Margit, as baffled by his change of subject as by his previous words, could only nod.
“Then do you remember when she first came home from Wallachia?”
“I remember. Her brother brought her.”
“Miklós… How was she then? Just as you remember her?”
“I didn’t see her then. It was said she’d had a terrible fright escaping the Ottomans and was alive only through God’s intervention. I think she was very ill. Countess Hunyadi visited. They say even the king came, though I never saw him. Then she married György Baráth…”
“Who the devil is Baráth? I’ve never heard of him.”
“They are an old family. Of the same stock as the Szilágyis. And my own family. Although neither of us rose as high as the Szilágyis.”
“A curious marriage for the king’s most marriageable cousin.”
“She needed peace. He gave it to her.”
“Did she tell you that?”
Margit bit her lip. “No,” she admitted. “It’s what we all thought.”
“We being all the concerned neighbours around Horogszegi?”
When she nodded, he stared broodingly into the depths of a large bush before reaching out and pulling the head off the nearest flower. Margit swallowed.
He said, “I suppose there is no one in her train—servants or attendants of whatever station—who have been with her for longer than you?”
“No,” said Margit with satisfaction.
The Impaler said, “Thank you for your time, and your help.” And, turning on his heel, he strode back toward the palace.
Margit gazed after him with her mouth open. It was some time before she remembered to shut it.
***
“There will be war,” Stephen told the king during his farewell audience. “I’ve invited it by not paying Moldavia’s tribute to the sultan. A gesture from you could stave it off or enable a notable Christian victory.”
Matthias sighed and went back to staring out the window onto his formal gardens. Today there was precious little enjoyment in them, let alone peace.
“I’m aware of it,” he said at last. “As I told you before, everything possible will be done to preserve the principalities.”
“And Vlad Dracula?”
Matthias lifted one annoyed hand as if to wave that name away. “I have offered him my sister—apparently that is not enough for His Mighty Majesty.”
He sounded petulant, and he knew it. Vlad always brought out the worst in him. But he was damned if he’d pander to the Wallachian’s every whim. In fact, if he was honest with himself, he had to admit that continuing to withhold Ilona had less to do with his mother’s request and more to do with his desire to show Vlad who held all the cards. After twelve years’ incarceration, it should have been obvious.
Stephen smiled slightly. “You never saw them together much, did you?”
Unbidden, a vague, half-forgotten vision flashed through Matthias’s mind. His brother and cousins tense before an oddly magnificent stranger with a fabulous sword which he showed especially to him. And Ilona, taking his attention in a wild game of tag that somehow excluded everyone else. His small self had been resentful, glad when his father and Mihály had come to break it up…
Matthias frowned. “Not much, but enough,” he said dryly.
Stephen said, “I always thought of them as two halves of the same whole. I told her that once, although I never told him…”
Matthias stared at him as the words sank in. He remembered Ilona when he’d seen her in the garden shortly after her arrival; and Ilona with Vlad in the gallery this morning, the vagueness falling from her like autumn leaves under his attention. Two halves of the same whole that it seemed he really couldn’t afford to unite. Not for Ilona’s sake, or even his mother’s. But for his own. For the sake of his dynasty. His mother’s scruples about Ilona had probably saved him from a disastrous decision.
Stephen’s eyes fell before his, as if he sensed Mathias’s new determination.
“You could,” Stephen said delicately, “leave the matter of his marriage for future negotiation. Vlad’s usefulness does not depend on his marriage to anyone.”
Matthias glanced at him. “Meaning?”
“Meaning he’s more than a prince. He’s a military commander with considerable skill and genius. He inspires confidence and devotion among his own men, and among the Ottomans, as you know, he inspires a terror second to none that can only count in our favour.”
Matthias tugged thoughtfully at his upper lip. “This confidence and devotion may no longer be so great.”
“He’ll win it back,” Stephen said with certainty.
