Castle Rouge (6 page)

“There is room for more in my party,” Irene said.

Red Tomahawk looked at his employer. “I have a contract to stay. I am a performer now. Like Sitting Bull.”

I doubt that anyone in that tent had the slightest impression that Red Tomahawk or Sitting Bull, the legendary Sioux chief who also appeared in the Wild West Show, were mere contract players on the world stage.

When we returned to our hotel room, Irene doffed her bonnet as if it were a crown of thorns. She ran her fingertips into the hair at her temples, perhaps seeking to push the migraine away.

“Verdun! Would you believe that our modest party has driven this band of maniacs out of Paris! Is there any sherry in the decanter?”

She threw herself into the lounge chair, crossed her feet on the ottoman, and picked up her cigarette case and lucifers from the small round table beside it.

I poured two generous glasses of sherry. A
sommelier
would object, but we were two American women alone at last, and I had never seen anyone as able to become completely herself, or the opposite of it, as Irene Adler.

“Thank you.” She regarded me with weary amusement. “Nell would never abet my vices so readily.”

“No doubt that is why you acquired a husband.” It was a bold observation. I was speaking of her Lost as if they were Perfectly Fine.

“Having done so, I intend to keep him. And Nell. So.” She exhaled an exceedingly thin stream of smoke. “You wish to analyze every gory detail of our recent encounter in the cavern.”

I sat in a matching lounge chair and sipped sherry, dislodging my feet from their ladylike slippers.

“Yes! I saw the woman at the morgue, her clothes on pegs above her naked body as if displayed on a line. I saw the mutilations to the breast and…generative organs. The cavern showed me where such an atrocity had likely occurred.”

“Not the organs. That is the point.”

“It is?”

“Jack the Ripper was an…organ man, not the begging organ-grinder on the corner you pass by without noticing but a new and nasty variety. He reveled in bowels and intestines. He cut off breasts and ears and noses and slit faces, to be sure, but his real work was excavating the body, cutting out the womb, draping entrails like Roman shades and rearranging guts like furniture.”

“Is that why the upholsterer James Kelly is the leading candidate for the villain?” I refused to let her blunt speech scare me off the subject, as she had no doubt hoped it would.

“James Kelly is what we theater folk call ‘typecast’ for the role of Jack the Ripper. He is mad. He hates women. He hates particularly women who will couple with him, especially his wife, whom he killed for her trouble in marrying him, calling her a whore as he did it. He had just escaped the lunatic asylum and was in London, in Whitechapel, at the time of the Ripper killings last autumn. He fled to Paris after the last and most loathsome death, Mary Jane Kelly’s. Here he has helped create erotic furniture for the high-class brothels of Paris, where more murders and mutilations of prostitutes have occurred.”

Irene had not truly regarded me during this brutal recital, but now she turned the full power of her gaze upon me.

“You have never explained to me, Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, how it is that you have been able to pass yourself off as a woman of easy virtue in brothels in both London and Paris. I do not take you for a victim of anything but your own ambition. Is there no length to which you will not go to pursue a lurid subject matter?”

“Now you are sounding like Nell, Keeper of the Proprieties. It is none of your business how I do my job, or…what I am, maiden or harlot.”

“Surely there is some middle ground,” she said, smiling persuasively. “And if there is, I am assured that you have found it. Women have been forced to trick men into believing they are virgins when they are not for centuries. I have not yet heard, however, how it was possible to trick men into thinking a woman is no longer a virgin, when she is.”

“You are accusing me of being a virgin?”

“If you wish to put it that way.”

“That is indeed a serious charge.”

“How you love to turn convention on its head. So did I. Once.”

“It was easy in London. Even in the uppity East End, prostitution is illegal, however much it is winked at by Brits with monocles in their upper-class eyes.”

“Yes, but you must have encountered a hitch here in Paris. Prostitution is legal and strictly regulated against disease. How were you able to pass the inspections? A speculum does not lie, at least to the existence of a hymen.” She eyed me with a combination of dubiousness and respect. “The examinations are rough and humiliating.”

“So was my life at home with Jack Ford. I would do anything to escape that. A wife is far more the humiliated creature than a Paris prostitute.”

“I am a wife and do not consider myself humiliated in the least.”

“Oh, the sainted Godfrey, to hear Nell talk! I cannot wait to see this mythical beast.”

“I sincerely hope that you soon do.”

Her tone’s intensity made my cheeks flare with heat, but I spoke past that humiliating habit of mine, from which my nickname derived.

“Here you are, so eager to keep Miss Nell from learning the rough edges of life. Let me tell you of a few rough edges she would never stomach. An intact hymen is the bride’s badge of innocence, the harlot’s one-time prize. I didn’t reckon that Paris would require such piggish examinations, but…I made certain to…disable mine before they could investigate me.”

“You deflowered yourself. It must have been painful. You are as formidable in your way as Red Tomahawk.”

“Thanks. Now that your curiosity is satisfied—”

“Not mere curiosity, Pink. That is so crass. You know that certain information is crucial.”

“And the means of my masquerade is that crucial?”

“I needed to know to what lengths you’d go.”

“Happy?”

“No. I wonder if you have escaped Jack Ford as thoroughly as you think.”

“He was no King of Bohemia, that is true, but a petty tyrant in his own mad way. James Kelly puts me in mind of him.”

“James Kelly. Gone, too. With the Gypsies-O.”

“You really think he’s gone off with that lot? And Nell? He did show a fancy for her when we three and Sherlock Holmes cornered him in his rooms.”

“If a knife at the throat betokens a fancy….” But she frowned, and I knew I had hit home.

