Castle Shade Page 2

  “It is actually quite a pleasant piece of countryside,” Holmes insisted. “Mineral resources, rich agricultural valleys, the Carpathians for defence. A fascinating source of folkloric traditions and superstitions.”

  “One assumes their farmers grow plenty of garlic. You were there, right?”

  “I was, yes. A week of what might be called reconnaissance, while you were sailing from Venice to the Riviera.”

  “A whole week? And you didn’t solve the case?”

  “My—our client was not there at the time.”

  “Who is this client? You said in Monaco you had an interesting woman with an intriguing problem.” The other word he’d let drop that day—vampires—might have sparked my sub-conscious imagination, but I had taken it for one of his laboured witticisms, and had not dignified it with further questions.

  “Our client is the Queen of Roumania.”

  “Queen Marie? Wow.”

  Granddaughter of two empires—her father was Victoria’s second son, her mother the only surviving daughter of Tsar Alexander II—Marie had been given to the crown prince of Roumania, now Ferdinand I, the second king in Roumania’s young dynasty.

  I was not generally impressed by inherited power, but I’d been seeing photographs of the glamourous and clever Queen Marie my entire life: Marie in Red Cross garb during the War, Marie’s translucent eyes beneath a splendid Baroque crown, Marie waving to her adoring countrymen from a train, Marie in a folkloric costume, Marie taking tea in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Theatrical, striking, and unmistakeable—and then the woman had gone on to conquer the Paris peace talks armed with little more than beauty and determination, charming Europe’s leaders into remembering their promises to Roumania—promises that included the return of Transylvania. She had single-handedly doubled the size of her adopted country overnight.

  “What does she need from us?” I asked. “Another batch of missing Russian jewels? Roumania was badly plundered during the War—I imagine any royal possession that wasn’t nailed down vanished into some invader’s pocket.”

  He rearranged his coffee-spoon, straightened the handle on his cup until it was parallel with the table’s edge. “Nothing missing, no.”

  “Blackmail, then? Or smuggling?” Roumania’s boundaries included both the Danube and the Black Sea, making for a watery highway into the very heart of Europe.

  “Their problem is with strigoi,” he said. I waited. He took a sip of cold coffee, replaced his cup, and adjusted it again. I frowned at the deliberate motions of his fingers, and at the way he was not meeting my eyes. He looked…embarrassed?

  “I’m not familiar with that word, Holmes.”

  “Strigoi are a kind of, er, vampire.” He sighed, then looked up. “Russell, this corner of Transylvania appears to be having a problem with vampires.”

  Chapter Three

  I laughed. Who wouldn’t? But once I’d recovered from the coughing fit this set off, I noticed the distinct lack of humour on his face. “Oh, Holmes, you can’t be serious? When you mentioned Roumanian vampires, I thought it was like…I don’t know. Switzerland having a plague of cuckoos. Do you mean to tell me that people in Roumania are dying of exsanguination?”

  “Not dying, no.”

  “Holmes, I absolutely refuse to believe that the dead are walking in Eastern Europe.”

  “Of course not. This agency stands flat-footed—”

  “—on the ground. Yes, I read Dr Watson’s story. ‘The Sussex Vampire’ turns out not to be a vampire, but a disturbed young man with some poison darts.”

  “No doubt we shall uncover some similarly prosaic explanation here. However, there is a child involved in this situation as well, and I agreed to look into it.”

  “An infant victim?”

  “Oh no. Not an infant. By no means.”

  He slid his hand into his breast pocket and came out with an envelope. From it he pulled the crisp, clear photograph of a document, on which was printed:

  SA NU ADUCI FIICA TA INAPOI LA BRAȘOV SAU VA MURI.

  “Is that Roumanian?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Russell,” he chided, “Roumanian is a cognate of Romance.”

  For a split second my sluggish brain pictured a land inhabited by newlyweds and women bent over Ethel M. Dell stories—but no, he meant Rome, as in Ancient. Which suggested that the country’s language was closer to that of Spain than of neighbouring Serbia.

