Ilona spoke of her life in Sancraiu, of the changes that had taken place in her on travelling to Bucharest, of the horizons that had started to open when she lived in Brighton, and her frustration at the lack of opportunity in Romania, even in the capital. She was serious about asking him to help her get a visa so she could enter Britain legally, find a job, perhaps marry, obtain citizenship. She had ambitions, she had hopes. Ethan could prove the gateway through which she could reach them. He’d had brushes with immigration control and wondered whether his word would count for anything.
The track went through twists and bends, always moving up. The higher they went, the colder it got. Their breath hung in the air ahead of them like a mist. Not once did the horse snicker or protest.
He told her about Abi, he didn’t know why. The words came unbidden, the memories made sharp by the frozen air or the concentration of light or Ilona’s youthfulness. He talked and she listened. It was as if her being his guide had placed him in a relationship to her of pupil to teacher, supplicant to advisor. The wolves howled again, and he shivered at the thought of sudden death. He could not begin to guess what he was going to find at the castle. Sarah dead? Or his own death waiting for him? A bullet? A sharp knife? Something blunt and heavy to cave in his skull?
‘This path will take us to the castle,’ Ilona said. ‘We must tie the horse.’
He saw a path leaving the track at an angle.
‘I’ll go ahead,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to stay here.’
She shook her head.
‘I agree to take you to the castle. I’ll stick to that, if you don’t mind.’
He wasn’t up to arguing, and he’d already seen what she was capable of. He nodded, and off they set.
The cold did strange things in their lungs. It was painful to breathe. Ethan felt as though he’d swallowed tiny splinters of glass. They wrapped strips of cloth across their mouths, but the fabric quickly grew wet as droplets of their breath mixed with the sub-zero temperatures. In the narrow path, there seemed to be no way out. Ethan remembered the woods near Woodmancote as a child. He’d gone there hunting for rabbits. It had seemed an adventure.
Suddenly, the trees fell away and they were standing on the verge of a white place. During the time they’d been in the forest, the clouds had broken up and dissipated, leaving a moon almost at the full, high up in a sky splintered with stars. Ethan had never set eyes on such a sky. The light pollution of western Europe did not reach this far. If there were lights anywhere, they were of little consequence. The stars were folded into one another, galaxy into galaxy, like egg white spooned into a bowl for meringue.
It was as if a grand theatrical designer had mounted lights on ramps to set off the centrepiece of his set.
‘Vár Farkasnak,’ Ilona said. ‘“The Wolf’s Lair”.’ She lifted her right hand and pointed across the banked and drifted snow to a tall building that rose up like a ship cresting high white waves. On top, steep roofs were piled upon one another, their sharp angles gliding and pitching, and among them towers rose dramatically, topped by lanterns from which thin spires pierced the night sky like lances. Lower down, the body of the castle was lost in shadows. Trees stepped down from the forest almost to the rear of the building, and others stood in pairs or singly at the front and sides. A single light burnt in a window, high up on the second floor, close by a steep buttress towards the northern corner.
Ethan would have stepped directly from the trees onto the snow meadow in front of him, but Ilona grabbed his arm, shaking her head.
‘If anyone is watching, they’ll see you at once. We need to skirt round the trees and make our way to the castle from the rear.’
They crept along the treeline, shadows among shadows. Walking was harder here: the trees were set too close to let them easily work a way through them, and the snow was deep and soft from the most recent fall; at times they sank into it up to their knees.
It took about twenty minutes to reach the rear. No lights burned here, not even an external lamp set for security or as a beacon. The moonlight stencilled the doors and windows in sharp outline. There were only three doors, one at each end and one in the middle. Ethan headed straight for the end door nearest him, and reached into a pocket for a set of lock picks he’d borrowed from Lindita, guessing he might have to break into a building or a room at some point. He’d learnt how to pick a lock years before, from burglars he’d arrested.
