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A queen, a castle, a dark and ageless threat - all await Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes in this chilling adventure. Queen Marie of Roumania, granddaughter to both Victoria, Empress of the British Empire, and Alexander II, Tsar of Russia, is in need of Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes' services. The Queen, a famous beauty who has transformed Roumania from a quiet backwater into a significant force, invites the pair to Bran castle, the ancient fortress that sits on the border with the newly regained territory of Transylvania. The threat the Queen fears is dubious: shadowy figures, vague whispers, dangers that may only be accidents. But a young girl is involved. So, putting aside their doubts, Russell and Holmes set out to investigate the mystery in a land of long memory and hidden corners, from whose churchyards the shades creep.
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Seitenzahl: 531
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
LAURIE R. KING
To all those who manage to keep their heads in an impossible time.
May all your stories have happy endings.
The walls of my castle are broken; the shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements. I love the shade and the shadow …
– Bram Stoker, Dracula
I ripped myself from the fever dream somewhere west of Ljubljana.
My face was pressed up to a window, as it had been in the dream. Outside was the same mist-soaked night, the same eerie glow of a full moon.
I jerked upright and thrust out my hands, turning them over, back and front – but even in the near-dark, I could see they were perfectly clean. There were no red and dripping stains gloving the skin.
Andnowolves, I thought, chasing after the smell of blood on my hands. The pack’s vivid howls merged into the distant rise and fall of a passing train’s whistle, while my horse-drawn carriage and its sinister driver became, reluctantly, an aged train compartment behind a steam-powered engine.
I shuddered to rid myself of the macabre sensations, then pulled the thin blanket back up around my shoulders, coughing as I patted around for my glasses. With them on my nose, menace retreated a step. Only a nightmare. Wolves and a carriage, triggered by our destination. The blood, though … I’d had the blood of two different dead men on my hands, these past months. Perhaps I should have anticipated the psychic toll.
I wiped ineffectually at the cracked window, trying to see where we were. Not a mysterious forest, thank goodness, but a railway station, with one dim light shining through the decorative iron braces of the platform roof. Silent and deserted.
How long had I been here? For that matter, where was here? My memories weren’t entirely gone – I knew what that felt like – just… slow. Like pulling a boot from deep mud. Let me see: we had boarded the train in the Côte d’Azur. And we were headed to Roumania. The last station-marker I’d noticed was – Padua?
None of which helped much. I squinted at the rusty and ill-lit metal sign, decided that I had assembled as much information as I could without outside resources, tossed back the travelling rug – and only then realised that I was not alone in the compartment.
‘Holmes, what are you—’ I began, then dissolved into a fit of coughing, followed by an enormous sneeze. That knocked loose a recollection: the Murphy children, back in France, hacking and snuffling in all directions. ‘Sorry, I seem to have picked up a head cold. And I think a fever – I had the most vivid dream, that I was in Jonathan Harker’s coach at the start of Dracula. Alltheevilthingsintheworldwillhavefullsway – sorry, I’m babbling. But why are you sitting there in the dark? And where on earth are we? I can’t even tell what language that sign is.’ Surely Italian didn’t have that pepper-pot sprinkling of accents and subscript marks?
He stirred in his dark corner. His feet came down from the seat, his features coming into view as he leant forward to look out of the window. ‘I believe that is Slovenian,’ he said, then retreated back into the shadows.
Slovenia. Edge of the Balkans, south of … everywhere. Next to Italy?
I sneezed again. This time his arm stretched out, offering a clean handkerchief. Sherlock Holmes always had a clean handkerchief. I used it, and again the pressure on my sinuses knocked forth a couple of ideas. First, that any question Holmes did not answer was generally more important than the one he did, and second, the fog I was looking through was not all on the outside.
‘Good Lord, Holmes, are you trying to suffocate us?’ I stood to wrestle with the window latch, no more able to smell the air than I could read the sign outside, but knowing that at least some of my dizziness was due to the dense smoke in my lungs. Heaven only knew how long he had been sitting there in the dark, mulling over some conundrum. By the looks of the compartment’s atmosphere, it had been quite a five pipe problem.
The stuff that billowed out into the night was thick enough to summon the fire services. I dropped onto my seat, coughing now with fresh air rather than stale fug.
With an exaggerated show of patience, Holmes put down his pipe and picked up the Italian newspaper from the seat beside him. He crossed his legs and switched on a reading lamp, to disappear behind the pages.
When the coughing spate passed, I tried again. ‘Slovenia is some way from Bucharest.’
My husband and partner muttered something under his breath. The exiting air had ceased to look like a chimney, so I closed the window somewhat, scowled at the station name that might have been spillage from a typesetter’s tray, then turned on my companion a glare strong enough to burn a hole in the pages he was pretending to read. He raised the paper a little.
‘How long have we been sitting here?’ Another mutter. ‘How long?’
He gave up, folding the newspaper noisily into something resembling a rectangle, and took out his watch. ‘Not quite three hours.’
During which time he had not been stirring up alternate transport or threatening the engineer with bodily harm, but instead, silently poisoning us both with nicotine.
I recognised the signs. To find him curled in a corner with his filthy old pipe and a handful of the very cheapest tobacco meant he was searching for connections between a series of apparently unrelated facts. As Dr Watson said, Holmes had a positive genius for minutiae – dogs that stayed silent, dried pips from an orange. Many of his cases started with some tiny event that the rest of humanity would not even notice.
A pipe-fuelled rumination explained why he had been sitting there, oblivious to the world. However, in my current state, there was little point asking what he was working on. I would never be able to follow his thoughts without stimulation of my own.
‘What are the chances of getting some tea?’
‘Very slim. We left the dining car behind in Trieste.’
‘Trieste?’ I laboriously summoned a mental image of Europe, drawing a line between where we had started and where I’d thought we were going. Granted, I’d been both busy and distracted in the Riviera, where several much-interrupted nights (and, I suspected now, a low-grade fever) caused my brain to shut down within minutes of boarding the train. That same mental state, come to think of it, had led me to follow Holmes blindly in the first place, without questioning the details of his travel plans. Never a wise thing to do.
