Chapel Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  For this I received a glance of irritation mixed with surprise.

  “Because I perceive for the first time a keen and twisted intelligence behind the brutal murders in both these great cities, despite the crude and perplexing nature of the atrocities.” His gaze fastened on me with reluctant curiosity. “I trust that I am not so opinionated a man that I cannot admire the courage of a woman as well as that of another man. I grant that in the past few days you three women have found and faced such dark crimes as would drive the majority of your sex mad.”

  At this he glanced to Irene, who again sat slumped at the table, lost in her torment like some absinthe drinker enslaved by “the Green Fairy” of delusion. The crude artists who sell their wares in Montmartre often depict these abandoned souls. I had not seen her react to anything around her since Sherlock Holmes had left her side.

  He lowered his voice. “You see the results of meddling in matters of such a debased nature.” Dark brows lowered over piercing eyes. “I have no time to waste speculating on your purpose here, but do not doubt that you have one. That matters nothing now. You must attend to her, as no one else is able to do so. While I can sympathize with the loss of a trusted companion, I have no closer ties, although my friend Dr. Watson, the married man, could no doubt tell me of the deeper agonies of an endangered spouse. I suspect that the disappearance of an only brother is not quite the same thing, and frankly, my brother is better equipped to defend himself in dire circumstances than I myself.” He regarded me as sternly as a parent. “I have no doubt that a young American adventuress like yourself may be convinced that you can weather any corruption, as she was once convinced. Now you see what her actions have brought upon her: the attention of forces far beyond the normal.”

  “You believe there is a supernatural—”

  He muffled a snort of dissent and resumed his low tone. It was as if we conferred in a sickroom about a patient beyond all reaching.

  “Please, Miss Cochrane! If there is any dimension to the case that smacks of the unearthly, it is a variety of spiritual, rather than occult ill. Yes, I have ascertained your surname. I am far more aware of the movements of you all, and of those around you, than you suspect, which is as it should be.”

  His smile at my surprise was wan. “I cannot claim to see the extent of the connections as yet. Yet be of good courage. I am convinced that there are connections. I would almost suspect that Napoleon of crime, who is the one man who may have more influence in London than Whitehall or Windsor, save that he is too rational for the elements loosened on us in this case. I sense the same evil spiderwebtrembling beneath our feet, with a hidden source at an unsuspected center. Have you studied the habits of spiders, Miss Cochrane?”

  “No,” I said. “I am more interested in the human variety.”

  “You should not neglect the humble arachnid, a varied and ingenious tribe in the world of terrestrial invertebrates, often vilified but seldom credited. While a spider will spend a long, patient night weaving a web many thousandths its own size, it can in the blink of an eye disassemble the lot and vanish. This is what I have seen in Paris.”

  “Like the Gypsies,” I said, remembering the odd band from the exposition grounds.

  “Better than Gypsies. They left tracks. A spider leaves no trace. Unless you search for such with a magnifying lens.”

  “What of those demented people in the cavern? They are ‘traces.’ ”

  He shook his head. “A sorry collection of lost souls. The barely human offal of Janus-faced superstition and self-gratification, dredged from the lowest streets. Some are religious zealots turned half-mad, like Kelly. A pity he escaped. So did far too many others. I should have been involved in the matter from the first.” He glanced at Irene, as if torn between blaming and pitying her. Then he shook himself back into a brusque analysis of the situation.

  “The Paris police are sorting through a tangle of languages . . . Polish, Russian, Portuguese, but are disgusted to number some of their fellow citizens among the congregation, as well as petty thieves and prostitutes. Yet even in their dementia, these benighted beings prate of some god, some “master” who approves their debaucheries in the name of faith, mind you!”

  “I have often seen wrongdoers justify their acts by imagining that they do good, Mr. Holmes, but . . . what could justify what we saw last night?”

  “Madness, yet within it or behind it the same kernel of method that makes it doubly dangerous. The wellspring lies in London and the crimes attributed to that darling of the sensationalist presses, Jack the Ripper.”

