“I don’t like it!”
“I don’t care! I say yes!”
“You have been gone too long; this is not a matter that you can decide alone!”
Dacia pretended that she wasn’t listening to the shouting across the hall and took a card, looked at it, and discarded it with a sigh. Radu looked at his own cards, frowned at the one she had discarded, and raised his bid by a penny.
“Thank you for telling me what I can and cannot do,” Aunt Kate screamed at her brother. “May I remind you of who I am?”
“You know,” Dacia said, drawing another card, “I think that I should be the one who gets to scream.”
They had been listening to Aunt Kate arguing with Radu’s father, Horia, for nearly an hour now. It was because of Dacia, naturally, but this time it wasn’t something disgraceful that she had done. Instead the argument was about whether she should be allowed to do something: specifically, to go to the opera with Prince Mihai. Uncle Horia and Aunt Kate wouldn’t dream of talking it over with Dacia, and Radu seemed to despise the prince, so Dacia was sitting in the parlor playing cards with her cousin and trying to avoid the topic altogether.
As well as anyone can avoid a topic that is being discussed in the next room by two irate and shouting adults.
“I really don’t see what all the fuss is about,” she murmured.
“You don’t know Mihai,” was all Radu would say. “Call.”
She threw down her cards, which were completely useless anyway, and watched with a sour expression as Radu gathered up the pennies they had been bidding with.
“And you do?” She studied Radu, but his expression was closed as he pocketed the coins and then began to shuffle the cards. “What can you tell me about him?”
“You should stay away from him, that’s what I can tell you about him,” Radu said, sounding more like his father than usual.
“It’s just the opera,” Dacia said. “I don’t understand why your father objects.”
“Nothing is ever ‘just’ anything with Mihai,” Radu muttered.
“Have I been gone long enough for you all to run mad?” Aunt Kate’s voice pierced the walls. “This is an opportunity we cannot pass up!”
“It is an opportunity you think we cannot pass up,” Uncle Horia countered. “But those of us who remained here—”
“You know why I left, and what I’ve given up,” Aunt Kate shouted. “Now I’m back, with her. It’s time! It’s long past time! The rest of the family—”
“The rest of the family spends too much time in the country, pretending it is still the twelfth century,” Uncle Horia shouted back. “I who know the Draculas all too well—”
“I not know the Draculas? I? Don’t make me laugh!” Aunt Kate’s voice was so enraged that Dacia cringed.
“Who are the Draculas?” Dacia forced herself to nonchalantly pick up the cards Radu had just dealt her. “That can’t possibly be their real name. Who would call themselves Dragon? Or want to be associated with Vlad Tepes?” She wrinkled her nose.
“Mihai’s family name is Dracula,” Radu said, arranging his own hand. He glanced up and caught her expression. “No, really. He’s descended from Vlad the Impaler too. Which just proves that you don’t know him well enough to see him.”
Dacia tossed aside the information that the elegant Mihai was related to the twelfth-century butcher known as Vlad the Impaler. It was impossible. She and Lou both had nightmares for a week after their governess had regaled them with stories about that monstrous warlord.
“How can I know Prince Mihai if no one will let me see him?” she asked reasonably.
Radu just snorted, but Dacia thought that she had scored a point. It had been three days since she had met the prince on the Calea Victoriei. They had walked and talked for an hour, with Radu trailing sullenly behind them. The day after their meeting, Prince Mihai had sent flowers and a note. The day after that, an invitation to dinner and the theater, which she’d been made to turn down, and today he had sent her a beautiful black velvet cape lined with lilac silk to wear to the opera, with a plea that she join him for just one night. Aunt Kate had agreed that Dacia had been punished for the Incident in England long enough, and had given Dacia permission to attend the opera with the prince.
But Uncle Horia and Radu had arrived after breakfast that morning and Dacia had made the mistake of telling them about her upcoming outing with Mihai. The shouting match in the library had commenced not ten minutes later.
“It’s your bid.” Radu jingled the coins in his pocket.
“I don’t think my head is in the game,” Dacia said drily. “Actually, I want a book from the library.” She rolled her eyes at his skeptical look. “No, I really do! I want a dictionary. Lou sent me a letter, and I wanted to look up one of the words.”
“Her vocabulary is more expansive than yours,” Radu said with a smirk. “It seems that one of you was paying attention to that fancy American governess.”
