Silent Water Read online

I kept moving away from her, and she flicked her wrist, pointing the dagger next to Dantyszek. “Sit.”

  I did as she told me, but I kept my eyes locked on hers the whole time. When I was on the floor, my back against the wall, she took a seat on a stool across from us, the dagger still pointing. It was a solid double-edged weapon, at least six inches long. In the hands of someone who knew how to use it—and somehow I knew that she did—it was a fearsome and deadly instrument.

  We stared at each other for a long time, but her face was inscrutable. Her eyes, too, became distant and detached so that I was no longer sure if she even knew who I was. It occurred to me that she might have gone insane, and I decided not to upset her or make her angry. I would wait until she spoke first. Maybe that way I would have a chance of getting Dantyszek out of there alive.

  The silence continued for what seemed like a very long time, and even Dantyszek went quiet. Then Helena spoke, her voice calm and even slightly amused, “I suppose you would like to know how I found myself here in this cellar with him?”

  I nodded. I had already guessed that she had drugged him with the poppy milk, the same method Mantovano had used with the guards on the night of his death. In both cases, she was the one who had procured the bottles from Baldazzi. But how had she managed to get Dantyszek down here? For although she was young and strong, she could not possibly have dragged an unconscious man all the way to the kitchen and down the steps to the cellar without being seen by anybody.

  “Well, it is a long story.” She laughed with relish, and I realized that she was proud of what she was about to say. Once again, I wondered if her sanity had left her. “I lured him here with the promise of the one thing a man like him would never refuse—an amorous encounter.”

  I heard Dantyszek take a ragged breath and try to spit out his gag again, to no avail. I kept staring at Helena.

  “When you told me about his upcoming mission to Naples”—she waved the dagger in Dantyszek’s direction without looking at him—“I knew I had to act quickly. The storm and the emptying of the kitchen came just in time, and with the help of a few coins, I procured a spare key to the side door from one of the kitchen maids.”

  For a moment, I wondered if it had been the girl Marta, the same who had given me the sack of fruit a few days earlier. But it could have been any one of the two dozen servants who worked there. Besides, that was the least of my worries right then.

  “I had sent a message to him to meet me upstairs in the kitchen at midnight last night, and when he arrived—punctually, of course”—she laughed again—“I gave him a cup of wine to welcome him. I had mixed it with Doctor Baldazzi’s poppy milk, and after he drained it, I told him there were empty cells downstairs that we could go to in case someone returned to the kitchen to feed the fire in the oven. By the time we made it here, he was barely awake, and before he could put his hands on me, he fell like a log to the floor. After that, tying him up was easy.”

  Dantyszek moved sharply, and I heard the clink of metal again. I realized that one of his legs was chained by the ankle, the short chain fastened to the wall. What kind of a church crypt had this place been?

  As if guessing my thoughts, Helena said, “During the previous century, the good fathers used this crypt as a prison for witches. I learned as much as I could about it before I implemented my plan, mainly from Michałowa. She knows all kinds of stories and is only too happy to share them.”

  That I could believe. Normally, I would not have put much faith in the veracity of Michałowa’s tales, but the chain and the hinges sticking out of the wall three feet above the floor that had likely supported some sort of a bench or cot suggested that it might indeed have been a prison cell once. If so, the women held here must have gone through terrible suffering.

  I shuddered as I looked up at Helena. She was not insane. She had planned this out from the beginning to the end, leaving nothing to chance. Her mind was sharp and clear, but it was also in the grip of some powerful and sinister force. I recalled my early sense that nothing was what it seemed in this story. Appearances could be deceiving: that was what I had thought about Latalski and his possible association with the bibones et comedones; that was what Konarski had said about Maciek; that was also what I had felt when I found out that Mantovano had been drinking wine on the night of his death. Yet the true deception was right before my eyes this whole time—in an innocent-looking young woman whose calm demeanor belied an unspeakable darkness in her soul.

  The deviousness of it took my breath away.

