The Queen took a sip of coffee, and settled into her chair with as much ease as a woman of her stiff-backed generation and class ever showed. Her pale, compelling gaze rested first on Holmes, then on me, before returning to Holmes.
“How much do you know of what has been happening here?”
“When I came last month, Mr Florescu described the incidents that took place in the spring. He was quite thorough.”
“I am glad. He was not pleased at sharing our problems with a stranger.”
“Understandable. But I believe that things have been quiet since then?” I shot Holmes a quick glance. Did he not intend to mention last night’s adventures?
“So I understand. Florescu says there were a few odd happenings, but nothing the people have found too troubling. A cow dies, an old man becomes ill, a tree fails to set fruit. Witchcraft, perhaps, but nothing worse.”
“I am sorry to hear that.”
She looked up sharply. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that if the disturbing episodes do start up again, now that you are back, there will be even more blame attached.”
The pale eyes blazed. “Sir, do you suggest that ‘blame’ turned against the Queen is of more concern than outright assaults on her citizens?”
“No, I am not,” he said, although to some degree, he had been. “I am suggesting that, if trouble starts again, it indicates that the threat may be larger than mere local resentments. And that could mean that political unrest follows. Madam, I do not think any of us wish for Roumania to experience the sort of unrest common to the recent past.”
She nodded—but I liked her the more, for this instantaneous defence of those beneath her on the social scale.
“I am loved here,” she said, in that aristocratic voice that brooks no disagreement. “Have no doubt of that. My work during the War years, my refusal to flee or to even send my children into safety, my willingness to undertake unseemly manoeuvrings during the Paris peace talks and the victories I won there—they have made me the people’s Queen as no coronation could have done. Any rumour that attaches to me will soon wither and die, as they have in the past. No, Sir, the fears that drove me to send for you, Mr Holmes, are not the fears of a Queen. They are the fears of a mother.”
“So you said in your initial letter,” he replied.
“Open threats are not unusual. The world is full of mad people. But I have never before had one directed against my children. That is why I left Ileana at Peleș—our castle in Sinaia. She wanted to come—she loves Bran as much as I do—but I ordered her to stay there with her father who…is not well. She is guarded there, as she could not be here. I left my lady-in-waiting there by way of support.”
“Why do you think that note was sent?” Holmes asked. “And why against her, rather than you personally?”
“Whoever sent it no doubt knows that I would never be swayed by a threat to myself. It is a coward’s way to come under my guard, by attacking my daughter. And here in Bran, of all places, where she and I are accustomed to ride, even to walk about, completely on our own.”
“Tell us about the Princess. If the threat is against her—against her presence here, at the very least—why might that be? Why would someone not wish her to be here in Bran?”
“Other than that Ileana’s absence would guarantee mine? I cannot think. Her life here is perfectly innocent and without event. She rides, she visits with the village girls, she joins me in the garden and helps entertain our visitors. Foreign visitors adore Bran, despite its remoteness—particularly journalists with cameras.”
I took the opportunity to inject a question. “So the Princess has friends and interests of her own here?”
“Of course! She invites friends from the city, but she also has a group of village girls she helps with schoolwork and such. She…” The Queen paused, then gave a short sigh and a long answer. “You must understand, to be the child of royalty is not a comfortable thing. One’s physical needs are met, certainly, but there is a cost. And in these modern times—oh, the cost can be heavy. When I grew up, I had sisters all around me, parents who loved me, a country that honoured and respected what we were. It was idyllic, in many ways. But Ileana…my daughter’s childhood has been hard.”
She rose, causing us to shoot to our feet as well, and walked over to a collection of silver-framed photographs on a side-table. She brought back two, handing one to each of us. We sat down again, studying them.
Mine was a studio photographic portrait of a girl who looked vaguely like young Gabriela. Formally posed, then hand-tinted, it was not entirely a success, with the subject’s innate solemnity coloured by pinks and blues more suited to a porcelain doll. It showed a girl at the end of adolescence, whose face retained some childhood roundness, but whose eyes—those unnaturally blue eyes beneath the heavy brows—were direct, unflinching, and older than her years. It was the expression of a person who had been wounded, and left with the expectation that life was going to require all the strength she could summon.
Holmes held out the other photograph, so I traded him. This second one—untinted—showed a more informal gathering of men and women in a summer before the War: men in uniform, women in long white skirts and broad-brimmed hats, two boys in sailor suits seated at the front. A woman at the side dandled an infant, and one at the centre held a young girl on her lap, the child’s blonde curls gathered in a big white bow.
Then a face at the back came into focus, and I realised what I was looking at: the Romanovs—Tsar, Tsarina, and children. And that was Queen Marie, seated beside the woman with the girl.
