Chapter Text
It was both the faults of Maria and Henry.
Maria was a lavish admirer of spiritual and material goods. Henry appreciated beautiful possessions, uncontained by others, that were worth their weight in gold. Hence his engagement to the divine perversity that was Maria de Montebale. She did not fail to love. No, not in the least. She was a true lover. Vigorous, avaricious, consuming.
Jonathan had told Mina that society had had to accustom itself to the Italian aristocrats custom of kissing Henry's cheek, neck and shoulder in a gesture as easy as a smile from across the room during parties and private salons. It was her hand that would guide him at his back into a room. That was the first remarkable observation Mina had made of Maria and Henry. She had almost thought it to be unladylike, but Jonathan had simply said:
"I have never seen a woman so at ease with her own bombasity. If anyone insults Henry in front of her she will bear less resemblance to Aphrodite than that of Athena. The rebuke would be in the extreme."
It had been the arrangement of Mina's parents and Jonathan for Mina to stay in the boarding house until their wedding.
Yet, it seemed, that it would be post-poned.
Mina watched from the exterior lines as Jonathan's business related travel extended further, and her Mother invented the most positive and negative accusations. Mina was in no doubt that her Father was being barraged with abuse from his thin-lipped wife.
"Marry her to a man named Harker! Most as well have engaged her to a Swindler, a Lout, a Grubb!"
Yet it was Mina's Mother who had insisted on the engagement to Mr. Jenkin's newest asset at his solicitors firm.
The maids whispered that Mrs. Murray and Mr. Jenkins knew each other from days of old.
Mina did not know what to believe, and she tried not to think if it.
Nonetheless, there was a rupture in family cordiality that Maria had leapt upon with Henry in tow.
"Why does Mina not be our guest in one of my families properties here? Not the same, of course, as the suite of a palazzo, but an apartment, or some rooms, of complete privacy?"
Mina was aware of her parents grand ideals of the majesty of gentry, nobles, aristocracy and royals. Their discovery that their daughter had befriended an Italian aristocrat engaged to marry a relative of Queen Victoria had filled them with joy.
It was only Henry who counted in their esteem. Maria was Italian, and a Catholic, and therefore counted for nothing except a gift-giving presence in the view of Mr. and Mrs. Murray.
So, the couple accepted.
Mina had moved into the third floor rooms of an old house with multiple origins. Slavic, Turkish, Magyar, Scythian and Saxon decorations made a union that took Mina's breath away. It was decadence, yet only in base materials. There was no room and no desire for French, Italian or English influence.
"Did a Bohemian design this house?" Mina had asked. "The woodwork, the furniture, the carpets...its extroadinairy."
"A very wealthy man from Romania." Maria told her. "All of those eras come into one. Wallachia, Moldavia, Ottomans, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Holy Roman Empire, and the Russian Czars to boot."
"I have...never seen anything like this before." Mina saw dragons carved into timbers that lined the ceiling in the dining room. "In England and Scotland...acorns and bumblebees, unicorns and thistles. Cupboards, dressers, clocks and armchairs. But this..." She tilted her head back as she walked into a reception room, and discovered a pressed metal ceiling. "Maria!"
"Now that is the newest member of the interior." Maria enthused. "See all those swirls? Vine leaves and swan necks, blossoms and birds? The Baroque is back without the excess. Hm..." Maria thought of a way to explain to Mina what she knew from personal experience. How dour the world had become since the industrial revolution. How traditional crafts had been lost. A new breed of small-minded idiots had come to wave flags of religions, colonies, politics, and kingdoms at the crowded, rotting table. "Oh, who am I to say?" Maria said instead, her eyes glowing. "I am just terribly glad that all of my kin survived those Habsburgs and other undesirable Germans so I can be here with you! Come, come, let me show you the bathing room! Have you ever laid your eyes upon black marble and gold taps? Now you have!"
Mina almost took the Lord's name in vain when she did come to the bathing room on the second floor. She thought the bathing room had to be the most luxurious room in the house. Candles in bronze dishes with decorations of deer on the sides presented a bath with steps to climb into. The white tub was sunken into a black marble body. The black marble was placed with discreet simplicity across the floors and half the walls. To Mina's surprise, the room was full of multi-paned windows decorated with a light frost.
