Castle Rouge (4 page)

The Prince is almost moved enough to bound up from his sofa seat. Almost, but not quite. It is too soon after lunch, which no doubt had been twelve courses.

“No! The scoundrel! You are saying he had a hand in my, er, custom-appointed couch? This is revolting.”

“Your Highness must have known the events that occurred upon the object in question during your absence.”

“I was told that the piece was ruined and, of course, I would never reclaim anything that had played a part in a scene so opposite to the refined and joyous purpose for which it was intended.”

Here I nearly snort my disbelief and contempt. This
siége d’amour
was a spoiled nobleman’s toy for cavorting with two bought women at once. To consider this a “refined” use was more than an upright and plainspoken American could stand.

Fortunately, Irene has lived in Europe long enough to avoid plainspeaking when irony will do.

Instead of launching the lecture I would have at this prince of lechery, she merely remarks, “Your Highness has put your finger on the most interesting feature of some of these latter-day Paris slayings: the choice of a refined scene of the crime, and of refined victims. Yes, one could simply say that James Kelly strayed onto the scene in the course of installing the furniture. Certainly, judging from the encounter we three women had with him later, he was unable to restrain himself from violence when in the presence of women of a certain type.”

“Whores,” Sarah announces in her most ringing, stagy tones, and in English. “Oh, don’t frown at me, Bertie. You know you adore the female in every incarnation, from maid to mistress.”

“So I was within moments of encountering this monster?” Bertie notes with a shiver.

“So was Bram,” Irene adds.

The heavy-set Irishman, who’d been content to cede his usual role as raconteur to Irene during this macabre discussion, finds himself the sudden center of attention. His cheeks pink above his bushy red beard. For all his hearty manner, he is a sensitive soul.

“I had accompanied Irving to the
maison
on previous visits to Paris,” he says quickly. “Now that I am in Paris alone, I went only to pay my respects to the, er, madame.”

He always refers to Irving as a demigod, presumably recognizable to all by his last name alone. Perhaps that is the role of a manager.

This all-consuming position includes accompanying the Great Man to Paris scenes as scandalous as the cancan clubs and various
maisons de rendezvous
. When Englishmen visit Paris, there is only one thing they want to do, apparently. Except for Sherlock Holmes, which raises other, equally interesting speculations in my reportorial mind. Also raising speculation are the more macabre outings of Irving and Stoker along with hundreds of daily gawkers: the public display case of unidentified corpses at the infamous Paris Morgue.

I realize how cleverly Irene has turned a condolence call into an interrogation, for two of the four men in this room had been present at the scene of the first two Paris murders and a third, the Baron de Rothschild, spirited both the Prince and later Irene and Nell from that same
maison
.

I can see by the drooping of the inspector’s very disciplined mustaches that he had not known of the Prince’s presence in the house of sin and death, nor the fact that the…device upon which two women died had been commissioned especially for His Royal Highness. Being French and worldly, the inspector would not condemn the perverse intention, only the murderous turn its use had taken.

“Kelly possessed a certain religious mania,” Irene muses for the benefit of her friends and suspects.

I began to wonder if even the inspector and I are excepted from the suspect category, for of course I, too, had been present that night and had found the butchered bodies. Probably we are not. I am beginning to see that, like Sherlock Holmes, Irene is relentless in the pursuit of truth, though her approach is far less direct than his.

I also begin to see that she arranges scenes like a playwright. First she assembles the dramatis personae, then she lets them speak among each other and thus speak the truth to her, all unknowing.

It’s a theatrical approach that requires much patience and rehearsal before any denouement can be expected.

“Nothing in Jack the Ripper’s London murders indicated a religious mania,” the Prince says finally, after long mulling over Irene’s comment.

