Castle Rouge (24 page)

At a distance, his height and girth reminded me of Bram Stoker. I wondered for a wild moment if the man I had met as “Bram Stoker” in Paris had been the King of Bohemia in disguise. Many royal persons in Europe traveled incognito.

But as Irene and I approached our royal host, I saw that his fair hair was more gold than crimson and that, although he wore bristling side whiskers, it was not the full beard Bram Stoker cultivated.

This man also wore military uniform, a magnificent ensemble of red-and-black wool so swagged with gold medals and braid that it made Quentin’s all-purpose uniform look a thing of poverty and pity.

“Do I bow, curtsey, or swoon?” I hissed to Irene with my lips not moving as we approached His Royal Highness. The King of Bohemia was a far more handsome and formidable figure than England’s Prince Bertie!

“He is Germanic, so formality is always welcome,” she answered, sweeping into a floor-dusting curtsey worthy of a Russian prima ballerina. She had opened the revers and drawn up the skirt flaps of Nell’s plain black “surprise” dress before we had left the carriage, so she now had some fine embroidered pink-silk “feathers” to flaunt.

I followed suit as best I could in my prim, checked coatdress and matching cap, wishing I wore the furred turban and Russian silk cloak I had on my first interview at
The Pittsburg Dispatch
. While I don’t believe that clothes make the man, I do believe that being suitably well-dressed makes the woman more successful at whatever she undertakes. It is good to reassure the male sex that we are just women and too decorative to be taken seriously. When they don’t pay us more than superficial attention, we can get a lot more work done. At least I have always found it so.

“Irene!” the King said in English, bending forward in his stiff attire to raise her upright. “You visit my city and country again in the guise of a busy and not-too-gaudy bird of passage, and your constant companion is also one who dresses for all business and no chatter.”

“This is not Nell,” Irene said quickly, “but a young American friend we call Pink.”

“Pink. Most extraordinary.” He gazed at me through narrowed blue eyes, as if not believing their testimony. “The other one was called—?”

“Nell,” she reminded him again, patiently.

“Nell. That’s right. Did you enjoy your musical welcome?”

“I loved it! I felt almost like Sarah Bernhardt, although in only a small way. Only Sarah herself can feel like Bernhardt in a large way.”

“I like your ways, whether small or large, far better than the Divine Sarah’s,” he said laughing, standing back to gesture to a pair of huge brocade-covered armchairs.

We took our seats as he occupied a third gigantic chair.

“And Clotilde?” Irene inquired as she drew off her gloves—pink, I saw, to match the interior trim on the surprise dress.

“Ah, she will be here shortly. Much as she adheres to your every word and whisper, she does not wish you to spend too much time alone…without her.”

For an instant I had thought the King was about to say “too much time alone with me,” but that couldn’t be.

“You two are still inseparable then?” Irene asked.

“Ah. How dare I not be devoted to my lady wife? She has been to school with a paragon and never lets me forget it.”

I was certain that a great deal more was going on here than I might guess, but before I could determine what, I heard the click of a distant door, then the further clicks of shoes moving across marble floors.

A thin pale woman approached us, her hair the white-gold satiny sheen of the far North. She was clad in a changeable green-lavender tea gown of exquisite design that could have only come from where we had last been, Paris.

I rose with Irene and we curtsied again.

Again a royal person reached out her hands to Irene and elevated her at once to her own level. “My dear Irene! I was delighted when Willie mentioned that you would be traveling through Prague. And my dear Nell—!” She turned to grasp my hands and extend me the same astonishing royal favor when her pale blue eyes blinked as if facing too much sunlight.

“Why, Nell, you have changed—”

“This is not Nell, though her mode of dress may be similar. This charming girl’s name is Pink and she is American, as I am.”

The Queen’s almost invisible eyelashes flickered like falling snowflakes, seeming to melt off her face with the motion. “Not Nell. Yes. I can see that now. I simply expected—I’m so sorry, my dear.”

I had the oddest impression then: that the King would hardly know Nell if he fell over her and that his Queen had a deep and abiding attachment to her.

