Castle Shade

by Laurie R. King

  * * *

  —

  The trickle of cool air through the train window had no chance against the warm wrap, the soft bed, and Holmes’ droning voice. I slept.

  My fevered state no doubt contributed to the dreamlike tints that coloured the narrative—coloured the events of subsequent days, for that matter. However, I believe the story of Queen Marie of Roumania would have ended up feeling like a fairy tale no matter how bluntly the facts of her life were presented.

  Chapter Five

  Once upon a time there was a golden-haired young princess named Marie. She and her sisters lived in a big country house in a peaceable landscape, with ponies to ride and gardens to run through and servants to watch over them. From time to time, they were taken to visit their grandmother, who was Queen of Half the World.

  As Marie grew, she became a beauty, a tall, slim young woman with thick blonde hair and ice-blue eyes. She fell in love with the young man who would—although no one knew it yet—become her country’s king, but being first cousins, her mother’s religion forbad it. Instead, the Duchess of Edinburgh and her mother-in-law, Victoria, chose for Marie the crown prince of a new country on the other side of Europe. Prince Ferdinand, Roman Catholic nephew to the childless king, was physically awkward, socially shy, largely inarticulate, and primarily interested in plants. Had she been less beautiful, less sure of herself, less skilled a horse-woman, he might have been less awkward with her. As it was, he was no match for his bride in anything but position.

  That was judged enough. The match was made.

  Marie was sad, because she loved her cousin, because her new home was far from her dear sisters, and not least because she had little in common with her new husband. But the blood of the world’s greatest dynasties ran in her veins, and she had been training for the job of Queen from the time she could walk.

  Two months after her seventeenth birthday, the English princess became the Roumanian Crown Princess, and went to live in a barbaric place more Ottoman than European, with few railways, no telegraph, and not even a proper palace in its capital city. A country whose language the girl did not speak, whose customs she did not understand, and a husband she barely knew. And when she got there, the old King had expectations: that his heir’s wife would be quiet, and obedient, and tame.

  Marie was accustomed to riding out alone on the most spirited of horses, seated astride as she raced paths and jumped hedges. Now she had attendants, and a side-saddle. She lived in the King’s castle and rode the King’s horses and travelled at the King’s whim, making such friends as she was permitted.

  The years passed: children, parties, ceremonies.

  Not until she was thirty-one, the mother of four in a world of growing turmoil, did she encounter a man who took her seriously. Prince Barbu Știrbey came from a family of boyars prominent since the fifteenth century. Astute, quiet, darkly handsome, and Sorbonne-educated, this high-ranking aristocrat was yet known for his interest in modernising his vast estates. He was also a fine horseman, with a house in the same hill-resort the royal family occupied during the hot summers.

  The two met during a time of peasant uprising, when farmers rebelled against the conditions of near-slavery imposed on them by the feudal system of land ownership. Prince Barbu was a patriot to his bones—and to him, that meant a loyalty to the people of Roumania. He taught Marie about the urgent need for democracy, and for agrarian reform—and 32-year-old Marie, venturing into the realm of politics for the first time, convinced her husband, and eventually the King.

  It was the beginning of a formidable partnership between a Prince whose family had ruled the land for centuries and a Queen who could barely speak a Roumanian sentence. Gossip flew, naturally, but since neither her husband nor the Prince’s wife showed any hint of offence, there was no fuel to feed scandal’s flames.

  The Princess had found firm ground beneath her feet at last, and began to look at Roumania as a home, rather than a place of lonely foreign exile. When she rode out, she spoke with peasants in their fields and housewives at their doors. When her husband and the old King talked, she would look up from her needlework from time to time, and venture questions. She began to wear the richly embroidered traditional clothing her people had given her—at first awkwardly, as a sort of fancy-dress, but then as a way of showing her Roumanian identity. She bore her sixth child in 1913, when she was 38. War broke out in the Balkans. Cholera swept the land, and Marie left her palace each day to tend to the camps of dying soldiers, holding their hands, wiping their brows, listening to their prayers. Over their sick-beds, she fell in love with her people—and in the process, they with her.

  Then an Archduke was shot, and a world of long-simmering tensions erupted into the Great War.

  Roumania’s King was a German, chosen to establish a new nation’s monarchy. When the War began, his impulse was to declare for the Kaiser, though the majority of Roumanians—along with the English-born Princess Marie—were opposed. The country chose neutrality. When the King died two months later and Ferdinand and Marie took their thrones, neutral it remained. For two years, Marie honed the traditional feminine arts of persuasion, working behind the scenes, among men who laughed at the idea of a beautiful woman with a mind for politics, to convince them that the Central Powers of Germany and Austria were going to lose, and that Roumania’s future lay with the alliance of Russia, France, and England. She and the Prime Minister prevailed, and in August 1916, buoyed by the Allies’ promise of national reunification, Roumania declared war on Austria-Hungary.

