Chapter Sixteen

Outside, a pair of lads the same age as the one inside were perched on a low wall, trying to look unconcerned over the fate of their friend. I gave them a smile meant to be reassuring, and followed Holmes, who had gone into the shop.

Holmes is over six feet tall. When he plants himself in a room, people tend to edge away, particularly women who do not come up to his chin. Casimir the shopkeeper was somewhat taken aback at the parting of the customers, but as he focused on Holmes, then on me, he rallied enough to say, “English, yes? How may help?”

I murmured to Holmes, “Buy some peppermints.”

“I—yes, my good man. Peppermints.” One long finger jabbed in the direction of the glass jar filled with sweets of startling hues. Casimir reached for a scoop and a sheet of paper, and Holmes continued. “The doctor. He was burgled.”

Casimir looked blank.

“Someone robbed him? Stole?”

“Ah, yes. Stole. Ver’ bad. How much you like?”

It was Holmes’ turn to give an uncomprehending look, so I answered. “Two scoops. Please.”

The scoop descended into the jar, and I turned my attention to the shelves, always a fascinating insight into a village’s life. The usual sacks of rice and flour were interspersed with ground maize. Tins of foods familiar and not—could those actually be red peppers, rather than tomatoes?—and boxes of everything from candles to laundry soap. Hanging from the rafters were an assortment of dried sausages and cheeses, and the highest shelves, reachable by ladder, held oversized cook pots and paraffin lanterns.

“When was it?”

The scoop stopped moving. “When. When.” Followed by an address in Roumanian to the audience, who chimed in for a time before consensus was reached. “Iunie.”

“June. Does anyone know who did it?”

No hesitation: “Tigani.”

A chorus of voices arose, apparently in agreement. Arms were raised, pointing in the direction of Brașov. I held out some coins, letting Casimir choose his payment for the sweets. But while he was doing so, my gaze wandered up…

“Earl Grey!”

He looked up from his task, then cast a glance over his shoulder and laughed. Several of our audience joined in. “You want buy?” He stretched up and took the packet down from its solitary splendour on the shelf. When he placed it on the counter, a puff of dust flew up from its surface.

“No thank you. But you sell it?”

“Sell this, you want. Hey, maybe give it to you free, you buy something else.”

“Is there not much of a market for Earl Grey here, then?”

“You ever taste that?”

“I don’t care for it, no. But I believe Queen Marie does.”

“Oh yes. Her Majesty came five years ago, I put that box up maybe next year. Sat there ever since. Should be ‘Queen Marie Tea’ not Earl of Grey.”

Chuckles from the others in the shop told me that this was a local jest. I finished paying for our sweets, and had to be reminded to take them with me as I followed Holmes out.

“So,” I said. “Everyone in Bran knows the Queen’s odd taste in tea, not just those who work in the castle.”

“Given that the packet has been a local gag for several years, that no doubt includes the nearby community of Tigani.”

Tigani was a word I recognised, from its European cognates, although they call themselves Roma, which simply means people. In England, they are called gipsies, though they migrated not from Egypt, but from northern India, over a thousand years ago. Like any nomads, they do not mix well with the settled peoples. And like my own Jewish people, they tend to be blamed for any problems in a neighbourhood.

Wherever the Roma lived, they would be well familiar with villages rising up with cudgels and flames to drive them out. I thought it unlikely that the local Romany encampment would risk breaking down the door of a doctor’s surgery to steal medical equipment and drugs.

The two boys were still on their wall. I fished a mint from the twist of paper and tucked it into my cheek, then passed the remainder to them. From their reaction, you’d have thought the packet contained golden guineas.

Holmes was standing beside the doctor’s new-looking motorcar. I paused at its back window to peer inside.

Shooting-brakes are designed as transport for hunting, and generally only have a front seat. Sometimes there is a bench or fold-down seat in the back, but more often, the back is open, a space to transport dogs to a shoot or birds and game home. In this one, the passenger side of the front seat was missing. Instead, seven feet of padded wooden bench ran from dash-board to back door, long enough for the tallest man to stretch out on. The wood was simple pine, bashed about and marked by heels, but the pad was covered with leather, and sturdy brass hinges suggested that the box was used for the doctor’s storage as well as transporting pregnant women and injured farmers. Across from it, on the driver’s side of the back area, was a shorter, unpadded bench. Gouges and oil-stains on the floor suggested that the car was used to shift all manner of things. Including, by the looks of it, his patients’ gifts of chickens that were still alive.

“It would make a fine rural omnibus,” I said to Holmes. Who did not hear me, because he was already out of earshot.

I jogged down the road to catch him up, and asked him what he’d thought of the doctor.

He was silent so long, I thought perhaps he hadn’t heard, but he’d only been thinking. “Doctors are a class I find difficult to see with an objective eye. My experience with them has been of polar opposites, with Watson at one end and a handful of perfectly vile individuals at the other. Whenever I encounter a doctor who appears as noble and generous of heart as Watson—well, my impulse is to mistrust the evidence of my eyes.”

