Chapter Seven

The rhythm of the train changed. A short time later, buildings grew up around us and we pulled into Brașov, climbing down into the late afternoon sun amidst the bustle of a town of some 40,000 souls. The passengers washing in and out of the train doors looked distinctly rural, with an equal balance of native dress and Western-style clothing. The men were bearded, the women’s costumes demure, and as for skin colour, I was probably the darkest person in sight, apart from my sun-bleached hair.

Holmes had wired ahead with our arrival time, so we were met by the Queen’s own Rolls-Royce. Its driver, a black-headed, mischief-eyed fellow of around thirty, was dressed in the costume of the natives. Despite looking like someone who would be more at home with a horse-cart, he greeted us in English and efficiently supervised the porter’s loading of our bags. When all was stowed away, he put the car into motion and took us through a neat and prosperous-looking town surrounded by wooded hills.

His skill was reassuring, and I relaxed enough to turn my gaze to the town’s high-faced buildings and broad, paved squares. Carts moved among cars, some of them a sort of modern hybrid—a traditional horse-drawn wooden cart, but built atop the axle and narrow tyres of some ancient motorcar.

The town gave way to a prosperous and fertile countryside. The road became dirt, though well maintained, and the houses farther apart. Electrical poles ceased to follow our way, although a telegraph line persisted. Another mile, and the villas turned to farmhouses, their gardens to orchards and fields. I began to catch sight of the haystacks that I had been seeing all day from the train. Nothing like the familiar piled domes of England, these were six or eight metres high with a trimmed sapling protruding from the top. The stacks marched over the countryside like a clan of enormous, shaggy creatures.

“Those haystacks look like gigantic bears,” I said to Holmes, after a while. “Or those mythic Himalayan creatures said to live above the snow line.”

“One does wonder if the local hooligans don’t occasionally adorn them with a pair of dinner plate–sized eyes.”

I laughed, then with a glance at the driver—behind a glass shield, but still—lowered my voice. “They do rather…loom. I’d have thought the people would build their horror tales around those things, rather than dead folk climbing from their graves.”

“History gives us a number of reasons why these people are quick to see shades and vampires in every corner. The Countess Báthory would be one. And another—” He stretched forward to retrieve the speaking tube. “Would you kindly pull over up ahead? Just past that hay field will do nicely.”

The driver nodded as he steered towards a wide patch, the entrance to a field.

A short way off, a family was in the process of building one of the haystacks. A young woman was balancing beside the protruding sapling, at least a dozen feet from the ground, while two men and a woman took turns throwing rakefuls of hay up for her to arrange. Children were collecting freshly cut hay into clumps with rakes of their own—the wooden kind, hand made, with teeth whittled before a fire during long winter nights. Further out, two figures rocked back and forth, back and forth with the implacable rhythm of the scythe that looks so easy but leaves a neophyte’s back in spasms. Nearby, in the deep shade of a walnut tree, two old women were gathering up their spindles and knitting, having spent the heat of the afternoon on a pair of three-legged stools watching over a baby and a tumble of small children. One of the grannies noticed me, and gave me a wide and toothless grin.

Holmes caught my elbow to redirect my attention away from the rustic scene.

I had been aware of the low mountains encircling this agricultural plain, with the occasional mouldering castle perched on their tops, but since leaving Brașov, the fruit trees and fields of tall maize lining the road had kept me from noticing how near we were to the approaching hills. From this clearer spot, I could now see the ridge that rose abruptly a few miles away, heavily wooded, its trees parting to reveal, in stark loneliness, a tall, pale castle that…

I thought my recent dreamlike state had given way to full-blown hallucination.

The castle seemed to ripple as I looked at it, mimicking the effect of Dracula’s mist—or more likely, of the day’s heat.

Mist or mirage, the structure was from the pages of a child’s book. High and narrow, on the point of a hill, it was composed of mismatched towers and blunt stone walls. A bit of half-timbered construction framed its few high windows. One expected Rapunzel’s hair to gleam from beneath a cupola, and long, bright, Medieval banners to ripple from the tower-tops. One wondered if a troll lived in its cellars, or a Count who preyed upon the village girls…

I took off my glasses to rub my eyes, but when I looked again, it was unchanged. Magical, yet enigmatic.

