Book Read Free

Castle Shade

Page 25

by Laurie R. King


  * * *

  —

  I did in fact intend to soak my aches in that luxurious bath-tub while he was away, and definitely indulge in some sleep—he was sure to find something to keep us up for much of the night. And I performed my duty as a responsible guest by dispatching a servant down to the police to say that they should seek out a man with a very new motor-cycle. After that, I aimed myself at the stairs.

  However, halfway up the first flight, my feet stopped, and descended again. The entire house was busy elsewhere. I could just take a quick look…

  I put my head out to check the inner courtyard. Empty at the moment—so I slipped into the main “ground-floor” room, pressed about by its thick walls and currently used as a builders’ store.

  Ileana had heard her ghosts in two rooms, both on the eastern side behind the immensely thick shield wall. If there was some kind of hidden passage inside it, how many of the tower’s levels did it span? To link all five storeys would require a vertical shaft with a ladder, rather than stairs. The walls on this ground-floor room were massively thick, more foundation than wall. The three south windows brought in enough light to show the stacks of builders’ equipment, half-covered with dusty tarpaulins. The single window piercing the shield wall was tiny, and sat at the end of a long, narrow arch.

  I went over every inch of the tunnel-windows, and found no breaks or seams that could hide a doorway. I even examined the windowless wall on the north side, and raised the tarpaulins to look at the floor, in case the pile was concealing a trapdoor. All I saw was some workman’s half-eaten meal, left there for the mice to discover.

  Short of tearing down stones or shifting the entire builders’ store, I had to accept that there was nothing here.

  I went back into the courtyard, nodding at a maid who was raising a bucket from the well, and trudged up the four flights of stairs to the top. It was uncomfortable to think that a hidden passage might open up near to our rooms, but here, too, I found nothing—nothing but this floor’s marginally less-tidy heap of plaster and tile. And unless those buckets, bales, and crates hid an opening in the floorboards—and unless the person using it had been able to restore the dust to its original thickness—there was no trapdoor.

  I turned with a light heart to my rooms, relishing the idea of four or five hours without interruption. I intended to nap, truly I did. But my hand rested on the handle and would not turn. Ileana had not heard her unlikely rats on the ground and top storeys. She had been on the first floor, and the third.

  But, surely the point of any secret passage was to provide unseen escape, in case of entrapment? Perhaps not in the most luxurious of pseudo-castles, where the greatest danger was of a guest laying eyes on a maidservant emptying the night-waste. But here, in a military outpost between two often-warring provinces?

  No, it was almost certain that what she had heard were rats.

  I turned the handle and walked into the room. Someone had found the time, despite the morning’s turmoil, to tidy and dust. They had even plumped the pillows of the window-seat, arranging them invitingly against the wall, should one wish to sit and gaze out of the window. I was grateful, yet again, for this room—not only for its plumbing, but its airiness and light. Well worth all those stairs to be given these windows, so noticeably larger and less deeply set than those below. Directly under the roof as we were, the walls did not need to be as massive as those two or three floors down.

  Less massive.

  That explained why, on this top level, there were two long, narrow rooms along the back of the shield wall, the rooms whose ceilings had collapsed and given me a view of the ancient tree-trunks supporting the roof.

  Up this high, there was no need to cut, transport, and lift enough stones to fill the shield wall. Whereas on the ground floor, thin walls like those of the two long rooms would have caused the tower to collapse before its first troops moved in.

  While in between…

  My mind’s eye created an isosceles triangle: the length of the shield wall, the angle of a length of stairs, and the height of a room—or should it be two?

  I trotted down one flight of stairs to the large music room.

  The lower levels all had two or more rooms, to bear the weight from overhead. The long room’s south end had comfortable chairs gathered under the windows; its north side had a sort of library corner; in between were a piano and the protruding inglenook fireplace with its built-in benches, ideal for keeping warm on a winter’s day. Is that what Mr Florescu did, I wondered? Light a few of Her Majesty’s thick beeswax candles, drink her port, read her books? When a castle is occupied for less than half the year, do the servants begin to feel it is their own? And perhaps allow events to take place that its new, outsider owner—a woman, at that—does not need to know?

