Mary walked on for a while in silence. Then she said, “I thought I wanted adventure.”
“You do want adventure,” said Irene. “We none of us want to stagnate, to live behind closed curtains all our lives for fear the sun will fall on us too strongly—that was quite poetic of me, wasn’t it? You’re just not used to it, so you’ve gotten drunk on it, and now you have a hangover. That wasn’t quite as poetic . . . ah well. And for all your strength, Mary, you have a weakness that Justine and I don’t.”
“What’s that?” Mary felt half resentful and half curious. What was Irene going to say? And did she want to hear it?
“You can’t punch a wall, or kick down a door, or burst into tears. For most of us, emotions are a safety valve—but not, I think, for you. I don’t think you’re capable of letting yourself go in that way, nor do I think it would bring you any satisfaction. Rather, it would be a further source of distress. What you need is a safety valve—something violent, but calm and rational. I know! Target practice!” Irene looked very pleased with herself. “You see, I can diagnose you as well as Sigmund, and I won’t even charge you for my services.”
Mary laughed. How long had it been since she had laughed? She could not remember. “That reminds me of a certain London gentleman of my acquaintance who is in the habit of shooting at his parlor wall!”
“I told you that you were like him!” said Irene. “Just for goodness’ sake avoid some of his less healthful habits, and I don’t mean destroying his wallpaper or playing the violin at all hours.”
“What do you mean?” asked Mary.
“Oh, nothing. Ask John Watson sometime. Look, the sky is on fire!”
Indeed, the sky over Vienna was a blaze of oranges and pinks and yellows—all the colors of sunset.
“You know him so much better than I do,” said Mary. “Do you think you might return to London someday? He would probably . . . I mean, Dr. Watson said you were the love of his life.”
Irene looked at her in astonishment and then burst out laughing. “Oh, sweetheart! John is a wonderful man, a war hero—brave, loyal, kind. But there’s so much he will never understand. Sherlock and I get along so well because we’re complete opposites. In habits, temperament, the choices we make. Me and Sherlock—I don’t think so. Honestly, I don’t think any woman could be happy with a man like him, and I certainly never could be. I married Godfrey because I wanted what any woman wants—passion, devotion. I wanted to be loved like a woman, not a mystery to be solved. I would never be happy with Sherlock, and I seriously doubt that he would be happy with me. Look, the first star!” She pointed up at the sky, which was beginning to turn violet at the edges. Mary followed her finger. Yes, there was the evening star, shining down just as it did in London.
“Except maybe . . . I wonder if he would make you happy, Mary?” Irene looked at her speculatively. “You’re not quite like any other woman, are you?”
“I would never presume—” Mary began, in confusion.
“Oh, honey,” said Irene, taking her arm again. “Give me some credit for knowing how a twenty-year-old Fräulein thinks. I was there once too, you know. Come on, let’s get back. If Diana doesn’t have dinner soon, she’s going to destroy something, and I have too many nice things to let that happen.”
“Twenty-one,” said Mary. “I’m twenty-one.”
Irene laughed and pulled her along under the chestnut trees. “Same difference.”
MARY: Why is this book so much more embarrassing than the last one?
CATHERINE: Because you did more embarrassing things?
MRS. POOLE: When she visited, Mrs. Norton said my treacle tart was the best she’d ever tasted, so how’s that for your fancy European cakes?
DIANA: Did you say treacle tart? I want a treacle tart.
By the time they got back to the apartment, Frau Schmidt had already prepared a dinner of chicken in red sauce, with potatoes and pickles.
MARY: It’s called a paprikas. Pronounced “ash.”
DIANA: And it is seriously the best food in the entire world.
The next morning, after Diana had kicked her awake, unintentionally for once (she must have been having a particularly active dream), Mary had a serious talk with the incorrigible Miss Hyde.
“Wake up,” she said, shaking Diana by the shoulder. “I don’t want you trying anything heroic, do you understand?”
“Go away,” said Diana, without opening her eyes. “What are you doing here anyway? Go back to your own room.” She pulled a pillow over her head.
