Castle Rouge (2 page)

In
Chapel Noir
, Irene Adler and her cohorts not only encountered Kelly but also came across a truly fiendish cult with which Kelly appeared to be affiliated. Their own investigations into the notion of a
group
of maniacal individuals is buttressed by excerpts I used from the “yellow book” (kept by an unknown individual who seemed to be investigating the cult) that had somehow come into Nell Huxleigh’s possession at some point.

Irene Adler herself, through her deductive abilities—admittedly more instinctive than Sherlock Holmes’s scientifically based investigations—had concluded that a subtle and sacrilegious pattern underlay the latest Paris depredations against women, particularly women of loose moral character. She determined that the attacks occurred on certain saints’ days and in the geographic pattern of a Chi-Rho, an ancient Christian symbol for the Christ figure on the cross. It is represented by an “X” crossing through the letter “P.” Another disturbing religious element in the Paris crimes was discovering a cavern where the cult met, in which the graffito immediately erased in Whitechapel
—The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing—
had been inscribed on the wall, in French and in human blood.

Although Nell Huxleigh prides herself on her Christian devotion, it was Irene Adler who first detected the pattern that referenced elements of Judaism, Catholicism, and Satanism. My documentation doesn’t yet give me any insight on Adler’s religious upbringing or philosophy, other than that, like many artistically inclined persons, she is most suspicious of overtly religious expressions. And, of course, compared to her biographer, Nell Huxleigh, she is markedly lacking in the usual outward demonstrations of religious belief and piety.

The religious question is extremely intriguing, given that a Whitechapel murder site also had been decorated with a line of graffito about the Jews, either an apologia or an attempt to implicate them in the Ripper murders.

We must bear in mind the rampant anti-Semitic feeling during this period in western Europe, extending as far east as Russia, which was conducting brutal pogroms that forced the mass emigration of Jews to western Europe, including Whitechapel, and America, where they were less welcome than even the Irish. Hitler did not arise in a historical-sociological vacuum.

With all these new factors thrown into the speculative stewpot that is the Ripper question, I confess that I approached the next volume of the Huxleigh diaries with confusion and trepidation. Yet even I could not have predicted what I found. I have endeavored only to present it and the supporting materials as reasonably and calmly as possible, in honest chronological sequence, so that history may judge.

I have done all that I can. It is up to posterity to decide if it wishes to believe the stunning revelations implicit in these conjoined narratives. Certainly the conclusion that all three narratives reach, each in their own separate and harrowing way, is so shocking as to be unbelievable, save that it makes perfect sense, even as the modern mind may shudder at its implications for the historical participants’ future, and for, in hindsight, our own brutal and bloody past.

Fiona Witherspoon, Ph.D., A.I.A.
^*
April 2002

Cast of Continuing Characters

Irene Adler Norton:
an American abroad who outwitted the King of Bohemia and Sherlock Holmes in the Conan Doyle story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” reintroduced as the diva-turned-detective protagonist of her own adventures in the novel,
Good Night, Mr. Holmes

Sherlock Holmes:
the London consulting detective building a global reputation for feats of deduction

Godfrey Norton:
the British barrister who married Irene just before they escaped to Paris to elude Holmes and the King

Penelope “Nell” Huxleigh:
the orphaned British parson’s daughter Irene rescued from poverty in London in 1881; a former governess and “typewriter girl” who lived with Irene and worked for Godfrey before they met and married, and who now resides with them in Paris

Quentin Stanhope:
the uncle of Nell’s former charges when she worked as a London governess; now a British agent in eastern Europe and the Mideast, he reappeared in
A Soul of Steel
(formerly
Irene at Large
)

John H. Watson, M.D.:
British medical man and Sherlock Holmes’s sometimes roommate and frequent companion in crime solving

Pink:
another American, although no innocent abroad; met in
Chapel Noir
at a Paris brothel where a double murder occurred; a young woman with a taste for the sensational and her own agenda

Bram Stoker:
acquaintance of Irene and Nell; the theatrical manager for Britain’s foremost actor, Henry Irving; an aspiring writer of sensational stories. He figured in
The Adventuress
(formerly
Good Morning, Irene
) and, more suspiciously, in
Chapel Noir
.

William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody
and
Red Tomahawk:
appearing with the Wild West show in Paris. Both assisted Irene in tracking the Ripper suspect in
Chapel Noir
.

Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, King of Bohemia:
the Crown Prince who courted Irene years before, then feared she might disrupt his forthcoming royal marriage. He hired Sherlock Holmes to recover a photograph of Irene and the Prince together, but she escaped, promising never to use the photo against the King. They met again in
Another Scandal in Bohemia
(formerly
Irene’s Last Waltz
).

Queen Clotilde of Bohemia:
former Danish princess who married the King after his pursuit of Irene and found herself a pawn in a political intrigue in
Another Scandal in Bohemia
.

James Kelly:
a demented Liverpool upholsterer who stabbed his wife to death and escaped a madhouse, residing in Whitechapel during the Jack the Ripper murders of autumn, 1888. Immediately after the last Ripper slaying, he fled to France, where Ripperlike murders soon occurred, as related in
Chapel Noir
.

Inspector François le Villard:
a Paris detective and admirer of Holmes who has translated the English detective’s monographs into French. He worked with Irene Adler Norton on the Montpensier case in
The Adventuress
(formerly
Good Morning, Irene
).