  “But why, Helena? Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  For the first time a shadow of pain crossed her face. She rose from her stool and began pacing the cell to the door and back. I could hear her breath quicken. “To make you understand,” she said at length, her voice catching, “I would first have to tell you about Zamborski and what a monster he was.”

  Something lodged in my throat like a stone that I could neither swallow nor spit out. I suddenly realized that up until then—and despite all evidence to the contrary—I had still held a tiny glimmer of hope that the kidnapping of Dantyszek was not related to the murders. That Helena would say something to make that clear, to cut herself off from those other crimes. She might have found the ruby dagger abandoned somewhere and was now using it for this prank—in poor taste, to be sure, but with a perfectly good explanation. Like jealousy. Maybe they had been lovers after all, Dantyszek had left her, and she wanted to take her revenge by frightening him?

  But now I saw this last illusion evaporate like a fog that lifts only to leave one staring at the stark, horrible, inescapable reality of a devastation beyond repair.

  “It is all his fault. It all started with him.” She stopped in the middle of the cell, her hands by her sides. She gazed into the flame of the candle, her sea-green eyes wide and still, her face frozen. Only her lips moved as she spoke, which made her look like a sleepwalker, talking from somewhere deep within herself, slowly and dispassionately. “It happened on Midsummer Eve. We all went down to the riverbank to float flower wreaths and light bonfires. It had always been my favorite holiday, when nature is at its most lush and green. It is so warm, the air so clear, and the scents so heady that it makes you think that summer will never end, that we will never grow old, never die, and you are simply happy, so happy to be alive.”

  I could see her eyes glaze over, but it was a moment before I realized that they were brimming with tears.

  “We were having a delightful time, the other maids of honor and I. You were there too.” Her eyes swiveled in my direction, and two tears ran down her cheeks. “For once you were enjoying yourself, not watching over us like a hawk.” There was a slight mockery in her voice, but I ignored it as my mind reeled back to that June celebration. She was right—it was a joyous occasion, a tradition in these northern lands that went back hundreds and hundreds of years, all the way to pagan times. The Church frowns upon it, of course, which is why it is so popular with young people, who come to eat, sing, and dance outside all night. Yet something terrible had happened last year, and I was frantically trying to remember if I had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. But I could not.

  Helena must have seen the struggle in my face. “You didn’t see it. Nobody saw it. Zamborski came up to me and took my hand to lead me in a dance. I was in a cheery mood and I’d had more wine than I am used to, so I didn’t notice when we moved outside the circle of the other dancers, away from the light of the bonfire and toward the shadow of a copse of trees some distance away. There we stopped, and I thought he wanted to kiss me, so I laughed and turned away, but he grabbed me by the arm. I told him to let me go, that I wanted to go back to the others, but he said that what I wanted was something different, something I didn’t know yet but would enjoy when I tried it.

  “He pulled me into the copse, and I cried out, but nobody could hear me through the music and laughter and the roar of the bonfires up and down the river. It is that sound that haunts me at night even mor
e than his breathing in my ear as he pushed me to the ground and forced himself on me.”

  “Oh, Helena.” My hand went to my mouth. “I had no idea. I didn’t notice anything—if I had seen—” I could not go on, knowing how inadequate my excuse was, how belated the assurance.

  “When he was done, he said I had got what I deserved for besting him at the archery contest earlier that day, that even though I had won, I was still a weak woman who needed to be shown her place.” She wiped her tears, flowing freely now, with the back of her hands. It was a childlike gesture and it broke my heart, for it reminded me how young she still was. “And then he said that if I ever told anyone about it, he would say that I had seduced him, and that I had been drunk. And then everybody would think that I was a whore, fit for a tavern rather than a royal court. Oh, how I wish I had been drunk that night,” she said bitterly. “Maybe I would have no memory of any of it now.”

  I made to rise. I wanted to put my arms around her, to comfort her, but as soon as I moved, her body jerked as if jolted from sleep, and she swung the hand that held the dagger out in my direction. “Stay where you are,” she said through gritted teeth, her eyes flashing like the blade in the candlelight.

