Castle Rouge (19 page)

“How have you interrogated him?”

“We have our methods, Mr. Holmes. They may not be as mysterious as yours but are no less important. As it happened, the Foreign Office was most happy to provide an interpreter, one who even spoke the particular dialect of this…Yuri Chernyshev chap.”

At the mention of the Foreign Office, Holmes seized the jar again and subjected it to scrutiny. I believe he meant the gesture to hide his expression of satisfaction, for of course his brother Mycroft must have had something to do with it. I recalled again that the most eminent personages in England were interested in both the Ripper case and Holmes’s progress with it.

“What has he allowed you to learn of him?” Holmes asked again, finally.

“He was a brushmaker in Vilna, wherever that may be. Russia is a very large land mass.”

“Indeed,” said Holmes, never glancing up from the mouth of the pottery jug. “From its far western islands to its eastern wastes, it girdles the globe over an expanse that would go from Cairo to Fiji, should Russia lie on a more temperate southerly longitude instead of the icy upper half of the map. Were it not for the frozen expanses of upper North America and Greenland—and a few modest European countries on the western fringe of Europe—Russia would girdle the globe. As it is, the nation extends from Nunyamo near the furthest extreme of Alaska to Gdynia above Warsaw. A mighty land indeed.”

Lestrade’s jaw dropped at this apparently idle excursion into geography, but less so than mine. If there was any subject my brilliant but erratically educated friend found less interesting than the clockwork operation of the heavens, it was the specific arrangement of the earth and sea below those heavens.

“At any rate,” Lestrade finally went on, studiously consulting his notes, “this Chernyshev said the Czar’s police came to his village of Vilna, wherever it was between, ah, Nunyami and Gardinia, and so taxed and beat the Jews that they fled like sheep to Europe and eventually he found his way to London and Whitechapel, where he resumed his work as a brushmaker.”

“And his reason for being out that night?”

“He admits to being a member of the International Working Men’s Educational Club, which we know as an organization of Jewish anarchists.”

“But he denies attacking the young woman just outside of it?”

“Of course. There’s not a Ripper suspect we’ve had in hand that did not deny everything.”

“And does he admit to a state of drunkenness?”

“Admit? He is proud of it.”

Holmes peered deep into the jar. “He claims to have emptied this jug by himself?”

“Absolutely. It is rarely attained here in England, being a popular village brew all over Russia. He claims to have wandered the streets all night, intending to drink until he could not stand.”

“And these chips along the bottle’s lip, could he explain them?”

“I happened to have noticed that very thing, Mr. Holmes,” Lestrade said with a ferrety grin at me. “Looks as though the bottle might have been used as a bludgeon, although that poor woman was not struck with anything but a blade. So I asked him about that, through the interpreter, who said that men in his village used to gather in the forest and beat these jars against a tree trunk until the sealing fell off and they could drink. And that is how the chips came to be.”

Holmes set the jar away from himself at the center of the desk, with the air of a cat tiring of a dead mouse. “Russia is a brutally large land, filled with peasants who follow peasant pursuits. I understand their miserable lots make them prodigious drinkers, especially of a potent distillation of rye. No doubt the spirit in this jar was that brew so common in Russia and yet so rare here.”

“Given the fellow’s condition when you ran him down, I can only hope it will continue to be rare here.”

Holmes nodded, and stood.

“I say, Mr. Holmes, do you not wish to see this man for yourself? He is sober now, and we have retained the translator.”

Holmes didn’t hesitate. “That is most kind and prescient of you, Inspector Lestrade, but I have no need to interview the man. There is no doubt he attacked the woman we found, as you could have proved had not your fellow policemen trampled the ground about her body until all traces of a bootprint missing a large nail were erased. I suggest you examine the bottom of Chernyshev’s boots, but it will only show the futility of prosecuting him. For want of a nail…Still, I would keep an eye on him.”

“But Mr. Holmes! This man may be the Ripper! Have you no interest in pursuing the matter?”

“No. He is all yours, I am happy to say. I’ll bid you good day.”

