Castle Rouge

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  I felt a stunning terrifying plunge, Quentin’s hands slipping over my shoulders, my bare shoulders as the Gypsy blouse fled like a ghost, and…I began shaking, as if I would shake myself out of my box, out of time….

  And I knew it was the worst thing to do, and I couldn’t stop it to save my soul.

  “My God, Nell, I’m sorry!”

  Quentin had backed away, his hands raised as if swearing an oath.

  And what could I say, how could I say, that I had discovered that good and evil were so close that I could for the moment stand neither one nor the other?

  “I’m sorry.” He reached again for me, then forced himself back. “I can’t know—”

  I could say nothing. I shook so hard I could not speak, could not explain, could not retract, could do nothing, a prisoner in an invisible box no one could see, that only I could feel.

  “I can’t stay without wanting to comfort you,” he said, “and I can see that is the worst thing I can do.”

  He left then, and I sank down by my coils of rope and wept into their coarse and somehow comforting braids until they were soaked with my salt and regret.

  A soft knock on the connecting door to Godfrey’s room a half hour later roused me from my puddle of self-pity. Irene, of course, warned by Quentin. I both resented and secretly appreciated that inevitability.

  When I opened the door, Irene peered in like a supplicant.

  “We are having a war council in the library in half an hour. I thought you might not want to miss it.”

  “War council?”

  “To decide what to do with our captives, and other matters. You’ll attend?”

  I nodded.

  She stepped over the threshold, her arms full of clothing. “I thought you might prefer to wear ordinary garb. We brought only one carpetbag each on our journey, but this was most useful.”

  She laid my surprise dress on the bed. I was indeed surprised to see it, and dismayed.

  “Who will be at the council?” I asked.

  “Godfrey and myself, Bram Stoker, Pink….”

  “Why is she still with us?” I asked with uncustomary irritation. “She has no real part in this affair.”

  “Perhaps ‘Pink’ does not.” Irene paused, looking rueful. “But she is also Nellie Bly, a daredevil reporter for a New York City newspaper. She was following the Ripper’s trail from London to Paris before we happened upon her.”

  “Pink? Elizabeth? Is named Nellie! Nellie—?”

  “Bly. The pseudonym comes from an American song.”

  “She isn’t a fallen woman, then?”

  “Not at all. So we can hardly exclude her from our conference.”

  “And who else cannot be excluded?”

  Irene hesitated again, then came out with it. “Sherlock Holmes.”

  I made a face but held my tongue.

  “Yourself, of course,” she rushed on before pausing again, then plunging. “And…Quentin.”

  As I had feared. I fingered the gown’s satin shirtwaist. Quentin had seen me wear it. I had seen Quentin while wearing it. But Irene was right; there was little to choose from, and I was anxious to shed Godfrey’s trousers and my long-worn Gypsy blouse, as useful as the full sleeves had been for concealment and carrying.

  “And these.” Irene laid a full set of ladies’ lingerie on top of the gown: corset, chemise, pantaloons, petticoat. For a moment these articles looked as foreign as a sari, though a good deal more complicated.

  “I will help you dress,” Irene decreed.

  And so she did, fussing with the intricacies of the surprise dress while I donned the underthings and stockings and garters. My black walking boots had survived my kidnaping, but I decided to keep the Gypsy boots instead. Only the toes would peep out from under my hem, and they were a deep eggplant color that almost looked black.

  “You will need this to fit into the surprise dress.” Irene brought over the cotton and whalebone corset, its loosened strings dangling like skinny pink serpents.

  I let her help pull the thing over my head and shoulders and then ply the laces. She tsked as she noticed the bruises still visible on my arms and shoulders, but tightening laces was hard work, and she did not waste her breath on words.

  I donned the surprise dress, but fastened the black revers over the pink shirtwaist and had her lower the panels on the skirt that revealed the pink underskirt.

  “But you look so pretty in pink!” she objected.

