Castle Rouge (40 page)

The lean man in black sat on Tatyana’s left, or sinister, side.

Hmmm
.

Although only four or five feet separated us from the trio at the table’s other end, I could tell that the English colonel felt he had been assigned a chair “below the salt.”

I couldn’t help thinking that Tatyana regarded all women as rivals and wanted to keep them well beyond arm’s length. Hence my banishment. Also, she wished to upset Godfrey and myself by separating us.

Colonel Moran’s short fingernails gleamed as they strummed the wooden tabletop. His blue eyes were as icy as an arctic sky, as I recalled, his white hair having retreated like some glacier to expose a gleaming bald forehead and skull that was as bony as his bearlike jaw. He seemed to have become some human icon of the massive beasts he hunted and killed: Indian tiger and albino Russian bear. His baldness reminded me of the tonsured sleekness of a fanatical medieval monk, the kind who would put perfectly innocent men to the stake. And women, of course. One sensed a rigorous, keen intellect married to the self-importance of a saint…or a sensualist. He had met me, and Godfrey, at one of Sarah Bernhardt’s crowded soirees. I could only hope neither of us were sufficiently memorable when the Divine Sarah and Irene in full fine feather shared the room. Again this renegade fellow struck me as a man who was a law unto himself.

“
Parlez-vous français?
” he suddenly barked at me, and I do mean “barked.”

“
Un peu
,” I answered with utter honesty. A little.

He rushed some other foreign words out next, thick and brusque.

I shrugged.

“English?” he asked.

“My language or my nationality?” I asked back.

He laughed then. “Is there a difference?” He frowned at me, a formidable expression on that high forehead. “You are known to me?”

“I think not.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“I should,” he said shortly, and leaned back from the table as the surly servitor from the other end of the table came to pour a stream of red wine into his empty silver goblet.

I watched the servant, not the colonel. There was something familiar about him, just as the colonel had sensed something familiar about me. That meant we had seen the familiar person in a place and at a time when we were concentrating on something, or someone, else.

I knew what had distracted the colonel from recognizing me: the presence of Irene, who could dazzle a blind man into overlooking braille, and, later in our accidental acquaintance, his life-and-death struggle with Quentin Stanhope on Hammersmith Bridge.

But what kept me from recognizing the lumbering servant? Other than the fact that he was unkempt and his shirt was stained with things too disgusting to think about, of course. How could Tatyana keep such a clod in her retinue?

I glanced to the fireplace, where the Gypsies from the hall were now gathering like hounds at a medieval banquet, quaffing nameless spirits from pottery jugs and still tightening their miserable violin strings as if it mattered whether they were in tune or not. Three swarthy young girls had joined them, tambourines dripping as many gold coins as their dingy articles of dress.

Tatyana enjoyed having these low creatures do her unconventional bidding, that is why they were here.

I tried to dissuade the slow-moving servant from filling my gilt-lined goblet with the bloody wine, but he would have poured it right over my fanned fingers, so I jerked my hand away from the cup just in time to avoid a burgundy bath, or whatever variety the wine was. I couldn’t help noticing that the fellow tried to stare down the front of my gown. I pulled my shoulders back like a soldier to prevent any unintended gap. The man grinned before moving on.

“I have seen that chap before,” the Colonel said after drinking deep of the wine. He was looking at Godfrey.

So the Colonel was present, but had not been informed of who we were or why we were here!

“I feel I should know him, too,” I said, deliberately looking at the tall, thin, old man instead of Godfrey. Anything to divert the high-tempered Colonel Moran from Godfrey. Quentin had been a seasoned foreign-office spy, and still struggled to fight the man to the death. How would a barrister like Godfrey be able to defend himself against such a formidable foe?

Having chosen the lean old man as diversion, I was forced to contemplate him. Quite frankly, he still looked remarkably like Sherlock Holmes in disguise as the French
abbé
in Paris not two weeks ago, except that this man’s hair was iron-gray, not white. Of course his black garb was not a cassock, I saw, but a frock coat so old-fashioned he more resembled a liveried servant than a guest.

