The Dead Travel Fast (14 page)

He paused and stared upward at the high stones of the castle, the sharp pointed towers piercing the sky above. “Here the people say, one time in a hundred years a Dragulescu goes to the Scholomance to learn the Devil’s ways,” he finished bitterly.

I took a deep breath and wrapped my shawl more closely about my body. For some unaccountable reason, all the talk of the occult and curses had overcome me, and I felt bowed with foreboding. “I think I have heard quite enough about the Devil for one day.”

I started up the Devil’s Staircase and Florian followed. We did not speak again.

12

That evening we were a smaller company at table, for the countess had kept to her room and Frau Amsel dined with her. The count was distracted, eating nothing but pouring out several glasses of amber Tokay. Cosmina bravely attempted to keep the conversation light and engaging, but although the count replied to her pleasantly enough, the conversation eventually faltered, and when the meal was at last concluded, she excused herself and went directly to bed. Florian followed soon after, and I made a motion to withdraw, but the count intervened.

“I have something to show you in my workroom,” he said, and although his tone was conversational, there was no mistaking the note of command.

Wordlessly I followed him up to the workroom. The candles had been lit and Tycho slumbered peacefully on the hearth.

“Come and see what I have found,” the count said eagerly. I went to the worktable where he had taken up a pretty box of pale wood inlaid with darker wood in an intricate pattern. The front of it was set with a series of knobs, half a dozen, and when he raised the lid I could see they were attached to corresponding rods carved with symbols. A table of similar symbols had been incised on the lid of the box.

I put out a tentative finger. “It is very curious. I’ve never seen the like. Is this ivory?” I asked, touching one of the rods.

“It is. It is a device for making astronomical calculations. The rods are fashioned of bone or ivory, and the whole of it is known as Napier’s bones after the astronomer who designed it.”

“A macabre name,” I observed.

He slanted me a knowing look. “It is the fatal flaw of Transylvanians that we have a fondness for the macabre. Surely you discovered that last night.”

“I cannot begin to understand what happened last night,” I said slowly.

He waved to the sofa by the fire. “Sit. I will try to make sense of it for you.”

I had intended to make my excuses, plead a headache or some other trifling indisposition and effect an escape. But as always, the power of his personality persuaded me to something I had not intended.

But I was determined to preserve some vestige of formality, and as I perched upon the edge of the sofa, spreading my skirts wide between us, I saw his lips twitch in amusement.

He settled himself as far from me as the narrow sofa would permit.

“You think us barbaric,” he began.

“I do,” I acknowledged. “But it is a barbarism I would know better. I do not come from a modern city. Edinburgh is a place where ideas are exchanged and philosophies are born, but no one looks to us for the latest fashions or the most modern conveniences. The Highlands are more backwards still, with folk content to live as they have for a thousand years. And yet Transylvania is a place apart. It is nothing so simple as manner of dress or speech or whether a railway has been put through a valley. It is an acceptance of mythology and feudalism, the two of them tied together in such a way as I cannot separate them, warp and weft of the same peculiar cloth.”

“You think we nobles keep the stories of monsters circulating in order to keep the peasants under our thumbs?” he asked, his tone mildly amused.

“Not deliberately, but I think it suits both master and serf to preserve the old ways. And the worst of it is, all of you and the land itself, conspire to make me believe it as well.”

“Is it so terrible to believe in the dark and terrible things you have been told of? Fear and passion walk hand in hand, you know. We are afraid of being destroyed, being possessed, and yet we crave it. What child has not thrilled to ghost stories whispered under the bedclothes by the dark of the moon? And what man or woman has not longed to be lost in the wood and found again?”

I shook my head. “You speak in riddles and I do not understand you.”

He leaned forward, his grey eyes quite black in the shadowy room. “Then let me speak plainly. You are afraid here and you do not know what to believe. I have told you I will protect you. You have only to trust me and you will be free to enjoy your fears.”

“Enjoy them!”

He gave a little shrug. “Everything may be enjoyed in life, my dear Miss Lestrange. Even fear. It wants only a change in one’s perspective.”

“And what ought my perspective to be?” I demanded.

“That this is an adventure,” he replied, leaning closer still. He was more animated than I had ever seen him, alight with something that nourished and strengthened him. Had he given over taking opium for something stronger still? Or had he begun to feel his power as master of this dark place?

