Castle Rouge (64 page)

At last my painstaking piecework is done, and I can quote freely from Tatyana’s yellow casebook without fear of betraying the astounding truth, for now it lies open to be read, and perhaps debated, by the entire world.

The identity of Medved, the Russian word for “bear” often used as an affectionate term, a shuddersome notion in this instance, must be plain to even the most casual student of history.

He is none other than the young Rasputin: Grigorii Efimovich Rasputin. This is the so-called “mad monk” whose influence on the last Czar and Empress of Russia, Nicholas and Alexandra, played a major part in their downfall and deaths.

In twenty-some years from the events of this narrative, Rasputin’s remarkable and sinister charisma will make him a confidant of the imperial couple because of his apparent ability to arrest the hemophilia that afflicts the young royal heir. He will be the most notorious and powerful man in Russia and a key figure in the violent end of Czarist Russia and the Russian Revolution, that culminating and last great act of a dramatic series that began with the American and French revolutions in the late eighteenth century. That revolution will begin almost eighty years of Soviet socialist rule and the Cold War of the twentieth century.

The Rasputin of his glory days in St. Petersburg will be an older and more notorious man but no wiser in some matters. His prodigious appetite for liquor and women will remain. He will be able to walk up to aristocratic ladies in broad daylight and public company and begin undressing them. He will persuade women to sleep with him to test his chastity and theirs with predictable results: failure. The enormous size of his manhood will become a matter of such public knowledge that when challenged while drunk and disorderly on the streets, he will unbutton his fly and identify himself by his member. He will consort with gypsies and lose himself in their music, dancing to unconsciousness. His powers as well will deepen with the years, both the strange potency of his personality and his peasant constitutional stamina that made it almost impossible for his assassins to kill him even by a combination of poison, shooting, stabbing, and drowning in December of 1916.

Regard the oxymoron: Holy Devil. To anyone who knows Rasputin’s unique history that epithet will apply only to him. In his own lifetime an enemy had already titled a book about him just that. He was not a monk, but he followed Christian religious practice and also drew on the more primitive powers of the shaman, for the people of his remote Siberian homeland are not so different from the native American Indians who occupied the frigid lands across the Bering Strait where Russia and Alaska almost touch fingers through the chain of icy islands that both separate and connect them. The Christianity that mixed uneasily with the harsh Siberian society in which captured thieves were beaten to the point of death provoked many strange growths.

No doubt Tatyana detected Rasputin’s political usefulness and encouraged his excesses, perhaps to give her power over him in later years. Also, it is obvious, she envied his capacity for evil in the name of good. From reading the record of her association with the young Rasputin, like Krafft-Ebing she hoped to learn something of mankind from the acts of its most aberrant members. Unlike Krafft-Ebing, she was not a scientist and a scholar, but a master manipulator and a voyeur.

She herself is worthy of intense psychological study, but the age of Freud had not yet taken hold and what was done with her was what had been done with a “Lady Dracula” from a house related to Vlad Tepes line. Elizabeth Bathory in the sixteenth century, one of history’s most prolific sadistic serial killers, numbering perhaps six hundred-some victims in her search for young girls’ blood to keep her young, was locked away from the world forever, until she died.

Some attribute Bram Stoker’s inspiration for Count Dracula, the quintessential vampire in Stoker’s appropriately immortal novel,
Dracula
, which he began writing in the year following these events and published in 1897, to the incarnadine careers of Vlad and Elizabeth. The evidence, however, points to only a glancing acquaintance with their existence. It is far more likely that the trials he and his associates experienced during the period related here influenced his imagination and the novel that would debut eight years later. Some have found similarities between
Dracula
and
Macbeth
: the bloody content and brooding land and castle of both works, sleep-walking scenes, and such parallels as
Macbeth
’s three witches with Count Dracula’s three brides.

Some also compare Stoker’s novel to another published in 1894, George du Maurier’s
Trilby
, which introduced the Jewish mesmerist, Svengali, who hypnotized the eponymous tone-deaf heroine into vocal feats. In
Trilby
as in
Dracula
, several Englishmen (and one American) all in love with the same woman (Trilby or Lucy) fight to save her from a predatory foreign male.

