Castle Rouge (60 page)

“Journeys end in lovers’ meetings.” It had sounded like a jibe from the lips of Sherlock Holmes, but I wondered if a trace of envy flavored it. It was from Shakespeare. I would have to look up the play when we were back in Paris and I had time.

Meanwhile, Irene sang like a benediction.

“Thro’ many dangers, toil, and snares, I have already come.

“’Tis grace has kept me safe thus far, And grace will lead me home.”

The words and verses were short and simple. The song soon over. The memory of its absolute purity would never die.

When the last echo of the last note had died, we looked at each other, all petty rivalries or cross-purposes evaporated, all at peace, together.

This moment could not last, but it could be savored.

50.

Found and Lost

I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see

—
JOHN NEWTON,
AMAZING GRACE
, CIRCA
1760–1770

We returned to our rooms, Godfrey and I, to gather what belongings we had before we left the castle forever.

Rather, Godfrey retired to his room with Irene, and I retired to mine alone.

As I lit the candelabra feeling an odd blend of practicality and horror, I heard the mysterious murmurs of a married couple beyond the connecting door. And the mysterious silences.

I felt a warm flood of security, like a child who knows her parents are in the house. I also felt the cold, hot, empty loneliness of a child who knows she must grow up someday, and then who will take care of her?
No one
.

This last rush of feeling was ridiculous. I would return to Neuilly with Irene and Godfrey. All would be as before.

No!
I was not as before.

I had little to gather in this room. Godfrey’s nightshirt to return, two books Godfrey had fetched me from his explorations. That was all. Everything I had brought with me was destroyed. Except the chatelaine in my pocket.

At the window, my rope of bed linens lay coiled like a great albino snake. Its head reared as if to strike…the end that Godfrey had looped and knotted around the window’s central post.

I went to look out on the night, a full moon that shed light and shadow on the mountains and the meadows, gilding everything, making what was harsh and inhospitable lovely.

Bats reeled against the moon’s fat face, looking like moths drawn to an irresistible flame.

The night was still…until something scratched at my door.

Rats and cats? I had never seen much of these supposed denizens. Perhaps only in human form.

I went to my door, afraid to approach it.

Another scratch.

“Yes?”

“Nell?”

“Quentin?”

“May I come in?”

“Yes, but…I am so used to the door being locked from the outside.”

“Nothing simpler,” he replied, and I heard the latch lifted.

“I’m sorry,” he said on entering. “There was so much to manage.”

“You are Irene’s first lieutenant,” I said, proud of both of them. “I have never seen her so willing to relinquish the leading role. Did you hear her sing?”

“Who did not? It was…amazing. I’ve always known she had been a singer. I didn’t know that she was a Singer, like a Siren. From now on, when I think of the life I might have had, and regret it, I’ll think of the life she had, and lost, and my regret will look very puny.”

“Would you really prefer to be still living on Russell Square in London?”

“Would you really prefer to be living in Shropshire?”

“Sometimes.”

“Honest Nell. You make hypocrites of us all.”

“No! I’ve no desire to make anyone feel unhappy, ever.”

“Sometimes it can’t be helped. Sometimes it’s even good for us.”

I shrugged.

He glanced at the window. “So this is the famous rope.”

“You’ve heard of it?”

“And you climbed down the castle wall with Godfrey and Bram Stoker.”

“Between them. They would have caught me if I slipped.”

“But your rope would have caught
them
if they slipped.”

He stepped away in the moonlight, as if to look at me anew. This made me very nervous and a trifle irritated. It was as if he felt he had underestimated me, and if he had, then he didn’t know me at all. And if he didn’t, then my heart should break. And yet…I had been kept in a vampire box for a week and hung by a rope over a chasm since last we had met, and I do not think any part of me would break as easily anymore. And for that I felt very sorry.

“What is this?” he asked.

“What?”

He was smiling….I saw his white teeth in the moonlight, like pearls. “This…arrangement.”

His fingers touched the braids coiled around my head.

“That is how I got the idea for the rope. My hair was…impossible after a week being shipped across Europe in a box—”

“Nell,” he murmured.

But I had not finished explaining myself.

“Godfrey was able to convince the Gypsies to get me the makings of a bath. The Gypsies! Can you imagine! Godfrey is a barrister St. Peter at the Gate would have to reckon with. At any rate, I was clean but lacked the simplest wherewithal of good grooming, so I braided my hair and in so doing thought of the rope when Godfrey proposed climbing down the castle walls by himself, which was of course unthinkable.”

“Unthinkable,” he repeated. His fingers still played in my plaited hair.

“I planned to undo the braids tonight, but the compression has quite destroyed my hair.”

“Let me,” he said.

“Destroy my hair?”

“Undo your braids.”

Well, I didn’t think he should. Really. An unrelated male. An unrelated male of a higher position in society. It was almost like undoing corset strings, wasn’t it? Although I wore no corset, not even a corselet since Mr. Holmes had required the lacing to bind Tatyana, though I certainly could not tell
Quentin
that! Even though he had once most efficiently de-corseted me when I had swooned with shock from his appearance in disguise in a place and at a time I had never expected him to be.

Such as here. And now.

In the moonlight. By the window of a castle.

I had perhaps divided my hair into a dozen or so braids, and I could feel his fingers working at the first.

There was something comforting and parental about that steady tug, a service I had performed many times for my charges during the two short years I was a governess. For my dear charges. Where were they now, my temporary little ones? His niece Allegra we could certainly find at a moment’s notice, but the others….

His fingers tugged at another braid.

“What are we to do now?” I asked.

“Here? Now?”

