Castle Rouge (28 page)

He drinks down half of the first jug in one endless draught, his head thrown back like a wolf howling, only this beast swallows the howl, again and again.

They would never offer me to drink from that vessel, and I don’t protest. I do not wish to see the beast in myself, but in others. One’s own beast is always too predictable.

The violins moan like a woman in heat, and the great bonfire in their midst sizzles like burning skin.

The night is chill. The violins skitter up and down the scale of tortuous sound. Smells of spilt wine and vomit conjoin into a strange Gypsy sacrament. At night we momentarily link with the passing caravans. Then the women and girls join us to stamp their bare feet on the icy ground, at one with grime. The gold coins on their wrist and ankle bracelets spatter like grease on a hot skillet.

Swarthy faces grin in the ebbing and flowing firelight. Eyes are ebony set in mother-of-pearl.

His eyes, though, are aspic-clear, a pale, eerily bloodless silver-blue.

Remarkable that one so dark should have eyes so light.

Opposites war in him more openly than they do in the rest of mankind.

I am rapt in it, the crude and the exalted, the holy and the inhumane. Perhaps it is my heritage from a harsh land that also spawned great wealth and beauty. I am bound to my earth, my dirt, my mortality. My feet are peasants, but my soul soars like royalty. My shod feet can’t feel the hard earth, but I sense its slow, icy heart beating beneath my slightly numbing toes. It reminds me of other music, other dances.

I could sit here. Turn to stone. Grow deaf to the cacophony, blind to the raucous stew of sights, cries, and smells. I could become a mountain, an Alp or a Caucasus, a Hindu Kush. I could become a graven image, a god. I could become a monument.

Once I so aspired. I masqueraded as an artist then, and all artists are mad. Or should be. I know this Woman. And I do not know her. She was an artist once, but lost that rank, like a deposed queen. She lost her kingdom. Can a Queen lose a Kingdom? In a just world, yes. But there is no just world, only many worlds that can be twisted and spun and tossed from universe to universe like balls.

So I have become a Juggler. And sometimes I toss lives instead of balls.

Hmmm
, balls.

Quite a metaphor. Our world but a ball. A celebration but a ball. A manhood…but a ball, or two.

It can all come tumbling down if the Juggler wills it: the world, the glitter, the power.

I sit here, a supportive player. The King in disguise. The Queen in retrograde. Everything burns with cold. Skin and illusion peel away.

Play, Gypsies, play!
The music defines the dance, the dance the play, the play the climax.

Death.

Death is the greatest choreographer, playwright, scrawler in history.

He has very pale blue eyes, and He is Mine.

23.

Rapunzel in Ash-blond

15 May—One more have I seen the Count go out in his lizard fashion. He moved downwards in a sidelong way, some hundred feet down, and a good deal to the left. He vanished into some hole or window
.

—
JOHNATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL, BRAM STOKER’S
DRACUIA

The brass bathtub so mysteriously imported to my bedchamber also mysteriously remained in place, though empty.

I began to realize what force Godfrey had exerted to obtain for me an article of a domestic scene far less grand and far more comforting than this vast, mostly unpeopled old castle.

Since the few servitors the castle boasted only entered Godfrey’s chamber, I took to coiling my lengths of braided linen in the dry, red-gold giant’s bowl of the bathtub.

Godfrey always brought our meals in to me on the tray by which they were delivered to him. It didn’t matter the hour—morning, noon, or night—we broke fast, supped, and dined on similar dishes: stews that blended unidentifiable meats with unidentifiable vegetables. Our only libation was wine, a dry, sour yellow wine that reminded me of certain wolf leavings in the snow.

Our nightly entertainment was the distant howl of these wild creatures. Much as I publicly approved Godfrey’s plans to survey our prison with a mind to escaping, I couldn’t imagine fleeing the safety of old stone into the cold teeth of wolf packs.

We spent our evenings huddled in our heavy tapestry bedcovers by my fireplace. At least wood was plenty, as well as great wooden lucifers as long as tapers.

“I think the common link is Gypsies,” I often began. “There was a troupe in Paris that disappeared before we discovered the meeting ground below. And you say the courtyard teems with the creatures here.”

“Sometimes,” Godfrey amended. “At other times the areas surrounding the castle are as deserted as its interior.”

“But the few people you have seen in the castle are Gypsies.”

“They are dark-favored and colorfully dressed, but I don’t think that makes them Gypsies in this part of the world. There is one woman, sturdy enough to chop wood should she choose, and two men I have seen. None speak English, although I can make myself understood with a combination of German and English, especially English pantomime, if I work hard enough at it.”

“How odd it is! That you arrived at that quaint little village as advised and that the moment you took the coach to the castle you became a prisoner.”

“A tacit prisoner, Nell. I was never bound, simply led to my chamber and locked in. The coachman actually toted up my luggage before lowering the latch on my door from the outside. I didn’t even discover that I was a prisoner until I decided to ‘go down’ for breakfast the next morning.”

“I wish
I
had suffered such a genteel abduction.”

“My dear Nell, so do I! I would have changed places with you a thousand times over. I cannot explain why I was treated so gently. It infuriates me!”

“Did you do nothing in Prague to irritate the Gypsies?”

“I think the Gypsies are not an end but a means, Nell. Colorful they may be, but it would be a mistake not to look beyond them.”

“Or smell beyond them! The food we are afflicted with reminds me of something one would leave out for the castle mastiff.”

“Given the wolves’ chorus we hear each night, a castle mastiff would be a welcome brute. Still, food means our captors intend to keep us alive.”

“For what? Another bloody ritual? I would rather be eaten by wolves.”

