The Enchantress of Bucharest

by Alex Oliver

  "A bad one." Radu rubbed two fingers beneath the brim of his hat, and looked weary.

  "Not at all. Shall I tell you? There we all are, drawn up in our silken Turkish finery, lounging on our divans, worrying if we're five minutes late to the latest fashion, agonizing over whether the turn of our recent 'good morning' to the prince could be taken as less than perfectly respectful... and there you are, dressed for riding, ready to die for honor and choking on a lie? You made us all feel very old, and ashamed."

  "I didn't..."

  "What's better is that you did this under the prince's nose. Either he accepts that you are as you appear - blazing with a rather antiquated honesty - or he suspects you are fiendishly clever enough to use that appearance knowingly, to be playing a deep game."

  "Whereas actually I'm a rustic up from the country and finding it hard to adapt."

  Sterescu laughed again, "Or that's what you wish us to think." The big man cut off any objections with a raised finger. "No, I wanted to thank you for reminding me that we were warriors once, and to invite you to a ball at my house on Friday night. Come meet everyone in a less daunting setting. I can promise a spectacle such as you've never seen before. You'll never guess who I've lured to entertain us... Gabrielle Geroux, the great illusionist of Versailles. It was difficult to get her to travel so far, but my daughter persuaded her in the end. No one can say no to Ecaterina." He rose and dusted himself off, his robe making him look like a great ball swathed in a golden curtain. Sapphires sparkled in his hat. "So you will come?"

  "I would be honored."

  Sterescu darted another meaningful look at Frank, but this one he found he couldn't translate. "Have you decided what to do with the money?"

  "I thought I would use it to buy a present which I could give to the prince."

  The older man laughed again. "Ironic," he agreed, "but a little too pointed. You could... endow a monastery. Build a church."

  Frank was struck suddenly with the thought of the peasants he'd seen, driven off the land, piling all their furniture on wagons and heading for Transylvania, where the taxes were less punitive and they could actually afford to eat. "Send it home," he said, astonished it hadn't occurred to anyone before. "Give it to your people to pay the taxes with. You'll be giving it back to the prince, in essence, while doing good for your country at the same time."

  The boyars grinned together, and at that moment Frank could see why Radu reminded Sterescu of a vanished youth - there was a fleeting resemblance between them, marker of a long shared history. "Perfect!"

  "Your servant's name...?"

  "Forgive me," Radu rubbed his smile off with an open hand. "This is the honorable Frank Carew, the son of the English Earl of Huntingdon. He has honored me by agreeing to take a place in my household, but he is my companion, not my servant."

  For all Frank claimed to have no pride, being overlooked and dismissed from a conversation had rankled. This warmed his heart.

  It also warmed Sterescu's expression. "Ah, I should have known that no mere servant could be so wise. Forgive me, Sir, and please, you must come to my party too."

  "I cannot think of anything that would please me more," Frank said truthfully, still glowing a little at the thought that Radu, at least, did not think him suddenly lesser. Just because his father had tried to murder him did not take away his breeding or his upbringing, by which he was Radu's equal.

  That equality seemed suddenly very important to preserve, illusory though it was when Radu was paying his wages—and doing so, moreover, just because he liked Frank's pretty face. He'd never quite understood why women made such a great fuss over the desire to possess their own property or make their own wills, but the more he found himself dependent on a lover's charity for all material goods, even for such nebulous things as whether his pride mattered or his station was acknowledged, the more it all became perfectly clear.

  Chapter Four

  In which Radu’s Talent becomes apparent. As does his Guilt.

  ∞∞∞

  Radu had learned to appreciate the surfaces of things. Down in the depths there was usually anguish, sometimes monstrosity, always that which did not bear looking on. To look away and concentrate only on the pleasant outsides was the only way to keep going. Otherwise one would stop and mourn until one wasted away, and what good would that do anyone?

