Castle Rouge (32 page)

Foreign Activity

Well, well; what a broth of a boy he is!…

He’s like a breath of good, healthy, breezy sea air
.

—
WALT WHITMAN ON BRAM STOKER
1854

FROM A JOURNAL

By the next morning I was speaking in Irene’s deep basso of the night before, thanks to almost catching my death of cold and damp on our expedition.

While I coughed and honked like a San Francisco foghorn, Irene pored over maps of Prague the Rothschild bank had sent to our rooms earlier at her written request. Why a visit to a Gypsy fortune-teller should inspire urgent study of city maps was beyond me. Irene was dressed for a day at home, at least, in soft slippers, a long burgundy faille skirt, and a ruffled pink shirtwaist that would do very well under the surprise dress.

“You have been here before,” I commented about the maps, “twice. I’d think you would know your way around by now.”

“Not by foot among all these narrow byways,” she commented absently, her forefinger tracing one, then another, serpentine route on the map.

“I hope you’re not detecting another complicated pattern, as in Paris, behind all the evildoings in Prague, perhaps in the shape of an Egyptian Ankh. Say, I bet the word ‘Gypsy’ comes from Egyptian.”

“The ankh is a religious symbol, true, and you’re probably right about the origin of Gypsies, but I don’t have enough information yet about any recent murders in Prague to discover grand patterns. I hope Quentin can remedy that when he comes.”

“Quentin is coming?” I sat up in my humble trundle-bed. “I must dress then.”

“You are ill and better off staying snuggled under the quilt.”

“Not with strange men visiting the rooms.”

Irene cocked a dubious eye over her shoulder. “You have, as you assert to all who will hear, resided in brothels on two continents. Why the nicety now?”

“I am not masquerading as a
fille de joie
now.”

“Nor would you do well at the profession in your current state,” she added with amusement, still mooning at the map like a lovelorn cartographer.

I sneezed, violently, in answer, but struggled out of the entangling linens nevertheless.

“You surely do not think,” Irene added, “that Quentin cares whether you are attired for the street or not? I’m sure that his spy work has required him to visit a brothel or two hundred in the performance of his duty.”

“How that would shock Nell,” I said while I struggled into my clothes behind the curtain that sequestered our washstand area from the room proper. “I do believe that being shocked is one of the joys of her life. I myself am, of course, long beyond shock.”

“I wonder,” Irene murmured, but perhaps I misheard her.

I finally emerged from behind my makeshift dressing room wearing a soft cream-colored shirtwaist and long black skirt, the only other outer garments I had allowed myself on this sudden and dangerous journey.

Irene glanced at me with a wry smile. “I would suggest a bit of powder on your nose.”

I rushed to the round mirror over our fireplace. My nose was as scarlet as the fever. My nickname should be not Pink now, but Cerise.

“It’s in my traveling case,” Irene suggested.

I’d been dying to rummage in this glorious puzzlement. It was the centerpiece of her carpetbag, with all other items surrounding it like padding. The burled wood was fitted with myriad drawers and compartments, hiding a glimpsed hoard of sterling silver bottle caps, so I hastened to the object in question where it sat.

I was like a child ransacking my mother’s dressing table, save no child had ever had a mother like Irene, and I wondered if one ever would.

The cosmetic carrier reminded me of a silverware chest, every niche lined with emerald-green velvet, all holding in tight custody enough intriguing bottles to release a caveful of genies. I found the wide glass jar of powder and used the soft fur of a rabbit foot to stroke it over the blazing nose revealed by a mirror set into the case’s top lid.

I then ran my fingertips over the satin-smooth fronts of the tiny drawers, not daring to explore further, but memorizing the rare fittings as a blind person might.

Imagine my shock when a portion of the case’s bottom pushed out as if on a spring, and I saw a drawer of various paper money and gold coins open before me!

Irene arose at once to stand guard above me, shaking her head. “You have managed to trigger a release that has baffled the border guards of six nations.” She shut the drawer.

“I thought it was only a vanity case.”

“That was the idea. Feminine fripperies are the last suspected of serious content. That can apply to people as well as cases.”

