Castle Rouge (38 page)

Irene’s pen point tapped one location on the map, leaving a cluster of black dots. “As we noted, the ancient Joseph Quarter is in many ways a shadow of Whitechapel, an ancient tangle of streets where the poor and the outcast have always huddled. And the spiritual center of the Joseph Quarter is the old Jewish cemetery. Nell, Godfrey, and I found it a useful place to visit once before. That is where we will begin tonight.”

“At the cemetery?” I asked. “What can dead people tell us?”

“People go all the time to that cemetery to leave notes on a dead man’s tomb,” she said, “notes full of questions, pleading, prayer.”

“You speak of Rabbi Loew,” Bram Stoker said eagerly, “the prominent rabbi of Prague who purportedly raised the Golem. But, you know, Irene, that is like most legends, pretty far-fetched. The rabbi was dead two hundred years before those Golem rumors became common in the city.”

“Two hundred years!” I cried. “Just when did this rabbi die?”

Irene turned to Bram Stoker, who leaped into the breach like a happy schoolboy with just the right answer when he is called upon.

First he smiled at me. “You are an American. One hundred years is an aeon in your young country. Europe is older, and the farther east one goes, the older and deeper the roots drive if you can but find them. When did this rabbi die? In the sixteenth century and the Old New Synagogue was already in use then. Yes, even the New Town is very old here. Prague is haunted by some of the most charming legends, including its history as a seat of medieval alchemy.” Mr. Stoker shrugged his massive shoulders. “Some legends are not so charming, and I like those even better as a source for my stories.”

“Tell us some,” Irene requested. “It’s a bit soon to go prowling.”

I have heard a few first-class lecturers in my time, including Oscar Wilde and Buffalo Bill Cody, but Bram Stoker could have held his own with anybody. No wonder he had entertained steamship passengers with a magic act during the Atlantic crossing!

We sat on the sofa and chairs arranged for tea, Mr. Stoker barely perching on a tapestry-upholstered side chair. As he spoke, his face and arms became animated. At times he leapt up from the chair to enact a point.

“The business that has brought me to this city of a hundred spires is sad indeed, but I am glad indeed to have made its acquaintance,” he began. “Prague is not a city known for murder, but rather for the mysterious and mystic, yes. And it has been much contested through centuries of war and religious conflict.

“Irene, you mention the precarious position of the Jews in these modern times. You speak of political scapegoats. It has always been so, and in Prague particularly so. I speak of the distant fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the European quest for westward exploration was rivaled by the East’s fierce pounding at the continent’s back door. The Ottoman Turk pressed hard at this string of countries that were being drawn into what would become the mighty Austro-Hungarian Empire. And religious differences proved fatal for many. Land on the wrong side of the eternal Catholic-Jewish-Protestant triangle, and you could be burned at the stake and tortured first.”

“It sounds like our Wild West Indians are just a last gasp of what has been going on in the world for centuries,” I said.

“The evil that men do is bottomless,” Mr. Stoker agreed, “no matter their race or creed. So Prague was a prize that was tossed back and forth between Polish kings and Hapsburg kings, and always the Turks with their eyes on it, until in the late fifteen hundreds a Hapsburg youth of twenty-four was made the first King of Bohemia to nobody’s satisfaction, including his own.”

Irene interrupted the story. “The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.”

“What makes Rudolf interesting is that he did not while away his life at the court in Vienna, but actually moved his court to Prague, along with artists and goldsmiths and precious stonecutters and scientists and astronomers, which during that time included alchemists. Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler were among the brilliant scientists who worked in the city, but the most notorious of Rudolf II’s guests were two Englishmen, John Dee and Edward Kelley.”

Irene shook her head. “Yet another Kelley! The infamous Dee and Kelley, alchemists, occultists, frauds. Antonín Dvo
ák toyed with composing an opera on the subject, but could think of no way to include female voices. I was singing in Prague at the time, and he was seeking subjects that were both Bohemian, yet suitable for my very difficult dark soprano voice. He even suggested that I could sing Kelley, the younger man.”

“Really?” I asked, astounded. “The great Dvo
ák wanted to compose a part just for you?”

“Once,” she said shortly. “Before I dallied in Bohemia, I had a European operatic career that was not considered insignificant.”

“Well, I never heard of you.”

“I should hope,” Quentin Stanhope said a trifle sternly, “that a young person of your limited background and great distance from the European centers of culture would have ‘not heard of’ a great many important matters and persons, for what is life but an opportunity to learn one’s limitations.”

“Irene is a sublime singer,” Bram Stoker added to the chorus descending upon me. “She is to the musical stage what Sarah Bernhardt is to the dramatic stage, and it is a true tragedy that circumstances have limited her performances of late to circles of close friends.”

I really hadn’t given a moment’s thought to Irene as anything but a lady detective of sorts, so there was nothing to do but subside into silence.

After a long pause, Bram Stoker filled it.

