shadow thrown upon the muslin.
Florian watched the interplay with a sullen air and began to work a mournful little melody upon the harpsichord until the countess called to him.
“Florian, my dear boy, play us something more cheerful. We have had enough of sorrowful things,” she commanded with a kindly smile.
He obeyed, spinning out a pretty tune that was so soft and coaxing, his mother began to nod over her needlework, and it was still possible to hear the gentle rustle of the fire and the heavy sleeping breaths of the dog settled upon the hearth rug.
Only the count seemed unaffected by the soothing music, for he took a chair close to mine, ostensibly to look over the castle guest book I had unearthed. I turned the pages slowly, reading over the spidery scrawls of ink, once black but now faded to pale brown upon the foxed pages.
But the count was not a man to be ignored, and as Cosmina and Charles fell into conversation, he spoke, his voice low and soft and pitched for my ears alone.
“It will never do.”
I puzzled over a rampant signature that scrolled over the better part of a page. A baroness of some sort, visiting from Buda-Pesth a quarter of a century ago. The castle had been a hospitable place then, for each page was filled with signatures of the great and good, and the further back I turned, the more exalted the names.
“What will never do?” I murmured. I had found an archduke, and just below, the illegitimate son of a pope.
“You and that fellow,” he said, darting his eyes at Charles almost imperceptibly. “It is absurd.”
“I do not understand you,” I said primly.
“Don’t you? Come to me when he is abed.”
I caught my breath at the brazenness of his command, but still I kept my eyes fixed firmly upon the decaying page before me.
“I shall not.”
“Do not hiss at me, my dear. I mean only to talk with you. It was an invitation to converse, nothing more.”
I dared a glance and was surprised to find his eyes alight, whether from amusement or malice, I could not say. He was an enigma to me, this curious nobleman from Transylvania. I could not say from one moment to the next what he believed, what he held dear, what he would not do. More than an enigma, he was a chameleon lizard, always changing his colours just when I had learnt his disguises.
But even such a man as this could not command me, I decided, summoning my tattered pride.
I opened my mouth to refuse him, but just then he put out a hand, barely touching my arm. “Please?” he asked.
He was humble, as I had seldom seen him, and I wondered if this was a fresh stratagem of his to throw me from my complacency.
“I cannot,” I said firmly. And to show that I meant it, I closed the book and rose to walk away.
Cosmina’s silhouette of Charles was a remarkable thing. It managed to convey the features of the man, but it captured something indefinable as well, some essential part of him that I would have thought unknowable without conversation and expressions. I looked at the flat shadow snipped from the ebony paper, and I saw the friend, the publisher, the erstwhile suitor. And something more. Cosmina had captured something rather dashing about him as well, and I realised this was how she saw him, not as the stiff and stuffy man of business, but as the congenial gentleman who had engaged her attention.
“It is very like,” I said finally, and Charles looked mightily pleased.
He gave way for me to take my turn behind the little screen, and I saw that the count had settled himself behind a chessboard. I had not seen it before; the pieces appeared very old and fashioned of marble, burnished to a sheen with long use. As I watched in some trepidation, the count invited Charles to a game and they began to play. All the while, Florian kept up his gentle melodies while his mother drowsed and the countess read, occasionally putting out a slippered foot to stroke Tycho’s back.
“What a pleasant man your friend Mr. Beecroft is,” Cosmina said softly as she began to cut the silhouette.
“Yes, he is rather.”
“Have you known him long?” I wished I could gauge the strength of her interest, but her expression was hid from me by the muslin screen.
“Years, actually. I must have met him when I was eleven, perhaps twelve. His family firm published my grandfather’s books, and his father and my grandfather were great friends. They were both of them Englishmen settled in Edinburgh, so they felt the kinship of living abroad, I think. When his father called, Charles and I were left to amuse ourselves in the corner while our elders talked.”
“And yet you never mentioned him at school. Curious.” Her tone was speculative, but I could hear the decisive snips of her scissors.
“I cannot think why I should have,” I told her honestly. “He was simply a person I knew. I only saw him once or twice each year until I came home from school and Grandfather fell ill. He called one day with some business or other for Grandfather and the poor old dear was asleep. Charles and I talked instead and he discovered I had written a few little stories. He asked to see them, and took them away to read. A week later he returned with an offer to see them published in a magazine, with an eye to grooming me to write a book.”
My recollection was true and the events innocent enough, and yet I felt as if I were a penitent, called upon by her confessor to recount her crimes. I glanced at the muslin screen, but Cosmina was nothing more than an alteration in the light to me-no form, only the suggestion of a presence. In contrast, I was clearly revealed to her, every inch of my profile and expression laid bare. I felt naked and exposed, and I disliked it.
“Are you almost finished?” I asked.
“Very nearly, my dear. Hold quite still. I am at the neck and it is rather tricky as your hair is so heavy just there. Still, it would be worse if you were wearing your necklace,” she added, and I started, realising that I had quite forgot to retrieve the beads from the workroom. I should have to go to the count for no other reason than to reclaim my property before Cosmina detected my foolishness.
“Oh!” she exclaimed suddenly, her voice a study in woe.
“What is the matter?” I said, my voice a trifle too sharp.
I rose from my chair to see what the trouble was. Cosmina sat, black paper in one hand, scissors in the other.
She looked at me in dismay. “You moved so quickly, you startled me and I have quite ruined it.”
She gestured towards her lap where the tiny black image of my head had fallen to her skirts, the neck as neatly cut as if by a guillotine’s blade.
16
That night my sleep was broken by dreams of the count again, and the following day I felt thick-headed and dull; even Charles commented that I did not seem myself. Cosmina fell ill again, a relapse of her cold, and I did not see her, although Dr. Frankopan called and said he had given her something to help her to rest. Charles accompanied him back to the village, where the good doctor promised him a hearty meal at the inn, and I roamed the library, too distracted to settle. In the end, I decided a rest in my room would clear my head, but as soon as I entered, I realised someone had been there before me.
I was aware of my pulses quickening, as if I feared someone still lingered, watching me.
“I am not afraid,” I said stoutly. Almost as soon as I had said the words, my eyes fell to the table and I counted myself a fool. Coiled there was the string of blue beads I had misplaced. Since I had not gone to his room to retrieve them, the count must have returned them to me. Still, I could not rid myself of the feeling that someone had been in my room for a longer period of time than merely returning the necklace would have required. I searched my things carefully. Nothing had gone missing; nothing seemed actually disarranged. And yet I could not