Baron Alphonse de Rothschild:
head of the international banking family’s most powerful branch and of the finest intelligence network in Europe, frequent employer of Irene, Godfrey, and Nell in various capacities, especially in
Another Scandal in Bohemia

Albert Edward:
familiarly known as Bertie, the Prince of Wales, royal rake and bon vivant and heir to
Queen Victoria

Sarah Bernhardt:
the leading actress of the age, a self-made success, extravagant impresaria, and friend of Irene Adler

Prelude

I often have this strange and moving dream

Of an unknown woman….

—
PAUL VERLAINE,
MON RÊVE FAMILIER
,
1866

FROM A YELLOW BOOK

She cleaves the night like a sailing ship. The ruffled wake of her trailing skirts leaves a silvered moon path on the greasy black cobblestones. Water and dirt have crept up her ragged hems for a foot or more, swelling her skirts into anchors instead of sails. They momentarily sweep up the damp and slime before it flows shut like sludge behind her.

She has long since lost the will to lift them from the muck.

She does not so much walk as stagger deliberately, like a noblewoman in a state procession. She is unaccompanied, alone, but each step she takes is emphatic. Each pauses. No marcher to some stately processional, she. The only music the night makes are bursts of raucous song from the public-house doors she passes by.

Each feverishly lit portal exhales a hot, bright breath of ale, laughter, and sour sweat.

The spring night is chill. Mist steams off the cobblestones in the scrofulous patches of gaslight that fail to illuminate the poorer quarter.

Drinking songs—robust, merry, deluded—barely penetrate her deadened mind.

She has no coppers to buy even a tankard of ale, much less lodging for the night. She can sell herself, but not if she is too worn to exchange coy words with the lone men who prowl beyond the frail, flickering halos crowning the gaslights.

She knows they are there. Should one find her, and pay her instead of running away after, she will have the choice of food or drink or some crowded corner out of the night fog.

He will have to lift the street-soaked skirts for her, though.

She has a history, but she does not remember it. She had family once, but they do not remember her. Once she had employment, but her fingers and eyes gave out, and the younger girls from the country could do the work better, at first, as she had.

Her fingers grow numb along with her feet, her face. If a carriage came clattering down the street, she wouldn’t have the heart to dodge it. In fact, the thought of an onrushing carriage, black as a funeral coach, is a welcome dream. It would stop her feet in their monotonous march. She would like to stop all movement now, finally. All. Her bodice expands with a breath, just a little. This duel with whalebone stays for space is too difficult. Who can outblow Leviathan? She remembers the big, black-bound book in a place she had once called home.

What country is this, what city?

Who can say? It could be London, Paris, Prague, Helsinki. It is a city not her own. Yet she claims no country but her own mind.

What child is this?

She does not know. Country, city, self. Not anymore.

If only Leviathan would come and carry her away, as it did Job. Or was that Jonah? Away into the dark inside of the sea, where nothing moves.

Something does move. It careens into her. Somebody.

Drugged with hopelessness, paralyzed by hunger, drained of all thought and will, she sinks. The dark of a byway swallows her. She doesn’t feel her cheek scrape rough brick, her back slam into ungiving wall.

He is muttering at her, Leviathan, but she can’t understand the words and doesn’t care to anyway. He is lifting her heavy, sopping, filthy skirts, and she feels the absence of their constant weight as a dim animal relief, not quite understood.

He is poking at her buckram bodice, that well-built wall to keep her from breathing. He is poking with a stick, a sharp stick, but what has her life become but a poking with a sharp stick….

A hot tongue cuts across her throat. Something warm and wonderful floods down her chest. Honey, warm honey. She sinks, hearing the irritating clop of nearing horses. She is too far away to throw herself under their iron feet. She is too far away to do anything, even when the force that had caught her ebbs away like mist.

Perhaps this time she, too, will ebb away like mist.

Now the carriage has stopped and the horses, but the trickle of hot liquid at her throat has not.

She is, as far as she can tell, still alive.

What a pity.

1.

Evening in Paris

She suffered the penalty paid by all sensation-writers of being compelled to hazard more and more theatric feats
.

—
WALT MCDOUGALL,
NEW YORK WORLD
ILLUSTRATOR
, 1889

FROM A JOURNAL

I was born Elizabeth, but they call me Pink.

I have had to steel myself often in life.

First against my stepfather, Jack Ford, a drunken brute. Then against the men who said I had no right to exist as I was, who would patronize me.

Now against a woman who would appeal to my conscience.

I am an exposer and righter of wrongs. An undercover investigator. My mission is above conscience. My mission
is
my conscience.

She would divert me.

I do not like it, not even when she assembles Bertie, Prince of Wales; Baron de Rothschild; Bram Stoker; and Sarah Bernhardt into one room in Paris.

Hers.

Beyond this convocation of capitol B’s the only person of interest who is missing is Sherlock Holmes, the renowned English consulting detective. Even this cold-blooded Brit hesitated—a few moments—in forsaking her and Paris for London and fresh insight into the most appalling murderer of the age, Jack the Ripper.

I should perhaps figure her into this scene: Irene Adler Norton, ex-diva, ex-American, ex-Pinkerton agent.

She is now also a woman deprived of the two personal props in her life: her husband, Godfrey Norton, and her friend and supporter, Nell Huxleigh, both English, both taken in mysterious ways by mysterious enemies.

I think of women in Greek tragedies: Hecuba in
The Trojan Women
, Medea mourning her faithless man and sacrificing her children, Electra murdering her mother. Women who like Samson shake the pillars they are bound to and make the known world tremble.

She is very dangerous right now, Irene Adler Norton, and I don’t care to be here for the catastrophe.

She has blackmailed me, this woman, this implacable Fury. She has reached into me like the stage artist she was and captured my attention. She has sunk her tiny, precise teeth into my soul, found my aching vulnerabilities and bound me with silken fibers of steel.