HS04 - Unholy Awakening (8 page)

Tears brimmed, but did not flow.

‘They use our family graveyard for their target practice, Procurator Stiffeniis,’ she whispered fiercely. ‘They shoot at the crosses to calibrate their muskets.’

‘Why did you come here, then?’

‘Would my father have come away if I had not told him that we were taking my mother home? To her
real
home. She comes from Lotingen originally, you see. I knew that I would find a tomb here in the name of Kassel. It was her maiden name. My father’s home is where my mother lies.’ She glanced around the vast, empty kitchen. ‘I searched for such a house as this one to put his mind at ease. To calm the fever in his brain. I hoped that he would recover something of the clarity that he once enjoyed.’

She crossed her arms over her breasts, and clenched her shoulders. ‘Then this had to happen.’ She nodded towards the garden and the well. ‘I told you that the Schuettlers asked me to return the key to the house.’ Her lower lip quivered for an instant. ‘I…I had to give them money. More money. I had to
beg
them to let us stay! But what am I to do if they should ask for more?’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Blackmail is what I mean.’

The raw force of her feelings was evident. She looked disdainfully towards the garden, rage quivering in her eyes and on her lips. Then she gathered up her gown, pulled fitfully at the tatters of her shoulder puff, then marched the length of the kitchen to the lonely little cupboard.

‘I must pay them, or leave the house,’ she said, marching back towards me with a stone bottle in one hand, two green glass beakers in the other. She held them up for my inspection. ‘I can offer you wine, if that will do you?’

I began to refuse, but she interrupted me.

‘I do not like to drink alone,’ she said, going over to the table, filling the beakers, pushing one towards me, inviting me to sit down on the stool, while she sat on the table-top. ‘Those money-grabbers tried to justify their extortion. They said that they had had to chase intruders off last night. Why, sir, I saw them talking together! There were men with torches at the gate, though they did not have the courage to enter the garden, or attack the house.’

I felt a shiver of fright ripple down my spine. Members of the mob that Major Glatigny had thought to scatter outside the cemetery had made their way to the home of Emma Rimmele and her father.

‘I’ll ask the French to set a guard…’

‘Please, don’t!’ she spluttered. ‘That would be the final straw. It would plunge my father into the nightmare from which I have been obliged to carry him off.’

I thought of calling for Prussian soldiers. But they might be more dangerous than the French. The people in the mob might be their friends or relatives. For all I knew, there could have been off-duty Prussian soldiers in their midst the night before.

‘I barred the doors. I am used to it. We’ve been living under siege in our own house, surrounded by Frenchmen. I know how to defend my father and myself,’ she said with a confident smile, closing one eye, sighting down her forefinger at me, thumb cocked vertically in an eloquent mime of a pistol.

‘I hate to think how much the Schuettlers will charge me now,’ she went on seriously, ‘for bread and milk and wine. The eggs their scrawny chickens lay will be worth their weight in gold, I shouldn’t wonder!’

She drank more wine. It seemed to drown her fear and fire her anger.

‘The sum is bound to increase, but…Well, I…I cannot pay it…’

She stared at me for some moments. Her brow creased, her lips appeared to tremble in supplication. ‘Find the killer quickly, sir, or I’ll be forced to beg on the streets to keep my father and myself alive.’

‘I’ll speak with Schuettler…’

‘I forbid you to do so.’ The supplicant was gone in a flash. She had made a decision, and would not be shaken. ‘They would only deny it, or send me on my way tonight. And where would I take my father, then?’

She raised her hands in a gesture of helpless ness.

‘Perhaps you are right,’ I admitted.

She smiled ruefully. ‘Help my father, if you can, sir. Which is to say, help him to remember how to release his money from the bank where it is deposited.’ She placed her beaker on the table, and stood up. She rubbed at the wood of the table with the tip of her finger as if she meant to drill a hole in it. ‘The cash that we had is running low,’ she said. ‘And as you’ve seen today, he is ever more demented.’

While speaking, she traced a line with her finger on the table-top. As she stood so close beside me, I thought I saw a hint of doubt on her face. It was as if she wished to ask me a question, but lacked the courage to put it into words.

‘He has told you something, Herr Stiffeniis. It has shocked you. I can see it in your eyes. What did he say of me?’

‘Who are you talking of?’ I asked, playing for time.

‘My father.’

I hesitated for a moment. ‘What do
you
think he may have said?’