He raised his head slightly, as if catching the scent of me in the air. “You are not thinking as a writer or as a woman,” he chided. “You are trembling and shrinking like a schoolgirl from your fears. If you embraced them, faced them down, you would see the opportunities that lie before you.”

“What opportunities?”

“To create. To find pleasure. To live,” he replied, moving closer still.

But as he spoke, I thought of the villagers lacking even fresh water and my indignation rose within me. I said nothing, but arranged my skirts again, spreading them carefully between us as a boundary he must not breach.

“Stop fussing with your dress. You are vexed with me,” he said, directing that piercing gaze at me. “Why?”

“I am a guest in your home. It is not my place to be vexed with anything you choose to do,” I said evenly.

He laughed, a sharp mirthless laugh. “You do not believe that.” He gave a tug to his neckcloth, as if it were wound too tightly. “Come, we have endured too much together for pretence. Tell me why you are cross with me and I will tell you why you are wrong.”

This last bit of arrogance pricked my temper beyond recall. “I am cross because I find we have no point of connection. I thought there was some sympathy between us, some common feeling, and I learn instead that you are everything I have been taught to despise.” I warmed to my theme and carried on, heedless of the words themselves. “You are a libertine and a rake. You take pleasure in everything and responsibility for nothing. You have wealth and opportunity and you squander them both upon idle pleasures. You are the master of this land, and yet you lift not a finger to ease the burdens of its people.”

He gave me a slow, lazy smile. “I had no idea you were such a revolutionary, my dear Miss Lestrange. Shall I build you a barricade from which to denounce me? Or would you prefer a tumbrel to carry me through the streets to my destruction?”

“You have very kindly and quite thoroughly proven my point. I lay the most serious charges of defect of character at your feet and you laugh. You are amused by my scorn rather than abashed at your own failures.”

“Because you do not scorn me,” he said evenly. “You scorn yourself because you see me for what I am and still you cannot help but think of me.”

I gaped at him, but before I could form a proper response, crafted of equal parts logic and disdain, he continued on. “I know all these things about myself, and if you will but call it to mind, I am the one who first revealed them to you. It should come as no surprise to you now that I am an indolent creature of pleasurable habits. I freely confessed to you I am a hedonist, given to frivolity and idleness. Do you think to wound me with the arrows I myself placed in your quiver? Carry on, my dear. You are welcome to try. But I am immune to your barbs, and in fact, I suspect they strike you more deeply than they ever could wound me, because I am content. It is only you who wish me to be better than I am.”

“I wish you to be what you could be,” I rejoined. “Nature has gifted you beyond compare, and you throw these gifts back at her because you cannot be troubled to exert yourself on anyone’s behalf but your own.”

“Really? I remember exerting myself rather a lot last night and at your insistence,” he countered, his eyes bright with mischief.

“I am sorry for that,” I returned. “I had no notion of what I was asking of you.”

“And yet I complied,” he mused, stretching his legs out comfortably, his hands laced behind his head. “I complied solely upon your request. You command me and I obey, and yet I am castigated for failing to exercise my power to better those less fortunate. I could say the same of you.”

His tone was bantering, but his words were arresting.

“You will not speak seriously with me. I ought to have known it was a mistake to attempt this.”

I rose, but he was quicker, placing himself directly in my path with a smoothness and speed that seemed almost inhuman.

“Let me pass,” I said. The top of my head scarcely reached his chin, and even as I said the words, I knew them to be futile.

“She gives an order, and yet I do not feel the force of it,” he said softly, bending his lips to my ear. “She could command me to any crime, lure me to any sin, and yet she does not put out her hand to direct me.”

“Let me pass,” I said again.

“More hesitant yet again,” he said, moving his lips still closer to my ear. “I would do anything you asked of me, Theodora, do you not know that? You have only to stretch out that little hand to save me. You could destroy me with your goodness.”

He took my hand in his, reverently, sacredly, turning it over in his as a pilgrim might a holy relic. And then he pressed his lips to the palm as his other arm stole about my waist.

“I cannot think,” I said stupidly, and I felt a strange giddy lassitude come over me. I swayed, but his arm held me fast.

