CHAPTER XIII

In which Zofia Turbotyńska discusses cruel monsters, and later, when two important expeditions beyond Cracow are undertaken, she delves in the bushes and the armorials, and comes close to solving the puzzle.

As she ascended the stone steps of Helcel House again, Zofia felt almost at home. Who knows, she let her fancy fly, maybe one day, many years from now, in the twentieth century, once Ignacy has lived a very long life, in the reign of another emperor, I shall come to reside here myself, in one of the apartments on the second floor? Franciszka will have her own little room nearer the entrance, and she will receive the guests who have arranged to visit by telephone. By then I imagine everyone will have a telephone. As long as it’s not the room where poor Mrs Mohr was killed . . . she added hastily in her thoughts. Then she knocked at the office door and went inside without waiting to be invited.

Only Mother Zaleska was there, still looking haggard and indolent, the shadow of her former chubby self. There were rumours abroad that Mother Juhel had accused her of employing ‘criminal types’, refused to listen to any justifications and was considering possible penalties, including appointing a new mother superior for Helcel House and sending Mother Zaleska back to Smyrna, where she had already spent over twenty years in the oriental heat. Zofia decided not to harass her with any conversation – she merely asked if she knew where Alojza might be, and indeed, two minutes later she found her in the library.

‘I think we should go outside,’ said Alojza, winking a bulging eye at her. ‘In this place . . . the walls have ears!’

Zofia nodded. As she knew, the triple murder had prompted understandable fascination among the residents; it was probably of less interest to the convalescents, most of whom were younger people with plans for the future, just waiting to be ‘set free’; but the old and infirm, especially the almsmen and women, who couldn’t afford to ‘go out’, didn’t have much entertainment here. Zofia had heard for herself a scrap of conversation in which one old woman said to another: ‘I worked as a costermonger, I had a stall at Szczepański market’ – these were artless people, for whom the mysterious events were a sign heralding the imminent end of the world, or at least the collapse of modern morals, and it bade them fear for their own safety; for most of them it was one of the last thrills in their life – so they spent hours discussing Sedlaczek the cook and Morawski the watchman, spinning incredible yarns. Those who had been lucky enough to exchange a few words with either murderer boasted of their alleged ‘close acquaintance’ with them, or fired off rhetorical questions: ‘God alone knows if I were going to be next . . .’ or ‘She’d never have poisoned me – I can’t bear the taste of almonds!’ And so as soon as Zofia entered the library, where several residents were gathered, the room fell silent, and the ears under the mob caps and snow-white locks seemed even bigger than usual. They sought another place for their conversation.

At this time of day there were people hanging about everywhere, and it was too cold in the garden, so they went up to the attic to talk amid the smell of timber and drying sheets.

‘Well, Sister, is there any news of Mrs Czystogórska?’ asked Zofia just in case, though she suspected she knew the answer already.

‘Unfortunately not. The police have registered her as missing: she has vanished from the House, simply dissolved into thin air.’

‘I’d like to help the poor woman’s family in a small way, by sending them a few crowns.’

‘I can have them delivered,’ said Alojza unenthusiastically.

‘I would rather bring them solace in person, or at least through my Franciszka.’

‘She used to live on Grodzka Street, but since her husband died and she came to live here she has no family left in the city,’ said Alojza, shaking her head. ‘Only in the distant outskirts, beyond Krowodrza.’

‘That is a long way,’ agreed Zofia. ‘But for a noble purpose, such obstacles can be overcome. I shall send my Franciszka, you know, Sister, my cook who has a grandmother here, old Mrs Gawęda . . .’

‘Yes, yes, of course, Mrs Gawęda, a most devout lady . . .’ replied Alojza mechanically, who had a good word, usually the same phrase, to say about every one of those in her care. In a remote part of the attic a rafter creaked.

‘Could you please explain to Franciszka where the Czystogórskis live?’

‘Her relatives’ name is Orawiec,’ Alojza corrected her. ‘But of course I’ll tell her.’

There was a tone audible in her voice that Zofia had never heard before. Irritation? She realised the nun must be sick to death of the whole business of murdered and missing old ladies, of Helcel House, and most likely of her, and was probably cursing the day she had introduced her to the institution’s internal matters. Sensing impatience from the nun who thus far had been her affiliate, Zofia decided to take her leave, but as they were coming downstairs from the attic, stepping carefully to avoid treading on each other’s dress and habit, she said in parting:

‘I admire you, Sister Alojza, for the truly Christian support that you offer me. I am not just grateful, but full of admiration. So much time and care, so much expertise . . . God bless you.’

She may not have done a cookery course, and had gained all her culinary knowledge at home, from her mother and grandmother’s advice, but she did know how to add sugar.

 

As she was already on the top floor, she decided to postpone her conversation with Lidia Walaszek, with whom she planned to investigate the ‘Italian theme’, and instead knocked at the door of Countess Żeleńska’s apartment. This time she found her in, and it was almost like the first day – her maid Ludwinia opening the door, the countess calling Entrez! from the small sitting room, the same armchairs and the same bell jar clock as then, but the countess herself was far more cordial. Not so cordial as to rise from her chair to greet, plainly put, a commoner, but she told the maid to fetch tea and Pischinger cake. Naturally the conversation began with the event of the week – Matejko’s funeral, which the countess had watched from the windows of the Pod Baranami Palace, home to her cousins, the Potockis. She had read the detailed report in The Cracow Times, of course, and talked to several people who had joined the procession, but she still longed to know more and was eager to hear every detail: how certain people were dressed, what comments were made about various bons mots from the speeches, and so on. So, partly making use of what she had managed to see, and partly fabricating, Zofia told her this and that, passed on one or two rumours and then shifted the conversation to other tracks.

