Blood Ritual

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘Might they really follow me?’

  ‘The odds are they won’t bother,’ said Michael. ‘The odds are that I’m being neurotic, simply because it’s you.’ Had that broken down the barrier? He thought it had. After a moment he said, very gently. ‘But will you let me be neurotic? To please me, will you go back to Vienna and stay behind locked doors for a few days?’

  ‘Sister Clothilde’s locking-up round would keep out anyone,’ said Hilary, and Michael smiled and hoped she had not picked up any of the bitterness he was feeling. It was agonising to find that a houseful of nuns could give Hilary better protection than he could. But he said, ‘We’ll have coffee now, shall we, and then ask Tobias to get a taxi to take you to the station in Debreczen. I’ll come with you and then back here in the taxi. Once you’re on the train stay with other people all the time.’

  ‘A carriage with several others in it,’ said Hilary, who was not really believing any of this, but saw the argument.

  ‘Well they’re usually open carriages these days. That shows how long you’ve been in the cloisters, my girl,’ said Michael. ‘But if you don’t like the look of any of your travelling companions lock yourself in the loo or the guard’s van or something. Get a porter to get you a taxi at the other end, and take—’

  Hilary said, ‘I know what comes next. “Not the first cab in the rank or the second, but the third”. Conan Doyle’s advice.’

  ‘I suppose you could be given worse. Will you ring me here when you reach Vienna station? And then again from the Convent?’

  ‘Even if it’s midnight when I get there?’

  ‘Even if it’s the end of the world,’ said Michael.

  The calls came through faithfully, and Michael took them in Tobias’s little coffee room, where he had asked Tobias to join him.

  Hilary sounded perfectly all right. She reported that the journey had been uneventful and in fact rather interesting, and a porter had been helpful over the matter of a taxi at Vienna station.

  ‘Not the first and not the second but the third.’

  Sister Clothilde had sat up to let her in as arranged and had made a pot of tea, which had been unexpected because to be drinking tea at midnight was the height of decadence in monastic circles. And now she was locked away from the world and its villains.

  ‘Stay that way, my love.’ Michael said it softly, but he knew she had picked it up. ‘Until we find out what’s going on.’

  ‘Tobias will go with you?’

  ‘He will.’ Michael smiled, recalling Tobias’s complete absorption in the story and his instant assent.

  At the other end of the phone Hilary said, ‘And you’ll find Catherine?’

  ‘If she’s there. I won’t forget her. Or Pietro.’

  ‘You’re storming the battlements of CrnPrag, aren’t you?’ She sounded sleepy but amused. There was absolutely no reason for Michael to worry about her.

  He said, ‘Storming CrnPrag with the blast of war blowing in my ears.’

  ‘Goodnight, Michael.’

  ‘Goodnight, my love.’

  Chapter Thirty

  Reverend Mother was pleased to see Sister Hilary and to hear that Mr Devlin had remained in Debreczen, but she eyed Hilary thoughtfully. She would not let her thoughts show, of course, but it did not take a mystic or a visionary to see that something had passed between those two. Reverend Mother hoped it was not what she feared, but even forty-five years in God’s service did not give one any especial optimism where human nature was concerned, and Mr Devlin was extremely attractive. Reverend Mother had been conscious of it herself: a lifetime of celibacy did not stop you from recognising these things.

  She explained that there had been a telephone call from Varanno and it appeared that Sister Catherine was to stay a little longer. There had apparently been some confusion about the travel arrangements – Reverend Mother had not inquired too closely into what had actually taken place, because it was none of her concern. But the week’s leave of absence had been extended in view of Pietro Bathory’s continuing illness, and they were all praying for him of course – tomorrow’s Conventual Mass was to include a special intention in his name and all was in God’s hands. And, said Reverend Mother, briskly donning her administrative persona, since Sister Hilary had returned earlier than planned perhaps she would help them by taking on a little work in the library during Sister Catherine’s absence.

