by Maia Chance
* * *
Gabriel hiked along the dark, wooded track towards Schilltag, thinking.
Perhaps the tapestry had been a gift from the old servant woman’s employer. He had learned yesterday that some of the castle servants had stayed on after Count Grunewald had left.
Or perhaps the old woman had stolen the tapestry. That would account for Frau Herz’s reticence. But there he was, thinking like one of those awful nobs who suspected the servants were forever after the silver teaspoons—
There was a snap of twigs.
Fancy running into a bear when he hadn’t got his gun.
He caught a movement in the trees, a metallic glimmer. Silently, he stepped behind a tree trunk.
It wasn’t a bear. It was the woodsman, Herz, prowling through the undergrowth.
Odd. He hadn’t a torch to light his way, and he wasn’t on the track.
And—Gabriel observed him a few seconds more—he wasn’t heading home, towards the rear gatehouse. No, he was traipsing deeper into the wood, and he had a rifle on his shoulder.
Gabriel decided to follow him. Perhaps Herz would lead him to the secret that the Schilltag folk were so eager to keep hidden.
* * *
Gabriel had been a lieutenant in the cavalry during the Crimean War. He’d led scouting missions many times. So creeping through an ink-shadowed forest in pursuit of an armed and disgruntled man did not faze him quite as much as it ought to have.
He didn’t dwell upon that, however, as he was led deeper and deeper into the trees. He was too intent on keeping sight of Herz, and on keeping his own footfalls silent.
Herz was nothing more than a black shape up ahead, blending in and out of still blacker shadows. Now and then, the steel barrel of his rifle flashed.
After about twenty minutes, Gabriel stepped on a rotten log. It collapsed under his weight. The undergrowth crackled.
Up ahead, Herz froze.
Gabriel held his breath, watching as Herz turned his head from side to side, listening.
Presently, Herz set forth again.
After a few heartbeats, Gabriel followed.
They were passing a stream that gurgled alongside a vertical, fern-covered bluff. By Gabriel’s calculations, they were heading to the northwest, away from the castle and Schilltag. The cottage was directly west of the castle, and Gabriel estimated that they had passed it already. Where was Herz going, then?
And, for that matter—where was Herz?
Gabriel stopped. He’d lost sight of the woodsman, and he couldn’t hear anything but the splashing stream and the sighing tree branches. He took a step, towards an opening in the trees, and another and another.
Something clamped his leg with shocking force. He cried out, collapsing sideways into a damp cluster of ferns.
His left calf was caged inside a steel trap.
Thank God he was wearing tall stovepipe boots. And the trap did not, like most bear traps, have steel teeth; its jaws were padded with leather.
Which suggested—Gabriel gritted his teeth against blinding bursts of pain—that the trap was not for animals at all.
It was a man trap.
The shadowy undergrowth parted. His gaze traveled up the barrel of Herz’s rifle.
9
“Prue.”
Prue jerked her head up. She was sprawled facedown on the lumpy ticking mattress, dozing. It wasn’t late, but she only had a candle, and anyway, she sure didn’t intend to peruse the Bible someone had put in the tower. It didn’t have a single picture, even.
“Prue.”
Hansel! Her heart pitter-pattered. She scrambled to her feet and dashed to the window.
“Hello,” she whispered into the darkness.
Hansel was just a smudge of gray in the garden. “Did you enjoy the pastries I sent along on your tray with Freda?”
“Yes. And the biscuits, too, and the sausages. Oh—and the Turkish delight.” Ma would be shocked. She always said a lady should give the impression of watching her figure in front of a gentleman, even if it meant stuffing her face like a carpetbag later on. But then, Hansel wasn’t really a gentleman.
“I have come,” he whispered, “to tell you what I have learned.”
“They going to let me out?”
“Not yet. But something strange has occurred. All of those things that were removed from the house in the wood yesterday by the two professors and taken to the castle library—all of those things have gone missing.”
