Castle Shade

by Laurie R. King

  A woman in wide skirts and a brilliant head-scarf scurried past us, one hand tucked around a chicken and the other firmly pulling along her wide-eyed infant. And indeed, my eye spotted a similar shape to that at the peak of the gate arch, worked in red cotton up the length of her sleeves.

  “Buna seara,” Holmes said politely. She giggled and hurried on.

  “Roumanian sounds rather like Italian, doesn’t it?” I said. “Perhaps if I simply wrote things down, the locals would understand me. The literate ones, at any rate. How much of the language did you pick up while you were here last month, Holmes? Er, Holmes?” I looked around and saw his figure disappearing into the pathway between a small pasture and a barn. I followed, and found him leaning on a low wall surrounding an orchard, taking out his tobacco pouch.

  Bees.

  The hives were old-fashioned skeps, knee-high basketry domes resting on boards—like eggs from those shambling hay-creatures dotting the landscape. The small openings at the bottom of each skep were thick with end-of-day traffic. The air smelt of honey. I propped my elbows against the wall, facing the opposite direction from Holmes, watching half a dozen sheep crop the stubble around the base of an amiable hay-monster. Somewhere nearby, the odours of meat and spices heralded the approach of the dinner hour. Smoke rose from many of the chimneys.

  After a time, Holmes led me down a beaten path that turned out to connect with the centre line of the H of roads through Bran. Dogs barked, children shrieked. Every woman we saw wielded either a farm implement or the eternal spindle. Somewhere, a concertina was playing. We ambled along, admiring the neat houses and a few shop-fronts. One could see signs of long-time poverty given a sudden boost: even the smallest and meanest of houses had repaired shingles and new front doors. One or two of the buildings here were in need of renovation—which surprised me, since I’d have thought that the closer to the castle, the greater the prosperity. On closer examination, they proved to be abandoned, and yet they backed onto the Queen’s parkland. Perhaps the Queen’s architect had plans for them.

  We went through a vestigial crossroads and turned down the leg of the H that followed the river. More homes and small farm buildings, many of them with long strings of garlic hanging beneath their eaves, but I had seen those before, and told myself that the purpose was culinary, not for the repulsion of the undead. Indeed, there were often strings of drying peppers, onions, and maize under the eaves as well.

  We came to a garage, the Queen’s Rolls-Royce out in front with the driver assiduously polishing away the dust of the road. We greeted him; he tugged at his hat in response. The stables were nearby, and behind them an orchard of trees old and young, with a riot of flower beds along the edges—explaining all those bouquets in the castle.

  “Have you met her? The Queen of Roumania?” It was a question I had somehow not considered before. Perhaps because the idea of knowing the granddaughter of an Empress and a Tsar seemed inherently unlikely.

  “Not since she became Queen. I met her briefly, many years ago in Malta, when she was very young. I doubt she would remember the occasion.”

  “It must be odd,” I reflected after a time, “to grow up aware that your chief value as a person lies in who you can be married off to. There is power, and yet little self-determination.”

  “Every so often, one encounters a woman of her type who reaches past the distractions of position, pleasure, and society’s assumptions to become something greater. And even more rarely, one finds a woman who craves not power, but the chance to create something new.”

  “And Marie is one of those?”

  “As I said: an interesting woman.”

  A boy came out of a nearby farmhouse with a bucket, setting off a stampede of goats that leapt and bounced in pursuit of whatever the bucket contained. He held it high, just out of their reach, to tempt the creatures into a nearby shed. There followed a series of thumps, bangs, and affectionate curses. Silence fell. We studied the goat-shed door which, like almost every other wooden surface in the village, had been carved—although these shapes were crude geometry compared to the village’s elaborate gates and posts. I was about to ask Holmes if he knew of any significance when the boy came leaping out, slapping the door shut behind him. He fastened the latch, noticed us watching, and tugged his hat-brim as he trotted across the yard to his own supper.

