“A ghost that drinks blood?” Frank’s back chilled. He twitched his shoulders to dislodge the prickly feeling of a cold gaze resting there, and winced at the ache. “And can become solid when it pleases?”
“Yes. When it is hungry it bites above the heart and pierces it, drinks you down fast. When it’s playing it bites you above the eyes and drains you slowly from the top down.”
Frank felt inclined to say What nonsense! but recognised that his fatuous faith in an enlightened world where these things did not happen was thoroughly disproved. “And that’s what Văcărescu is?”
“Mm.”
Odd, how deep the sense of betrayal went. Surely this was no more than he had suspected himself. When had he begun secretly hoping for something else? Then he stumbled back into clear thought. “Wait, though. You said they sleep in the day? I’ve seen Văcărescu in the day. Riding around.” He waved a hand at the window in illustration. “Out doing things.”
Mirela had given up on her attempt to plait her unruly hair—the plaits kept springing apart at the end the moment she let go of them. Bold as brass, she was now rummaging in the clothes chest at the foot of Frank’s bed, but she looked up in confusion when he said this. “Constantin Văcărescu?”
Frank could have kicked himself. Could only hope that his idiotic slowness was the lingering result of head injury and not his natural state. “No. No, the young one. Radu.”
“He’s just a lackey,” she said, dismissively, coming up with the trousers and long shirt Frank had been wearing when he was rescued. They had been laundered and put away carefully, even though Alaya had been horrified at the thought of a gentleman of his calibre ever wearing such lowly garments again. “Thinks he’s in charge, but it’s they who are the true power. Constantin and his wife. May I have these?”
“Take them. His wife . . .?” Frank’s head was still more than half hollowed out by forgetting, and it was true that a lingering headache made thoughts hard to string together. But really, when had he seen any other noblewoman in this household? “Your mother and I,” Constantin had said, and she had been sitting there, sewing, with that ancient serenity on her child’s face. “Not Alaya?” But of course it would be Alaya, whom he had never seen except at night. The little gilded porcelain doll with the gentle eyes.
“Yes.” Mirela pulled the shirt on over her shift. It came down to her knees, like an overdress, and she sighed, rubbing her hands together as if to get some warmth into them. “It was she who captured me while you were distracting Constantin.”
Possibly some part of Frank had already known this. He remembered Radu Văcărescu slumped in exhausted sleep on the end of his bed after trying to stay awake all night and all day for a week. Silently, stubbornly, and without any thanks from Frank, he had been trying to protect his guest from the monsters in his house. Not a lackey, Frank thought, fiercely defensive, with no surprise at his sudden sea change of emotion. This made sense, and it was joy he felt at last, joy at finally having firm ground under his feet. Now perhaps he could stand up and begin to act.
“Would you have married him?” he asked, perhaps idly.
“Obviously!” Mirela grinned at him, in the act of pulling on the trousers under her other layers. “I would have found a way to kill the strigoi for good. Then my sons would be boyars, and my daughters would marry princes.” She laughed. “Can you imagine that? I would come back dressed in cloth of gold and make the village that once owned me kneel down at my dirty Roma feet.”
Frank smiled at her vehemence. She made him feel braver, just being there, undaunted and irrepressible.
“But he didn’t think I was good enough for him,” she finished, hard mouthed, with her head bent as she tied his unwanted green sash around it for a scarf.
“Then he’s a fool,” said Frank, honestly enough. “I don’t think they would really have let him, in any case. That wasn’t about you. It was about them trying to get him to move them to Bucharest, and him refusing.”
“You saw that?”
“I was behind the door, listening.”
Mirela looked him up and down with the same dismissive twist to her lips as she had used when mentioning the younger Văcărescu, and he thought that was a bit rich, given that he had already sacrificed himself for her once. Did she expect him always to be on hand to heroically throw himself to the wolves for her? She clearly didn’t need his help.
“Why can’t the strigoi just go to Bucharest on their own?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know why they can’t make him do what they want with mind control. That’s how they get around everyone else. But if they can’t control him with their wills, then in the daytime they must be vulnerable to him. Perhaps if they went alone he would follow and bring them back? I don’t know. The only important thing for me is that they have sworn not to touch their own servants. So now I’m a maid here and I’m safe. Here I can study their weaknesses, work out how to destroy them. Even if I knew where my family had fled, I wouldn’t bring them back home until these things were gone . . . What keeps them from eating you?”
Long nights of resentful card games, the young lord not leaving until dawn. But what had stopped Alaya that first time, when he woke to find her peering at him, her face close above his, her mouth half open and her eyes wide with fascination? “Maybe they like the thrill of the chase?” Unsettling thought. “Maybe they’re just waiting until I can give them a better run?”
“They are cruel,” she agreed, her face clouding over as though she spoke from recent memory. “And you’re right. They like to give their prey a head start. Though sometimes that doesn’t work for them so well.”
She wriggled the wooden wedge out of the door, and as she did so, she was abruptly a different woman—a much less fantastically dressed one. All the new courage on which he had been congratulating himself seemed to run out of his hands. “You’re not going?”
