The Dracula Papers, Book I: The Scholar's Tale

by Reggie Oliver

  “No.”

  “Is there a place where we can be alone?”

  “We are alone.”

  “Your mother is watching.”

  “Why should you want to be alone with me?”

  “Would you object?”

  “No.”

  So it went on, neither wishing to be the first one to surrender to the other; both longing for surrender; both knowing (almost) that the other wished for it; both keeping up a pretence for a thrill of uncertainty; both being certain. It was all as pure and fragile as a tazza of Venetian glass.

  I felt some guilt about my eavesdropping. I hated to interrupt, but the more I listened, the more painful seemed my position, and theirs too. At last I bustled round and confronted Prince Vlad.

  I had embarked on a mild but dignified remonstration when he suddenly stood up, eyes blazing with rage, a little pulse racing in his neck, left leg trembling. He shouted.

  “How dare you interrupt us, old pedant!” Old! I was twenty three at the time! “Leave us at once!”

  I was stunned by this outburst. I knew that if I retreated abjectly before the onslaught I would never regain his respect. I stood before the pair in silence. The girl looked puzzled and a little distressed by this turn of events. I asked the Prince to come to me in the tower library within the hour.

  I wonder who was more nervous before that interview, he or I. What kept my balance, I think, was a fundamental indifference to my fate. If I was to be thrown out of Transylvania on the whim of an arrogant young prince I would go gladly and return to Wittenberg. I had tasted enough danger and adventure to feel that they are overrated both as instructors and as entertainers.

  By the time Vlad arrived (just as the hour was striking) I was absorbed in a book: as I recall, Cornelius Agrippa’s notable treatise on the superiority of women. Like all works that seek to propound self-evident truths it has always struck me as thoroughly unconvincing. For several moments Vlad stood before me while I pretended to be still absorbed by my book. When I looked up I found that his eyes were filled with tears.

  For once I understood by instinct. “She told you to apologize to me?” I said.

  Vlad nodded as the tears flowed down his cheeks. His sobs were more convulsive for the violence with which he attempted to control them. I told him to sit down and for more than half an hour he poured out his devotion to the Lady Rozelinda. He recounted to me many of the things she had said which, though hardly original or arresting, were remarkably sensible for a girl of fourteen. It was strange to hear this wild, dark boy uttering such commonplaces, and no doubt it was her influence that prompted him to communicate to me his fear of Mircea. In particular he was afraid that his brother might find out about his association with Rozelinda. I could do nothing but counsel secrecy and discretion, and I promised to assist in any way provided that it did not interfere with study.

  Negotiations continued between Transylvania and Bohemia as summer faded into autumn. The Turks were busy on the borders. Ragul would ride away and come back with tales of fresh skirmishes but still Xantho did nothing. He promised much but no money went out from the treasury for more troops and supplies. I felt unease occasionally but this was soon dissipated by the distractions of the court. Castle Dracula had its own terrors but it always seemed safe enough from the terrors of the outside world.

  The precipitation of catastrophe often begins with some slight, apparently insignificant event, and so it was in this case. Its consequences live with me and the other protagonists to this day and God alone knows whether the eventual outcome will be good or evil. This is how it began.

  I had been sitting in the library one morning working on a small treatise I had been compiling for my own amusement on the beliefs and superstitions of Transylvania. I had embarked on the work in order to distract my mind from thoughts of my home in Wittenberg to which it had often been returning of late. Autumn sunlight fell on the manuscript at an oblique angle and made the dark ink glisten on the page before drying. I could faintly hear the wind in the mountain forest, but the scratching of my pen was the only truly audible sound. There was a knock and Razendoringer entered.

  Distress was on his face. He seemed unwilling to come far into the room and his manner was peculiarly servile. His hands held a little leather cap which he twisted and tortured in his anxiety. I wanted to remind him that I was his friend, but felt constrained by his self-absorbed anguish.

  There was a little silence.

  “I have lost the Lady Dolabella,” he said at last.

