Castle Rouge (20 page)

Godfrey sank away from me, the movement allowing the light behind him to fall upon his pale features. “May the thirtieth! But this is June the sixth, according to my best calculations. What can have happened to Irene since in so long as that?” His worried eyes returned to me. “What can have happened to you?”

“It was horrible!” I began to recall just how awful, despite my muffled, pounding headache. “Two terrible brutes trapped me in the panorama building outside the cavern. A panorama is a peculiarly French attraction, for they are always a circuitous sort. It is a circular building lined with a huge panoramic painting of a crowd scene, only this one turned like a top…not the painting, but the building. It was not open at that early hour of the morning, of course, and shuttered and dark inside, but some villains set the mechanism rotating, so I was quite dizzy and made even more so when a man came out of nowhere from among the wax figures and tried to smother me with a thick, sick-smelling cloth. Then I was crammed into a box—like a coffin—and knocked about for a good long time. Irene had mentioned long ago a ‘vampire box’ they use on stage for trick appearances, but mine was a disappearance.”

Even as I recalled the circumstances of my abduction, I became more fully aware of its physical results. I ached and burned from head to foot. After so long supine in a box, I could barely take a breath deep enough to support more than a few sentences, for my corset felt like the relentless embrace of an Iron Maiden. I also was beginning to detect a ghastly foul smell, and feared that I might be its source.

“Oh, Godfrey! I have spent
all that time
in these same clothes!”

Most men would have been insensitive to my predicament or outraged sensibility, but Godfrey immediately was moved to action.

“Unthinkable! I’ll return in an instant.”

His shadowy figure vanished as swiftly as a withdrawn lantern shutter, leaving the blurred white daylight from the window beyond to sear my weakened eyes like live coals.

I shut my eyelids, now welcoming the dark I had feared during all my journey. Perhaps I had imagined Godfrey’s comforting presence. Perhaps I was still in my jolting coffin, my mobile vampire box. No wonder every bone and centimeter of flesh on my body throbbed!

I almost sobbed, save that the breath I caught and held became a girdle of fire around my chest.

“I’m back,” Godfrey announced. “We are in a castle, but all we have for servants are cats and rats.”

“So like a Grimm fairy tale,” I murmured. Perhaps I had awakened in one of those folk parables.

Something like a cloud floated over me.

“This is a fine lawn nightgown, Nell. It will serve as a dressing chamber for you, for no woman you would care to have touch you is available here to assist you. You say you are having trouble breathing?”

“Well, yes, my—” How should I explain my predicament with the corset to Godfrey, who was not even a physician? “I have been cruelly bounced from pillar to post and now you say I am in a castle?”

“A castle of rogues and phantoms, alas, and no very fine place at all. I think I can guess your quandary. Now don’t breathe for a few moments.”

While he had been talking, Godfrey had pulled the voluminous fabric over me like a tent. Then he reached within it, and I felt a strange pressure at my ribs. For an instant my pain multiplied, and I couldn’t restrain a cry. But the wail ended in a relieved sigh as my tortured lungs and bones suddenly expanded, at last unfettered from whalebone and cotton lacing.

I realized that the metal hooks and eyes at the corset front had been pinched together until they burst apart. Only a man’s great strength could accomplish this instant unbinding. I was very glad then that when Godfrey wed Irene he had assumed some of my former duties as ladies’ maid. And I recalled another instance when another man in other circumstances had so loosed me. I would have blushed, but I was too weak to do so.

Every new breath came more deeply, and more painfully, so I felt both relieved and yet more tormented than ever.

“Now.” Godfrey’s fingers were working at the many horn buttons fastening the front of my coatdress. “You must permit me some liberties. You have been cruelly confined, in every respect, for days.”

Although I trusted the motives and refinement of Godfrey above that of all men on earth, his attack on the buttons reminded me so vividly of the demented creature with the pale, mad eyes pawing at my bodice in the panorama building that it was all I could do to keep still and avoid screaming.

Yet as the heavy wool gown came away like a husk, I again felt such welcome relief that I could not stop myself from weeping.