She smiled a glum smile. ‘I know too well, sir. He’s been telling everyone when he thinks that I am not listening. He says that I am not his daughter. That I am a…How did he describe me this time? As a demon? A changeling? Or has he now decided that I am a
vampire
?’

She hissed the final word as if to frighten the gullible.

‘He did mention that possibility,’ I replied, as lightly as I could manage.

I was sitting, she was standing. As a magistrate I am used to gazing down on those that I judge. Here the rules of interrogation were reversed. Even when she seated herself close beside me on the table-top again, I was forced to look up, while she looked down; we were both aware of the sudden change of role. She seemed to be waiting for me to say more, as I had often done before with a reluctant witness.

‘A vampire who has taken his daughter’s place,’ I confirmed.

She placed her hands together on her knee, and leant towards me. ‘Don’t you believe him? Would any natural daughter care for such a troublesome father?’ She was gently taunting me. Her attention to him was an obvious fact. She sat up straight. ‘Now, Herr Stiffeniis, I must tell you the bitter truth,’ she said very slowly. ‘We have very little left. Money for a week, but not much more. That is, unless my father comes to his senses, which is out of the question, as anyone can see. Unless I find a person who will vouch for me to the extent that I may call upon our funds in the bank, I don’t know what we’ll do.’

I had not considered this necessity before. A daughter may manage, but a father or a husband generally pays. Money would certainly be a problem for her.

‘By bringing him here, I had hoped to save the situation.’ She raised her hand and pushed a curl from her forehead. ‘But his mind is travelling downwards on a steep path. Faster and faster it goes. He no longer recognises
me
. He thinks that I am someone else.’ A sob burst from her lips, but she smothered it with her hand. ‘Can you imagine what that means, sir? A person you hold dear, who suddenly believes that you are his enemy!’

Her words set fire to the tinder in my own breast.

I thought of the change in Helena since Anders died. She had seemed, somehow, to accuse me of being responsible for his death, though she could find no way of putting it into words. She would not allow me to console her, and seemed to be unaware of my own pain.

‘I think you
do
know,’ Emma said, and her voice was hushed. The expression on my face had evidently been more eloquent than words. ‘You understand what it means to be a stranger in your own home. In this house there are just the two of us. My father, and myself. I see the doubt in the eyes of others. Whom should they believe when he speaks against me? There is not much that I can do to convince them.’ Suddenly, she clasped her right hand to her left breast. ‘This is where they strike, is it not?’

‘Strike?’ I murmured.

She pressed her breast so hard it almost took her voice away.

‘When they drive the stake into the heart.’

Was she mocking me again?

‘What are you saying?’ I asked dismissively.

‘Isn’t that what people do in such cases? Is it not what you have tried to stop them doing to poor Angela Enke?’

‘Vampires do not exist,’ I said with force. ‘I know it, and so do you.’

‘But what about the others…’

As she spoke, her head drooped slowly until it rested on my shoulder.

I did not speak. Nor did I dare to move. I felt the weight of her leg on mine, her right breast crushing against my left arm. What could I do? Her breath seemed to scald my neck, her lips pressed urgently on my skin. They parted. Her tongue burnt hot against the vein beneath my ear. Her teeth nipped gently at my skin. Her wet mouth crushed my neck, and a delicious poison seemed to seep into my being. I felt as helpless as a fly caught in a spider’s maw. She bit more hungrily against my flesh. I felt the sucking play of her lips. She might have been slaking an insatiable thirst from a chalice full of some narcotic liquid.

Just as suddenly, she pulled away.

I raised my hand and touched the spot. The skin was unbroken, though it was hot and wet. Her gentle laughter sounded in my ear.

‘You are unharmed,’ she said quietly. ‘I do not want your blood.’

I stood up quickly, backing away until I struck the door which led into the garden. She sat watching me, her lower lip pinched between her teeth, an expression of puzzlement – or was it disappointment? – upon her lovely face. Clearly, she had expected some other reaction from me.

‘I must go,’ I said, fumbling with the door, which was locked.

I was in a panic, trying to run away, and I knew it. It was not so much that I wished to escape from her. It was what she wished me to do that shocked me. And the possibility that I might if I stayed.

‘The Schuettlers will see you,’ she said with an amused smile. ‘That’s not the door by which a magistrate would leave after having spoken to the lady of the house.’

‘We have nothing to hide,’ I said.

‘You and I know that,’ she said, never taking her eyes off me for an instant, ‘but it is not enough. We both know that I am not a vampire, but nor is that sufficient. Leave by the front door, Herr Procurator Stiffeniis. And cover that red mark on your neck.’