  “You mean she no longer loves you?”

  “I do not know. I have not seen her. She has vanished.”

  It was not until that moment that I was fully aware of the difficulties under which Razendoringer laboured. Because of his size, questions concerning the Lady Dolabella’s whereabouts were greeted with laughter or a condescending silence. Those whose sympathy and humanity disregarded his size were not in a position to tell him anything.

  I asked him about his meetings with the lady and it seemed they were intimately connected with the courtship of Vlad and the Lady Rozelinda. It appeared that Vlad’s fear of discovery had grown upon him so that he did not even wish Countess Cantemir — who was eager for the match — to be too aware of how far matters had gone with them. Perhaps what he feared most was ridicule. The young fear it unnecessarily; the old accept it, knowing that there are worse things. Apart from myself Vlad’s only confidant was Razendoringer who had chaperoned many of their walks together with the Lady Dolabella. And Dolabella had been the means of passing letters to Rozelinda when circumstances had contrived to separate her from Vlad.

  A few days before, on a fine autumn afternoon, the four of them had taken ponies to ride out in the forest. The Transylvanians have a kind of horse, called Vizkri, which they breed for the benefit of children. These are only four feet high, hardy, shaggy animals and very suitable for dwarfs to ride upon.

  The sun glanced brightly through cascades of leaves which the wind drove onto the golden floor of the forest. The two pairs of lovers divided, Razendoringer and Dolabella lagging behind and talking quietly in low voices. They talked in a serene kind of ecstasy about marriage and a future untainted by the abnormality which had hitherto plagued their existence.

  Though Dolabella was more highly born than Razendoringer, she had suffered as much rejection, in particular from her parents who were of normal height and whose other children had been similarly blessed.

  Suddenly a gun was heard to fire in the forest. A thousand birds seemed to fly up from their leafy refuges. Razendoringer, thinking only for the moment of Vlad his master, spurred his mount forward to see what had happened.

  “My mind was bent on rescue but what could I have done for them?” he said to me. He found Vlad and his lady ahead on the path. They had dismounted and were looking about them in some dismay and astonishment but no harm had come to them. Then Razendoringer looked behind him and saw that the Lady Dolabella had not followed. All three rode back down the path but found no trace of her. She had vanished.

  Rozelinda was almost as distraught as Razendoringer and Vlad shared as much as he could in her solicitude.

  The story puzzled me. There seemed no reason for the abduction of a lady dwarf whom most people regarded as no more than a servant. She would not have vanished of her own accord; and there was that sound of a gun which indicated a stratagem. I liked it less each time I thought about it. True evil always smells of madness.

  I asked my friend what I could do to help. He made a kind of gesture which seemed to indicate that quite possibly I had nothing to offer him but that he would turn to anyone in his desperation. Vlad had done little to assist the search. He had only obliged to please his love and now that he was deprived of Rozelinda — for Countess Cantemir had forbidden them to see each other after the forest incident — his time was much taken up with thinking about her, writing to her and being inconsolable.

  I thought that I had little chance of unravelling the
mystery, but fate unfortunately allowed me to do so.

  My efforts to instil some of the graces of European learning into the heads of the Princes of Transylvania had met, as I believe I have said, with only partial success. Vlad was an apt pupil, but now given over exclusively to love, while Mircea, on the other hand was given over to nothing but himself. His Latin was deplorable, his Greek nonexistent. I had set him to construe some Virgil, as I remember, part of the sixth book of the Aeneid where the Cumaean Sybil leads Aeneas down to Hades, and his work had been so wretched that I told him to come to me that evening in the library and recite to me by heart that passage which begins: “facilis descensus Averno...” Normally he would not have come, but I threatened to tell his father, the King, the one person in the world of whom he was truly afraid.

  When he came to recite, he was as late as he dared to be and as sullen as he could. But, remarkably, he had learned the passage thoroughly. Indeed, he was bellowing his way through the verse at such a pace that I had to beg him to stop, as he was littering the air with false quantities. I took him back to the beginning and asked him to recite slowly and with care. But though his memory proved faultless his mind seemed to be elsewhere.

