Castle Rouge

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Again I was back in the panorama, trapped and mauled, sinking into a sleep that had lasted almost a week.

  No! My arms lifted up and out, not so much to strike him as to ward off evil.

  The gesture surprised him. He began laughing and made to push closer.

  I heard a terrible crash, metal clattering and glass shattering. Tatyana’s raucous laughter echoed like an out-of-tune aria performed by a banshee.

  Another hand seized mine, spun me, drove me almost to the end of my wits. I was so tired of being on a planet that turned like a top at every opportunity.

  Godfrey had me in his dancerlike grip and slowly stepped into the pattern of a box waltz. We moved back and forth like Austrian automatons, scribing a docile square on the stones underfoot.

  The lead Gypsy violin descended the scale, slowing as it went until it was dragging out a mocking slow-motion waltz. There were no turns, no gallops, just step side-back side-front. One-two, three-four, like a march of very tired soldiers.

  Gradually, my vertigo faded. The funereal pace of the violins calmed my racing heart. I kept my gaze on Godfrey’s calm gray eyes, on the slight smile on his lips.

  Without my noticing it, he maneuvered me back to the table again, and pulled away when I was close enough to rest my trembling hands on the wood and stand long enough for him to retrieve my chair and seat me.

  “You English call that a dance?” Tatyana taunted. “Come, Medved. We shall show them a dance.”

  She led the revolting servant onto the floor, his hand still grasping the neck of a pottery jar he swigged from again and again.

  Godfrey was less interested in Tatyana and her untrained ape than in Colonel Moran, whom he finally spotted sitting in his own former chair. So he leaned against the table beside me and cast a comforting glance my way.

  I was glad to be off my feet and anchored once again, but I did turn in my chair to watch the exhibition Tatyana was about to make of herself with her “Medved.”

  She had been a ballerina, or so she had claimed when we had first encountered her in Prague. Ballerinas were such ethereal, graceful creatures that it was hard to imagine this woman of fire and earthy contempt ever emulating a dying swan.

  Now she mimicked some Gypsy fandango, circling around her drunken swain, shaking her coarse, flowing blond hair at him, leading him close to her, then leaping back to let him founder.

  He was openly reaching for her now with huge, greedy hands. I shuddered to picture those grimy fingers on my neck and shoulder and knew I should have to rub my skin raw in my room tonight to banish the memory. Grasping hands. What had they done to me during the days and nights I was drugged? Was this ghastly man among the retinue then, free to rummage about my person?

  The lack of memory was maddening! I would never know what had happened to me, or what had not. My teeth started chattering, but couldn’t be heard over the violins, which were keeping pace with the drunken lumberings of the great uncouth fool in the center of the room.

  Tatyana danced at him like a teasing blade in a duel, drawing him forward, then driving him back. After a few minutes of this, the creature finally toppled over, bottle clasped in his hand, like some traveling company Caliban drunk almost to death on Prospero’s island that had once been his.

  Laughing, Tatyana leaped over his fallen body and came striding toward us.

  She shook her unbound hair like a mane. “Your business is done here,” she told Godfrey. “Take the little Englishwoman upstairs to her room. At least you did not marry such a milksop as this. Go!”

  Godfrey shepherded me away and out into the entrance rooms of the castle.

  The revelers slumped in their chairs or on the floor, except for the thin old man, who remained oddly erect in his seat. The violins played on, more slowly and fainter. Medved slumbered like a fallen Satan in the center of the room, his unbroken bottle beside an outflung hand, leaking liquid that darkened the stones like blood.

  I didn’t speak until we were making our weary way up the grand stone staircase, Godfrey’s hand supporting my elbow while I dragged my heavy skirts up riser after riser.

  “What did she want? What was the purpose of such a travesty of a dinner?” I asked him.

  “For one thing, the old man was Count Lupescu, who owns this forest and its castle. It was my assignment to purchase the lot for the Rothschilds.”