  The thought caused me to notice how long the shadow from a nearby hay creature was. “We should probably head back before the sun goes down. I wouldn’t want the castle to send out a search-party.”

  He tapped out his pipe on the ground, crushing the embers under his boot. We walked back arm in arm, up the hill to the castle, and to a very pleasant dinner, and to a most welcome bed.

  Chapter Nine

  I fell asleep that night as if I’d been clubbed. I woke in exactly the same position that I’d lain down in. However, the light coming into the ancient room was not the golden dawning sun, but the silver tones of the near-full moon.

  I wasn’t sure what had awakened me, but I had been dreaming. Dracula again, with horse-drawn carriages and dancing blue flames. I turned irritably on the pillow, pulling it down under my head—and froze.

  Was that wolves?

  I jerked up from the pillow, straining to hear, feeling the ghostly stickiness of drying blood on my palms. A long minute ticked by…then yes, it came again, a distant howl, unearthly in the night.

  Russell, be honest: could you tell the difference between a wolf and a dog, from far away? It was a dog. Sure to be. And even if it was a wolf, the thing wasn’t about to appear, glowing-eyed, beside my bed. I settled back against the pillows.

  And waited. But I’d either gone to bed too early, or slept too many hours in various trains, because my body was telling me it was time to rise.

  After a while I gave up. I donned my glasses and a light robe, padding through our rooms to the narrow window-seat, where I drew my feet up onto the cushions.

  I could feel the castle sleeping around me, half a millennium of stone and wood, unimpressed by the ephemeral beings that traipsed around its rooms. Change here would be slow, and hard-won, with the everyday miracles of modern life laid on at the cost of much sweat and probably blood. How many generations of sleepless eyes had gazed out of this window, across the dark village? There was one light in the landscape below, one faint, warm rectangle where some citizen lay restless, or ill, or birthing a child. Other than that, the view beneath the full moon was like a film paused in a projector with a failing bulb: silent, still, and half-seen.

  Moonlight is always uncanny. It obscures as much as it reveals, putting every object into sharp and deceptive contrast. Here, it exaggerated the presence of those haystacks. I found myself trying to catch them move. As if they were trolls or woolly mammoths, dancing an imperceptibly slow pavane across the fields.

  Even more slowly, I became aware that there was actually movement out there, somewhere. Not that I could tell what, or even where. An owl, perhaps—or a bat too small and quick for the eyes to follow? Or maybe a wisp of high cloud, gently migrating? I rose onto my knees, then took my eyes out of focus, which is generally the best way to perceive anything by half-light. And waited. Nothing disturbed the pale tracks that were the roadway. No gleam of cigarette or silhouette of wings. But after a time, I found myself watching one of the faint building-shapes. There was no reason for my eyes to focus there, so why—

  A distant dog barked at the same instant my attention snapped to a spot a thumb-nail’s breadth from a gleam of pale doorway. A shadow had flitted from one side of the lane to the other. I waited, then—yes, another faint smudge along the marginally paler line of the track, slipping behind a shape I knew was a barn, pausing there long enough that I thought I had missed it…only to have something quiver in and among the trees and flicker across an open space to merge its shadow with that of a hay-monster—

  I squeaked and
nearly flew head-first out of the window when something brushed my bare toes. “Holmes! Damn it, you nearly sent me to the rocks.”

  “You did seem remarkably intent,” he said. “What is out there?”

  “Nothing. I mean, something, but I couldn’t tell what.”

  “How large?”

  “I don’t know, it was never completely out in the open. It might have been a—” I caught back the word wolf. “A large fox. In this light and at that distance—and with my eyes—all I had was an impression of motion.”

  “Do you believe it was a fox?”

  “Or a dog. Sorry to disturb you—I couldn’t sleep, after a dog howling woke me. It sounded like a wolf.”

  “It probably was a wolf.”

  “Really?” I pulled back to look at his face, close to mine in the shadows, lit only by the moon.

