Castle Shade

by Laurie R. King

  “Kaleméra, Patéra Konstantinos.”

  The figure turned, revealing a handsome bearded individual who could not have been much more than forty. He straightened, and beamed. “Good morning, my English friend,” he boomed, his words heavily accented but quite clear. “You still here, eh?”

  “I am here again,” Holmes replied, picking his way through the pepper plants to shake the man’s grubby hand. “And I have brought my wife.”

  “Ah! Good morning, Missus! Wife? No—too pretty and young for this old man!” He roared with laughter as he saw me go both pink and speechless.

  “Costel,” came a woman’s chiding voice from the house. “Nepoliticos.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” he said, looking not in the least abashed. “So rude. My wife, she is always reminding me. I tell her when we married, man with my tongue will never make a bishop, yet still, me she marries.”

  I’d forgot that Orthodox priests could wed—as clearly this one had. His wife shook her head, then stepped back into the house as the priest crossed the garden, favouring his left foot somewhat, to trade his hoe for the dusty, once-black cassock lying across the back of a bench. He dropped the garment over his head, fished out his beard, and ran a hand down the back of a slim tortoise-shell cat that appeared from between the rows, before gesturing us towards a rustic arbour propped against the side of the house. It had been built out of sapling trunks and large branches, and planted with grape-vines—which explained the exaggerated height, since its entire leafy ceiling was covered with long clusters of nearly-ripe grapes.

  Father Constantin paused on the way in to sluice off his hands. At the entrance to this simple gazebo, he looked over the fruit that was in the full sun, then reached up to snap a heavy stem against his thumb-nail.

  He held it out to me, dropping it in my cradled palms. The warm fruit, dark globes frosted with the bloom of ripeness, smelled like summer. I pulled off a few, handed the half-cluster to Holmes, and he in turn gave them back to the priest. Father Constantin murmured a blessing and popped a pair of them into his mouth.

  For some reason, the fruit in my hand called to mind Persephone and her six pomegranate seeds, that tied her forever to the Underworld. I smiled at my fancy, put a grape in my mouth, and bit down.

  What happened next was one of those odd moments that carve themselves into one’s memory, an unexpected melding of sensation and thought that, even as it is happening, seems destined to stay in place forever. The crack of the firm grape between my molars, the flood of rich juice with a slight tang in the sweetness. The odour of the priest, an earthy smell of sweat and sunlight, comforting and real. The cool dapple of shade, the deliberation of Holmes’ long fingers on the fruit, the cat, eyes half-shut and tail gently encircling its feet in the sun…

  Like a photograph, the moment was captured. Then I swallowed the grape, followed it up with another, and the three of us ate in silent communion until the stem was stripped bare. And if I was now permanently condemned to return to Roumania because of the snack, well, there could be worse places to spend eternity.

  Father Constantin brushed off his hands and laced them over his stomach, a gesture that in the doctor had raised a symbolic barrier, but in this man seemed to do the opposite. “So my friend and wife, what do you come today for?”

  “As you know,” Holmes began, “I came here to assist the Queen’s architect with his plans for the castle’s renovations, but I am also quite interested in the ancient traditions of the country.”

  “We spoke of many fairy tales, yes. It is a thing our Queens seem to enjoy—the other Queen, too, liked to write book of fairies.”

  “Although Queen Marie is less…flamboyant than Carmen Sylva ever was.”

  Princess Elisabeth of Wied, known by her nom de plume Carmen Sylva, had been a strong candidate for the position of wife to Edward, Prince of Wales, until Bertie decided he didn’t care for her looks. Instead, she was passed on to Carol I, Roumania’s inaugural King—whom she alienated first by failing to bear a son, then by showing more interest in her eccentric literary and musical salons than the work of royalty, and finally by encouraging an affair between their eldest son and an unmarriageable lady-in-waiting—topping it off, or so rumour had it, by expressing an opinion that elected governments were better than royalties. Marie, first as Crown Princess and then as Queen, had done somewhat better in carrying out her role as Queen Consort without scandal.

