Chapter Fifty-four
“When the Queen is not here,” Florescu told us, “I live in the village. Andrei came to my door a week into the new year, half-frozen, and said that if he could not return to Bran, he would drown himself. I let him sleep before the fire until we could figure out what to do. But I have neighbours there, and in the spring, I move into the castle, to be here for Her Majesty. This year, it was earlier than usual, in March. If Andrei stayed in my house, he would be seen. So I brought him here.”
“How did you know about the secret stairway?” I asked.
“Madam, my family have been Bran’s caretakers for a very long time. There is nothing about the castle I do not know.”
“I imagine you took care to encourage the Queen and her architect not to change the two places where doors are hidden? Not this year, at least.”
He blushed slightly—I couldn’t blame him, considering the ugliness of that first-floor cabinet.
“So who else knows? The cook, her helper, the housekeeper. Vera. Not Gabriela?”
“No. And Vera has only known since yesterday.”
Vera herself spoke up at last, the first word she’d said since walking in. “When I hear that it was you—you, Andrei, friend of my sister—who whusper at me from graveyard like some spooky! I so frighten, you scare the pants off a me.”
The startling colloquialism launched Andrei into a vehement Roumanian back-and-forth with Vera that I could only follow by their expressions and gestures: abject apology on his part and indignation on hers; a meek gesture to his wounded forehead followed by her declaration that could only translate “It serves you right.”
Eventually, Vera relented—relented, too, in English. “I would not expect that stupidness. My sister always say, Andrei was good boy.”
“You look like her,” he admitted to the floorboards.
“Ah—that why you stare at me through peepy-holes when I dusting and doing work? Good thing one of girls not have room near there. Not nice boy.”
His head snapped up. “I not stare! I only look, see who out there. Nothing to do. Long days, inside wall. I not stare. Not at girls.”
“Just at me?”
“Yes at you—I mean no, I always like you, and I like to see you, yes, you very…”
I thought I’d better cut this off before she went for his throat. “To be clear, you’re telling us that Andrei has lived inside the walls since March, shortly before the Queen arrived. A few of the servants knew, and would leave food down amongst the builders’ storage on the ground floor. He would sleep during the day and come out at night, to retrieve his food and stretch his legs.”
Florescu resumed. “When the Queen is away, there is no problem for Andrei to come and go at night. Only one guard, and I can send him to kitchen, or tell him I can’t sleep so I will take his watch. Then Andrei can walk, out in the open. At night, through the village a little, mostly through the forest. This is not perfect, not permanent, but until the Queen goes again, back to Bucharest when it grows cold, this is all I could think of.”
“Your fear is the charge of desertion, is that right?”
“He could be shot.”
I looked at Holmes. “Do you know the law here?”
“I imagine it is much the same as ours.”
I explained to the others. “Roumanian law may be different—or I suppose, that of the Austro-Hungarian empire—but if it’s anything like England, yes, desertion is a crime, but no one is interested in prosecution anymore. A confession usually results in discharge and an annulment of any awards or medals. But that raises a question—Andrei, how old were you when you enlisted? When you became a soldier?” I added, since his face was a study in confusion.
“How old? I think maybe fifteen, sixteen.”
“You lied about your age?”
He shrugged. And it was true—even English regiments tended to keep mum about soldiers they discovered were underage, merely deploying them in areas less likely to see active battle. I remembered reading about a twelve-year-old boy fighting with a Balkans regiment, in the early days of the War. By 1916, the Central Powers would have been desperate enough to turn a blind eye to the age of those in uniform. Nine years later, a certain amount of shame might have entered into their view of desertion.
“Andrei, you were underage and badly wounded. You nearly died, and you walked away after the battle was over. I doubt that in 1925, any military court would want to prosecute you. And if it does, well, my husband and I know many powerful individuals.”
He stared at me, uncomprehending. I opened my mouth to try again, with words of one and two syllables—but Florescu got there first.
As the Roumanian phrases rolled out, those almost-comprehensible bites of near-Italian and almost-Spanish, the soldier’s face went from confusion to scorn, to disbelief, then open protest, before verging into astonishment. When Florescu went silent, the young man sat frozen for a time before his dark eyes swung over to Holmes and me. We gave him an encouraging nod.
He leapt out of his chair to seize my shoulders and kiss my cheek soundly. He did precisely the same to Florescu, and would have embraced Holmes but for an outstretched hand, pointedly stuck into his face. That he grabbed and shook, hard.
As he did so, he grinned, wide and incredulous from under that recently trimmed moustache—and with that, a jolt of recognition hit me, explaining many things.
The young man had the same long, distinctive incisors that I had seen beneath the edges of Florescu’s moustache. God only knew what had led Florescu to marry a mad wife and forced the other woman into marriage with a wife-beater—or indeed, when those two nuptials had taken place—but clearly, some twenty-six years ago, the future major-domo had had an affair with a village girl.
The boy did not yet know that his protector was something much more than that to him, but Florescu did—I could see the awareness in his eyes. Here was the last secret Florescu had kept from us.
