I was tempted to linger; it was rather flattering to be taken for a lady spy.
The streets of the old town were silent under the moon. Shadows clung to the deep doorways and gathered under the eaves. I was in no mood to appreciate it. The past had come alive, but it had not brought the scent of romance or high adventure, only a dirty, ugly tragedy that would not die.
Nobody said anything till we got back to the Schloss. I was heading blindly for the door that would eventually lead to my beautiful bed when two hands caught at my arm. The hands belonged to two different people, but they moved with a unanimity that verged on ESP.
‘Sit here,’ said Tony, indicating a bench in the garden.
‘Talk,’ said Blankenhagen.
‘I suppose it can’t wait till morning?’ I yawned.
‘I can’t wait till morning.’ Tony sat me down and took his seat beside me. Blankenhagen sat down on my other side. I hunched my shoulders, feeling closed in.
‘Also dann, sprich.’ Blankenhagen was too absorbed to realize he had abandoned the formal third-person plural and was addressing me with the familiar form. ‘How did you know that a man dead for half a millennium had been poisoned with arsenic?’
I started out with a complete account of the story of the shrine, for the doctor’s benefit. I was pretty sure by then of Blankenhagen’s innocence, but it didn’t really matter; if he was guilty, he already knew, and if he didn’t know, it would not hurt to tell him.
Blankenhagen listened without comment He didn’t have to say anything; his reactions were mirrored in his face, which I could see fairly well in the moonlight. I stressed the fact that we had no leanings towards larceny. If and when we found the shrine, we intended to hand it over to Irma.
‘But we got distracted,’ I went on. ‘From the first day I walked into this place, I kept losing track of the shrine in my preoccupation with the people who had been involved with it back in fifteen twenty-five. Irma’s uncanny resemblance to her ancestress was one reason for my interest, but it was more than that; as time went on, these people came alive for me. Konstanze and her tragic death; the steward, who had been foully murdered; and the count, Burckhardt.
‘He was no worse than many of his peers, but he was not an appealing character. Nothing we learned about him made him any more attractive – his defence of the autocratic bishop, his participation in the torture of Riemenschneider, his murder of the steward. All these things were perfectly in character – as we saw his character. I was prejudiced against him from the start, and my prejudice kept me from seeing the truth.’
Tony’s face relaxed into a half smile as he listened. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that I was also prejudiced against Burckhardt because he was a lousy male. Konstanze was a woman – intelligent, repressed, and persecuted. I would automatically take her part.
It was quite true. But there was no need to say so.
‘I was also biased,’ I continued, ‘by our modern view of the witchcraft persecution. We know witchcraft was nonsense. The countess’s trial was a repetition of the classic features – the curse, the evil eye, the Black Man who came on cloven hooves to lie with his mistress. Bilge, all of it – familiar from dozens of historical cases, but still bilge.
‘But in one sense the witchcraft trials were not nonsense. Many of the victims believed. Most were innocent, forced into false confessions by the agony of the torture. But enough of them went to the stake swearing eternal loyalty to their Dark Master to assure us that the belief was genuine. Witches and warlocks really did try to render cattle and people infertile, cause storms, kill and curse. They failed to do evil, not through lack of intent, but through lack of power. And when supernatural means proved ineffective, they might turn to practical methods. One element in the witchcraft cult was the use of poison.’
Tony’s breath caught.
‘One of the oldest and most commonly used poisons is arsenic,’ I went on. ‘It’s mentioned by Roman authors, if I remember correctly, and in the thirteenth century the proporties of arsenicum were discussed by no other than Albertus Magnus. We found a copy of his well-known work in the library. I think I know now who owned it . . .’
I turned to Blankenhagen.
‘As a doctor, you know that there were no scientific tests for poison till the mid-nineteenth century. Maybe one of the reasons why arsenic was so popular is that the symptoms of arsenic poisoning are identical with those of certain gastrointestinal disorders. I read that in the same book that told me arsenic remains in the body – in the roots of the hair and under the nails – for an indefinite period of time. That’s why I thought we might have luck tonight.’
‘I have never heard of it after so long a time,’ said Blankenhagen. ‘But perhaps no one ever tried. Murders several hundred years old are not generally of interest to criminologists.’
‘Get on with it,’ said Tony, nudging me.
‘The other night I just happened to find myself in Burckhardt’s room.’
‘I knew it,’ said Tony. ‘I knew it . . . We’ll discuss that later. I suppose you tripped and fell and accidentally, not meaning to do any real searching, discovered a secret panel?’
‘I found a box,’ I said haughtily, ‘which contained a quantity of greyish powder. I didn’t think of arsenic at first. The colour put me off, for one thing. I think of arsenic, when I think of it at all, as white. Either the stuff was contaminated by dust and dirt, or it had been coloured, as commercial arsenic is, to keep people from mistaking it for salt or sugar.’
Blankenhagen interrupted.
‘What you found may not be arsenious oxide, the ‘white arsenic’ of popular fiction. Elementary arsenic is grey, metallic in structure. Upon exposure to air it takes on a darker colour and loses its lustre.’
‘You can look at it later, if you want to. It’s not important; most forms of arsenic are intensely toxic. It was not the colour of the powder that alerted me. It was something else altogether.
‘The hidden drawer where I found the box was littered with the bones of dead rats. They had gnawed their way into the box, and – curiosity killed a rat. Defunct rodents aren’t unusual, but it was extraordinary that so many of them should have chosen the hidden drawer as a place in which to die.
‘Dead rats . . . rat poison . . . arsenic . . . the witchcraft-poison complex. I guess that was the way my thoughts ran, but I wasn’t aware of the progression; it just seemed to hit me all at once. And with that came another thought. What if we had been looking at the tragedy of Count Burckhardt and his wife backwards? What if he was not the villain but the victim of a plot?
‘My first reaction was a violent negative. But the more I thought about this new theory, the more things it explained. My assumption of Konstanze’s innocence wasn’t logical. It was based on a number of emotional prejudices which I needn’t go into in detail.’
Tony snickered. I took the golden amulet from my pocket and handed it to him.
‘You weren’t exactly logical about Konstanze either,’ I reminded him. ‘And your emotional prejudices in her favour aren’t hard to understand. Take a look at this. I found it in the box with the arsenic. Then I remembered something you told me when we were discussing the witchcraft cult one time. I think it was the Burning Court affair, under Louis the Fourteenth, that set you off.’
‘Damn my big mouth all to hell and back,’ said Tony calmly. He handed the image to Blankenhagen, who was practically sprawled across my lap in his anxiety to see. ‘Probably of Moorish workmanship – possibly even older. I’ve seen something like it in an ethnological museum. So, when you saw the little frog god, you remembered the theory that the witchcraft cult was a survival of the old prehistoric nature religion.’