  She was glad to see that the habit of years held; whatever might have taken place during the vaguely confused events of the last few days, the ingrained obedience was quite plainly still there. Sister Hilary accepted her new duties automatically, which was exactly as it should be; life had to go on, even though hearts might be bruised.

  Hilary, acceding to the request that was really an order, felt safe inside the convent. There was comfort in knowing what was expected of you, and there was reassurance in the gentle mechanism that spun the convent’s day. It was a mechanism that she was very used to: it was compounded of prayer and meditation and study, and of orderly duties in the convent itself or the infirmary wing. There were no disturbing, reckless young men who got under your armour and stirred up feelings you had not known you possessed. St Luke’s Order adhered to a strict pattern, with each House following the same structure, so that, except for the different language, Hilary thought she might almost have been in the Hampshire Convent again. The days here were exactly as they had been at home: you rose at five o’clock and read the Office for the Day, and then heard the conventual Mass. For the trained nuns there was work in the infirmary; for the others there was the running of any large house. Food had to be prepared and served; laundry had to be dealt with, the vegetable gardens had to be tended. Each nun kept her own room clean, of course, but there was the cleaning of the communal rooms: studies and music rooms and interview rooms for patients and their families. There was correspondence to be answered and account books to be kept and balanced. This was done here by the young Sister Thérèse, who had been working on a literary project with Catherine involving the life of Teresa of Avila. It was exactly like the convent at home, where two of Hilary’s colleagues had collaborated on a book about St Luke’s work with the sick which the British and Foreign Bible Society had printed and circulated.

  The Vienna House had even the same raggle-taggle queue of tramps who came to the side door at noon every day. The nuns kept a stricter rota here than in England, with even Reverend Mother taking a turn, saying, Hadn’t Our Lord Himself fed the needy with His own hands? Hilary had grinned to think of Sister Veronica spooning out stew to tramps, but Reverend Mother did it with great panache and appeared to think it a very valuable exercise indeed.

  ‘Those men have some remarkable philosophies,’ she said. ‘I learn an astonishing amount from them. Most interesting.’ She refused to listen when Sister Clothilde said that the cost of doling out hot dinners every day was becoming alarming, even when you used the cheapest cuts of meat and threw in as many root vegetables as you could to plump it out. Sister Clothilde was as charitable as anyone, but she did not approve of feeding idle layabouts who could very likely find honest work to do somewhere, even if it was only sweeping the streets or emptying dustbins. But alms-giving was an integral part of any Christian institution, and the tradition of a midday dinner queue was one that had been observed for many years by the Order, and so Sister Margaret who oversaw the sculleries always made sure that there was a simmering cauldron of stew and a separate steel urn of the strong tea that the men liked.

  The queue formed every day, coinciding with the chiming of the noon Angelus bell.

  Within the grey, subterranean world of the homeless, it was agreed that the chiming of St Luke’s midday bell gave shape to a shapeless life. You might be sunk in torpor or the hag-haunted sleep of cheap raw alcohol, but while you were in the city the bell would always penetrate your consciousness. You would rouse yourself and you would cobble your mind and your body together to be sure to get to St Luke’s in time for your portion of h
ot, filling stew and your mug of tea. Nobody who stood on the steps of St Luke’s ever cavilled at the tough mutton or belly pork that flavoured the stew; nobody certainly felt at all deprived on Fridays, which the devout sisters still counted as a fasting day, despite Vatican II. On Fridays there were usually good solid fishcakes, or even what Reverend Mother, who was French, called ‘bouillabaisse’, which was a fancy name for fish stew.

  Sometimes the sisters wanted a job of work doing, which nobody ever actually called payment, but which could probably be regarded in that light. Nobody ever jibbed at this; it was always some very simple task, something that the sisters could not manage themselves, something requiring strength. It was a source of amusement to the raggle-taggle gentlemen of the road that it was nearly always when the sharp-tongued Sister Clothilde was on dinner duty that they were asked to perform these small tasks.

  ‘It gives them a sense of dignity,’ Sister Clothilde said firmly to Reverend Mother. ‘It teaches them independence.’

