“All of’em, as it happens. I wash ’em in a bunch after I’ve used ’em up, then I start over again. How was the drive?”
I dropped into my old chair and poured coffee, since I was too tired to make tea. Elbow placement required some attention, for the table was covered with delicate clock innards. But at last I was looking at Dad from a comfortable angle.
I thought about the close calls, the traffic snarls, and the spectacular Southwest scenery, all stitched together by the black and yellow ribbon of the road. “Okay.” My throat hurt. I swallowed. “How’s Gran? Mom already crashed?”
Dad squinted down into the clock, pausing as he made another tiny adjustment. “Your grandmother is fine. Asleep, of course. As for your mother . . . answering this question would entail broaching the forbidden It.”
It covered everything that had happened to me last summer.
On my arrival home from Europe, I’d told them the whole story, but a couple of days later, when reality hit me along with the blazing heat of a Southern California September, I’d asked my parents not to talk about It anymore because it hurt too much.
But I couldn’t forbid my grandmother, who was the reason I’d gone in the first place. She’d been in a deep depression that had gradually slipped her into a coma by the time I left for Europe. It was hearing me speak Dobreni on my return that brought her out of it. When she began asking entirely natural questions about the changes in her homeland, the memories hurt so much that I accepted the first job that would get me away from having to provide answers . . . and you see how well that worked.
I stiffened my spine and thought of LaToya’s sad eyes and determined face as she stood outside the room containing the mangled body of her husband. “I’m here to deal with It,” I said to Dad.
“Good. In October Milo invited your grandmother and your mother to visit him. Gran wasn’t up to traveling yet, but your mother went. She’s been there ever since.”
“Mom’s in Dobrenica? With Gran’s ex?” I was so not ready for that.
“London.” Dad wiggled his brows.
“London, as in England?” I repeated, as though there were fifty Londons. Maybe there are. “I thought Milo was crowned King of Dobrenica back in September. Finally. After seventy years. I saw him in Dobrenica the day before I left.”
“Apparently some old duke who was about to leave England for Dobrenica had a stroke instead. Milo returned to England, and something or other has kept him there ever since.”
“Something or other? An earthquake? A revolution? Redecorating the palace with bees?”
Dad grinned at the Napoleon reference, then shot his forefinger at me, Mick Jagger style. “Dobreni politics. You know how much interest your mother has in politics.”
“That would be zip.”
“But apparently she’s been a big help in other ways. Still able to deal with more It?” Dad asked, and on my nod continued. “Your grandmother decided a couple of weeks ago that she’s through with physical therapy, and she’s going to join them for the holidays.”
“Wait. Wait. Gran is not going back to Dobrenica, she’s going to see Milo in London?”
“Yep.”
“The guy she dumped seventy years ago.”
“The very same. I offered to go along as wingman, since your Gran’s never been on a plane.”
Obviously a whole lot had changed while I’d been grinding my way through interminable days teaching elementary French and German, and wasting night and day thinking (or dreaming) about how I didn’t want to think (or dream) about Alec, nor the Wicked Count Tony (well, not really wicked, was he?) nor the castles and mountains of Dobrenica.
“I’m on a plane to Heathrow tomorrow. Which is why I’m up till all hours.” He gestured at the clock. “I want to have this finished before I go.”
“This isn’t a sale clock?” I asked.
“For Milo,” Dad said. “Christmas gift from the family.”
Silence built, broken by the low mutter on the radio, and the tinkle of a tiny clockmaker’s hammer on the worn sixties’ Formica.
Dad poked a ruler through his beard to scratch his chin, then said, “Alec won’t be in London. He’s too busy in Dobrenica.”
Pop! went the balloon of exhaustion that had made my head feel like it was floating. Now it felt like a bowling ball on my shoulders.
Dad looked up, scraggly brows climbing toward his wild hair. “Was it the holiday that brought you back?”
I sipped coffee, trying to find words. Then I started talking. “There was a call on the language department phone, and when I picked up, it was the hospital. . . .”
