Castle Rouge
Page 19
“A significant difference, you will allow. So Irene was interested in her as a witness to the discovery of a crime.”
“I do hope so! What other reason would she have for insisting the girl move into our Paris hotel rooms? She even took her to the Paris Morgue, without me.”
“Obviously, as a witness,” Godfrey hastened to point out. “Irene will do many unusual things when pursuing an enquiry. You must tell me the whole story of these Paris murders, and what they have to do with Jack the Ripper.”
“Oh, I will. I have, in fact, the small notebook from my chatelaine with me to serve as reference, though I have had to write very small and succinctly.”
“That must have been extremely difficult.”
“Writing small?”
“No, succinctly.” His gray eyes twinkled as he sipped the wine.
“Well, first I wish to know how you were kidnapped. Did a man with mad eyes come rushing at you?”
“Luckily, no. I simply followed instructions. The Rothschild interests had been contemplating a loan to a Transylvanian nobleman wishing to use this castle as collateral. I was to travel here to assess the property and ensure that man’s agents were able and honest.”
“And once you arrived here?”
“It was made plain that I was not to leave. In fact, I believe the entire transaction to have been a ruse. I have met no Transylvanian nobleman, only Gypsies and guards. And the cats and rats, of course, which I do not believe add value to the property. In fact, a decaying castle in this remote forest has no value whatsoever. The count, unless he is totally fictitious, which is distinctly likely, will have to look elsewhere than the House of Rothschild for underwriting.”
“Obviously this Transylvanian business was a complete ruse to get you here. But I cannot imagine why, or why I am here also. Perhaps your secret mission for the Rothschilds in Prague would better explain matters.”
“Perhaps it would, but I am sworn to silence.”
“Since I am the walking dead, perhaps you can confide in me.”
“Nell! Do not refer to yourself that way.”
“Godfrey, I have spent nearly a week in what amounts to a coffin. I feel quite resurrected. What can be so secret that you cannot break silence in such dire circumstances?”
“Baron de Rothschild himself demanded secrecy.”
“Yes, I know, and Irene was not too pleased about that.”
“She was annoyed to be kept in the dark but in a perverse way she was also proud that I was the one man on earth the Baron trusted with this mission.”
“Now she must be merely frantic. I shudder to think how our mutual disappearances may affect her. She is a performing artist, after all, and her emotions are always finer tuned than those of less imaginative persons, such as myself. She may not yet know of your predicament.”
“I pray not! The Rothschild interests in Prague expect me to be gone for some time and knew that communication would be slow and unreliable.”
“Are we really so remote as all that, Godfrey?”
“We are in the back garden of Nowhere, dear Nell. These regions are quite uncharted by all but the natives.”
I sighed, too abstracted to refuse more wine.
“It cannot be this assignment regarding Transylvanian real estate that was so secret,” I said finally. “It must have been a matter much closer to Prague.”
“You are right.”
“Don’t sound so impressed. I am familiar with your ways of thinking and acting since I was your typewriter-girl in the Temple years ago. And”—I could not resist getting back at him a tiny bit for presuming that I should not be a full confidante now that our fates were conjoined—“I have apprenticed Sherlock Holmes since last I saw you.”
He set goblet to tabletop with a thump. “Holmes! What was he doing in Paris, and what were you doing associating with That Man?”
I was much amused by Godfrey referring to the creature in the same capitalized tone that I took, so I speedily answered his question. “It involves those very macabre matters I so unwisely referred to earlier. I, too, was sworn to secrecy by the Baron de Rothschild, along with Irene, of course.”
Godfrey’s mouth made a grim line. “I see that the House of Rothschild has been exceedingly busy with both sides of the House of Norton and Adler. Not to mention the House of Huxleigh. Clearly, we must make a clean breast of things hitherto secret. Shall I go first?”
“Please.” Secretly, I dreaded having to describe the cruel and gruesome scenes Irene and I, and sometimes Pink, had confronted since Godfrey had left us gay and innocent in Paris.
First he rose and found a candelabra, lighting the stumps of several yellow tapers. By now the sky was almost dark. The birds had become silhouettes that still called and dipped and rose far away, looking more like bats.
Godfrey set the candelabra on our impromptu dinner table, where the flames flickered in time to the last visible flights beyond our window on the world.
He poured more ruddy wine into each of our goblets.
The darkness falling both inside and out, the candlelight, the vast but deserted castle setting, all these reminded me of the most deliciously terrifying ghost stories that had gripped my mind as a child and never let go.
I rose and fetched my nightgown from the bed, using it as shawl over my overexposed arms and shoulders.
Once I had seated myself again, Godfrey began.
“The Baron enjoined secrecy because the matter touched on the one issue that frightens him: a violent uprising against the Jews. The site was again Prague.”
I nodded, having seen this fear of the Baron’s for myself only recently, but then involving his home city of Paris.
“Irene and I had been in Prague, along with you,” I pointed out, “when rumors of the revived Golem in the Jewish Quarter threatened the civil peace there last year. Why could we two not know of the problem now?”