I walked back to town beside the Cut.

What sort of relationship had I just established with my most important witness?

A witness, I reminded myself, that many people in Lotingen believed had thrown Angela Enke down the well after having sucked her dry of blood.

The sign above the door had been painted by a fancy hand.

Scarlet letters on a creamy ground:
Frau Graube’s School of Stitches – tailoring to order
.

Here, Emma Rimmele had found Angela Enke. The girl’s mother had told me that her daughter often went to see Frau Graube in search of work, and that she sometimes slept at the homes of girls who worked there, too.

I lifted the latch and a bell tinkled.

A dozen ornate iron pillars held up a low ceiling above the bonnets of a score or more of young women who were sewing and stitching in the large room. An older dame, the proprietor of the place, was seated at the far end behind a desk which was raised on a high dais. Ruth Graube was a well-known figure in Lotingen. A half-blind widow in her sixties, she had been justly famed for making bridal gowns and christening smocks with exquisite stitching. Frau Graube herself had made the clothes in which my two eldest children had been carried to the Pietist chapel to be baptised. One of her girls had made the shift in which little Anders had recently been laid to rest.

‘Is that the door I hear?’ Frau Graube cried out.

Her shrill voice made an exclamation out of every question.

‘Aye, Frau Graube,’ a dozen voices chimed, breaking off the quiet chatter with which the room had been humming. The right-hand wall was made entirely of panes of glass set in lead frames which looked out onto an open courtyard stacked with carts. Sunlight flooded in, while the other side of the room was lit by overhead oil lamps with large glass bulbs. In the centre of the room stood three long tables around which the workers were perched on stools.

‘Which friend has come to visit us this afternoon?’

The whole assembly looked at me, but no-one cared to answer. They all knew who I was, and had guessed why I was there. These girls knew Angela Enke better than her mother did.

‘It is I, Frau Ruth,’ I called, stepping into the room.

‘Herr Procurator Stiffeniis,’ the mistress’s voice rang out. ‘I’ve been expecting you since yesterday.’

I made my way towards her desk, passing between the long tables at which the girls and women were working. They were making uniforms, French and Prussian by the look of the rolls of blue, red and green material which were being cut into sections on the table to the right and nearest the windows, taking shape as sleeves, lapels and coat-tails as the pieces were carried off into the darker recesses of the room, where the youngest girls with the sharpest eyes were stitching them together beneath the oil-lamps.

‘I need your help, Frau Ruth,’ I said, taking her outstretched hand.

It was a pudgy hand, the fingers stiff, the joints knotted. Rheumatism had put an end to her needle-plying several years before. Now, she taught the young the secrets of her nimble-thimble generation, despite her failing sight, which she guarded behind a pair of metal spectacles framing two square lenses of thick black glass.

‘I know why you are here,’ she murmured.

‘A dreadful business!’ I exclaimed.

‘How is Frau Helena now?’ she asked me, her voice weighted with concern.

I had been there only months before to place the order, and collect the shroud.

‘My wife is well enough,’ I lied. ‘She is still feeling the loss…’

She turned her head away from the light. ‘And you, sir? I’m sure you feel it, too.’

I nodded, though I knew she could not see me. ‘I am more fortunate,’ I said. ‘I have my work to distract me.’

‘Such unhappy work, Herr Procurator,’ she said with feeling. She turned her head the other way. ‘I hear Gretel’s footsteps!’

A girl in a dark dress and matching mob-cap placed a large tray on the table. It contained a small samovar and two porcelain cups and saucers with green floral designs. They were from the Dresden factory, I think.

‘I used to detest the infusion made from nettles,’ Frau Graube said, leaning close. ‘But it is like the French. You get used to it, and them, by daily doses. They do provide a lot of work for us, it must be said. I don’t know what they do with their underwear, shirts and uniforms! The stuff they use is stuff of the very poorest quality. They bring it with them. But you’re not here to talk of stitches, are you?’

‘Angela Enke,’ I said without preliminaries.

‘If she had stayed with me,’ she said, ‘it might never have happened. I have redeemed so many girls, you know – orphans from the workhouse, others from the prison. Angela wasn’t one of those, of course. A poor home, but an honest one.’

She hesitated, thinking, leaning forward to sniff at the samovar.

‘What was she like?’ I asked.

