Castle Rouge (39 page)

Bram looked puzzled, unsure how to take Irene’s comment. “A good woman is an angel on earth,” he finally blurted out. “A man is a fool and a lout for causing such a one any trouble. The man must live up to the natural goodness of women.”

“And,” I wondered, “the women in brothels? What has happened to their natural goodness, sweetness, and light?”

He realized, as if struck by lightning, that I had first met most of the present company in a brothel. If his presence in the same brothel was open to charitable interpretation because he was a well-known man of respectable reputation in his profession, my presence there was unequivocally damning. I was a fallen woman, period. He was, as the Scots rule in court, not proven: though we both had been found in the same place on the same night at the same scene of a crime. And of course, he did not know then nor did he know now my true professional purpose in being there.

This time Bram Stoker paled instead of blushing, as I usually did. During the days and nights after my debut in the Paris brothel, I had been absorbed into Irene’s immediate circle. I had behaved as the respectable young woman I knew myself to be. Bram Stoker had forgotten that I was supposed to be beyond redemption. And if I was not worthy of redemption because of my presence at the
maison de rendezvous
, then what did that say for him?

“So,” Irene said, “how does one rank sin and crime? Had the Ripper only paid the women to do what dozens of other men did and gone on his way, who would have accused him of wrongdoing? Oh, the police, if they had to make an arrest now and then for what went on anywhere and anytime in Whitechapel.”

“It’s not just Whitechapel,” Quentin said. “And not just women.”

“What do you mean?” Irene grew suddenly alert.

Quentin shook his head. “I have seen treachery unparalleled in Afghanistan. MacLean dead, nearly beheaded at Tiger’s and Sable’s damned conspiring that came to naught. I have lived on the uncivil side of the blanket, and reveled in it. I have seen things south of the Carpathians that would make Jack the Ripper pause.”

“Perhaps that is what Jack the Ripper
has
seen. You must not hold back, Quentin. You must tell us what the world holds for those who look it in the face. What were you thinking of just then?”

“Many things. Many things I vowed to forget.” He waved a hand in front of his face as if pushing away cobwebs. “We are mixed company here.”

“No. We are one company.” Irene was as grimly resolute as I had ever seen her, which was saying something. “Nicety has no place among us. We can’t afford to mince after a galloping maniac merely because there are ladies present. Tell us what you know; why else have you learned the opposite side of civilization except to educate?”

“All right. These mutilations of the Ripper that appall so many. They are not unheard of. In Africa, in Arab lands, it is even common practice to mutilate young girls in their female parts.”

Irene and I listened with masks of iron. To show revulsion might stop this grim recital.

“Mutilate how?” Irene asked.

“Excise…parts. The girl feels nothing afterwards but pain. The husband knows he is the only father.”

“Ah.” Irene glanced at me.

I nodded. I knew the intricacies of this and that more than most, thanks to my having to learn how to hoodwink the madams in the brothels as to the state of my virtue.

Bram Stoker avoided looking at us, but was listening with utter fascination.

Quentin also avoided looking us in the eye. He stared out the window, as if seeing all those foreign countries with foreign ways.

“Arab brides? Also very, very young. In some tribes they are first excised of their responsive parts, then they are…sewn shut.” His words were clipped. “On the wedding night, the virile groom will achieve consummation with the sheer power of his masculinity. The less virile groom will have to use a knife first.”

Quentin stared out the window. Bram Stoker gazed at the map of Prague as if struck to stone.

Irene and I remained silent, each feeling the savagery of the practice, which would make of pleasure an eternal agony.

“Who does the cutting, the sewing?” Irene asked.

“The married women of the tribe.”

That was perhaps the most shocking fact of all.

We said nothing and could suddenly hear the mantel clock tick. I had never noticed the clock ticking before.

“Dear God,” Bram Stoker said at last. “It beggars all the lurid turns of my imagination, or anything the world’s greatest playwrights, even the ancient Greeks who blanch at nothing, have put onto the tragic stage.” His voice was shaking slightly. “I can see why women even in our civilized age and country might wish to avoid the marital duty.”

“To lie back and think of England,” Irene asked, “as the Queen advised her many royal daughters on the occasions of their many politically advantageous royal weddings?” She turned to Quentin. “What of the Arab concubines?”

“You mean—?”

“Are they also surgically altered?”

“There is no need. They will bear no heirs.”

“What difference does it make if the surgery is physical, or mental? The effect is the same.”

“You are saying,” Bram Stoker said, stumbling his way through points of view he had never encountered before, “that we are as uncivilized in our way as the Arab tribes.”

Irene nodded. “And that Jack the Ripper, in his own mad way, is merely exercising a twisted version of the prerogatives of other men in other places.”

“But…the Ripper wasn’t trying to safeguard heirs.” Mr. Stoker was still blinking at the enormity of this line of thought.

“Are you sure?” Irene said. “Some suggest that the Ripper had contracted a venereal disease from a Whitechapel whore and killed these others out of revenge. A man with a venereal disease might pass it on to his wife and through her to his children. Was he not then, in his maddened mind, protecting heirs?

“Some suggest that the Ripper was hunting a whore who was pregnant by him and that he found her in Mary Jane Kelly and took away the foetal material, as he had the wombs in the other victims, unnoticed in the bloody carnage of that scene.

“I suggest that the attacks on the very womanliness of these women in Whitechapel and Paris and Prague, from excised wombs to severed breasts to slashed faces, is not so different from the systemic mutilation of some women in Arabia or elsewhere.”

“And what is the common key?” I asked.