In fiction, Dracula is far the more sinister figure than Svengali, but in real life, Gregorii Efimovich Rasputin is the king of predatory foreign males in both the intimate and public arenas. He obviously did not stay incarcerated, though when he may have escaped back to Siberia to resume his grotesque spiritual and political journey to international notoriety is impossible to know.

Did Tatyana escape with him? Is she known to history after that at all, or by another name? That is a mystery that even Sherlock Holmes may not have been able to solve.

One thing is certain: Colonel Sebastian Moran was at large and armed again with an air rifle in 1894 when he attempted to assasOsinate Sherlock Holmes.

Fiona Witherspoon, Ph.D., A.I.A.
^*
November 5, 2001

Castle Rouge

Reader’s Guide

“Perhaps it had taken until the end of this century for an author like Douglas to be able to imagine a female protagonist who could be called ‘the’ woman by Sherlock Holmes.”

—
GROUNDS FOR MURDER
, 1991

Reader’s Guide

To encourage the reading and discussion of Carole Nelson Douglas’s acclaimed novels examining the Victorian world from the viewpoint of one of the most mysterious women in literature, the following descriptions and discussion topics are offered. The author interview, biography, and bibliography will aid discussion as well.

Set in 1880–1890 London, Paris, Prague, and Monaco, the Irene Adler novels reinvent the only woman to have outwitted Sherlock Holmes as the complex and compelling protagonist of her own stories. Douglas’s portrayal of “this remarkable heroine and her keen perspective on the male society in which she must make her independent way,” noted the
New York Times
, recasts her “not as a loose-living adventuress but a woman ahead of her time.” In Douglas’s hands, the fascinating but sketchy American prima donna from “A Scandal in Bohemia” becomes an aspiring opera singer moonlighting as a private inquiry agent. When events force her from the stage into the art of detection, Adler’s exploits rival those of Sherlock Holmes himself as she crosses paths and swords with the day’s leading creative and political figures while sleuthing among the Bad and the Beautiful of Belle Epoque Europe.

Critics praise the novels’ rich period detail, numerous historical characters, original perspective, wit, and “welcome window on things Victorian.”

“The private and public escapades of Irene Adler Norton [are] as erratic and unexpected and brilliant as the character herself,” noted
Mystery Scene of Another Scandal in Bohemia
(formerly
Irene’s Last Waltz
), “a long and complex
jeu d’esprit
, simultaneously modeling itself on and critiquing Doylesque novels of ratiocination coupled with emotional distancing. Here is Sherlock Holmes in skirts, but as a detective with an artistic temperament and the passion to match, with the intellect to penetrate to the heart of a crime and the heart to show compassion for the intellect behind it.”

About This Book

Castle Rouge
, the sixth Irene Adler novel, opens in the Paris of June 1889 with Irene Adler facing two demoralizing disappearances: her husband, English barrister Godfrey Norton, has vanished into the uncharted wilds of Transylvania while on secret business in Bohemia for the Rothschild banking family. And Irene’s longtime companion, Nell Huxleigh, appears to have fallen into the hands of either Jack the Ripper or a sinister cult acting with him in Paris six months after the vile Whitechapel murders. Even Sherlock Holmes, who had crossed paths with Irene and her cohorts in attempting to track the Ripper’s Paris resurrection, has abruptly returned to London to reinvestigate the Whitechapel murders from a new perspective. So the usually indomitable Irene, sadly shaken, must draw on her circle of acquaintances to rescue her loved ones. Despite the proffered financial assistance of Baron de Rothschild and Bertie, Prince of Wales, Irene finds less aristocratic (if not less notorious) but more practical aid from Buffalo Bill and an Indian scout in his Wild West Show playing in Paris. Irene dragoons another American in Paris, Nellie Bly, the daredevil American girl reporter who has been passing as a courtesan named Pink while tracking the Ripper from London to Paris, into her rescue party. And then there’s the famed theatrical manager, Bram Stoker, who’s made a habit of hiking wild and lonely places.