“Has that impulse been wrong, ever?”

“It has, unfortunately. Those who raised the most suspicions turned out to be saints, one and all.” He gave a wry laugh.

“And speaking of saints, are we headed to see your priest?” It was far too early for those hours of uninterrupted “study” that he had promised me, although I could already feel my energies flagging. “You must have met him last month.”

“I sought him out. As I said, there is nothing quite so useful as a village priest for translating, though generally through a filter of Latin or Greek. Although in fact, Father Constantin speaks English fairly well.”

“I’m glad to know I won’t have to struggle with my Latin declensions.”

“Today we require his memory, not his linguistic skills. If, however, it stretches back that far.”

We found Father Constantin in the small garden behind the presbytery, or whatever the Greek Orthodox called their priest’s home—although until Holmes greeted him by name, I assumed him to be the gardener.

“Kaleméra, Patéra Konstantinos.”

The figure turned, revealing a handsome bearded individual who could not have been much more than forty. He straightened, and beamed. “Good morning, my English friend,” he boomed, his words heavily accented but quite clear. “You still here, eh?”

“I am here again,” Holmes replied, picking his way through the pepper plants to shake the man’s grubby hand. “And I have brought my wife.”

“Ah! Good morning, Missus! Wife? No—too pretty and young for this old man!” He roared with laughter as he saw me go both pink and speechless.

“Costel,” came a woman’s chiding voice from the house. “Nepoliticos.”

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, looking not in the least abashed. “So rude. My wife, she is always reminding me. I tell her when we married, man with my tongue will never make a bishop, yet still, me she marries.”

I’d forgot that Orthodox priests could wed—as clearly this one had. His wife shook her head, then stepped back into the house as the priest crossed the garden, favouring his left foot somewhat, to trade his hoe for the dusty, once-black cassock lying across the back of a bench. He dropped the garment over his head, fished out his beard, and ran a hand down the back of a slim tortoise-shell cat that appeared from between the rows, before gesturing us towards a rustic arbour propped against the side of the house. It had been built out of sapling trunks and large branches, and planted with grape-vines—which explained the exaggerated height, since its entire leafy ceiling was covered with long clusters of nearly-ripe grapes.

Father Constantin paused on the way in to sluice off his hands. At the entrance to this simple gazebo, he looked over the fruit that was in the full sun, then reached up to snap a heavy stem against his thumb-nail.

He held it out to me, dropping it in my cradled palms. The warm fruit, dark globes frosted with the bloom of ripeness, smelled like summer. I pulled off a few, handed the half-cluster to Holmes, and he in turn gave them back to the priest. Father Constantin murmured a blessing and popped a pair of them into his mouth.

For some reason, the fruit in my hand called to mind Persephone and her six pomegranate seeds, that tied her forever to the Underworld. I smiled at my fancy, put a grape in my mouth, and bit down.

What happened next was one of those odd moments that carve themselves into one’s memory, an unexpected melding of sensation and thought that, even as it is happening, seems destined to stay in place forever. The crack of the firm grape between my molars, the flood of rich juice with a slight tang in the sweetness. The odour of the priest, an earthy smell of sweat and sunlight, comforting and real. The cool dapple of shade, the deliberation of Holmes’ long fingers on the fruit, the cat, eyes half-shut and tail gently encircling its feet in the sun…

Like a photograph, the moment was captured. Then I swallowed the grape, followed it up with another, and the three of us ate in silent communion until the stem was stripped bare. And if I was now permanently condemned to return to Roumania because of the snack, well, there could be worse places to spend eternity.

Father Constantin brushed off his hands and laced them over his stomach, a gesture that in the doctor had raised a symbolic barrier, but in this man seemed to do the opposite. “So my friend and wife, what do you come today for?”

“As you know,” Holmes began, “I came here to assist the Queen’s architect with his plans for the castle’s renovations, but I am also quite interested in the ancient traditions of the country.”

“We spoke of many fairy tales, yes. It is a thing our Queens seem to enjoy—the other Queen, too, liked to write book of fairies.”

“Although Queen Marie is less…flamboyant than Carmen Sylva ever was.”

Princess Elisabeth of Wied, known by her nom de plume Carmen Sylva, had been a strong candidate for the position of wife to Edward, Prince of Wales, until Bertie decided he didn’t care for her looks. Instead, she was passed on to Carol I, Roumania’s inaugural King—whom she alienated first by failing to bear a son, then by showing more interest in her eccentric literary and musical salons than the work of royalty, and finally by encouraging an affair between their eldest son and an unmarriageable lady-in-waiting—topping it off, or so rumour had it, by expressing an opinion that elected governments were better than royalties. Marie, first as Crown Princess and then as Queen, had done somewhat better in carrying out her role as Queen Consort without scandal.

