by Sarah Rayne
‘Your journey was not too tiring?’
‘Not at all,’ said Hilary. ‘And I was glad to be of help to Sister Catherine.’
‘You have not visited our country before?’
‘No. It’s very interesting. And this is a wonderful house.’
‘It has many memories. Much history.’ In a minute, thought Hilary, he will lean forward and say softly: and I should enjoy showing it to you, my dear. He’s a grandee of Vienna in the nineteenth century, or Russia before the revolution. He ought to be wearing a dark red velvet smoking jacket and sipping vintage port or old French brandy.
‘In England we would regard Varanno as a national treasure,’ she said, and saw the smile touch his lips.
‘That is a courtesy. Perhaps . . .’ He stopped and looked towards the half-open door. ‘But here is your supper tray,’ he said, and Hilary caught the lurching shadow cast by the hunchback, Ficzko. ‘I shall wish you goodnight. We will meet tomorrow,’ said Franz-Josef, in his careful English. ‘And then perhaps I may show you more of Varanno,’ he said.
Hilary grinned inwardly. I knew he’d say it.
Catherine went warily down to the small panelled room off the hall, which the Family used as a sitting room. This would be difficult and it might be painful but it had to be got through.
‘We will be waiting for you,’ Franz-Josef had said earlier on, when Catherine had gone cautiously into his study after taking Hilary to her room.
‘Come down as soon as you can.’ That was her mother. ‘Make sure that your friend has all she needs,’ Bianca had said, ‘and then come down again.’ Catherine had not expected any particular warmth from her, but there had been one of Bianca’s swift, scented embraces. Catherine felt with a shock, how thin her mother had grown. Did I do that? she had thought, and then, in the same instant: of course I did not! Vanity, Sister Catherine. If Bianca had grown thin from worry for anyone, it would be for Pietro. And then her mother had surprised her again, reaching for her hand and saying, ‘I’m glad you are here, Cat.’
Cat . . . It was that she was afraid of. All the time they were drawing nearer to Varanno, she had been afraid that the minute she entered the house again, Sister Catherine, the good, hardworking nun, would fade and Cat, Elizabeth’s Catspaw would return. And beyond Cat, so well hidden that nobody had ever suspected her existence, was the third self: Katerina, Pietro’s Katerina . . . If Pietro was dying, what will happen to Katerina? I don’t control any of my selves, she thought in sudden panic. Even Sister Catherine is owned by Reverend Mother. And in another minute I shall know how ill Pietro is. This is the moment.
Franz-Josef was standing before the fire, and even though her senses were strung almost to snapping, Catherine felt a small tremor of amusement. The famous negligent-hand-on-the-mantel stance. Graceful and elegant. He might be posing for Portrait of a Sybaritic Gentleman. It looked studied but it was entirely unconscious, of course.
Bianca was curled into the deep old armchair, her dark hair lit to coppery life by the fire. Catherine saw faint lines of strain about her mother’s eyes which she had not noticed on her arrival, although Bianca was so beautiful that it did not matter. Thin and ravaged she was beautiful. She would be beautiful at eighty.
On the other side of the fire sat her cousin Ladislas and his father, Stefan. Did this mean they believed Pietro to be dying; was Ladislas already plotting? Ladislas had always coveted everything that was Pietro’s. Catherine studied him and thought he had not changed very much. Greedy and insolent. He did not rise as she came in, but lounged in his chair, looking at her with faint, slightly amused contempt. Catherine bit down a spurt of anger.
Stefan stood up as she entered, and held out his hand. Stefan had all the courtesy that Ladislas disdained – but he is no better than Franz-Josef’s copyist! thought Catherine. But she took his hand and smiled a brief greeting. She had always been a little afraid of Stefan, although Pietro had said Stefan was no worse than weak and that it was Ladislas who was the ruthless one. Ladislas would stop at very little to get Varanno, said Pietro. Catherine took a huge breath, because she had arrived at the moment now. She said, ‘Where is Pietro?’
There was the space of a heartbeat, and she was aware of Franz-Josef and Bianca both turning to look at Ladislas and Stefan.
Bianca said, ‘I believe that Ladislas is about to tell us,’ and Franz-Josef said, ‘Well, Ladislas? Stefan? I have kept my promise. Cat is back. Now it is your turn. Where is Pietro?’
