Once

by Elisabeth Grace Foley et al.

  A supercilious sniff and shoulder toss were the only answers from the woman which, Maria reasoned, meant an answer in the negative. Flora was blond, slender, poised, and polished. Everything Maria was not, and that rankled. The maid took the old garments from Maria’s embarrassed hand. Her mouth twisted in disgust as she rolled the mess into a ball and cast it in a hamper. In their place, she handed to Maria a linen shift, grey stockings, leather shoes, and a neat cotton dress.

  Like an Amish girl, Maria thought. I can do this. Laura-Ingalls-style. Stockings, petticoat, dress. The reflection looked back at her cramped and dwarfish in the side of a pewter pitcher. A less than attractive image of plain clothing, wild hair, and traces of winged eyeliner which had begun to chip off and sift under her eyes.

  “Charming.” She licked her thumb to help rub off the makeup.

  “Nu, nu, nu!” The maid slapped Maria’s hand away and continued to scold her in Romanian, then dipped a square of flannel into the pitcher and applied it to Maria’s face. The scrubbing was merciless and extended behind her ears, around her neck, and even to her collarbones, but at the end of it, the girl in the squatty reflection was, at least, moderately clean. The maid attacked Maria’s hair next, pulling it out of the messy bun with many a muttered complaint. She braided it, impaled Maria’s scalp with a number of hairpins that felt knife-tipped, and then, seemingly, considered her duty done.

  In rousing Romanian, her dark eyes flashing, the maid lectured Maria. Then without warning, she grinned, a malicious expression which showed small, white teeth, sharp as a kitten’s.

  “You are so stupid,” Flora remarked in near-perfect English. “You think you are important.” Flora took a mincing step forward, then reached out and pinched Maria’s forearm. A hard, twisting pinch.

  “What the heck?” Maria yanked her arm away and massaged the bruised skin.

  “That is for being American. This,” and Flora grabbed her chin, “is for being prettier than I. Beware your pride, English.”

  Maria tore the irrational maid away from her. “You’re insane!”

  “Ceau,” Flora said and, with another kitten smile, drifted from the room.

  “Wait—do I stay here?” Maria shouted after her. Fearing to be left alone in the far reaches of a strange mansion, she scurried after the asylum-worthy maid.

  Vanished.

  Maria paused in the empty hall, painfully conscious of her own heartbeat and the fact that she had absolutely no idea of what to do now. What seemed like a hundred doors opened onto that hall, each exactly alike. Maria cursed herself that she was unable to remember which side they’d come from. That would at least give her a chance to fumble her way back down to the white room and present herself before Ioan like a lamb ready for the slaughter. What he planned to do with her might as easily be accomplished downstairs as up. There might be witnesses there at least.

  “Not the biggest fan of that idea, are you, Itty?” she mumbled, hugging herself. The man’s eyes were like actual wells and his skin was too white. No, she didn’t like the thought of stumbling into his office, admitting to having lost the vindictive Flora.

  Then, like the ram in the wilderness, an unsought strain of logic wrestled down Maria’s panic. If she wanted to present her case to the king and queen anyway, she’d have to find them herself. The maid left no doubt that Ioan would not aid her in that respect. Cristian had said the queen spoke at least a bit of English. Maria smoothed her skirts. She guessed she looked presentable enough now to spring the news on them gently. Ugly, subservient clothing, what more could a foreign dignitary ask?

  Thus determined, Maria calmly chose a door on the farthest end of the hall.

  With a begrudging wail it opened onto a staircase much like the one they’d taken upward. She trudged down this without incident, meeting neither ghoul nor housemaid, and found herself in the red-carpeted hall. From this room, Maria felt she remembered the route taken by their tour guide in the former world. This part of Peles seemed to be exactly the same as Peles of the Future, so Maria pushed through the striking weapons rooms decorated, literally, to the hilt. It would embolden her, she thought, to smash through some of this glass and steal the coral-inlaid saber with which to protect herself against the bedlamites staffing this palace, but there was no time.

