The Lady Rogue

by Jenn Bennett

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was more than aware that I was sprawled atop a naked Huck. I’d been here before, and my body hadn’t forgotten his, no matter how hard I’d tried to erase it from my memories. But that had been in kinder, gentler times.

  In the hotel corridor, a guest yelled, “Here! They went this way!” Heavy footfalls gave chase, and a commanding voice ordered everyone to stay in their rooms.

  That sounded promising. Were we out of danger now? Then I should move off Huck. Any second now I would. On the count of . . . something. Ten? Maybe on the count of twenty. He felt more pleasant beneath me than I cared to admit. Desperation does terrible things to a girl.

  “Look at us,” he purred beneath me. “Just like old times.”

  Only it wasn’t. Because I remembered with a pang of disappointment that Father sent Huck here to fetch me instead of coming for me himself, that Huck had all but disappeared from my life, and now he showed back up, no apology or explanation—and only because he was instructed to come here. If Father had found Vlad Dracula’s ring would I even have known Huck had been in Turkey?

  Wrenching my father’s journal from where it was jammed between us, I rolled away from Huck and stared at the hotel ceiling until I heard him groan. Then I shrugged out of my coat and blindly offered it in his direction. After a few moments I felt him tug it out of my hand to cover himself.

  Neither of us got up right away. We just lay there together, listening to hallway noise.

  “You all right?” Huck finally asked.

  “Not really,” I said. “It’s been a very bad year.”

  He grunted an acknowledgment. “I’d raise a glass to that, but I think perhaps I need to put trousers on. Think the coast is clear? Sounds like those gobshites are gone, yeah?”

  “Sounds like it. Huck?”

  “Yes?”

  “What were they looking for?”

  “Probably the same thing they were looking for when I saw them in Tokat—something in that journal. Good thing they didn’t get it, yeah?”

  “Good thing,” I repeated.

  “Theo?”

  “Yes?”

  “We need to leave Istanbul tonight. It’s not safe here anymore.”

  I was beginning to understand that now. “Where is that place my father was talking about in that letter—where he wants us to meet him?”

  “Aye, that. It’s where he stayed this summer. A hotel in Bucharest.”

  Bucharest? Romania—my mother’s homeland! Wild. Enigmatic. Brimming with history, mystery, and dark superstitions.

  I’d been to Romania only once, briefly, a few months after I was born, when my mother was attending her father’s funeral. Never since. I’d been begging Father to travel there for years, but he would never take me. He had a thousand reasons why. Nothing to see. I have other work. Too far. I don’t have time. What he never said was that he was avoiding Romania because it reminded him too much of my mother.

  But my father never said a lot of things. Like that I’d ever see Huck again. Yet here we were, miracle of miracles.

  I knew one thing. Whatever danger we were in, it was substantial enough to produce an even greater miraculous feat: it had convinced Richard Damn Fox to change his stubborn mind.

  JOURNAL OF RICHARD FOX

  June 19, 1937

  Orient Express

  We’re soon headed out of Budapest and on toward Bucharest. Funny how similar those cities sound. Funny that I’m nervous to leave one and go to the next, as if I’ll encounter Elena’s ghost when we cross the Carpathians. I’m fortifying myself with dry martinis, and I suppose that’s got me thinking sentimental thoughts, because my mind keeps returning to when I arrived in Europe, before I met with Rothwild about this Vlad-the-Impaler ring.

  Three days ago I visited Huck on my way to meet Jean-Bernard in Paris. The first time I’d seen him since he left Foxwood. He was in good spirits. I wasn’t. It was terrible leaving him. His aunt is a miserable woman, and I fear he’ll rot there if he stays too much longer.

  Truth is, Huck shouldn’t be here at all. He should be home with us at Foxwood. What ever happened to “family first”? Because I feel as if my motley little family is utterly broken, and I don’t know how to fix it. God do I wish Elena were still alive. She’d know what to do.