  “This is a war council, you said. I do not wish to appear frivolous.”

  “I don’t think you ever could.” She sighed. “Now, as for what I can do with your hair, bereft of curling irons, rats, and combs…and with the braiding that has made it so thick!”

  She sat me down before the dim mirror and began twisting my hair into a chignon, pulling pins from her own hair to anchor mine into a semblance of a hairstyle.

  I saw myself swiftly reassembled as quite nearly my old self, yet all these artifacts of my old life hardly seemed to matter now.

  Irene hummed as she subdued my hair into something resembling a coiffure. Lullabies.

  “Would you like to talk?” she asked at last.

  “No.”

  Her hands hesitated on my hair. “Where would you like to go from here?”

  “Home.”

  She was utterly still again for a moment. “And…where is that?”

  “Why, that bucolic backwater of a village, Neuilly.”

  “We could…there’s no reason now—my presumed death is either known to be erroneous or I am sufficiently forgotten—that we couldn’t remove to London. England.”

  “I may not know where we are now, but I know quite well where London is. Are you mad, Irene? That man Sherlock Holmes lives there and your interests would be forever tangling with his, I don’t doubt. No. I wish to go home to Neuilly and supervise our impossible maid Sophie and that annoying parrot Casanova, and Lucifer, the devil of a black cat, and Sarah’s poor little serpents.” I could not bring myself to mention Messalina, Quentin’s endearing little mongoose whose care I had assumed.

  “If that’s really where you want to go. You have never liked Paris.”

  “Oh, it is not so bad when murderers are not running amok in it. In fact, I would like to return to l’Exposition universelle and see the Wild West Show and ride the elevator on the Eiffel Tower, and I especially would like to visit the nautical panorama when it is open for viewing.”

  That last request was tantamount to a rider thrown by a thoroughbred deciding to get back on the mount. I watched in the mirror while Irene’s careful expression finally relaxed into relief and even a modicum of joy.

  “We shall!” she said. “We shall do all that and more as soon as we return.”

  She was not, or perhaps I was not, a person given to physical expressions of emotion, but her hands left my hair to squeeze my shoulders encouragingly.

  I winced.

  “Oh, you are hurt! That awful journey has battered you most dreadfully, my poor Nell!”

  “It will heal,” I said stoically.

  “Of course it will.”

  “Except—”

  She grew quiet again.

  “I don’t know what happened to me during the week I was transported here. Godfrey says I was kept drugged by chloroform. I was shipped like an animal, Irene, with no food and a little water slopped on me from time to time, unable to attend to my most basic needs. I arrived here thirsty and starving and filthy.”

  “I know, I know,” she cried kneeling beside me so our faces were paired in the mirror. She spoke to my reflection. “Haven’t I imagined every possibility a hundred times. It was barbaric.”

  “The only consolation is that I was too disgusting to be violated. Except that Tatyana’s beast would probably violate a corpse, and James Kelly, too.”

  “Nell.” She started to put her hands on my shoulders again, but lifted them away as if remembering to avoid a hot skillet. “Nell, if you had been ravaged, you would have fe
lt great pain for some time. There would have been blood. Was there?”

  I let out a long breath. “No. I ached and was bruised all over, but not that.”

  “Then you needn’t worry about what you don’t remember happening. Ever.” She eyed me cautiously in the mirror, sideways. “And…once in Paris, what about the Rue de la Paix?”

  “What about it?”

  “Could we not find time for a small expedition to Maison Worth, do you think? As long as we are out and about anyway? Shall we go there, too?”

  I understood that it was the will to make the journey, not the destination, the pretext.

  “We shall!” I answered.

  She lightly pressed her cheek against mine in the mirror. “We shall do astounding things.”

  51.

  The Disposition

  In person ‘Nellie Bly’ is slender, quick in her movements, a brunette with a bright, coquettish face. Animated in conversation and quick in repartée, she is quite a favorite among the gentlemen.

