The Lady Rogue

by Jenn Bennett

JOURNAL OF RICHARD FOX

  November 23, 1937

  Tokat, Turkey

  I’ll never forgive myself. I should have never brought Huck and Theo here. This is my fault. What can I do? Theodora, if you’re reading this, the Dragon—

  Smeared across the paper, a line of ink trailed away from the last word, as if he were interrupted.

  A sense of unease crept over me. “What is this?” I murmured. None of it sounded good. I reread it several times and pointed to the page. “What is he talking about here? ‘Dragon’? Vlad the Impaler was sometimes called Vlad Dracula, son of the Dragon. It was his father who was the actual Dragon. I mean, so to speak. It was a byname, like . . . Alfred the Great. That sort of thing.”

  “Vlad the Dragon. Breathes fire. Not literally. Just don’t piss him off.”

  “Like that,” I confirmed. “And obviously both father Vlad and son Vlad have been dead for more than four hundred years—despite the loose connection to Bram Stoker’s fictional Count Dracula, they weren’t immortal vampires.”

  “You say ‘vampire’ as if it were a possibility. Have you run across something with sharp teeth and a hatred of garlic over the last year?”

  “Sadly, my investigations have been vampire-free,” I said.

  “Good to know,” he said, making the sign of the cross in the air for good measure. Then he pointed at the journal entry. “Look here at the date—yesterday. That’s when I was arranging for transportation. He had to have written this before he slipped out of the hotel and left me in Tokat.”

  I thought for a moment. “So he took the second mystery meeting with an unknown person, returned to the hotel while you were out searching Tokat for a plane or a car, began writing this journal entry, and then . . . quickly left the hotel?”

  “Seems to be so,” Huck murmured.

  Maybe the previous journal entry would shed more light. It had been written the day before the last entry:

  JOURNAL OF RICHARD FOX

  November 22, 1937

  Tokat, Turkey

  Returned from the cave empty-handed. The expedition was a failure. Now we’re back at our hotel, which is barely better than sleeping in tents, as there is currently no running water here: the hotel’s water main is being repaired. After a yelling match with the hotel manager, I left to meet with someone whom I wished I’d talked to before we went up the mountain. Would have saved me blood, sweat, and tears.

  Vlad’s Turkish enemies didn’t behead him in Wallachia and take his legendary war ring across the Black Sea. It’s not here. A retired Muslim cleric showed me a lockbox that had been taken from Topkapı Palace thirty years ago. Inside was a letter to the Ottoman sultan, dated 1891. It was written by a Romanian boyar, confirming receipt of a package that was sent from Turkey to Romania. And it was damn enlightening. . . .

  Seems to me that there are three rings. Two fakes, one real.

  I can’t be sure, but I think the actual ring was duplicated in Turkey. Two reproductions were sent back to Romania along with the real ring, and all were distributed to three historic families there for safekeeping. (“The power is in one” is what was written in the boyar’s letter, which I assume to be a reference to the war ring’s supposed esoteric power or curse.)

  Regardless, I think two duplicates were made to confuse anyone who’d come looking for the real war ring. So maybe Rothwild was right: perhaps the ring in his possession is one of the reproductions.

  That leaves two more—one real, one not. I need to retrace my steps back to my summer trip in Romania. Must talk to: XTTNMVGAFWVLWJQUIKLWLAUCJ. One of these three has the true ring, I’m certain.

  The boyar’s letter mentions what I believe to be a gruesome way to authenticate the ring, though I can scarcely believe it. No doubt Theo will say “I told you so!” and God knows I hate it when she’s right. She gets this look in her eye exactly like Elena used to.

  This was definitely more enlightening. I eagerly skimmed over the words again, absorbing them like sunlight, and asked Huck, “What did he mean when he said here that I was right? Why would I say ‘I told you so’? I’ve never given him advice about this ring. What is he talking about?”

  “Beats me,” Huck said. “What about this gobbledygook here? And here? This is the cipher part?”

  “Yes. Looks like he’s trying to hide someone’s identity—whoever showed him the boyar’s letter in the lockbox, and then three people who may have the ring?”

  “Can you decipher it?”