‘Holmes, why the devil are we … never mind. Where’s the Bradshaw’s?’
‘Our Bradshaw’s Guide appears to be somewhat out of date. Hence the siding upon which we sit.’ He handed me a book that looked as if it had walked from Paris on its own.
‘Holmes, this was published before the War.’
‘I was assured that little had changed in this part of the Continent.’
‘You were duped,’ I said brutally. I dropped the thick volume onto the seat, causing several pages to shoot to the floor. When I stood, stretching my cramped limbs, I could feel the rawness in my throat and the ache in my bones.
Children: such a gift.
The passageway was dark, lit by bulbs of tiny wattage at both ends. I set off down it, glancing into the other compartments, but the train seemed as deserted as the station. Two cars back, I became aware of a noise, and followed it to the train’s last car. The snores of a uniformed attendant were causing the windows to rattle. Until I walked over and kicked his feet from their rest.
He fell to the floor, snorting himself awake, then leapt upright when he beheld me looming over him. ‘Madam! Yes! May I be of service?’ He straightened his tie and looked surreptitiously around for his shoes.
‘How do I get to Vienna?’
The answer required his cap, but that, once firmly squared on his blunt head, seemed to bring a degree of professional memory. ‘Madam is going to Bucharest, is she not?’
‘Madam is clearly going nowhere at the moment, and I can’t see why I should visit every tiny village in Eastern Europe on the way. Getting out of …’ I waved towards the unpronounceable sign outside. ‘… here, in any direction will give us more of a chance of actual progress than waiting for the tides to wash us to the northeast.’
He blinked in incomprehension, and bent to retrieve the footwear he had spotted under the table.
I sighed. ‘Do you have a Bradshaw’s? Or any train schedule?’
The one he had was in German, but it was only three years out of date, rather than Holmes’ fifteen. I pored over it, trying to locate a string of letters approximating those on the sign outside. I found one at last, followed its listings along the page, then consulted the clock on his wall.
‘We are here?’ I asked. He bent to study the name above my finger.
‘Yes, madam,’ he said, following that with a noise like an aged coal miner clearing his throat. I took a sharp step back, then decided he’d been pronouncing the village name.
‘And this train, going west, will pass here at three-fifteen? This is Tuesday, right? And not a second or fourth Tuesday?’ There did not seem to be any other tiny-print rubrics in the train schedule – assuming it was still August, and I hadn’t been in a Sleeping Beauty coma on the cramped leather seat.
He looked at the calendar under the clock, his lips moving as he worked on the complicated matter of the day of the week, then nodded. ‘Yes, madam.’
Now the big question: ‘Can you get that train to stop?’
‘But madam, your tickets are for …’
The gaze that had failed to ignite Holmes’ newspaper worked a treat on the attendant. He did up a button on his uniform coat and nodded vigorously. ‘I can, madam.’
‘You stop that train, and I shall reward you. You let it go by, and I shall not be pleased.’
He actually gulped, and snatched up a lantern to trot away down the corridor.
I went back, ever the optimist, to tell Holmes he should gather his things.
The approaching train seemed determined to roll on through, but our wildly gesturing attendant did catch the engineer’s attention at the last moment, and the squeal of slammed-on brakes managed to stop it before it had entirely gone past the station platform.
We waited until our new attendant appeared – rumpled, unshaven, and clearly flung from his sleep by the abrupt deceleration. The two men hurled recriminations and explanations at each other, ending when Holmes shoved his valise into the new man’s arms and climbed through the train’s open door.
The man led us to a compartment, satisfyingly empty. When I then asked if he might possibly be able to find some warm food for two benighted travellers, either my demure fluttering of eyelashes or (more likely) the sizeable tip he had seen me hand the first attendant soon had us seated in the dim, barren dining car, while hopeful noises came from the kitchen.
What seemed like two minutes later a simple feast appeared: tea – blessedly hot and reasonably near-British. It was soon followed by fat, buttery omelettes and bread only slightly stale.
We pronounced ourselves well satisfied, and sent the cook back to his bunk.
I surfaced at the end of the omelette – which must have employed at least six eggs – and soothed my raw throat with more tea. At last, with the urgent needs of alternative travel and stoking the inner furnaces behind me, I could attempt to make sense of our longer-term issues.
Namely, what on earth we were doing here.
‘All right, Holmes, what’s going on?’
‘There is a situation of interest in Roumania.’
‘You told me that some days ago.’ It had seemed unlikely at the time, standing on a sun-drenched walk over the Monaco harbour. Roumania was as close as Europe got to wilderness: neither West nor East, not quite feudal yet a fair distance from a functioning democracy, a land beyond the reaches of the Cook’s guides. ‘And granted, it’s a place where the maps have “Here be dragons,” but I can’t see why we needed quite such a roundabout route. Instead of the nice, luxurious Train Bleu back to Paris and a transfer to the Orient Express, you chose a long, slow meander on a rock-hard seat, with no dining car, through villages with names like Coughhackiščina and Phlegmja?’
‘Are you in a hurry to get somewhere, Russell?’
‘I … Holmes, you’re the one with the urgent task! Aren’t you? I’d have been more than happy to spend another week in the Côte d’Azur, baking out this head cold. Instead – what awaits us in Bucharest, anyway?’
‘Not Bucharest.’
‘No?’
‘A village near the town of Brașov, in Transylvania.’
‘Transyl— good God.’ I stared at him. If Roumania was a realm of dragons, then the province of Transylvania would be the creature’s lair: dark, mysterious, and potentially deadly. There was a reason why Bram Stoker chose it as the home of his ancient vampire – a novel that had given me nightmares even before I knew I was going there.
‘It is actually quite a pleasant piece of countryside,’ Holmes insisted. ‘Mineral resources, rich agricultural valleys, the Carpathians for defence. A fascinating source of folkloric traditions and superstitions.’
