly women and manly men. There is no greater abnormity than a woman in breeches, unless it is a man in petticoats.’

 
“That column made me so mad, I can’t tell you!”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I suppose you’ve been told to stick to the domestic arts a time or two as well.”

  “Even by no less than Sherlock Holmes. Your Pittsburg columnist seems to have gotten his ‘breaches’ and ‘breeches’ mixed up, not to mention a lot of five-dollar words that add up to nothing. You didn’t find that our evening stroll in trousers made us into instant ‘abnormities,’ did you?”

  “I do believe in gracious female dress, but admit I found wearing trousers a terrific lark.”

  I was eager to continue my recital of Pittsburg indignities, caught up in telling my own story for a change.

  “Anyway, I sat right down and wrote a long letter telling Mr. Quiet Columnist’s boss, the paper’s editor, that I could so do those things and seek work, and indeed had to. I signed it ‘Lonely Orphan Girl.’ Q. C. seemed to think we girls all had a choice in life, when most of us don’t.”

  “And you got a letter back.”

  I managed to look shame-faced, like the green girl of twenty I had been five years before. “I didn’t use a return address. Women don’t do that, put their names out in public like that. Even Bessie Bramble, the one woman columnist on the newspaper, uses a pseudonym.”

  “I have never found anonymous indignation very satisfying,” Irene said, harking back to my earlier comment.

  “Anyway, Q. C.’s boss got my letter.”

  “His ‘boss.’ Such an American word,” she mused. “We forget what a colorful slang we have, and so individual. ‘Dear Boss.’”

  She was quoting a letter attributed to Jack the Ripper, but I was off on my own story. I told the stories of others so much I had forgotten how much my own meant to me.

  “I didn’t say anything colorful in my letter, although I could have. Anyway, next thing I knew, there was this request in the letters to the editor column to ‘Lonely Orphan Girl.’” I recited the words I would never forget in all my life. “‘If the writer of the communication signed “Lonely Orphan Girl” will send her name and address to this office, merely as a sign of good faith, she will confer a favor and receive the information she desires.’”