Castle Rouge (21 page)

“American!” I put in. “You and I are American, and I have never been sheltered.”

Quentin Stanhope ended the discussion by lifting his gauntleted hands in a gesture that was both surrender and a command for peace.

“We should not argue when dear lives are in the balance. I had thought one reason I was facing those maddening brutalities in the far corners of the world was to keep the wolves from the doors at home. But Saucy Jack and his ilk have clearly broken down the barriers.” He glanced at me. “You can’t realize what a shock it is to see Irene traveling hand-in-glove with a woman not Nell.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” I reassured him with a grin. “We are far from hand-in-glove. It is more like hand-in-shackle.”

My bitter undertone made him raise his eyebrows at Irene, but he didn’t pursue the subject, at least not while I was present.

“What you both are saying,” he summed up, “is that Nell is made of sterner stuff than I think. That may be some comfort as we fumble our way to finding her, and Godfrey, but how are we to be sure that following the killer of these women in London, Paris, and now Neunkirchen will lead to our companions?”

“Exactly!” I put in.

“I don’t doubt it from what you told me of the deviltry afoot in those two great cities,” he told her. “Still, it goads me to be but a step behind such a killer. And there is more troubling news.”

Irene said nothing to encourage revelations, just watched and listened. It was odd to see her ceding center stage to another. Then I realized that danger had made more or less equals of us all, and she did not have an audience of her betters whose attention and assistance she needed to cajole and command.

“What is it?” she asked quietly.

“My sources among the Rothschild and British government agents, who have given me carte blanche thanks to the hidden aid of persons whose identity and high office I can only guess at, have all found disturbing traces. There was a party ahead of us, ahead of Kelly, all the way from Verdun, with luggage enough that some was loaded into the baggage car, from Verdun to…a final destination. Prague.”

“Prague. I cannot say I am surprised. This was Godfrey’s most recent posting for the Rothschilds.” Irene managed to look both hopeful and troubled.

“So you said,” Quentin pressed. “Do you know what his mission was?”

Irene shook her head as if irritated by her own ignorance. “It was a private commission between him and them. What sort of trusted agent would tell his wife the details, even if she was so thoughtless as to ask? I would no more ask you what your instructions from the Foreign Office were. Are.”

His smile made the dangling mustaches bracketing his mouth into wry parentheses. “Discretion is a rare virtue in a wife.”

“Discretion is a rare virtue in anyone, I have found. However,” Irene added with a raised eyebrow, “I have concluded some things about Godfrey’s assignment.”

“Excellent! Deduction is an established facility in wives.”

I sat forward myself to learn if Irene had withheld matters from me that she would share with an old friend.

“I believe that Godfrey was engaged upon vital but extremely dull matters of international property and political concerns,” she said, most disappointing me. “National alignments in this part of the world shift like chessmen on a board and have for centuries. Godfrey’s approach to any legal entanglements arising from this chronically volatile condition would be an impeccable blend of foresight, tact, and unexpected daring. He adores the red tape and fine points of legal discourse, yet is quite willing to turn them on end for his own purpose, or perhaps for a perceived greater good. I admit that such cerebral skirmishes bore me, but if Godfrey encountered trouble on such a mission, it would be because he was more than certain parties expected.”

“Including the parties for whom he was acting?”

Irene sighed and smiled at the same time. “Especially the parties for whom he was acting. He demands a certain standard of himself, and of his associates. It is, at times, annoying to one and all.”

Quentin Stanhope laughed. “Still, they hire him.”

“As the Foreign Office continues to employ you: they know they can find no more honest agent. Your refusal to accept the official version of events at the disastrous battle of Maiwand eventually exposed two dangerous spies in the region: Tiger and Sable.”

“But only years later, when everyone had forgotten the unnecessary deaths caused that day.”

“The dead remain so. Tiger and Sable remain alive and dangerous.”

He rested his forehead in his hand, stroking his sunburnt brow as if it throbbed. “We’ve heard little from or of them. They may be pretty toothless by now, or dead of their schemes and counter-schemes. Old battles, Irene; hoary foes. I have made an ancient land my home and myself into an anachronism.”

“How lucky, then, that an anachronism is precisely what I need at the moment. Godfrey mentioned a murder in one of his letters, in passing.” She smiled again, ruefully. “To Godfrey bloody murder will always take second place to the thrilling crimes of international appropriations, treaty violations, and legal atrocities involving state seizure of property.”

“These are the matters you think have led him astray into deep personal danger?”

Irene nodded. “What do you think, Pink?”

I was startled from my intense mental recording of this exchange for later entry into my journal.

Nell was so right about one thing, and one thing only! “Think, Pink” indeed! Still, my lowly opinion had been sought, and I would give it, even if it was not what my hostess wanted to hear.

“I think that James Kelly is laying the trail to follow and that the gory murder of a young woman in Prague, as mentioned by Godfrey himself as noteworthy, is the obvious incident to investigate next. As for this Golem man-monster of Prague that is suspected of reviving just in time to do this latest dirty deed, he sounds like a fantastical scapegoat to me. Still, he does remind one of those nasty sayings found in London and Paris about the Jews not being the ones who will be blamed for nothing, or whatever phrase that so contradicted itself. Follow the Ripper and we will find Godfrey, and Nell. If they’re still alive to find. That’s my opinion.”

My forthright views may not have won instant seconding, but they certainly silenced Irene and Quentin for some time.

18.

A Lukewarm Baptism

A young German gentleman told her that he had once greatly offenced an important local family by saying the word ‘corset’ in the presence of its ladies
.