  “So it was legitimate business you did here?”

  “If that old fellow was really Lupescu and he really does own this estate. Madame Tatyana is quite capable of stocking the castle with her own cast of characters, all serving her whim and her twisted sense of amusement, as we do.”

  “We serve her? I do not!”

  “We are prisoners, of course. We dance to her tune, as the evening demonstrated quite literally.”

  “Godfrey, I have been thinking of Irene.”

  An expression of pain crossed his face. “It may be better not to do that until we have put this place behind us. We must escape before she is lured into following us here. She is the true target of this elaborate plot.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she is Irene, and Tatyana is not.”

  “That is cryptic.”

  “A woman like Tatyana is driven by all she is not.”

  “Not a dancer anymore, but Irene isn’t a singer anymore.”

  “Tatyana is also not active in the Great Game as she knew it anymore; she must create her own game.”

  “The Great Game. You mean all the European nations fighting over bits and pieces of India and the Orient, that Quentin has been drawn into for so many years?”

  “The Great Game is one nation trying to control another and another and another. Tatyana regards herself as a nation unto herself, and she will try to control anyone who crosses her path, or who she can trap into her path.”

  “Why would she be so evil?”

  “Because it is easier than trying to be good.”

  “Now that is simplistic, Godfrey. That would work to quiet a schoolroom charge, but I am a grown woman and less likely to swallow it.”

  We were by our rooms by now. Godfrey loosed my elbow. “Evil is very simple, Nell, almost childlike. I suspect it’s mostly utter selfishness. You had best go in and wash off what of it you can.”

  “I do wish I could bathe again!”

  “I fear the Gypsies will be far less biddable now that Tatyana and her minions are here.”

  “I wouldn’t care to disrobe in this place with some of the residents it has now,” I added with a shiver.

  “Most wise.” He looked very worried as he gazed down at me. “Remember. We do have an escape plan.”

  “We do?”

  He nodded and kissed me good night on the forehead, as my father used to.

  “We do, and we may have to use it soon.”

  I opened the heavy door into what I regarded, perhaps optimistically, as my room, and watched him enter his adjoining chamber. I knew that Tatyana would send someone fast on our heels to latch us in from outside. At least Medved was now too drunk to manage this duty.

  Godfrey had not allayed my fears. Our chances of escaping this castle were even dimmer than before, and now there was obviously something to escape: Tatyana, Colonel Moran, and the trained bear of a man Tatyana was encouraging to become an even more terrifying beast.

  35.

  Bloody Words

  I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha.

  Yours truly.

  —JACK THE RIPPER

  FROM A JOURNAL

  I must admit I liked making a sensation.

  For the next ten minutes I was quizzed on the locales in the United States where rotgut and moonshine could be found, and of what and how it was made.

  I was no expert on this topic, but pointed out that homemade spirits have long been the privilege of the common folk in every land and that the so-c
alled government interferes with that process at its own risk, although it always does.

  In fact, I pointed out, the British insistence on a whiskey tax was a greater influence than a tea tax in encouraging the American rebellion.

  While I stoutly explored this topic, Irene was walking through the ruins of the activity in the chamber, picking up two or three of the pottery jars, the ones with gobbets of white wax still clinging to their open lips.

  “This isn’t wine spill,” she noted casually, staring at the earthen floor beneath the old Jewish cemetery of bodies piled twelve generations deep.

  Slowly, the men’s attention returned to her.

  “What is it then?” Quentin asked.

  “Blood.”

  “Blood?” Bram Stoker paled, then hurried to her side. “These drops, all blood? What makes you say such a thing?”

  “Because we”—she glanced at me—“have seen such quantities of blood spilled at an underground site in Paris.”

  I hastened to her side as well, quite ready to give up my role as fount of all knowledge of things alcoholic.

