Chapter Six

We rode the train—indeed, we rode a number of trains—for what seemed like days. We passed through cities, mountains, farmland, while the restless fever rose again and pulled me into sleep. I would wake, and follow Holmes into the restaurant car, then return to my seat and my stupor. Holmes would be there, then gone, then there again.

When I woke, countryside was passing by, bright fields beneath a blazing sun. This time, the hypnotic rhythm did not lull me back to sleep. Instead, I found my mind turning over in a way that felt almost normal—although it had skipped back to the days before Marie of Roumania had entered my life, to seize on a series of odd events and innuendos, creating links and eventually presenting me with an uncomfortable conclusion.

“Holmes, you and I—what’s the matter?”

He hastened to wipe the startled expression from his face, and finished using the lit match I’d nearly caused him to drop in his lap. “Nothing is wrong, Russell. Merely that you have not spoken in nearly seven hours.”

“Really?” I looked again at the day outside: it was well after noon. “Hm. My fever may have broken. I feel better now.”

“I am relieved to hear it.” He got his pipe going and waved out the flame. “You were saying?”

“Oh, yes. You and I really need to discuss how much of a role Mycroft is allowed to play in our lives.”

He eyed me through the drift of smoke, then asked cautiously, “How does this thought come to you now?”

I made an impatient gesture at the landscape. “We’re headed into the Carpathian Mountains to investigate village whispers. Either you suspect this to be the edge of some criminal enterprise, or someone other than you sees it as a series of sparks near a political powder keg. The only indication of crime I’ve heard is the vague threat to a young woman. However, if it’s politics, that means your brother, Mycroft, has sent you here—a theory supported by your continued attempts to avoid giving me direct answers. Hence, my statement that we need to move the matter of Mycroft’s influence over our lives up on our agenda.”

A deliberate puff of smoke nearly obscured the mingled look of amusement and wariness on his face. For the moment, amusement won out. “Do you know, I now begin to understand Watson’s astonishment over my thinking processes. Russell, it is true that I had a telegram from Mycroft, urging me to assist Queen Marie—but I was already in Bucharest when his wire caught up with me. Following a Queen’s entreaties, not a spy-master’s order. I did not feel the need to irritate you by mentioning his request.”

“Well, it is irritating, to have the sense of some invisible force—”

He overspoke me, forcibly. “Russell, for the present, let us agree that you and I do need to develop a policy regarding my brother’s…requests, whether or not they come from the British government. However, I do not feel that is a question we can confront without him in the room.”

After a moment, I nodded. “When we get back to London, then.”

“Agreed.”

“Though to be fair—could the threat here actually be political? Less against the daughter than the mother?”

“I would agree, the threat is as much against Marie as it is against Ileana—perhaps more so. And in this part of the world, political unrest is a given—although at present, things seem relatively calm. There was a Bolshevik-led peasant revolt a year ago, up in Moldavia. The Communists are no doubt busily infiltrating every branch of government. And there are many Hungarian nationalists who wish to see the provinces returned to the one-time Empire.”

“What about resentment at the royal family being outsiders? Surely the fact that the King and Queen are German and English, respectively, creates tensions? Why did they do that, anyway? Didn’t Roumania have its own royal families?”

“That was the trouble—there were too many of them. Choosing to elevate one prince over the others would plunge the country back into chaos. Bringing in a superfluous younger son from the other side of Europe and placing the crown on him put the native princes on equal footing.”

“And are none of those families making a bid for power? Such as the Queen’s friend, Prince Whatsit?”

“There are those who believe Prince Barbu somewhere between éminence grise and outright Rasputin, but were it clear that he was positioning himself for a takeover, I have no doubt Mycroft would have told me.”

I watched some countryside go past: hay and maize, sheep and rivers. If not politics, then what was responsible for bringing this fairy-tale Queen up against cold threats and ancient superstitions?

I had seen a film the previous autumn, on a ship bound for Lisbon. Nosferatu was Stoker’s novel with different character names, and had proved chilling even though one of its reels had disappeared over the side. The stark black-and-silver images reduced a number of my young, blonde actress companions to quivers and shrieks, which was probably why the film stuck with me. Nine months later, I could clearly picture that eerie pale figure, looming over the bed of a beautiful woman…perhaps a very young one…

“So tell me, Holmes, how does this beautiful, wealthy, much beloved and apparently perfect royal person come to be worried about…” It was hard to even say the word.

“Vampires?”

“Yes,” I said.

