Castle Rouge

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Bram Stoker nodded his agreement. “I love to study all the arcane practices of the past, but I write fiction. I don’t believe my own stories, Miss Pink, and I doubt anyone will believe the truth from you on this matter. As well announce to the world that you have discovered an ancient nest of surviving vampires!”

  That made a smile quirk her lips, and then she looked up, her eyes narrowed. “You are right, Mr. Norton, perhaps there is another story for me. I need a spectacular ‘stunt,’ that’s for sure. My sister journalists never rest. In fact, I have just had a terrific idea, but I may need your help, my dear Quentin.”

  She glanced sideways at him, a dimple tucked into the corner of her smile.

  “If it does not involve deranged religious cultists, I am your man, my dear Pink.”

  “Done!” she said, glancing around the table. “And if I need a favor from any of you, I expect to get it for being an unnatural reporter and keeping my lips sealed. That is a most uncomfortable state for me.”

  I, meanwhile, was writing down the exchange in script so tiny a mouse could hardly read it: I may need your help, my dear Quentin. I am your man, my dear Pink. My pencil point broke off. I stared at the much too large blot of a gigantic period.

  I could feel my cheeks flaming. While I was bouncing around railyards in a box, they had been traveling together.

  I heard a chair’s legs scrape back from the table, but did not look up at the sound.

  “If I am your only Mercury,” Quentin said, “I will commandeer a horse with wings. And I’ll contact the Rothschilds in Paris as well as the Foreign Office in London, to make sure the local satraps know that the mightiest of Europe and England support our needs.”

  “My name,” said Sherlock Holmes, “will be your password with all parties but the Rothschilds and the King of Bohemia. There you may use Mrs. Norton’s.”

  “Good. The sooner I’m gone the faster you will have help in keeping this monstrous crew confined. Be wary, and good-bye.”

  I managed to breathe deep and look up. Quentin was nodding farewell to everyone around the table. Our glances crossed and held for a brief moment.

  “Godspeed,” I mouthed, but no sound came out, and I fear he turned away before he could even see my lips move.

  I sensed a motion at my right. Godfrey was looking at me with the same steadfast expression as when he had vowed that either he and I would escape the peril together or neither would. He put his hand out, as he had then, and I put my hand in his.

  I do not know what he had been told, or how much he knew of what had passed between Quentin and myself, but I knew that Godfrey at least would never desert me.

  52.

  The Inquisition

  Sin, if sin lurks in you…sin, then you will repent and drive evil from you. So long as you bear sin secretly within you…you will remain a hypocrite and hateful to the Lord. The filth must be expelled.

  —MEDVED ADDRESSING HIS CONGREGATION

  “It is time,” Sherlock Holmes said after Quentin had left, “to talk of many things with our captives. I suggest a minimum of inquisitors. Myself and perhaps Mrs. Norton.”

  I bridled at that “perhaps,” although I did not much like the idea of Irene facing Tatyana again, an enemy as hateful and capable of untold violence as any human I had heard of, alive or dead. She was indeed a Messalina for our modern times.

  Godfrey stirred beside me, expressing the same reluctance.

  “Why not me?” Pink demanded. “I promise not to print a word of it.”

  “It should be Nell,” Irene said, surprising everyone, including me. “She has suffered most at their hands, and, besides, she can take notes. For our private use only, of course.”

  “There is no point in us interviewing Medved,” Holmes said, “although the foreign office has people who can speak his language. I wish to interrogate Moran myself, with an armed Mr. Stoker and Mr. Norton for company. He is a fierce old warrior and would attack a pride of lions if necessary. I don’t wish to betray my identity to the fellow, so will masquerade as Mr. Stanhope masquerading as a Gypsy.”

  “Colonel Moran has seen Quentin on more than one occasion,” I pointed out. “He fought him to the death. Do you really think you can mislead such a canny opponent into believing you are Quentin?”

  “I know Quentin Stanhope stands as inimitable in your eyes, Miss Huxleigh, but the foreign office employs dozens of spies who don native dress and operate under cover in foreign climes. I need not be the particular man, simply one of his ilk. And I need not explain myself to Colonel Sebastian Moran.

