The Dead Travel Fast (2 page)

But it reflected very poorly upon me as a woman of independence that I even cared for his opinion, I told myself with some annoyance. I took up my things and informed Mrs. Muldoon I meant to walk before dinner—no unusual thing, for strenuous walking had always been my preferred method for banishing either gloom or anger. I set my steps for Holyroodhouse and the looming bulk of Arthur’s Seat. A scramble to the top of the hill would banish the fractiousness that had settled on me with my grandfather’s passing. Physical exertion and a brisk wind were just the trick to freshen my perspective, and as I climbed I felt the weight of the previous dark days rolling from me. The view was spectacular, ranging from the grey fringes of the firth to the crouching mass of the castle at the end of the Royal Mile. I could see the dark buildings of the old town, huddled together in whispered conversation over the narrow, thief-riddled closes, the atmosphere thick with secrets and disease. To the west rose the elegant white squares of New Town, orderly and sedate. And I perched above it all, breathing in the fresh air that smelled of grass and sea and possibility.

“I thought I would find you here.” I turned to see Charles Beecroft just hoving into sight, breathing rather heavily, his face quite pink. “I called in at the house, and Mrs. Muldoon was kind enough to direct me here.”

He climbed the last few steps, relying upon the kind offices of his walking stick to support him. He was not elderly, although he acknowledged himself to be some fifteen years my senior. But his had been a sedentary life with little occupation outside either the opera or the offices and no country pursuits to speak of. He was a creature of the city, more accustomed to the drawing room than the meadow.

“You needn’t have come all this way, Charles,” I said, smiling a little to take the sting from my words. “I know how much you dislike fresh air.”

He laughed, knowing I meant him no insult. “But I like you, and that compels me.”

It was unlike Charles to be gallant. I steeled myself, knowing what must come next. He stood beside me, both of us intent upon the view for a long moment. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a few sweets. He offered one to me, but I refused it. Charles always carried a supply of sweets in his pockets. It was an endearing habit, for it made a boy of this serious, solid man. One would look him over carefully, from the hair so tidily combed with lime cream to the tips of his beautifully polished shoes, and one would expect him to smell of money and books. Instead he smelled of honey and barley sugar. It was one of the things I liked best about him.

“So,” he said at last, “Transylvania.” It was not a question. He has accepted it, I thought. I was conscious of a sudden unbending, a feeling of relief. I had expected Charles to be difficult, to throw obstacles in my path. But he had, very occasionally, demonstrated a rather shrewd understanding of my character. He knew I could be bridled only so tightly before I would snap the reins altogether.

“You have met my sister,” I said.

“Your brother-in-law was kind enough to introduce me. A lovely woman, your sister.”

“Yes, Anna always was the beauty.”

He sucked at the sweet. “You underestimate your charms, Theodora. Now, I know you mean to go and I have no authority to stop you. But I will ask you again to consider my proposal.”

I opened my mouth, but to my astonishment, he grasped my arms and turned me to face him. Charles had never taken such physical liberties with me, and I confess I felt rather exhilarated by the change in him. “Charles,” I murmured.

His eyes, a soft spaniel brown, were intent as I had seldom seen them, and his grip upon my arms was firm, almost painfully so. “I know you have refused me, but I do not mean to give up the idea so easily. I want you to think again, and not for a moment. I want you to think for the months you will be away. Think of me, think of the ways I could make you happy. Think of what our life together could be. And then, when you have had that time, only then will I accept your answer. Will you do that for me?”

I looked into his face, that pleasant, kindly face, and I searched for something—I did not know what, but I knew that when he grasped me in his arms, I had felt a glimmer of it, something less than civilised, something that clamoured in the blood. But it was gone, as quickly as it had come, and I wondered if I had been mad to look for real passion in him. Was he capable of such emotion?

“Kiss me, Charles,” I said suddenly.