“With the Ripper, insanity is foremost, but behind it are motives that have become customs elsewhere. It has to do with hobbled wives and concubines who are good for only one thing: what is denied the wives, pleasure.”

I could see Irene drawing the patterns even as she spoke. She walked back to the map and stared down at its enigmatic lines, at the confusion its very attempt at clarity spawned, as all maps do.

She traced the lines of the Chi-Rho. “And God is in it, whether He is called Allah or Yahweh or Christ because so often men who sin say that God gives them leave to be so inhuman.”

“Religious mania,” Mr. Stoker said, “it was often mentioned last fall in London, but never that seriously pursued.”

“It will be seriously pursued now,” Quentin said grimly. “You are right, Irene. The Koran is cited that men are to have concubines on earth and in heaven, but wives must be faithful conduits to many sons on earth, hence they are conquered and subjugated through the very acts of generation. I merely thought the practice an inexplicable foreign barbarity, but it is worse: it is a wholly self-serving strategy.”

“As good a definition of evil as I have ever heard, Quentin,” Irene said.

Quentin Stanhope suddenly took a deep breath. “You were right to force me to speak so frankly, Irene. I find I can now tell you the full truth about the worst atrocity here in Prague. I uphold your cause, Irene. I would give my life to recover Nell and Godfrey. Yet I found myself tongue-tied when it comes to detailing everything I have uncovered in Prague until you insisted I testify to what I have seen elsewhere, and told no one.”

“You must tell us all,” she said, “especially about Prague.”

“The last death, or the last until the one at the brothel last night. No one knows but two Rothschild agents, Godfrey, and now myself. They only told me because Baron de Rothschild in Paris had demanded full cooperation with you and your agents, and I was the first to reach Prague. Even then it took a cable to the Baron to convince the agents to talk to me.” Quentin laughed bitterly. “Would that the members of the Queen’s army had such unswerving loyalty and obedience.”

“Some do,” Irene said.

Quentin shrugged, as if dismissing himself. “The woman was found alive. Alive and…defaced. But”—he glanced from Irene to me and back again. I realized it was because we were Bram Stoker’s “good” women who were to be spared lest we judge too harshly.

“An infant was with her.”

“Unhurt?” I asked. I had taken care of my many younger brothers and sisters from an early age, and a tale of youthful suffering never failed to fire me up.

He shook his head.

“An infant?” Irene repeated, as shocked as myself.

“Days old. The child’s throat had been cut, and he had been drained of all blood.”

“Vampires!” Bram Stoker said…cursed. “Modern vampires!”

“Drained of all blood,” Irene repeated, “but he must have been alive when….”

Quentin nodded. “It rivals anything I have heard of in the brutal East, but now I understand the murder scene of the perverted Madonna and child.”

“What of the mother?”

“Young, perhaps seventeen. Only a trusted physician was allowed to examine them. He was not a young man, and suffered a small stroke afterward.”

“Was the woman by any chance mutilated?” Irene asked as dispassionately as a physician who would
not
suffer a small stroke.

It struck me again that often women are better suited than some men for the gory details of life and death.

Quentin nodded. “Her left breast had been cut off recently and…there were other cuts in her generative parts.”

Irene nodded brusquely, unwilling to probe more deeply as much for Quentin’s sake as our own. We had been on this trail longer and had begun to expect the obscene.

Then she looked, stunned, at me. “Pink! The woman we saw in Neunkirchen…the cuts. They made an ‘X,’ didn’t they? And here in Prague?” She glanced wildly back to Quentin, who nodded with obvious distaste.

“Has anyone thought to look, to see…if there is a vertical cut, surmounted by a half-curve?”

I gasped right out loud, despite priding myself on my fiber. The men stood stunned into silence at the very thought behind her question.

We had been drawing Chi-Rhos on maps of three capital cities. Had Jack the Ripper been drawing them on women’s flesh all along, and had they been obscured by the blood and thunder of the grosser dissecting acts he had committed?

Was it all just a religious mania, as some said? Jack the Ripper was “down on whores,” as written in one of his purported letters, and he thought he was doing God’s work?

I can’t say that I ever put much faith in God after all the woes my poor mother and we children had faced after our true father, the judge, died and left us destitute. But I sure didn’t think much of Him if he would allow such things to keep going on in His name, or at least under His sign.

In a way I was glad that our poor, sheltered Nell, wherever she might be, was not here to confront such brutal acts by fiendish men.

31.

In the Soup

But I cared a great deal for the much more formidable person behind him, the bosom friend of Moriarty….

—
HOLMES TO WATSON, ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE,
THE EMPTY HOUSE

I didn’t swoon, although I had long hoped the man was dead.

On second thought, it seemed better to not draw attention to myself so I could be taken for granted, as usual, and thus have a chance of seeing and hearing something that someone thought I shouldn’t.

After all, Colonel Moran could hardly have paid me very much attention, even on the fateful occasion where Quentin had battled him in my presence. He was a hunter and used to “heavy” game, like African lion and Bengal tigers and Russian bear. I was Shropshire rabbit through and through. Yet rabbits have very big ears.

And indeed, it was Godfrey he glowered at, though why he should, I can’t imagine.

Godfrey recognized him at once also, but acted as if this man’s presence and identity did not matter in the slightest. I decided to take my cue from him.

So when Tatyana nodded to indicate I should take the seat she had decreed for me at Colonel Moran’s right hand, I wafted that way like an agreeable dinner partner.

I didn’t like the way the man stood behind my heavy chair and pushed it toward the table, so I was not so much seated as “scooped” and shoved.

Still, I remained as serene as Irene playing a scene with a leading man who can neither talk nor walk well, which she has informed me was often the case when performing in grand opera.