by Sarah Rayne
Greetings were exchanged. Michael’s German turned out to be good but Sister Catherine spoke fairly fluent English with only a slight, rather attractive accent. She and Hilary exchanged the pax, the kiss of peace, and Sister Catherine reached for Michael’s hand and clasped it, bidding him welcome, and hoping the journey had been comfortable.
‘You are Austrian, Sister?’ said Michael, as the little car – probably a small Fiat by the feel and the bounce – drew away from the airport car-park.
‘Hungarian.’ Her voice was soft and gentle, but Hilary caught a hint of ruthlessness beneath. Like a gloved cat. An absurd thought. But her name is Catherine. A Cat in velvet gloves . . . Silk mittens on little vicious claws . . . Hilary pushed the thought down at once. As they drew into the stream of traffic, she was aware that Sister Catherine drove fast but competently. That is how I drove once. Confident and heedless of all danger. Another thought to be pushed down. Think instead of the safety of the cloister walls.
She said, ‘How long have you been in the Order, Sister?’
‘Three years now. I do not have so much dealings with the patients at the moment; I am – you would call it the librarian. It is interesting work because the convent is very old.’ As the Fiat bounced across the city, she pointed out various landmarks.
The former Imperial Palace. The Castle of Schonbrunn. Coffee houses and art galleries. There was a drifting scent of good coffee and croissants and of exhaust fumes and jostling humanity. Michael, tilting his head to catch every nuance, every layer of feeling, thought that the air almost thrummed with music.
Vienna, the City of Music . . . And I cannot see it.
‘The convent is in the Innere Stadt,’ said Sister Catherine, and Hilary noticed that she said ‘the convent’ and not ‘our convent’.
‘Innere Stadt – that is, Inner City?’
‘Inner State,’ said Sister Catherine. ‘It dates back to almost a thousand years. Parts were built on the plague graves of the Middle Ages.’
‘It’s all very beautiful,’ said Hilary, leaning forward to see the crowded streets, trying to describe them to Michael.
‘And that is – oh, surely, the State Opera House! Is it, Sister? An immense building, with equestrian statues and a kind of cloistered walk. I cannot quite see the posters – yes I can, Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte.’
Michael said, ‘I should like very much to attend.’ And thought: but not Zauberflöte with its light-hearted froth and fantasy. Zauberflöte was for the sighted, for happiness and flippancy. If he went to the Vienna State Opera, it should be to hear the dark, haunted Don Giovanni, Mozart’s ravaged creation, arguably his most sombre work, but unquestionably one of his finest.
‘You are fond of music, Mr Devlin?’
‘Very.’
‘A visit to the Opera House could perhaps be arranged.’
‘I should be indebted to you if it could, Sister,’ said Michael, and it was then that Sister Catherine swung the car into a turning off the Karntnerstrasse with its fashionable shops and bustling shoppers, and said, ‘Ahead of us are the spires of St Stephen’s Cathedral. The Convent of St Luke is in the cathedral’s lee.’
Michael felt the darkness of the ancient streets close about them the minute they entered the cathedral’s shadow. It was as if a curtain had come down, or as if they had passed through a dark, low door.
Sister Catherine manoeuvred smoothly down a narrow street with tall buildings on each side, each one huddling closely to its neighbour, most of them with jutting first floors that overhung the street. The road was fairly smooth, maintained by the efficient Viennese, but the pavements were cobbled and uneven. Gothic stone arches spanned the street over their heads, and between the buildings, Hilary glimpsed dark alleys and courtyards with rusting iron lamps hanging over doors. Stone steps led down to cellar doors and gargoyles leered from the stonework. Several of the buildings still bore the strange Ophidian cross which the Knights Templar had taken for their emblem. Hilary received the chill impression of beliefs and worship older than Christianity by far, and of grisly pagan rituals. These ancient buildings had seen murder and martyrdom; their stones were soaked in intrigues and terror and butchery. This is the real Vienna, thought Hilary, looking through the car windows. That other, the lighthearted, music-drenched city is grafted on, it is a thin veil over the true face of the city.
