Quiver (3 page)

Maria isn’t in sight; has she stood me up? She’s done it before. But then I see three tables at the far end, raised on a dais. The area is dark except for one small lamp hung from the ceiling. Two of the tables are empty, but a figure with blonde hair occupies the one farthest to the right. She’s facing away from me, but then she drapes her arm over the back of her chair and turns around. Automatically, I stand a little straighter. Maria smiles, and even in the low light her chandelier earrings shine.

I walk over to her. “Danica!
Jó estét
.” Maria greets me with two cheek kisses and a long hug. I take a slow breath and smell her gardenia perfume before she releases me. I linger, then pull away slowly. She’s wearing a low-cut black silk dress, and her hair falls in light waves past her shoulders. “You look wonderful,” she says.

“And you,” I reply. Maria is ten years older than me but is easily one of the most beautiful people in the room.

“Sit.” She points to the black upholstered bench across the table from her chair. There is a martini waiting for me, three olives.

“I didn’t think I’d hear from you again.” I wait a beat. “You know, after you left in Budapest.”

“Ah, Budapest. Nonsense.” She flicks her wrist, dismisses everything with a swish of her hand. “I ordered for you,” she says, gesturing towards the drink. “Send it back if a martini is not still your favourite.” She crosses her legs and takes a sip of her red wine.

“So,” says Maria, “you are working at Stowmoor? Your old supervisor, Carl, he tells me this.”

“Yes. Started a few weeks ago.”

“Have you met Foster?”

Is she just fishing or does she know I have? I stifle a smile, think how badly she would like to know about my tête-à-tête with Foster last week. “Can’t discuss that. Confidential.”

“But it’s only me, Dani.” She blinks her doll eyes a couple of times, blue irises bright next to dark liner and thick black lashes.

In the past this display might have swayed me. I’m still taken with the effect, but I say, “I can’t discuss it, Maria.”

“Fine. But I assume, then, there is something you
could
say.”

“Your note said you had something?” I sip my drink.

“Yes, that. Carl told me you have moved in with an artist. Living in Shepherd’s Bush. Not as trendy as you would hope?”

“Well, it’s kind of exciting. There was a murder in the park by the tube station last week. And the grocery is close by.”

She tries to make me feel like a ghetto-dwelling undergrad eating ramen noodles from a Styrofoam cup. How did she get all this information from Carl? I consider leaving. Maria leans back, re-crosses her legs, then leans forward again. She lowers her chin slightly, tilts her head and smiles.

“I have them, Danica. Báthory’s diaries.”

“You don’t!” How could she possibly have them? We’d found nothing in Budapest. The diaries were only rumoured to exist; there was a reference or two in old history books, a note that sixty years ago someone read a report that someone claimed to have seen them. It was harder still to find any information on where the diaries might currently be. But we’d decided to search.

“I could not take them from the library. But for three days, they let me read them.” Maria smiles, reaches for her silver clamshell purse and pulls out some lip gloss.

“What library? In the archives? How did you find them?”

When I was in Budapest, Maria had said the logical place to start was with the National Archives. We climbed up Castle Hill in mid-July heat; the archives office was in one of the grey stone buildings amid the spires and staircases. Maria led me through a wooden double door, down a hallway to a little office where three ladies worked at old cherry desks. Rows and rows of card catalogues lined the walls of the room. Maria spoke with the ladies for a few minutes. Finally, she turned to me with a translation: we’d need an exact catalogue number for any box we wanted to retrieve.

“How can we know what box we want?” I asked. “Where are the records of what’s in each box? Can’t they do a database search on the computer or something?”

“Dani, here it is different. The records, they are not all on computers.”

I looked around the office again. There was an old microfiche reader in the corner and a mid-nineties-looking PC on one of the ladies’ desks. “Are you serious? Where are the records, then?”

Maria waved at one of the card catalogue stacks.

“The entire archival records for the whole country are in card catalogues?”

“They have started, with the digitization. But for now, only paper records are complete. The ladies, they have said we can order up all the boxes of the Báthory family, and then we can look. But the diaries, there is no guarantee they will be in the boxes. They say people, before us, have tried to look and found nothing.”

I began to understand why no one had officially discovered the diaries. Still, if we put in the work and went through absolutely everything, maybe we could find them. “Well, how many boxes are there? When can we go through them?”

“They said there are perhaps fifty. But Dani, things here, they take time. The boxes, it will take four months for them to arrive.”