‘Apparently Baroness Banffy did not honour the funeral with her presence. Though her nephew was there . . .’

‘Her nephew? That’s the first I’ve heard of him. And as for her, I don’t think she’s at all interested in Cracovian affairs. And I can understand that – after all, she spent half her life in the wilds of Transylvania. But this was a national event!’

‘Indeed it was. Does she still look so worried?’

‘Worried? Enraged, more like. I’ll tell you,’ she said, leaning towards Zofia, ‘before Ludwinia comes back from the kitchen, that she and that maid are at terrible loggerheads over which is better. Polcia only serves a baroness, Ludwinia a countess, yet to the hoi polloi these things matter. They say spiteful things to each other, petty rebukes . . . but when Ludwinia saw the jewellery that Polcia’s wearing these days . . .’

‘I noticed that at the cemetery.’

‘Exactly. Not at work, perhaps, but once she’s doing her own things, she dresses up, as if she were at least a second-class resident with her own room and savings set aside . . . Not much more and Ludwinia will start to expect diamond necklaces from me. But I think the luxuries have come to an end, because lately the baroness is terribly at odds with her Polcia. I’m sure she won’t take back the things she’s given her, mais c’est fini.’

Just at that moment Ludwinia came in with a tray of clinking teacups, and the countess asked: ‘What about the raffle prizes for our lottery? I hope you haven’t forgotten them. Christmas is approaching!’

‘Mother Zaleska doesn’t seem willing to provide them free of charge . . . oh, that’s enough, thank you, just half a cup for me and then I’ll be on my way.’

‘I know, I even brought the matter up with her myself.’

‘That’s extremely gracious of you, your ladyship . . .’

‘A mere trifle,’ said Żeleńska, waving dismissively. ‘I like to do my bit on behalf of the general good. But she informed me that now it all depends on you – apparently you and she have an arrangement.’

‘I’m pleased to hear she hasn’t forgotten,’ replied Zofia, not betraying what it was about, and began to contemplate the little china basket of sliced Pischinger cake, wondering whether it was appropriate to reach for a second piece.

 

From the countess’s apartment she went in search of the Italian, from whom she hoped to learn the answers to several important questions. She knew that Mrs Walaszek had once tried to establish her own order in the kitchen, but her eccentric culinary ideas had not found favour either in the eyes of the nuns or the residents of the House, so she had been thanked politely and advised to occupy herself with embroidery, where her ‘southern ways’ couldn’t do any harm.

Zofia found her on the ground floor, in a large room where, in the company of some other permanent residents and a couple of convalescents, she was busy embroidering napkins and tablecloths. Engrossed in her work, Mrs Walaszek did not notice Zofia standing in the doorway, who in her turn was watching the Italian extremely closely – and suspiciously. Should I tell her about Fikalski’s wife, who is living out her days with relatives in Bochnia? she wondered. Or perhaps she’s perfectly aware of that already, because she’s that bigamist’s accomplice, and they teamed up to murder Mrs Mohr, who could have exposed them. A crime committed by lovers . . . The world had seen that sort of thing before – she’d read about such cases.

‘What beautiful embroidery, my dear!’ she cried with delight as she went up to Mrs Walaszek’s chair, immediately feeling that her own tone was exaggerated and artificial.

‘Good morning, Meesees Troobotyska!’

For a while they chatted about embroidery, the superiority of cross stitch over chain stitch, and vice versa; only then did Zofia decide to get down to brass tacks and ask about ‘that amiable bachelor’. Mrs Walaszek became distinctly saddened and suggested they go into the corridor; it occurred to Zofia that in this building everyone had their secrets, but hardly anyone had a quiet corner in which to confide them to an intimate friend. They sat down on a bench beneath – as Zofia noticed from the corner of her eye – a crooked little picture of St Joseph, sure to be the work of one of the residents with artistic pretensions.

‘Lately ’e ’as been avoiding me,’ the woman whispered sadly.

‘Ah, dear lady,’ said Zofia, trying to play the role of a woman with experience in affairs of the heart, ‘that’s what men are like . . . We can never be sure of their feelings. If their only concern is a base physical urge . . .’

‘Lurge?’

‘Lust.’

‘Oh,’ she laughed, ‘maybe that ees ’is only concern!’

Zofia had plenty of sympathy for a carefree approach to life . . . or to put it another way, she told herself she had plenty of sympathy for a carefree approach, but she found this attitude scandalous. However, her reason for holding this conversation was not to see to the morality of a woman who was actually a stranger to her, and a foreigner to boot.

‘Or whether their only concern is a dowry, the lure of easy money.’

‘’E theenks I ’ave money, that I am reech, because there’s a Campiagni family from Veneto, great borghesia. But I am Campiani, from Udine. Deefferent family, leettle money. I do not tell ’im. Why should I? Let ’im theenk that.’