Matthias regarded him. “You are a man full of ideas, suddenly. Is this your reparation to your cousin, or are you helping yourself?”
Stephen’s gaze didn’t waver. “I hope I’m helping all of us.”
***
When Count Szelényi reentered the room, Vlad turned from his desk and said impatiently, “Well?”
“Countess Ilona is resting.”
Vlad smiled sourly. “You didn’t get past the dragon, did you?”
“No,” Szelényi confessed with a sheepish smile. “She is a very determined, if comely, dragon. However, I believe she is entirely devoted to her mistress.”
“Devoted and misguided is a difficult combination to deal with.”
“I don’t believe she’ll keep your message from the lady,” Szelényi added with a shade of anxiety. “She just won’t disturb her in order to deliver it.”
Vlad nodded thoughtfully. “However, a note she may leave by her side without disturbing her. Would that offend our dragon’s protective instincts?”
“It might work…”
With sardonic amusement, Vlad drew a piece of paper toward him and began to write swiftly, conscious always of other eyes that might read it. In fact, it was Szelényi’s duty to read it. Vlad was fairly certain it would be beneath his honour to do so now, but then it was not really Szelényi’s prying eyes which concerned him.
“Ilona,” he wrote. “I will not give up. Give me something, anything that might aid me.” It might, he thought, be taken as a request for a love token. Although he was pretty sure Ilona wouldn’t see it that way. The old Ilona would have understood immediately that he was asking for information, for anything, to use as leverage to change the king’s mind. Whether this frail, vague, and distraught version would be able to read between the lines was another matter.
He sealed it with unnecessary force, as anger invaded him once more. But all his life he had schooled himself to put the anger aside before it prevented his brain from working and brought about disaster and even now, he forced himself to remember courtesy and common sense.
“Forgive me for treating you like a messenger boy,” he said ruefully to Szelényi. “It is a matter of honour to me, and you are the only man I trust to act for me.”
A tinge of colour spread into Szelényi’s cheeks. “I am glad to. And please know, it is also an honour for me.”
Then, taking the brief note, he departed. Vlad watched him go, then turned back to the letter he’d been previously writing to Carstian. That too was a difficult task. It had taken Carstian a long time to become reconciled with Radu, and Vlad didn’t want to endanger his old friend or the man’s family by speaking out of turn.
He still had friends in Wallachia, good people who had never deserted him in their hearts, however necessary the physical submission to his enemies had been. He would reward that when he went home. In the darkest of days, when hopelessness had engulfed him, their loyalty had been all that kept him going.
The words he’d written danced in front of his eyes. It was Ilona’s face he saw clearly. Ilona as a girl, laughing and lively and insatiably curious. Ilona on their first sleigh ride, berating him. Ilona dancing in his arms, glowing with such happiness that her beauty dazzled him. Ilona now, thin and faded perhaps, but still beautiful, still his…
How long did it take to wa
lk to Ilona’s apartments and back? Where was Szelényi?
Vlad pushed his letter aside. He was in no state to concentrate on it, let alone do it justice. He rose from his chair, stretching prodigiously. He needed to be in the open, he needed to ride for miles, to run on his own legs for miles, to best someone, anyone in sword play. Or in a straightforward, unarmed fight. He slammed his fist into the nearest cushion.
When Szelényi got back, he’d make him take him out of this closed-in hell. It was worse than Tîrgovişte.
Hurry, damn you.
Szelényi’s familiar knock sounded at the door, heralding his slightly breathless entrance. To Vlad’s disappointment, he still carried the letter to Ilona in his hand. Striding to the prince, he held it out like a prize.
“The lady answered.”
Vlad’s heart soared. Seizing the letter, he shook it open and read the single line she’d written under his:
“There is nothing you can say.”
What in hell does that mean?
Frustrated, he tossed the useless note on to his desk. “Count, would you care to ride out with me?”
“Of course. I’ll have them ready the horses.”