“Yes, Miss Riding Hood?” Godfrey leaned across the distance between our two chairs to tug playfully on one of my braids that had come unpinned from atop my head.

I found myself blushing in the hot halo of the flames. Deprived of even a comb, I had concluded that my unkempt hair could benefit from the same rigorous interweaving that I was accomplishing with the bed linens. So I had braided my hair and coiled it on my head. Godfrey claimed I looked like a Swiss mountain maid, and indeed, the cloudy mirror in the corner revealed a figure from one of Irene’s more cloying operettas. I doubt my own father would have known me, had he returned from the grave to ascertain the doings of his only daughter.

“I no longer wish Irene to rescue us,” I announced as soon as my burning cheeks had cooled a bit.

“No?” He seemed amazed.

“I could not bear to be seen like this.”

“I think it rather charming.”

“You have been alone too much in a deserted castle,” I admonished him in my best governess declaration.

Godfrey cast off the bedcover like a cocoon and stood. He was wearing only his shirtsleeves, most irregular for a gentleman in the presence of a lady, even if she is got up to look like a milkmaid.

“The clamor in the courtyard has died down. I’d a mind to try out your climbing rope tonight.”

I turned to regard the bathtub with its burden of twisted linen. Would my braided ropes hold?

I rose also, forsaking the warmth of my brocade tent, and went to study the yards and yards of pale coils like a headless snake in the bathtub.

“Will they be strong enough?” I wondered aloud.

“That depends on the knot we fashion at the turret window. A pity that the bed linens weren’t filthy.”

“A pity! Not for us.”

“I meant that this white rope will be very evident against castle walls.”

The flaw in my scheme came home to me like a knife in the ribs. My vaunted safety line was a betraying trap should anyone observe his expedition.

Imagine feeling deprived because one has only clean sheets to work with! While I stood there gaping at my handiwork, I heard Godfrey rustling and scraping behind me like a giant rat.

A giant rat. It was possible that what I heard was not Godfrey, but exactly such a creature the size of a Shropshire calf. I turned, afraid of what I would see.

Godfrey was on his knees by the still-crackling fire, digging ashes up like a dog.

His mad actions had covered his shirt in a pall of gray, and his hair and face as well.

He looked up at me, laughing. “If you dry the stew bowls, we can carry the ashes to the bathtub.”

“Have you gone mad? Bathing requires water, not ashes.”

Godfrey rose, his cupped hands filled with ashes that he carried to the bathtub and emptied atop my lovely, white-linen ropes. It was as if a storm cloud had opened above them, raining gray.

After that we shuttled to and fro with our empty wooden dinner bowls until the ropes were the dull color of a moonless night.

Our evening’s labors were hardly begun.

Godfrey coiled the gray loops over both shoulders and still there were uncounted coils left in the tub. I had no idea that I was being so industrious during my long, sleepless nights.

I looped what I could over my arms and trailed him to the window, still open, as it always had been. That open window was the one element that kept my mind from turning on itself during these endless idle days and nights. That and the act of tearing and braiding.

Now my labors were to meet their test, and Godfrey’s life would be the proof of the pudding.

He leaned perilously far out of the window to loop one end twice around the stone support in the window’s center. Then he made a series of mighty knots the size of fists.

“Would I had been a seafaring man,” he noted with a shrug, wrapping his hands in linen bandages as I had done when working.

I tied them off.

Godfrey had left a long tail of rope free. This he now knotted in turn around the legs of a trestle table we both wrestled to the window.

“Would I had been a mountaineering man. If my knots slip,” Godfrey added, “the table will crash into the window. Being too wide to pass through, it should act as a stopgap. If the wooden boards don’t give.”

“And if my braidwork gives?”

“On that score I have no fears.” Godfrey jumped up on the window frame and balanced there like a large monkey, certainly a seafaring man’s trick. “The knots are the key to success, and they are all my doing, not yours, Nell. Remember that.”

“Do take care, Godfrey. It is quite chill out there at night without a coat.”

He nodded and occupied himself with inching down the wall on my line.

I leaned over the sill. A waxing moon cast light like caps of snow on the high point of every brutal rock littering the sharply sloped meadow far below.

The air beyond the open frame was surprisingly icy. My huge fireplace had done more to warm that cavernous room than I credited it with. Wind tugged at my entwined braids and chapped my cheeks.

“Where are you going?” I finally thought to ask. The goal of being able to go somewhere had obscured what could be gained from it.

Godfrey nodded to a point at the left and below. “A trio of window arches. I thought I’d start small and close to home.”

At that he pushed his feet against the stones and swung sideways like an ape. When his feet touched stone again, he was at least a story lower than before, had this towering castle anything so modest as mere stories.

I grew quite dizzy from following the arc of his descent and was forced to draw back inside. The quiet countryside so far below looked as peaceful as an eiderdown comforter. I almost cherished the illusion I could fly, that I could lean out and waft featherlike below to the cool snow banks waiting to cushion my fall.

Delusion! I had eaten too much Gypsy stew for too long. It was bad enough that Godfrey was bouncing from stone to stone like a monkey on a string. Barristers should never let their feet leave the ground. How could I ever tell Irene that Godfrey had hung by a thread of my construction?

I leaned against the cold stone wall and shut my eyes and listened for the inevitable sounds of disaster.

I awoke sitting on the floor, my limbs so stiff that I had to unbend them by inches and wait for the fires of Hell to desist burning before I could unbend another inch.

The actual fire across the room had become a shadow of itself, as if a mastiff had shrunk into a Pomeranian.

The moonlight had shifted to cast silver pathways on the stone floor and the threadbare carpets.