Covenant With the Vampire (16 page)

“Jeffries would not wear it,” I explained, and after a beat added, in a low
voice: “He has disappeared.”

“Oh, Arkady!” she cried, so caught up in anguish that she addressed me as a
familiar. “You still do not understand, do you?” At once she glanced furtively
over her shoulder at the women waiting for her a short distance away. Leaning
close to me, as though frightened someone might overhear, she whispered, “My
own fate no longer matters to me. I have lost the two men I loved most in all
the world, and I care not whether I live or die. Yet I fear so for
you and your wife and child…”

My heart began to beat more swiftly at the thought that anyone might believe
Mary in danger. “What is it you fear, Masika? That someone will harm us?”
Laszlo,
I told myself;
she knows he is a murderer.
Yet her next
words served only to perplex me.

“Not physically. But there are worse sorts of injury - those inflicted on the
soul.” She raised her hands to her face and emitted a soft, bitter sob. “Mine
has endured enough. I want only to die.”

“Masika, you must not say such things - ”

She continued as though I had never spoken, reaching forth to touch my cheek
and gaze upon me with that gentle maternal fondness. “You are as your father
was when he was young, full of goodness and kindness. But it may be too late
for you already; too late.”

“I do not understand,” I answered, but she interrupted in a whisper hoarse
and swift, as though afraid I might try to stop her:

“The covenant, Arkady Petrovich; the covenant!

Come to me in the day when he sleeps. It is not safe for us to converse here
in the open; there are too many ears, too many spies. Today we cannot speak;
my house will be full. But come to me quickly - in a day, two days. We must talk,
and…“ Here her voice dropped so low I could scarcely hear. ”… there is a letter
from my son you must read. He knew his time was near, and so he wrote to you.
But for your sake and mine, speak of this to no one. You must swear to keep
this secret. Only come - !“

Her urgency was compelling, but I could make no sense of her words. “But why,
Masika?”

“Because…” she began, then hesitated for the space of some seconds, looking
up intently at my face with grief-filled, anxious eyes, as though fearing condemnation.
“Because I loved your father. Because it is your brother we bury today.”

I recoiled, overcome with shock, unable to reply as she strode away quickly
to join the group of waiting women, whose dark forms disappeared swift as low-flying
blackbirds over the spring-wakened grass.

I waited for the last of the mourners to disappear, then I stepped forward
to the burial-plot, where the gravediggers were beginning to cover the entrenched
coffin with shovelfuls of dirt. The unadorned stone marker read:

RADU PETROVICH BULGAKOV 1823-1845

Bulgakov was Masika's surname, but it gave my heart no comfort to see on the
marker the Russian patronymic: Petrovich, son of Petru.

I cannot describe how I feel now, or felt then. Stricken. Wounded. Betrayed.
Bitterly angry, at Masika, at Father. At this young man, for dying before I
met him.

When I came to myself, I asked the older gravedigger: “What did he die of?”

The man stopped shoveling to regard me with polite hostility as he lifted his
rumpled cap and wiped his grimy brow with an even dirtier forearm.

“You are Dracul, sir. Surely you know.” His tone was perfectly civil, yet conveyed
the depth of his hatred for me - and his fear.

“Tsepesh,” I corrected him, but there was no reproach, no anger in my tone,
only the sincere desire to know. That name evoked a sudden image of Jeffries,
lying impaled on tall, swaying branches of pine; I struggled to repress it.
“Honestly, I do not. Please…” I paused and added, thinking of Laszlo: “Was it
murder?”

He stared at me through narrowed, skeptical eyes, trying to judge my sincerity.
Something he saw must have convinced him at last, for he replied, as he withdrew
his scrutiny and went back to digging:

“Aye, you could say that, sir. His throat was torn out by wolves.”

Zsuzsanna Tsepesh's Diary

12 April.

I keep dreaming of his eyes, his emerald eyes.

Yesterday, I was certain I would die; today I am a little stronger and can
sit up and eat the soup Dunya brings. Writing is no longer a terrific effort.
Oddly, this disappoints me.