“We’re in Vienna. Don’t you remember? To rescue Lucinda Van Helsing. Do not try to rescue her by yourself. Gather as much information as you can, let her know that we’re working on a way to get her out, and then wait for Dr. Freud to come release you.”
“Of course,” said Diana from under the pillow. “That’s the plan. Don’t I always stick to the plan?”
“No,” said Mary. “If you stuck to the plan, you wouldn’t be in Vienna at all. But this is really, really important. If you try any heroics, you’re going to get caught, and then we’ll need to rescue the both of you—which will be inconvenient for us, and embarrassing for you. That is, if we can even pull it off. You might have to stay in the Maria-Theresa Krankenhaus forever! So don’t try it.”
“All right, whatever,” said Diana, pushing the pillow off herself and onto the floor. “What’s for breakfast?”
It did not much matter, because they had to eat so quickly. There were pastries and coffee in the dining room, but Irene told Diana to grab a couple of the pastries and drink her coffee as quickly as possible.
“Just drink it down, there’s a good girl,” she said, looking at her wristwatch. “It’s almost cold anyway. We’re supposed to meet Sigmund in an hour, and I don’t know what traffic will be like on the Ringstrasse. Mary, you and Justine will go set up the observation post. At least one of you should be there at all times. Greta will help you, and you will always have either her or Hannah with you. Diana, remember, if you’re in trouble, find a way to signal. A handkerchief out the window, a nightie, something that can be seen with binoculars. We’ll send word to Sigmund, who’ll come get you out. And if he can’t—well, I don’t know yet, but we’ll do something. Come on . . . and that’s not the right hat. You need something more frivolous if you’re going to impersonate an average teenage girl. Try this one.”
Diana, looking sufficiently frivolous in a confection of peach netting, followed Irene out the door, dodging a kiss from Mary along the way. “Remember!” Mary called after her. “No heroics!” Diana made what looked, to Mary, like a rude gesture, but as the door was already closing behind her, it was difficult to tell.
DIANA: It was a rude gesture.
MRS. POOLE: Knowing you, it would be.
Mary turned to Justine. “Ready?”
Justine just nodded. She was looking more composed this morning, after the emotional storms of the day before. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Really, don’t look at me so inquisitively. Irene was right: I needed some sleep and time to be alone. I’m better now, a little. Enough.”
“All right,” said Mary, doubtfully. She was still worried, but when Hannah came in to tell them that their cab was waiting below, they followed her down the stairs and into the courtyard.
At the inn, Greta was waiting for them in the third-floor room. It was obvious that she had been sleeping on the narrow bed. The room had been made slightly less uncomfortable by the addition of thick pillows, a wool blanket, and a worn carpet for the floor. There were boxes of crackers and tins of soup stacked against one wall. On the rickety table was a spirit lamp over which food could be cooked, in a simple fashion. By the window was a set of binoculars and a retractable telescope.
“I’m glad you’re here,” said Greta when they arrived. “And not simply because of the pastries, although they are most appreciated!” Justine had brought several for her, wrapped in wax paper by Frau Schmidt. Greta took one, bit into it, and said through a mouthful
of jam, “There is something worrying me.”
“What is it?” asked Mary.
“Look down there,” said Greta, pointing toward the street. “In the shadows by that building next to the wall of the Krankenhaus—it is a tobacconist’s. And there, on the other corner, by that greengrocer’s. You can see it better through the telescope.”
Mary expanded the telescope and looked where Greta was pointing, but could not see anything strange or out of the ordinary. At the greengrocer’s, a woman was putting potatoes into her string bag, and there was no one in front of the tobacconist’s, although a moment later a man emerged puffing on a pipe. She wondered if Sherlock would have been able, at this distance, to deduce what tobacco he was smoking.
“I don’t see anything in particular,” she said. “Am I supposed to?”