“Ha-ha!” Dacia flicked him with a finger. “No, a strange man in the street called her an insulting name, and I can’t believe it means what she said it means.”
“Another man has insulted LouLou?” Radu was instantly outraged. “Tell her to describe him for me, and I will hunt him down!” He made a fist.
“As long as you let me help,” Dacia said, gingerly curling her own hand into a fist. She’d always wanted to punch someone. But only if she could knock them out with one blow. And only if they truly deserved it, which this man did. “And, of all things, it’s the same man from the ship. Apparently he’s following her through Paris.”
“The bas—” Radu bit back the insult. “Something must be done! What did he call her?”
“He called her a houri, and he kept—What on earth is so funny?”
“A houri?” Radu was still laughing. “Is she certain?”
“Yes, of course she is! This man has been following her, Radu! First the ship, then in Paris. It’s very serious!”
“Oh, he certainly must be discouraged, but it’s not . . .” Radu laughed again.
“Explain yourself, or I shall get my parasol and smack you,” Dacia ordered.
“A houri is a sort of temptress,” Radu said. “A creature so beautiful that she drives men mad. An unearthly being, magical and alluring.” He started laughing again. “If Lou doesn’t like it, we must certainly take steps, but some women would be flattered.”
“But that’s not flattering, it’s atrocious,” Dacia insisted. “It’s vulgar, it’s forward, it’s—”
“If he does it again, I will take care of him for her, since her father certainly won’t,” Radu said, casually dismissing Uncle Cyrus, but Dacia didn’t know what to say about that. Radu gathered up the cards and shuffled them again, though they hadn’t played a hand.
“We might as well play one more time,” he said as the fight in the library continued.
Dacia subsided, not entirely mollified. As Radu dealt the cards, she strained to hear more of the argument in the library. It wasn’t exactly difficult.
“This is the reason I brought her here!” Aunt Kate shouted.
“Don’t play obedient daughter now,” Uncle Horia retorted. “You came back for your own sake, not hers!”
“This is the reason she was even born!”
Radu froze with one hand on the cards he was about to deal. His eyes were enormous. Dacia stiffened, but only for an instant, then she was on her feet. She crept through the parlor door and across the hall to the library. She pressed her ear against the door, holding her breath to make sure she heard her uncle’s answer.
“Not for this,” Horia said, his voice so quiet that if Dacia hadn’t had her ear to the door, she never would have heard him. “Not for him.”
“Have you forgotten? My task? Your task? Our part in all this?” Aunt Kate was no longer shouting, either. In fact, she was quiet and icy calm.
“I never forget,” her brother said calmly. “How could I? But I do not approve.”
“You do not approve?” Aunt Kate’s voice was cold. “It is not for you to approve. It is for you to uphold the honor of the family—or are those words only flung in my face?”
“Do not remind me,” Horia said. Dacia heard him sigh heavily, even through the door. “You have been gone too long, Katarina, to truly understand. Gone too long, and returned with nothing to show for it.” A heavy pause. “And your own sins are tainting your thoughts, even now.”
Heavy steps approached the door, and Dacia sprang away. Or she tried, anyway. Radu had come up behind her so silently she hadn’t even noticed him there, and now she ran right into him. He jumped back and then to the side, trying to move out of her way, and stepped on her foot instead. She let out a cry and lurched sideways, Radu tried to catch her, and they both fell to the floor in a heap.
The library door opened.
“Radu, what is this?”
“Dacia, behave yourself!”
Aunt Kate and Uncle Horia were standing above them wearing matching annoyed looks. Radu and Dacia looked at each other, and then at the adults standing over them, and just shrugged. Normally Dacia would have laughed, but not after hearing what she had just heard.
“Ana Katarina, what is going on here?”
The new voice was sharp, the Romanian very formal. And very angry.
Dacia, who was facing away from the speaker and looking up at her aunt, saw Kate go pale. Swallowing, Dacia pushed her skirts down so that they covered her legs and feet, and then twisted around slowly to face whoever it was who had frightened Aunt Kate.
She found herself looking at a very old and rather stout woman wearing a traditional embroidered dress and a headscarf. She looked like the matron of some goat-herding clan, and the top of her head would not have reached Dacia’s chin, yet somehow she seemed to dominate the hall. Dacia goggled at her while the old woman stared back with great disdain, then struck the floor with the tip of her carved walking stick.
