Castle Shade

by Laurie R. King

  “Yes, at seven. Or maybe bit later. But before dark. She come in early to get the breakfast started, makes for long day to work dinner, too. And her father need to eat, he at home, not too well. Drunk man, yes? You need her?”

  “Oh no, thank you, we just happened to notice that she didn’t go down the hill with the rest of you.”

  “Yes, she gone home. She does stay, sometime, in the castle, but only if someone watching her father. And not often when Queen is there, too many people then—no beds.”

  “I understand. And she probably is happy to be home before dark—didn’t she tell me that she lives up near Râșnov?” Râșnov was on the road to Brașov.

  “Râșnov? No, no—other side, halfway to Predelut.”

  “Really? I must have misunderstood. Well, thank you, Vera, I won’t keep you and your dogs up any longer, sleep well.”

  The look on her face suggested that my concern about Gabriela had awakened hers, and that with one more iota of doubt, she would set off—with or without me—to check on her friend. So I took care to distract her, with a string of idiotic explanations that I’d been writing a letter home and that Gabriela had promised to get me the recipe for those delicious walnut biscuits I’d tasted the other day and I forgot to get it from her and so when I was staring out the window and noticed Vera go past I thought…

  Nonsensical, all of it, but it deflated the girl’s growing concern quite nicely, and she was looking a touch superior by the time I dithered to an end and told her that my husband was waiting to walk me to the castle, and let her shut the gates and cross the yard to her door.

  The dogs gruffed to themselves a few times, and the village settled down.

  * * *

  —

  The moon was not much more than half-full, and had there been any haze in the sky, I would have been blindly feeling my way down the road with a stick. As it was, I moved with caution, but I’d been over these roads several times now, so I knew more or less where I was and what obstacles to avoid.

  When I reached the crossroads, I looked up at the black shape against the sky. Had there been any lights showing, I would have been tempted to continue on and check, just to be sure. But Vera said that her friend had gone home before dark—which here was 7:30—and I had little taste for causing a second castle-wide panic of the day.

  The shed where I had sat the other night was as good a place as any to watch the confluence of roads through this half of the village. I felt around until I located the log, adjusted the large torch I’d borrowed from the castle guard-room, and settled my aches for a long night.

  It could not have been twenty minutes later that I heard motion. A faint rumour of sound, considerably less than the scrape/pause of my feline companion from the other night. I moved out of the shed to listen…it came from the direction of the castle. Footsteps, heels in a steady pace.

  Had it not been for the sound that proceeded it, I would have missed the figure entirely. With the warning, my eyes detected a motion of darkness against the dark, some tall cloud of a shape travelling from right to left on the road that led towards the church and cemetery. Indistinct, with the outline of a hay-monster but the dimension of a person.

  My own crepe soles made less noise than a breeze against the road as I hurried to follow: down to the join of roads, where to my relief the figure was still visible. I rounded the corner and fell in behind, keeping my distance, trying to guess where he was going. He passed the Dumitru house without so much as a bark from the dogs—but as he went past the gates, a beam of lantern-glow gave him the brief outline of a man in a cloak, and in an instant, my heart was in my throat.

  …face-down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings.

  I could feel that tough fabric flung around me, the ties around my knees and the choking stink of chloroform filling the world, the terror and hopelessness, and waking up to the sure knowledge that I’d been buried alive.

  The figure swept on, implacable, assured, passing the entrance to the cemetery and on to—

  But I’d lost him. Did he hear my footsteps, and duck aside to wait? I bent to pull out my knife—and when I straightened, I saw the figure of Father Constantin, outlined in the light of his own front door. I heard his wife’s voice, calling a question, and the door closed on his easy reply.

  Not a hay-monster or vampire, but the village priest attending to his flock.

  Not a cloak, but a cassock.

  I stood motionless, there in the centre of the road. A cassock was made of tough, dark fabric. Could it have been he, enveloping me in cloth and knocking me out? He was all over the village, at all times, intimate with the people and their ways. Who better to plant rumours in their midst? And he’d been a medic, during the War: training enough to pour a vial of stolen chloroform over a captive.

  But the seed of suspicion refused to grow. The affection in his wife’s voice, and his simple ease with us. His garden, his grapes—his cat. That memorable moment, disparate parts melding into a whole, lodging in my memory: the taste of the juice and the sound of the skins breaking between my teeth; the smell of the garden and images of a thousand hanging grapes over a cat in the sun, tail curled.

  Wait. Smell…

  The reek of chloroform had washed over me, but before that. Had there been any hint of sweat, any brief, evocative moment of a man’s hard work beneath a hot sun? Would I remember, a thing that would only have been a quick impression before the chemical hit?

  Yes, I would.

  And no, the man who attacked me, the cloth that closed in on me, had no such odour. My assailant had smelled…stale, perhaps? Or was that just the cloth? In either case, he had not been working in the sun, and the cloth had not covered a man who strode up and down the village a dozen times a day.

  It was not Father Constantin.

  I was glad. I went back to my shed, and my night watch.

  All was peaceful for a long time. The occasional dog and over-vigilant rooster. The silent texture of owl’s wings passing overhead. The tiny thread of sound from hunting bats.