He hesitated only a moment, then settled his lips over mine. His kiss was a polite, respectful thing. His mouth was warm and pleasant, but just when I would have put my arms about his neck in invitation, he stepped back, dropping his hands from my arms. His complexion was flushed, his gaze averted. He had tasted of honey, and I was surprised at how much I had been stirred by his kiss. Or would any man’s kiss have done?

“I am sorry,” I said, straightening my bonnet. “I ought not to have asked that of you.”

“Not at all,” he said lightly. He cleared his throat. “You give me reason to hope. You will consider my proposal?” he urged.

I nodded. I could do that much for him at least.

“Excellent. Now tell me about Transylvania. I do not like the scheme at all, you understand, but your sister tells me you mean to write a novel. I cannot dislike that.”

He offered his arm and we began to descend the hill, walking slowly as we talked. I told him about Cosmina and her wonderful tales of vampires and werewolves and how she had terrified the mistresses at school with her pretty torments.

“One would have expected them to be more sensible,” he observed.

“But that is the crux. They
were
sensible, very much so. German teachers have no imagination, I assure you. And yet these stories were so vivid, so full of horrific detail, they would chill the blood of the bravest man. These things exist there.”

He stopped, amusement writ in his face. “You cannot be serious.”

“Entirely. The folk in those mountains believe that vampires and werewolves walk abroad in the night. Cosmina was quite definite upon the point.”

“They must be quite mad. I begin to dislike your little scheme even more,” he said as we started downward again. He guided me around a narrow outcropping of rock as I endeavoured to explain.

“They are no different from the Highlander who leaves milk out for the faeries or plants rowan to guard against witches,” I maintained. “And can you imagine what a kindle that would be to the imagination? Knowing that such things are not only spoken of in legends but are believed to be real, even now? The novel will write itself,” I said, relishing the thought of endless happy hours spent dashing my pen across the pages, spinning out some great adventure. “It will be the making of me.”

“You mean the making of T. Lestrange,” he corrected.

As yet I had published in that name only, shielding my sex from those who would criticize the sensational fruits of my pen solely on the grounds they were a woman’s work. It had been my grandfather’s wish as well, for he had lived a retiring life and though he enjoyed a wide acquaintance, he preferred to keep abreast of his friends through correspondence. He had seldom ventured abroad, and even less frequently had he entertained his friends to our house. Mine had been a quiet life of necessity, but at Charles’s words I began to wonder. What would it be like to publish under my own name? To go to London? To be introduced to the good and great? To be a literary personage in my own right? It was a seductive notion, and one I should no doubt think on a great deal while I was in Transylvania, I reflected.

“How do you mean to travel?” Charles asked, recalling me to our conversation.

“Cosmina says the railway is complete as far as someplace called Hermannstadt. After that I must go by private carriage for some distance.”

“You do not mean to go alone?”

“I do not see an alternative,” I replied, looking to blunt his disapproval.

He said nothing, but I knew him well enough to know the furrowing of his brow meant he was knitting together a plan of some sort.

“Tell me of the family you mean to stay with,” he instructed.

“Cosmina is a poor relation of the family, a sort of niece I think, to the Countess Dragulescu. The countess paid for her education and there was an expectation that Cosmina would marry her son. He was always from home when we were in school—in Paris, I think. Now his father is dead and he is coming home. The marriage will be settled, and Cosmina wishes me to be there as I am her oldest friend.”

“Why have I never heard you speak of her?”

I shrugged. “We have not seen one another since we left school. I have had only Christmas letters from her. She was never one to correspond.”

“Why has she never come to visit you?”

I made an effort to smother my rising exasperation. Charles would have made an admirable Inquisitor.

“Because she is a poor relation,” I reminded him. “She has not had the money to travel, nor has she had the liberty. She has been caring for her aunt. The countess is something of an invalid, and they lead a very quiet existence at the castle. Cosmina has had little enough pleasure in her life. But she wants me and I mean to be there,” I finished firmly.

Charles paused again and took both of my hands in his. “I know. And I know I cannot stop you, although I would give all the world to keep you here. But you must promise me this, should you have need of me, for any reason, you have only to send for me. I will come.”

