Castle Rouge (15 page)

He measured me. I measured him. We were both not what we appeared to be. That we understood, if we did not understand each other, or remotely wish to.

“He should be rowing a boat on the Serpentine!” I exclaimed the moment the man was gone.

“That would indeed be a waste of his talents.” Irene sipped cold tea as if it were ambrosia.

I suspected that all her senses were dulled, so intent was her mind on restoring her losses.

In truth, I had sensed some mettle beneath the fellow’s manner, though I hated to admit it in an Englishman.

“You are accustomed to acting alone,” Irene mused. “It is both admirable and a certain handicap. Perhaps it is my theatrical history but I am used to large casts acting in concert. You disparage my instinct to cast gentlemen of my acquaintance in leading roles. You consider it womanly weakness. On the contrary, no war was ever won by lone soldiers.

“This is a war, Pink. Undeclared perhaps, but nonetheless serious. I will use who I can where I can, and not apologize for it. Including you.”

“There is something heartless in you.”

“I hope so.” She leaned forward and spoke to me, fiercely. “Sentiment or horror will not aid us in this battle. Only persistence. Consistency. Implacable pursuit. This is what has been directed at us. Me and mine.”

She sat back to deliver herself of a speech for my benefit.

“As Buffalo Bill can rely upon the peerless tracking skills of Red Tomahawk, Indian of the Wild West, I can equally depend upon the insight and courage of
my
emissary from the Wild East.

“Quentin Stanhope is a valuable spy for the British Foreign Office,” she went on. “More than that, he is a man who has absorbed the very nature of the foreign into his bones and blood. He is an explorer of what polite society wishes hidden. He has seen, drunk, slept, eaten, lived—and no doubt almost died—elements of uncivilized life that we can scarcely imagine.

“I do not accept his escort. I welcome his collaboration.”

“Quentin. That name is familiar….”

“He is a friend of Nell’s, and thus my truest and best ally.”

“A friend? Of Nell’s? That seems hard to believe.”

“Then let me modify my description. He is an admirer of Nell’s.”

“Really?”

There was no mistaking her meaning. The duplicitous rogue Englishman Quentin Stanhope was seriously taken by our little Nell.

Really! I was almost intrigued enough by this ridiculous notion to consider abandoning Sherlock Holmes to his Johnny-come-lately investigations in Whitechapel. Perhaps Jack the Ripper did not lurk in our future, but the savagely civilized Quentin Stanhope might prove to be of equal interest.

8.

Uneasy Allies

Case 21. Lustmurder

It satisfied me to seize the women by the neck and suck their blood. Since I was twelve I experienced a peculiar feeling of pleasure while wringing the necks of chickens. I often killed great numbers of them and claimed that a weasel had been in the hen-coop
.

—
RICHARD VON KRAFFT-EBING,
PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS

FROM A JOURNAL

“No more than one bag apiece,” Irene decreed.

I raised my eyebrow.

This from the mistress of the well-rounded wardrobe? Yet she was serious, and just how much soon came home to me.

She vanished into Nell’s bedroom and returned with a garment draping her arm. “Nell’s ‘surprise’ dress. It lifts the overskirt and revers to reveal a more formal aspect. For Nell it was a matter of economy,” she added, stroking the pink-satin lining as if it were a pet. “For me it shall be a matter of practicality, which Nell would most approve. The skirts shall be a trifle short for me, but will permit more freedom of movement.”

Irene’s relentless will may have driven her to seek a more practical wardrobe among her lost friend’s possessions. I also believe that dressing in Nell’s clothes was an actress’s way of donning her persona. She would move forward in the outward guise of her friend, absorbing her mental habits as well as her habiliments, beginning to think and feel as she did, setting herself on the trail in the very mind of the one lost.

I did not have such a theatrical approach. I went out to one of the fabled Parisian department stores,
Le Bon Marché
in this instance, and satisfied my own imitations of Nell by purchasing a checked coatdress of fine, light wool, much like that she had worn on our last outing to
l’Exposition universelle
. I topped it off with a hoydenish billed cap that quite made me feel like a newsboy hawking sensational late editions on the curb. Read all about it!
NELLIE BLY TRACKS RIPPER TO VERDUN
.

Oddly enough, clothed as Nell, I felt some of her stern island spirit dampening my natural American exuberance.

At such instants it occurred to me I might be invoking a dead woman’s semblance and spirit. Yet somehow, that thought did not deter my resolve. I would give Irene’s wild flight eastward a week of my time. Then I must return west to England and America. My absence would not go unnoticed that much longer.

I must admit that my heart beat a cancan of anxiety beneath my sober, checked coatfront as we made our way through the
Gare du Nord
, that monstrosity of a railway station, all echoing stone and the seagull-like cries of children and conductors.

When we reached our railway car and slung our single carpetbags into the brass racks above the seat, Irene smiled.

“That is all Nell and I had when fleeing Bohemia: a carpetbag each.”

“You and Nell did this before? Traveled by train across Europe?”

“Yes. Only then nine of the King of Bohemia’s best agents were on our track. This time, we are on the trail.”

“To where? Pursuing whom?”

She ignored my questions and gazed out the window at the crowds milling back and forth on the platform like people at a carnival gawking at freaks behind glass.

“Ah, there he is! Do not look! We must not appear to recognize him. He will join us when the train is underway.”

Our tickets were marked for Verdun. Irene seemed nervous now, withdrawing one of her slim dark cigars, then returning it to the exquisite case that held them. That blue enamel lid boasted a single, slanted capital “I” picked out in diamonds on the cover, one precious item she had not left behind, but it weighed little. She glanced at the passage, where late passengers were thronging past to find their compartments.

