Castle Rouge (44 page)

“Now that is simplistic, Godfrey. That would work to quiet a schoolroom charge, but I am a grown woman and less likely to swallow it.”

We were by our rooms by now. Godfrey loosed my elbow. “Evil is very simple, Nell, almost childlike. I suspect it’s mostly utter selfishness. You had best go in and wash off what of it you can.”

“I do wish I could bathe again!”

“I fear the Gypsies will be far less biddable now that Tatyana and her minions are here.”

“I wouldn’t care to disrobe in this place with some of the residents it has now,” I added with a shiver.

“Most wise.” He looked very worried as he gazed down at me. “Remember. We do have an escape plan.”

“We do?”

He nodded and kissed me good night on the forehead, as my father used to.

“We do, and we may have to use it soon.”

I opened the heavy door into what I regarded, perhaps optimistically, as my room, and watched him enter his adjoining chamber. I knew that Tatyana would send someone fast on our heels to latch us in from outside. At least Medved was now too drunk to manage this duty.

Godfrey had not allayed my fears. Our chances of escaping this castle were even dimmer than before, and now there was obviously something to escape: Tatyana, Colonel Moran, and the trained bear of a man Tatyana was encouraging to become an even more terrifying beast.

35.

Bloody Words

I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha.

Yours truly
.

—
JACK THE RIPPER

FROM A JOURNAL

I must admit I liked making a sensation.

For the next ten minutes I was quizzed on the locales in the United States where rotgut and moonshine could be found, and of what and how it was made.

I was no expert on this topic, but pointed out that homemade spirits have long been the privilege of the common folk in every land and that the so-called government interferes with that process at its own risk, although it always does.

In fact, I pointed out, the British insistence on a whiskey tax was a greater influence than a tea tax in encouraging the American rebellion.

While I stoutly explored this topic, Irene was walking through the ruins of the activity in the chamber, picking up two or three of the pottery jars, the ones with gobbets of white wax still clinging to their open lips.

“This isn’t wine spill,” she noted casually, staring at the earthen floor beneath the old Jewish cemetery of bodies piled twelve generations deep.

Slowly, the men’s attention returned to her.

“What is it then?” Quentin asked.

“Blood.”

“Blood?” Bram Stoker paled, then hurried to her side. “These drops, all blood? What makes you say such a thing?”

“Because we”—she glanced at me—“have seen such quantities of blood spilled at an underground site in Paris.”

I hastened to her side as well, quite ready to give up my role as fount of all knowledge of things alcoholic.

Under the sweeping examination of Quentin’s lantern, the spray of drops did look very bloodlike. I finally identified the sickly sweet odor of the cavern: not lilacs, like above, but blood.

“Have you examined the walls?” Irene asked Quentin.

“For what?”

“More blood.”

We all followed him to the perimeter of the cave, trooping behind as his lantern light washed up and down on the crudely hewed stone.

Under our feet lay burnt-out candle stubs, dried kernels of rat leavings, and more burgundy drops turned almost black except at their very centers, which were as rich as a bloodred rose.

“Good God!” Quentin had stopped, the lantern swinging slowly from his hand.

“What is it?” Irene demanded, rushing up behind him.

“Writing. In mostly consonants. That damned Czech….”

“Let me see! I have sung in that language. I recognize some words.”

Irene seized the lantern and moved along the wall, peering at a faint black pattern that looked vaguely foreign, like an Arabic or Cyrillic alphabet. Were we to add Arabs and Russians and Czechs to our Gypsies and Indians and Transylvanians for a truly exotic stew?

Irene sighed and let the lantern droop at her side.

“We have seen these words before, in another language. I can’t make out every word, but one particularly is clear. I believe that when we get this phrase translated it will read: ‘The
Gypsies
are the men Who Will not be Blamed for nothing.’”

I gasped out loud. I had seen the strangely feminine-case French version (
Juives
, which read in English like a misspelled “Juwes”) on a cellar wall in Paris not two weeks before. An almost identical phrase so mentioning the “Juwes” had been scribed in chalk, supposedly by Jack the Ripper, at Goulston Street in Whitechapel on September thirtieth.

The men in our party, knowing less, were less impressed.

“What a strange sentiment,” Bram said. “It makes no sense. Grammatically, it is a nightmare.”

“Nightmares do tend to be ungrammatical,” Irene said, still bending over the faint letters. “The last phrase of this type we saw had been inscribed in blood. Sherlock Holmes theorized from the evidence that a man had been whipped along the wall and forced to write those words in his own blood.”

“Sherlock Holmes never theorizes,” I corrected her. “He declares.”

“Thank you, Nell,” she said sardonically, glancing at me, both acknowledging the tart common sense of her lost companion, Nell Huxleigh, and the fact that I was known as Nellie Bly in the wider world.

Perhaps she was also acknowledging that in my own inimitable way I was serving as a useful compatriot in the act of confronting and solving crime.

Quentin glanced at me with a puzzled frown, a look of loss upon his ill-lit features that it was impossible for a daredevil reporter to miss.

Irene sighed. “This scene is too similar to the Paris locale to be coincidental.” She pointed to another mark on the cave’s wall. “Even to the ancient symbol of Christ, the Chi-Rho, which combines an ‘X’ to represent the cross of crucifixion intersected by a ‘P,’ which represents the Savior. I can think of only one sensible course.”

“What is that?” Quentin asked.

Irene sighed again, loud enough to be heard in the first balcony, had we been in a theater. As it was, rats skittered away at the deep, theatrical regret audible in that sigh of defeat and resolution.

“Mycroft Holmes must be contacted immediately. We need his brother Sherlock here to examine the scene as soon as possible.”

She glanced around the disordered environment that screamed mute violence not long past.