Now Zofia saw her in a completely different light – now she didn’t know which of the two was more cunning, which was better at playing romantic games . . . maybe their only aim was to beguile each other, and old people are just as likely to do things that Zofia thought only fitting for courting young couples. She decided not to say anything about Mrs Fikalska – may the battle continue.

‘Indeed,’ she said, laughing, ‘let him think that. Unfortunately . . . it’s getting late, and my husband will be home from the university for luncheon soon, so I must return on the double. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye,’ replied Lidia née Campiani, hunter of dowry hunters, rising from the bench to go back to her needlework.

‘Oh, I almost forgot!’ said Zofia, turning back a few paces. ‘One more thing. A mere trifle. I wanted to ask if you happen to know a certain resident of this house, Baroness Banffy . . .’

‘Sciacallo di Piacenza!’ hissed Mrs Walaszek.

‘Who?’

‘The wild dog of Piacenza,’ she repeated, but seeing a lack of understanding on Zofia’s face, she raised a finger, dashed down the corridor and entered the library. A few minutes later she was back with one of the ten volumes of Brehm’s Tierleben; she was carrying the book carefully, using a finger to mark a particular page. She opened it to a colour plate showing a rather timid-looking jackal, with the caption: Schakal (Canis aureus) 1/6 natürl. Grosse.

‘Yes, yes, I know, I understood that. We call it a “jackal”. But what is the reference?’

‘Everyone in Eetaly ’as ’eard of the ye . . . the Hyena of Brescia,’ she began to explain.

Not just in Italy. Of course Zofia had heard of the Austrian General von Haynau, who was famous for his exploits during the 1848 revolution in Italy and Hungary, where he hanged anyone and everyone as if it were still the Middle Ages and not the nineteenth century. But what did it have to do with Baroness Banffy?

‘But not of the Jackal of Piacenza,’ Mrs Walaszek continued.

‘Piacenza?’ Zofia could not pinpoint this city on the map.

Mrs Walaszek seemed to be wondering whether to go and fetch an atlas from the library, but finally replied: ‘Een Lombardy. You see, in Piacenza a duchessa ruled, from the ’ouse of Absburgo, but she was a good lady, weedow of the imperatore Napoleone. But the signora died, and a new ruler came, duca di Lucca, from the ’ouse that ruled before the duchessa, but then just in Parma . . .’

Zofia felt herself getting lost, not just in Italian geography but in the twists and turns of the local politics, too. Here, at the centre of Europe, things were simpler – from the day she was born she had spent her entire life under the rule of one single emperor, and for the rest of her earthly existence she hoped to be subject to just one more at the very most. Stability and order, not some form of southern belligerence.

‘When the rivoluzione and the war broke out, the Austriacchi captured Parma and Piacenza . . . maresciallo Radetzky, you know?’

‘Yes, the man the march is named after,’ Zofia recalled at once. Ignacy loved marches; he often went to Planty Park on a Sunday to listen to the military band that played there.

‘Allora, when Radetzky beat the keeng of Sardinia’s army, a teerrible defeat, a catastrophe, so in Lombardy and Toscania was rivolta. In ten days the cruel Hyena, von Haynau, captured Brescia and keelled the men, weemen and even the cheeldren. Molto crudele! The soldiers whipped the weemen in the piazza, o Dio!’

‘And this Jackal?’

‘’E was tenente . . . lertenant?’

‘Lieutenant,’ Zofia corrected her. ‘Leutnant.’

‘Exactly. Right ’and man of the Hyena, who sent ’im to Piacenza. He ’anged twenty men in one seengle day on Piazza Cavalli, and beat the weemen ’imself with a gatto a nove code . . . wheepping them to the blood . . . My father told me everything, ’e saw eet with ’is own eyes.’

‘And that was Baron Banffy? Husband of the baroness who lives here in Helcel House?’ exclaimed Zofia, on whom this grisly tale made quite an impression.

‘Si, barone Banffy, bastardo!’ At that instant Mrs Walaszek, or rather Lidia Campiani, became the Italian Carbonaro of Zofia’s imagination. Like a Roman goddess of revenge, ready to attack Baroness Banffy with a dagger for the crimes committed by her husband who’d been lying in the family crypt for years, somewhere in darkest Transylvania. It was true that General von Haynau had come a cropper later on – she remembered that in France or England some working-class men had given him a sound thrashing, obliging him to stop travelling about Europe. Nor was it hard to imagine some Italian patriots wanting to be revenged on their nation’s oppressors. After all, there were plenty of reports in the newspapers about Russian or Italian anarchists assassinating people, like that Orsini fellow, who had tried to blow up the Emperor Napoleon III outside the opera, or that man called Hryniewiecki, who had succeeded in killing the tsar, and himself as well in the process.

Indeed, she found the vision of Cracow as a hotbed of Italian revolutionaries terrifying, but also alluring in its own way. She imagined the eyes of the entire world turned on her city, reports in the global press . . . Not that Cracow was without its fair share of political murders – fifty years ago an investigating magistrate called Wolff had been shot dead in Planty Park. He had so doggedly pursued a young people’s conspiracy that there was no space left in Cracow’s jails. Afterwards they sang: ‘They killed a wolf, one of a thousand more, you thousand wolves, be full of fear’ . . . But that was long ago.

