by Sarah Rayne
Michael listened carefully to Hilary’s explanation of the unexpected journey. Sister Catherine’s brother taken suddenly ill, and the need for her to return to her home in Romania for a time. The convent’s rule that a nun must not travel alone. Michael caught the faintest hint of rebelliousness in Hilary’s voice and knew she was disliking having to submit to the request which had probably been tantamount to an order to travel with Catherine.
‘Do you mind going with her?’
‘It might be difficult to refuse. And you’ll be in the clinic. You don’t need me, not really.’
‘Don’t I?’
‘No.’ A flat denial. Michael changed tack.
‘Romania’s a long and awkward journey by rail. Even with the correct papers, you’ll almost certainly be subjected to delays by the rail authorities. It would be far easier to drive there.’ He stopped, because at the mention of driving, there had been a bolt of panic from her. Why? He waited, and when she spoke, her voice held a note of defensiveness.
‘I should perhaps explain—’
‘That you don’t drive?’ There was surely nothing wrong about not driving: she had entered St Luke’s at a very early age, after all. And there would be nothing unusual about not wanting to drive such a long distance in a foreign country.
He waited, but Hilary only said, ‘I have not driven for – not for many years.’
‘Fair enough. But a car would be easier from all points of view. The checkpoint guards are strict but they aren’t unreasonable. And Sister Catherine drives.’
‘But we couldn’t take the convent car,’ said Hilary. ‘Reverend Mother’s already said that they couldn’t be without it for so long a time. It’s the only car they’ve got.’
‘A poor thing but their own. It’s probably not equal to such a long journey,’ said Michael. ‘But cars can be hired.’
‘So you see, Reverend Mother,’ said Michael, seated in her study, enjoying the scents of old leather and beeswax and woodsmoke, ‘you see, the matter could arrange itself very easily.’ He paused, trying to gauge her reactions. ‘They don’t need to trouble with railways – tiring and perhaps distressing for them. Expensive for the convent. If Sister Catherine feels able to drive us, I will hire a car and travel with them.’
Reverend Mother had the feeling of being outmanoeuvred. She suspected that Michael Devlin was aware of this and rather amused by it. But one must be practical and his offer was not to be lightly declined. She said, ‘Why should you go to so much trouble, Mr Devlin?’
‘For one thing I must return to the area,’ said Michael. ‘I always intended to. And if I can hire a car – possibly through Reuter’s – I can be dropped at the place we stayed at before, the Red Angel. It was several kilometres outside Debreczen, almost on the Romanian border, as I recall. It would be a good halfway mark. We can break the journey there, and then Hil . . . Sister Hilary and Sister Catherine can go on to Varanno.’
‘It is a fairly long journey, Mr Devlin.’ Michael thought that the elderly nun had not missed the fact that he had almost omitted Hilary’s religious title, but she did not refer to it. She said, ‘Sister Catherine’s home is on the edge of the Carpathian Mountains. A matter of some three hundred miles from here. Perhaps a little more than that.’
‘Yes. But Debreczen can’t be much above half a day’s journey from Vienna in a fast car. Four to five hours.’ The sudden grin flashed. ‘Half a day to Debreczen: a rest and a meal for the sisters – they would be my guests for that, of course. Even an overnight stay if necessary. And then another half-day’s journey for them to Varanno. I can stay at the Red Angel and begin some preliminary work. I should have several uninterrupted days.’
‘A book?’
The grin flashed again. ‘A series of articles to begin with,’ said Michael. ‘Never predict.’
‘And to discuss a literary project too soon is to risk aborting it.’
‘Yes.’ Michael turned his head. ‘You understand that?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, there ought to be people in and around Debreczen I can talk with. Local people who might know of the channels being used for bringing out the refugees from Bosnia. That was what seemed to be happening when I was there before. That’s why I’m going back.’ He caught a flare of interest, and remembered that the elderly nun was French. ‘On the surface it seemed very much akin to the French Resistance Movement in the last war,’ he said.
‘Yes, I understand. But Debreczen is a long way from Bosnia and Hercegovina, Mr Devlin. It seems to me quite remarkable that you should have found refugees in a place so far from the theatres of war.’
