Chapter Sixteen #2
I laughed. I desperately wanted to take it home with me so I could tease Raleigh with it, but if I asked to keep it, Father Leon almost certainly would have said yes, and the cathedral’s treasury was a much safer place to store three-hundred-year-old art than the ever-shifting halls of Castle Rostenburg.
I studied the image closely, searing it into my memory.
Even those with the means rarely commissioned portraits of their infant children in those days.
Raleigh’s parents must have loved him dearly.
I wondered if he could remember them well, all these centuries later.
‘Who is the other boy?’ I asked, tracing my thumb over the frame.
‘I believe it’s Prince Leopold, his older brother.’
An older brother. I never knew he had one. It felt strange to picture the Linfords long lost, to imagine the castle filled with life. Raleigh had a family once, with siblings and parents who loved him. Somehow it made our castle feel even emptier.
‘What happened to him?’ I dreaded the answer. Raleigh held his family’s titles. For a second son, that could only mean one thing.
‘Seems he was thrown off a horse,’ the priest said, with all the brevity of a scholar discussing a curious historical footnote. He realised his mistake when he saw my concerned expression. ‘Quite a number of years after this, mind you. He was in his thirties.’
His thirties. He lived longer than Raleigh, then, in a way.
I wondered what the age difference was between them.
If Leopold died in his thirties, Raleigh must have been in his late twenties at the time, which is where he remained.
So Raleigh couldn’t have found out he would inherit his father’s title long before he changed.
No wonder he was such a negligent ruler. He was never raised to rule.
Father Leon talked me into strolling through the market with him before I subjected myself to anything so dreary as research, mostly because he had a craving for a particular cheese and insisted I must try it for myself.
The markets were exactly as I remembered from when I was a child: a bustling hub of activity with hawkers from every village in Rostenburg.
It wasn’t at all the ghost town my father had described.
Maybe there were slightly fewer stands than before, but there were no signs of starvation.
Leon found his cheesemonger and insisted on sampling all the wares despite the fact that he had tasted them all before. I lingered to one side, waiting for him to make a decision, until the merchant’s wife turned to me. ‘Anything for you, Your Serene Highness?’
It took me a moment to realise why her words caught me off guard. ‘Oh, no, I’m not … Please just call me Clara.’
The woman’s smile told me she was absolutely not going to do that, but there was no malice in it.
‘I can’t tell you how happy we were to hear of your engagement.
’ She carved a large slab from an oozing goat’s cheese and began to wrap it.
I was glad she was distracted so she couldn’t see the confusion I struggled to hide.
‘I don’t think any of us could have dreamed of a better match,’ she continued.
‘Here, this is for you.’ She handed me the cheese, despite my protests, and wouldn’t accept payment until Father Leon plucked the coin from my hands, dropped it in his own purse and said he’d consider it a donation to the church, which satisfied everyone except me.
‘I can’t take this,’ I said to him when he ushered me away. ‘I have plenty to eat up at the castle.’
‘Times may be harder than usual, but no one’s starving. We can spare you a piece of cheese. God knows your father has spared enough for us over the years.’ He seemed to remember he wasn’t supposed to use the Lord’s name in vain and lazily crossed himself.
The words rang in my head. ‘What do you mean?’
‘When the drought started,’ Leon said, as though I should know what he was talking about.
‘Times were a little tough for a while there, but the prince delivered us enough aid to get by, and then your father brought all that surplus food from Orlfen to bridge the rest of the gap. Oh, you should see your face. Yes, I know he charged a lot for it, but he helped us more than you can imagine. Orlfen is incredibly lucky to have your father at its helm.’
‘Father came here to buy,’ I said. My body felt far away, my voice further still.
‘Well, he’d take a few things home, but mostly he was selling. Saving for your dowry, I heard. Clearly it paid off.’
Father Leon didn’t know how I’d come to be engaged to Raleigh. How could he? Of course he would think Father paid the dowry. The whole valley knew about that bloody dowry.
But where had it come from? Though that money had cast such a shadow over my life, it had never occurred to me to wonder how Father had accumulated so much.
Mother had her own income from her family’s estate, but that stopped after her death.
Father owned no land, and his salary from Raleigh was modest at best. I’d never thought to question it until the answer was staring me in the face.
I gave Father Leon my apologies and, with a garbled excuse even I barely understood, left him by the cheese stand, oblivious to my epiphany.
I found Enrique at a picked-over stall offering scrawny fruit that had limped into ripeness.
He was holding up an apple, scrutinising it with an unmatched intensity, while the woman selling looked ready to run if he so much as spoke to her.
‘We need to go,’ I told him.
‘These apples were harvested too early,’ he said.