I gave his hands a friendly squeeze. “That is kind, Charles. And I promise to send word if I need you. But what could possibly happen to me in Transylvania?”

2

And so it was settled that I was to travel into Transylvania as soon as arrangements could be made. I wrote hastily to Cosmina to accept her invitation and acknowledge the instructions she had provided me for reaching the castle. William concluded the business of disposing of my grandfather’s estate, proudly presenting me with a slightly healthier sum than either of us had expected. It was not an independence, but it was enough to see me through my trip and for some months beyond, so long as I was frugal. Anna helped me to pack, choosing only those few garments and books which would be most suitable for my journey. It was a simple enough task, for I had no finery. My mourning must suffice, augmented with a single black evening gown and a travelling costume of serviceable tweed.

Mindful of the quiet life I must lead in Transylvania, I packed sturdy walking boots and warm tartan shawls, as well as a good supply of paper, pens and ink. Charles managed to find an excellent, if slender, guidebook to the region I must travel into and a neatly penned letter of introduction with a list of his acquaintances in Buda-Pesth and Vienna.

“It is the only service I can offer you,” he told me upon presenting it. “You will have friends, even if they are at some distance removed.”

I thanked him warmly, but in my mind I had already flown from him. For several nights before my departure, I dreamt of Transylvania, dreamt of thick birch forests and mountains echoing to the howling of wolves. It was anticipation of the most delicious sort, and when the morning of my departure came, I did not look back. The train pulled out of the Edinburgh station and I set my face to the east and all of its enchantments.

We passed first through France, and I could not but stare from the window, my book unread upon my lap, mesmerised as the French countryside gave way to the high mountains of Switzerland. We journeyed still further, into Austria, and at last I began to feel Scotland dropping right away, as distant as a memory.

At length we reached Buda-Pesth where the Danube separated the old Turkish houses of Buda from the modern and sparkling Pesth. I longed to explore, but I was awakened early to catch the first train the following morning. At Klausenberg I alighted, now properly in Transylvania, and I heard my first snatches of Roumanian, as well as various German dialects, and Hungarian. Eagerly, I turned to my guidebook.

All Transylvanians are polyglots,
it instructed.
Roumanians speak their own tongue—to the unfamiliar, it bears a strong resemblance to the Genoese dialect of Italian—and it is a mark of distinction to speak English, for it means one has had the advantage of an English nursemaid in childhood. Most of the natives of this region speak Hungarian and German as well, although a peculiar dialect of each not to be confused with the mother tongues. However, travellers fluent in either language will find it a simple enough matter to converse with natives and, likewise, to make themselves understood
.

I leafed through the brief entry on Klausenberg to find a more unsettling passage.

Travellers are advised not to drink the water in Klausenberg as it is unwholesome. The water flows from springs through the graveyards and into the town, its purity contaminated by the dead
.

I shivered and closed the book firmly and made my way to the small and serviceable hotel Cosmina had directed me to find. It was the nicest in the whole of Klausenberg, my guidebook assured, and yet it would have rated no better than passable in any great city. The linen was clean, the bed soft and the food perfectly acceptable, although I was careful to avoid the water. I slept deeply and well and was up once more at cockcrow to take my place on the train for the last stage of my journey, the short trip to Hermannstadt and thence by carriage into the Carpathians proper.

Almost as soon as we departed Klausenberg, we passed through the great chasm of Thorda Cleft, a gorge whose honeycombed caverns once sheltered brigands and thieves. But we passed without incident, and from thence the landscape was dull and unremarkable, and it was a long and rather commonplace journey of half a day until we reached Hermannstadt.

Here was a town I should have liked to have explored. The sharply pointed towers and red tiled roofs were so distinctive, so charming, so definably Eastern. Just beyond the town I could see the first soaring peaks of the Carpathians, rising in the distance. Here now was the real Transylvania, I thought, shivering in delight. I wanted to stand quietly upon that platform, but there was no opportunity for reflection. No sooner had I alighted from the train from Klausenberg than I was taken up by the hired coach I had been instructed to find. A driver and a postilion attended to the bags, and inside the conveyance I discovered a handful of other passengers who demonstrated a respectful curiosity, but initiated no conversation. The coach bore us rapidly out of the town of Hermannstadt and up into the Transylvanian Alps.