‘It was remarkable to me, as well,’ said Michael. ‘But that’s the interest, of course. The distances they had travelled.’
‘From Bosnia?’
‘That’s the odd thing,’ said Michael slowly. ‘We found several families from Bosnia, certainly, but there were also some from Ceauşescu’s Romania – from the troubles in the late Eighties. We didn’t manage to find out how any of them had got so far – we hadn’t a Russian-speaking interpreter – and then I was wounded.’ He felt his fists clench. ‘But I want to know how they managed to get so far,’ he said. ‘It was hundreds of miles. How did they do it? The Bosnian people were in a state of siege, they were half starving. And the refugees we found were pitiful, ragged creatures . . .’ He felt the remembered anger flood his mind, seeing again the frightened families hiding on the mountainside in the shadow of the old castle. ‘There was some kind of channel open,’ said Michael. ‘It’s the only answer. Somebody was getting them out in immense secrecy. And I want to know more. Also, I want to know why I was hit to stop me finding out more.’
‘You were – actually attacked?’
‘Yes. It’s how I was blinded.’
‘Would it not – forgive me – but to publicise this, would it not risk closing the . . . the channel for others? Deprive others of a safe passage? Because,’ said Reverend Mother, ‘the war is still going on, Mr Devlin.’
Michael said, ‘Blow the cover? No, of course I won’t do that. But it depends who is bringing them out, Reverend Mother. And why.’ He made as if to lean forward, his enthusiasm flaring, and as he did so, felt the blank black wall rear up. Damn! I can’t see! He said, ‘I can accept Romanian refugees in Debreczen fairly easily. I can accept Bosnian refugees there, although with difficulty. But—’
‘But to find both is far beyond the realms of coincidence,’ said Reverend Mother.
‘Precisely. You are an astute lady, Reverend Mother,’ said Michael with a sudden grin.
‘God has blessed me with a modicum of ordinary common sense,’ rejoined Reverend Mother composedly. And then, her voice serious, ‘Might it be a hostage situation of some kind?’
Michael said, ‘If I had my sight, I should be staring at you in awe.’
‘It is a possibility?’
‘It might be. But I recall . . . oh, damn, if only I could see!’ The cry was torn from him, and for a moment he covered his face with both hands. Absurd to make the gesture of shutting out the light when there was no light for him to shut out, but he did it. After a moment, he said, ‘So smothering. So frustrating. At times I want to tear at the blackness as if I could simply rip it aside like a curtain.’
‘We are keeping you in our prayers, Mr Devlin.’
‘It’s more than I deserve.’ Michael fought for calmness, and after a moment said, ‘You will forgive the damn, I daresay.’
‘I have heard very much worse. Go on with what you were saying.’
‘I recall,’ said Michael, ‘that there was the impression of people being brought together for a specific purpose. But that the nationality did not matter.’
For a moment there was silence. Michael could hear the ticking of a tiny clock somewhere in the room. He could hear the expanding of old oak. Then Reverend Mother said, softly, ‘A collecting.’
‘Rather say a trawling.’
‘People being brought to one place fo
r – perhaps for a sinister purpose. Siegfried blowing the magic horn to his followers?’
Michael said, ‘Not just astute, but also imaginative. I wonder how many people would use Wagnerian opera to illustrate a point.’
‘Once I was extremely fond of good music. But I have understood accurately?’
‘Oh yes. An assembling,’ said Michael. ‘A herding together of human cattle so that they could be slaughtered. Perhaps even culled.’
He felt Reverend Mother’s shock and, after a moment, she said, ‘I had not realised – this is a very terrible thing that is taking place—’
‘Someone gathering together a collection of humanity,’ said Michael. ‘Yes; if so, it would be truly terrible.’
‘Someone extremely powerful and very wealthy,’ said Reverend Mother, half to herself.
‘Yes.’
‘But for what purpose?’
‘That,’ said Michael, ‘is what I have to discover.’
Michael had rather enjoyed the brief discussion with the severe-sounding but obviously scholarly Reverend Mother. He had been entirely sincere when he had called her astute and imaginative. Not for the first time he thought that God, when he chose, chose only the cream. Hilary was cream. In fact Hilary was vintage champagne and Mozartian opera and Beluga caviare.
