Erdély’s magic is very different from Westerwald’s. Max’s Archduchy felt like a fairy tale version of Vegas, with its traffic, commuter hustle and skyline of high-rise offices contrasted against the ancient churches and quaint, tree-lined squares. But Erdély is like climbing through the looking glass into an entirely new world.
It is utterly quiet in the palace at night. The thick stone walls absorb all sound, and when I step out onto the ornately carved wooden balcony that links our suite to the next I breathe in fresh mountain air which is rich with the dark aroma of wet earth. High above the silhouettes of the mountain tops, the Milky Way glitters against the velvety sky, breathtakingly clear. There is no constant rumble of traffic, no sirens to break up the night, just the night song of crickets. An honest-to-goodness owl hoots, and Adam laughs when I jump at the sound.
When I wake in the morning, Adam is still asleep. I watch him, tempted to lean forward and kiss his eyelids, rub his stubble across my cheeks, but I hold myself back. I don’t want to wake him just yet, don’t want this moment to end, as if I can somehow freeze time.
In six days, I’ll be on a plane back to Vegas. In six days, the fairy tale will be over.
To avoid temptation, I slide out of bed, pull on my pyjama shorts and favorite sleep shirt, and let myself out onto the balcony. This side of the palace overlooks the forest, and the peace and stillness is absolute. After the craziness of the last few weeks, this quiet moment to do nothing but stop and breathe, to smell the lush vegetation, feels glorious. But it can’t last.
I need to start thinking about the life waiting for me back home, about my final semester and finding a new job, about my mother and her no doubt ill-fated romance with her latest boss, about my new niece, who is due any day now. Yet that life seems more like a dream than where I am right now. Vegas feels like a mirage on the horizon.
A maid brings a tray of coffee and pastries to our sitting room, her knock waking Adam. Since I know all too well that he’s still naked beneath the sheets, I hurry to get the door. She greets me in what I can only assume is the local dialect, and doesn’t even bat an eyelid at my skimpy pyjamas. If I made the bed here, I suspect she wouldn’t turn up her nose at me.
Last night’s dinner was a quiet family affair, and when we go downstairs for breakfast we find Sonja alone at the breakfast table, staring unseeing into her coffee cup. Her face brightens as we enter. There is no entourage, no uniformed footmen, and Lajos has already gone to work at his office in the parliament building in town. Unlike the palace in Neustadt, which always seemed to be teeming with people, this palace feels too big and too quiet. How lonely must it be without kids and grandkids to make it feel more like a home?
After breakfast, Sonja gives us a tour of the castle. With its massive stone hearths, high beamed ceilings and suits of armor, it looks more like a movie set than a home. The main part of the palace seems to have been designed for entertainment. There’s a great hall, drawing rooms, a music room, a billiard room, and even a small theater, but everything is under dust covers, closed-up and silent. It’s a place where there should be parties and people, where kids should play hide-and-seek. Instead, it’s the dogs that chase around us in circles. My initial nervousness around them quickly eases. They’re very eager to roll over on their backs to let me scratch their tummies.
“You’ll never get them to stop now,” Adam says with a laugh. “They clearly know a sucker when they see one.”
That’s me – the sucker who’s let herself be sweet-talked into the playboy’s bed, and into believing that maybe fairy tales really do exist. I’m an idiot, right? But a strangely happy idiot.
In the portrait gallery which connects two wings, Adam pauses for a moment. “I remember this room. Nick and I played here together. We turned it into a bowling alley until my mother found us and made us go play outside instead.”
It’s such a normal memory, the kind of memory any kid could have.
Sonja smiles sadly. “Yes, there are good memories too.”
The formal rooms have wood-panelled walls decorated with portraits and tapestries, and the library is barely half the size of the one in Max’s palace, but there’s a private family wing which is far more modern, complete with a den with a big flat screen TV (“Lajos is addicted to European football,” Sonja says) and a private gym. The way Adam’s face lights up at the sight of the gym tells me how he manages to maintain that gorgeous physique.
I’ve never been a gym bunny. I prefer the outdoors to air-conditioning and piped music. But a few hours later I’m regretting that thought, because the one form of outdoor exercise I never in a million years pictured myself doing was horse-riding. It’s like dance lessons all over again, except that in place of stepping on Adam’s toes and bumping into him, I’m bouncing up and down on the back of a big, scary horse, going around in circles. Thank heavens the only two people there to witness my awkward attempt are Adam and the groom.
