Adeline’s palms tingled. Standing there, she experienced a strange—almost surreal—sensation. If those three had disappeared in a puff of smoke, it wouldn’t have seemed any more bizarre than her current feelings. Out of place. Out of time.
“Thank you,” she said. The cook and the butler stood, unmoving, while she climbed the stairs. She could feel their eyes burning into her. Needles prickled her skin, but she would not hurry. She closed the door, sweat breaking out on her forehead. Adeline wiped it away with a cursory flick of her hand, then strained to hear any conversation that might start after her departure, but the wood was too solid to make out any sound on the other side of it.
* * * *
At Café Central the following evening, she reported her experiences to the professor, and then dropped her bombshell. She had been going over it again and again and always came up with the same conclusion.
“I’m almost sure Frau Lederer was the model for the portrait of Cleopatra.”
She expected the professor to react in some way. He didn’t.
“I am not surprised, because I suspected things were not as they should be there,” he said. “My friend has been researching into the genealogy of the butler and the cook. His findings are quite extraordinary and certainly defy easy explanation.”
“What were they? What did he find?”
“You must understand first that Professor Martin Lansdowne is the finest, the very finest in his field. If he cannot trace someone’s lineage, then, believe me, it doesn’t exist.”
“What do you mean? They do exist. You’ve met Butters.”
“Neither of them have any traceable past. Of course, they may have changed their names. But that begs the question, why? Why would an innocent butler and cook go to considerable trouble to conceal their true identity?”
“They must have something to hide.”
“Clearly. But what?”
Adeline shook her head. “I can’t imagine, but Dr. Quintillus was, as we know, a ruthless murderer. They have both been with him some years. Maybe they occupied another, more sinister role in his life at some time.”
“My belief entirely. This evidence—or more accurately, lack of it—coupled with your experiences yesterday serve to convince me that they know far more than is yet clear to us. The precise nature of their role I could not possibly speculate, yet. But I will caution you to be very careful around them. It is probably best that you keep away from any return visit to the kitchen. I would also like Professor Lansdowne to research the girl. Magda. Do you know her surname?”
“She told me it’s Varga, and she has never been married. But she didn’t join the household until after the doctor died, so I can’t believe she would have any role in this…whatever it is.”
“Nevertheless, when we consider the sources of the assertions that she only came to the household recently, we cannot hold them to be accurate. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. Perhaps she’s innocent, perhaps not. We first have to be sure who our enemy is if we are going to defeat him, or her.”
That made sense to Adeline. As much as anything did these days. “She’s Hungarian. From a small village near Budapest, but I’m afraid I don’t know the name of it.”
“No matter. I’m sure Professor Lansdowne will work his magic with what little we do know. I shall telephone him tomorrow morning. As soon as I receive a response, we can plan our next course of action. Has anything else happened in the house?”
Adeline shook her head. “It’s been quiet. A bit too quiet sometimes. In the library, I quite often feel the atmosphere is so thick I could slice through it.”
“I hope you don’t stay there after you have dined?”
“No, and I haven’t seen that picture again, either. For which I am most relieved.”
* * * *
When Adeline returned, the house was in darkness. She switched on the light in the hall.
Butters came out of the library. He wore his usual dour expression. This time he wasn’t alone.
“We have been waiting for you. Please come in.”
He stood aside. Adeline hesitated. But where could she run to? There would be no more trams tonight. It was freezing outside and she wouldn’t stand a chance out there on her own.
“I was going to bed,” she said.
“Please come in here.”
Polite coldness. Was it really any icier out in the street?
Adeline turned to the front door and touched the handle. It refused to budge.
Then Butters was at her shoulder. “There is no point. Come with me.”
She moved like an automaton. She willed herself to stand still, but his voice paralyzed her somehow. He seemed to take control of her movements so that her legs refused to obey her and drove her inexorably on. She fought against it, but still her feet dragged her closer to the library, where Frau Lederer was waiting for her.
The cook’s uniform had been replaced by a long black dress, high-necked and long sleeved. Frau Lederer said nothing, but moved gracefully toward the far end of the room.
“What do you want?” Adeline said at last, trying to keep her voice steady, mostly failing.
“Come with us,” Butters said, nudging her forward. Yet again her legs obeyed him and her feet stumbled over the rug and then the polished floor.
The basement door opened by itself, swinging wide. Adeline tried to force her brain to obey her, but her unsteady gait took her onward, close behind the cook.
“Who are you?” Adeline asked. She grasped the handrail.
No reply.
At the end of the corridor, the room that had always been in darkness was now lit. Maybe a hundred candles illuminated the walls and hieroglyphics as Adeline had never before seen them. She had seen pictures of some archaeological digs in Egypt over the years and clearly this entire room had been modeled on an actual tomb. Maybe Cleopatra’s.
The portrait that so haunted her hung on the wall—its face in profile.
Frau Lederer motioned Adeline to a gilt, high-backed chair she didn’t remember seeing before. Unable to stop herself, she sat. Terror coated every pore of her body. Sweat broke out on her forehead and palms. She gripped the arms of the chair.
