Deanna Raybourn - The Dead Travel Fast

I was conscious of my hand, flown to my throat, and I dropped it. “I am perfectly well, only startled. I thought I was quite alone in the tower, and I remembered the tales I have heard of bandits in these mountains.”

He did not smile at this absurdity. “And monsters in the castle? There are no bandits here, Miss Lestrange-at least not the sort who would dare to enter my castle uninvited. And you are not alone in the tower. My chamber is directly above yours.”

This piece of intelligence was both comforting and unsettling. Comforting because it was a relief to know that another human being rested within the sound of my voice should I have need of him; unsettling because it was the count. I knew not what to make of him, and as the only other inhabitant of this part of the castle, I fell even more within his power than I had realised.

Suddenly, he put out his hand. “Come with me, Miss Lestrange. I wish to show you something.”

I hesitated and he reached further. “There is no call for reluctance. I was not entirely honest. I do not wish to show you something. I wish to see something, and I would rather not be alone. Your presence would be of service to me, and I think you are too gracious to refuse your host,” he added with the slightest touch of imperiousness.

He waited, his hand outstretched. I thought of the revelations Cosmina had made about his character, his evil habits. I thought of them, and still I went, putting my hand willingly into his. His fingers clasped over mine and I felt a sense of completion, as if something I had not realised was lost had been restored to me. It was disturbing, for I knew my own intentions would be nothing to him or to me should he choose to ignore them. There was a powerlessness, a lassitude that came over me at his touch, and I knew it was madness to follow him.

But follow him I did, up the spiralling stairs to the upper floor. We entered his bedchamber and I gasped aloud, for this room was handsomer than any I could have imagined. The furnishings were lighter than those elsewhere in the castle-more graceful, though still decidedly masculine. The great bed was hung with dark blue velvet spangled with starry knots of silver thread fashioned to mirror the ceiling, although nothing could compare to the scene overhead. Arching above was the whole of the night sky rendered in countless shades of blue and black and violet, shading subtly from evening through midnight and into the first light of dawn. Each of the stars was carefully picked out in silver and gold, shimmering to magnificent effect in the dim light.

“It is extraordinary,” I breathed.

The count smiled. “This was my grandfather’s room. He had the ceiling painted to commemorate my birth.”

I must have looked quizzical, for he raised his arm and pointed. “This is the sky as it looked on the night of my birth. Each constellation, each star, precisely where it was when I first drew breath in this room.”

I spun slowly in a circle, taking in the heavens arching above me. “How? A painter surely would not know the location of the stars.”

“But my grandfather did. He made sketches and instructed the painters. Every detail was done to his exacting orders.”

I would have marvelled at the ceiling for hours but he moved to a little door set within the panelled wall and beckoned. “Come.”

I followed and we climbed another twisting stair, emerging into a workroom of sorts, fitted with a desk and bookshelves and a chest with great flat drawers for charts or maps. But the drawers were open, the contents spilling across the floor and the books had been dashed from the shelves, some of the spines broken. A variety of telescopes stood ranged in a corner, forlorn and forgotten, only the glitter of broken lenses betraying their wounded condition. The whole of the room was thickly veiled with dust and cobwebs, and the scrabbling in the walls spoke of mice.

The neglect was pitiable, for this room was far more decayed than any I had yet been shown, and the odour of mildew and mould was heavy in the air. The curtains hung rotting from their poles, the velvet shredded to ribbons.

The count muttered something under his breath, an imprecation from the sound of it. There was no light save the candle he carried, but even by that feeble flame it was possible to see both the decay of the room and his anguish.

“Was this your grandfather’s room?” I asked softly. My voice seemed odd and unnatural in that place, an intrusion against an atmosphere thick with ghosts.

“Yes. He was one of the foremost amateur astronomers in Europe in his day. From this tower he studied the stars and wrote scientific papers. He corresponded with some of the greatest minds. He even discovered a comet. And this is all that remains of his work,” he finished, his features twisted by anger.

His bitterness was not to be wondered at. I remembered the care with which I had treated my own grandfather’s things after his death. It had been my last service to him, and it would have been a desecration to the man himself to treat his books and papers with disrespect.

“I suppose the maids did not secure the room and the elements and perhaps wild creatures have wreaked havoc.”

He gave a mirthless laugh, scorning my simple explanation. “This is not the work of a forest animal, my dear Miss Lestrange. This was deliberate.” His voice fell then; what he said next was barely audible, rendered in a harsh whisper and-I was quite certain-not directed to me. “You cannot be rid of him, even as I cannot be rid of you.”

The remark was a cryptic one, but if I did not understand what had happened in this place, at least I knew why he had urged me to accompany him. He had feared this and not wanted to learn the worst of it alone. He had needed me, and I understood that he needed me still. It is a powerful and intoxicating thing to a woman when a man has need of her, and in that moment I put aside much of what Cosmina had revealed. His habits might have been unsavoury, but he was not so vicious as she had painted him if he still cared so deeply for a beloved grandfather’s memory.

“It can be put right,” I said calmly. “The books may be mended and the papers sorted. I suppose those are star charts there upon the floor. They want only to be pressed with an iron, barely heated, and they will come right. The curtains are quite beyond repair, but I daresay you can find others. As for the telescopes-” I went to them, peering closely through the gloom and picking carefully amongst the rubble “-this one seems to have escaped the damage.”

I retrieved the smallest of the instruments and placed it into his hands. The lenses were unbroken, the body of the telescope damaged only by a single long scratch. He turned it over in his hands, his expression inscrutable.

“This was his gift to me when I was twelve years old. I never took it when I travelled because there was no better place to see the stars than here, he always said,” the count told me, his voice low. He seemed calmer then, his anger banked but not diminished.

He glanced to the window, and the starlight I had seen from my room must have beckoned him, for he went to an iron ladder I had not noticed and pulled hard upon it. Satisfied that it was firmly fixed to the wall, he pocketed the telescope and began to climb towards a door in the ceiling above.

“When I have opened the trap, I will come back and help you up,” he promised. I heard a great metallic clang, and before I could refuse he had swarmed back down, agile as a monkey, and taken my hand.

“Put your hand here and your foot upon this,” he instructed. I did as he bade me-slowly for I was hampered by my heavy skirts-and soon emerged onto an open platform bound by a stone battlement that stood just higher than my waist. It was a precarious place to stand, for the tower’s conical roof rose high and pointed from the centre and our perch was the narrow footing at the base of it. But it felt as if we had climbed to the top of the world, and I looked about in wonderment. As far as the eye could see, the dark shadows of the Carpathians rippled in peaks and valleys, shrouded in forest and faintly lit with starlight. Above us the vault of the cold black sky stretched to eternity, the stars scattered over it in thousands of pinpricks of light.