Before attempting the lock, he scrutinised the rear of the building carefully, to be sure there wasn’t an alarm of any sort. Ilona followed suit. There was nothing visible to the naked eye. The lock was old-fashioned and rusty, but it took Ethan less than a minute to spring it open. He turned the knob slowly, his gloved hand finding it hard to find purchase on the icy metal.
He pushed the door open and stepped inside. The pick was back in his pocket, and the gun already in his hand. Ilona came behind him. She closed the door and silence descended. Inside, all was darkness; fat, swelling, suffocating darkness. Ilona took one of the torches out of her pocket and switched it on.
They were in a short corridor at the far end of which stood another door of solid wood. Beyond it might be another dark room or a brightly lit chamber filled with castle staff. Ethan listened for a while and decided in the end that there was no one next door. Probably. Ilona switched off her torch. He turned the knob and thrust the second door open.
Darkness, as before. Silence, as before. Ilona sent another beam of light into the darkness, revealing some sort of games room. There was a dartboard on one wall, and table football in a corner next to a half-size billiard table. The room was spacious, low-ceilinged, and cold. Did someone come here to play billiards with frozen fingers? Was the room left unused during the winter? Ethan wondered if the answers would offer a clue as to how inhabited the castle was.
Through the next door they found a corridor. Low-watt bulbs burnt in wire cages all the way down a long whitewashed ceiling. Doors opened off it at intervals. It was obviously a service corridor, bereft of ornaments or pictures, the floor bare wood, its walls painted in light green paint that showed signs of damp in many places.
How to decide on a door? Ethan was reminded of the old dilemma in fairy tales: which of the three doors will our hero pass through? There’s a beautiful princess behind one, and demons behind the other two. There must be at least a dozen in the corridor, he thought.
They walked on slowly, inspecting each door in turn. Some had inscriptions on small panels. Bucatarie. Câmarâ. Furnituri.
‘This is all kitchens and storerooms – things like that,’ said Ilona as they passed, her torch picking out the handwritten letters in old Romanian script, their outlines fading against blistered card.
Right at the other end, they came to a battered, red-painted door, above which a small sign read Scarâ.
‘Stairs!’ said Ilona.
Beyond the door, a steep flight led upwards.
‘I think we have to head for the second floor,’ said Ethan. ‘To find the room with the light.’
At the top of the stairs, another red door, likewise dented by who could tell how many years of servants pushing it open with heavy trays in their hands. It opened onto a narrow, unlit corridor, a more integral part of the castle proper. On the walls hung oil portraits of children dressed in fine clothes, their faces dimming and shining in the harsh light of the torches. They wore the clothes of little aristocrats, furs and velvets and silks, the girls with their hair plaited, the boys in boots and leather trousers. Their faces were the faces of ghosts, their eyes straining to see what living man or woman passed. Ethan wanted to ignore them, but they stared so arrogantly, at once children and the adults they were destined to become.
The end of the corridor gave directly onto a dark place that seemed at first to be without walls. They swung their torch beams through the blackness, like searchlights in a war zone, and slowly they formed a picture of an open space, some sort of hall bisected by a massive wooden staircase. The sides
of the banisters facing them were studded with small heraldic shields on which were painted the devices of ancient families and the symbols of nearby towns and counties, painted in bright colours once, but dulled and faded now.
They picked out an armoured hand holding a long sword, and next to it a bunch of grapes. Further up, a white shield surmounted by a crown carried the image of a wolf suckling her cubs, and above that again a quartered shield portraying a church and a castle with high towers. Ilona noticed that several shields showed an angel and a lion passant with a cross between them, and a sun and crescent above their heads. Just beyond that was a stranger thing, a sable shield divided in half per pale, with small white swastikas on the sinister or left-hand side, and a single golden crucifix across the dexter. It seemed brighter and probably newer than the shields with which it kept company. They could not guess at its meaning. Ethan knew that the swastika originally had a benign meaning in Buddhism or Hinduism, he wasn’t sure which.