“In fact, it is not only vampires, but all stripes of witches, ghouls, and supernatural creatures. Remember, this is a land of peasant farmers, who cannot banish the night by switching on an electrical bulb. I suppose that is why the country is rich ground for dark stories. There’s nothing like a long winter with a forest outside one’s door to stir the imagination.”

“An odd place to find Victoria’s granddaughter.”

“The capital city, naturally, is a different world from Transylvania—though Bucharest is more Ottoman than European, and it must have been difficult in Marie’s early years. Even now the country has its share of economic and social problems. It would not be helpful to have rumours circulate about the Queen.”

“Such as?”

He eyed me, no doubt judging my fitness to participate in a discussion. But whatever he saw seemed to satisfy him, and he gave a decisive nod.

“You complain that I have avoided direct answers. Very well, I shall give you the points on which I have been meditating. Perhaps you will be able to see more of a pattern than I.

“During my week in Bran, I managed to glean details about three key events—although as you are aware, burrowing to the source of any whispered tale is never an easy task for an outsider.

“It began the second week of March, when a seventeen-year-old village girl disappeared. She worked at the castle—Bran is strictly a summer retreat for the Queen, but this year, Marie came earlier than usual, wishing to consult with her architect and gardeners before she left for her planned summer in Europe. One morning, the village girl did not show up for work. That evening, one of the other maids went to see what was wrong, and found that the girl’s parents had thought she was at work.

“Alarm was raised. Some hours later, cooler minds thought to conduct a search of her room, where it was found that some of her possessions were missing as well. The next day, the Brașov police learned that she and a young man had boarded the train to Bucharest. Some days later, a brief letter came to say she had gone off with her love—and yet, village gossip persists with the conviction that she did not go of her own will, but that someone took things from her room to make it appear that way, and sent a letter in writing that merely looks like hers.”

“What has that to do with the Queen?”

“On the surface, nothing at all. The second episode was serious, but hardly out of the ordinary. It happened some ten days later, when a twelve-year-old scullery maid was preparing vegetables in the castle kitchen and sliced open her hand. Something had drawn the cook and other adults away, and it happened that the Queen was passing and heard the child cry out. She went to see what was wrong, seized a bowl to protect the child’s clothing, and started to bind the injury with a dish-cloth. When the others came in, they saw the child struggling against the pain in her hand and the Queen working to hold her still while she staunched the wound.”

A curiously vivid picture came to mind, attached to some dark bit of memory: a rustic kitchen, a beautiful Queen, a young girl bleeding copiously into a crockery bowl…But I couldn’t trace my uneasiness to a specific source, and Holmes was going on.

“There was considerable alarm upon seeing a bowl apparently half-filled with blood, but as it turned out, much of it was water. However, it is worth noting that, when I heard the story some three months later, it was the bowl of blood that had become the main interest, not the royal person hastening to give care.

“In the days that followed, villagers reported a series of uncomfortable events. A shooting star, a cow’s death, a broken leg, a bat trapped in a room. Then, the night before the Queen and her daughter were to set off for Paris, a child took a short-cut through some trees, and either tripped or was attacked.”

“How old a child?”

“Eight. She burst into her house crying, covered in dirt, with blood on her palms and on the neck of her blouse. She claimed that some huge, dark, winged creature had come out of the trees and flung itself at her. She fell, struggled, and got away, fleeing home. Her father and some other men took torches to go see, but found nothing except for a trampled flower from the Queen’s garden. A branch of lilac. When asked the next day, the child denied that she had stolen the flower. Some time after that, she said perhaps she had taken it, and also that it was possible she’d just tripped and fallen. By the time I spoke with her, she had no idea—and the story of an attack had already taken root.”

“The lilac couldn’t have come from some other garden?”

“Not this one, I am told. It is of a particularly rich shade of purple.”

“And the Queen’s garden isn’t public?”

“Strictly, no. It would not be difficult to pilfer the occasional blossom, but the villagers tend not to. And a child of eight would surely know that taking such a thing home to mother would be cause for a scolding, at the least.”

“What about the other things—the dead cow and the broken leg?”

“The cow may have been old, and the man’s leg broke when a wheel came off a cart.”

“Meaning that both carry as much weight as a trapped bat, when it comes to evidence of wrongdoing. The interesting thing…”

“Mm?” he said, by way of encouragement.

“Well, it’s a series of unconnected events in the life of a village. I could imagine that in the winter, when there’s nothing to do but watch the snow fall, odd events would take on significance. But I’d have thought that in the springtime, everyone would be too busy to gossip.”