  Reluctantly, I focused my eyes on the photograph. “Fiica would be girl, or daughter. Brașov you said was the name of a town in Transylvania. And muri, well. That last phrase probably means ‘she’s going to die.’ ”

  “ ‘Do not bring your daughter back to Brașov or she will die.’ ”

  I tipped the glossy surface to better see the image. “There’s a smudge.”

  “Blood. Human blood—our friends in the Monaco police department allowed me to use their laboratory. I believe it was placed there deliberately, for effect, since the lines of the thumb-print are too smeared to identify. I’ve sent the original card back to London for safe-keeping.”

  “When did you get it?”

  “It reached me in Venice, the day after you departed. Re-addressed from Sussex. Along with this.”

  He handed me a page of expensive paper, with expensive handwriting—a woman’s hand using a bold nib, the script upright, clear, and strong. Full of personality. The page itself had been torn away at the bottom with a straight edge—or more likely, I decided, the top of the page had been removed, to conceal an identifying address. But when I held it to the light, the watermark made my eyebrows go up. When I looked at Holmes, he nodded.

  24 June 1925

  London

  Dear Mr Holmes,

  I write in a hurry and in secret, with a mother’s hope that this finds you, and that you are able to help me. The enclosed reached me last week. Before I left Roumania, in April, there had been two or three rather unsettling episodes and rumours in the neighbourhood of my castle, Bran, near to the town of Brașov.

  I had intended to return home to Bran in August with my daughter Ileana, following some weeks in England and Germany. Now I am divided as to what I should do. I have spoken with my cousin about the matter and he has suggested that I ask you to come and see me, to give your advice as to what action I should take. Were this threat aimed at myself, I would step down from the train with my head high, daring any man to act against the wishes of the people who love me. But it concerns my daughter, and my will quivers at the thought of harm coming to her.

  I shall be in London for another two weeks, and would gladly see you at any place you find convenient. Please respond to the Palace—my cousin’s people will see that I receive any letter or cable.

  Marie

  Queen of Roumania

  My cousin, I reflected, was King George V; the Palace was Buckingham, whose letterhead she had been trying to conceal.

  I studied the dramatic signature of a woman who knew her own mind, and considered Holmes’ response to this letter. One trip across Europe might be explained by curiosity, or even a grudging sense of responsibility to Victoria’s granddaughter. But a second trip? By a man who had been known to blithely send female clients back into danger, who had insulted the King of Bohemia to his face? Why didn’t he simply tell her to hire a bodyguard?

  “Holmes, you turn down cases with more substance than this all the time. I accept that Marie is an intriguing person in her own right, but you can’t be taking her seriously just because she’s royal?”

  “It was her reference to ‘unsettling episodes and rumours’ that caught my attention. You being off on your sailing expedition, I wired back to say I would look into the matter, then took the train to Bucharest and thence to the village of Bran. Where indeed I found the ai
r filled with rumours of mysterious figures and men risen from the dead.”

  My head was starting to ache. “This all sounds a touch…metaphysical, Holmes.”

  “Some of my more challenging cases began with what one might call supra-natural events. Ghostly dogs, a face looking in at a second-storey window.”

  “If you say so.”

  “The castle’s major-domo knows more or less who I am, but to all the rest, I presented myself as an architectural consultant—Castle Bran is in the midst of renovations—with an interest in folklore.”

  “Which allowed you to both poke into every corner and ask a bunch of odd questions. And yet, you did not manage to solve the case. Not only that, you broke off your investigation and travelled back across Europe to Monte Carlo, to find me.”

  “Yes. Although I had done as much as I could in the Queen’s absence, and thought I might as easily wait for her return in the South of France as in the Carpathians.”

  As I studied him, I realised that he was again avoiding my eyes. What could be any more embarrassing than Transylvanian vampires? (I admit to a touch of humiliation myself, merely writing that sentence.) What possible, even-more-uncomfortable part of his explanation had yet to drop?