  So, he enjoyed the week as it came, bringing sunlight to long closed rooms. The visit of the piano-tuner on the Monday restored a beautiful harmony to the rounded tone of the piano in the music room, which surely none of the family had ever touched. Frank played a little, picking out snatches of Hayden and long, curlicue passages from Bach, ornate as the plasterwork of the ceilings.

  Hospitality alone, Radu tried to tell himself, demanded that he should make all the sacrifices necessary for Frank's comfort. He was a guest, a foreigner, and a noble one at that. He honored the family and the country by his presence, and it was no more than Radu's duty to answer that with as much protection as he could provide.

  It didn't hurt that as he sat amid the gilding of the music room, delicate face gone soft with music, sunlight flooding through the windows in golden lances and turning his hair the same color as the gilding, he looked like some unearthly thing, angelic, breakable, too fine for this earth.

  Radu should have let him die. He couldn't add up his actions and see anything other than selfishness in them. Well, wasn't he allowed to be selfish, now and again? What was the point of high birth and power if one could not exercise them every so often, to hold and keep the things you wanted to keep?

  These thoughts too did not do well in the light of day. He shoved them beneath the surface as he dealt with the small duties of innocent people. A visit from the tailor, which left him and Frank more up to date. Frank had tried to tell him he needed a powdered wig and breeches if he was to look like the English gentleman he was, but it would be a crime to cover such hair with horse-pelt, white powder and pomade. A folly of a fashion, from which Frank should have been glad to have escaped. The subject had been successfully scoffed at and dropped, and the tailor had brought trousers, boots and hats fit for a prince instead.

  It was pleasant to be well dressed, to no longer look like an ignorant country cousin. Pleasant too when the fathers of the boyar families began to visit, one by one. Calling cards on the tray in the morning, carriages pulling up on the gravel drive in time for lunch. He took to carrying tuică in an inner pocket, like a peasant farmer, rather than continually have the servants run back and forth to pour a shot for every visitor.

  Early days. These visits only permitted of small talk - asking after the health of one's family, the prosperity of one's land. Very frequently the marriage prospects of one's daughters. Radu understood that his appearance, out of seclusion, newly in possession of a large gift of money and still single, could only mean that he was on the hunt for an appropriate wife. Though this thought too trailed off into darkness, it was not something he discouraged. Let him act as he was expected to act, let him enjoy the sunshine while he could.

  For under all of it, like a stingray beneath a frozen sea, there swam the knowledge of what rested under the floor. For hundreds of years his small branch of the larger, illustrious Vacarescu family had dwelt in their mountains, and found a balance that allowed them to be endured by those whom they both protected and preyed upon. He could not imagine how it was to work, how he was to balance here. He didn't know what to do, and therefore he did nothing.

  The first two or three nights free of his parents had felt like liberty, like a chance to finally be normal, sociable—human. But as the week wore on without them coming in at nightfall to talk, even coming back before daybreak to gloat, he began to think it was not he who had been released from bondage. The thought of them unfettered was...

  Was another thing with which he would not sully his day. He allowed himself to be carefully dressed for Decebal Sterescu's ball, to enjoy the sight of Frank in a green silk sash and a long, brocaded, brandy-color
ed coat. To enjoy the carriage ride - open topped so the lowlier denizens of the town could gawk at his splendor - through oak lined avenues gone blue and cold with evening twilight.

  Out to a great circular drive packed with carriages, ambling now as each paused at the wide open doors of the long, white house, long enough to disgorge ladies with skirts swaying like cathedral bells beneath exquisite lace aprons, and men sparkling with jewels, as peacock-fine as their wives.

  The servant who jumped down from the running board of his carriage to open the door and unfold the steps was that same tall Roma girl he had been offered as a bride back home, and still no one around her appeared to think it strange. She'd been offered in place of a Vlach girl, she'd been a boatman, and now she was in the place of a footman, looking up at him with the beginnings of impudence in her honey-brown eyes.

  He wasn't sure why he had not challenged her the first time. Why he continued to preserve her unspoken secrets. Perhaps, the first time, believing she would be dead by the end of the night, it had not mattered so much that no one but he could see the darkness of her skin.

