Castle Rouge (56 page)

Godfrey also seized a pair of chopping knives for himself and Bram to conceal inside their jacket pockets.

Mr. Holmes observed our acting and armament rituals without comment, but I suspect he found them nothing more than amusing.

He led us into the maze of hallways that connected the castle’s main rooms on this level. Again, we heard noise and tumult from a distance, this time coming from outside the castle. We crossed the flagstones to the great entrance.

I glimpsed a twilight scene lit by torches, somehow dismayed that dusk had fallen. It did not seem possible.

In that half-dark, I saw figures limned against the glow of a bonfire, Gypsies and others. Perhaps a half dozen of their covered wagons were drawn up before the castle, and horses and dogs were silhouetted against both fire and the fading sunset.

From the costume of some of the women I glimpsed—white aprons and caps—I gathered that at least a portion of those present were villagers, for I never saw a Gypsy woman wearing white of any kind.

A tall figure crossed the open space by the castle entrance…the priest who was a Count who was a fraud!

I did not look forward to our motley party confronting him, no matter what mime the Gypsy mute who led us performed. Mr. Holmes was astute in thinking that people would shun a figure with such an obvious handicap…those who can hear, see, and speak shy from confronting those who cannot, although a touch of leprosy would have done our group more good if we wished to escape unchallenged.

Indeed, with half our number able to pass as Gypsies (although what anyone would make of me in Godfrey’s shortened trousers I have no idea), it was just possible that we might stroll among and through them to freedom.

This vista was so welcome that we all stopped to draw a mutually liberated breath. And in that communal silence, harsh against the sounds of the gathering outside, we heard one sharp, snapping sound, like a stick shattering in a fire.

Alas, all of us were worldly enough (myself unwillingly so) to recognize at once that we had heard a firearm being cocked…behind us.

We turned, I and my three doughty companions, to face Colonel Sebastian Moran holding a most peculiar weapon upon us…a walking stick!

46.

A Midsummer Nightmare

But fare ye well; ’tis partly my own fault; which death or absence soon shall remedy
.

—
HELENA IN
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

The brass handle of the long wooden cane caressed Colonel Sebastian Moran’s clean-shaven cheek. Since his stance was that of a man holding a rifle to his shoulder, none of us were inclined to challenge his presumed command of the situation.

“An air rifle, lady and gentlemen and Gypsy traitor,” he announced. “It can shatter stone at three hundred yards and what it can do to bone at thirty feet none of you would like to see, nor live to see again were you its target.”

We said nothing.

“You are wanted in the dining chamber.” He gestured abruptly with the barrel of his…cane.

I really could not contemplate any more bizarre events of the day, so joined my fellows in shuffling gingerly across the vast hall and through the open coffered doors into the room that had become so familiar to us all, Sesostros included.

No food and music occupied the room this night, only our sinister hostess clothed in a voluminous red-black velvet dressing gown, her hair loosened like tongues of amber-orange fire over her shoulders.

She was writing in a small book covered in yellow moiré, but shut it when we entered the room.

“Do you know what day—I should say, night—this is?” she asked.

“We have lost track of time, for some reason,” Godfrey answered.

She looked up at him and smiled almost gently. Almost.

“Always the barrister, Mr. Norton. Precision is your God. I do not know what my God is. Chaos, perhaps? Miss Huxleigh, how you surprise me, for an Englishwoman. Trousers, you minx! And a Gypsy swain in tow. I saw you two speak with hands across the room, a courtship in pantomime. Or was it conspiracy? I cannot decide whether I most wish to see you play the coquette or the two-faced fool. Either role is against your religion, isn’t it, so both would be equally satisfying to me.”

Tatyana next let her odd red-brown gaze, the color of dried blood, fall on Bram Stoker. “Well acted, my not-so-naive friend! I am almost inclined to let you play my Medved, since the original is unavailable for the time being, but I fear you lack his depth of character.”

This was so outrageously insulting that I drew in an indignant breath on Mr. Stoker’s behalf.

