Castle Rouge

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Footsteps sounded outside our door.

  Irene rushed to pull the door wide open. “What—?”

  Quentin entered, a sheepish red giant in his wake: Bram Stoker.

  “Bram!” Her tone was neither accusing nor welcoming, simply announcing.

  He paused outside our threshold, hat in hand, wiping his forehead with a huge white square of Irish linen.

  “My dear Irene, once more you find me in an awkward position, and I find myself most shamed to see you again.”

  “Shame is a pointless emotion that has its origin in the attitudes of others, not anything we have done ourselves. I don’t much subscribe to it.”

  Still he hesitated to cross our doorway. “Are you sure you want the company of such a blackguard as I might be? Had this chap not taken my part, I would be undergoing a police interrogation even now, and these fellows here do not speak a drop of English.”

  “Come in,” she urged him, impatient at last. “You certainly have a tale I would like to hear.”

  As he entered our chambers, nodding ducklike in embarrassment, I noticed at once that his beard was not as sharply trimmed as in Paris and that his clothes were rough-and-tumble tweeds more suitable for country lanes than city thoroughfares. All in all, Bram Stoker resembled a shaggy auburn-haired bruin that had charged through a very large bramble patch.

  “Sit down,” Irene ordered. Mr. Stoker responded like a tame bear in the circus and sat, saying no more. “Quentin, go down to the dining room and order up breakfast…everything hearty you can think of, with pots of tea and coffee and lots of cream for both.”

  Bram had sat upon the nearest possible object, a leather-covered ottoman. To see such a huge man perched upon such a low stool made him look an oversized youth being kept after school for bad behavior.

  Despite her vaunted disdain for shame, Irene immediately capitalized on this advantage and began striding back and forth before him, in apparent agitation. “I sent you on ahead to find Godfrey. What are you doing in Prague still? Prague is where Godfrey’s journey into obscurity began, not ended!”

  “I know, I know.” Mr. Stoker patted his forehead again. Like most large men, his nerves showed up on his face in the form of perspiration. “I have, in fact, tramped over half the Carpathians in the past few days and only yesterday returned to Prague to seek out more specific information on the area.”

  “Which you expected to find in a brothel?”

  Mr. Stoker flushed as readily as I do. “That earlier murder in Prague that Godfrey mentioned in his letter to you? It had occurred outside of a brothel, which I discovered on my first swing through the city, before I took the train to Transylvania and from there went on foot. I learned much in the mountains.” He seemed to gather himself, anxiety fleeing before the greater excitement of news. “Much. There has been a good deal of foreign activity at a particular village near Sigisoara, near the old castle that hangs over the settlement like some crumbling church from a forgotten religion.”

  He rubbed his hands together in relish even as his huge frame shuddered with delicious distaste. “The region reeks with bizarre legend and folktales. I have never encountered such an elaborate history, though I have never visited this eldritch part of the world before. I tell you, Irene, it makes the bare, witch-haunted heaths of Macbeth’s Scotland seem like a South Sea island paradise compared to it. This bitter land’s name means ‘over the forests,’ and it consists of a plateau surrounded by mountains, often iced over with snow. The forests are thicker than thorn bushes. Every height is crowned with a fortress, and the whole region is one impenetrable mass of stone and tree, except to the man on foot, of course, and he must venture alone. The only carts I saw were a few Gypsy caravans drawn by lone sway-backed horses, and they went singly. Otherwise, it is all peasants and travel by shank’s mare, which suits me. These rural folk seldom venture from their villages and have not done so for hundreds of years.”

  “No wonder even the Magyars have kept their greedy paws off of it.”

  This was Quentin Stanhope speaking. He had finally followed his charge into the room and now lounged against the fireplace mantel in the way of the lord of the manor. So like an Englishman!

  Quentin nodded at Mr. Stoker but looked at Irene. “Not your Mr. Kelly, I presume?”

  “No.” Irene sounded momentarily disappointed. “This is Mr. Bram Stoker, a respectable man of the theater.”

  “I thought that there were no respectable persons of the theater,” Quentin retorted.

