Coronets and Steel (23 page)

I shook my head firmly. “Thanks. I appreciate your offer, but I won’t trouble you.”

She regarded me, but did not seem angry. More like surprised. I wondered if she’d expected me to start hinting for handouts. Again I felt a spurt of irritation and scolded myself for projecting. She said quickly, “Then you must agree to a family party, in your honor, or I shall not give up. It would be so charming for your relations to meet you.”

Okay, that I could get behind. Newfound relatives! But . . . “I don’t have a suitable dress for formal parties,” I hedged. “I’m traveling light.”

“Then we shall avoid the gala. A simple gathering for after-dinner drinks. As for party clothes . . .” A crooked smile like my mother’s brought out the dimple. “What could be easier? I shall send over a frock of my daughter’s. It is bound to fit. Please, my dear. I shall beg until you give in—”

“I’d be honored,” I said awkwardly, feeling like a boor. “And as for the dress, don’t put yourself out. I’ll make do with what I have, since it’s not formal or anything.”

“Ah, thank you, dear child. Here is my address, should you change your mind and decide to come to me.” She reached into her Hèrmes handbag, pulled out a sheet of folded notepaper, and handed it to me.

The address was engraved at the top, under a coronet. “So. Will you come to lunch with me, my dear? There is so much I wish to ask you. Your—your grandmother, how I shall enjoy meeting her. Once we have found my poor daughter, and her wedding is concluded. So tiresome! The details must be arranged, and the bride not here—pardon me, my dear, here I rattle on and you have no idea what it is I’m talking about, have you?”

I am so not going there.
“She’s getting married,” I responded blithely. “That’s easy to understand. As for lunch, I wish I could, but I did have something else going—”

It was the shock that caused me to lie. Thrilled as I was at the idea of finding my family at last, I desperately needed some time alone. I wasn’t ready for this sophisticated woman who so weirdly resembled Mom but whose handbag probably cost more than our mortgage.

“Of course. Tomorrow evening, then. I shall tell you all about it when you come to me. Shall I send someone for you?”

“That would be nice.” At least that didn’t sound like I was begging for handouts, so I nodded like a dashboard doll. “Thanks.”

“Gaspard will call for you at a quarter to eight, then. I hold tomorrow evening a treasured promise.”

She had led us to the maze garden, which bordered the long curved sweep of a drive from the huge gate to somewhere on the other side of the palace. Directly in front of the palace waited a new Volvo with flags mounted on the front bumper. Seeing us, a chauffeur emerged from the car and opened the back door, where he stood at attention.

Aunt Sisi pressed my hands between hers. “Au revoir, my dear. Remember the address if you change your mind.”

“Thank you.” I turned away and marched briskly to the gate. The guard there gave me a salute. I gave him a rather strained smile in return.

 

When I got back to the inn I was met by a sharp change in atmosphere. Though the charming downstairs restaurant had always been tidy, it was even more clean than it had been for the wedding. Madam bustled out, calling urgently for Theresa, and this time she curtseyed before asking what my pleasure would be for dinner tonight? No mention of dining with the family. I stared down into her solemn face and slowly began to realize what Aunt Sisi’s words had meant.

The local police had come here and asked about me. They—and the Waleskas—assumed I was Ruli, using a false name. Aunt Sisi had rushed to meet me . . . and now she was the only person who knew I wasn’t her daughter.

I was about to straighten Madam out, but my reluctance to go into my background, my purpose for being here, made me hesitate.

If it didn’t harm Ruli to have a double prancing around the Adriatic, it won’t hurt her here, I decided. I’d let Aunt Sisi do the talking, when and if she wanted. Until that time, easiest to leave things as they were.

I turned to Madam, who had not asked why I suddenly understood their language. The giddiness had abated, but my emotions still roiled.

The Waleskas’ faces showed concern, so I forced a smile and said to Theresa, “Anything’s fine for dinner. There are two things I would like to do . . .”