The priest cocked an eyebrow at the word flamboyant, but when Holmes gave him a few synonyms, the priest nodded. “A good thing, that our Queen is not like the earlier. Her Majesty was not born Roumanian, but she has been made so.”

“And because of that, and because the people of Bran hold a special place in her heart, she is concerned about the fairy tales they are telling themselves now. The dark ones.”

The priest leaned forward to fiddle with the bare grape-stem. “It is…troubling, yes.”

“You heard what happened last night? To Vera Dumitru?”

“I went to her, this morning, when I heard.”

“Is she all right?” I asked.

“She will be. Vera has a…what do you say—a straight head?”

“Level-headed?”

“Level-headed, yes. Not one to believe in ghosts.”

“Dr Mikó would agree with you.”

“Ah—you saw our doctor, then?”

“He’d just arrived, so he hadn’t heard what happened. But he said he’d go by and check on her.”

“He will. To the doctor, all of Bran are his nestlings. Fierce like a mother hawk, you know? Since his wife and small son die of the gripa.”

“The flu?”

“My first winter here. Terrible time. So many funerals, chopping holes in frozen earth. I would weep at night.”

“I can see that an epidemic would make a doctor very protective.”

Holmes brought us back to the main track. “What did you learn from Miss Dumitru about the incident? I should like to tell the Queen.”

I expected the priest to claim the sanctity of the confessional or something, but either it did not count as a confession to his mind, or the sacrality of the Queen trumped his own, because after a moment, he started talking.

Just before Christmas, Vera Dumitru, then seventeen, had lost her fiancé in an industrial accident in Brașov. She had loved the boy deeply, and the past months had been very hard on her. (Something in the priest’s careful phrases made me wonder if Vera had been pregnant when the boy died—but if so, she must have lost the baby. Or that could have been my imagination.)

Our young friend Gabriela—“such a responsible girl, keeps house for her father since the mother died”—had recommended Vera at the castle this past spring, when the Queen was expected to take up residence. In Father Constantin’s opinion, the friendship and the work helped Vera as much as the income did. She had been looking more cheerful, of late, and she had even been seen batting her eyes at one of the village boys.

“Și acum asta,” he murmured, and shook his head with a sigh. She had set off from the castle with friends last night. They stopped to gossip a little, then split up for their homes, a safe thing in this quiet place. Not like the city, he said, where fathers had to guard their daughters. Here, everyone saw everything, and any sin was sure to be overheard.

The words he used for what Vera heard from the churchyard were nearly identical to those Mr Florescu had given us: Andrei, who was killed near Fagaraș during the War.

“That would have been during the opening months of the Roumanian War, is that right?” Holmes asked.

“Roumania declared war in August 1916, after England and France said, yes, we will give you Transylvania. Andrei joined then—on the Austrian side, of course—and was killed early, in September or October. Almost no training, they were given a uniform and a gun and sent out.”

“Was he brought home then? Or much after?”

“I think not right away. Families suffered, not knowing, but armies had other things to worry about than sending home the dead.”

“You weren’t here then, in Bran?”

“No, I was just finished with seminary when War broke out. I joined. In 1916—Hungary was fighting for two years by then, and I was a captain—I was wounded.” He stuck out his left boot, by way of illustration. “My foot was no good for rough ground, so I ended up in offices, but I wanted to help people so they later made me medic. I came to Bran six years past, when the old priest died. My wife was born in Brașov. She has family here, cousins, which is good.”

“How old are the cousins?”

“Thirties, forties. An uncle is near to sixty.”

“Would you ask the uncle to talk to me, about when Andrei Costea was buried?”

The blue eyes fixed on Holmes. “What are you looking for, with these questions?”

“I am looking for answers, Father Constantin. To questions such as: How certain can we be that the man who lies in the graveyard is in fact Andrei Costea? And, did Vera Dumitru know the young man? What made her think the voice was actually him, rather than some lad playing a trick on her? And from there, I have to wonder if there is any link between this young soldier and Queen Marie, or her friends, or her servants.”

Constantin went over this in his mind, frown deepening. “You think the boy was a deserter?”

“If a few weeks went by between the death in battle and his body arriving here, I doubt anyone opened the casket to examine him. Were there identity tags?”

Constantin shook his head. “By that time in the War, who knows? There was a letter—his sister has it. And with so many dead men, on a battlefield, mistakes can be made. But if so, why would he not return? Everyone says he was a good boy who loved his brother and sister. He would at least have sent word.

“As for Vera—yes, she knew him. A small village, who does not know everyone? She was young, maybe nine or ten, when he went off to war, but Andrei’s house was not far from hers. He would have been friends with her sister and brother.”

“Do the two of them still live here?”

“The sister is in Bucharest. The brother—well, there is an answer to your last question. Vera’s brother is our Queen’s driver.”