The cold did strange things in their lungs. It was painful to breathe. Ethan felt as though he’d swallowed tiny splinters of glass. They wrapped strips of cloth across their mouths, but the fabric quickly grew wet as droplets of their breath mixed with the sub-zero temperatures. In the narrow path, there seemed to be no way out. Ethan remembered the woods near Woodmancote as a child. He’d gone there hunting for rabbits. It had seemed an adventure.
Suddenly, the trees fell away and they were standing on the verge of a white place. During the time they’d been in the forest, the clouds had broken up and dissipated, leaving a moon almost at the full, high up in a sky splintered with stars. Ethan had never set eyes on such a sky. The light pollution of western Europe did not reach this far. If there were lights anywhere, they were of little consequence. The stars were folded into one another, galaxy into galaxy, like egg white spooned into a bowl for meringue.
It was as if a grand theatrical designer had mounted lights on ramps to set off the centrepiece of his set.
‘Vár Farkasnak,’ Ilona said. ‘“The Wolf’s Lair”.’ She lifted her right hand and pointed across the banked and drifted snow to a tall building that rose up like a ship cresting high white waves. On top, steep roofs were piled upon one another, their sharp angles gliding and pitching, and among them towers rose dramatically, topped by lanterns from which thin spires pierced the night sky like lances. Lower down, the body of the castle was lost in shadows. Trees stepped down from the forest almost to the rear of the building, and others stood in pairs or singly at the front and sides. A single light burnt in a window, high up on the second floor, close by a steep buttress towards the northern corner.
Ethan would have stepped directly from the trees onto the snow meadow in front of him, but Ilona grabbed his arm, shaking her head.
‘If anyone is watching, they’ll see you at once. We need to skirt round the trees and make our way to the castle from the rear.’
They crept along the treeline, shadows among shadows. Walking was harder here: the trees were set too close to let them easily work a way through them, and the snow was deep and soft from the most recent fall; at times they sank into it up to their knees.
It took about twenty minutes to reach the rear. No lights burned here, not even an external lamp set for security or as a beacon. The moonlight stencilled the doors and windows in sharp outline. There were only three doors, one at each end and one in the middle. Ethan headed straight for the end door nearest him, and reached into a pocket for a set of lock picks he’d borrowed from Lindita, guessing he might have to break into a building or a room at some point. He’d learnt how to pick a lock years before, from burglars he’d arrested.
Before attempting the lock, he scrutinised the rear of the building carefully, to be sure there wasn’t an alarm of any sort. Ilona followed suit. There was nothing visible to the naked eye. The lock was old-fashioned and rusty, but it took Ethan less than a minute to spring it open. He turned the knob slowly, his gloved hand finding it hard to find purchase on the icy metal.
He pushed the door open and stepped inside. The pick was back in his pocket, and the gun already in his hand. Ilona came behind him. She closed the door and silence descended. Inside, all was darkness; fat, swelling, suffocating darkness. Ilona took one of the torches out of her pocket and switched it on.
They were in a short corridor at the far end of which stood another door of solid wood. Beyond it might be another dark room or a brightly lit chamber filled with castle staff. Ethan listened for a while and decided in the end that there was no one next door. Probably. Ilona switched off her torch. He turned the knob and thrust the second door open.
Darkness, as before. Silence, as before. Ilona sent another beam of light into the darkness, revealing some sort of games room. There was a dartboard on one wall, and table football in a corner next to a half-size billiard table. The room was spacious, low-ceilinged, and cold. Did someone come here to play billiards with frozen fingers? Was the room left unused during the winter? Ethan wondered if the answers would offer a clue as to how inhabited the castle was.
Through the next door they found a corridor. Low-watt bulbs burnt in wire cages all the way down a long whitewashed ceiling. Doors opened off it at intervals. It was obviously a service corridor, bereft of ornaments or pictures, the floor bare wood, its walls painted in light green paint that showed signs of damp in many places.
How to decide on a door? Ethan was reminded of the old dilemma in fairy tales: which of the three doors will our hero pass through? There’s a beautiful princess behind one, and demons behind the other two. There must be at least a dozen in the corridor, he thought.
They walked on slowly, inspecting each door in turn. Some had inscriptions on small panels. Bucatarie. Câmarâ. Furnituri.
‘This is all kitchens and storerooms — things like that,’ said Ilona as they passed, her torch picking out the handwritten letters in old Romanian script, their outlines fading against blistered card.
Right at the other end, they came to a battered, red-painted door, above which a small sign read Scarâ.
‘Stairs!’ said Ilona.
Beyond the door, a steep flight led upwards.
‘I think we have to head for the second floor,’ said Ethan. ‘To find the room with the light.’
At the top of the stairs, another red door, likewise dented by who could tell how many years of servants pushing it open with heavy trays in their hands. It opened onto a narrow, unlit corridor, a more integral part of the castle proper. On the walls hung oil portraits of children dressed in fine clothes, their faces dimming and shining in the harsh light of the torches. They wore the clothes of little aristocrats, furs and velvets and silks, the girls with their hair plaited, the boys in boots and leather trousers. Their faces were the faces of ghosts, their eyes straining to see what living man or woman passed. Ethan wanted to ignore them, but they stared so arrogantly, at once children and the adults they were destined to become.
The end of the corridor gave directly onto a dark place that seemed at first to be without walls. They swung their torch beams through the blackness, like searchlights in a war zone, and slowly they formed a picture of an open space, some sort of hall bisected by a massive wooden staircase. The sides of the banisters facing them were studded with small heraldic shields on which were painted the devices of ancient families and the symbols of nearby towns and counties, painted in bright colours once, but dulled and faded now.
They picked out an armoured hand holding a long sword, and next to it a bunch of grapes. Further up, a white shield surmounted by a crown carried the image of a wolf suckling her cubs, and above that again a quartered shield portraying a church and a castle with high towers. Ilona noticed that several shields showed an angel and a lion passant with a cross between them, and a sun and crescent above their heads. Just beyond that was a stranger thing, a sable shield divided in half per pale, with small white swastikas on the sinister or left-hand side, and a single golden crucifix across the dexter. It seemed brighter and probably newer than the shields with which it kept company. They could not guess at its meaning. Ethan knew that the swastika originally had a benign meaning in Buddhism or Hinduism, he wasn’t sure which.
They stepped further into the hall, knowing that, at any moment, their lights might be seen, and someone might come out to challenge them. Ethan led Ilona to the stairs, and they began to climb. They shone their torches on the walls, revealing a gallery of large paintings, portraits once more, but not of children. These showed men and women in all the finery of aristocrats. Voivodes, boiers, dregators and serdars in sable coats and chains of office, their hands on the hilts of battle swords, rings twinkling on their fingers, their inner jackets embroidered in thread of gold. Beside them their wives shimmered like walking tapestries, no expense spared on their finery, their earrings of pearl, their emerald necklaces, their delicate hands enriched with rubies, sapphires, and amethysts.