‘One assumes their farmers grow plenty of garlic. You were there, right?’
‘I was, yes. A week of what might be called reconnaissance, while you were sailing from Venice to the Riviera.’
‘A whole week? And you didn’t solve the case?’
‘My – our client was not there at the time.’
‘Who is this client? You said in Monaco you had an interesting woman with an intriguing problem.’ The other word he’d let drop that day – vampires – might have sparked my subconscious imagination, but I had taken it for one of his laboured witticisms, and had not dignified it with further questions.
‘Our client is the Queen of Roumania.’
‘Queen Marie? Wow.’
Granddaughter of two empires – her father was Victoria’s second son, her mother the only surviving daughter of Tsar Alexander II – Marie had been given to the crown prince of Roumania, now Ferdinand I, the second king in Roumania’s young dynasty.
I was not generally impressed by inherited power, but I’d been seeing photographs of the glamourous and clever Queen Marie my entire life: Marie in Red Cross garb during the War, Marie’s translucent eyes beneath a splendid Baroque crown, Marie waving to her adoring countrymen from a train, Marie in a folkloric costume, Marie taking tea in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Theatrical, striking, and unmistakeable – and then the woman had gone on to conquer the Paris peace talks armed with little more than beauty and determination, charming Europe’s leaders into remembering their promises to Roumania – promises that included the return of Transylvania. She had single-handedly doubled the size of her adopted country overnight.
‘What does she need from us?’ I asked. ‘Another batch of missing Russian jewels? Roumania was badly plundered during the War – I imagine any royal possession that wasn’t nailed down vanished into some invader’s pocket.’
He rearranged his coffee spoon, straightened the handle on his cup until it was parallel with the table’s edge. ‘Nothing missing, no.’
‘Blackmail, then? Or smuggling?’ Roumania’s boundaries included both the Danube and the Black Sea, making for a watery highway into the very heart of Europe.
‘Their problem is with strigoi,’ he said. I waited. He took a sip of cold coffee, replaced his cup, and adjusted it again. I frowned at the deliberate motions of his fingers, and at the way he was not meeting my eyes. He looked … embarrassed?
‘I’m not familiar with that word, Holmes.’
‘Strigoi are a kind of, er, vampire.’ He sighed, then looked up. ‘Russell, this corner of Transylvania appears to be having a problem with vampires.’
I laughed. Who wouldn’t? But once I’d recovered from the coughing fit this set off, I noticed the distinct lack of humour on his face. ‘Oh, Holmes, you can’t be serious? When you mentioned Roumanian vampires, I thought it was like … I don’t know. Switzerland having a plague of cuckoos. Do you mean to tell me that people in Roumania are dying of exsanguination?’
‘Not dying, no.’
‘Holmes, I absolutely refuse to believe that the dead are walking in Eastern Europe.’
‘Of course not. This agency stands flat-footed—’
‘—On the ground. Yes, I read Dr Watson’s story. “The Sussex Vampire” turns out not to be a vampire, but a disturbed young man with some poison darts.’
‘No doubt we shall uncover some similarly prosaic explanation here. However, there is a child involved in this situation as well, and I agreed to look into it.’
‘An infant victim?’
‘Oh no. Not an infant. By no means.’
He slid his hand into his breast pocket and came out with an envelope. From it he pulled the crisp, clear photograph of a document, on which was printed:
sa nu aduci fiica ta inapoi la brașov sau va muri.
‘Is that Roumanian?’
‘Yes.’
‘What does it say?’
‘Russell,’ he chided, ‘Roumanian is a cognate of Romance.’
For a split second my sluggish brain pictured a land inhabited by newlyweds and women bent over Ethel M. Dell stories – but no, he meant Rome, as in Ancient. Which suggested that the country’s language was closer to that of Spain than of neighbouring Serbia.
Reluctantly, I focused my eyes on the photograph. ‘Fiica would be girl, or daughter. Brașov you said was the name of a town in Transylvania. And muri, well. That last phrase probably means “she’s going to die.”’
‘“Do not bring your daughter back to Brașov or she will die.”’
I tipped the glossy surface to better see the image. ‘There’s a smudge.’
‘Blood. Human blood – our friends in the Monaco police department allowed me to use their laboratory. I believe it was placed there deliberately, for effect, since the lines of the thumbprint are too smeared to identify. I’ve sent the original card back to London for safekeeping.’
‘When did you get it?’
‘It reached me in Venice, the day after you departed. It was re-addressed from Sussex. Along with this.’
He handed me a page of expensive paper, with expensive handwriting – a woman’s hand using a bold nib, the script upright, clear, and strong. Full of personality. The page itself had been torn away at the bottom with a straight edge – or more likely, I decided, the top of the page had been removed, to conceal an identifying address. But when I held it to the light, the watermark made my eyebrows go up. When I looked at Holmes, he nodded.
24 June 1925
London
Dear Mr Holmes,
I write in a hurry and in secret, with a mother’s hope that this finds you, and that you are able to help me. The enclosed reached me last week. Before I left Roumania, in April, there had been two or three rather unsettling episodes and rumours in the neighbourhood of my castle, Bran, near to the town of Brașov.
I had intended to return home to Bran in August with my daughter Ileana, following some weeks in England and Germany. Now I am divided as to what I should do. I have spoken with my cousin about the matter and he has suggested that I ask you to come and see me, to give your advice as to what action I should take. Were this threat aimed at myself, I would step down from the train with my head high, daring any man to act against the wishes of the people who love me. But it concerns my daughter, and my will quivers at the thought of harm coming to her.
I shall be in London for another two weeks, and would gladly see you at any place you find convenient. Please respond to the Palace – my cousin’s people will see that I receive any letter or cable.
Marie
Queen of Roumania
Mycousin, I reflected, was King George V; thePalace was Buckingham, whose letterhead she had been trying to conceal.