The other thing that dancing and horse-riding have in common is that when I wake the next morning I ache all over from using muscles I didn’t even know existed. “You are so lucky that sex with you is pretty good,” I groan. “Because I can’t think of any other reason why I’d let you sweet-talk me into doing that.”
“Only pretty good?” He nudges his morning erection against me. “Perhaps I need to give you another chance to re-evaluate that opinion.”
As he reaches to pull me closer, I slip away with a giggle. “Not now, you won’t. At the moment I feel like I was kicked by the horse instead of riding it.” And if I’m suffering, he can suffer too.
I stand in the shower, resting my forehead against the cool tiles as the water beats down on my back.
Only five days left.
***
There are bicycles in the royal garage, alongside a handful of discreet luxury vehicles. There isn’t a flashy sports car or Rolls Royce in sight, so Lajos and Sonja clearly don’t do ostentatious displays of wealth. As we follow the cycle path along the river into Arenberg, we’re joined by more and more cyclists, schoolkids and commuters on their way to work. Cycling seems to be a major form of transportation here.
The town is small enough that it can be explored end-to-end in just a few hours. The historic centre of town is pedestrian only, with quaint storefronts, cobbled streets and little squares. Apart from a few high-end stores, there are no big name brands here – not even a McDonald’s.
On either side of the main square are the town’s two most impressive buildings, the parliament building and the main church, surrounded by street cafés, bars and souvenir shops.
“This is where the parliament meets?” I ask, incredulous. It’s only three stories high and, though the windows have fancy pediments and there’s a coat of arms painted beneath the high gabled roof, it looks like any other building. The flag hanging at half-mast reminds me that this is a country in mourning for its crown prince.
“The senate only consists of twenty people. They don’t need a whole lot of space.”
“But where are the soldiers to guard it?”
Adam laughs. “Erdély doesn’t have an army. It has always relied on diplomacy to keep it safe.”
The church of St József’s is a medieval building, its domed interior decorated with colorful frescoes that surpass those I saw in Westerwald. The church has a vaguely eastern look to it, with a bulb-shaped bell tower that reminds me that this area was once the borderland between Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
We wander the streets and pop into the art museum, housing the amazing collection gathered by a former Fürstin, an Austrian princess who was a great patroness of the most famous artists and musicians of her time. Adam tries valiantly to hide his boredom, and after an hour I show mercy on him and let him take me to lunch in one of the local inns.
***
Four days left.
The castle’s gardens are a fraction of the size of those at the palace in Neustadt. There is only one formal garden, with neat paths, trimmed hedges and color-co-ordinated flower beds and a couple of lawned terraces.
“Is this where we have the obligatory archery scene?” I ask as we wander across a stretch of lawn mown in neat patterns.
Adam looks at me as if I’ve asked where they keep the elephants. “What?”
“You know, bows and arrows – like in the movies? There’s always a scene where the heroine accidentally shoots someone in the ass.”
“In which case, I’m not letting you anywhere near any bows. I don’t fancy an arrow in my arse.”
I giggle. “I’m flattered that you think I’m the heroine of this story.”
“Aren’t you?” He pulls me up against him and kisses me so thoroughly that I’m breathless and panting. “For the record,” he says as we resume our walk, “I don’t think I’ve fired an arrow in my life.”
***
Pre-dinner drinks are served on the fountain terrace each evening. “Or in the library, when the weather’s not so good,” Sonja says. The sun sets behind the mountains, turning the sky blue-gray as it darkens.
This evening we’re joined by guests, a dynamic, dark-haired man with sharp eyes and his young wife, a pixie-haired woman not much older than me. They’re both wearing jeans, so I relax and chat easily with them until Adam whispers in my ear: this is Erdély’s prime minister, Yannik, and his wife.
He laughs at my shock. “You expect all government ministers to be old men with white hair?”
They stay for dinner and the conversation flits from hobbies and favorite foods, to skirt the forbidden topics of politics and money. Seems the etiquette rules can be broken. The men dance around the more contentious subjects, keeping the conversation light but feeling each other out, no one wanting to give away too much, or come out and directly ask the question that hovers, unspoken: will Adam step up and be this nation’s next leader?