As Szelényi left once more, Vlad picked up the letter and gazed at it harder, as if willing it to reveal something more. Like what had happened to Ilona between her escape and her first marriage. Yes, her first marriage. I will make another for her!
Her writing was just as he remembered it—hasty, almost to the point of a scrawl, and yet perfectly legible, free of elaborate loops. Firm.
He realised there was hope in that line. Perhaps not the hope he’d been looking for, but surely it told him she wasn’t sinking back into indifference and vagueness.
“I stopped paying attention, Vlad, but I was never stupid.”
Vlad had the feeling that, distressed or not by the king’s infernal procrastination and wavering, Ilona was paying attention again.
All he had to do was find a way to make Matthias change his mind, to make their marriage possible.
Chapter Thirteen
Transylvania and Wallachia, 1457-1458
“He’s coming, he’s coming!” The servant gasped, collapsing in a breathless heap on the floor. “Save yourself, lady, take your lady mother and run! Everyone must run!”
“Stand up and explain yourself,” Ilona said severely. Although the man’s hysterical fear could not but communicate itself to her, making her stomach lurch and twist, she knew better than to act on his fear without any facts.
She was alone in the comfortable hall at Horogszegi. Her mother, recovering from some fever that had laid her low all summer and autumn, was in her bedchamber, resting. Mihály, inevitably, was in Hungary, and Miklós and his wife absent as usual on one of the larger estates. And so it fell to her, peacefully embroidering a shawl as a gift for Maria, to act on this new crisis.
“Who is coming?” she demanded as the man hauled himself to his feet, still overexcited but with a touch of the sheepish behind the wildness in his eyes.
He uttered, “Dracula!”
Before she could prevent it, one arm closed across her leaping heart. Her other hand nearly made it as far as her hair before she forced it to drop back to her side. The needle fell, dangling from her work.
“Vlad Dracula? The Prince of Wallachia?” she said, to remove any possible doubt.
“Of course!”
“Don’t be silly,” Ilona reproved. “The prince will not harm us or anyone on this estate! He is my father’s friend and ally. You are spreading stupid fear where there should be none!”
All the same, she had to admit that the man’s behaviour was at least partly Vlad’s fault. He’d led several punitive raids into Transylvania, to help Mihály quell Cilli-inspired revolts and to punish the German towns for their fickle harbouring of pretenders to Vlad’s throne. The German towns had long played that game, of course, and the princes had been forced to put up with it, doing no more than writing strong letters of protest or curtailing the town’s trading privileges in Wallachia.
Only Vlad went a step further, using military intervention, and if the carnage he left behind was ridiculously exaggerated by the towns to evoke the sympathy of Hungary, well, it was still horribly efficient and thorough.
Mihály was back in control of Transylvania, thanks largely to Vlad’s help and the fearsome reputation he was accruing—much according to plan, Ilona thought cynically. But his raids had never come close to Horogszegi before. There was no need.
“Are you sure it’s the Prince of Wallachia?” she asked the man doubtfully.
“He’s not as easy man to mistake!” was the indignant answer.
Ilona frowned at him for insolence, and he tried visibly to pull himself together. “It’s him,” he said firmly. “And a huge, wild army. Oh my God, he’s at the gate! My lady, what’ll we do?”
“Let him in,” Ilona said dryly. “With all respect. He is a welcome guest in my father’s house!”
Not entirely convinced by her calm good sense, the man seemed inclined to dawdle, to debate the sense of allowing such a man entrance, but before he could go and obey her, Ilona heard the sound of voices below. Something thumped loudly, and booted footsteps sounded on the stairs, leaping up them, surely, two or more at a time.
Ilona and the servant stared at each other, each wondering if somehow Ilona had got it wrong.
The door burst open, and Vlad Dracula strode in.
