Roots of Evil (10 page)

And although she had known – well, sort of known – what happened in a bed on a marriage night, she had not known that it robbed you of all resistance or that the emotions it brought were so intense and so deeply sweet that you wanted to weep for sheer joy…

‘I am sorry,’ he had said at last, raising his dark head from the pillow. He was not Austrian – Alice did not then know what nationality he was except that he was not English – but he spoke English well. ‘My poor little English sparrow,’ he said. ‘I had not thought you would be a virgin.’

‘I’m glad. I’m glad you were the first.’ She had wanted to say, And you’ll be the last, but had not quite dared.

‘You should go back to the house now. I take you. But we can be together again soon, if you wish that.’

‘Yes. Yes, I do wish that.’

‘Very good. Then we go now. You will have to walk from the carriageway around the side of the house and go in through the garden door. You can do that? You do not mind that?’

Alice did not say she would have walked through hell’s deepest caverns and back again, or that she would have entered the house by way of the sewers or the chimneys if he had asked her to. She said, ‘Yes. Yes, I can do all that. I expect it will be quite easy.’

But life is seldom easy, and it is hardly ever predictable.

The house was in an uproar when Alice got back. Most of the guests had left, although a few, more inquisitive than the rest or perhaps simply more insensitive, had remained. To give support, they were all telling one another. Poor little Nina, poor child, jilted on her betrothal night. And betrayed by her own maid, the scheming hussy! Disgraceful. And where
was
the sly creature, that was what they would all like to know! It was to be hoped that the slut would be dealt with suitably when – and if! – she returned to the house.

At the centre of it all was Nina herself, lying on a chaise-longue in the upstairs drawing-room, sobbing and fretfully pushing away all the offers of laudanum or bromide in warm water, her hair in a snarl, and the delicate gloves and silk sandals she had been wearing tossed petulantly to the floor. Her mother sat at one end of the chaise-longue, wringing her hands ineffectually, saying that no one had ever been able to soothe Nina when she got into one of her nervous states, and oh dear, what were they to do, and think of the
scandal
…In front of the fireplace her papa and her brother were conversing in low voices.

Alice had hoped to creep unobtrusively to her room, but she was pounced upon, hauled into the drawing-room, and offered to the assembled company to be suitably dealt with. As she looked round, the thought that came uppermost in her mind was not her own plight, but that in Miss Nina’s situation she hoped she would have had more self-control than to indulge in a spoilt-child tantrum before everyone.

They fell silent as soon as they saw her; even Miss Nina sat up straight, and forgot about crying. The words
shameful
and
guttersnipe
hissed round the room; Alice had learned a little German by this time – she had, in fact, learned rather more than a little – and she could recognize those words very well indeed.

In the end, it had been Miss Nina’s brother who had ordered her from the house, his eyes meeting Alice’s in sly triumph. He adopted a prim shocked tone which Alice thought the greatest absurdity of the whole situation, and said she was to go immediately, they could not have such a creature under their roof. And then, possibly
mindful of the need to appear considerate before guests, despite the circumstances, amended this to first light. She was to go at first light: she would be allowed to take her belongings with her – they were not thieves in this family, he added righteously. But after tomorrow they did not want ever to see or hear from her again. He glanced at his parents as he said this, and apparently receiving tacit approval, added, in a final burst of spite, that one day he hoped to see her reduced to begging in the streets for what she had done to his sister.

Alice said loudly, ‘Well, it is no worse than what you have done to some of your mother’s maids,’ and saw his face flush with embarrassment. He glanced uneasily at the listening people, and in a burst of bravado Alice added, ‘You tried to do it to me as well, but I fought you off.’

This time it was not embarrassment that flooded his face, it was glaring fury, and he took a step towards her, his fists clenched so that she thought he was going to hit her. But then Nina – by now Alice had ceased to think of the pampered little goose as ‘Miss’ – pettishly threw her shoes across the room at Alice, and followed them with a little cut-glass scent bottle. None of the objects hit Alice, but the scent bottle shattered and spilt its contents all over the polished floor, threatening to tip the scene from tragedy to melodrama, since grand passions do not play well against an overpowering aura of lily-of-the-valley perfume, and the gentlemen of the party had to discreetly cover their mouths and noses with their handkerchiefs.

Alice did not care. She did not care that she was being turned from the house and threatened by Nina’s brother;
she said defiantly that she would go now, rather than wait until the morning.

She must suit herself about that, they said, and smugly told one another that at least no one could accuse them of turning her out into the night.

Alice whisked from the room, and tumbled her few possessions into the locked box that she had brought with her from England. Carrying it, she set off down the sweeping carriageway to the high road, and embarked on the long walk across the city to the tall old house near St Stephen’s Cathedral.