"Not quite your own home, my darling." Maria said. "I never would have considered having a heated towel rack, an armchair, and a coal burner near the bath until you described your family home to me."
Mina felt quite provincial.
"I am sure my Mother would put a library of good housekeeping books in there if the steam would not mould them." She remarked.
Maria laughed.
"But there are no curtains, Maria." Mina said.
"This high up?" Maria's eyes glittered coyly. "That would be a determined pervert. But, but! If we open them, you shall see the rose garden I have kept a secret for you."
The rose bushes were a deep red, and they were planted in the narrow petals design of a cathedral rose with a bird bath at the centre. The icon imagery made Mina's eyes linger. The garden was bordered by thick walls concealed by climbing species, Cyprus pine trees in neat cones, and Irish yews in a handsome disarray that blended into the climbing specimens.
"We should have tea out there, my dear." Maria said.
It had taken Mina two days to accustom herself to her new home. There was such an immediate feeling of familiarity that it disconcerted her. The only products of light were the sun or the flames of candles captured in ceramics or the pressed metal ceiling. Never had somewhere so profoundly close to gloom immersed her in such contentment.
Mina was all too aware of folly, and terrible thoughts. She prayed to God to protect her from them. She had not told anyone of the nightmares that she had been having. There were subtle signs. Her corset an inch tighter, her eyes heavy in the afternoon.
No one could know about the visions of pearls in her ears and around her throat with the fingertips of a man with long, light hair pushed under them to carress her throat. No one could know how she woke thrashing in the night, convinced of the excruciating pain of a claw trap cutting through her flesh to the bone, and the sadistic malice of a Mohammedman approaching her.
"You need a man's companionship." Her Mother had told her. "You need a man's interest."
It was the most explicitly the woman had ever spoken.
If this image is God's idea, why has he given me Jonathan Harker? Mina thought.
The thought kept coming.
The night of the celebrations of the anniversary of the revolution. The Grand Hotel. The carnival.
Count Dracul had made an indelible mark on her thoughts. His presence lived in her mind. The nightmares did not stop, and the fear grew in her. She could not speak of them without opening a world of destruction of her character and her reputation. Madwoman, the spastic lady, the deficient bovine. All words and slogans her parents used effortlessly, mockingly, arrogantly.
Count Dracul made it worse, for Mina thought that he would not regard her in that way if she told him.
Three weeks of waiting for Jonathan had become an extension. The journey to the Romanian Kingdom and the organization of a centuries old estate had transpired to be a monumental commission. A note in Jonathan's handwriting had arrived for her.
His apology had been so formal, yet so tender.
He was a man of modernity. Women were not fragile goods that needed to be cherished. Women were not idiots that could not survive without men. He believed in bicycles, development of specialized medicine, charity groups, social organisations, and the vote for women.
He had never before left her, or told her in correspondence, that he thought of her with utmost compassion. He had never told her that he understood her, and he had never quietly requested, almost pleaded, for her patience and forgiveness.
Mina found herself telling Maria. They laid on a tartan blanket in one of the petals made by the planting of the rose bushes. Maria had a plate of small croissants on a china plate. She and Matia took turns to dip them in clotted cream and fig jam.
"Glory to all good and kind that he works!" Maria laughed. "A man of letters, energy and drive. He is loyal to his role, and to the esteem of his person."
Spoken of in that manner, the situation no longer gnawed at Mina's already uneasy conscience.
"You're lonely." Maria said softly. Mina turned her head. They gazed at each other. "You are lonely, my darling." Maria insisted. "You do know it is no crime for a young woman to have companions? A widower prince is the most sublime of them. You are in the position of an angel, dear Mina. Saving grace to a man that would gave followed his wife to the grave if he could have."
"What...what is it that stopped him?" Mina heard the high pitched her voice had risen to.
"God." Maria said. "Such as he is, or isn't. We'll never truly know until we get to the pearl gates. Unfortunately, we can't come back to tell those we love what actually happens. Everything...is an idea, darling, until we find it ourselves. It is why life is so terrifying, and death so terrifying."