At once the room filled with his size, his presence. Though he wore no armour, there was something unmistakably martial about his dark clothing and long boots. His father’s sword and several daggers clanked at his belt. His long, black hair flowed over his leather-padded shoulders.
Ilona stood up, immediately drawing his gaze. His furious dark eyes slammed into her like a blow.
“Prince,” she managed. “You are most welcome, though you take us by surprise.”
The fury darkened, retreated enough for a gleam of sardonic amusement and, perhaps, shame. “Forgive my—sudden—entrance. Your people denied any of the family was home, and I knew they were lying.”
“That’s the price you pay for a few atrocities from the past. May I know why you’ve come?”
A smile had begun to play around his lips and eyes. “I suppose I must have come to be chastised again.” He hesitated. “You must know there is no danger from me. Neither I nor my men will harm anyone or anything of yours.”
“I’m aware of it. They”—she indicated the servants now gathering in the doorway, staring at Vlad with popping eyes—“are not.”
“I’m sorry,” he said abruptly. “I need to speak to Mihály, and this seemed the easiest way.”
“He’s in Buda.”
Turning away, Vlad looked as if he would slam his suddenly closed fist on the table. With an obvious effort of will, he relaxed his hand.
“I understood he would be here.”
“He was detained in Buda. He still plans to come home, but we don’t know when. Jakob, have them bring wine for the prince, then go about your business.” The man bolted, looking back over his shoulder as if unsure whether it was right to leave her in the company of the terrible prince. Vlad kicked the door shut in the faces of the other servants and walked towards Ilona.
She regarded him in what she hoped was a sensible and mature way. “Why did you need to speak to my father so urgently? Can I help?”
A short laugh escaped him. “I don’t know—can you?” The smile was back, teasing about his lips and eyes, but she had the uncomfortable feeling that the anger hadn’t left, was merely controlled—for the time being.
He said, “Perhaps you know I have been in correspondence with your father.”
She nodded. “Of course.”
“About you.”
Her breath caught. The unwelcome colour began to seep into her face as she turned away.
He said, “You didn’t know?”
“I know there was a letter from you.”
A
letter proposing a marriage between the prince and Ilona. Mihály had told her that much, sending her into a state of blissful shock. She hadn’t dared to hope that those few moments in his arms, his kisses, would lead to anything further. Men flirted with attraction; they married politics and power. And Mihály’s position in either was still uncertain. Though that fact hadn’t made her father grab at the offer. Instead, he’d told her about it, brooding, frowning at her without really seeing her.
“Historically, Wallachia is not stable,” he’d mused with regret. “Vlad might change that. If anyone can, it will be him. But a marriage for you… Interesting. I’ll discuss it with your aunt.”
In an agony of anticipation she’d waited and waited for anything further to be said on the matter, and nothing ever was. Gradually, the fever of longing died to a dull ache, because she imagined Vlad had lost interest, found a better marriage to pursue, although she heard nothing about that either. Maria kept her informed of court intrigues from time to time, but even she had said nothing.
And so Ilona went back to waiting.
Vlad said, “I came for an answer.” His implacable voice reached deep inside her, filling her with hope once more, because he hadn’t forgotten, had, in fact, cared enough to come riding furiously out of his way with an army at his back just to get his answer.
Ilona repeated, “He’s not here,” and it came out as a whisper.
“What did you say?”
She cleared her throat. “I said, he’s not here.”
Vlad took a step closer to her. “No. What did you say to your father? I know he cares for you deeply, would be reluctant to give you where you didn’t want to go.”
Perhaps, Ilona thought ruefully. But she’d have to make a spectacular fuss and have the reasons listed in writing with evidence. And even then she doubted it. She tried to drag her wayward thought back into line, to remember the question he expected her to answer.
She said, “I didn’t say anything. He didn’t ask me.”
Her head was turned away from him, gazing at the door, willing the servants to come with the wine, terrified in case they did before…before what?
A Prince to be Feared: The love story of Vlad Dracula Page 17