  Beneath all his natural anger at my pedantry I could detect something else, a seething impatience: his eyes glowed with it. But, the lesson concluded, he showed no inclination to leave the library. In fact, he appeared to find my continued presence there distinctly irksome. He looked at my papers, scraped his boots on the hearthstone, poked at the fire. He pulled books out of the boxes and shelves, shuffled noisily through a few pages, banged them shut and then dropped them on the floor.

  My sensibilities were now alive to the possibilities of mischief and this inward excitement often brings out my natural capacity for deception. In such circumstances I frequently adopt a bland and harmless exterior, and so I said that I must be on my way; I complimented him on his new-found interest in books; I pretended to be oblivious of his condescending smirk; I commended him to the works of Diogenes Laertius — an insufferably tedious writer — and left him in possession of the library.

  Knowing the intricacy of court intrigue I was alerted to the possibility that Mircea might be in league with Alexander of Glem. If this was so then Mircea might share Alexander’s knowledge of the Old Queen’s apartments.

  I waited for five minutes outside the library door, then opened it to find, as I expected, nobody there. Books that Mircea had pulled from the shelves were lying about, some face down with their spines broken, others tossed into a corner. For a moment I was overcome with grief at this neglect of learning — pedants have passions too — then I turned my attention to Mircea’s absence. Undoubtedly he had left the room by the fireplace, but he had not left the stone door open, which showed that he was operating with caution and not out of idle curiosity, and moreover that he must have known how the door operated from the other side which was more than I did. So I turned the dog’s head and the witch’s hand and went in. Once in, I pushed the door to and it slid back into place.

  My own recklessness shocked me. I had no idea what to do. I stood still listening carefully in the darkness. I thought I could hear sobbing. I began to walk up the steps to the Old Queen’s apartments. The door to her rooms was ajar. I looked in and saw nothing at first but the flicker of a candle. The weeping, magnified by darkness, seemed to soak the place in grief. The light was coming from the great bedroom. I crept up to its entrance and looked in.

  Mircea stood holding a branched candlestick high above his head. The soft light made his face gleam with youth and there was a look of triumph, almost of joy on his face, which in other circumstances you might have rejoiced to see. But I shuddered, knowing what his joy meant.

  Some yards away from him stood the Lady Dolabella, her clothes in tatters. She was chained by the leg to one of the posts of the Queen’s bed. I saw the expression on her face: there was defiance, but also curiosity, as if she had been searching his face for an explanation. Fresh blood was trickling from the calf of one of her small, sturdy legs.

  “Tell me about her,” said Mircea. “Tell me about your mistress.”

  “I have told you,” she replied. “What more do you want to know?”

  “You have told me nothing about Rozelinda. Nothing that I want to know.”

  “Why do you keep me here?”

  “I’ll explain in a moment. But first, tell me: is your lady a virgin?”

  “Of course. How dare you ask such a question?”

  “It is not for you to ask whether I dare anything. Shall I make you dance again?” Dolabella retreated and shook her head. “Is her body without blemish, then?” Dolabella stared at Mircea as he stooped and picked up an ivory handled scourge off the ground. “Is her skin clear and white? Do you undress her? What clothes does she take off first?”

  Dolabella remained silent while Mircea walked round her, keeping his distance. She watched him almost lazily, with an indifference born of utter weariness.

  “I will give you a pen and paper,” he said. “I want you to write to your mistress to follow me here to see you. I want you to write that I can be trusted. Your mistress is anxious for you and desperate to see you. Are you not flattered?”

  “It is what I expected.”

  “Vain little person, aren’t you? Here’s pen and paper. Write.”

  “Never!”

  “Then dance, dwarf!”

  With a savage sweep he lashed at Dolabella’s little legs. She howled with agony and began to caper up and down, hampered and chafed all the while by the shackle on her leg. Mircea screamed and jeered so much that his noise drowned out Dolabella’s cries. I watched, tormented by indecision, as the whip whistled and cracked around Dolabella’s legs. In the candlelight I saw the blood run again.