  “Probably.” I’d just need some time to study the patterns. Was it a Caesar cipher? That would be too easy. “Oh! I bet it’s a Vigenére cipher. It’s harder to crack. It’s encoded with a passphrase—a random word that would determine how each letter of the message would be encrypted.”

  “How do you figure out the passphrase?”

  “You normally wouldn’t. That’s the point. The person who encoded the message—in this case my father—would pick the passphrase and write the encoded message using it. He’d only share the passphrase with the message’s recipient. You can’t decode the message without it.”

  “Unless you could guess it?”

  “Unless you could guess it,” I confirmed.

  “Well, count me out. Right now I’m so knackered, I couldn’t guess how many feet I have.” Huck settled back against the berth’s pillow and rubbed a hand over his face. “I barely slept last night, and I drove all day, and now I need to sleep.”

  Not me. I was too wired to sleep. I stared at the open journal on my lap, mind spinning on both the words I could read and the ones that were encoded. How would I figure out Father’s cipher passphrase? And who was the Dragon? And what did he learn in that second meeting that prompted him to leave and direct Huck to come fetch me in Istanbul? Whatever my father had gotten himself involved in, it must be bad.

  But I did know several things: (a) that ring was more than just a piece of history, (b) someone besides this Mr. Rothwild fellow who’d hired Father to find the ring was interested in it—enough to send goons after us—and (c) Father’s final journal entry was addressed to me, which meant he intended for me to read it.

  And I would.

  “Look,” Huck said, stretching his neck from side to side. “There’s no need to get worked up about cracking his code. We’re going to meet Fox in Bucharest, just like his letter said. We’ll be there tomorrow night. All we have to do is sit back, enjoy the first-class service, and have a little faith, and everything will be fine.”

  “That’s nearly word for word what Father said when he dumped me at the Pera Palace Hotel and ran off to Tokat to meet up with you in secret. And look how that turned out.”

  Huck frowned at me. “You’re going to stay up all night and decode his journal, aren’t you?”

  How could I not? This was my chance to do something besides sitting around hotel rooms for days at a time. “I’ll require the bottom berth to work,” I said. “The lamplight down here is brighter.”

  Huck sighed dramatically, pushed out of the berth, and headed across the compartment, mumbling something about finding our car’s restroom.

  “If you want to help,” I called out, eyes on the journal pages, “ring that Rex fellow and order a pot of tea.”

  “What if I don’t want to help? What if I just want to brush my teeth and go to sleep?”

  “Even better. I’ll work faster without your constant chattering.”

  “Comments like that could make a boy think you haven’t missed him at all.”

  “Oh, really? Is that something like when a girl sends a boy a dozen letters across the ocean and he never replies?” I said.

  Huck paused on the far side of the compartment and looked as if he might explain himself. Just for a moment. Then, without another word, he stepped into the corridor and pulled the door closed behind him, shutting me out. Making me feel as if he’d slammed the door on my heart, too.

  I’d known sharing a compartment was a bad idea. He was going to sleep, and I was going to stay u
p all night wishing he’d talk to me. And then tomorrow we’d find my father in Bucharest, and he’d have some sort of explanation for all of this—one that was likely half as dangerous as I worried it could be—so Huck was probably right when he said cracking the journal’s code was a fool’s errand. And I’d be an even bigger fool to try to suss out what had gone wrong after Black Sunday last year. Tomorrow I’d go back to New York with Father while Huck would return to Belfast. Who knows when I’d see him again.

  Or even if  I would.

  A waste of time, all of it.

  So why couldn’t I let it go?

  JOURNAL OF RICHARD FOX

  June 20, 1937

  Orient Express, somewhere in the Kingdom of Hungary

  Rainy day. Should be hitting the Romanian border soon. Today I’m feeling less sentimental and more hungover, so I’ve put a temporary moratorium on martinis. Practically the picture of restraint, I am.

  Sitting across from me in the restaurant car, Jean-Bernard is reading a history book on Transylvania and Wallachia, neighboring regions along the Carpathians. Fascinating history this area has. Everybody and their mother tried to claim those lands. But it all really went to hell in the Middle Ages, when the Carpathians sat between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.

