Castle Rouge (26 page)

“I pray not! The Rothschild interests in Prague expect me to be gone for some time and knew that communication would be slow and unreliable.”

“Are we really so remote as all that, Godfrey?”

“We are in the back garden of Nowhere, dear Nell. These regions are quite uncharted by all but the natives.”

I sighed, too abstracted to refuse more wine.

“It cannot be this assignment regarding Transylvanian real estate that was so secret,” I said finally. “It must have been a matter much closer to Prague.”

“You are right.”

“Don’t sound so impressed. I am familiar with your ways of thinking and acting since I was your typewriter-girl in the Temple years ago. And”—I could not resist getting back at him a tiny bit for presuming that I should not be a full confidante now that our fates were conjoined—“I have apprenticed Sherlock Holmes since last I saw you.”

He set goblet to tabletop with a thump. “Holmes! What was he doing in Paris, and what were you doing associating with That Man?”

I was much amused by Godfrey referring to the creature in the same capitalized tone that I took, so I speedily answered his question. “It involves those very macabre matters I so unwisely referred to earlier. I, too, was sworn to secrecy by the Baron de Rothschild, along with Irene, of course.”

Godfrey’s mouth made a grim line. “I see that the House of Rothschild has been exceedingly busy with both sides of the House of Norton and Adler. Not to mention the House of Huxleigh. Clearly, we must make a clean breast of things hitherto secret. Shall I go first?”

“Please.” Secretly, I dreaded having to describe the cruel and gruesome scenes Irene and I, and sometimes Pink, had confronted since Godfrey had left us gay and innocent in Paris.

First he rose and found a candelabra, lighting the stumps of several yellow tapers. By now the sky was almost dark. The birds had become silhouettes that still called and dipped and rose far away, looking more like bats.

Godfrey set the candelabra on our impromptu dinner table, where the flames flickered in time to the last visible flights beyond our window on the world.

He poured more ruddy wine into each of our goblets.

The darkness falling both inside and out, the candlelight, the vast but deserted castle setting, all these reminded me of the most deliciously terrifying ghost stories that had gripped my mind as a child and never let go.

I rose and fetched my nightgown from the bed, using it as shawl over my overexposed arms and shoulders.

Once I had seated myself again, Godfrey began.

“The Baron enjoined secrecy because the matter touched on the one issue that frightens him: a violent uprising against the Jews. The site was again Prague.”

I nodded, having seen this fear of the Baron’s for myself only recently, but then involving his home city of Paris.

“Irene and I had been in Prague, along with you,” I pointed out, “when rumors of the revived Golem in the Jewish Quarter threatened the civil peace there last year. Why could we two not know of the problem now?”

“The Golem was merely a legend, an animated clay man-monster capable of killing. That was…child’s play”—for some reason the phrase made Godfrey wince as soon as he had employed it—“compared to the latest manifestation in Prague. Quite frankly, the Baron thought female ears far too delicate to hear the circumstances.”

“The Baron,” I said indignantly, “drew Irene and me into matters in Paris that involved murder and mutilation and
maisons de rendezvous
.”

“He must have grown desperate, then, after I left.”

I decided not to take offense. “I suppose he was. It took Sherlock Holmes too long to come over from London. He had to rely in the nonce on our fine female ears.”

“And this led to the dancing naked demons and Red Tomahawk’s battle axe?”

“Yes. But do go on about your more shocking case in Prague, Godfrey, while I try to think of terms genteel enough to convey to a gentleman all that we three women have been through in Paris in the past three weeks.”

“Irene, you, and this Pink person?”

“Yes.”

Godfrey stirred, then took a cigar case from his inside breast pocket. Only one smoke remained. “Do you mind, Nell?”

“I always mind but on certain occasions I keep quiet about it. This is one of them.”

He half-rose to lean over the candelabra and draw one candle flame into the already lit and extinguished cigar-end. I realized that the poor man had been husbanding his supply of cigars and would soon be out.

In moments a noxious blue plume twined up toward the window.

As with Irene, smoking was a process that aided thinking, and then led to talking.

“You know, Nell, how volatile the peace between Christians and Jews is in all our great cities.”

“Indeed, since I have delved so deeply into the murders of Jack the Ripper I learned that it has been of grave concern to the leaders of London and Paris as well as Prague. It seems that the first instinct with these murders has been to blame the Jews.”

“And in Paris you say there were Ripperlike killings of women.”

I nodded. “Two courtesans destined for the Prince of Wales and a poor woman near the Eiffel Tower whose profession may have been innocent, or not. And another woman, not to mention the interrupted mutilation in the cavern.”

“Courtesans, the Prince of Wales, mutilation. I am rather astounded to hear you use such terms so easily.”

“I could not help knowing what was really going on, though I tried very hard not to. Perhaps you see that you need not spare my ‘delicate’ ears.”

“The Baron did think this was too much grue for women. A body was found in Prague as well.”

“You mentioned the death of a woman in one of your letters, and that the Golem was suspected again.”

“Did I? It seems a lifetime ago. No, that woman’s murder was ghastly, but routine compared to another more unthinkable murder, involving a mutilation—”

“Of a second woman!” I cried in excitement, for if multiple women had been slain in Prague, then the Ripper had been at work there before Paris. London to Prague to Paris, it made no sense. Kelly couldn’t have gone as far as Prague, could he? Would he?

Godfrey shook his head, speechless.

“Not another woman dead?”

He shook his head again. “Not this time. A baby. An infant.”

“A baby?
Murdered?
”

I had thought myself beyond all shock but now I grew suddenly speechless. My arms were wrapped around each other holding my makeshift shawl closed over my bosom. Let my arms open out, just a bit, and they could cradle a child. A baby. An infant. I had not held a little one since visiting my father’s flock in Shropshire. During my years as a governess, my charges had always reached the age of the schoolroom.

