Blood Ritual

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘A good friendship, that,’ said Reverend Mother, who believed that while the Rule forbidding unhealthy intimacy must be observed, there was nothing wrong in honest friendship. ‘Sister Thérèse came to us at such a young age that she knows little of the outside world and Catherine, who came later, little of monastic life. They’ll give one another balance.’

  ‘Sister Catherine has a remarkable command of languages,’ said Sister Marie-Claire. ‘And her Latin is truly scholarly. I wonder—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wonder if we might assign her to the library and the archives for a time? She could translate some of our older manuscripts because, as you know, Reverend Mother, there is so much that the monks left behind them, and we have never had the time or the resources to translate or transcribe any of it.’

  ‘Jesuits,’ said Reverend Mother in an expressionless voice.

  ‘Well, yes. But Sister Catherine is too intelligent to be diverted by any specious arguments.’

  ‘That is true, Sister. And I have never believed in blind obedience.’ Reverend Mother frowned, and Sister Marie-Claire had the sudden impression that Reverend Mother did not want Catherine Bathory to enter the convent’s library. This was so extraordinary as to be scarcely believable. But one did not question a superior, and so Sister Marie-Claire waited, and at length Reverend Mother said, ‘You are right. It would be good work for her.’

  ‘It would.’ Sister Marie-Claire went off, pleased to have recommended such a devout, hard-working novice. Sister Catherine had some deep sadness in her life, of course, this was apparent, but perhaps she might one day be able to talk about it. Nobody would pry, but the nuns would be there to listen if the time came. Already a degree of trust had established itself between Catherine and their good Sister Thérèse. All the same, it was odd that Reverend Mother had seemed almost afraid of letting Catherine into the library.

  It was not, of course, possible to refuse the important and rather flattering task assigned to one, or even to question it.

  Catherine, listening carefully to Reverend Mother and Sister Marie-Claire, had to bite back the words: but I do not want such luxury! Because it would be luxury indeed to work in the quiet old library with the rows upon rows of ancient books and manuscripts. The novices were not permitted to enter the library, which was tacitly reserved for the more senior nuns, but Catherine had sometimes paused outside the low oak door and thought: if only.

  She bowed her head and accepted the work, and acknowledged Reverend Mother’s murmured blessing, but inside she was crying that she wanted the hard, sometimes distasteful work in the infirmary; she wanted to scourge her soul of Elizabeth’s dark taint and she wanted to scrub and wash and feel cold and exhaustion. It could not be said.

  The sun was setting as she entered the library, and Catherine saw that the windows overlooked the old cobbled square outside. Golden rays slanted in, lying across the old polished floor in diamond shapes, picking out the goldleaf lettering on some of the books, and the rich calf and vellum of the bindings. Catherine stood for a moment in the doorway, letting the scents and the calm touch her. A beautiful room. A room so reminiscent of Franz-Josef’s library at Varanno that homesickness, sharp and hurting, welled up without warning. She moved forward and, as she did so, felt a stirring, an oily coalescing of the shadows.

  Something waiting for me.

  And there, over the fireplace, lit by the dying sun, was the carved outline of a letter ‘E’, up-ended to represent a wolf’s jawbone with three jutting teeth, all of it encircled by a coiled serpent.

  The ancient Bathory emblem.

  For a moment bewildered incomprehension blurred her. mind, and the library tilted and swum before her eyes. And then, without warning, it fell back into sharp relief, and Catherine understood.

  This had been Elizabeth’s Viennese town-house.

  Chapter Seventeen

  For several dizzying minutes, the darkness enveloped Catherine, warm and familiar and beckoning. Scarlet-streaked night. And the silken kiss of the blood. God help me, it is starting again.

  Elizabeth’s presence was all about her and the months of careful devotion might never have been. The jagged lightning was cleaving her mind again, showing the cascading blood beyond . . .