  —THE SOCIAL MIRROR, 1885

  We gathered at the library table that evening for what amounted to a picnic. Godfrey and Irene had brought bread and stew and cold cuts of meat and cheese from the castle kitchen. Sherlock Holmes, still wearing the robustly youthful Gypsy guise that seemed so at odds with his fussy metropolitan self, complimented the absent Tatyana’s wine collection while importing two bottles of dusty but apparently impeccable vintage. I suspected that a postprandial pipe was inevitable, and that I should not have the courage to object, since the man had saved all our lives, at least partially.

  Pink wore a new garment to me: a checked coatdress of most modest and practical design; in fact, very like the one I’d had to destroy after my dreadful journey.

  It gave me a turn, as if seeing her in my stead, and I can’t say I much liked the reminder of that gown and those circumstances.

  I pulled the tiny silver notebook and pencil from my chatelaine and laid them on the table.

  “Nell, no!” Irene exclaimed, pausing in constructing a roast beef and bleu cheese sandwich. “Don’t tell me that you’ve managed to take notes of your ordeal?”

  “I had to write very small, with many abbreviations, and will no doubt need a magnifying glass to decipher it all, but, yes, I did.”

  The dwarf who had served Tatyana made himself busy picking up napkins that had slipped to the floor and offered to pour the wine, but Mr. Holmes commandeered that role.

  He was also apparently in charge of the disposition of our prisoners, for he sat down, demolished a chicken sandwich, then dusted his hands of such details of eating on his dinner napkin and began.

  “The poor misled fools who provided the congregation here are best left to what they can make of their lives. It is to be hoped that lacking a leader and the resources for such private meetings they will regain their senses.”

  “Surely some more restorative action could be taken, Mr. Holmes.” Bram Stoker began doubtfully.

  “Perhaps, but who would take it? Would Mrs. Norton’s Krafft-Ebing care to come here to the village and study mass hysteria? I doubt it.”

  “He is not my Krafft-Ebing, Mr. Holmes,” Irene objected mildly.

  The uncloaked Gypsy waved an elegantly dismissive hand quite incongruous with the role. “He will forever be so in my estimation, Madam. I am not sure what I owe you for introducing me to such a depraved work, but I am sure to find it useful in my future endeavors.

  “The priest Lupescu will certainly be subjected to village justice, and perhaps the discipline of his fellow churchmen, although I doubt the full extent of the crimes here will travel much beyond the village.

  “No. Our real problem is that the nearest telegraph office is in Oradea, some two days’ travel distant.”

  “That is indeed a problem, Mr. Holmes,” Pink said. “I am in desperate need of a telegraph office.”

  “That is something else that requires discussion, Miss Pink,” he said. “Later.”

  His use of the diminutive shocked me. I sensed a grudging respect for her that I found quite unearned. Often she acted as imbecilic as her name, in my opinion, but perhaps that was youth and being American.

  Mr. Holmes went on. “Our immediate and most pressing problem…ah, Stanhope. Have a seat. You may be just the answer to our discussion.”

  It was hardly a “discussion,” but I didn’t dare object or look up as I heard Quentin pull out one of the heavy chairs and sensed him settling at the only vacant spot, between Bram Stoker and “Miss Pink.”

  “You are just the man to ride to Oradea and set matters in motion,” Mr. Holmes said. “We need a small military detail from Bohemia to convey our prisoners to Prague. The various foreign offices concerned will no doubt decide on some way to handle this difficult affair.”

  “What is ‘this difficult affair?’” I asked without looking up from my notes.

  “The difficulty is how these disparate individuals so deeply involved in so many heinous crimes in so many countries are to be dealt with. I refer to Madam Tatyana, of unknown surname. To Colonel Sebastian Moran, a retired British Army officer and renowned heavy-game hunter and London club man, but the second most dangerous man in London, for all that, and the most dangerous man in Europe, with the exception of Tatyana’s trained bear. And to this…Medved, who is, of course, responsible for the Whitechapel murders attributed to Jack the Ripper and the similar murders in Paris and Prague.”

