CHAPTER 5 Royalty's Dark Side
Alex was awake enough to know it was raining, and she thought, through remnants of some strange dream of being lost in a deep darkness, that the booming she heard was thunder. But then she realized it was her grandmother banging on her bedroom door. She rose, struggled to escape the dream, and unlocked the door, still in her nightgown.
Her grandmother was in a state. "I thought you'd died in there," she said. "How could you sleep through all the racket I was making? And what did you drag through the house last night?"
Alex stepped out into the hall, looked back toward the stairs, and saw a string of leaves and mud trailing up from the entryway. She mustn't tell her grandmother what had happened after she'd been warned to watch the cat. She didn't even believe it herself.
"I found blood on the bathroom sink. Are you injured?"
Alex refused to panic, but thought a partial confession might be best. "I'm sorry, Bunică," she said, "but the kitty escaped out the backdoor. I had to chase him down."
Her grandmother frowned. "You aren't to go out at night, Alex. This isn't Bucharest. And the blood?"
"I had a nosebleed. Must be the altitude," she lied.
"Get dressed and come downstairs," her grandmother said, obviously not believing a word. "Eat your breakfast."
Alex dressed noticing she felt unusually strong but was still confused about the events of the previous evening concerning the woman and man. She wondered if anything at all had happened. She saw in the hall mirror that the marks on her neck had almost disappeared. Or, were they ever even there? Nălucă circled her feet, rubbing against her legs. Why this new affection?
She followed her grandmother into the kitchen where her obviously cold breakfast of mortadella, fried egg, cheese slices and tea were all laid out on the breakfast table. Her grandmother had already eaten.
"I'm sorry," Alex said, again.
"Don't apologize until you've told the truth."
Perhaps a little more confession would be in order. "I did chase Nălucă into the trees," she offered. "I found him inside the gazebo."
"That old foundation? And the leaves?"
"I fell running from someone. Did bump my nose." After all, she couldn't tell the whole truth. "I hit it on one of the gazebo benches running from a man. But Bunică, why didn't you tell me you'd rebuilt it."
"What are you talking about, child? The gazebo hasn't been rebuilt."
"Of course it has. I was inside it last night." She rose from her breakfast and went into the living room where the bay window looked out over the backyard. The rain had stopped. "I can't see it from here, but I'm sure it's there."
Her grandmother had already started outside, and Alex followed her through the wet grass, sidestepping puddles, but the gazebo was nowhere to be found.
"It was right here," Alex said, walking into the little clearing. But the ruins were just the same as they'd always been, the circular cement foundation now rain soaked. "I don't understand," she said. "That wasn't a dream."
"Where did you see the man?"
"He was right here." She walked to the far side.
"Did he chase you?" her grandmother asked.
"No. He wasn't after me. It was a chance encounter. I found the kitty and returned."
Her grandmother still didn't seem satisfied. "We've had a series of rapes in Sinaia and other small mountain towns to the north over the last few months," she said.
"He made no aggression toward me." But Alex had her own question about last night, and she thought her grandmother might have an answer. "This man. He thought he recognized me. I surprised him, and he called me Marie."
This seemed to please her grandmother no end. "Did he then, really?" She came up close to Alex and looked her over carefully. "You've seen an apparition," she said. "And inside the gazebo. Remarkable."
"It was so real." She still didn't want to tell her about the woman. "How could someone in Sinaia know my other given name? No one outside my family knows it."
"This would be a real mystery then," her grandmother said, and her mood changed instantly. "You do favor her, you know."
"No, I don't know. Whom are you talking about?"
"Marie, Queen of Romania. She had the gazebo built many years ago."
"That couldn't be who he meant. I believe he was referring to some woman living today."
"Possibly. But still, you do favor her."
"Bunică, I don't look like a queen."
"Let's go back in the house. Finish breakfast, and I'll tell you a story." Her grandmother turned to go. "Perhaps you fell asleep on the sofa and had a powerful dream."
"And all the leaves I tracked in?"
They walked back across the wet grass, reentered the house, and Alex returned to her breakfast. Nălucă jumped up in her lap and purred while she ate.
Her grandmother sat opposite her at the kitchen table. "Perhaps this is the time I should divulged my little secret. Now that you've told me yours, I'll tell you mine. I've been keeping this one for decades, and it's time I told someone who can pass it down. You've read of Queen Marie in the history books?"
"Yes, of course. She was the great savior of Romania during World War One. She attended the troops as a Red Cross nurse."
"Yes, she even had her own regiment of hussars. Marie was the architect of modern Romania," her grandmother said. "She was a warrior woman, of sorts, but her husband King Ferdinand was a coward, and if it hadn't been for her leadership during the War, Romania wouldn't exist today. And now I'm going to tell you something that I'm guessing wasn't in your history books. Marie, though married to the King, had an affair with one of her hussars. Something about loving the sight of a military man on horseback. And she had a child."
Alex looked up from her breakfast. "How do you know this, Bunică?"
"Firsthand knowledge, my dear. Firsthand. Marie, Queen of Romania, told me that when the child, a girl, was born they made her shuffle it off to a family who adopted it without knowing its lineage. But Marie loved that illegitimate child as much as she did all those she had by the King, perhaps more. And she never forgot her."
"You knew the Queen?"
"Yes. And you'll come to understand why in just a moment."
This much of her story told, the old lady got up from the breakfast table with a groan and took Alex into the living room where they looked out through the wall of windows. They viewed the countryside that cascaded down below them revealing the red-tile tops of buildings in the town of Sinaia, the ribbons of Highway E60, the railway, and the Prahova River that cut through the valley, all trailing north to Braşov, where Alex's brother Gavril lived. On the other side of the little city, the mountains once again rose up to form the valley's far side.
