Borrower of the Night - Elizabeth Peters [66]
‘We’ll have to see Würzburg,’ George said. ‘Maybe after we leave here. How much longer do you plan to stay, Vicky?’
‘I never make plans. I’m just a creature of impulse. Don’t let me interfere with your arrangements.’
Blankenhagen gave me an enigmatic look, and continued to be informative about Riemenschneider.
‘He was one of the councillors of Würzburg. During the Bauernkrieg, he and eleven other councillors supported the peasants, and when the nobles captured the town he was imprisoned.’
‘So he picked the losers,’ George said. ‘He got his, I suppose.’
Blankenhagen shifted in his chair.
‘They pierced his hands,’ he said. ‘Never again did he do a work of sculpture.’
‘Artists shouldn’t dabble in politics,’ George said. ‘He should have stuck to his last, or chisel, or whatever he used.’
I wanted to hit him with something – something hard. I consider myself unsentimental, but I could not have joked about an atrocity like that. What made it worse was that George wasn’t joking. He meant what he said.
‘He had at least the knowledge,’ snapped Blankenhagen, ‘that he suffered for a cause he believed was right.’
‘I wonder,’ said George, ‘if that was any satisfaction to him.’
We spent the evening in the lounge, yawning at each other. Tony was silent and rather peaked-looking. For the first time in too long I remembered his injury. I hadn’t even had the decency to ask how he felt. Feeling guilty, I let him escort me to my room when the witching hour of ten struck. If he had asked me nicely, I might even have agreed to stay there. But he didn’t ask. He told me.
‘Stay put tonight. That’s an order.’
I nodded. A reflexive movement is not binding legally.
The next two hours were difficult. I didn’t want to leave my room until I was sure Tony had fallen asleep. It would be just like him to check up on me. But I had a hard time keeping awake. I was short on sleep and long on tiring adventures.
Finally I barred my door and shoved the heavy cupboard away from the wall. As I started down the hidden stairs I noticed that the beam of my flashlight was getting dim, and I retraced my steps. I had bought extra batteries and a can of oil in town earlier, and I was taking no chances on having my light fade out in the middle of some dark hole. Then I went back to the passage.
This time the door at the other end opened without difficulty. My errand that afternoon had taken me to Schmidt’s room. His door was locked, but, as I had expected, my key opened it. Those locks were a joke. I assumed that the old ones had been ripped out and sold. If they were like the beautiful handmade antique locks I had seen in museums, they had been valuable. The Gräfin hadn’t missed much.
Naturally I couldn’t give the Burckhardt-Schmidt apartment the careful search it demanded during the day, with people wandering the halls and servants popping in and out. My aim was to clear the secret entrance so I could come and go in the small hours.
Since I knew where the passage ended, it didn’t take me long to locate the sliding panel and figure out how it worked. The mechanism was a variation of the carved rosette pattern in the Great Hall. It controlled a bolt instead of a handle; the door could be locked, but only from the inside.
I confess that bolt amused me. A tyrant, medieval or modern, needs all the locks and bolts he can get. But since one branch of the passageway ended in the bedchamber of the Countesses Drachenstein . . . Marriage was as perilous in those days as it is today.
In the still hours of the night the unoccupied chamber had an uneasy atmosphere. It didn’t feel abandoned. Too many Drachensteins had breathed their last in the carved, canopied bed. It may have been a trick of my imagination, but I almost fancied I could see a depression the size and shape of a human body in the smooth counterpane.
I wedged a chair under the door handle before I got to work. Schmidt was safely locked up in the local hospital, but that didn’t make me feel safe. He