“Missing?”
“Someone stole them. The skeleton, the furniture, the cups and plates. The painted ceiling beam with the gold leaf. Gone.”
“How’s that going to let me out?” Prue tapped her fingernails on the stone sill. She was starting to feel like a monkey in a cage. A wild monkey. Not the melancholic kind in the zoological gardens who’d given up on life.
“I suspect,” Hansel said, “that Mr. Coop was killed because of something to do with the house in the wood, and the things taken from the house. It is too much of a coincidence that they were stolen just after he was killed.”
“But I don’t see—”
“Listen.” He lowered his voice. “I observed the skeleton, when it was laid out in the library yesterday.”
“And?”
“It had soil on it. Fresh soil, of a different sort than that found about the cottage.”
Prue rolled her eyes. These kinds of details were dull as, well, dirt. She hankered for something to happen.
“Which means,” Hansel said, “that the skeleton was placed in the cottage quite recently, and it was taken from the ground elsewhere. And”—Now his whisper was almost lost in the night—“and I believe I know where it came from. I am going there, tonight, to learn if I am correct.”
“Wait. You’re headed somewhere? Tonight?”
“Now.”
Prue’s heart leapt. Something was happening! “Take me along.”
“It is not—”
“Oh, please, Hansel! Pretty please. I’m coming down with cabin fever in here. I swear you can lock me up again as soon as we’re back.”
“If anyone were to see you—”
“Who’s going to see me?” If Ophelia saw her, of course, she’d be furious. But Prue couldn’t bring herself to worry about that. She just needed out.
Prue wasn’t sure how much Hansel could make out in the moonshine, but she pulled her best Romeo and Juliet face.
Maybe Hansel saw her Juliet face, maybe he didn’t. But he sighed, paused, and then said, “All right. I will go and attempt to fetch the key. It is kept on a hook in the kitchen.”
* * *
Mrs. Coop rallied from her stupor not long after sunset. She demanded that Ophelia help her bathe and fetch her beef broth and toast. It was after dark when she finally dissolved once more into snores on her bed, and Ophelia was able to sneak off.
She made her way, in a dark hooded cloak and with Amaryllis’s yellow silk slipper tucked away in a pocket, down a spiral stair and out into the fresh-scented night. She hurried through the courtyard garden. White blossoms glowed and nodded like phantasms.
She cast an anxious glance up at Prue’s dark tower. She’d sent Prue a note of encouragement earlier, and she’d heard from the second footman, Wilhelm, that Prue was warm and well fed in there, and equipped with an English Bible. Katrina and Freda had been enlisted to take Prue trays of food and remove her chamber pot. Poor hapless Prue.
Ophelia’s heart thumped as she neared the gate in the wall, the same gate those two black-clad gentlemen had vanished behind at dawn. Or had they?
Ophelia gave her head a brisk shake.
Surely her mind hadn’t cooked those fellows up. It wasn’t like her to see things that weren’t there. The world was like a theater stage set, as far as she could figure. If you went peeping around the back of
things, you were likely to find rope pulleys, wooden supports, and some frowny fellow smoking a cigarette. No magic. Just bare facts.
She let herself through into the kitchen gardens. They smelled of earth and tangy tomato leaves. She picked her way between the vegetable beds, spying what had to be the chicken yard, off to one side. Feathery rustles and soft clucks came from inside the henhouse.
And there it was: the wooden door Cook had spoken of, in the far wall. In the moonlight it looked gray, not green, but that had to be it. Ophelia pushed it open.
On the other side, rows of gnarled fruit trees fanned down a steep slope. Their branches stood out like black claws against the moon-sheened sky. A breeze shuffled their leaves.
She scanned the jagged black perimeter of forest at the bottom of the slope. Somewhere, an owl hooted. Goosebumps prickled her arms.
Merciful heavens! Ophelia Flax. You aren’t one to quiver like a Christmas jelly. Get on with it.