Dad listened as he delicately wielded one tool then reached for another.
When I ran out of words, a gust of hot wind rustled the tree outside our big kitchen window, and the chair beneath my dad creaked. He said, “It’s the first time you ever heard a ghost talk, right?”
I closed my eyes. “He was not a ghost,” I whispered. “I don’t know what he was but . . . ghosts are dead. His heart had stopped, but . . .”
“I believe that is the definition of dead.” Dad wiggled his eyebrows. “Let me rephrase: Is it the first time someone has talked to you . . . without their body?”
“Yes.” I dropped my hands flat to the table. “Dad, there were two things I thought about on the long drive back. One, what happened with Ron scared me bad. I didn’t want it to be true, because I don’t want the responsibility of thinking that maybe I talked someone out of dying. But I believe that I did. That is so very scary. What if next time I screw it up, and someone . . .” I shook my head, and discovered I was actually shivering, in spite of the warm air.
Dad took my hands in his. “Second thing?”
“I kept thinking about how I grew up with pretty much just us.”
“Are you saying your childhood was unhappy?”
“No! I had a great childhood. You know that. But . . . maybe what seemed perfectly normal to me, really wasn’t?”
Dad laughed as he let my hands go and picked up his tool again. “What’s normal?”
I shook my head. “I mean, I never thought about how Lisa Castillo’s house was always noisy with people. Her siblings, her cousins. The neighbors. But Lisa never came over here. I never realized that until the drive home.”
Dad said, “She came over once or twice around the time you two started kindergarten. But there was a time . . .”
“Go on.” Tired as I was, somehow I needed this conversation. Maybe the exhaustion made it easier to deal.
“You probably don’t remember. Your grandmother made the two of you lunch, and Lisa said, the way little kids do, Why does your grandma talk funny? She wasn’t being mean, and she probably meant the accent, but your Gran took it hard. So after that, she stayed in the back room when Lisa came over, and I think your little friend found it strange that you and she were always left alone, so she stopped coming. You didn’t seem to mind. When you wanted to play with other kids, you went up the street to the Castillos’. The rest of the time, you had your books and your ballet as well as us. And you seemed happy with your grandmother’s company when your mom and I were on the road.”
“But it really was just Gran and me when you guys traveled for work. Gran didn’t have any acquaintances, much less friends. Did she ever try?” I slurped more coffee and grimaced at the taste.
“Well, we know now that her accent was Dobreni, but it sounded German to California ears. And you have to remember, after the war, Germans were not exactly popular. Your Gran stuck hard to the French myth, probably in self-defense, but she really hated lying as much as she hated having to speak English.”
“So she closed herself up,” I said, following his train of thought, “with her piano, and books, and us. Okay, so let’s leave aside the question of what’s normal. LaToya told me to clean up the peanut butter knife, and I swear her words cut worse than . . . worse than memory.” I finished on a sigh. “Dad, why does love hurt so much? It hurts every time I thin
k about Alec or Dobrenica.”
He placed a tiny screwdriver on the table, then scratched his chin through his beard again. “Rapunzel, think how hard it is going to be for your grandmother to face Milo again, the guy she dumped. And she hasn’t your strength.”
I looked up. “So you agree with LaToya. I need to deal. I guess I don’t know where to begin.”
“You can start by going with us to London. The invitation included you as well, you know. Milo liked you when you two met, last summer.”
“Is Gran strong enough for a flight to England?”
“The physical therapist said yes. The doc said it was her decision. She is determined to go. Feels it’s her duty. If you could handle going with us, I think it’d be a good deed,” he went on. “You wouldn’t have to stay long, if your job doesn’t leave you much free time.”
I grabbed at my one last hope. “They’ll never have tickets this close to the holidays—”
For answer he reached under a welter of papers, pulled out three airline packets, and dropped them in my lap. “I don’t know if this will actually work, but I tried to time it so we’d see the lunar eclipse from the plane. Wouldn’t that be cool?”