My apologies were interrupted by a knock at our door, which Irene rushed to answer.

Quentin Stanhope stepped in, but I hardly recognized him. He was dressed as a man about town in dark city suit and homburg, with no exotic mustaches. Other than his weather-darkened skin, he looked like an ordinary Englishman, or Frenchman, or German.

He immediately removed the hat to quirk a smile at Irene and me in our demure lady-clerk garb, looking as uncomfortable as I felt. Given his newly civilized aspect, I was glad to have dispensed with my tiresome checked coat…and my shining scarlet nose.

“I may not look it,” he said, “but I’ve had quite a night of it.”

“I am not used to gentlemen who boast of such a fact to ladies,” I returned.

Irene stared at me, no doubt because I had made quite a night of it many times during my undercover assignments in houses of ill repute. Still, I felt we were all appearing as our proper selves at last, and much preferred pretending to the sane and safe society in which we gave the (temporary) appearance of being staunch members.

“We had quite of a night of it, too,” Irene answered, “consulting a Gypsy fortune-teller in the old quarter of the city.”

“Nothing so arcane for me,” Quentin said with a grimace. “I paid my compliments to one of the moderately regarded Prague brothels, where I am sorry to say another woman has been killed. I have brought back an interesting suspect, though I had a devil of a time extracting him from the police.”

Irene held her breath for a long moment, then said, “You haven’t caught James Kelly, have you? He’ll require stern handling. Why would any police force let him go? How did you get him away from the authorities? I admit I long to question him under the proper circumstances, which is any time before the police do. This miserable man was last seen in pursuit of Nell, by my very eyes. Where is he?”

“I don’t know who the fellow is, but he’s waiting below. He could be a Kelly. There’s an Irish look to him. The Rothschild agents helped me convince the police that he was a mere blundering Englishman who had happened to visit the place, like myself, and had no link to the atrocity so recently discovered.”

“Another woman killed.” Irene began pacing. “This is an epidemic! I do not like deceiving the police, but they could hardly understand the larger implications and the critical issue of…Nell.”

Quentin, who had been trying to get another word in, in vain, glanced at me and shrugged his surrender. “I’ll have him up,” he said, leaving our chamber.

“Another murder.” Irene practically ground her teeth with frustration. “Last night! When we were out.” I knew what she was thinking. We might have prevented it. Yet I doubted we would have happened on the right brothel at the right time even if we had been searching them for James Kelly.

Footsteps sounded outside our door.

Irene rushed to pull the door wide open. “What—?”

Quentin entered, a sheepish red giant in his wake: Bram Stoker.

“Bram!” Her tone was neither accusing nor welcoming, simply announcing.

He paused outside our threshold, hat in hand, wiping his forehead with a huge white square of Irish linen.

“My dear Irene, once more you find me in an awkward position, and I find myself most shamed to see you again.”

“Shame is a pointless emotion that has its origin in the attitudes of others, not anything we have done ourselves. I don’t much subscribe to it.”

Still he hesitated to cross our doorway. “Are you sure you want the company of such a blackguard as I might be? Had this chap not taken my part, I would be undergoing a police interrogation even now, and these fellows here do not speak a drop of English.”

“Come in,” she urged him, impatient at last. “You certainly have a tale I would like to hear.”

As he entered our chambers, nodding ducklike in embarrassment, I noticed at once that his beard was not as sharply trimmed as in Paris and that his clothes were rough-and-tumble tweeds more suitable for country lanes than city thoroughfares. All in all, Bram Stoker resembled a shaggy auburn-haired bruin that had charged through a very large bramble patch.

“Sit down,” Irene ordered. Mr. Stoker responded like a tame bear in the circus and sat, saying no more. “Quentin, go down to the dining room and order up breakfast…everything hearty you can think of, with pots of tea and coffee and lots of cream for both.”

Bram had sat upon the nearest possible object, a leather-covered ottoman. To see such a huge man perched upon such a low stool made him look an oversized youth being kept after school for bad behavior.

Despite her vaunted disdain for shame, Irene immediately capitalized on this advantage and began striding back and forth before him, in apparent agitation. “I sent you on ahead to find Godfrey. What are you doing in Prague still? Prague is where Godfrey’s journey into obscurity began, not ended!”