There was a sudden silence, and Catherine, not understanding, looked from one to another. Why had Pietro’s whereabouts anything to do with her returning to Varanno? She waited, and saw Stefan hesitate and then look across to Ladislas. As if he is bowing out, thought Catherine. As if he is letting Ladislas take up the reins. He’s cold and cruel, and he’s rather weak. Yes, it’s in his mouth, I never saw it before. Pietro was right.
And then Ladislas said, ‘This is going to be rather painful.’
‘Well?’ It was the sharp, authoritative voice of one who has never encountered disobedience in any form, and Catherine sat up a little straighter and was overwhelmingly grateful to her father for being what he was. Brimful of charm, but with iron authority beneath. He could be far more ruthless than any of them; he would slap Ladislas down at once if Ladislas were insolent, and he would do it with that remarkable polite cruelty that was so devastating. The sharp mind in the velvet scabbard. No one will ever hold a candle to him, thought Catherine, looking at her father. Not even Pietro – shining, brilliant Pietro – had ever quite matched Franz-Josef.
‘As you know,’ said Ladislas, speaking as if he was measuring each word, ‘Pietro was living in Paris. I don’t know what his reasons for leaving the Family were—’
‘And you don’t need to know them,’ said Bianca sharply.
‘He was living in one of the poorer quarters,’ said Ladislas, after a moment, and although he had tried to sound regretful, the regret was unmistakably false.
‘There was no reason for Pietro to live in any kind of poverty,’ said Bianca.
‘Was there not?’ said Ladislas, eyeing her.
‘His share in the banking concerns were made over to him when he left us,’ said Franz-Josef and Catherine looked up, because she had not known about this, and it almost sounded as if her father had helped Pietro to leave. Was that possible? Had Pietro perhaps spun some kind of story about wanting to leave the Family’s houses, which Catherine thought would have been entirely believable to anyone who knew Pietro. ‘Because money is so dull unless it’s mine,’ he had once said.
‘Properly invested the shares would have brought a rich income for many years.’ The steel was in Franz-Josef’s voice, and Catherine thought: so they still finish one another’s thoughts, my parents.
‘And,’ said Bianca, ‘he was retained in a consultancy capacity in the Paris House.’
Ladislas said, ‘I was always taught that it was rather vulgar to refer to money in public.’
‘I was always taught that it was the height of ill-breeding to show discourtesy to one’s host,’ said Franz-Josef instantly, and the hot colour flooded Ladislas’s cheeks.
Bianca stretched out a hand to Ladislas and said, ‘Oh, the child is both vulgar and ill-mannered, Franz-Josef,’ and Catherine heard the tolerant affection in her voice and saw her father register the gesture through narrowed eyes. Ladislas and Bianca? I wouldn’t put it past her, thought Catherine. For all her devotion to my father, I wouldn’t put a small fling with Ladislas past her.
Franz-Josef said, ‘Go on, if you please.’
Ladislas withdrew his hand from Bianca’s and smiled, as if he might have gained an unexpected ally. ‘Poor Pietro,’ he said, softly. ‘He had sought solace in strange places by the time I found him. He was drinking too much and he was talking too much. There were women . . .’ Ladislas spread his hands. ‘Where Pietro is, there will always be women, of course,’ he said dismissively, and Catherine thought: and that is one of the reasons you ha
ted him so much! But she waited and Bianca laughed.
‘“Solace in strange places . . .”! My dear boy, what have you been reading?’
‘And,’ said Franz-Josef, tranquilly, ‘Pietro’s womanising and drinking were never particularly excessive.’ He crossed the room and poured brandy into his glass from the square-necked decanter and then turned back to Ladislas. Giving himself a stance of even more authority, thought Catherine, appreciatively.
‘Also,’ said Franz-Josef, ‘your motives for actually seeking Pietro out were questionable, to say the least. But do go on.’
Ladislas glanced at Stefan who said, ‘It depends, you know, on what he was drinking, and on whom he was drinking it with.’
