Castle Rouge (13 page)

Indeed, I was used to regarding him as a sort of human bloodhound who needed to put his eyes and magnifying glass to the ground. Then I would marvel at the conclusions of great moment he could glean from the smallest mote of evidence, be it a speck of a particular kind of clay or a drop of hitherto unseen blood.

But I had never expected to see him perform this investigative ritual upon a filthy cellar floor beneath a raucous public house in Whitechapel.

“A good thing you are not married, Holmes,” I noted. “A spouse of any sensibility would swoon dead away at the sight of your garments after such an exercise as this.”

“I am not married, Watson, for other reasons than to prevent the female sex from swooning. Lean a little closer with the lantern…a bit lower and to the right. There, there’s the spot, old fellow! Now for a delicate extraction worthy of any dentist—”

“I am a fair hand at extractions myself.”

“I doubt you have ever plumbed such a prize as this.”

Holmes raised a tweezer into the lantern light. I could just glimpse a translucent curl caught between the tiny steel tongs.

“Candle wax, Holmes? I imagine a hole the age of this contains pieces of wax going back to the time of Charles II.”

“I will admit that candle wax is a common remnant on the scene of several crimes possibly attributed to Jack the Ripper in Paris, but this is wax of another sort, Watson, from another country, I believe. I need a container for it,” he announced peevishly, going face down on the packed stone and dirt again, still holding the miserable wisp of “prize” aloft.

“A container? All I have is a lantern and my pockets, which you would hardly find sanitary enough for a piece of precious evidence.”

His head came up, turned over his shoulder. He frowned. “Of course you have nothing useful about you, Watson. I quite forgot. Can you be good enough to go up those rickety stairs and ask…er, bribe, the proprietor for…the smallest glasses he might have, Watson. Cordial glasses would do. Two or three. And being clean would help.”

“I shall have to leave you in the dark for I cannot navigate those stairs without light.”

“Then be quick about it! I cannot move for fear of crushing these rare flakes of evidence.”

I mounted the perilous stairs, grumbling to myself. I suppose I should go out and about with empty vials in my pockets, all in case Holmes discovered a flake of tobacco or a dab of beeswax worth preserving.

This Mr. Finn proved to be a businessman born who found even bribery too much trouble. I was forced to buy a double pint. My request for cordial glasses earned a hearty round of laughter. This was hardly the place to serve the finer liquors meant for such vessels. I explained my need for pocket-size glass containers and threw myself on his mercy. My abject need gave him such a sense of superiority that he ducked down behind the counter and solemnly lined up three tiny open-mouth glass objects on the bar.

I suppose my gaped-mouth reception of these items was worth his trouble. He explained that he had obtained these from an American who couldn’t pay his bar bill and apparently traveled with his own bizarre set of measuring cups for whiskey. I had to pay him six pence before he handed over the three glasses after first swiping their interiors on his grimy apron on my request. Rather, I had requested that they be clean: the swipe was his interpretation of that condition.

I apportioned a glass to each of three pockets so they should not rattle and hastened to the pub’s rear, where the scents of ale and elimination combined into a heady brew. Down the dark and shifty stairs again I went, to find my friend still stretched supine, like a corpse, just where I had left him.

“Excellent, Watson,” he crowed as I handed over the first glass. “Strange things. What are they?”

“American shot glasses,” I explained with pardonable smugness. “It appears that Americans seek to control their intake of spirits by using such Lilliputian glasses.”

“Strange breed, the Americans,” Holmes muttered, utterly disinterested in odd customs as long as they provided what he needed.

The small steel tongs Holmes had produced from his pocket—a tool I had never known him to carry before, a most suggestive fact—released the pale wax into the first receptacle.

Holmes’s elbows worked like cricket legs, pulling himself forward.

“More light,” he ordered.

I delivered, and in a moment he triumphantly lifted another crumb in the tongs. “Cork this time, Watson. Lovely brown cork. From Portugal, of course.”

“Wine corks seem rather expected in the cellar of a pub, I should think.”

“But not French wine in a Spanish bottle sealed with Portuguese cork.”

“I agree that it does not seem quite English.”

Holmes was ignoring me, his nose to the ground and literally sniffing. “Red Tomahawk’s foreign firewater,” he muttered to himself, not pausing to explain anything to me. “Scent and yet no scent. Ha! The savage is a connoisseur. But what is this stuff?”

“Red Tomahawk, Holmes?”

He waggled dismissive (and filthy) fingers at me from the floor. “Foreign cases make for strange allies, Watson. I have one more sample to find here and…aha! Another vial, noble physician.”

I produced a second shot glass, feeling rather like the barman at the Officer’s Club in Kandahar. My wounds from Maiwand ached in the damp underground. I unaccountably became wary of cobras in the dark corners beyond the circle of light the lantern threw.

Holmes sprang up with the combination of energy and utter limberness a youth of seventeen but half his age would have envied.

His dirty palms dusted off his filthy clothes before he reached for the last of the shot glasses in my hand. Another bit of candle wax drifted to its empty bottom.

“The way to transport our loot is thus.”

He bent to retrieve the other shot glasses from the floor and nested them one atop the other. Over the top one he thrust his thumb, and then pushed the whole tower into his coat pocket.

“It’s back to Baker Street and my laboratory, Watson. I believe the cellar floor here is sufficiently clean.”