“Four months? Where are they?” I asked.

“They are in the storage cellars, below the castle. The archives, they are very large. Here, things are more complicated than I think you are used to, Dani,” she told me.

In the dim light of Tiger Tiger, I wait as Maria finishes dabbing clear shiny gloss onto her lips, rearranges her purse and snaps the clamshell shut before she answers me. “They were not there, where I looked at first. It was a bit challenging. It was necessary to speak to several people.”

“Who? Where were the diaries?”

“The diaries were not in the archives of the Báthory records. I consulted with some historians at the universities, in Budapest, then Szeged. The story, it is too long for tonight.”

Of course it is. “But you saw the diaries? You read them?”

“I transcribed them, and translated them.”

“Into English?”

At this, Maria laughed. “Always impatient! Now they are for the most part in modern Hungarian. But I have started on English copies and I have brought my transcripts here.”

“How long will you be in town?”

Another laugh. “I am here for many months. On contract with the Museum of London. Did you not notice my address on the card?”

“Yes, but—”

“I am consulting on the Jacob exhibition. But they do not work me too hard yet. I am thinking of using my spare time to write the diaries in English. After that, I will go with the original plan. Publish a modern edition.”

She finishes her wine, sets the glass on the table and looks at me without a shade of guilt. The original plan was for us to search for the diaries together.

“So you’ve started translating them already? How far along are you?” I had fantasized about pulling the diaries out of a long-neglected pile of manuscripts. I’d pictured Maria and I passing Báthory’s words between us, the paper she had touched.

I had been fixated on the idea of finding the diaries. It had become a cherished distraction from the requirements of my program, the jumping through hoops, the ferocity of Carl’s insistence that I compete for every possible award. One day I made the mistake of mentioning to Carl that I had an interest in finding the manuscript and maybe contributing to an edition of the diaries. “That’s a vanity project, Danica,” he had said. “Chasing after a myth. Where is the scholarly merit? How much time would this take away from your training?”

Maybe it was vanity that had motivated me. The belief that I was entitled to a more interesting reality than an academic life could provide. Even now I’m angry with Maria for continuing the project without me. But still, I’m compelled; if she has them, I want to see them.

“The translations? I really have not gotten anywhere yet.” Her mobile beeps from her purse. She pulls it out. “Ah, text from Edward.”

I’ve drained my martini. Maria slowly packs her purse, picks her coat off the hook on the wall. She wraps the grey fur over her dress and pulls a black belt taut around her small waist.

“You’re leaving?”

“This place,” she tilts her head and sniffs, “it is not where I wish to spend a Friday night.” I take a second look, notice the frayed rayon seat covers and several blobby stains on the floor. The businessmen have accumulated a half-dozen empty beer bottles with labels half peeled.

I stand too. “But will you show them to me?”

“You would not think I would keep them from you?” she says as she pulls her hair out of her collar and lets it fall around her face. A man around my age walks onto the dais. “Ah, Edward,” she says and kisses him. “Danica, here is Edward. He is an arts columnist at the
Guardian.
”

“And sometimes I write for the less illustrious
Time Out London,
too,” he says. Edward is handsome, what you would expect for Maria. He’s immaculately groomed, and his chocolate-brown dress shirt complements deep brown eyes and a tan. “A pleasure,” he says, holding out one hand to me while keeping the other around Maria’s waist. I shake his hand half-heartedly and hear Maria introduce me as “a friend and colleague.”

“Dani, I will be in touch,” she says as she and Edward float down from the dais and across Tiger Tiger’s lounge.

She lured me and won. I’m angry and disappointed. And embarrassed that I’m disappointed, that I even came at all. Of course she would drag me out and then abandon me, leave me sitting in a dark corner in a tacky club, alone on a Friday night. It’s my own fault; I shouldn’t have given her the chance. I have a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and still I fall for her. She’s not a balanced, empathetic person. She’s manipulative, selfish, opportunistic. I will recite all of this to myself repeatedly and not respond to her again.

But if she’s telling the truth, she has Báthory’s diaries.

