‘Must I account for it? “There are more things in heaven and earth,” as your poet so cleverly puts it.’
‘Rrrr,’ said Tony He turned the growl into a cough. ‘I would be more willing to admit the supernatural if there were some quasi-logical reason for a haunting. Even a spectre has to have a raison d’être. You surely know the classic explanations – unexpiated crime, for instance.’
‘How clever!’ exclaimed the Gräfin. ‘;But what of innocence abused and unavenged? Konstanze was falsely accused – ’
‘Naturally.’
‘Yes, we moderns know the folly of the witchcraft persecution. Yet her fate was not surprising. She was a learned woman who had been educated by a family priest in her home near Granada. His lessons apparently gave her ideas which were, in that day, dangerously heretical. It is said that she was in commumcation with Trithemius, at Würzburg.’
‘That must be apocryphal,’ Tony said. ‘Trithemius died in fifteen sixteen. But that doesn’t account for the lady’s restlessness. She can’t be worried about her reputation; we know she was innocent. And I’m afraid we’re in no position to punish her persecutors, or give her Christian burial.’
He looked at his hostess with the candid wide-eyed stare that had brought out the motherly instinct in many middle-aged ladies. I could have told him it wouldn’t work; the Gräfin had about as much maternal instinct as a guppy. She smiled gently.
‘It is very mysterious.’
After she left, Tony and I discussed the interview. We agreed on one thing: the Gräfin almost certainly knew about the shrine. One of the most common motives assigned to restless spirits is their desire to tell their descendants where the gold is buried. The Gräfin must have been familiar with the whole corpus of supernatural literature; her failure to mention this point was significant.
‘She knows,’ I summarized, ‘but she doesn’t know where. If she had the shrine, she’d throw us out of here. She has every excuse; our snooping has been outrageous.’
‘I don’t know.’ A visit from the Gräfin always depressed Tony. ‘She might let us stay on just for the fun of watching us stumble around. We must look pretty ridiculous, and her sense of humour is decidedly macabre.’
‘She couldn’t risk it,’ I argued. ‘If we find the shrine, we’ll turn it over to Irma – unless Elfrida can lift the loot before we make the discovery public. She’d have to silence us, in that case. Why should she take such a chance unless she had to? I’m sure she hasn’t found it. Not yet.’
Tony looked more cheerful.
‘I guess you’re right. Shall we have a look at Burckhardt’s room?’
‘Right now?’
‘Right now. No more roaming by night. That’s when all the kookie things happen.’
‘Okay,’ I said agreeably.
But when we reconnoitered, we found Schmidt’s room occupied by a buxom chambermaid who was scrubbing the floor. It was clear that the process would take some time, so we retreated. I tried to console Tony – not, of course, by telling him I had already searched the room – but by pointing out an unpalatable fact that had just occurred to me.
If the Gräfin knew about the shrine, she had certainly searched Burckhardt’s room and all the other obvious hiding places. She wasn’t stupid; if she had not located the shrine, it must be concealed in a more obscure spot than we had anticipated.
The idea didn’t cheer Tony much. It didn’t cheer me either. My reasoning was not invalidated by the fact that I had found the secret drawer. Its contents held no useful clue, and the Gräfin would have no reason to remove them. Perhaps the scraps of parchment and the mutilated bag had not even belonged to Burckhardt, but to one of his many successors or predecessors.
Since there was nothing else to do, we went sightseeing. By Tony’s definition, this activity includes frequent stops for liquid refreshment The drinking places of Rothenburg are all charming; you can guzzle beer or drink tea in dark, raftered rooms or sit in a cobblestoned square admiring the view. We tried both, and since we couldn’t decide which ambience was preferable, we tried both several times.
I suppose it was inevitable that we should end up at the Jakobskirche. With our chance of finding the shrine seeming even more remote, we were just torturing ourselves by visiting Riemenschneider’s altar, but we couldn’t keep away.
It is so beautiful that all the adjectives critics and art historians use seem inadequate. The dark wood glows. The bodies breathe, and are just about to move. The central carving depicts the Last Supper, at the moment when Christ makes the statement: ‘One of you shall betray me.’ You can see the effect of the words on every face.
I glanced at Tony, who was standing beside me. He never looked at me that way.
‘Come on,’ I said gruffly. ‘Let’s have another beer.’
We had several more beers before we went back to the Schloss, but the beverage didn’t have its usual effect on our spirits. I knew why I felt so uneasy. For the last thirty-six hours, there had been a strange absence of activity – not even a séance to disturb the peace. It was as if something were waiting for us to move. But it could not wait indefinitely.
I went to bed early that night. Tony gave me the usual lecture about staying in my room, but even that didn’t stimulate me. I had no plans for the night. I was, to use a classic phrase, baffled.
Once in bed I found I couldn’t sleep, or concentrate on the novel I had brought for light reading. The room was very quiet. The single lamp glimmered lonesomely in its restricted circle of light. But as I lay on the bed, smoking one cigarette after another in reckless defiance of every health regulation, I had never felt less sleepy. The sense of something waiting, a mounting pressure against my mind, grew steadily.
From where I lay I could hardly avoid staring straight into the painted eyes of the face that had become an unreasonable obsession. With just a little imagination I could sense a slender presence, just beyond the bounds of ordinary sight and sound, pressing on an invisible door, trying to come through, to tell me something . . .
I sat upright with a profane remark. Going to my suitcase, I took out the crumbling wooden box. Maybe if I tried some logical research on the fragments of parchment, it would brush the cobwebs from my brain.
But the scraps were hopeless. Only a word here and there was legible, and they were common words such as ‘have’ and ‘we.’ I couldn’t even find a name.
Absently I reached into my pocket and took out the small golden frog. I sat staring into the empty pop eyes as if they held some knowledge. And as I stared, the memory stirred again – the dark memory, like fragments of a childish nightmare . . .
My finger had dipped into the peculiar grey-black powder in the box. It was an odd substance, dusty but not dust. It was too coarse for dust, almost crystalline . . .
The monstrous idea struck me like a fist in the stomach. For several seconds I sat gaping down into the box, my finger buried to the end of the nail in the grey powder. When I realized what I was doing, I jerked it out and wiped it against the skirt of my robe.
‘It’s impossible,’ I mumbled.
But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. It distressed me horribly. It made me sick at my stomach. True or false, the bizarre theory should not have had such a strong emotional impact. It was only a side issue in any case, one which could never be settled.
That last thought was pure wishful thinking. Even as it formed in my mind, my inconvenient memory produced a paragraph from a book I had once read.