Voiture-Lit 1st Classe № 5 ﹠ 6
The door to the No.5 berth swung open as soon as Rasputina knocked on the door. “Please come in, I’ve been waiting for Your Highness and Grace.”
The middle-aged lady’s tone, though still a little stiff and dry, had lost its edge from earlier. In fact, her blue eyes had softened, warm and almost with a hint of tears. She stepped to the side and held the door open for them to enter.
“Madame…Valmet Dragomirecki?” Anastasia politely asked, glancing down at her passenger list. “How are you feeling?”
“Nothing other than a little ennui.” Dragomirecki nodded her head jerkily as she closed the door shut. “Will the sofa be a good place to rest for Your Highness and Grace?”
Anastasia gratefully accepted her invitation and sat down at the edge of the sofa, resting her notepad on her lap.
“I must apologise that I don’t have tea to serve at this time,” she continued, directing a glance at Rasputina. “Your Grace?”
“No need, I prefer standing,” Rasputina replied, gazing around at the clean interior of Dragomirecki’s compartment. “Madame Dragomirecki, how often do you ask your maidservant to tidy up your cabin?”
“Every other hour,” she replied with a wave of her hand. “I can’t stand even a single speck of dust in my room, I’m telling you.”
Anastasia paused writing on her notepad to comment, “might you be suffering from OCD?”
“What might Your Highness be suggesting?” she said, bemused. “Though, if Your Highness is inquiring about any maladies I might be festering, an alienist diagnosed me with zwangsvorstellung some time ago.”
“Sorry?”
“I have my diagnosis with me, if you want to take a look at it.” Dragomirecki slowly rose up from her seat and went into the bedchamber.
“Have you heard of such an illness before, Rasputina?” Anastasia whispered.
She shook her head. “I’m not too familiar with Königreich medical terms…but it’s interesting that Madame Dragomirecki has seen an alienist before—particularly one from the Königreich.”
“What is an alienist, by the way?” Anastasia tilted her head to the side slightly. “A person who studies aliens?”
“Well…I believe the term ‘psychiatrist’ is what they prefer to be called nowadays. Basically, a doctor who treats the mentally ill,” she explained. “Most renowned doctors hail from the Königreich, which is where the most famous medical school in the world is founded. For Madame Dragomirecki to have travelled all the way there to seek a doctor, she must have been truly desperate.”
Just then, Dragomirecki returned from her bedchamber, a manila envelope in her left hand. She opened it and pulled out a letter, passing it to Anastasia.
“Hmm…” She began reading the letter with a frown.
Rasputina went behind her and tried to discern the letter’s contents, but most of the words were unfamiliar to her. “Anastasia, what are you doing?”
“I, uhm…” She hesitantly brought the letter closer to her face, her eyes squinting at the words. “I can kind of understand what this is saying.”
“Huh?”
“It looks like this was issued by a Professorin Westphal from the Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften,” she said slowly and deliberately. “She describes Frau Obolensky as a woman of anxious persuasion, often having hallucinations of her late husband throughout the day. Frau Obolensky believes she has greatly sinned by allowing herself to live on, muttering phrases relating to scrupulosity over and over again to herself while rocking back and forth. To treat these tormenting cogitations, Professorin Westphal prescribed a trial soporific drug and advised Frau Obolensky to repress her memories into the unconscious.”
Rasputina stared at Anastasia in astonishment. “H-how?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head and rubbed her eyes before staring at the letter again. “It’s as if I have understood this language since I was born.”
Rasputina’s gaze lingered on her for a moment longer before she turned to Dragomirecki. “Can you please explain why your last name is different from what is stated here?”
Dragomirecki paused, sucking in a small breath through her teeth before speaking in a subdued voice. “Obolensky…is his surname…I merely took it after m-marrying him b-b-because it was a noble surname, Your Grace. I-I don’t deserve such a name.”
“Your late husband was a nobleman, I see,” she said quietly. “That explains why you have a maidservant, am I right?”
“Your Grace is asking about Schmidt?” Dragomirecki murmured, averting her gaze to the wall which connects to the adjacent compartment. “She is the only servant who didn’t abandon me when we had to flee the Königreich…” She paused again and looked squarely at her. “Your Grace will want to question why a subject of the Königreich is forced to leave her homeland and become an émigré, am I right?”
At least, her story explained the letter’s origins. Rasputina blinked and asked, “y-yes, why leave? Did something bad happen to your family?”
