Castle Rouge (45 page)

I cannot say how long I crouched there like a child on a stairway eavesdropping on adults, fearing the worst but determined to hear whatever I could.

Perhaps the sin and strain of eavesdropping had deafened me to all else.

How else can I explain the sudden shuffle of boot on stone and turning to find my room also occupied by an intruder?

I would have screamed had I not known that it would put Godfrey in danger if Tatyana knew I’d been listening.

I rose slowly, my knees resisting after such a long while bent.

Had I suspected that anyone else would have intruded on our quarters, it would have been Tatyana’s old partner in espionage, Tiger.

But this unexpected guest was far worse than the intimidating Colonel Moran—the dancing bear she called Medved.

He was dancing now in his beastly way, swaying slightly from side to side on his booted feet, a pottery jar clutched against his filthy shirt front.

He grinned at me, showing a full set of teeth at least, but he was young yet and could be expected to loose them in carousing later.

“Eat,” he pronounced in English as if it were an achievement. “Drink.”

“I have eaten,” I said, moving away from the door so he wouldn’t barge through and betray my listening post. I hoped he was too drunk to even hear the murmur of neighboring voices, particularly his mistress’s.

He followed me as obligingly as any distraction could wish, stopping only to tilt back his head and drink from the unstoppered jar.

I felt the windows at my back, the chill night air raising gooseflesh on my neck and arms. It was shocking how cold the room became once away from the hot-throated fireplace.

I began to shiver.

He came lumbering and grinning after me, humming some simple Gypsy tune.

I had backed us into a dim, cold corner, away from all the noise and warmth of the crackling fire. It was as if I had left a friend behind at a time I most needed one.

At least I could hear nothing of Godfrey or Tatyana, but that may have been because my heart was beating too loudly to permit any kind of eavesdropping at all, except on my own frightening situation.

“Cold,” he said, this one-word wonder. It was amazing that he spoke any English at all, but I suspect that Tatyana relished teaching him the occasional nugget of European knowledge, much as one would enjoy tossing a bit of meat to a hound.

I wondered if his mind was whole, and if he was Gypsy or of some other exotic tribe of pariahs, perhaps one of Quentin’s Afghans or Turks.

He frowned as if noticing my shivers. “Drink.” His greasy fingers splayed and then came behind my head. Together his hands forced my face to meet the lip of the crude crock. Bitter cold yet strong acid poured into my mouth, down my throat, down my chin and neck, burning like liquid fire wherever it touched.

I sputtered and choked, bucked away like a force-fed lamb, struggled to breathe, and inhaled some of the corrosive stuff up my nose.

All the while he laughed and nodded, and released me only to apply the same bitter medicine to his own mouth again.

I was revolted to the brink of vomiting.

But he was singing again, and swaying, staring at me.

Though his hair was as dark as a bramble bush, I suddenly realized that his eyes were as light as water, that I was seeing right through them as through an open window. Some strange, cold, pale fire shone behind them, like a thin curtain of ice. I had never seen such a transparent gaze, utterly unreflective, drawing me into an oddly sweeping empty world behind them, like the misty countryside you glimpse over the Mona Lisa’s shoulder, past her smile.

He was smiling. And swaying from side to side. Singing. Gruff nonsense syllables a bear would mouth. For a moment I wondered if a man could transform himself into a bear…if Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Indians could do it. They were like Gypsies, weren’t they, Indians? The men dancing around a fire, chanting, swaying. The internal fire of the mysterious liquid still tingled on my tongue and all down my throat and chest and stomach.

It was as if I had swallowed acid, but felt no fear.

He came crooning closer, his eyes growing as large as full moons in the daylight sky, white and milky, cool as silk.

I couldn’t seem to concentrate hard enough, or long enough, to notice his food-encrusted tunic and greased-matted hair. The eyes were clean and as hot-cold as the liquid in the bottle he lifted again to my teeth.

Almost I would have lost myself to this strange lethargy so like something else I had known. A dream, perhaps.

But then I felt his fingers tugging at the bosom of my nightshirt, pawing, trying to rip the fabric apart. Suddenly the scene was familiar. Myself trapped by the velvet curtain that divided the close, artificial scenes of the panorama from the freedom of the outside world. Hands reaching for me. A strange soft pillow of forgetfulness pushed against my mouth and nose. Staring blue eyes unblinkingly absorbing my sight, my sound, my self.

I pushed it all away, the memory and the man-bear intruding on my very soul.

The next thing I knew I had fallen to the floor and the pottery jar came down hard beside me, spilling its contents and rolling sideways across the Oriental rug.

A triangular piece had fallen away.

The wounded bear was roaring silently up on two feet, blood running from a corner of its mouth. It wiped a crimson paw on the already abused shirt front, leaving a dark swath of liquid and blood.

I think he left, taking nothing with him but a brute surprise.

It was morning when I awakened, damp and dirty and confused, as if from an artificial sleep.

I would have thought I’d dreamed my night visitor, but I awoke stretched out like a Gypsy on the rug. My mouth had a dry, stale taste. The fallen jug lay just beyond one outstretched hand.

The fire across the room had gone out, and the front of my nightshirt was still wet.

I sat up, shuddering with the cold that aggravated the severe stiffness I noticed next.

My first thought was Godfrey. Was he safe? I had no idea how last night’s “debate” had ended. I was afraid to find out.

While I lay there, huddled and uncertain, I heard a gentle knock.

Even that startled me like the thwunk of an executioner’s axe. (Not that I have ever heard the thwunk of an executioner’s axe, but one can imagine how it would sound. And if one likes ghost stories, one does.)

I pushed myself upright and hobbled to the connecting door like a beldame from a fairy tale.