  The fighting began immediately. Marie donned a Red Cross uniform and spent her days nursing the sick and wounded. In November, her three-year-old son died of typhoid. In December, Bucharest fell, and the government and royal family fled to a small, starving enclave trapped between Russia and the Central Powers. Injured soldiers came on every train; the army grew short of bullets for its German-made guns; food dwindled. In late 1917, the Bolsheviks swept across Russia, murdering Marie’s cousin and all his family, lining up the army’s officers for execution, leaving Roumania a tiny island surrounded by enemies who snarled over her bones and sent assassins after the royal family.

  Shaky treaties were signed, to save the remnants of the country, yet still the army was slaughtered. Bucharest and the countryside were stripped bare by occupying troops. By the time Armistice was declared, half its soldiers, nearly one in ten of its citizens, were dead. The countryside was ravaged, the capital city was a husk.

  And yet, when the royal family arrived back in Bucharest, the starving populace exploded in joy—and their love was directed in most part at the Queen who had nursed them, comforted them, grieved with them, and shared both their sufferings and their determination to prevail.

  A year later, when Roumania’s Prime Minister failed at the Peace Conference, Marie rode into Paris and threw all her forty-four years of royal wit and charm into the masculine business of negotiating a fair settlement. She fixed her mesmerising blue eyes on Clemenceau, Curzon, and Churchill, until all but the tight-laced American President were eating from her graceful, if work-hardened hands. When she returned to her home, she brought with her all the long-lost provinces of greater Roumania, and laid them at the feet of her beloved adopted homeland.

  There was one final fairy-tale touch to the story.

  On the edge of Transylvania, the biggest and richest of those returned provinces, stood a small castle beside a mountain pass. Built in the fourteenth century as customs post and border defence, it was visible for miles, a blunt, workaday fortress rather than an aristocrat’s home. As centuries passed, the Ottoman threat came and went, weapons changed, borders shifted. The castle was taken over by Hungary, then returned to the city fathers of nearby Brașov, then sold to a Transylvanian Prince before returning to Brașov again. It was used to house Austrian troops, then became the headquarters of the Forestry department.

  In 1920, the Br
așov city fathers desperately presented it to their new country’s Queen. Not that they expected much more of her than the occasional visit and a willingness to keep the walls standing. After all, her main summer residence was only thirty miles away, on the other side of the former border.

  But instead of polite dismay, Queen Marie embraced their gift with all the passion in her romantic heart. Its evocative outline, its derelict state, its location in territory she herself had brought to Roumania—Castle Bran was the stuff of dreams, which came to her at a time when her daughters were marrying, her sons growing away from her, her husband ageing into himself. She had been given at last the opportunity to create a home that was not in the corners granted by any King. Castle Bran was hers, as no person or place had been since she’d married at the age of seventeen.

  Renovations were gentle, gardening extensive, happiness complete. The Queen came to Bran as often as she could, to ride through the hillsides and entertain friends and spend happy hours with the gardeners. She stepped back from the international stage and worked on her writing, publishing books and articles about her homeland for American and English readers. Photographers would visit and capture this dignified figure, whose mature beauty the camera loved, posing among the flower beds in her Roumanian embroidered costumes and wimple-like head-scarf that covered her middle-aged chins.

  The fairy-tale princess, born to royalty, embraced by commoners, could now retire to her mountain-top keep with her books and her triumphs and her youngest daughter, and be happy at last.

  In some fairy tales, happily ever after is where things end.

  In others, happiness is where the problems begin.

  Chapter Six

  We rode the train—indeed, we rode a number of trains—for what seemed like days. We passed through cities, mountains, farmland, while the restless fever rose again and pulled me into sleep. I would wake, and follow Holmes into the restaurant car, then return to my seat and my stupor. Holmes would be there, then gone, then there again.

  When I woke, countryside was passing by, bright fields beneath a blazing sun. This time, the hypnotic rhythm did not lull me back to sleep. Instead, I found my mind turning over in a way that felt almost normal—although it had skipped back to the days before Marie of Roumania had entered my life, to seize on a series of odd events and innuendos, creating links and eventually presenting me with an uncomfortable conclusion.

  “Holmes, you and I—what’s the matter?”

  He hastened to wipe the startled expression from his face, and finished using the lit match I’d nearly caused him to drop in his lap. “Nothing is wrong, Russell. Merely that you have not spoken in nearly seven hours.”

  “Really?” I looked again at the day outside: it was well after noon. “Hm. My fever may have broken. I feel better now.”

  “I am relieved to hear it.” He got his pipe going and waved out the flame. “You were saying?”

  “Oh, yes. You and I really need to discuss how much of a role Mycroft is allowed to play in our lives.”

  He eyed me through the drift of smoke, then asked cautiously, “How does this thought come to you now?”

  I made an impatient gesture at the landscape. “We’re headed into the Carpathian Mountains to investigate village whispers. Either you suspect this to be the edge of some criminal enterprise, or someone other than you sees it as a series of sparks near a political powder keg. The only indication of crime I’ve heard is the vague threat to a young woman. However, if it’s politics, that means your brother, Mycroft, has sent you here—a theory supported by your continued attempts to avoid giving me direct answers. Hence, my statement that we need to move the matter of Mycroft’s influence over our lives up on our agenda.”