  “But ladies first,” he said, turning to Irene. “Are you ready to confront your worst enemy?”

  “Nell?” she asked me in turn.

  I nodded and stood. Across the table, Pink also stood and held something out to me.

  I gazed on it without comprehension.

  “My notebook. It is much larger than yours, and I suspect there is no need to conceal the notetaking from Tatyana.”

  “No,” Mr. Holmes agreed. “It may unnerve her, but I doubt the Black Hole of Calcutta would unnerve that woman. Speaking of which, I wish we had such a secure cell to keep her in.”

  “Do report back,” Bram Stoker called after us as we left the room.

  Poor man. It must have killed him to have the last threads of this gruesome story unwound out of his presence.

  We climbed the endless stairs and entered a wing of the castle I had never seen, though it was much like the one that Godfrey and I had called home for two weeks.

  We needed candlesticks to navigate halls furnished with moth-eaten carpets and furniture whose aged joints were so dry they had begun to collapse at the legs and arms, rather like arthritic old people.

  Pairs of grim men in peasant dress stood guard on either side of a series of barred doors.

  “We learned from your adventures, Miss Huxleigh,” Mr. Holmes informed me, “and chose rooms where time had not knocked out all the window glass.”

  I felt a flutter of appreciation most alien to me. Imagine! My exploits were daring enough to serve as a warning when incarcerating others. It was not an achievement to benefit all mankind, but it was certainly rewarding to hear Mr. Sherlock Holmes admit that something I had done had caused him to use more caution.

  At the door he paused. “I did not ask you, Mrs. Norton, if you wished to be present at this interview. I merely assumed it.”

  “You assumed quite rightly, Mr. Holmes. I had warned this woman before against meddling with me and mine, and you saw how little she regarded that warning in the exquisite trinket with which she anonymously gifted me at the Bohemian National Theater.”

  “Indeed,” he said with a bow that was pure London, “as vicious an assassin’s trick as it has ever been my privilege to disarm. We will use no names within. I wish to hide my identity from this woman so long as allowable, to eternity if possible.”

  “Why?” Irene asked.

  “She is one of those very few persons who seem born solely to cause misery in the world. Only death will quiet her mischief. If she lives and goes free to do harm again, I wish to have the advantage in pursuing her, that is all.”

  “You are saying that me and mine are in permanent danger from this creature?”

  “Of course you are, as I am from a certain obscure mathematician who happens to be the mastermind behind all the organized evil done in London. I warned you time and again against meddling in criminal matters. This is the price you pay, as do all who know you.”

  Irene nodded, not so much in agreement as to hasten the culmination of our quest.

  “There are certain facts and theories that I wish to test with Madam Tatyana,” Mr. Holmes said. “You will let me satisfy myself on these scores, as well as learn something of the scheme she had set in motion, before you address your personal concerns.”

  “Of course,” Irene agreed. “I was far too engaged in working to find my nearest and dearest to investigate anything else and, in fact, relied upon you to
attend to that matter.”

  “Did you? I live only to serve,” he responded with another ironic bow and nodded to a guard, who lifted the huge bar so we all might pass into the room.

  It was like entering the lion’s cage at the zoological gardens.

  One first needed to know where the beast lay before taking in the scenery.

  The chamber was large enough and filled with enough of the same fustian furnishings of my own room that at first glance it was hard to pierce the shadows and spy a person in residence.

  For a moment there was the sinking feeling of certain escape. Yet the window glass winked back at me whole and enormously old and thick.

  We three remained by the door, and I for one had mixed feelings when I heard the heavy latch fall into place again behind us. Was Tatyana locked in, or were we locked in with her?

  I examined the bed’s heavy hangings and the lumps under the coverlet, knowing my own device of hiding the rope there.

  Mr. Holmes was taking a methodical inventory of the room from right to left.

  Irene looked thoughtful for a moment, and then looked up.

  I followed her gaze, and gasped.