Which was a very treacherous way to think.
An imp of mischief had reared its head when he had told Reverend Mother, coolly and as if there was no question about it, that he would assume the cost of the hire-car. But he would do it anyway and worry about the cost later.
It felt reassuringly familiar to telephone Reuter’s, feeling his way about the old-fashioned dial-telephone in Reverend Mother’s study, and it was strongly morale-boosting to hear the smooth-skinned, dark-haired Annalise answer the phone and express delight at hearing the English Mr Devlin after so long an absence.
‘I do not forget you, Michael.’
There had been an extremely pleasant interlude with Annalise when she was in Reuter’s Berlin office and Michael had been there shortly after the wall came down, interviewing the East Germans. She spoke excellent English, cooked like an angel and made love like a devil. Michael smiled, remembering, and explained that he would be requiring a car for a matter of a little over a week. It must have a good tape-deck . . .
‘Ah, the music,’ said Annalise, and her voice slid into its furriest, sexiest note. ‘Everywhere you were there must be music,’ she said. ‘Everywhere. I remember it.’ Michael remembered it as well: Annalise’s bed with the evening summer sun streaming in, both of them wine-flown from a long decadent lunch, both of them riotously trying to time orgasms to the swelling crescendos of Wagner’s Tannhäuser overture. Glasnost and perestroika rolled up into one absurd, hugely sexy adventure.
Annalise said, ‘I remember it all so very well, Michael,’ and Michael smiled.
He said, ‘A good car? For old times’ sake, Annalise?’
‘For old times’ sake, Michael.’
Chapter Five
Michael thought he had managed rather well in the matter of packing. There was a way of folding shirts that he had not quite mastered, although he thought he had not done so badly. And he would not be wearing shirts very much. Sweaters and cords would be sufficient. Maybe a shirt and tie for dinner. He remembered that the Red Angel had had a small, rather nicely furnished dining room with chintzes and oak-panelling. The food had been very good. Panic threatened as he remembered that Hilary would be a hundred and fifty miles away, and he would have to find his way about the inn single-handed. He would have to cope with ordering food, finding it on the plate, eating it . . . But it would have to be done at some stage. At least this was not Italy, where he might have to struggle with spaghetti.
He packed the shirts and added the tapes and the portable cassette-player with its headphones. Once it would have been books: the ragged collection that usually accompanied him when he was travelling. Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey; Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited; Mansfield Park. Maybe a couple of Agatha Christie whodunnits. Now it was Mozart and Schubert and Haydn. Would they become as familiar, as welcome travelling companions as Lord Peter and Harriet Vane, or Fanny Price and her Edmund?
He accompanied Hilary to the convent’s early Mass before they set out, aware of her surprise, amusedly aware that it was many years since he had listened to the rise and fall of the liturgy.
‘I shan’t remember the responses,’ he said.
‘I don’t suppose you will,’ she said, apparently unworried.
The first thing to assail him in the convent’s small chapel was the incense, and so sharply evocative was it that for a moment he put out a hand for balance.
Incense . . . The sweet pungency of the burning oil, companion of his schooldays with the monks, as evocative as pot-pourri, as potent as Noel Coward had once avowed cheap music to be.
But Noel had never sat in a Viennese chapel and listened to the rise and fall of the nuns’ plainchant, or, at least, one assumed he had not. The Bach fugue that followed closed about Michael like a warm bath. The intelligentsia condemned fugues as nothing more than skeletons, frameworks, childishly easy to write, but Michael rather enjoyed the predictable patterns. It was a little like listening to a sonnet instead of poetry. And whoever the organist was – one of the nuns? – she was very gifted. God taking the cream again.
There was breakfast after Mass in the nuns’ long, sunny-feeling refectory. Michael was beginning to find his way about the convent now – ‘Remember to count the steps and note any landmarks along the way,’ Hilary had said early on – and Michael, using the stick he hated, found he could make a cautious way to the refectory unaided. Through the door that closed off the guests’ wing, hear it swish to, then turn right, fifty paces exactly, feel the carved panelling just above what the estate agents called dado level.