Ahead of them a massive stone arch framed the entrance into the Singerstrasse, and beneath the arch were thick, wrought-iron gates. Hilary caught sight of the convent itself; a massive grey stone building set behind a high wall.
Behind them the sun was setting, bathing the twelfth-century cathedral in rose and pink splendour, but as they passed through the gates, it slid below the horizon and the shadows uncoiled.
Catherine had felt the English journalist’s recoil at the dark narrow streets and the alleys that twisted around the cathedral. He had felt the darkness in the streets of the Innere Stadt and Catherine thought he had felt the darkness within Catherine herself. It had been in the way he had tilted his head to listen when she spoke, and in the sudden stillness that had descended on him. Was he more sensitive because he had lost his sight? Yes, almost certainly.
Something very close to despair threatened her at the knowledge, because she had striven so hard; at times she thought she had wearied Heaven with her pleas. Help me to quench this secret, evil self . . .
She thought she had been four – perhaps she had been younger – when she had become aware of the other little girl, the dark, hungry little girl who lay coiled in her mind.
The little girl was a person of claws and teeth. She liked to hurt people. She liked to make them bleed, and then – this was truly dreadful – she liked to smear the blood into her skin. Just when you least expected it, she would whisper into your ear that wouldn’t it be marvellous, wouldn’t it be exciting to stick a knife into one of the cousins, to see how much they bled; wouldn’t it be thrilling to hear them squeal with pain.
This dark, cruel little girl could be shut out for pretty much most of the time, but it meant you had to concentrate very hard on something else. You had to study a difficult lesson with your hands clapped over your ears, or you had to go running as hard as you could across the gardens at Varanno, which was where Catherine had lived with her parents and her brother Pietro; you had to go running round and round, so fast and so long that at last you flopped down exhausted, and you were too tired to hear anything.
The only time that Catherine never heard or sensed the little girl’s presence was when Pietro came home, because when Pietro was in the house nothing else mattered in the world. All the demons and all the phantoms in Hungary might have gibbered at her bedside and she would not have cared. When Pietro was there nothing bad could happen.
The sisters of St Luke’s Viennese House were looking forward to the arrival of the distinguished English journalist. Reverend Mother had said he was not to be given any special treatment; a room in the small hospice wing and meals served in the guest dining room. Exactly as all of the patients who could walk and feed themselves. But it was very interesting to think that Mr Devlin, who had been at the centre of some of the terrible events in Yugoslavia, was to be with them for a time. Perhaps he might tell them a little of his work? Reverend Mother did not believe in shutting yourself away from the world: how could they pray to the good God for the poor suffering souls fleeing from Bosnia, blessed innocent children made orphans, or Iraqi gunmen killing in the name of their barbaric religion, if they did not know about them? she said. There was no reason why Mr Devlin could not be asked to give them a little talk one evening after Compline.
The convent would make a special intention at Mass for Mr Devlin: Reverend Mother would write it in the little leather-bound diary which was kept in the presbytery for the purpose. It did not do to leave such things to the memory, not when you were no longer as young as you had once been. They would allot the Mass for the day of Mr Devlin’s arrival, which was the Feast of St Micha
el the Archangel and very suitable too.
When she was ten, Catherine discovered the word ‘possession’. It was not a word that people used any longer: ‘Superstition,’ Pietro said when Catherine asked him. ‘There is no such thing, Katerina.’ He regarded her with the dark eyes that could bum with such fervour that you felt as if you were tumbling down and down into his mind. Only then he would smile, and the eyes would become brimful of delight and mischief so that you forgot about falling into minds and remembered about life being fun.
Possession meant the taking over of a soul by a malignant intelligence. It was unthinkable to Catherine that Pietro should ever be wrong about anything, but he was wrong about possession not existing. The Catholic Church knew about possession, and Catherine, fighting the cruel, cold little girl in her mind, knew about it as well.