“And yet, the events grew in importance, taking on shadows of meaning far beyond a cut hand and a fall in a forest.”

“It suggests underlying tensions in the area. I do hope they didn’t drag some old woman out of the woods and burn her as a witch?”

“No one has been burned, hammered with a stake, or otherwise dispatched. At least, not before I left for Monaco.”

“And you found no indication of what those tensions might be? If not political unrest, then economic problems?”

“Farmers always live a precarious existence, but harvests have been good, and the country is pulling out of its post-War hardships.”

“What about after the Queen left in April? What strange events have happened since?”

There was a brief gleam in his eyes. “None.”

“None at all? No broken arms, two-headed calves, rabies outbreaks?”

“The summer would appear to have been remarkably placid. In fact, two different people thought to remark on how the events ceased as soon as the Queen and her party departed.”

“Really. What about before they arrived—wasn’t anything strange going on during the winter?”

“Only one that I heard. A village girl caught sight of a man who had died in the War.”

“Would that have been a ghost or a—what was the word? Strigoi?”

“The young man died in battle in 1916. One gathers that the rules of vampirism require the living-dead to show up within a reasonable time.”

“Seems a bit arbitrary, but fine, let’s call him a ghost. When was he seen?”

“Sometime in January. While the Queen was in Bucharest, many hours away.”

“Holmes, I don’t see a reason why any of this should be attached to the Queen.”

“In another part of the world, it would not be. However, there is a complication to keep in mind here.”

“Only one?”

“A figure in the shadows that only someone from Eastern Europe would see. Have you heard of a Hungarian Countess by name of Erzabet Báthory?”

Two days earlier, retrieving the name would have been a struggle. It was a relief to have the information pop up, and make connections. “Countess Báthory! So that’s why…”

The name brought with it the impression of dusty tomes: an ancient library in the depths of the Black Forest. October, 1919. Trying to take my mind off recent matters and the pain in my shoulder by an escape into books—except that recent matters included a woman who’d tried to kill me, and my topic of research was history’s murderous women.

“Erzabet Báthory,” I said. “Known as the ‘Blood Countess.’ Accused of a mind-boggling number of crimes.” The Countess had been a remarkable beauty, which her accusers attributed to a regimen of bathing her skin with the blood of virgins. My state of turmoil as I bent over those German books explained the uneasiness attached to the image of a bowl filled with blood. I realised that I was rubbing my shoulder, and dropped my hand away.

“One of history’s few women multiple-murderers,” Holmes noted. “Accused of the torture and death of hundreds of young girls, between 1590 and 1610.”

“Accused, yes,” I said. “Although she was an extremely wealthy woman and, as I recall, the charges were brought by those who—by complete coincidence, I am sure—happened to benefit hugely when she was stripped of her possessions.”

“There were hundreds of accusers, with an extensive list of crimes and atrocities.”

“Compiled years after the first accusations, by a religious fanatic whose help in ‘overseeing’ her dead husband’s estate had been spurned by the Countess. A man who was close friends with those due to inherit the most. Who tortured her servants into providing information, and quickly put to death the three closest to her—those who would know the truth of the matter. The Countess herself was permitted to live out her life under house arrest in a very comfortable castle. Which does rather weight the scale on the side of conspiracy.”

I remembered the details, since I’d been desperate for a retreat into the safety of research. Not something I needed to mention now. “Holmes, you know that any wealthy or strong-willed woman in history has always been in danger of accusations. If not of sexual misconduct, then of some kind of witchcraft. When her enemies are high-ranking political and economic rivals, it is easy for a few ugly rumours to become outright atrocity.

“But that was three centuries ago. And as far as I know, no Bram Stoker has produced a work of popular fiction about the Countess Báthory. The only reason I know about her is because you abandoned me that week you spent in men’s clubs and Turkish baths, going after the Stuttgart embezzler. How would a village of Roumanian peasants even have heard of her?”

“In fact, the Countess is as well known in this part of the world as Jack the Ripper is in England. A native of the Balkans would react to a bowl of blood in the same way a London resident would react to a woman found dead of savage knife wounds.”

“Ah. I begin to see the problem.”

“I thought you might. I should also mention that it is not uncommon to find a belief that Elizabeth Báthory drank the blood she shed, not just washed in it.”

“Rejuvenation internal and external,” I mused. If there was one thing the world knew about Roumania’s Queen, it was her striking beauty and youthful vigour. It would not take a great deal of talk to have people seeing her as a modern version of the Blood Countess—or indeed, one of Bram Stoker’s Transylvanian vampires.