Frau Lederer began to chant. Although Adeline couldn’t understand a word, she knew she had heard it before, in the same, strange language.
She tried again. “What do you want from me?”
They did not answer. On the far side of the room a door slowly opened.
A tall figure in a stovepipe hat crossed into the room. His eyeless sockets black and empty. His whole arid presence devoid of humanity. He moved toward her. Something tickled the back of her neck and crawled around to the front. Adeline’s arms wouldn’t move, but she could turn her head. A black metallic-looking beetle perched on her shoulder.
Chapter 9
Adeline woke with a start. Where was she? Her eyes focused on the walls of her room in Vienna. She pushed the sheet and blanket aside and looked down at her crumpled nightgown with no recollection of getting undressed or going to bed last night. Common sense told her she must have dreamed everything. But it had been so real. The cook and the butler. Quintillus. That chanting. She shook her head, trying to clear it, went over to the window and drew back the drapes on a dry morning with a pale yellow sun promising fine weather.
Her shoulder itched and stung. She’d been bitten by some insect. Mosquitoes in February? She donned her dressing gown and made her way to the bathroom. In the mirror, she saw two little puncture marks, angry red in color and swollen into two small balls of fire forming lumps on her shoulder. When she touched them, pain shot through her arm. She bathed her skin, relishing the soothing caress of the warm water and, as she did so, she remembered the beetle on her shoulder. That, at least, had to be true.
Back in her room, she stripped off the bedding, but found nothing excep
t a couple of blood spots on the sheet. Adeline remade the bed, dressed and put on her shoes. Her arm throbbed. She must find something to relieve it.
She checked the time. Just before eight thirty. Butters would be arriving with her breakfast in the library, but he was the last person she wanted to mention this to.
As she left her room, she caught sight of something near the fireplace. She went over and bent down. A sizeable beetle—its carapace shiny black with iridescent green flecks. A scarab—maybe the same one that bit her last night. She must show it to Professor Mayer. Adeline looked around for something to put it in, and found it. A matchbox. Using a handkerchief, she carefully picked up the dead insect and placed it in the box, which she returned to the mantelpiece.
Her arm throbbed more violently. Down in the hall, she caught a glimpse of Butters as he disappeared back to the kitchen. Magda was polishing the table. She would have to do.
“Magda, I’ve been bitten by a beetle. Is there anything in the house I can put on it to make it less painful?”
“I’ll ask Frau Lederer,” the maid replied.
Adeline couldn’t allow that. “No, no, don’t trouble her. She’s much too busy. Is there nothing in the house to treat bites?”
Magda thought for a moment. “I think I know of something. I’ll go and get it.”
“Thank you.” Adeline hoped and prayed Magda was precisely who she claimed to be and that whatever she brought wouldn’t do any more damage than had already been inflicted.
* * * *
Wincing at the stinging, burning pain in her arm, Adeline went into the library and recoiled. The smell of lilies stifled the heavy atmosphere. Butters and Frau Lederer stood at the far side of the room in front of the window.
Frau Lederer was dressed in the long black gown she had worn last night. “Come to us,” she said, her voice more heavily accented than before.
Adeline shook her head.
“You will come to us.” Butters’s tone was firm and commanding. Adeline’s brain swam with its hypnotic effect. She had to go to them.
The strange surrealism returned. Her head seemed suspended in some sort of cloud, trapped in a body that would no longer obey her.
They led her down to the basement and into the room where the hieroglyphics adorned the walls and the portrait—now removed from the wall—had been propped up on an altar of deep purple velvet. Once again, a forest of candles lit up every corner. A small whimper, Adeline recognized as hers, punctured the heavy atmosphere. She could make no protest, no other cry, even though her mind screamed at her to get out.
A tug on her arm and the sound of tearing cotton. Frau Lederer had ripped off the sleeve of her dress. The insect bite throbbed and burned. Metal gleamed, and Butters raised a sharp dagger.
Adeline braced herself. She refused to show fear to this man. To do so would give him even more power over her than he already possessed. She closed her eyes. In a few seconds, an instant’s sharp pain, and warm blood and pus trickled down to her wrist. She opened her eyes in time to watch it splash into a small golden bowl, held by the cook. The incision had released the pressure building up in her infected arm and Adeline almost swooned with the relief it brought. The flow of blood slowed to a mere trickle and then stopped. Frau Lederer silently removed the bowl and placed it on the altar.
She dipped her right forefinger into it and touched the portrait so that a red smear appeared on the cheek of the subject. Neither the cook nor the butler had uttered a word since they had brought her down here. Both began to chant as before. Butters steered Adeline to the gilt chair she had dreamed she had sat in the previous day. If she had dreamed it.
A shape began to form in one corner of the room.
Frau Lederer clutched a small gold statue to her chest and her body began to heave. Adeline’s eyes stung. The room filled with the familiar eerie green radiance. It pulsed with new urgency. The figure formed itself. The jackal head atop the body of a man. Set waited silently in front of her. Expressionless. Statuesque. Real.
