Castle Rouge (53 page)

Now…if only Bram had not so thoroughly lived up to his role of unflappable Englishman that he had fallen asleep!

After our realization that the drinking vessels used in Paris were also common to the inhabitants of the castle, or some of them, Godfrey and I had resolved that to stay was folly. Especially now that Bram was virtually a prisoner as well. If we could rouse Bram and get him to Godfrey’s room, we would be three.

So I waited on this end of the rope, hoping that soon both men would be making their way back to safety before we took an even greater risk in a bid for freedom.

What an eerie night it was! In the courtyard not visible from this part of the castle I could hear the distant wail of Gypsy violins. From the surrounding mountains came the piercing howls of wolves, sometimes singly, sometimes in chorus as they appeared to harmonize with the oddly human wailings of the Gypsy violins.

I thought of my treacherous lad among them and cast a Gypsy curse his way.

There must have been a mighty conflagration in the courtyard, a fire like that the Gypsies had careened around on
l’Exposition universelle
grounds only three weeks before. I could hear the flames beating like great bird wings and glimpsed a glow like dawn at the far bottom wall of the castle visible to me.

Apparently the smoke rose so high it disturbed the vermin in the turrets high above us, for there would come every so often a high keening chitter like a banshee, and I would look up to see a dark cloud burst forth against the lighter clouds of night and break into waves as hundreds of bats deserted their high perches to fan across the night sky.

This disturbance among the animals that haunt the dark made me even more uneasy. Some event of great moment seemed to be building to a climax all around us, as in a play. I, for one, had no intention of staying for the curtain call.

The rope jerked and then trembled and jerked again.

I watched its pale length until a pair of black-gloved hands came edging along it like crows. Then the full dark figure followed. Godfrey, at least, was making his perilous way back. Was Bram with him, or had he been unable to face this circus high-wire stunt in the dark? I could not blame the man, if so. That was a very high price to pay for being the friend of my friend, Irene Adler Norton.

Then I remembered the despicable Tatyana calling me “Miss Stanhope” in that snide, mocking tone and thought that I would harness wolves and bats if I had to in order to escape her.

Godfrey’s strained face was soon peering around the window frame, then he got his feet on the broad stone sill and leaped down into the room again.

“Bram?”

He jerked his head behind him and leaned out to assist our sturdy friend as he fought his way through a frame barely wide enough for him.

Bram sat for a moment on the sill, swinging his feet like a child and catching his breath. He withdrew his handkerchief and swabbed his brow.

“Was the journey too arduous for you?” I demanded anxiously. “It is a frightful distance down, and cold and dark against the castle stones, but the rope seems secure enough.”

Bram leaped down to the floor and stamped his booted feet on it.

“My toes were going numb in that wind, but that’s minor damage. I haven’t embraced sheer rock so hard since I encountered that rough bit of cliff-climbing in the Highlands. To answer your question, Miss Huxleigh, I am an enthusiastic hiker and a happy clamberer. I’m pleased as punch to do our murderous hostess out of a prisoner this night.”

He turned to Godfrey. “Why was the village priest introduced to you as a so-called Count?”

“I was supposedly sent here to deal with the Count who owned the castle and surrounding lands. It must have been a fabrication from the first. Hence the local priest, as the most educated Transylvanian at hand, was persuaded to sign and seal a property agreement I had drawn up. What puzzles me is why a legitimate priest would participate in such a charade.”

“That question is only one of many that have been at high boil around the village. The Gypsies have been pouring into the region and are gathering in the castle courtyard as if it were a Wild West powwow of Indian tribes. The lady who occupies the castle has drawn many servitors from the Gypsies and many from the young folk of the village. Why this ruined castle is now bustling with so much activity is the greatest mystery of all, although the villagers like the money that flows from her coffers to theirs.”

Bram Stoker finished his analysis by glancing at me in puzzlement. “Your garb at dinner was charmingly atypical, Miss Huxleigh, but your costume now quite confuses me.”