“The photograph was taken during my cousin’s visit to us in 1914, just before the War began. We’d hoped that Carol and Olga might…well. But instead, Ileana and Alexei simply adored each other. The Tsarevitch is the boy sitting down at the front, next to my son Nicholas. Ileana was five—that’s her with the bow. In a better world, Alix and I might now be discussing an upcoming engagement between Ileana and Alexei. Instead, the whole family lie in their graves somewhere in Russia, and Ileana was made to witness things during the War that no young girl should see. She has nightmares, still, of carts filled with naked bodies.
“Since the War, Ileana has lived a somewhat solitary life. Her nearest sister is nine years older, which makes for a wide gap between playmates—and then Mignon married and Ileana was left with me. It’s one of the reasons I agreed that she might spend a year at home in boarding school. She needs to make friends from that world, as she will not here. One might wish she was not so shy. Still, she and I are very close. In many ways she is the daughter of my heart. Nonetheless, a girl needs someone her age to confide in. In the city, she has friends more suited to her position, but out here, the choice becomes servants, or loneliness.”
“You say servants. Is one of her friends the kitchen girl? Gabriela?”
“Florescu’s niece, yes. A most dependable young person. And through Gabriela, as I said, Ileana has come to befriend certain of the nicer girls of the village.”
I considered that. Where there were young girls, there would be factions and rivalries—and considering the vastly unequal positions involved, there was sure to be a jockeying for favour.
Were Holmes and I searching too high for our culprit? Could it be something as simple as a girl taking her petty revenge for some affront or snub? Most of the events did involve girls or young women, and all would have been quickly forgotten but for the gossip that followed: the young woman who ran off to Bucharest (but maybe really hadn’t), then the kitchen maid’s cut hand (which interested the Queen strangely), and finally the child who tripped in the woods (or was it an attack?). A particularly determined young person could have been responsible for stirring up village talk, aiming it not at Ileana herself, but at the authoritative figure behind her: the Queen.
Holmes would be unhappy if it all came down to a resentful adolescent.<
br />
At present, he was not interested in girls, even those who were royal intimates. Instead, he asked, “Who else would wish to discourage you from Bran?”
“From Bran? No one but me cares a fig about Bran. The castle was derelict when I received it, as you can no doubt see. The land it stands upon is small, and would not justify so much as a resentful letter, much less a campaign of threats. No doubt there are many who resent my happiness—not here in Bran, but those in Bucharest and elsewhere. But to organise against me and menace my daughter? Who would be so cruel?”
Who indeed? I had known husbands who relished tormenting their wives, but I had no reason to think King Ferdinand was one of those—even if he could contrive to build peasant rumours in a village he rarely visited. To say nothing of his current illness.
The wife of one of Marie’s rumoured lovers? Chief among those was Prince Barbu Știrbey, a man who lived much of the time in the summer capital of Sinaia, not far from the royal castle of Peleș: intimidating Queen Marie into leaving Bran would cause her to spend more time near Prince Barbu, not less.
What about another lover, one we did not know about? Marie was a remarkably attractive woman, but she was fifty years old, growing thick around the middle. Her great passions appeared to be riding horses, growing dahlias, and building a literary reputation.
Was there someone else who resented her presence here? I’d lived in the English countryside long enough to know that a sudden influx of royalty—bringing with it the royal purse—would make the local residents grumble about new-fangled inventions, motorcars racing through the lanes, and the way that foreign visitors leaned on the fences and frightened the livestock. To say nothing of forcing the local residents to keep their dogs, goats, and presumably children from straying across the roads.
At the same time, this was a poor corner of a backward nation. One would have to be a remarkably devout Socialist to spurn a job on the castle repair crews, a market for milk and cheese, and a chance to sell embroidered goods to the castle’s wealthy guests.
I was depressed to think that, of all the possibilities, the one thing I had not disproved was the thing that Holmes swore had not brought us here: international politics.
Chapter Thirteen
We made our way through the winding passages of the castle by the light of dancing flame, and found our rooms aglow with fragrant candle-light. I went to change out of my dress. Holmes, however, did little more than exchange his jacket for a dressing gown.
He poured himself a glass from the crystal decanter, then snuffed the candles as he passed, to join me at the window. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, traces of village life came into view: a few faintly-lit windows, a swinging lantern winking in and out between the trees. The head-lamps of a motorcar wound back and forth for a time, then turned in to a lane and were swallowed by darkness.
“You still anticipate another…episode, now that the Queen is back?” It seemed unlikely, after that warm, sunlit breeze that was Queen Marie. Surely her presence in Bran would drive the haunts away, not attract them?
Holmes set his glass on the deep stone window-sill and reached for his tobacco. I closed my eyes against the flare of the match.
“If one does take place,” he said at last, “it will tell us a great deal.”
“When shall we go down to the village and keep an eye on things?”
“It is too early, the residents are still astir.”
“Midnight, then? Although let’s hope no one notices us, wandering about the village. They’ll get out their pitch-forks and stakes, then and there.”
* * *
—
At midnight, dressed in dark clothing, we crept from our rooms and through the unlit passageways. The night was still, the moon three days after full. Just outside the door to the guard’s room, which would have men on duty at all hours while the Queen was in residence, I took up position behind a terracotta vase the size of a baby elephant. I listened to the low grumble of their conversation, and braced myself against the coming noise.