However, she wondered, what sort of publicity would they get half a century later from the treacherous murder, using poison, of the ageing widow of an Imperial-Royal lieutenant, even if he were a cruel brute? She took another close look at Mrs Campiani-Walaszek, widow of an official for the Galician Railway of Archduke Carl Ludwig, convalescing at Helcel House after an attack of kidney stones. Temperament aside, she did not exactly look like the emissary of malevolent conspirators. Besides, why would she have employed Mrs Krzywda when she herself had access to the kitchen?

‘I understand that you’re not fond of the baroness?’ she asked cautiously.

Mrs Walaszek spat out a few words in Italian; there was no need for Zofia to request a precise translation, as their meaning was perfectly clear to her.

‘A drrreadful wooman,’ added Mrs Walaszek, switching back to Polish, ‘but not because she’s a Banffy – she was only Banffy by marriage . . . she must ’ave ’ad a different name before. But she ees a signora antipatica.’

After this next outburst, without batting an eyelid she calmly picked up the volume of Brehm.

‘I won’t keep you from your fabulous embroidery any longer,’ said Zofia, smiling radiantly. ‘Thank you very much for our talk.’

They said goodbye and headed in opposite directions: Walaszek to the library to return her study aid, and Zofia to the exit. As she was passing through the main gate she realised that for today her true, detective life was at an end; she would have luncheon with Ignacy, and supper that evening, but she wouldn’t send Franciszka to see the Czystogórska family until tomorrow morning, when she herself would set off on another expedition. Today all she had left to do was to inspect the work of the new maid, who had already started to annoy her by being slow, listen to Ignacy rustling the newspaper, and maybe read a novel. Far more terrifying than the horror of finding corpses among the rumpled bed sheets or in a corner of the attic.

 

Yet even this depressing autumn evening was to bring a spark of interest, and from the least likely direction: from a column in Ignacy’s copy of The Cracow Times.

‘Ghastly business in Barcelona,’ he cast into mid-air, but Zofia didn’t pick up the thread.

‘Truly ghastly.’

Silence.

‘Listen to this, dear heart. An anarchist threw a bomb at the theatre there, just like Orsini. Twenty-two people were killed and forty injured – a bloodbath.’

‘What were they performing?’

‘William Tell. The explosions were during Act Two.’

‘I’ve never been fond of Rossini. There’s nothing of interest after the overture anyway.’

Another quarter of an hour passed in silence, while Ignacy cut something out of the newspaper, and Zofia thought about people who disturb public order. That’s it, all these anarchists, Carbonari and rebels act in a similar way, they’re recognisable . . . yes, quite – by style. In fact, it takes no effort at all to recognise one, because they don’t try to conceal their crimes. All these troublemakers are relying on publicity, their aim is to sow terror . . . Surely if they really did want to kill a resident of Helcel House, they’d have done it with a bang, not on the sly?

 

To travel to Krzeptów, a village near the city of Tarnów, and back in a single day, and also to have time to talk to Countess Wielhorska there, who had penned the letter of recommendation for Mrs Krzywda, or some of the servants perhaps, or someone else who knew the murdered almswoman, Zofia had to set off early in the morning, at a time when she was usually still in bed. Maybe that was why she dozed through most of the journey – the train rocked gently and her fellow passengers did not impose themselves to excess by being talkative, or corpulent, or malodorous, so not much of the trip stayed in her mind. But there was another reason, too: despite being excited by each new lead and each new idea, she was weary now; gradually she was losing faith in her chances of identifying the killer. None of it fitted together, and whatever facts she established instantly slipped from her grasp; so far, her only success had been proving to the police that Mrs Mohr was poisoned. But if the price of this success – which tickled her sense of self-regard nicely, more so perhaps than having a poem published in the Illustrated Weekly or running a charity collection in cooperation with a countess – were to be condemnation of the utterly blameless Czech cook, then it was a success she could do without. And the more this dispirited her, the sleepier she became; she very nearly missed her stop.

She emerged in front of the station – a wide building, formed of three smaller ones joined by ground-level passages, but squat and provincial; the turrets at either end were a joke, like sticking a tower on a peasant cottage. People had been muttering for ages that Galicia’s railway stations should be bigger, more modern and more attractive, but so far few of the buildings were as fortunate as the one in Cracow, which had been considerably rebuilt some twenty years ago, and was now being decorated and made higher. One could only hope that the empire’s mission to civilise would reach Tarnów too . . .

‘Is the honourable lady looking for a hotel? In need of a place to stay?’ asked an obsequious little man, trailing his left leg.

‘No, on the contrary – I need to travel on from here.’

‘How do you wish to travel? By train? By carriage? By droshky?’

‘By carriage. To Krzeptów.’

‘At your service, honourable lady,’ he said, bowing, and hobbled off to a group of three bearded men who turned out to be carters; one of them came over with the intermediary, and then the arrangements, bargaining and wrangling began. Heatedly, because Zofia was not prepared to overpay. Though even so, she told herself, in Cracow for the same money, including a tip for the lame man, she wouldn’t travel as far as St Benedict’s, the little church on Krzemionki hill, where in any case she only went once a year, in spring, for Rękawka, the traditional egg-rolling festival. (Personally she abhorred it, but Ignacy was fond of eccentric Cracow customs and loved scrambling up the hill to toss gingerbread, cooked sausages and small coins to greedy urchins; she regarded it as an apology for profligacy, but as a good wife, every year out she went to the mound and gloomily watched the wealth of the Turbotyński household being squandered.)