"I'm scared of dying." Mina said. "I'm scared I'll go to hell."
"I never was." Maria told her. "I'm too beautiful, and I only do what I wish to do."
Mina laughed.
"It does not work like this!" She said.
"And, I am certainly not going to God unless I can bring Henry with me." Maria gave a coy smile. "I'm not interested in heaven without my lovely gentleman."
Maria held Mina's hands in her own. She squeezed it kindly.
Maria wrote to Count Dracul.
The three of them would go out to dinner, or rather, Mina and the Count would go out to dinner.
"Would you like me to come?" Maria asked as she sealed the envelope with a wax seal and a press of the de Montebale crest.
Mina hesitated in her answer. The shame it caused made her body hurt. The obvious folly, constantly compelling her against her wish for self-control, felt all too strongly like a form of possession.
"My darling, you are so agonised by happiness. Do you feel you don't deserve it?" Maria asked.
Mina moved her shoulders awkwardly, and touched her brow faintly with her fingertips as she tried to arrange her emotions into a settled order.
"I am...so glad to not have to live with my parents anymore." The words came from Mina with an excruciating pain that twisted her expression. "It was not good for me anymore. I had...no room to feel like myself."
"All the more reason for you to spend time with our dear Wallachian friend!" Maria enthused. "You have not yet had a chance to experience life and he has forgotten what it is like to experience life! You two must go out, as much as you can! Have fun, as much fun as you can!"
So Mina did.
The evening sated her feelings of time spent unfulfilled.
Vlad's conversation lent itself to classical artwork, and botany of the Arabic and Indian continents when Mina answered his request to know what she liked to talk of.
The conversation widened to experiences of travels, ships, trains, private homes, natural wonders, and landscape.
At one point, Vlad held her hand on the table, and the world did not end in an outburst of moral indignation.
"Your dress, it is borrowed from Maria?" Vlad observed the navy gown with the white collar, cuffs, and lace decorations on the bodice.
"She told me that an evening away from the floral and the pastel would be a beneficial change." Mina replied. "I think it makes me look quite pale."
Mina was right, it did.
"Your own taste becomes you." Vlad said. "I believe red would become you. Green. Gold. Pink."
Mina smiled.
"I have nothing in red, or green, but in pink, and a yellow that could be gold in the right light, yes." Mina softly chuckled. "I once heard that widowers are connoisseurs of women's dress. What is your opinion of that?"
"It depends on the widower." Vlad said. "All men have an opinion on how a woman is beautiful."
"What is your opinion?" Mina asked. "What did your wife wear?"
Vlad gazed at her.
A lotus opening. The petals of a lily unfurling.
Deep wound.
Haunting regret.
"Pearl's." Vlad began. "Rubies. Diamonds set in silver and platinum."
"Oh my goodness..." Mina said.
"Most of her dresses were made from velvet, damask, silk and chiffon that is made outside the kingdom." Vlad continued. "Silver, grey, lavender and purple. Blue, green and white. Colours of the Earth where we lived. Furs of wolves and bears that I hunted, or my kinsmen hunted."
"Oh." Mina imagined the death of the creatures before they covered the body of the dead Countess. Arrows in the side, and axe through the back of the head. "I...think I would be in awe of her, and quite frightened of her."
"She was kind." Vlad's thumb moved over her knuckles. "She would say...that you are pure. You do not harm others for your own benefit. It is rare to be like this."
The dinner lasted more than four hours.
Mina asked more questions about Vlad's wife.
She saw him grow miserable, and weary, but it did not settle in her. She did not realize that she should stop. A curiosity in her, light shining off glass, continued to compel her.
"How did she die?" Mina asked.
"You...cannot expect me to speak to it." Vlad said.
It was only then that Mina understood the trespass that she had committed.
"We should leave, Mina." Vlad said. "It is becoming late." He lifted his hand for the cheque, averting his eyes from her.
It was the only time that Mina had seen him do that to her.
"Oh, good Lord, I apologise." Mina said. "I truly am sorry."