At the count of sixty, Holmes sent a bronze pot full of flowers clattering down the stone stairs. As the guards shouted and ran to confront this noisy intruder, I slipped around behind them, and had the outer door open when Holmes appeared. We shut it silently, and left the guards puzzling over what resident cat might have pushed the pot over.
Holmes was at the bottom of the stairway by the time I’d felt my way down it, but my eyes were adjusting to the moonlight, and I could move off with him into the drive without feeling utterly blind.
I had been over the central roads of Bran village during the daylight, but Holmes’ previous stay here had taught him which houses had noisy dogs or sleepless old ladies, and which corners had conveniently long views. He now steered us around the former to a convenient position with the latter, and there he abandoned me. We could not know where a disturbance might come from; therefore, I would watch over the upper section of village from the Brașov road, while he took up a position overlooking the side along the river.
I listened to his retreating footsteps, and he was gone. I was alone, in the dark, in a place where some evil was stirring…
In Transylvania. Which, between Polidori (winner of the Most Melodramatic Final Line in Fiction award) and Vlad Țepeș (there being no melodrama in his battlefield “forest of the impaled”) made a person all too susceptible of Stoker’s dark shapes creeping head-first down a tower wall, or the repugnant intimacy of an undead Count, whose cold, red lips sought to nuzzle into the warmth of a woman’s neck—
Oh, for heaven’s sake, Russell, don’t be a child! I scrubbed at my apprehension with cold scorn, and stepped inside the small roofed structure that we had seen earlier. In a proper town, it might have been a shelter for those awaiting an omnibus. Here, it had probably been a pig shed whose walls had rotted away. Or a home for all the local pigeons and bats. The night felt cool, after weeks of Mediterranean summer, so I pulled my coat up for the warmth and my cap down for the bat-protection, took a slow breath to calm my thoughts, and prepared for a long night of doing nothing at all.
The village slept. The moonlight rendered a mosaic of half-familiar shapes. The metal roof of a house up the way shone clear, as did the white-painted trim of the village shop and a line of whitewashed stones some house-proud citizen had arranged along their front garden. Everything else was rendered in tones of grey: dark grey doorways and recessed windows, shimmering grey willow leaves catching a drift of air, pale grey chimneys and window-frames. I could even make out the tessellations of plaster triangles on the ancient half-timbered building in need of renovations.
Many ancient peoples believed in a land of shade, where the dead dwell in a twilight underworld. In Hebrew, it is tsalmaveth, the death-shadow. In one of the more peculiar Biblical passages, King Saul, who is in desperate need of advice, orders the witch of Endor to summon the prophet Samuel from the shadows. Samuel appears, but he is vexed at being disturbed and angry at Saul’s lack of faith. Things don’t go at all well for the King, implying that summoning the dead is not the best way to reach a decision.
Fairy tales often contain similar lessons. I remembered a story from one of my mother’s books, read when I was far too young for it, about a couple who were given three wishes. The first inadvertently causes the death of their beloved son; the second brings the son back—but when the young man’s father realises that what is being returned to them is the very corpse that lay, rotting and mutilated, in the graveyard, he uses the third wish to banish the nightmare crawling towards their cottage door. I did not sleep well for weeks after reading the story—but I also spent hours trying to come up with commands that might be specific enough to avoid the loop-hole repercussions of horror.
My father said this proved I would grow up to be a lawyer. My mother took to storing some of her books on higher shelves.
I could also remem
ber lying in my lonely hospital bed many years later, knowing that I, too, would ask for my family re-animated, no matter the result.
As I sat there amongst the sleeping innocents of Bran, twenty years after reading “The Monkey’s Paw” and eleven years after the hospital, I became aware of a sound. Faint, still far away, but coming closer.
The hair rose down the back of my neck. My breath stopped, my ears strained, my eyes stared into the grey shapes outside the shelter—all equally futile. Nothing moved, yet there was sound. As if some creature was laboriously dragging itself along. Scrape; pause. Scrape; pause.
I eased my hand down to pull the knife from my boot-top, and stood—
The noise stopped. A minute, two. I put all my perception to my ears, but it was hard to hear over the pounding of my heart.
Finally it started up again, more rapidly now: scrape/pause, scrape/pause, scrape/pause. Another, slightly longer pause, then it resumed. It seemed to be getting closer, but…wasn’t the sound a little…unsubstantial, for a crawling corpse?
Then my eyes caught motion, at last. A shadow moved out from one patch of darkness to the next, but the size of it calmed my heart even as the shape piqued my curiosity.
The next time it emerged, out of the dappled print at the base of a bush, I realised what it was: a small cat dragging its large prey.
The tension of the past minutes came out in a loud snort. The cat froze, staring in my direction, then adjusted its jaws around the rat or rabbit and staggered away with it.
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