“The Golem was merely a legend, an animated clay man-monster capable of killing. That was…child’s play”—for some reason the phrase made Godfrey wince as soon as he had employed it—“compared to the latest manifestation in Prague. Quite frankly, the Baron thought female ears far too delicate to hear the circumstances.”
“The Baron,” I said indignantly, “drew Irene and me into matters in Paris that involved murder and mutilation and maisons de rendezvous.”
“He must have grown desperate, then, after I left.”
I decided not to take offense. “I suppose he was. It took Sherlock Holmes too long to come over from London. He had to rely in the nonce on our fine female ears.”
“And this led to the dancing naked demons and Red Tomahawk’s battle axe?”
“Yes. But do go on about your more shocking case in Prague, Godfrey, while I try to think of terms genteel enough to convey to a gentleman all that we three women have been through in Paris in the past three weeks.”
“Irene, you, and this Pink person?”
“Yes.”
Godfrey stirred, then took a cigar case from his inside breast pocket. Only one smoke remained. “Do you mind, Nell?”
“I always mind but on certain occasions I keep quiet about it. This is one of them.”
He half-rose to lean over the candelabra and draw one candle flame into the already lit and extinguished cigar-end. I realized that the poor man had been husbanding his supply of cigars and would soon be out.
In moments a noxious blue plume twined up toward the window.
As with Irene, smoking was a process that aided thinking, and then led to talking.
“You know, Nell, how volatile the peace between Christians and Jews is in all our great cities.”
“Indeed, since I have delved so deeply into the murders of Jack the Ripper I learned that it has been of grave concern to the leaders of London and Paris as well as Prague. It seems that the first instinct with these murders has been to blame the Jews.”
“And in Paris you say there were Ripperlike killings of women.”
“Courtesans, the Prince of Wales, mutilation. I am rather astounded to hear you use such terms so easily.”
“I could not help knowing what was really going on, though I tried very hard not to. Perhaps you see that you need not spare my ‘delicate’ ears.”
“The Baron did think this was too much grue for women. A body was found in Prague as well.”
“You mentioned the death of a woman in one of your letters, and that the Golem was suspected again.”
“Did I? It seems a lifetime ago. No, that woman’s murder was ghastly, but routine compared to another more unthinkable murder, involving a mutilation—”
“Of a second woman!” I cried in excitement, for if multiple women had been slain in Prague, then the Ripper had been at work there before Paris. London to Prague to Paris, it made no sense. Kelly couldn’t have gone as far as Prague, could he? Would he?
Godfrey shook his head, speechless.
“Not another woman dead?”
He shook his head again. “Not this time. A baby. An infant.”
“A baby? Murdered?”
I had thought myself beyond all shock but now I grew suddenly speechless. My arms were wrapped around each other holding my makeshift shawl closed over my bosom. Let my arms open out, just a bit, and they could cradle a child. A baby. An infant. I had not held a little one since visiting my father’s flock in Shropshire. During my years as a governess, my charges had always reached the age of the schoolroom.
Yet I remembered holding these small, sometimes squalling, often hairless bundles of soft pink skin and wide, wandering blue eyes.
That someone, anyone, could slaughter a baby—!
“Nell. I feared it would be too much for you.”
Godfrey’s hand on my wrist made me jerk my arms apart. The phantom babe in my arms vanished safely into the past.
“Yes, it is,” I said, “but tell me anyway. Only three weeks ago I would have never dreamed of such infamy in a sane world, but I have since seen for myself the kind of fiend who might do such a thing. It is as Irene said: if we do not work to stop him, who will?”
“There were rumors of forbidden Jewish rites at the old cemetery,” Godfrey said as total dark descended on the world outside and the room within, except for the fluttering of the candelabra flames in the air from the open window, which sounded like the hollow whoosh of bat wings, and the emberlike glow of his last cigar.
“There are passages and caverns beneath that area,” I pointed out, “as Irene and you and I found on our last visit to Prague.”
He nodded. “The conspirators who needed a prison found that lost underworld first. This time another breed of cave rat had infested the area.
“The King sent in soldiers on information that had been given by some mad Gypsy beggar raving about the Infant Savior dying while still in His manger.”
“When was this?”
“In April.”
“So Kelly could have come to Paris after…”
“It is hard to imagine a man named Kelly, Nell, taking part in the debased ritual the soldiers interrupted. It was a sacrilegious enactment of a painting of the Virgin and Child they found: a young woman with her newborn babe lying in a manger. Only no magi came to offer gifts, only madmen who speared the infant through the heart and drained his blood as the mother looked on.
“The men the soldiers found escaped, all scattered like rats through the passages, knowing every turn as a snake does its coils. The so-called mother remained, along with the tiny corpse.
“Pottery jugs of some strange liquor lay all around. And cups. There was some evidence that the men had drunk the baby’s blood.”
“And they escaped, these cannibals?!”
Godfrey nodded. “The soldiers had not been prepared for what they found. Shock struck them to stone at first, battle-hardened soldiers. So all they had was the mother, who claimed she was the Virgin Mary, and the poor, white, limp body. The child was only days old.”
“Horrible! Even Paris was nothing like this. Do you suppose, Godfrey, that it is possible that the rumors were right? It has long been said that the Jews kill Christian babies. Could this have been some hidden Jewish ceremony to deny the Godhood of the baby Jesus?”