Adeline’s vision clouded. She wanted to rub her eyes, but her hands wouldn’t move from her lap. The cook moved in front of her, still chanting. Butters joined her. Adeline’s vision blurred. Pyramids, desert, and shadows of people who belonged as decoration on an ancient tomb’s walls floated impossibly before her eyes. Their form shadowy. At times indistinct as if transmitted from faraway. The chanting died away and the images faded with it. Adeline was left in the basement that had become her prison. Set stood—a silent, forbidding sentinel cloaked in a green, pulsating glow.
Butters spoke to Frau Lederer in their strange, archaic language. The cook handed over the portrait of the queen to him. Behind him, the figure of Set faded. No more pulsing light. The atmosphere lifted and Adeline’s fingers flexed.
Butters held the portrait above his head, then without warning, brought it down and smashed it on the altar.
Adeline and the cook cried out. Frau Lederer brandished the statue.
Butters drew back his fist and smashed it into the cook’s face. She fell heavily and the statue dropped from her hands and clattered to the floor. Released from her paralysis, Adeline jumped up, balled her fist and landed a punch on the butler’s chin. She tried to run but her foot snagged in the hem of her skirt and he caught her before she could escape.
“You stupid woman, I’m trying to save your life.”
He twisted her arms tightly behind her back. Adeline struggled but his grip was too firm. Her anger had reached boiling point. If she could kick him, knee him in the groin or hit him again she would, but he held her too firmly.
“Let me go. Let me out of here!”
From the floor where she lay, semi-conscious, the cook moaned.
“You could have killed her,” Adeline said, still struggling to free herself.
“Would to heaven I had,” Butters said. “Believe me, it would be better for you if she never left this room.”
That was unexpected. “But you’re both involved in this…this…whatever it is. This attempt to bring Cleopatra back to life.”
“You really don’t understand anything, do you?”
Butters manhandled Adeline. She fought his grip on her.
“Let go of me!” Adeline staggered as Butters unexpectedly released his hold.
The cook cried out. The dagger glinted in her hand. Bloodstained.
Butters staggered backward and gripped the gilt chair.
Nothing stood between the wild-eyed woman and Adeline. The cook gripped the handle tighter.
Adeline backed away. Her voice rang out around the room, thankfully firm and strong. “Who are you?”
The door flew open and a shot rang out. The woman dropped the dagger. For a few seconds, Adeline’s eyes met with hers. She read a mix of fear and incomprehension before the cook fell dead at her feet.
Adeline stared at the sprawled figure on the floor. In the chair, the butler stirred. A rustling of skirts and Magda dashed past, dropping her small pistol in the process. She cradled Butters’s head. “Can you hear me, Mr. Butters?”
The butler gave a faint nod.
Adeline stared at the maid as if she had never seen her before. Gone was the frightened mouse of a girl. Magda took charge. She eased off the butler’s jacket to the slightest of protests from the semi-conscious man “It seems to be a flesh wound,” she said, peering at the blood-drenched gash in the butler’s back, an inch or two below his right shoulder. “Not too deep, thankfully. He must have twisted away at the right moment. Nevertheless I think we should try and get him upstairs. Into the library at least. Can you help me?”
Adeline nodded. Questions demanded to be answered, but not now.
Between them, they half-carried the butler. Back in the library, they set him down on a leather settee.
“I will telephone for the doctor,” Magda said.
�
��But, what about Frau Lederer? We can’t leave her there.”
“No. I will deal with her. Later. We have more urgent business with the living than the dead in this house.”
Magda left Adeline alone with Butters. He stirred and opened his eyes.
“Mrs. Ogilvy.”
“Yes, Butters. I’m here. Magda is telephoning for the doctor. Frau Lederer stabbed you with the dagger you used on me.”
Adeline looked down at her bloodstained arm. Astounded, she couldn’t locate the actual wound. Just a trickle of dried blood.
“Scarab,” the butler said. “She brought it to you.”
“Frau Lederer?”
“Not Frau Lederer. Arsinoe.”
“I don’t understand. Who is Arsinoe?”
The butler closed his eyes and slipped back into unconsciousness.
A few minutes later, he was still out when the doctor arrived. He examined Butters, requested hot water and clean towels and, while Adeline sat quietly on the Chesterfield, he worked on the butler. Magda stood nearby.
The doctor looked up, a frown creasing his face. “You say your cook did this?”
“Yes, Doctor,” Magda replied.
“And where is she now? Do the police have her?”
“She ran away,” Magda said before Adeline could respond. Out of sight of the doctor, the maid shook her head at Adeline, who said nothing.
“Then I must report this incident to the police so that they can apprehend this woman.”
“Yes, Doctor.” Magda lowered her eyes.
His wound bandaged and consciousness beginning once again to return, the doctor and Magda helped Butters to his room, where he was under orders to stay in bed for the next few days.
When the doctor left, Magda joined Adeline in the library.
Adeline motioned her to sit down. “Will you please tell me what’s going on?”
The maid took a deep breath and began, “Since I came to this house I have seen things I can barely believe. The dead walk in this house.”
“You’ve seen Dr. Quintillus?”
Wrath of the Ancients Page 12