The inspector answers for her. “Allow me, Your Highness. I have studied the case most avidly. In all such murders of fallen women a religious mania is suspected. As the purported
billet-doux
from the Ripper said, ‘I am down on whores.’ Usually such reactions are moral. I believe that it is the frustration of the natural instincts that creates such madmen. In Paris, in France, we have made houses of prostitution legal for decades and inspect the women to ensure good health. It has eliminated much unnecessary disease and is the only reasonable approach to the situation. England and London are not so enlightened. Men who have contracted foul diseases from whores become murderously infuriated. It is no wonder that these Ripper slayings, and others that frequently occur in this Whitechapel district, are more common to England than to France.”

“Until now,” Irene notes.

The inspector flashes her an impatient look. “What? Two women at a reputable house?”

I shudder to think what Nell would have to say about the very French notion of a “reputable” whorehouse were she here to ride scout on the discussion.

The inspector natters on. “The third woman was either an unlucky laundress or one of the lone unfortunates,
femmes isloée
, who plies the streets on her own.”

“You have not addressed,” Irene says, “the strange subterranean aspect of these Paris killings. That is another aspect purely Parisian: cellars, sewers, catacombs. Even the morgue and the wax museum were used to display the bodies in some bizarre manner.”

The inspector shrugs, a classic French response to the mystery of life.

“The
Musée Grévin
,” he says grandly, “is far more than a wax museum, especially during
l’Exposition universelle
and the inauguration of
La Tour Eiffel
. It is a landmark of Paris. Might not even a madman wish to pay tribute to the attractions of the City of Light in planning his crimes?”

“The Ripper managed to keep to obscure and hidden ways in London,” Irene points out.

“London!” The inspector barely restrains himself from spitting. “Whitechapel. Paris has no such sinkhole as this. It is no mystery that the Paris murders involve a finer sort of victim.”

“Then the Ripper has moved to Paris and grown nice.”

Bram Stoker speaks up at long last. “The bloody rites I heard of in the cavern beneath the fairgrounds don’t sound very refined. Were I to write such a scene, I’d be accused of sensation-mongering. I agree with what the man in the street said during the Ripper attacks last autumn. No Englishman would do it.”

“Nor any Frenchman!” the inspector shouts, his mustaches twitching like cockroach feelers.

Amazing how no nationality on earth would spawn a Ripper so long as any man of that race is present.

“The Jews,” the Baron says quietly, “are often accused, and falsely, of atrocities toward Christians. Oddly enough, the facts prove the atrocities are inevitably committed against them. Us,” he adds.

“That is the trouble!” When the Prince of Wales finally speaks again, he does so passionately. “There are all sorts of political scapegoats abounding that one faction or the other would like to accuse of the Ripper’s crimes, including members of England’s royal family! I have been repeatedly criticized for consorting with Jews and merchants and jockeys and, er, women.”

“And does Your Highness deny any of it?” Irene asks, a trifle archly.

The Prince, like any pampered aristocrat, responds to the coy like a cat to a whisker tickle. That is one thing I grant Sherlock Holmes. He is not pampered and he is not an aristocrat.

“Well, no,” Bertie says, demonstrating the disarming honesty that makes him tolerated if not beloved. “Drat the fellow! He has caused endless trouble, and I wish they would lock him away.”

“‘They’ is always us, Your Highness,” Irene says. “And that is why ‘we’ must do something about Jack the Ripper. I take it I have your permission to try.”

The inspector snorts delicately, being French.

Irene needs no one’s permission, but she wishes some of the people in this room to see that she has a royal mandate.

“I would be delighted,” the Prince says, smiling a bow in her direction. Bertie has always enjoyed deferring to women, except his mother. Irene has never underestimated official approval.

She smiles back. Like a privateer of old, she has won the royal letter of mark.

She is free to hoist the Jolly Roger and to board and commandeer any ships she chooses.

Lord help us, she already has the U.S.S. Nellie Bly in her fleet and I shudder to think what freebooters she will add to her armada.

2.

Plainsmen in France

The red man does not wear his heart upon his sleeve for government claws to peck at. One knows what he proposes to do after he has done it. The red man is conspicuously among the things that are not always what they seem
.

