Borrower of the Night

small barred opening that could be closed by a sliding iron plate.

We didn’t need Tony’s keys. The doors had not been locked for centuries, not since the last Count of Drachenstein had given up his seignorial privileges of imprisonment and execution to the state. But the doors looked functional, even now.

‘They will squeak,’ Tony warned, and pushed on the first door.

Squeak was hardly the word. The hinges screamed like a wounded animal.

I was secretly relieved when the flashlight showed no heap of mouldering bones, no grinning skeleton held erect by rusted chains. There was nothing in the cell, not even a bench or a shard from a broken water bowl. It was simply a square, windowless stone box about eight feet by eight. Yet there was an aura in that room which would have made human bones seem like meaningless stage props. The cell stank of fear and despair; a miasma of ancient agony shrouded the walls like fog. It required all the courage I possessed to step into that evil little room. From the sound of Tony’s breathing I suspected he didn’t like it either.

The walls and floors seemed to be solid. The second cell was a duplicate of the first, and the third, which was so small that neither of us could stand erect in it, was equally unproductive. Tony let me precede him in a retreat which closely resembled flight, and neither of us stopped running until we stood panting in the Great Hall, with a closed door between us and the grim medieval kitchen.

I don’t know how Tony passed the rest of the day; I spent quite a lot of time washing. I was grey with dust and sticky with perspiration, but I kept on washing long after my surface was clean. The stink of those cells had penetrated to the bone.

I had another errand to take care of. By the time I finished, I was good and hungry. The dining room was full when I arrived. Glancing around, I realized I had been so absorbed by the small group of guests who occupied my wing of the Schloss that I had lost track of the others. The family from Hamburg and the honeymooners were gone. Most of the tables were occupied by a party of German students, husky, tanned youngsters who made even Tony look elderly.

George was brash and cheery as ever.

‘Where were you two?’ he asked. ‘I went downtown later, but I couldn’t find you.’

‘We drank beer,’ I said. ‘What did you do for amusement?’

‘Went to church. I was breaking the Tenth Commandment – or is it the Ninth?’

‘Coveting your neighbour’s goods?’ Tony was not amused. ‘The Riemenschneider altar?’

‘Yes. I’d steal it if I could think of a way to get it out of Germany. There’s another altar at Creglingen, across the valley. I think I’ll drive up there tomorrow.’

‘It is considered his masterpiece by some,’ said Blankenhagen suddenly. ‘I myself prefer certain figures in the museum of Wurzburg.’

‘We’ll have to see Wurzburg,’ George said. ‘Maybe after we leave here. How much longer do you plan to stay, Vicky?’

‘I never make plans. I’m just a creature of impulse. Don’t let me interfere with your arrangements.’

Blankenhagen gave me an enigmatic look, and continued to be informative about Riemenschneider.

‘He was one of the councillors of Wurzburg. During the Bauernkrieg, he and eleven other councillors supported the peasants, and when the nobles captured the town he was imprisoned.’

‘So he picked the losers,’ George said. ‘He got his, I suppose.’

Blankenhagen shifted in his chair.

‘They pierced his hands,’ he said. ‘Never again did he do a work of sculpture.’

‘Artists shouldn’t dabble in politics,’ George said. ‘He should have stuck to his last, or chisel, or whatever he used.’

I wanted to hit him with something – something hard. I consider myself unsentimental, but I could not have joked about an atrocity like that. What made it worse was that George wasn’t joking. He meant what he said.

‘He had at least the knowledge,’ snapped Blankenhagen, ‘that he suffered for a cause he believed was right.’

‘I wonder,’ said George, ‘if that was any satisfaction to him.’

We spent the evening in the lounge, yawning at each other. Tony was silent and rather peaked-looking. For the first time in too long I remembered his injury. I hadn’t even had the decency to ask how he felt. Feeling guilty, I let him escort me to my room when the witching hour of ten struck. If he had asked me nicely, I might even have agreed to stay there. But he didn’t ask. He told me.

‘Stay put tonight. That’s an order.’

I nodded. A reflexive movement is not binding legally.

The next two hours were difficult. I didn’t want to leave my room until I was sure Tony had fallen asleep. It would be just like him to check up on me. But I had a hard time keeping awake. I was short on sleep and long on tiring adventures.

Finally I barred my door and shoved the heavy cupboard away from the wall. As I started down the hidden stairs I noticed that the beam of my flashlight was getting dim, and I retraced my steps. I had bought extra batteries and a can of oil in town earlier, and I was taking no chances on having my light fade out in the middle of some dark hole. Then I went back to the passage.

This time the door at the other end opened without difficulty. My errand that afternoon had taken me to Schmidt’s room. His door was locked, but, as I had expected, my key opened it. Those locks were a joke. I assumed that the old ones had been ripped out and sold. If they were like the beautiful handmade antique locks I had seen in museums, they had been valuable. The Grafin hadn’t missed much.

Naturally I couldn’t give the Burckhardt-Schmidt apartment the careful search it demanded during the day, with people wandering the halls and servants popping in and out. My aim was to clear the secret entrance so I could come and go in the small hours.

Since I knew where the passage ended, it didn’t take me long to locate the sliding panel and figure out how it worked. The mechanism was a variation of the carved rosette pattern in the Great Hall. It controlled a bolt instead of a handle; the door could be locked, but only from the inside.

I confess that bolt amused me. A tyrant, medieval or modern, needs all the locks and bolts he can get. But since one branch of the passageway ended in the bedchamber of the Countesses Drachenstein . . . Marriage was as perilous in those days as it is today.

In the still hours of the night the unoccupied chamber had an uneasy atmosphere. It didn’t feel abandoned. Too many Drachensteins had breathed their last in the carved, canopied bed. It may have been a trick of my imagination, but I almost fancied I could see a depression the size and shape of a human body in the smooth counterpane.

I wedged a chair under the door handle before I got to work. Schmidt was safely locked up in the local hospital, but that didn’t make me feel safe. He might be the villain who had engineered some of the supernatural games, but he couldn’t have played the star role of the Black Man. Some source of malice was still on the loose, and I didn’t want it interrupting me.

By this time I was becoming an expert on secret panels. It took me only a few minutes to find another carved rosette. The old craftsman hadn’t been very imaginative about that device, but maybe he had to select a design his dim-witted patrons could remember. The mechanisms controlled by the rosette were varied and ingenious; this one opened a panel rather than a door. It was only a couple of feet square, and its outlines were cleverly concealed by carved mouldings that were part of the design of the panelling.

The count’s wall safe was a single block of dressed stone that slid out of the wall like a drawer. I knew right away I hadn’t found the shrine; the stone was only half a metre high. I lowered it to the floor and thrust my hand into the cavity in its top.

I touched some small brittle objects that felt like twigs. I shone my light down into the stone drawer and jerked my hand back with a snort of disgust. The brittle twigs were rodent bones – the remnants of a battalion of long-dead rats.

The bottom of the drawer was covered with scraps of chewed parchment and paper. I cursed the rat bones and selected a few scraps which were big enough to offer some hope of decipherment. Then I removed the only other object the drawer contained: a small chest, made of wood and bound with silver.