  The creature was crouched under the high ceiling like a spider in a corner! I cannot say what a turn it gave me to see a human being in such a position. It was an unearthly sight, and the evil expression on her face did nothing to allay my fear.

  “We shall have to alert the guards to her climbing feats,” Mr. Holmes said under his breath. “She went from chair to paneling to candle sconce to ornamental plaster work. Madam,” he said in a ringing tone, “will you come down to talk?”

  “For a mute fool you certainly have acquired a voice, and a London accent,” she answered.

  “Many mute fools are more than they seem. Will you come down?” He stepped forward as though to assist her.

  In that moment she leaped, or fell.

  I gasped again, much distressed by my weakness.

  It was an amazing descent, as though managed by someone half monkey, half cat. She swung for a split second from the candle sconce, fell twisting to land briefly on the back of a tall chair and then tumbled to the floor, rising instantly to her feet.

  “Brava,” said Irene, clapping softly. “The Russian Ballet teaches its company to defy gravity, among other things.”

  Tatyana then took a deep swanlike bow, her forehead nearly touching the tattered carpet before she stood again at her full regal height.

  “How did you corrupt my Gypsies?” she asked, addressing no one of us.

  “As you did,” Irene answered. “With golden coins, only more of them.”

  “Ah, your personal fortune has been depleted, how sad.”

  I watched Irene hold her tongue from answering, but knew what that answer was as if I had heard it pronounced aloud: Irene’s personal fortune was not invested in coins. It would not do to confirm that Tatyana’s weapons of choice were so effective, however.

  “And how is the admirable Godfrey?” Tatyana inquired.

  Sherlock Holmes intervened, whether to stop her taunts of Irene and myself or simply because he was impatient to address the specifics of the crime, I cannot say. Given his cold-blooded nature, I would choose a thirst for affirmation of his deductions.

  “I wish to confirm certain opinions about this cult and your role in it, and this Medved individual’s as well.”

  “Do you always get what you wish, Englishman in Gypsy guise? Is it you, Cobra?”

  He was silent.

  “I have not seen you in your own semblance for some years. Is that why you retain that absurd persona? Your light eyes give you away.”

  “They also gave away Medved.”

  “Yes, aren’t they most extraordinary? That a peasant should be gifted with such heavenly eyes…perhaps that is why he decided he had a religious vocation. I think he has misjudged his gifts, but who am I to dissuade an unlettered genius from following his natural bent?”

  “So you followed him, Madam, even as you led him first to London and then to Prague and Paris. Why there?”

  “Because that is where his flock was flocking.” She laughed with pleasure at the very idea, and turned to Irene. “Have I not read of your figure of freedom in New York harbor, the Statue of Liberty sent by the French, those masters of liberty, fraternity, and equality, but the slaves of political havoc? What does that make America?”

  “‘A teeming shore,’ says the poem.” I quoted the striking patriotic phrase Pink had declaimed about the statue.

  Irene smiled serenely. “A refuge for the ‘wretched refuse’ of Europe’s shore.” To hear her intone “wretched refuse” was to hear the term stripped of all opprobrium and elevated to an honored title. “The point is that one nation’s exiles are another nation’s gift. Nations, like every other human institution, always exile the different, the original, the independent.”

  “And so with my adorable Medved.”

  I nearly gagged at her adjective.

  “Poor peasant lad. At an early age he showed signs of unusual talents, stopping the blood of hemorrhaging animals, for instance. He had a peculiar rapport with horses, could calm them by speaking to them. He had an uncanny instinct for detecting thieves and more than once pointed out the culprit to the entire village.”

  “This was in Siberia, Madam?” Sherlock Holmes inquired.

  “I thought your knowledge was all of hot climes like Afghanistan and India. What do you know of Siberia?”

  “I know that is where the peasants brew vodka in pottery jars and seal them with wax, requiring them to be struck against a tree or cavern wall to be opened, just like the bottles found at the site of cult rituals in Paris and Prague. And London.”

  I saw Irene’s face tense. This was the first she or I had heard that these same vile ceremonies had been held in London, too. I saw her eyes fly to Sherlock Holmes. She was itching to know what he had learned in Whitechapel.