  “You have been listening to Nell too much,” Irene answered, and then caught her lip between her teeth, as if dearly wishing to listen to Nell too much right now.

  Not I! I stole another glance at Quentin Stanhope. He looked quite dashing in his current street guise. I could see why even meek little Nell had developed a sentimental attachment to such a man, especially one with the same chameleon tendencies as her pal Irene. Nell was, of course, far too prissy for the likes of Quentin Stanhope. He would require a more adventuresome woman. I had never met the absent Godfrey, but couldn’t help wondering how a pasty-faced barrister in an idiotic lambs-wool wig could possibly compete for female hearts with a sunburnt spy in Arab robes.

  Quentin Stanhope intercepted my gaze and winked at me before turning an absolutely bland expression back on Irene and her theatrical friend.

  Well! At least someone in this company realizes that I am a keen and useful observer and no mere Sancho Panza to some female Don Quixote.

  “Getting back to Transylvania,” Irene said to Bram, sounding troubled. “You describe a difficult, rugged terrain.”

  “No doubt!”

  “And this is the place where you think Godfrey was sent?”

  “I am no confidante of the Rothschild interests.” Mr. Stoker aimed an accusing look at Quentin Stanhope, who obviously was. “I am a mere walker and wanderer, but I have learned to absorb a great deal from my solitary tramps. I sense…some ancient evil brewing in those whited sepulchers of mountains. Should I have encountered Macbeth’s three witches over a boiling pot in the forest, I would not have been surprised.”

  “Or a single witch over a bowl of burning embers,” Irene murmured to me in a stage aside.

  I could see that she allowed for a theatrical sense of exaggeration in Bram Stoker’s account. Her comment to me both mocked that tendency in him, and in herself.

  And in me? And Quentin? Perhaps. We all played larger-than-life roles in the world. In a sense, we all performed stunts. How ironic that the only two apparently endangered members of our circle were the most conventional among us.

  “So, Bram.” Irene changed subjects as an orchestral conductor might initiate a new movement. “Why were you at the brothel?”

  Bram Stoker bristled, quite literally with that red beard of his. “Why was Mr. Stanhope there?” He looked at Quentin.

  “For the same reason, I suppose,” Quentin said. “I was investigating the earlier deaths of prostitutes in Prague. Unfortunately, another occurred while I—we—were in attendance. Irene had told me that you had gone on ahead, but I didn’t realize who you were when I extricated you from the thick-skulled Bohemian authorities, who are utterly innocent of the international implications of these murders, and should remain so.”

  Bram looked a little dazed. “Quite right. I’d returned to Prague because I was at a loss on how to proceed in Transylvania. Reinforcements seemed called for, though my military strategy is usually deployed for the stage and in my stories.” He sighed heavily. “The truth is, Irene, I am at my best tramping around a new scene meeting residents and gathering stories. Storming the castle was never my bailiwick.”

  “You believe you have found a castle that needs storming?” she asked.

  “Perhaps. Meanwhile, we are now enmeshed with another of these brothel-house murders. It is most confusing.”

  “No,” said Quentin, thrusting himself away from the mantel that had been his prop. “It is appalling, but not confusing. I have been in Pra
gue long enough to discover that the city has been plagued by a series of prostitute murders.”

  “How many?”

  “Perhaps four or five. They were over a series of months and prostitute murders are common, but these were uncommonly violent.”

  “When?” Irene asked.

  “Before the killings in Paris.”

  “And last autumn, in London?”

  “After London.”

  “So…London. Prague, then Paris…and now Prague again. Why would a lust-murderer, a man obsessed with a particular type of woman, usually a prostitute who can be found in plentiful supply everywhere, shuttle back and forth across Europe like a train on schedule? Is that it? He traveled by train?”

  “What,” I put in, “of your discoveries in Paris? The saints’ days and the geographical pattern of the murders?”

  “Indeed. What of it?” Irene’s gold-brown eyes burned as red-hot as Russian cherry amber. “Quentin! I need a map of London, of Whitechapel, with the Ripper’s killing sites marked upon it. Can you get that?”

  He raised his now manicured hands. “Specific demands mean swifter need, no doubt.”