I studied the dramatic signature of a woman who knew her own mind, and considered Holmes’ response to this letter. One trip across Europe might be explained by curiosity, or even a grudging sense of responsibility to Victoria’s granddaughter. But a second trip? By a man who had been known to blithely send female clients back into danger, who had insulted the King of Bohemia to his face? Why didn’t he simply tell her to hire a bodyguard?
‘Holmes, you turn down cases with more substance than this all the time. I accept that Marie is an intriguing person in her own right, but you can’t be taking her seriously just because she’s royal?’
‘It was her reference to “unsettling episodes and rumours” that caught my attention. You being off on your sailing expedition, I wired back to say I would look into the matter, then took the train to Bucharest and thence to the village of Bran. Where indeed I found the air filled with rumours of mysterious figures and men risen from the dead.’
My head was starting to ache. ‘This all sounds a touch … metaphysical, Holmes.’
‘Some of my more challenging cases began with what one might call supranatural events. Ghostly dogs, a face looking in at a second-storey window.’
‘If you say so.’
‘The castle’s major-domo knows more or less who I am, but to all the rest, I presented myself as an architectural consultant – Castle Bran is in the midst of renovations – with an interest in folklore.’
‘Which allowed you to both poke into every corner and ask a bunch of odd questions. And yet, you did not manage to solve the case. Not only that, you broke off your investigation and travelled back across Europe to Monte Carlo, to find me.’
‘Yes. Although I had done as much as I could in the queen’s absence, and thought I might as easily wait for her return in the South of France as in the Carpathians.’
As I studied him, I realised that he was again avoiding my eyes. What could be any more embarrassing than Transylvanian vampires? (I admit to a touch of humiliation myself, merely writing that sentence.) What possible, even more uncomfortable part of his explanation had yet to drop?
‘All right, Holmes, let’s have the rest of it. I imagine it has something to do with why you were in such a deep study with your pipe that you nearly asphyxiated us both.’
He reached down to pick up the loathsome object, fortunately making no move to fill it with tobacco, merely turning it over in his hands.
‘The solution of a case requires two things,’ he said. ‘Data, and perspective. My “deep study,” as you call it, was an attempt at the latter.
‘Russell, when my practice was young, a governess once came to me with a question that irritated me with its triviality. My attitude nearly cost the woman her life. Some years later, I refused to board a train for Switzerland to help another woman, with catastrophic results. And yet, both of those cases came after the one in which I met Irene Adler, whom I chose to overlook until she had soundly trounced me. Even now, after all this time – indeed, after having you in front of me for ten years – I suspect that again, in the South of France, I failed to understand some key elements of the matter. Elements having to do with another woman I ought to know well, Mrs Hudson.
‘No,’ he said, waving away my protest, ‘I am aware that there are things she – and you – did not tell me, but for the moment, I merely mention the matter because it underscores an inescapable fact: that I, Sherlock Holmes, have a blind spot. I tend to overlook those problems brought to me by women.’
I blinked at this extraordinary admission.
He gave the pipe a wry smile. ‘Hence, my suspicion, when the queen’s letter came, that to follow my impulse and reject this mother’s plea for her daughter might be … unwise. Hence, too, my ruminations with the pipe, in an attempt to overcome the blindness with a closer examination of the facts.’
‘Which you have not?’
‘Which, as you say, I have not managed to do.’
‘I see.’ I was not sure I did, entirely, but it was food for thought.
‘The daughter’s name is Ileana. Beloved child, close companion. She is the queen’s youngest, after an infant son died during the War.’
‘All right.’
‘She is sixteen.’
‘And?’
‘And I realised … That is, I suspected that perhaps another, more qualified …’
I leant forward over the table. ‘Holmes, what is it you want me to do?’
He took a deep breath, and met my gaze at last. ‘I should like you to be my inside informant, into the mysterious realm of the adolescent female.’
‘You want me to spy on a Roumanian princess? Or – no: you expect me to befriend her! You think that because she and I are only nine years apart, we are sure to become good chums? Or perhaps you’re looking for a nursemaid to keep her out of your—’
He cut me off before my indignation could rise. ‘Russell, no, I do not imagine that you will either be assigned a young friend or handed her to care for. Although a girl in her situation – surrounded by servants, her closest relationship with a mother who has lost all her other children by marriage, death, or alienation – would no doubt benefit from meeting a person like you. A woman with abilities and a life of her own, a person habitually unimpressed by royal titles, stunning heritage, and blatant wealth.’
From him, this was a compliment. Although his next sentence was more to the point.
‘My time in Bran led me to suspect that the focus of threat centres on Princess Ileana – and not merely the warning on that card. All of the “unsettling episodes” to which the queen refers have to do with Princess Ileana’s contemporaries in the village. That is, her friends. And yet, even now I cannot decide whether to treat these episodes as adult fact, or as childish imagination. In either event, you will agree, Russell, that girls of that age are more likely to confide in a slightly older woman such as yourself than they would a considerably older man.’
I was not overjoyed at the prospect of being thrown to a gaggle of young women, but I could see his point. ‘I hope you’re not going to tell me that the princess is jabbing some poor infant in the neck with a poison dart.’
‘Not so far as I am aware.’
‘Very well, I will provisionally agree, to be your delegate to the land of the adolescent girl. However, you also told me this case had to do with vampires. Holmes, I have to say that the idea of setting young girls alongside someone with Bram Stoker fantasies makes me distinctly uncomfortable.’
He glanced around the deserted car, and dropped his table napkin beside his plate. ‘Let us adjourn to our compartment, for the remainder of this conversation.’
To my pleasure, I discovered that the beds in our compartment had been made up in our absence: untold luxury after a night on a bench. My aching limbs wanted nothing but to crawl into one and disappear; however, I needed to hear what we were up to. So I compromised by wrapping myself in one of the bedcovers, but taking care to sit bolt upright, lest the call of sleep prove too loud.
‘What are these “episodes and rumours” that unsettled the queen? And where do the undead come in?’
Holmes dropped into the chair that had been pushed to the corner and took out his pipe – the amiable cherry one, with the fragrant tobacco.