I storm around the West End for a while. Theatre signs, lit up and pulsing, spur me to walk faster. I pass through the red glow from
Thriller,
the yellow glare from
Avenue
Q. Soon the streets are teeming with people filing out of shows, making their way to overpriced bars. I want to diffuse my anger among the chatter of the crowd and dull my craving to see Maria again. Groups of friends bunch together on the sidewalk, divide the flow of people striding around them. I’m jostled into the roadway twice and decide to push onto the underground and go home to Henry. It’s only quarter to eleven, but he’s already in bed, flipping through a Marcel Duchamp book he’s fished from one of our yet-to-unpack boxes. He takes off his reading glasses when I come through the door. I crawl on top of him, coat and heels still on, and land a gentle kiss in the hollow of his neck. “Hey, Venus,” he says, pushing off my coat, undoing my halter. He turns me onto my back and pushes my hands above my head, and I welcome the weight of his body on mine. I close my eyes and try to erase Maria and her gardenia smell. Imagine the diaries dissolving, bookworms devouring every slip of parchment, every copy Maria might have made.

Two days later, a message from Maria turns up in my inbox:

So lovely to see you the other night. The first of many meetings, I am sure. For now, a snippet for you.

x, M.

She has attached a file called “Báthory Vienna.” Immediately, I click on it.

Vienna, November 14, 1599

I am much pleased with Dorca and Fizcko this evening. This morning I was sure they would fail to deliver what they have been promising me all week, and that the only punishment to be witnessed tonight would be their own beatings. But Dorca found such a pretty girl, with truly sable hair, rare for a peasant. And Fizcko constructed the perfect cage, barbs strong and sharp as steel tusks. I told Helena Jo not to clean after our play—I want to wake tomorrow and see the rusted blood thick on the cellar floor. Fizcko followed my instructions exactly. After supper (the duck was not warm enough) he waited until I was comfortably seated in the cellar. The girl was bound, ankles together, wrists behind her back, a coarse-woven sack over her head. She moved little, having had no food since Tuesday; any longer and they are too limp for my purposes, any less and they are not desperate enough. She was crumpled on her side near the brick furnace, where she could feel the heat and hear Fizcko setting the long irons. Her hair spilled past her shoulders, out of the brown sack, long knotty waves of the purest black. She was without a dress, wore only a dirty ragged petticoat, a patched and rough corset, the kind poor women stitch together. Whenever Fizcko turned the irons, the clangs echoed in the cellar and the girl would let out a noise, goaded, I presume, by fear: a sort of half moan, tailed with a tiny, high-pitched shriek. Sometimes the shrieks would come in waves, three, four at a time, as if all her body could do was take in small snatches of air and force them out in minute spurts. I hoped her gag was tied tightly, cutting into the corners of her mouth, rubbing that pink flesh raw as slaughtered beef.

The cage sat directly before me. It was black iron, the bars set just wide enough apart for a girl to extend an arm, maybe a leg if she wasn’t too stout. Just wide enough so Dorca could jab her with the irons, enough so I could see every futile movement she made, could watch exactly how she moved to impale herself on those tusks. There was a constellation of spikes, all at least eight inches long, protruding inwards. To the top of the cage was fastened a chain, which was threaded through a pulley; once the girl was inside, Fizcko would hoist her up. In this cellar space it wouldn’t be very high, but high enough for the cage to swing at least a foot above my head. This old house used to be a monastery; thank God those Augustinians made such a sturdy, high basement. The bottom of the contraption was a steel grill, strong enough to hold a frantic dying girl, open enough to let her blood rain down below.

At last the pokers were heated. Fizcko gathered up the crumpled girl and stood her in the cage. He moved to take the sack off her head before I reminded him to stop and loose only her hands, so that she could do the rest. Fizcko locked the door to the cage and told the girl to untie her own feet, take off her blind and gag. She started to scream as soon as she saw where she was, locked fast in the maw of my spiked cage, with Fizcko hunched and dirty outside the bars, stoking the furnace. She cursed in German at him, and he brandished a glowing iron towards her. The girl whimpered and stumbled back, screamed again when her forearm scraped against a spike: a half-moon mark, fresh red, sprang up on her skin. She was an easy bleeder.

She kept looking towards me, taken, I imagine, with what she saw. Helena Jo bleached my hair just last week, so now it looks like white-gold silk. I had the girls do my hair up today, a twist at the crown. They put in the ruby combs that Ferenc brought back from the Turks. Just before supper I changed my collar to a stiff white lace. I must have looked like an angel, all golden and light and glittering. I could calm these half-starved, frightened girls before they died, kill them quick, draw a knife blade across their pale throats, their skin soft and easy to split as an apricot. I could explain to them that their virgin blood had a purpose, would contribute to the preservation of my beauty, that they are dying to serve one greater than themselves. But I would miss their screams, their tears.