Borrower of the Night

They could afford to be noble. Whoever married Irma – and I figured they had an equal chance, she was ready to fall into the arms of any man who asked her – got all three stones. I felt old and wise and rather sad. She was corny, but she was a good kid. I think she really meant it – for about a minute and a half.

‘Aw,’ I said, ‘shucks. Forget it, Irma.’

‘But I mean it!’

‘Sure you do. But we can’t accept anything like that.’

‘But – but what can I do with it?’ Irma asked helplessly.

‘The National museum, I think,’ said Blankenhagen. ‘It is the richest in Germany; it will offer a fair price.’

‘The Met, or some foreign museum, might offer more,’ said Tony. Irma looked at him.

‘No,’ said Blankenhagen firmly. Irma looked at him. ‘It is fitting that such a treasure should remain in Germany.’

‘Hmmm,’ I said. ‘Tell you one thing. If I were you, I’d take those jewels out and sell them separately. Nobody can afford to buy the shrine as it is; and the jewels will attract every crook on two continents. You can substitute paste copies without affecting the beauty of the workmanship; and isn’t that the important thing?’

‘Are you always right?’ asked Blankenhagen, looking at me severely. ‘You are too clever. That is a very annoying quality. How did you know the shrine was here, in this room?’

‘Oh, well,’ I said modestly; ‘that was easy. You told Irma about the arsenic, and Burckhardt’s murder? But don’t you see, that was the clue we were looking for. Many of the details will never be known; but I think I can reconstruct the outlines of the story now.

‘Konstanze was young, seventeen or eighteen, when Burckhardt married her and brought her here. Yet even then she must have been deeply involved in the witch cult; they started young, usually at puberty. It isn’t surprising that she should have learned to despise her oafish husband. Maybe she turned to Nicolas because he was available, and corrupted him. Maybe he didn’t need corrupting. A man of his ability must have hated the social system that labelled him inferior, and the ignorant clod who exemplified that system.

‘Anyhow, I’m sure the two became lovers before the Revolt broke out. Konstanze had been poisoning her husband for some time; it takes several months for arsenic to work its way through the body and show up in the hair and nails. And there were all those references to Burckhardt’s queasy stomach, remember?

‘Burckhardt’s call to arms must have pleased her. She wouldn’t have shed any tears if he had been killed in battle. Then the matter of the shrine came up, and that was a real bonus. I can see Konstanze drooling over those jewels and cursing the old count for giving them to the church.

‘At first, everything seemed to be working out for the lovers. Burckhardt practically handed the shrine over to them by sending it to Rothenburg in Nicolas’ charge. Nicolas murdered or bribed the guards and brought the shrine to the Schloss alone. He and Konstanze hid it in the tomb of the old count. Then Konstanze wrote that letter to her husband saying that the expedition had never arrived.’

‘He kept her letters,’ Tony muttered. ‘Carried them around with him, brought them here . . .’

‘He was a stupid sentimentalist,’ said Blankenhagen, looking contemptuously at Tony. ‘Stupid not to suspect such a story . . .’

‘We didn’t suspect it,’ I said wryly. ‘And he was deeply in love with her; love has a very dulling effect on the brain. There was no reason why anyone should have been suspicious. Even when we found Nicolas’ body, and the wing that had been broken off the shrine, there was no evidence to show that Konstanze knew anything about it.

‘After that night, when Nicolas appeared as the Black Man, he went into hiding. He couldn’t be seen hanging about; Konstanze meant to kill her husband, if he wasn’t killed in battle, but until he was dead she couldn’t let him get suspicious. And he wasn’t the only one who had to be deceived. The bishop was after the shrine and he was giving Konstanze a hard time. I’ll bet her reputation was already shaky. The mere fact that she read authors like Albertus Magnus and Trithemius would be enough to start nasty gossip.

‘So Burckhardt came home from the wars, hale and hearty, and delighted to see his loving wife. She didn’t waste any time. He was taken ill the day after his return.

