The Tourmaline (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  The inlet was a tidal pool. It backed onto a swamp of reeds and cattails where a tiny stream came down. The tide was rising now, flowing quickly over the bar that separated the pool from the sea. Coming that way, Miranda had seen the movement of small fish. They had knocked against her ankles as she’d waded through the inlet. Trapped by the rising waves and then sucked back over the bar, they had flashed their silver bellies in the brown water. She had not been able to catch them, but now she carried the net down to the bar. Standing on the collapsing shore a yard or so above the water, she could see the fish turn in a school, and she flung the net over them and hoped for the best.

  More than once Stanley’s father had taken her to fish for perch on a lake near his house in Westchester County. They’d used rods and reels of course, but the patience was the main thing. Brainless, the fish came back and back. After several empty casts she figured out how to spin the net, uncurl it in the air, and the weights opened it up flat.

  Then she caught some fish. Holding the net like the bag, she swung them down against the dry sand. She spread the tarpaulin on the top of the dunes and laid out the stunned silver bodies in the bright air. They were small, two inches long at most. She hoped they would dry in the heat until they were like anchovies or kippered herring.

  She went to the boat to find the knife. Already when she came back, flies had preceded her. She sat down on the tarpaulin with twenty or so fish between her outstretched knees. One by one she cut their heads off and dug out their small guts, which she dropped into a hole in the sand. Pausing sometimes to bat the flies away, she split the bodies down to their spines and laid them out with the flesh up. Then she waved her hands over them for twenty minutes or so, but when she picked one up it seemed unchanged, though the day was hot. How long did fish take to dry? Hours? Days? She remembered a picture in a social studies book, a woman in South India stooping over a pile of fish laid out in the street between two turquoise houses. Now that she thought about it, everything she had attempted with these fish was based on that picture, which of course referred to nothing and no place—not in this world. And of course her grandfather’s house in Westchester, his rods and reels, all that was gone.

  She scraped some flesh away from the silver skin and the weak spine, and ate it. She couldn’t help herself. She ate seven fish for breakfast and then continued walking. The beach was straight and endless, and the waves were long and small. She searched her memory for impressions of this place, but there was nothing.

  Long past noon she was worried she would find no water, and turned back. When she came to the fish again, they had achieved a rubbery hardness, though there were flies. The small hole with the guts and the fish heads was full of them.

  None of this was satisfactory or gave her confidence for the future. Nevertheless it was a kind of preparation. Miranda forced herself to eat some more, and wrapped the rest of the fish in the net, which she carried over her shoulder with the tarpaulin. When she saw the spire of the castle again, she went into the garden and drank at the Magdalena fountain. She was hot and sweating. The night before, she’d slept in her dirty clothes and her damp underwear. The wool shirt was Blind Rodica’s, but the jeans she’d worn all the way from Massachusetts. Her bra was too tight. Her underpants were stiff and gray and streaked with blood.

  The next day, she thought, she would try the beach to the south. Perhaps Constanta lay that way.

  Or maybe she’d try the carriage road inland. Yes, that was obviously the best choice. But why was it so hard for her to make up her mind what to do? The truth was, much as she missed Peter and Andromeda, much as she detested her isolation here, her sense of everything held in abeyance, still she found the silence restful. It was obvious she couldn’t stay here. Even if there were food she couldn’t stay. But she knew that if she took one step away, then everything would start again. Now for a moment she was like a girl on a high diving board, moving back and forth, taking a few practice jumps. One step, though, and she would feel the plunge. Along the carriage road, after a mile or a half a mile she would pass a house or a village or a town.

  Try as she might, she remembered nothing of what lay over the western horizon, though she must have traveled that way many times. Past the house and Umar’s house and the garden, the surrounding map was blank. Insula Calia—where was that?

  This was her last night of preparation. Tomorrow she would walk straight out the road. She would read her aunt’s letter, do what her aunt told her. More than that, she would use her influence to send a message to Peter somehow—no, maybe that wasn’t such a great idea. Murderers and spies—at first she wouldn’t tell people who she was, until she found out what it meant to them, to her. She’d keep her bracelet hidden. She’d invent a name for herself. She had some money now, and a way to protect herself if worse came to worst. She’d gotten food for herself. When it was first light she would go.

  But she wanted new clothes. She wondered if there was something in her aunt’s closets or drawers she could wear. She hadn’t searched the bureau in her aunt’s bedroom. The clothes in her own room were for a seven-year-old girl.

  So she went back to the castle to her aunt’s room, and then climbed to her room again. Once there, she stood in front of the glass, overcome with loneliness. Where was Peter now, right now? Surely he hadn’t left her all alone. Surely he would look for her, would know or guess or feel where to look.

  In time she lit the candle. She had brought some things from downstairs. Now she moved the candle to a stool beside her.

  When she was younger, she had always tried to avoid looking at her own body. She was self-conscious about it, and had not kept a full-length mirror in her room. Andromeda had liked to parade around naked in the house if she was changing her clothes, or after a shower when her mother wasn’t home. That was all right for her—she had the body for it. But Miranda had tended to slip into her clothes without looking, especially as she’d started to mature. She didn’t have a bathroom of her own, and never spent much time in her parents’ bathroom or the one on the ground floor. Once when she had taken a long shower, Stanley had walked in on her while she was staring glumly at her face and hair. She’d been wrapped in a towel. He’d laughed, then come to hug her.

