“Baiat prost,” he muttered. “I will leave here. I am too stupid, I will get people in trouble.”
That was probably true. However, I did not wish to be the cause of his hasty departure into the night. “We will see if we can find some way to help you. Something that doesn’t mean living inside the walls.”
“Is not all that bad. Only when Queen is here, I have to stay inside more. Other times I go out two, three nights a week.”
I wanted to ask him about the other nights, if he had by chance seen a man in city shoes on Thursday, or a man in a full cloak on Saturday, but my bones were aching, and I knew that Holmes would want to go over it all again. All I needed to do was return Andrei to his bolt-hole for a few hours, and make sure he did not sneak off before Holmes got back from Sinaia.
“Well, I’m sorry you didn’t happen to be out last night, but I wonder if you’d mind—”
“You ask medic?”
“Sorry?”
“Medic. Doctor. You ask what he see?”
“I haven’t talked with him today, no, though his car is here.”
“Car, yes—big, like ambulanță?”
“Yes, it looks like an ambulance.”
“Was in old barn on road to Fagaraș yesterday night. Barn with no roof, you know?”
“Sorry, are you saying that the doctor hid his shooting-brake—his motorcar—in a barn last night?”
“Hid? I don’t know. And could have been someone else. But he goes sometimes. Think he keeps a motor-cycle there. Car comes, motor-cycle goes—then motor-cycle comes, car goes. Not far from Gabi house—maybe he saw her?”
It was hard to focus, over the clamour in my brain. “Sundays aren’t one of the doctor’s days in Bran,” I said, which was more than a little nonsensical. Andrei said something in reply, but that I didn’t hear at all.
Instead, I was on my feet. “Can you show me the holes? In the stones.”
“See now?”
“Yes.”
“Come,” he said again, automatically tucking away the plate and smoothing out the wrinkles in the tarpaulin. He led the way up the cluttered stairway, holding back a hand until he was sure the room beyond was clear, then led me rapidly through to the ugly unit and inside it. At his gesture, I pulled its door shut, taking out my torch.
I clambered over his bedding and up the claustrophobic passageway behind him, concentrating on the stairs underfoot rather than the press of stones on all sides. At the top, he pointed at a perfectly blank piece of wall, and stepped back, pressing against the wooden door.
So there I stood: at the top of a run of precipitous stairs, with a criminal whose secret I knew, who only had to give me a hard shove to avoid discovery. And then I turned out my torch.
Oh, if I survived this, Holmes was going to kill me.
But Andrei did nothing except breathe. My eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness. Finally, I became aware of a tiny stream of air on the side of my neck. Saying a prayer that I had not catastrophically misjudged this man, I bent gingerly to set my glasses against the stones.
The hole was, naturally, as long as the wall was thick, but its sides were smooth and it was wider at the far end than the quarter-inch of its inner diameter. It had also been cleverly angled so as to look down, rather than out at the far-distant hills. Through it, like a miniature telescope, lay the little crossroads at the centre of the village. A woman passed across my line of sight, right to left, carrying a basket. Father Constantin’s wife.
Another faint breeze was stirring the hair on my left temple. This second hole brought me nearly against Andrei’s rather fetid shirt-front. This one showed the road north towards Brașov. A cart was leaving town, a motorcar approaching, one that had the air of police department about it.
I pulled away. My eyes had adjusted enough that I could find the third hole by its line of dust-motes through the dark. It was higher than the other two, and its tube considerably longer, since it cut through the wall at a diagonal. The end of it must also have been far larger, since the scope of this view was considerable—from the Bran crossroads, busy now with castle servants laying out trestle tables and food, to the line sketched in vegetation across the countryside that was the other north road out of Bran.
As I watched, the police motorcar appeared, turning up that road. It drove for a time, then stopped on the lane before the Stoica house. Perhaps half a mile short of the heavily used farm access lane beside the derelict barn. “You said the barn with most of the roof missing?”
“Yes yes, very old.”
I pictured the place. Heavily grown about by trees and shrubs, a car parked behind it would be invisible to the neighbours. And on a Sunday afternoon, when no one was in the fields apart from Romany courting couples, a man might ride in on his remarkably silent motor-cycle, and wait near the derelict barn until evening fell and a girl was walking home.
A toss of the blanket and a quick dose of chloroform, and he could bundle her away—into an oversized motorcar along with the cycle itself, scattering a few more oil-stains on the floor. If he waited until full dark, and perhaps crept along the first half-mile by the light of the moon, he would soon be in open countryside, and could pull onto the road to Brașov as he had a thousand times before.
“Did you see the car leave?”
“No. Can only use holes for some time,” he admitted. “Wind coming through, it hurts the eyes.”
“I bet.”
“But later—lots later—there was car going along that road. Up to Brașov.”
“Any idea what time?” I asked, expecting a negative.
“Late. Maybe one hour before someone arrive, banging on door.”
That would have been Gabi’s father.
That decided me. I pulled away from the stones and thumbed on my torch, raising it until it I could see his face, and he could see mine. “Andrei, do you want to help Gabi?”