It was not often that I was as shocked as Inspector Lestrade by Holmes’s unpredictable approaches to crime solving.

I finally scrambled out of my chair, nodded farewell to the stunned inspector, and hastened after Holmes.

15.

The Wild East Show

Wild Magyar horsemen tumbled down the Carpathian passes in the late ninth century….

—
THOMAS REIMER, A GERMAN HUNGARIAN HISTORIAN

FROM A JOURNAL

Our train had pushed beyond Frankfurt toward Vienna when I first spied the riders.

They came at a distant angle at first, then soon galloped alongside us. The horses’ ribbon-caparisoned halters, reins, and saddles fluttered with rainbow motion, but the riders’ full-sleeved and trousered garb was no less colorful.

“I see why Colonel Cody hails the horsemen of the world in his show,” I noted, standing on the shuddering train to look out the window with my nose pressed against the glass. “Who or what are these wild men?”

“Magyars,” Irene says, leaning forward to regard them. “Cousins and mortal enemies of Turks and Huns. Hundreds of years of mounted battle beat beneath the hooves of their steeds.”

Her voice took on the thrilling tone of a melodrama, or an endless Sarah Bernhardt death scene. She is like Bram Stoker: if it is a cast of hundreds and cost thousands, it is Theater, even if it is real. Perhaps especially if it is real.

“Bandits do this,” I said, breathless myself as I sat to pull out my journal and began scribbling penciled notes. “In the American West. They run down trains and stop them dead, then rob the passengers.”

“Bandits operate worldwide.” Irene reached into the side pocket of the “surprise” dress that carried something Nell never would have when she wore it: a small black pistol. “We move into mountainous country. That is where civilization loosens its grip and the Old Ways win out again.”

“Do those men really mean to stop our train and rob us?”

Irene shook her head. “I don’t think so. They are showing off. They are a mere distraction.”

“A distraction for what?”

“Watch and see,” she said with an irritating smile. It was not that the smile was irritating; it was the fact that she smiled at such an uneasy time that was irritating.

I saw that despite the drawn pistol, she was not afraid, not even were Billy the Kid to board our train.

Then neither should I be!

Our train did not stop, but the engine did jerk and spit up a long grade like a balky mount.

Not long after that I heard bootheels pounding down the passage.

At our door they stopped.

A fierce, mustachioed face peered in at us through the frosted glass.

The door sprung wide. A man in high-heeled boots of mad design and a military uniform trellised in gold braid invaded our compartment.

He strode at once to the window, tapping upon it with a long-barreled pistol that was as gilded as his uniform.

The riders came galloping alongside, men whose foot-long mustaches whipped back like their mounts’ long black tails. They lifted sleeves as ruffled as a seventeenth-century English cavalier’s and flourished rifles before they careened away at the same diagonal with which they had intercepted us. I watched the black manes of their pale gray mounts grow small and become as wispy as storm clouds on the horizon.

“What magnificent beasts!” I exclaimed.

“The horses, or the men?” Irene asked, turning from me to our guest—our invader—before I could, in all honesty, choose. “Well met, Bassanio.”

“This is no Rialto.” The officer sat without invitation, doffing his savage bearskin helmet.

I eyed his slanted black mustaches and eyebrows, his flushed, swarthy face. Surely a distant descendant of Genghis Khan or…

“Thanks for the cabled warning, Quentin,” Irene said. “Kelly was seen in Neunkirchen. We are on the right trail.”

He nodded, still catching his breath.

“Will you not lose your horse?” I interjected.

“It was borrowed.” He tossed me a glance as a soldier might unleash a grenade.

I flushed. The horses were stage props, no more. As perhaps I was.

He glanced back, observed my high color, and made a brisk bow. “I am sorry my unannounced appearance startled you, Miss Pink.”

“No more so than the Ripper,” I replied as tartly as Nell might have.

At the same instant the expression in his eyes recognized, welcomed, and then blanched at my evocation.

I was surprised at myself as well. It was as if Nell accompanied us in some unseen way. Like Irene, I was unexpectedly taking on her coloration. Had this meek nonentity really had such an effect on us, on all of us?