So in Krzeptów she left the carter outside the inn and went for a walk. She had no intention of driving up to Countess Wielhorska’s palace in a shabby Tarnów cart, to be taken for a boor. Krzeptów was like hundreds of other villages throughout Galicia: a road that ran down a small valley, lined with cottages that were falling apart with age, from which poverty was driving people to the other side of the ocean, and on two opposite hills stood two strongholds: a solid, stone church, its tower broadcasting the piety of the local people, and an ancient comital palace. Or rather what was left of it.

For the further Zofia went up the neglected, potholed road, the clearer it became that she wasn’t going to a palace, but the ruins of one. Finally, a wide, charred facade, topped with a tympanum, loomed from behind the bare crowns of some large parkland trees. Below there was a porch propped on columns, overgrown with creepers, and higher up a wall cut open by three arches. Through the broken ground-floor windows some dark inner rooms were apparent, though their decaying ceilings did not admit much light; whereas the roof must have caved in long ago, because the arches were open to the dull grey sky. Here and there the remains of former outbuildings were visible too – collapsed brick walls preserved the outline of erstwhile stables, a coach house or a workers’ block. In the middle of the courtyard, which was thickly overgrown with maples, acacias and lots of prickly thistles that kept hooking on the flounces of her dress, Zofia could make out the casing of a round pond. A fountain must once have played in it – there were some rusted pipes protruding from the bottom of it, but the stone figure must have been looted years ago.

There wasn’t a living soul in sight. The birds that flew away for the winter had already gone; the occasional jaded rook called lazily in the distance. If one could imagine nothingness personified, the Wielhorski Palace was it: a wide, dismal facade with nothing but ruin and decay lurking behind it, topped as if ironically by a large heraldic crest. Beneath a crown with nine tines adorned with ostrich feathers there was a horseshoe with two crosses – one on top of it, slightly peeling, and the other ringed by it. Zofia was no great expert on heraldry; she could identify her husband’s family crest and a few of the most common ones, but she was almost certain this one was the Lubicz coat of arms. Just in case, she took her notebook out of her bag and copied it. At first she was going to do a rough sketch, without any detail, but here in this desolate spot she suddenly felt sad and uneasy, so she decided to draw it precisely, just as Miss Buchbinder, the woman who had taught her drawing, deportment and French, had instructed her long ago, with shading and contours. Carefully cross-hatching its gloomy recesses brought her a sense of calm, though of course, it wasn’t a matter of great importance. More to the point, Countess Wielhorska definitely could not have sent a letter from Krzeptów a year or two ago – she certainly hadn’t been sitting at her splintered desk or forming shapely script with ink made of mud. Unless by some miracle she were living not in the palace but in one of the tumbledown cottages festering at the bottom of the hill.

 

The inn, probably more than a century old, sat brooding by the main gate like a large mother hen. Wide and solid – plainly the drinking here was on the same grand scale as the building – it had a hip roof with broken shingle, which stuck out a little at the front, where it was supported on six massive columns forming an arcade. In summer, that was where the customers sheltered from the heat and the innkeeper’s helper laid out those who had drunk too much, but at this time of year the roof kept off the rain instead. Around midday there wasn’t a living soul here, except for a grizzled old mongrel dozing by the wall. Zofia ran up three small steps and opened the wide, semicircular door into the inn.

As she was in the countryside, she remembered to offer the traditional greeting: ‘The Lord be praised’, but realising a Catholic greeting was inappropriate here, she bit her tongue and said, ‘Good morning.’

‘Good for some,’ said the innkeeper, casting her a reluctant look from behind a long row of solid mugs made of poured glass lined up on the bar, which he was wiping with a rag of dubious cleanliness. ‘A day like any other.’

‘It’s coming up to one o’clock,’ said Zofia, comparing the hands on her watch with a large round clock that hung behind the innkeeper, between a shelf full of glasses and a shelf full of bottles.

‘Somewhere, but it’s always a quarter to eleven here,’ he calmly replied.

‘I am looking for the countess . . .’

‘Yes? I thought you were a countess. We don’t usually see such . . . fashionable ladies in here.’

‘Countess Wielhorska, from the palace.’

The innkeeper stopped wiping the glasses, put the next one down on the tabletop and raked his beard with his fingers.

‘Well, you’ve some searching to do . . . There ain’t been counts nor countesses here since . . . my grandpa Chaskiel’s day.’

‘From what year would that be?’

The innkeeper sighed and put down his rag.

‘The year . . . Not since the year when the sheriff in Tarnów said the masters were going to wipe out the peasants – so peasants came from elsewhere, with flails, pitchforks and boathooks, across deep snow because it was the winter . . .’

‘So were they killed? Or did they leave?’

But plainly he loved telling this story, and it had to start at the beginning.