It was a much greater distance than she remembered. By the time she had walked through the sprawling suburbs with the great houses and the parks, and had entered the city proper, Vienna had emerged from its sinister night-persona to become a bustling place of bright daylight, and of workers bound for their daily employment, and milk-carts and street-sweepers, and alleycats foraging for scraps after their night’s adventuring. Sunlight trickled over the stones and the walls, and the scents of good coffee and freshly baked croissants drifted from the houses and the cafés. The servants’ breakfast would be being served about now; if Alice had not left she would have been in her usual place at the long table. But what’s done is done, my girl, and you’ll survive a few hours without breakfast. In any case,
he
would give her breakfast. She visualized steaming coffee that he would have brewed himself, and warm rolls stuffed with ham and thin cheese, or buttered eggs. And his eyes regarding her across the small table that had stood in the window of the piano-room…

Using the cathedral spire as guide, she entered the maze of little streets and cobbled alleyways surrounding it, and began to look for the tall old house. It was then that the nightmare began.

Last night she had been too far gone in longing to take note of exactly where they were, and she had certainly not looked at street names. But surely she would recognize the place again. She began to walk around the streets, eagerly looking at the houses, craning her neck to find a familiar corbel on a window ledge or a stonework carving above the entrance to an alleyway.

The morning wore on, and the sun began to be high and hot. People came out of their workplaces and bought rolls and paté and fruit to eat in the little squares. Alice began to feel hungry and thirsty; her feet were starting to blister and her arms ached from carrying the box with all her possessions. She had only a few schillings, but there was enough to buy some coffee and a wedge of rye bread with cheese. She ate it sitting on a bench in the cathedral’s shadow.

After that she renewed her search. But by late afternoon the shadows were creeping back over Vienna, and the dark underside of the old city was stirring. The lamps were lit in the streets, and when she passed a tavern or a wine cellar laughter and voices and food-scents gusted out. Alice, dizzy with exhaustion, began to have the feeling that she had somehow stumbled into an entirely different city without realizing it. For the first time she began to feel frightened, and for the first time she faced the possibility that she would not find the tall old house.

Once Lucy had reached her teens she almost forgot about Alraune. There were far more interesting things in life than all that gothic romance stuff about a slightly sinister ghost-child, and in any case who cared about things that had happened all those years ago? demanded Lucy’s rebellious fourteen-year-old self. Alraune had never existed. And yet…

And yet she never quite shook off the feeling that Alraune was much closer than any of them guessed. She occasionally woke from disturbing dreams – dreams that were half sad but that were also half terrifying, and that had always left her with the feeling that Alraune was not someone she would ever want to meet.

And now Trixie Smith had stirred those dreams up, so that back at her desk after Deb’s funeral, determinedly concentrating on Quondam’s horror-film presentation, Lucy caught herself thinking about Alraune, and
thinking as well that these days all kinds of information was accessible at the flick of a computer key. Births and deaths, and marriages and divorces. Electoral rolls and property tax accounts and census records. Yes, but would Alraune figure in those kind of lists? And if so, under what name, because presumably you would not go through life with a name like that if you could help it.
Mandragora officinarum
. Imagine having that called out in a school register. Imagine giving it as your name if you were applying for a driving licence or making a dentist’s appointment or collecting your dry-cleaning. And even if Lucy did find the right name and was inclined to make a search for Alraune, where would she begin? And if Deb had not died so abruptly, could she have talked to her about Alraune? Would she have opened up a bit more? Lucy had sometimes had the feeling that Deb would like to have talked to Lucy about the family, but it had never happened. Was that because Edmund had always been around?

In the house where Lucy had spent her early childhood there had been boxes of stuff about Lucretia and her life; corded trunks and tea-chests full of newspaper articles and photographs and posters, all stored away in attics. Lucy’s mother had once said that when Lucretia died, her entire life had been packed into those boxes and those tea-chests. ‘After her death no one could face any of it,’ she had said. ‘Some pasts should die, never forget that.’

‘Rot, Mariana, you’re simply being melodramatic again,’ Aunt Deb had said tartly. ‘You love all that stuff about Lucretia, in fact you dine out on it – I’ve heard
you telling your friends all the stories,’ she added, and Lucy, who had been hoping for a story about the mysterious Lucretia, had seen something flicker on her mother’s face that made her look so unlike her normal self that she had felt suddenly nervous.

‘Oh, yes, of course I do,’ Mariana had said at once. ‘It’s all the greatest fun. Dear Lucretia and all the lovers and the scandals. What else is there to do but make capital out of it? But there were other things, weren’t there?’ She gave an exaggerated shiver, like a child deliberately trying to frighten itself. ‘That suggestion that she spied for the Nazis in the war…’

Aunt Deb had said, ‘Mariana—’ but Lucy’s mother had not paused, almost as if, Lucy thought, she wanted to stop Aunt Deb from going on.

