THE DIARY OF MISS DACIA VREEHOLT
Lou read the letter over twice before she nodded her approval. It said a great deal about Dacia’s real emotions that she was having Lou read it before sending it to Lord Johnny. The tone of the letter was just as brash and confident as ever, but Lou knew now that it was mostly an act. They had to get out of this house, out of Romania. Lou felt suffocated, and found herself rising up on her toes without even thinking about it, as though she could launch herself into the air and fly away.
“I wish I was the Wing, whatever that means,” she said to Dacia as she watched her cousin fold up the letter and slide it into an envelope. “Then perhaps I could fly away from here.”
“As long as you bring back a carriage for me,” Dacia said with a quick smile.
“Naturally, I won’t leave without you,” Lou said.
“Where were you planning on going?” said a man’s voice from the doorway.
Both girls jumped, and Dacia let out a little scream. When they saw that it was just Radu, Dacia punched him in the arm.
“Don’t you knock before you enter a lady’s bedroom? I might have been dressing!”
Red rolled up Radu’s face from his collar, clashing horribly with his bright hair. Lou didn’t want to see how much redder he could turn, so she quickly put an end to his suffering.
“But she wasn’t, so no harm done. Can you do something for us?”
“Yes,” Radu said, his high color fading and a wary look entering his eyes. “What is it?”
“I want to send this letter to Lord Johnny Harcastle,” said Dacia brusquely. “He’s staying in Bucharest, at the Crown and Cross Hotel.” Despite their maid in Bucharest taking a dislike to Dacia, she had still reluctantly discovered Lord Johnny’s address for them, though by the time she had surrendered this information it had been too late to send him a note. Dacia finished sealing the letter and held it up. “I don’t dare give it to a servant to post, I am certain they’ll show it to Lady Ioana first.”
“What does it say?” Radu licked his lips nervously. “It doesn’t tell any . . . family secrets, does it?”
Lou felt a guilty flush rising on her own cheeks. Truthfully, it didn’t, but it was looking for answers to some of the family secrets.
Dacia, however, refused to be cowed. At least not by Radu. And Lou found her guilt passing as Dacia read him a lecture on his unbecoming curiosity concerning her amours tendres, as she termed them. By the time she was done, Radu was blushing again, and Lou was feeling inexplicably cheered up. They would get their letter to Lord Johnny, he would answer some of their questions, and if they needed to leave suddenly, he would help to arrange it. She remembered his piercing blue eyes, the firm set of his mouth. With her father and Lord Johnny to help them, they would get out of Romania.
“You’d better pay some Gypsies to send it,” Radu said when Dacia let him speak.
“How do we find some?”
“Out at the gate of the estate,” Radu said. “There are usually a couple of them sitting there. We hire them to run errands or help with house repairs.”
“Are you sure they aren’t loyal to Lady Ioana?” Lou had seen several Gypsies on their way to the estate, and they frightened her. They had stood and simply stared at the carriage, not with curiosity, but with hard eyes that seemed to be weighing her.
Radu shook his head. “They don’t like Lady Ioana. They don’t like anyone who isn’t Gypsy. But they’re loyal to whoever pays them.”
“Take us to them,” Dacia insisted. “I don’t want to deal with them alone.”
“No, I’ll go,” Lou said, surprising everyone, including herself.
Radu and Dacia gawked at her, which made her start blushing again.
“If anyone sees me, they’ll think I’m just curious,” Lou said. “If they see Radu, they’ll know he has a job for the Gypsies, and ask him what it is. If they see you, Dacia, they’ll ask you what you’re doing as well. I’m sorry, but you’re always . . . up to something.”
“You have a point,” Dacia admitted. She gave Lou a searching look. “Are you sure you want to?”
“Someone has to,” Lou said, raising her chin.
“Here.” Radu fished in his pockets and brought up a handful of coins, a button, and a crumpled handkerchief. “Sorry.” He took back the handkerchief and button, and gave her the coins. “That should be enough for them to post the letter, and consider themselves well paid for the effort.”
“I can pay for my own letter,” Dacia said stiffly, reaching for her purse.
“But I feel like . . . I know I’ve let you both down,” Radu mumbled. “I’m just not able to . . . I can’t do anything else.”
Dacia looked like she was going to protest some more, but Lou just took the money and thanked him. She knew what it was like to feel helpless, and it was disturbing that Radu felt that way.