  The second time, he had been curious, but thought perhaps she had relatives among the boatmen, willing to overlook her sex. This time it seemed inconceivable that his well-scrubbed, liveried footmen could look at her - in her washing line of mismatched clothes, her black tangled hair constrained by neither headscarf nor hat - and see one of their own.

  He recalled he'd meant to interview her about it, find out what manner of a talent this was, and think how it could best be used. But in the meantime perhaps his staring was drawing attention that she did not need. He pressed a coin into her hand. "Get yourself some proper clothes. I will wish to speak to you on Friday morning."

  She just remembered in time not to curtsy, but it was a close and awkward thing.

  Frank looked between the two of them with an expression of bemusement.

  "What do you see?" Radu asked him, quietly enough so the other men could not hear.

  "It's a footman," said Frank, shrugging, "the same as the others only a little younger. Pock marked. Red haired, rusty green eyes."

  The girl pressed her hand to her mouth as if to stop herself giggling. Looked like she would say something - she was actually reaching out to tug on Frank's sleeve - when the driver of the carriage behind them flicked his long whip over his horses. They shoved forward into the back of Radu's carriage, the men on the rear postilion fending them off with open hands. His driver took the hint, moved on, and the girl hopped up easily enough on the footplate and went with them.

  Curious. Radu suffered himself to be lead into the party, Frank at his side, but just a hair's breadth behind, as was only right.

  "What did you see?" Frank asked, looking about with curiosity and a not unwelcome awe at the beauties of the Sterescu house. From the main hall four spiral staircases rose to the upper floors, each one so heavily carved and fretted they seemed to mimic the ladies' lace. Everywhere was color and ornament, scroll work, ogees, woodwork like the tangled branches of the deep forest, smoothed and varnished to a deep lustre and touched all over with gold.

  The outside of the house had been an unwelcome blend of Wallachian and Ottoman styles, but the inside was pure Carpathian. Radu approved.

  "I saw a Roma girl."

  "Oh," said Frank, with a look of enlightenment. "It must have been Mirela. She does that. Somehow changes her shape, I mean. She was a chambermaid at your house when I saw her last."

  "You saw her on the boat trip down here. She was one of the boatmen on the raft."

  Frank stopped, and the crush of fellow invitees had to sweep around him, like a river around a small island. "I remember. She looked like Nicu then. I knew it couldn’t be Nicu because he was dead, but how could you tell?"

  "She looked exactly the same as she always does. Scruffy, cocky, half dressed." So Frank saw her differently each time, and Radu did not. Judging from the footmen's lack of reaction, they too saw her in her disguise. Nor had the boatmen seemed to find her out of place. Nor... Radu revisited the humiliating memory reluctantly, nor had his parents seen anything other than a village girl.

  Had she fooled even the villagers who had sent her? Or had they, knowing her talent, sent her in preference to one of their own, hoping she would fool him too?

  A stirring of something began under the murk in his heart, lightening it from within. He had always thought himself a resolutely unremarkable man. One occupying the place of a hero, without any of a hero's natural gifts. Weaker than the things he had been given to control. Helpless, even. Yet did he of all people have a gift of seeing the truth? How ironic.

  He wondered what he could do with it. How easily it could be turned into a weapon. He was still wondering when the pressure of the crowd swept them up again, scoured them along the rest of the corridor and deposited them, jostled and hot, in the first great dining room.

  There Sterescu welcomed them with open arms and another shot of palinka. Radu was grabbed by the elbow, turned around to face an older and younger woman, and a teenage boy, all in shades of blue silk that complimented the Chancellor's outer robe perfectly. They would have looked well composed in a family portrait. "My wife, Sanda." She was a handsome woman whose beauty was a little marred by an oversized nose. He tried not to look, but guessed from her amusement that he hadn't succeeded.

  “Our son, Stefan.” The boy's flicker of a smile told of shyness, partly conquered by willpower and long training.

