Elizabeth Peters - Borrower of the Night

We went up a flight of stairs to a gallery that ran around three sides of the hall. From this a door opened onto a corridor. On the stairs I tried to take one of the suitcases, and was promptly squelched; but I took no pleasure in the drag of the girl’s shoulders as she trudged ahead of me along the corridor into an intersecting passage. It was a relief when we finally reached the room she had selected for me.

The room was lit by a pair of tall windows that opened onto the west side of the castle grounds, a wilderness of tangled bushes and weeds. Also visible were the mouldering ruins of a structure older than the Schloss itself. It was, I decided, the original keep of the first castle ever built on the plateau; it had to be a thousand years old. I guess Americans are bemused by sheer age; the words dug into my mind and reverberated, awesomely. One thousand years . . . It looked its age. The top floor, or floors, were missing; the ruined walls were as jagged as rotten teeth. Beyond the keep, the ground dropped abruptly, in a series of steep steps, to a wooded and verdant valley half veiled by the mists of afternoon heat.

The view was the only good part of the room. Hilton would have turned faint. The brown stone walls were bare except for a few old paintings, which were so blackened by time that it was hard to see what they were meant to represent. The bed was modern; the pink spread and canopy were new, and their bright cheapness clashed badly with the dignified antiquity of the walls. An ugly green overstuffed chair and a cheap bedside table were also new. They were dwarfed by the dimensions of the room, which contained no other furniture except a flat kitchen-type table, a massive wardrobe which served as a closet, and a bureau with a load of chinaware. I viewed this last item morosely. I used to spend summers on a farm. I also noted, with a pessimistic eye, that the lamp on the bedside table was an oil lamp.

I turned to meet the eye of my guide. She had seen my negative reaction, and it pleased her; but she was rubbing her sore shoulders, and my sense of pity for small things – which includes so many things – overcame my annoyance.

‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘Delightful, Fräulein –er –may I ask your name?’

There was an odd little pause.

‘ Ich heisse Drachenstein ,’ she said finally. ‘Dinner is at seven, Fräulein .’

And out she went. She didn’t slam the door, but I think she would have done so if her arms hadn’t ached. The door was about eight inches thick and correspondingly heavy.

‘Drachenstein,’ I muttered, reaching for my suitcases at last. ‘Aha!’

She couldn’t be the present countess. From what I had learned, that lady was the widow of the former count, who had passed on some years earlier at the biblical age of three score and ten. Daughter? Niece? Poor relation? The last sounded most plausible; she was concierge and porter, and heaven knows what else.

I shrugged and walked over to the bed to start unpacking. Then my eye was caught by one of the dusty paintings which hung opposite the foot of the bed. For some reason the face – and only the face – had been spared the ravages of time. It stood out from the blurred canvas with luminous intensity. And as the features came into focus, I got the first shock of what was to be a week of shocks.

The face staring back at me, with an unnerving semblance of life, was the face of the girl who had just left. Under the picture, a label read: ‘Konstanze, Gräfin von und zu Drachenstein. 1505?–1525.’

Chapter Three

IT WOULD HAVE been fun to think I had been shown to my room by the family ghost, but after consideration I abandoned the idea. For some reason, the only logical alternative disturbed me almost as much as the ghost theory. Family resemblances like that do crop up, though I had never seen one quite so startlingly close. But it is distasteful to me to think that a random rearrangement of genes can duplicate me, or anyone else, at the whim of whatever power controls such things.

I unpacked, and then kicked off my shoes and lay down on the bed. It was surprisingly comfortable. I didn’t mean to doze off, but excitement and travel had tired me out. When I woke up, the sun was declining picturesquely behind the plateau and my stomach was making grumpy noises. It was almost seven. I didn’t meet a soul as I retraced my steps, through the Great Hall and across the courtyard. Apparently the rest of the guests had already gone to dinner. I was looking forward to that meal, and not only because of my hunger pangs. I had every expectation of seeing at least one familiar face.

The dining room had been one of the drawing rooms of the château wing. Its painted ceiling and plastered walls were extravagantly baroque, and not very good baroque. The westering sun, streaming in through floor-to-ceiling windows, freshed the gilt of the smirking naked cupids and cast a rosy glow over the shapes of pulchritudinous pink goddesses. At a table by the window, looking neither cherubic nor pulchritudinous was the person I had expected to see.

I approached, not with trepidation – because who was he, to resent my presence? – but with curiosity. I wasn’t sure how he was going to receive me.

He looked up when I stopped by his chair, and a broad grin split his face. Then I felt trepidation. I didn’t like the gleam in his eye. He looked smug. I wondered what he knew that I didn’t.

‘Greetings,’ I said. ‘I hope you have been saving a seat at your table.’

‘ Grüss Gott ,’ said Tony. ‘Let us use the local greeting, please, in order to show our cosmopolitan characters. Sure, I saved you a place. I knew you’d be along. What kept you?’

With a wave of his hand he indicated the chair next to his. I took it, without comment; if he wanted to continue the childish pattern of noncourtesy he had established back home, that was fine with me. I put my elbows on the table and studied him. No doubt about it: jaunty was the word for Tony.

‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.

‘Couple of days.’

‘You must have made good use of your time. What have you – ’

‘Quiet,’ said Tony, scowling. ‘Not now.’

He was trying to look like James Bond again. It’s that loose lock of hair on his brow. I didn’t laugh out loud because it was expedient to keep on good terms with him, for a time. I turned my head away and glanced around the room.

If the tables in the dining room were any guide, the hotel part of the Schloss wasn’t large, but it was doing a good business. There were a couple of dozen places laid, four to a table. Most of them were occupied.

‘Fill me in on our fellow guests,’ I said.

‘Two American high school teachers,’ Tony began, indicating a couple at the next table. ‘A German family from Hamburg – two kids. The honeymoon couple are French; the old miserable married couple are Italian. There are some U.S. Army types from Munich, and a miscellaneous bevy of Danes.’

‘You’ve been busy,’ I said, smiling at him. He looked pleased, the naïve thing.

‘The little fat guy who looks like Santa Claus without the beard is a professor,’ he went on complacently. ‘What he professes I don’t know; he keeps trying to corner me, but I’ve avoided him so far. The middle-aged female with the face like a horse is English. She’s a crony of the old countess’s.’

‘Old countess? Is there a younger one?’

‘You must have met her. If she wasn’t carrying your suitcases, she was scrubbing your floor. She does all the work around here.’

‘Her?’ I gasped ungrammatically.