‘…but of course the war was over years ago, and we’ve all forgotten it, and in any case Lucy’s too young to understand any of this, aren’t you, my lamb?’

But Lucy had understood quite a lot because when she was small people had still talked about Lucretia. Sometimes they called her ‘that woman’, and used words like ‘disgrace’ and ‘immoral’. Once, in Lucy’s hearing, a woman with a pinched-up mouth like Lucy’s drawstring gym-bag had said Lucretia had been lucky not to be executed for treason, and she did not care who heard her say so. Lucy thought treason had something to do with people being shut away in the Tower of London, and then being burned alive or having all their insides cut out, which would be pretty gross either way and not something you would want done to your grandmother.

The boxes and the tea-chests had ended up in the
attics, which was where Mariana said you put such fusty old things: she did not want them littering up her nice rooms! Oh, nonsense, the attic stairs were not all that narrow; it was simply a matter of manoeuvring the boxes around the little twisty part to the second floor. Perfectly accessible, and also splendid for make-believe games – for Lucy and for Edmund when he came to stay in the holidays. Poorest Edmund, stuck in that house with that dreary old father. The two of them must make a search for old costumes next time; they might organize some games of charades this Christmas, said Mariana.

After Lucy’s parents died she had made a private vow never to forget them; to always remember what they looked like and how their voices sounded. But the memories had grown dim and vague with the years – she could remember a lot of laughter, sometimes a bit too shrill, and a lot of vividly dressed people sipping drinks in the evenings and at weekends – but at this distance it all seemed rather unreal and two-dimensional: like watching figures on a stage. It was ironic that the attic memories – the fragments of Lucretia’s life – had stayed with her far more vividly than the memories of her parents.

But the greater irony was that if only those stored-away memories – those crammed-full boxes and those too-heavy-to-move tea-chests – had been available now, Lucy could have plundered them for clues to Alraune. She frowned and pushed this thought away, because the memory of when and how those brittle pages and those stacks of smudgy newsprint had been lost was one of the dangerous memories. One of the bits of the past that should be left to die.

And she thought that even if she had been able to find anything, she would not really have wanted to pass it on to Trixie Smith. She thought she would have wanted to keep Alraune secret. She felt all over again the ache of loss for Aunt Deb, who could have been consulted about this.

Still, whoever you were, said Lucy to Alraune’s uneasy legend, and whether you were real or not, you churned up a few nightmares for me, so now that you seem to have been resurrected, so to speak, I think I might like to know a bit more about you. I don’t really know very much at all, and I’m not even sure what your place would be in the family tree. And were you really born to Lucretia, or have I simply assumed that because you were named for her film?

So what actual information was there about the dark chimera that was Alraune? Well, Alraune was supposed to have been born at the start of World War II and smuggled into one of the neutral countries when little more than a baby, to lie low in safety until the war ended. The stories of the actual smuggling varied wildly, from quite reasonable, quite credible, accounts of unobtrusive journeys in plain cars across various enemy borders, and then escalated dramatically to French-Revolution-style escapes in baskets of cabbages or mad moonlight flits inside fake coffins with plague crosses on the lids. It was these last tales that made Alraune’s existence sound like the purest fantasy. But other than this, there was not a great deal to go on.

Everyone in the family had always shied away from discussing Alraune. Aunt Deb had once said that
Alraune’s childhood had been bitterly tragic, but she had also said that Alraune was better forgotten. But ‘bitterly tragic’ could mean anything. If you related it to World War II it could mean an Ann-Frank-style incarceration in a sealed-off attic with Nazi stormtroopers searching the house, but if you took it in a more general sense it might mean an early death from some inexorable disease.

If one was going to look for Alraune, where would one start? Always accepting the old maxim about it being impossible to prove a negative, where could you start, when you were not sure if you had an accurate name, and when you were not even sure of the reality of the person you were trying to find?

As abruptly as a door being slammed back against a wall, the answer was there. What Lucy needed was a link back to that era, and Lucretia herself might provide that link. She had been a luminary of the silver screen – she had been famous and infamous and above all she had been
news
. What today was called a celebrity. Almost everything she had done from the late 1920s to the day of her death had been documented in one form or another. In newspapers, and in the glossy film-star magazines that had become fashionable after the war.

Scouring magazines would be time-consuming, and any accounts Lucy did find might be biased or exaggerated. But Lucretia’s life had not just been charted in print; a great deal of it had been captured on film. And Quondam Films had a section devoted entirely to old newsreel footage.