I paid no attention to eclipses, lunar or otherwise. “Dad, you told me you don’t see ghosts or have any arcane powers.”
He grinned and rubbed my shoulder. “No. I hoped you’d show up. Go get some sleep. I’ll unpack your car.”
TWO
DAD’S GREAT PLAN for some family astronomy fun was a total failure, since most of Europe was being hammered by massive snowstorms, as were parts of the East Coast. For us, that meant short flights and long delays in airports that all blended together into a nightmare of loudspeakers, plastic chairs in horrible colors, and the endless rumble of rolling suitcases as people streamed back and forth.
Gran sat between us, quiet and focused on Lettres de Madame de Sévigné. Her way of dealing with stress was reading. I tried—I had Dad’s copy of the latest Robert Harris novel about Cicero, which he’d loved—but I couldn’t concentrate on the pages. Not Harris’s fault. I still wasn’t caught up on my sleep, and I was horribly distracted.
It was right around midnight New York time when I got so restless that I left my stuff with Gran and Dad and prowled around, looking for . . . I still don’t know what, because I don’t get premonitions. All I can tell you is what happened.
I was walking past one of the shops and caught my reflection in the glass. I turned to check myself out—you know how you do—except my butt-length mane wasn’t in its looped chignon on my head; it was short, trailing untidily on my shoulders in total bed head. My long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans had turned into a fashionable shirt and slacks that had to be straight from Paris.
My gaze shifted to my eyes. No. Those were not my eyes, though they were the same brown, they were—
“Ruli?”
The last time I’d seen Ruli, she’d driven me to the first town past the border of Dobrenica, after I talked her into going through with her marriage to Alec.
“Help me.” I heard her voice inside my head. She said it in French, and then again in English. “Help me.”
“Help you? How? What—”
“Ma’am, are you okay?”
I looked up, right into the face of a security guard. She gave me that wary look people get when they might be facing a crazy person. I sneaked a peek back at the window. There I was. No, it was still Ruli.
I glanced back at the security guard, who frowned at the window and then at me. She didn’t see what I did.
One quick glance. Now I could see us both, but Ruli was a double image, growing more faint by the second, until she was a blur.
“Ma’am?” The voice was more insistent.
“I’m all right.” I smiled, doing my best to project normalcy. “Jet lag.”
Other bored, tired passengers eyed us from their uncomfortable seats. The security guard asked me a couple of questions, my answers were sane and boring (we’ve been up for hours, waiting for the flight to London, see that old lady over there? That’s my grandmother) and she let me go.
My heart was still beating hard when we boarded our flight a short time later. I didn’t tell Dad or Gran what I’d seen, because I still wasn’t sure what to think.
Real or not real? I thought in frustration, as the plane bumped down the runway. Though the security guard and the gawkers hadn’t seen anything, Ruli’s appearance felt way too real, the way that Ron Huber had been real. But Ruli’s appearance had also been different than Ron’s—he’d vanished in a blink, like most of the apparitions I’d seen.
So why did Ruli fade slowly? Either this was some kind of weird form of communication, or something drastic was going on . . . maybe in her dreams. So was Ruli really talking to me? Ron had definitely been talking to me.
I’d only met Ruli twice: once when I rescued her from her family’s castle and again on my last day in Dobrenica. She had rich friends, a high ranking family, and she was married to Alec. Given all that, it made no sense for her to be calling to me, especially in that ghostly form. But nothing about apparitions made sense.
Thinking such things at thirty thousand feet made me kind of squirmy. But we landed at Heathrow in perfect safety. It was a relief to find Mom waiting at Heathrow, looking bulky and unfamiliar in cold weather gear. She hugged us each, then said, “Milo is feeling funky. The cold. He asked me to apologize for not being on hand to greet you.”
Gran murmured something polite and proper, but in French. When she didn’t even attempt English, she was upset, though you would not have known it to look at her. Her tension was another reason I kept Ruli’s apparition to myself. At first I’d thought it was due to her flying for the first time, but if anything, landing made her more so.
