Castle Rouge (54 page)

When I opened them, I could just glimpse my fellow explorers’ dark backs silhouetted by the candles they carried.

And I realized that the rush of blood and breath in my own body, that had seemed to be an internal wind I heard whipping around me, had been joined by the faint suspicion of another sound, a distant, actual sound, also of rhythmic nature.

Was it the sea? But none was near. An inland lake? The wind from outside rushing through aOtunnel, an escape tunnel?

My companions had become aware of it, too. I saw Godfrey’s pale face as it turned over his shoulder, the candle casting grotesque light on the familiar features.

“Wait here, Nell. Bram and I will investigate below. One will come back and wave a candle if it’s safe for you to proceed.”

Irene would never have stood for being left behind like a piece of awkward luggage, midway down a staircase in the dark.

I dare not raise my voice in objection and betray our presence, and as I hesitated the men proceeded without me, making any attempt to follow in their withdrawing footsteps more dangerous by the instant, for both the light and sound of their motion had vanished as if swallowed by the gaping dark jaws of leviathan.

I huddled bitterly against the wall, clutching my candle and its feeble flame. Even as I debated that I still might stumble after them, I knew the opportunity had been lost to my hesitation. I was far too obedient to male instruction, I reflected. My parson father was the kindest man on earth, but he was a churchman and expected to be heeded. Unlike Irene and Pink, who found joyful opportunity in defying the strictures of men of power and influence, I went like a Shropshire sheep to holding pen! I had even ceded my sole weapon, the hat pin, to Godfrey and was now armed with only candle stumps that it would take minutes to release from their makeshift carrier in my sleeves.

What a ninny! So much for my brave climb down the castle wall. I was helplessly pinned against a safe interior wall now, unable to move or risk them returning and not finding me. Yet I could not say when they would return, or if. So I must stand here and know nothing, do nothing. Except worry. And wait. And not know what’s really happening.

Irene, I knew, could worry. I knew that even at this moment she worried about me and Godfrey, but I had never known her to wait.

I was just about resolved to move ahead on my own when a moth of light flickered far below. I sighed my relief at having thus achieved that happy state for the meek of heart of doing exactly what I wanted to do while appearing to respect the wishes of others.

Keeping a hand to the wall on my right and my candle uplifted like Florence Nightingale’s famous lamp in my left, I made my way down into the pitch dark as fast as I could.

And I was so relieved to see Godfrey and Bram—actually, Godfrey or Bram, since only one candle beckoned—returning safely from a first foray into the lower depths.

I came abreast of the candle almost ready to laugh with joy.

A bare hand seized my wrist to steady me, and the candles we each held almost collided like goblet rims in a toast.

The conjoined light revealed a horribly familiar face, the dark hair a disheveled frame to an even more disordered expression of frantic fear, the pale blue eyes staring into mine with confused recognition.

“The Master,” James Kelly demanded, shaking my wrist. “Where is He? Tell me!”

I shrank against the wall, whose safety I had resented but moments before.

He looked around in the dark as if seeing other eyes that I could not.

“They did not want me here. They wanted me locked up in Paris, but I escaped them all and when I found the Master, they fled. Away from me. They left me to the dogs and wolves.”

That I could well believe. Even in the flickering candlelight I could see that his clothing was as disordered as his hair and expression. He looked as if he had been clambering through wildwood for the past two weeks.

And perhaps he had been.

“The Master is the Only One,” he murmured, his frantic tone becoming pleading, almost weeping. “He understands. He has walked the same way of the Cross. We know the suffering, the pain, the same happy flaw that all men do, that all women caused since Eve.”

His diseased eyes fixed on me again. I remembered how he had taken a pocket knife and drilled into his wife’s ear, for no reason, so that she died horribly a day later in hospital. He had been in the cavern under the Paris exposition grounds where the woman had been horribly mutilated by a madman. Had that been the Master? But Red Tomahawk’s battle-axe had been flung into that devil’s back even as he flaunted his gory trophy.

James Kelly held only a candle now, and the madness in his eyes, but he had seen me among the motley rescue party in the cavern and gone straight for me, as he had in his rooms when he was trapped there by Irene and Pink and I. And Sherlock Holmes.