I hesitated. I had been about to ask if they knew the hours to the business side of the cathedral, which had to be where they kept records, but everything Aunt Sisi had told me froze me up. I’d lost my anonymity. Was that a bad thing or a good thing? Bad in that everyone who might recognize me would want to know what I was doing, but good because if they thought I was Ruli I’d be wafted past red tape, but then there’d be even more questions . . .

And I skipped to my second thing. “I would like to hire a vehicle to take me up into the mountains tomorrow, for a day trip.”

Madam spread her hands as if to say “Anything—anything!” And since all friendly intercourse seemed to have been frozen by the awesome intrusion of Rank, I decamped to my room.

By morning, when I woke up to the roar of thunder announcing a major storm, I knew there’d be no trip to find Mina Hajyos.

But I was not upset. I wanted to spend time on the language—try to figure out what was going on in my brain. I could track down Mina the governess the day after Aunt Sisi’s party.

It was early, so I did a set of ballet exercises, even using the empty hallway for some combinations, leaps, and turns. It felt great, except that I wished I could get in some fencing. My arms needed the work, or I’d lose my speed and flexibility. I settled for a double set of push-ups.

I was going to head downstairs to breakfast when Theresa came to my door in her old-fashioned school uniform. Surprised, I forestalled her shy questions by asking, “Do you have school in summer?”

“Yes, we have festival in spring, and mid-August to early September. It is winter when we take our long break. The snow is sometimes too heavy for many students to come.” Then back to business, “Mama wishes me to say that the rain might prevent a journey into the mountains, unless it is urgent.”

I said, “It can wait a day. Meanwhile, I have a question, but it can also wait, if you’ve got to get to school.”

“It is early. I helped mother get the bread in an hour ago.” Her serious mouth lifted at the corners. “Please ask.”

“It’s about Fyadar. I saw a mural in the royal palace. Is he a Dobreni figure? I—I know a few of the stories, and I have loved them all my life. I’d love to find out more. Fyadar, and his friend Xanpia. She’s either an angel or a witch, I guess, since she’s got some kind of power. Fyadar seems to be a boy in some stories, and in some he’s half-animal.”

“You know about Fyadar?” Her expressive was odd, interested yet wary. Then she smiled. “Fyadar is a figure of legend.” She spoke formally, with the practice of presenting a report before a class. “The stories about him and his friends are ancient . . .” She went on to describe how the teachers during the Soviet years explained that he was borrowed from the Greek Pan, because he was half-goat. Fyadar, with his band of other magical mountain-forest denizens such as a good werewolf and a young vampire—

“Vampire?” I yelped, almost adding,
Gran never mentioned any vampires!

Theresa flushed. “Yes,” she said in a low but firm voice. “It is true that they are cursed. As some say are the were-creatures. But many children, ah, it is not their fault, and Saint Xanpia is friend to all.” Her voice hitched on a gasp. Her face flooded crimson, and she added, “So it says in the legends. Fyadar and friends, they roam the mountains.”

“I wonder if the legends are the same ones I heard. Have they changed in the last few years?”

You know how people will give you an answer, but not to the question you asked? “The legends are old. Fyadar and his friends were allied with the animals and birds.”

“Except for evil ones, like wolf packs,” I said, hoping to get her past the obvious details to whatever made her hesitate, as if thinking out each sentence, innocuous as they sounded. “And evil fey.” Since we were speaking French, I used the word
fée.
Her eyelids flickered, as if the word had extra meaning. Different meaning. As if it was a cue, or a code. “I never heard anything about weres. Or vampires.”

She stood there, looking at the floor.

Somewhat exasperated, I went on, “In the stories I was told, Fyadar and his friends often appeared and helped lost children, starving children, mistreated children. I got the feeling that the Fyadar legends were myths centered around the mystery, and well, what with bears and wolves, the savagery of mountain life.”

“The Soviet instructors called them escapism for children,” Theresa said, still in that school recitation voice. “All religion, and stories about—about the mountains—were forbidden. The older generation, during the war, could only study German things. “

“But your parents and grandparents told them anyway?” I prompted. Because how else would she know them?