  “All right, Holmes, let’s have the rest of it. I imagine it has something to do with why you were in such a deep study with your pipe that you nearly asphyxiated us both.”

  He reached down to pick up the loathsome object, fortunately making no move to fill it with tobacco, merely turning it over in his hands.

  “The solution of a case requires two things,” he said. “Data, and perspective. My ‘deep study,’ as you call it, was an attempt at the latter.

  “Russell, when my practice was young, a governess once came to me with a question that irritated me with its triviality. My attitude nearly cost the woman her life. Some years later, I refused to board a train for Switzerland to help another woman, with catastrophic results. And yet, both of those cases came after the one in which I met Irene Adler, whom I chose to overlook until she had soundly trounced me. Even now, after all this time—indeed, after having you in front of me for ten years—I suspect that again, in the South of France, I failed to understand some key elements of the matter. Elements having to do with another woman I ought to know well, Mrs Hudson.

  “No,” he said, waving away my protest, “I am aware that there are things she—and you—did not tell me, but for the moment, I merely mention the matter because it underscores an inescapable fact: that I, Sherlock Holmes, have a blind spot. I tend to overlook those problems brought to me by women.”

  I blinked at this extraordinary admission.

  He gave the pipe a wry smile. “Hence, my suspicion, when the Queen’s letter came, that to follow my impulse and reject this mother’s plea for her daughter might be…unwise. Hence, too, my ruminations with the pipe, in an attempt to overcome the blindness with a closer examination of the facts.”

  “Which you have not?”

  “Which, as you say, I have not managed to do.”

  “I see.” I was not sure I did, entirely, but it was food for thought.

  “The daughter’s name is Ileana. Beloved child, close companion. She is the Queen’s youngest, after an infant son died during the War.”

  “All right.”

  “She is sixteen.”

  “And?”

  “And I realised…That is, I suspected that perhaps another, more qualified…”

  I leant forward over the table. “Holmes, what is it you want me to do?”

  He took a deep breath, and met my gaze at last. “I should like you to be my inside informant, into the mysterious realm of the adolescent female.”

  “You want me to spy on a Roumanian Princess? Or—no: you expect me to befriend her! You think that because she and I are only nine years apart, we are sure to become good chums? Or perhaps you’re looking for a nursemaid to keep her out of your—”

  He cut me off before my indignation could rise. “Russell, no, I do not imagine that you will either be assigned a young friend or handed her to care for. Although a girl in her situation—surrounded by servants, her closest relationship with a mother who has lost all her other children by marriage, death, or alienation—would no doubt benefit from meeting a person like you. A woman with abilities and a life of her own, a person habitually unimpressed by royal titles, stunning heritage, and blatant wealth.”

  From him, this was a compliment. Although his next sentence was more to the point.

  “My time in Bran led me to suspect that the focus of threat centres on Princess Ileana—and not merely the warning on that card. All of the ‘unsettling episodes’ to which the Queen refers have to do with Princess Ileana’s contemporaries in the village. That is, her friends. And yet, even now I cannot decide whether to treat these episodes as adult fact, or as childish imagination. In either event, you will agree, Russell, that girls of that age are more likely to confide in a slightly older woman such as yourself than they would a considerably older man.”

  I was not overjoyed at the prospect of being thrown to a gaggle of young women, but I could see his point. “I hope you’re not going to tell me that the Princess is jabbing some poor infant in the neck with a poison dart.”

  “Not so far as I am aware.”

  “Very well, I will provisionally agree, to be your delegate to the land of the adolescent girl. However, you also told me this case had to do with vampires. Holmes, I have to say that the idea of setting young girls alongside someone with Bram Stoker fantasies makes me distinctly uncomfortable.”

  He glanced around the deserted car, and dropped his table napkin beside his plate. “Let us adjourn to our compartment, for the remainder of this conversation.”

