Castle Shade

by Laurie R. King

  The father instilled in his son a love for the common people and a profound desire to do well for them. The boy decided to train as a doctor, and his father agreed, selling a farm so his son could study at the great universities to learn his trade, even if it only meant that he would come home to heal the ills of farmers and patch the wounds of those working in factories.

  When the young doctor returned at last, qualified to practise in his homeland, he found his father bedridden. The son’s life was beginning, the father’s reaching its end, but his heart was eased by knowing that his son was dedicated to their people.

  As the father faded, he told his son stories of the family’s proud history. Of its treasure found and lost, of its sons sent off to conquer new worlds and invent new disciplines. And of the secrets of the family’s past: how the Mikó family were not only of the aristocratic rank, they were in fact royal. Princes of Transylvania, not poor cousins.

  Oh, the outer world did not take it as so: the record of a marriage had gone missing, a fire set by a rival so as to render an heir illegitimate. But royal the doctor’s family was. More than the lands of the estate had been theirs, at one time. And perhaps, in a new day, their glory would return.

  At long last, the father died. The doctor buried him, married a young woman of the town, had a son of his own. They lived in the family mansion, using her small inheritance and his slim hospital salary to eke out a life in the too-big, too-remote house. In the years that followed, more land went and fewer men remained to farm it, a terrible cycle of boundaries narrowing down.

  Then the Great War plunged the world into chaos. The doctor went to war, his wife and son moved in with her parents, the house was closed up.

  Four endless, nightmare years, battling disease and sawing off limbs, but all the while, all the long, exhausted, blood-soaked days, all the freezing sleepless nights, he held to himself the knowledge that he was a Prince in disguise.

  The War ended. Somewhat to his surprise, the doctor had not been killed by a stray bullet or one of the many outbreaks of cholera and typhoid. He went home to Brașov, to his wife and son in the tired house, with the few servants and farmers who had survived. He brushed off his medical bag, and went back to the quiet life of treating civilians.

  A Prince, in disguise.

  And every time he went down to the village of Bran, he would look up and see the towers of the castle that should have been his. The place he had played in as a child, secretly regarding its derelict nooks and crumbling walls as his long before he learned how true—how nearly true—that was. When they were boys, the caretaker’s son, Grigorei Florescu, had seen his longing and used it to wield a child’s power. Even after they grew to be men, Florescu kept the castle’s rightful owner at bay.

  All because of a four-inch-long iron key.

  If he’d had money, the young doctor could have gone to the city fathers of Brașov and offered to take the derelict castle off their hands. They’d have been glad to unload it—but what then? His income was that of a country doctor, paid in chickens and coins, with a handful of rents from the estate’s few remaining tenant farmers. Even if he’d sold everything he had, house, land, and furnishings, it would barely cover the cost of repairing the castle’s roof.

  His impotence was an ever-gnawing pain, even when his family brought him joy.

  But in 1919, the Spanish flu swept the land, and he buried his wife and son in the same week.

  The following year came the Queen.

  The city fathers, seeing their chance at moving the growing expenses off their books, drew up a magnificent deed and presented this foreign woman with his castle. And where another woman would have thanked them with the ill-concealed horror of a maiden aunt whose cat presented her with a dead rodent, this one promptly declared it a fairy-tale castle, and started pouring the riches of her English fortune into it.

  For three years, whenever the doctor would pass through Bran to treat a broken finger or attend a breech birth, he was aware of the castle on the hill. He felt like a man who had lost his beloved to a wealthy rival: happy for her good fortune, grateful she was being given the care she deserved, and aching that he could not do it for her.

  And then suddenly, out of the blue, he could.

  That all but unknown uncle with his stunningly unguessed-at fortune and his intolerable sense of timing. The disbelief, the dawning realisation, and the terrible bitterness that followed.

  Why hadn’t the old bastard had the decency to die three years before? Why did he have to wait until the castle of their ancestors had been turned over to this foreigner, this dilettante, this woman…

  He’d been handed the keys to the kingdom, only to find the locks changed.

  He tried to make the best of it. He couldn’t bring himself to use the money for his own sake, to restore the Mikó house to a thing of glory. He did turn some of his fortune to improving the lives of his people, and closed the part of his practice that had been primarily done for the income. But that only left more time to brood. He began to drink, he did not replace servants who quit, he found few pleasures.

  Until one night after dinner, three glasses of brandy into the evening, he looked up at the library wall and found himself studying the decorative branches of the family genealogy, that meaningless, all-important, ever-tormenting half-inch gap in the tree’s branch.

  What if it weren’t there? What if everything wasn’t as hopeless as he’d always assumed? Weren’t there really only two barriers to reclaiming Bran as his own?

  The first was that broken line, which rendered a son and heir illegitimate. But what if a record came to light? The official church records were gone, but letters of agreement might be…conveniently discovered. Long lost, joyously found, a marriage restored and a line of succession clarified. Once that was done, back-taxes could be negotiated, apologies made and accepted. He had no doubt that the city fathers of Brașov would be pleased to have one of their own inside those walls instead of a foreign woman.