  4

  SEVERAL HOURS AFTER THE ROOM invasion, Huck and I sat on opposites sides in the back of a car provided by the hotel, speeding through Istanbul in the brisk night air. We were headed toward the railway station to catch a train into Europe. Together. As if the last year or so of our lives had been erased.

  Appearances could be deceiving though, couldn’t they?

  At night the ancient city was a maze of dark alleys and golden streetlights. I couldn’t stop surveying the nearby traffic, making sure we’d not been followed. Every shadowy driver was a suspect, though we hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the two intruders who’d trashed my hotel room.

  “Relax. We’re okay now,” Huck told me in a low voice after I’d squinted too hard at a figure standing under a dull streetlamp. He adjusted a herringbone flat cap that was pulled down tight on his forehead, covering his mop of curls. He’d donned a long, charcoal wool coat that hung to his knees, one that I’d never seen him wear before. He looked calm, which was definitely the opposite of how I felt.

  “Are we?” I asked, grumpy and anxious. “Are we really okay?”

  “Probably,” he said unconvincingly.

  My thoughts circled around to the reason we were leaving Istanbul. I desperately craved more information from Huck about what had happened in Tokat. We’d barely had more than a few minutes alone, what with all the hubbub and annoying practical minutia—things like ensuring that nothing in my room was stolen and convincing the hotel manager not to summon the police after Huck reminded me of the warning in Father’s letter. Then I had to sign a hundred pieces of paperwork to settle the hotel bill on credit, which required waiting for a cable authorization from Father’s bank in New York.

  And then there was Huck and what was between us. Or what wasn’t between us. Whatever it was, it felt like we were sitting on opposite sides of a muddy wartime trench, and I wasn’t sure if I could trust him ever again. Not like I did before he left.

  I tried not to think about it. After all, we had bigger concerns, such as my father and where he was right now and the men who’d trailed Huck to my hotel room. All of it came back to Vlad the Impaler’s ring, but I couldn’t see how everything fit together. Not yet at least. Though I’d reread my father’s letter to Huck several times, I hadn’t yet had a chance to look through the red journal. It was currently burning a proverbial hole in my travel satchel, begging me to read it. I just needed to get settled on the train, where I could open it in private.

  “I wish the driver would go faster,” I mumbled.

  “Patience,” Huck said. “As the proverb says, bear and four bears.”

  “Forbear,” I correct. “Bear and forbear.”

  “Mine’s better. What requires more restraint than four bears?”

  “If we make it onto this train, tonight I’m going to pray that four bears eat you while you’re sleeping.”

  “It would definitely take four, on account of my Herculean strength and great manliness.”

  “Yes, I suppose it does take a massive amount of testosterone to leave your home like a dog with its tail tucked and retreat across an entire ocean to your aunt’s house when the going gets tough.”

  “Ouch. I’m going to forgive that one. It’s your free insult.”

  “Oh really? Going to make me pay for the next one? Feel free to take the only lira I still have out of my handbag, since my tutor stole the traveler’s checks. That would be a fitting end to today.”

  He didn’t answer, but I could tell by the way he folded his arms over his chest that he was upset. Good. That made two of us.

  Thankfully, it wasn’t long before we pulled up to Sirkeci Railway Station, which looked more like a Byza
ntine palace or a mosque than a train terminal, with its domed roof and stained-glass windows. We exited the car while the driver flagged down a railway porter and arranged for our luggage to be carried to the train. Huck helped, and I surveyed approaching passengers who marched past silhouettes of palm trees.

  After everything was arranged, we entered the station and headed onto Platform No. 1. A friendly man behind the lone open ticket counter provided us with our exchanged tickets. We then passed under a series of moonlike clocks protruding from columns, dodging nimble porters who wheeled teetering stacks of luggage on long racks. To our left a handful of well-dressed passengers sat at café tables strewn with pistachio shells outside the station’s restaurant, smoking cigarettes and drinking tea. And across the platform, under the soft glow of the station lights, were the peacock-blue cars of our night train.

  The Orient Express.