  The floorboards talked to themselves as I crossed them, north to south. They were mostly covered with thick carpets and the skins of large furry creatures—a bear that measured more than nine feet from nose to tail took up most of the inglenook floor; something smaller but equally thick between the two armchairs at the south-facing windows. One’s toes longed to shed their footwear.

  The book on the table beneath the window was the Aldous Huxley novel Queen Marie had mentioned the other night. A length of silk marked her page.

  The windows and walls on this side were smooth plaster, freshly painted, and unlikely to be hiding anything larger than one of the ikons that turned their enigmatic gazes upon my search. The eastern wall was also recently decorated, and the upright piano pushed against it did not hide a doorway. The inglenook fireplace held no secrets. The only way in through its plaster and tiles would be via the chimney, a manoeuvre suitable only to a small monkey.

  But the room’s northern corner was a sort of library alcove, where wooden shelves held books ancient and modern. And I’d seen enough country house priest’s holes and secret passageways to know where to look for an unnecessary seam in a board, or a patch of wear in an unexpected spot.

  Yes, there it was: a cunningly hidden panel set into its middle section.

  And that small knot-hole above the top of the books? It would make for a logical viewing port.

  I stepped to one side to consider matters. There would be a trigger device to open the door, of that I had no doubt. I could find it with my torch.

  But when I worked the lock, it would make a noise.

  When a rat-catcher sends his dog down a hole, he first blocks the other entrances to the den, just as a London copper only kicks down a front door when his partner is at the back. I did not want to bring in one of the castle’s servants—that glance shared by the three women in the kitchen warned me against putting my trust in them. Holmes would be back, in just a few hours…

  But somewhere, Gabriela lay in the dark.

  I went back upstairs for a torch (and fresh batteries, just in case) and a couple of scraps from the builders’ waste pile, which I left in the music room.

  Now to locate the other end of my rat-run. The second floor had a pair of rooms belonging to King Ferdinand, with an immense, heavily carved four-poster bed, a matching wardrobe, and tapestries on the walls (Ferdinand, I remembered—unlike his wife—enjoyed hunting, so used Bran in the winter). Any of those could conceal a passage large enough for a mounted knight, but none of them appeared to. Similarly, the room next door: heavy furniture, few decorations, a light layer of dust.

  But no hidden door.

  I started for the stairway, then retreated at the sound of quick feet coming up. The footsteps continued on, and I scurried down silently to the first floor.

  There were essentially five rooms on this level, one of those above the guard-room. The other four had a sort of intermediate quality, somewhere between family and public use. The eastern side, against the shield wall, held a dining room on the north, with two windows overlooking the village, and a drawing room to
the south, its three windows looking up the river valley and the Queen’s orchard and flower gardens.

  Unless the passageway was a vertical tube, negotiated by ladder or hand-holds nailed into the rock, the lower end of my rat’s run would be on the far side of the shield wall from the third-storey library alcove.

  Renovations in this room had been the work of decorators rather than builders: patch the plaster, slap on whitewash, replace the pitted and cracked window-glass with clear panes, and cover as much of the floor as possible with thick carpets. Soon, I imagined, the Queen’s architect would have his way with the substance of this level, and launch into arguments over whether to rip out those time-black doors between the rooms, the wood kicked about by every soldier that had lodged here for three centuries, and replace them with fresh oak and teak from Africa.

  Until then, the builders had clearly been instructed to work around the existing features rather than setting their crow-bars to them. Even the massively ugly wooden shelf-unit beside the south-facing windows.

  I took the time to study all sides of this monstrosity. Had no one noticed that the shelves only accounted for half its thickness? Or was it such a difficult piece, everyone simply agreed not to see it, and cover it over with decorative objects and framed photographs?