  Under the sweeping examination of Quentin’s lantern, the spray of drops did look very bloodlike. I finally identified the sickly sweet odor of the cavern: not lilacs, like above, but blood.

  “Have you examined the walls?” Irene asked Quentin.

  “For what?”

  “More blood.”

  We all followed him to the perimeter of the cave, trooping behind as his lantern light washed up and down on the crudely hewed stone.

  Under our feet lay burnt-out candle stubs, dried kernels of rat leavings, and more burgundy drops turned almost black except at their very centers, which were as rich as a bloodred rose.

  “Good God!” Quentin had stopped, the lantern swinging slowly from his hand.

  “What is it?” Irene demanded, rushing up behind him.

  “Writing. In mostly consonants. That damned Czech….”

  “Let me see! I have sung in that language. I recognize some words.”

  Irene seized the lantern and moved along the wall, peering at a faint black pattern that looked vaguely foreign, like an Arabic or Cyrillic alphabet. Were we to add Arabs and Russians and Czechs to our Gypsies and Indians and Transylvanians for a truly exotic stew?

  Irene sighed and let the lantern droop at her side.

  “We have seen these words before, in another language. I can’t make out every word, but one particularly is clear. I believe that when we get this phrase translated it will read: ‘The Gypsies are the men Who Will not be Blamed for nothing.’”

  I gasped out loud. I had seen the strangely feminine-case French version (Juives, which read in English like a misspelled “Juwes”) on a cellar wall in Paris not two weeks before. An almost identical phrase so mentioning the “Juwes” had been scribed in chalk, supposedly by Jack the Ripper, at Goulston Street in Whitechapel on September thirtieth.

  The men in our party, knowing less, were less impressed.

  “What a strange sentiment,” Bram said. “It makes no sense. Grammatically, it is a nightmare.”

  “Nightmares do tend to be ungrammatical,” Irene said, still bending over the faint letters. “The last phrase of this type we saw had been inscribed in blood. Sherlock Holmes theorized from the evidence that a man had been whipped along the wall and forced to write those words in his own blood.”

  “Sherlock Holmes never theorizes,” I corrected her. “He declares.”

  “Thank you, Nell,” she said sardonically, glancing at me, both acknowledging the tart common sense of her lost companion, Nell Huxleigh, and the fact that I was known as Nellie Bly in the wider world.

  Perhaps she was also acknowledging that in my own inimitable way I was serving as a useful compatriot in the act of confronting and solving crime.

  Quentin glanced at me with a puzzled frown, a look of loss upon his ill-lit features that it was impossible for a daredevil reporter to miss.

  Irene sighed. “This scene is too similar to the Paris locale to be coincidental.” She pointed to another mark on the cave’s wall. “Even to the ancient symbol of Christ, the Chi-Rho, which combines an ‘X’ to represent the cross of crucifixion intersected by a ‘P,’ which represents the Savior. I can think of only one sensible course.”

  “What is that?” Quentin asked.

  Irene sighed again, loud enough to be heard in the first balcony, had we been in a theater. As it was, rats skittered away at the deep, theatrical regret audible in that sigh of defeat and resolution.

  “Mycroft Holmes must be contacted immediately. We need his brother Sherlock here to examine the scene as soon as possible.”

  She glanced around the disordered environment that screamed mute violence not long past.

  “And most severely cross Mr. Holmes will be with us all about the mess that we and the rats have made of everything.”

  36.

  Alone at Last

  They threw their heads back and poured the pure liquid, which had a sweet, slightly narcotic smell…straight down their thin throats. When satisfied they wiped their hairy mouths on their sleeves….

  —V. P. KATAYEV, A MOSAIC OF LIFE

  Who would dream that I would ever welcome the privacy of my grandiose cell? Not even the nightly thump of the exterior latch falling to entrap me within could dismay me.

  I did indeed find myself breathing more easily once alone in my chamber.