  She supposed she had known vaguely that Elizabeth possessed a house in Vienna; she had certainly known that at times in the year a lavish cortége had threaded its way down from Csejthe and the Carpathian Mountains, stopping at various inns on the way, finally coming in to the old city through the ancient Stubenthur gate. And of course this was what her father had meant that day at Varanno. ‘I believe an ancestor stayed there,’ he had said. Not an ancestor. An ancestress.

  It would have been almost preordained that Elizabeth would come to Vienna’s Old Quarter. She would have been drawn to these streets, to the Blutgasse itself, the sinister Blood Alley with the dark alleys and twisting stairs, and the echoes of the bloody slaughter of the Knights Templar. Thirteen hundred and something had it been? Had Elizabeth felt the pain and heard the screams reverberating down the years? Did she once sit here as I am sitting here, looking out into the square?

  She forced her mind to concentrate on the task in hand; on the transcribing and cataloguing of the haphazard collection of books and manuscripts and diaries; on the privately bound sermons and essays. Elizabeth is on the other side of a wall and the wall has iron spikes on the top. She cannot get over it. Remember that, hold on to that. Concentrate on laying out a work area at the leather-topped table; on setting out pens and a large lined pad for notes. Good.

  And after her initial panic, the task assigned her was fascinating. After the months of physical drudgery in the infirmary and the kitchens, Catherine felt her mind being stretched, and it was a good feeling. She worked methodically through most of that first day, absorbed and intent, liking the sensation of touching the lives of people who had lived here before her; enjoying the beautiful script of the monks who had used the house as their Order’s headquarters until the turn of the century. There would be all kinds of history in the monks’ careful records: household accounts, records of items bought or sold. What the historians called primary source material. Perhaps there would be letters with references to Viennese life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Marvellous. It might be possible to have some of the documents printed and bound for private circulation within the Order, in the way that she and Sister Thérèse were hoping to have their work on St Teresa of Avila printed and circulated. She would ask Sister Marie-Claire if Reverend Mother might consider this. She placed the monks’ records to one side.

  The library was quiet and calm and Catherine relaxed her guard. The tainted years when Elizabeth had lived here belonged to another world. She had been foolish to panic. Elizabeth had been here, as she had been at Varanno, at Csejthe, at all her other castles. But she was not here now. Probably the monks who came after her, and then their own Order of St Luke, had made such strong imprints that Elizabeth’s darkness had been dispersed. This was very heartening. Catherine reached for a fresh batch of papers from a top shelf and made a new heading for her notes.

  The noon Angelus bell broke her concentration and she went obediently into the refectory for the midday dinner. It was like coming up out of smoky green water, and Catherine, eating the stewed lamb with rice, felt herself blinking as if she had come from a darkened room into brilliant sunlight.

  The sun was setting behind St Stephen’s Cathedral, showering the old quiet library with a mellow, golden glow, when Catherine at last leaned back, massaging her aching neck. Had the bell sounded yet for Vespers? She thought she would have heard it if it had.

  Four-and-a-half centuries ago, Elizabeth had been here. With Ferencz? Yes, Ferencz would have wanted to show his beautiful, arrogant young wife off to Austrian Society. Catherine thought they had not been married for very long when he brought her to Vienna.

  Ferencz had feared Elizabeth and he had not really understood her; in those fir
st years she had given him no children, which was a sadness for a man with lands and estates to be inherited. But she was diligent in swallowing philtres and potions to cure her infertility, and she was remarkably knowledgeable about such things.

  Ferencz had managed to put from his mind the rather distasteful incident when he had come upon the Countess punishing one of her ladies by smearing the poor creature’s naked body with honey and tying her to a tree, and then watching as the woman’s body became a heaving mass of ants and flies.

  ‘The creature was caught stealing,’ Elizabeth had said off-handedly, and Ferencz, who liked a quiet life when he was at home, had accepted this. Serving wenches were no concern of his, except to tumble in bed when the mood took him, although he was not overly fond of the pastime.

  But for all his Lady’s strangeness, he liked to attend imperial receptions and Court functions with her at his side. He liked to see her at the head of the long table in the panelled banqueting hall at their house in Vienna. They entertained all the dignitaries of the day; the Palatine, Gyorgy Thurzo, came frequently, and the old Emperor Maximilian. It was well known that Thurzo greatly admired Elizabeth. But there would have been no impropriety, of course. Elizabeth did not much care for that side of marriage.