He guided me to the sofa, and I knew that he had been quite wrong. I did not command him. I was powerless before him, and whatever he asked of me, I would surrender to him.

He pressed me down into the soft velvet cushions, murmuring my name over and again, chanting it like an incantation. I twisted my hands in his hair, begging mutely. He complied, kissing me over and again, introducing me to pleasures I had never imagined, for who could imagine paradise who has never yet wandered there?

He braced himself to pull away his coat and waistcoat, and it was then that I saw the first scarlet drops seeping through the white linen wound about his neck.

A chill ran through me, and I felt my heartbeat hard and fast in my throat as I stared in horror.

“What is it?” he demanded. Seeing the direction of my gaze, he put his hand to his neckcloth. His finger came away red, and he stared at it.

“An accident, when I shaved,” he said, but his complexion had gone white as marble, and he thrust himself away from me. The word
strigoi
hovered unspoken between us, souring the air.

“Go now,” he said harshly. He turned from me, and I rose, hesitating. Even then, I did not wish to leave him, even then, when the first seeded doubts about what he was began to flower.

He glanced once over his shoulder. “I will save you even if you will not save yourself,” he said, his voice low and menacing. “Go to your room and bolt the door. Hang the basil and say your prayers.
Go now!
” he roared, and I gathered up my skirts and fled from him.

The next morning I found a note pushed under my door, a small scrap of paper with two words slashed across in thick black ink.
Forgive me
. I read it over a hundred times and carried it in my clothes, resting against my skin. It was my talisman, my consolation against the doubts that beset me. I had made up my mind that vampires did not exist, that Dr. Frankopan’s tales of
strigoi
were the ramblings of a frightened old man. But the events in the crypt—the strange and otherworldly appearance of the corpse—and the circumstances of my last parting from the count had shaken my certainty. I had seen the blood upon his neck and I had heard the desperation in his voice. Whatever I believed he was, it was nothing to his own anguish. Had his father, that monstrous revenant, attacked him directly? Had he made something dark and unnatural of his own child? When I lay alone in my bed in the depth of the night, with the low howls of the wolves passing on the wind, I could almost believe it.

And yet by the light of day, it seemed impossible. Aurelia’s death could be put to a wandering maniac—perhaps the work of an itinerant or the savagery of the Popa men who roamed the mountains claiming to be wolves. The castle, for all its battlements and fortifications, remained unlocked. A man wanted only the physical strength to manage the Devil’s Staircase and the stealth to gain entry after the household was fast asleep. Perhaps Aurelia had even arranged an assignation with the fellow and things had gone terribly wrong, I decided. It was certainly a more palatable solution than the notion of vampires.

The Transylvanian
strigoi
was simply a device, I reasoned. It was a relict of grief and a longing for the departed to come back again. It was achingly sad, a simple people’s response to the suddenness and finality of death. It spoke of the desire to cling to the dead, to keep them alive in one’s memory, walking the earth, searching for a way to break the bonds of mortality. Taken alone, it was merely a tragic bit of harmless folklore, put about by unlettered people who had seen little of the world and knew nothing of life beyond their mountains. I knew from my grandfather’s writings that every primitive culture boasted a type of vampire, and I knew too that such things were never found amongst civilised folk. There were no revenants in cities. Only in the imaginations of the country peasants were they to be found, incarnations of bereavement and loss and fear, and in so remote a place as Transylvania, even the educated might be seduced into believing.

And it must be acknowledged that the suggestive atmosphere of the castle played its part. It was as Gothic a ruin as any to be found in sensational novels, although I understood well enough why most of the vast castle had been left to decay. The mountains were thick with forests, but it would take acres of trees and dozens of men to fell enough wood to keep the fires blazing through the winter in the castle. Far cheaper and much less bother to simply lock the doors and leave the empty wings to moulder away. The furniture and ornaments, the hangings and books were all costly, doubtless purchased in more solvent times. Such things were expensive to keep in good repair. It would require a sizable staff to keep the castle in good order, the books supple and free of dust and worm, the furniture clean and the moths chased away, the instruments and weapons polished and gleaming. The castle was a pale shadow of what the place must have been at one time, bristling with soldiers, bright banners flying from the turrets, perched proudly upon the mountain.