“I have work to do. Fires to rake and make.”
“You’ll come back?” He was quite sure now that she found him pathetic. He did too, so it seemed quite fair, and no trouble at all to ignore her exasperation and offer her his most charming, most helpless smile. It worked, as it so often did.
“Oh, if you wish.”
“And then we’ll work out how to kill them. Together. We’ll put a proper end to all of this.” Before they are the end of us.
Mirela opened the door and checked the emptiness of the passageway beyond before she returned to pick up her sack of coal. Her smile seemed neither as twisted nor as harsh on her new face as it would on her old. “It is plain to see you are a foreigner. Your people don’t offer my people help. I’ll deal with this, and you can profit from it, as it always goes.”
She shook her head and, stepping out of the room, closed the door behind her.
Slightly stung by this, Frank tried to wind himself up to heroic action, yet couldn’t seem to find the spring. But it was light outside, and rain-washed foothills loomed green against a clearing sky. Best take this opportunity while he could. He wrestled his tall boots on and stood. If his time to act was running down, and he was increasingly convinced he was no hero who could slay the monster and rescue the princess himself, perhaps what he needed was to find himself a champion who could.
The sound of cutlery on china plates, incongruously mundane in this medieval castle, drew Frank to a small dining room. There he found the housekeeper, supervising two of the maids as they cleared the remains of a light lunch from the board.
“Oh,” she smiled. “Master Frank. I didn’t know you were up. Please have a seat, and Oana will bring you some breakfast.”
“Feeding me up for them?” Frank joked, and regretted it when the matronly woman flinched. This was no more her fault than it was his.
“I’m doing what I can to make your stay a pleasant one while it lasts,” Anca said with some dignity. She buried her hands in her apron and twisted it as though she were breaking the neck of the Christmas goose. “What else can I
do?”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I just . . .” He intercepted some of the serving dishes before they made it off the table and collected sarmales, brânzoaice, and a cup of small beer. “I have just become aware of my situation. I didn’t mean to take it out on you. I hope you’ll accept my apology.”
Her laugh sounded as though he had managed to hurt her again in the same place, but she only patted down her skirts and waited until he was done before clearing his plate away. “Of course, sir. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“I would welcome coffee. And a chance to talk to your lord. Do you know where he is?”
“In the library, sir. Oana will guide you, and I’ll bring the coffee up to you both.”
The weather had cleared as he ate. Frank found himself ducking down—the library’s door was made for an older time, when people must have been both thinner and shorter—and coming through into a place a little like a church, lit brightly by sunlight. It was wood panelled, like all the rooms he had seen so far, but the panelling was covered in curlicues painted in a thousand medieval devices. Little oddities lurked among the shelves. As he walked through a shaft of rainbow light, from a window depicting some biblical scene in which all the players looked like Cossack horsemen, his fingers trailed over carvings. Here a man curled up tight, laughing fit to burst his belly, next a field mouse, poking an inquiring nose out of the sound hole of a stringless lute.
The books themselves nestled among the painted and sculpted exuberance as if—as must indeed be the case—it had been made for them. Bindings of gilded leather and fine cloth, embroidered with tiny stitches. Better than that, along one high shelf a dozen yards of ancient folded palimpsests, no backs on them, so the stitched folds of the spine were visible between boards heavy with clumsy jewels. Above that, where one needed a stepladder to reach, the shelves had been turned into deep alcoves, and each one was haphazardly stuffed with scrolls.
Frank had not yet remembered, beyond scholar, what it was he had been intending to do with his life, but at the sight of the library, of all those books, something in him took flight for joy. He read the nearest titles. Frowned, peering at the nearby shelves. Not alphabetically ordered. Nor by subject. Was there . . .?
A large volume was set up on a reading stand in the centre of the room. An index of some sort, he thought, trying to work out the scheme by which the collection was organised. Each bookshelf bore a coat of arms on the top, bright with colour and rampant with fierce animals. Perhaps . . .? But no, there was no reference to the blazons in the index, nor did the shelves seem to be numbered. As for the scrolls, he wasn’t sure they were recorded in this book at all.
He was evening up a gap on the bookshelf closest to the door, sliding a taller volume out of the centre and replacing it next to brothers of its own size, when the housekeeper reappeared in a scent of cinnamon and bitterness, with a coffeepot on a silver tray and a slightly more genuine smile.
At this reminder, Frank’s delight faded enough to allow him to remember he had not come here simply to explore the library, but, oh, that was a bonus. All these books! Wallachian and Russian books, Arabic and German and Slavic. Some of the ugly jewelled ones crackled in his fingers like autumn leaves and smelled of eons of history, hand written in letter forms he could barely decipher, in languages no living man had spoken for centuries.
“This is wonderful. No wonder he doesn’t want to leave.”
“Have you got no farther than the anteroom?” She sounded a little like a fond nanny, wondering why so little progress had been made in the tidying of the nursery.
“There’s more?”
“Follow me.”
