Borrower of the Night: The First Vicky Bliss Mystery

Synopsis:

Meet art historian Vicky Bliss, She is as beautiful as she is brainy — with unassailable courage, insatiable curiosity, and an expertise in lost museum treasures that often leads her into the most dangerous of situations.

A missing masterwork in wood, the last creation of a master carver who died in the violent tumult of the sixteenth century, may be hidden in a medieval German castle in the town of Rothenburg. The prize has called to Vicky Bliss, drawing her and an arrogant male colleague into the forbidding citadel and its dark secrets. But the treasure hunt soon turns deadly. Here, where the blood of the long forgotten damned stains ancient stones, Vicky must face two equally perilous possibilities. Either a powerful supernatural evil inhabits this place. . . or someone frighteningly real is willing to kill for what Vicky is determined to find.

BORROWER of the NIGHT

ELIZABETH PETERS

The first book in the Vicky Bliss series

Copyright © 1973 by Elizabeth Peters

For Betty and George
who don’t believe
in ghosts either

Foreword

As all lovers of Rothenburg will realize, I have had the temerity to add Schloss Drachenstein to the genuine attractions of the town. Like all the characters in this book, the Counts and Countesses of Drachenstein are wholly fictitious and bear no resemblance to any persons living or dead. Equally fictitious, sad to say, is the legend of the Riemenschneider shrine. Apart from this single aberration, the sculptor’s life and works were as I have described them.

One

WHEN I WAS TEN YEARS OLD, I KNEW I WAS never going to get married. Not only was I six inches taller than any boy in the fifth grade—except Matthew Finch, who was five ten and weighed ninety-eight pounds—but my IQ was as formidable as my height. It was sixty points higher than that of any of the boys—except the aforesaid Matthew Finch. I topped him by only thirty points.

I know—this isn’t the right way to start a narrative, if I hope to command the sympathy of the reader. A narrator should at least
try
to sound modest. But believe me, I’m not bragging. The facts are as stated, and they are a handicap, not a cause for conceit. If there is anything worse than being a tall girl, it is being a tall
smart
girl.

For several years my decision didn’t give me much pain. I wasn’t thinking seriously of marriage in the fifth grade. Then I reached adolescence, and the trouble began. I kept growing up, but I grew in another dimension besides height. The results were appalling. I won’t quote my final proportions; they call to mind one of those revolting Bunnies in
Playboy
. I dieted strenuously, but that only made matters worse. I got thin in all the right places and I was still broad where, as the old classic says, a broad should be broad.

Mind you, I am still not bragging. I am not beautiful. I admire people who are slender and fine-boned and aesthetic-looking. The heroine of my adolescent daydreams had a heart-shaped face framed in clouds of smoky black hair. She was a tiny creature with an ivory complexion and a rosebud mouth. When she was enfolded in the hero’s brawny arms, her head only reached as high as his heart.

All my genes come from my father’s Scandinavian ancestors—big blond men with rosy cheeks and blazing blue eyes. They were about as aesthetic-looking as oxen. That’s what I felt like—a big, blond, blue-eyed cow.

The result of this was to make me painfully shy. I suppose that seems funny. Nobody expects a bouncing Brunhild to be self-conscious. But I was. The intelligent, sensitive, poetic boys were terrified of me; and the ones that weren’t terrified didn’t want to talk about poetry or Prescott. They didn’t want to talk at all. Rubbing my bruises, I became a confirmed misandrist. That attitude left me lots of time in which to study. I collected degrees the way some girls collect engagement rings. Then I got a job as a history instructor at a small Mid-western college which, in view of what is to follow, had better be nameless. It was there I met Tony. Tony teaches history too. He’s bright; very bright. He is also six feet five inches tall, and, except for his height, he rather resembles Keats in the later stages of consumption.

I met Tony on the occasion of the first departmental faculty meeting. I was late. Being late was a mistake; I hate walking the gauntlet of all those male eyes. There was one other woman present. She looked the way I wanted to look—thin, dark, and intellectual. I smiled hopefully at her and received a fishy stare in return. Most women take an instant dislike to me. I can’t say I don’t know why.