—
MRS. FRANCES TROLLOPE,
DOMESTIC MANNERS OF THE AMERICANS
, 1832

After Godfrey’s departure, I found myself plunged into a troubled stupor I certainly could not describe as anything so refreshing as “sleep.”

I also found myself starting awake, as though the thought of sleep itself had become a torment. Yet a moment later I would again plummet off the cliff of consciousness into this uneasy waking dream.

In one vague interval someone had come and gone without my noticing. I gazed during one of my instant waking periods at a huge tub that now sat atop the thick turkey rug, steam rising from its rolled copper lips.

I had managed, in my linen-wrapped tossings, to unbutton and work off my petticoats, which now coagulated at my ankles in a gray froth of much-abused ruffles. I still half-lay on the rigid corpse of my split-asunder corset, too weak to work it out from under me. Only such hard goods as my walking boots and the many chains and charms upon my silver chatelaine were salvageable. At some time during the long ordeal, the checked cap that matched the coatdress had been shed like an autumn leaf.

The sight of the steaming tub inspired me to action beyond my current strength. I arranged to slide off the bed, leaving my underclothes behind in an unappetizing pile like a skin-shedding snake. At least I was still shrouded by the nightgown Godfrey had brought me. I remained snakelike despite my dislike for the creatures: I had to crawl rather than walk to the oasis of cleanliness that awaited me like a desert-heated mirage.

I thought of Quentin Stanhope fleeing the slaughter at the battle of Maiwand in Afghanistan, half-conscious, crawling through endless dunes of rock and sand.

With such a stalwart example in mind, I finally came to the warm copper vessel. I knew I needed an attendant, but believed Godfrey when he said that I would not care to suffer the assistance of anyone native to the place.

The windows, two arched Gothic panels flung wide like an angel’s wings on a vista of heavenly blue sky, told me that my chamber was at some great height only a lizard could escape, else why taunt prisoners with unguarded openings?

Lizards. I shuddered. Why was I thinking of miserable crawling things? Perhaps because I had been reduced to their low animal form of animation myself?

I was able to get to my knees and gratefully inhale the hot clean mists rolling off the water. At least someone had heated it royally.

Finally I trembled my way upright, or half-upright. My lower limbs shook with the effort, and my poor ribs burned as if goaded by hot pokers.

Lifting the gown’s voluminous skirts around my knees, I stepped into the shallow end of the tub. Slowly I immersed myself, arranging the copious folds of my gown over the tub’s edges as a sort of tent.

I would not stand unclothed before those open windows, even if only clouds and hawks could peer in. I felt no security in this aerie of stone and wood, and in this most abysmal moment of my life could bear having no witness, not even a mouse from a hole in the wall.

The water was warm and enveloping. At first it stung my abused skin in a hundred places, but soon it comforted. I glanced at the huge copper ewer intended for rinsing. Beside it on the carpet lay a sharp-edged block of yellow soap, big enough to fill the hand of a giant.

Even from where I sat, I could see a slick of black-edged bubbles on the bar of soap’s surface. Who knew what filthy sort of person had used it before me? Yet my numerous stings and cuts needed cleansing, and the inherited dirt would soon dissipate in the fresh water of my bath. So I leaned over—ouch!—to seize and baptize it in the untainted water.

It rose up cleaner. I began to rub it on my extremities, wincing at the clumsy shape and sharp corners. Soon my once-pristine water was cloudier than the sky outside my window.

I slipped the nightdress over my arms and left it draped across the foot of the tub. Then I closed my eyes, held my breath, and submerged my head and face, hair and all.

Milky water closed over me like warm silken sheets. A gentle shroud, it sheltered me from any unkind eye. I surfaced and lathered my sadly tangled hair once, twice, three times, producing a fleecy blanket of bubbles on the surface of the water by the time I finished.

Examining the floor again, I discovered a large, rough oblong of pale linen. My towel, I supposed.

This I dabbed at my hair and face, then my arms, until I was able to wrap it around myself, rise to my unsteady feet in the rapidly cooling tub water, and pull the nightgown into service again.

Not much later I was dripping on the rug but decently covered, and theoretically cleaner. I paced back and forth, hoping the motion would dry me more. In so doing, I discovered a dressing table jammed into a dark corner, with a mirror hung above it.

The still-stinging wounds aggravated by soap and water tempted me to the mirror. Once before it, I saw the surface glowed with the reflected light of the window. I discreetly elevated first one portion, then another of my gown, examining myself. I gasped to see the red-purple blotches left by the corset stays and huge bruises as gruesome as a bloody sunset all over my body.

No wonder I ached and burned so!

Worse than that actual discomfort was the uneasy suspicion that intrusions more foul than mere knocking-about might have been performed upon my unconscious form. I closed my eyes. Behind them a man’s rapacious figure came streaking for me like a bird of prey, all gleaming, focused eyes and reaching talons…who knew what had happened to me during the captivity that was but a blur in my memory?

James Kelly had held a blade to my throat in his mean lodgings, and I had escaped. But who knew what he had done during all my unremembered days and nights of captivity?

Someone knew, I told myself with a shudder. Several someones. All of my unknown abductors, for more than one man had participated in my capture.

When Godfrey knocked at my door an hour or two later, I was mostly dry and sitting with my feet tucked up under me on the bed.

I had kicked my discarded clothes into a pile beside the cold bathwater.

“Nell. Good. You look better.”

He eyed the malodorous pile by the copper tub. “Perhaps we could, er, wash these things in the cooling water.”

“Godfrey, ‘these things’ are not worth the washing. I do not even want to contemplate what they went through, much less myself. I wish them burned.”