  On the threshold of the king’s study, she paused. How ridiculous to barge into a throne room and expect to be welcomed. Perhaps she had better think this over better. But the insanity of the entire situation propelled her forward. Reason could not aid her now. Reasonably thinking, she would never have traveled back in time, or been scrubbed up by a maid with murder in her eyes, or have ridden up a mountain road in a cart that smelled of donkeys, or given her Toms to a beggar woman. Reason would have argued that she stay home, and she would never have gotten into this situation in the first place. She had a whole new respect for Reason, now that it meant nothing.

  Maria breathed deeply of the smell of new wood and lacquer and beeswax. An intelligent smell. A kingly smell. Beyond the lintel a pen scritched across paper, spelling out state secrets or dull orders.

  She leveled her shoulders and stepped through the study.

  All sound suspended. Maria was vaguely, awesomely aware of Ioan at his tall desk, his composed, white face looking almost luminous it had gone so pale. He opened his mouth to speak and Maria, at a loss for how to behave, smiled at him.

  She had sighted the other man seated at a heavily carved, ponderous desk. The king, narrow-faced and bearded, bearing in his countenance a lifetime of heavy responsibility. Maria passed Ioan’s desk under silent protest, stopped, faced the other desk, and looked His Majesty in the eye.

  “I’m Maria Wied. I’m twenty-six years old, I’m American, and I am from the future.”

  To his credit, Ioan remained white and scandalized, as distant as the Polar star and quite as icy.

  His Majesty glowered as he rose. Maria had never felt at ease among military men—she always felt they would enlist her, shave her head, and force her into pushups given the slightest chance. Now, under the incensed gaze of a soldier-turned-monarch, Maria’s nerves gave way.

  “I’m sorry to bust in here like I own the place,” she babbled, suddenly fearful of what anyone might do, “but if you only knew how confused I am. I broke through the bookcase in your very own library but somehow ended up at the monastery at Cotroceni in this era. I have no idea what happened and there was this monk who was going to arrest me for grave-robbing or something so I came here and Cristian—you probably wouldn’t know Cristian, but he’s foreman of the draftsmen—suggested I talk to Ioan here but Ioan sent me off with this horrible maid who abused me and then left me in the attic or someplace so I came down to find you on my own. I just don’t know what to do and… oh!”

  The tears would come after this and for a wretched five minutes, Maria bent over the king’s desk, dropping hot tears onto the cherry wood, not even considering the varnish. Strangely, neither king nor secretary moved a fraction during this time. It was possible Reason returned to the world in their actions, for one cannot continue to cry bitterly when other people in the room stand there, emotionless as candlesticks. It is not physically possible. Maria finished her cry. If she did not feel less anxious she at least felt a little damp, and that was sympathy of some sort. She rubbed her nose on her sleeve. She was twenty-six. She had meant to impress the king with her oration and now—well, now he looked as if she’d gone and drunk the sacramental wine in the middle of Matins.

  A simple “I’m sorry” and tear-bath wasn’t going to cut this one. From the distance of a hundred and some-odd years, Maria felt Heath’s disappointment. It comforted her somehow, as if his actual hand settled on her shoulder with a proper:

  “Oh come on, dry up,” and that bracing eye-brow raise reserved particularly for her edification.

  At the balancing point in all awkward interactions when some decision or another must be made, the farther door opened and the queen who had once been beautifu
l entered.

  She paused, wavered, and turned to go.

  “Elisabeth.”

  The queen’s head snapped into submission. Maria winced.

  “Forgive me, Karl,” the queen murmured. “I was not aware you were occupied.”

  “Wait, please.” The first sentence Maria had heard from the king. The weary, weary weight in his tone surprised Maria out of the straggling remainder of her tears.

  She stood a little straighter, swallowed the lump in her throat, wished wildly for an Advil, and waited.

  “This young woman has brought to us a strange, wild story,” he continued in accented, but fair English. “I think, if anyone’s mind will be making sense of the truth behind her story, yours is up to the task.”