Yet I remembered holding these small, sometimes squalling, often hairless bundles of soft pink skin and wide, wandering blue eyes.

That someone, anyone, could slaughter a baby—!

“Nell. I feared it would be too much for you.”

Godfrey’s hand on my wrist made me jerk my arms apart. The phantom babe in my arms vanished safely into the past.

“Yes, it is,” I said, “but tell me anyway. Only three weeks ago I would have never dreamed of such infamy in a sane world, but I have since seen for myself the kind of fiend who might do such a thing. It is as Irene said: if we do not work to stop him, who will?”

“There were rumors of forbidden Jewish rites at the old cemetery,” Godfrey said as total dark descended on the world outside and the room within, except for the fluttering of the candelabra flames in the air from the open window, which sounded like the hollow whoosh of bat wings, and the emberlike glow of his last cigar.

“There are passages and caverns beneath that area,” I pointed out, “as Irene and you and I found on our last visit to Prague.”

He nodded. “The conspirators who needed a prison found that lost underworld first. This time another breed of cave rat had infested the area.

“The King sent in soldiers on information that had been given by some mad Gypsy beggar raving about the Infant Savior dying while still in His manger.”

“When was this?”

“In April.”

“So Kelly could have come to Paris after…”

“It is hard to imagine a man named Kelly, Nell, taking part in the debased ritual the soldiers interrupted. It was a sacrilegious enactment of a painting of the Virgin and Child they found: a young woman with her newborn babe lying in a manger. Only no magi came to offer gifts, only madmen who speared the infant through the heart and drained his blood as the mother looked on.

“The men the soldiers found escaped, all scattered like rats through the passages, knowing every turn as a snake does its coils. The so-called mother remained, along with the tiny corpse.

“Pottery jugs of some strange liquor lay all around. And cups. There was some evidence that the men had drunk the baby’s blood.”

“And they escaped, these cannibals?!”

Godfrey nodded. “The soldiers had not been prepared for what they found. Shock struck them to stone at first, battle-hardened soldiers. So all they had was the mother, who claimed she was the Virgin Mary, and the poor, white, limp body. The child was only days old.”

“Horrible! Even Paris was nothing like this. Do you suppose, Godfrey, that it is possible that the rumors were right? It has long been said that the Jews kill Christian babies. Could this have been some hidden Jewish ceremony to deny the Godhood of the baby Jesus?”

“The mother was Moravian, not Jewish. The men who ran wore hooded robes and girdles; no one could say if they were Jews or Arabs…or Druids, for that matter. Allegations of Jews killing Christian babies have never resulted in proof, although they resulted in the killings of many Jewish men, women, and children in the ghettos. Baron de Rothschild’s representatives insist that no Jewish ritual, however old, sacrificed anything but animal flesh.”

I shook my head in disbelief. How could I have expected to have encountered an atrocity even worse than the insanity in the cavern beneath
l’Exposition universelle?
And so soon after? Was the entire world awash with madness and brutality and pointless death? Perhaps so….

Godfrey went on, reluctantly, but caught up in witnessing to the case he had encountered. “The mother—woman, though she was just a girl herself—could or would say nothing, save that she was the Virgin Mary. She, too, had suffered.” Godfrey looked away. “Certain…parts had been mutilated.”

“What parts?”

“Nell, I’d rather not say.”

“I must know, Godfrey.”

“There is no polite way to describe it.”

“You are a barrister. I trust you to find a way to convey your meaning in the subtlest possible terms.”

“We have never spoken of such matters. Most men and women do not.”

“Most men and women are not imprisoned in deserted castles in the wild Carpathian Mountains with Gypsies and cats and rats. You must understand, Godfrey, that Irene and I interrupted just such a wild, vicious scene in Paris. There is perhaps a connection. Tell me.”

“That poor girl. Someone had…removed…certain attributes of womanhood, apparently months before. Before the baby was even born.”

“Certain attributes?”

“The ones considered most feminine.”

I thought I knew what he meant, but must be sure.

“Can you be more specific?”

“I can, but I…”

I had never seen Godfrey so at a loss for words. He took a long draught of the dinner wine, then spoke, suddenly as brusque as a surgeon.

“Her left breast was missing, for one.”

I gasped.

“You see, Nell! I should have kept silent.”

“You do not understand, Godfrey. I am not so much shocked by the brutality of the deed, God help me, as by the similarity of it. That was why Red Tomahawk threw his battle axe. It was to stop a man who had cut off a woman’s breast from doing further damage. There seems to be only one explanation. I had spoken of demons and witches in trying to describe that scene in Paris and the atrocities we traced from one end of the so-called City of Light to the other, but now I have a better description. Devil worshipers. These sorts of things are the work of devil worshipers.”

“You’re not saying that Jack the Ripper was a devil worshiper?”

“Why not? Whyever not? The things he did, the mutilations…it was suggested that his abominable…excavations into the bodies of his victims was for wombs to sell to physicians. What if he was looking for unborn babies?”

“Nell! I cannot imagine you even imagining such things, much less suggesting them to me.”

But Godfrey had not been where I had been and seen what I had seen, nor had he once eagerly read the dozens of gruesome ghost stories that had seasoned my young imagination.

“All I can say is that just after that unthinkable act of mutilation, when I rejoiced to see Red Tomahawk hurl himself and his axe at the man who performed it, another man emerged from that writhing, debased crowd.

“I saw James Kelly burst from the mob of robed figures, running right for me as he recognized me from our first encounter. He meant to make sure that I did not elude him again.”