How was it possible for a building stuck atop a bare hill to feel secretive? It should be the very opposite, open and forthright. And yet, it gave me that distinct primitive sensation of being watched, as if something was studying me from a hidden corner of its façade. Not threatening, or even unfriendly, merely…there.

Holmes appeared not to notice anything. And being loth to admit to another round of febrile delusions, I kept my impressions to myself.

I followed him back to the car and we set off again, pausing to avoid a trotting horse-cart laden with people. From a distance, they were indistinguishable from any other cart full of Roumanians, but up close, the differences were profound—in their attitude more even than their clothing. The women stared at us openly, the standing man with the reins pretended we weren’t there, and the children, who needed haircuts or shoes or both, jeered.

These would be the local Romany, or gipsies, rootless and proud and never trusted by their more settled cousins. Somewhere nearby would be a collection of lightly built houses and fences made of scrap, with glossy horses and well-cared-for wagons. Nothing of value that could not be packed up and carried away within hours.

But now the more settled village began to appear, the very opposite of Romany dwellings: sturdy houses surrounded by wooden fences with high, heavily carved gates. Some of the gates had a horse’s skull fastened to them, but other than that macabre touch, they were handsome entries to the dwellings within. Most of the gates stood open, showing glimpses of the gardens and yard inside. Pigs rooted, chickens scratched, children wandered—but when a boy came pelting out of one gate, a laugh on his face and a dog at his heels, our driver matched his speed and leaned out of the window, saying something in a language that I did not know, but almost felt as if I understood. The boy slowed and made what was clearly a smart reply, causing the driver to raise a finger that was not threatening, but certainly admonishing. I felt that the exchange might have escalated into a confrontation, but the boy glanced into the back, saw us there, and made a wave of the hand that could have been taken as agreement. The driver took it as such, and drew his elbow in to continue on our way.

“That was something about the Queen?” I said to Holmes. “Regina, and sara asta?”

“I believe it was ‘The Queen is coming tonight.’ Although I fail to see the significance.”

I reached forward to slide the window open. “May I ask, what was that you were telling the boy?”

“I warn him, that Queen Marie returns.” A glance in the mirror told him that I did not understand. “Mr Florescu, he has orders to village people, when Queen is here, that dogs are inside or tied.”

“Who is Mr Florescu?” I asked.

Both men spoke simultaneously. “The butler,” Holmes said. I did not really hear the driver’s reply; however, it had looked like he said, “God.”

“Why would—ah,” I said. “Because she rides?”

“Yes. Mr Florescu say to Bran: if a dog frightens her horse and makes her fall, that dog will be shot and family will go to prison.”

There was once an eccentric Duke of Portland so misanthropic, he made his maids turn their faces to the wall at his approach. Requiring dogs to be tied at least had some justification.

Although perhaps not deserving of a death sentence and imprisonment.

We went past what looked like the village shop, separated from the road by an expanse of gravel. On this sat a most unexpected conveyance: a large, new motorcar, halfway between a shooting-brake and an ambulance. As we went by it, I noticed a sign on the small building attached to one side of the shop: the surgery for the village doctor, with a plaque giving his hours.

It was comforting to know that we could have our vampire bites treated by Western medicine—at least, if we fell ill on a Monday, Thursday, or Saturday, between the hours of 10:00 and 7:00.

Which reminded me: “Holmes, we stopped back there to illustrate why the people here tend to see shades and vampires. Was it something to do with the castle?”

“You remember that Stoker’s character bears the surname of a Roumanian ruler whose name is synonymous with brutality.”

“Vlad Dracula. Known as Vlad the Impaler.”

“In this part of the world, Vlad is something of a hero, for his long success against the Ottomans. During his career, he had any number of dealings with the rulers of Brașov, it being the town nearest the border between Transylvania and Wallachia. Vlad’s grandfather owned all of the land around here. And it has to be said…” (Here he paused, to bend down and peer through the wind-screen at something, then resumed.) “…that despite the novelist’s trick of using shiny facts to create a façade of verisimilitude on an otherwise unconvincing farrago of nonsense, in Stoker’s case there is some indication of a more specific connection; namely, that for a period of several weeks, Vlad Țepeș…” (The motorcar slowed to avoid three wandering hens and a goat, then turned off the road.) “…a man who built his reputation for brutality by impaling enemies on spikes while they were still alive, when he was finally captured by the Hungarians in 1462, may have been kept locked in a small dungeon at the base…” (The heavy car slowed, then shifted gears for a steep climb. The moment our bonnet tipped towards the sky, Holmes made a wide-handed voilà gesture to the front window-screen.) “…of Castle Bran.”

