Castle Rouge (59 page)

This man laid before our horrified eyes was such a figure. While Medved held up his sinewy naked arms, his robe having ebbed to his hips, a knot of grasping young women clasped his legs as if they supported a heroic public statue. His manhood (for my father had kept a secret book of Greek and Roman statuary that I, in a childhood sin, had found and perused) enormously visible, Medved’s followers took knives to the very same area on his supine worshiper.

I would have swooned, having good reason to do so, except that I was past swooning. Even Godfrey’s hand over my eyes could not dampen my imagination.

Thanks to Godfrey’s brotherly interference, I missed the most astounding event of the evening: not sexual misconduct, not orgiastic excess, not false religious ritual, but a figure darting from the shadows beyond the fire to the very feet of Medved himself, screeching, begging, pleading, all in English!

I heard the words and jerked my head free of Godfrey’s control just in time to see James Kelly, slavering on his knees before the brute Medved.

“Master,” he was shouting. “I have been faithful to thee. I have followed thee despite all barriers. Sin is salvation. Let me sin. Let me take this man’s place. I have earned the sacrifice. Master, the blood is the Life, let me shed it for you and Drink your Blood in the Cup.”

All eyes in the cavern had sobered to attend to Kelly’s demented plea, though few could understand its words.

“Quick,” came Sherlock Holmes’s voice over my shoulder, harsh as a diving kestrel’s cry. “Hold Tatyana while I bind Moran.”

After an instant’s shocked paralysis, Bram and Godfrey leaped upon the woman like dogs upon a hind to pull the black cloak down over her arms to bind her.

Sherlock Holmes had wrested away Colonel Moran’s cloak and struck him a blow with the butt of a pistol. I watched as he used Kelly’s trouser belt to lash the man’s hands behind his back.

My own corselet lacing soon slashed into the air like a whip and then was servicing Madam Tatyana in similar fashion while she struggled like a wildcat with Godfrey and Bram.

“Kelly?” I asked no one in particular and everyone, wondering how the items used to bind him earlier had reappeared here.

“I freed him during my short sabbatical from your company,” Mr. Holmes said, eyeing the chaos below, “expecting just such a distraction. Look. There’s an exit from the cavern beyond the bonfire. We must be quick about leaving while Kelly distracts the crowd. Gentlemen, don the robes. Miss Huxleigh and myself are already in Gypsy guise. Jump down and be ready to catch the lady. I will follow. Draw any weapon you possess. This mob is mad with frenzy and hot for blood, their own first, but ours will do.”

Barely had he finished speaking than Bram and Godfrey were bounding through the window frames, landing hard on their feet eight feet below.

I paused to stare into the bound Tatyana’s eyes, which burned with some overpowering emotion…failure, blood-lust, or hoped-for revenge? I wondered if she knew the identity of who had foiled her.

I had no longer to dally. Sherlock Holmes lifted me over the sill like a sack of potatoes and cast me into the waiting arms of Godfrey and Bram Stoker, who absorbed my weight together as if I had been a thistledown, so that not a foot touched the floor.

He leaped down immediately after and pushed us in the direction he wished us to run. We went where herded, as had been our wont of late. Here on the cavern floor I smelled the raw power of vodka mixed with the ugly perfume of sweat and blood and other unmentionable excesses.

The glazed eyes of the celebrants barely noted our passing as if we were sparks from the fire rushing by. Their condition lent us an instant’s invisibility. We darted through and beyond them and circled the fringes of the group, hunting Mr. Holmes’s vaunted exit.

He was in the lead, with Godfrey and Bram on either side of me, practically carrying me along.

We felt the fire at our backs and saw a blot of darkness that expanded as we neared it. This could only be our exit.

As we raced for its welcome darkness, light bloomed and then swelled at its center. Torches flared into a mass like a sun as a new mob of people rushed to fill our only escape route with their thronging presence.

Like flood water in a mine shaft, they swept us apart and pinned us against the wall with an irresistible force.

I could see no one, hear nothing over the roar of the oncoming crowd.

But the mob had seen us. Perhaps two dozen unintelligible, ravening men pressed me and my companions against the wall into a prison cell constructed of human bodies.