‘On the crucial night, the night of the steward’s murder, the conspirators decided to move the shrine. We’ll never know why; Burckhardt was dying, so maybe they thought it was safe to proceed with their plans. At any rate, there they were, down in the crypt; I can see Konstanze holding the lamp and Nicolas working on the tombstone. He raised it. The shrine was lifted out, losing a wing in the process. And then . . .

‘Then they looked up and saw, in the lamplight, the face of the man they had robbed and cheated and tried to murder. God knows what aroused him, or how he got the strength to come looking for them. But he was there. He must have been there. He saw the lovers, with the shrine between them, and he knew the truth. You can’t blame him for turning berserk. The theft of the shrine was bad enough, but the knowledge that his servant and his beloved wife had cuckolded him . . . he went mad. By the time he finished Nicolas, who must have put up a fight, Konstanze was gone – with the shrine. I suppose she had someone with her, a servant maybe, who had helped with the heavy work. She could quietly bump him off at any time with her handy store of arsenic. Nobody asked questions in those days about the death of a serf.

‘After stabbing Nicolas and throwing him down at Harald’s feet, like a dead dog, Burckhardt piously closed his father’s tomb. What I can’t get out of my mind is a suspicion that Nicolas wasn’t dead when the stone was lowered. If you remember the position of the body . . . Well, enough of that. It certainly wouldn’t have worried Burckhardt. Having disposed of one traitor, he went after his wife. He would have killed her too, if it hadn’t been for the nurse, who thought he was delirious. She testified to his insane strength and mentioned that his dagger was not at his belt. But Burckhardt was half dead from arsenic poisoning. They wrestled him back into bed, and Konstanze finished him off in the next cup of gruel.

‘Maybe he had time, before he died, to whisper an accusation to a servant or priest. Maybe not; she would have watched him closely, and arsenic doesn’t leave a man particularly coherent. In any case, the bishop got suspicious. He disliked Konstanze anyhow. So she got her just deserts, by an ironic miscarriage of justice – though I think the punishment was worse than the crime.’

‘Death by arsenic poisoning is exceedingly painful,’ said Blankenhagen.

‘I know. But the count had helped torture Riemenschneider and had bashed in the skulls of a lot of miserable peasants who were only trying to get their rights . . . I guess they were all rotten.’

‘So we figured,’ Tony said sweepingly, ‘that the shrine had to be in the countess’s room. The count had the whole castle at his disposal, but she was limited to her own room.’

‘We,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

‘One more thing,’ Tony said, ignoring me. ‘I don’t think anyone else caught this. Remember Irma’s cry at the seance – das Feuer? That was the result of Schmidt’s hypnotic talents and the Grafins gruesome stories; but what I didn’t think of until later was that Konstanze didn’t know German. She was a Spaniard, and she and Burckhardt probably communicated by means of the Latin spoken by the noble classes in those days. So if she had given a last frantic scream, as she may well have done, it would have been in Latin or Spanish. In other words – no ghost.’

‘Obviously,’ I said.

‘Sooo clever,’ murmured Irma.

‘That’s about it,’ I said briskly. ‘No more questions?’

‘Only my heart’s gratitude,’ said Irma mistily. ‘Now I go to see that we have a celebration dinner. I cook it with my own hands, and we dine together, yes? And a bottle of Sekt.’

‘Sekt,’ I said glumly. Sekt is German champagne. It is terrible stuff.

Irma departed, to cook her way into somebody’s heart. I wondered whose heart she was aiming for.

I looked from one man to the other. Neither of them moved.

‘Well,’ I said.

‘I want to talk to you,’ said Tony to me, glaring at Blankenhagen.

‘And so do I,’ said the doctor, staying put.

‘Go ahead,’ I said.

‘If we could have some privacy . . .’ said Tony, still glaring.

‘I do not mind speaking in your presence,’ said Blankenhagen. ‘I have nothing to hide.’

Tony said several things, all of them rude. Blankenhagen continued to sit.