It’s exhausting, and a tension headache builds in the base of my neck. Maybe this is why everyone avoids stressful topics – because it’s stressful.
But then I discover that the prime minister’s wife, Lena, is an art history professor at the university in Arenberg and a local history buff and, like me, she too waitressed her way through her college years. We swap funny stories, and I’m able to relax again. She tells me some of the more outrageous exploits from their nation’s history until we remember that the same spoilt royal whose shocking behavior we’re laughing over is an ancestor to two of the people at the table.
“Oops,” she mouths at me, and we burst out laughing.
I like her. If we’d been together in school, we might have been friends.
“Our department runs a part-time history course in English you might find interesting,” she suggests. “How long are you here for?”
“I leave on the weekend.”
“Maybe when you come back, then.”
I don’t bother to tell her I won’t be back. I can barely bear to think about it, let alone say it out loud.
After dinner, when the men head off to catch the end of a football match on TV, Sonja gives Lena and me a tour of her personal passion: her antique porcelain figurine collection.
Westerwald may have its fancy jewelry vault, but I think I prefer this display. The figurines are delicate and intricately detailed, and vary from early eighteenth century Meissen figures to art deco ballerinas.
Sonja picks up one of a mother with a child in her lap, both dressed in white, and cradles it lovingly. “This one isn’t very valuable. It’s a nineteen-eighties soft paste piece in the Capodimonte style. Nick gave it to me one Mother’s Day.”
She sets it down and turns to us, her face composed but her eyes haunted. “Would you please excuse me from joining you for coffee?”
I recognize her smile. It’s the same one I use on customers when I’m not really in the mood, but have to maintain appearances. “Of course.”
Lena and I head back downstairs to the drawing room where after-dinner coffee is always served.
“I know one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” Lena says softly as we head downstairs, “but now that I’ve met Adam, I think Prince Nicholas’s death might have been a good thing for this country.”
What can I possibly say to that? Secretly, I agree. Nick’s death wasn’t just a blessing in disguise for Erdély, but for Adam too, if only he’d open his eyes and see it.
***
Three days left.
Borrowing one of those not-too-ostentatious sedans, we explore the rest of Erdély, driving through a landscape of farmland, vineyards, traditional farmhouses and tiny hamlets, finally arriving in the spa town of Veldes with its public, Georgian-era hot and cold mineral baths. The complex has an indoor heated pool, steam rooms and a splash pool full of kids outside, but the buildings look sad and tired, a vivid contrast to the brand spanking new luxury resort next door which is so classy it makes the casino hotel I worked for look like a Best Western.
The true gem is our discovery of a brewery close by. As we sample the local beers, the owner stops to chat. “You enjoying your holiday?” he asks, making friendly conversation. Friendliness is definitely a local trait.
I smile up at him. “What gave us away as tourists?”
“Aside from your accents? Locals don’t stop to sample the tasters. They stock up on their favorite brew and leave. And since the day-trippers who come across the border for a few hours never come this far south, you must be visiting a while. You staying at the spa resort or one of the gasthofs in Arenberg?”
Adam catches my eye. “On a farm. Of sorts.”
“Ah, a farm stay! Well, I hope you enjoy the rest of your trip.”
“More people should know about this place,” I tell Adam when the owner moves away. “Not just this brewery, but Erdély itself. Do you know this country doesn’t even have a Frommer’s tour guide? I think that’s something you should get right onto.”
“I haven’t agreed to take the job yet.”
“You should. This place has so much potential for tourism. And I don’t mean in a kitschy Vegas way.”
He shrugs. “I’d have to live here for at least part of the year.”
“And how is that a problem? Look around you. This is as close to paradise as any country can get.”
He stares into the distance, not looking at me. “I like my freedom. If I accept, I’d be tied to this place and its people for the rest of my life.”
This isn’t news, but a sharp, sudden pain twists inside my chest. He doesn’t do commitment, to places or to people. It’s not like he has ever led me on or promised anything more than this week. But I do do commitment.
I want commitment. The realization hits me like a sledgehammer: I’m falling for him. The way I always feared I would, from that very first time I laid eyes on him. I’m falling for my very own kryptonite, a man who will never commit to me, who is going to leave me as soon as he’s had enough.