The Adevarul de Cluj was the only paper which came with an English translation. ‘Holmes,’ I said with a chuckle, ‘listen to this: ‘Some Strange Happenings In Eastern Bohemia’.’
The article began, ‘A man’s skeleton discovered during excavations for a deep well in the village of Mikulovice may indicate the presence of a vampire coven. Fearing the deceased might return from the grave, he was sent on his final journey weighed down with a huge stone on his chest and another one on his head. “Only the bodies of people believed to be vampires were given such treatment,” reports a local priest.’
The story continued, ‘The site may be the world’s first burial place for the Undead, people who are believed to rise from the grave, walk once more on the Earth to prey on the living. All the skeletons showed tell-tale signs of anti-vampire rituals. Some were weighted down, others had a nail driven through their temple, or variously debilitated and their heads cut off and faced downward so they should not find their way back to the world of the living. These funerary rituals indicate the bodies were the remains of revenants in the eyes of the villagers.’
This was followed by the most chilling fact of alclass="underline" ‘Some of the whole bodies were buried facing down in the hope that when the time came for the vampire to rise it would dig with claws on its hands and feet ever-deeper downward into the earth.’
The article went on to report a very recent case in the Romanian village of Marotinul-de-Sus. When a woman fell ill for no apparent cause, the inhabitants smelt the presence of a moroi (vampire). Around midnight, several relatives of a recently-deceased man dug up his corpse, fearing he had become the vampire. They split open the ribcage, and removed his heart. This was burned, and the ashes given to the sick woman to drink in water to escape the vampire.
‘Holmes, what do you think of such goings-on?’ I asked with a further chuckle.
My companion failed to answer. Instead, he stared out at the landscape rushing by.
Chapter VI
THE MEETING AT THE IRON GATES
BY the second evening our train had entered mountainous territories. Hills, rocks and mountains piled one upon the other. The great fir forests stretched downwards to the very verges of cultivated fields in the lower valleys. We breathed the keen air and the balsamic odour of the pine trees. Green softened into sfumato. High peaks towered above us, etched by deep, fast-flowing rivers and avalanche-threatened passes that seemed uncrossable even as we wended our way through them. At one point ice-melt roared over a curving precipice into a vast cauldron, recalling the infamous Reichenbach Falls from whose black depths endless clouds of vapour rise. We looked out on the dainty green of the fresh spring spreading through the mountain meadows, and for contrast to the virgin white of the lingering winter above, the peaks now turning red with the light of a sun long dipped on us in our gorge below. The Continental spring had warmed the granite beneath the thin soil. Patches of colour were springing into being, like exotic quilts laid between moss-covered rocks - corn speedwell, rusty-red columbine, hart’s tongue, wild primula, violets, Lady’s Smock. A further profusion of white clover clothed the banks of glittering streams.
Another night went by. With a jolting of carriages we arrived at the river port of Orşova. The Orient Express leg of our journey was at an end.
Our boxes waited on board while the railway staff unloaded a live Cossack bear and several enormous panels of St. Petersburg. The station master approached us enquiring if we were ‘Milords anglais’. He handed over a message from Sir Penderel Moon. The British Legate was in the vicinity and wondered if we might find time to meet him within the hour. He would await us at nearby cataracts on the River Danube known as the Iron Gates. I went in search of a fly while Holmes ordered porters to transport our luggage to the harbour offices of the Austrian Danube steamship company.
Some thirty minutes later, the carriage deposited us at the fabled Iron Gates, as formidable a creation of Nature as the Reichenbach Falls. The waters rush through the narrow granite defile in sheets of glass-like transparency, the sound coming to us like a distant piano playing a repetitive but pleasant melody in the key of G. Spray rolled up like the smoke from a burning house. Incongruous in the forbidding setting, a small picnic party of men, elegant in Eton jackets, panama hats and pearl-grey gloves leapt across the spray-damp rocks like the wild goats of the Khyber Pass. Two or three of them carried telescopes. Their voices came to us on the slight breeze, unsettling cries of the profoundly deaf.
An isolated figure sat on a promontory staring down at the gleam of the boiling waters. He caught sight of us and clambered across the boulders towards us with the uncertain leaps of a male in middle age.
‘Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson, I presume,’ he said with a pleasing smile.
‘Your Excellency the British Legate, we presume?’ I replied on our behalf.
He held out his hand. ‘Yes. I apologise for interrupting your journey. I wanted to meet you before you travel on to Sofia. I understand you are undertaking a commission at the request of Prince Ferdinand.’
His voice dropped. ‘In the hope of recovering a certain missing treasure, I believe?’
I inclined my head with considerable misgiving. It would not help our investigation if the detail was already seeping through the Diplomatic Corps.
The Legate threw me an enquiring glance. ‘May I ask if you have brought your famous service pistol, Dr. Watson?’
‘I have, Sir Penderel,’ I responded, ‘but, as you appear to have heard, we are here to recover the Codex Zographensis, not to engage in shoot-outs.’
‘You might well assume that searching for an ancient manuscript is hardly a death-defying act, but you are entering the Balkans,’ the Legate replied. ‘The weaponry used by assassins in the Balkans may be highly valued among archaeologists and the British Museum but it can inflict savage wounds or death. Just over there,’ he pointed across the river to the Bulgarian frontier, ‘a deadly game is being played out. The Prince is at all times exposed to injury or death at the hands of a well-known Russian-backed assassin. You will be travelling at his side into the most remote plains and mountains of the whole of Europe.’
‘The Prince did tell us that - ’ I began.
‘And you took it as a little joke?’ Sir Penderel enquired gravely. ‘I beg you not to. The peril is a very real one. Assassinations are in fashion right across Europe - here a Russian Tsar, there a French President. Why not a Bulgarian Knyaz?’
The British Legate leaned closer. ‘A year ago, while the Prince attended a funeral service for a Bulgarian general - who had himself been assassinated - an infernal machine concealed in the roof exploded. More recently, a Palace chef put typhus germs into the royal soup, which made Ferdinand extremely ill. To greet the Prince’s return to Sofia this month, the Chief of the Russian Secret Police sent him an infernal machine disguised as a box of the finest cigars. The Prince thanked him profusely and used the device to assassinate one of his own enemies.’
‘And the remedy?’ asked Holmes.
‘The Prince must ensure the succession. He must remarry. Ferdinand needs a wife who will succour the Crown Prince and curry public favour through charitable endeavours. Above all, she must stand in for him at public occasions where his life might be most at risk.’
Sir Penderel smiled at a separate recollection. ‘Prince Ferdinand once asked me whether I thought it feasible that he could gain the hand of one of our dear departed Queen’s granddaughters. “Think of it,” he said. “A grand-daughter of the Queen-Empress of England! Granddaughter of the Tsar-liberator! Cousin of the German Kaiser! A future Tsarina of All the Bulgars!”.’