  And Prince Vlad wasn’t interested in political tightrope. He wanted to stand his ground and keep his territory. He would not pay tribute to the sultan. Period.

  Here’s the thing: Vlad didn’t have a big army or much of a coffer. Wallachia had little to trade. The only way he could keep his territory was through sheer tenacity and being a vicious monster. Rage was his weapon, and he was a damn angry man.

  His war strategy was scorched earth. When the sultan came to fight him, he burned his own land. Poisoned wells. Dammed up the rivers. Left no animals for the invading armies to hunt. The Turks couldn’t eat or drink, and they all got sick because Vlad sent people with the damn bubonic plague into the Turks’ camp.

  Rothwild thinks this bone ring I’m searching for somehow increased Vlad’s rage. At least, that was the whispered gossip in Vlad’s time. The bone ring was ensorcelled. Made with black magic. Created by an occultist. Maybe even given to Vlad by the devil himself. Sure: that and half the other so-called cursed medieval objects. I’ve yet to hold the devil’s handiwork. Everything evil I’ve found was made by human hands.

  6

  I DIDN’T SLEEP THAT NIGHT. NOT much anyway.

  Father’s journal was mostly to blame. But even if I hadn’t stayed up, skimming his words while trying (and failing) to guess his cipher’s passphrase, I wouldn’t have slept much. Extended post-midnight passport checks halted our train on the Balkan peninsula at the borders of both Turkey and, thirty minutes later, crossing into Eastern Europe, Bulgaria.

  After the border checks, a dining car was added sometime in the morning, but I was too tired and cranky to roll out of the berth for breakfast, succumbing to that dull laziness brought on by train travel—something that turned Huck into the living dead, as I’d heard not a single snore from him last night. Nor a single word.

  Noon came and went before I was motivated to leave our compartment, and that was mostly because my bladder was aching. I had to wait in line to use the public facilities. For the record, there is nothing more humbling than washing bits of yourself over a basin in a public lavatory on a moving train.

  On the other hand, the glorious thing about rail travel is that the dining car is never officially closed. They may say it is, but I’d never been refused service. When I strode into our dining car in the early afternoon, Huck shuffling behind me, the main luncheon crowd had cleared out. Only a few stragglers sat at scattered tables, taking tea and reading or gazing out windows decorated with burgundy velvet curtains. There wasn’t much to see; we were in Bulgaria now, and under gray skies, the scenery was flat as a pancake and never-ending.

  In an hour we’d be debarking for the border at Ruse and taking a ferry across the Danube to Romania, where we’d pick up a simple train—no sleeping compartments—to Bucharest; we’d be in the Romanian capital city before nightfall. Even though I hadn’t cracked the cipher in Father’s journal, and perhaps because we were so close to our destination, I was feeling somewhat less anxious than I was when we stepped onto the train last night. There was even a copy of Le Figaro, a French newspaper, that someone had left on the table, and the mots croisés puzzle was still untouched—c’est magnifique! I could focus on that instead of having to make small talk with Huck.

  A steward rushed down the narrow dining car aisle between tables set formally with china and silver to take our order. I couldn’t decide, and hadn’t eaten actual hot food since yesterday, so I requested one or five dishes and tried to avoid the steward’s judgmental eyes.

  “It’s easily twenty degrees colder here than it was when we left Istanbul,” Huck told me after the steward left our table. Several passengers in the dining car were dressed for chilly weather. Huck, too: over his long sleeves, he’d donned a soft gray cable-knit cardigan with tortoiseshell buttons. It looked nice on him, but I’d never say so in a hundred years. So I distracted myself with removing the crossword puzzle page from the French newspaper and folding into a small, neat rectangle, making sharp creases with the edge of my fingernail.

  “Crack Fox’s cipher yet?” he asked, oh so slowly rearranging his silverware, as if it were work that required a detailed eye and a surgeon’s touch.

  Okay, fine. I supposed I couldn’t ignore him for the rest of the train ride. I would treat him like any other traveling companion, like he was paid by my father to talk to me.