  The priest cocked an eyebrow at the word flamboyant, but when Holmes gave him a few synonyms, the priest nodded. “A good thing, that our Queen is not like the earlier. Her Majesty was not born Roumanian, but she has been made so.”

  “And because of that, and because the people of Bran hold a special place in her heart, she is concerned about the fairy tales they are telling themselves now. The dark ones.”

  The priest leaned forward to fiddle with the bare grape-stem. “It is…troubling, yes.”

  “You heard what happened last night? To Vera Dumitru?”

  “I went to her, this morning, when I heard.”

  “Is she all right?” I asked.

  “She will be. Vera has a…what do you say—a straight head?”

  “Level-headed?”

  “Level-headed, yes. Not one to believe in ghosts.”

  “Dr Mikó would agree with you.”

  “Ah—you saw our doctor, then?”

  “He’d just arrived, so he hadn’t heard what happened. But he said he’d go by and check on her.”

  “He will. To the doctor, all of Bran are his nestlings. Fierce like a mother hawk, you know? Since his wife and small son die of the gripa.”

  “The flu?”

  “My first winter here. Terrible time. So many funerals, chopping holes in frozen earth. I would weep at night.”

  “I can see that an epidemic would make a doctor very protective.”

  Holmes brought us back to the main track. “What did you learn from Miss Dumitru about the incident? I should like to tell the Queen.”

  I expected the priest to claim the sanctity of the confessional or something, but either it did not count as a confession to his mind, or the sacrality of the Queen trumped his own, because after a moment, he started talking.

  Just before Christmas, Vera Dumitru, then seventeen, had lost her fiancé in an industrial accident in Brașov. She had loved the boy deeply, and the past months had been very hard on her. (Something in the priest’s careful phrases made me wonder if Vera had been pregnant when the boy died—but if so, she must have lost the baby. Or that could have been my imagination.)

  Our young friend Gabriela—“such a responsible girl, keeps house for her father since the mother died”—had recommended Vera at the castle this past spring, when the Queen was expected to take up residence. In Father Constantin’s opinion, the friendship and the work helped Vera as much as the income did. She had been looking more cheerful, of late, and she had even been seen batting her eyes at one of the village boys.

  “Și acum asta,” he murmured, and shook his head with a sigh. She had set off from the castle with friends last night. They stopped to gossip a little, then split up for their homes, a safe thing in this quiet place. Not like the city, he said, where fathers had to guard their daughters. Here, everyone saw everything, and any sin was sure to be overheard.

  The words he used for what Vera heard from the churchyard were nearly identical to those Mr Florescu had given us: Andrei, who was killed near Fagaraș during the War.

  “That would have been during the opening months of the Roumanian War, is that right?” Holmes asked.

  “Roumania declared war in August 1916, after England and France said, yes, we will give you Transylvania. Andrei joined then—on the Austrian side, of course—and was killed early, in September or October. Almost no training, they were given a uniform and a gun and sent out.”

 
“Was he brought home then? Or much after?”

  “I think not right away. Families suffered, not knowing, but armies had other things to worry about than sending home the dead.”

  “You weren’t here then, in Bran?”

  “No, I was just finished with seminary when War broke out. I joined. In 1916—Hungary was fighting for two years by then, and I was a captain—I was wounded.” He stuck out his left boot, by way of illustration. “My foot was no good for rough ground, so I ended up in offices, but I wanted to help people so they later made me medic. I came to Bran six years past, when the old priest died. My wife was born in Brașov. She has family here, cousins, which is good.”

  “How old are the cousins?”

  “Thirties, forties. An uncle is near to sixty.”

  “Would you ask the uncle to talk to me, about when Andrei Costea was buried?”

  The blue eyes fixed on Holmes. “What are you looking for, with these questions?”