“I know, I know.” Mr. Stoker patted his forehead again. Like most large men, his nerves showed up on his face in the form of perspiration. “I have, in fact, tramped over half the Carpathians in the past few days and only yesterday returned to Prague to seek out more specific information on the area.”

“Which you expected to find in a brothel?”

Mr. Stoker flushed as readily as I do. “That earlier murder in Prague that Godfrey mentioned in his letter to you? It had occurred outside of a brothel, which I discovered on my first swing through the city, before I took the train to Transylvania and from there went on foot. I learned much in the mountains.” He seemed to gather himself, anxiety fleeing before the greater excitement of news. “Much. There has been a good deal of foreign activity at a particular village near Sigisoara, near the old castle that hangs over the settlement like some crumbling church from a forgotten religion.”

He rubbed his hands together in relish even as his huge frame shuddered with delicious distaste. “The region reeks with bizarre legend and folktales. I have never encountered such an elaborate history, though I have never visited this eldritch part of the world before. I tell you, Irene, it makes the bare, witch-haunted heaths of Macbeth’s Scotland seem like a South Sea island paradise compared to it. This bitter land’s name means ‘over the forests,’ and it consists of a plateau surrounded by mountains, often iced over with snow. The forests are thicker than thorn bushes. Every height is crowned with a fortress, and the whole region is one impenetrable mass of stone and tree, except to the man on foot, of course, and he must venture alone. The only carts I saw were a few Gypsy caravans drawn by lone sway-backed horses, and they went singly. Otherwise, it is all peasants and travel by shank’s mare, which suits me. These rural folk seldom venture from their villages and have not done so for hundreds of years.”

“No wonder even the Magyars have kept their greedy paws off of it.”

This was Quentin Stanhope speaking. He had finally followed his charge into the room and now lounged against the fireplace mantel in the way of the lord of the manor. So like an Englishman!

Quentin nodded at Mr. Stoker but looked at Irene. “Not your Mr. Kelly, I presume?”

“No.” Irene sounded momentarily disappointed. “This is Mr. Bram Stoker, a respectable man of the theater.”

“I thought that there were no respectable persons of the theater,” Quentin retorted.

“You have been listening to Nell too much,” Irene answered, and then caught her lip between her teeth, as if dearly wishing to listen to Nell too much right now.

Not I! I stole another glance at Quentin Stanhope. He looked quite dashing in his current street guise. I could see why even meek little Nell had developed a sentimental attachment to such a man, especially one with the same chameleon tendencies as her pal Irene. Nell was, of course, far too prissy for the likes of Quentin Stanhope. He would require a more adventuresome woman. I had never met the absent Godfrey, but couldn’t help wondering how a pasty-faced barrister in an idiotic lambs-wool wig could possibly compete for female hearts with a sunburnt spy in Arab robes.

Quentin Stanhope intercepted my gaze and winked at me before turning an absolutely bland expression back on Irene and her theatrical friend.

Well! At least someone in this company realizes that I am a keen and useful observer and no mere Sancho Panza to some female Don Quixote.

“Getting back to Transylvania,” Irene said to Bram, sounding troubled. “You describe a difficult, rugged terrain.”

“No doubt!”

“And this is the place where you think Godfrey was sent?”

“I am no confidante of the Rothschild interests.” Mr. Stoker aimed an accusing look at Quentin Stanhope, who obviously was. “I am a mere walker and wanderer, but I have learned to absorb a great deal from my solitary tramps. I sense…some ancient evil brewing in those whited sepulchers of mountains. Should I have encountered
Macbeth
’s three witches over a boiling pot in the forest, I would not have been surprised.”

“Or a single witch over a bowl of burning embers,” Irene murmured to me in a stage aside.

I could see that she allowed for a theatrical sense of exaggeration in Bram Stoker’s account. Her comment to me both mocked that tendency in him, and in herself.

And in me? And Quentin? Perhaps. We all played larger-than-life roles in the world. In a sense, we all performed stunts. How ironic that the only two apparently endangered members of our circle were the most conventional among us.