She gave me a quick, fleeting smile, before her dark gaze earnestly read my face again. “The adults, when young. In school. They . . . they had their own resistance. They wrote stories.” When I didn’t throw up my hands and run away in horror, she offered with less timidity, “My sister’s generation. And older. Inherited them. And wrote more.”

“They resisted by writing stories?” I repeated and laughed. “That is
awesome!
” The word came out in English. I hastened to clarify, to win an answering grin from her, all over her face.

As if a cork had been pulled from a bottle, Theresa explained in a stream of enthusiasm, her thin hands gesturing.

The secrets began with the hiding of the Jews when the Germans invaded. They vanished—in plain sight. It was a countrywide conspiracy. Later, under the Soviets, the suppression of all religion caused a similar urge to secret resistance.

The children included the secret hidings in their stories, to the extent of publishing them, usually by what used to be called jellygraph. This labor-intensive method of publication involved writing in copy-ink on a tray of gelatin, and pressing papers on the ink until the ink slowly sank to the bottom of the tray. Then you had to write it all out again.

“Anna joined a Fyadar secret society when she was ten.” Theresa laughed. She was sitting on my chair, her feet together and her back straight. “They had signals, and passwords, and the little books were passed from hand to hand. Many had been recopied. I have collected some of these,” she added self-deprecatingly. “They are rare and fragile.”

“May I see some?” I asked.

Her cheeks pinked. “I will show you, but they are not, well, literature. Some are badly spelled as well, and have crude drawings not proper. Of the Gestapo, when they came to oversee the German soldiers, and of the Soviets. But,” she tipped her head, “Sister Magdalene once told me Fyadar societies did more for making children remember their heritage than the combined efforts of the overlords.”

“So the local Jewish children were part of this?”

“Yes.” She smiled. “The Gestapo could not take away people who were not there. They dressed like us, and learned and worshipped in secret, and our parents and grandparents saw nothing, heard nothing. They had their own schools, in secret. But the children met to trade books, at certain places.”

“Wow. How could that happen? I mean, the rest of Europe sure wasn’t as enlightened. I wish they had been.”

Theresa gave me a troubled glance. “I know. But here, early, we had to learn to live with one another, because . . .” She turned her gaze toward the window, and the wariness was back. “Because peace is good,” she finished firmly, in that tone people use when they’re trying to cover over for something they’d meant to say. “The people told the Germans that the Jews were sent out of the country two hundred years ago. There are no Jews anymore, that’s what they told the Germans, and the Soviets.”

“And it worked?”

“Dobrenica is small,” she said, hands out.

“So tell me about the secret societies. You belonged to one?”

“By the time I was old enough to join, the societies were already small. The Soviets were gone, and it did not matter so much to be secret anymore. I loved to read the stories, and I began to collect them.” She ducked her head and buried her hands in her skirt.

I said gently, guessing, “And you wrote a few, perhaps?”

She blushed, and there was the fleeting grin again.

“I’d love to see those.”

“They are written in Dobreni.” She was barely audible. “And are not very good. I was young when I wrote them. Now I am too busy with studies.”

“I would enjoy seeing them, if you would enjoy sharing them. That’s the story I grew up loving. And as for not very good Dobreni, I’m trying hard to learn, and the best way to learn is by practice.”

So that’s how I spent the day.

As soon as I began to read, the rhythms of sentences were so familiar I began to suspect that during those early years, when Gran had babysat me while Mom and Dad worked, she’d told me those stories in Dobreni. That had to be why the language surfaced in my mind like a reverse of the sinking of Atlantis—no sign of it at first, then suddenly it’s all there, though in simple form.

Once I figured out the orthography and the spelling, reading was easy. Some of the stories were handwritten and drawn in battered old composition books, others blurrily reproduced by jellygraph. Most were what we’d today call graphic novels—drawings connected by dialogue. In the sixties someone must have discovered comics, because the dialogue began to appear in balloons like the comics I grew up with, as opposed to the early books with the dialogue written in tiny letters beside each drawing.

As had happened at the palace, the language became easier to read—partly because the vocabulary was simple. Kids wrote for each other, so there wasn’t much attempt at sophisticated structure or poetic flights.