Borrower of the Night vbm-1

by Elizabeth Peters

  The monstrous idea struck me like a fist in the stomach. For several seconds I sat gaping down into the box, my finger buried to the end of the nail in the grey powder. When I realized what I was doing, I jerked it out and wiped it against the skirt of my robe.

  ‘It’s impossible,’ I mumbled.

  But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. It distressed me horribly. It made me sick at my stomach. True or false, the bizarre theory should not have had such a strong emotional impact. It was only a side issue in any case, one which could never be settled.

  That last thought was pure wishful thinking. Even as it formed in my mind, my inconvenient memory produced a paragraph from a book I had once read.

  I must have stood by my door for almost five minutes, reaching for the handle and pulling my hand back, reaching, pulling back . . . It was a horrible idea. It was crazy.

  I knew I would never sleep soundly again unless I found out.

  The hour was later than I had realized. Tony was sound asleep. I beat on his door for quite a while before he answered.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘The game’s afoot.’

  I didn’t wait for him. The next victim was Blankenhagen. It took almost as long to rouse him. By the time he opened his door, Tony had joined me, which was just as well; Blankenhagen probably wouldn’t have let me in without a chaperone. A chaperone for him, that is.

  They were both furious. After I had talked a while they were still furious – but they were interested. I asked the doctor a question. His face was a sight to behold.

  ‘Heiliger Gott – I do not know. I suppose it is possible . . .’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Then . . .’ I spoke softly but urgently. Several times Blankenhagen’s mouth opened as if to interrupt, but he didn’t. I think he was struck dumb. Tony kept making strange strangling sounds.

  ‘But,’ said Blankenhagen when I had finished. ‘But – but – now, at this hour?’

  ‘It has to be now. I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve got to find out. If I could do it alone, I would.’

  Blankenhagen sat twitching like a hen on a clutch of radioactive eggs. Finally his narrowed blue eyes moved to meet Tony’s. They both turned to stare at me.

  ‘I am insane,’ muttered Blankenhagen. ‘You understand, I have not the equipment, even if – ’

  ‘I know. But the first part has to be done now.’

  ‘Allow me then to assume my trousers.’

  Tony and I went out into the hall while the trousers were assumed. He was wide awake now and so torn between anger and fascination that he was barely coherent.

  ‘Why didn’t you – why did you – I ought to kill you, you – you woman!’

  ‘I woke you up,’ I pointed out. ‘I needn’t have done that. I’m sorry I did, if you’re just going to stand around and yell.’

  Blankenhagen emerged, with trousers, just in time to prevent an undignified scuffle. I led the way down the corridor, stopping in my room to get a coat and some other equipment. Our next stop was at the carpenters’ shack in the south wing. Then we proceeded to the crypt.

  As the work went on, I was convinced of one thing. This particular tomb had not been opened before. It was doubtful whether we could open it now. The mortar chipped away easily, but the stone slab on which lay the carved effigy of Count Burckhardt von und zu Drachenstein behaved as if it were reluctant to leave its place. But it was a couple of inches thinner than the first slab we had raised, and this time nobody sat on the floor and watched. Finally we had the slab propped back, and Blankenhagen climbed down into the vault.

  The coffin was metal. Even after Blankenhagen had shot the bolts that held the lid in place, he had to score through the corroded joint. I had anticipated this possibility; our tools included a couple of metal files. When Blankenhagen’s hands gave out, Tony took his place in the vault. I followed Tony, ignoring male chauvinist complaints from Blankenhagen. (There were no complaints from Tony, but not because he wasn’t a chauvinist.) To reach the upper part of the coffin I had to sprawl across the lid, and some of my wilder fancies can be imagined. I got the lid loose at last. My hands were raw and so were my nerves.

  Lying on the floor of the crypt, Blankenhagen reached down into the vault and grasped one of the coffin handles. Tony took the other. They heaved in unison; and we found ourselves looking down on the face of Graf Burckhardt, who had departed this life in the year of our Lord 1525.