"That illegitimate child," she said, "was my mother. Marie was my grandmother."
"But then, am I even related to you?"
Alex was having difficulty with the bright sunlight now peeking through the cloud cover. It blinded her. That dream-like encounter the night before had set her mind a drift, and now these revelations seemed to be more important than she could withstand. Her head was spinning, but she didn't want to stop her grandmother, who obviously had been keeping a secret for years that she was about to share with her.
"Yes. Your mother really is my daughter. Look Alex. Have you ever noticed anything special about your name?"
"No."
"Before Marie married Ferdinand, she was called Marie Alexandra of Edinburgh. Your two given names are the reverse of hers. What led me to believe that someone in your family would be special is your father's name, Eidyn. Eidyn is the ancient form of the word 'Edinburgh.' You essentially have the same three names, as did Marie before she married. Yes, Marie was your great great grandmother, and you share her name."
"But my family name, it's coincidental."
"No. Your mother and father, theirs was an arranged marriage. I was involved up to my ears in the planning of it. Your father is also an illegitimate castoff of royalty in E
dinburgh. When your sister was born, I loved her, but in my heart of hearts, I was so disappointed because I knew she wasn't the one I expected. She wasn't special. I was waiting for the daughter that would fulfill my every wish. Years passed. I'd given up. And then you came along. Instantly, I knew it was you. I insisted on your naming. "
"I was an accident. My parents never wanted me."
Nălucă jumped up onto the back of the sofa and purred loudly into Alex's ear, as if he were trying to tell her something. She brushed him away, he was becoming a nuisance, but he returned immediately. He was making her dizzy.
"But the gods did, child. The ancients tell us that Divine Will works within the element of chance."
"You're saying that I'm descended from royalty, that I am royalty? And that some divine force caused my birth? That can't be true."
It wasn't just her grandmother's revelations that troubled Alex. When the cat purred into her ear, her eyes blurred. It seemed that a great darkness came and went, her dreams once again invading her psychic space. Nălucă purred again, and she saw shapes traveling a dark mysterious road.
"Yes. We are all royalty. Though denied, hushed up, hidden from the public, we are all direct descendants of Queen Victoria, grandmother of Queen Marie of Romania. Even your father's touch of royalty is through Queen Victoria."
"So this is the reason I was admitted to Oxford," Alex said, her head spinning and not quite able to grasp this new social order.
"Let's just say, it didn't hurt. You'll be looked after there too, so nothing to worry about."
The vertigo wouldn't turn loose of Alex. She fell against the side of the sofa, rolled off onto the floor, and fainted dead away. Again, she saw dark shapes clustered about her. She stumbled off the dark psychic road and wandered alone in a barren landscape. She fell onto the dark earth and was lost in the wilderness of her dreams with ominous, quarreling shapes coming to fight over her.
When she came to, she was still stretched out on the floor with her head in her grandmother's lap and Nălucă sitting on her chest.
"Now it's my turn to apologize, child. Never did I imagine that such a revelation would hit you so hard. I'm thinking I should take you to the doctor."
"Oh, please, Bunică. I'll be okay. It's just that I was so sure of the gazebo, but perhaps I was dreaming. I don't know what happened just now," Alex said. "It was as if a dark cloud enveloped me."
Her grandmother got Alex back up on the sofa and went to fix them both another cup of tea. "Something to wake you," she said.
"Coffee," said Alex. "I need coffee." She had to shake the dreams or she'd lose her mind.
Alex had developed a chill. She had her grandmother draw the curtains, and they moved to the chair before the fireplace. Nălucă again found her lap. Then, at Alex's insistence, her grandmother continued her story.
"Did you understand what I told you?"
"Oh yes. I'm the direct descendent of Queen Victoria, from both sides of my family. We're a bunch of royal castoffs?"
"I guess that's one way of putting it. But to me, we're simply the hidden royalty, the invisible royalty. We are the dark side of royal reality. They are the light; we are the darkness. I have something special for you, Alex," she said, and off the mantle she took a rather new volume that had seen a lot of use. "This you must take with you. It's a biography. Something special, at least to me."
Alex took it from her, opened it and turned to the title page. It was a biography of Queen Marie of Romania, in English.
Her grandmother continued, "All the forces at work in the universe are not of this world. Some poor souls here on Earth have destinies, just as some events are fated. I've wondered for a while if you might. And then that apparition mistook you, at least in my mind, for Queen Marie. I wouldn't worry over this. It is a coincidence, but some coincidences have an acausal connection."
Alex then curled up on the sofa, her grandmother piled pillows around her, and she set to reading about Queen Marie. For the first time, she felt more than an interest, a real kinship, with someone in a book. She seemed to gravitate to every detail of the woman's life, her children, her lovers. She wondered about the baby girl that Queen Marie had given away, Alex's great grandmother. She wished the book said more about her. From what her grandmother had said years before, her name was Catherine, and that when she was grown, she'd not been the one to raise her own baby, Alex's grandmother. Alex couldn't remember why.
But Alex also felt something strange, alien waken inside her. The fainting and shadow visions were part of it. The queen's extramarital affairs radiated a sexual yearning that Alex hadn't known. Forbidden love, she thought.
That evening, after her grandmother went to bed, she got restless and needed to get out of the house. Also, Catalin had said that he'd meet with her again in the ruins of the gazebo, but Alex wasn't about to chance the forest with that serial rapist still lurking about. Still, she had to get out, so she decided a little trek into the center of Sinaia was just what she needed. She made sure Nălucă stayed behind.
It had always been against her nature to walk the streets of Sinaia, but then, she didn't feel her normal self tonight. Not at all.