There was a rather nasty pause. Then Bianca said, in a light, amused voice, ‘Meths and diseased prostitutes, Stefan? Cocaine and crack? Pietro? My dears!’ One of Bianca’s extravagant amused shrugs. ‘How absurd!’ She leaned forward, her eyes shining in the fireglow. ‘It was a reasonable try, Stefan, but it wasn’t quite good enough,’ she said.
‘But by all means try again,’ said Franz-Josef, politely, and Catherine, sitting quietly in her corner, heard the amusement in his voice and experienced a surge of delighted triumph, because whatever Stefan and Ladislas were up to, verbally at least they were no match for Franz-Josef and Bianca.
Ladislas sat back in his chair, and looked across at Stefan as if saying: well? Your turn now?
Stefan leaned forward and the planes of his face suddenly seemed sharper and crueller. When Bianca said, ‘A medical opinion now, Stefan?’ he looked at her levelly enough.
‘Ladislas was trying to wrap it up a little,’ he said, ‘to make the truth more acceptable.’ A quick gesture. ‘But if you must have it without the frills . . .’
‘Oh I think we must, my dear.’
‘It is very tragic, what has happened to Pietro,’ said Stefan, slowly. ‘But you should be grateful that I am able to help him.’
Franz-Josef stared at him, and after a moment he said, in a voice devoid of all expression, ‘Where is Pietro?’
Stefan said, ‘I am afraid, Franz-Josef, Bianca, Cat . . .’ One of the polite inclinations of his head to Catherine. ‘It is his mind,’ he said. ‘Pietro’s mind has failed.’
There was a sudden silence. Then Franz-Josef said, ‘He is – you are saying he is insane? Mad? Pietro?’
‘There is a degree of – personality disorder,’ said Stefan. ‘An – absence of reality.’
‘And?’
‘There is only one thing to do,’ said Stefan. ‘When Ladislas brought him back, I put him at once in – a place where he could be given care.’
‘You should be grateful for my father’s background,’ said Ladislas.
‘Certainly we should,’ said Bianca, in a silken purr. She looked across at Franz-Josef. ‘Remember how Stefan has made a study of these things.’ She rearranged her skirts, and curled her feet under her. ‘“The study of the human mind as it disintegrates is the most fascinating thing in the world.” Have I quoted you correctly, Stefan?’ She smiled, catlike. ‘Stefan enjoys his poor moonstruck madmen,’ said Bianca. ‘He will enjoy Pietro if we let him.’ She looked back at Stefan and Ladislas. ‘You have put him in your own private asylum?’ she said. ‘Yes, I thought that was what you meant. How remarkably Machiavellian of you both.’
Stefan started to speak, but Franz-Josef forestalled him, and for the first time that night, Catherine heard his voice stripped of its normal urbanity.
‘There?’ he said. ‘You have put Pietro there?’
‘Yes.’ Stefan sat back.
‘Pietro is inside CrnPrag,’ he said.
The silence closed down, complete and terrible.
Chapter Eight
Catherine lay in her familiar bed on Varanno’s eastern side, and stared up at the ceiling.
Pietro is inside CrnPrag.
CrnPrag, the bleak, lonely stronghold on the Romanian borders, was neither quite of Romania or Hungary, but straddled the two. It was a dark old mansion, standing in its wooded acres, walled in by a high stone wall with spikes on the top so that no one could look in and no one could look out.
CrnPrag, roughly translated, meant the threshold of darkness; when they were all younger, Catherine’s cousins had made up stories about it: splendid, terrifying stories, the kind that you told seated about a huge fire in the depths of winter, with the shutters closed against the howling night and chestnuts roasting on the hearth and mulled wine fragrant with cinnamon and nutmeg. Sometimes she thought they had forgotten she was there, curled into the chimney corner of the huge schoolroom.
CrnPrag was a mystery place; there was some secret about it. Parents and uncles stopped talking if it was mentioned and glanced uneasily over their shoulders. Perhaps it was a place of monsters and demons said the cousins, with delighted terror. A place where grisly experiments were carried out and where strange, half-human creatures lived a nightmare existence.
The fire would burn lower and the shadows would creep across the floor, and there would be the scent of the half-burnt chestnuts and a sprinkling of shells and salt in the hearth. The tales would become wilder. Eerie lights sometimes burned in the dungeons; howls were heard when the moon was full. Mutant creatures walked the mountainside by night. None of the cousins believed any of this, or only a very little, but it was fun to tell the stories.