  Gold-crested cars sat along the track with the acclaimed Wagons-Lits company name above the windows. It was a short train tonight—only the engine and two sleepers sandwiched between a couple of baggage vans. There was no dining car for the evening leg of our trip; one would be added tomorrow morning, after we crossed the border into Europe, just in time for breakfast.

  Clipboard in hand, a middle-aged conductor in a blue uniform stood near the steps of the second sleeper. Huck and I headed his way, and when he greeted us, Huck gave him our names: “Miss Theodora Fox and Mr. Huxley Gallagher.”

  “Ah, yes, from the hotel,” the conductor said with a charmingly French accent, inspecting us over the silver rims of his eyeglasses. “Your destination is only to Bucharest?”

  Many passengers would continue on to Hungary, at least, and many would ride all the way to Paris. The conductor reminded us that our journey would be broken up at the Bulgarian border, where we’d exit and take a ferry over the Danube before picking up a fresh train on the opposite riverbank in Romania to finish the final short leg of the trip to Bucharest.

  “Your large trunk is stored in the baggage van, and the small valises have been placed in your compartment,” the conductor informed us, reading from his clipboard. “You have been booked into the number two compartment in the first Pullman coach here. First class, two berths.”

  “And what about Mr. Gallagher’s assignment?” I asked, adjusting the fur-trimmed coat on my arm. For train travel, I’d changed into a new skirt and top, leaving my gutter-water clothing behind in the hotel, as there was no time to launder it.

  The conductor blinked at me. “Why, the same, mademoiselle. It is the only open compartment left until Bucharest, I’m afraid. There is a note here from the Pera Palace . . .” He ran a gloved finger along a penciled note before looking up at me, expectant. “You and the gentleman are siblings, oui?”

  Not again. I briefly fantasized about snatching the clipboard from the conductor and smacking it against Huck’s too-handsome face.

  “Mademoiselle?” the conductor asked.

  “Ah, yes,” Huck said when I didn’t answer right away, clearing his throat. “Good ol’ sis of mine.” He slapped me roughly on the back.

  “A remarkable similarity,” the conductor said dryly, gaze flicking between Huck’s long body and the compact, sturdy build I’d inherited from my mother’s side of the family tree.

  “Different fathers?” I said, smiling weakly.

  “And mothers,” Huck murmured somewhere near the top of my head, a little too loudly. I poked his side until he made a muffled noise, pain mixed with laughter.

  “Not my job to judge, monsieur.” The conductor’s biting tone was giving me the distinct impression he believed us to be unmarried lovers, trying to pull the wool over his eyes. If he only knew. Ugh.

  “There’s no chance you couldn’t find another compartment for me?” I asked. I mean, surely I couldn’t sleep in the same room as Huck. I’d rather have put my hand in a locked cage and watched rats feast on my fingers. “I’d prefer, uh . . . my privacy, you see? Maybe someone else in the train could be moved?”

  The man exhaled slowly. “I cannot move passengers who’ve had reservations for weeks, especially when everyone is already settled and you are the last to board. If I may say so, you are quite lucky to get this compartment.”

  “But—”

  “Everyone is already settled,” he insisted sharply, making me feel like a spoiled child being reprimanded for demanding extra pudding. “I can make arrangements for separate compartments tomorrow night. One will become available after we change trains in Romania. Tonight, however, I must ask that you stay where you are put, if you please.”

  A silent scream filled my head. My heart grew legs and blindly raced around inside my chest, bumping into my rib cage and falling over, completely panicked.

  Me. Huck. One compartment. Two bunks, sure. And we used to share rooms all the time when we were younger. But now . . . ?

  Before I could protest further or drop onto my knees in front of the conductor and sob delicate lady tears on his well-shined shoes, the doleful sound of a train whistle cut through the steam that now billowed over the platform.

  “That will be our signal to depart,” the conductor said, motioning for us to board the train. “It is our pleasure to serve you through continental Europe. Please watch your step.”