Vlad's eyes lifted to her face slowly.
"It has been...horrendous...for me, Mina." Vlad said. "You could not imagine."
"What - what will you do now?" Mina asked. "Are you returning to the hotel? Are you sending me back to Maria?"
She heard the fraught desperation in her voice, and it shamed her.
Vlad's eyes returned to her. They glowed richly. Mina desperately wanted him to tell her that it was alright, even though she knew it was not.
"Feet that have not yet stepped on down to the ground." Vlad spoke lowly, his accent heavy. "Infant heels, still pink. How will you be cut, how many grasses? These unwanted thorns of life."
Mina swallowed.
"Yes...you're right." She said softly. "I have never had anything truly ill happen to me. I do not know where to begin with such circumstances that you have suffered."
"And then how will you run from animals?" Vlad asked. "Yes, from dishonest people. Across the clean field, the dormant forest, the evil will chase you into the hills."
Mina gazed at him, unsure if she was in receipt or fortune or curse from him.
"How your fingers tremble when meeting a beloved, a friend." Vlad said. "They will be intertwined with a kiss. They will cover each other with a sacred vine."
The water came to their table with the cheque. Vlad extracted his wallet from inside his jacket, extracted a series of notes, and told the waiter to take the excess.
"How will barefoot walk in the white light?" Vlad put to Mina. "Seek happiness in the land of burning? On stones, and sand, the the red sea? In a country that is no longer on a map. When your legs grow tired, they howl and cry, and will ask for mercy. They will be taken to a green house with windows to the field, not left to rot in raw ground to lie and cry. Up in the golden air, the old infants's heels will sparkle in the evening soft light."
Mina went to the Grand Hotel with Vlad.
They sat side by side in the carriage cab instead of sitting opposite each other. Both of Mina's hands were wrapped around the crook of Vlad's arm. One of his hands laid over hers against his body.
The moon had risen in an indigo sky. Velvet tranquil with diamonds.
Mina still held Vlad's elbow as they climbed the ornate staircase from the hotel's foyer. She had no care that the reception had seen her in company with Vlad and purposely knew not to ask the Wallachian Prince who she was and where she had come from.
Mina wondered for a moment if Vlad felt the press her fingertips and despised.
He would have unattached me, Mina thought. He would have just sent me back to Maria's address
Vlad extracted a key from his coat, and unlocked the doors of his apartment.
"Please, come in for a little longer." He said.
They stepped over the threshold of the apartment, and Vlad shut the door behind them.
"Please." Mina said. "There...there is something I want to say. I understand if you never want to see me again, but, please, I want to say just one thing."
Vlad swallowed.
"Tell me." He said.
"To be so bereft, Count..." The back's of Mina's fingertips absorbed the heat of Vlad's cheek as her hand rose to touch his face. "You must have been so certain, and so assured, that you were earnestly loved by your wife."
Vlad's hand curled into Mina's. He moved his face against the back of his fingertips so his mouth could press into a lingering kiss against them.
"What is an experience if it is not shared?" Vlad asked, his voice throbbing low with emotion.
Mina's brow furrowed slightly. Tension that was in itself a feeling of beauty wound in the core of her body. She felt taller, and her spine stronger, by it's presence. Gravity planted her feet to the ground in her heeled boots as they had never been before. She felt no need to be gentle, polite, and mannered. The man before her would not demean and detest her if she was not.
Yet she wanted to be so for him.
She did care, and she did hope she had the death of understanding to imagine and empathise with him. The loss of his wife had transformed his identity as a man, and therefore, those who recieved him.
Mina looked at Vlad and saw a man who had slept alone, wondering night after night how to make the bed feel less empty. She looked at him and saw a man who had not looked over his shoulder to see his wife coming into the room with her sewing basket or a portfolio of sketches.
What of the children? Mina thought. Those he wanted but never had? They exist, too, somewhere. Close to us, but lost, even if they never were laid on the cot or held on our chest
"That is true." Mina told him. She smiled a little. "You'll make me cry, too." Her voice softened as her eyes sparkled. "She was very good to you. How clear it is...for me to see. Oh...I envy her." Mina's smile became wider. "What a lovely to be comforted by."
