“There’s a mausoleum . . . a new walkway with a bunch of sculptures of Stephen, who became the Prince of Transylvania and King of Poland. It runs between two churches Stephen built with spoils after defeating the Turks . . .”

“Tell me about the churches.”

“Both built by Stephen Bathory. One Minorite—”

“What’s that?”

“The Friars Minor—the minor brothers,” Rolan says quietly. “Franciscans.”

“It’s been rebuilt,” Jester says. “It burned down. It isn’t original.”

“What about the other one?”

“The other one . . . is Calvinist.”

I glance at Rolan.

“Elizabeth was a Calvinist.”

“The Bathory family is buried there. The churches are near one another,” Jester says, sending directions.

We come to the Minorite church, and I look up at its ornate red-striped exterior. Except for the adjacent museum, it’s the same shape and size as the Calvinist church farther up the hill.

I insist on peering inside the reconstructed sanctuary in case something catches my eye, stirs a memory. An image. A shape. A smell. I’ll take anything at this point.

The minute we step into the interior I reel back, overloaded by the gilded altars, the icons, the shape of the pews, the figures of saints.

“We’ll never find it,” I say. My pulse is a cudgel in my head. “It could be anywhere. Anything. In a drawer of the office. In the bookshop. A hollowed-out arm of a saint—”

I struggle to catch my breath, an iron band closing around my lungs. My mind won’t stop, is traversing the museum, charting churches, diagramming the walkway between them, juxtaposing saints . . .

Rolan takes me by the arm, pulls me out into the air.

“This isn’t it,” he says.

“How do you know?”

“She was a Protestant.”

I shield my eyes with a shaking hand. “The Franciscans helped her!”

“They helped her child.”

“Why, when she wasn’t even Catholic?”

“Because they believe in direct interaction with the world. Feeding the hungry. Clothing the poor . . .”

“Protecting the Progeny.”

“Protecting the Progeny.”

We trudge up the hill, past the wooden bell tower separate from the church itself. It is labeled with a large sign: BATOR.

Bathory.

Near it, on an outdoor pedestal, sits a bust of Stephen, the placard in Hungarian.

I begin to tremor. I am surrounded with Bathory images, land, conquest, and history. And, in the absence of sleep and a good burn, I am falling apart.

We enter through the carved side door. Gothic windows stretch up the walls of the church. The sanctuary is airy, modern, and white except for the wooden joists that split apart like palm fronds to spread into a magnificent lattice across the vaulted ceiling. It is too clean, too sparse, to offer a hiding place for even the least tainted soul, let alone an artifact as morbid as Elizabeth Bathory’s diary.

An entrance near the back of the church opens into a whitewashed room. In it: a single marble sarcophagus with an ornately carved lid.