“He may have moved,” said Greta. “Sometimes they are there, sometimes not, and not always the same men—but always in the shadows. I think they are watching the Krankenhaus. That is only an intuition, you understand, but Madame Norton has taught me to trust my intuition. It will show you the truth when logic cannot, she always says.”
Sherlock would certainly not agree with that! He had always told Mary that intuition could lead you astray. Perhaps Irene was right, and the two of them would not have been compatible after all.
“What do these men do?” asked Justine.
“Nothing. That’s what is so odd. They are not beggars or peddlers. They simply stand, sometimes looking down at the pavement, sometimes up at the walls of the Krankenhaus. Never many, two or three at a time. But there is something about them—they remind me of dogs that smell a rat in a drainpipe, and wait and wait for it to come out.”
Mary frowned, worried. What Greta was describing reminded her of the last time they had been watched, by the Beast Men that Edward Prendick had created. But surely all the Beast Men had died in the fire? And Prendick himself was in London, not here in Vienna. Once again she wished that Catherine could have come with them. Perhaps Greta was imagining things? After all, she was Austrian, and Austrians were a romantic people.
BEATRICE: Not any more so than the English! If you do not think the English are romantic, you have not read your national poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott . . .
MRS. POOLE: I don’t know what poetry’s got to do with it. The English are a sensible people, always have been, always will be.
BEATRICE: Except about the Queen and Empire!
MARY: For goodness’ sake, don’t get into a political discussion with Mrs. Poole. Do you want our supper burnt? Not that it would matter to you, I suppose. How do you even burn weed soup?
Anyway, if there were strange men watching the Krankenhaus, there was nothing they could do about it now but observe, and wait.
“There they are,” said Justine suddenly. Had she seen the men Greta was describing? No, there was Dr. Freud alighting from a cab just outside the gates of the Krankenhaus. He was greeted by one of the guards, and then he helped Diana out.
It was Diana, wasn’t it? Even from this distance, Mary could tell that the girl following the doctor was slender, delicate, frightened. All her gestures seemed to proclaim her reluctance to enter those gates, and he was like a coaxing father, gently urging her forward.
Well! Diana was a good actress after all. Who would have thought she could play such a part?
DIANA: I told you!
Mary did not like seeing her go through those gates or disappear into the Krankenhaus itself, whose front doors seemed to swallow her up like a giant maw. Three days, she told herself. She would see her sister in three days.
“Well,” she said, when she could no longer see either Diana or Freud, and the guard had returned to his post. “Now what?”
“Now,” said Greta, “we wait.”
They waited.
The hours passed slowly. One of them always kept watch. The other two read—Greta had provided them with a stack of books and magazines, although the magazines were in German and only one of the books was in English. Mary soon tired of The Complete Poems of William Wordsworth. Sometimes Justine sketched in a notebook she had brought with her. Sometimes, while Justine was watching, Greta taught Mary card games, at which she was better than she had expected. Sometimes one of them would go out to use the rather unsanitary restroom down the hall. Eventually, they had a sort of luncheon, and then a sort of supper, although the tinned food and crackers were not particularly appetizing.
When darkness fell, Mary, whose turn it was to watch, said to Greta, “I understand what you mean, now—about instinct. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like them either, standing in the shadows like that. They even seem to avoid the street lamps. They’re just watching, that’s all. But watching what? Could they be guards for the Krankenhaus, disguised as ordinary men?”
“I do not know,” said Greta, coming to the window. “They don’t look like guards, though. The guards are mostly former soldiers. They have a way of holding their heads, as military men do. You can tell they have drilled and marched and obeyed orders. Those men in the shadows, not so.”
“Then I don’t know either,” said Mary. She watched them because there was nothing else to watch with the binoculars, other than the ordinary routine of the Krankenhaus—guards changing, wagons filled with provisions going in and coming out empty, morning and evening. Might that eventually be their way in, and then out with Lucinda Van Helsing? Meanwhile, the men in the shadows did nothing.
Mary did nothing either, or nothing worth mentioning. She watched. She waited. Sometimes she slept. The three of them had arranged to sleep in turns, in the narrow bed—one at a time, so two of them would always be awake. And the hours kept passing.