Agonised by, Mina knew.
Two tears ran down her cheeks. Each aligned with the shape of her nose, and ran over her upper lip.
The water that glistened there made Vlad lean down to her.
The edges of his hair brushed Mina's lips and took the water from them. Her hand in his moved to rest against his clothed collarbone.
"I have upset you." Vlad said into her ear. He found the point of her perfume there. The place where earrings of pearls and diamonds and silver had hung. A place that he used to hold in his teeth carefully while she moved under him. "Forgive me."
"You enchant me." Mina told him, her mouth brushing against his jaw and cheek.
Vlad felt that he could not let her go back to the boarding house.
Mina did not want to leave him when he was so responsive, and malleable to the best of her person.
It was too late in the transcendence of their conditions to naturalism to afford a ridiculous notion of others opinions or awareness. Mina's parents, the absent Jonathan.
Society was not civilisation. Mina did not like to think it. What did it all mean, if not? What did she mean, if her role was found to be closer to a pantomime designed by designs of insanity called modern culture?
He's not an unfaithful man, Mina thought of Vlad. He is disembodied. He has had time with the worst of feelings. Noe he needs time with the best of feelings
"Perhaps you should retire, Count." Mina told him. "If not to sleep, then rest. Do not worry. I shall not leave just yet. I will sit with you. I want to."
Vlad gazed at her.
"Have I shocked you?" Mina asked. "Does it seem that I have overstepped my station as a friend of your friend?"
"I would hope..." A corner of Vlad's mouth lifted slightly. "...that you are my friend, too."
"We are in good fortune, then." Mina said. "We are friends. I will wait her while you change. Call my name when you are in bed."
Vlad experienced the same feeling of his multiple attempts of suicide.
The way his body had fallen. Velocity of speed in combination of the ice in the air hitting the exposed skin of his face and his hands as he plummeted towards the earth.
The blindness as his eyes had not longer being able to focus due to the speed of the fall. The suffocation as his lungs failed to contract breath as his figure split the air.
He left her and retreated to the suite.
To not be too quick, and to not be too slow.
Teeth cleaned, cologne. Night shirt, dressing robe. Only a bare inch more of his skin uncovered due to the absence of a starched collar and fitted tie. Vlad moved an armchair of blackwood with a frame carved with the serpentine bodies of dragons close to the bed. Mina would be able to extend her legs, and he could not simply lunge to her.
What a farce it seemed. What a glory it seemed. All that time passed in the world, and how, now, it delivered itself unto him.
"Mina." Vlad called.
The suite's doors were decorated with panels that were painted by hand with paint and rare metal gild. Swans, doves, swallowtails and pheasants coupled with vines, climbing roses, fig trees, and branches bearing apple fruit. Yet once the doors were open, the Rococco gave away to the High Middle Ages at Vlad's request to the management of the grand hotel.
The subtle magic of the familiar. Heavy bed curtains in dark red velvet and damask above white linens with densely woven fibre across the mattress. A vase of red roses within the room in a silver urn decorated with deer, and a dozen beeswax candles that provided clear, untarnished light.
Vlad saw Mina's eyes widen and her lips parted in wonder as she came into the room. Vlad's heartbeat soared as she closed the doors behind her.
It seemed like a dark cave in the first moments. From the cream, mint, pink, acorn and gold of the French apartment, the small coercion of Wallachian tastes seemed like the sun's light sucked from the earth.
"Have you been resting like this?" Mina asked. "Every night? My goodness. It's like a fairytale."
"I wanted it to be like my home once it was decorated." Vlad said. "The men in my family were told to be quiet when the women brought furniture, icons, paintings, and silks into the chambers."
"Corrupting influences." Mina jested. "What a sin for eives to want their husbands to be comfortable."
Vlad's hair, and the absence of a moustache or a beard, made him look young without being childish.
When was his last kiss? Mina thought.
Vlad was glad that he was sat up in the bed, stationary and supported as Mina gracefully lowered herself into the armchair brought close to the bed. Her gaze of entirely humane qualities were the subject of divine memories and lingering consolidations.