Yeah. Because she was about to see Milo again; that is, Marius Alexander Ysvorod senior, whom she was supposed to marry back in 1939. Instead, she ran away from Dobrenica with Ruli’s and my grandfather, Count Armandros von Mecklundburg, when she was sixteen and Milo was around twenty.
This would be their first meeting since the eve of World War II.
Dad took Gran’s arm and walked ahead. Mom gave me a humorous roll of the eyes and whispered, “Milo was bummed about how it’d look not to meet her, but I told him she’d hate a public reunion.”
“Bet he’d hate that, too,” I muttered back.
“Big time.” Mom grinned.
When we got through customs and made our way outside, there was Emilio, the dapper, gray-bearded little man who had been Milo’s aide-de-camp for many decades. And Alec’s for nearly two.
Beaming with hearty good will, he bowed to Gran and welcomed her in Dobreni. “So good to see you again, Mam’zelle,” he said to me. “How was your trip?”
I mumbled something and then stepped back as Mom introduced my father. Emilio gazed up into my father’s face. No two men could have been more dissimilar than the short, trim Dobreni and my rangy, rumpled father with his wild Rasputin look.
“Whoa,” Dad said with his usual cheer. “Winter is cold. Nobody ever told me that cold is cold.”
Emilio chuckled. “Is this your first visit outside of California, Mr. Murray?”
“Call me George. ‘Mr. Murray’ makes me think I’ve been busted, or worse, I’m back in a suit and tie. Yes, I did see snow once, when I was a kid, but.... Here, let me help forklift the kafuffle,” Dad said, pointing to the bags.
Dad made easy weather chat as the porter got tipped, and the suitcases, along with the box containing the clock, got shifted to the trunk of a beautifully maintained Bentley Mulsanne.
Dad and I were glad to get into the warm car. Although we’d separately made sure that Gran had several choices of outer garments, the weather had been hot when we left, and I’d overlooked the possibility that I might need anything beyond my denim jacket (which had been fine, so far, in Oklahoma). Dad had relied solely on his ancient fringed suede, which had lasted for four decades thus far because in Southern
California, you wear a coat maybe three times a year.
Conversation during the drive was a three-cornered question and answer session on what plays were running in London. Dad cheerfully outlined his plan to see everything he could, Mom told us what she’d seen and done, and Emilio made recommendations. I sat next to Gran, equally quiet as I fought against the vertigo induced by traffic on the wrong side of the road.
Finally I shut my eyes. I had to get a grip. When I next saw Milo, I knew it would be his son I’d be thinking about.
I gave Alec up for the sake of the Blessing, and there is no Blessing.
Supposedly, there was this magic protection, the Blessing, that happened around Dobrenica’s borders if the five ruling families met in peace on September 2nd for a marriage between two of their members. The little country would be shifted outside of our time-space continuum into something called Nasdrafus, which I didn’t understand well enough to try translating. (“Fairyland” isn’t quite right.) Anyway, peace was a political necessity in a country still recovering from the old Soviet hold, and as for magic—or Vrajhus, as they called it—well, all I can say is, once you’ve seen Dobrenica, you could totally believe it exists.
But I guess it doesn’t exist, after all. September 2nd had come and gone, Alec and Ruli had married, and Dobrenica was still here. If they hadn’t married—if there had been some last-second reprieve—then surely, surely, Alec would have shown up on my doorstep on September 3rd.
But no call, no letter. No visions. Nothing.
“Here we are,” Mom said.
We’d already reached Hampstead. When I looked up, the headlights glowed on two rows of snow-dusted trees as we drove down a long driveway.
The house was a Georgian three-story, mostly hidden by trees. The Bentley drove directly into a spacious garage that had probably once been a carriage house. It was only slightly warmer than being outside.
Emilio sent our bags off with a couple of servants and escorted us to a parlor where tea awaited, steam rising invitingly from the spout of the silver teapot. Havilland cups and saucers sat on a silver tray that looked like it had been etched around the time that Paul Revere was learning his trade on my side of the Atlantic.