—
HELEN CODY WELMORE,
THE LAST OF THE GREAT SCOUTS
,
1899

FROM A JOURNAL

There are many things for which I will never forgive Irene Adler Norton, but I guess the one that is least her fault is the thorn that rankles most. The fact is that the Paris Ripper could only be the London Ripper on the move and that the real story had its roots back in London where it all began the previous autumn of 1888.

So Sherlock Holmes telling me that I owed it to Irene to nursemaid her in Paris didn’t sit well at the time he declared this to be the case, and it especially didn’t go down like butter now that I was tied to a secondary investigation while he was back in Blighty chasing the Real Ripper.

Irene and I strolled through the now-familiar grounds of
l’Exposition universelle
, brushing skirt hems with shopgirls and ladies of leisure sharing a holiday spirit and utter ignorance of the horrific and hidden events that had transpired here but two days before.

Our expedition with that pack of Rothschild agents and Buffalo Bill to hunt down the Paris Ripper had reached such a shocking and savage climax that every man in sight thought I should be spared further discussion of the particulars. I had heard only such snippets from Inspector François le Villard as he regarded necessary for my nursemaiding of Irene or as fit for my foreign and female ears.

I could hardly prod Irene to dissect the matter in every lurid detail yet, since her long-time companion Nell had vanished at the height of the horrors. The only concrete result of our pursuit of the Paris Ripper was one missing English spinster and a sinister sign later in our hotel room that Irene’s English husband, Godfrey, journeying from Prague to Transylvania on business for the enormously influential Rothschild banking family, was also in unknown but likely hostile hands.

It had not been a good night for the British.

If Sherlock Holmes had not as good as threatened me with arrest to keep me at Irene’s side, I would be off on investigations of my own. I so resented being pent up on the sidelines with the women while the men made history.

“I suppose,” Irene said, apparently unaware of my irritation, pausing to gaze at the fountains exploding like Old Faithful beneath the pierced iron silhouette of the Eiffel Tower, “that you would like to analyze the crimes that occurred here as they fit into a larger picture.”

“You bet I would! But I daren’t ask the natural questions any reporter would want to know because of Nell vanishing so abruptly at the height of the atrocities. The last I saw of her was you yelling at her to leave the cavern when that madman James Kelly came rushing at her. Do you suppose he caught up with her? And, if so, why so far away from where we all were? And why did Kelly go for her particularly?”

Irene’s gaze lowered to meet my eyes. I saw then that they focused on something far different from spectacular fountains or my humble opinions.

“You almost sound envious of Nell being the Ripper’s target, and indeed it could have as easily been
you
and not Nell missing now. Perhaps.” Did her soft monotone almost hint that this would be the far, far better thing for all concerned?

I would not be shamed, not by her. Not again. “Certainly I am better qualified to fend for myself in desperate circumstances than Nell is. I have survived a madhouse, after all, a sweatshop, and brothels on two continents.”

“If fending for oneself is still an issue.” She turned her gaze again at the plumes of tumbling water.

“Nell must be alive!”

“Why?”

“Why not leave her body at the panorama building where she was apparently abducted, then?”

“Perhaps he needed her for future…rites.”

“From what I understand, which is too little, the participants were willing sacrifices. I do not see Nell ever becoming a willing sacrifice.”

“The people controlling events wished to leave no trail, that much is true,” she said absently. “In that they failed. Nell was able to unclasp her lapel watch, so that it dropped to the floor to mark the spot where she was taken. That clue allowed Red Tomahawk to note the signs they’d left and begin tracking the party immediately.”

“They left in the gypsy wagon, isn’t that right?”

“In
a
gypsy wagon. There may have been more about than the one we observed by the campfire earlier.”

“‘The one we observed!’ I was allowed to observe very little that night in that mob of people. Observation is my work, my gift, my livelihood. You should have brought me to the forefront. I might have noticed something vital.”