Castle Shade

by Laurie R. King

  A curiously vivid picture came to mind, attached to some dark bit of memory: a rustic kitchen, a beautiful Queen, a young girl bleeding copiously into a crockery bowl…But I couldn’t trace my uneasiness to a specific source, and Holmes was going on.

  “There was considerable alarm upon seeing a bowl apparently half-filled with blood, but as it turned out, much of it was water. However, it is worth noting that, when I heard the story some three months later, it was the bowl of blood that had become the main interest, not the royal person hastening to give care.

  “In the days that followed, villagers reported a series of uncomfortable events. A shooting star, a cow’s death, a broken leg, a bat trapped in a room. Then, the night before the Queen and her daughter were to set off for Paris, a child took a short-cut through some trees, and either tripped or was attacked.”

  “How old a child?”

  “Eight. She burst into her house crying, covered in dirt, with blood on her palms and on the neck of her blouse. She claimed that some huge, dark, winged creature had come out of the trees and flung itself at her. She fell, struggled, and got away, fleeing home. Her father and some other men took torches to go see, but found nothing except for a trampled flower from the Queen’s garden. A branch of lilac. When asked the next day, the child denied that she had stolen the flower. Some time after that, she said perhaps she had taken it, and also that it was possible she’d just tripped and fallen. By the time I spoke with her, she had no idea—and the story of an attack had already taken root.”

  “The lilac couldn’t have come from some other garden?”

  “Not this one, I am told. It is of a particularly rich shade of purple.”

  “And the Queen’s garden isn’t public?”

  “Strictly, no. It would not be difficult to pilfer the occasional blossom, but the villagers tend not to. And a child of eight would surely know that taking such a thing home to mother would be cause for a scolding, at the least.”

  “What about the other things—the dead cow and the broken leg?”

  “The cow may have been old, and the man’s leg broke when a wheel came off a cart.”

  “Meaning that both carry as much weight as a trapped bat, when it comes to evidence of wrongdoing. The interesting thing…”

  “Mm?” he said, by way of encouragement.

  “Well, it’s a series of unconnected events in the life of a village. I could imagine that in the winter, when there’s nothing to do but watch the snow fall, odd events would take on significance. But I’d have thought that in the springtime, everyone would be too busy to gossip.”

  “And yet, the events grew in importance, taking on shadows of meaning far beyond a cut hand and a fall in a forest.”

  “It suggests underlying tensions in the area. I do hope they didn’t drag some old woman out of the woods and burn her as a witch?”

  “No one has been burned, hammered with a stake, or otherwise dispatched. At least, not before I left for Monaco.”

  “And you found no indication of what those tensions might be? If not political unrest, then economic problems?”

  “Farmers always live a precarious existence, but harvests have been good, and the country is pulling out of its post-War hardships.”

  “What about after the Queen left in April? What strange events have happened since?”

  There was a brief gleam in his eyes. “None.”

  “None at all? No broken arms, two-headed calves, rabies outbreaks?”

  “The summer would appear to have been remarkably placid. In fact, two different people thought to remark on how the events ceased as soon as the Queen and her party departed.”

  “Really. What about before they arrived—wasn’t anything strange going on during the winter?”

  “Only one that I heard. A village girl caught sight of a man who had died in the War.”

  “Would that have been a ghost or a—what was the word? Strigoi?”

  “The young man died in battle in 1916. One gathers that the rules of vampirism require the living-dead to show up within a reasonable time.”

  “Seems a bit arbitrary, but fine, let’s call him a ghost. When was he seen?”

  “Sometime in January. While the Queen was in Bucharest, many hours away.”

  “Holmes, I don’t see a reason why any of this should be attached to the Queen.”

  “In another part of the world, it would not be. However, there is a complication to keep in mind here.”

  “Only one?”

  “A figure in the shadows that only someone from Eastern Europe would see. Have you heard of a Hungarian Countess by name of Erzabet Báthory?”