Mustering what confidence she could, and being mindful to keep her back straight, but not straight enough that she looked like she was marching to her doom, Lou went downstairs. The stairs were narrow and shallow, which meant that there were quite a lot of them. They were also made of tile, and the low heels of her shoes clacked loudly as she went down to the main hall. It, too, was tiled, but there was a large rug in the middle, and she practically leaped from the bottom step to the muffling rug. She walked as lightly as she could to the front door, which was so huge that she had to push it open with both hands once she had figured out the latch.
A maid crossed the hall just as she was turning to close the door, and they both froze for a moment. Then Lou summoned her best Aunt Kate Look and said in Romanian, “Close this door; I don’t want to let in the draft.” And stepped across the porch as carelessly as she ever had in her New York home.
The gravel drive sloped, so she was rather less elegant walking down it than she had been crossing the porch. The gravel rolled out from under her heels, and she had to lift her skirts in the back to keep them from dragging. By the time she reached the front gate, her skirts were crumpled where she’d been clutching them, and the letter was crumpled as well. No matter, it was still readable.
She lifted the latch of the wooden gate, and found it even harder to open than the front door. But when she had moved it an inch or two, she heard a rough voice speaking a language she didn’t recognize, and felt someone take hold of the other side of the gate and pull it out of her grip. She let go willingly enough, and stepped through.
A thank-you died on her lips when she saw who had helped her with the gate.
He was a Gypsy, of course. She should have known. He wore a tall hat and a thick, embroidered coat. He glared down at her from a great height, and she felt her confidence sapping away.
“What do you want?” His Romanian was only slightly accented.
Belatedly Lou wondered what she would have done if he’d only known the Gypsy language.
“Oh. I—I want—My cousin and I want—”
“Which cousin?” The man let out a harsh laugh. “There are too many of you to count! You’re like rabbits, not wolves!”
“Ah, I suppose . . . but it’s Dacia and I, and we—” She held out the letter.
“You want to send a letter?” The man looked at the creased envelope with disgust, and then spit to one side. “The postman comes in the morning.” He turned his back on her.
Lou wondered if he would have turned his back on Radu. Or Aunt Kate. Or Lady Ioana. Or even Dacia. She breathed deeply through her nostrils. She was sick and tired of being of no consequence. She was here because no one would suspect her of dissembling if she’d been caught. And now she couldn’t even finish the job, because this large, sneering man didn’t think her worth his time.
“Now see here!” Her voice rapped out, not in imitation of Aunt Kate, but with its own steel showing through. The man turned, surprised, and Lou glared at him. “I want to send this letter to Bucharest as soon as possible, and no one else can know about it.”
He took it from her and studied the address. “Lord John Harcastle,” he said, turning over the strange name in his mouth.
“Yes. A young English lord, staying at the Crown and Cross Hotel in Bucharest.”
“No.”
“No?” Lou wavered a little, then straightened again. “I shall pay you.” She reached into her pocket for Radu’s coins.
“Yes, you will pay me. But I will take the letter to the young English lord at Poiana.”
“No, he’s staying in Bucharest,” Lou insisted.
“Poiana,” the man said loudly and slowly. “Yesterday, my brother helped a young English lord find Peles Castle in Poiana. The other man in the carriage, he called this English boy Lord Johnny. They said, they hoped the food is better than Crown and Cross, when they paid my brother.”
“Are you certain?”
The man glared at her. He snatched two of the coins from her hand. “Keep the rest. Maybe you will need me again.”
“Here.” Lou handed him two more silver coins. “If the man in Poiana isn’t Lord Harcastle, I want you to send this letter to the Crown and Cross in Bucharest.”
The man raised one eyebrow, and then let out a blast of laughter. “Silver in the hand, silver in the blood, but steel in the bones? Very nice.” He shoved the coins into one pocket, the letter into another, and then stalked off.
Lou went back through the gate, which she had to leave open because it was too heavy for her to close by herself, and then hurried up the treacherous drive to the house. When she was halfway across the main hall, her mother fluttered out of the sitting room.
“There you are, darling!” She grasped Lou’s arms, squeezing with her soft little hands that were surprisingly strong. “Don’t you just adore it? I’d forgotten how wonderful the old house was! And the smell of the trees, and the earth! So romantic!” Her mother heaved a little sigh, her eyes far away. Then they sharpened on Lou’s face. “Were you just outside?”