‘Vampires are a persistent theme across history,’ he began. ‘Writers like Polidori, Le Fanu, and Stoker draw from ancient myths and folk belief. And from each other, naturally – Mycroft had a well-worn penny dreadful called VarneytheVampire when we were growing up, which I imagine Stoker also read as a boy. The idea is found in cultures from Egypt to Ireland, of a person who rises from the grave to commit mischief and destruction.
‘The Slavic countries up into the Carpathians are a particularly rich source of vampire mythology. Every region has its favourite means of identifying, repelling, and killing a member of the non-dead. Among them are the strigoi – cognate with the Latin strix and striga, a sort of owl that feasted on human flesh, and thence the Italian strega.’
‘Witch.’
‘Modern laboratories might diagnose porphyria from the photosensitivity, red lips, and prominent teeth. Or rabies may cause a person to bite, while catalepsy has been the cause of premature burials for as long as – what is wrong?’
He’d seen me shiver – but less from fever than from the creep of rising hair. ‘I’ve always been horrified at the thought of being buried alive. God knows where I first came across the idea, but when my family died, I’d have nightmares that they were trapped in their coffins. I would picture my mother’s fingernails clawing the …’ I rubbed my arms and gave him an awkward laugh. ‘Just a minor phobia, Holmes.’
‘I shall arrange for you to be buried in a Victorian patent safety coffin. One with a large bell.’
‘Very good of you. But when it comes to your Roumanian shades, I don’t believe you’re talking about premature burial.’
‘No indeed. In the Stoker novel, vampirism is a kind of contagion, used to create more of its kind out of the living. In Roumania, a vampire is someone who dies but whose soul refuses to fully leave the body. Hence a being that is neither living nor truly dead.
‘There are a thousand variations in how strigoi behave and what one can do about them. Some of the creatures are merely irritating, not dangerous. Others literally suck away their victim’s lifeforce, be it livestock or people, and must be dealt with before they kill an entire village. Some run in packs like werewolves, others behave like witches – apparently alive, a part of the community, but secretly robbing their neighbours of life.
‘Once a village have decided that their troubles are due to a strigoi, the solutions vary. Some areas dig up the body to burn the heart and scatter the ashes, or cut the corpse’s tendons and leave it face-down in the coffin to keep it from climbing out. If the strigoi is one of those who appears to be alive, they solve the problem by burning the house down around them. And there is the classical spike through the creature’s head or heart – I understand that ancient skeletons have been found with iron bars lodged in their ribs.
‘Sometimes, when a vampire is suspected but not identified, villagers attempt to repel it by hanging up garlic or wearing a cross. Sprinkling mustard seeds over a floor or roof keeps the creature too busy counting to go further.’
I had been subsiding into the bedclothes, pushed there by the inevitable weight of a Holmesian lecture, but at this statement, I roused. ‘That one has to be a joke.’
‘At times,’ he said, ‘an outsider finds it difficult to be certain.’
’Holmes, what do vampires have to do with the threat against Princess Ileana?’
‘In another country, perhaps nothing. But in Roumania, with its history and folklore, and with a queen out of England – quite a bit. One has to travel the road of how Her Royal Highness Princess Marie of Edinburgh became the beloved mother of a nation. Marie was the product of Russian empire, British throne, and German nobility. Far too valuable a piece to waste in the chess game of nations, at the tender age of seventeen she was played into the promising new house of Roumania, a country on the border of several great powers, promised to the nephew and heir presumptive …’
The trickle of cool air through the train window had no chance against the warm wrap, the soft bed, and Holmes’ droning voice. I slept.
My fevered state no doubt contributed to the dreamlike tints that coloured the narrative – coloured the events of subsequent days, for that matter. However, I believe the story of Queen Marie of Roumania would have ended up feeling like a fairy tale no matter how bluntly the facts of her life were presented.
Once upon a time there was a young golden-haired princess named Marie. She and her sisters lived in a big country house in a peaceable landscape, with ponies to ride and gardens to run through and servants to watch over them. From time to time, they were taken to visit their grandmother, who was Queen of Half the World.
As Marie grew, she became a beauty, a tall, slim young woman with thick blonde hair and ice-blue eyes. She fell in love with the young man who would – although no one knew it yet – become her country’s king, but being first cousins, her mother’s religion forbad it. Instead, the Duchess of Edinburgh and her mother-in-law, Victoria, chose for Marie the crown prince of a new country on the other side of Europe. Prince Ferdinand, Roman Catholic nephew to the childless king, was physically awkward, socially shy, largely inarticulate, and primarily interested in plants. Had she been less beautiful, less sure of herself, less skilled a horsewoman, he might have been less awkward with her. As it was, he was no match for his bride in anything but position.
That was judged enough. The match was made.
Marie was sad, because she loved her cousin, because her new home was far from her dear sisters, and not least because she had little in common with her new husband. But the blood of the world’s greatest dynasties ran in her veins, and she had been training for the job of queen from the time she could walk.
Two months after her seventeenth birthday, the English princess became the Roumanian crown princess, and went to live in a barbaric place more Ottoman than European, with few railways, no telegraph, and not even a proper palace in its capital city. A country whose language the girl did not speak, whose customs she did not understand, and a husband she barely knew. And when she got there, the old king had expectations: that his heir’s wife would be quiet, and obedient, and tame.
Marie was accustomed to riding out alone on the most spirited of horses, seated astride as she raced paths and jumped hedges. Now she had attendants, and a side saddle. She lived in the king’s castle and rode the king’s horses and travelled at the king’s whim, making such friends as she was permitted.
The years passed: children, parties, ceremonies.
Not until she was thirty-one, the mother of four in a world of growing turmoil, did she encounter a man who took her seriously. Prince Barbu Știrbey came from a family of boyars prominent since the fifteenth century. Astute, quiet, darkly handsome, and Sorbonne-educated, this high-ranking aristocrat was yet known for his interest in modernising his vast estates. He was also a fine horseman, with a house in the same hill resort the royal family occupied during the hot summers.