“I have no family to speak of,” she muttered. “I can’t have children, Your Grace. We only found out after the marriage.”
“If that’s the case…”
“Y-you, the Kaiserin, are letting that damn Reichskanzler do whatever he pleases without any restraint! What are you even doing here, a whole ocean away from your domain?!” Dragomirecki spat suddenly. “You liar, das Blaue vom Himmel versprechen! The volke have barely seen your face ever since your ascension! Why haven’t you—”
She inhaled sharply, squeezed her eyes shut, and muttered something along the lines of “we are defenceless but not honourless”. She then staggered to an armoire beside the sofa. Drawing open the doors, she grabbed a vial of yellow liquid from the top left shelf and drank it all.
Rasputina noticed that the vial had a label which read ‘Barbitursäure’.
“Madame Dragomirecki?” Anastasia asked in a concerned voice.
It took a while for Dragomirecki to sit down and finally speak again. “P…pardon me for my earlier rudeness, Your Highness and Grace. My emotions have gotten the better of me yet again. Do you have any other questions for me?”
Anastasia and Rasputina exchanged worried glances with each other, before Anastasia quickly invited Dragomirecki to answer a series of standard questions such as ‘what were you doing during the dinner service’ and ‘what did you order from the staff’. She claimed that she had been seated at the table from start to finish, and did not order any drinks because of her medication.
“Thank you, I suppose that’s all from me. We’ll be conducting a short interview with Mademoiselle Schmidt just to confirm the details you gave, if you don’t mind.” Anastasia set her quill into the inkwell and glanced up at Rasputina. “Is there anything else that we’re missing, Rasputina?”
“O-oh, uh…” Rasputina looked at Dragomirecki. The latter avoided her gaze and tried to keep her fists from clenching. The tension in the air was almost physically painful.
She suppressed a grimace and tentatively asked, “Madame Dragomirecki, did Mademoiselle Schmidt leave your side at any point in time during the dinner service?”
Surprise flashed in her eyes. “Yes, once. Schmidt told me that she had left her pendant which she had meant to wear for dinner in her compartment. I believe she went to find the Conductor to assist her in retrieving it.”
“Would the pendant be kept inside her reticule?”
“Well…I suppose so. Schmidt doesn’t own a jewellery box.”
Machel was telling the truth, then. Rasputina was about to thank her when she suddenly remembered a weird detail Dragomirecki had said during her outburst in the lounge car.
“By the way, you did mention earlier that someone was rummaging around your compartment in the middle of the night, didn’t you?” she asked quietly. “Can you please elaborate on that?”
Dragomirecki started. “A-about that…” Hesitating, she lowered her eyes to the floor for a moment. “I swear I heard a person opening the armoire and searching through it noisily behind the bedchamber door while I was on the verge of slumber. I thought it was Schmidt cleaning the room again, so I called for her to ask her to return to her compartment. But the person did not reply, and just as I was about to get out of my bed, the noises stopped. I kept calling Schmidt’s name, yet there was only silence. I finally went outside to check the drawing room, but there was no one there.”
“Why would you think that the intruder is your maidservant?” Anastasia curiously asked.
“I gave Schmidt my keys last night so that she can enter my compartment in the morning to wake me up and prepare my morning dress,” she answered.
“Did you exit your compartment to search the aisle?”
“N-no, because the compartment door was locked just as I had left it before retiring to my bedchamber.” She shook her head vehemently. “I thought it might have been another hallucination, so I left it at that and went back to sleep. B-but in the morning, when Schmidt was opening the armoire to get my medicine, she found a peculiar shoe inside. It obviously didn’t belong to either of us, hence I fear last night’s episode could be…”
Rasputina caught Anastasia’s eyes and they raised their eyebrows together. “Pray tell,” Rasputina asked urgently. “Where might this so-called peculiar shoe be at this moment?”
“I left it where Schmidt found it.” Dragomirecki gestured at the right armoire door. “At the back of the bottom right shelf.”
She hurried over to the armoire and checked the bottom right shelf. Sure enough, there was an object that resembled a high-heel shoe—the left shoe, to be exact.
The moment she took it out, Rasputina instantly understood why Dragomirecki described the shoe as ‘peculiar’.
“Rasputina, this is—” Anastasia gasped loudly when she saw what Rasputina was holding. “—a glass slipper!”