Two women inhabit my body now. One is the Zsuzsanna I have always known: weak,
timid, her father's good, obedient girl. That one is so grateful to Mary for
all her kindness, to Dunya for caring for me in my illness. I know they love
me and want me to get better, and I want to please them by doing so. That one
loves sweet Brutus for his devoted presence at my bedside, and is moved to tears
when he worriedly gives my hand a cold, wet nudge and gazes up at me with those
adoring amber eyes. That one knows she almost died and is terrified at the prospect.

But the other -

Ah, the other. The other knows that she is changing, and embraces that change.
The other is strong, passionate, and waits only for him to return, to fulfill
his promise to bind us together forever.

I know he is trying to come to me. He has not forgotten. He tried last night,
I think; I have the faintest dreamy recollection of Brutus lunging onto the
window-seat and barking ferociously. I remember emerging from my drugged stupor
enough to sense his disembodied eyes, staring at me out of the deep velvet shadows
of my closed eyelids. I tried to speak, and could not; so I
thought
to him instead, and I believe he heard. I told him what they had done to the
window. I warned him about the dog.

God, how the other Zsuzsanna hates Mary! hates Dunya! hates that accursed dog,
for keeping him from my window. Were I not so weak and unable to rise, I would
strangle the life from them for daring to separate us! They feign innocence;
they will not speak of him, but they know what they are doing. They know, the
sniveling liars! They freed the dog from the kitchen and put the garlic flowers
in my window while I was asleep, stealing in here like thieves to do their evil
work.

The fools think they can stop him.

Despite my weakness, I sense the approach of a Strength I have never known,
the hint of a body free of the infirmity that has plagued me my whole life.
I feel my spine moving, untwisting, lengthening; I sit taller, straighter each
day. There is a dull throb in my ankle, and when Dunya and Mary leave the room,
I peer at my foot beneath the covers and see that it, too, is straightening.
I smile despite the pain. At last, to be free! to be strong! I welcome this
other Zsuzsanna; I am changing into something new, something wonderful. I am
not sure what that might be; I only know that it is far better than any life
I have ever known. At times, the weakness lifts, and I catch an ecstatic glimpse
of it. To be strong and free and united with
him
-
this
is Paradise.

Let the little cripple die! Let me be rid of her at last!

Father and Arkady were wrong: there
is
an afterlife. Not the simpering,
harp-strumming, angel-winged, cloud-sitting eternity envisioned by the Christians,
but something dark and deep and fiery, as bold and pure in its impassioned Self-devotion
as Lucifer Himself!

They will not win. He will instruct me, and when the time is right, I will
summon him. I need only be patient, and wait…

* * *

The Journal of Mary Windham Tsepesh

12 April.

I am so worried about my husband.

Zsuzsanna is much improved today. The doctor“s - or Dunya’s - ministrations seem
to have worked. She is still extremely weak, but she was sitting up this morning
and eating breakfast when I came to see how she was doing.

The easing of my concern about Zsuzsanna has caused my fears about the
strigoi
to lessen - at least, in the cheerful sunlight of day. Then it seems
I dreamed the conversation with Dunya, which now seems curiously unreal, like
a distant dream. Like the nightmare image of Vlad transforming into a wolf.
At times, I can convince myself that that vision was some sort of hallucination
prompted by grief, travel, and pregnancy. Only one thing seems unshakably true:
that Vlad is a threat to Zsuzsanna, and we must do whatever we can to keep him
away.

Yet at night, I dream of Vlad's eyes, and know that it is all true. At night,
I find it harder to explain the fact that Zsuzsanna's twisted spine is straightening
before our very eyes.

So I will continue to indulge Dunya and let the garlic wreaths remain on the
window (at night; we shrewdly removed them in the morning, and a good thing,
since Arkady came to visit his sister at noon). They can do no harm (and once
the sun sets, I become convinced they do much good). Most importantly, I will
see that Brutus stays in the bedroom at night.

But it is Arkady I am more worried about at the moment. I have written about
Zsuzsanna first, in hopes I would calm down, but once again I am near tears.
We quarreled today, for the first time.