  “Oh, but how I wish I could accompany you to London!” The words had burst out unbidden. “I—I . . . worked in the London houses, you know, before this, and not long after the Ripper crimes. I might have some insight—”

  “Insight is not needed there. Detection is. And you are needed here. You would abandon the woman who has taken you under her wing? Now, at her darkest hour? Are you Americans all enterprise, and no heart?”

  “Is it odd to hear a man of supreme rationality arguing the supremacy of the heart.”

  “Follow me to London, young Miss Cochrane,” he said with such icy conviction that I was completely tongue-tied, “and I shall have you arrested for your sins. Prostitution is not legal there, as it is here.”

  He glowered at me one last time, then clapped his hat upon his head. “Good day.”

  What an arrogant, priggish Englishman! I closed the door behind Sherlock Holmes with mixed feelings. Part of me longed to pursue him and the investigations that he would refine and renew in White-chapel. Yet beneath my impatience lay a heavy heart. Who could have anticipated this tragedy? I realized with a chill that so easily I instead of Nell could have been missing. I wondered how that would have affected Irene’s degree of shock, or Sherlock Holmes’s promises of aid.

  Irene wasn’t looking at the door, either to watch Sherlock Holmes depart or my return to her side.

  Instead, she was staring toward my sleeping alcove. “What is that?” she asked in a dead, dazed tone.

  I looked to see what she meant. “Oh. My trunk.”

  In the silence Irene stared at my trunk as if trying to see through it, as if she thought it contained Nell.

  “I forgot I’d asked the steward to get it ready,” I recalled as much as explained. So much had happened since that moment, so terribly much.

  “Ready?” Her tone still held a heart-wrenching note of vague confusion.

  “I, I’m sailing tomorrow”—I glanced at my locket-watch, ashamed that mine was still pinned to my bosom while Nell’s . . . it was better not to dwell on details. I could as easily take the boat train to London now if I wished to disobey Sherlock Holmes, and I obey no man. Time had already slipped away like a thief, turning midnight to dawn. “I’m sailing . . . today at 6:00 P.M. on the Persian Queen. For America. Going home. I’d bought the tickets weeks ago and forgot to mention it in all the—”

  I could say no more, for Irene Adler had sprung at me like a panther, bridging the six feet between us in an instant, her hands hard on my wrists, her face and voice as sharp as edged steel.

  “No, you are not,” she said. “You are not sailing anywhere while Nell is missing, and Godfrey. Not while I need you. We are going to find them.”

  “But Sherlock Holmes—”

  “Sherlock Holmes has other matters to attend to, and I do not want him involved.”

  “You were a broken woman only moments ago—”

  “Let him think so. I do not want him meddling in this. It is too important.”

  “I can’t see how I can be of any help—”

  “Don’t worry about it. I can.”

  Her grip had never lessened. For the first time I feared her. “But I have obligations—”

  “Yes, you do! You are obliged to Nell and me. You have ridden on me long enough. Now I will ride on you, Nellie Bly, daredevil reporter, and you will have by far the better story for it, believe me, if that is what it takes to get you to ow
n up to who and what you are.

  Stunned, I found myself on the brink of sobs, like a child who has been caught in a terrible misdeed and knows it. I had not allowed myself even near such a state since I was ten years old and Jack Ford had first torn our house apart and attacked my mother and called her bitch and whore. I felt racked by guilt. Shock. Fear. And a certain dull, dawning sense of . . . excitement.

  “How did you know? No one else guessed. Not even Sherlock Holmes. Have you always known?”

  “That doesn’t matter now. Our next step does. The greater mystery lies not back in London, but here in Paris and . . . beyond.”

  I nodded. Once. Hard. And shook loose a few large, humiliating tears.

  Irene Adler Norton at last eased her grip on my aching wrists. She seemed well satisfied.

  50.

  Resolution

  She has the face of the most beautiful of women, and the

  mind of the most resolute of men. . . there are no lengths to

  which she would not go—none.