Apparently ours was private, for no one darkened our glass-inset door.

Irene consulted the small enameled watch she wore on a long chain around her neck. I had never seen her wear a watch before. She had left such practicalities to Nell until now.

“We leave in moments,” she fretted. “I can’t imagine what is keeping him.”

“Mr. Stanhope, you mean?”

“Well, I wasn’t expecting Red Tomahawk.”

“I don’t see that we need him.”

“Red Tomahawk?”

“Mr. Stanhope. Or Mr. Stoker.”

She shrugged and pushed the heavy velvet window curtains back even farther to gaze at the people milling on the platform amid clouds of steam.

The train throbbed, then jerked forward. Wheels creaked as they slowly groaned into motion, like a slugabed awaking in the morning.

I felt the unbidden thrill of beginning a journey to a strange place, despite my misgivings. And I was rather glad Mr. Stanhope had missed our train.

The car jerked and ground forward, barely in motion at first, but gaining speed and smoothness with every passing second.

Yes! The odious Englishman was indeed too late to accompany us.

Footsteps pounded the narrow passage beyond our compartment door.

Oh, no! I had been relieved too soon.

A flushed face under a peaked cap pressed against our etched glass until its nose was flattened like a piglet’s.

Irene leaped up despite the unevenly lurching train and opened the door.

“Madame Norton?” the urchin asked, grinning.

At Irene’s nod he thrust a misfolded newssheet at her. “For you.”

“And for you,” Irene answered in French equally as simple to understand, pressing a few sous into his palm to replace the paper.

He nodded and raced out of sight again.

She quickly went to the window, looking back to the station.

“Ah, he landed on all fours, but safely. Brave lad!” Before she finished speaking the train’s rapid acceleration pushed her back against the plush green upholstery.

I couldn’t help thinking of the man who had done that work, and of James Kelly, who had found other, more murderous uses for his upholsterer’s chisels….

But Irene rested against the padded velvet seemingly untroubled by macabre thoughts. She was reading the newspaper so suddenly delivered to her.

I tried to skim the text from the opposite seat, but the train’s progress through the rail yards was too rough to permit easy reading, especially the surreptitious sort that I excelled at. And besides, the text was in some foreign language, not even French, I think, but German or some such.

We do not much study foreign languages in the U.S. Unlike the Europeans, we don’t have neighboring states that use other tongues jammed up against our borders, and our foreign immigrants keep to themselves in sections of the city, or else learn English.

Irene read raptly, with the absorption of the linguist born. I could see how learning to sing in a handful of languages had taught her the major European tongues. It occurred to me then that the profession of opera singer was a demanding one requiring years of study to produce the impression that one could then waltz onto a stage in improbable costumes glittering with paste and foil and sing one’s heart out like the Emperor’s dying nightingale in five different foreign languages for three or four hours a night.

Irene sighed loudly enough for it to carry to the first balcony and set the paper down in her lap as if it were suddenly heavy.

“Well, we have lost our escort for the first stage of the journey.”

At my mute questioning face, she added. “Quentin has gone ahead by horseback and coach. He says it is faster. But the Rothschild agents have been ahead of even him. Here is the Mannheim newspaper from two days ago. A village called Neunkirchen just over the French border near Worms—in Germany,” she added, sensing my mystification.

I took the folded pages she handed me, remembering our lessons in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s
Psychopathia Sexualis
. German is the language said to underlie much of English, but I can claim no easy understanding of those twisted Gothic letters.

Of course the name “Neunkirchen” caught my eye.

Some of the words beneath the headline struck me with familiarity, but before I could interpret them, Irene did the task for me.

“The body of a young woman was found. ‘As if torn apart by wolves.’ Near the train station.”

“At Neunkirchen.”

“‘Newchurch,’ I believe it means in English. It seems that the Ripper precedes us.”

I sat up. “And Mr. Stanhope believes he can make better time than the train?”

“I believe he can,” Irene said with a smile. “Civilization is a great retardant. I wish he could make as good time as Jack the Ripper, but that gentleman knows where he is going, and we do not.”

“Are madmen that…competent?”

“When they are not so much mad, as evil. And I fear that this is the case.”

I said nothing in answer, but my heart was beating with fear and anticipation, a state it often reached when I was launched on one of my famous ‘stunts.’

I wanted to be on horseback flying along the hilltops with Quentin Stanhope instead of chuffing along the switchbacks in an iron box on wheels. I began to understand how a plains warrior like Red Tomahawk might feel touring with the Wild West Show.

“We will have to stop in Neunkirchen,” Irene added with a frown.

I saw that she resented any pause in her haste to follow a possible route to Nell. “I will wire ahead from Verdun, so that we don’t waste any time.”

But we would waste time. Like Red Tomahawk we followed a trail, we did not break it. We were forced to keep our eyes and ears and mind to the ground just ahead, to slow down to observe traces, even if they were as obvious as dead bodies. To pause and think and worry and wonder.

No mystery why Jack the Ripper had eluded so many bobbies and gendarmes. He had the advantage of forging a trail, not following it.

We were all doomed to be a little too late, perhaps even Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

9.

The Devil His Own Way

I incline to Cain’s heresy,” he used to say. “I let my brother go to the devil in his quaintly ‘own way.’”

—
UTTERSON, THE LAWYER IN
THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL
AND MR. HYDE
, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
, 1886