  Mr Florescu, I thought, had paid it some attention. As, I suspected, had the cook, her oldest assistant, and the housekeeper.

  Around the back, I found what I was looking for. I knelt, and got to work with my heaviest picklocks. I kept as quiet as I could, for the sake of surprise, but when I worked the mechanism, it gave a click.

  I would not have heard anything through stone, but this was wood, and it did not block the sound of movement from within. I worked my fingernails into the wood and pulled—it gave a scraping sound, like the one Ileana had heard—but I ducked down, in case of attack, or falling plaster, or a torrent of rats.

  No rats came, no man leapt at me, no gun went off or club descended. Instead, I heard the sound of a panicked scramble. I turned on my pocket torch.

  Just inside the narrow doorway lay a thick pile of blankets and rugs, currently unoccupied. Slap-slap-slap echoed from the darkness up to my left. It stopped. Letting as little of myself into the doorway as possible, I extended the torch inside with my right hand, pointing the beam up in the direction of the sounds. Nothing lethal came crashing down, so I let my head follow.

  The tunnel went up, and up, a black shaft of rough stones not much wider than a man’s shoulders. Its steps were worn from centuries of booted feet—suggesting that it was built as a mere short-cut, and later turned into a secret passage by the addition of the library and wooden unit. The man at the top was barefoot, not booted, and did not appear to hold any arms other than the two he had been born with. Both of which were currently wrestling with the back side of the library door, now firmly shut with the wedge I had jammed into its base. Eventually, he realised that it was not going to move, and he turned, lifting a hand against the light.

  Tousled hair, bare feet, untrimmed beard, mismatched clothing with patches and frays. No weapon appeared, so I lowered the light a few degrees, taking it out of his eyes.

  “Andrei Costea, I presume?”

  Chapter Forty-one

  At his name, the young man stood away from the unresponsive door.

  “Who that?” he demanded.

  “My name is Mary Russell. Please come down.”

  While he considered his options, I returned the torch beam to what lay at my feet: multiple layers of rugs and blankets, possibly with boards underneath, creating a surprisingly tidy nest. Two narrow shelves and half a dozen twenty-penny nails driven between stones held his possessions—on one shelf, a basket of candle stubs, kitchen matches, a Roumanian Bible, an English children’s story, a soldier’s wash-kit, and a corked bottle filled with what I sincerely hoped was water, since tiuca would be explosive around open flame. The other shelf was his pantry: a stub of cheese, some fruit, a wheaten roll…and two walnut biscuits oozing their dark filling, which made me smile.

  I checked his progress down the stairs, then looked at the army haversacks hanging from two of the nails. Those might hold any manner of deadly object, from bayonet to revolver. On the other hand, he might also have a gun under his pillow, so to speak, and catch it up as he went past. Though if he hadn’t done so when he was first disturbed…

  Holmes would be furious if he found out, but I decided to trust the man, and left everything where it lay, to back down the stairs and into the room beyond.

  Though I did move far enough back to dive for the adjacent doorway, should he emerge with blade or firearm in hand.

  He did not.

  Andrei Costea, Great War deserter and ostensibly long-buried citizen of Bran—and more recently, cemetery strigoi and castle ghost—was a man of about my height and precisely my own age, twenty-five. Brown eyes, a mop of curly hair in need of a trim, a dark bruise on his forehead, and a nose that had been broken and thus given personality. His skin, once tan, had that washed-out look of someone who had been indoors for a very long time. It had also been some time since he had use of a bath: his moustache was so long it covered his mouth, and his cheeks bore two or three weeks of stubble. I took care not to stand too close to him.

  He automatically pressed the hidden door shut, wincing at the click of the latch. He’d paused to catch up a pair of much-mended woollen stockings, and pulled them on now, eyeing the room as if expecting a wolf to come leaping out at him. I held up my empty hands.