I had become hardened to unconventional dress and so glanced at myself in reminder. It was indeed a “costume.” I had borrowed a pair of Godfrey’s trousers and suspenders and rolled up and basted the pant legs to suit my height and incidentally to reveal my gaudy Gypsy boots. I found the loose blouse and corselet too comfortable to relinquish, for Godfrey’s jackets had proven far too roomy for me to wear.

“Our only way to freedom is by the rope,” I said. “I will not remain behind while you and Godfrey climb down to another entrance into the castle and seek to return in order to free me. I have already been accosted twice by a madman in my own chamber and do not intend to remain here alone.”

Godfrey reported the most recent, forcible ejection of Medved. After that, there was no argument nor further comment on my mode of attire.

Of course I was far more worried about my attempted feat than I would say. My hands, abraded by the task of tearing apart the bed linens, were not entirely healed. While they were useful for most daily tasks, I could not say that the strain of using them to cling to the rope would not try them beyond my ability to hold on. And I have never been the sort fond of heights. Even leaning over the window sill, solid stone two feet thick that it was, made me slightly giddy.

Confessing such weaknesses would only hamper my gentlemanly companions’ own efforts to save themselves. I would simply have to go through with it. Irene would imagine herself some dashing mountaineer and embrace the courage that went with the role. I had no such training, and no such convenient capacity for imagination.

My imagination was wont to dwell on the great height, the biting wind, the overwhelming dark, the impossible distance, the likelihood of there being something rotten in the weave of my rope that would suddenly unravel thread by thread until, with a shriek of fiber from fiber to rival the howling of a lone and starving wolf, the rope would give, and we would all plunge to our battering death upon the rocks below like so many sailors whose ship had shattered into toothpicks beneath them…. There, that was a sufficiently dire example of an imagination gone berserk.

Perhaps it would help if I imagined Tatyana and her henchman Medved only feet behind us on the castle wall, crawling after us like loathsome spiders or lizards. But such a vivid picture might make me hasty, and instead of being goaded to greater efforts, my grip would slacken, my feet slip, and I would go crashing to a slow, bruising, tumbling death below like a rock cast loose from some alpine peak and jostled until it dispersed into tiny bits thousands of feet below….

Perhaps I should not try to use my imagination at all.

“We will link ourselves together,” Godfrey was decreeing, having been studying the practicalities of our attempt while my imagination was running amok. “There will be enough give between us that we won’t hamper each other’s motion.”

“And if one should slip?” I asked. “Myself, for instance.”

“Oh, that,” said Bram Stoker quickly. “You are such a light weight that we will hardly notice, and will haul you back up directly.”

“And if you should slip?”

Bram hesitated not a moment in drawing a clasp knife from his pocket. “I will cut the rope.”

“I have no knife,” Godfrey complained.

Only a man would compete in means of noble self-destruction.

“Besides,” he added. “That would only save us if you went first. I have made this climb before, so I should lead.”

“There’s only one sensible order,” Bram said. “Miss Huxleigh must go last, because if either or both of us fall and we must cut the rope, she will still be fixed to an anchor. You must go second, as if you slip I am strong enough to draw you back up. I will be first because my greater weight makes me a liability, and I can cut myself loose if necessary. But it will not be necessary, my friends! You will be behind me and can advise me on the route. What could be simpler?”

“Breaking our way through a door and finding some stairs,” I put in.

“Have you taken note of the thickness of these doors?” Godfrey asked.

I had, and our climbing expedition was by far the quieter escape…unless one or all of us fell and then our voices would no doubt join the howls of the wind and the wolves and the screech of the bats and the Gypsy violins.

So we queued up at the window and looped my handiwork around each of our midsections in the order decided upon while Godfrey secured the end of the rope around the stone support pier of the window as before.

Would it hold three where it had one before? Time would tell.

Bram Stoker shook hands solemnly with each of us and climbed upon the sill. I had the strangest feeling that matters of relationship or sex or size or age made no matter here. We were embarked on a common enterprise, and each must trust in some measure to the other’s ability. I was the hidden and industrious spider who had woven the thread so slender and yet so strong upon which we all would hang. Bram was the experienced climber who would lead us, as fate allowed, or sacrifice himself should he as leader lose his purchase. Godfrey was the desperate but courageous amateur who had forged the trail alone and now would guide others in his successful footsteps.

