Angels of Istanbul, page 3
“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 because he had lost his rank. The fact that 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 vital to preserve, illusory though it was when Radu was paying his wages—and doing so, moreover, just because he liked Frank’s pretty face. Frank had never quite understood why women made such a great fuss over the desire to possess their own property or make their own wills, but now that he found himself dependent on a lover’s charity it was beginning to become clear.
With his parents, Radu had learned to shrug off insult and powerlessness. Mavrocordatos had certainly not earned his affection, but he was a Greek on a Wallachian throne—he must have known he would never have it anyway. If his test had allowed Radu to appear in good light to the rest of the court, Radu supposed he could forgive it after all.
He had accustomed himself to appreciating the positive surfaces of things. Down in the depths there was usually anguish, sometimes monstrosity. To refuse to look and to concentrate 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 rest of the week as it came, bringing sunlight to long-closed rooms. The visit of the piano tuner on 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 Haydn and 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. Frank was a guest, a foreigner, and a noble one at that. He honoured 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 celestial colour, Frank looked like some unearthly thing, angelic, breakable, too fine for this earth.
Radu should have let Frank die—should have let his parents kill him and kept them in their place as a result. He should have sacrificed his lover to keep his country safe, but he hadn’t. It had been selfish, irresponsible of him.
But 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, hold on to the things he wanted to keep?
He shoved his doubts 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 initially asked for a powdered wig and breeches so he could dress as the English gentleman he was, but it would be a crime to cover such hair with horse-pelt, white powder, and pomade. The subject had been successfully scoffed at and dropped, and the tailor had brought trousers and boots and hats fit for a prince instead.
It was pleasant to be well-dressed, to no longer seem 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 ţuică 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.
As none of these new relationships had yet had time to deepen into intimacy, the visits only permitted small talk—asking after the health of one’s family, the prosperity of one’s land. Frequently the marriage prospects of one’s daughters. Radu understood that his appearance, out of seclusion, newly in possession of a considerable gift of money and still single, could only mean to others that he was on the hunt for an appropriate wife. Though this thought, too, trailed off into darkness, it was not an impression 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 branch of the illustrious Văcărescu family had dwelled 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 find a 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 prospect 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-coloured coat. To enjoy the carriage ride through several acres of parkland in which fruit trees were just beginning to drop their petals, a lightly fragranced snow lit up by many lanterns.
Out to a great circular drive packed with conveyances, ambling now as each paused at the wide-open doors of the 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 her presence strange. She’d been offered in place of a Vlach girl, she’d been a boatman, and now she was doing the job 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 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 see her—in her washing line of mismatched clothes, boatman’s felt waistcoat, shirt over kirtle over trousers, her black tangled hair constrained by neither head scarf nor hat—and mistake her for 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 Monday morning.”
She remembered in time not to curtsey, but it was a close and awkward thing.
Frank frowned, his gaze flickering between the two of them.
“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. Pockmarked. Red haired, rusty-green eyes.”
The girl pressed her hand to her mouth as if to stop herself giggling. She might have said 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.
How odd. Radu suffered himself to be led 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, where they handed their outer cloaks to hovering servants and took the first of a series of shots of palincă, four spiral staircases rose to the upper floors, each one so heavily carved and fretted they seemed to mimic the ladies’ lace. Everywhere was colour and ornament, scrollwork, ogees, woodwork like the tangled branches of the deep forest, smoothed and varnished to a deep lustre and touched all over with gold. Such patches of the plastered walls that suffered to be seen through all the ornament were painted robin’s-egg blue, and gave again the impression of a summer sky seen through a tree canopy.
The outside of the house had been a blend of Wallachian and Ottoman styles, but the inside was pure Carpathian. He took note of it, like another secret revealed.
“I saw a Roma girl.” Radu smiled at the other new arrivals, hoping they did not see uncertainty under it. To have peers, all of a sudden—it was delightful, but disconcerting. How did one deal with equals? He didn’t know. “A very impertinent one.”
“Oh.” Frank smiled, nodding. “It must have been Mirela. She does that. Somehow changes her shape, I mean. She was a chambermaid at your house.”
“You saw her on the boat trip down here too. 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 was wearing Nicu’s shape then. I knew it couldn’t be Nicu because he was dead, but how could you tell?”