I spotted Tony amid the crowd because of his height. There were other things worth noticing—big brown eyes, broad shoulders, and black hair that flopped over his forehead and curled around his ears. His face was fine-boned and aesthetic-looking. At that moment, however, it had the same expression that was on all the other male faces, except that of Dr. Bronson, the head of the department. He had interviewed me and had hired me in spite of my measurements. I’m not kidding; it is a common delusion, unshaken by résumés and grades, that a woman with my proportions cannot have anything in her head but air.

I sat down with an awkward thump in the nearest chair, and several men gulped audibly. Dear old Dr. Bronson smiled his weary smile, brushed his silvery hair back from his intellectual forehead, and started the meeting.

It was the usual sort of meeting, with discussions of schedules and committees and so on. After it was over I headed for the door. Tony was there ahead of me.

I don’t remember how he got me out of the building and into the Campus Coffee Shoppe, but I have never denied he is a fairly smooth talker. I remember some of our conversation. I hadn’t encountered a technique quite like his before.

The first thing he said was,

“Will you marry me?”

“No,” I said. “Are you crazy?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of love at first sight?”

“I’ve heard of it. I don’t believe in it. And if I did, love and marriage don’t necessarily go together.
Au contraire
.”

“So beautiful and so cynical,” said Tony sadly. “Doesn’t my honorable proposal restore your faith in my sex?”

“It merely reinforces my impression that you are crazy.”

“Look at it this way.” Tony put his elbows on the table. The table wasn’t very clean, but neither were Tony’s elbows; I deduced that this pose was characteristic. “All my life I’ve been looking for my ideal woman. I’m pushing thirty, you know; I’ve had time to think about it. Beauty, brains, and a sense of humor, that’s what I want. Now I know you’re intelligent or old Bronson wouldn’t have hired you. He’s above the sins of the flesh, or thinks he is. You are obviously beautiful. Your sense of humor—”

“Ha,” I said. “You deduced that from the twinkle in my eye, I suppose.”

Tony cocked his head and considered me seriously. A lock of black hair fell over his left eyebrow.

“Is that a twinkle? It looks more like a cold, steely glint. No, I’m willing to take the sense of humor on trust.”

“You’d be making a mistake. I am not amused. And even if I were amused, I wouldn’t marry you. I’m not going to marry anyone. Ever.”

“If you prefer that arrangement,” said Tony, with a shrug.

So it went, for most of the winter. The demoralizing thing about Tony was that he wasn’t kidding. He really did want to get married. That didn’t surprise me; any man with a grain of sense knows that marriage is the only way, these days, to acquire a full-time maid who works twenty-five hours a day, with no time off and no pay except room and board.

Naturally Tony wouldn’t admit to these motives. He kept babbling about love. He couldn’t help it. His background was hopelessly conventional. He came from a big jolly family out in the Bible Belt, with a fat jolly mother and a tall, thin jolly father—he showed me their pictures, which he kept on his desk. That shows you what he was like. He was crazy about his parents. He even liked his brothers and sisters, of whom there seemed to be an indeterminate number. He had a half-ashamed and inarticulate desire for children of his own. Oh, his ostensible motives were admirable—and his attractions were considerable. To say we were physically compatible is to put it mildly, but that wasn’t all; we had a hundred interests in common, from European history to basketball. (He had been the star of his high school team, and so had I.) He shared my passion for medieval sculpture, and he was crazy about old Marx Brothers movies. I couldn’t imagine finding anyone I liked better. But I didn’t weaken.

“Why not?” Tony demanded one day. It was a day in January or the beginning of February, and he was getting exasperated. “Damn it, why not? Are you down on marriage just because it’s out of fashion? I didn’t think you were so conventional!”

“That has nothing to do with it. I’m not against marriage
per se
. I’m against it for me. I’m not going to get married. Why the hell do I have to repeat it every other day? I think I’ll make a tape.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“What, the tape? It would save the wear and tear on my vocal cords. Now listen, Tony—” I put my elbows on the table, and then removed them; I was certainly not going to imitate his vulgar habits. “Your attitude is a perfect illustration of the reason why I don’t intend to marry. I state a point of view, and you attack it. You don’t listen, you don’t try to understand, you just say—”

Tony said it.