“Get up,” the old woman ordered.
Dacia scrambled to her feet, cheeks burning, and made a little curtsy to the old woman, who in point of fact barely came up to Dacia’s shoulder. She was shaped like a barrel: hard and strong without a hint of softness. Her white blouse was thickly embroidered with gold thread and tiny red beads, and her apron was so stiff with more beads and embroidery that Dacia didn’t think the woman could sit down.
“Doamna,” Dacia murmured.
“Do you know who I am?” The old woman’s black eyes raked Dacia from head to toe.
“No, doamna,” she said meekly.
“I am Lady Ioana Florescu. Your grandmother,” the old woman said, neither offended by Dacia’s ignorance nor noticeably appeased by her humility now.
Her grandmother? Dacia gaped unbecomingly. This was a grandmother of a different stripe than she was used to. Clearly this grandmother didn’t invite confidences, or hold little tea parties in the back garden, the way her grandmother Vreeholt did. And Dacia was relatively sure that there were no small dogs playing about on the rug in front of the fire at this grandmother’s house, either.
“It’s very nice to meet you, Grandmother,” Dacia said.
“You will call me Lady Ioana,” the old woman snapped. “I am the head of this family, not some daft old woman who keeps biscuits in a jar for sticky little children!”
“My apologies, Lady Ioana,” Dacia said.
She found herself missing Grandmother Vreeholt with a sharp stab of longing. This frightening old woman was just one more trial in a long list of horrors since she had started on this journey.
“Perhaps you’ll do,” Lady Ioana said, but not with any real approval. “Come with me into the library; I have words to say to you.” She looked down at Radu, who was still crouched on the floor. “Get up, you stupid boy! You’re the worst of the lot.”
“I’m sorry, Lady Ioana,” Radu mumbled, and scrambled to his feet, bowing.
“Radu, why don’t you come with us?” Dacia did not want to be alone with this nasty old woman. Even having Radu standing in the corner looking awkward would be better than nothing.
“I don’t wish to speak to Radu,” Lady Ioana barked, striding across the hall toward the library door. “I’ve spoken to him enough, and yet he never improves. Now is the time to see if there is any hope for you, girl.”
Dacia stiffened her spine and followed the old lady into the library, shutting the door behind them without being asked. Lady Ioana sat in the largest chair, an enormous wing-backed affair of heavy leather and brass studs. Dacia refused to stand on the rug in front of her as though she were a schoolgirl being called to task. She sat down opposite her grandmother in a velvet-upholstered chair and idly picked up the book on the small table at her elbow, flipping through it and smoothing the pages to hide her nerves.
“Yes, Lady Ioana?” She looked up at the old woman through her lashes, as though only mildly interested in what she had to say.
“You are bold,” Lady Ioana observed. “But is it only for show, or is it backed with a real spine?”
Dacia had no answer for that, or at least none that didn’t sound like childish protesting, so she simply didn’t answer.
“You cause a great deal of trouble, that is for certain. First the boy in New York, then another in England, and now you have caught the eye of Prince Mihai.”
“Aunt Kate doesn’t seem to mind that,” Dacia said tartly.
“Ana Katarina has her own opinions,” Lady Ioana said flatly. “But she should keep them to herself in this matter. If she’d been a good judge of proper behavior, she wouldn’t have been sent away to begin with.”
Dacia felt the floor drop out from under her feet. Aunt Kate had been sent away? She always made it sound as if she and her sisters had gone to New York out of sheer boredom! Did this have something to do with the man on the train? Dacia leaned forward eagerly as her grandmother went on.
“The princely family is not like your New York society,” Lady Ioana said. “It is not a great conquest for you to have caught his eye this soon. These things have taken oceans of time to prepare for, and cannot be rushed.”
As her grandmother’s words sank in, Dacia felt her ire with the old woman rising again. She’d been hoping for juicy secrets about her mother and aunts and their past, not to be scolded and told . . .
“Are you saying that I’m not good enough for Mihai?” She drew her head back, putting on her most haughty expression. “I assure you, he does not seem to think so.”
“If he chooses to amuse himself with you so quickly, we are not to tell him no.”
