Castle Rouge

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  We sat on the sofa and chairs arranged for tea, Mr. Stoker barely perching on a tapestry-upholstered side chair. As he spoke, his face and arms became animated. At times he leapt up from the chair to enact a point.

  “The business that has brought me to this city of a hundred spires is sad indeed, but I am glad indeed to have made its acquaintance,” he began. “Prague is not a city known for murder, but rather for the mysterious and mystic, yes. And it has been much contested through centuries of war and religious conflict.

  “Irene, you mention the precarious position of the Jews in these modern times. You speak of political scapegoats. It has always been so, and in Prague particularly so. I speak of the distant fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the European quest for westward exploration was rivaled by the East’s fierce pounding at the continent’s back door. The Ottoman Turk pressed hard at this string of countries that were being drawn into what would become the mighty Austro-Hungarian Empire. And religious differences proved fatal for many. Land on the wrong side of the eternal Catholic-Jewish-Protestant triangle, and you could be burned at the stake and tortured first.”

  “It sounds like our Wild West Indians are just a last gasp of what has been going on in the world for centuries,” I said.

  “The evil that men do is bottomless,” Mr. Stoker agreed, “no matter their race or creed. So Prague was a prize that was tossed back and forth between Polish kings and Hapsburg kings, and always the Turks with their eyes on it, until in the late fifteen hundreds a Hapsburg youth of twenty-four was made the first King of Bohemia to nobody’s satisfaction, including his own.”

  Irene interrupted the story. “The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.”

  “What makes Rudolf interesting is that he did not while away his life at the court in Vienna, but actually moved his court to Prague, along with artists and goldsmiths and precious stonecutters and scientists and astronomers, which during that time included alchemists. Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler were among the brilliant scientists who worked in the city, but the most notorious of Rudolf II’s guests were two Englishmen, John Dee and Edward Kelley.”

  Irene shook her head. “Yet another Kelley! The infamous Dee and Kelley, alchemists, occultists, frauds. Antonín Dvoák toyed with composing an opera on the subject, but could think of no way to include female voices. I was singing in Prague at the time, and he was seeking subjects that were both Bohemian, yet suitable for my very difficult dark soprano voice. He even suggested that I could sing Kelley, the younger man.”

  “Really?” I asked, astounded. “The great Dvoák wanted to compose a part just for you?”

  “Once,” she said shortly. “Before I dallied in Bohemia, I had a European operatic career that was not considered insignificant.”

  “Well, I never heard of you.”

  “I should hope,” Quentin Stanhope said a trifle sternly, “that a young person of your limited background and great distance from the European centers of culture would have ‘not heard of’ a great many important matters and persons, for what is life but an opportunity to learn one’s limitations.”

  “Irene is a sublime singer,” Bram Stoker added to the chorus descending upon me. “She is to the musical stage what Sarah Bernhardt is to the dramatic stage, and it is a true tragedy that circumstances have limited her performances of late to circles of close friends.”

  I really hadn’t given a moment’s thought to Irene as anything but a lady detective of sorts, so there was nothing to do but subside into silence.

  After a long pause, Bram Stoker filled it.

  “Dee and Kelley are fascinating, but can hardly have anything to do with contemporary killings, here or elsewhere. In fact, it seems almost as unlikely that we sit here more than theoretically concerned even with such a modern monster as Jack the Ripper.” He eyed Irene, looking doubtful and wary.

  “You are sure,” Bram asked, “that Nell and Godfrey vanishing is related to the Ripper case?”

  “Nell was last seen in Paris being pursued by the leading candidate for the Ripper, and Godfrey—” She paused, sighed heavily, then spoke again. “No one but Pink knows this. And Sherlock Holmes. A lock of Godfrey’s hair had been left on my pillow in the Paris hotel when I returned from our raid on the barbaric rites of the cult where Nell vanished.”

  “You are certain—?”

  Irene didn’t allow Quentin to finish. “What can I say? That Nell and Godfrey may be lost? That we may all be too late?”

