Blood Red (9781101637890) (6 page)

A porter came to get her bag just before the train was due to pull in to the station at Budapest. She had arranged the full journey at Bucharest, and now she alighted from her car to find a helpful conductor fluent in Romanian, Hungarian, and German ready to direct her to a special waiting room just for first class passengers where she could pass the time until she was ready to board the next train, this one from Budapest to Vienna.

If she had been anyone else, there was no doubt in her mind that she would not have rushed through this journey in such haste. Bucharest was home to many beautiful churches and the Royal Palace, and certainly would have been worth stopping in for a few days. And as for Budapest, well! A week would not have been enough. And then, Vienna, oh, Vienna . . .

But . . . she was an Earth Master, and even though she had shielded herself heavily, she was soon at the point of
needing
that coffee pot at her elbow, drinking cup after cup of the beverage, mellowed with cream and sweetened with sugar. Budapest etched away at her shields. She felt every wound made to the Earth on which it stood, felt sickened by every poison in its metaphorical veins. Individually, the great iron engines of the trains, belching smoke and steam, did not trouble her much, but crowded together in the station they made her feel ill. She could scarcely feel the Earth beneath all the stone and cement, and what she felt was unhappy. There might have been some Elementals here, but they were none of them
good.
They were not the sort she would ever attempt to contact.

She was only too happy when it came time to take her place on board the Budapest to Vienna train, although she really couldn't enjoy the lovely parlor car until the train was well into the countryside. She did not have a private compartment for this leg of the journey, but rather had a seat in the first class parlor car. The porter had taken her silence for shyness, or perhaps grief—she was, after all, wearing black and her ticket listed her as “Frau” von Schwarzwald. He had assiduously seated her in her own plush red chair in the back of the parlor car, with her own little table, set away from the groupings of identical chairs and settees that would encourage socializing. She was glad he had, and glad that her veil allowed her to study the car and her fellow passengers with a degree of anonymity.

Paneled in highly polished wood, carpeted in real Turkish carpets, with red plush curtains at every window and stained glass skylights inset into the roof, she imagined that the parlor car must be a reflection of what the parlors of the very wealthy looked like. She was glad that she was wearing what she had chosen for this journey, even though she had picked it for its imperviousness to travel and not for any other consideration. Her simple, sober gown of black had been lovingly stitched by Mutti after the fashion plates in her beloved magazines out of the very finest of alpaca and delicate linen. As Rosa covertly studied the women around her, it occurred to her with no little astonishment that Mutti's handiwork not only equaled that of the fashionable ateliers whose creations were worn by the well-to-do around her, it surpassed them. No one was giving her a second glance, because she fit in with the rest of the folk in this car so perfectly.

She had worn this selfsame gown on the journey to Romania as well, but it was likely that amid the crowding and the wailing of unhappy children and the general weariness of all of the travelers in second and third class, no one had paid any attention to its quality.

Or they assumed I was a servant that had been gifted a cast-off from my mistress.
That happened quite a bit, actually, and not only in well-to-do families. In her home village, servant girls often got old clothing as an added benefit from a generous mistress.

She breathed a little thanks to Mutti, for without this gown, she would certainly have found herself embarrassed back to the second or third class carriages where she belonged.

A waiter and waitress moved easily among the tables, offering coffee and tea and plates of pastries. Now that they were well into the countryside, Rosa's appetite was back and she gratefully accepted both. But she watched carefully how the ladies about her ate, and copied them, cutting the pastries into tiny bites and eating delicately, rather than picking the good things up in an ungloved hand and biting straight into them.

The car seemed to be full of a mix of Hungarian and German speakers. The porter had put her portmanteau in a rack above her head, but after the little waitress in her black uniform dress and stiffly starched white apron had cleared away the plate and cup, the girl offered Rosa a selection of fashionable magazines, so there was no need of the book in her bag. She feigned studying the stories and the fashion plates as she actually studied her fellow passengers.