While this realisation was reverberating through me, Andrei had turned to Vera, and froze. In the end, she broke the impasse, rising from her chair to step forward, as dignified as Queen Marie, to bestow on her admirer a decorous kiss on the cheek—only to let out a loud “oof” as he flung his arms around her and swung her in circles across the floor.
The three of us watched the laughing couple. Florescu looked startled, Holmes had a pleased expression on his face, and I—I was thinking: some weeks…no, five days ago, I arrived here feeling that I was stepping from a fever dream into a sun-dappled fairy tale. One with a Queen in a castle, a witch in the woods, and an honest peasant boy in disguise. A story where maidservants planned their own future and the Princess got to vanquish the evildoer. One where ghosts came out of the shadows, and true love came out of the air. This tale had everything but a talking cat.
I leaned over to rest my shoulder against my husband’s. “And that,” I told him happily, “is about as close as one can get to a story-book ending.”
End notes
By Miss Russell’s editor, Laurie R. King
As Miss Russell said, in some fairy tales, happily ever after is where things end; in others, happiness is where the problems begin.
There was indeed once a Queen by name of Marie, and a Princess by name of Ileana—but the tale in which Ileana grew up was the kind with darkness at its base. The kind of story where a little girl is surrounded by forces out of her control, with disease taking her baby brother and enemies driving her family from its home, with guns and bombs and assassins coming far closer than any child should see, and ending in betrayal by her own family.
Queen Marie died in 1938, so she did not see the Communist era devastate her beloved country. She had many problems with her wayward son, Carol II, but she could not know that he would take revenge for imagined slights by banning Prince Barbu Știrbey from her funeral, and by driving his sister Ileana from her homeland.
Prince Barbu Știrbey, who also served his homeland in spite of its government, died under the Communists in 1946, the day after attending a party at the Russian Embassy.
Romania’s huge economic problems under the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu woke a desire for tourist money—which led to the reinvention of Bran Castle as Dracula’s Castle. This makes for a colorful visit, although there is, as Miss Russell realized in 1925, a notable lack of evidence, historical or architectural, that Bram Stoker had this particular Carpathian castle in mind.
Those familiar with the village of Bran and its castle may notice that the author occasionally plays fast and free with certain details: the location of churches, the progress of the castle plumbing in 1925, Queen Marie’s social calendar, and Ileana’s location during that summer. As her readers know, despite being Miss Russell’s literary helpmeet, I am not always able to ascertain when various aspects of the Russell Memoirs have undergone a transformation, whether through Miss Russell’s creative memory, her taste in storytelling, or some arcane matter of national security.
Please don’t blame me for Miss Russell’s deliberate imprecisions.
To all those who manage to keep their heads
in an impossible time.
May all your stories have happy endings.
Acknowledgments
This story’s correspondent of The Times, Mr Alan Broder, takes his name from the generosity of a certain professor of computer sciences at New York’s Yeshiva University, during a 2020 fundraiser for Second Harvest Food Bank in central California.
Thanks are due, now more than ever, to the fabulous ladies and gents of Penguin Random House, who battled for this book through stressful weeks of pandemic lockdowns and election turmoil. That it exists at all is due to their dogged determination that life will go on, and stories will be told. Thanks, Hilary, Allison, Kim, Melissa, Carlos, Emma, Caroline, and a thousand others. I love you guys.
And when it comes to love, my buds and supporters, without whom I just can’t imagine this past year: Zoë, Bob, Alice, Merrily, Karen, Sabrina, Erin, John, Mary Alice, Anna, Angela, Clio, and all you Beekeeper’s Apprentices, I feel you at my back, pushing hard.
Thanks, too, to the folk at Bran Castle, Romania, who cheerfully replied to odd questions from the other side of the world—and who have one of the best websites out there. And to Olga, who corrected my Roumanian spelling.
In books, as in life, it takes a community.
By Laurie R. King
Mary Russell
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
A Monstrous Regiment of Women
A Letter of Mary
The Moor
O Jerusalem
Justice Hall
The Game
Locked Rooms
The Language of Bees
The God of the Hive
Beekeeping for Beginners: A Short Story
Pirate King
Garment of Shadows
Dreaming Spies
The Marriage of Mary Russell: A Short Story
The Murder of Mary Russell
Mary Russell’s War: And Other Stories of Suspense
Island of the Mad
Riviera Gold
Castle Shade
Stuyvesant & Grey
Touchstone
The Bones of Paris
Kate Martinelli
A Grave Talent
To Play the Fool
With Child
Night Work
The Art of Detection
Beginnings: A Short Story
And
A Darker Place
Folly
Keeping Watch
Califia’s Daughters (as Leigh Richards)
Lockdown
About the Author
Laurie R. King is the award-winning, bestselling author of seventeen Mary Russell mysteries, five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, and many acclaimed stand-alone novels such as Folly, Touchstone, The Bones of Paris, and Lockdown. She lives on California’s Central Coast, where she is at work on her next Mary Russell mystery.
LaurieRKing.com
Facebook.com/LaurieRKing
Twitter: @LaurieRKing and @Mary_Russell
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
Castle Shade Page 33