But in Catherine’s mind, CrnPrag was forever entangled with fear and lurching monsters and gothic legends; with winter fires that burned with the blue flame that meant hoar frost tomorrow. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley by the banks of Lake Geneva, vying with Byron and her husband to tell the best ghost story, weaving her eerie tale about the modern Prometheus.
In the end, it had been Pietro himself, hearing Catherine cry out one night from a nightmare, who had told her the truth about CrnPrag.
It was a private mental asylum, he said, having listened to the nightmare. It was nothing more than a place for poor sick-minded people: Stefan Bathory’s own realm where he cared for and studied the incurably insane. It was not frightening, but on the contrary, rather pitiful that people had to be shut away like animals, said Pietro, fluffing up the pillows and straightening the sheets, and then turning away to cover the bedside lamp with a thin silk scarf so that it cast a warm soft pool of light. But mental illness still carried a stigma, even today, which was why CrnPrag had to be surrounded by secrecy and a degree of furtiveness. All right now? he said, standing up and looking down at her, and Catherine had smiled sleepily and said, ‘All right.’
CrnPrag, high up in its strange borderlands, was nothing more sinister than a place where those who were beyond help or an embarrassment to their families and society, could be placed. There was nothing in the least supernatural about CrnPrag, only what the cousins had whispered, only what imagination conjured up. There was always something a bit fearsome about asylums, of course. The dark old madhouse in the mountains, maniacs glaring through the bars of their cages and sometimes escaping to terrorise the countryside . . . Yes, it was the stuff that legends were made on.
And now Pietro was inside that dark old madhouse. He was locked away with the poor tormented souls that Stefan had in his care. Pietro with his fine-boned beauty. Pietro who had always made Catherine feel safe, and who could chase away nightmares with reason and silk-draped lamplight. And whose mouth tasted of wine and sinless ecstasy.
He was shut inside the stark, legend-drenched madhouse with Stefan Bathory’s pitiful moonstruck madmen.
It was an easy enough matter to wait until the house was wrapped in sleep and then steal out of her bedroom.
It felt strange, but not unduly so to reach into the large wardrobe at the side of the room and feel her hands close about the clothes she had worn when she lived here. French silk and Italian wool. Donna Karan and Yves St Laurent and Armani. Gucci shoes and bags. There was a drift of expensive perfume clinging to the carefully hung clothes. The thick cloaks she had worn for the snow-bound months; th
e boots and riding things. The designer clothes for supper parties with the cousins. People did not dress up so very much these days, but the Family dressed up. It had been part of the fun.
And with the putting on of those clothes, Cat is pushing up to the surface again . . .
Catherine shook her head angrily, and pulled on dark corduroy trousers and a thick woollen sweater. She glanced in the mirror, and saw that her hair, although cut short as required by the Order, was not unbecoming. It curved about her head in a dark, glossy cap. It ought not to matter how one looked – the nuns had instilled this into her – but it mattered to Catherine now. It mattered because she was going to Pietro, after nearly four years of cloistered calm, after nearly fifty months of prayer and fasting and the ever-turning wheel of the religious year. After all those days and months and hours, she was going to Pietro.
Because, even if a hundred learned men and women swore on the Bible, Catherine would never believe that Pietro was mad. And even if he was, she would never leave him to the mercy of Stefan Bathory’s dark old madhouse, not if Armageddon was at hand and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were riding into the world.
She hesitated about waking her parents, but she had become accustomed to keeping her own counsel. She would do so now; she would find out the truth, and only then would she ask for their help. This gave her unexpected confidence; it was a definite plan to follow, it was something to shape and dictate her actions. I’ll do it, thought Catherine, stealing silently through Varanno, feeling how the house was not quite asleep, in the way that most old houses never quite sleep. There were soft creakings everywhere, heart-stoppingly like a stealthy footfall, and there were little rustlings in the eaves, which would be no more than a night wind, or perhaps house martins. There was the creak of contracting timbers from somewhere. Halfway down she paused, scanning the shadows. Had that been a furtive movement behind her? She waited, her heart pounding.