Some of her fellow Foresters had seen people—well, men—of this class up close in the past, but Rosa never had. Wealthy men often came to the Schwarzwald to hunt, and the Bruderschaft sometimes acted as guides to keep them out of mischief. These men and women fascinated her. It made her head swim to think that the women would change their clothing four and five times in a day to match whatever social activity they were doing. More than that, if they happened to participate in what passed in their class for “sport.” And they would keep a perfectly good gown for no more than a handful of years before discarding it as “out of fashion” rather than remaking it as Mutti did.

She eavesdropped on them shamelessly. Most of them were either returning from, or going on, “tours.” She knew what these “tours” were—whirlwind sightseeing trips to major capitols, occasionally taking in some countryside by way of relief. They would whisk in and out of the agreed-upon series of “things worth seeing” without really seeing any of them.

She wondered why they did it at all. It wasn't for education. It wasn't to examine the beauties of these places, for as near as she could tell,
every
place was judged inferior in some way to what they had “at home.”

Maybe it's just for something to do.

Certainly the women, at least, seemed to have very little to occupy them in the intervals between changing clothing. They didn't tend their own children. They didn't make their own clothing or cook their own food. They didn't clean their own homes, and didn't even direct the people who
did.
That was the job of the housekeeper.

She could not even begin to imagine living like that. Although it was wonderful being pampered and cared for on this journey, especially when you compared it with the slog that had been the outward half, she knew that too much more of being tended to hand and foot would drive her mad. Living in gowns like the one she was wearing would drive her mad. And above all, not having anything practical to do with her time would drive her mad.

As she came to that conclusion, a gong sounded softly. This was the signal that they were all to rise in a leisurely fashion, and make their way into the next car—the dining car—which existed for the
sole
purpose of being eaten in, by these people and no others.

Luncheon, like the other meals she'd had on these trains, was amazing. And it was even more amazing to bear witness to the sheer amount of food that the men, at least, were tucking away. Eight courses! For luncheon! Small wonder those elegant vests strained a little to cover the bellies beneath them.

Out of deference to her apparent mourning, she was given a table by herself, allowing her to eat as slowly as she liked while she observed those around her.

Then it was back to the parlor car, where watching her fellow passengers had grown boring enough—and their conversation unvarying enough—that she retreated to her book. She caught some of the women casting curious glances her way, and she suspected that they were surreptitiously trying to read the title. Not that the title would bring any of them any enlightenment. She'd taken it with permission from the Romanian Brotherhood's library, as they had a second copy, and the Bruderschaft didn't possess this work; written in Latin, it was a treatise on a subject rather important to her—werewolves and other shape-shifters.

Tea and coffee and more pastries were served in mid-afternoon; she declined the pastries but accepted the coffee. About the time when she would have been sitting down to supper at the Bruderschaft Lodge, the steward passed through the car, politely informing the passengers in a deferential murmur that they were about to enter Vienna.

Rosa had felt the nearness of the city for some time. It wasn't as bad as some German cities she had been forced to pass through; Vienna was well known for its green and growing spaces. But it was uncomfortable, and she was very glad that she would not be staying overnight there. She would be taking another night train all the way across Germany, and arriving in Munich in the morning. From there, she would take a train to Stuttgart, then a local train to Freudenstadt, and someone from the Bruderschaft would meet her at the station with her horse. She would be home, and everything would go back to normal again. Meals at the proper time, not the time these people took it. Meals that would be simple, not ones that left you groaning.

Of course, nothing was straightforward in these journeys. Vienna had more than one railway station. She would arrive at the South Railway Station, and would have to leave from the West Railway Station. When she had made the outward trip with Hans, it had involved the scramble of two modestly dressed people—in Hans's case, a man dressed in rustic clothing—trying to compete for taxis against people who were . . . well, not “rustics.” It was a good thing they'd made sure to have plenty of time to make the exchange; in the end they had gotten a tired looking old man with an equally tired, old horse and a shabby thing that could barely be called a “taxi,” and they had clomped along at a snail's pace.