“With all those people.” I started up. “What has become of James Kelly? I don’t remember seeing him once Tatyana and Colonel Moran were subdued.”

“James Kelly?”

“Jack the Ripper. Only—Sherlock Holmes implied that he wasn’t. Where is he?”

“Holmes or Kelly?”

“Kelly! I certainly don’t care where Sherlock Holmes is.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Ouch! That pulled.”

“Sorry. If you would calm down and stop agitating yourself…. We’re holding a meeting later downstairs to decide all these issues. But not for a while yet.”

I leaned back against the wall and let Quentin continue my unraveling.

Questions pushed to the fore of my mind like nettles, but I bit my tongue and held them back. He was right. This was the first time in three weeks that I need not worry about something.

Except him.

He turned me to face away from him and began unbraiding the back of my hair.

“I wonder that you can do that in the dark,” I said finally.

“A spy learns to do almost everything in the dark. It’s a soothing facility.”

“I braided my rope at night, mostly by feel. I had the fire-glow though.”

“You cheated,” he said, jerking playfully on one of my braids. I had never had anyone to tease me before.

This was the last one. I felt it unravel strand by strand, and it seemed every fiber of necessity of the past weeks, which was what I had lived on, had fallen away into loose, rolling waves as well.

Quentin turned me around to face him and combed his fingers through my hair as if admiring his own handiwork.

I couldn’t breathe, but that didn’t seem to be an unwelcome state.

His fingers slipped up into my hair at the back of my head and then he was pulling my face to his or pushing his face to mine.

I felt as if I had been dropped from a rope to hang swinging over a precipice, a feeling both frightening and exhilarating and thus utterly confusing.

He kissed me, as he had kissed me once before long ago, in front of a window, a light, slight kiss like a moth fanning its wings.

This was different and before I could even say how it was different Medved reared up before me like a devil summoned from Hell, his fingers clawing into my hair and pushing my face toward the hard, fiery lip of a pottery jar of vodka…and then James Kelly was lurching toward me against the marvelous painting of a spinning seascape, prodding at my bodice, as Medved had, leaving me locked in a dark space, sent spinning and bruising through time in a vampire box…the secret trapdoor in a stage floor which the monster will jump out of when the cue is given…the coffin, the prison, and you are left filthy and battered and alone and not knowing…not knowing even where you have been or what has been done to you in London, in Paris, in Prague, in Transylvania!

I felt a stunning terrifying plunge, Quentin’s hands slipping over my shoulders, my bare shoulders as the Gypsy blouse fled like a ghost, and…I began shaking, as if I would shake myself out of my box, out of time….

And I knew it was the worst thing to do, and I couldn’t stop it to save my soul.

“My God, Nell, I’m sorry!”

Quentin had backed away, his hands raised as if swearing an oath.

And what could I say, how could I say, that I had discovered that good and evil were so close that I could for the moment stand neither one nor the other?

“I’m sorry.” He reached again for me, then forced himself back. “I can’t know—”

I could say nothing. I shook so hard I could not speak, could not explain, could not retract, could do nothing, a prisoner in an invisible box no one could see, that only I could feel.

“I can’t stay without wanting to comfort you,” he said, “and I can see that is the worst thing I can do.”

He left then, and I sank down by my coils of rope and wept into their coarse and somehow comforting braids until they were soaked with my salt and regret.

A soft knock on the connecting door to Godfrey’s room a half hour later roused me from my puddle of self-pity. Irene, of course, warned by Quentin. I both resented and secretly appreciated that inevitability.

When I opened the door, Irene peered in like a supplicant.

“We are having a war council in the library in half an hour. I thought you might not want to miss it.”

“War council?”

“To decide what to do with our captives, and other matters. You’ll attend?”

I nodded.

She stepped over the threshold, her arms full of clothing. “I thought you might prefer to wear ordinary garb. We brought only one carpetbag each on our journey, but this was most useful.”

She laid my surprise dress on the bed. I was indeed surprised to see it, and dismayed.

“Who will be at the council?” I asked.

“Godfrey and myself, Bram Stoker, Pink….”

“Why is she still with us?” I asked with uncustomary irritation. “She has no real part in this affair.”

“Perhaps ‘Pink’ does not.” Irene paused, looking rueful. “But she is also Nellie Bly, a daredevil reporter for a New York City newspaper. She was following the Ripper’s trail from London to Paris before we happened upon her.”

“Pink?
Elizabeth?
Is named Nellie! Nellie—?”

“Bly. The pseudonym comes from an American song.”

“She isn’t a fallen woman, then?”

“Not at all. So we can hardly exclude her from our conference.”

“And who else cannot be excluded?”

Irene hesitated again, then came out with it. “Sherlock Holmes.”

I made a face but held my tongue.

“Yourself, of course,” she rushed on before pausing again, then plunging. “And…Quentin.”

As I had feared. I fingered the gown’s satin shirtwaist. Quentin had seen me wear it. I had seen Quentin while wearing it. But Irene was right; there was little to choose from, and I was anxious to shed Godfrey’s trousers and my long-worn Gypsy blouse, as useful as the full sleeves had been for concealment and carrying.

“And these.” Irene laid a full set of ladies’ lingerie on top of the gown: corset, chemise, pantaloons, petticoat. For a moment these articles looked as foreign as a sari, though a good deal more complicated.

“I will help you dress,” Irene decreed.

And so she did, fussing with the intricacies of the surprise dress while I donned the underthings and stockings and garters. My black walking boots had survived my kidnaping, but I decided to keep the Gypsy boots instead. Only the toes would peep out from under my hem, and they were a deep eggplant color that almost looked black.