“Some local official,” Colonel Moran said with a dismissive snort as he took in the fellow’s age and garb. “It is the younger man she is really interested in.”

“Then I do not see why we are here,” I said forthrightly.

He turned a sudden and awful grin on me. “Obviously, you are here to amuse me. I seldom share a table with an English female these days. I am trying to decide if she has chosen to surprise me by partnering me with a nun or a whore.”

“I am Episcopal,” I said quickly, taking a false sip of the wine to hide my confusion.

“She is never predictable,” he muttered as much to himself as to me. “She likes turning foes into allies and allies into foes. It will cause her trouble one day.”

“It seems that she is only arranging some business,” I noted, for Godfrey and the strange man in black were in animated conversation, much punctuated by gesture, indicating that they did not fluently speak each other’s language.

“She is always arranging some business. She promised me a superb hunt tonight.”

“What game?”

“Wolves? I have heard them howling. But I do not hunt pack animals. They are too pathetic. Weakness makes them band together. The only worthy game is a beast that walks alone, like a tiger or a lion. I am hoping for bear. Or…something else unexpected that can rise up on two legs.”

Another serving man, this one garbed in worn livery, glided by to place saucers of soup on our golden charger plates.

This was not Gypsy stew, but true broth with exotic mushrooms floating within it! I lifted a sterling silver spoon, then waited to see Tatyana served from the same tureen.

She caught me watching, and lifted a not disapproving eyebrow in my direction.

The next instant she gestured the wine steward, if such a clumsy sort could be called that, to take an empty place along the side of the table and seat himself as though a guest.

He, too, was served several ladles of broth, save that he picked up the low flat dish and drank from it like a dog!

I looked away, carefully skimming my spoon to gather a polite serving, and sip it.

Colonel Moran laughed, and lifted his wine cup in a mock toast.

“To your health, Miss or Ma’am. I see that you will not let manners desert you no matter the company.”

He put down his wine to attack the soup with the same
politesse
I had used, as if welcoming a civilized example.

I confess that the soup was delicious, the broth light and flavored, the ingredients tender yet filling.

At the table’s other end, Godfrey was sketching patterns on the linen with the tip of his knife, the old man leaning forward intently to follow the invisible symbols.

It did indeed look like a business discussion. Could this be the person he had expected to deal with on the Rothschild matters? He paid no attention to me, but I could sense that his attention from the corner of his eye never left me, and Colonel Moran.

“Damned if don’t know that fellow from somewhere!” The Colonel drank deeply again.

“London?” I suggested, knowing that the two men had first glimpsed each other in Paris.

“London? Perhaps. Is that your home?”

The darks of his eyes expanded with curiosity.

“It has been, although I am originally from the country.”

“The country! You don’t say. How would I ever have guessed? And what name do you go by?”

“I was christened Penelope.”

“Penelope!” He chuckled. “What a different world from mine you must live in, Penelope. No doubt that is why Sable has invited you. She adores contrasts.”

“Sable?”

“A pet name of mine for her.” He leaned very close, and I think he leered. “Do you have any pet names?”

“I’m afraid not, but I do have some pets.”

“And what sort of pets do you keep?” he jeered.

“A very lazy, large black cat.”

He snorted despite scooping up another spoonful of soup.

“A parrot.”

He rolled his eyes.

“A mongoose name Messalina.”

He looked up from the soup.

“And two serpents that I have not yet named.”

“And why have you not yet named them?”

I pretended I was Sarah Bernhardt playing some doomed, pagan empress. “I am not quite sure which shall survive yet.”

The colonel stared at me. “Definitely not a nun,” he muttered to his soup as he finished the serving. “Are you sure you don’t keep a monkey?”

“A monkey? Certainly not. Why?”

The moment I spoke I regretted my question. I did not want Colonel Moran connecting me with a monkey of any sort. He was recalling a fortunately brief encounter we had at Sarah’s Paris party that included a piano and a monkey. I could only hope the monkey was more memorable than I had been on that occasion.

“I don’t know,” he said. “A monkey suddenly came to mind. I have lived in climes where they are common as pets, as are mongeese. However did you acquire one of that breed?”

