Doruntine Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t you say that he could have been hiding something from you?” Stres asked. “He didn’t want to set foot on the ground, even when he came to get you; he never so much as turned his head during the whole journey; and judging by what you’ve told me, he wanted to travel only by night. Wasn’t he hiding something?”
    She nodded.
    â€œI thought about that,” she replied, “but since hewas dead, it was only natural for him to hide his face from me.”
    â€œOr maybe it wasn’t Constantine,” he said suddenly.
    Doruntine looked at him a long while.
    â€œIt comes to the same thing,” she said, her voice calm.
    â€œWhat do you mean, the same thing?”
    â€œIf he was not alive, then it’s as if it wasn’t him.”
    â€œThat’s not what I meant. Did it ever occur to you that this man may not have been your brother, alive or dead, but an imposter, a false Constantine?”
    Doruntine gestured no.
    â€œNever,” she said.
    â€œNever?” Stres repeated. “Try to remember.”
    â€œI might think so now,” she said, “but that night I never had any such doubt, not for a moment.”
    â€œBut now you might?”
    As she stared deeply into his eyes once more, he tried to decide just what it was that dominated that look of hers: grief, terror, doubt, some painful longing. All these were present, but there was more; there was still room for something more, some feeling indecipherable, or seemingly indecipherable, perhaps because it was a mixture of all the others.
    â€œMaybe it wasn’t him,” Stres said again, moving his head closer to hers and looking into her eyes asthough into the depths of a well. A wetness of tears rose up. She was crying again.
    â€œI don’t know what to do,” she said between sobs.
    He let her cry in silence for a while, then took her hand, pressed it softly and, after glancing at the mother, who seemed to be sleeping in the other bed, left noiselessly.
    The first reports from the innkeepers began to come in two days later. Nowhere had anyone seen a man and woman riding on the same horse or on two horses, nor a woman traveling alone, either on horseback or in a carriage. Although no reports had yet arrived from the most distant inns, Stres was irritated. He had been sure that he would find some trace of them at once. Is it possible, he wondered as he read the reports. Could it be that no human eye had spotted them? Was everyone asleep as they rode through the night? No, impossible, he told himself in an effort to boost his own morale. Tomorrow someone would surely come forward and say that he had seen them. If not tomorrow then the next day. He was sure he would find some seeing eye.
    In the meantime, acting on Stres’s orders, his deputy was sifting carefully through the family archives, seeking some thread that might lead to the solution to the puzzle. At the end of his first day’s work, his eyes swollen from going through a great pile of documents, he reported to his chiefthat the task was damnable and that he would have preferred to have been sent out on the road, from inn to inn, seeking the trail of the fugitives rather than torturing himself with those archives. The Vranaj were one of the oldest families of Albania, and had kept documents for two hundred and sometimes three hundred years. These were written in a variety of languages and alphabets, from Latin to Albanian, from Cyrillic to Gothic. There were old deeds, wills, legal judgments, notes on the genealogy of the family that went back as far as the year 881, citations, decorations. The documents included correspondence about marriages. There were dozens of letters, and Stres’s deputy set aside the ones dealing with Doruntine’s marriage, intending to examine them at his leisure. Some of them had been drafted in Gothic characters, apparently in German, and sent to Bohemia. Others, and these seemed to him