How can this new and uneasy detecting alliance, its members all harboring hidden agendas of their own, retrieve Godfrey and Nell from the abyss into which they seem to have fallen? The trail will take the trackers back to Bohemia and the secrets of many-spired Prague, then eastward on to a darker land with an even darker history: the Transylvania of the legendary fifteenth-century warlord whose murderous deeds make even the abominations of Jack the Ripper pale in comparison, Vlad the Impaler.

For Discussion

RELATED TO
CASTLE ROUGE

1. Advancing historical suspects for Jack the Ripper, from British Royals to other notorious killers of the era, has become a popular fictional and nonfictional game over past decades. Rasputin’s youth is shrouded in mystery, and he fits the classic serial killer profile: a boy already prone to binge drinking and blackouts becoming a man whose intense notions of religion deeply conflict with his need for sex. Why did the author develop this particular suspect given the particular direction in which she takes Irene Adler and her cohorts, far afield from the foggy London town and the Holmes Canon? How does Rasputin’s candidacy alter the perception of the historical Ripper and his motivations? Although the authorities then often cited “religious mania” as a likely motive for the Ripper, why has it so seldom been used in later fiction and nonfiction explorations of the case? How does the role of religious mania in the life of James Kelly, the Englishman, both differ from and resemble the pagan/Christian sects that erupted in Rasputin’s peasant Siberian culture for two centuries? Do elements of modern religious upbringing echo these eternal notions that sex is bad and that women who have sex deserve punishment? Why must some men despise what they desire? And what has it to do with self-hatred?
   
2. Nell plays an entirely different part in this novel.
   The Drood Review of Mystery
   observed of
   Chapel Noir
   . “This dark tour de force proves by its verbal play and literary allusiveness that Douglas wants neither Irene nor herself underestimated in fiction. More important, she wants women fully informed about and capable of action on the mean streets of their world.” Nell begins
   Castle Rouge
   as a helpless abductee, but proves to be more adaptable and resilient than her protective friends might suspect. Does she gain strength by being separated from her “leading lady,” Irene? Her relationship to all the male characters in the series is changing in these Ripper-related novels. How and why, and is it for the better, or worse? Or both?
   
3. The immediate British public’s reaction to the murders and mutilations in Whitechapel was: “No Englishman could have done it.” What does this say about the attitudes of nineteenth-century colonial nations then busily engaged in making inroads into “dark continents” and unsettled places? Are the savageries of the Siberian wastes any less comprehensible than the atrocities of the American Indian wars? Are the Russian peasants, persecuted Jews, and itinerant Gypsies any less subject to control and eradication than the Native Americans? What would the young Rasputin have made of himself in the American West?
   
4. The mysterious author of the Yellow Book entries in
   Chapel Noir
   is revealed in this novel. Is this also another person displaced from a native culture, like the wandering Red Tomahawk and Rasputin…and Quentin Stanhope and Nell Huxleigh, and Irene Adler herself? If you have read
   Another Scandal in Bohemia
   , the previous novel to
   Chapel Noir
   by seven years, what fore-shadowing of this person and locales and themes and events appear in the earlier novel? Has Irene Adler helped bring these disastrous eventualities upon herself? Through what weaknesses, or what strengths?
   
5. Bram Stoker’s
   Dracula
   is central to this Jack the Ripper duology, yet Dracula himself never appears in it. Although Conan Doyle flirted with the occult in his Sherlock Holmes stories, he always came down on the side of the rational explanation. Does
   Castle Rouge
   “flirt” with this alternate dimension of unreality, and why? What is Douglas saying about the man who imagined Dracula and his motivations? Are the fictional Dracula, the historical Vlad the Impaler, and Jack the Ripper brothers under the skin?
   
6. Douglas has said she likes to work on the “large canvas” of series fiction. What kind of character development does that approach permit? Do you like it? Has television recommitted viewers/readers to the kind of multivolume storytelling common in the nineteenth century, or is the attention span of the twentieth century too short? Is long-term, committed reading becoming a lost art?