The Veils of the Budapest Palace (Darke of Night Book 3) (19 page)

I thought about that for quite a long time. “It makes a strange kind of sense,” I allowed. But I was wary. I wanted to believe in this version too much. Because it let Zsigmund and Zsigmund’s family off the hook of suspicion. “And the man tonight...just a random attack by a hungry soldier?”

“I suspect something like that. And I will report it to the authorities.”

“But the mist,” I said, sitting down on the stairs with the pillow in my lap. “How do we explain that?”

I scowled down the staircase as if it could bring me answers, then glanced back up to where Gabor stood looking steadily down at me. Downstairs, the front door slammed and footsteps hastened across the hall.

Reluctantly, I smiled. “The same way as we explain my nightmare and the pillow? I’m overwrought.”

“Aren’t you?” he said gently. “Forgive me, but Zsigmund’s not an easy man to live with. On top of which, he’s carried you across Europe to a strange country and a strange new family where your home must scarcely feel your own. We are all very sensible of these things. You should be too. Whatever the count’s odd ways, he does welcome you here.”

“Thank you.” I said, touched.

He nodded and turned to go back downstairs.

“Gabor?” I said impulsively.

He paused, glancing back over his shoulder.

In a rush, I asked, “Did Zsigmund write to you from Lescloches asking you to find out about me?”

“No,” Gabor said.

I slumped with relief and shame. It had just been Countess Narinyi’s spite and Zsigmund’s temper, along with my own insecurities that caused me to believe such a thing. I was making us both unnecessarily unhappy and owed him a huge apology.

Gabor stirred. “Zsigmund and I are not so close. We never write. More exactly, he wrote to the count, his grandfather, and suggested I make enquiries.”

Indirectly.
Zsigmund had said he’d asked indirectly... It seemed that the world, so recently revived in hope, was falling in on me again. Someone was running up the stairs, but I couldn’t rouse myself to move.

I met Gabor’s gaze. “Did you?”

He gave the faintest smile, just as Zsigmund leapt around the corner to the landing and pulled up short, almost like a rearing horse.

“Well,” he said, gazing from me sitting on the stair to Gabor standing on the one below. “A confab. Or are you planning to sleep on the staircase?”

Almost surprised to see it, I glanced down at the pillow in my lap. “Of course not.”

“I’ll leave you to it,” Gabor said vaguely and walked sedately downstairs.

Zsigmund advanced upon me. My heart fluttered, as it always did around him. And when he reached down, it positively leapt. But he didn’t touch me, merely lifted the pillow from my lap.

“Shall we?” he said, gesturing me to precede him.

I rose from my step, which immediately brought me too close to him. His intense brown eyes devoured my face, the hint of a frown between his brows. As though he were anxious for my well-being. Did he know about the attack in the mist? Why would he? Unless the soldier was still his man.

He said deliberately, “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

I licked my dry lips. “Like what?”

He shrugged. “Whatever’s on your mind. It never used to be hard for you to talk to me, even when you didn’t want to.”

“I went to the museum with Margit Borruth.” Perhaps because his attention was so close, I couldn’t think of anything else to say on the subject. Dropping my gaze, I turned and began to climb the last few stairs to our floor.

“Perhaps questions help,” he said in a harder voice. “Such as why you were holding hands with Karl von Degenfeld this morning.”

“I wasn’t,” I said impatiently. “Well, he was holding mine.”

“Why?”

I shrugged impatiently. “For no amorous reason, if that’s what you’re imagining. He seemed to think I was unhappy.”

“Well, there he and I are in agreement. If I say it aloud, will I be allowed to hold your hand too?”

I flushed, hurrying across the landing to the passage that led to our room. “If I didn’t know better, Zsigmund,” I said loftily, “I’d think you sounded jealous.”

“What makes you think you know better?”

My heart jolted, but when my gaze flew to his face, it was dark and frowning and unapproachable. “I don’t. I don’t know anything anymore.” I drew in a breath that seemed to shudder. “Were you out in the mist? Did you get lost in it?”

“It’s only over a tiny part of the city. It’s already lifting.”