The two met during a time of peasant uprising, when farmers rebelled against the conditions of near slavery imposed on them by the feudal system of land ownership. Prince Barbu was a patriot to his bones – and to him, that meant a loyalty to the people of Roumania. He taught Marie about the urgent need for democracy, and for agrarian reform – and thirty-two-year-old Marie, venturing into the realm of politics for the first time, convinced her husband, and eventually the king.
It was the beginning of a formidable partnership between a prince whose family had ruled the land for centuries and a queen who could barely speak a Roumanian sentence. Gossip flew, naturally, but since neither her husband nor the prince’s wife showed any hint of offence, there was no fuel to feed scandal’s flames.
The princess had found firm ground beneath her feet at last, and began to look at Roumania as a home, rather than a place of lonely foreign exile. When she rode out, she spoke with peasants in their fields and housewives at their doors. When her husband and the old king talked, she would look up from her needlework from time to time, and venture questions. She began to wear the richly embroidered traditional clothing her people had given her – at first awkwardly, as a sort of fancy dress, but then as a way of showing her Roumanian identity. She bore her sixth child in 1913, when she was thirty-eight. War broke out in the Balkans. Cholera swept the land, and Marie left her palace each day to tend to the camps of dying soldiers, holding their hands, wiping their brows, listening to their prayers. Over their sickbeds, she fell in love with her people – and in the process, they with her.
Then an Archduke was shot, and a world of long simmering tensions erupted into the Great War.
Roumania’s king was a German, chosen to establish a new nation’s monarchy. When the War began, his impulse was to declare for the Kaiser, though the majority of Roumanians –along with the English-born Princess Marie – were opposed. The country chose neutrality. When the king died two months later and Ferdinand and Marie took their thrones, neutral it remained. For two years, Marie honed the traditional feminine arts of persuasion, working behind the scenes, among men who laughed at the idea of a beautiful woman with a mind for politics, to convince them that the Central Powers of Germany and Austria were going to lose, and that Roumania’s future lay with the alliance of Russia, France, and England. She and the prime minister prevailed, and in August 1916, buoyed by the Allies’ promise of national reunification, Roumania declared war on Austria-Hungary.
The fighting began immediately. Marie donned a Red Cross uniform and spent her days nursing the sick and wounded. In November, her three-year-old son died of typhoid. In December, Bucharest fell, and the government and royal family fled to a small, starving enclave trapped between Russia and the Central Powers. Injured soldiers came on every train; the army grew short of bullets for its German-made guns; food dwindled. In late 1917, the Bolsheviks swept across Russia, murdering Marie’s cousin and all his family, lining up the army’s officers for execution, leaving Roumania a tiny island surrounded by enemies who snarled over her bones and sent assassins after the royal family.
Shaky treaties were signed, to save the remnants of the country, yet still the army was slaughtered. Bucharest and the countryside were stripped bare by occupying troops. By the time Armistice was declared, half its soldiers, nearly one in ten of its citizens, were dead. The countryside was ravaged, the capital city was a husk.
And yet, when the royal family arrived back in Bucharest, the starving populace exploded in joy – and their love was directed in most part at the queen who had nursed them, comforted them, grieved with them, and shared both their sufferings and their determination to prevail.
A year later, when Roumania’s prime minister failed at the Peace Conference, Marie rode into Paris and threw all her forty-four years of royal wit and charm into the masculine business of negotiating a fair settlement. She fixed her mesmerising blue eyes on Clemenceau, Curzon, and Churchill, until all but the tight-laced American President were eating from her graceful, if work-hardened hands. When she returned to her home, she brought with her all the long lost provinces of greater Roumania, and laid them at the feet of her beloved adopted homeland.
There was one final, fairy-tale touch to the story.
On the edge of Transylvania, the biggest and richest of those returned provinces, stood a small castle beside a mountain pass. Built in the fourteenth century as customs post and border defence, it was visible for miles, a blunt, workaday fortress rather than an aristocrat’s home. As centuries passed, the Ottoman threat came and went, weapons changed, borders shifted. The castle was taken over by Hungary, then returned to the city fathers of nearby Brașov, then sold to a Transylvanian prince before returning to Brașov again. It was used to house Austrian troops, then became the headquarters of the Forestry department.
In 1920, the Brașov city fathers desperately presented it to their new country’s queen. Not that they expected much more of her than the occasional visit and a willingness to keep the walls standing. After all, her main summer residence was only thirty miles away, on the other side of the former border.
But instead of polite dismay, Queen Marie embraced their gift with all the passion in her romantic heart. Its evocative outline, its derelict state, its location in territory she herself had brought to Roumania – Castle Bran was the stuff of dreams, which came to her at a time when her daughters were marrying, her sons growing away from her, her husband ageing into himself. She had been given at last the opportunity to create a home that was not in the corners granted by any king. Castle Bran was hers, as no person or place had been since she’d married at the age of seventeen.
Renovations were gentle, gardening extensive, happiness complete. The queen came to Bran as often as she could, to ride through the hillsides and entertain friends and spend happy hours with the gardeners. She stepped back from the international stage and worked on her writing, publishing books and articles about her homeland for American and English readers. Photographers would visit and capture this dignified figure, whose mature beauty the camera loved, posing among the flower beds in her Roumanian embroidered costumes and wimple-like headscarf that covered her middle-aged chins.
The fairy-tale princess, born to royalty, embraced by commoners, could now retire to her mountain-top keep with her books and her triumphs and her youngest daughter, and be happy at last.
In some fairy tales, happily ever after is where things end.
In others, happiness is where the problems begin.
We rode the train – indeed, we rode a number of trains – for what seemed like days. We passed through cities, mountains, farmland, while the restless fever rose again and pulled me into sleep. I would wake, and follow Holmes into the restaurant car, then return to my seat and my stupor. Holmes would be there, then gone, then there again.