The countryside was idyllic. I was enchanted with the Roumanian hamlets for the houses were quite different than any I had seen before. There was no prim Scottish thrift to be found here. The eaves were embellished with colourful carvings, and gates were fashioned of iron wrought into fantastic shapes. Even the hay wagons were picturesque, groaning under the weight of the harvest and pulled by horses caparisoned with bell-tied ribbons. Everything seemed as if it had been lifted from a faery tale, and I tried desperately to memorise it all as the late-afternoon sun blazed its golden-red light across the profile of the mountains.

After a long while, the road swung upward into the high mountains, and we moved from the pretty foothills to the bold peaks of the Carpathians. Here the air grew suddenly sharp, and the snug villages disappeared, leaving only great swathes of green-black forests of fir and spruce, occasionally punctured by high shafts of grey stone where a ruined fortress or watchtower still reached to the darkening sky, and it was in this wilderness that we stopped once more, high upon a mountain pass at a small inn. A coach stood waiting, this one a private affair clearly belonging to some person of means, for it was a costly vehicle and emblazoned with an intricate coat of arms. The driver alighted at once and after a moment’s brisk conversation with the driver of the hired coach, took up my boxes and secured them.

He gestured towards me, managing to be both respectful and impatient. I shivered in my thin cloak and hurried after him.

I paused at the front of the equipage, startled to find that the horses, great handsome beasts and beautifully kept, were nonetheless scarred, bearing the traces of some trauma about their noses.

“
Die Wölfe
,” he said, and I realised in horror what he meant.

I replied in German, my schoolgirl grammar faltering only a little. “The wolves attack them?”

He shrugged. “There is not a horse in the Carpathians without scars. It is the way of it here.”

He said nothing more but opened the door to the coach and I climbed in.

Cosmina had mentioned wolves, and I knew they were a considerable danger in the mountains, but hearing such things amid the cosy comforts of a school dormitory was very different to hearing them on a windswept mountainside where they dwelt.

The coachman sprang to his seat, whipping up the horses almost before I had settled myself, so eager was he to be off. The rest of the journey was difficult, for the road we took was not the main one that continued through the pass, but a lesser, rockier track, and I realised we were approaching the headwaters of the river where it sprang from the earth before debouching into the somnolent valley far below.

The evening drew on into night, with only the coach lamps and a waning sliver of pale moon to light the way. It seemed we travelled an eternity, rocking and jolting our way ever upward until at last, hours after we left the little inn on the mountain pass, the driver pulled the horses to a sharp halt. I looked out of the window to the left and saw nothing save long shafts of starlight illuminating the great drop below us to the river. To the right was sheer rock, stretching hundreds of feet to the vertical. I staggered from the coach, my legs stiff with cold. I breathed deeply of the crisp mountain air and smelled juniper.

Just beyond lay a coach house and stables and what looked to be a little lodge, perhaps where the coachman lived. He had already dismounted and was unhitching the horses whilst he shouted directions to a group of men standing nearby. They looked to be of peasant stock and had clearly been chosen for their strength, for they were diminutive, as Roumanians so often are, but built like oxen with thick necks and muscle-corded arms. An old-fashioned sedan chair stood next to them.

Before I could ask, the driver pointed to a spot on the mountainside high overhead. Torches had been lit and I could see that a castle had been carved out of the living rock itself, perched impossibly high, like an eagle’s aerie. “That is the home of the Dragulescus,” he told me proudly.

“It is most impressive,” I said. “But I do not understand. How am I to—”

He pointed again, this time towards a staircase cut into the rock. The steps were wide and shallow, switching back and forth as they rose over the face of the mountain.

“Impossible,” I breathed. “There must be a thousand steps.”