Vlad gazed at one of Mina's hands in her lap, and the other holding the arm of the chair. Draga mea. The only one he had ever wanted to remain forever.
Come home, he thought. Fall in love with me again
"If I tell you a story, shall you tell me one?" Mina proposed.
"I will." Vlad replied.
Mina told Vlad of experiences from childhood; excursions in fruit orchards, the second home near the sea, enormous German governesses and very rude Scottish nannies. It made Mina laugh when the retrospective view of some of the experiences hit her.
Nanny MacDonald with her harsh tongue for the adults and pear soap scented cuddles was probably a discreet woman drunk. Frau Gerber was certainly too fearsome with her arms like irons for any man to ever decide to marry. How did a governess come to have such a figure? What did she do on her days off?
Vlad told her a story about his parents. His Mother coming to the base of the Carpathian mountains to marry his Father as warfare drew closer, and ties needed to be consolidated and strengthened for the inevitable end.
She saw within him, that there were snow capped mountain peaks and the slate roof turrets of medieval castles. Fires in the hearths of fortified walls. Dragons in the woodwork and the tapestries.
Without concious warning, fatigue overcame Mina. Vlad did not interrupt it, or mind her to waken herself. He watched as Mina's head relaxed back in the armchair, before it slowly descended to her shoulder. Her cheeks rounded, and her chin softened, with rest. Her closed eyes seemed to grow larger, her eyelashes and brows thick, with her long white nose stark against her dark hair arranged around her face.
As Mina slept, the last states she was aware of were the smell of the roses in the room, and with it, the past life of someone else.
With a deep draw of breath, a gasp of life above an ocean of which there was no sign, Mina woke.
She remained in the armchair, and she wondered if a long time had passed. She saw Vlad had gone to sleep on his side that faced her. Her eyelashes fluttered as she blinked away the shock of her sudden wakening and acquainted herself with Vlad's changed presence.
No one in the world would believe this, Mina thought in wonder. All of this nonsense I have heard throughout my life of wily cads, evil seducers, bounding ravishment, and none so possessed for this sin as the aristocrats and nobles of Europe. I either have discovered the sublime exception, or I am surrounded by idiots
His hair was tucked behind one ear, and the veins across his eyelids and temples were visible as her face focused upon them. Light and dark green. Life.
"Are you alright, Mina?" Vlad asked. His eyes slowly opened. Mina was apalled by her lack of manners and stunned by the kaleidoscope of colours that glittered in his dark eyes, lucid with peace, as they looked over her.
"I rather surprised myself." She said. "I dropped off without meaning to, and I suddenly woke."
"Are you comfortable?" Vlad asked.
"I...yes. Yes, I am." Mina replied. "I wonder what time it is? I hope Maria has not become concerned and has called the calvary in response."
"Her excitement does have limits." Vlad said. "She understands the severity of authority."
"I..." Mina found herself unsure of herself.
Excuses to go. She truly had stayed. A time agreeable, and by extent, a time assured.
She should go, yet she did not want to.
It had been so good. There was nothing wrong. It was perfect, strange, and new.
"There is a guest bedroom, and two servants room in this apartment." Vlad said. "All three are prepared. Please, stay, if you want to."
Mina felt herself transported into a reverie. Affection melted the marrow in her bones. Security. Comfort. Certainty.
I don't have a nightdress, she thought.
Mina laughed. She could not help herself. She laughed and laughed.
"I'm sorry!" She exclaimed. "I'm so sorry. I - I don't have a nightdress and I just thought...I am sorry, I am not mocking your suggestion, please, believe me. I thought I...could be like Eve but even she -"
Vlad began to laugh, too.
"- even she possessed much more propirety than that." Mina continued to laugh. "Oh...oh my goodness. I have...become quite silly."
"I enjoy...the sound of your laugh." Vlad said.
Mina knew her complexion had taken on the colour of a strawberry. Her cheeks were warm with the coloured that sat under her skin.
"I'm foolish, sometimes." She said. She eased herself out of the armchair, and moved to sit on the edge of Vlad's bed. "Yet you make me feel just the opposite."