  The fire was low, so I piled stick after stick on the embers glowing like hungry wolfish eyes until the black mouth of the mantel roared like a red-hot lion.

  Then I went to the basin where the water would form a thin crust of ice by morning, wrung out a cold cloth, and patted it over my face and shoulders.

  I quickly undid the borrowed gown’s fastenings and stepped out of all of Tatyana’s things, soon sheltering under the comforting volume of Godfrey’s nightshirt. It felt like exchanging filthy Gypsy garb for an angel’s robe.

  Then I wrapped myself in the bedcover, sat in a chair by the fireplace, and allowed my mind to sink into the exhaustion it welcomed.

  Soon I dreamed, for upright wolves played the violin in the corner of the castle, tongues lolling, while Tatyana’s peasant servant tore off his face, and I saw the pale blue eyes were indeed James Kelly’s, and Godfrey turned into the old man who turned into Sherlock Holmes, and I became a bird who fluttered up to the rafters and tried to warn everybody about what was happening.

  I beat my wings and beat my wings, but nobody heeded me, and I couldn’t fly anymore….

  I awoke to the fire beating flaming wings of heat against the stone walls of its prison. It sounded like an entire flock of crows imprisoned in the chimney above.

  I heard another flutter that had been tickling my awakening senses: voices rising and falling nearby.

  I pushed my heavy hair behind my ears to hear better—I would have to rebraid it in the morning, for I certainly didn’t want to emulate Tatyana in any respect.

  One voice was low-pitched, a basso Irene would call it. Godfrey. The other voice was more erratic, ranging from contralto to soprano.

  I unbent from the chair, aching all over, and tiptoed to the door that connected with Godfrey’s chamber, dragging my warm coverlet with me.

  “It is the finest French brandy,” one voice was saying.

  Hers.

  “I don’t need it,” Godfrey said.

  “Ah, but you should want it. Need is for peasants.”

  “I am of peasant stock.”

  “Not I. So I will have the brandy you refuse.”

  I heard the gurgle of liquid into a cup or goblet.

  “Are you not interested in my forebears?” she asked.

  “Not particularly.”

  “You English! You always modify everything. You always understate. Is that because you’re afraid of losing everything?”

  “It’s because exaggeration leads to self-deception.”

  “And how do I self-deceive?”

&nbs
p; “I don’t know you well enough to say.”

  “You are so self-contained. So distant. Is it possible you want to be a barrister, to transact boring business for the kings of commerce? To live in Neuilly and drive to Paris occasionally to see the sights? To assist an unemployed opera singer in matters of a trivial nature? To escort a prim Miss Nobody from a dance floor?”

  “You see what you want to see, say what you think will wound. Can you truly wish to live like this? To play doomed games of spymanship in lost causes? To cultivate the crude because you have lost your one grip on culture and are an unemployed danseuse? To consort with criminals and Gypsies? To hold a Mr. Nobody captive because you have nothing better to do?”

  “You are jealous of Sherlock Holmes.”

  “You are jealous of Irene Adler.”

  “A strange way to refer to your wife.”

  “She is more than my wife, and I think you know that, and it maddens you.”

  “You have no idea what worlds I could maroon you in.”

  “I do, and I suspect this is only one of them.”

  I leaned closer to the door, listening through the generous crack near the ancient hinges, hardly daring to breathe.

  This was a duel. I had seen them skirmish before, Godfrey and this wild woman who called herself Tatyana. I had seen Irene duel her as well, in the dark of night, by surprise.

  What did she want, this woman who would not, could not leave us alone?

  I listened to their voices rise and fall, to the insults exchanged, the offers tendered and refused.

  She wanted us all where she stood: alone, hating, powerful for having no boundaries that others observed. Like Lucifer after the fall.

  I realized that if anything happened to any one of us, to our strong and honest trinity, Irene and Godfrey and I, she would have won.

  If I were harmed and Godfrey was there, yet unable to prevent it,…she will have won.