“She always looks the same to me. Scruffy, cocky, half-dressed.”
So Frank saw her differently each time, and he 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 . . . he revisited the shameful memory reluctantly. Nor had his parents seen anything other than a village girl. Father, indeed, had sworn he would have killed anyone who mocked them by providing a Roma bride.
Had she fooled 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 him with open arms and another shot of palincă. Radu tossed it back before Sterescu grabbed him by the elbow and turned him around to face two women—one older, one younger—and a teenage boy, all in shades of blue silk that complemented the stolnic’s outer robe perfectly. They would have made a fine family portrait. “My wife, Sanda.” She was a handsome woman whose beauty was a little marred by an oversized nose. He tried not to stare at it, 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.
After which the whole family turned, like planets to their sun, as the girl put her hand into Radu’s to be bowed over. Sterescu broke out in the most fatuous of grins. “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 felt 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 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 sceptic 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 with a starstruck expression—his mouth fallen open and his eyes dazzled. Ecaterina herself only looked intrigued. He had the impression that she had forgotten her admirers altogether; they were a painted backdrop against which she shone, but now she had found a subject 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, hampered as much as aided by the works of those who’ve gone before. So many of the ancient books are tissues of fantasy and cannot be relied on. They have to be tested at every point. I sometimes think it might have been easier to start from mere ignorance rather than from misinformation. At any rate, a sceptic would help us a great deal.”
“I . . .” Frank spoke hesitantly, as though overawed, “I have some small gifts. I would be interested in learning how to use them better. Might I . . .?”
“Of course!” She beamed and steered Frank to a seat next to her, watching Radu sideways as she did, expecting what? For him to be jealous that she was paying attention to another man? The thought was laughable, or it would have been if he had not caught that exact emotion on half of the onlookers faces, a flash of tight, possessive rage.
Ridiculous. Unless, again, he was seeing something that no one else saw.
Once they had sat at the long table and servants had brought the first dishes—sour soups with meatballs and mushrooms—he had time to notice Sterescu examining him doubtfully. 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 appear more overcome, but 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 had wanted to.
And there were two things that stood inexorably in the way of him wanting to ever court a wife.
“When you look at Ecaterina, what do you see?” he asked Frank, while the empty soup plates were being shoved aside in favour of platters of beef stew and cabbage rolls, mămăligă and stuffed peppers, 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. 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.”
“That’s . . .” Frank’s eyes widened as though he’d been about to say something uncomplimentary, “rather fun,” he finished, gamely. “What was the question again?”
They were, thankfully, side by side, so Radu could lean closer and under the cover of the music and the roar of conversation, nod up to the top of the table and ask again, “What do you see when you look at Ecaterina?”
“I . . .” Frank gave him a startled glance that morphed rapidly into revelation. “She’s the most beautiful creature, but more than beauty, she has a kind of spiritual perfection. I mean, you can’t see her and imagine that she’s capable of anything wrong. She’s kind and wise and perfect, and you can see all of that in her eyes. Now that you mention it . . .” He drained his wine, had another glass placed beside it instantly. “That is rather hard to believe. You think it’s a glamour?”
Radu’s parents had always told him that magic was for the feebleminded—for peasants who didn’t have enough to worry about and must therefore invent curses and witches and spirits to trouble their placid dreams. And perhaps that had been true for most of their three-hundred-year lives, but since the Rising things had changed. It now seemed dishonest to deny that something was going on that natural philosophy could not explain.
“I have no idea, but I see a very plain young woman. Do I see false or do you?”
“We’ll see,” said Frank, looking up towards the head of the table, where callow Stefan had risen, gawky as a blue heron in his new silk gown, his beardless face bright red with nerves as he opened a round of toasting in his unsettled voice, which broke in to a squeak on the “Noroc” at the end. Radu grinned at the poor boy and downed his glass, having lost count early on of how many shots he’d taken. What did it matter—he was still capable of standing up.
“What I want to know is: where is Gabrielle Giroux?” Frank went on. He, too, was merry with wine and plum brandy, pink across the cheeks and the bridge of his nose, and with wisps of his gold hair curling all around the brimless lip of his black hat. “She came to London last year, but I wasn’t able to attend. But the sensation! I don’t think anyone stopped talking about it for months. If you can’t see what she does, I will say you need to be most earnestly pitied.”
