Royal Blood - By Rhys Bowen Page 0,30

and when we came back to our compartments after a long and heavy meal, we found Chantal and Queenie already packing up our things, ready to disembark.

“I ain’t half glad to see you, miss,” Queenie said, apparently forgetting already how to address me. “I’ve been that scared. I didn’t sleep a wink among all them foreign types, and you should see what muck they eat—sausages so full of garlic that you could smell them a mile away. There was no decent food to be had.”

“Well, I expect we’ll have decent food at the castle,” I said, “so cheer up. The journey’s almost over and you’ve done very well.”

“I wouldn’t have come if I’d known,” she muttered. “Give me a nice café in Barking any day.”

“All ready?” Lady Middlesex’s face appeared around my door. “Apparently the train is making a special stop for us. So they don’t want to wait around too long. We must be ready to disembark the moment it comes to a halt.”

I looked out of the window at the gray countryside. It had become mountainous again and flakes of snow were falling. There was no sign of a city.

“Aren’t we going to the capital?” I asked.

“Not at all. The princess is being married at the royal ancestral castle in the mountains. That is why it is most important that I see you safely to your destination. I gather it is quite a long drive from the station.”

As she spoke, the train began to slow. We could hear the squealing of brakes and then it jerked to a halt. A door was opened for us and we were escorted down onto the platform of a small station. Peasants wrapped up against the cold stared at us with interest, while our trunks were unloaded from the baggage car. Then a whistle blew and the express disappeared into the gloom.

“Where the devil is the person they’ve sent to meet us?” Lady Middlesex demanded. “You stay there with the bags and I’ll go and find a porter.”

A local train came in, people got off and on and the platform emptied out. Suddenly I felt the back of my neck prickle with the absolute certainty that I was being watched. I spun around to see a deserted platform with swirling snow. Of course someone is watching us, I told myself. We must be frightfully interesting to peasants who have never gone farther than the next town. But I still couldn’t shake off the uneasiness.

“They can’t know we’re coming,” Miss Deer-Harte said. “They’ve probably mixed up dates. We’ll have to spend the night at a local inn and I can’t even imagine how awful and dangerous that will be. Bedbugs and brigands, you mark my words.”

At that moment Lady Middlesex reappeared with several porters. “The stupid man was waiting with his car, outside the station,” she said. “I asked him how we were supposed to know he was there if he didn’t present himself. Did he expect us to walk around looking for him? But he doesn’t appear to speak English. You’d have thought the princess might have taken the trouble to send an English-speaking person to welcome us. A proper welcoming party would have been nice—with little peasant girls in costume and a choir maybe. That’s how we would have done it in England, isn’t it? Really these foreigners are hopeless.” Suddenly she yelled, “Careful with that box, you idiot!” She leaped up and slapped the porter’s hand. He said something in the local language to the others and they gave a sinister laugh and took off with our bags. Miss Deer-Harte’s suspicions were beginning to rub off on me. I half expected the porters to have run off with our things, leaving us stranded, but we met up with them in a cobbled street outside the station.

Before us was a large square black vehicle with tinted windows. A chauffeur in black uniform stood beside it.

“My God,” Miss Deer-Harte exclaimed in a horrified voice. “They’ve sent a hearse.”

Chapter 11

Bran Castle

Somewhere in the hills of Romania

Wednesday, November 16

Cold, bleak, mountainous.

“Is this the only motorcar?” Lady Middlesex demanded, waving her arms in the way that English people do when speaking with foreigners who don’t understand them. “Only one automobile? What about the servants? They can’t ride with us. Simply not done. Is there a bus they can take? A train?”

None of her questions produced any response at all and in the end she had to concede that the maids would have to sit in