If she had to twist the means of my masquerade from me—and she was right, though I’d never admit it to her or any other soul—it had been humiliating. My best, most meaningful stories came from subjecting myself to humiliations ordinary people endure every day. And then there were the more spectacular stunts I did to keep my pen name in the public eye.

“He went after Nell,” she went on in a memory-driven singsong. “In the cavern. Right for her. I urged her to run away. For her safety. In that flight she found…what? Who? Capture, that much is clear. I don’t know if he found her. I hope not.”

“Somehow I did not envision Jack the Ripper in league with Gypsies. It smacks of an operetta.”

“No one envisioned the London killings as part of a…grand design. Or a common infection, at least. The Ripper has become an umbrella for all the ills that murderers do. Under the funereal ribs of his name shelter an entire nation of suspects, from lowest to highest, like the figures portrayed in a Parisian panorama display.

“If he is a single man, he may hide in a multitude. If he is many, he may trickle away like single poisonous raindrops into a muddy puddle of mankind. Yet we tracked down Kelly, as did Sherlock Holmes. Surely two such different hunting parties meeting at the same source means something.”

“It means that Sherlock Holmes is as subject to misconjecture as the rest of humankind.”

Irene smiled palely at my response. “Poor man.”

“I would not call that self-sufficient and arrogant creature ‘poor.’”

“The ultraintelligent are often mistaken for arrogant when they are merely right.” She sipped her sherry. “I meant ‘poor man’ because he eats and drinks reason and now he has put himself in the position of pursuing unreason. He should never have agreed to meddle in the flurry to find Jack the Ripper.” She leaned her cheek on her hand. “I wonder what he will make of
Psychopathia Sexualis
.”

“More than ‘poor Nell’ ever would! And she is the one of us all most likely to encounter the Ripper.”

“
Hmmm
,” Irene said, and said no more.

“I can’t see how you stand it! Nell was last seen pursued from the site of a murderous orgy by a suspect for Jack the Ripper and a candidate for these four latest Paris slaughters of women. Your husband has gone missing in the wilds of Wherever. And you sit in a Paris hotel room and speculate on the reading material of Sherlock Holmes!”

“Our enemies have stolen a march on us, Pink. If we jump up leaping in every direction, they will gain even more distance and time. We must settle the business in Paris before we move on, and move on we will. I have already put inquiries in motion.”

“Not through the Rothschilds.”

“Not yet.”

“Not through the Prince of Wales.”

“He is of use in areas I do not yet need.”

“Not through the Paris police.”

“I have, as a matter of fact, asked for some small information there.”

“Not through Madame Sarah.”

“No woman in Europe has more ex-lovers. We shall see if we need the aid of any as we continue the hunt.”

“And Buffalo Bill’s trusty scout Red Tomahawk came to a dead end at Verdun.”

“An end may be a beginning,” she said enigmatically.

“So with all these offers of aid, you accept only the company of a suspect for the Ripper almost as far-fetched as a member of the royal family itself, Bram Stoker.”

“Apparently,” Irene said with another Mona Lisa smile. “I am not trying to annoy you, Pink, but patience is the one virtue that Jack the Ripper does not have.”

“Nor do I! That does not make me the Ripper.”

Irene tilted her head even more, regarding me like a weary bird. “The Ripper could be a she. Now that is an interesting theory that I doubt has occurred to Sherlock Holmes.”

3.

Somewhere in London

I have never loved
.

—
HOLMES TO WATSON, ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE,
THE DEVIL’S FOOT

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

A telegram from my friend Sherlock Holmes was always to the point:

“Watson, if you can manage it, come to Baker Street at once. If you cannot manage it, come anyway, the sooner the better. I am working on the gravest case of my career.” My dear wife, Mary, was well used to Holmes’s clarion calls to the hunt. She merely nodded when I told her my errand and glanced to the pocket of my Norfolk jacket, where my service revolver reposed, as she had suspected. Holmes had not requested its presence, but old Army instincts told me that it might not be amiss. Grave cases require strong medicine, as any doctor knows.

Unlike many wives, Mary never demurred when my former rooming partner demanded my attendance. As a doctor’s wife she was used to my being called out unexpectedly. Also, she knew that we owed our very marriage to my friend’s storied deductive abilities, and, even more, to his stout heart in the face of danger.

So she merely smoothed lapels that needed no straightening, tucked in the muffler she had knitted for me, and, smiling, kissed my cheek as she saw me out the door.

The spring evening radiated the abiding damp that comes between rains. Through the fog and smoke the streets shone like a black cat’s well-licked coat.

I hailed a two-wheeler and soon the horse’s brisk hooves were beating a rat-a-tat on the cobblestones of Baker Street.

Mrs. Hudson answered my knock, the gaslight behind her in the hall making a halo of her tendrils of snow-white hair.

“He’s not here,” she informed me, then turned to lead the way up stairs so familiar that my feet could trace their height and length in the pitch dark.

“Wasn’t here for a fortnight,” she grumbled. “Off to foreign shores, as he will, I think. When he came back, he was in and out again like a messenger boy.” She paused in midflight, turning back to address me. “Won’t eat. Oh, I’ll bring his meals up, but if so much as a canary bird is pecking away at the food, I’d be surprised.”

“On the trail, I suppose,” I put in, knowing my comment wasn’t needed as either a goad or a period to further conversation.

“That man lives on nerve and shag tobacco.” Mrs. Hudson’s snowy head shook as if to dislodge an avalanche of disapproval.

I could have added another bad habit to her list, but forebear to mention the seven-percent solution of cocaine that, along with playing the violin, rather well in my opinion, was my friend’s only recreation.

“He works too hard,” she said, mirroring my thoughts as she opened the door. “No doubt,
you
’ll have some refreshment, Doctor.”

I required none but didn’t care to join Holmes in rejecting her culinary attentions.