From the sudden silence on the dashing Quentin Stanhope’s part, apparently so.

“What have you learned?” Irene asked.

“Gypsies, of course, travel east. And west.”

“You have learned nothing more of them?”

He lounged back in the velvet upholstery, the spurs on his bright leatherwork boots chiming. “I have found the horse with the misshapen shoe.”

“Are you sure?”

“The American Indian’s description was Johnny-on-the-spot: a mark like a mare’s-tail cloud in the sky. Almost like a tilde to my eye.”

“And—?” Irene was breathless with impatience.

“The caravan it pulled is heading east, accompanied by the usual packs of dogs and children walking alongside.”

“And?”

“Nothing else. No passengers but Gypsies. No fleeing English upholsterer, no hooded devil worshipers. Just Gypsies: close-mouthed, grimy, proud.”

“Then our party has all transferred to trains.”

“Perhaps not.”

Irene and I regarded Quentin Stanhope with intense interest.

“No one unusual has passed through the stations that lie behind you, or ahead of you,” he said. “There is no trace of an abducted woman, of a madman, or of a group of peasant foreigners.”

“The only trace,” Irene pointed out bitterly, “is the dead girl at Neunkirchen.”

Quentin nodded. “I find the fact that there is no trail most sinister of all. It tells me that they are good at this, at being invisible when they want to be.”

Irene fell back into the seat. “Then you don’t doubt that they exist?”

“No. And I have learned that there is something rotten in Prague. Something no one will talk about, but that everyone suspects like an unacknowledged nightmare. A nightmare too terrible to tell anyone about. The Rothschild agents, of course, will be more forthcoming, but I left them for you. I didn’t want to blunder into matters I only half grasp.”

Irene nodded, glanced at the pistol still in her hand, then shrugged and replaced it in her pocket.

“The last time I was in Prague proved very dangerous,” she said.

“I think the city will not disappoint your expectations,” Quentin responded with a small bow.

“I am glad you are with us.”

He glanced at me, as if annoyed that the “us” included me.

“I will do anything I can,” he said, not looking at Irene, “to see Nell restored to her proper place by your side.”

I suppressed a shiver. Dressed as he was, as some half-wild horseman of the Wild East, I could well believe that he was eager to unseat Nell’s usurper by any means he could find.

Was Godfrey Norton anything like this hard-edged adventurer? Overcivilized Englishmen made my head ache, but uncivilized Englishmen reminded me of wolves.

16.

Nell Ungirds Her Loins

As Lady Russell said, the English conclude if your dress is loose, that your morals are also. In that case I am thoroughly dissolute
.

—
MRS. SARAH AUSTIN
, 1862

“I am afraid you are not at all saved, Nell,” Godfrey told me with deep regret, “but merely join me in the state of needing to be.”

I blinked, not yet being sufficiently revived to understand the fine point of accuracy that barristers are wont to put on their simplest musings as if every sentence were a newly sharpened quill.

Besides, as my senses returned I became aware of various unpleasantries. Foremost among them was the light that glared behind Godfrey, turning him into a mere silhouette of a man. It seared my poor eyes that had been confined to dark and close places for God knew how long.

“Irene,” I murmured.

“She is safe, well?”

“I don’t know!” My voice had become a cronelike croak. “I last glimpsed her by the light of that demonic hellfire with those naked, murderous, mad things dancing around her.”

“Good God, Nell! Where have you two been?”

“To
l’Exposition universelle
in Paris.”

“
L’Exposition universelle—
? Your mind must be wandering. The Exposition is a place of wonder and entertainment. Perhaps I should ask
when
you last saw Irene.”

“Why”—I had to think. I had to think to say anything at the moment—“on Joan of Arc’s birthday, of course.”

“Joan of Arc’s birthday?! Since when do you mark the calendar by Joan of Arc’s birthday?”

“Poor Godfrey. You have sorely lost sense during our separation, having to repeat everything I say like that annoying parrot Casanova. It was actually Joan of Arc’s…feast day. That is it: a French Papist observation alien to Protestant Englishmen: May the thirtieth.”