‘The first night, the masters defended themselves: they summoned their domestics, they had shotguns and rifles, they barricaded the doors with armchairs and beds, and when those outsider peasants started to smash them, they shot through the doors, and laid two or three of them out dead.’ At this point he paused; he had his favourite pauses in this tale, not to give himself time to remember the facts, but just to increase the tension. ‘That lot went on their way. Only on the third day did our local peasants get agitated, deploy themselves around the whole village and post sentries. Up in the palace they were debating whether to defend themselves or escape . . . the two young masters tried to gallop on horseback across the park and on, through the woods, but the peasants caught them in an ambush: “Where are you going, you brutes?” Then another cries: “Kill the brutes, take their horses and flay them alive – the authorities have said anything’s allowed.” The young masters whipped up their horses, but that lot was after them, with pitchforks, this lot was hammering at the doors, while that lot was close on their heels . . . And this time it ended up with them taking the whole palace without a single shot – they went inside the place and herded the whole family into the drawing room. First the peasant women cried, saying: “We work for you, but you want to kill us”, but they already had blankets with them, so they forgot about their weeping and got down to looting. Throughout the palace they smashed the furniture, broke the locks off the doors searching for valuables everywhere, but they didn’t find any, so they ended up tearing the material from the walls and hacking out the door frames. But there was nothing, not a single jewel, nothing but the earrings they ripped from the countess’s ears’ – this made Zofia shudder at the thought of her own earrings – ‘and the wedding rings, all of which came off easily except for the old count’s, so they broke his finger. Mind you, it didn’t matter to him anyway, for he was dead by then. They were going to torture them, gouge out their eyes, cut off their hands and feet, but a tumult arose, they suddenly went for them with those sticks, and ten minutes later they even began to fight among themselves, all trying to hit the masters, but there wasn’t enough room, stirring such rage that their women screamed to separate them, while other women and children taunted the nobles, shouting: “It’s all because of you, it’s your fault they’re fighting like that!” Finally, the peasants were reconciled and started beating them with flails, and soon only those two young masters were left alive, clearly the strongest. They took them, now very weak, their arms broken, covered in blood, naked – their clothes were ripped off, I saw it with my own eyes as a little boy, and two men arguing so hard for a leather boot that they ripped it apart. Someone out of mercy gave the young masters a blanket, a sheet, a little straw so they wouldn’t freeze to death, and they took them on a sledge across the snow to the sheriff, and only there did they butcher them, for the Austrians paid ten florins for a dead noble, eight for a wounded one and five for one uninjured.’

The Galician Slaughter – of course Zofia had heard of these horrors before, not least from the young Żeleński. It was less than fifty years since the Austrian powers-that-be had incited the peasants to attack the nobles as a way of suppressing their imminent uprising.

‘And there have been no Wielhorskis since then? No Countess Wielhorska?’

‘I’ve not heard of any, but I was a little boy then, so high’ – he leaned over the counter and stretched out his hand about three foot from the floor. ‘The last countess I ever saw was that one, with blood dripping from her ears. After that, as they tortured her to death, I couldn’t look no more.’

Zofia glanced through the low, grimy windowpanes – good, the carter was still in the same place where she had left him. Yet another trail had proved to be a dead end – for the sake of form she asked the innkeeper about Mrs Krzywda; maybe she really had lived somewhere nearby, and this was her source for the fictional countess who’d supposedly penned her letter of recommendation. But no, he had never heard of her. Zofia was cold, angry and tired. It occurred to her to ask for a shot of strong drink, but she warmed herself instead with the thought that she hadn’t spent a single cent in Krzeptów. She thanked the man for the conversation, wrapped her collar more tightly around her neck and went out into the November chill.

 

‘My dearest Zofia, where have you been?’ said Ignacy, greeting her in the doorway with a question; in fact, she hadn’t the time to make up a convincing story about her all-day whirl of activity – above all she had to have an urgent chat with Franciszka, who was sure to be back by now from her own outing to Krowodrza.

‘All in good time, Ignacy . . .’ she said in a raised tone, as she took off her gloves and put them in their box. ‘If you’re hoping for supper before midnight . . . no, if you’re hoping for supper at all, then I’m sorry to say you must gird yourself with patience and let me go to the kitchen first.’

‘What are we having this evening?’

‘Carp in grey sauce?’

‘With a cucumber salad, please.’

‘All right, there’ll be cucumber salad too,’ she said, trying to adopt as calm a tone as possible, though she was quivering all over with curiosity about how Franciszka had got on with her mission. From the hall she could see the girl’s back as she cleaned the kitchen, carefully polishing the stove-lids.

‘We must make supper, it’s high time,’ she boomed from the threshold, so that Ignacy could hear her in the drawing room, and then she came down to her usual tone, or lowered it slightly to ask Franciszka: ‘How did it go?’

‘Oh, she’s alive, madam, she’s alive! You were right!’

Since the day Franciszka first set foot in her house Zofia had never seen her so overjoyed; she was sure it wasn’t because the woman in question was alive – her welfare and existence were certainly not important to Franciszka – it was simply that Zofia and her cook had both developed a taste for exactly the same thing: poking about in people’s fortunes, and proving that reality was actually quite different from how it appeared to others.

‘I knew it! Tell me, tell me everything,’ she said, and then loudly added, ‘carp in grey sauce it is!’

‘And cucumber salad!’ came a faint reminder from the drawing room.

‘And cucumber salad!’ she shouted back.

‘First I went to see Sister Alojza, I showed her your letter, she looked at something in it and made a face, but she told me what those people are called and where their cottage is. So off I go, a long way, on and on, it’s not Krowodrza, where the rich farmers are, no, it’s even further, the very last houses, and they’re not decent ones, but squatting on top of each other, almost collapsed. So on I go, asking where the Orawiec family live, and finally this skinny little urchin tells me it’s over there. So I rap on the door, and I rap again . . .’