Early next morning, Hannah arrived with a message from Irene—how were they, had anything happened, here was a salami, some poppy seed buns, and a jar of plum jam from Frau Schmidt. Gratefully, they ate slices of salami and buns smeared with jam. But they had nothing to report.
By that evening, Mary was heartily tired of staring at the Krankenhaus. She had grown familiar with its bricks, blackened with soot. She had started ignoring the men who continued to lurk in the shadows, two or three at a time. After all, they did nothing but lurk—and sometimes smoke! That morning, they had been joined by a new man, who sat cross-legged by the walls of the Krankenhaus. But he seemed to be a beggar, a real one—he actually begged. Once, several of the guards walked by and told him to move on. He moved to the tobacco shop, and sat there with his hat in front of him. The other men stayed in the shadows, watching, smoking, eventually walking away only to be replaced by new ones. And that was all. Honestly, had she ever been so bored in her life? As she had throughout the day, she wondered what Diana was doing.
Meanwhile, Diana was mad. Of course, she was officially mad—she was, after all, an inmate in the Maria-Theresa Krankenhaus. But she was angry-mad, and at herself, which was a new and uncomfortable sensation.
She had been in the Krankenhaus for two whole days, and had not found Lucinda Van Helsing. Of course she, Diana, should have found Lucinda right away. Wasn’t she the cleverest of them all?
That, at least, is what Diana believed.
DIANA: If you’re going to write from my point of view, then really write from my point of view. None of this “Diana believed” bullshit.
MARY: Where, where, do you learn words like that?
DIANA: What’s wrong with words like that? It’s all language, ain’t it?
MARY: Now you’re just trying to provoke me.
The first night after Freud had committed her, she had picked the lock on her door and stolen out of her room. It had been easy peasy, just as she thought it would be. On slippered feet, for the inmates of the Krankenhaus were not allowed boots, she had explored the dark halls of the asylum. Although it was so well-guarded on the first floor, perhaps because it was so well guarded, there were no guards on the second floor—only a station where the female nurses sat, when they were not with patients. Presumably
there was a similar arrangement in the men’s wing. It had been long after midnight, when all the patients were presumably asleep. The night nurses sat in the nursing station in case of emergencies, knitting or gossiping among themselves. Walking around the second floor had been easy, and she had already taken the uniform of an asylum attendant, left just lying there for anyone to steal in a locked cupboard. Now it was hidden under her mattress. But of course, Lucinda was on the third floor, not the second . . . that was the whole problem.
Her first day, she had learned the routine of the Krankenhaus. Freud has signed her in, and she had met, briefly, with the director, a large man with red cheeks whose name sounded like coughing and who resembled a choleric pig, as though one of the Three Little Pigs from the fairy tale had grown up into a man. He had looked at her with a false smile filled with crooked teeth and said, “I am so sad, Miss Frank, to hear that you have become ill, but it is good that you have come to our beautiful city of Vienna to be treated by Dr. Freud. He is developing quite an international reputation, is he not?” The director nodded at Freud as though pleased, but Diana could tell he was not pleased at all. “So, you shall be staying with us for a little while, yes?”
“Just until her father returns from Berlin,” said Freud. “I am very sorry, although not at all surprised, that she should have suffered this attack of nerves while he is away. We expect him back on Thursday, when I shall return, Miss Frank, to remand you to his custody. Meanwhile, we must make sure that you become strong and healthy again, must we not? And here in the Maria-Theresa Krankenhaus, you shall come to no harm, even from yourself.”
“Yes, our patients are not allowed scissors or any other sharp implements,” said the director. “Even needles are forbidden here, for the safety of our inmates—or rather, patients. If I may ask . . .”
“I stuck myself with a hatpin,” said Diana in a shy, breathy voice that Mary would scarcely have recognized. She hid her face in her hands. “Over and over. I could not help myself.”
European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club Book 2) Page 25