  But that left the Queen. Castle Bran was her beloved toy. The woman had turned all the years of offended pride and female resentments into making it a place that only grudgingly welcomed the men of her family, including the King himself. It was her playground, like a full-sized doll’s house, that she could dress up and fill with silly decorations and frivolous guests.

  But what if the castle no longer pleased her? What if that frivolous woman began to see its darker side—the dungeon in its cellars, the blood in its floorboards? What if the smiling peasants no longer pressed her outstretched fingers to their foreheads, and instead shied away as she came near?

  How long would she overlook the cold shoulders, the lack of strewn flowers, the tugging of children out of her path? Rocks, even, thrown at her gleaming motorcar?

  Not long at all, he thought. It would not take much to undermine her enthusiasm for the villagers, and then for their castle. A few months, and she would begin to look around for another doll’s house, and turn her back on Transylvania.

  All it would take was a piece of paper, and a story. A story his people would react to like the pluck on a violin string. A story that could only be told by someone who knew them as intimately as he knew his own family.

  The story of a woman who bathed in blood, whose perversions fed on the death of innocents, whose tastes and habits preyed on the people she treated as her possessions, as if they were part and parcel of the castle grounds. A woman whose wickedness stirred up other evil things, waking the dead and summoning the witches.

  Only a fellow Transylvanian could craft a story that spoke to his people. And only a doctor would know how to bring it to life.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  “His target is not Gabriela,” I told Holmes. “No more than it was me, or Vera Dumitru, or the chickens he tried to poison. His target is the Queen. And his weapon is a fairy tale.”

  “Wh
en a doctor goes wrong, he is the first of criminals,” Holmes muttered.

  “ ‘He has nerve. He has knowledge,’ ” I added.

  “Yes, I suppose—although I am not sure how much nerve has been required here.”

  “I don’t know, Holmes. I think it started with accidents: the girl who disappeared to Bucharest, then a few weeks later, the girl who cut her hand in the kitchen. Treating her may have given him the idea for an actual attack: frightening a child in the woods, and leaving a branch of lilac to tie it to the Queen.

  “After that, when the Queen was away, he had months to work out his plans. The food basket, the drugs—oh, and the break-in at the surgery, to make it appear that there was someone else in the area with chloroform. He seems to have a motor-cycle, as an alternative to that distinctive motorcar, and he figured out a way to conceal his comings and goings near to Bran—that old barn is a part of the family estate, according to the wall map. He let his servants go, took down the pictures on the walls. Then when the Queen returned, he started up in earnest: messages on walls, dead chickens. Though I bet he did have to work himself up for actually attacking me. I wonder if he practised somehow? And abducting Gabriela out from under the noses of her family? Careful planning only goes so far, when a man is doing everything himself.”

  “A monomaniac is fanatically dedicated to his cause. It would take little push to go from theory to act.”

  “So, he abducted Gabriela, and planted the pearl on the road where she was taken, to make it look as if the Queen had taken her. He is using proprietary food and drink to make it look as if an English person is keeping her prisoner, so that—what? When she escapes, like I did, she will tell everyone? Or when she…” I did not want to say it.

  “Or when her body is discovered, the food and drink will be found with her.”

  I stared at him. “You think he would?”

  “I think he’s mad. I think he could. I also expect that when she is found, there will be another correlation to your own abduction.”

  “What do…oh.” I touched my neck. Long, long ago, in another country and another state of mind, I had made a joke about Roumanians dying of exsanguination. There was no humour in the image of cheerful, vibrant young Gabi Stoica, pale and drained on a coroner’s table.

  “A doctor would not find it difficult, to drain the blood of a girl he has drugged unconscious,” he pointed out.

  “And when she was found, the countryside would rise up against the Queen, and drive her from Bran.”

  “Or so, at any rate, he would anticipate.”

  In England, I might find it difficult to picture. But here? “He’s had her for a little more than twenty-four hours. She must have been alive this evening, since he took her food and drink. But even if he intends to use the rest of the supplies in the hamper, we have less than a day to find her.”

  “So where would he put her,” Holmes wondered, “if not in the house?”

  “The map!” I exclaimed.

  We hurried back through the corridors to the billiards room. The map I’d found in the folder was too small in scale to show anything but the general outline of the current estate. But when compared to the detailed map on the wall of the estate office, it gave us some ideas.

  “Some of those buildings will have changed in the last eighty years,” I said, as Holmes applied a pencil to the small map, marking the location of various farmhouses and out-buildings.

  “We want one far enough from here to justify motoring there, rather than walking, but without close neighbours who would notice visits from that distinctive motorcar.”

  He had marked three. I compared them to the big map.

  “If I were he,” I reflected, “I’d want a place that people wouldn’t necessarily connect with me personally, and that others knew about, too. Otherwise, how would the Queen think to imprison someone there?”