When I woke, countryside was passing by, bright fields beneath a blazing sun. This time, the hypnotic rhythm did not lull me back to sleep. Instead, I found my mind turning over in a way that felt almost normal – although it had skipped back to the days before Marie of Roumania had entered my life, to seize on a series of odd events and innuendos, creating links and eventually presenting me with an uncomfortable conclusion.
‘Holmes, you and I – what’s the matter?’
He hastened to wipe the startled expression from his face, and finished using the lit match I’d nearly caused him to drop in his lap. ‘Nothing is wrong, Russell. Merely that you have not spoken in nearly seven hours.’
‘Really?’ I looked again at the day outside: it was well after noon. ‘Hm. My fever may have broken. I feel better now.’
‘I am relieved to hear it.’ He got his pipe going and waved out the flame. ‘You were saying?’
‘Oh, yes. You and I really need to discuss how much of a role Mycroft is allowed to play in our lives.’
He eyed me through the drift of smoke, then asked cautiously, ‘How does this thought come to you now?’
I made an impatient gesture at the landscape. ‘We’re headed into the Carpathian Mountains to investigate village whispers. Either you suspect this to be the edge of some criminal enterprise, or someone other than you sees it as a series of sparks near a political powder keg. The only indication of crime I’ve heard is the vague threat to a young woman. However, if it’s politics, that means your brother, Mycroft, has sent you here – a theory supported by your continued attempts to avoid giving me direct answers. Hence, my statement that we need to move the matter of Mycroft’s influence over our lives up on our agenda.’
A deliberate puff of smoke nearly obscured the mingled look of amusement and wariness on his face. For the moment, amusement won out. ‘Do you know, I now begin to understand Watson’s astonishment over my thinking processes. Russell, it is true that I had a telegram from Mycroft, urging me to assist Queen Marie – but I was already in Bucharest when his wire caught up with me. Following a queen’s entreaties, not a spymaster’s order. I did not feel the need to irritate you by mentioning his request.’
‘Well, it is irritating, to have the sense of some invisible force—’
He overspoke me, forcibly. ‘Russell, for the present, let us agree that you and I do need to develop a policy regarding my brother’s … requests, whether or not they come from the British government. However, I do not feel that is a question we can confront without him in the room.’
After a moment, I nodded. ‘When we get back to London, then.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Though to be fair – could the threat here actually be political? Less against the daughter than the mother?’
‘I would agree, the threat is as much against Marie as it is against Ileana – perhaps more so. And in this part of the world, political unrest is a given – although at present, things seem relatively calm. There was a Bolshevik-led peasant revolt a year ago, up in Moldavia. The Communists are no doubt busily infiltrating every branch of government. And there are many Hungarian nationalists who wish to see the provinces returned to the one-time Empire.’
‘What about resentment at the royal family being outsiders? Surely the fact that the king and queen are German and English, respectively, creates tensions? Why did they do that, anyway? Didn’t Roumania have its own royal families?’
‘That was the trouble – there were too many of them. Choosing to elevate one prince over the others would plunge the country back into chaos. Bringing in a superfluous younger son from the other side of Europe and placing the crown on him put the native princes on equal footing.’
‘And are none of those families making a bid for power? Such as the queen’s friend, prince Whatsit?’
‘There are those who believe Prince Barbu somewhere between éminence grise and outright Rasputin, but were it clear that he was positioning himself for a takeover, I have no doubt Mycroft would have told me.’
I watched some countryside go past: hay and maise, sheep and rivers. If not politics, then what was responsible for bringing this fairy-tale queen up against cold threats and ancient superstitions?
I had seen a film the previous autumn, on a ship bound for Lisbon. Nosferatu was Stoker’s novel with different character names, and had proved chilling even though one of its reels had disappeared over the side. The stark black-and-silver images reduced a number of my young, blonde actress companions to quivers and shrieks, which was probably why the film stuck with me. Nine months later, I could clearly picture that eerie pale figure, looming over the bed of a beautiful woman … perhaps a very young one …
‘So tell me, Holmes, how does this beautiful, wealthy, much beloved and apparently perfect royal person come to be worried about …’ It was hard to even say the word.
‘Vampires?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘In fact, it is not only vampires, but all stripes of witches, ghouls, and supernatural creatures. Remember, this is a land of peasant farmers, who cannot banish the night by switching on an electrical bulb. I suppose that is why the country is rich ground for dark stories. There’s nothing like a long winter with a forest outside one’s door to stir the imagination.’
‘An odd place to find Victoria’s granddaughter.’
‘The capital city, naturally, is a different world from Transylvania; though Bucharest is more Ottoman than European, and it must have been difficult in Marie’s early years. Even now the country has its share of economic and social problems. It would not be helpful to have rumours circulate about the queen.’
‘Such as?’
He eyed me, no doubt judging my fitness to participate in a discussion. But whatever he saw seemed to satisfy him, and he gave a decisive nod.
‘You complain that I have avoided direct answers. Very well, I shall give you the points on which I have been meditating. Perhaps you will be able to see more of a pattern than I.
‘During my week in Bran, I managed to glean details about three key events – although as you are aware, burrowing to the source of any whispered tale is never an easy task for an outsider.
‘It began the second week of March, when a seventeen-year-old village girl disappeared. She worked at the castle – Bran is strictly a summer retreat for the queen, but this year, Marie came earlier than usual, wishing to consult with her architect and gardeners before she left for her planned summer in Europe. One morning, the village girl did not show up for work. That evening, one of the other maids went to see what was wrong, and found that the girl’s parents had thought she was at work.
‘Alarm was raised. Some hours later, cooler minds thought to conduct a search of her room, where it was found that some of her possessions were missing as well. The next day, the Brașov police learnt that she and a young man had boarded the train to Bucharest. Some days later, a brief letter came to say she had gone off with her love – and yet, village gossip persists with the conviction that she did not go of her own will, but that someone took things from her room to make it appear that way, and sent a letter in writing that merely looks like hers.’
‘What has that to do with the queen?’