“Ah. Then you’ll be going out again this evening,” I said as neutrally as I could. I didn’t want him to go out. I wanted him around me, to convince me all was still well between us, although it so obviously wasn’t.

“No, I thought I’d stay in with you,” he said, and when I glanced at him quickly, he added, “Can’t upset old Karl all the time, can I? But you’ve no need to worry, I shan’t intrude. Friends will be coming in.”

“Unfit-for-your-wife friends?” I asked sardonically.

“Pretty much.” He pushed open the door to our room. “But I won’t let the dancing girls disturb you.”

I sailed past him. “How considerate.”

“Anything to please you,” he said, strolling into his dressing room and closing the door.

****

L
ater, I lay awake in the darkness, my eyes wide open. From below, I heard occasional bursts of laughter or a too-loud voice declaiming words I was too distant to make out, even if they’d been in a language I understood. From the noise, the company with Zsigmund was all male. Well, I hadn’t believed in the dancing girls; I was fairly sure he hadn’t meant me to.

I wondered if I’d ever sleep again. Despite Gabor’s rationalising of last night’s event, I couldn’t quell my continued unease. Because when I thought about it, there was really no more proof for his theory than mine. I might like his better in many ways—apart from the idea of trying to smother myself in my sleep—but that didn’t make it true.

In the passage outside, a floorboard creaked. I ignored it until it creaked again. Then, thoroughly alarmed, I threw off the covers and slid to the floor, reaching for my robe. I was not going to be caught in bed again, off guard and vulnerable... On the other hand, it would be foolish to rush into anything without knowledge. My heart hammering, I lit a candle and knelt at the door to peer through the keyhole.

The passage beyond was dark and, so far as I could see, empty. I stood and quietly, carefully opened the door, peering through the crack in either direction. Seeing nothing, I slipped out the door.

By the flickering glow of my candle, I stared into the thicker darkness beyond my room. No one used these rooms, but any intruder could hide there. I shivered, wishing I had Barbara’s gift of sensing presence through emotion. I’d know if anyone lurked in wait for me; I’d know who hated me; I’d know what, if anything, Zsigmund truly felt for me. Barbara would say it wasn’t as simple as that. And in truth, before I’d come here, I’d been inclined to take most of Barbara’s more bizarre beliefs with a pinch of rational salt. They made her fascinating and different to me, but hardly useful.

Although Patrick was no longer so vocal on the subject of mediums. He’d said recently there were more things in heaven and earth than he’d ever imagined. There had been that trouble at Haggard Hall earlier in the year. And I knew Barbara had somehow helped Guin in her haunted castle, although whether that was in the practical ways Barbara was so good at or with actual ghosts, no one had said. Or at least I hadn’t heard. Now, I would hear. Although I could see or hear no one in the passage, my skin prickled with the certainty of presence.

And indeed, when I turned my head and looked in the direction of the staircase, I was sure someone vanished around the corner. With a lurching stomach, I hurried after. I was thinking of the man who’d grabbed me in the garden. Had he somehow made his way up here while Zsigmund got drunk with his friends downstairs? I didn’t want to think that Zsigmund had let him in...

His friends are the perfect alibi for him. I would die while he has witnesses to his presence somewhere else.

If I truly thought that, I was insane to be pursuing the assassin through the house. But he could just as easily be someone with a grudge against Zsigmund, lying in wait for him. My best plan was to follow him, to see if he was real if for no other reason, and then raise the alarm. From the voices issuing from downstairs, there were several young men who together were surely capable of restraining him, however drunk they might be. All I had to do was call.

But by the time I reached the staircase, there was no sign of anyone. My “assassin” seemed to have been nothing more than the glimpse of an imaginary shape formed from the darkness. Some light seeped up the stairwell from the ground floor. It should have reassured me, soothed my unease. But for some reason, it didn’t. I moved around the banisters, peering downwards, although I didn’t really know what I was looking for.

Below me, I could see a light shining under the door of the count’s study. Either he or Gabor, or both, were still up. I walked around to the other side—and froze.