  Thanks to a well-sealed coffin, the Count’s body was fantastically preserved, almost mummified. The features were not nice to look at. They had an expression of twisted agony which was the effect (I kept telling myself) of the shrinkage of the facial tissue. The leathery lips were drawn back over yellowed teeth that looked predatory and vicious in spite of the long moustache that half veiled them. The body wore a gaudy court costume which had suffered more from the ravages of time than the flesh itself. The gold lace was black, and the velvet tore under Blankenhagen’s careful hands.

  The doctor appeared quite composed. After medical-school dissections, this probably looked like a relatively tidy specimen. He busied himself with the body. I found, to my disgust, that I didn’t want to watch.

  ‘We are all mad,’ he said finally. ‘But if madness has any method, I have what I require. Shall we . . .’

  Tony helped him with the coffin lid. They got it, and the slab, back into place, though not without effort. Blankenhagen tucked his specimens into an envelope.

  ‘I wonder under what law they will imprison me,’ he muttered, as we climbed the stairs into the chapel.

  ‘If you get in trouble, we’ll say we forced you,’ I said. ‘But I doubt if the Gräfin will make an issue of this.’

  Blankenhagen stopped under a trumpeting angel and looked at me.

  ‘Professorin . . . ’

  I tried not to look pleased. I love that title.

  ‘I am only flesh and blood,’ said Blankenhagen, thumping theatrically at his chest. ‘I am wild with curiosity. You must tell me the truth.’

  ‘I don’t know the whole truth myself. How soon can you give me some test results?’

  ‘lf I give you these, you will in turn give me your confidence?’

  ‘Well – okay. That’s fair enough. I – what was that?’

  Tony whirled around.

  ‘Nothing. What did you see?’

  ‘I could have sworn something moved behind the altar.’

  ‘Nerves,’ Tony said. ‘Mine are shot to hell.’

  Blankenhagen thought for a moment and then said decisively, ‘Also gut. I will tell you results tonight. Come, we go to the town.’

  ‘Not the police,’ I said apprehensively.

  ‘Ha, ha,’ said Blankenhagen, without humour. ‘I should go to the police with this story? No. I know slightly a man in Rothenburg, a chemist with whom I attended university. He has the equipment we need.’

  Blankenhagen’s friend lived in a modern area outside the walls, on a street paralleling the Roedertor. He was a youngish man with quizzical eyebrows and nocturnal habits; there was a light in the upper window of the house, and our soft knock was promptly answered.

  Blankenhagen’s explanation of our errand was decidedly sketchy, but it was accepted with no more than a lift of the chemist’s eccentric eyebrows. He ended up doing the experiment himself, after watching Blankenhagen fumble with his equipment for a while. He didn’t even look surprised when the significant dark stain appeared in the test tube.

  ‘You expected this?’ he asked amiably.

  Blankenhagen’s eyes were popping.

  ‘Amazing,’ he muttered ‘Expected? It is what she expected.’

  Tony was staring at me as if I’d grown an extra head.

  ‘I didn’t think of it,’ he mumbled, as if denying an accusation of crime. ‘Only a real weirdo would think of a thing like this.’

  To tell the truth, I was pretty amazed myself. But in view of the general consternation it behoved me to be calm. I thanked the chemist, apologized
for our intrusion at such an hour, and led my limp male acquaintances to the door.

  The chemist waved my apologies aside.

  ‘I do not ask questions. I do not ask if it is the Central Intelligence, the Federal Bureau, or perhaps Interpol. You will come for a beer, when it is over, and tell me what you can?’

  ‘I may not be allowed to tell,’ I said. ‘You understand?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Foolish, this secrecy; but I know how they are, these people.’

  I was tempted to linger; it was rather flattering to be taken for a lady spy.

  The streets of the old town were silent under the moon. Shadows clung to the deep doorways and gathered under the eaves. I was in no mood to appreciate it. The past had come alive, but it had not brought the scent of romance or high adventure, only a dirty, ugly tragedy that would not die.

  Nobody said anything till we got back to the Schloss. I was heading blindly for the door that would eventually lead to my beautiful bed when two hands caught at my arm. The hands belonged to two different people, but they moved with a unanimity that verged on ESP.