  Maria didn’t think she’d imagined the half wounded, half pleading look the King gifted his queen. Upon a direction from the king’s frighteningly important first finger, Maria said her story over again, omitting nothing. The queen listened with a beautiful kind of understanding in her face. Affection for this woman, instant and unreasonable, gathered in Maria’s chest. She reminded Maria irrationally of the sort of mother she’d always wanted; the sort she’d never had, being tossed through foster families the duration of her childhood. At this thought, her sudden affection expanded in an ever-widening pool drifting through her whole being. She loved this woman.

  After a moment, silence reigned. Then the queen cocked her head and looked at Maria. The corner of her mouth slid upward. “What is your name, my dear?”

  “Maria Wied.”

  This time she knew the deafening clash of meaning in the king’s and queen’s glances was not something her battered fancy had drawn up. So they believed her? She ventured a small smile and a little shrug.

  “I guess it’s kind of crazy, but I hope you believe me.” A pause and a snipped-off laugh. “There’s no one else left.”

  The king gripped the edge of the desk. He did not look at her, but remained with his gaze riveted on his wife who had lost all her color. Almost as pale as Ioan. Maria, suddenly wondering whatever had happened to the devastating-looking secretary, turned a fraction. Ioan’s jaw hung slack. He encountered her curiosity. His eyes flickered, but he did not stop staring. Maria returned to her original position, feeling all the new misery of being the center of an uncommon attention.

  The queen’s breath snagged as her eyes gnawed at Maria.

  No amount of Southern etiquette had taught Maria how to deport herself while being stared at as if she were a pork barbecue sandwich. Her first instinct, and she recognized it as a poor one, was to make a joke, to divert attention from herself and the break the awful, palpable silence with a laugh, a smile, anything. Anything for mercy’s sake.

  No, no why was the queen rushing to her? Taking her hand? Ordinarily, Maria didn’t care how she looked, but with the queen’s cream-colored fingers touching her own unkempt ones, Maria was sharply aware of the cracked blue polish on her nails.

  “Itty,” Elisabeth crooned, sliding her other hand up Maria’s cheek. “Mariechen, my child, God has spared you to me at last.”

  IV.

  The Gypsy

  In a dreadful humor, Heath returned to their lodgings in town. The hotel clerk, a man with decent command of the English tongue, had harangued him about leaving his girlfriend alone in a strange country. Heath forced his lips to part in an affable smile, neglecting to correct the man. Without bothering to explain where Maria had gone, Heath mounted the stairs to a room which smelled irreparably of cigarettes, and flung himself across the bed.

  His iPad connected to the hotel’s shaky wifi (“free wifey,” the man had boasted over the phone) but the signal strength barely supported the simplest of searches. He threw the tablet onto the mauve-colored chair and buried his face in his arms.

  Out of the mass of unwonted emotion, Heath tried to strain a single clear thought. His mental sieve caught nothing in the mesh. When he tried to think succinctly, he found only one panic-engineered phrase:

  Maria’s gone.

  Heath rolled over onto his back, then his side, before stalking to the window to pace the tiles in front of the radiator.

  That tour guide. There was something completely wrong about her. She reminded him of someone—at once grossly strange and wonderfully familiar, like all his nightmares made flesh.

  He’d had a girlfriend with golden eyes once.

  Must be that.

  “Come on, Maria.” He pressed a fist to the windowpane and watched a group of tourists load onto a bus. “You know Brandon’s gonna kill me.’“

  Their boss would have to be told about Maria, of course. Heath knew he couldn’t very well let the set designer vanish and not at least hint that they ought to start lining up substitutes. It’s not that Heath feared calling Brandon, though it wasn’t the most pleasant idea in the the universe. But once he admitted to HQ that Maria was gone, it meant she really was. And that was a reality he could not suffer.

  He could message Brandon on the interdepartment system. Never mind. Cowards shrank from speaking aloud. He pulled up Brandon’s personal number and dialed it on the hotel phone.

  The producer’s phone rang once, twice, three times.

  Heath glanced at the simple wall clock and calculated that if it was seven o’clock here, it would be noon in New York and nine in L.A.