‘And cauliflower too!’ cried Zofia for the sake of form.

‘This woman opens the door, she’s not old yet, so I can tell it’s not her. I ask if she’s Mrs Orawiec. Yes, she is. Aha, I say, I’ve come all the way from Cracow to see you – my lady has sent me to your aunt, Mrs Czystogórska. And she stands up straight, she does, and gives me such a nasty look. Auntie’s not here, she says. I nod my head and say, all right, but I have business with her, so I’ll wait. Then she says: Auntie’s not anywhere, probably killed, the police have been looking for her. They ain’t found a corpse, but we all think of her as dead. Mother of God! I exclaim in reply. Mother of God! I’ve come all this way from Cracow and she’s as good as dead. My mistress will be upset with me. And I can see she’s eager to shut the door in my face, I’ve a pot of soup on the fire, she says, it’s about to burn. So take it off the fire, I say, I’m only here a while, on important business. And she says her bit again: Auntie’s not here, she’s as good as dead. I shrugged and said ah, maybe you’ll be glad instead of angry, for my lady had a big sum of money to give back, everything your aunt had put away for her coffin and funeral, albeit a fourth-class funeral, but even so it’s fifty crowns . . . Well, I see the pot on the fire doesn’t matter now. Fifty crowns, she cries, fifty crowns! Hand it over! We’re her only heirs. Aaah, I say to that, it won’t be that easy, there’s no bill of exchange, it was just a verbal agreement. My lady said to give the money back, but only into the right hands. If she’s dead, she’s dead, peace on her soul. But she might turn up, then I’ll give it her back . . .’

Zofia was all but flushed with satisfaction; in this story she could recognise the essentials of the plan she had made Franciszka etch on her memory, but she could also tell how much the girl had added of her own accord, and how craftily she had cranked up Mrs Orawiec’s greed.

‘God be with you, I say, turn on my heel and go. And she stands in the open doorway. Come back, she cries, once I’ve gone twenty paces, come back! I turned around but I stayed put. What am I to come back for? If your aunt is found alive, send to the Helcels and ask . . . Come back, she calls. So back I go. Auntie’s here, she says, but they’re murdering everyone at those Helcels. They’ve killed ten of those old women already. So auntie escaped. They sent the policemen after her, but she’s so cleverly hidden they won’t track her down – let them think she’s not alive! And she leads me inside, and there she is, hidden in an alcove behind a wardrobe. I look, and there’s a rug hanging on the wall, the wardrobe’s in front of the rug, but the rug is moving, it moves aside and a little old lady with white hair comes out from behind it. She says to the first one: may lightning strike you down, you’ve brought a stranger, you’re showing me to a stranger, she says, and that woman says I’m to give back the borrowed money. I never lent money to no one, she says, she insists, what an honest woman, I think to myself, to which I say: Are you Czystomorska? Czystogórska, she bawls at me. Czystogórska! Aaah, that’s all, I say, my lady’s mixed it up, for I’m to go to Czystomorska with the money. And quick as a flash I was out of the door.’

‘So she’s hiding because she thinks . . .’

‘She thinks they’re going to kill her next. As if there weren’t anyone else to kill,’ said Franciszka huffily.

‘Splendid, splendid!’ said Zofia, almost raising her arms to hug Franciszka, but she restrained herself and just went a little closer to the girl. ‘You’ve done very well indeed . . . What’s that on your face?’ she suddenly asked, inspecting her closely. ‘You’re all red.’

‘It’s nothing, madam,’ replied the servant, blushing in addition.

‘Franciszka!’

The girl bowed her head and shrugged.

‘Franciszka!’

‘It’s for the pimples on my forehead.’

‘What pimples?’

‘I get them, I do. Here. And here,’ she said, pointing at two spots on her hairline.

‘But what have you done to yourself?’

‘Well . . . well, I went to Krowodrza, a long way away, to a place I’ve never been,’ she began, but then broke off.

‘Yeees?’

‘So I thought maybe I’d never go back there again either. And there was this old stone wall . . .’

‘Franciszka, for pity’s sake, what are you talking about?’

‘It’s all in The Angel’s Aid for Defence and Protection in Dire Need,’ she finally plucked up the courage to say. ‘If you’ve got pimples on your forehead, then Marianna Werner, she as was a famous clairvoyant . . .’ – Zofia felt like asking what exactly this Marianna Werner saw so clearly, but she bit her tongue – ‘advises you to go to a place where there’s an old stone wall and to rub your hand against it till it’s moist, and then wipe your face, chest and arms with that hand. You’re to do it three times, then leave without looking back and never return. So as I was in Krowodrza and I saw an old stone wall crumbling away, I’ll never be here again, I thought . . .’

‘I don’t wish to hear another word. I refuse,’ said Zofia in a dry tone. ‘Not a word. I won’t be surprised if after rubbing that wall the skin comes off your hands, and even worse pimples appear on your forehead. The Angel’s Aid – I ask you! A clairvoyant. Witchcraft in Krowodrza.’

She couldn’t understand how this bright – why not admit it? – intelligent girl, who had dealt with Mrs Czystogórska so cunningly, could at the same time faithfully believe in those cheap, fairground pamphlets that propagated old wives’ tales and other nonsense. She could feel the anger making her chest ripple above the edge of her corset, so to calm herself she took several deep breaths and merely said: ‘Cauliflower à la hollandaise. Cucumber salad. Carp in grey sauce. For dessert, cranberry jelly. With cream, if there’s enough left. And if there isn’t,’ she added with resignation, ‘then let it be without cream.’

