Castle Rouge Read Online Free Page B

victim.”
    “Then the Ripper has moved to Paris and grown nice.”
    Bram Stoker speaks up at long last. “The bloody rites I heard of in the cavern beneath the fairgrounds don’t sound very refined. Were I to write such a scene, I’d be accused of sensation-mongering. I agree with what the man in the street said during the Ripper attacks last autumn. No Englishman would do it.”
    “Nor any Frenchman!” the inspector shouts, his mustaches twitching like cockroach feelers.
    Amazing how no nationality on earth would spawn a Ripper so long as any man of that race is present.
    “The Jews,” the Baron says quietly, “are often accused, and falsely, of atrocities toward Christians. Oddly enough, the facts prove the atrocities are inevitably committed against them. Us,” he adds.
    “That is the trouble!” When the Prince of Wales finally speaks again, he does so passionately. “There are all sorts of political scapegoats abounding that one faction or the other would like to accuse of the Ripper’s crimes, including members of England’s royal family! I have been repeatedly criticized for consorting with Jews and merchants and jockeys and, er, women.”
    “And does Your Highness deny any of it?” Irene asks, a trifle archly.
    The Prince, like any pampered aristocrat, responds to the coy like a cat to a whisker tickle. That is one thing I grant Sherlock Holmes. He is not pampered and he is not an aristocrat.
    “Well, no,” Bertie says, demonstrating the disarming honesty that makes him tolerated if not beloved. “Drat the fellow! He has caused endless trouble, and I wish they would lock him away.”
    “‘They’ is always us, Your Highness,” Irene says. “And that is why ‘we’ must do something about Jack the Ripper. I take it I have your permission to try.”
    The inspector snorts delicately, being French.
    Irene needs no one’s permission, but she wishes some of the people in this room to see that she has a royal mandate.
    “I would be delighted,” the Prince says, smiling a bow in her direction. Bertie has always enjoyed deferring to women, except his mother. Irene has never underestimated official approval.
    She smiles back. Like a privateer of old, she has won the royal letter of mark.
    She is free to hoist the Jolly Roger and to board and commandeer any ships she chooses.
    Lord help us, she already has the U.S.S. Nellie Bly in her fleet and I shudder to think what freebooters she will add to her armada.

2.
    Plainsmen in France
    The red man does not wear his heart upon his sleeve for government claws to peck at. One knows what he proposes to do after he has done it. The red man is conspicuously among the things that are not always what they seem .
    — HELEN CODY WELMORE, THE LAST OF THE GREAT SCOUTS , 1899
    FROM A JOURNAL
    There are many things for which I will never forgive Irene Adler Norton, but I guess the one that is least her fault is the thorn that rankles most. The fact is that the Paris Ripper could only be the London Ripper on the move and that the real story had its roots back in London where it all began the previous autumn of 1888.
    So Sherlock Holmes telling me that I owed it to Irene to nursemaid her in Paris didn’t sit well at the time he declared this to be the case, and it especially didn’t go down like butter now that I was tied to a secondary investigation while he was back in Blighty chasing the Real Ripper.
    Irene and I strolled through the now-familiar grounds of l’Exposition universelle , brushing skirt hems with shopgirls and ladies of leisure sharing a holiday spirit and utter ignorance of the horrific and hidden events that had transpired here but two days before.
    Our expedition with that pack of Rothschild agents and Buffalo Bill to hunt down the Paris Ripper had reached such a shocking and savage climax that every man in sight thought I should be spared further discussion of the particulars. I had heard only such snippets from Inspector François le Villard as