  Two days earlier, retrieving the name would have been a struggle. It was a relief to have the information pop up, and make connections. “Countess Báthory! So that’s why…”

  The name brought with it the impression of dusty tomes: an ancient library in the depths of the Black Forest. October, 1919. Trying to take my mind off recent matters and the pain in my shoulder by an escape into books—except that recent matters included a woman who’d tried to kill me, and my topic of research was history’s murderous women.

  “Erzabet Báthory,” I said. “Known as the ‘Blood Countess.’ Accused of a mind-boggling number of crimes.” The Countess had been a remarkable beauty, which her accusers attributed to a regimen of bathing her skin with the blood of virgins. My state of turmoil as I bent over those German books explained the uneasiness attached to the image of a bowl filled with blood. I realised that I was rubbing my shoulder, and dropped my hand away.

  “One of history’s few women multiple-murderers,” Holmes noted. “Accused of the torture and death of hundreds of young girls, between 1590 and 1610.”

  “Accused, yes,” I said. “Although she was an extremely wealthy woman and, as I recall, the charges were brought by those who—by complete coincidence, I am sure—happened to benefit hugely when she was stripped of her possessions.”

  “There were hundreds of accusers, with an extensive list of crimes and atrocities.”

  “Compiled years after the first accusations, by a religious fanatic whose help in ‘overseeing’ her dead husband’s estate had been spurned by the Countess. A man who was close friends with those due to inherit the most. Who tortured her servants into providing information, and quickly put to death the three closest to her—those who would know the truth of the matter. The Countess herself was permitted to live out her life under house arrest in a very comfortable castle. Which does rather weight the scale on the side of conspiracy.”

  I remembered the details, since I’d been desperate for a retreat into the safety of research. Not something I needed to mention now. “Holmes, you know that any wealthy or strong-willed woman in history has always been in danger of accusations. If not of sexual misconduct, then of some kind of witchcraft. When her enemies are high-ranking political and economic rivals, it is easy for a few ugly rumours to become outright atrocity.

  “But that was three centuries ago. And as far as I know, no Bram Stoker has produced a work of popular fiction about the Countess Báthory. The only reason I know about her is because you abandoned me that week you spent in men’s clubs and Turkish baths, going after the Stuttgart embezzler. How would a village of Roumanian peasants even have heard of her?”

  “In fact, the Countess is as well known in this part of the world as Jack the Ripper is in England. A native of the Balkans would react to a bowl of blood in the same way a London resident would react to a woman found dead of savage knife wounds.”

  “Ah. I begin to see the problem.”

  “I thought you might. I should also mention that it is not uncommon to find a belief that Elizabeth Báthory drank the blood she shed, not just washed in it.”

  “Rejuvenation internal and external,” I mused. If there was one thing the world knew ab
out Roumania’s Queen, it was her striking beauty and youthful vigour. It would not take a great deal of talk to have people seeing her as a modern version of the Blood Countess—or indeed, one of Bram Stoker’s Transylvanian vampires.

  Chapter Seven

  The rhythm of the train changed. A short time later, buildings grew up around us and we pulled into Brașov, climbing down into the late afternoon sun amidst the bustle of a town of some 40,000 souls. The passengers washing in and out of the train doors looked distinctly rural, with an equal balance of native dress and Western-style clothing. The men were bearded, the women’s costumes demure, and as for skin colour, I was probably the darkest person in sight, apart from my sun-bleached hair.

  Holmes had wired ahead with our arrival time, so we were met by the Queen’s own Rolls-Royce. Its driver, a black-headed, mischief-eyed fellow of around thirty, was dressed in the costume of the natives. Despite looking like someone who would be more at home with a horse-cart, he greeted us in English and efficiently supervised the porter’s loading of our bags. When all was stowed away, he put the car into motion and took us through a neat and prosperous-looking town surrounded by wooded hills.

  His skill was reassuring, and I relaxed enough to turn my gaze to the town’s high-faced buildings and broad, paved squares. Carts moved among cars, some of them a sort of modern hybrid—a traditional horse-drawn wooden cart, but built atop the axle and narrow tyres of some ancient motorcar.