Perhaps I reminded him of someone: his innocent and dead wife, or the poor girl whose breast had been sacrificed to some satanic ritual, or our mother Eve….

“Where is He?” he pled, as if he did not recognize me.

Of course he didn’t! My hair was wound in braids around my head like a peasant’s. From the waist up I was dressed like a Gypsy, and we knew that the cult members had either employed or traveled with the Gypsies. The sight of my borrowed trousers might have maddened him more, but they were black and lost in the darkness. I looked, I realized, like any one of the Gypsy girls who worked around their camp outside or the castle inside.

“Is He not here to change wine into holy water and holy water into blood? He must be here! I have followed.
This is my body, in which pleasure resides. This is my blood, in which pain resides. Whoever shall drink my blood and share my sin shall obtain life everlasting
.”

He was reciting a chillingly garbled blend of Scriptures and Satanism.

I tried to twist my wrist free, but his grip tightened. He pressed me against the wall.

“You’re coming to the ceremony, of course. To dance, and drink the Master’s blood and feel the flames of the Spirit descend like a cloak and then comes the madness and then we renounce it all, some forever.”

He clearly meant death. I recalled my unexpectedly effective kick with Medved the previous night and prepared to repeat it.

That is when he laid the knife blade against my throat.

This knife was longer than a clasp knife that could be folded into a pocket, long enough that blade and handle spanned my entire neck.

Fear was like a noose that would strangle me before he could cut me. I was entirely alone with a raving mad Jack the Ripper. No hat pin remained to strike out with, no companions bearing candles stirred anywhere in the vast empty dark to come to my rescue.

“Don’t you want to wait for the ceremony?” I asked, trying to speak without moving my throat against the sharp steel brink it was poised upon like a diver on a cliff.

“Sometimes before, but usually after the ceremony,” he said dreamily, the eerily vacant blue eyes becoming even vaguer. “I go and do likewise, as the Master commands. By myself. As I did with my wife. It was her fault, you know. She was on me for the drink, but the drink is the Life. The holy water is the Blood.”

I didn’t know how to answer such gibberish, but I didn’t have to.

Out of the dark came a figure almost as dark. It caught James Kelly by the collar and pulled him away so swiftly and violently as if to fling him down into Hell itself. Instead the avenging angel smashed him into the wall beside me, and bent to strip him of something, probably the knife. Kelly’s candle had gone out like a shuttered lantern.

In the flicker of my own candle, which I still held for some strange reason, I recognized the keeper of my silver smelling salts and Godfrey’s note.

“You!” I burst out in accusation.

“Quickly!” returned a thrillingly, thoroughly English voice. “Step aside while I deal with this villain.”

My free wrist was seized as I was pushed into the deeper dark so speedily that my tiny candle flame finally gave up the ghost and expired.

Footsteps pounded the hollow earth and stone as two men contended in the utter dark, one with the frenzied strength of the mad. I heard the huffing of wild boars. I heard boot-soles scrabbling like hooves as their owners fought for balance and dominance. It was easy to imagine two supernatural forces in contention.

I edged along the cold stone wall, for that fierce contention could propel them into me and I would be gravely hurt by that mortal struggle. And I needed to be ready to escape should the wrong man triumph. I had not been in the fearful presence of men meeting like wild stags since Colonel Moran had waylaid Quentin and me on the Hammersmith Bridge. In each case a defender sought my safety, but first he must fight for his survival in a mindless, fierce battle that made me momentarily irrelevant to either party.

I could not even witness this titanic struggle, but simply heard the rough violence of it. I should not know who had won until…until it was too late perhaps.

A guttural, anguished cry was followed by the thumping of a body to hard ground.

The winner panted hard in the dark silence. I could tell no man by his breathing and held my own breath.

In a moment a groping hand brushed my arm in the dark.