  My mind is sometimes allowed to escape from the bonds of pedantry. I had to think quickly, knowing I was no match for him in a fight, and that besides assaulting a king’s son was not politic. But there was no way in which I would let this gallant and innocent little lady suffer a second longer.

  There was a grey damask cloth which covered a table in the first anteroom, much gnawed by mice and moth and full of holes, but of fine heavy material. This I put over myself in such a way that I could see through one of the holes. Then, crouching low, I sped into the Old Queen’s chamber, flapping the sheet and uttering a low, sepulchral groan. Both Mircea and his victim let out a scream of terror almost in unison. Mircea dropped the candlestick, plunging the room in darkness. He stumbled out whimpering and bawling for mercy and help. I let out a hideous cackle to speed him on his way. How long it would be before he realized he had been tricked was hard to tell.

  For a few moments there was silence except for the sound of Dolabella shuddering and sobbing with fear. It took some time to convince her that I was no ghost, but her old friend Dr. Bellorius. She had been so tormented by one misery or another that her mind had lost its accustomed clarity and courage. It took repeated assurances from me before she recovered her composure.

  There was no way in which I could unshackle Dolabella from the bedpost. I had to get help. This meant finding Razendoringer and Vladimir and getting them to the Old Queen’s apartments as quickly as possible. Thinking that to return via the library might lead to Mircea discovering my deception, I decided to take a risk. There was another way, the way by which the Queen and Ragul entered the apartments. After a few reassuring words to Dolabella I was through the arras and down the steps which led I knew not where.

  With barely a glance I passed the landing where I had managed to escape from the old bathhouse, down more steps, now at almost a run, and came to a heavy wooden door which opened smoothly on well-oiled hinges. I was in a part of Castle Dracula that I had never seen before. It was a suite of interconnecting rooms with rugs and statuary and paintings on panel. There were furs on the beds and coloured glass in the windows. I entered a room which contained a great portrait of a man, larger than life size, crudely painted but wi
th a sort of antique power. The eyes however were dully rendered. His features were heavy and seemed a more perfectly formed version of Xantho’s. The beard was white. A lozenge at the corner of the picture, carrying the royal arms of Transylvania and a painted scroll, proclaimed this to be the painted likeness of Mircea the Old.

  I heard the bell for the evening banquet, then voices and footsteps, so I stepped behind a wooden screen. In the panelling of the wall beyond I could just make out in the gathering twilight a small door. It must have been my unnaturally heightened sensibilities which alerted me to it.

  I pushed the door which gave inwards and led me into a tiny chamber with some steps leading directly upwards to the left. I shut the door behind me just as I heard people entering the room. The steps, built into the wall of the room, were barely wide enough for me to walk up them sideways; and they stopped where two points of light at eye level relieved the stuffy and Stygian gloom of my hiding place.

  The two holes were not much more than an inch apart and through them I had an uninterrupted view of the chamber. The panel in which these holes were contrived was of a smoother wood than the others and from this, as well as a calculation of the position of my vantage point, I deduced that I was looking through the eyes of the portrait of Mircea the Old. Once more, as I have so often been fated to do in my life, I became a spectator.

  Into the room came Demetrius Count Cantemir carrying two candles which he set down on a carved oak chest in front of a Venetian mirror so that they filled the room with light. His wife followed with the Lady Rozelinda. There was a look on Rozelinda face which I had not seen before, sullen and resentful. Her young cheeks were flushed with anger and embarrassment.

  Count Cantemir, dark and obsequious usually, was the master of his family. He told Rozelinda to sit down and she was firmly placed in a chair by his wife. More than ever did the Countess seem to lack character, to be a mere adjunct to his will. There was in her face the kind of peace and complacency which only comes from the total subordination to another. I saw how much more like Rozelinda was to her father. Two pairs of dark brooding eyes challenged one another.