They stepped further into the hall, knowing that, at any moment, their lights might be seen, and someone might come out to challenge them. Ethan led Ilona to the stairs, and they began to climb. They shone their torches on the walls, revealing a gallery of large paintings, portraits once more, but not of children. These showed men and women in all the finery of aristocrats. Voivodes, boiers, dregators and serdars in sable coats and chains of office, their hands on the hilts of battle swords, rings twinkling on their fingers, their inner jackets embroidered in thread of gold. Beside them their wives shimmered like walking tapestries, no expense spared on their finery, their earrings of pearl, their emerald necklaces, their delicate hands enriched with rubies, sapphires, and amethysts.
The stillness was palpable. High up, ancient tapestries hung on the walls, and flags, tattered and torn, moth-eaten or snatched from old battlefields, swung limply from their poles.
They reached the main landing and turned left, heading for the next staircase that would take them to the floor above. As they climbed, they listened for sounds, for any token of a human presence. No one stirred. But Ethan could not rid himself of the feeling that someone unseen was watching them, that someone was stalking them even as they climbed.
It soon became apparent that, from the second floor upwards, the castle broke up into its separate sections – a tower here, a turret behind it, a bartizan perched on its flank. A full investigation would leave them hopelessly lost in a maze of corridors, staircases, and hidden passages. They oriented themselves by a mixture of guesswork and calculation, and finally started down a corridor that would, they hoped, bring them to the lit room and whatever was waiting for them in it.
Ethan chose the third room along and switched off his torch. Ilona followed suit. Controlling his breathing, he took out his pistol in readiness before he turned the knob and pushed the door open.
They stepped into darkness, like birds flying into sudden night. Of course, it was always possible that, if this had been the room in which the light had been burning, someone had turned it off. Ethan switched his torch on again, and behind him Ilona did the same. He had not known what to expect, and it took several moments before a meaningful picture emerged: a leather sofa, two leather armchairs, a fireplace, and a desk covered with papers and sundry items, including an old-fashioned bakelite telephone. There was something old about the room and its furnishings. It wasn’t just that the room was part of an ancient structure. What struck Ethan was the atmosphere. The room did not seem to have been left disused, for there wasn’t a trace of dust anywhere; but it had nothing of the truly modern about it. The air held more than a trace of warmth, as though someone had sat in here before an open fire not long ago. Ethan stepped across to the fireplace; yes, there were fresh embers in the grate, and when he used a poker to stir them, they glowed cheerily for half a minute.
Ilona went to the desk. It was scattered with the usual equipment: a tub filled with pens and pencils, a couple of glass paperweights, a blotting pad. Next to these nestled a pair of embroidered shoes from Persia or India, she could not be sure: old trophies from the days Transylvania was part of the Ottoman Empire. She moved the torch to the other side and, moments later, she hissed at Ethan, calling him across.
‘Look,’ she said, pointing to some photographs in silver frames.
They were not family photographs. One showed a tall man sitting next to Adolf Hitler. Another showed a man and woman standing, one on either side of Heinrich Himmler. There were other photographs of the same three people with what Ethan took to be other representatives of the Third Reich. One showed a man in a fez wound with white cloth in conversation with Hitler.
Drawing back from the desk, they let their torches play across the walls, and here they picked out more portraits and photographs of places: two castles, one of which Ethan recognised as the Burg Almásy in Burgenland; several churches, not all of them Romanian; and landscapes of what looked like oases in a desert, possibly the Sahara.
‘The Sahara…’ he whispered.
‘A holiday, perhaps?’
He shook his head.
‘My grandfather,’ he said, more to himself than to Ilona. ‘We’re on the right track,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘We’re in the right place.’