  “Was it a fox?” he persisted.

  “Why does it matter?”

  “Russell, please. Did it feel like a fox to you?”

  “No, it ‘felt’ like a man—or a person, at any rate.”

  “Large, small, young, old?”

  But at that, I had to shake my head. “Probably someone on his way home from the pub.” Did they even have pubs in Transylvania? And if some man headed home for his bed, why had my first thought been of flitting?

  “Where was it, exactly?”

  I dropped into a seated position on the cushion. “Holmes, what are you expecting to see there?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. I shrugged, and glanced back at the window.

  “If you drew a line between us and that light at the far end of the village? The shadow was about eight degrees to the west, and just this side of that gleam of metal roof. It moved off, away from the road, and had just gone behind that double-haystack when you startled me. I expect that whoever—or whatever—it was, it then went into the orchard rather than crossing the open field.”

  Holmes’ eyes might be nearly four decades older than mine, but they were better at night than mine ever were. He turned them onto the village below as if shining a narrowed searchlight into a sky filled with hovering zeppelins. Remarkably intent was not the half of it.

  I slipped out from under his focussed glare and moved to the other window. I, too, watched for a time. For five or six minutes, nothing stirred. When there was movement, it was only a motorcar’s head-lamps, starting up several miles along the road. But unless its driver had sprinted in Olympics-record time, it had nothing to do with Bran. Or with me, clearly. So I retrieved the book I had left on the bed-side table and went into the adjoining room to read.

  I thought I would find it difficult to sleep again. There seemed to be a great deal of life in these old walls, an accumulation of history and violence. It is not that I believe in ghosts, exactly, but I will admit that more than once in my life, I have felt some inexplicable presence, the sense of being watched. And it was always in an old building in the dark. Which made the iron latches on the insides of our doors curiously reassuring.

  However, several hours later I woke with the book on my chest and the candle long burned out. The sun shone. The brass pot overflowing with flowers—a dozen or more varieties, all of them shades of orange—filled the room with good cheer. Filled me, too, it seemed. I stretched hard, feeling almost normal for the first time since boarding the train in Nice. The mid-night episode appeared to have cleared the fur from my brain as well, restored my thoughts and perceptions to reassuringly crisp outlines. I threw back the soft woollen rug I didn’t remember pulling over myself the previous night, and went in search of company and caffeinated beverages.

  Holmes was missing—no surprise there—but my stirring around drew the attention of the house. As I was buttoning my shirt, a tap came at the door.

  “Come? Ah, Gabriela, good morning.”

  “Good morning, Missus, I bring tea.”

  “You are a blessing from heaven, Gabriela.”

  She grinned, and set down the tray: tea-pot, jug of milk, toast and jam, an English newspaper three days old, and one perfect rose that could only have been picked at first light. “Your husband say this is what you like now, is right? Black India tea, not Queen Marie’s Early Grey? And eggs in a little?”

  “Perfect, thank you. So he went out already?”

  “Very early. Before light. He came, he drink coffee in the kitchen, he asked Unc—Mr Florescu to show him where the builders left their things, and then he leave. Left,” she corrected herself.

  “That does sound like him,” I said.

  “Queen send message to say, I come tonight. Though not Ileana—Princess Ileana, yes?”

  The second sentence was accompanied by a small shrug of disappointment. With my assignment in mind—to ingratiate myself into the world of the adolescent girls—I hastened to get my foot inside that door. “I don’t know the Princess, but I hear she’s a lovely person. Does she come often?”

  “Oh yes, Bran is home to her. To her heart, yes? She is…she is my friend.”

  The girl’s chin was up when she made the declaration, daring me to argue or to scold her presumption.

  I merely smiled. “I imagine it’s difficult for someone in Ileana’s position to make an honest friend. It’s always hard to know when people like you for yourself, and not for what you can do for them.”

  The girl nodded eagerly, heedless of any intimation that she might be among the latter.