But ah, today . . .

She alighted from the train carriage, and was directed to a railway employee whose sole job, it seemed, was to get taxis for the first class passengers. She joined the small group of her fellow “elite,” who followed him, and were in turn followed by no less than five porters pushing giant trolleys of baggage.

It seemed that there was even a separate class of taxi for the well-to-do. She told their guide where she wanted to go, and he grouped her with others who were also going to the West station.

In almost no time, Rosa and three other travelers from first class were seated in a spacious vehicle. Their luggage was piled up on the top with great efficiency, and they were off. They arrived at the Western station in half the time it had taken her and Hans to get there. When all the little details of paying were taken care of, a porter appeared for her luggage and it was whisked away, leaving her to have a leisurely cup of coffee and a slice of
Sachertorte
before getting to the Munich train.

It would have been wonderful, and she would have enjoyed playing the
grande dame
to the hilt, if she hadn't been forced to expend so much energy on keeping her shields up that she was
starving
by the time that
Sachertorte
arrived. And rich as the decadent chocolate cake was, she could tell it was barely going to hold her until dinner in the dining car. But it did give her the energy to send a telegram, and it was with glee that she did so, because Gheorghe's bounty made it possible to send such things. Vati would be very surprised to get such a missive, but he would take the news of her arrival to the Bruderschaft, and she would not have to linger in Freudenstadt, waiting for them.

By the time she was seated in the dining car, she was very, very glad of the rich menu on offer—this was Vienna, after all, the culinary capital of Central Europe, and the railroad felt impelled to offer its first class passengers the equal of any meal they could get at any of the city's most luxurious hotels.

Using magic took energy and strength. This was one reason why she preferred to use physical weapons against monsters, rather than magical ones. Or rather, she kept the magical ones in reserve . . . And if she were in farmland or forest, she could draw on the energy of the Earth to augment her own. But not in a city.

Now, she did know of some Earth Mages who
could
work—if handicapped—in a city like Vienna at least, where there were islands of green to keep the Earth from being completely poisoned or shut away, but she was not one of them, and neither was Hans. So they had been forced to keep solid shields up the entire time they were in Vienna, and the hours they had spent there had been an ordeal.
I think we ate our weight in food.
Part of the reason they had looked so rustic was that they had come prepared for Vienna, and were carrying
bags
of food, one each. Sausages, fruit, cheese—bread rolls had been easy to come by, since nearly every station had carts from local bakers outside it. By the time the train had left for Budapest, half their hoarded food had been gone.

She left the dining car while the train sped through the countryside, feeling better again. In her compartment, which was identical to the last sleeping compartment she'd occupied, the bed had been turned down, her nightgown—freshened with lavender-water and ironed again—had been laid out for her. There was a pot of herb tea, a plate of
kuchen,
and a vase with a bouquet of flowers on the little table, and a clever little oil lamp, mounted to the wall on a gimbal that kept it level, burned above the head of the bed. Not feeling equal, after that sumptuous meal, to tackling that Latin book on shape-shifters, she resorted to the frivolous and sensational stories in the magazines that had been left invitingly on the bedside table. Then, she slept.

When she woke, she was ready for the most complicated leg of the journey. Munich to Stuttgart, then the small local train from Stuttgart to Freudenstadt. Even traveling first class, with porters and railway employees at her beck and call, was not going to be easy alone, but she was rested and ready for it.
Much
readier than she and Hans had been, although at least from Freudenstadt to Stuttgart, they'd had the help of two fellow Elemental Masters—a Water Master in Freudenstadt, and a Fire Master in Stuttgart. She probably could have sent telegrams to them, asking for their aid again . . . but money made that unnecessary, and she was reluctant to disturb them when she had much more mundane help at hand.