“If you were taken in Paris,” Godfrey was saying, “and confined to a box, you must have been a prisoner for almost a week and have traveled by coach, boat, and railway train. Did they feed you, give you water?”

“I can’t remember. I don’t know what they did to me, or who they were, save that I was always very sick and a sweetly medicinal smell hovered over me the entire time.”

“Some drug, possibly chloroform. We are at least fed here from time to time. I will try to get you some broth or soup.”

“We?” For an insane moment, I hoped he would tell me that Irene was here with us after all and that it was all a nightmare that was over and the Rothschilds expected us to dinner at eight.

“I am speaking of you and I. There. The dress is off. Perhaps you can manage the other things as you gain strength.”

My arms had not yet fought their way into the nightshirt’s full sleeves. I sought to pull the loosened corset from under my body, but the effort was too taxing.

I became aware then that the sweet, sickly odor which had been my constant companion, almost a guardian angel during my ordeal, was finally fading. In its place rose some extremely impolite odors that I realized to my horror came from me, odors common on the debased streets of a district like Whitechapel, no doubt, but utterly foreign to a decently reared female of any sensibility at all.

After all I had survived, I could have now gladly died on the spot.

“And I will order the makings of a bath from these savages,” Godfrey said. “I cannot provide a maid whose aid you would deign to accept but perhaps after some soup and water, er, soap and water and soup, you will be stronger and can manage to tend to yourself.”

At that he withdrew like the gentleman he was, leaving me to take inventory of my truly lamentable state and to wonder where on earth we were and among what unutterably savage monsters that cats and rats should seem finer housemates than human beings.

17.

Sterner Stuff

Our sons are made of sterner stuff, but less winning are their caresses
.

—EURIPEDES,
THE SUPPLIANTS

FROM A JOURNAL

“First, Quentin,” Irene told our new and quite illegal fellow passenger, “I believe you need to explain to Pink your current garb and headlong method of boarding trains.”

“Really, no!” I demurred. Quentin Stanhope did not look like a man who was pleased to explain himself to anybody.

At the moment, however, he was engaged in deeply regarding me. Taken aback, I closed my journal and inserted my pencil in the silver tube mechanism that was both its holder and a lock for the book.

“It’s simple,” he said at last, stretching his booted legs toward the empty side of the seat opposite where Irene sat alone. He had chosen to sit alongside me, perhaps the better to discourse with Irene across the compartment. I found his presence most oppressive.

“This eastern part of Europe is a string of petty principalities, some long ago knuckled under to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, some maintaining a precarious independence. Each duchy has its officious tyrant, and the tyrants in turn have their gaudy military forces. My current guise combines the features of a dozen overbearing uniforms common to the region. Wherever I go, I am taken for a pompous, garlanded popinjay from the neighboring satrapy. So I go unchallenged but not much respected, an ideal position for a spy.”

“In addition,” Irene said, having long before returned her pistol to Nell’s innocuous pocket, “you may leap upon any operetta stage in Europe and melt into the chorus at an instant’s notice.”

Mr. Stanhope stroked his false mustaches, perhaps horsehair, and smiled. “On occasion the best disguise is the most extravagant, a lesson you learned long ago, Madam Diva.”

I could not restrain comment. “Then I must stick out like a sore thumb in my checked wool cloth and cap.”

“A charming ensemble,” he said with a bow. “I wish I could wear something as lightweight, neat, and practical.”

Somehow those words did not cheer me.

“Pink’s garb is more than practical,” Irene put in. “It resembles the clothing Nell was wearing when last seen. We have but to use her as a living reference point if we wish to question persons along the way.”

“I chose this myself, at
Le Bon Marché
.”

“And a brilliant ploy it was.” Irene went on while I reflected that I had all unthinking managed to duplicate Nell’s manner of dress. “We are also equipped with a cabinet sketch of James Kelly, the demon upholsterer of the Rue Caron. Its presence has already borne fruit.”

“Then this mad upholsterer is responsible for the sad death behind us?” he demanded.