She drew the slipper from her cloak.
It was too dark to see the exact tint of the grass stains or the size of the pebbles embedded in the leather.
To be sure, there was grass out here, and pebbles, plenty of them. Piles of leaves and rotten apples, too.
What had she been thinking? That she’d just waltz out here, find—
Her eyes, adjusting to the thin moonlight, picked out the faintest of shapes on a path between two rows of trees. Could they be . . . footprints?
She dropped to her knees and positioned the slipper inside one of the prints. It—well, it seemed to fit. The problem was, it wasn’t a complete print.
She got back on her feet and walked slowly down the slope, bending to peer at the path.
“You search for something, fräulein?” a gruff voice said behind her.
Ophelia froze. Then, slowly, she straightened and turned.
There was a man a couple of paces off to the side in the shadow of an apple tree. He had a bushy dark beard.
And a long-barreled gun aimed straight at her noggin.
He stalked closer.
She couldn’t move; it was as though her feet had become tree roots. She could only stare, a sob of terror swelling her throat, as he approached. He produced from somewhere a sack and threw it over her head. The silk slipper fell as she tried to tear the sack off, to blindly run.
But he’d hoisted her over his shoulder as easy as a bag of barley, and with his arm hooked around the backs of her knees, he loped off with her down the orchard slope.
She kicked and wriggled, screamed and berated him, but none of it slowed him down. He muttered and cursed in German—they sounded like curses, anyway—and tightened his sweaty hold on her knees.
They went like that for twenty minutes, maybe more, over terrain that felt rocky and through brambles that dragged against her body like longing fingers.
Then there was the sound of a door slamming open, and they were inside—light shone through the sack on her head—and he flung her down on a chair.
Ophelia had a split second of freedom, which she used to rip the sack off her head. They were in a big stone chamber, nearly empty. There was a massive fireplace, unlit, gaping like a hungry mouth, and the furry heads of bears, deer, boars, and a wolf mounted on the walls. A chandelier made of bronze and antlers held two dripping tapers. Their flames shuddered in the wind from the open door.
No sooner had she glanced around than the man was binding her arms behind her with a rope.
“For mercy’s sake!” she said. “I’m a lady, not a ship’s barrel. That hurts!”
He jerked the rope even tighter.
“You won’t get away with this.” Ophelia kicked at his arm.
“You will find,” someone else said, directly behind Ophelia, “that Herr Herz doesn’t take kindly to threats.” Whoever the man was, he had a British accent, and his voice was familiar. “Tried it myself.”
Ophelia realized for the first time that her shoulders were pressed up against something more solid and warm than a chair back. She tried, out of some hazy sense of modesty, to lean forward, but Herz had tied her fast. “You’re the professor,” she said, twisting her neck. “The young one.” She glimpsed only a square, woolen-clad shoulder.
“Young? Well, for the moment, I daresay.”
“You’re laughing? Can’t you do something?”
“I’m trussed up as tightly as a roast goose, I’m afraid.”
“You”—she addressed the bearded man—“are Herz? Why, I’ve heard of you!” He was crouched down, tying her booted ankle to the chair leg. “You’re the woodsman at Schloss Grunewald.” She made a half-relieved, half-anxious laugh. “This is a misunderstanding—I work at the castle, you see. I’m not a—”
“Nein, big feet.” Herz grabbed her other ankle. “No misunderstanding.”
Big feet?
Ophelia tried to kick him again, but his hands were like clamps.
He bound her ankle and stood, picked up his gun, and strode towards the door. “You stay here. I find out what to do with you.” He stepped out into the night.
“He’s leaving us?” Ophelia said.
“You’d rather he stayed? I don’t know if you noticed, but he isn’t one for light conversation.”
“Who knows how long he’ll be gone. We could freeze. We could starve!”
“Perhaps this isn’t the proper moment, then, to inquire how it is that an American lady’s maid finds herself in the Black Forest after nightfall, tied to a chair in an abandoned hunting lodge?”