Once again the Mouse from Shropshire had divided and conquered, or, rather, half-conquered.

“And where is the ever-charming Godfrey?” Queen Clotilde inquired conversationally, sweeping to a proprietary place beside her husband. “I assume you have come here to join him, so why is he not with you?”

For a moment Irene faltered. This simple social inquiry struck her like lightning and turned her to stone. For the long awkward seconds of a missed stage cue, Irene Adler Norton had no answer. Or perhaps she had too much answer.

I was always quick with my tongue. “That is what we have come here to find out,” I said forthrightly. I have always been forthright, and I supposed that royalty could stand it as well as anyone.

I glanced at Irene, who was still well and truly pale. “As you know, Your Royal Highnesses, Godfrey was visiting Prague on business. You may not know that he was called away and has mysteriously never been heard of since.”

The King looked at once to Irene. The Queen instead eyed me with sudden, deep interest.

“Godfrey? Missing?” she said. “He paid his respects at the Castle only a fortnight ago.”

She seemed utterly unaware of how much could go awry in a fortnight, much less a day. Perhaps that is a condition of being a queen. On the other hand, Clotilde, royal or not, struck me as something of a dull Dora.

“What may we do?” the King asked at once, still watching Irene with a strange blend of anxiety and expectation.

I could see her stage persona reassembling after the shock of Clotilde’s unanswerably innocent question. Her breath was expanding her lungs, her chin rising as if she were preparing to sing…only now, simply speaking was a feat. To be standing here, among these people who were both powerful and ignorant, knowing what we knew of Paris and Jack the Ripper and Nell’s abduction and Godfrey’s frightening disappearance….

“My dear friends,” she said, slowly becoming herself again, “Pink is right. This is no social call. We come fresh from Paris, where the populace would be terrified by the rampages of Jack the Ripper-like murders, did they know of them. Godfrey has apparently been lured from Prague to a destination unknown, and this disappearance seems connected in some mysterious way to the Paris events. What I need is whatever aid I ask for, which I won’t know until the need is immediate and dire.”

The royal faces had grown sober as her words mounted up. Clotilde turned a shocked and beseeching face to her husband halfway through the narrative.

He patted her hand that rested on his huge forearm like a bear reassuring a child, but he never looked at her. His eyes were only for Irene, which is a powerful testimony to her natural presence even when rattled, and I must say that she rattled rarely. And it testifies to her beauty, I suppose. One can never underestimate the potency of that among certain impressionable men. As Paul Bunyan and I like to say, “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.” And Paul Bunyan ought to know.

“You shall have whatever you wish,” the current Paul Bunyan in our presence promised.

I was uncertain which woman he was placating the more, Clotilde or Irene. Perhaps both. Men prefer any concessions they have to make to women to be doubly advantageous.

There was something unspoken in the room, among the three of them, that I would have given my best sterling silver garters to understand.

Unfortunately, I could have bent down to take off these scandalous items in full public view and have thrown them down on the marble floor like dice amidst these three at this moment, and no one would have paid me the slightest attention.

“The Rothschilds,” Irene began, her voice sounding hoarse and unused. She cleared her throat and her voice came clear as the cathedral bell when she spoke again. “Of course the Rothschilds will do all they can to assist me, since Godfrey was looking into matters pertaining to their property.”

“In Bohemia?” the King was quick to ask.

“No. In Transylvania.”

The King nodded, mollified. Apparently he expected to be made aware of the Rothschild actions in his land. The Queen clutched his arm tighter.

“Transylvania! That is such a wild and backward land,” she complained, “overrun by Gypsies and wolves and superstitious peasants. There is no great city there, like Prague, only crumbling walled castles and hamlets of ignorant peasants. Whatever would the Rothschilds want with property in that Godforsaken land? Whyever would someone as civilized as Godfrey go there?”

“Such backwaters, my dear,” said the King, “are where vast fortunes are to be made swiftly and without interference. Look at the American wilderness.”

