So I pulled the plug and, allowing him to offer me his hand, climbed onto the mat.
He found the injection mark on my right biceps. I raised the elbow to peer down at the tiny red welt amidst a mess of bruises. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
But that did not stop him from going over the rest of my epidermis, attaching plasters to any spots that seemed to be leaking, plucking splinters and general debris from others.
I eyed the distant bottle of brandy, but at least I was not looking at him. I took a breath and forced myself to voice the thought neither of us had yet brought into the room. “So, why did he not strip me and carry out a further assault, while I was—Holmes?”
My partner and husband had made an odd sound and rose so abruptly, the stool went over. He retrieved his cigarette case, took out tobacco, got it lit. I studied his back—and belatedly realised that perhaps at the beginning I ought to have said that the man had not…
Nor, I decided, should I say it now, not in so many words.
“I mean, granted,” I continued, “the fellow may have expected someone more voluptuous, but I’m not entirely unpresentable. And in any event, he doesn’t seem to have so much as looked—in fact, it did not seem like that kind of assault at all. Which leaves us with the question of, what was his purpose? Why abduct me, knock me out for half a day, and stick me in a box? One that, in the end, took an embarrassingly small effort to escape from?”
It was absurd to mistake assault for desire, but he knew that. I went on speculating for a time, while Holmes laid his cigarette down and returned wordlessly to his examination.
Down my back and right side, up my front and left, though I had to take over his stool by the time he had finished the repairs to my knees, and I was growing impatient for food as his finger-tips moved up my left arm.
“Holmes, thank you for acting the medic here, let me just put on a dressing gown and when I’ve sat still for a bit, we can ask for some lunch. Holmes? What is it?”
He had gone very still, his eyes on the side of my neck. I pulled away, and saw that utter lack of expression that is so worrying on his face. “What?” I demanded. “What’s the problem?”
I felt around the skin where he had been looking, but it hurt no worse than a dozen other places, so I climbed upright and staggered over to the looking glass to see what had so troubled him.
Ignoring the livid bruise on my cheek, the inflamed red of my eyes, and the sun-burnt look from the chemical, I tipped my chin towards the light from the window. Some straggles of wet hair lay down my neck, reminding me that I needed a hair-cut, but I brushed them aside and saw—
Two angry puncture marks, resting in the hollow above my left collar-bone.
“Russell,” said my husband, in the most phlegmatic manner imaginable. “I believe we see now what he was after.”
Her throat was bare, I thought, idiotically, showing the two little wounds…
At which point I was rescued by a flood of good, healthy rage.
“God damn it!” I shouted. “Who the hell is playing silly buggers here?”
Chapter Thirty-one
As always, food and drink helped settle the nerves. Looking back, Holmes’ standard remedy might have been a touch generous that day. Halfway through the sandwiches he had requested, I found tears of laughter running down my face.
“Enough,” he chided, the second time I asked him to check if my incisors were growing.
“No, truly Holmes, you’d best not sleep near me tonight, you might never wake up. And you know, I’m feeling a touch phobic about sunlight—and yet strangely tempted to creep out of the window head-first to clamber down the stones to the ground.” I giggled, ending in a hiccough.
He stood and put away the bottle, returning with coffee.
After a few more terrible jokes and obscure literary references, I let the humour subside, although I did find myself chuckling about nothing much, from time to time.
He waited until the reactions had spent themselves—fear, fury, and laughter in order—before trying to get any sense out of me.
“What impressions do you have regarding your attacker?”
“Other than being someone who can lay hands on chloroform and some injectable sedative? It was a man.” The attack had, I realised, roundly eliminated the possibility that some trouble-making village lass was behind these attacks. The person who laid hands on me was no girl. “He was at least as tall as I am, maybe taller. Heavier, though not heavy—when I elbowed him in the chest, there was not much extra flesh. Strong, although he had to drag me off the road, so perhaps not strong enough to lift me. Oh—and I wrapped my handkerchief around the torch, in case he left finger-prints. We mustn’t forget to retrieve it before the maid takes the laundry.” I noticed a flicker of surprise cross his face. “What, you didn’t expect me to think of the evidence?”
“I am gratified that your mind was sufficiently clear.”
“Yes, well. Other than that, the attack was as anonymous as could be. Silence, cloth that muffled my shouts and was too tough to tear, and a building that stands open to the elements. He was sure of himself—no particular fumbling around, no reaction when I fought back. And he was big enough to keep me down once I’d fallen. He didn’t speak—didn’t make any noise, not that I remember.”
“Would you say this was a practised assault?”
I was not fooled by his controlled, dispassionate quest for information. I could feel the rage simmering below the surface, that some person had dared to attack his wife. But I was grateful for the pretence of normality, and shook my head, as if we were discussing some impersonal case. “Not necessarily—it could simply have been carefully rehearsed. But there was no moment of hesitation or doubt, not even when I fought back.”
We considered the implications. It was bad either way: a man willing and able to waylay a strong, competent woman would find few challenges to another attack. And Holmes and I both knew that assaults tended to escalate, as confidence grew.