49.

Journey’s End

My mother said that I never should Play with the gypsies in the wood

—
ANONYMOUS

The heat and the pressure were unbearable. My pulses raced. I felt once again confined in a box. I wrenched my head from side to side, the only portion I could move, hoping to spy my friends.

Angry shouts in a foreign tongue assailed my ears. I sensed a flutter of violence to my right and managed to see Bram or Godfrey being stripped of his borrowed cloak.

And still the fissure between the walls spewed an onslaught of new forces into the cellar.

If only we had made our race to freedom ten or fifteen minutes earlier…. As the men milled around us, I realized that they didn’t wear the white robes of celebrants, but the full, colorful clothing of Gypsies. There was even a woman or two among them. I glimpsed long unbound hair under scarlet-and-gold scarves, but only briefly, as both they and I were below the common height and condemned to see only half of what occurred.

Bram roared like an angry bear behind me. I felt his cloak whip my shoulder as it was torn away and then I heard a shriek that almost sounded joyous.

One of the Gypsy women came tearing through the circle of men, knocking into their arms and shoulders left and right with some object in her hand.

She pushed past me, and as I turned to follow her impetuous progress, I saw Godfrey pressed against the wall only a yard’s width behind me. If we survived this, I would have to speak with him about his lamentable and very unbarristerlike tendency to attract strange and fanatical women….

Then I heard a voice shout “Godfrey!” It was the only voice in the world anyone could have heard in that chaos: one trained to shake the back walls of an opera house.

“Irene!” I cried, my own voice lost in the whirlwind, as a second Gypsy woman came in her wake, flailing right and left with a cane.

I had no trouble glimpsing Godfrey now, for Irene had cast herself upon him in an embrace so encompassing and with a kiss so ferocious that I looked away blushing.

My shoulders were suddenly taken in someone’s hands and shaken.

“Nell! Can this be you?”

I stared into the astonished blue-gray eyes of Elizabeth Jane, also known as Pink, equally astounded that she was so uncertain of my identity and then very pleased indeed.

I had not long to bask, for Irene had somehow managed to relinquish Godfrey and leaped upon me like an unmannerly dog. “Nell? Are you sure, Pink?
Nell?
” She petted my braids and my full sleeves and regarded me with the greatest amazement and delight, glancing over her shoulder to Godfrey every other instant as if she dared not let either of us out of her sight.

“And Bram!” she exclaimed, for he had managed to fight his way to join us. Her entering our prison circle had made it into a charmed one. The Gypsy men gave way like courtiers, suddenly less keepers and more guards.

Another man crashed through the ring of Gypsies, as brown of face as they and also wearing a strange medley of clothing from here and there, which I could hardly criticize given my equally unconventional attire.

“They are safe?” he demanded of Irene, blinking to take in Godfrey and Bram, who looked quite ordinary divested of their sinister robes.

He looked right over my braided head.

“Yes, both. All!” Irene caroled, her voice carrying over the screams and chaos all around us.

“But, Nell. Where is Nell?” Quentin shouted.

I could not speak. I could certainly not make myself heard as they did.

Irene shook me slightly, as if pinching a dream to make sure that it is real. “Here she is.” She whirled to claim Godfrey again, leaving me to face Quentin alone.

Can one be alone in a milling mob of madmen and six tribes of assembling Gypsies? Can two be alone in such a circumstance?

Quentin looked so different, but then he always did. I imagine I did too, and I never did. He stared at me, at my eyes, my face, my hair, my clothes, as if he did not know me and he feared he might never know me again. I saw not joy on his face but worry relieved and new worry as quickly born. Where Irene and Pink had pulled me into their commanding orbits as if we had been separated for a mere three weeks, which we indeed had been, Quentin regarded me across a chasm as wide as three years, or thirty. True, we had not seen each other in months. The cavern had become as quiet as a compartment on a train, though I could hear the dull roar of the entire world through which our isolated (and imaginary) railway car rolled.

His lips mouthed my name, but I could not hear the word.