“And most severely cross Mr. Holmes will be with us all about the mess that we and the rats have made of everything.”

36.

Alone at Last

They threw their heads back and poured the pure liquid, which had a sweet, slightly narcotic smell…straight down their thin throats. When satisfied they wiped their hairy mouths on their sleeves….

—
V. P. KATAYEV,
A MOSAIC OF LIFE

Who would dream that I would ever welcome the privacy of my grandiose cell? Not even the nightly thump of the exterior latch falling to entrap me within could dismay me.

I did indeed find myself breathing more easily once alone in my chamber.

The fire was low, so I piled stick after stick on the embers glowing like hungry wolfish eyes until the black mouth of the mantel roared like a red-hot lion.

Then I went to the basin where the water would form a thin crust of ice by morning, wrung out a cold cloth, and patted it over my face and shoulders.

I quickly undid the borrowed gown’s fastenings and stepped out of all of Tatyana’s things, soon sheltering under the comforting volume of Godfrey’s nightshirt. It felt like exchanging filthy Gypsy garb for an angel’s robe.

Then I wrapped myself in the bedcover, sat in a chair by the fireplace, and allowed my mind to sink into the exhaustion it welcomed.

Soon I dreamed, for upright wolves played the violin in the corner of the castle, tongues lolling, while Tatyana’s peasant servant tore off his face, and I saw the pale blue eyes were indeed James Kelly’s, and Godfrey turned into the old man who turned into Sherlock Holmes, and I became a bird who fluttered up to the rafters and tried to warn everybody about what was happening.

I beat my wings and beat my wings, but nobody heeded me, and I couldn’t fly anymore….

I awoke to the fire beating flaming wings of heat against the stone walls of its prison. It sounded like an entire flock of crows imprisoned in the chimney above.

I heard another flutter that had been tickling my awakening senses: voices rising and falling nearby.

I pushed my heavy hair behind my ears to hear better—I would have to rebraid it in the morning, for I certainly didn’t want to emulate Tatyana in any respect.

One voice was low-pitched, a basso Irene would call it. Godfrey. The other voice was more erratic, ranging from contralto to soprano.

I unbent from the chair, aching all over, and tiptoed to the door that connected with Godfrey’s chamber, dragging my warm coverlet with me.

“It is the finest French brandy,” one voice was saying.

Hers.

“I don’t need it,” Godfrey said.

“Ah, but you should want it. Need is for peasants.”

“I am of peasant stock.”

“Not I. So I will have the brandy you refuse.”

I heard the gurgle of liquid into a cup or goblet.

“Are you not interested in my forebears?” she asked.

“Not particularly.”

“You English! You always modify everything. You always understate. Is that because you’re afraid of losing everything?”

“It’s because exaggeration leads to self-deception.”

“And how do I self-deceive?”

“I don’t know you well enough to say.”

“You are so self-contained. So distant. Is it possible you want to be a barrister, to transact boring business for the kings of commerce? To live in Neuilly and drive to Paris occasionally to see the sights? To assist an unemployed opera singer in matters of a trivial nature? To escort a prim Miss Nobody from a dance floor?”

“You see what you want to see, say what you think will wound. Can you truly wish to live like this? To play doomed games of spymanship in lost causes? To cultivate the crude because you have lost your one grip on culture and are an unemployed
danseuse?
To consort with criminals and Gypsies? To hold a Mr. Nobody captive because you have nothing better to do?”

“You are jealous of Sherlock Holmes.”

“You are jealous of Irene Adler.”

“A strange way to refer to your wife.”

“She is more than my wife, and I think you know that, and it maddens you.”

“You have no idea what worlds I could maroon you in.”

“I do, and I suspect this is only one of them.”

I leaned closer to the door, listening through the generous crack near the ancient hinges, hardly daring to breathe.

This was a duel. I had seen them skirmish before, Godfrey and this wild woman who called herself Tatyana. I had seen Irene duel her as well, in the dark of night, by surprise.

What did she want, this woman who would not, could not leave us alone?

I listened to their voices rise and fall, to the insults exchanged, the offers tendered and refused.

She wanted us all where she stood: alone, hating, powerful for having no boundaries that others observed. Like Lucifer after the fall.

I realized that if anything happened to any one of us, to our strong and honest trinity, Irene and Godfrey and I, she would have won.

If I were harmed and Godfrey was there, yet unable to prevent it,…she will have won.

If Godfrey were forced to bow to her will to save me or Irene,…she will have won.

If Irene risked all to reclaim Godfrey and I, and perished in the attempt,…she will have won.

She was indeed envious of Irene, not for
what
she had, but for
who
she had. And now Tatyana had us.

My nails dug into the soft flesh of my palms, that had been tainted by the touch of Tiger and Bear, and perhaps worse, beyond the safe gate of my damaged memory.

She claimed to want Godfrey as a woman might want a man, though I know little of that emotion. What she really wanted was what Lucifer desired most, a soul, a will.

And what was it that Jack the Ripper had wanted on those bloody nights? Not a woman as a man wants a woman, that I knew now. He wanted a soul, a soul ripped from a body, a body ripped from humanity.

I sometimes have been mocked for my religious nature, even gently by my friends, a nature that is, well…natural in a parson’s daughter. But such early lessons teach a sensitivity to good and evil in their most elemental forms. The more sophisticated world does not wish to admit their existence.

I could live with what
might
have been done to me while I was unconscious and a prisoner. I could not live with what would certainly be done to Godfrey, and Irene, and myself, should Tatyana be able to manipulate us further.

I listened to the murmur next door. It was like overhearing barristers in court. The game was enjoined, the preliminary fencing launched. It had not yet come down to win or lose, good or evil, life and death.

But it would.