‘I don’t care,’ I spat out before I could stop myself. ‘I need to leave.’
He took notice of me then, his face tinged with a very rare trace of concern. ‘Did something happen?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I need to talk to Raleigh.’
‘He won’t be awake yet. Let’s shop first.’
‘I don’t care about your damn apples, Enrique.’ My emotions were threatening to spill, but I wasn’t sure what they were yet. ‘I need to go now. You can come with me or come later, but I’m leaving now.’
Enrique put the apple down. ‘Something happened.’
I turned away from him, pushing back into the marketplace.
He tried to follow but was immediately cut off by the crowd.
I pressed forward without him, the crowd blurring behind too many emotions to name.
Confusion. Dread. Grief? But was it grief?
Was there anything to grieve? I didn’t know.
I didn’t understand. I needed Raleigh. God, why couldn’t Raleigh be here?
Enrique caught up to me halfway down the stairs leading to the entrance of town. ‘What happened?’
I stopped and took a breath, trying to reason through my racing mind. ‘Where were you living before Raleigh hired you?’
Enrique regarded me warily, clearly trying to decipher whether or not this was a test. ‘Versailles before the revolution. Then Zurich until the invasion,’ he said, ‘But Raleigh found me in Salzburg.’
‘Did they talk about the Rostenburg famine there?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Never.’
‘Did Raleigh ever speak to you about it? You’re his chef – he must have briefed you. How do you order in ingredients?’
‘Can you ask one question at a time? He told me the Orlfen Valley was recovering, so Moira sourced everything from around Triz. What are you really asking me?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. My pulse felt like it was fizzing.
‘I don’t understand. Father always said the whole region was starving, but Triz is fine.
And now people are telling me that Father was selling them food and—’ A heaving sob racked through me, cutting me off mid-sentence.
And then I couldn’t stop. I never let myself fall apart like this in public: even Yann had only seen me break down on a handful of occasions.
But in that moment it felt like every emotion I’d felt over the last six months piled upon me at once.
On the day I’d turned twenty-five everything had seemed so simple.
Bleak, terrible, with a single shining light at the centre, but simple all the same.
Now I was part of a world I didn’t understand, only two months away from possibly losing my mortality forever, and suddenly not even the famine made sense. It was too much.
Enrique swore to himself in French, clearly unsure whether it was appropriate to comfort me or not. To my immense relief, he didn’t try, but let me sob until my tears dried out. I was wiping my face with my handkerchief, ready to press on, when something caught his eye.
‘You!’ Enrique barked.
On the other side of the stairwell a man was just reaching us, red faced and out of breath from the climb. He jumped when he realised Enrique was addressing him, and I could tell he was assessing whether it was too late to pretend he hadn’t heard. ‘Me?’
‘Do you know who we are?’
The man looked at me, my tearstained cheeks, then back to Enrique. ‘Should I?’
‘No. We’re researchers from Vienna. What do you know about the Orlfen famine?’
‘Oh, the “famine”.’ The man raised his brows to exaggerate his scepticism, visibly relaxing now that he knew he wasn’t in some sort of trouble. ‘No more than anyone else.’
‘Why did you say it like that?’ I asked.
‘Well, it wasn’t really a famine, was it? The mayor was up here every other month selling off the surplus food.’
I felt like the ground was shrinking beneath my feet, my mind pulling away from its earthly tether.
‘That’s just what they say to hide why people are really dying,’ the man continued, not noticing I’d slipped away.
‘Which is?’ I heard Enrique ask.
The man stepped forward dramatically, cupping his mouth. ‘Vampires,’ he said in a stage whisper. ‘I’ve heard the castle is full of them, and the prince gave them Orlfen so they wouldn’t attack the capital.’
This part I knew to be untrue. It pulled me back and I could feel the ground beneath my feet once more.
‘Vampires don’t exist,’ Enrique said calmly.
‘Like hell they don’t,’ the man said. ‘If anyone says it’s vampires, the vampires will come for them next – that’s common sense. So they had to say it’s a famine to explain all the deaths. But if that was true, why did the mayor keep coming here to sell food?’
‘He was buying!’ I interjected.
The man gave me a look that suggested he’d had a glimmer of recognition but couldn’t be bothered to investigate further.
‘Go ask him yourself if you don’t believe me.
Orlfen’s just on the other side of the mountain.
You can make it by sundown if you leave now.
’ He stepped forward, then stopped again.
‘But I’d stock up on garlic from the market first, if I were you.
’ And then he pushed on and continued his climb.
‘Did that answer your question?’ Enrique asked.
I kept my eyes on the man’s back until he had vanished over the top of the stairs. ‘I really hope it didn’t.’