The rope pulled as Bram let himself over the sill to the wall and the first foothold Godfrey had mentioned. It felt like a tug on my heartstrings. Then Godfrey was up on the sill and pulling me up beside him.

“For France and St. Denys!” he said with a swashbuckling grin.

“For England and St. George!” I retorted, too annoyed to gasp when he lowered himself out of sight. For France and St. Denys indeed! I pushed his leather gloves more tightly over my knuckles and turned to lower myself over the sill and down along the wall. It seemed a length of twenty feet before my toes touched the ledge he had mentioned.

But it was there, and quite wide enough for my footprint. I edged along, keeping my eyes on Godfrey’s dark form ahead of me, barely seeing Bram’s hulk in the darkness beyond.

I couldn’t help thinking of three blind mice.

The wind was not strong, but it was sharp, and my eyes soon watered, an unexpected handicap.

Still, Godfrey called out the hallmarks of the route: the decorative stone that protruded, the fissure that bridged to the next ledge. We made our slow, painstaking crablike way across and down the face of the ancient stones.

The inching movement became so routine I felt like lava flowing. My feet followed Godfrey’s every instruction, and I heard him guiding Bram ahead of him as well.

Tears were streaming down my face, but it mattered more what I felt than what I saw, and my hands and feet scraped along the stone as if attached to it.

Then, just as I believed I had attained a stability and a rhythm, a sudden jerk on the rope at my waist pulled me away from the wall, feet and hands, like an invisible current of wind.

I swung out as if snatched by a demon.

Then hands grasped my waist and I was lifted. I sat on a stone sill in an open window and the solidity beneath me felt like sand, and I grew so hideously dizzy that I had to cling to Godfrey while he pulled my limp form fully inside the window.

I leaned against a stone wall so like the one I had clung to for so long outside, my knees weak and my arms trembling.

Godfrey untied me like a nanny tending a babe from the nursery.

He and Bram were busy at the window frame and when I finally collected myself to ask what they were about, they explained that they had swung the rope away to dangle from our deserted chamber.

“If our absence is discovered, they’ll think we climbed straight down to escape outside the castle.”

“Could we have done that?”

Bram shook his head. “The rope’s too short. Jumping loose would have killed us. Let them think our bodies are rotting on the rocks below,” he added with the gusto of a true teller of gruesome tales. “That gives us time to explore the lower regions that Godfrey thinks might lead to an exit.”

I did not mention that I had experienced my fill of lower regions in Paris.

My full sleeves had been judged the handiest carrier of candles, so I struggled to extract three of my supply from Medved’s deserted candelabra from the narrow cuffs at my wrists.

Godfrey lit each one with a lucifer, and we moved through the massive chamber led by our personal fireflies of light. Our every step, no matter how soft, ground slightly on the stone floors unrelieved by carpets. Our progress sounded like the slither of some large snake.

We passed through two huge doors, both ajar so we didn’t have to worry about creaking hinges, and into the dark tunnel of a hall.

All we could hear was the scrape of our footwear and the rustle of our clothing…and perhaps our own breathing. I had never before felt like such a scuttling, hidden insect and grew to appreciate their courage in venturing into vast buildings to find a crumb of sustenance.

“Stairs,” Godfrey whispered, turning to us.

We each huddled against the nearest wall and cast our candlelight down as best we could.

Our gloved fingertips clinging to the surface that grew disturbingly slick the further we progressed, we inched downward.

Every moment I expected to take that final step that resulted in the jolt of level floor again, but down and down we went, and there was no level ground.

The silence had grown so intense that it became a kind of sound, a hollow, rushing emptiness like the passage of an invisible wind. Or…invisible spirits.

I thanked the season for being spring, rather than All Hallows Eve, then recalled something about another pagan festival day, Midsummer’s Eve. Could that be near? All I could think of was May poles. And rats and mice. And ghosts. So in my mind rats and mice and ghosts danced around a grisly maypole crowned by an impaled severed head. I shut my eyes in the dark to banish the image.