At the far end of the room, a bookshelf had been built out from the right-hand wall in such a way as to look like part of the far wall. When she passed it, the optical illusion was broken and he saw there was a space between the two, just wide enough for a short passage and another of those narrow doors. Grinning, Frank followed through a grey oak portal, ancient and studded with nails, set into a doorway that pierced a wall so thick it felt like a passage. On the other side, three deeply worn steps brought him to a floor as crazily humped and warped as a sea serpent’s back.
This room, too, was lined with shelves, though the shelves were less ornate, and the books on them more plainly bound. Workaday things: atlases and treatises on beekeeping, animal breeding, the improvement of the soil. How to win wars.
Above his head the ceiling was dark like the underside of a forest canopy and painted with darker green leaves. Three golden lanterns hung from chains, unlit, but unnecessary in the clear light that sheeted through a thousand panes of pale-green glass.
A section of apparent bookshelf proved to be a last door, cunningly painted and carved, fooling the eye, and even confusing the idle hand a little. Through this, another short flight of steps brought them to the inner sanctum. A round room of chestnut and gold, with a large desk and an indescribable chaos of stacked volumes and scattered papers.
Windows encircled him, and when Frank gazed out he saw he was in a turret built out of the edge of a mountain. Only sky and a deep fall in every direction. A hundred feet beyond the glass, directly at his eye level, a gyrfalcon floated on braced wings, gazing with haughty eyes at the tiny scurrying things down on the distant valley floor.
Radu Văcărescu sat at the desk with a pen in his hand and a large volume of accounts open before him. His head was propped on his fist, and his hair trailed in the ink. He couldn’t quite manage to hide the jerk of coming ungently awake when Anca put the tray of coffee down by his elbow, though he tried.
Frank could see why he dared sleep here. Even with the bookish clutter, stepping into the room was like stepping into a floating bubble of light: clear, clean, all but holy.
Wordlessly, Anca dropped them both a curtsey and left. Văcărescu gave Frank a slow inscrutable look, and waited for him to speak.
At the level grey gaze, so like the clarity of the room—comforting and bleak all in one—Frank discovered he didn’t know what to say. Starting with So, I hear your family are demons, seemed crass. Starting without it seemed false.
He pulled out one of the heavy mahogany chairs and settled into it with a sigh. Văcărescu set his pen down in its holder and seemed to recognise the silent plea for help. “I am glad to see you up and about. Have any memories returned?”
“Some.” Frank smiled. Yes, better to work up to it in the course of conversation. “Mostly it’s preverbal things. Attitudes, things I take for granted. I can feel the rest of it pushing up under the surface like a geyser readying to blow.”
Văcărescu returned the smile, and perhaps it was Frank’s new knowledge that freed the expression from the layers of irony he had read into it before. Perhaps it was only that this was the first time they had spoken unobserved, and the man felt able to shed one or two layers of armour. At any rate, it was a small and pleasant smile, laced with sympathy around the edges. “Perhaps then, it will be easier on you to tell you this now.”
As if recovering a breathing space Frank had destroyed by sitting close, Văcărescu rose and went to look out one of the windows, presenting his dull-blue back to Frank’s gaze. “I’m afraid we’ve found two bodies in the Olt, which we think are the remains of the other two English scholars. The friends you mentioned. One shot, one the victim of some kind of explosion.”
It was better to hear this now, when Frank couldn’t recall why he should grieve. But the news did jog something free of the logjam of his scattered thoughts. “Was there a third Englishman?” He saw a flash of tall boulders and a familiar face on the wrong end of a rifle. Smoke as Frank watched the man fall. “He would have been among the bandits, in the rocks by the side of the river. I think . . . I don’t know. I have the feeling it was not a random attack.”
“We found no other bodies, except for a couple of boatmen washed up farther downstream. If the man fell among his comrades, however, they are likely to have taken him away t
o bury.” Văcărescu turned and, leaning back against the windows, light limned by the empty sky, gave Frank a look of sharp interest. “Why would there be an assassin on your trail? Who are you, or what have you done to merit that?”
“I would very much like to know that myself.”
An impasse again, as Frank searched for a way of changing the subject gracefully. But there was none. How did you say Are you a lackey or a prisoner of the things that dwell in your house with you? without causing offence? Frank had forgotten many things, but not the casual strength of Văcărescu’s backhand blow. He could still feel it like a fresh graze on his cheek.
He picked up the coffeepot by way of distraction, poured the thick, bitter brew into two small cups. “Shall I be mother?”
The smile again in response, just far enough from being mocking to verge on kind. Văcărescu came slowly back to the desk as if reeled in by a careful fisherman. “What?”
“It’s what we say in England if we’re going to pour the tea.” Frank added sugar to his coffee and sipped. Horrible. But it kicked him in the chest like a mule and set his heart galloping, which was what he wanted from it—a goad to get him moving. Abruptly he was tired of his own cowardice, tired of the invisible restraints of what must have been a suffocatingly polite upbringing. Surely he could allow himself to be rude when his life was at stake?
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