  “No doubt. You can contact a man in the Foreign Office for aid. One Mycroft…Holmes.”

  Quentin Stanhope paled beneath his bronzed complexion. “In the Foreign Office…my God, Irene, M. H. is the F. O. It’s worth my neck to irritate that gentleman with an unwelcome or trivial behest.”

  “I have it on good authority that he will be helpful. You might mention the name ‘Sherlock.’”

  “‘Sherlock.’ Hmmm. Interesting. I will wire at once.”

  He snatched up his homburg and was out the door with only a terse nod of farewell.

  I was taken aback by this turn of events and demanded of Irene, “Do you really want Sherlock Holmes to know in what direction you are heading?”

  “No, Pink, I don’t, but it can’t be helped. Besides, he strikes me as far too devout a man of science to wander far into the swamps of religious symbolism. He offered me the aid of his highly placed brother, and I will take it. Besides—” She smiled ever so slightly. “If he thinks I am intruding upon his homeground by drawing on Mycroft Holmes’s resources, he will be less likely to look abroad for my inspiration and leave us alone to do our rescue work. His interests are not personal as ours are. I will not sacrifice Godfrey’s or Nell’s safety for the easy-resting of any royal head in the world, nor anyone’s ulterior purpose.”

  I felt that she cautioned me against self-interest as well.

  Bram Stoker had finally risen from his place of reprimand and now hunkered over the Prague maps Irene had used as a tablecloth.

  “Fascinating,” he murmured. “If Stanhope were here to tell us the locations of the murders, I imagine we could also plot the similar crimes of Prague. Here. This spot is the brothel where Stanhope and I, er, discovered each other. And there is the old Jewish cemetery, only a few streets away.”

  “So it is.” Irene had come over to stand beside him, looking like a porcelain doll beside some great stuffed friendly bear.

  I watched them warily, not forgetting Irene’s identifying the cosmopolitan Irishman as a Ripper suspect: he worked late at the theater, had been in London throughout the Whitechapel Horrors, was to be found in Paris this May when women again died, and could have easily slipped away to Prague on his solitary walking “vacations” to remote and unusual places. And Prague had just provided the second brothel in which he was to be found the very same night as a dead woman was. Add to this his obvious fascination with occult and gruesome matters and…Bram Stoker was still a very formidable suspect. The Krafft-Ebing book made plain that lust-murderers were people you’d never look at twice in that regard. Besides, I could better imagine an intelligent man like Stoker escaping unseen from the several Ripper murder sites, whereas James Kelly might be too madly erratic to play quite the clever fiend the world called Saucy Jack.

  Irene produced Nell’s artist’s case from her carpetbag and drew a sheet from the many papers it guarded.

  “There is a man we had encountered in our investigations,” she told Mr. Stoker, “who was in Paris at the same time we were. I was able to describe him to an artist friend in Montmartre.”

  “Not Toulouse-Lautrec?!”

  “No, Henri is a fine caricaturist but too much of an artist to permit people to resemble themselves overmuch in his work, other than through a wicked line or two that is far too subtle for the literal observer.” Irene’s smile at memories of the artist’s vivid posters of Paris nightlife faded. “Nell and I encountered him during our first sojourn in Paris. She was most unimpressed by his work.”

  I bit my tongue to keep from saying that being unimpressed was something of a religion with Miss Penelope Huxleigh. In the States we would have called her a wet blanket.

  Bram Stoker lifted the sketch into the light from the window. “I don’t know this hand, but—” He squinted at the paper. “By God, that is the servile fellow I saw slinking around the brothel last night. I took him for some laundryman who liked to sniff the dirty wash!”

  He turned scarlet and glanced at me with horror, not realizing that I knew instantly the type of brothel hanger-on he meant. Our genial Irishman was more intimate with the cast of characters in bawdy houses than he liked to admit.

  “You saw him? This man?” Irene demanded.

  “Briefly. He was leaving when I noticed him.”

  “This was after the woman’s dead body was discovered?”

  “No. Only moments before. I should remember, for I was soon herded into a small room filled with large policemen in very gaudy uniforms and put through my paces. That’s how I met Stanhope. He was brought in to translate. I say, what makes him exempt from suspicion, when I am not?”