  I raised my hands in a gesture that I hoped would calm her and sat back against the wall. “I am sorry for suspecting that you were having a liaison and that you were with child,” I said, guilt coloring my voice as I realized how unfair my words had been, how ironic and painful to her.

  She laughed scornfully. “You were worried about it two weeks ago because all you care about is your position with the queen, but I almost went insane with fear last summer, thinking of the possibility of having to bring a bastard child of a rapist into the world. I spent three terrifying, sleepless weeks until my courses arrived, but even so my mind has not known a moment of peace since then.”

  She went back to the stool and wrapped her arms around her chest in a protective gesture, like she had done the night I had found her in her nightgown in the gallery after the council meeting with the queen. She began rocking forward and backward, the dagger still clutched in her hand. “Every time I saw him in the castle—and it was almost every day—his air of self-satisfaction, his smirk, his nod whenever he caught me looking at him, his brazen flirting with women as if to show me that he could do whatever he wanted with whomever he wanted, and that nobody could stop him . . . it tore something inside me over and over again. And I knew that it would never close and heal as long as he was alive.”

  “So you sent word to him to meet you in the delivery passage during the Christmas banquet, and you killed him.”

  This time, her laughter was full of satisfaction; there was even a hint of relief in it. “Well guessed, signora. I did kill him, with my own hands and his own dagger.” She hefted the weapon in her palm, gazing at it fondly.

  I was about to ask how she managed to do that without drugging him too, when it all became clear to me. “You left our table in the hall—which I assumed was because you felt unwell—then you went up to the servants’ floor because you thought it would be empty at that hour, and through their corridor, you made it to the other side of the castle, where you used the servants’ staircase to reach the delivery passage. Zamborski was already waiting for you, or you had to wait for him, and when you finally met, you embraced him. He was kissing you when you pulled his dagger out of its sheath, reached your hand around, and plunged it into his back as you stood in front of him. That explains why his wound was in the middle of his back, not higher up between his shoulders.”

  That had been the nagging thought I had in the cathedral crypt that night after Christmas when the queen demanded to see Zamborski’s body. That was why I had not believed that a romantic rival had killed Zamborski in a fit of anger, or that he had been accosted and dispatched by a thief after his property. The strike had been quick and stealthy, but most importantly it had been inflicted by someone who was much shorter than Zamborski—in other words, a woman.

  “It also explains why there was no blood on your gown and you were able to return to the table without arousing suspicion,” I added, running my hand over my forehead where I could feel the wetness of perspiration despite the chill that pervaded the place.

  Helena gazed at me intently for some moments as if seeing me for the first time. She wagged her finger at me playfully. “You are clever, Donna Caterina. Cleverer than I thought, given your obsession with guarding our virtue from ourselves, and also your timid pining for Secretary Konarski.” I opened my mouth to protest, although I was not sure about what, for she was right on both counts. But she went on, ignoring me and growing more somber again. “Yes, that is exactly how I killed him. It made me sick to kiss him, but I kept thinking that that kiss would be his death, and that was what helped me endure it. It was a means to an end.”

  All the remaining pieces were falling into place. It was Helena that Maciek Koza had seen in the servants’ corridor as she was returning to the hall from killing Zamborski. What he had thought was the hem of a man’s cloak was a sliver of her dress—dark blue that night, but easily appearing black in the dimly lit passage —as she turned the corner away from him. With a bitter sense of irony, I remembered my fleeting thought as he had said it that it might have been Helena—or Lucrezia—returning from a secret rendezvous. How close I had been to the truth in that moment, and yet how far, for even that brief idea had not extended to me suspecting one of them of murder.

  Suddenly, the forgotten words Stańczyk the jester had spoken on the evening of the king’s birthday reception rang in my ears as clearly as if he were standing next to me in the cell. This was no man’s fury. How naïve was I, and how clever the dwarf! It had been no phantom or ghost who had sown terror in the castle those last few weeks, but a living, breathing—and much wronged—woman.