“Even if his motivation is the creation of rumours, rather than some sexual impulse, it does create a worrying scenario. His assaults have grown from whispering at a girl from a cemetery to jabbing one in the neck with a carving fork and tossing her into a nearby root cellar. What comes next? A full-fledged exsanguination?”
“Would you say the assault was aimed at you, specifically? Or simply any person, man or woman, who was walking down the road alone?”
“The housemaids do seem to wander around at all hours, don’t they? Though few of them are my height. If someone saw me leave the castle, they’d have known I would come back along that road at some point. But to plan an encounter, specifically with me, at that precise spot, at a time no one else was nearby? That leaves a great deal to chance. The villagers tend to shut their doors at dark, but there is still a certain amount of traffic that early at night.”
“How long since you had seen anyone else?”
I thought back. “When I came along the other road, there were some children and a farmer on a cart. A motorcar drove through the crossroads, and someone with the outline of Father Constantin was headed in the direction of his home. But it’s true, when I reached the crossroads and turned in to the village, I hadn’t seen anyone in five or six minutes.”
“Considering the unrest in the village, the man may have anticipated that a benighted pedestrian would more likely be a visitor than a resident.”
I couldn’t help thinking of those impromptu weapons I had seen in Vera Dumitru’s house. “It’s true that the villagers are hunkering down inside their gates, but they also appear to be preparing their wooden stakes.” I described what I had seen, placed conveniently near the door.
A thought then came to me. “It does rather raise the question of how, if you and I are caught wandering the village at night, we are to prove to an angry Roumanian that w
e are not strigoi.”
He shook his head. “We must end this before the mobs form.”
“Or before one of the girls is attacked.”
“That, too. But I would think that, whether you were a chosen target or an inadvertent one, it is the timing that matters.”
“When the Queen is here, yes. To give the impression that the acts are committed, if not by the Queen herself, then by someone in her immediate entourage. Though come to that, could it be one of them?”
“It would seem unlikely. The handful of attendants—a secretary, a lady-in-waiting, two or three others—do not strike me as valid suspects, being either far too fragile to commit that assault, or too intelligent to do so the instant the Queen returns to Bran.”
“It is puzzling,” I said. “We’re dealing with a methodical and, I should say, educated mind. The drugs suggest a person with some degree of medical training—otherwise, he’d have just bashed me and trussed me up. That’s a limited pool of suspects, here.”
“You mean, the doctor, the priest, and the major-domo.”
“You include Florescu?”
“You heard Her Majesty: the man is a jack of all trades, including the medical.”
“Dear me,” I said. “Another butler who may have done it. Although I will say, he looked honestly astonished when I walked up the road just now.”
“It is not necessarily he. There are five people in the village who attended at least one term in university, including Casimir the shopkeeper and Vera’s brother, the driver. The former was present when the doctor performed an emergency amputation last year, the latter watched him anaesthetise the kitchen maid with the cut hand this past spring. There are even a handful of would-be Communists—two men, one woman—known to have attended demonstrations in the city. The woman is Casimir’s sister-in-law, who has worked as a cleaner in the Brașov hospital. And one of the men is the driver’s closest friend.”
“Thus, local hotheads who know all the village habits and back alleyways, and witnessed the use of chloroform and perhaps morphia. When did you learn those little facts?”
“When I was here before. It is extraordinary how much one can pick up from the head cook in a house like this.”
“Does this take us back to the proposal that the motivation is political?” I tried not to sigh. “Perhaps you should tell me what you learned in Bucharest.”
He came back from his place at the window at last, to settle onto the chair across from me. A certain deliberation to his movements, a degree of lightness in his voice, were the only signs that his equanimity was not entirely real.
“In fact,” he began, “I learned far less than I anticipated. One goes into a series of interrogations hoping for clear clues to follow, or failing that, for clear indication that one hypothesis is unfounded, leaving one to explore the next. In this case, well…
“When I arrived at the Athenee Palace, I was given a packet of information sent by my brother from London, a basic dossier on three men with whom he had arranged appointments for the following day.
“I saw no reason to wait until morning, and instead began to ring around after them. The first is in a hospital halfway across the country, and has been for some time. The second was out of town, but has an indiscreet colleague who told me where the man’s secretary would be dining. The third was known to the hotel staff as a regular in the bar. My brother will not be happy to learn that his sources of information in this part of the world are not as precise as he imagines.”
That thought cheered us both up for a moment.
“The first name in Mycroft’s notes was an Anarchist currently laid up by the gout. The second was the head of Roumania’s Communist Party—a 58-year-old Russian named Dalca, who may have much metaphorical blood on his hands, but very little actual. Officer class, who gives the orders to the execution squad without ever holding the rifle himself.”
“Not exactly a natural-born Bolshevik.”
“No, but precisely what they often end up with, since this kind of man knows how to organise and direct the rabble.”
“Isn’t directing rabble what we’re seeing, here in Bran?”