  A deliberate puff of smoke nearly obscured the mingled look of amusement and wariness on his face. For the moment, amusement won out. “Do you know, I now begin to understand Watson’s astonishment over my thinking processes. Russell, it is true that I had a telegram from Mycroft, urging me to assist Queen Marie—but I was already in Bucharest when his wire caught up with me. Following a Queen’s entreaties, not a spy-master’s order. I did not feel the need to irritate you by mentioning his request.”

  “Well, it is irritating, to have the sense of some invisible force—”

  He overspoke me, forcibly. “Russell, for the present, let us agree that you and I do need to develop a policy regarding my brother’s…requests, whether or not they come from the British government. However, I do not feel that is a question we can confront without him in the room.”

  After a moment, I nodded. “When we get back to London, then.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Though to be fair—could the threat here actually be political? Less against the daughter than the mother?”

  “I would agree, the threat is as much against Marie as it is against Ileana—perhaps more so. And in this part of the world, political unrest is a given—although at present, things seem relatively calm. There was a Bolshevik-led peasant revolt a year ago, up in Moldavia. The Communists are no doubt busily infiltrating every branch of government. And there are many Hungarian nationalists who wish to see the provinces returned to the one-time Empire.”

  “What about resentment at the royal family being outsiders? Surely the fact that the King and Queen are German and English, respectively, creates tensions? Why did they do that, anyway? Didn’t Roumania have its own royal families?”

  “That was the trouble—there were too many of them. Choosing to elevate one prince over the others would plunge the country back into chaos. Bringing in a superfluous younger son from the other side of Europe and placing the crown on him put the native princes on equal footing.”

  “And are none of those families making a bid for power? Such as the Queen’s friend, Prince Whatsit?”

  “There are those who believe Prince Barbu somewhere between éminence grise and outright Rasputin, but were it clear that he was positioning himself for a takeover, I have no doubt Mycroft would have told me.”

  I watched some countryside go past: hay and maize, sheep and rivers. If not politics, then what was responsible for bringing this fairy-tale Queen up against cold threats and ancient superstitions?

  I had seen a film the previous autumn, on a ship bound for Lisbon. Nosferatu was Stoker’s novel with different character names, and had proved chilling even though one of its reels had disappeared over the side. The stark black-and-silver images reduced a number of my young, blonde actress companions to quivers and shrieks, which was probably why the film stuck with me. Nine months later, I could clearly picture that eerie pale figure, looming over the bed of a beautiful woman…perhaps a very young one…

  “So tell me, Holmes, how does this beautiful, wealthy, much beloved and apparently perfect royal person come to be worried about…” It was hard to even say the word.

  “Vampires?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “In fact, it is not only vampires, but all stripes of witches, ghouls, and supernatural creatures. Remember, this is a land of peasant farmers, who cannot banish the night by switching on an electrical bulb. I suppose that is why the country is rich ground for dark stories. There’s nothing like a long winter with a forest outside one’s door to stir the imagination.”

  “An odd place to find Victoria’s granddaughter.”

  “The capital city, naturally, is a different world from Transylvania—though Bucharest is more Ottoman than European, and it must have been difficult in Marie’s early years. Even now the country has its share of economic and social problems. It would not be helpful to have rumours circulate about the Queen.”

  “Such as?”

  He eyed me, no doubt judging my fitness to participate in a discussion. But whatever he saw seemed to satisfy him, and he gave a decisive nod.

  “You complain that I have avoided direct answers. Very well, I shall g
ive you the points on which I have been meditating. Perhaps you will be able to see more of a pattern than I.

  “During my week in Bran, I managed to glean details about three key events—although as you are aware, burrowing to the source of any whispered tale is never an easy task for an outsider.

  “It began the second week of March, when a seventeen-year-old village girl disappeared. She worked at the castle—Bran is strictly a summer retreat for the Queen, but this year, Marie came earlier than usual, wishing to consult with her architect and gardeners before she left for her planned summer in Europe. One morning, the village girl did not show up for work. That evening, one of the other maids went to see what was wrong, and found that the girl’s parents had thought she was at work.

  “Alarm was raised. Some hours later, cooler minds thought to conduct a search of her room, where it was found that some of her possessions were missing as well. The next day, the Brașov police learned that she and a young man had boarded the train to Bucharest. Some days later, a brief letter came to say she had gone off with her love—and yet, village gossip persists with the conviction that she did not go of her own will, but that someone took things from her room to make it appear that way, and sent a letter in writing that merely looks like hers.”

  “What has that to do with the Queen?”

  “On the surface, nothing at all. The second episode was serious, but hardly out of the ordinary. It happened some ten days later, when a twelve-year-old scullery maid was preparing vegetables in the castle kitchen and sliced open her hand. Something had drawn the cook and other adults away, and it happened that the Queen was passing and heard the child cry out. She went to see what was wrong, seized a bowl to protect the child’s clothing, and started to bind the injury with a dish-cloth. When the others came in, they saw the child struggling against the pain in her hand and the Queen working to hold her still while she staunched the wound.”