  I decided to take it a little further. “What is she like?”

  The girl’s hand fiddled with the cross at her neck as she considered her reply. “Princess is a good friend. Well, as good as possible. So many differences between us. Big, big differences. But she laughs and teases and is easy to talk with. We sneaked her to movie once in Brașov, her first time, can you believe? She works so hard.”

  “Really?” Hard work wasn’t something I’d have expected of a Princess. “Doing what?”

  “Oh, so much. School, dinner parties, gives speeches, Girl Reserves, Red Cross, factory girls—all sorts of help. Then she comes here and teaches, helps girls. And Girl Guides. You know Girl Guides?”

  “I know of them, yes. They do much good.”

  “Is not easy, being woman here in Bran. No jobs, school is mostly for boys. Ileana—Princess Ileana, she is a good person for girls here to see. Good friends to many, not just me. I think she likes here, too, because it is not…how do you say—formal? Not formal like her other lives. No one watching her here, she can go into the hills with friends and not guards and drivers and all. I think she is lonely, sometimes. She comes here and comes to the kitchen, just to talk. She likes that we don’t treat her—”

  A noise from outside snapped her attention to the door. No one came in, but it reminded her of her duties, and perhaps of her indiscretion. She gave me a nervous smile, then ducked out, leaving me with my morning tea, my out-of-date news, and my thoughts.

  It was after eight o’clock when I heard the doorknob turn. Holmes sidled in, cradling what appeared to be an armful of dirt. I grabbed up the newspaper and tossed it on the table for his treasure, which turned out to be two elongated puddles of hardened plaster, containing the prints of shoes, left and right.

  “Our shadow?”

  “A rather substantial ghost who walked through a patch of wet ground near a horse-trough.”

  “But not the farmer? No, of course not, those are city shoes.”

  “Men’s. A foot in the neighbourhood of 290 or 300 millimetres—the settling of the mud during the night makes it hard to judge. Mud can also interfere with a determination of height, since people tend to shorten their stride when the footing is uncertain. However, he was at least as tall as you, though some three stone heavier.” He glanced at his hands, then walked off to the adjoining room, raising his voice over the splashing water. “Florescu said that you hadn’t taken breakfast yet, so he�
��ll have it brought up.”

  “About time.”

  “Pardon?” He appeared in the doorway, drying his hands.

  “Sounds nice, I said.”

  He tossed his towel somewhere in the vicinity of the water source and came out. “He also said that Queen Marie needs to stay in Sinaia until this afternoon, but that she should be here by evening. That gives us the day to question the villagers about recent events. Ah, I hear the approach of coffee and eggs.”

  He opened the door, to save Gabriela the juggling act of knocking, and she dipped her head in thanks as she came in. She propped the tray on the table and began to lay the settings, as she had with our tea the afternoon before. I stopped her.

  “Gabriela, why don’t you just leave everything on the tray, and we’ll pick and choose. An informal breakfast is fine. I imagine you must have plenty of work, if the Queen is returning today.”

  Her dimples were both an acknowledgment of my statement’s truth, and an indication that she was happy to do it. She bounced us a curtsey, and whirled away.

  Chapter Ten

  “Why did you expect to find foot-prints, Holmes?” I asked, settling down with my laden plate. “And why did you refuse to tell me what you were looking for last night? Or for that matter, at any time in the past few days?”

  “I did not expect them, although the possibility led me to taking along the plaster of Paris. I did anticipate some sort of disruption in the village.”

  “And you did not think that worth mentioning? Or was this merely a test of my mental acuity?” I paused, fork in air. “Which, I grant you, has been somewhat less than scintillating.”

  “You have not been, as they say, at the top of your game. I judged a night of rest might help restore your wits.”

  “Very well, I have rested, I am no longer impaired. So why did you expect a disruption?”

  “Because the Queen is back from her travels. Or nearly so, Bran being only thirty miles from Sinaia by road—fifteen as the crow would fly.”