“One thousand, four hundred,” he corrected. “The Devil’s Staircase, it is called, for it is said that the Dragulescu who built this fortress could not imagine how to reach the summit of the mountain. So he promised his firstborn to the Devil if a way could be found. In the morning, his daughter was dead, and this staircase was just as you see it now.”

I stared at him in astonishment. There seemed no possible reply to such a wretched story, and yet I felt a thrill of horror. I had done right to come. This was a land of legend, and I knew I should find inspiration for a dozen novels here if I wished it.

He gestured towards the sedan chair. “It is too steep for horses. This is why we must use the old ways.”

I baulked at first, horrified at the idea that I must be carried up the mountain like so much chattel. But I looked again at the great height and my legs shook with fatigue. I followed him to the sedan chair and stepped inside. The door was snapped shut behind me, entombing me in the stuffy darkness. A leather curtain had been hung at the window—for privacy, or perhaps to protect the passenger from the elements. I tried to move it aside, but it had grown stiff and unwieldy from disuse.

Suddenly, I heard a few words spoken in the soft lilting Roumanian tongue, and the sedan chair rocked hard, first to one side, then the other as it was lifted from the ground. I tried to make myself as small as possible before I realised the stupidity of the idea. The journey was not a comfortable one, for I soon discovered it was necessary to steel myself against the jostling at each step as we climbed slowly towards the castle.

At length I felt the chair being set down and the door was opened for me. I crept out, blinking hard in the flaring light of the torches. I could see the castle better now, and my first thought was here was some last outpost of Byzantium, for the castle was something out of myth. It was a hodgepodge of strange little towers capped by witches’ hats, thick walls laced with parapets, and high, pointed windows. It had been fashioned of river stones and courses of bricks, and the whole of it had been whitewashed save the red tiles of the roofs. Here and there the white expanses of the walls were broken with massive great timbers, and the effect of the whole was some faery-tale edifice, perched by the hand of a giant in a place no human could have conceived of it.

In the paved courtyard, all was quiet, quiet as a tomb, and I wondered madly if everyone was asleep, slumbering under a sorcerer’s spell, for the place seemed thick with enchantment. But just then the great doors swung back upon their hinges and the spell was broken. Silhouetted in the doorway was a slight figure I remembered well, and it was but a moment before she spied me and hurried forward.

“Theodora!” she cried, and her voice was high with emotion. “How good it is to see you at last.”

She embraced me, but carefully, as if I were made of spun glass.

“We are old friends,” I scolded. “And I can bear a sturdier affection than that.” I enfolded her and she seemed to rest a moment upon my shoulder.

“Dear Theodora, I am so glad you are come.” She drew back and took my hand, tucking it into her arm. The light from the torches fell upon her face then, and I saw that the pretty girl had matured into a comely woman. She had had a fondness for sweet pastries at school and had always run to plumpness, but now she was slimmer, the lost flesh revealing elegant bones that would serve her well into old age.

From the shadows behind her emerged a great dog, a wary and fearsome creature with a thick grey coat that stood nearly as tall as a calf in the field.

“Is he?” I asked, holding myself quite still as the beast sniffed at my skirts appraisingly.

“No.” She paused a moment, then continued on smoothly, “The dog is his.”

I knew at once that she referred to her betrothed, and I wondered why she had hesitated at the mention of his name. I darted a quick glance and discovered she was in the grip of some strong emotion, as if wrestling with herself.

She burst out suddenly, her voice pitched low and soft and for my ears alone. “Do not speak of the betrothal. I will explain later. Just say you are come for a visit.”

She squeezed my hand and I gave a short, sharp nod to show that I understood. It seemed to reassure her, for she fixed a gentle smile upon her lips and drew me into the great hall of the castle to make the proper introductions.

The hall itself was large, the stone walls draped with moth-eaten tapestries, the flagged floor laid here and there with faded Turkey carpets. There was little furniture, but the expanses of wall that had been spared the tapestries were bristling with weapons—swords and halberds, and some other awful things I could not identify, but which I could easily imagine dripping with gore after some fierce medieval battle.