16
Dracula’s Bride
The corridor rolled away, its further end always out of reach of their torches. Alerted by the pictures in the first room they had entered, Ethan and Ilona paid more attention to the corridor walls. There were no portraits up here. Instead, a series of pictures in black and gilded frames depicted an assortment of themes. One showed a dove with golden rays fanning out from its wings and body, like the Holy Spirit in a religious painting; another a chalice from which a dove’s wings emerged, and a cross where the bird’s head would have been, and above it a second dove descending. A heavy black frame held what might have been an eighteenth-century print of a sphinx crowned by a five-pointed star. Next to it hung a framed flag about two feet by one, a red swastika flanked by four red fleurs-de-lis, all on a yellow background. Under the flag was a handwritten caption, ‘Burg Werfenstein, 1907. Liebenfels’. Religious and occult subject matter predominated.
They opened door after door, finding cold rooms in darkness. There was no need to investigate each one. Time was running out. It would not be long before someone noticed their presence and came to see what was going on.
The seventh door opened onto a very different scene. An oil lamp burnt on a table near the window. A dull fire glimmered in the grate, shedding a modicum of warmth into the chilly air. Bar a low truckle bed, the room was bare of furniture. A woman lay on the bed, huddled beneath a blanket.
It took slow moments before Ethan recognised her. Matted short black hair, frightened green eyes, pale cheeks turned green. She was staring at him, all the time cringing away from him, and it was plain to see that she was terrified and that she did not recognise him.
‘Sarah,’ he said, his voice soft, to avoid alarming her. ‘It’s me, Ethan. I’ve come to take you out of here.’
The terror did not wholly leave her, but her first reaction was simply a blank stare, as though worlds and ages had come between them, not the short time that had passed since her abduction or the brief passage from England to Romania.
He turned to Ilona.
‘Ilona, will you take off your heavy jacket and your scarf, and let your hair down? Let her see you’re a woman, show you mean her no harm.’
Ilona did as he asked, and approached Sarah slowly, smiling and speaking in a reassuring voice. At one point, she thought Sarah was about to scream, but she went on smiling and holding out her hands.
‘I’ve not come to hurt you,’ she said.
Sarah flinched as Ilona came to her and put out one hand to touch her cheek.
‘It’s all right, Sarah,’ she said. Ilona had to fight back her own sense of unease, having no idea what had reduced this young Englishwoman to her present state.
Suddenly, a hand darted out from beneath the thin bl
anket, and Sarah clutched Ilona by the wrist.
‘Don’t let them hurt me,’ she said. ‘Keep Lukacs off me, don’t let him do that to me again.’ She dragged the words from her throat, then her voice died away and she was convulsed by sobs.
Ilona sucked her breath in hard. She scarcely dared ask who had done this to the woman. She moved in close and got an arm round Sarah, pulling her tightly to herself. It was a sort of bonding. Ilona had never been raped, but more than one of her friends had been, and she knew what it did.
‘Sarah,’ she said, ‘we’ve come to take you away from this place. We won’t let anyone hurt you again. Ethan’s here… Your friend.’
Ethan ventured closer. He could not imagine what they’d done to her. Was Aehrenthal still here? Or his ugly sidekick Lukacs? Could they sneak Sarah out without alerting her kidnappers?
‘Sarah, love,’ he whispered. ‘It’s Ethan. I’ve come to take you home.’
Her eyes fluttered, and for the first time Ethan saw light in them.
‘Ethan?’
Her voice was almost inaudible.
‘Yes, dear, I’ve come to get you out of here.’
She shook her head.
‘He said…he’d kill me if I tried to leave. Someone…took away my clothes… He said the cold…’
‘The cold will kill you if you go out without clothes,’ said Ilona. ‘It will take some time before we can get you to warmth.’
‘What can we do?’ Ethan asked.
Ilona looked at Sarah, then at Ethan and herself.
‘Ethan,’ she said, ‘you and I, we have good quality clothes on the outside, and I think we have some warm clothing underneath. I suggest I give Sarah my jacket, and you can give her your trousers. If we’re fast…’
Ethan removed his thick outer trousers and handed them to Ilona. She flapped her hands in the air until he cottoned on and turned his back. Ilona drew the blanket away, wincing as she saw the bruises that covered Sarah’s naked body. She helped her into the trousers and the jacket. They fitted her well enough.
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