  Chapter Four

  To my pleasure, I discovered that the beds in our compartment had been made up in our absence: untold luxury after a night on a bench. My aching limbs wanted nothing but to crawl into one and disappear; however, I needed to hear what we were up to. So I compromised by wrapping myself in one of the bed-covers, but taking care to sit bolt upright, lest the call of sleep prove too loud.

  “What are these ‘episodes and rumours’ that unsettled the Queen? And where do the undead come in?”

  Holmes dropped into the chair that had been pushed to the corner and took out his pipe—the amiable cherry one, with the fragrant tobacco.

  “Vampires are a persistent theme across history,” he began. “Writers like Polidori, Le Fanu, and Stoker draw from ancient myths and folk belief. And from each other, naturally—Mycroft had a well-worn penny dreadful called Varney the Vampire when we were growing up, which I imagine Stoker also read as a boy. The idea is found in cultures from Egypt to Ireland, of a person who rises from the grave to commit mischief and destruction.

  “The Slavic countries up into the Carpathians are a particularly rich source of vampire mythology. Every region has its favourite means of identifying, repelling, and killing a member of the non-dead. Among them are the strigoi—cognate with the Latin strix and striga, a sort of owl that feasted on human flesh, and thence the Italian strega.”

  “Witch.”

  “Modern laboratories might diagnose porphyria from the photosensitivity, red lips, and prominent teeth. Or rabies may cause a person to bite, while catalepsy has been the cause of premature burials for as long as—what is wrong?”

  He’d seen me shiver—but less from fever than from the creep of rising hair. “I’ve always been horrified at the thought of being buried alive. God knows where I first came across the idea, but when my family died, I’d have nightmares that they were trapped in their coffins. I would picture my mother’s finger-nails clawing the—” I rubbed my arms and gave him an awkward laugh. “Just a minor phobia, Holmes.”

  “I shall arrange for you to be buried in a Victorian patent safety coffin. One with a large
bell.”

  “Very good of you. But when it comes to your Roumanian shades, I don’t believe you’re talking about premature burial.”

  “No indeed. In the Stoker novel, vampirism is a kind of contagion, used to create more of its kind out of the living. In Roumania, a vampire is someone who dies but whose soul refuses to fully leave the body. Hence a being that is neither living nor truly dead.

  “There are a thousand variations in how strigoi behave and what one can do about them. Some of the creatures are merely irritating, not dangerous. Others literally suck away their victim’s life-force, be it livestock or people, and must be dealt with before they kill an entire village. Some run in packs like were-wolves, others behave like witches—apparently alive, a part of the community, but secretly robbing their neighbours of life.

  “Once a village have decided that their troubles are due to a strigoi, the solutions vary. Some areas dig up the body to burn the heart and scatter the ashes, or cut the corpse’s tendons and leave it face-down in the coffin to keep it from climbing out. If the strigoi is one of those who appears to be alive, they solve the problem by burning the house down around them. And there is the classical spike through the creature’s head or heart—I understand that ancient skeletons have been found with iron bars lodged in their ribs.

  “Sometimes, when a vampire is suspected but not identified, villagers attempt to repel it by hanging up garlic or wearing a cross. Sprinkling mustard seeds over a floor or roof keeps the creature too busy counting to go further.”

  I had been subsiding into the bedclothes, pushed there by the inevitable weight of a Holmesian lecture, but at this statement, I roused. “That one has to be a joke.”

  “At times,” he said, “an outsider finds it difficult to be certain.”

  “Holmes, what do vampires have to do with the threat against Princess Ileana?”

  “In another country, perhaps nothing. But in Roumania, with its history and folklore, and with a Queen out of England—quite a bit. One has to travel the road of how Her Royal Highness Princess Marie of Edinburgh became the beloved mother of a nation. Marie was the product of Russian empire, British throne, and German nobility. Far too valuable a piece to waste in the chess game of nations, at the tender age of seventeen she was played into the promising new house of Roumania, a country on the border of several great powers, promised to the nephew and heir presumptive…”