  “I am looking for answers, Father Constantin. To questions such as: How certain can we be that the man who lies in the graveyard is in fact Andrei Costea? And, did Vera Dumitru know the young man? What made her think the voice was actually him, rather than some lad playing a trick on her? And from there, I have to wonder if there is any link between this young soldier and Queen Marie, or her friends, or her servants.”

  Constantin went over this in his mind, frown deepening. “You think the boy was a deserter?”

  “If a few weeks went by between the death in battle and his body arriving here, I doubt anyone opened the casket to examine him. Were there identity tags?”

  Constantin shook his head. “By that time in the War, who knows? There was a letter—his sister has it. And with so many dead men, on a battlefield, mistakes can be made. But if so, why would he not return? Everyone says he was a good boy who loved his brother and sister. He would at least have sent word.

  “As for Vera—yes, she knew him. A small village, who does not know everyone? She was young, maybe nine or ten, when he went off to war, but Andrei’s house was not far from hers. He would have been friends with her sister and brother.”

  “Do the two of them still live here?”

  “The sister is in Bucharest. The brother—well, there is an answer to your last question. Vera’s brother is our Queen’s driver.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Our interrogation of the priest was broken up by his wife, coming to take us in, despite our protests, for an early luncheon, since the Father had broken his fast at dawn. As it was not even midday, I anticipated light snacks meant to sustain until the dinner hour. Instead, we were ushered in to a working man’s primary meal.

  It started with a small glass of tuica, the eye-blinkingly powerful plum brandy that Roumanians take before every meal. On top of that went soup and cabbage rolls and the local version of polenta called mamaliga and a chicken gone red with paprika, and halfway through it I could see why the good Father put in the hours of physical work in his garden. When we escaped at last, I was all but comatose with the combination of sleeplessness, slivovitz, and stodge. I staggered up the hill, blinking owlishly at the guards, the butler, and the housemaid as I made an unerring line for my bed, only dimly aware of Holmes giving instructions that we intended to immerse ourselves in quiet study and were not to be disturbed until we called.

  I passed out, face-down on the covers.

  * * *

  —

  Voices. My face pressed against bedclothes. I had at least managed to take off my spectacles before collapsing, then. Good. It was always inconvenient to re-shape the frames.

  Unwillingly, I shifted, then dragged myself upright. Stockinged feet—so I’d got my shoes off, too, it seemed.

  My ears finally got a message through to my brain: someone was bumping and banging about in the next room. I had been married to the man long enough to recognise the sounds of irritation, and when I went to look, indeed, there was Holmes, on his feet, not napping.

  I yawned. “Did I hear voices? What time—heavens, it’s barely 1:30, I only lay down at one.”

  Finally, my eyes joined my ears: he was yanking clothes from his drawers and shoving them with his customary brusque neatness into a valise.

  “Are you going somewhere, Holmes?”

  Walking past me to the bath-room, he thrust an envelope into my hand.

  FAMILY FRIENDS AT ATHENEE PALACE BUCHAREST STOP. URGENT BUSINESS DEALINGS YOUR PRESENCE NEEDED STOP. BROTHER M

  I sighed, folding the telegram back into its envelope as he came through with shaving kit and tooth-brush. “Holmes, you specifically told me that our presence in Roumania had nothing to do with Mycroft.”

  “No, I said that I was already here investigating matters when he wrote, urging me to assist the Queen. It would appear that he now has what he judges pertinent information.”

  “About what? Vampires and graveyard voices?”

  “About the political situation.”

  “I should have known that politics would rear its ugly head.”

  “We both acknowledged the possibility from the start, although as you made it clear that you were not interested in politics, I have not required you to consider that aspect.” He jammed the shaving kit into the valise with more emphasis than was required.

  “Holmes, I’m sorry, you are absolutely right. The Bolsheviks killed her cousin’s entire family, and if they’re after this branch as well, we need to know. Give me a minute to wash my face and pack a bag, I’ll come with you.”

