Awaiting the Moon (42 page)

“He… he was suspected of taking advantage of a child… the child of one of the family’s serving staff.”

“Taking advantage of a child? What does that me… oh.” Understanding, when it came, turned her stomach. “How… how old was the child?”

“She was twelve… perhaps thirteen? Viktor was vague. It was not proven and he denied it; they had only the girl’s word for it, and children, especially of that class, are so unreliable.

And so her family asked Maria to take him with her when she married, and she did. He has never, to my knowledge, done anything so since. This is why I say it could be true, or perhaps not; more likely it is not. I have never known what, to think, but it remained in my memory all these years.”

The man brought their cups, carefully, and set them down on the table. “This is yours, Miss Stanwycke, with the cream. And, sister, this is yours… just the way you like, with nothing in it.”

Elizabeth watched him but saw no monster in the bland, pale, smooth face. Surely if he was such a wretch as to take advantage of a child, it would show. She would know it, she decided.

She was a good judge of character, after all. Rumor, she well knew, and innuendo, could ruin a person, and she refused to judge him based on old stories related at second hand. She had suffered from just such cruel gossip, and she would not hold him accountable for suspicions never proved. “Thank you, sir. You are so very kind.”

“I live but to serve this family, and those in its employ,” he said, then bowing and making his way back to where Gerta was sitting by the fire near Count Delacroix and Countess Adele.

“He has perhaps been cruelly misjudged,” Elizabeth said to her friend. “I know what it is to be so misjudged and I will not inflict that pain on another. I was named a… a fortune-hunting whore, and it hurt deeply.” She raised her cup to sip the tea, but her gaze was caught by a faint smudge of dark powdery residue at the edge of the vessel. With shaking hands she put it down and stared at it, trying to imagine some reasonable explanation that did not mean what she feared it meant. But too easily she could see the truth behind it. Her mind raced from surmise to logical assumption, and thence to a dreadful certainty. When Frau Liebner raised her own cup to drink, Elizabeth put out one staying hand. “Ma’am, do not drink. I think… I think I may know why I fell asleep so deeply last night.”

She explained some of her thoughts to her friend, and together they came to some conclusions. But still, they had no authority to act. All they could do, Elizabeth said, was to protect Gerta and Charlotte and hope Nikolas came home on the morrow. If he did not, they would need to do something drastic.

Later, their plans in place, Elizabeth retired after much public yawning and weary rubbing of her eyes. Supposedly she went directly to her bed to sleep, but really she stole through the secret corridors, which she had spent some time mapping out in the last couple of days, towards Charlotte’s room. They had managed to trick Gerta into sleeping once again up near her aunt Uta with yet another tale of a bad spell on the old grand dame’s part. It would not work another night. Mina was set to maintain a vigilant watch over the most unstable of the household, and Elizabeth had confidence that no bump on the head would occur this time, for Mina was now wary of the seemingly fragile but surprisingly tough Countess Gerta.

She and Frau Liebner had discussed the possible culpability of Bartol Liebner; was the smudge of dark powder a sleeping potion? And if so, why? Again it was not provable, but it had set her to thinking, to wondering. Was Bartol Liebner a perpetrator, or a pawn in some larger game? Was he the sole villain of the piece, or was there another hand as yet unseen?

She didn’t know.

She slipped like a ghost through the walls, first to a room where some answer might lay. She slid the panel open and there was the library, cold as a tomb without the master of the house.

She shivered but resolutely held her candle high. This very secret door was where Nikolas had entered the library the first night she had been there. Knowing all his secrets made her feel closer to him, but in truth he could still be miles away. Word had come that he was expected, but no one was sure if it was the next morning or still another day. His message had said simply that he would explain all when he arrived.

She stole over to the shelf she remembered to have contained encyclopedias of plants and herbs and ran her hand along the leather bindings, looking for one in particular. There it was, the red calf and gold-leaf lettering shining in the flickering light. She pulled it down from the shelf and laid it on Nikolas’s desk, leafing through it, aware that she should not be taking this time when she had grave concerns for Charlotte’s safety that night.