Frau Graube pursed her lips. ‘Headstrong, let’s say. Had her own way of doing things. She worked quite regularly with us until…oh, it must be four or five years now, I suppose. She was quick and clever with a needle, but…you know the story, surely, sir? That boy of hers who went to fight the French, and never came back again? I caught her drinking,’ she said, and her voice sank to a hoarse and very audible whisper. ‘
Drinking!
I won’t allow it. Working on her own at home, or going out to houses, she was free to do whatever she liked, but I could not take her back.’

‘And yet, she came to you occasionally, her mother said.’

Frau Graube nodded. ‘I’ve more work than I can handle, what with all the troops in the town. I could always give her something to tide her over. Our tea is surely ready by now,’ she announced loudly, then added in a loud whisper: ‘You know what idle hands get up to, sir.’

‘Are you suggesting that she was a regular tippler?’

‘No, no!’ she answered quickly, waving her hand in protest. ‘Once was enough for me. Angela Enke was a good girl, honest and Christian, but she had known tragedy. I like my stitches straight, sir, and so do my customers! You had do better to talk to one of her particular friends.’

She nodded her head dismissively in the direction of her employees.

This invitation was what I had been hoping for. ‘Her mother mentioned a girl,’ I said, as I sipped my nettle tea. It caused my lips to pucker and my tongue to fur, though I complimented her upon it, and I took another generous quaff, emptying my cup, which I set down with a rattle on the saucer.

‘Would you care for more, Herr Procurator?’

‘That’s very kind, but no, thank you,’ I said quickly. ‘With whom would you suggest that I talk?’

Frau Graube finished her tea more slowly, savouring the sour taste, running her pale tongue over her grey lips. ‘Kitti Raubel,’ she called out loudly. ‘Step up here to my desk, if you would be so kind. Make sure you leave your table neat and tidy.’

As the young woman put down what she was doing, a sort of stifled hubbub broke out among the rest of the assembly.

‘Silence!’ Frau Graube snapped, emphasising this order by slapping a large wooden ruler flat on the table-top. ‘Get on with your work! Those jackets must be done before the day is out.’

I watched the approach of Kitti Raubel. She was tall, bony, her face long and thin, her hands bright red. ‘Equine’ was the word that I might have chosen to describe her. This impression was reinforced by her large bloodshot eyes, a long nose, large ears, and a receding chin. When she curtseyed, trying to smile at me – nervous at being called – and showed her large yellow teeth, the word etched itself upon my brain.

‘Frau Graube?’ she said, in a high-pitched, nervous whinny.

‘This gentleman would like to ask you some questions,’ the matron said. ‘About that poor, unfortunate friend of yours. Don’t pretend to be dumb, for I know that you are not. Do you hear me, Herr Procurator Stiffeniis? Do not take no for an answer!’

‘I certainly won’t,’ I began to say.

‘It might be better if you took her outside,’ Frau Graube insisted. Before I had the time to wonder whether this delicate concern was for myself, or for the girl, she added: ‘Otherwise there will be no work to be got out of any of them. Now, good day to you, Herr Stiffeniis.’

I walked down the room, the girl trailed after me, and the hectoring voice of the seamstress piped up again. ‘Come along now, girls! Pick up your needles and threads! Back to the grindstone, I say. I’ll only pay you for a full day’s work. I cannot see so well, but these old hands will tell me who has been idling.’

I stepped out into the daylight, waited for the sewing-girl, then closed the door.

Kitti Raubel stood before me like a docile pony waiting to be saddled. She looked down, eyes wide, hands stretched stiffly down along her sides.

‘You know what happened to Angela, don’t you?’

The girl looked up. ‘I know that she is dead, sir.’

‘When did you see her last?’

Again, those brown eyes seemed to question what I meant.

‘The last time she was here, do you mean?’

I nodded. ‘Let’s begin with that occasion.’

The girl pinched her lower lip between her thumb and forefinger. ‘She came here last week, sir. Thursday…no, it must have been on Friday. We never work but Saturday morning, then Sunday’s always free for church. The lady came that day…’

‘Which lady?’

‘The lady from the big house near our village…’

‘Do you live in Krupeken, too?’

She blinked. ‘I do, sir. That’s how I know Angela Enke. Sometimes when she’s coming to town in the morning, or going home again, we walk along the path together.’

I felt a sense of uplift and relief. Had I finally found a person who might be able to tell me something useful?

‘Which path?’ I asked. ‘The canal path?’

The girl nodded again. ‘It’s longer, but we like it better.’

‘You came to town that way together last Friday, did you?’