I pulled the door open a crack and placed an eye to the crack.

“Nell!” Godfrey was dressed and looking quite normal. “What has happened?”

“I need a coverlet.”

“Your own is—” He appeared to realize that I would have to expose my nightshirt-clad self to retrieve my coverlet and vanished for a moment, returning with the coverlet from his bed. I pulled it through as narrow a width of the door as I could manage, recalling the rich man and the eye of the needle from the Scriptures, and wrapped myself up in it like an Indian squaw.

Only then did I step back and admit Godfrey to my chamber.

“Obviously you have had a fright, Nell,” he observed, stepping over the threshold to survey my chamber. His eyes fell on the fallen jug at once. “Oh, no! Tell me it was not that drunken oaf from Tatyana’s table below!”

I nodded, clutching his coverlet.

Godfrey took me by the shoulders and guided me to the fireplace chair, where he deposited me. Then he fanned the last dying embers and teased them into flames with slender sticks peeled from the piled logs beside the mantel.

“I heard Tatyana last night,” I finally said. “What did she want?”

Godfrey paused in building sticks into fire enough to ignite logs. “Nothing honorable. Or sensible. But she enjoys resistance, at least for a time. I could overpower her in an instant if I decided there was any profit in it.” He turned, his forehead wrinkled with worry. “But you, Nell, alone in here with that brute—! What happened?”

“He came in shuffling and swaying and singing.”

“Drunk on whatever fills that pottery jug.”

“He made me drink some, pushed the thing against my teeth.”

Godfrey came over and patted me on the shoulder, rather awkwardly. “If you had called out, Nell, I would have come.”

“And what would Tatyana have made of that? She does not like being forsaken for another.”

“Better you should have called out. She wouldn’t have liked her trained beast devoting attention to you. Better they should quarrel among themselves. Is that all he did, force liquor down your throat?”

“He, uh, tried to assault your nightshirt, Godfrey, I’m very sorry. It may have a tear or two.”

“The bastard!” He peeled back my—or his, rather—coverlet to examine the state of the nightshirt. Our joint inspection revealed that sturdy British sewing had withstood the inroads of the brute.

“Nell, I am sorrier than I can say. If I knew how we could safely flee this very day—”

“It is all right, Godfrey. During this strange…attack I was reminded of the great similarity between this and the moment when I was abducted from the panorama in Paris. The same pawing and clutching, the same fixed, demented gaze…Godfrey, is it possible that one man may transform into another? I know it was James Kelly that came at me in Paris, twice. Yet this creature here in Transylvania reminds me of him, as if they were brothers. Or the same in different form.”

Godfrey sat back on his heels to consider it. I was relieved that my presenting him with a problem had taken his mind off the indignities I had suffered. One does not wish one’s indignities long contemplated by others, no matter how near and dear.

“I suppose you are talking about metamorphosis, Nell. It is a Greek idea.”

“Like much that is bizarre.”

“Or mythical, at least. Such notions have people turning into trees and flowers and animals, all at the intervening powers of the gods from Mount Olympus. Still, it is a strong notion, and an ancient one, so one might wonder if there was some historic basis for it.”

“Perhaps I simply sensed the universality of evil.”

Godfrey returned his pale gray gaze to me—absent of anything more mesmerizing than kind familiarity—and smiled. “The universality of evil is certainly a given that touches all ages and places. I am glad that you are all right.”

“Of course,” I said, now warmed and able to sit up absolutely straight without support of chair or corsets and without shivering.

I gazed at the abandoned pottery jug lying on my carpet.

“Irene put some significance on the wine bottles and such we found abandoned in the underground sites in Paris. I wonder if this object might be instructive. Sherlock Holmes put great stock in corks, which this container is missing, but is there something else telltale about it?”

“I don’t know, Nell.” Godfrey stood up and approached the object in question. “But we can look into it.”

“Excellent. I can tell you it was a most potent and disagreeable libation, quite enough to turn a man into a bear.”

He nodded and bent down to retrieve the homely item. A bit of pale wax fell off the top as he lifted it up.

I realized that my “diversion” for Godfrey’s sake, to give him something else to think upon than my recent trials, had hit on a universal truth as widespread as universal evil.

These were traces of the same props and players—the crude bottles and cruder men, the remote locations with underground cellars—as had haunted the underbelly of Paris when the Ripper killings continued.

That is when I resolved that we must leave this place as soon as possible.

37.

Sovereign Security

Put not your trust in princes: in a son of man in whom there is no help
.

—PSALM
146:3

FROM A JOURNAL

I awoke the next morning in our Prague hotel room, memories assembling around my trundle bed like dreams.

My mind tried to bat them away, but sights and smells seeped under the door and through the window frames.

Darkness, a rain mixed of blood and wine, the reek of the charnel house and the privy, the dry, overriding scent of old, hard earth in which bones and rats kept company.

I stared up at the ceiling, an alabaster exercise in plaster and gilt. It looked like icing on a cake, shockingly out of tune with what I’d seen and heard and thought so recently.

“James Kelly,” I murmured to myself. He seemed to have slipped off the map since Neunkirchen, unless his hand was to be sensed in every subterranean scene of chaos and revelry and implied violence.

Why would an upholsterer be hieing across Europe merely to escape us? Our hunting party.

Irene was up, dressed, and seated at the desk, wearing the men’s clothing she had donned the night before. I corrected my impression: she was likely still up from the night before and had not changed clothing.

“Awake, Pink?” she asked without looking over her dark serge shoulder to verify her impression. Sometimes her instincts were uncanny. No doubt it was from listening for cues onstage. “Better dress quickly.”