  —THE KING OF BOHEMIA, “A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA”

  She was resolute, set on doing “something that no other girl

  had ever done.”

  —BROOKE KROEGER

  FROM A JOURNAL

  “I cannot allow,” Irene said, seated once again at the table across from me, “my anxiety about Nell and Godfrey to distract us from the clues still to be uncovered here in Paris.

  “I have thought and thought upon the events of the past two weeks,” she continued in a soft monotone. “Yet the horrors we witnessed last night intervene, like scenes from some opera set in Hell itself. My mind struggles to populate the grotesque scenario with my nearest and dearest in the sacrificial roles. This is death to the investigator. I begin to understand why Sherlock Holmes is so aloof from all emotional entanglements. In this matter I must rely upon your reporter’s cold-blooded instincts.”

  “I am very warm-blooded, I assure you! No one cares more about the downtrodden than I. But when I am playing a role during one of my ‘stunts,’ which is what the American press calls my ‘detective’ investigations in various false roles, I am used to suppressing my natural sympathies. How did you know who I really was? Did I say or do something to give away the game?”

  Her lips twitched in what would have been a weary smile had she been capable of producing one now. Pushing herself upright by the heels of her hands like an old woman, she left the table for her bedchamber. She soon returned bearing a bundle of letters and a small volume that she slapped to the tabletop.

  “How did I know? The sprightly little book on your voluntary incarceration.”

  I blinked to recognize the garlanded and blossom-strewn cover before me, Ten Days in a Mad-House, priced at twenty-five cents and with the author’s name etched in my most flourished script, “Nellie Bly.”

  “Your photograph is within,” she said, “along with details of ice-cold baths and sitting fourteen hours a day on hard benches with no occupation and forbidden to talk. The Pinkertons apprise me of undercover work in America. In fact, the agency noticed your discreet departure for Paris and alerted me to keep an eye out for you, on the certainty that you would unearth something sensational.”

  “I expected to be writing Ten Days in a Paris Brothel. I didn’t expect anything like the double murders there.”

  “Nor did I anticipate a double abduction.”

  This silenced me, though little does. I picked at the embroidery knots on the table scarf, unsure what to say next, a rare state with me.

  My every nerve wished to be dogging the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes back to Jack the Ripper’s home ground in London. The events in Paris were too scattered, too confusing for me to grasp. I doubted that even Irene Adler Norton, for all her gifts and her desperate stake in the outcome, could make them lead her to any conclusion worth having.

  Yet . . . Sherlock Holmes was right. For me to desert this woman now would be inexcusable. I was not used to letting others’ circumstances curtail my freedom.

  “You will get a better story with me, you know,” Irene said softly.

  I looked up, blushing furiously. “That’s not my only concern.”

  “Oh, you are a relentless little bloodhound in the guise of a well-mannered spaniel, and I wouldn’t have you any other way right now, Miss Pink. That is the name you use most, isn’t it? The best lie is always the truth presented like a glorious gem in a false setting. I know the American ‘Girl Reporters of Derring-Do’ use pseudonyms. What is your real name?”

  “Pink,” I conceded. “I’ve always been called Pink and have always called myself Pink. It is Pink . . . Elizabeth . . . Jane . . . Cochrane.”

  She nodded and began shuffling through the letters she had fetched, laying them out as if they were tarot cards with omens written on them. Godfrey’s letters, I noticed with a wince.

  “There is the question,” Irene said, “of whether this cult or a similar one was meeting in Whitechapel last autumn. The question of whether Kelly or any other Ripper suspects attended their orgies.”

  “Those lunatics in Whitechapel? The English don’t go in for bizarre religious cults.”

  “No, they exported all such people to America two centuries ago.”

  This glimmer of Irene’s usual sharp commentary encouraged me.

  “Religious maniacs are common to every race,” she went on, “even the British. Besides, the London authorities suspected someone like Kelly from the first. Whitechapel teems with poor foreigners practicing odd beliefs.”

