Castle Rouge (18 page)

That is all I remember, all I sense.

And now…darkness but no motion.

The stillness makes my stomach rebel, or it would, were there not a black hollow curled tauter than an empty fist where my stomach should be.

In fact, I can sense none of the ordinary limits to my being, only the ear-ringing shriek of silence when intense sound has suddenly stopped assailing one’s ears, only a kind of throbbing that seems to indicate where I leave off and something…Other…begins.

Vaguely, the memory of a shrunken room, of a box, assembles around the entity I suspect of being “Me.”

I try to move what would be my fingers, were they still there. To stretch the nerves and muscles I imagine until the flesh I assume touches…something.

No wall. No wood. Nothing.

I feel as if I am floating.

I must be dead, or halfway there. My “self” seems both swollen and weightless. Perhaps I have expanded and burst out of my box.

That I remember. The ungiving limits that I met both up and down and from side to side, as close as a shroud but as hard as Sherwood Forest yew.

If I am on my way to Heaven, why no light and no angelic chorus? If I am sinking into Hell, why no fire and demonic jeers? I know that I do not believe in the Papist limbo, though this state feels most like it. I would most dislike being forced to reconsider my denomination on the brink of paradise. Or of perdition.

The box may be gone, but I feel a barrier around my form nonetheless: it is as close as an insect’s carapace and is hot as an iron poker and aches like a fever. This would confirm my worst surmise: Hell, it is then. I do not think that I have been so very bad but such determinations are up to the Deity, and I was always told He was a harsh Judge.

In fact, I hear amid the high-pitched whine of silence a distant voice. It comes from above me. It calls my name. “Nell.”

Well. Would the Deity, or even the Devil, use the abbreviated form of my name rather than the full and formal “Penelope?” I think not. One does not judge with diminutives.

So. I may be…not quite dead.

“Nell.”

Must I try to open my eyes? The lids are as heavy as a rosewood piano cover. As a copper coffin lid. I doubt that such luxurious substances are fit for the funereal accessories of someone as insignificant as I.

The box and the motion seem to be gone. It might be to my benefit to try to open what in another place and time were my eyes. I seem to have forgotten the series of movements that achieve such a thing in an everyday world.

“Nell, for God’s sake!”

The voice is beginning to sound irritated, or urgent. It is beginning to sound familiar. It invokes the Deity, so it is not the Devil. Perhaps. After what I have glimpsed of Hell, it is not safe to regard the Devil as anything but a near neighbor.

I hear a bellows fan the flames that lick at the edges of my mind. The bellows is myself. I had…sighed.

I feel my extremities stir, feel the first soft tingle of sensation growing into a buzzing, itching, screaming torment like a rectangle of fire.

I must open what passes for my eyes in this state. The act is so alien. I realize that I have embraced the darkness for the sights it impedes. I see flames and gibbering forms and sharp blades and blood….

Suddenly the darkness behind my eyes has become more awful than any sight they might open upon. I blink them ajar, again and again, fighting the daylight that sears like a red-hot iron.

“Nell, you are all right?!”

I rather doubt it!

My bleary focus shows a face hanging above mine. Something familiar…

“Irene?” I ask.

There is no answer.

“Irene? You have found me!”

Then I must have been “lost.”

Lost or not, I am suddenly buoyed by a swell of confidence and security. Of course Irene has found me. That is what she does. She finds things. And people. And sometimes evildoers. Am I an evildoer? Is that why I suffer so? It must be.

“Nell.” The voice sounds despairing, and I suspect Hell again. We are fellow inmates of Gehenna, that is why it burns so.

“It’s only I. Godfrey.”

Godfrey!

Godfrey.

I have never heard of an archangel named Godfrey, but I am convinced that there is one, and that he has found me.

I am saved!

14.

Unknown in Whitechapel

I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies
.

—
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, SHERLOCK HOLMES IN
THE BLUE CARBUNCLE

FROM THE NOTES OF JOHN H. WATSON, M.D.

“So I am saved,” the girl said, sighing in her hospital bed.

She did not so much speak, as rasp.

Yet she was very lucky. The slash across her throat had run like a placid river, broad but not deep. The wound would heal into a thin pale scar, nature’s very narrow mother-of-pearl necklace, and her voice would recover completely in time.

My friend Sherlock Holmes was not a man for the sick room. He possessed too much wiry energy. The subdued hush required of the hospital aggravated rather than soothed him.

Still, he knew when a client required cautious handling, and this pathetic girl was indeed his client now and more deserving of coddling than any titled aristocrat in distress.

“My dear young woman,” Holmes said in that deliberately kindly tone he adopted only for the deeply distressed, “you have truly faced a terrible ordeal. Can you testify at all to the appearance of your attacker? It would be a great service.”

Although this was very true and quite logical, it had no effect whatsoever upon a girl who had stumbled through a vale of despair into horrors Holmes and I could only guess at.

Nevertheless, she seemed to recognize in his controlled address a fellow sufferer of the human condition. Her eyes had a clarity her voice was incapable of at the moment, and she turned their pale blue sorrow upon him.

“Mr. Holmes,” she said, having marked our introductions with touching precision. “I must admit to not much noticing anything around me last night. The man was a shadow who came from the shadows. He was taller than me, and he didn’t stop to say sweet words but pushed me against a wall and had at it.”

“Taller? As tall as I?”

That made her smile. “No.”

“Dr. Watson?”

She glanced my way, and I fancy that her gaze warmed, as if she knew that I had tended her.

“Dr. Watson would have to stand up, as you do.”

I complied, apologizing. Doctors are used to long hours in hospital wards and sit when they can.

“About as tall as Dr. Watson. The nurse said…was it really your wife’s muffler I bled all over?”

