“Cosmina stole my rosary and the letter, I believe that. And I think it likely she killed Aurelia as well. But the carving fork, her look of surprise when I revealed where it had been found. The imploring glances she sent your way. You conspired with her, didn’t you? You had a greater reason to wish for Aurelia’s death. You were an insulted wife, outraged and betrayed. And she carried the proof of that betrayal in her womb, a proof that might well cost your son a portion of his own inheritance.”
It fitted together, so neatly I was astonished I had not seen it before. “I do not know how you persuaded her to do it, what promises or threats, by what tricks or cajolery, but she did. And you took the carving fork, did you not? For yours was the only other key to the silver. Cosmina cleaned it and returned it, but you took it away, and meant to keep it, for it gave you a hold over her to keep the instrument of Aurelia’s destruction. What then? Did you fail to give her what you promised? I suspect you convinced her you could persuade Andrei to marry her, and you failed again. Is that why she attacked your son? To be revenged upon you both? And how cleverly it was done. If she had succeeded, she would have killed him and I would have borne the blame of it. She would have inherited her fortune and could have secured the castle itself as her own, with no one the wiser to her crimes. Only you would know she had destroyed Aurelia, and you would never reveal it. But she attempted the life of your son, the one act you could not forgive, and even as she stood in his room, imploring you to save her, you turned your cheek and offered her no succour. And now she has ended as her mother did, with no one to whom she can confess the truth and even if she did, who would believe her? For the Dragulescus are masters of all they survey,” I finished, sickened by the tidy menace of it all.
I rose. The countess coughed again, more deeply this time, and when finished her colour was high.
“Do you think you will tell this to Andrei?” she asked pleasantly. She took up a dainty pair of scissors and snipped off the scarlet thread, putting her work aside.
“He has a right to know the truth,” I said stoutly.
She laughed, an unpleasant and unwholesome sound. I thought of the madness that ran like a broken thread through the women of their family and I wondered to what extent the countess herself was damaged.
“My dear, my son will never believe you. He knows what Cosmina is. She is a creature flawed from birth. She has told lies and engaged in malicious and petty acts from the time she came to live with us. It is no great stretch to think she has merely expanded her repertoire to include the trick of murder. It is what he chooses to believe because it is logical and neat, and my son has a logical mind. It comforts him to fit things into tidy categories and fix them with a label, as an entymologist will label his specimens. He feels he understands Cosmina, and if you go to him, you will ask him to create a new understanding, a place where I am a greater evil than she and where you are to be believed above his own mother. What man is capable of that?”
And whatever villainy the countess was guilty of, none was greater than the piece of sophistry she had just constructed. Of course she was entirely correct. There was no proof she had ever coaxed Cosmina to become the instrument of her revenge—only the carving fork under the pillow and Cosmina’s look of surprise had betrayed her. The structure of my argument had nothing sturdier than sand for a foundation, and I saw the whole of it blow away upon the winds of her scorn.
She rose and rang the bell. “Would you care for some tea, Miss Lestrange? I feel the need for some refreshment.”
My hands fisted at my sides. “No. I will leave this place and I will not speak of this. But I see you for what you are. You are a monster,” I said, my voice low and harsh.
Just then the door opened and the countess smiled over my shoulder, baring sharp white teeth. “Tereza, Miss Lestrange was just leaving. Will you—” But whatever she meant to ask was lost, for she broke off, putting her hands to her mouth, as if to stifle a scream. Suddenly she opened her mouth, and as we watched in horror, a river of blood began to flow, over her lips and onto the floor.
“Strigoi!” Tereza cried, pointing with a shaking finger.
Her scream brought Frau Amsel who ran to her mistress, taking up a basin to catch the blood. She turned to me, her eyes wide in her pale face. “Fetch the count! Go now! And take the girl!”
I turned and put an arm around the white and shivering Tereza, urging her to leave. As we quitted the room, I glanced over my shoulder one last time at the gruesome scene. The countess was covered in her own blood, for it had spilled from the basin, staining her hands and skirt and puddling upon the floor. Frau Amsel fretted and fussed and held the basin closer, but even as she did so, the countess raised her eyes over Clara’s shoulder and met mine, her gaze calm and inscrutable. I hurried out with Tereza and found the count.
The next hours were tense and watchful ones. Without Dr. Frankopan, there was no physical nearer than Hermannstadt, and once more Florian was dispatched to the city to find a doctor and bring him back. In the meanwhile, the haemorrhage was stopped and the countess was dosed with a sedative left by Dr. Frankopan and sent to sleep. It was thought too dangerous to move her, and so the count emerged at last and told the rest of us to retire, for his mother rested and he and Frau Amsel would stay with her.
I ached for him, for his eyes were deeply shadowed and mournful, but he belonged to her then, and I left him to spend my last night alone in the Castle Dragulescu.
In the end, it was not my last night, for with the countess’s collapse, our travel arrangements had been thrown in disarray and Charles and I were forced to postpone our departure one day further. It was not a pleasant day, for there was much whispering about the countess’s condition and there were furrowed brows and dark looks among everyone in the household. Charles was fretful and nervous, ready to be quit of the place, and he chafed at the delay, even as I relished it. I had one more precious day to commit to my memory all that I wanted to remember about the place, and I wandered the castle, free of interference and interruption as I took my leave of it.