Chapter Forty-two
Andrei’s heroic determination to help find Gabriela, no matter what it cost him, was somewhat deflated when I explained that his role would be to sit behind a pair of locked doors with a book and wait for Holmes to return.
“I come!” he insisted. “I help.”
“If you come, everyone will be looking at you, not looking for Gabi. And this is important.”
I could have left Holmes a message, coded or in some exotic language, but it was better to leave him an explanation and resource in one. Since I didn’t actually know where I was going anyway, Andrei’s person might put us on an equal footing when it came to finding me.
I drew my knife and poked around under the door to locate the wedge, then tapped it away. Andrei checked the peep-hole first, but there were no witnesses, and we got to the top floor without being seen. When we reached our rooms, I had to turn and yank Andrei inside, so loth was he to sully its magnificence with his less-than-pristine self.
“You need to wait for my husband,” I told him again. “He will not be here for at least two hours. You can sit, drink water, eat…well, there’s not much, but eat whatever you can find. Read a book. Be comfortable.”
I went into my bedroom to fetch a few things I might need, and came back to find he had taken precisely one step further into the room.
Our door had a mere latch, no key. “Lock the door when I go,” I told him. “My husband, his name is Holmes. When he comes, he will find it locked. He will think, ‘Ah, my wife is here,’ and call to me. If you hear any voice not English, keep quiet, they will go away. They cannot come in. They will think I am sleeping. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“When you let him in, stand out of sight. Any one in the hall will think it is me. Yes?”
He nodded.
“Two hours,” I repeated. “Or three. Anything you need?”
His eyes slid sideways to the adjoining door. “You have water?�
�
“For drinking—oh, you mean, do I have a bath? Oh my dear young man, do I ever have a bath.” When I showed him the room with the porcelain tub and the actual geyser, he knew what he was looking at, and it might have been paradise itself. I grinned at him. “Just not too long, yes?”
“One hour,” he confirmed, and gave me a grin in return.
What I could see of it under the shaggy facial hair seemed like a nice grin. Uncomplicated, not the brightest, but honest and open. I found myself looking at the rest of him, and thought of something. I went to Holmes’ chest of drawers and took out the Roumanian costume. When I tried to hand it to Andrei, he would not take it. I looked pointedly at his much-mended and long-unlaundered garments.
“Andrei, you need clothes. People who see you now think, who is this? People who see you in these,” I held up the garments, “will think, oh, it’s some friend of the castle.”
Heaven only knew where he’d been for the past nine years—I had no time to find out now—but disguise was a thing Andrei understood.
I thrust the clothes at him. “Lock the door. Have a bath. Eat the apples. And tell my husband what you saw through the holes.”
I waited until the latch sounded behind me, and flew away down the stairs.
* * *
—
The castle seemed deserted. Indeed, in the Queen’s absence, even the entrance stood unguarded. Once away from the castle itself, I did not need to worry as much about concealment—I only needed the inside servants to think I was in my rooms.
I moved as quickly as I could without actually breaking into a run, but to my relief, the shiny prow of the shooting-brake was in its place beside the village shop. I strolled into the shop, which was about to close. When the single customer had left, I purchased yet another assortment of hard sweets to justify my presence, and left. I poked through them, making a covert survey of the vicinity—I could hear the doctor’s voice in the surgery, and a patient. A cart rattled past, the shop door locked behind me, and the instant I was alone, I ducked low and scurried to the narrow gap between the doctor’s motorcar and the surgery wall.
I pulled open the back passenger-side door and found, as I’d thought, that the long bench built to transport patients was in fact a hinged box. There was a hasp, just inside the passenger door, but no padlock. I lifted the padded lid and looked in. Pine wood, seven feet long, two feet wide, less than eighteen inches deep. A couple of heavy boards lay in the bottom, one end bevelled and the other with a small cross-piece: ramps, for bath-chairs, gurneys—or motor-cycles. Chains at either end of the lid kept it from falling too far back and pulling out the hinges.
But for those chains, it might have been a coffin.
The thought gave me pause, literally. Staring into that bare wooden box, the very last thing in all the world that I wanted was to get inside. Visions of scraping finger-nails, clawing at the wood…
I heard a voice then, and simply reacted. Dive inside, reach out to ease the door shut, then pull the knife from my boot and place it along the top edge of the box, to keep the hasp from accidentally fastening.
I let the lid settle over me—then thought of something else: check to make sure the sweets wrapper was securely twisted shut. The driver might notice a sound like rolling marbles, as we went around corners.
I shifted around so my right hand could hold the knife in place. I only needed enough of a gap to keep the latch from going down over its staple, while taking care not to let the blade stick out enough to be seen. Voices came, shockingly close—then doors opening, more than one. To my alarm, the car began to rock with the weight of many people climbing in. At least four bodies thumped down inches from my nose, amidst loud conversation and the sound of the engine starting. I felt the gears working beneath my spine, and the car set off.