“No, no, my dear. You are not to worry about that. It was
my
muffler, knitted by my wife. Mary would be pleased that it was at hand to help save your life.”

“Would she?” A look of inexpressible pain crossed her face. “Kind, is she?”

“A veritable angel on earth.”

“I thought I saw an angel. On the street that night.”

“Were you…?” Holmes began.

“Drinking? No. I had no money for it. Never did. It was from the shirt shop to the streets. I’d no time nor pence to do much of anything but walk. Most of the men stopped me, then ran away. It is all like a dream.”

“And in this dream,” Holmes insisted, “there was one last man and he cut you.”

She put a pale hand to her pale throat and the paler bandage that swathed it.

“All I could think of was that my spilled blood would at least make a warm blanket.”

Even Holmes was struck silent. Then he began again. “How tall?”

“I am five-foot-one. Perhaps five-foot-five.”

“His complexion?”

“The night was dark, but there was a bar of streetlight just moving across his face. Fresh-faced. Was that the angel?”

“Eyes?”

“Not dark. Light. You could see through them to someplace else. I almost…got there.”

“Facial hair?”

“I saw no mouth. Just a brush across.”

“A mustache?”

“A mustache. My father had a mustache, but he is dead.”

“Light or dark?”

Her eyes fixed on something above our heads, like an ascending saint. “Dark,” came her dreamy voice. “His face was as round and pale as a moon, but his hair was dark. His mustache was small and brown, like a mouse.”

“Mouse-colored mustache,” Holmes repeated with a sharp glance at me. “Age?”

She shook her head. “Neither young nor old. Thirty?”

Holmes flashed me a triumphant glance, although puzzled. Her description, pried out feature by feature, matched exactly the man Holmes had captured and also one man who had accosted Elizabeth Stride, the man who had escaped while Holmes pursued the phantom of Israel Lipski.

While we silently consulted, our witness had fallen into a deep sleep. I gazed on her with the bittersweet surety of a physician. She would survive, but for what?

“Remarkable,” Holmes murmured, whether referring to her testimony or her survival I could not tell. “Now we have a more unpleasant task ahead.”

“More unpleasant?” I demanded, aghast.

“The man must be interviewed as well.”

We walked out of the long lonely wards, our footsteps echoing.

“She is well-spoken,” I noted. “And something of a seamstress apparently. Perhaps Mary could use—”

Holmes’s glance was both impatient and sympathetic, but he said nothing.

“There are only two interesting features, as you would call ’em, Mr. Holmes, in this arrest,” Inspector Lestrade said while we waited in a mean room at the Yard for the prisoner to be brought in.

Holmes could not contrive to look very interested in what our acquaintance from Scotland Yard found interesting, but I assumed that expression of rapt attention to symptoms so necessary to physicians.

The lean-faced inspector grimaced in my direction to acknowledge my effort.

“First,” he said with slow importance, “it is a matter of interest to more at the Yard than me that Mr. Sherlock Holmes should bestir himself so far from Baker Street as Berner Street and just happen upon the first woman-murder attempt after Jack the Ripper was persuaded to retire.”

If Lestrade had hoped to intimidate Holmes, he had got the wrong man in more instances than one.

“Second,” the inspector said, leaning nearer the better to put his case, “it was most interesting that the only weapon to be found upon the fellow, in a deep pocket of his jacket, was no knife or blade at all, but this.”

Lestrade reached to the table behind him and thumped to the top of his battered oak desk an ungainly crockery jar perhaps ten inches high.

Holmes immediately seized upon it for closer inspection, drawing his magnifying glass from his own jacket pocket. He applied it and his eye closely to the jar’s thick lip.

“Some crude liquor container,” Lestrade said, “but the contents are all gone, down the fellow’s throat, no doubt. What say you, Mr. Holmes? I did not even find a razor thrust down that empty pottery throat. He could have clubbed the woman with this, but where’s the knife?”

“I assume you have had the area searched between Dutfield Yard and Westworth Street where I cornered the fellow.”

“Yes, and no trace of a knife.”

“Perhaps, but there are a hundred places along such a route to conceal or discard such a weapon that even the police would not notice.”

Holmes passed the jar’s open mouth under his nostril and inhaled so delicately that I suspect I was the only one present to notice it.

His thumbnail flicked a bit of pale wax adhering to the lip almost fondly. Then he set it down again. “What do you know of our man, or, rather, what is he letting you know of himself?”

Lestrade frowned on the word “our,” but his countenance smoothed immediately. He did not often have the chance to inform Holmes, rather than the other way around.

“We’ve done a pretty fast job of getting his facts and figgers together, if I do say so myself.”

“And who else would say so?” Holmes asked with a smile so swift and small that Lestrade blinked to wonder if he had seen it at all. He also apparently missed the insult implicit in the remark. Sometimes Holmes couldn’t resist baiting the more plodding emissaries of the law, though in private he accorded Lestrade more respect than he gave most of Scotland Yard.

Invited to perform, the inspector reeled off a list of details. “He is an immigrant. We had to send away for someone who could speak his language.”

“That must not have been difficult,” Holmes said. “Russians have poured into Whitechapel in recent years.”

“Oh, so you think he’s Russian?” He did not wait for Holmes to indicate what he thought, which was wise as Holmes did no such thing, and went on. “Not so much Russian as”—he glanced at his notes—“Georgian. It’s a part of Russia, I suppose, but they take much pride in which exact part they call home, perhaps because it’s such a big country.”

I knew from my time in the Near East that there was a lot more to geographical pride and prejudice than that, but kept silent. It was always best to let Holmes lead the conversation, for I could never guess the many streams of suspicion that were always flowing in his busy mind.