“Yes,” Lou said, seeing no point in lying. She was a terrible liar.
“Why?”
“Radu said that sometimes Gypsies hang around the gate. I wanted to see one, but there isn’t anyone there.” Which was not a lie. There wasn’t anyone there. Not anymore.
Her mother shuddered. “Stay away from the Gypsies, darling; they aren’t our kind of people.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lou said with relief.
“They are far better society than Prince Mihai,” Lou’s father said, coming out of the sitting room behind her mother.
There was a dark cloud in her father’s eyes, and Lou felt her knees begin to shake. Perhaps there was no point in waiting to hear from Lord Johnny, and she and Dacia should simply beg her father to take them away right now.
“We’re about to have tea, dear,” Lou’s mother prattled on, ignoring her husband. “And then we’re off to tour Castle Bran! You’ll simply love it! The most homey little castle you can imagine!”
“I’m sure Prince Mihai’s illustrious ancestor Vlad the Impaler found it very homey when he spent a decade there under arrest,” Lou’s father said coldly.
Lou’s mother let go of her arms, a hard look on her plump, pretty face as she rounded on her husband. “And how would you know anything about that? You are not Romanian!”
“No, thank goodness, I am not,” Mr. Neulander said, his face just as hard.
Lou took a step backward, away from both her parents. She was on the verge of crying, suddenly, and clenched her fists to stop the tears. She had cried far too much in the past few days.
“Which is why I raised my children to be Americans,” Mr. Neulander continued. “And which is why, when our tours of Bran and Peles are over, I will be taking our children back to Bucharest. And from Bucharest we will return to New York.”
“Our sons will be returning to Bucharest with you,” Maria agreed. “But Louisa will remain here.”
Lou opened her mouth to protest, and her father shot her a look.
“LouLou should not be here. Dacia should not be here,” he said in a low, intense voice. “I would like to insist that you should not be here, and yet more and more, you seem to be turning into one of them, and so I will not force you to return with us. But I will take my daughter and niece away from here, if it’s the last thing I do.”
“It will be.”
So silently had Lady Ioana entered the hall that Lou’s legs jolted and nearly threw her to the floor when her grandmother spoke. The old woman was standing in the doorway of another room, the light from a window behind her making her white headdress glow.
“Dacia and Maria Louisa belong with us. They belong to us. And when you see why, you will not want to take them away. Should you try anyway, out of some misguided sense of honor, you will be removed by force.”
“You can’t take my daughter—” Lou’s father began, a muscle in his jaw jumping.
“She isn’t your daughter,” Lady Ioana announced.
Lou felt a small cry escape her lips and choked it back.
“She is Maria’s daughter,” Lady Ioana went on, not looking at Lou. “This has been explained to you. By all means, take those horrible boys and go. They are yours. Today, tomorrow, it doesn’t matter to me. But don’t think to try to take the girls.
“You will not long survive my wrath.”
Lou looked at her father, willing him to scoff at the old woman’s claims. But his face was white with rage or fear or both, and instead he let out an anguished cry of his own and turned his back on his wife, and Lou, and fled.
Lou’s legs did collapse, and when Lady Ioana and Maria turned their gaze on her, she was clutching at the tight weave of the Turkish carpet and sobbing.
“Get up, you foolish girl, and wash your face,” Lady Ioana ordered. “You are stronger than this, and you must be stronger still.
“In two nights you will find out why you must forget your father.”
THE DIARY OF MISS DACIA VREEHOLT
12 June 1897
Something is horribly wrong with Lou, and she will not speak to me. She won’t speak to anyone. Lady Ioana said something to her, I know that. And I fear that her parents have quarreled. I certainly hope that they weren’t tactless enough to quarrel in front of her. Really, they should know by now that Lou is far too sensitive for that sort of thing! Long before this vile journey, I was convinced that Lou and I should be given a place of our own. No one else in this family has a care for her delicate nature, and I would do far better without my parents and Aunt Kate always shadowing me as well!
Tea was ridiculously awkward. Uncle Cyrus not present, Aunt Maria weepy, Lou silent, and Lady Ioana gloating. Still, everyone else was convinced that a visit to Castelul Bran will be heaven on earth. More later on that, if true. Or if not.
Note: perhaps if this whole thing turns out as horrible as I fear it will, I can use it as leverage in negotiating a private household. There is a darling apartment on Fifth Avenue that would suit the two of us admirably.