“Yes, Miss Huxleigh?” She taunted me with a supercilious lift of the eyebrows. “You are about to be brave and draw attention to yourself when any woman of sense would shrink into invisibility behind the men. Do you aspire to usurp the place of your bolder, brighter, more beautiful friend? Perhaps in Mr. Norton’s affections? Perhaps in another’s?”

Well, I would have run out of gasps had I expressed my full indignation at each of these ludicrous and irrational charges.

Instead I said, “I was about to say that the only time I was inclined to shrink from anything was when your pet Medved assaulted me in my room but since I was able to repulse him—a quite fitting verb, I might add, for such an uncouth person—no shrinking was required.”

“Ah, yes, but were you able to repulse him when you lay drugged in your humble wooden crate? Although you mostly resembled a corpse during that time, I doubt that would have stopped Medved.”

She had publicly laid bare my worst nightmare, and I had no response. Bram Stoker did.

“A most interesting choice of words, Madam. Am I to believe that you credit these local legends of the living dead, of those who seek corpses for sustenance? I fear Miss Huxleigh is far too lively to be a survivor of such a creature, and if she were, I would advise you not to sleep too soundly at night, for she would be far more dangerous than the usual Englishwoman.”

“Ah, a man after my own interests. Are you anyone of note in your world? Forgive me, but I have never heard of you.”

“Alas, no. I am as I appear to be…an enthusiastic traveler and a collector of arcane legends. I shall without a doubt add you to my roster, as a lamia perhaps?”

“I think you are much more interesting than a tiresome barrister. I would prefer to be a succubus, however.”

For some reason, Bram Stoker blushed like the burning bush of the Bible.

Tatyana leaned back and pushed the yellow book away like a full plate she had partaken of too much already.

“I don’t know what to do with you, my guests.” Her eyes fell at last on the rakish figure I knew to be Sherlock Holmes, although he was behaving now like a rather bright bird, glancing from face to face, apparently attempting to understand without benefit of hearing.

“Gypsies,” she said considering, “are so predictably loyal when paid enough. That you were not disturbs me.”

Sherlock Holmes squinted at her speaking lips, then shrugged and smiled and glanced at me.

“What did you bribe him with?” Tatyana asked me without taking her eyes from the supposed Sesostros.

“Kindness?” I suggested. “A person who does not speak is much overlooked.”

“Kindness! Just the sort of pablum I would expect from your lips. You really are too good to be true. It will be a pleasure to introduce you to the rites below.”

“I have seen them already,” I answered.

“But not as a participant.”

I was quite surprised when I felt every man in the room, excepting Colonel Moran, tense like a cocked air rifle.

Although being a victim of the cult’s bloody rites had long been my greatest fear since being captured, when the actual threat was made, I was surprised to find myself more angry than frightened.

Unlike our hostess, I knew that Sherlock Holmes carried a pistol and that Godfrey and Bram sported knives and one heretofore proven-effective hatpin. I myself kept custody of Kelly’s knife. It is true that we were a piteous number compared to the hordes assembling inside and outside of the castle, but I could not help remembering another ritual scene where Buffalo Bill and his valiant companion Red Tomahawk literally leaped into the fray while the pistol-armed Rothschild agents held back in horror. Irene’s was the only pistol to speak on that occasion, I recalled, so it struck me that a few valiant souls were far more defense than an army of the easily discouraged. For what was discouragement but a lack of courage?

If Tatyana could not discourage us, she could not defeat us.

I wonder if that ever had occurred to her.

It had certainly never occurred to her that we might be armed with more than audacity.

“Call the escorts to take our guests to the ceremonies below,” she ordered Colonel Moran.

He hesitated. “I don’t care to see Europeans—”

“Like myself, you have no true homeland, Colonel, no continent to call your own. We are our own island nation now and rule it. Call the celebrants of the season.”

He left the room, and we four held our ground in silence. Tatyana’s complacency, or perhaps her contempt, kept her from even suspecting that any of us might have managed to arm ourselves, much less all four.

“The study of mankind is man,” Tatyana said, eyeing us. “‘What fools these mortals be.’”