I heard another voice, high-pitched with command and even a bit peevish. “Yes, ‘journeys end in lovers’ meetings,’ but we’ve work to do in this
abattoir
of the Carpathians. I assume these are your trained Gypsies, Madam Norton. I need to direct them.”

She took in the man’s disguise in an instant, then without hesitation she pulled a large playing card from the gathered fullness of her borrowed Gypsy sleeve and presented it to Sherlock Holmes.

“The Tarot,” he observed with a sigh. “And blood on the swords? Is that not a bit melodramatic even for a prima donna?”

“It always works in the operettas,” she answered with an ecstatic grin, linking her arm through Godfrey’s.

“I am translator,” Quentin said, not yet taking his eyes off of me. “I will go with you.”

They were gone and we five were left alone against a dirty dark stone wall, watching from the sidelines. I realized that it had become quiet in our corner for some time.

Irene, her arm still linked with Godfrey, linked her free arm with mine. She was smiling though her eyes were bright with tears. Bram Stoker grinned and pulled my free arm through his and patted my hand before he reached out to link arms with Pink. We stood, absolutely content in our own company bought at such cost, and watched.

Before us, the Gypsy troops, and that’s what they indeed were, rounded up the poor deluded souls who had already punished themselves for their sins.

Mr. Holmes and Quentin were leading a party of ten to storm the monsters’ gallery above the cavern floor and collect the bound prisoners.

Behind the mighty bonfire, which the Gypsies were beating with unburnt logs, scattering the great burning pieces of wood, sending up showers of sparks, pushing it all apart to burn down in small brush fires here and there, another knot of Gypsies were struggling.

From my vantage point they appeared to be squabbling among themselves, as if they were gathered around a game of dice and disagreed. I was reminded of the Roman soldiers gambling for the cloak of Christ after the Crucifixion.

I couldn’t imagine what made me think of that, except that the great crossed logs against the far wall recalled the X-shaped crosses on which some of the Disciples were crucified, and the Chi-Rho of course.

And then a struggling, half-naked figure reared up against that awful black X-shape, throwing off the Gypsies as if they were children.

His naked upper torso was streaked with sweat and charcoal and drops of other people’s blood. I was certain I was looking on the anti-Christ, and it was Tatyana’s Medved, the leader of this demented ceremony.

Again the Gypsies rushed to hold him down. Again he exploded upright among them, not a tall man, but a powerful man, a man of almost superhuman strength. His nudity, his dreadful condition, were so evocative of the suffering of Christ that I stood transfixed by him despite myself, as I had been frozen by his burning ice-blue eyes in my room not long before. What if we were wrong? What if there was some divinity in all this? Good Christians should suffer meekly…was this not what this congregation was doing, walking in the tortured footsteps of Our Lord? I had heard of flagellants in the early church, in the Roman Church, of hideously tortured saints, even among the missionaries to the American Indians. Was what happened here any worse than what the Church would have us read about and revere in the martyrs? Did we not see the truth here?

I confess to confusion as I watched more pagan Gypsies converge on the lone struggling figure and finally bear it to the ground to be bound.

All the celebrants of the cellar chapel were subdued now and being herded to the castle’s upper areas. I saw Mr. Holmes and Quentin moving among the Gypsy guards.

We five were too exhausted to do anything but watch numbly and savor our reunion.

Then as the sounds of riot gave way to the weeping and sighing and moaning of prisoners, Irene began to sing. It was nothing operatic, but it was, to my everlasting surprise, a hymn.

“Amazing Grace.”

What was most amazing was how the rock chamber amplified and magnified her voice, as pure as a mountain stream as the simple English words echoed off of hard stone and fell on our ears like warm rain.

Even Medved, upright and still struggling in his bonds, paused and lifted his shaggy head like a dog scenting something rare and held still.

Sherlock Holmes stopped halfway up the stairs, Colonel Moran and Tatyana at pistol point ahead of him.

At the first note, Tatyana’s head of ungoverned hair snapped up and back, as if she had been shot. I could not see her face and didn’t want to. I didn’t even look at Irene, but merely swayed slowly left and right with my comrades as the music bade us. I wanted only to hear those healing syllables and notes, to let anguish and worry and fear of the past and the future rinse away like the road dust from a long and very arduous journey.