  The town gave way to a prosperous and fertile countryside. The road became dirt, though well maintained, and the houses farther apart. Electrical poles ceased to follow our way, although a telegraph line persisted. Another mile, and the villas turned to farmhouses, their gardens to orchards and fields. I began to catch sight of the haystacks that I had been seeing all day from the train. Nothing like the familiar piled domes of England, these were six or eight metres high with a trimmed sapling protruding from the top. The stacks marched over the countryside like a clan of enormous, shaggy creatures.

  “Those haystacks look like gigantic bears,” I said to Holmes, after a while. “Or those mythic Himalayan creatures said to live above the snow line.”

  “One does wonder if the local hooligans don’t occasionally adorn them with a pair of dinner plate–sized eyes.”

  I laughed, then with a glance at the driver—behind a glass shield, but still—lowered my voice. “They do rather…loom. I’d have thought the people would build their horror tales around those things, rather than dead folk climbing from their graves.”

  “History gives us a number of reasons why these people are quick to see shades and vampires in every corner. The Countess Báthory would be one. And another—” He stretched forward to retrieve the speaking tube. “Would you kindly pull over up ahead? Just past that hay field will do nicely.”

  The driver nodded as he steered towards a wide patch, the entrance to a field.

  A short way off, a family was in the process of building one of the haystacks. A young woman was balancing beside the protruding sapling, at least a dozen feet from the ground, while two men and a woman took turns throwing rakefuls of hay up for her to arrange. Children were collecting freshly cut hay into clumps with rakes of their own—the wooden kind, hand made, with teeth whittled before a fire during long winter nights. Further out, two figures rocked back and forth, back and forth with the implacable rhythm of the scythe that looks so easy but leaves a neophyte’s back in spasms. Nearby, in the deep shade of a walnut tree, two old women were gathering up their spindles and knitting, having spent the heat of the afternoon on a pair of three-legged stools watching over a baby and a tumble of small children. One of the grannies noticed me, and gave me a wide and toothless grin.

  Holmes caught my elbow to redirect my attention away from the rustic scene.

  I had been aware of the low mountains encircling this agricultural plain, with the occasional mouldering castle perched on their tops, but since leaving Brașov, the fruit trees and fields of tall maize lining the road had kept me from noticing how near we were to the approaching hills. From this clearer spot, I could now see the ridge that rose abruptly a few miles away, heavily wooded, its trees parting to reveal, in stark loneliness, a tall, pale castle that…

  I thought my recent dreamlike state had given way to full-blown hallucination.

  The castle seemed to ripple as I looked at it, mimicking the effect of Dracula’s mist—or more likely, of the day’s heat.

  Mist or mirage, the structure was from the pages of a child’s book. High and narrow, on the point of a hill, it was composed of mismatched towers and blunt stone walls. A bit of half-timbered construction framed its few high windows. One expected Rapunzel’s hair to gleam from beneath a cupola, and long, bright, Medieval banners to ripple from the tower-tops. One wondered if a troll lived in its cellars, or a Count who preyed upon the village girls…

  I took off my glasses to rub my eyes, but when I looked again, it was unchanged. Magical, yet enigmatic.

  How was it possible for a building stuck atop a bare hill to feel secretive? It should be the very opposite, open and forthright. And yet, it gave me that distinct primitive sensation of being watched, as if something was studying me from a hidden corner of its façade. Not threatening, or even unfriendly, merely…there.

  Holmes appeared not to notice anything. And being loth to admit to another round of febrile delusions, I kept my impressions to myself.

  I followed him back to the car and we set off again, pausing to avoid a trotting horse-cart laden with people. From a distance, they were indistinguishable from any other cart full of Roumanians, but up close, the differences were profound—in their attitude more even than their clothing. The women stared at us openly, the standing man with the reins pretended we weren’t there, and the children, who needed haircuts or shoes or both, jeered.