  And then the peaceful world ended.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  The first sign of the pending disaster was an odd rhythm to the sky over the village. I squinted, cursing my poor night vision, and moved into the road, staring for a full minute before I identified it: an approaching lantern on the far side of the village, the rhythm from the bounce of a person’s walk.

  It was coming up the centre-line in the H. I retreated, ready to duck back into the shed if the lantern turned towards Brașov, but it did not. And yet it did not head for the cemetery road, either—which meant the castle.

  I moved down to the village centre to watch the drive—and yes, the lantern was climbing up it, illuminating a pair of baggy trousers.

  I was not startled by my name whispered out of the night, since I’d expected Holmes to follow the lantern. I felt him move closer.

  “Did you see who that is?” I asked.

  “No. He must have come from outside of the village, from the upper road that circles along the base of the hills to Râșnov. He is unsteady on his feet.”

  “Oh Lord,” I said. “Gabi. She lives up that road, and her father is a drunk.”

  “What did Miss Dumitru say?”

  “She thought Gabriela left at her usual time, just before dark, although she’d have been too busy at the time to notice for sure.” I looked at the pale shape that was Holmes’ face.

  “Holmes, the girl looks a lot like Ileana. At night, if they didn’t realise that the Princess had left…”

  We watched the man disappear around the top of the castle drive.

  “Shall I follow him? To see what’s happened?”

  “No. If the girl was given a bed there, all will be well. If not, we must try to locate the place of her—the place she’s gone to before others
do.”

  The word abduction stood between us, as we waited for the girl’s drunken father to return. He did not. Instead, one of the castle’s low windows grew light—but from moving lamp-light, not a stationary candle.

  The kind of light that would indicate a search of the rooms.

  We hurried away, across and up the H of roads. The cluster of houses that formed the village soon gave way to small farms.

  We had come along this farm track the other day, on our way back from the witch-inhabited forest. Its surface was pitted and carved with the occasional rut, and would be difficult in the winter months, but for now it was dust rather than mud. Once we were free to pull out our torches, we got to work. Holmes took the side with the larger fields, I the side with the hills rising behind the dwellings. We went slowly, playing our muffled beams over any patch of softer ground, looking for an indication of recent disturbance. Here a cow had strayed into the bushes. There a discarded tin, its label long nibbled away. A fresh crack in a fence attracted Holmes’ attention, but the scuffs and debris below it testified to a log bounced from a cart.

  Half a mile along the track, a glowing window down a side-lane indicated a nighttime disturbance. (An illness, perhaps? Father Constantin’s parishioner?) We clasped our fists around the ends of the torches to narrow the beams, lest the occupants be gazing out of their window.

  Something caught at my attention. I paused. Nothing visible, but an ineffable breath that raised the hair on the back of my neck. Faint, but unmistakeable. “Holmes, do you smell—?” But before I could pronounce the word chloroform, we were spotted. Light abruptly spilled out of the open doorway and a woman’s voice called, “Tata?” followed by a phrase that ended in a familiar name.

  “I think she just asked if her father had found Gabi,” I muttered at Holmes.

  “Then it can’t have been much further on.” His torch-light began to move more rapidly.

  I turned back to my side, pulling my obscuring hand away so as to let the beam go wide. The woman called again, and then I heard her speaking to someone else.

  This time, the shout came from a man.

  Damn.

  The man, inevitably, came to investigate what a woman might not have, his lantern marching down the road accompanied by a string of Roumanian that sounded first irritated, then aggressive.

  At the corner of my eye, I noticed another window go light as a neighbour woke. “Holmes, you slip away. They’ll be so confused by finding a woman out here they won’t go looking for you, and one of us ought to go up to the castle and see what’s—”

  I stopped. Was that—

  The man reached the road, Holmes’ torch went off, a neighbour’s voice called out—and I stamped my foot down on one of the two things that had caught my eye.

  I would have grabbed up the other one, had I been given two more seconds—but at least it provided a convenient distraction.

  For everyone recognised the little golden cross engraved with dogwood flowers, lying broken-chained on the roadside. No one paid me any mind, or remembered that there had been two torches. Instead, the moment the woman saw the necklace, she began to wail. This would be Gabi’s sister, I thought, and the sister’s husband—perhaps turned from their beds by her drunken father, and thus watching the road for his return. In moments, lights sprang up in every nearby window.

  And on the road. Neighbours in various stages of undress milled and queued to exclaim over Gabi’s necklace. And as if the cry had been heard a mile away, powerful torches appeared, from the direction of Bran. At their head strode a middle-aged farmer, rapidly sobering, along with Mr Florescu, striped pyjamas peeking out between a formal black overcoat and a pair of well-shined shoes.

  His moustache, however, bore its customary sharp points.

  The woman ignored her father to turn to her uncle, resting one hand on the butler’s sleeve and directing a torrent of explanation at him. The only recognition she gave her father was to jab an accusing thumb in his direction, but then, that was a common attitude from the families of chronic drunks. She held up the necklace to show Florescu, her voice wavering, and when he put his arm around her, she broke down into sobs.