“That’s what this is? A hunting lodge?” Ophelia looked around. The glass eyes of all those dead, stuffed critters looked right back. “What are you, a college professor, doing out in the woods after midnight? Strolling around composing sonnets in your head? Odes to the moon?”
“Sonnets and odes are not quite the same thing—”
“Kindly answer the question.”
“I asked you first, you may recall.”
Ophelia felt as steamed as a forgotten teakettle. Worse, she was painfully aware of the way their shoulders were pressed together, and that the feel of his body, the faint scent of his shaving soap were . . . comforting.
“Listen,” she said, “Professor—Professor What’s-Your-Name—”
“Penrose.”
“Professor Penrose. Let’s not waste time splitting hairs but decide how we’re going to get out of this scrape before that mad woodsman comes back. I didn’t like the look in his eye one bit, and goodness knows who he’ll bring back with him.”
“How do I know I can trust you?”
“Trust me? With what?”
“Well, in order to get ourselves unfixed from these chairs, we must work together. I don’t wish to risk you leaving me high and dry.”
“I’m a Yankee. We’re a dependable sort.”
“Ah. Like one of those severe ladies in black bonnets you see in old portraits from the colonies. Ladies who could churn butter with one hand, burp a baby with the other, and read a psalm book with the other?”
“Exactly.” Ophelia had an itchy suspicion he was teasing her. Yes. He was. “Three hands!”
“Three? Forgive me. I must’ve lost count. But, pray tell, how did such an upright young Yankee lady find herself in such a compromising position?”
Ophelia chewed her lip. “All right. I’ll tell you. But only because I’m—well, as a matter of fact, I’m most grateful to you for sticking up for Prue like you did. If it weren’t for you, she’d be in jail in Baden-Baden this minute.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Well,” Ophelia said, “it’s like this: I was out in the castle orchard when Herz caught me.”
“Searching for an apple, like the one that was poisoned? You do realize that that apple needn’t have been picked just before tea yesterday—could it not have been sitting in a pantr
y in the castle for days, even weeks?”
He was a highfalutin tinhorn, wasn’t he?
“I think,” Ophelia said, “Mr. Coop usually picked those apples himself. He always seemed to have some in his pockets. None of the servants got them for him, not that I know of, anyway. As a matter of fact, I was in the orchard looking for footprints to match a—a suspicious shoe I found.”
“Ah. Taking matters into your own hands, then?”
“Prue wouldn’t hurt a fly. I’ve got to get her out of that tower before—” She snapped her mouth shut. She’d almost said, Before Inspector Schubert finds out we’re really actresses. “And you? What were you doing?”
“Following Herz.”
“But why?”
“Scholarly pursuits.” He fell silent.
“Now listen here, professor. You’re clamming up on me, and after I told you everything.” Well, almost everything. “It’s not fair.”
“I study folklore,” he said.
“Everyone in the castle knows that, and let me tell you, if I’d known you could study fairy tales at college, I would’ve gone a long time ago.”
“Fairy tales aren’t for children, and they aren’t trivial.”
Ophelia rolled her eyes in the direction of a stuffed bear’s head. “No?”
“Their careful study takes one to the very heart of how language works. How it is transmitted from generation to generation, how it evolves through the centuries. These tales even allow scholars to track the migration of ancient peoples across Europe.”
Ophelia felt out of her depth. It wasn’t a familiar or pleasant feeling. “But why follow Herz?”
“I had hoped—foolishly, I suppose—that he would lead me to a clue about the cottage and skeleton that were found.”
“Did he?”
“I had the misfortune of stepping into a steel-jawed trap before I could find out.”
Ophelia gasped. “Are you all right?”
“My leg will be bruised.” He paused. “Miss Flax. Your intention is to unmask Homer Coop’s killer.”
“I’m getting Prue out of that tower. And then we’re going straight back to New York.”