I could hardly answer that his mortal enemy Cobra had given it to me. Luckily, the sole liveried servant I had seen came ’round again to collect soup bowls and the resulting stir distracted my interrogator from monkeys, if not me.

“So what are you in England, an artist’s model?” The colonel was gazing lasciviously on my unbound hair.

No doubt he expected me to be flattered instead of insulted. And no wonder he could not recognize me! I’d forgotten my frothy hair made an entirely new woman of me. Glory be! But an artist’s model? They were hardly better than harlots.

“No, I am a—” What could I say I was? A retired governess and typewriter girl? Tatyana was right: it was vital to keep one’s enemies off balance. I remembered reading some American newspapers that Godfrey occasionally bought for Irene, remembered especially a brazen female correspondent with the unforgettable name of Bessie Bramble. “I am a…daredevil lady reporter for the newspapers.”

“The devil you say!”

“
Dared
evil I said.”

“You?”

“Well, there aren’t many of us, so we don’t have to dare much.”

“I haven’t seen women writing for the British papers.”

“I…don’t. I’m the London correspondent for the
New York World
.” There, let him do me harm at his peril. The entire globe would hear of a missing daredevil lady reporter! Eventually.

32.

Caught Mapping

All these eastern European lands are caught in a crossfire of religion, race, and a brutal taste for conquering their neighbors…Shrines to Christian saints still decorate roads throughout Poland, Transylvania, Moravia, and Bohemia, yet the people placate pagan gods, demons and superstitions…. They still see vampires on the threshold and werewolves among the trees
.

—
GODFREY NORTON TO NELL HUXLEIGH, CAROLE NELSON
DOUGLAS,
ANOTHER SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA

FROM A JOURNAL

Dusk has forced us to light the lamps.

In that artificial light, Irene plunged her pen into the crystal inkwell again and began tracing a familiar figure on the map of Prague.

The curving street of
Vaclavs nemesti
ran from the museum toward the Old Town Square, where it looped to the right around the ancient Jewish Joseph Quarter to complete the letter “P” that intersected the “X” made from the sites where murdered women had been found.

“It’s hard to believe,” I said, “that a maddened killer would select his victims from their nearness to certain streets so that their death scenes would provide a pattern on a map, should anybody have the wit to see it.

“Sacrifices, like all rituals, call for specific places,” Quentin said. “God told Abraham to take Isaac up the mountain.”

“I don’t argue that point, Quentin,” I said, calling him by his Christian name for the first time. It was ridiculous, after all the horrors that had been so plainly spoken in our midst, that we should cling to formalities in addressing each other. “I am simply saying that it is odd that Jack the Ripper, the man everyone presumes to be a killer, should oblige religious ritual with the placement of his victim’s bodies.”

“I agree,” Irene said.

Before she could go on, Bram Stoker added his opinion. “It does not strike me as at all odd. Remember, the Ripper killings involving the ritual laying out of the dead women’s few poor possessions…and the worst expression of this was the way he ‘arranged’ their entrails around the body, over a shoulder and such.”

Irene supported Bram as well. “That is one fact that made the Jews suspect of the crime: they perform ritual sacrifice of animals, and so were favored suspects because the women were killed as if in a ritual.”

“Masons found suspicion clinging to them, too,” Bram said, “for much the same reasons. Like the Jews and their mysterious Kabbalah that Christians regard with both fear and fascination, they have ritual secrets that spawn rumors of conspiracy and violent orgies.”

“Yet the Chi-Rho is a Christian symbol.”

“Useful,” I put in with a flash of insight, “if the Jews wished to discredit the Christians.”

“Usually it is the other way around,” Irene objected.

“Which is why,” I retorted, “that would be such a brilliant plan.”

“I find this religious linkage most troubling.” Quentin tented his hands and tapped his forefingers against his lips. The prayerful gesture was most at odds with his words, but he seemed unaware of it. “According to the work of this Krafft-Ebing to whom you directed our attention, Irene, a man who kills women, or children, from some sort of religious mania that judges them befouled, acts alone. Yet every indication since London has been that many are involved in these killings, even if it is only Gypsy caravans spiriting away the wrong-doers.”