  “Not yet,” I said, keeping my eyes on the rolling landscape. Father’s journal was currently in my handbag, into which I now stuck my hand to search for a pencil. “But don’t worry—I will.”

  “Naturally. Being pigheaded is one of your best qualities, if memory serves.”

  “It’s called perseverance.”

  “Aye. That’s what Fox calls it when he does it too. Like father, like daughter.”

  “I wouldn’t know. You spend more time with him than I do these days.”

  “I spend more time getting cursed out by him. Besides, I would have much rather been in Istanbul.”

  “Is that so?” I said, frustrated to realize that my pencil was still in our compartment.

  “You don’t think I wouldn’t rather be lounging on plush beds, having room service deliver jugs of wine, and scantily clad serving girls to feed me grapes?”

  “It’s a hotel, for the love of Pete, not Caligula’s Palace.”

  “Shh. Don’t spoil my daydream.”

  No worries there. I was too busy with my own daydream, which featured me as a black-hooded assassin, sneaking through hotels, eliminating ample-bosomed serving girls and poisoning all the grapes. “Do you have a pencil?” I asked in frustration.

  “Afraid not.” He squinted at me over the table. “Trying to ignore me for that crossword puzzle? You forget—I know you too well, Theodora Fox.”

  I forgot nothing. That was precisely the problem.

  Luckily, I was saved by our steward, who soon rolled out a trolley laden with food, which he deposited on our table. Bottles of mineral water. Perfectly cut sandwich triangles. Blinis topped with caviar and crème fraîche. Some sort of potato terrine and tiny bowls of olives and shelled pistachios, to which I’d become addicted while staying in Turkey. And after lighting a flame beneath a silver spirit kettle, which steamed with freshly brewed tea, the steward wheeled the emptied cart away, leaving Huck and me on our own again.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I’m famished,” Huck murmured, tucking into the finger sandwiches. He inhaled three before I could blink.

  “I would have ordered more if I’d known you were practicing for a competitive eating contest.”

  He smiled. “You know what they say. Empty stomach, empty mind.”

  “No one says that.”

  “An uneaten sandwich never spoils.”
<
br />   “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  “Hang on. I’ve got it now,” he said brightly. “Six sandwiches a day keep the doctor away.”

  “You are still absolutely terrible at proverbs.”

  “Pfft. I’m a proverbial champion. A modern-day Confucius,” he said, eyes twinkling as he dipped the end of his sandwich triangle into a cup of tea, pausing for effect before shoving it into his mouth. He loved to dunk. Bread in soup, cookies in milk, sandwiches in perfectly good tea. Sometimes I thought he did it just to annoy me; soggy food made me want to retch.

  I flagged down the steward and ordered more sandwiches for Huck to ruin. We both ate heartily—some of us more than others—and after the plates began to empty, our forced conversation turned from our impending stop in Romania to my father and shared bits of what we both knew about Vlad the Impaler, me from books and my mother’s stories and him from what little he’d gleaned on the trip to Tokat.

  “Fox said Prince Vlad of many names . . . Vlad the third or Dracula or Tepid—”

  “Țepeș,” I corrected. “Vlad Țepeș. It means ‘impaler’ in Romanian.”

  “Huh. Did not know that. Anyway, Fox said he was either a national hero or a mass murderer, depending on who was telling the stories.” He casually leaned back in his chair, long arms languid, a lazy king lounging on a throne. “I mean, sure, he skewered a few people on spikes to scare off invaders, but was it wrong if it was for the protection of his country?”

  “Forty thousand people,” I corrected. “He impaled forty thousand. He invaded Bulgaria”—I tapped the glass, pointing to the moving landscape—“somewhere out there and impaled twenty-three thousand Turkish forces stationed here when the Turkish sultan demanded taxes from him. Then, when the sultan marched north to Wallachia, he was greeted by the gruesome sight of another twenty thousand impaled Turks greeting him along a road for sixty miles.”

  Huck whistled. “That’s a lot of skewered bodies. Imagine the stench.”

  “And the work. Impaling someone can’t be easy. And supposedly Vlad preferred to do so while they were still alive. They’d die slowly for a day or two in utter agony.”