But just one moment more… yes… there it was. Laboriously, she made out the German lettering. Her verbal skills in the language were much better than her reading skills, though she had been reading all she could get her hands on to improve herself. A small line drawing accompanied the text, and from what she could tell the descriptions were chillingly similar.

Agitation. Wild, vivid hallucinations. Episodes of frantic movement while holding the conviction that one had become an animal. Learned men had studied folklore and had determined a rational explanation; it was unfortunate that in all the years of suffering no one had opened this particular book and read this particular passage. Perhaps it was just that in times of tribulation the mind leaped to conclusions, oft times that confirmed one’s worst fears rather than searching out a more mundane explanation.

The book fell from her hands, and Elizabeth felt a chill down to her marrow. Countess Gerta was indeed being systematically drugged, and possibly by more than one kind of substance.

One would make her sleepy and lethargic, as they had postulated, but another would cause the hallucinations. She had never even suspected that was possible, that such delusions could be induced in such a manner. Was Charlotte the next objective of the fiend’s scheme? And why?

And was this truly Bartol Liebner’s doing, or was there some mastermind behind it all, some devious plot that reached beyond what she had so far discovered?

There was no time to ponder. She hastily put the book on the shelf and slipped back into the walls to make her way to Charlotte’s room. She would watch over her herself, if need be, but nothing was going to happen to her charge, and when Nikolas came home she would lay it all before him. As the master of the house he would ultimately have the responsibility of figuring it all out. But as awful as it was, what a relief it would be for him to learn that his sister was not mad, but drugged! It was later than she had thought, Elizabeth realized when she stealthily emerged into Charlotte’s room, candle held high, and saw the full moon rising above the deep green forest. Her charge was sleeping calmly, the soft, regular breathing an assurance that she was well. Elizabeth tiptoed to the window and looked out over the moonlit landscape.

“No,” she whimpered as she looked down. “It’s not possible!”

But it was. There, staggering across the snow, was the cloaked figure of Gerta von Holtzen, headed directly for the forest and the wolves.

“Damn! And damn again!” Elizabeth cried. “Can no one contain her?”

“What? Who…” Charlotte awoke and sat up in her bed, her pale face a mask of fear.

Elizabeth whirled, the flame of her candle flickering wildly. “Charlotte, listen to me,” she said, moving toward the door. “Listen well! You must awaken and tell your aunt Adele or your aunt Liebner… or anyone who will listen!” The need for secrecy was eradicated by the greater need to protect Countess Gerta in the absence of Nikolas. “Tell them that your aunt Gerta is in trouble and in the north woods. And then stay with one of them! I am going now to get her… she’s not well…just tell someone!”

She bolted from the room and realized she did not even have the few moments it would take to alert someone; she would just have to trust that Charlotte had listened and would heed her.

But still… she must do everything that she could. As she raced down the steps she caught hold of a footman and said, in the best German she could manage, “Tell Countess Adele to send help, into the north woods. Countess von Holtzen is in trouble!”

The man gazed at her with wide eyes. Did he understand? Did he not understand? She had no time to figure it out, for every second she delayed took the countess closer to the woods and nearer deadly danger. She raced out the front door, leaving it open behind her, but when she glanced back she saw framed the portly figure of Bartol Liebner.

“Miss Stanwycke,” he called out. “Is everything all right? Do you need my help?” .

She turned away from him and ran. But she was already too late. The cloaked figure was even now plunging recklessly into the forest edge, as if she knew she was being followed. “No, oh no,” Elizabeth whimpered, floundering through the fresh powdery snow that had fallen just that morning. “It’s March… does winter never end in this land?”

Her cries echoed and disappeared in the night air, and in the distance she heard a sound that stopped her in her tracks and raised the goose bumps on her arms. Wolves. The keening cry soared and wailed, beckoning the countess to her destruction. Why, if she was to hallucinate, could she not have imagined she was a mouse and needed to find some hidey-hole to burrow into?

Elizabeth trudged through the snow, slipping in her haste and tumbling into a drift. She extricated herself and finally found where the deluded woman had gone into the woods. She followed, no choice left to her by her own humanity and by Nikolas’s plea. She must protect the countess from herself. Soon… soon Nikolas would be back and would sort the mess out.