  “That…animal! I do not believe it.”

  “You honor him, Miss Huxleigh, by your terminology. Yes, he is undoubtedly the Ripper. I suspect that he does not even remember the crimes, however; we ourselves witnessed his immense capacity for drink. I am convinced that after serving as…ringleader at these secret rituals that play such sadistic variations on the carnal and the religious that even Baron von Krafft-Ebing would be confounded by them, and him, this Medved stumbled into the streets in a drunken state and continued to offer up sacrifices to the knife, only these were not willing participants.”

  “I cannot believe it! No women would let such a drunken, filthy creature near them.”

  “That is indeed a mystery to me as well, but if you had spent as much time as I have on Whitechapel street corners you would see that a great many poor women already suffer such unappetizing specimens. And remember that the women, too, are usually drunk.”

  “Even so,” I said with a shudder, then felt Quentin’s gaze upon me and spoke no more.

  “And then there is Kelly,” Mr. Holmes went on, “who has already been judged mad and escaped detention once. Each of these persons must be dealt with as best befits their crimes and individual backgrounds. And absolutely none of it must be made public.”

  Shocked silence reigned at the table as Mr. Holmes sipped his wine and nodded satisfaction.

  “Now, see here, Mr. Holmes,” came Pink’s clear and rising inflections. “‘None of it must be made public.’ That’s my job, to make things public, and I did not expose myself to so much misery and danger to return home and let Bessie Bramble lord it over me with her latest sensational story.”

  “If you would persist in your notion to publicize these lamentable events, involving as they do interests of the ruling families of England and Bohemia, not to mention the French and Russian governments and Germany as well, you would discover that America is not so isolated from Europe as you think. It would mean your position, and still you would be silenced, or worse, ridiculed as a lying fraud.”

  “America doesn’t let the Old World dictate to her.”

  “In the larger sense, no. But there are delicate issues always between countries, and your government would find it much to its best interests to be discreet rather than add to the reputation of Nellie Bly.”

  “Irene?” she appealed.

  “I have not made up my mind,” Irene answered, “but I don’t know how you could possibly describe the actions of such a distorted cult in the public print. When you write of fallen women, the world in general has a
notion of what their state is, and why. This cult is, quite simply, beyond belief, and you might consider your future reputation very seriously before you commit to unmasking what the world really doesn’t want to hear about.”

  “Like modern slavery,” Quentin added in rather melancholy tones. “England and America point to exact dates when they eliminated such evils. It still exists on as large a scale as before in other parts of the world. There are some things that no civilized nation wants to know, or its people to know.”

  “But this is a story of a lifetime! Not only Jack the Ripper, the most notorious fiend on the planet, but a whole set of people doing even more fiendish things. I cannot let it go unnoted.”

  Holmes sighed deeply over his fisted hands. “I would hate, Miss Bly, to have to go searching for you, or your remains, because our international friends had decided you were a person as dangerous to their political stability as Tatyana and Medved.”

  “They would go that far?” Pink glanced at Quentin, which allowed me to take the slightest peek.

  He looked quite all right, but he kept his eyes on the tabletop.

  “Holmes is right. This has become a political matter, and with the Russian involvement Tatyana’s presence implies, it is too volatile to entrust to the public. Better that Jack the Ripper go unidentified through eternity than that such a scandal shake so many governments. There is the matter of emigration and the volatile state of native populations over that issue. This cult that drew so many of so many nations into its bloody toils would cause riots in the streets, not to mention stir up the always simmering anti-Semitism. The anarchists and socialists would leap upon the issue. There could be chaos.”

  Pink sat back, pouting and not bothering to hide it. “It is the story of the century.”

  “Perhaps,” Godfrey said, “but this century will end in eleven years. Perhaps you can find a more uplifting subject that looks forward rather than back, not this last spasm of a remnant of ancient barbarism.”