Someone glowed, presumably bathed in light from behind, just beyond the library door. Not the big, ugly man who’d grabbed me in the mist, but a woman. I could see her skirts, although the light blinded me to her face. I had the strangest fancy that I could see through her skirts, through her whole person, to the passage beyond.

The woman raised her arm; long pale fingers stretched towards me and curled, beckoning.

I shivered. And yet all my fears seemed to fall away like autumn leaves from a tree. She might not have made the floorboards creak—the house was in poor repair and floorboards creaked all the time—but I was sure suddenly it was this ghostly figure I’d been following.

I walked round to the top of the stairs and descended to the first floor. A burst of laughter came from the drawing room, a clinking of glass. I ignored it, concentrated on finding the glowing woman.

As I reached the first-floor landing and hurried across to the library, I thought she’d gone. I could no longer see her anywhere. But then, when I slowed, I saw her farther along, by the open door to the music room. I walked faster.

She vanished. But I didn’t hesitate. Everything seemed to have been leading here. I walked into the music room, and the door swung shut behind me. I started, although I felt no immediate need to leave.

She sat on the stool where I’d first imagined her. Her face and clothes were the same too, not conjured from my imagination at all, unless this was also. I gazed at her in fascination, and she gazed back with peculiar intensity, as if willing me to do something, or perhaps just understand.

“Are you Ilona?” I asked.

Her face twitched towards me.

“Zsigmund’s mother?”

This time the twitch was a more definite frown. Almost as if she knew I was speaking but couldn’t understand the words. I tried the question again in Hungarian, and then in French, the language of the Hungarian nobility, but got the same response. Maybe she was another ghost entirely.

She rose, gliding towards me, and my candle flame blew back and flickered out. I could see only the palely glowing, semitransparent figure who stood right in front of me, staring.

“What is it?” I asked helplessly. “What is it you want of me? Are you warning me?” My stomach twisted. “Is Zsigmund in danger?”

She moved suddenly, rushing on me. I gasped with shock, though I felt nothing more than the faintest bodily tingle.

I spun around, searching. “Where are you? Please, don’t go.”

Several moments passed before I saw her again, gliding across the room towards the open double doors that led to the drawing room. Again, I followed her. Her transparent body seemed to provide all the light I needed. I didn’t bump into anything.

Inside, we went through much the same process. I sat on the yellow sofa I’d uncovered previously, and she came close, staring, almost glaring at me while I asked her questions that produced very little response apart from another rush at my head. I wondered if it was anger or frustration, or if she imagined she could communicate from inside me. That was how Barbara talked to the dead—and I was so sorry for doubting her, for right now, I wished I had even the tiniest part of her knowledge. I’d never felt so helpless in my life.

The ghostly apparition formed again right in front of me. Her fingers coiled around mine. Although I couldn’t feel them, as such, I did understand her plea for me to follow her. We went on into the smaller sitting room and then the bedroom, and I thought that perhaps this was where she was strongest. Her body seemed just a little more substantial. I thought I could make out more expression on her beautiful face as she sat down on the bed and patted it silently for me to join her.

This was where she’d died. The thought chilled me.

“What is it you need me to know?” I asked her. “How you died? Was it not suicide?”

She stared at me. I stared at her. But it seemed we occupied two different worlds and while the veil might have thinned enough for us to see each other, we still couldn’t communicate through it.

“Barbara,” I murmured helplessly, “I wish you were here!” For the one thing I was sure of was that Ilona—or whoever this ghost had once been—hadn’t come to me on a whim but through dire necessity. This was important. And if she truly was Ilona, as I believed, then surely her reasons were to do with Zsigmund?

Gazing at the ghost, I thought quite hard about Barbara and how she could possibly communicate with the dead. She opened her mind, somehow, and let the spirits in. I tried, imagining my mind opening like a flower to receive the thoughts of the ghost beside me. I willed her to speak to me, for me to understand her.

She stared at me; the strange, deep eyes that were little more than blackness, never blinked. Instead of growing stronger in response to my efforts, she seemed to fade...or at least to change. Her features blurred and twisted until I fell back in alarm, and then they stilled into those of an entirely different person.

Barbara Darke.

T
he face of my friend stared back at me with something approaching horror.