 

By seven, Franciszka had managed to make the entire supper. She really is a treasure, thought Zofia for the umpteenth time. Dish after dish appeared from the kitchen, brought in by the new girl, whose name Zofia still couldn’t remember. She did her best to address her impersonally, or simply passed her by in silence, focusing instead on some mundane task, such as picking bones out of the fish, coated in sweet grey sauce with raisins and almonds.

‘Why so quiet, my dear?’ said Ignacy, battling with his own set of fish bones. ‘There seems to be something bothering you lately.’

‘Me? Not in the least.’

‘But something’s wrong. Overworking, perhaps? Today you slipped out while I was still in the land of Nod, and you vanished like a golden dream – you were probably at Helcel House again . . .’

‘If I were there as often as you imagine . . . would you pass the cucumber salad, please . . . I’d have no time to run the house at all. Indeed, sometimes I have to discuss the details of the charity collection – it’s becoming increasingly urgent, and it would be far more convenient for me to do it by telephone instead of having to head out of town each time’ – Ignacy skilfully turned a deaf ear to that – ‘but today I had quite other matters to attend to.’

And, in an effort to distract her husband, who was showing too much interest in her activities, she changed the topic to one of his hobbyhorses.

‘But just imagine, I actually found a moment to get you a small gift.’

‘A gift?’ He rested his knife and fork against his plate. ‘What can it be?’

‘It’s just a trifle, really,’ she said, waving dismissively, and then turned around. ‘Could somebody please hand me my reticule? My handbag, the velvet one,’ she added, seeing that the girl didn’t know that word, and then held out her hand in a meaningful, expectant gesture. The maid looked around uncertainly to left and right, spotted the red velvet bag lying in the hollow of an armchair, ran to fetch it and handed it to her.

‘Thank you. Now where did I . . . ah, here it is,’ she said, taking out her notebook; to avoid revealing too much of its contents, with a single precise tug she tore out a page. ‘Here you are, it’s a drawing of a coat of arms that I thought you might like. It’s rather an old one.’

Ignacy patted the front of his jacket and waistcoat with both hands until he found his pince-nez, set it on his nose and examined the drawing.

‘Indeed it is. Very nicely done – I’ve always said you have a talent for drawing. Of course, it’s . . .’

‘The Lubicz coat of arms?’

‘No, look at this: one arm of the upper cross is missing. One of the Lubicz clan, while dividing up his patrimony, ran down his brother and did him harm, hence the cross has an arm missing, in eternal memory of the harm that was done, and hence the name of this coat of arms – Krzywda.’

Of course, thought Zofia. Krzywda – she had only thought of it as a surname until now, without paying attention to the literal meaning of the word krzywda: harm. The arm of the cross hadn’t peeled off – it had never been there at all.

‘It’s very fine,’ Ignacy went on. ‘I’m going to have it framed so I can hang it above my desk. A comital crown – now, whose might it be? The Rzewuski family, perhaps? I think they were the only counts who bore the Krzywda coat of arms . . .’

‘And the Wielhorskis too,’ said Zofia mechanically; she had stopped listening to Ignacy at all, and when he said, ‘Oh yes, the Wielhorski family too,’ it didn’t get through to her. In an instant she was experiencing something she’d only read about in novels featuring brilliant detectives to whom almost the entire picture of connections and dependencies suddenly becomes clear. The facts began to mesh together like the cogs in a machine; suddenly it all made sense, and she knew where to look for the facts that remained unclear. With her fork and knife suspended in mid-air, for the first time in her life Zofia Turbotyńska was having a genuine revelation, as a curtain of appearances was ripped aside, exposing the truth in all its splendour.

‘And if my memory is not deceiving me, the Znaniecki and Huściło families, too,’ said Ignacy, completing his recitation of the list of families that bore the Krzywda coat of arms – Ignacy the amateur heraldist and cucumber salad addict, as he helped himself to a fourth portion.

 

‘My dear Zofia, where on earth are you going?’ cried Ignacy from the drawing room half an hour later, when he saw Zofia, wrapped in a fur stole, creeping out of the house. ‘Surely you’re not off to organise your lottery at this time of night?’

She had already taken hold of the doorknob, but briefly she hesitated. She took a few steps back from the hall and said: ‘Ignacy, any woman who wants her husband to love her must preserve a touch of mystery. Otherwise she becomes as flat as a board and as dull as ditchwater. Do you really want me to lose all my allure?’

Ignacy folded his newspaper and stared at his wife in amazement. But seconds later a playful smile she had rarely seen appeared on his kindly face.

‘Go on, off you go! If that’s the price I’d have to pay, then upon my word I’d rather not know a thing!’ he said. For a moment she thought he ever so slightly winked.

 

‘Just a moment, madam, just a moment, where are you . . .’ said the receptionist, trying to stop her, but at this time of night he could hardly stand upright; he clutched desperately at the counter for the support of solid timber and to give his own presence substance. Before he’d had the time, Zofia was urgently rapping at the door of room number 14. She heard the creak of the wooden bed, then footsteps and the grate of a key in the lock.

‘Mr Banffy, we must have a serious talk.’