Borrower of the Night - Elizabeth Peters [27]
‘The count and his lady dined there,’ Tony muttered, looking at the dais. ‘Their sleeping quarters were behind the screen. Rushes underfoot, and the dogs fighting over table scraps . . .’
‘Gracious living,’ I agreed. ‘According to the guidebook, this place was abandoned long before fifteen twenty-five. It wouldn’t be a bad spot to hide something.’
Tony shook his head.
‘It may have been abandoned as living quarters, but I’ll bet it was still in use as a guard tower. Anyhow, if I were the count, I’d prefer to have my valuables closer at hand, so I could keep an eye on them. Way out here – ’
He stopped speaking. He was opposite one of the window slits, and a narrow shaft of sunlight lay across the section of the floor at which he was staring.
‘What – ’ But I didn’t have to finish the question. I saw them too – footprints, clearly marked in the thick dust. The footprints of a man – a big man.
Tony knelt down. He thumped the floor with his fist, and sneezed as a cloud of dust enveloped his head.
‘If anything has been hidden under these boards, I’ll eat it,’ he announced, between sneezes. ‘Feel them. You’d expect wood so old to be rotten and crumbling, but these boards are practically petrified.’
I joined him on the floor. As my fingers touched the rock-hard surface of the wood, I felt weighted down by the sheer overwhelming age of the place.
‘They wouldn’t have been this hard four hundred years ago,’ I said.
‘That’s not what I meant. Look at the construction of the floor. There’s only one thickness of wood – each plank is a foot thick, sure, but there’s no space for a hiding place in between them. The beams in the ceiling below support these planks.’
‘How big is the shrine, anyhow?’
‘No dimensions were given.’ Tony went to the wall and thumped ineffectually at the stones. ‘But I should think it would have to be a metre or so high. Maybe bigger.’
Okay, I thought to myself; if you don’t want to talk about those footprints, we won’t talk about them. And I won’t mention the light I saw here last night. For all I knew, it might have been Tony who had carried that light, and this expedition might be a blind, to convince me of the futility of the Wachtturm as a hiding place. I watched Tony idiotically bruising his hands on impenetrable stone, and winced. If he had come here alone in the small hours of the night, I had to admire his nerve. The place was sinister enough in broad daylight. I tried to remember how much time had elapsed between my seeing the light, and leaving my room. I couldn’t estimate accurately. Tony might have had time to get back from the keep and accost me in the corridor.
Tony turned from the wall.
‘These stones look solid to me. We’d have to demolish the place to make sure nothing was hidden here.’
‘So why are we wasting our time?’
‘Let’s have a look at the top floor, just in case.’
I got to the stairs ahead of him. When I came out onto the next floor, I stopped short, swaying with a sudden attack of vertigo. There was no top floor. The roofless walls were waist high at some points; mostly there was no wall at all, only a sudden drop into the thorny brambles far below. The view across the green valley was sensational, but I didn’t linger to look at it. I backed cautiously towards the stairs, and Tony went with me. It was unnecessary to speak; there was no hiding place up there.
When we were out in the sunlight again, Tony drew a deep breath.
‘That takes care of that. The Schloss is the place for us.’
‘It’s so damned big. Where do we start looking?’
‘I think more research is indicated.’
‘You just want to sit around and read books,’ I said unreasonably. ‘I want to do something. Even if we don’t know where Burckhardt’s room was, there are other possibilities. The crypt, for instance – ’
‘How do you know there is a crypt?’
‘There’s a chapel.’
‘Okay, I’ll give