“The mother was Moravian, not Jewish. The men who ran wore hooded robes and girdles; no one could say if they were Jews or Arabs…or Druids, for that matter. Allegations of Jews killing Christian babies have never resulted in proof, although they resulted in the killings of many Jewish men, women, and children in the ghettos. Baron de Rothschild’s representatives insist that no Jewish ritual, however old, sacrificed anything but animal flesh.”
I shook my head in disbelief. How could I have expected to have encountered an atrocity even worse than the insanity in the cavern beneath l’Exposition universelle? And so soon after? Was the entire world awash with madness and brutality and pointless death? Perhaps so….
Godfrey went on, reluctantly, but caught up in witnessing to the case he had encountered. “The mother—woman, though she was just a girl herself—could or would say nothing, save that she was the Virgin Mary. She, too, had suffered.” Godfrey looked away. “Certain…parts had been mutilated.”
“What parts?”
“Nell, I’d rather not say.”
“I must know, Godfrey.”
“There is no polite way to describe it.”
“You are a barrister. I trust you to find a way to convey your meaning in the subtlest possible terms.”
“We have never spoken of such matters. Most men and women do not.”
“Most men and women are not imprisoned in deserted castles in the wild Carpathian Mountains with Gypsies and cats and rats. You must understand, Godfrey, that Irene and I interrupted just such a wild, vicious scene in Paris. There is perhaps a connection. Tell me.”
“That poor girl. Someone had…removed…certain attributes of womanhood, apparently months before. Before the baby was even born.”
“Certain attributes?”
“The ones considered most feminine.”
I thought I knew what he meant, but must be sure.
“Can you be more specific?”
“I can, but I…”
I had never seen Godfrey so at a loss for words. He took a long draught of the dinner wine, then spoke, suddenly as brusque as a surgeon.
“Her left breast was missing, for one.”
I gasped.
“You see, Nell! I should have kept silent.”
“You do not understand, Godfrey. I am not so much shocked by the brutality of the deed, God help me, as by the similarity of it. That was why Red Tomahawk threw his battle axe. It was to stop a man who had cut off a woman’s breast from doing further damage. There seems to be only one explanation. I had spoken of demons and witches in trying to describe that scene in Paris and the atrocities we traced from one end of the so-called City of Light to the other, but now I have a better description. Devil worshipers. These sorts of things are the work of devil worshipers.”
“You’re not saying that Jack the Ripper was a devil worshiper?”
“Why not? Whyever not? The things he did, the mutilations…it was suggested that his abominable…excavations into the bodies of his victims was for wombs to sell to physicians. What if he was looking for unborn babies?”
“Nell! I cannot imagine you even imagining such things, much less suggesting them to me.”
But Godfrey had not been where I had been and seen what I had seen, nor had he once eagerly read the dozens of gruesome ghost stories that had seasoned my young imagination.
“All I can say is that just after that unthinkable act of mutilation, when I rejoiced to see Red Tomahawk hurl himself and his axe at the man who performed it, another man emerged from that writhing, debas
ed crowd.
“I saw James Kelly burst from the mob of robed figures, running right for me as he recognized me from our first encounter. He meant to make sure that I did not elude him again.”
I shook myself free of the dreadful memory, whose shadow had followed me to this remote castle on the edge of Europe, and to Godfrey.
“I was captured shortly after, and brought here. I wonder what they want of me. Women do not seem to fare well in their hands.”
“She was very young, this girl they found in Prague,” Godfrey hastened to reassure me. “Perhaps sixteen, no more.”
“If you mention my great age to relieve my mind, I would point out that most of Jack the Ripper’s London victims were above forty and I am just past thirty.”
My best tone of umbrage accomplished what I had intended: distracting Godfrey from the bad news he had borne and his own dismay that I had seen too much in the past three weeks to pretend shock at the news of it.
“I did not mean to imply that you were too old to be a victim, Nell,” he said.
“I should hope not. Nor am I too old to contemplate escape from a most unpleasant circumstance. I propose that you attempt your route across the castle walls, only I will braid our bed linens into a rope so that you have some safety line.”
He glanced doubtfully at the hulking darkness of my gigantic, drapery-hung bed. During our talk I had realized that neither of us dare linger at the castle, no matter how apparently deserted, to see what our captors meant to do with us when they arrived. And they would arrive soon, the entire coven, no doubt.
“I assume you have a similar resting place?” I prodded. Dear Godfrey, he had glimpsed a bit of the horror, but not its full outline.
He nodded, still puzzled.
“The sheets for these behemoths of beds are the size of sails, Godfrey. I need an instrument sharp enough to start a tear along the weave of the linen, and of course they bring us no knives to eat with. Luckily they did not notice nor think to take away my chatelaine, which was in my pocket. My embroidery shears are just the thing. I shall shred your sheets and mine. Once I have strips to braid I can produce a rope long and strong enough to take you halfway to Warsaw. Our current captors will never notice that the linens are missing beneath these heavy brocaded coverlets, and, from what you tell me, they are far too slovenly to want to change our bed linens.”