  ‘And it gets our firewood chopped and our trees felled,’ said Reverend Mother urbanely, and Sister Clothilde looked up suspiciously, because you could never be quite sure whether or not Reverend Mother was essaying a gentle joke against you.

  ‘None of them looks as if they’ve an ounce of strength left in their poor starved bodies,’ declared Sister Margaret, who itched to drop every one of the down-and-outs into hot baths and comb the lice from them and scrub away the stench of drink.

  But between them, there was usually one or two who could wield an axe or shift a heavy piece of furniture.

  There was one today; a new face in the queue, a bit younger than most of them, and certainly not as worn. He had with him a long canvas bag with carrying handles, the kind used for workmen’s tools, and the stalwarts glanced at him a bit warily. You sometimes got interlopers; sons – very occasionally daughters – of the rich, who thought it was fun to pretend to be poor and homeless for a few days. Once or twice there had been people from newspapers who wanted to write about the injustices of a city that harboured so many homeless, and who used expressions like ‘unfair distribution of wealth’ and ‘oppression of the working classes’. The rag-tags had not much interest in these matters, but they were always pleased to talk because you could usually turn this kind of thing to your advantage.

  But the newcomer did not talk about injustice or oppression. He was rather quiet, although he was very interested in the stories about the convent: about how it had been altered and added to over the years; how the infirmary wing was across the courtyard and the sisters’ quarters in the old part of the house which you could see from here. They were glad to show off their superior knowledge and point out these different parts to him. They were pleased to identify the nuns for him, pointing out Reverend Mother in front of whom you had to be watchful of your manners, and Sister Margaret who cooked the grandest stew ever and was less severe, and Sister Thérèse who was a bit offhand on account of being young and shy. There was even a young English nun visiting the convent; the rag-tags described her to the newcomer who found it all very interesting.

  After a few days they began to think of him as one of themselves. He was no trouble; he was well-mannered and liked to listen to their tales, and he did not try to push his way to the front of the queue ahead of the elders of the community.

  On the morning when Sister Clothilde was on dinner duty and asked for help in moving an old marble sink out of the sculleries, he was the first to volunteer.

  Ladislas Bathory placed the canvas bag on the stone floor and stood in the convent’s scullery and felt a wild surge of triumph. I am inside.

  It was annoying that Pál and Anna’s people had let the English girl escape, but at least they knew who she was. Ladislas had listened very closely to the description of Hilary and he thought he would recognise her. She would have to be silenced of course, and as soon as possible. They could not risk her telling the police what she had seen inside Csejthe.

  Stefan had been cautious; he had asked whether they could be sure of Hilary’s identity, but Ladislas had thought they could.

  ‘She was driving the car that brought Cat from Vienna,’ he said. ‘And according to Bianca she took it from Varanno to follow Cat—’

  He stopped, and Stefan said, ‘I suppose you do know what you are doing over Bianca, do you?’

  ‘Jealous, father?’

  ‘Not in the least. But make sure you don’t find that your little intrigue turns about on you,’ said Stefan.

  ‘The biter bit?’

  The grin deepened, but Stefan said seriously, ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  The intrigue with Bianca was immensely satisfying to Ladislas, but the thought of finding and silencing Hilary was unexpectedly arousing.

  But overriding the thought of Hilary, even overriding the necessity to find a hiding place until nightfall, was another emotion, one which he had not expected. I am in Elizabeth’s house. I am in the place where she moved through Viennese society like a dark, beautiful she-wolf, and where she danced and presided over banquets and donned a mantle of conventionality. And then, when the guests had gone, she had cast aside the mask and the real Elizabeth had looked out of her eyes.

  Ladislas finished moving the old cracked sink into an outhouse and, without looking back, crossed an inner courtyard and entered the central portion of the house. He stood for a moment, savouring the scents of polish and old wood.