  “He is in the British foreign service, and you are not.”

  “A spy? Really?” Mr. Stoker eyed the closed chamber door, as if he would rush out to catch up to Quentin Stanhope and instantly interview him. “Fascinating! Seemed a rather trivial chap.”

  “That is the point of spying. But you must tell no one.”

  Mr. Stoker looked insulted. “I keep many eminent persons’ confidences in my position as manager for Irving and his theater.”

  “Nell’s life may depend upon it, and Godfrey’s.”

  “I swear, Irene,” he said, hand on heart. “I would never do anything to harm a hair on either of those heads.”

  That I believed. But then the Ripper never killed anyone he knew, did he? Only anonymous prostitutes that the world would little miss or long remember.

  The two of them stared down at the map for some moments after this sober turn of the conversation. Then a knock on the door announced the normal world going about its daily business. Irene literally shook herself into a more normal mood to admit the waiters. She lured Bram away from maps and missing friends by sweeping the table free of papers she transferred to the nearby desk. In moments the surface that had been the center of gruesome speculation became a centerpiece of a breakfast feast.

  After some persuasion, Bram finally tucked into the piles of eggs and sausage and fried potatoes like a starving wolf. I suspect that if what he said was true, he had arrived at the brothel too late for dinner. In any decent foreign brothel, dinner was a lavish affair that marked the beginning of the night’s entertainment.

  Irene rearranged the food on her plate with the tines of her fork, as she often did nowadays, seeming to design the meal rather than consume it.

  I joined Mr. Stoker in eating hearty.

  “Yes, eat up, Bram and Pink,” Irene said. “We will be taking a walking tour of the more unsavory parts of Prague tonight, but first I hope that Quentin will return with the map of Whitechapel. I suddenly crave more than eggs Benedict.”

  The tines of her fork carved a parallel pattern in the white arctic waste of our tablecloth. When Irene thought, her fingers often pantomimed musical motions…piano playing, the curlicues of a musical clef. The fork tines were perfect f
or scribing a musical staff, but that is not quite what she sketched so absently.

  After tilting my head, I recognized the strange figure: an “X” through the staff of the letter “P.” A Chi-Rho. Before unknown to me, this ancient Christian symbol would ever after bring to my mind the Christ…and Jack the Ripper.

  27.

  Auld Acquaintance Not Forgot

  I asked you for a violin & you did not refuse me but (to me weak mentally & bodily, & who wants something to keep him up) did worse than that by putting me in a state of anxiety & suspense.

  —JAMES KELLY TO A BROADMOOR ASYLUM OFFICIAL, 1884

  “If I eat much more of this overseasoned Gypsy goulash, I shall soon be playing the violin,” Godfrey said, pushing the bowl away.

  I would die before I would admit it, but I had grown accustomed to the pepper-spiced meals that were our daily lot. It was ever so much more palatable than French cuisine.

  “This imprisonment of ours makes no sense, Nell!” he added. “No one cares that we are captured, and the Gypsies certainly can’t be behind it. Unless…they are acting for forces that oppose the Rothschilds.”

  “What forces oppose the Rothschilds besides Christians?” I asked.

  Perhaps I had been meant to be a missionary, I daydreamed over my battered metal spoon as I dragged it through the dark, meaty sauce. Perhaps I had been destined to eat unknown dishes in undiscovered corners of the world, converting pagan souls to the Lamb of God….

  “If I eat another morsel of lamb I shall baaaa!” Godfrey exclaimed, throwing down his spoon.

  “Lamb? It is lamb?”

  “Surely a Shropshire lass would know lamb if she ate it.”

  “Shropshire lamb is not so highly seasoned. Besides, I never ate the lamb.”

  “Well, you have been consuming lamb by the bowlful now.”

  “Oh.” I pushed my food away.

  “Christians don’t generally oppose the Rothschilds,” Godfrey said, returning to political speculations, “only small factions that wish to foment political upheaval and use the Jews as a striking point. That is why they might try to create an atrocity to fix everyone’s attention, such as this murdered infant.”