“Not according to the man’s secretary. Who, you will be amused to hear, is a West End confidence trickster by name of Ernie Johnston, whose habit is to bilk men with shady business practices. So far as he is aware, Comrade Dalca has never heard of Bran, or even Brașov. And although the Party would no doubt happily take credit for any plot against the Queen, and encourage any revolt that might come out of it, it does not appear that the Communist Party is attached to this.
“Last was the Roumanian correspondent from The Times, who employs the hotel bar as his personal information centre. Mostly for the gathering thereof, but he was also willing to provide me with knowledge about Her Majesty’s relationships with her eldest son, with Prince Barbu Știrbey, who manages the royal estates, and with Știrbey’s wife. However, whether by knowledge or rumour, he has heard no indication of rising discontent or plot aimed at Queen Marie.”
“Was it wise to hand a newspaper man a bit of juicy gossip like that?” If word got out that Sherlock Holmes was looking at Queen Marie’s Transylvanian vampires, the village would be knee-deep in cameras and eager newsmen.
“I believe he will keep the matter to himself.”
“Really? What did you have to threaten him with?”
“I owe him a favour.”
“A favour? Holmes, I hope it was worth it.”
“Since he also gave me a telephone number for the Prince, I believe it was.”
“You talked with Prince Barbu as well? Roumania’s very own Grey Eminence? Possible—” I caught myself, and lowered my voice. “Reputed father of various children of Queen Marie?”
“None other. We travelled from Bucharest to Sinaia in his private railway car, so we had nearly four hours together, during which time we talked about the Dacians and Huns, the Hapsburg rule, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. He agreed that, though Transylvania has not been independent since the seventeenth century, there are nationalists who live in hope—and there is no doubt that they see the current situation of the royal family a golden opportunity to break away.”
“The King is ill, his daughter said.”
“The King is ill, his heir is a libertine with no interest in ruling, and the next in line is a boy of four. Queen Marie may be the strongest man in the royal family and a much-loved source of national pride, but legally she holds little authority beyond that of advisor.”
“So this would be a time for Transylvanian Nationalists to strike?”
“It would be. Except that, so far as Prince Barbu can see, there is no sign that they are actively doing so. Which was also the judgement of the Times correspondent, who has little idea why the Roumanian people are so amiable about the shortcomings of their royal family, and would be pleased to catch word of a nice scandal to justify the employment of a man far from home and limited to the 300 words of an Eastern European by-line.”
“Could it be Prince Barbu himself? Not that he personally would have waylaid me on the road, but could he be creating problems for the royal family? If he’s an ambitious man, he could have his eye on founding a second Roumanian dynasty.”
“The man I spoke with demonstrated nothing but unwavering loyalty, to both Queen and King. He was largely responsible for the land reforms that kept the country from rising up in revolt, he administers the Queen’s estates, he remains a close advisor to the King. And,” he added, seeing my dubious expression, “Barbu’s wife is a close confidante of Queen Marie as well.”
Which could mean the wife was exceedingly stupid—or remarkably modern—but Holmes was right: it was also possible that the purported lover was indeed merely a close and trusted friend.
“It sounds as if you liked him.”
“I found him a remarkably subtle mind.
Quiet, unassuming, and able to listen. His knowledge is both broad and detailed, and demonstrates a habit of dedicated research, not merely cocktail-hour chat. He is a patriot. He loves his Queen, but more than that, he respects her. And I should say that he respects his King as well. Which is a less easy task.”
“So either Count Barbu is immensely skilled at the art of deception, or he has no personal ambitions beyond service—to his country in general and the royal family in particular.”
“I would not say he has no personal ambitions. But I saw none that would drive him to betray his Queen and actively work to sully her reputation among the people.”
“So if it’s not the Communists, nor the Nationalists, nor even her closest advisor, where does that leave us?”
“It leaves us closer to home.”
“The personal, not the political.”
Well, at least that got us out from under Mycroft’s influence. The first good news I’d had today.
Chapter Thirty-two
It had been more than two hours since I’d stormed up the castle drive, and I became aware of an odd sensation within my brain, like a drain when the plug had been removed. I fought its pull by getting to my feet and circling the room, thinking aloud. “ ‘Closer to home’ means evidence and interviews. More interviews. Not more people interviewed necessarily, but people more reinterviewed.” Stop babbling, Russell. “Not that we have a great deal of actual evidence: those plaster casts you made, and possibly finger-prints on my torch. Have you been examining the feet of every man you pass? Most of the local footwear has little resemblance to the smooth, sophisticated plaster of your casts. A farmer wearing those would risk skating across a barn-yard like an old woman on ice. Half the people wear what looks like hand-sewn moccasins. Where was I? Right—evidence. Can you find the equipment to raise prints off the torch, Holmes? Lamp-black and a soft brush would help.”
I had come to a halt near the recessed window-frame. My shoulder was propped against it. Also my head. In the silence, some thought was trying to push itself to the surface. Some evidence that had been placed directly beneath my nose. Mice?
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