“Obscenities will get you nowhere,” I said. “My feelings are a fact, not a personal delusion. They are valid for me. What business have you got trying to tell me how I ought to feel? You think you want an intellectual wife, who can discuss your work with you. But it wouldn’t last. After awhile you’d start expecting apple pie instead of articles, and then you’d want me to quit work, and if I got promoted and you didn’t, you would sulk, and then if we had a baby you wouldn’t get up in the middle of the night and change its dirty diapers—”

I stopped, not because I had finished my monologue, but because Tony wasn’t listening. His elbows were on the table, his face was hidden in his hands, and he was laughing so hard that the table shook.

Since he wasn’t looking, I permitted myself a sour smile. So maybe it did sound funny. But the basic premise was sound. I knocked one of Tony’s elbows out from under him so that his chin splashed into his coffee cup, and that ended that discussion.

But it wasn’t the end of the argument. I could tell by the speculative gleam in Tony’s eye that for the first time he was really thinking about the problem. It was amusing to watch him ponder my hang-up, as he called it, as methodically as he would consider an abstract academic question. At least it was amusing until he came out with his conclusions.

We were at Tony’s apartment. He had built a fire in the fireplace and had carefully seated himself in a chair across from the couch where I was sitting. He hadn’t touched me all evening, which was enough of a change to make me wary. He sat there for a long time staring at me, and finally he said,

“I’ve figured it out.”

“Oh, have you?”

“Yes. What you need is to be dominated.”

“Is that right,” I said.

“That tough exterior is a defense,” Tony explained. “Underneath, you are looking for a stronger shoulder to lean on. But since you are a superior female, you need to be convinced that the male is even more superior.”

“All right,” I said, between my teeth. “You may be stronger than I am, you ape, but just try those gorilla tactics on me and you’ll get something you—”

“No, no, I’m not talking about anything as crude as physical domination. I intend to convince you of my intellectual superiority.”

“Ha, ha,” I said.

“You doubt that I am your intellectual superior,” Tony said calmly. “Of course you do. That’s your trouble.”

I bit back the yell of outrage that was right on the tip of my tongue. He wanted me to lose my temper; that would prove my emotional immaturity.

I leaned back on the couch, crossed my legs, and took a deep breath. Tony’s eyes glazed, but he didn’t move.

“And how,” I inquired, practicing deep breathing, “do you propose to convince me?”

Tony was a funny color. With some effort he dragged his eyes away from my torso and stared at the fire.

“I haven’t figured that out yet,” he admitted. “But I will.”

“Let me know when you do.” I fell back onto the couch, hands clasped behind my head. I kicked off one of my shoes. “Did I tell you I expect to have two articles published by the end of the year? How are you coming with the one you started last fall?”

That was too much. Tony growled and lunged. I was ready for him; I slid out from underneath and stood looking fondly down on him as he sprawled awkwardly across the couch.

“Since you are going to dominate me mentally, there’s no point in this sort of thing,” I said, slipping my foot back into my shoe. “Call me when you’re ready to start dominating.”

He was ready sooner than I expected.

It was one of those awful March days in the Midwest, when ice and snow and sleet seem doubly outrageous because they follow a few days of mild weather. Slogging along through the slush, I was not in my best mood, even though the evening ahead looked interesting. Tony was about to share one of his finds with me—a man, not a theory of history. Jacob Myers was one of the big wheels in our little town. Actually, he was the only wheel of any size. One of his ancestors had donated the land on which the university was built; the family automobile plant was the leading industry. The public library, the main street, and the park were all named after members of the clan. Having too much money (if that is possible) and a weakness for culture, Myers dispensed fellowships and research grants with a lavish hand. Oddly enough, one of the few faculty members who hadn’t profited from this generosity was Tony, though his father and Myers were lodge brothers, or something. I happened to know—though not from Tony—that he had even paid back the money Myers had loaned him to finish graduate school. Myers hadn’t liked that. My informant declared the old man used to light his cigars with Tony’s checks until Tony threatened to leave the town and the university.

I never said Tony lacked good qualities.

Anyhow, this was the night on which I was destined to meet the great man. And if he was inclined to throw any research money my way, I was fully prepared to accept it.

Tony should have picked me up that night, but that was one of his weapons in our not-so-unarmed cold war: no concessions to femininity, not even common politeness. If I wanted to be liberated, Tony’s manner implied, I could damned well be good and liberated. I had no intention of engaging in a vulgar debate on the subject; if he couldn’t see for himself that basic courtesy has nothing to do with sexual competition, I was not the girl to point it out. I would have picked
him
up if I had owned a car, on such a stinking wet, dreary night.