“Even better. I’ll work faster without your constant chattering.”
“Comments like that could make a boy think you haven’t missed him at all.”
“Oh, really? Is that something like when a girl sends a boy a dozen letters across the ocean and he never replies?” I said.
Huck paused on the far side of the compartment and looked as if he might explain himself. Just for a moment. Then, without another word, he stepped into the corridor and pulled the door closed behind him, shutting me out. Making me feel as if he’d slammed the door on my heart, too.
I’d known sharing a compartment was a bad idea. He was going to sleep, and I was going to stay up all night wishing he’d talk to me. And then tomorrow we’d find my father in Bucharest, and he’d have some sort of explanation for all of this—one that was likely half as dangerous as I worried it could be—so Huck was probably right when he said cracking the journal’s code was a fool’s errand. And I’d be an even bigger fool to try to suss out what had gone wrong after Black Sunday last year. Tomorrow I’d go back to New York with Father while Huck would return to Belfast. Who knows when I’d see him again.
Or evenif I would.
A waste of time, all of it.
So why couldn’t I let it go?
JOURNAL OF RICHARD FOX
June 20, 1937
Orient Express, somewhere in the Kingdom of Hungary
Rainy day. Should be hitting the Romanian border soon. Today I’m feeling less sentimental and more hungover, so I’ve put a temporary moratorium on martinis. Practically the picture of restraint, I am.
Sitting across from me in the restaurant car, Jean-Bernard is reading a history book on Transylvania and Wallachia, neighboring regions along the Carpathians. Fascinating history this area has. Everybody and their mother tried to claim those lands. But it all really went to hell in the Middle Ages, when the Carpathians sat between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.
And Prince Vlad wasn’t interested in political tightrope. He wanted to stand his ground and keep his territory. He would not pay tribute to the sultan. Period.
Here’s the thing: Vlad didn’t have a big army or much of a coffer. Wallachia had little to trade. The only way he could keep his territory was through sheer tenacity and being a vicious monster. Rage was his weapon, and he was a damn angry man.
His war strategy was scorched earth. When the sultan came to fight him, he burned his own land. Poisoned wells. Dammed up the rivers. Left no animals for the invading armies to hunt. The Turks couldn’t eat or drink, and they all got sick because Vlad sent people with the damn bubonic plague into the Turks’ camp.
Rothwild thinks this bone ring I’m searching for somehow increased Vlad’s rage. At least, that was the whispered gossip in Vlad’s time. The bone ring was ensorcelled. Made with black magic. Created by an occultist. Maybe even given to Vlad by the devil himself. Sure: that and half the other so-called cursed medieval objects. I’ve yet to hold the devil’s handiwork. Everything evil I’ve found was made by human hands.
6
IDIDN’T SLEEP THAT NIGHT. NOTmuch anyway.
Father’s journal was mostly to blame. But even if I hadn’t stayed up, skimming his words while trying (and failing) to guess his cipher’s passphrase, I wouldn’t have slept much. Extended post-midnight passport checks halted our train on the Balkan peninsula at the borders of both Turkey and, thirty minutes later, crossing into Eastern Europe, Bulgaria.
After the border checks, a dining car was added sometime in the morning, but I was too tired and cranky to roll out of the berth for breakfast, succumbing to that dull laziness brought on by train travel—something that turned Huck into the living dead, as I’d heard not a single snore from him last night. Nor a single word.
Noon came and went before I was motivated to leave our compartment, and that was mostly because my bladder was aching. I had to wait in line to use the public facilities. For the record, there is nothing more humbling than washing bits of yourself over a basin in a public lavatory on a moving train.
On the other hand, the glorious thing about rail travel is that the dining car is never officially closed. They may say it is, but I’d never been refused service. When I strode into our dining car in the early afternoon, Huck shuffling behind me, the main luncheon crowd had cleared out. Only a few stragglers sat at scattered tables, taking tea and reading or gazing out windows decorated with burgundy velvet curtains. There wasn’t much to see; we were in Bulgaria now, and under gray skies, the scenery was flat as a pancake and never-ending.
In an hour we’d be debarking for the border at Ruse and taking a ferry across the Danube to Romania, where we’d pick up a simple train—no sleeping compartments—to Bucharest; we’d be in the Romanian capital city before nightfall. Even though I hadn’t cracked the cipher in Father’s journal, and perhaps because we were so close to our destination, I was feeling somewhat less anxious than I was when we stepped onto the train last night. There was even a copy ofLe Figaro, a French newspaper, that someone had left on the table, and themots croiséspuzzle was still untouched—c’est magnifique!I could focus on that instead of having to make small talk with Huck.
A steward rushed down the narrow dining car aisle between tables set formally with china and silver to take our order. I couldn’t decide, and hadn’t eaten actual hot food since yesterday, so I requested one or five dishes and tried to avoid the steward’s judgmental eyes.
“It’s easily twenty degrees colder here than it was when we left Istanbul,” Huck told me after the steward left our table. Several passengers in the dining car were dressed for chilly weather. Huck, too: over his long sleeves, he’d donned a soft gray cable-knit cardigan with tortoiseshell buttons. It looked nice on him, but I’d never say so in a hundred years. So I distracted myself with removing the crossword puzzle page from the French newspaper and folding into a small, neat rectangle, making sharp creases with the edge of my fingernail.
“Crack Fox’s cipher yet?” he asked, oh so slowly rearranging his silverware, as if it were work that required a detailed eye and a surgeon’s touch.
Okay, fine. I supposed I couldn’t ignore him for the rest of the train ride. I would treat him like any other traveling companion, like he was paid by my father to talk to me.
“Not yet,” I said, keeping my eyes on the rolling landscape. Father’s journal was currently in my handbag, into which I now stuck my hand to search for a pencil. “But don’t worry—I will.”
“Naturally. Being pigheaded is one of your best qualities, if memory serves.”