  “Paris is not London.”

  “No. The city also is not itself these days.”

  “Not itself?” I feared her mind was still somewhat unanchored, and who could blame her?

  “No. Think! The exposition has brought thousands of people from far lands to the heart of the city, people with customs most Parisians would consider savage. Do you believe that the brutal copulation and mutilation we witnessed in the cavern last night, that Jack the Ripper’s butchery of women in Whitechapel, is unprecedented? Ask me to detail for you the Arab bride’s wedding night sometime when your stomach is particularly strong, as reported by that intrepid explorer, Sir Richard Burton. The women’s bodies we saw bore evidence of similar ritual mutilations. Remember Krafft-Ebing: lustmurder occurs in all places and times and may destroy children as well as women, and sometimes even men.”

  While I did as she said and sat silent in thought, Irene pulled the letters from their envelopes, slowly, softly, as if handling spun glass. It occurred to me that her husband might be dead, not merely missing. I could be watching a widow mourning her memories.

  Certainly she was lost exploring her own personal world again, skimming one page, then another. I dared not speak.

  “Here,” she said suddenly. “I knew I had read something. It was in his letter to Nell. . . .”

  Her voice and attention faded away again. I waited.

  All of a sudden she began reading, in a strong, steady voice, as if performing.

  Also, I thought that you would be wildly interested in the fact that some of the folk here believe our friend the Golem has risen yet again.

  This time his reputed appearance has stirred even more panic than before, for it is a particularly bloody murder that they attribute to this automaton.

  Of course, you and I and a few others know that the Golem’s previous appearance was not what everybody assumed it to be, and that it is extremely unlikely that this medieval legend has bestirred itself to spread terror in the residents’ hearts once again.

  “Now that is significant,” she said.

  “I’m not familiar with this ‘Golem.’ ”

  “You would not want to be. It is a giant clay man, an automaton, conjured by a desperate rabbi to protect his people from assault, an ancient Jewish legend of Prague. Like all monsters summoned for good purposes, it went berserk and threatened those it was to protect until the rabbi removed the spelling paper from its mouth and it ‘died.’
>
  “I wonder if we have something similar at work here,” she mused in her new and eerily distractable way.

  Despite glimpses of her usual wit, she was still a woman scorched to the bone by lightning.

  “The letter mentions ‘a particularly bloody murder.’ ”

  “Exactly. And Godfrey was lured away from Prague. Obviously, Prague bears investigation. I do have . . . acquaintances in high places there. There we must go.”

  “Prague! That is half a world away from London and Paris. On the mention of a single murder you would go there?”

  “I also have enemies there. Sherlock Holmes is correct: my activities here in Paris have caught the attention of someone operating in a larger context than a mere murderer, no matter how notorious. Obviously, the message left about Godfrey was direct and personal. Nell’s disappearance is less clear.”

  “She could have been abducted by Kelly. He escaped last night, as did several other cult members.”

  “She could have been taken by somebody completely unrelated to the cult,” Irene said. “That section of the exposition was dark and deserted.”

  “She could have been taken by . . . Gypsies.” I was grasping at straws from a melodrama.

  “Yes, she could have,” Irene agreed seriously. “They roam far and wide, and I sense this matter has sunk its roots in many places and times. I also think that we have been ‘shepherded’ for some time. Whoever shot at us outside Notre Dame cathedral, was he frightening us away from the catacomb and the evidence of cult meetings below, or toward it?”

  “He?”

  “I doubt that Annie Oakley has been drafted for this conspiracy, though I know of a certain heavy-game hunter who would have the nerve to fire a rifle at night in Paris. Whoever shot could have hit us if he wished to.”

  “Well, I don’t like that!”

  “Let Sherlock Holmes head west into the alleyways of White-chapel. I smell the Baltic salt of an east wind blowing, Pink.” Irene faltered for a moment. “It is best that I not call you ‘Nellie’ and betray your public identity.”