“Just because he’s a prince . . . My father is descended from the oldest families in New York . . .” Dacia faltered. “I don’t understand,” she confessed at last, swallowing her pride.
“Of course not,” her grandmother snorted. “But you will soon enough. Once the other one arrives, we’ll take you both to the estate, and then you’ll learn what it means to be a Florescu!”
Crashing her stick on the floor again, Lady Ioana got to her feet. Dacia also stood, but much more slowly. She was even more confused and upset than before, but at least she understood some of what had just been said: Lou should have left Paris that very morning.
“You’re tall and skinny,” the old woman observed as she looked up at Dacia. “You’ll be the Claw. Ana Katarina says the other is the Wing, like me.” Lady Ioana gave a pleased smile, creasing her already wrinkled face.
Dacia looked at her, stunned. “Did you just say that Lou is the Wing? And I’m the . . . What does that mean, exactly?”
“Soon you will know,” her grandmother said. “Very soon.” She went stumping out, leaving Dacia standing in the middle of the rug.
Someone knocked on the open door a minute later and then came in. It was Radu. He only nodded when he saw Dacia standing there, shaken. He pushed her shoulder, and she slumped into a chair.
“She has that effect on people,” Radu said.
“She said what that man said,” Dacia said, aware that she wasn’t making any sense. But then, she didn’t think that anyone else was, either. “She said that I am the Claw, and Lou is the Wing.”
Radu’s face went white. “She told you?”
“What does it mean, Radu?” Dacia felt feverish. “What does all this mean? Why did that man ask Lou what she was, the Wing or the Claw . . . and what on earth is the Smoke?”
Impossibly, Radu’s face went even paler, and Dacia noticed for the first time that he had a few freckles on his nose. “Who said this?” His voice came out strangled.
“The man, the one who called Lou a houri. He asked which of those things she was.” She pulled his face closer to hers, still gripping his lapels. “You know, Radu Florescu, and you’re going to tell me. Now.”
“I can’t,” Radu choked out. “If I do, they’ll kill me!”
“They’ll kill you?” Dacia let go of him, suddenly weak in the face of his sheer terror. He really believed what he was saying. “Who will kill you?”
“The family!”
“Our family?” Dacia didn’t believe him. “Nonsense! And Lady Ioana just—”
“Lady Ioana can say such things,” he said. “Of course she can! But I’m not Lady Ioana! If I say anything, they’ll kill me! Now give me Lou’s letter. I have to show my father so that he can find that man.”
“Find him?” Dacia felt like there were too many thoughts in her brain, and if one more was added, she would go mad. “Why do they need to find him?”
“So that they can kill him,” Radu said as if the answer should have been obvious. “He shouldn’t know such things! He will need to be removed.”
“If you don’t need me, then I’ll indulge in some hysterics,” Dacia announced calmly. “I believe I’m due. Now back away, I’m going to scream.”
But the sound that came out of her throat was more like a sob.
FROM THE DESK OF MISS MARIA LOUISA NEULANDER
22 May 1897
Dear Dacia,
We are leaving Paris at last, but I am not sure that is a good thing. How is Bucharest? Does it feel safe? I know that this is a strange question, yet I cannot shake the feeling that I am traveling into danger. I have not seen That Awful Man, as I call him, since that day I hit him with my parasol. Yet my dreams are troubled, and I cannot be easy. I am sure that I will feel better once we are reunited.
I have enjoyed your letters a great deal, though I am sorry that you were bored on the ship from London. Sea travel is not all that exciting, I am quite agreed. And Aunt Kate’s tryst on the train (though I hardly dare to write the words, they are so scandalous) is quite the most amazing piece of news! I want to hear all about it in person when I get there. I am not sure if I am too shocked to find it romantic or not. Who was he? Do you suppose he has been waiting for her return all these years she has been in New York? Is he the reason that she has turned down so many offers of marriage? And did he put the nasty thing on the tracks so that the train would stop, and they could steal a moment together? There now, that sounds romantic, if slightly deranged.
All my love,
Louisa (Lou)
P.S. I could have sworn that I saw Lord John Harcastle getting into a hired carriage the other day outside the Louvre. I recognized him from your clippings. But I have searched and searched the papers for a notice of a visiting British lord, and there were none. They have documented Will Carver’s every move . . . and even mine, I blush to say! So perhaps I was mistaken.