  As he went along the long corridors with the oak floors – every inch gleaming with true conventual fastidiousness – he encountered what were clearly patients from the infirmary side. Most had nuns with them, helping them to walk rather falteringly or pushing them in wheelchairs. They all looked up with varying degrees of curiosity but they were all wholly unsuspicious.

  Ladislas smiled openly at them all and said, ‘Good afternoon to you.’ And walked purposefully on, carrying the long canvas bag at his side. None of them was Hilary.

  He did not feel in the least nervous. Everyone he encountered would assume he was a workman with a job to do. Plumbing or electricity. But he was aware that he trod a thin line; at any minute someone might demand an explanation of his presence.

  It was believed within the Family that if the Countess walked then she walked in two places only: Csejthe Castle which she had loved for its wild desolation and its thick, muffling walls, and this house where she had entertained the glittering pageantry of the Hapsburg Court, and where she had held her infamous blood-drenched banquet for the sixty serving girls. Ladislas, walking warily through his ancestress’s house, thought: if you are here, Elizabeth, guide me to a hiding place.

  He found it with an ease that was very nearly sinister. Are you showing me the way, Elizabeth? Half hidden at the end of a corridor on the first floor, there was a small, tucked-away stair, twisting up and up and round, finally debouching at the very top of the house, directly beneath the roof.

  It was stiflingly hot and there were discarded pieces of furniture, broken-backed chairs, desks rotten with woodworm. Bundles of old curtains and trunks of rat-nibbled papers. Tiny scuttering pawmarks lay in the dust: mice or even rats. But the dust was undisturbed by human footprints and Ladislas smiled. Absolutely right. Plainly no one had come up here for a very long time. He would not mind the rats and he would be safe until the convent slept and he could go in search of Hilary. If he crept partway down the stairs he would probably be able to hear the nightly locking-up ritual. The smile curved his lips as he remembered how the tramps had been so eager to impart their knowledge about the convent’s customs.

  He wondered if Elizabeth had truly guided him up here. Would she have wanted him to be undetected? Would she have cared if he had been caught? He thought she had been a cold-hearted creature as far as her children were concerned, impatient and intolerant. But the gerons at Csejthe told how, despite her lack of interest, her children had stood by her. The husbands of Anna and Orsolya and also Pál himself had all spoken for her at the end, petitioning for
leniency for their mother. The Bathorys had closed ranks, as they always did in times of trouble. Ladislas knew as much about Elizabeth as any of the Family; he had spent a great deal of time with Anna and Pál, listening to their memories, and he knew that there had been many occasions when Elizabeth’s children, with their respective spouses, had stayed at Csejthe Castle and in this house.

  But there was nothing to suggest that Elizabeth had ever possessed any normal maternal instinct: Anna and Pál spoke of her brilliance and her dazzling looks and her defiant courage, but they were evasive about their relationship with her and there was nothing to show if Elizabeth had welcomed, or even wanted, the visits of her children.

  It was irritating when your family descended on you almost without warning, certainly without asking. Elizabeth had other things to do than make preparations to welcome her daughter Anna and Anna’s husband, Miklos Zrinyi, to Csejthe. It was autumn, when the nights were long and the evenings were languorous and tinged with indigo and violet, and when the twilight was scented with woodsmoke. It was not a time to devote several weeks to the entertainment of a daughter you hardly knew and a son-in-law who disliked and feared you: Elizabeth had no illusions about Miklos Zrinyi’s opinion of her. And autumn at Csejthe was the time when the wild woodland sorcery of the mountains was at its strongest, and when the forest witches could yoke new daemons and persuade familiars to yield up new spells. She wanted to prowl the mountainside and go into the forests, finding out the old witches with their remarkable knowledge. She wanted new and more potent spells.

  She was nearing fifty now, and although her looking-glass assured her that she was as white and as firm-skinned as she had been at twenty, ugly doubts sometimes brushed her mind.

  There had been an occasion recently where a woman, the mother of one of the creatures who had been butchered at the banquet in the Blutgasse, had flung herself in front of the Countess’s carriage, screaming imprecations.