  “He could plan on simply dumping her along a road—either dead, or alive but thoroughly drugged. However,” he added, hearing me draw breath to argue, “you may be right. What about the hunting lodge, there in the edges of the forested part?”

  “Off the road, a long drive leading in, and in August nobody’s hunting deer but poachers. And witches. But it’s a good six miles away. If we’re going on foot, I am going to raid the pantry before we set off.”

  He folded the map and slid it into a pocket, a distinctly smug sort of gesture. “We could, if you like. Though it might be simpler to borrow transport from the doctor’s stables.”

  * * *

  —

  The options in borrowed transport were as follows: a landau with a broken axle, a child-sized dog-cart with no quadruped in sight, a steam tractor without a steering-wheel, and a motor-cycle. A gleaming, nearly new machine with a thin layer of road dust on its metal.

  “That has to be the same one,” I said.

  He dropped to his heels for a closer look at the long silver tube of the exhaust, tapping its side with a knuckle. “This is a larger silencer than is generally provided. It explains how he could come and go without people noticing him.”

  “There were oil-stains on the floor of his motorcar—and two heavy boards made into ramps. He could hide the car, move around on the cycle, then load it up again when he needed to be on his way. Going out the back roads so no one in Bran noticed him.”

  We studied the machine. A key rested in its ignition. A glance in the tank confirmed that it held petrol. A jacket, leather helmet, and a pair of goggles dangled from a peg beside the door.

  It has always baffled me why, when a man and woman ride a conveyance on which one is seated behind the other, it is invariably the man on the controls. Surely it would be better to let the marginally shorter person go in front? Instead, the woman is left to the pillion position, where she might study the man’s shoulders and the view to either side.

  This might not be the time for a feminist discussion. And, after all, he’d been the one to find the thing, so—I waited until he had the machine running, politely declined the offer of our only pair of goggles, and climbed onto the hard metal luggage rack behind him.

  He did give me the map, although we only required it once. We saw the gates leading to the hunting lodge but continued on past, along the unpaved road. After the next bend, he slowed, switched off our head-lamp, then circled back.

  He cut the engine as the gates came into view, and we pushed the cycle off the road, tucking it behind a tree, then climbed back onto the track.

  I heard the rustle of his clothing, then the click of his pocket-watch opening. Its luminous hands said 11:15, almost four hours after the doctor had driven away from his house. Was the man here now? Did he plan to stop here for the night? Had he changed his mind about what to do with Gabriela? Was he…? Would we find…?

  I shook myself, and followed Holmes’ form, just visible in the light of the half-moon. Down the road and through the gates, we found the drive’s surface somewhat better than that of the public track outside. “Do you see any sign of life?” I breathed.

  “None.” I could see no shape of a building, no lights gleaming through curtains. Perhaps it was behind the trees.

  On the big map, the lodge appeared to be half a mile back from the road. We’d gone about half of that when we heard an approaching motor, and Holmes seized my elbow to steer me towards the verge. I agreed—best not to assume the motor would pass by. Unfortunately, either its engine was particularly quiet or it was travelling faster than it had seemed, because in seconds, its head-lamps were swinging into the drive. Holmes gathered me up and threw our bodies at the nearest shape.

  Fortunately, the shape was bushes, not the trunk of a tree. We froze, other than slowly migrating downwards amidst crackles of wood and grunts of discomfort. The head-lamps passed without slowing, so we scrambled backwards, with mild curses this time, and tore our clothing free of the barbs in
time to see the distinctive shape of the shooting-brake.

  “That’s the doctor’s,” I said.

  We ran after the tail-lights, Holmes at the fore, me following as fast as I dared, being nearly blind. The head-lamps turned, to reveal a building half-hidden behind the trees. We kept running for a bit, then returned to the verge and to as brisk a walk as the ground permitted. The engine shut off. I waited for a door to open, but oddly, he stayed in the car. No one came out of the building, and no lights burned inside.

  When both motor and lodge were in full view, Holmes and I came to a halt. The powerful head-lamps, carving sharp designs of shadow over the front of the rustic building, seemed to be bouncing rhythmically: up-down, up-down.

  “What is he doing?” I whispered to Holmes.

  Still the driver remained where he was—and then there was sound as well: a man’s voice, loud and unintelligible through the open window.

  “He sounds angry,” I said.

  “Very.”

  It sounded like an endless string of curses—although that is not uncommon with a foreign tongue. The head-lamps bounced, the voice chanted along with it—

  “He appears to be pounding the steering-wheel,” Holmes noted.

  With that, the motor’s door flew open. The driver climbed out and slammed the door with all his strength—so hard, in fact, that the latch didn’t catch and the door flew back at him. This time the shout he gave could be nothing but a curse. It was followed by an even harder slam and a pound of his fist on the uncompliant metalwork, with a kick for good measure.