With a chill I recognized Puck’s final lines from Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, whose cast included a fairy queen named Titania! This Titania had fallen in love with a lowly tailor who magically had been given the head of a donkey. It was all a trick that her lord Oberon—was that Colonel Moran?—had used to teach his contrary queen a lesson. Was Godfrey to play the ignominious part of the tailor Bottom, then? And Puck, the mischievous sprite, was that possibly…Sherlock Holmes? And who was I? Confused Helena, perhaps. And Irene? Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. And was Pink…Hermia, the object of both Demetrius’s and Lysander’s love? Were they Quentin and Bram Stoker, then? Or, more loathsomely, James Kelly and Medved?

“My God,” Bram Stoker murmured beside me, openly despairing for the first time that night. “Curse me for a theatrical dunce who has lost track of time! It is indeed Midsummer’s Night. Today is June twenty-first. The summer solstice. An ancient pagan feast day.”

Only I heard his self-accusing muttering, but it was dire enough to divert me from my mad recasting of Shakespeare’s play. Even I knew that ancient pagan feasts were a likely time for devilish rituals.

“And you,” said Tatyana after a silence, gazing at Sherlock Holmes in his Gypsy guise. “Are you merely mute, or more clever than I think? Or simply stupid?”

I give credit to Mr. Holmes for nodding and grinning amiably through her roll call of questions, all the while making gestures that could be Gypsy signs or a mute’s attempt at sketching out an answer.

“It’s a pity that you could not stay where you were put,” she said to the rest of us, her hand lifting from beside her heavy velvet gown to reveal the elaborately chased revolver she held, far larger and more ornate than Irene’s trusty model of many years. “Too many unwanted guests are descending on the castle, and we shall have to leave sooner than expected. So shall you all, although not by the route you expected.”

She stood, placed the gun upon the table before her, and pulled a heavy black wool cloak from the chair behind her onto her shoulders.

“I suppose, though, that you deserve the privilege of seeing Jack the Ripper at last, especially Miss Huxleigh, who has been flirting with the fiend for some time.”

My mind reeled insanely through the possibilities. What Tatyana enjoyed calling “flirting” meant only that I had brushed shoulders with the actual killer and had never known it. Was it Kelly, secretly bound and hidden in the caverns below? Colonel Moran even? A man who had hunted heavy game was being outpaced by a world which was rapidly depleting the supply of such beasts. Had he descended to the mad stalking and butchery of helpless women? Was that why he was such a docile servant to Tatyana, rather than a colleague?

Or…was the Ripper the least likely suspect? Bram Stoker, also a secret tool of this terrible woman because of the knowledge of his secrets she held. Or even…I had cherished this suspicion, rather illogically, but perhaps my instincts were better than I knew…had Sherlock Holmes jumped the tracks of the straight and narrow, his raging cocaine habit and lonely ways finally driving him to madly seek and kill the women whose intellects and bodies he spurned equally? Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing had made the matter plain, from what Irene and Pink said of his disgusting work,
Psychopathia Sexualis:
ordinary men often hid extraordinary obsessions and appetites that they could not control.

There was no doubt that devils walked among us and perhaps more closely in my own footsteps than I knew.

My last glance was at Godfrey. His expression was calm. There was no way anyone sane could suspect Godfrey of Ripper tendencies. I had one true ally, as I have always had, and we would stand shoulder to shoulder no matter what shocks and threats this night brought. As he had said to me earlier, so I swore silently back to him, “either both, or none,” but I added another phrase of my own, “
or if only one, then you
.” At least Irene was not here to risk herself, and I was free to risk myself.

When Tatyana pulled the monk’s hood over her hair, I felt a chill of apprehension that such a warm garment was never meant to impart. There had been three identically cloaked figures watching from the sidelines during the Paris atrocities: Tatyana, Colonel Moran…and who else? The third of that sinister party couldn’t have been James Kelly, for he had spied me from the mob of insane worshipers and rushed forward.
So who had it been?
Did we have another mortal enemy among this lot whose identity we did not know?

Or…cruelest of ironies, had it been Bram Stoker and had his innocent arrival here been only a ruse to lull us into revealing our escape plans? Such a notion was fiendish, but it was possible, especially if Mr. Stoker were Jack the Ripper.