  I looked away, my gaze falling on Dantyszek. He was staring at Helena steadily, without anger but without much sympathy either. He was almost defiant.

  “What about him?” I asked. “Did he hurt you too?”

  “No. He is not the kind of beast Zamborski was, at least not to my knowledge. Though you never know,” she added with an indifferent shrug.

  “Then why hold him?” I grasped at it. “Why not let him go?”

  “Because,” she said with an impatient intake of breath as if she were speaking to a child or a simpleton, “he makes the behavior of men like Zamborski possible. As the leader of the bibones et comedones, he glorifies and encourages the pursuit of women, and the likes of Zamborski look up to him.”

  Dantyszek pulled on his chain again, and I could sense his exasperation returning. His hands tensed as he tried to break the tie binding his wrists, but the rope was fastened securely and tight, one of the many practical skills Helena must have learned from her father. Dantyszek let out a muffled groan of frustration, but he was weakening, and his chest worked laboriously with each breath. He had not eaten for more than twenty-four hours, and I doubted that Helena had given him anything to drink either.

  “He needs water.” I pointed with my chin to a pewter jug in the corner by the crate where the candle was standing. “Can I remove his gag for just a moment so he can have a few sips?”

  She shook her head. “The water is for me. He doesn’t need it anymore. He doesn’t have long to live.”

  Dantyszek slumped next to me, and for the first time, I began to fear for my own life. If she meant to kill him, she would not let me out of there alive to let the world know what she had done. A cold dread spread through my core and to my limbs, rendering them heavy as lead as I realized that the most likely outcome would be both of us dying at her hand. When she was done with us, and before the kitchen staff returned, she would make her way out of the castle and out of Kraków, perhaps dressed in my clothes for a better disguise, and nobody would ever know she had been there that night. Meanwhile, our bodies would remain in the dank cellar to rot or be eaten by vermin, undiscovered for months or years to come. Eventually, all that w
ould be left would be bare gray bones, indistinguishable from the others buried in this crypt centuries ago. This image stood so vividly in my mind that I began to shake.

  “You are cold in your wet clothes, signora,” Helena observed, then her tone turned ominous. “You shouldn’t have come here. It was a bad idea—”

  “I was looking for him because the queen was impatient to dispatch her letter to Naples,” I hastened to explain to prevent her from saying what I knew she was going to say next: that I would share Dantyszek’s fate. It was a pathetic explanation, but I wanted to distract her and keep her talking about anything but what she was going to do to us. Until help arrived . . . but what help? Nobody knew we were there, and it must have been the middle of the night by then. The banquet was over, and everybody had gone to bed, relieved that another body had not been found.

  “He is not going to Naples, not only because a dead man cannot travel, but also because the letter of condolence to Signora Mantovano is full of falsehoods,” Helena said matter-of-factly.

  “What do you mean?” I asked as my ears hopelessly strained for any sound of footsteps outside. Had I left the door to the cellar open? I tried to remember desperately, but I could not.

  “What I mean is that the letter likely states that Mantovano was not only a dependable and competent secretary, but also a faithful and loving husband. In reality he was a cad and a lecher, no better than Zamborski, Dantyszek, and the rest of that wretched society. Actually”—she put a finger to her chin and looked up in a mock gesture of wondering—“he may have been even worse because they at least never pretended to be virtuous and pious. When was the last time you saw him”—a quick swing of the dagger tip toward Dantyszek—“sing praises of the Holy Virgin in a front stall of the cathedral, Mantovano’s favorite pastime? No, he prefers to wink at the flesh-and-blood virgins in the stalls across from him. The pleasures of the bed are the only gods he worships.”

  She roared with laughter and slapped her thigh the way a man would. When her mirth abated, she affected a look of inquiry as she leaned forward, asking Dantyszek directly, “Or should I have said ‘preferred’ and ‘worshipped,’ given you aren’t going to do either anymore?” Her lips curled into a smirk at the look of terror in his eyes.