As she grew up, she understood that she was actually very privileged. Father said so quite often. Mother and the aunts said so even more often. It was only Pietro who had said, ‘Try to escape them, Katerina. Try to leave Varanno as soon as you can.’
But she understood that she had been born into a warm, safe world which she did not have to leave, not even to go away to school, because of the Family being so very wealthy, There was schooling from their own people – ‘Very good schooling,’ Mother once said, rather wistfully, as if she would have liked Catherine’s opportunities. It appeared that when Mother had been a child, learning for girls had not been thought very necessary, although Mother was so beautiful that it probably had not mattered. Catherine did not think she was beautiful, or at least not as beautiful as Mother, but she enjoyed her lessons and she was quite good at them. By the time she entered St Luke’s she could speak and write several languages, including Latin.
The other little girl was very learned indeed. She could speak more languages than Catherine, and she knew about things like alchemy and philosophy and about herbs which you gathered when the moon was full, and about prowling forest creatures. She knew about wars and invasions, although she called the countries by names that Catherine thought were no longer used. She had uncles who went to war and killed their enemies by hacking them to pieces, bellowing with delight as they did it. Sometimes they sewed their victims’ severed heads back on and paraded them before the people, roaring with mirth. There were aunts who took what seemed to be dozens of lovers and sometimes murdered them while they slept. Catherine could taste the blood and the cruelty and the barbarism. She could feel the girl’s greedy enjoyment of it all.
It became harder to shut the girl out. Catherine began to know what she looked like: there was not a sudden flare of illumination like when you switched on a light, but there was a slow wiping away of a smoky, smeary looking-glass, so that after a while, the face watching you from the silvery depths got clearer and clearer.
The girl was small and pale with huge burnt-pitch eyes that could smoulder with hunger. She liked being pale – she tried all kinds of things that made Catherine shudder to make her skin even paler. There were experiments with animals: the nerves and livers and hearts pounded into a paste, moistened with blood. There were plants gathered beneath a gibbous moon. She went into the forests by night and squatted in horrid dark log cabins with withered crones who chanted strange rituals and burned belladonna leaves and datura. There was one wizened old creature called Darvulia, whom the little girl listened to particularly. Catherine heard the chanting and smelt the blood and the smoke and sometimes it made her so ill that she had to leap out of bed and run to the basin on the dressing table to be sick. Several times she did not get up in time and was sick in the bed, but she always mopped it up and put on fresh sheets and burned the sicked ones in the old wash-house, so nobody ever knew.
The girl liked to dress in white. When she went on visits, she sometimes wore a scarlet velvet cloak over her white gowns. She was going to be married to a rich man – Catherine thought the word intended was either prince or count. It would mean riches and castles. The man had already been selected, and the girl did not know the man very well, but it did not matter. He was a great warrior, which was important, and he was very wealthy, which was even more important.
As Catherine grew up, the girl grew up as well. Varanno was filled with parties of Catherine’s cousins who came to stay; there were picnics and expeditions in the surrounding countryside. The hunting of foxes or the occasional stray wolf. Long winter nights when they would bank up the fires in the stone hall and dance and drink wine, or tell stories and play word games. Catherine was to understand later how narrow and how stifling it had all been, but from within it had been safe and warm.
The girl was with her all along. It got harder to shut her out. She jeered at the boy cousins who fumbled at Catherine’s breasts when they tried to kiss her, and whispered how much more fun it was to touch ladies than men which Catherine found vaguely disturbing. If you were a lady yourself, you did not want to kiss and touch other ladies. That was not what happened.
Oh yes it is, my poor innocent Cat, oh yes it is . . .
In the study, which was Catherine’s father’s especial province, hung a small, rather dark portrait, not very skilfully executed – Catherine had been taught about Masters such as Titian and Tintoretto and about Raphael and she knew that this unknown painter’s talent had been only modest. She had never particularly looked at the portrait, in the way that you did not particularly look at things you grew up with.