The conclusion of this long, drawn-out, and meticulously timed sentence was a close-up view of a slab of rock, on which stood the high, featureless walls and towers without flags that I had seen earlier. Bending far down, its top extended out of sight.

I looked at my husband. “Do you plan on indulging your flair for the dramatic throughout our time here?”

“I expect so,” he said complacently.

A lesser motorcar would have coughed to a halt and drifted backwards down the hill, but the Rolls flexed its muscles to deliver us through the narrow gap between the castle’s trim, flat outer wall and a hacked-off outcrop of native stone. Beyond the gap lay an open area just large enough for a motorcar, with care, to turn around.

Waiting for us was a tall, black-eyed man in his forties with a melancholy face, a silver streak through his slick black hair, and a moustache so trim and pointed, it resembled a punctuation mark. This had to be the major-domo, the grand version of a butler. He, like the driver, wore native dress—the same loose trousers and blouse I had seen in every field and village, although this man’s pantaloons had never worked in a field, and his cream-coloured shirt was heavy with embroidery. This appeared to be the uniform of the place, since others in similar, less heavily decorated clothing appeared from out of nowhere, tugging at their forelocks before queuing up behind the car to seize our bags. The…butler?—gestured, causing one of his underlings to leap forward and seize Holmes’ door. At the same moment, the driver reached for mine, that we might emerge simultaneously.

Once we were standing on the ground and every spine was as rigid as could be, the butler gave a formal dip of the head and welcomed us to the castle—which, according to his attitude, was his castle, even though his words explained that the Queen sent her greetings, that she regretted that she had been delayed in Sinaia, but that she would come as soon as possible on the morrow.

This had to be the god-like Mr Florescu. He continued speaking, though mostly to Holmes, which was both typical of men and understandable, since they already knew each other. That left me free to crane my head at the sheer walls rising up from the out-crop of living rock.

Castle Bran was, I had to agree, a stage built for the dramatic. All the theatrical story-book elements were there: remote, wooded, and secretive. And yet, it was no Neuschwanstein, no picturesque home for pampered aristocrats and their art collections. This was a defensible slab built for hard use by armed men. Its towers had been designed, not for show, but for unbroken views of the two lines of approach. The small, narrow windows in its lower levels were not some coy façade, but a means of protecting the castle’s defenders as they took deadly aim—both for their arrows and, if I judged that higher protrusion correctly, for the dropping of heavy objects or boiling-hot liquid on enemies below.

Whoever built this castle did not intend to be driven off.

Behind it lay a valley, linked by a narrow depression in the hills with the plateau we had driven through. A cluster of houses and small fields followed the curve of a busy stream, with a road leading up to the forested ridges—an unassuming track that Holmes’ maps, pored over on the train, had told me led to Bran Pass and through the southern leg of the Carpathians to the Danube, then to the Balkans and the Adriatic beyond. I would have studied the view in more detail, except the butler had taken up an expectant position at the foot of a long, steep stairway. At the top of it waited a set of sturdy wooden doors, studded with iron bolts and fitted into a stone arch.

The stairs were narrow, to make it difficult for invaders to fight their way up. The windows puncturing the walls grew larger with each level, with those at the top storeys conveniently placed for the dropping of stones or boiling liquids. Even the castle’s shield wall facing the drive—a blunt, massively thick prow intended to repel siege machines—had windows at the heights, with shallow balconies that were built as machicolations. A stone eased from there to bowl its way along the sloping wall would hit those at the bottom like skittles pins.

“Russell?”

Holmes’ voice called me from reverie. I gave the gathered menfolk an apologetic smile and followed him around the motor and up the stairs.

I wondered, as we started up the steep climb, if this could possibly be the only entrance. Wouldn’t that mean princes and potentates rubbing shoulders with cooks, housemaids, and delivery boys?

Or perhaps this was the trade entrance, and Holmes and I were not quite as honoured as he had thought.

I gave a mental shrug. So long as we were not housed in the quarters used to imprison Vlad, and I was not expected to carry my own bags, I could live with being considered a hireling. I followed Holmes and the Transylvanian butler through the iron-studded doorway and into the Medieval castle of Bran.