  “How,” he was asking Tatyana, “did you manage to supply Medved and his followers with Siberian-brewed vodka in the major cities of western Europe and the capital of the British Isles?”

  “It was cumbersome and it was expensive, but nothing was too good to inspire my Medved.”

  “He is your protegé then?” Irene asked.

  “Agh! You understand nothing! A protegé would follow in my footsteps. Medved as a dancer in the Russian ballet…how amusing. ‘Medved’ means ‘bear,’ you know, in Russian. It is my pet name for him. He will be known better by his real name, Grigorii Efimovich.”

  “Gregory, son of Efim.” Irene said promptly.

  “Ah, you know the Russian usage. Is he not fascinating? Not yet twenty-five and look at all he has accomplished? He has sent several great capitol cities to their knees.”

  I soberly contemplated that he was barely older than Pink.

  “Or perhaps he is only twenty,” she went on with a shrug. “They hardly know the year of their own birth, these incredibly hardy peasants. The year of the ice storm. Whatever sticks in human memory. I mentioned his talents, healing and also a certain clairvoyance. He recognizes character at first sight. Some call it second sight. But he is young and has other talents as interesting. By the age of fifteen, he drinks like a sperm whale. He fights like a wolf. He mates like a mink. Perhaps I should say sable.”

  “If he is such a beast,” Irene said calmly, as though beastliness were a fine civilized subject for discussion, “and a foreign beast at that, who barely speaks a word of English, or French, or Bohemian, how was he able to approach the prostitutes of each city? As some have pointed out, he is drunken, dirty, crude. Even streetwalkers would be cautious of such a figure.”

  Tatyana laughed. And laughed. And laughed. It was a high-pitched, hooting cackle one would expect from a witch, not a fairly young woman, but it seemed oddly natural coming from her. She threw back her supernaturally long throat (reminding me of a serpent) and indulged in laughter the way I guessed some would indulge in liquor.

  “
Oh, my poor, foolish, ordinary, blind women! You and your prim little secretary there! He has this last and most wondrous gift, my Medved. He is irresistible to women.”

  “Not I,” I said. “I repulsed him.”

  “Perhaps you did,” she said with a denigrating look I much resented, as if she eyed me up and down and inside and out and found me wanting. Me, a decent woman!

  “But I tell you,” she said, stalking toward me with one foot crossed in front of the other, reminding me of the few times I had seen Sarah Bernhardt on the stage playing some femme fatale or other. “I tell you, Miss Huxleigh, that Medved, drunk as any lord in England and only half as drunk as a Siberian peasant in top form, can approach a queen or a Gypsy fortune-teller or a prostitute or a girl-child of twelve, and they will fall to him, succumb to him, like overripe fruit to a windstorm.”

  She was face-to-face with me before anyone could stop her. I held my ground. “Name one,” I said.

  “One what?”

  “One queen he has seduced.”

  “Not yet. But there will be!”

  “If he lives that long,” Sherlock Holmes put in. “Step back, Madam, or I shall be forced to make you.”

  She spun to face him.

  “You think you can, Cobra? Or are you someone else? I am not as gifted as Medved at sensing character. I cannot quite tell. I bow to your command.”

  And she fluttered back as lightly as a firefly, like a ballerina en pointe, a mocking, infinitely graceful figure of the gaslit stage.

  “I should tell you,” Mr. Holmes continued, “that I have had some little time to investigate these brutal rituals of yours and Medved’s. Like everything evil under the sun, they are not without precedent. Nothing criminal ever is, in my experience.

  “From the first I detected a similarity to the rites of the flagellants, a religious sect that crops up in many lands and that is as old as Greece. There is a thread in mankind that cannot unweave pain from pleasure, or that seeks to punish pleasure with pain. To this we owe many historic atrocities. I had never heard of the Siberian variety until your protegé’s activities drew my attention in Paris. You were discreet in London, even having Colonel Moran find and procure the ritual sites. In Paris Medved went mad. I have a theory—”