That evening, as the sun sank beneath the high peaks of the Carpathians, I wrapped myself against the rising chill and ventured into the ruined garden. I knew he would be there, and the burden of farewell lay heavy upon my heart. We had seen little of each other with all that had happened, and whatever idyll we had enjoyed together, it had come to an end. It remained only to say goodbye.
He did not turn as I approached, but Tycho pricked up his ears and gave a little whine of protest. I bent to scratch his head.
“He will miss you,” the count told me.
“And I him. I owe him my life,” I said, burying my face into the ruff of thick grey fur at his neck. After a moment, I wiped away my tears and rose.
“You must not weep,” the count said with some severity. “How can I let you go if you weep?”
“And how can you not?” I asked, knowing the inevitable was upon us.
We walked for a little while then, deeper into the decaying garden. I could see the remnants of beauty there even yet, and I knew it could be made right again.
“I will restore it,” he said, intuiting my thoughts. “I will make it right again. My grandfather would have approved.”
“It will be magnificent,” I said, seeing it in my mind’s eye, beautiful and fertile and full of the promise of living things.
“I will make all of it better,” he said, his voice firm with conviction.
“I know you will. You will be the saviour of this place.”
He gave a short, bitter laugh. “I am no saviour, least of all of myself. And I very nearly destroyed you. I cannot ask you to stay. Not now. My mother is—” He broke off, then cleared his throat, continuing on in a voice rough with emotion. “She is dying. Consumptive, the doctor tells me, although she will not own it. She clings to her legends and her superstitions because they give her comfort, but she is dying, and it will not be quick and it will not be easy. I must do what I can for her. Alone.�
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I stared at him. Had I been wrong then? Was she simply a malicious old woman with a cruel sense of humour to play upon my fears? Or was she something darker and more evil still, a strigoi, feeding and then calling up blood to extricate herself from a situation she found intrusive?
“I did not realise,” I said slowly.
“There is often consumption in the village,” he explained. “She used to nurse the valley folk before she fell ill. I ought to have seen it when I came home,” he said, his complexion darkening. “She was so pale and fragile. Her eyes were so bright. How did I not see?”
I thought of the symptoms she had manifested; the symptoms of a consumptive were very like those of a vampire. Even now who was to say which she was?
“How did I not see what she was?” he continued, and for an instant, something fierce and almost angry flashed in his eyes. Did he know then? Did he sense the monstrous evil within her? Whatever his feelings, he did not share them, but he recollected himself and gave me a joyless smile. “I must attend to her,” he said smoothly. “I am the only one who can see to it she is taken care of as she must be.”
Again that slight, shivering touch of something not quite right. Grief at his mother’s ill health, or something darker? “I know,” I said, summoning a courage I did not feel. I had not thought it would be so hard to leave him. “I must go. I have a novel to finish, and a life to begin.”
He fixed me with those startling grey eyes. “So we understand each other, then.”
“Not entirely,” I said, breaking off a withered leaf so I did not have to look at him. “You see, I realise now it was all trickery. Everything you made me think about you, it was all just the sophisticated japes of an experienced seducer. You came to my room by way of the tapestried stair, you made me believe you were something more than human. I see it now.”
“If you want apologies, I will make you none,” he said fiercely. “I wanted you and I knew what to give you to make you surrender. Yes, it was calculated and deliberate, but it was not malicious. I had my conjurer’s tricks and I used them well. Even now you do not know what to make of me, and I will not own what I am. I want you to think of me when you leave this place and wonder whether I am merely a mortal or something beyond. A better man would release you and want you to love another. I am no better man. I am selfish and flawed and I have nothing to offer you that is not broken or imperfect, including myself. And so I offer you nothing. But I will love you until the day I die, and no man will love you more.”
He kissed me then, and I clung to him and we stood as long as we could in the shadows of his grandfather’s garden, watching the first stars shimmer into life in the pale violet sky.
“When this is over,” he said, his lips against my hair, “come to me in Paris. I will give you everything you could desire.”
I opened my mouth, but he put a finger to it. “No, do not answer. Just think on it. You will live in luxury, I promise. You will dress like a countess, be the envy of everyone who sees you. I will keep you as you ought to be kept, with every wish and whim fulfilled.”
I pushed his finger aside gently. “As your mistress,” I said.
He regarded me a long moment in the dying light. “I can offer you nothing more. Not now.”
“Then I will take nothing from you save your heart,” I told him lightly, although mine seemed to fracture within my chest even as I spoke.
“But—”
It was my turn to speak and force him to silence. “You offer me all that you think you can give, and I thank you for that. But it is not enough. It never will be. I may not be worthy to be your wife, but I am far too worthy to be your mistress. To accept your invitation would mean to give up my work, for no kept woman can be a respectable authoress, and I mean to earn my keep by my pen. I know you will say it is not necessary, that you will keep me, and that would suffice for most women. But I am unlike most women, as you yourself have observed,” I told him, lifting myself just a little. “And I will make my own way.”