‘Oh no, sir. I remember now. It was on Saturday morning. On Friday Frau Graube asked me if I could do the job, but I knew that I would be too busy. I had to spend that Saturday afternoon pickling onions with my mother. I had promised to help her, and I didn’t dare go back on it. That was when I asked Angela…’

‘Let me get this straight,’ I interrupted. ‘Fraulein Rimmele spoke to Frau Graube on Friday. Is that correct?’

‘It is, sir. She had a dress and some gentleman’s clothes. She wanted them takin’ in and takin’ up, and dressing with black bunting. For a funeral, she said, but Frau Graube wouldn’t do anything for her. Couldn’t, really. Got to finish them uniforms by the end of this week, that was what she said. We’d been working on them last week, too, without a pause. A slight commission like that one, fixing up old clothes, Frau Graube said that one of us could do it out-of-hours, if that was what we wanted. But we was all tired out, sir,’ she held up her hands, showing me the palms. ‘Just look at my poor finger-tips!’

They were swollen, pricked and scratched.

‘It’s the needles, sir. They get so blunt, you see. An’ that French material is rubbish, it’s so stiff. I knew that Angela was looking for work, though. She’d told me so a day or two before. I went to their cottage that night, last Friday, as I said, and I told her. You come with me tomorrow, I said, Frau Graube’ll give you something to work on. And that young lady was most insistent any way. She said that the work would have to be done at her place. Said she had a sick parent to look after, what couldn’t be left alone. Angela came to the school, got the address from Frau Graube, and that was that.’

The girl stared fixedly at me. Then she flicked her thumbnail loudly against her large upper teeth.

‘Living in the same village, you must have seen Angela again,’ I said.

She played with the fingernail between her teeth for a moment.

‘I saw her two days ago,’ she said.

‘The day before her body was discovered,’ I specified.

‘That’s right, sir. She’d been to the lady’s house on Saturday afternoon. She’d started on the work. Almost finished it, she said, except for some hemming. She’s very quick when she needs the money…’

She dipped her head and looked down at her boots.

There was something else, I could see it. But the girl was reluctant to tell me for some reason or other.

‘And?’

Silence.

‘What else did Angela say? Come along now, Kati…’

‘Kitti,’ she corrected me. ‘Angela walked to town with me on Monday morning. She was supposed to be going to Durkheim’s Emporium to buy black lace for trimming, she said. Fraulein Rimmele had given her some coins and told her to buy a yard of lace, sir, but it wasn’t near enough…’

All of this confirmed what I already knew. Emma Rimmele had told me earlier that morning, money was short, and she could not draw upon her father’s bank funds.

‘What did Angela do?’

Kitti Raubel cleared her throat, and glanced towards the closed door.

‘I won’t tell Frau Graube,’ I went on. ‘Is that what you are worried about?’

The girl nodded slowly. Her eyes remained fixed on mine, while her head bobbed up and down.

‘Well?’ I insisted.

‘She took some old lace from the cast-offs box out in the yard,’ she pointed. ‘It wasn’t nothing, sir. We’d never have used it, really. Not for nothing important, like. She took some of that old stuff, and said that it would do. The lady wouldn’t notice…’

‘Frau Graube?’ I interrupted.

Kitti Raubel shook her head from side to side. ‘Fraulein Rimmele, sir. Angela said that she was a…She used a word, sir. Said she was a flighty harringdon, and that she didn’t care a nip. All she wanted was a frilly black dress. Not a real mourning dress, just something she could wear to visit her mother who’d been buried in the grave yard.’

A harridan? I had noted the oddity of Emma Rimmele’s clothes, remarking to myself on the make shift nature of her mourning outfit, the modesty cape of black lace, the heavy boots that she wore, her lack of stockings. Had Angela Enke been jealous of the lady?

‘What else did Angela say?’ I asked.

Kitti Raubel blushed bright red and hid her face by looking at the ground.

‘Is something embarrassing you, Kitti?’ I enquired.

She nodded solemnly, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

‘I didn’t know whether to believe her, sir,’ she said at last. ‘We spend all day closed up in the workshop. We talk a lot, us girls. ’Bout everything, really. ’Bout the ladies that come, and the clothes they make us make. Angela, too, of course. But she saw other things, sir. Going into people’s homes, working there beside them, you see the lot. What they eat, what they drink. The things they say. To each other, and about other people, too. Angela was one for a bit of gossip. Half the time I didn’t know whether to take her serious. Half the time I’m sure she made it up. It’s true what Frau Graube said about her. Angela liked a drink, and she could tell a merry tale…’