  ‘Sit here,’ said Tony, indicating a bench in the garden.

  ‘Talk,’ said Blankenhagen.

  ‘I suppose it can’t wait till morning?’ I yawned.

  ‘I can’t wait till morning.’ Tony sat me down and took his seat beside me. Blankenhagen sat down on my other side. I hunched my shoulders, feeling closed in.

  ‘Also dann, sprich.’ Blankenhagen was too absorbed to realize he had abandoned the formal third-person plural and was addressing me with the familiar form. ‘How did you know that a man dead for half a millennium had been poisoned with arsenic?’

  I started out with a complete account of the story of the shrine, for the doctor’s benefit. I was pretty sure by then of Blankenhagen’s innocence, but it didn’t really matter; if he was guilty, he already knew, and if he didn’t know, it would not hurt to tell him.

  Blankenhagen listened without comment He didn’t have to say anything; his reactions were mirrored in his face, which I could see fairly well in the moonlight. I stressed the fact that we had no leanings towards larceny. If and when we found the shrine, we intended to hand it over to Irma.

  ‘But we got distracted,’ I went on. ‘From the first day I walked into this place, I kept losing track of the shrine in my preoccupation with the people who had been involved with it back in fifteen twenty-five. Irma’s uncanny resemblance to her ancestress was one reason for my interest, but it was more than that; as time went on, these people came alive for me. Konstanze and her tragic death; the steward, who had been foully murdered; and the count, Burckhardt.

  ‘He was no worse than many of his peers, but he was not an appealing character. Nothing we learned about him made him any more attractive – his defence of the autocratic bishop, his participation in the torture of Riemenschneider, his murder of the steward. All these things were perfectly in character – as we saw his character. I was prejudiced against him from the start, and my prejudice kept me from seeing the truth.’

  Tony’s face relaxed into a half smile as he listened. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that I was also prejudiced against Burckhardt because he was a lousy male. Konstanze was a woman – intelligent, repressed, and persecuted. I would automatically take her part.

  It was quite true. But there was no need to say so.

  ‘I was also biased,’ I continued, ‘by our modern view of the witchcraft persecution. We know witchcraft was nonsense. The countess’s trial was a repetition of the classic features – the curse, the evil eye, the Black Man who came on cloven hooves to lie with his mistress. Bilge, all of it – familiar from dozens of historical cases, but still bilge.

  ‘But in one sense the witchcraft trials were not nonsense. Many of the victims believed. Most were innocent, forced into false confessions by the agony of the torture. But enough of them went to the stake swearing eternal loyalty to their Dark Master to assure us that the belief was genuine. Witches and warlocks really did try to render cattle and people infertile, cause storms, kill and curse. They failed to do evil, not through lack of intent, but through lack of power. And when supernatural means proved ineffective, they might turn to practical methods. One element in the witchcraft cult was the use of poison.’

  Tony’s breath caught.

  ‘One of the oldest and most commonly used poisons is arsenic,’ I went on. ‘It’s mentioned by Roman authors, if I remember correctly, and in the thirteenth century the proporties of arsenicum were discussed by no other than Albertus Magnus. We found a copy of his well-known work in the library. I think I know now who owned it . . .’

  I turned to Blankenhagen.

  ‘As a doctor, you know that there were no scientific tests for poison till the mid-nineteenth century. Maybe one of the reasons why arsenic was so popular is that the symptoms of arsenic poisoning are identical with those of certain gastrointestinal disorders. I read that in the same book that told me arsenic remains in the body – in the roots of the hair and under the nails – for an indefinite period of time. That’s why I thought we might have luck tonight.’

  ‘I have never heard of it after so long a time,’ said Blankenhagen. ‘But perhaps no one ever tried. Murders several hundred years old are not generally of interest to criminologists.’

  ‘Get on with it,’ said Tony, nudging me.

  ‘The other night I just happened to find myself in Burckhardt’s room.’

  ‘I knew it,’ said Tony. ‘I knew it . . . We’ll discuss that later. I suppose you tripped and fell and accidentally, not meaning to do any real searching, discovered a secret panel?’