Soon they would figure out what his uncle had done, and why. Soon, God willing, soon.

The woods had gone silent, the absence of howling even more ominous to Elizabeth than the sound had been. In the woods it was not as easy to follow the trail, for the snow had drifted unevenly and some patches were bare. Muttering a prayer for guidance, Elizabeth called out,

“Countess! Countess Gerta, please, come back!”

No sound greeted her, and really, she had not expected it, for the woman had proven to be incapable of hearing reason when in such a state. If her suspicions were correct, Bartol Liebner must have found a way to administer the hallucinogenic herbal concoction to Gerta, but how had she slipped from Mina’s guardianship this time?

It was no time for wondering such things. She staggered on, pulling up her skirts and wading through a drift; there had been no time to retrieve a cloak, and she was in danger, she knew, from the cold. But so was the countess in that same danger. It was only by her brother’s concerted effort that she had not frozen to death any of the times she had disappeared into the forest.

Then Elizabeth came upon a bare patch, which though welcome made it harder to see where the countess had gone. She stopped, panting, to catch her breath and heard a rising wail once more, but this time it was the reedy sound she knew was not the wolves but the countess. She plunged on through the snow with a renewed fervor, knowing now she was on the right track and that the countess had likely stopped. If she could just get to her…

There was a clearing ahead, perhaps the same one the countess had chosen last time, and Elizabeth made her way there. If it had not been for the full moon gleaming down on her as she came into the clearing in the middle of the woods, Elizabeth would have thought she was hallucinating.

There, standing on a patch of beaten snow, Gerta von Holtzen stood. She had stripped off all her clothes and they lay in a circle around her; her unbound hair rippled down over her shoulders and back, glimmering silver in the blue white light of the full moon. She still wore stockings, but they sagged on her thin legs and were coated in ice. Her shoes she had discarded with her garments. Her slender white body exposed to the cold, she stood, arms spread wide, and howled, the sound a keening wail that raised the hairs on the back of Elizabeth’s arms.

“Countess,” Elizabeth called softly as she approached, stretching out her freezing hands in a beseeching gesture. “You must come back with me, please! Gerta, you must—”

Snapping and snarling, the woman turned on her and growled, her eyes wide and her teeth bared. She swiped at Elizabeth with her fingers crooked into talons and then barked, before throwing back her head and howling again. Without warning she made a rush at Elizabeth and swiped again, scratching Elizabeth’s bare hand with her fingernails.

Shaking with fear and shock, Elizabeth retreated, trying to think logically what to do. If only she could, but her mind was whirling, trying to know what was right, trying to come to some decision. She held her blood-streaked hand close to her body, the scratches throbbing with a fierce heat. What would bring the countess out of her strange delusion?

She had to try.

“Countess, please, just let me help you,” she said, keeping her voice soothing.

Gerta bared her teeth, her pale eyes glittering. “I am the wolf woman, I am woman by day, wolf by night,” she cried in guttural German and threw her head back, ending her words on a keening howl.

Elizabeth, with the improved knowledge of German she had come to over the past months, understood every eerie word. “No,” she whispered, then said more strongly, in German, “No!

Countess, you are simply a woman, a graceful, fair woman… a mother…”

“I am wolf woman!” Gerta howled, then she stared at Elizabeth, growled with an ominous, throaty snarl, and took one step toward her, her gaunt, naked body white in the gleaming moonlight. “I am wolf woman, I am a huntress, I seek blood, and my teeth grow long as the moon waxes full…”

A rustling in the woods interrupted her and a huge wolf bounded into the clearing and stopped abruptly, as if appalled by the sight of the two women. It stared, dark eyes watching Elizabeth with almost human intensity. Gerta turned to it with a glad cry and outstretched arms.

Elizabeth, fearing for her own safety if she rushed at the beast to retrieve the countess, turned and stumbled to the far edge of the clearing, trying to master her fear of the wolf, trying to think what to do. The beast was enormous, with a mantle of dark bristling fur over its heavy shoulders and a thick ruff of black sliver-tipped fur around its face. If only Nikolas was back!