  Brandon Thurman was likely finishing his second mimosa, wiping his mouth on a monogrammed napkin, calling for Natalie to reschedule his nine-fifteen appointment an hour later so he could cram some yoga into his routine and swing by the juice bar before hitting the office.

  Heath winced as a deafening crackle birthed a dubious connection between two continents. Was he ready to handle this conversation?

  “What’s up, man?” Brandon’s voice sounded suntanned.

  “Hey, Mr. Thurman.” Killed Heath to call him that, seeing as the only difference between them was that Brandon had graduated into money and Heath had not. And that Heath had class and Brandon wouldn’t know class if it knocked on his door in a three-piece suit playing a Vivaldi concerto on a Stradivarius.

  “Heath?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “So how’s Europe? Glittering? Gorgeous?”

  “Um, yeah. Yes sir. All that.”

  Heath listened to Brandon drag on a Cuban cigar. The cigar was always a point of contention. A cigar? Really? No subtlety. Now if it had been him, Heath always thought, he’d go in for tailored suits, a daily professional shave, and excellent shoes. Leave the Cubans out of it.

  “You working out for Maria? How is she? Got any ideas for me yet?”

  On the European side of the phone, Heath viciously knotted the phone cord. “Look, international phone calls are useless for anything but news. Bad or good.”

  “Yeah, who’s paying for this call?”

  “Mr. Thurman, this news is bad.”

  Brandon puffed some more on his cigar. “What’d you do? Get canned for smuggling something through customs?”

  “Listen.” Heath pinched the bridge of his nose to still his throbbing headache. “We were touring one of the castles here and Maria—well, you know how Maria is—she stayed behind to look at some of the books and broke the glass in one of the cases.”

  On the American side, Brandon shuffled through papers. “Wow. Broken glass. Sure Interpol’s after you two, all right. Look, just tell them Fischer-Thurman will pay for whatever damage was done. We’re an American film company. It’s not like we don’t have insurance for this sort of thing. It’s not like you flew the Millennium Falcon into a castle turret.”

  “Yes, sir.” Heath paused. “I wish that was the only trouble.”

  “If it isn’t one thing, it’s everything with you people. What’d my designer do? Steal the royal chef’s jeweled cook-book?”

  “A book is missing, sir. And so is Maria.”

  Silence. Silence so firm and cold you could skate across it. Heath watched the second hand of the wall clock make the rounds before Brando
n spoke. When he did, it was without the accompaniment of a cigar.

  “I hope you’re satisfied with your performance, Heath, because I don’t think the board will be. I gave you this internship as a friendly bandage for your slightly ruined reputation.”

  Heath’s chest seized. “I applied just like everyone else and went through the process.”

  “Hah. Applications, the board, just formalities. I knew if you worked for Fischer-Thurman, you’d have a chance to get another corporate job and not botch it this time like your father did.”

  Heath dug his left fist into the duvet cover of his bed. “I don’t see how this relates to him.”

  “Cor-rect. It doesn’t relate. Because was Fischer even your father? Seems like your mother had a hard time confirming that, if the water cooler gossip is even halfway accurate.” Brandon’s loud exhale forced Heath to pull the receiver away from his ear.

  “I’m not my father, Thurman.”

  “I know you aren’t. And I’m just picturing you and your father having a Vader and Skywalker moment here. Morality and high courage.”

  Heath stiffened. “Is there any way this conversation is even remotely helpful in getting Maria back?”

  Brandon wound down. “Haven’t you called the police yet? Isn’t it their job to figure things like this out? It’ll probably give them the most excitement they’ve had in years. Bet they’ve had enough of investigating marten-poaching.”

  “Sir, your employee, Maria Wied, is missing in a foreign country and you’re not concerned?”

  “Tell me what I’m supposed to do, Heath.”

  Grinding his jaw. “Don’t you know anybody?”

  Brandon’s breath whistled through his nostrils as he considered this. “There is a guy I know—filmmaker. He’s Romanian. Or maybe Moldovan. Something.”

  “And can you call him? He might know people.”

  “It’s worth a call,” Brandon agreed. “But look, try to get her out of trouble with the least publicity.”