He put a hand to the nape of my neck and bent to rest his brow upon mine. “Go back to Scotland with Charles then, and write your book and know that I will be there. When the wind comes unexpectedly through the casement, you will hear your name and it will be my voice calling. When you blow out a candle, it will be my breath that rises with the smoke, curling once to touch your cheek. And when you weep—” he paused to rub his thumb over my cheek to catch my tears “—when you weep, you will taste the salt of my tears upon your lips.”
He kissed me again and again until I thought I would die from breathlessness and longing. When we broke apart I looked to the night sky. Above us, a single star shimmered into life.
“Venus,” I said, pointing with a trembling hand. “You see, you have taught me well. I shall not forget.”
20
I did not forget, and it was the memory of that enigmatic and fascinating man that warmed me through the months that followed. I left Transylvania an older and marginally wiser woman, with a book of poetry in my pocket and the pieces of my heart resting beside. There was a new coolness to me, a reserve that none could penetrate, and my hauteur served me well in the new life I fashioned for myself.
I did not go to Scotland; there was nothing within its grey streets to lure me back. I went instead to London, where I wrote and walked and waited to be made whole again. To his credit, Charles was a prop to me, advancing funds against the sale of my book to permit me to take furnished rooms in a pleasant quarter of the city and visiting often in the capacity of friend as well as publisher. We had endured much together, and sometimes, when the hour grew late and the moon hung low, we spoke of Transylvania and the extraordinary time we shared there. It had finally occurred to me that the greatest mystery—whether the strigoi actually existed or whether Cosmina had been a murderess—could have been solved by the expedient of searching the garderobe for traces of blood. A human villain would have rinsed the blood down the sluice to create the fiction of a vampire; an actual vampire would have fed upon it. But it was far too late to make such conclusions now, and I knew the question would never be settled within my mind. Was the countess a strigoi who had committed her own murder and seen her niece carried away for the crime? Or was she a consumptive old woman who had formulated a murderous plot? I should never know, and after a time, I realised I did not wish to. There were times I did not wish to think upon my time in Transylvania at all, and others in which I wished to relive every moment. Charles was a great comfort to me in both moods.
“Do you ever hear from him?” he asked me once. I did not ask whom he meant.
“No. And I am glad of it,” I told him truthfully. It was difficult enough to lay the ghost of his memory without the thorn-prick of letters to disturb my peace. But each night before I slept, I read Baudelaire, until the pages grew thin and worn with handling.
To his credit, Charles never renewed his addresses. “Having met the count, I would not dare,” he told me once, with a sort of pointed jollity. I understood his meaning. The count was larger than life; no mere mortal man could ever hope to challenge him on any ground, much less carry the field.
But Charles was a comfortable companion during those long months, and the following year when my book was published, it was Charles who arranged for readings in the most popular salons and stood beside me to fend off an enthusiastic public. The book had been brought out to surprising acclaim—surprising to me, although Charles claimed that he expected nothing less from a thrilling tale of vampires and werewolves and abducted heiresses. I was much in demand, and once or twice found myself addressing rather more exalted company than that to which I was accustomed. The most important of these was a reading Charles had engaged before the Society of Literary Fellowes, a collection of titled gentlemen—founded by a viscount—who dabbled in letters and thought themselves terribly daring for consorting with authors. The society met in the townhouse of the viscount, in a fashionable square in Belgravia, and I dressed myself carefully f
or the occasion, in new finery of blood-red velvet, befitting an authoress of sensational tales, I thought. I was much sought after that evening, and presented to so many titled heads I could not help but think I was the lone commoner in the room. The elevated company made me rather nervous, and I paused to collect my nerve as I began to read, slowly at first, but then gaining speed and confidence with the excited gasps and sighs of my audience. I finished to warm applause, and for an hour after I was importuned with still more people clamouring for introductions and pressing me with questions about my researches.
“How did you find Transylvania, Miss Lestrange?” asked the viscount himself. “I am told it is a wild and friendless place, full of bandits and bloodthirsty creatures.”
I strove for an answer that would be both truthful and just. “I found it unlike anyplace else in the world,” I told him at last. “It is a land of myth and legend, and yet the peasants are kindly and generous. It is a curious alchemy of medieval and modern. Manners are free, for a man and woman may walk together without either chaperone or censure, but one must always be alert, for to stir out of doors is to make oneself vulnerable to wolves and other creatures.”
As I expected, the ladies shivered in delight, while the gentlemen regarded my answer soberly. “I shall have to organise a holiday,” the viscount said. “I should quite enjoy hearing these local legends from the horse’s mouth as it were.”
“I shouldn’t dare,” his wife said with a shudder. She was a pretty little thing, with blond curls and half her husband’s years, swathed in forget-me-not blue to match her eyes. She turned to me. “I am so pleased the book ended happily. I was desperately afraid the baron would not come for dear Rowena.”
I smiled at her. “You have penetrated my secret, my lady. I am a coward. I have not the courage to deny my readers a happy ending.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh, you must not say you are a coward, for I am quite devoted to your book and will not hear a word against you, not even from your own lips.”
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