“I do not wish to,” Clotilde answered. “This is a wild enough part of Europe for my taste. Prague is the last civilized city before the uncivil East unrolls its not-so-magic carpet and controls all the wild wastes of the world.”

Irene answered before I could rise to my country’s defense. “Your Highness’s Viking forebears were no doubt a bit superstitious and wild, to hear tell. Today’s Scandanavians are known for exporting delicate fairy stories and pastries, but their history was raw and bloody, like that of any nation in the making.”

“But we did all that during the Dark Ages!” For such a colorless woman she was true-blue patriotic. “You Americans are still shaping the borders of your land, often by conquest. I only remark that Translyvania is a place no one of refinement or culture would care to visit.”

“I doubt we could argue with you,” Irene answered with a smile, “but since a person of refinement and culture I value very highly is likely there, perhaps not by his own will at this point, there I will go, once I have satisfied myself that no clues to his whereabouts remain in Prague.”

“Of course you must go whither your husband goeth,” Clotilde replied with what I consider truly simpering and annoying docility.

Not that I didn’t share her sentiments that anywhere a husband went a wife could and should go, and vice versa. Only there was no need to be submissive about it.

“I can provide escort,” the King said.

Irene bowed her head. “That is very generous and may be necessary, but first I need to explore Prague, and particularly this case that one of Godfrey’s letters mentioned. A young woman was found dead in a way that revived rumors of the Golem.”

“Oh, not that again!” The King’s ruddy face grew as red as Old King Cole’s. Though he was a young man, barely past thirty, and sturdily made, I could see him becoming quite fat and tyrannical in his later years, rather like Bertie.

“The Golem is myth!” he went on. “Yet one that does much harm, to Bohemia and the Rothschild interests for that matter. I imagine you will be meeting with representatives of those interests. There was some such meddling during your last visit to my hapless land.”

“Your Majesty is not suggesting that I am an agent of the Rothschilds—?”

“No, but you know who is. Damn it, Irene! If Godfrey has gotten himself into some mess because of those banking politicians—”

“Godfrey is but a barrister, Willie, you know that. And who got Bohemia into a mess last time, if not rescued by those banking politicians and their…assistants?”

My eyes caught Clotilde’s. Suddenly the King and Irene were talking like old friends, or enemies or
…hmmm
.

Clotilde remained clinging to his arm like a sack of Paris silks by Worth, but her pale blue eyes took my measure as a disinterested party. She shrugged ever so slightly, for my eyes only, as if to say we supporting players must keep our own counsel, and our eyes and ears open, while the lead actors hold the stage, but afterward…surely there would be time for a French scene or two between she and I….

Of course I resolved to cut her out from the herd and have a nose-to-nose with her as soon as possible.

“You will stay for tea?” the King inquired abruptly. “I will send for the Rothschild representative so you may consult with him here, away from prying eyes in the town. And there are some paintings I have acquired since your last visit, that I should like your opinion of.”

I had the sense of a spat diverted into a social occasion.

I was impressed. I was not on spatting terms with any royal persons…that I know of. Yet. But I am young.

20.

Of Corsetry and Atrocity

They were real instruments of torture; they prevented me from breathing, and dug deep holes into my softer parts on every side
.

—
A VICTORIAN LADY

The clothes they have left for me are entirely improper.

“At least they are clean, as I insisted,” Godfrey said, handing them over with the awkwardness of a good man confounded.

I find it most bitter that he was abducted with his luggage intact and can remain a gentleman even in durance vile while I have been stripped of every outer vestige and left only my inmost self.

It is just my ill luck, I understand, but I cannot reconcile it.

Then I think. Once, when I was young and foolish, and indeed I once was, I had cherished hopes of a sentimental alliance with an ungainly young curate in my father’s parish. I had almost forgotten his name but now I have much time for reflection and the memory returns to me like a favorite book that opens to a signed flyleaf in a familiar hand: Jasper Higgenbottom. He went to be a missionary in darkest Africa, which was entirely appropriate, given the unfortunate elephantine appearance of his ears. But he sang quite well. I had supposed I might perhaps marry and accompany him.