“I’m afraid that all you have accomplished is the transfer of dirt from one surface to another.”

“Let the microscope be the judge of that, Watson. The microscope is often the judge of us all and will be even more so in the times to come.”

I left that miserable cellar with Sherlock Holmes as confused as the police. I had no idea why a few cork crumbles and flakes of wax and glass and pottery shards, all things one would expect to find in a cellar that sheltered a modest supply of wine bottles, should excite my friend’s attention.

We stood on the paving stones outside, breathing less-confined air, although no sweeter.

“I failed that night, Watson,” Holmes said suddenly, pausing in relighting the old clay pipe. He drew so deeply on the pipe that the end of the bowl burned bloodred. “I need to explore the building’s rear, then our expedition will be over.”

“I see that my service revolver was unnecessary.”

“We are not out of Whitechapel yet, Watson.” Holmes marched around the side of the building to where the streetlight cast more shadow than light.

We had not even turned the second corner to the building’s rear when he stopped. “I cannot credit it! Watson, the lantern!”

I had taken custody of the light and struggled to pull the shutters fully open to reveal what Holmes had discovered.

It was most like the crumpled pile of discarded clothes that had announced every Ripper victim last year.

“Right here, near the very spot. I cannot believe the audacity of the creature! Your diagnosis, Doctor. I will hold the light. And the revolver, though I believe our man is gone.”

I knelt on the damp cobblestones, felt the neck. It was warm, as was the blood, which was still liquid.

“Quick, Holmes! Summon a bobby. She’s still alive.”

He flung back a few words of encouragement as he raced away. “By God, Watson, if you can keep her that way you may be the one man in all England who will be able to bring Jack the Ripper to justice and salve my conscience.”

After he had vanished, I pressed the neck wound shut, unwinding Mary’s knitted scarf to make a bloody bandage of it.

“It’s all right, my dear,” I murmured to ears that might soon be deaf for all time. “Help is coming and you are among friends.”

7.

Taking the Air

PLAYING MAD WOMAN NELLIE BLY TOO SHARP FOR THE ISLAND DOCTORS

THE SUN FINISHES UP ITS STORY OF THE “PRETTY CRAZY GIRL.”

She is intelligent, capable and self-reliant, and…has gone about the business of maintaining herself in journalism in a practical, business-like way
.

—
THE NEW YORK SUN
, 1887

FROM A JOURNAL

Irene surprised me the next day by proposing that we visit
Notre Dame de Paris
.

“Why?” I demanded.

“Because it is Paris in the spring?” She paused in pinning on her hat to add with brittle emphasis, “Because it is the first time, the first place, where Our Enemy showed itself.”

“You mean the pistol shots.”

“Rifle shots, Buffalo Bill believes, which makes them much more interesting.”

“Then they were not merely some usual afterdark danger of Paris?”

“Knives and fists and the cancan are the usual afterdark dangers of Paris. Not rifles. I wish to reconsider the site, and the incident, by daylight.”

“Should we be dallying to speculate with Nell and Godfrey gone missing?”

“No, of course not! We should be charging to the rescue. But where? Where first? Verdun, an innocuous city on the fringe of France? If there is an Enemy, where does it hide? Come from? Go to? We must have some notion of the who, what, and whyfore before we rush off anywhere.”

“And visiting Notre Dame will provide us with this greatly needed ‘notion?’”

“I hope so.” Irene smiled tightly.

“Is not Bram Stoker to act as our escort?”

“Bram? No. Why?”

“Why not?”

“I have sent him east on a walking tour.”

“On a walking tour?”

“Well, he will take the train first. And then he will walk.”

“You had other plans for him.”

“And you disapproved of my typically feminine weakness in relying on male escort. I decided you were right.”

“I was merely pointing out an inconsistency in your character.”

“Quite rightfully so. I have remedied it.”

“But…I didn’t really mean it.”

“How unfortunate,” she murmured. “Bram left Paris this morning by rail. It shall be some time before we see him again, I suspect.”

“So he is forging eastward to all the adventure, as Sherlock Holmes ranges westward to London and Whitechapel, and we are merely going to visit Notre Dame Cathedral?”

“Which is an adventure in architecture,” Irene said almost as piously as Nell might, drawing on her gloves. “Do be patient, Pink. There is more going on in the world at large than even Nellie Ely can fathom.”

The day was sublime. Paris sparkled under one of those skies marbleized by pale veins of cloud. The scents of burgeoning buds and leaves overpowered even the eternal odor of horse that is every major city’s most dominant perfume.

Irene looked a fit subject for an
Academic
portrait painter in her pale yellow satin-faille gown worked with borders of blond lace at the hem and very fashionable three-quarter-length sleeve. This subtle gown was topped by a black fichu-wrap, an exquisite sleeveless overbodice of ribbon and lace that was caught at the narrow waist by a satin sash and ruffled into a peplum both front and back. She wore a broad-brimmed hat rather than the rapidly becoming passé bonnet.

I admit that I sighed for her sense of style even as it puzzled me. One would never guess she had faced deep personal losses only forty hours before. That is a testimony, I believe, to the stage arts she had mastered as an opera singer. The numb, stricken creature I had glimpsed for a few desperate hours had been banished to some hidden cell of her mind.