  He paused, then pounded one fist into another with such violence that we all held our breaths.

  “Quentin!” Irene stepped to him, caught his hands in her own. “Don’t you think that I have imagined every awful eventuality? A thousand times. So are we to be frozen by our fears? Are we to be what these monsters wish? Feckless. Fearful. Unable to move? No! There is evil in the world. Sometimes it is aimed at us, very personally. Then is when we must surmount the usual. Then is when we most must be unpredictable. Then is when we must dare! And succeed.”

  “You believe this, Irene?”

  She waited a long moment to answer and then it was anticlimactical. “Usually. When I am not feeling so utterly useless and hopeless.”

  What a tactician! She was forging an alliance from the uncertainties we all feel at times. From beneath her dark jacket she lifted the locket on a long chain she had used to mesmerize the Paris victim of those same barbaric rituals we had been discussing. She opened it to reveal the poignant comma of dark hair. “I know the color; besides, why lay another’s hair upon my pillow? Especially since Godfrey was found to have gone missing shortly before the Paris raid.”

  The men kept silence but I could not.

  “Who would do such a thing? A clever person who saw you were close on the Ripper’s trail may have wanted to distract you, but I’m sure travelers in the lands beyond Prague often lose touch with civilized outposts. It must be like the Wild West before the railroad: a long time between mail runs.”

  Irene remained unconvinced. “Anyone who knew enough about my personal circumstances and was clever enough to want to deceive me with a false lock of hair could have easily managed to obtain the real thing. I sense a larger game than find-the-Ripper being played, which is why I wanted you, Quentin, among our party.”

  “And me?” Bram asked. “What good can I do? I am a world traveler, yes; a good arranger of stage and other business; a sometimes scribbler.”

  “You are also a member of Henry Irving’s Beefsteak Club and are familiar with our guidebook on this hunt for the Ripper, Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis.”

  “I am not proud to admit to that knowledge. Among artistic folk there can be a fascination with the basest forms of human behavior.”

  “Not only ‘artistic folk,’” I put in. “The reading public laps up that sort of thing like oatmeal with cream in the morning. The fortunate love to hear how sadly the other half lives. Ordinary folks in London weren’t interested in hearing about what they called those ‘unfortunates’—the women who lacked even brothels in which to ply their underpaid trade but had to use the public streets. Once they had attracted the attention of the Ripper, everybody gobbled up all there was to know about them, from just how their innards were shredded to what few worthless remnants were found in their sorry pockets.”

  I do not often give speeches, but I had not had a chance to write a good indignant article in too long.

  “That’s why I like living in so-called uncivilized countries,” Quentin said, eyeing me with both surprise and sympathy. “Some of the practices may be savage, but starvation, forced labor, and slavery are out in the open, not hidden away in city byways so nice folks won’t notice.”

  Irene shook her head. “The world should be better than any of that by now, but I know it isn’t. Even grand opera appeals to audiences with madness, scandal, suicide, and murder, all sung in perfect pitch, of course. I am but a singer and must follow the syllables and staffs as they are composed, but why do writers revel in the darkest
side of humanity?”

  She was asking Bram Stoker.

  “A taste for the fantastic is inborn, I think. My son Noel began having nightmares at the age of three. The demons are always in our earliest dreams. It is better that we let them out during daylight.”

  “If these bad dreams are let out to play,” Irene suggested, “do you mean that it is less likely that one will enact them in real life?”

  “You have played parts, I am sure,” Bram said, “that mimic acts or represent ideas you would never endorse in actuality.”

  “And someone like James Kelly, reared to follow a strict sexual morality he could not, will he replay his guilt in nightly private performances on the streets of Whitechapel? According to Krafft-Ebing, this hatred of women, the entire sex and each innocent individual, is a common feeling among such men.”

  “It is slightly more understandable,” Bram said, “when you consider that women are chosen by society to be our strictest judges of morality, the mother, the wife. I agree that man is a feckless being, full of raw, unworthy needs he cannot control. No wonder his ravening soul turns good women stern and makes them ready to send him away. No wonder he will find bad women.”