  Elizabeth had been sorry to leave her beautiful cruel cage behind in Csejthe, but there would be diversions to be found in Vienna.

  One of the diversions was leading Gyorgy Thurzo on and then rejecting him. He had a man’s grunting desires and a man’s coarse protruberances. Ugly beyond bearing, like great swollen warts. Like a hanging, withered tongue.

  She eyed instead the slender perfumed ladies who graced her table. The Turks and the Eastern pashas whom Ferencz’s armies fought knew the pleasures of lying with their own sex; the men had a saying for it: a woman for duty, but a boy for pleasure. Elizabeth, greedily eyeing the patrician ladies who came to dine, had her own version: an aristocrat for the body but a peasant for the blood.

  She entertained them all lavishly and regally; ambassadors and dukes and princes. Sometimes there were churchmen. It amused her to seat Catholic cardinals and Protestant ecclesiastics together and watch their subtle, cruel sparring. It was like putting two spiders in a cup and watching them fight.

  The house thrummed with life and noise and shone with the flames of hundreds of candles when guests came. The scents of good food and spiced wine and burning fruitwood filled the rooms, and there would frequently be music from gypsy orchestras, or acrobats or flamenco dancers. It was splendid and colourful. Elizabeth moved through it all, imperiously beautiful, garbed in her favourite white or sometimes scarlet, frequently with a black, fur-lined cloak slung about her shoulders. Her jewels were always magnificent: pigeons’-blood rubies and garnets and seedpearls and jewelled snoods for her hair. Married ladies were expected to dress more richly than single girls, and it was fun to issue orders to the pale, weak-eyed sempstresses. She had lately discovered the pleasure of dragging them down to the cellars if they sewed a seam or a hem crookedly, and using their own needles on them. Sometimes they took a whole week to die.

  She spent hours in front of her looking-glasses, searching for the first signs of ageing; flinging herself into a tantrum if there was the slightest hint that her white skin had been touched by wind or sun.

  ‘Nothing, madame,’ said Illona, peering over Elizabeth’s shoulder.

  ‘No trace of it, madame,’ said Dorko, her face swimming into view, so that the three of them were reflected in the glass: Elizabeth’s dazzling beauty at the centre. It made Elizabeth feel better – it made her feel safer – to see how Dorko and Illona were ageing: how their skins were wrinkling and drying, and their hair turning thin and dull.

  And beneath the silks and the furs, the jewels and the formality, the hunger gnawed at her as fiercely as ever. Beneath the perfumed velvets and satins, she was for ever assessing, selecting, discarding. Even with Ferencz home, there was no reason not to satisfy herself. An aristocrat for the body, a peasant for the blood. The one hunger fed the other. The Viennese house was not her beloved Csejthe, but it had deep, far-reaching cellars where plump peasants could be taken. Ferencz did not hear if she stole through the slumbering house, a candle held aloft, and slipped between the sheets of another’s bed. It was sweet beyond imagination to feel the silken skin of some nobleman’s daughter, to feel pointed breasts instead of coarse-haired masculine chests. Fingers and tongues could do all the things that a man’s ugly genitals could. Afterwards, she would go to the underground rooms, the love juices drying between her thighs, holding the skirts of her silken robe about her ankles, and see what Dorko or Illona had locked into the cellar for her.

  The cellars were deep and dark and no one ever heard. If the girls screamed, their lips could be sewn up with iron needles. If they struggled, their flailing hands could be stilled by red-hot needles under the nails. It was an exquisite pleasure to let the thin, agonised blood drip from fingertips, and to smear it over face and neck. If the creatures tried to run away, the undersides of their feet could be ironed with white-hot flat-irons to give them scarlet-soled shoes. Dorko and Illona could be trusted to get rid of the bodies very early the next morning, before anyone was about.