  After which the whole family turned, like planets to their sun, and broke out in the most fatuous of grins as the girl put her hand into Radu's to be bowed over. "Our daughter, Catia... I mean Ecaterina."

  From the radiance of their parental pride, he expected a goddess, but she was a startlingly average girl. Middling height, a little too thin to be sensual, her mousy hair not justifying the ringlets in which it artfully escaped from her elaborate headdress. Her features were unremarkable, except for the port wine stain that spread like a new burn across the right side of her jaw and onto the lower part of her cheek.

  Her hazel eyes were quick and expressive. She too had been all but glowing when he first raised his eyes to her - full of pride and the certainty that she would dazzle. They stood what seemed an inordinately long time, looking at one another with a sense that a step had been missed in the dark. Her expression and the expressions of all those around him passed into puzzlement.

  Ecaterina frowned at him, and then a kind of intellectual curiosity sharpened her face as she leaned in and almost seemed to sniff him. "I am very pleased to meet you," she said, doubtfully, drawing back her gloved hand and rubbing it. "Are you a practitioner of the arcane arts, at all? St. George's Cloak is on your land, I understand?"

  "It is," Radu agreed, wondering what had just happened. "But I am a skeptic where magic is concerned. So much of it is chicanery and coincidence and the operation of men's fertile imagination and fears. I have seen many rational men claim to be able to do magic, and none of them could prove themselves before me."

  The onlookers gasped, as though he had done something astonishing by contradicting her. Even Frank was watching the girl as though he couldn't believe she existed - his mouth fallen open and his eyes dazzled. Ecaterina herself only looked intrigued. He had the impression that she had forgotten her onlookers existed; they were a painted backdrop against which she shone, but now she had found something better. Something that interested her more. He couldn't help but be flattered.

  "I hope you will come to my salon on a Wednesday afternoon," she said. "All the best people of Bucharest with an interest in theurgy attend. We are making some progress into understanding the art. So many of the ancient books are tissues of fantasy and cannot be relied on. It is worse than starting from ignorance, having to test all that is already written to find the truth in it. A skeptic would help us a great deal."

  "I..." Frank spoke hesitantly, as though she overawed him, as though he didn't feel himself worthy to stand in the same room
as she. "I have some small gifts. I would be interested in learning how to use them more fully. Might I...?"

  "Of course!" She beamed and steered Frank to a seat next to her, looking at Radu sideways as she did, expecting what? For him to be jealous that she was paying more attention to another man? The thought was laughable. Or it would have been if he had not caught that exact emotion on the faces of half of the onlookers, a flash of tight, possessive rage through every man in the room.

  Ridiculous. Unless, again, he was seeing something that no one else saw.

  Once they had sat at the long table and servants brought the first dishes - sour soups with meatballs and mushrooms - he had time to notice Sterescu looking at him doubtfully, disconcerted. It reminded him that he was a single man with a large estate, and Sterescu was the father of a daughter of marriageable age. Perhaps it would have been politic to look more impressed. It simply hadn't occurred to him. The girl gave him the impression she would rather pick him apart under a microscope than let him court her, even if he wanted.

  And there were two things that stood inexorably in the way of him wanting to ever court a wife.

  "What do you see?" he asked Frank again, while the empty soup plates were being shoved aside to make way for platters of beef stew and cabbage rolls, mamaliga and stuffed peppers, skewers of mutton and pork and chicken with onions and tomatoes, seasoned with rosemary, mixed meat sausages with mustard, balls of polenta wrapped around melted cheese, red beans and pickles and pilau.

  Frank was holding up his soup bowl in one hand, his plate in another, as if waiting for someone to come and take one away. His expression was indescribable, but made Radu happier - flummoxed and enchanted and utterly out of his depth. It was charming to see someone who didn't understand the most basic of things.

  Radu emptied a serving bowl onto Frank's plate, stacked the soup bowl on top of it, and began a little tower of crockery between them. "You stack them," he said. "By the time you can't see over them, you know you've eaten enough."