  “If some women were not so ‘good,’ then, other women would never have to be ‘bad’?”

  Bram looked puzzled, unsure how to take Irene’s comment. “A good woman is an angel on earth,” he finally blurted out. “A man is a fool and a lout for causing such a one any trouble. The man must live up to the natural goodness of women.”

  “And,” I wondered, “the women in brothels? What has happened to their natural goodness, sweetness, and light?”

  He realized, as if struck by lightning, that I had first met most of the present company in a brothel. If his presence in the same brothel was open to charitable interpretation because he was a well-known man of respectable reputation in his profession, my presence there was unequivocally damning. I was a fallen woman, period. He was, as the Scots rule in court, not proven: though we both had been found in the same place on the same night at the same scene of a crime. And of course, he did not know then nor did he know now my true professional purpose in being there.

  This time Bram Stoker paled instead of blushing, as I usually did. During the days and nights after my debut in the Paris brothel, I had been absorbed into Irene’s immediate circle. I had behaved as the respectable young woman I knew myself to be. Bram Stoker had forgotten that I was supposed to be beyond redemption. And if I was not worthy of redemption because of my presence at the maison de rendezvous, then what did that say for him?

  “So,” Irene said, “how does one rank sin and crime? Had the Ripper only paid the women to do what dozens of other men did and gone on his way, who would have accused him of wrongdoing? Oh, the police, if they had to make an arrest now and then for what went on anywhere and anytime in Whitechapel.”

  “It’s not just Whitechapel,” Quentin said. “And not just women.”

  “What do you mean?” Irene grew suddenly alert.

  Quentin shook his head. “I have seen treachery unparalleled in Afghanistan. MacLean dead, nearly beheaded at Tiger’s and Sable’s damned conspiring that came to naught. I have lived on the uncivil side of the blanket, and reveled in it. I have seen things south of the Carpathians that would make Jack the Ripper pause.”

  “Perhaps that is what Jack the Ripper has seen. You must not hold back, Quentin. You must tell us what the world holds for those who look it in the face. What were you thinking of just then?”

  “Many things. Many things I vowed to forget.” He waved a hand in front of his face as if pushing away cobwebs. “We are mixed company here.”

  “No. We are one company.” Irene was as grimly resolute as I had ever seen her, which was saying something. “Nicety has no place among us. We can’t afford to mince after a galloping maniac merely because there are ladies present. Tell us what you know; why else have you learned the opposite side of civilization except to educate?”

  “All right. These mutilations of the Ripper that appall so many. They are not unheard of. In Africa, in Arab lands, it is even common practice to mutilate young girls in their female parts.”

  Irene and I listened with masks of iron. To show revulsion might stop this grim recital.

  “Mutilate how?” Irene asked.

  “Excise…parts. The girl feels nothing afterwards but pain. The husband knows he is the only father.”

  “Ah.” Irene glanced at me.

  I nodded. I knew the intricacies of this and that more than most, thanks to my having to learn how to hoodwink the madams in the brothels as to the state of my virtue.

  Bram Stoker avoided looking at us, but was listening with utter fascination.

  Quentin also avoided looking us in the eye. He stared out the window, as if seeing all those foreign countries with foreign ways.

  “Arab brides? Also very, very young. In some tribes they are first excised of their responsive parts, then they are…sewn shut.” His words were clipped. “On the wedding night, the virile groom will achieve consummation with the sheer power of his masculinity. The less virile groom will have to use a knife first.”

  Quentin stared out the window. Bram Stoker gazed at the map of Prague as if struck to stone.

  Irene and I remained silent, each feeling the savagery of the practice, which would make of pleasure an eternal agony.

  “Who does the cutting, the sewing?” Irene asked.

  “The married women of the tribe.”

  That was perhaps the most shocking fact of all.

  We said nothing and could suddenly hear the mantel clock tick. I had never noticed the clock ticking before.