  “That is not necessary. There is plenty for you to do here in Bran.”

  “Such as what? Interview Vera’s brother—the Queen’s driver?”

  “I had just finished doing so when Florescu waylaid me with that telegram. The young man knows nothing about Andrei Costea’s death other than that a coffin arrived in the last weeks of 1916, with the young soldier’s name on it. So far as he remembers, no one looked inside.”

  “Another dead end, then. So to speak.” He did not reply, merely scowled at the bag before yanking the top shut and reaching for the buckle. I had to protest. “Holmes, come now, sulking is beneath you.”

  He looked up in surprise. “You misunderstood, Russell. My irritation is not with you, but with my brother. My instincts are that the answer to our mystery lies here in Bran, not in the capital city. But it would be irresponsible to push away the very real threat of international intrigue simply because it does not fit into some highly incomplete data. We need that information; we cannot expect Mycroft to send his informants here; therefore, I must go to them. I see no reason for both of us to go. I shall return tomorrow on the earliest possible train. See what you can find in the meantime. And if you need me before that, wire the Athenee. I will steal a motor, if I have to, and be here before noon.”

  He stepped to the wardrobe to fetch his tightly furled umbrella, picked up the bag, and left.

  But as he went past me, he paused to rest his lips in a brief and apologetic kiss against the side of my head.

  Chapter Eighteen

  When he had gone, I rubbed at my face, then went to run some water into the basin and try to wash away the sleep. I did eye the bed, longing to crawl back into its softness. But if a man more than twice my age could keep moving on no sleep, so could I.

  The voices that roused me had apparently been accompanied by a tray of coffee. The dregs remained, tepid and stale but no worse than some things I had drunk in recent travels. And it helped kick my brain into life, reminding me of the morning’s conversations with the doctor and the priest.

  Bran was like an English village, in that everyone would either be related, or friends, or related to friends. This was an advantage when one was looking for common knowledge that people didn’t mind talking about, but if one sought information that people wanted hidden, no gangland snitch would be less of an outcast
than a neighbour who gave it away.

  There are various ways around the reluctance of witnesses. An amiable face can encourage a loosening of mistrust. A clever interrogator can convince a witness that she knows all about it already, and is only looking for confirmation. Occasionally, one finds a would-be informant just panting to show off his inside knowledge.

  Other times, you just have to go looking.

  But before I sought out people to question, I needed to take a closer look at my surroundings. Holmes had spent a week here already, and got to know the ground then. Time I caught him up.

  And yes, he would probably sleep all the way from Brașov to Bucharest—then have a lovely quiet bed at the Athenee Palace Hotel—but I wanted something to show when he got back, to prove that I, too, had been on my feet and active.

  I drained my cold, bitter cup and laced up my boots.

  * * *

  —

  Near our top-floor rooms was a gallery overlooking the courtyard. I went there now, propping my elbows under one of the arched openings as I tried to make sense of the jumble of towers, roofs, and angles before me. This main block of the castle, its eastern tower, had five storeys, beginning with its “ground” floor entrance and central courtyard—which were actually one flight of stairs up from the true ground level outside. On my right, forming the northern wall, was the donjon, whose flat roof angled sharply down towards the castle interior. The donjon was the highest tower by at least a couple of storeys, turning its blunt north face over the broad agricultural lands in the direction of Brașov. Beyond it, and half its height, were the castle kitchens, outside which stood the courtyard’s well.

  The far corner of the castle was a round tower with a pointy witch’s hat of a roof—the Queen’s quarters were there, two storeys below where I stood, framed in my view by the high, wooded hills immediately across the narrow river valley. The round tower was linked in both directions by open-sided galleries, strung along the ramparts and towers that encircled the courtyard. For a woman brought up in English palaces, a woman whose jewels had been worn by Tsarinas, this frontier citadel in a dirt-road village with no electricity made for an unlikely retreat. Even Marie Antoinette had put comfort at the fore, when she played milk-maid in Versailles.