Once the search would have meant meanderings through imperfectly-kept card-indexes or basements crammed with badly-labelled boxes, climbing on to library-steps to reach the higher shelves or crawling on hands and knees to see what was pushed on to the bottom sections. In a way there was a rather faded romance about that kind of search, because it gave you the feeling of thrusting your hands back into the past, and of brushing the tips of your fingers against the cobwebby fragments of history.

But from a practical point of view it was much easier to be able to call up Quondam’s archive list on a computer screen, which was what Lucy was doing now, and type in a search request for newsreels between 1940 and 1950 containing anything on Lucretia von Wolff.

Lucy waited while the computer scanned its files – it took a few moments because there was quite a lot of stuff for it to scan. The film and TV news-makers had really got going in those years, and there had been so much going on in the world that they had wanted to record. Quondam had recently acquired some terrific footage of Dunkirk and VE Day and D-Day, and the marketing department were considering assembling the reels into chronological order, with the idea of trying to interest one of the major war museums in them. When Lucy had finished with the horror presentation she might be involved in that, which she would like very much.

The responses to the search request came up, and Lucy leaned forward eagerly. Most of them seemed to deal solely with Lucretia’s return to the screen after the war; she had made a couple of films in 1947 and 1948, one with the tempestuous Erich von Stroheim, which
had apparently been an explosive pairing, but which had been regarded as a very fine example of
film noir
. There had been a good deal of advance publicity about both films, and from the entry it looked as if some of the footage showed Lucretia arriving at the premières. It would be interesting to see these some time, but at the moment they were not what Lucy was looking for. She scrolled down the screen to see what else there might be.

And there, towards the end, were three entries that sounded as if they focused more directly on Lucretia’s private life. Two were from Pathé News, and the other one bore a maker’s name that looked to be either German or Dutch. Lucy, aware of a sudden beat of anticipation, requested viewings of all three as soon as possible and sent the request along the inter-office email system.

After this she returned, with slightly diminished enthusiasm, to
The Devil’s Sonata
, which had turned out to have telltale amber discolouration, indicating that the cellulose nitrate had started to decompose – probably from storage at the wrong temperature – meaning it would have to be copied all over again. In addition there was a massive flaw halfway through the second reel, which could have been caused by anything, but which meant that the lustfully intentioned and satanically inclined violinist was precipitated straight from the opera house stage (where he had been wearing formal white tie and tails) to the heroine’s Left Bank atelier, where he was wearing a velvet jacket and the standard villain issue of cloak and wide-brimmed hat.

Lucy was just wondering if there were any stills that
would shunt the plot along, and if so, whether Quondam’s technical department could use them to patch over the flaw – this had been done fairly successfully with the famous Frank Capra 1937
Lost Horizon
– when an email pinged into her inbox to say she could view two of the three newsreels she had requested. The German one, it appeared, was currently the subject of a copyright wrangle, so to all intents and purposes it was
verboten
at the moment, but she could see the two Pathé reels. One was nine minutes in length and one was four and a half, and both were flagged as being in need of restoration, which could mean anything from a few slight hiccups that only a purist would notice, to comprehensive damage by flood, fire or tornado. But that said, a projectionist could be available in the smaller of the two viewing-rooms at half past three, and would Lucy please confirm if this would suit her.

The viewing-room was small and almost completely dark and there was a scent of warm machinery and also of blackcurrant throat lozenges from the projectionist, who had a sore throat and was inclined to be lugubrious as a result.

Lucy waved to him to start the first reel, and sat down. She had no idea what she was about to see, or whether it would tell her anything about Lucretia – and about Alraune – that she did not already know. Almost certainly it would not. Be logical, Lucy. But her heart was thudding, and as the projector began to whirr she clenched her fists so hard that her nails dug little dents into her palms.

The familiar oblong of light appeared on the small screen, and the soundtrack kicked in with the distinctive Pathé music. The commentary began, the commentator speaking in the stilted, pseudo-jolly accents that had been obligatory in the forties and fifties. BBC pronunciation, people used to call it, sometimes meaning it sarcastically, sometimes not.

This one was the longer film of the two, and it seemed to be mostly about Lucretia’s arrival at Ashwood Studios, and the plans for shooting the murder mystery – the film that had never been finished because of the real murders. Lucy thought Ashwood had been hoping to rival Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean – hadn’t
Rebecca
come out around then? Certainly it had been the heyday of
film noir
: black rainy streets, criminal treachery, victimized anti-heroes and
femmes fatales
. Films like
A Woman’s Face
and
Desire Me,
or
Citizen Kane
and the all-time classic,
The Third Man
. Each had had its own sultry intelligent temptress, of course: Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, the luminous Greer Garson. And Lucretia von Wolff.