Borrower of the Night

Synopsis:

Meet art historian Vicky Bliss, She is as beautiful as she is brainy — with unassailable courage, insatiable curiosity, and an expertise in lost museum treasures that often leads her into the most dangerous of situations.

A missing masterwork in wood, the last creation of a master carver who died in the violent tumult of the sixteenth century, may be hidden in a medieval German castle in the town of Rothenburg. The prize has called to Vicky Bliss, drawing her and an arrogant male colleague into the forbidding citadel and its dark secrets. But the treasure hunt soon turns deadly. Here, where the blood of the long forgotten damned stains ancient stones, Vicky must face two equally perilous possibilities. Either a powerful supernatural evil inhabits this place. . . or someone frighteningly real is willing to kill for what Vicky is determined to find.

BORROWER of the NIGHT

ELIZABETH PETERS

The first book in the Vicky Bliss series

Copyright © 1973 by Elizabeth Peters

For Betty and George
who don’t believe
in ghosts either

Foreword

As all lovers of Rothenburg will realize, I have had the temerity to add Schloss Drachenstein to the genuine attractions of the town. Like all the characters in this book, the Counts and Countesses of Drachenstein are wholly fictitious and bear no resemblance to any persons living or dead. Equally fictitious, sad to say, is the legend of the Riemenschneider shrine. Apart from this single aberration, the sculptor’s life and works were as I have described them.

One

WHEN I WAS TEN YEARS OLD, I KNEW I WAS never going to get married. Not only was I six inches taller than any boy in the fifth grade—except Matthew Finch, who was five ten and weighed ninety-eight pounds—but my IQ was as formidable as my height. It was sixty points higher than that of any of the boys—except the aforesaid Matthew Finch. I topped him by only thirty points.

I know—this isn’t the right way to start a narrative, if I hope to command the sympathy of the reader. A narrator should at least try to sound modest. But believe me, I’m not bragging. The facts are as stated, and they are a handicap, not a cause for conceit. If there is anything worse than being a tall girl, it is being a tall smart girl.

For several years my decision didn’t give me much pain. I wasn’t thinking seriously of marriage in the fifth grade. Then I reached adolescence, and the trouble began. I kept growing up, but I grew in another dimension besides height. The results were appalling. I won’t quote my final proportions; they call to mind one of those revolting Bunnies in Playboy. I dieted strenuously, but that only made matters worse. I got thin in all the right places and I was still broad where, as the old classic says, a broad should be broad.

Mind you, I am still not bragging. I am not beautiful. I admire people who are slender and fine-boned and aesthetic-looking. The heroine of my adolescent daydreams had a heart-shaped face framed in clouds of smoky black hair. She was a tiny creature with an ivory complexion and a rosebud mouth. When she was enfolded in the hero’s brawny arms, her head only reached as high as his heart.