  These would be the local Romany, or gipsies, rootless and proud and never trusted by their more settled cousins. Somewhere nearby would be a collection of lightly built houses and fences made of scrap, with glossy horses and well-cared-for wagons. Nothing of value that could not be packed up and carried away within hours.

  But now the more settled village began to appear, the very opposite of Romany dwellings: sturdy houses surrounded by wooden fences with high, heavily carved gates. Some of the gates had a horse’s skull fastened to them, but other than that macabre touch, they were handsome entries to the dwellings within. Most of the gates stood open, showing glimpses of the gardens and yard inside. Pigs rooted, chickens scratched, children wandered—but when a boy came pelting out of one gate, a laugh on his face and a dog at his heels, our driver matched his speed and leaned out of the window, saying something in a language that I did not know, but almost felt as if I understood. The boy slowed and made what was clearly a smart reply, causing the driver to raise a finger that was not threatening, but certainly admonishing. I felt that the exchange might have escalated into a confrontation, but the boy glanced into the back, saw us there, and made a wave of the hand that could have been taken as agreement. The driver took it as such, and drew his elbow in to continue on our way.

  “That was something about the Queen?” I said to Holmes. “Regina, and sara asta?”

  “I believe it was ‘The Queen is coming tonight.’ Although I fail to see the significance.”

  I reached forward to slide the window open. “May I ask, what was that you were telling the boy?”

  “I warn him, that Queen Marie returns.” A glance in the mirror told him that I did not understand. “Mr Florescu, he has orders to village people, when Queen is here, that dogs are inside or tied.”

  “Who is Mr Florescu?” I asked.

  Both men spoke simultaneously. “The butler,” Holmes said. I did not really hear the driver’s reply; however, it had looked like he said, “God.”

  “Why would—ah,” I said. “Because she rides?”

&n
bsp; “Yes. Mr Florescu say to Bran: if a dog frightens her horse and makes her fall, that dog will be shot and family will go to prison.”

  There was once an eccentric Duke of Portland so misanthropic, he made his maids turn their faces to the wall at his approach. Requiring dogs to be tied at least had some justification.

  Although perhaps not deserving of a death sentence and imprisonment.

  We went past what looked like the village shop, separated from the road by an expanse of gravel. On this sat a most unexpected conveyance: a large, new motorcar, halfway between a shooting-brake and an ambulance. As we went by it, I noticed a sign on the small building attached to one side of the shop: the surgery for the village doctor, with a plaque giving his hours.

  It was comforting to know that we could have our vampire bites treated by Western medicine—at least, if we fell ill on a Monday, Thursday, or Saturday, between the hours of 10:00 and 7:00.

  Which reminded me: “Holmes, we stopped back there to illustrate why the people here tend to see shades and vampires. Was it something to do with the castle?”

  “You remember that Stoker’s character bears the surname of a Roumanian ruler whose name is synonymous with brutality.”

  “Vlad Dracula. Known as Vlad the Impaler.”

  “In this part of the world, Vlad is something of a hero, for his long success against the Ottomans. During his career, he had any number of dealings with the rulers of Brașov, it being the town nearest the border between Transylvania and Wallachia. Vlad’s grandfather owned all of the land around here. And it has to be said…” (Here he paused, to bend down and peer through the wind-screen at something, then resumed.) “…that despite the novelist’s trick of using shiny facts to create a façade of verisimilitude on an otherwise unconvincing farrago of nonsense, in Stoker’s case there is some indication of a more specific connection; namely, that for a period of several weeks, Vlad Țepeș…” (The motorcar slowed to avoid three wandering hens and a goat, then turned off the road.) “…a man who built his reputation for brutality by impaling enemies on spikes while they were still alive, when he was finally captured by the Hungarians in 1462, may have been kept locked in a small dungeon at the base…” (The heavy car slowed, then shifted gears for a steep climb. The moment our bonnet tipped towards the sky, Holmes made a wide-handed voilà gesture to the front window-screen.) “…of Castle Bran.”