“Dee and Kelley are fascinating, but can hardly have anything to do with contemporary killings, here or elsewhere. In fact, it seems almost as unlikely that we sit here more than theoretically concerned even with such a modern monster as Jack the Ripper.” He eyed Irene, looking doubtful and wary.

“You are sure,” Bram asked, “that Nell and Godfrey vanishing is related to the Ripper case?”

“Nell was last seen in Paris being pursued by the leading candidate for the Ripper, and Godfrey—” She paused, sighed heavily, then spoke again. “No one but Pink knows this. And Sherlock Holmes. A lock of Godfrey’s hair had been left on my pillow in the Paris hotel when I returned from our raid on the barbaric rites of the cult where Nell vanished.”

“You are certain—?”

Irene didn’t allow Quentin to finish. “What can I say? That Nell and Godfrey may be lost? That we may all be too late?”

He paused, then pounded one fist into another with such violence that we all held our breaths.

“Quentin!” Irene stepped to him, caught his hands in her own. “Don’t you think that I have imagined every awful eventuality? A thousand times. So are we to be frozen by our fears? Are we to be what these monsters wish? Feckless. Fearful. Unable to move? No! There is evil in the world. Sometimes it is aimed at us, very personally. Then is when we must surmount the usual. Then is when we most must be unpredictable. Then is when we must dare! And succeed.”

“You believe this, Irene?”

She waited a long moment to answer and then it was anticlimactical. “Usually. When I am not feeling so utterly useless and hopeless.”

What a tactician! She was forging an alliance from the uncertainties we all feel at times. From beneath her dark jacket she lifted the locket on a long chain she had used to mesmerize the Paris victim of those same barbaric rituals we had been discussing. She opened it to reveal the poignant comma of dark hair. “I know the color; besides, why lay another’s hair upon my pillow? Especially since Godfrey was found to have gone missing shortly before the Paris raid.”

The men kept silence but I could not.

“Who would do such a thing? A clever person who saw you were close on the Ripper’s trail may have wanted to distract you, but I’m sure travelers in the lands beyond Prague often lose touch with civilized outposts. It must be like the Wild West before the railroad: a long time between mail runs.”

Irene remained unconvinced. “Anyone who knew enough about my personal circumstances and was clever enough to want to deceive me with a false lock of hair could have easily managed to obtain the real thing. I sense a larger game than find-the-Ripper being played, which is why I wanted you, Quentin, among our party.”

“And me?” Bram asked. “What good can I do? I am a world traveler, yes; a good arranger of stage and other business; a sometimes scribbler.”

“You are also a member of Henry Irving’s Beefsteak Club and are familiar with our guidebook on this hunt for the Ripper, Krafft-Ebing’s
Psychopathia Sexualis
.”

“I am not proud to admit to that knowledge. Among artistic folk there can be a fascination with the basest forms of human behavior.”

“Not only ‘artistic folk,’” I put in. “The reading public laps up that sort of thing like oatmeal with cream in the morning. The fortunate love to hear how sadly the other half lives. Ordinary folks in London weren’t interested in hearing about what they called those ‘unfortunates’—the women who lacked even brothels in which to ply their underpaid trade but had to use the public streets. Once they had attracted the attention of the Ripper, everybody gobbled up all there was to know about them, from just how their innards were shredded to what few worthless remnants were found in their sorry pockets.”

I do not often give speeches, but I had not had a chance to write a good indignant article in too long.

“That’s why I like living in so-called uncivilized countries,” Quentin said, eyeing me with both surprise and sympathy. “Some of the practices may be savage, but starvation, forced labor, and slavery are out in the open, not hidden away in city byways so nice folks won’t notice.”

Irene shook her head. “The world should be better than any of that by now, but I know it isn’t. Even grand opera appeals to audiences with madness, scandal, suicide, and murder, all sung in perfect pitch, of course. I am but a singer and must follow the syllables and staffs as they are composed, but why do writers revel in the darkest side of humanity?”

She was asking Bram Stoker.

“A taste for the fantastic is inborn, I think. My son Noel began having nightmares at the age of three. The demons are always in our earliest dreams. It is better that we let them out during daylight.”

“If these bad dreams are let out to play,” Irene suggested, “do you mean that it is less likely that one will enact them in real life?”

“You have played parts, I am sure,” Bram said, “that mimic acts or represent ideas you would never endorse in actuality.”

“And someone like James Kelly, reared to follow a strict sexual morality he could not, will he replay his guilt in nightly private performances on the streets of Whitechapel? According to Krafft-Ebing, this hatred of women, the entire sex and each innocent individual, is a common feeling among such men.”

“It is slightly more understandable,” Bram said, “when you consider that women are chosen by society to be our strictest judges of morality, the mother, the wife. I agree that man is a feckless being, full of raw, unworthy needs he cannot control. No wonder his ravening soul turns good women stern and makes them ready to send him away. No wonder he will find bad women.”

“If some women were not so ‘good,’ then, other women would never have to be ‘bad’?”