It was my fault. I was foolish to mention the business about Vlad and Zsuzsanna
so soon. It has only been one brief week since Petru's death, and Arkady still
grieves. It is only natural. And yet…

Yet I cannot escape the fact that, since we came to Transylvania, he has become
darkly moody and reclusive. He tells me little these days, when in England he
loved to have long talks and seek my advice on subjects, because, as he said,
“You are so coolly logical about things, Mary, and I am not.” He has always
been emotional, but in a positive, cheerful manner, full of energy and passion.

Now he is silent, withdrawn, brooding. Every night he stays up late writing
in his journal after he returns from the castle rather than come to bed to speak
to me. I know that he is unhappy there, that something has happened with Vlad
to trouble him.

When I rise in the morning, he is still asleep, his dark head against the pillow,
his handsome face, with its large eyes, bold black brows, straight, narrow aquiline
nose, growing faintly paler each day. There are lines and shadows gathering
beneath those eyes; he has aged ten years in a week. I cannot help thinking
how he resembles his sister, and how Vlad drains the emotional life from them
both.

I feel lonely for him. The husband I knew is changing into a distant, melancholy
stranger. I worry this Arkady will remain even after the grief for his father
has lifted.

He rose this morning only shortly before luncheon, and we shared a meal in
near-total silence. He seemed exhausted, more so emotionally than physically,
and though he was absently sweet to me after his old custom, his thoughts were
clearly elsewhere. Something troubled him, and so I was reluctant to disturb
him, but as the meal ended, I dared at last to speak. The fact could no longer
be hidden that Zsuzsanna was seriously ill; he would discover it sooner or later
(even if he was currently too preoccupied to question why she no longer presented
herself at meals). As her brother, he had the right to know.

“Dear,” I said, at the great dining-table that had once seen a large family
and now seemed sadly vast with only us two, “please don’t be alarmed, but you
should know that Zsuzsanna's condition worsened and she has been seriously ill.
We fetched the doctor from Bistritz last evening.”

He had begun to rise. At this news, he paused in the middle of the movement
and lingered there, frowning with the enormous effort of bringing his attention
from the infinitely distant point it had been to the present, and the words
I had just spoken. For some seconds his hazel eyes remained clouded, then cleared
as at last he registered and understood my remarks. The line between his eyebrows
deepened, lengthened.

“Zsuzsanna ill?”

“Yes,” I allowed, careful to keep my tone bright and optimistic. “But today
she is much better.”

His gaze swept uncertainly over me, the table, the dining-hall, the small pane
of sunlight filtering through the distant window. “Oh,” he said. “Well, I’m
glad she's better. Perhaps I should go see her.”

“I think she would appreciate that.” I favoured him with a small encouraging
smile - conniving woman that I am, smug in the knowledge that the garlic wreaths
had been carefully removed and hidden in the closet. “Let me go with you.” And
I rose and wound my arm around his before he could stand. I wanted to make certain
that Zsuzsanna said nothing to upset him; I suppose I feared she had noticed
the garlic and would say something, or that she would tearfully confess to Arkady
about Vlad. I wanted any shocking news broken to him gently.

We went into Zsuzsanna's room, where she sat in bed, once again writing in
a journal and once again hurrying to shut it before we could read. The sunlight
streamed in through the open shutters, illuminating the alcove where I had seen
Vlad and Zsuzsanna embrace, and the sash had been thrown up to let in the pleasant,
unseasonably warm air. The room seemed cheerful and pleasant, as if the bright
sun had burned away the evil. Even Brutus seemed relieved, and greeted us with
a peripatetic tail and a great, tongue-lolling grin. I detected a faint smell
of garlic with sheepish discomfort, but Arkady seemed quite oblivious of it.

Fortunately, Zsuzsanna revealed nothing, and was sweet and considerate of her
brother, reassuring him that he should not spend an instant worrying over her.
The crucifix Dunya had fastened round her neck had slipped beneath her gown,
and she did not mention it to Arkady.

It all went quite well - until afterwards, when we left Zsuzsanna's room together
and headed down the great winding staircase, Arkady taking the inside so that
I might lean heavily upon the polished wood railing.