‘On the surface, nothing at all. The second episode was serious, but hardly out of the ordinary. It happened some ten days later, when a twelve-year-old scullery maid was preparing vegetables in the castle kitchen and sliced open her hand. Something had drawn the cook and other adults away, and it happened that the queen was passing and heard the child cry out. She went to see what was wrong, seized a bowl to protect the child’s clothing, and started to bind the injury with a dishcloth. When the others came in, they saw the child struggling against the pain in her hand and the queen working to hold her still while she staunched the wound.’
A curiously vivid picture came to mind, attached to some dark bit of memory: a rustic kitchen, a beautiful queen, a young girl bleeding copiously into a crockery bowl … But I couldn’t trace my uneasiness to a specific source, and Holmes was going on.
‘There was considerable alarm upon seeing a bowl apparently half-filled with blood, but as it turned out, much of it was water. However, it is worth noting that, when I heard the story some three months later, it was the bowl of blood that had become the main interest, not the royal person hastening to give care.
‘In the days that followed, villagers reported a series of uncomfortable events. A shooting star, a cow’s death, a broken leg, a bat trapped in a room. Then, the night before the queen and her daughter were to set off for Paris, a child took a shortcut through some trees, and either tripped or was attacked.’
‘How old a child?’
‘Eight. She burst into her house crying, covered in dirt, with blood on her palms and on the neck of her blouse. She claimed that some huge, dark, winged creature had come out of the trees and flung itself at her. She fell, struggled, and got away, fleeing home. Her father and some other men took torches to go see, but found nothing except for a trampled flower from the queen’s garden. A branch of lilac. When asked the next day, the child denied that she had stolen the flower. Some time after that, she said perhaps she had taken it, and also that it was possible she’d just tripped and fallen. By the time I spoke with her, she had no idea – and the story of an attack had already taken root.’
‘The lilac couldn’t have come from some other garden?’
‘Not this one, I am told. It is of a particularly rich shade of purple.’
‘And the queen’s garden isn’t public?’
‘Strictly, no. It would not be difficult to pilfer the occasional blossom, but the villagers tend not to. And a child of eight would surely know that taking such a thing home to mother would be cause for a scolding, at the least.’
‘What about the other things – the dead cow and the broken leg?’
‘The cow may have been old, and the man’s leg broke when a wheel came off a cart.’
‘Meaning that both carry as much weight as a trapped bat, when it comes to evidence of wrongdoing. The interesting thing…’
‘Mm?’ he said, by way of encouragement.
‘Well, it’s a series of unconnected events in the life of a village. I could imagine that in the winter, when there’s nothing to do but watch the snow fall, odd events would take on significance. But I’d have thought that in the springtime, everyone would be too busy to gossip.’
‘And yet, the events grew in importance, taking on shadows of meaning far beyond a cut hand and a fall in a forest.’
‘It suggests underlying tensions in the area. I do hope they didn’t drag some old woman out of the woods and burn her as a witch?’
‘No one has been burnt, hammered with a stake, or otherwise dispatched. At least, not before I left for Monaco.’
‘And you found no indication of what those tensions might be? If not political unrest, then economic problems?’
‘Farmers always live a precarious existence, but harvests have been good, and the country is pulling out of its post-War hardships.’
‘What about after the queen left in April? What strange events have happened since?’
There was a brief gleam in his eyes. ‘None.’
‘None at all? No broken arms, two-headed calves, rabies outbreaks?’
‘The summer would appear to have been remarkably placid. In fact, two different people thought to remark on how the events ceased as soon as the queen and her party departed.’
‘Really. What about before they arrived – wasn’t anything strange going on during the winter?’
‘Only one that I heard. A village girl caught sight of a man who had died in the War.’
‘Would that have been a ghost or a – what was the word? Strigoi?’
‘The young man died in battle in 1916. One gathers that the rules of vampirism require the living dead to show up within a reasonable time.’
‘Seems a bit arbitrary, but fine, let’s call him a ghost. When was he seen?’
‘Sometime in January. While the queen was in Bucharest, many hours away.’
‘Holmes, I don’t see a reason why any of this should be attached to the queen.’
‘In another part of the world, it would not be. However, there is a complication to keep in mind here.’
‘Only one?’
‘A figure in the shadows that only someone from Eastern Europe would see. Have you heard of a Hungarian Countess by name of Erzabet Báthory?’
Two days earlier, retrieving the name would have been a struggle. It was a relief to have the information pop up, and make connections. ‘Countess Báthory! So that’s why …’
The name brought with it the impression of dusty tomes: an ancient library in the depths of the Black Forest. October, 1919. Trying to take my mind off recent matters and the pain in my shoulder by an escape into books – except that recent matters included a woman who’d tried to kill me, and my topic of research was history’s murderous women.
‘Erzabet Báthory,’ I said. ‘Known as the “Blood Countess.” Accused of a mindboggling number of crimes.’ The countess had been a remarkable beauty, which her accusers attributed to a regimen of bathing her skin with the blood of virgins. My state of turmoil as I bent over those German books explained the uneasiness attached to the image of a bowl filled with blood. I realised that I was rubbing my shoulder, and dropped my hand away.
‘One of history’s few women multiple-murderers,’ Holmes noted. ‘Accused of the torture and death of hundreds of young girls, between 1590 and 1610.’
‘Accused, yes,’ I said. ‘Although she was an extremely wealthy woman and, as I recall, the charges were brought by those who – by complete coincidence, I am sure – happened to benefit hugely when she was stripped of her possessions.’
‘There were hundreds of accusers, with an extensive list of crimes and atrocities.’
‘Compiled years after the first accusations, by a religious fanatic whose help in “overseeing” her dead husband’s estate had been spurned by the Countess. A man who was close friends with those due to inherit the most. Who tortured her servants into providing information, and quickly put to death the three closest to her – those who would know the truth of the matter. The Countess herself was permitted to live out her life under house arrest in a very comfortable castle. Which does rather weight the scale on the side of conspiracy.’
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