Chapter 33
When the Perpignan express had disappeared completely beyond the silvery trees and village roofs, Barley shook himself. “Well, he’s on that train, and we’re not.”
“Yes,” I said, “and he knows exactly where we are.”
“Not for very long.” Barley marched over to the ticket window-where one old man seemed to be falling asleep on his feet-but soon came back looking chastened. “The next train to Perpignan isn’t until tomorrow morning,” he reported. “And there’s no bus service to a major town until tomorrow afternoon. There’s only one boarding room at a farm about half a kilometer outside the village. We can sleep there and walk back for the morning train.”
Either I could get angry or I was going to cry. “Barley, I can’t wait till tomorrow morning to take a train to Perpignan! We’ll lose too much time.”
“Well, there’s nothing else,” Barley told me irritably. “I asked about cabs, cars, farm trucks, donkey carts, hitchhiking-what else do you want me to do?”
We walked through the village in silence. It was late afternoon, a sleepy, warm day, and everyone we saw in doorways or gardens seemed half stupefied, as if he or she had fallen under a spell. The farmhouse, when we reached it, had a hand-painted sign outside and a sale table with eggs, cheese, and wine. The woman who came out-wiping her hands on her proverbial apron-looked unsurprised to see us. When Barley introduced me as his sister, she smiled pleasantly and didn’t ask questions, even though we had no luggage with us. Barley asked if she had room for two and she said,“Oui, oui,”on the in-breath, as if she were talking to herself. The farmyard was hard-packed dirt, with a few flowers, scratching hens, and a row of plastic buckets under the eaves, and the stone barns and house huddled around it in a friendly, haphazard way. We could have our dinner in the garden behind the house, the farmwife explained, and our room would be next to the garden, in the oldest part of the building.
We followed our hostess silently through the low-beamed farm kitchen and into a little wing where the cooking help might once have slept. The bedroom was fitted up with two little beds on opposite walls, I was relieved to see, and a great wooden clothes chest. The washroom next door had a painted toilet and sink. Everything was immaculately clean, the curtains starchy, the ancient needlework on one wall bleached with sunlight. I went into the bathroom and splashed my face with cold water while Barley paid the woman.
When I came out, Barley suggested a walk; it would be an hour before she could have our dinner ready. I didn’t like to leave the sheltering arms of the farmyard at first, but outside the lane was cool under spreading trees, and we walked by the ruins of what must have been a very fine house. Barley pulled himself over the fence and I followed. The stones had tumbled down, making a map of the original walls, and one remaining dilapidated tower gave the place a look of past grandeur. There was some hay in the half-open barn, as if that building was still used for storage. A great beam had fallen in among the stalls.
Barley sat down in the ruins and looked at me. “Well, I see you’re furious,” he said provokingly. “You don’t mind my saving you from immediate danger, but not if it’s going to inconvenience you afterward.”
His nastiness took my breath away for a moment. “How dare you,” I said finally, and walked away among the stones. I heard Barley get up and follow me.
“Would you have wanted to stay on that train?” he asked in a slightly more civil voice.
“Of course not.” I kept my face turned from him. “But you know as well as I do that my father may already be at Saint-Matthieu.”
“But Dracula, or whoever he is, isn’t there yet.”
“He’s a day ahead of us now,” I retorted, looking across the fields. The village church showed above a distant row of poplars; it was all as serene as a painting, missing only the goats or cows.
“In the first place,” Barley said (and I hated him for his didactic tone), “we don’t know who that was on the train. Maybe it wasn’t the villain himself. He has his minions, according to your father’s letters, right?”
“Even worse,” I said. “If that was one of his minions, then maybe he’s at Saint-Matthieu already himself.”
“Or,” said Barley, but he stopped. I knew he had been about to say, “Or perhaps he’s here, with us.”
“We did indicate exactly where we were getting off,” I said, to save him the trouble.
“Who’s being nasty now?” Barley came up behind me and put one rather awkward arm around my shoulders, and I realized that he had at least been speaking as if he believed my father’s story. The tears that had been struggling to stay under my lids spilled over and rolled down my face. “Come, now,” said Barley. When I put my head on his shoulder, his shirt was warm from sun and perspiration. After a moment I pulled away, and we went back to our silent dinner in the farmhouse garden.
“Helen wouldn’t say more during our journey back to the pension, so I contented myself with watching the passersby for any signs of hostility, looking around and behind us from time to time to see if we were being followed by anyone. By the time we reached our rooms again, my mind had reverted to our frustrating lack of information about how to search for Rossi. How was a list of books, some of them apparently not even extant, going to help us?
“‘Come to my room,’ Helen said unceremoniously as soon as we’d reached the pension. ‘We need to talk in private.’ Her lack of maidenly scruple would have amused me at another moment, but just now her face was so grimly determined that I could only wonder what she had in mind. Nothing could have been less seductive, anyway, than her expression at that moment. In her room, the bed was neatly made and her few belongings apparently stowed out of sight. She sat down on the window seat and gestured to a chair. ‘Look,’ she said, pulling off her gloves and taking off her hat, ‘I’ve been thinking about something. It seems to me we have reached a real barrier to finding Rossi.’
“I nodded glumly. ‘That’s just what I’ve been puzzling over for the last half hour. But maybe Turgut will turn up some information for us among his friends.’
“She shook her head. ‘It is a wild duck chase.’
“‘Goose,’ I said, but without enthusiasm.
“‘Goose chase,’ she amended. ‘I have been thinking that we are neglecting a very important source of information.’
“I stared at her. ‘What’s that?’
“‘My mother,’ she said flatly. ‘You were right when you asked me about her, while we were still in the United States. I have been thinking about her all day. She knew Professor Rossi long before you did, and I never truly asked her about him after she first told me he was my father. I don’t know why not, except that it was clearly a painful subject for her. Also’-she sighed-‘my mother is a simple person. I did not think she could add to my knowledge of Rossi’s work. Even when she told me last year that Rossi believed in Dracula’s existence, I did not press her much-I know how superstitious she is. But now I wonder if she knows anything that might help us find him.’
“Hope had leaped up in me with her first words. ‘But how can we talk with her? I thought you said she had no phone.’
“‘She doesn’t.’
“‘Then-what?’
“Helen pressed her gloves together and slapped them smartly against her knee. ‘We will have to go see her in person. She lives in a small town outside Budapest.’
“‘What?’ Now it was my turn to be irritable. ‘Oh, very simple. We just