At that touch, I was possessed by a wild surmise. How could I have not seen! The swarthy skin, the bizarre, flowing, Gypsy garb…hadn’t Quentin Stanhope been similarly disguised and dressed as an Arab when he had fallen unconscious at my feet in Paris more than a year ago? He was a spy…and more, he could go to ground in the treacherous East like a native born. Of course, the moment I had gone missing Irene would have called upon his aid.
Quentin
had been the Gypsy who had contrived to deliver food to my door. I should have known from the first, by that quite inappropriate wink from the supposed Gypsy.

How obtuse I had been! And now I knew that it was his hand that reached for me in the dark. My heart galloped as if my Gypsy boots were running off with me. I leaned against the wall, breathless, as I felt his form draw close to me.

“It
is
you!” I managed to whisper.

“Quite.” A lucifer flared, and my fallen candle warmed to life and light again.

I gazed up at the dashing figure, his eyes cast down at the candle’s stuttering flame.

When he had surprised me in soldier’s guise on the train from Prague I had swooned, but he had caught me. I did feel oddly lightheaded now and wondered what form his greeting would take once the necessities were addressed.

“Are you all right,” he was saying, “my—”

“Quentin,” I breathed.

He froze for an unguarded instant as he saw my face in the candlelight.

“Good God, no! So you are indeed all right, Miss Huxleigh?”

The sentence was long enough, and the voice now strong enough that I realized my dreadful mistake in an instant.

“I am reasonably…well,” I said stiffly.

“Good. I could use something to bind him with. You don’t have anything—? No. I will have to improvise.”

Sherlock Holmes in Gypsy guise lowered the candle to reveal the unconscious form of James Kelly as he bent over it.

I was so humiliated by my error that I determined to provide what he wanted.

“As a matter of fact, Mr. Holmes,” I said, “I do have a bit of sturdy lacing if you will wait a moment.”

I unthreaded the cord of my Gypsy corselet, which fell to the ground unnoticed and unmourned.

“Excellent,” he said, testing the line’s resilience. “Long enough, and strong enough, to keep Mr. Kelly out of mischief for a few hours.”

He had absolutely no curiosity about where on my person I had found or stored such an item.

I watched him securely bind Kelly’s arms behind him, then use the man’s own belt to confine his ankles.

“How did you manage to overpower him in the dark?” I wondered.

“The dark had nothing to do with it. My advantage was Baritsu, an Oriental martial art that involves many quick and deceptive movements. Perhaps your Mr. Stanhope may know something of it.”

“Perhaps. Have you any notion where he might be?”

Sherlock Holmes paused after finishing binding Kelly, then glanced up with a private smile. “In Prague, I imagine, with your friend Mrs. Norton and her shadow Miss Pink. My brother Mycroft has arranged to delay their intrusive rescue attempts.”

I gasped. “Quentin is with Irene and Pink?”

“He joined them in Paris, why? You shouldn’t be surprised.”

I wasn’t surprised, I was something entirely different. Quentin was with Irene. I expected no less. Quentin was with Pink. Quentin was with Pink while I was confined to castle and corselet and braids and lamb stew night and noon with Godfrey in Transylvania.

It was only after a few more agonized moments of supposition that I realized that Sherlock Holmes had admitted to interfering with my dearest friends’ movements.

I drew myself up, sans the support of my fallen corselet. “On the one hand, Mr. Holmes, I find it presumptuous and utterly despicable that you would connive against my friends. On the other, I am glad that they have been prevented from risking themselves on our behalf.”

“Where is Norton, by the way?”

“I don’t know. He and Bram Stoker went ahead to explore. One or both was to return to the foot of the stairs with a candle when there was something to report.”

“So you didn’t go waltzing down into Kelly’s clutches out of ignorance.”

“I never go waltzing anywhere out of ignorance, Mr. Holmes, which you would know did you know me better. Kelly carried a candle, and it was too dark to see who he wasn’t until I was too close to retreat.”

“Quite,” he agreed.

“And I would like my smelling salts back.”

“What?”

“The sterling silver smelling salts vial that I gave the Gypsy violinist.”

“Ah.” He pulled something from the pocket of his ridiculous full trousers (that had seemed dashing when I assumed that Quentin wore them) and held it out. “You devised a clever if desperate plan. I imagine the barrister managed the Latin.”

“My father was a parson in the Church of England,” I rejoined as stiffly as ever.