Irene nodded. “The ticketmaster identified him as a man lacking money for passage…and returning later with the fare in fistfuls of coppers.”

Quentin frowned as if he would like to have James Kelly in his own fists.

“Such a death as met the flower girl at Neunkirchen,” Irene said as gently as she would address a child, “was merciful compared to what the victims in London and Paris faced, when the killer had more time and less obvious motive.”

“Tell me about that,” he said. “Tell me about Nell.”

Irene stirred uneasily on the plush train upholstery. I thought she would produce her smoking case and lucifers, but she didn’t.

“Godfrey was abroad,” she began, “on Rothschild business. Had he been in Paris, would Baron de Rothschild have called upon him instead of me? I don’t know. However, murder is not beyond my ken, and murder is what needed investigating: two women at a bordello patronized by the leading men of Europe. Inspector le Villard of the Paris police, whom I know, came to fetch me, along with his superior, the Prefect himself.”

“You could hardly refuse such a summons.”

“I never would refuse such a summons. Unfortunately, Nell insisted on accompanying me, despite the demurs of two very insistent police authorities.”

“There is no one as adamant as an English governess.”

“As a former governess,” Irene corrected. “And she had been a shop girl and typewriter girl by then, as well as an instructress of a foulmouthed parrot and my shadow at two death scenes. But what we found at that
maison de rendezvous
was brutal beyond anything we two could ever have imagined.”

“Oh, come now!” I couldn’t keep from saying. “I was the first one to spy out that scene, and stomach-turning as it was, Nell was not the unprepared innocent you portray. She’d followed the newspaper reports of the Ripper case last autumn like a three-year-old overdosing on sweets before Christmas, as she herself confessed. ‘Had a weakness for ghost stories as a child.’ Was as bloodthirsty as a little Apache, more like it. I’m sorry, but it won’t do her any good being painted as a swooning ninny. I don’t see why you two always have to tread on eggs about her.”

While I believe in plainspeaking, I’m not at all surprised when it’s not well received.

Quentin Stanhope regarded me as coldly as only an Englishman can, but I had withstood the icy eye of Sherlock Holmes when he was ordering me what to do and that was a chillier regard than any I had met on earth thus far.

“Who
is
this woman?” he asked Irene in a way meant to put me in my place: nonexistent.

Irene joined him in discussing me as if I were a butterfly pinned in a specimen box and quite deaf, not to mention dead.

“She is a blunt, American newspaper reporter who goes by the pen name of Nellie Bly. She has masqueraded as an inmate in sweatshops, madhouses, and brothels. She is a brave woman but perhaps has forgotten that reading about murderous thrills and chills is quite different from encountering them personally. Yet she is right in one thing, Quentin: Nell, the most peaceful and domestic of female souls, has always had a great interest in the gory, the frightful, the sensational. It was she who quickly educated me to the depredations of Jack the Ripper in London, down to the disembowelings.”

“Nell?” He remained smugly disbelieving. “You’ll forgive me, Irene, but a child may pretend to a certain swagger as a matter of self-protection. You should not have allowed her to follow you along this brutal path, particularly these—what do you call them now?”

“Lust-murders. And it is not I who named them, but a certain German aristocrat, Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing.”

“Lust-murders.” Quentin Stanhope’s frown became a glower, and given his current costume, he truly looked as ferocious as a Hun. “It would be like exposing my dear niece Allegra to a tour of Bluebeard’s castle. I can’t condone it.”

“She insisted! You know how adamant Nell can be.”

Again I intervened. “I recall she was quite boastful about having visited the Paris Morgue before, when you found the drowned man.”

“Drowned man?” Quentin’s alert gaze bored into Irene’s face again. “I’d not heard of that.”

“You’ve not heard of many of Nell’s and my adventures, perhaps because you never stay in one place long enough for a good storytelling session. Nell is not the sheltered miss you knew in London more than ten years ago, Quentin, any more than you are the coddled young gentleman-about-town. You know that there are stories of your life on the steppes and in the Hindu Kush that would whiten our hair to hear. Give us poor sheltered European ladies credit for having a few adventures of our own.”