  “Mr Costea, I do not want to hurt you. But we need to talk.”

  “I not to stay here. Come.”

  His stockinged feet padded noiselessly across the boards. I followed, keeping well back. However, it appeared that he merely wanted to be away from the civilised portion of the castle, and scurried down the lesser stairs, ducking nimbly under the props.

  When I emerged warily on the ground floor, he had closed the room’s other door and settled onto a folded tarpaulin atop a stack of bags labelled Plaster. He picked up the plate of stale food and placed it on his knee, absently picking at the contents.

  He was living under the noses of the castle residents—or at least, some of them.

  I found an empty pail, overturned it, and sat, watching him apply his attention to the bread and apple, as if he had forgot I was there.

  If Vera had not already told me about Andrei, I might have thought him slow by nature. But her word—simple—seemed more appropriate. He was not stupid, and any brain damage had been done early, not during the War. He was good-looking under the tousle and stubble, with a direct gaze that seemed to notice a great deal.

  He reminded me of the men who spent their lives with dogs or horses: for them, most human beings did not quite claim their attention—although the few who did would win their complete and utter devotion.

  I adjusted my assumptions, from brain-damaged to merely unfocused, and ventured a question. “How long have you been here?”

  He did understand basic English, probably about the level of that children’s book I had seen. Speaking was, as always with a foreign language, a different matter. “Seex month.”

  “You came in February?”

  His reply had four or five syllables and a diphthong, but I took it to be “January” in Roumanian. Before I could ask him for the details, he flung out a beseeching hand. “Please, Mees, what happen? In castle, today, all…confuse.”

  “They’re all out looking—wait. How do you know that?” He must stay behind his doors during the daylight hours, and the two peep-holes looking into the first- and third-floor rooms couldn’t have told him much.

  “Is holes. In stones. Tiny-tiny windows, to see out.”

  “In the stones? Not just in the doors?”

  “In doors and also in stones.”

  “Really. How many?”

  “On
e this end, three that end, two at side.” His gestures illustrated one hole in the wall at the foot of his makeshift bed, thus overlooking the river valley, then two over the castle’s drive, and three at the top of the stairs, looking out across the wider plateau towards Brașov. I supposed it made sense: a secret staircase would be a trap without spy-holes. No doubt each tiny hole would be tucked beneath a protruding stone, invisible so long as the person inside took care not to light a lamp after dark. And a bored young man might spend much of his day circulating from one peep-hole to the next.

  “Mees, please, what happen?”

  “Do you know Gabi? Gabriela Stoica?”

  “Gabi, yes—she good?”

  “No, she has disappeared.” He looked blank. “She is gone. Someone took her.”

  This brought him to his feet with a torrent of Roumanian. I held up a pacifying hand. “All the village is looking for her. We will find her.” He sat down, not to relax but to better see my face.

  “When she go?”

  “When did she disappear? Yesterday. Some time between seven and eight. You understand?”

  “Eight of the clock, yes—just dark.”

  “Yes, it was probably dark. She was walking home, and did not get there. I don’t suppose you were looking out north at the time?”

  “Dark I was looking other way, over village. Lights come on,” he explained. “Families, people, nice to see.”

  I looked at him, hearing the longing in his voice. “You go out sometimes, don’t you? Into the town.”

  “After dark only. Not often.”

  “When was the last time?”

  “Three night ago.”

  “Ah. So it was you, who spoke to Vera Dumitru from the graveyard.”

  He flushed bright red. “Stupid, stupid thing to do. I thought maybe, so nice to talk to somebody—instead she throw rock and run away.” He touched the bruise on his forehead. “I don’t mean to scare her. Stupid Andrei.”

  “She has good aim,” I said. He gave a rueful nod. “Don’t worry about Vera—she just thought it was one of the boys teasing her. Because she told people that she saw you earlier in the year, from the courtyard.”

 

‹ Prev