  Standing there, patting her heaving shoulders, he noticed me at last. It was hard to judge his reaction, what with the constant shift of light and shadow along the road, but I did see his spine go straight, so I patted the air, to reassure him that I did not require his attention.

  The woman’s sobs began to slow. He caught the eye of a thin, grey woman in a dressing gown, and turned his niece over to her. The crowd separated, the women heading towards the house with the sister, the men waiting for orders.

  But first, there was the Queen’s guest to be dealt with. “Mrs Holmes, why are you here?”

  It was a very brusque question, considering our relative positions, but his emotion was understandable. “We saw Gabi’s father walking up the drive to the castle, and slipped out to see if we might be able to help.”

  A thin version of the truth, but to judge by the darting lights through the castle windows, in the first minutes of searching through its rooms, a pair of oxen might have walked through the doors and Florescu would not have known.

  “Are you out here by yourself?”

  “My husband went up one of the side lanes,” I said, looking vaguely into the darkness.

  “I will have Dmitri walk you back.” He lifted his hand and a large young man leapt to attention. Florescu snapped out an order, his voice overriding my protests in a way that would never have happened within the castle precincts. I did not push matters. What, after all, could I do here?

  Except for one thing.

  I fumbled and dropped my torch. As I knelt to retrieve it, I moved my boot and used my finger to scoop up the hidden object. I then used the beam to dazzle the eyes of the two men, so they did not notice me dropping my find into a pocket.

  Florescu delivered a lecture to Dmitri, either a series of tasks or a detailed warning of what to do with me. And considering Florescu’s attitude, which was more that of consulting a mental check-list than of trying not to look too pointedly at a troublesome English guest, I thought the young man was being told what Florescu wanted from the castle. My suspicions were confirmed when Florescu, looking reluctant, tacked on a final command that included the words telefon, politie, and Brașov.

  My escort and I met Holmes a short distance along the road, before the village itself. I thanked Dmitri and told him we would be along. He looked dubiously at Holmes, as if thinking him a bit on the mature side for a bodyguard, but then accepted my husband’s wave of dismissal and set off to the castle at a trot. Within a few steps, it turned into a run.

  Gabriela was loved, in Bran Castle.

  I checked down the road to make sure we were alone, then handed Holmes my torch. “Shine that on my hands.”

  I rubbed the object free of clinging soil, then opened my hand.

  It was as big as my thumb-nail. Perfectly round. With a lustrous gleam even beneath the dust.

  “There can be only one person in Bran with a necklace like this,” I said. “Possibly in all of Transylvania.”

  He picked the spectacular pearl off my palm, turning it about under the torch. “The wear on the hole is almost non-existent. And I believe this one will prove to be marginally smaller than those in the string we have seen her wearing.”

  “Do either of those things matter? A dramatic lie is better than a humdrum truth, when it comes to rumours. The point being that it was lying four feet away from a small gold crucifix. It was Gabriela’s, I saw it close enough to be sure—although from a distance, or at night, the one Ileana wears would look the same. As indeed, Ileana herself would look the same.”

  “A cross,” he noted. “As if the person who took her could not bear the presence of a religious artefact.”

  “And as I was about t
o tell you when we were interrupted—that was Gabriela’s sister, by the way, and her husband—I could smell chloroform.”

  “Did anyone else smell it?”

  “No, and I didn’t mention it. Gabi’s cross is what sent the guard running back to the castle, under Mr Florescu’s orders. They’re calling in the police, from Brașov.”

  He rolled the beautiful pearl around between finger and thumb, then handed it back to me. “The police will send a detective, rather than mere constables. We can only hope that he has a modicum of brains, and can at least act as witness.”

  “Holmes, we’ve been lucky. We’ve managed to foil several of his efforts before they could come to light and create a panic. Even if his target tonight was in fact Gabriela, not Ileana, I am afraid for the girl. His frustration must be enormous. If it reaches the breaking point, he may take it out on Gabriela.”

  “True. Although I cannot see any solution to the matter save laying hands on him and getting the girl back.”

  “As soon as possible. But, Holmes? I don’t think we should point out that the two girls and their crosses would look alike, in the dark.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  When we reached the village crossroads, the castle came into view—a startling sight, with lights beaming from most of the windows.

  The dark houses around us would not remain that way for long. A man with a lamp was hurrying up the path to the village telegraph office.

  My feet slowed to a halt outside the sagging gate of the derelict house. “Holmes, I…we need to check.”

  He stayed with me as I crossed its weed-grown yard, walked across the room, and lifted the lid of the large storage bin.

  It was empty, but for a crushed allium flower and the visceral sweep of memories raised by the smell of dust and dank. I shivered; Holmes touched my arm, and we left.

  The castle was like an ants’ nest. Alarmed footmen poured down the stairway with electric torches, paraffin lanterns, and enough makeshift truncheons for a small war. When we had successfully navigated against this tide, we found the female staff milling about the courtyard, hastily dressed and not far from panic. The cook had seized a rolling pin as she came through her domain, and looked more than competent to put down a revolt all on her own.