  What could I do? Not a damn thing. The tickets were exchanged, and I certainly didn’t want to sit around the station tonight, sleeping on a bench until the next express. The look Huck gave me was apologetic with a soupçon of panic as he murmured, “Family first?”

  Touché.

  The anxiety I was feeling manifested into a cold sweat that blossomed over the back of my neck as I climbed two metal steps and entered the train behind Huck. A moment later the conductor closed the door behind us, and the Orient Express trundled into motion. We made our way down the sleeper car’s narrow corridor, past compartment doors on our right and windows to our left. Through the glass panes, the steam-wreathed platform shifted slowly, slowly, and then faster, until it fell away into the night. We cleared the station, leaving everything behind:

  The Grand Bazaar.

  The Pera Palace Hotel.

  The strangely dressed intruders who wanted my father’s journal.

  And my father, wherever he was right now, may the devil take him.

  All of these things disappeared from view but not from my thoughts, where they became tangled up with the conflicted feelings that I had about Huck and our current situation. On top of everything, like icing sugar sprinkled atop a cake, was the strange thrill that I always felt when traveling. My mother used to call it “travel fever”—a little fear of the unknown, a little excitement for adventure. Whatever it was, I embraced it like an old friend as I shuffled down the train corridor and wondered what she’d think if she could see me now, stealing away to Eastern Europe at night.

  My mother had been no stranger to this sort of thing. Not to my father’s fervor for adventuring or to the strange objects that lured him around the globe, because they lured her, too. To places like India and the discovery of a two-thousand-year-old copper crown, thought to be Greek in origin, perhaps from the time Alexander the Great tried, and failed, to invade the Indian subcontinent.

  The markings on the box that housed the ancient crown spoke of curses and black magic. My father scoffed at that, saying it was silly, superstitious hogwash. He encouraged her to inspect it. And though he denied it now, I overheard him telling her that he had a buyer who’d pay far more than the government would for her expertise in authenticating it.

  Anything for the thrill of the take. Even if it put your family at risk.

  Because it did. The local workers warned my mother that the kiln worker who’d originally dug it up had died unexpectedly.

  Three weeks later she was dead too.

  To be fair, the official cause of her death was a particularly dangerous species of malaria, likely contracted days or even weeks before she touched the crown. There was absolutely no proof she was cursed or bedeviled
. But she wasn’t the last person to perish mysteriously after handing the crown; a government official from India’s Ministry of Culture died too. After that the copper crown was reported stolen. No leads. No witnesses. It was there one day and gone the next, much like my mother.

  My father said it was nothing more than dumb luck.

  But I believed. In curses. And magic spells. The esoteric and supernatural. Things that couldn’t be explained, things rarely seen and unproven. That’s why I read everything I could get my hands on about magic. Why I photographed haunted walls in ancient markets and was desperate to find proof that ghosts were real. Because I firmly believed a cursed object took my mother. And if Father continued on his devil-may-care path, one of these days it was going to take him too.

  If it hadn’t already.

  “Here we are. Number two. Guess this is us,” Huck said, ducking through an open door, where our carry-on luggage sat on the floor, swaying rhythmically with the steady clack of the train as it rolled along the track.

  The compartment was dim. Its only source of light emanated from a small compact lamp on a foldaway table beneath the window. There was scarcely room for two people to stand without bumping into each other; otherwise, it was well-appointed: voluptuously polished wood paneling, a hidden washbasin with a gilded vanity mirror, a spray of lacy orchids thrust into a tiny vase. Two built-in berths had been lowered and outfitted with crisp white sheets and embroidered coverlets; a pull-down ladder led to the upper bed.

  Behind me in the corridor, a young English attendant with ginger hair popped his head into our compartment. His cheeks were so ruddy, they made him look as if he’d been racing up and down the train. “Good evening. My name is Rex. I’ll be your attendant,” he informed us breathlessly. “You’re Miss Fox and Mr. Gallagher?”

  “Last time I checked,” Huck said.

  Rex smiled. “Anything you need, no matter the hour, just ring the call bell and a light will appear outside your door. Either myself or the conductor will appear promptly.”