  Even now, with no one around, she found it hard to strip down to nothing and examine herself. She found it hard to strip out of the hateful clothes, the chafing underwear, stiff with salt from the previous day. And even when it was all off, she found herself looking at different parts in isolation. Close to the surface of the mirror, she examined her elbow, the seawater rash along the crease of her thigh.

  Maybe she couldn’t remember any more, but there was no individual part of her that seemed different when she looked at it alone. And maybe it wasn’t just modesty that had made her hesitant, but a premonition. When finally, with a lump in her throat, she held up the candle and stepped away from the glass, and stared at her face and head and body all together, her first impression was she scarcely recognized herself. Something given, something stripped away—no, it wasn’t true. For there she was after all, her pale skin and narrow nose, her ears that stuck out, and her nice, wide forehead. There she was after all, her thin lips, her long neck, and then the rest, and you might even say there was an improvement. Why was she even worrying about her childhood, what she remembered? Look at her—her childhood was gone.

  How many people could recall more than just a couple of things from when they were five or six or seven? So what difference did it make? What did it mean to say your childhood made you what you were? She’d asked Peter once and he’d just stared at her.

  Now, standing nude before the mirror, the thought of Peter filled her with embarrassment; she looked for a small moment more, and then she put the candle down. And as the sun set, she tried to lose herself in new details. Among the clothes that she had brought from her aunt’s drawers, she selected some silk underwear, made without elastic. Then she slipped on some men’s clothes that she had found in a back bed
room—a dress shirt, collarless, with French cuffs that she rolled up. The shirt was a pale yellow. With it she wore pleated linen trousers, lighter and more comfortable than her jeans.

  The shirt and trousers, she wondered if they were Lieutenant Prochenko’s clothes. They weren’t exactly clean, because they’d lain there a long time. The shirt had a peculiar smell. But everything was much more comfortable; she combed her hair out with the tortoiseshell comb. There was still a terrible tangle and she yanked at it. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, made a face, put her tongue out.

  She had found some silver scissors in the drawer, part of the same set. If she was going to be different, she wanted a difference she could see. With a sudden impulse she began to cut her hair above the tangle at about the level of her jaw. She was skilled at this. She and Andromeda had often cut their hair together, in Andromeda’s mother’s house on Syndicate Road.

  In back of her the door was open to the landing. She was concentrating on what she did, working carefully with the scissors and the comb. There was a hand mirror that sometimes she held up behind her. The candle cast an uncertain light now the windows were dark.

  When she looked up finally, the scissors in her hand, she was shocked to see that she was not alone. There was someone standing in the doorway. The candle was between her and the mirror. She had seen a flicker of movement in the shadows, heard the rattle of a chain. But when she turned, the door was empty.

  At first Miranda had no fear. Instead she felt a flicker of anger, part of her previous mood. Someone was spying on her. She put down the comb, and snatched up from her desk the long, unloaded revolver. It was heavy in her hand. She stepped to the door. It was dark on the landing and she could see nothing.

  “Hai, nu te mai ascunde acum—come out now, show yourself,” she said. She threw the scissors onto the desk, then seized the candle and stepped out over the threshold. “Come out,” she said, and lifted up the light. There in a corner of the landing crouched a girl.

  She also was barefoot and was wearing a long dress. An ankle bracelet jingled on her instep. Her shirt was embroidered in red thread. Her face was hidden in a mass of tangled, coarse brown hair, which she now parted with her fingers.

  Miranda pointed the unloaded gun at her and held up the candle. She was excited by her first words of Roumanian, which had come out of her unasked. She felt a thrill of strength.

  “Who are you? Show your face.”

  “Nu ma rani—please don’t hurt me,” said the girl. “I saw the light, and then my father sent me. No, I begged to go. Please, you are the one. The vampire knows it.”

  Miranda struggled to understand. Again she felt a swell of anger. “What are you talking about? Don’t use these words.” She felt both liberated and confused by this new language, which she used with the facility of an eight-year-old.

  Once again there was a lot she didn’t understand. But she wouldn’t be intimidated in her father’s house. She took a step forward. “Show me. What’s your name?”

  The girl pulled her hair back from her face, revealing a lumpy nose and high cheekbones, and almond-shaped black eyes. Miranda had been confused by her small size, and now saw she was older than she first had seemed, perhaps sixteen years old. Her lips were thick, and her face was chapped and rough. She scrambled to her knees and put her hands out. “Miss, I saw the lamp, I had to come. My father spoke a summoning. You must know it is not safe here. The vampire is on the road from Murfatlar. You’ll see torches.”

  The light had changed in the little room behind Miranda. She stepped back as the girl got to her feet. She knelt on her bed and looked out toward the west, where there were lights among the trees along the carriage road.

  “Usurper’s soldiers,” said the girl. “Please come with me.” Already she was halfway down the tower stairs. Miranda snatched her things up from the desktop.