There seemed to be three men and a woman, in addition to the driver. I caught the occasional word—they were talking about the Queen leaving, and something about the King, then laughter, which broke off abruptly to a voice from the front. It seemed to be a question, and although I couldn’t decipher the words, their responses—in voices gone respectful—were about Gabi. I caught words here and there, enough to suggest that no one had any clue as to where she was or who might have taken her. The back-and-forth began to pick up.
And then a quick snap of a phrase from the front silenced them, but for a few apologetic phrases. There was no further talk.
It was both terrifying and absurd. My heart was pounding, my mouth dry as dust, and the only way I could keep from either bursting into panicked hilarity or shoving the lid up was to force my brain into a close and alphabetical review of Latin nouns. Masculine first declension. The accola sitting over my head started me: resident. He might also be an agricola—farmer—while another might qualify as anagnostes (a reader). The man behind the wheel was our auriga (charioteer). Fortunately, I had barely finished with my chosen Cs (coprea, copreae, copream—buffoon, a word that certainly described the occupant of the coffin) when the car swerved aside and braked hard. To my relief, we were not taking on more passengers, but getting rid of these. All of them? I couldn’t tell. The juggling of the suspension was reversed, the doors slammed, voices called polite thanks, and the car ground back into gear and jerked away.
One sharp phrase, which sounded like a curse, then silence.
I lay still, but there was no further conversation. I seemed to be alone with the driver. Would he notice if my coffin lid rose, just a fraction? It would improve the state of my nerves, to have light and air, especially if we were driving to his house on the far side of Brașov.
A throwing knife like mine has no appreciable handle. Its thickness is uniform, other than the very tip, but the additional fraction of an inch would make breathing easier.
My head was towards the front and, this being an English motor, my right hand was on the side nearest the door, and thus, the lid’s opening. I worked my left arm over—difficult, but just possible—to grasp the knife with my finger-tips while my right hand pressed up.
The lid did not move.
I adjusted both hands and pushed harder, then hard enough that, if it had been open, the lid would have flown back and revealed me to the man in front.
Stop. Breathe.
In, out. Shaky, but controllable.
The weight of the passengers must have dropped the lid just enough to let the hasp catch over the staple. I could force it—I could try forcing it—but not without giving myself away.
I was strong. There was air—there was plenty of air, the stuffiness was in my imagination, and was not what was making me feel light-headed. No, there was not sufficient height for me to bring my legs up, but my arms were strong. And it was only a wooden box, not a steel trap. I was not buried, merely inconvenienced. Really.
Breathe.
On the other hand, even my rational mind agreed that I did not wish to be trapped here any longer than I had to—not just because of the terror of being buried alive that was gnawing at my nerves. Because once the doctor stopped and got out, I needed to follow him, immediately. If I lost him, this entire fool’s venture was for naught. Holmes would give me that look of mingled pity and disapproval, and Gabriela Stoica would still be missing.
So I took a deep breath of the stink of fear, and pulled away the knife.
I could always use it on my wrists. But before that, I would try something else.
The bench was simple, soft pine rather than finished walnut, but the man who had made it was a decent craftsman. He’d taken care to use the right length of screws, so they did not protrude and rip open an incautious hand. And while my skin was grateful for his care, just now I’d have appreciated a pair of identifying metal points to tell me where the staple of the latch was located.
Instead, I lay in the close, sweltering blackness and felt along the boards for any slight betraying rise in the
surface. I found a bump, then another, but they were not a pair, and several inches from where I thought the latch was mounted. Down and up, back and forth, and—ah: one, then two minuscule strains in the surface texture, an inch and a half apart.
Cursing the dark, the low roof, and most of all my left-handedness, I drove the point of the blade into the wood, wrenched it around in a half-circle…and felt my whole body relax.
The wood was soft enough to give way. Carving a hole through it was just a matter of time and determination—and though the former might be in question, of determination I had plenty.
Sweat ran down my face and turned my palms slippery. I dropped the knife several times, but it made no sound on the deepening blanket of wood chips. The smell of pine was a pleasant change, although as it grew, I began to hope the open windows would keep the driver from noticing. And I breathed through my mouth, to reduce the chance of a sneeze.
We slowed, turned, turned again, paused—but I had heard the sounds of a city growing outside, and the man had told us he lived north of Brașov. Still, I redoubled my efforts, slicing my finger once when my hand slipped forward onto the blade—then suddenly the remaining millimetre of wood gave way, and the knife jerked forward to stop with a faint tick. I held still, waiting for a slowing or a swerve of reaction…
No. I pulled the knife from the hole and lay breathing for a while, as if that tiny hole was now letting in a flood of oxygen and daylight. I used the saw-dust to dry my hands, let them rest for a minute, then shifted as far onto my right arm as the box would permit and went exploring.
The angle my digging had followed led straight to the side of the staple’s upright section. I enlarged the hole, aware that now every fragment of wood risked dropping to the outside. At last, my exploring knife-point found the line of the staple, and travelled up it until it caught on the hasp section that had fallen into place. I pressed outward, slowly, firmly…
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