Three steps down, and right again, the draught from the small window stirring the air, and the refectory door was at his hand. Six paces forward and there was the long polished oak table, with the faint drift of lavender from an open window. One or another of the nuns always put out a hand to guide him to a chair, doing it automatically and even absently, rather in the way you might pass the salt if asked, not pausing in your conversation, but complying politely with a request. This always pleased Michael.
Today he arrived as the crisp new croissants baked in the convent’s own kitchens were being set down. There was coffee, hot and strong, and apricot or strawberry preserve. Thin slivers of ham were wrapped about smoked cheese. Michael always found cheese an odd thing to eat for breakfast, but he ate it anyway. There was something remarkably satisfying about having made your peace with God. A huge well-being enveloped him. It will be all right. He would trace the strange, far-flung Bosnian refugees; he would find out who was financing the secret escape route, and he would write the articles, or even Field’s accursed book. He would be able to pay for Istvan’s grisly operation, and he would regain his sight. He amended this: with God’s help he would regain his sight. And grinned inwardly because the ambience of the convent was already getting to him. Strange how powerful religion is.
‘You drew strength from the Mass?’ said Hilary at his side, and Michael jumped because her words were exactly in tune with his thoughts. But he said, composedly, ‘Yes. And the music.’
‘I thought you would,’ she said.
Debreczen felt precisely as it had done eighteen months earlier. Ancient, a little secretive. Cramped, but cool and shadowy because the buildings were of thick old stone. Fragrant with the scents of potentilla and gentian and with the pine forests from the east; heavy with the intrigues and the plots of the last century, and with all the blood-soaked lore of Romania and the darkling forests of the lands beyond. Transylvania, the Land Beyond the Forest . . . Was this the road that Stoker’s Jonathan Harker might have taken?
But the journey in the swift comfortable BMW provided by Reuter’s was smooth, and Sister Catherine appeared untroubled by th
e distance.
‘Driving is something I have missed,’ she said, tranquilly. ‘This is a pleasure for me.’
No other vehicles hooted at them on the Karntnerstrasse and, once on the open roads, no sinister carriages with the horses wearing black plumes and oblong boxes wedged on to the roof appeared to be giving chase. The BMW gathered speed with contemptuous ease. It was a pity Harker had not been able to call on Teuton technology.
Once beyond the city-confines proper, Michael asked if music would be acceptable.
‘Very acceptable,’ said Hilary at once.
‘Sister Catherine?’
‘Yes – it would be very pleasant. You have brought tapes? Where does . . . Oh yes, I see.’
The powerful car ate up the miles, and the soaring notes of Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 went with them. Michael, leaning back, able to feel that this was the open countryside, surrendered to the music. Schumann was said to have composed this when emerging from a spell of madness and, for the first time, Michael could identify with Schumann’s emotions; hearing the triumph as the madness sloughed away from the tortured composer, feeling the delight at breasting the dark waves of his insanity. It was like surfacing in a huge sunlit ocean after half drowning; it was like coming up into the light after being shut away underground. A paean. An excelsior. A dark agony rolling back. I shall play this if Istvan restores my sight. I shall feel like writing this if Istvan restores my sight.
And then they were driving through Debreczen with its ancient fortresses, and out on to the road that wound into the brooding Carpathian Mountains. Michael thought that an early twilight had fallen by now. Had it? Yes, there were the scents and the sounds of twilight everywhere. The good things of day beginning to droop and drowse . . . Strange how potent Elizabethan iambic verse was . . . Michael felt the light close off and the dusk-laden coolness brush his skin.
‘We are here?’
‘We are here, Mr Devlin.’
The fourteenth-century Red Angel was not so fourteenth century that it did not provide a courteous welcome. Tobias, the owner, remembered – or said he remembered – Michael, and expressed himself as pleased to welcome him back, although not in such tragic circumstances, they were to understand. It was a truly terrible thing to lose one’s sight, but they would hope that matters could be put to rights. In the meantime, Mr Devlin was very welcome, said Tobias, and was helpful about registering and explaining the times of meals in the small dining room. Michael asked if it was too late for a meal to be served, and felt Tobias beam with delight. It seemed nothing could be easier; there was a side of beef only waiting to be carved, and several side dishes. To follow, Tobias could recommend his wife’s plum dumplings. And then coffee and cheese?