  Catherine, seated motionless at the leather-topped table, no longer seeing the manuscripts and the folios of a later age, felt Elizabeth’s presence and Elizabeth’s hungers filling her mind. Like pouring water from one jug to another. Elizabeth was very close; she was on the other side of the wall that Catherine had built; she was watching silently. Catherine could almost see her great dark eyes peering out of the shadows.

  And if she once finds a breach in the defences I have constructed, she will be with me.

  She will wind her claws about my mind and my soul and the killings will begin all over again.

  Dorko and Illona had spent a great deal of time preparing for the Lady’s banquet tonight, chuckling hoarsely as they reminded one another of all the other banquets held here.

  But tonight there would be no dukes or cardinals at the table. The Master had left to fight the Turks again, and tonight the guests would be of a very different order.

  Tonight the Lady would don her scarlet mantle . . .

  The entire household had turned out to see the Count’s departure; cheering and waving from the windows, running and scurrying about the courtyard, pleased to be attached to such an important warrior but secretly relieved at bidding farewell to the rowdy entourage, which made a great deal of work for everyone. The Emperor had commanded the Count to fight against Islam again, everyone knew that. The Carpathian Mountains provided a natural defence for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but you could not be too careful, not when you were dealing with Turks, nasty marauding things. The Count always went off with a promptitude that told his household a very great deal. He was still a little afraid of his Lady, of course; even after eight years he still feared the strange, imperious creature he had married. It was a relief to him not to have to share her bed.

  It was a relief to Dorko as well, because it was Dorko who had to prepare the fertility philtres, mixing the Turkish jasmine oil, slyly sent to the Lady by her cousin Sigismond of Transylvania, and blending into it the bodily emissions of the Master, taken from his bedsheets. It would have been distasteful work to anyone but Dorko, who enjoyed mumbling over the horrid stale juices and slipping the philtre into the Master’s wine. Once the Lady had given birth to a son or two, none of it would be needed, but for the time being it was as well to help things along by adding a bit of a thrust to the Count’s lance, although it was necessary to be discreet about it.

  But, for tonight, the two women had their orders, and they would obey them to the letter. Ah, the Lady had enjoyed her oval cage, built by the cringing blacksmith at Csejthe; Dorko and Illona had enjoyed it as well.

  They had laughed about what was going to happen tonight, and they had enjoyed gathering up the guests. The pretty, feckless daughters of Viennese artisans and chandlers and apothecari
es. Service in a Countess’s castle, they had all been told; easy pleasant tasks in the still-room or even the bedchamber. The care of beautiful gowns and cloaks and furs. Come inside, my dears. . .

  And now there were nearly sixty of them, all safely locked inside the long, rather dim room on the house’s eastern side. All bidden to seat themselves at the long, carefully laid tables, and partake of the food and the wine set out for them.

  But the wine was drugged to a nicety; it would dull the creatures’ wits and blur their reactions, and at sunset Dorko and Illona would close the shutters and lock and bolt the doors.

  The Lady would enter and fall upon her prey.

  The housemaid’s cupboard in CrnPrag was cold and dank. Catherine stretched her cramped limbs and lifted her head, listening. Above her head was a narrow slit of window; she had watched the sliver of light turn pale as the day progressed. There had been sounds of life within the great old mansion: people coming and going, the chink of crockery from the nearby kitchens. Ordinary, homely sounds. They ought to have been reassuring; they ought to have told her that this was a normal house – an institution certainly – but normal. A place where people prepared food and clattered crockery and called to one another as they went about their work. At midday there was the scent of something savoury cooking, and the hunger juices filled her mouth, so that she turned on the tap over the sink cautiously, and drank water from her cupped hands.

  Several times she caught the sound of the creatures in the cells screeching, and she shuddered and automatically murmured a prayer. The thought, At least I can still pray! touched her mind comfortingly.

  Even at the very blackest of times, she had been able to pray. Even when she left the library – Elizabeth’s library – that first night, wrapping herself in a thick dark cloak and going stealthily out through the little garden door which the nuns seldom used. Even then she had murmured the Mea Culpa.