  “Dear God,” Bram Stoker said at last. “It beggars all the lurid turns of my imagination, or anything the world’s greatest playwrights, even the ancient Greeks who blanch at nothing, have put onto the tragic stage.” His voice was shaking slightly. “I can see why women even in our civilized age and country might wish to avoid the marital duty.”

  “To lie back and think of England,” Irene asked, “as the Queen advised her many royal daughters on the occasions of their many politically advantageous royal weddings?” She turned to Quentin. “What of the Arab concubines?”

  “You mean—?”

  “Are they also surgically altered?”

  “There is no need. They will bear no heirs.”

  “What difference does it make if the surgery is physical, or mental? The effect is the same.”

  “You are saying,” Bram Stoker said, stumbling his way through points of view he had never encountered before, “that we are as uncivilized in our way as the Arab tribes.”

  Irene nodded. “And that Jack the Ripper, in his own mad way, is merely exercising a twisted version of the prerogatives of other men in other places.”

  “But…the Ripper wasn’t trying to safeguard heirs.” Mr. Stoker was still blinking at the enormity of this line of thought.

  “Are you sure?” Irene said. “Some suggest that the Ripper had contracted a venereal disease from a Whitechapel whore and killed these others out of revenge. A man with a venereal disease might pass it on to his wife and through her to his children. Was he not then, in his maddened mind, protecting heirs?

  “Some suggest that the Ripper was hunting a whore who was pregnant by him and that he found her in Mary Jane Kelly and took away the foetal material, as he had the wombs in the other victims, unnoticed in the bloody carnage of that scene.

  “I suggest that the attacks on the very womanliness of these women in Whitechapel and Paris and Prague, from excised wombs to severed breasts to slashed faces, is not so different from the systemic mutilation of some women in Arabia or elsewhere.”

  “And what is the common key?” I asked.

  “With the Ripper, insanity is foremost, but behind it are motives that have become customs elsewhere. It has to do with hobbled wives and concubines who are good for only one thing: what is denied the wives, pleasure.”


  I could see Irene drawing the patterns even as she spoke. She walked back to the map and stared down at its enigmatic lines, at the confusion its very attempt at clarity spawned, as all maps do.

  She traced the lines of the Chi-Rho. “And God is in it, whether He is called Allah or Yahweh or Christ because so often men who sin say that God gives them leave to be so inhuman.”

  “Religious mania,” Mr. Stoker said, “it was often mentioned last fall in London, but never that seriously pursued.”

  “It will be seriously pursued now,” Quentin said grimly. “You are right, Irene. The Koran is cited that men are to have concubines on earth and in heaven, but wives must be faithful conduits to many sons on earth, hence they are conquered and subjugated through the very acts of generation. I merely thought the practice an inexplicable foreign barbarity, but it is worse: it is a wholly self-serving strategy.”

  “As good a definition of evil as I have ever heard, Quentin,” Irene said.

  Quentin Stanhope suddenly took a deep breath. “You were right to force me to speak so frankly, Irene. I find I can now tell you the full truth about the worst atrocity here in Prague. I uphold your cause, Irene. I would give my life to recover Nell and Godfrey. Yet I found myself tongue-tied when it comes to detailing everything I have uncovered in Prague until you insisted I testify to what I have seen elsewhere, and told no one.”

  “You must tell us all,” she said, “especially about Prague.”

  “The last death, or the last until the one at the brothel last night. No one knows but two Rothschild agents, Godfrey, and now myself. They only told me because Baron de Rothschild in Paris had demanded full cooperation with you and your agents, and I was the first to reach Prague. Even then it took a cable to the Baron to convince the agents to talk to me.” Quentin laughed bitterly. “Would that the members of the Queen’s army had such unswerving loyalty and obedience.”

  “Some do,” Irene said.

  Quentin shrugged, as if dismissing himself. “The woman was found alive. Alive and…defaced. But”—he glanced from Irene to me and back again. I realized it was because we were Bram Stoker’s “good” women who were to be spared lest we judge too harshly.