  ‘I found a box,’ I said haughtily, ‘which contained a quantity of greyish powder. I didn’t think of arsenic at first. The colour put me off, for one thing. I think of arsenic, when I think of it at all, as white. Either the stuff was contaminated by dust and dirt, or it had been coloured, as commercial arsenic is, to keep people from mistaking it for salt or sugar.’

  Blankenhagen interrupted.

  ‘What you found may not be arsenious oxide, the ‘white arsenic’ of popular fiction. Elementary arsenic is grey, metallic in structure. Upon exposure to air it takes on a darker colour and loses its lustre.’

  ‘You can look at it later, if you want to. It’s not important; most forms of arsenic are intensely toxic. It was not the colour of the powder that alerted me. It was something else altogether.

  ‘The hidden drawer where I found the box was littered with the bones of dead rats. They had gnawed their way into the box, and – curiosity killed a rat. Defunct rodents aren’t unusual, but it was extraordinary that so many of them should have chosen the hidden drawer as a place in which to die.

  ‘Dead rats . . . rat poison . . . arsenic . . . the witchcraft-poison complex. I guess that was the way my thoughts ran, but I wasn’t aware of the progression; it just seemed to hit me all at once. And with that came another thought. What if we had been looking at the tragedy of Count Burckhardt and his wife backwards? What if he was not the villain but the victim of a plot?

  ‘My first reaction was a violent negative. But the more I thought about this new theory, the more things it explained. My assumption of Konstanze’s innocence wasn’t logical. It was based on a number of emotional prejudices which I needn’t go into in detail.’

  Tony snickered. I took the golden amulet from my pocket and handed it to him.

  ‘You weren’t exactly logical about Konstanze either,’ I reminded him. ‘And your emotional prejudices in her favour aren’t hard to understand. Take a look at this. I found it in the box with the arsenic. Then I remembered something you told me when we were discussing the witchcraft cult one time. I think it was the Burning Court affair, under Louis the Fourteenth, that set you off.’

  ‘Damn my big mouth all to hell and back,’ said Tony calmly. He handed the image to Blankenhagen, who was practically sprawled across my lap in his anxiety to see. ‘Probably of Moorish workmanship – possibly
even older. I’ve seen something like it in an ethnological museum. So, when you saw the little frog god, you remembered the theory that the witchcraft cult was a survival of the old prehistoric nature religion.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Ingenious,’ said Blankenhagen. ‘But there is nothing in the amulet to suggest the countess rather than the count. You found it in his room. Why should he not be the one who worshipped devils?’

  ‘Where I found it is irrelevant. The countess had the whole castle at her disposal after her husband died, and it would be smart of her to conceal such damning evidence outside her own room. I thought of her; instead of him, because of the suggestion of Eastern design. She came from Spain. The Moors were there for a long time, and cultural traits linger on. That’s weak, though. You’re overlooking the conclusive point.’

  ‘Bitte?’

  ‘It was the count who died,’ said Tony.

  ‘Ach, so.’ Blankenhagen grinned and rubbed his chin. ‘Yes, the symptoms described could well have been those of arsenic poisoning. In fact’ – he looked startled – ‘we know now that they were. But the motive. Why did she kill him?’

  ‘Maybe he found out about her unorthodox religious beliefs,’ Tony offered. ‘In that day and age it would have been a legitimate motive for murder – although Burckhardt would have called it execution. There’s no reason to suppose he wasn’t a proper son of Holy Church; our theories about his unwillingness to give up the shrine were based on nothing except the necessity to account for behaviour which was otherwise unaccountable.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘But I suspect Burckhardt had a more personal reason for being annoyed with his wife.

  ‘Remember the maid’s hysterical story about the Black Man? It sounded like pure fantasy; the records of witchcraft trials are full of similar lies. But stripped of its supernatural interpretations, what did that story amount to? The maid saw a man, cloaked and booted, in travelling costume, sneak into the castle in the dead of night and embrace the countess.’

  ‘Booted?’ said Blankenhagen dubiously.

  ‘The wench heard his spurs clicking on the floor. That was what suggested cloven hooves.’