But when she was fourteen, she suddenly saw that the subject was the girl – her girl. Her girl who dressed in white and liked to hear about blood and pain, and who whispered that it was more exciting to prowl the moonlit forests and talk with the ancient learned women than to play at amateur theatricals; more fun to touch breasts and stroke smooth pale thighs than be mauled by horrid boys with their coarse skins and the bulging swellings in their trousers. The cloven was more exciting by far than the crested. For a long time Catherine did not understand this.
The portrait showed, in one corner, the single letter ‘E’ constructed out of three cruel teeth embedded in a vertical jawbone and encircled with a coiling dragon. It was no odder, no grislier than a great many emblems and escutcheons that belonged to any one of the once-noble families who lived out here. But to Catherine it was disquieting.
The girl in the portrait was young and slender, with extraordinary white skin and huge, burnt-pitch eyes. Her hair was drawn back beneath what Catherine thought was called a jewelled snood, but it looked to be silky black. There was a rich full mouth – was it sensual or sensuous? Catherine thought later that at fourteen one did not know the difference. There was the stiff white coif and the full sleeves and tight jewelled bodice of the sixteenth century.
She spent hours standing beneath the portrait, looking into the dark eyes, trying to decide whether there was cruelty or passion in them, both of which she thought might have been understandable emotions, or whether there was simply a dark, cold void, which was somehow the eeriest thing of all.
The portrait was anonymous, but the lady had a name: she had been called Elizabeth.
But Catherine’s father, asked a carefully casual question, said she had been known in her day as Die Blutgräfin.
The Blood Countess.
Chapter Three
Hilary was horrified to discover a seething jealousy when Reverend Mother said that Sister Catherine would go with Michael to Herr Istvan’s clinic. It was plainly a sensible course of action; Hilary did not know Vienna and she had only a thin smattering of German. Sister Catherine could drive Michael to the clinic on the eastern outskirts of the city and, if necessary, act as interpreter.
The instinctive response, ‘Michael is my responsibility!’ could not be uttered. Hilary bit her lip and said that it was a practical plan, and in the meantime it would be a happiness to accede to Reverend Mother’s request to give a little talk to the sisters about the English House and their methods. Perhaps she might use the library to make her notes? She understood that it was a library of great excellence,
she said in her careful but rather rusty French, which was Reverend Mother’s native language and which Hilary was trying to use as much as possible from courtesy and to polish up the rustiness.
Sister Catherine was friendly but quiet on the brief journey to Istvan’s clinic, and Michael realised with surprise that he was comparing her with Hilary. Hilary would have enjoyed this journey; she would have liked seeing more of Vienna. Michael would have enjoyed her pleasure.
Laszlo Istvan’s clinic gave the impression of great cleanliness and efficiency, and Michael remembered that the Austrians had more than a dash of Teuton in their blood. The examination on Istvan’s curved couch was no better and no worse than those he had undergone in London. You could not see the glinting instruments that peered into your eyes and your brain, and so you ought not to flinch from them.
But Michael did flinch; he felt the brush of the cold steel instruments and he felt Istvan’s breath brush his cheek as the man bent over him. Clean and fresh and spearminty, as if he might have eaten something strongly flavoured for lunch and had brushed his teeth to remove any lingering offensiveness, or at the least sucked a peppermint. The small courtesy pleased Michael. Dentists and doctors and hairdressers ought never to have halitosis. A surprising number did.
Michael’s German was good, although he was unfamiliar with medical terms, but Istvan turned out to have a working knowledge of English. What he said was clear in any language.
A very small chance of restoring some sight. Istvan would not lift Mr Devlin’s hopes, and in fact the process he had in mind was little different to the English methods.
Laser surgery would be used, of course, as it always was with this type of injury. Herr Istvan explained the course the operation would take, becoming a little technical in his explanation about the prolongations of brain tissue into the eyes, so that Michael lost him once or twice. But the message was clear: only a very small chance of success. But worth the attempt. Herr Istvan did not, it was to be understood, urge hopeless cases into his clinic purely for the money—