  “Miss, put out the light.”

  There was no reason to keep it. Miranda blew out the flame. Torchlight was coming through the windows on the garden side. There were men in the carriage road by Juliana’s house. She could see their torches, though they made no noise. And there were torches on the dunes.

  The girl led her across the big hall, then pushed out through the windows to the terrace overlooking the sea. Stone steps led down to the water beside a wooden pier. The girl leaped from stone to stone until she was standing in the surf, and Miranda followed her. Suddenly terrified, she jumped down into the water, cold and dark. She followed the girl straight out underneath the pier, pulling herself among the seaweed and barnacle-encrusted pilings into the deeper water. The girl had flopped out of her skirt, which she held bunched in her hand as she pointed straight out toward the east. “Porpoise Rock,” she whispered. “See the light?” There was a red light over the water. It gleamed for a moment, then went out.

  “Can you swim?” she whispered. Miranda pushed forward through the small waves. The light had not seemed so very far away. But the girl held her back—“No, they will see. Hide here. I will show you.”

  The water was to their necks. They clung to the second-to-the-last piling and waited. There were men with torches on the beach to the north side. And there were lights in the house now. After several minutes, some men came onto the terrace and stood looking out over the sea.

  “Nosferatu,” murmured the girl.

  It was clear the one she meant. He stood with his hands on the stone balustrade. He looked to be in his early thirties, with curling black hair and pale skin. His white shirt was unbuttoned, loose. He peered up and down the beach and then over the water.

  It seemed impossible he would not notice them: two heads clumped together between the seventh and eighth strut of the jetty, perhaps thirty yards away. Miranda found herself cursing her new clothes. She had her gun and her money and her diary in a nest of rags, and the whole thing was done up in the oilskin like a kind of a package. She had hoped to keep it dry, but now she let it sink into the water. She crouched down until only her head was above the surface, moving with the waves as they sucked in and out. She was aware of the girl whispering a chant or a prayer as the man on the terrace strode toward them down the steps to the jetty. A soldier followed him, carrying a torch.

  How was it possible he did not see them? The boards creaked under his boots. Light spilled down through the boards onto the water as he walked the length of the jetty and stood above them. Another soldier followed him. “There is a trail of footprints,” he said, “leading toward Mamaia Sat.”

  “Take the horsemen,” said the vampire.

  “What about the house? Shall we…?”

  “No. She might return.”

  “We found her clothes,” said the soldier.

  They were standing at the jetty’s end. Miranda clung to the piling, her feet unsteady on the shifting stones. This girl, she decided—there was no reason to trust her. There was no reason to allow her to clutch hold of her as she was doing. There was no reason to allow her to pull her down into the water. “Trust me,” the girl murmured, and pulled her down until she was submerged, looking up through the water at the torch at the end of the jetty and at the vampire’s face as he peered over the edge. Her lungs were burning, but the girl forced her down among the tumbled rocks at the bottom of the piling, gripping her despite her struggles. The vampire’s face hovered moonlike above them, distorted by the intervening water, and Miranda was aware of black eyebrows, even of soft eyelashes, because he was so close.

  And when she came up for air, the face was gone, and the footsteps were receding down the planks. She and the girl clung to each other, bobbing in the waves until the torches were gone along the beach, out of sight among the dunes. Then Miranda tried to pull away. “Go,” said the girl. “Swim out to where you saw the light.”

  The water glistened here and there with phosphorescence. Miranda tried to hold her bundle above the water. The waves were not heavy and there was no undertow. Behind her there were torches on the beach. Miranda could see t
he girl’s head as she struggled after her.

  There was a current of cold water, and then another warmer current. The moon was rising over the sea. She swam into the path of the moon until she saw a low rock break the surface of the water in front of her. She was swimming over a sand bar, gleaming white beneath her. The water, which had been deep, now grew shallow again, and she heard it gurgling and sucking at the sides of the rock, a long, misshapen ridge, higher at the north end. Seaweed clung to it.

  A voice spoke: “Is that Ludu?”

  “Father.” This was from the girl.

  “You have her?”

  In the light of the moon, newly revealed from behind a cloud, Miranda saw the outline of a long, low boat. Held into a crevice in the rock’s far side, now it came away slowly and pulled around the head of Porpoise Rock. It cleaved between the girl and Miranda, who caught some strands of kelp and let the slow waves push her up and down against the rock. When the waves were at their lowest point, she found she could touch bottom.

  She was full of apprehension and relief. There were three men in the boat—two oarsmen, each with a pair of oars. In the stern huddled the man who had spoken, and who now helped the girl to clamber over the side. “Where is she?” he said.

  “There.”

  The man uncovered his lantern and held it up. Blinded on three sides, it spread a garish red light between the boat and the rock.

  “There,” repeated Ludu. With the red light in her eyes, Miranda could no longer see the men.

  “Bring it in,” said the voice, and the boat backed toward her, trapping her against the rock. “Don’t be afraid.”

  Letting go of the weeds, Miranda shielded her face with her hand. “Put out the light,” she said, and the man obeyed her. Now in a moment she could see him in the flat stern, holding the tiller. He had a wide beard and his head was tied in a bandana.