Master James was more sober. “You’re on the job yet, my lad,” he told him. “I want a call from Amsterdam as soon as you’re there, and I want to talk with the housekeeper. Here’s money for your tickets and some meals, and you’ll bring me back your receipts.” His hazel eyes twinkled then. “That’s not to say you can’t get a little Dutch chocolate for yourself at the station. Fetch me a bar, too. It’s not as good as Belgian, but it’ll do. Off with you now, and use your head.” Next he gave me a grave handshake and his card. “Good-bye, my dear. Come again and see us when you’re thinking of university for yourself.”
Outside the office, Stephen grabbed my bag for me. “Let’s go, then. We’ve tickets for the ten-thirty, but we might as well get a head start.”
The master and my father had taken care of every detail, I noted, and I wondered what extra chains I’d have to slip at home. I had other business for now, however. “Stephen?” I began.
“Oh, call me Barley.” He laughed. “Everyone else calls me that, and I’m so used to it now that it gives me the creeps to hear my real name.”
“All right.” His smile was just as contagious today-easily as contagious. “Barley, I-could I ask you a favor before we leave?” He nodded. “I’d just like to go into the Camera one more time. It was so beautiful, I-and I’d like to see the vampire collection. I didn’t really get to look at it.”
He groaned. “I could tell you like grisly stuff. Seems to run in your family.”
“I know.” I felt myself flushing.
“All right. Let’s take a quick look again, but then we’ve got to run. Master James will put a stake throughmy heart if we miss the train.”
The Camera was quiet this morning, nearly empty, and we hurried up a polished staircase to the macabre niche where we’d surprised my father the day before. I swallowed a threat of tears as we entered the tiny room; hours ago, my father had been sitting here, that strangely distant look veiling his eyes, and now I didn’t even know where he was.
I remembered where he’d shelved the book, though, replaced it so casually as we talked. It would be below the case with the skull, to the left. I ran a finger along the edge of the shelf. Barley stood near me (it was impossible for us not to stand close together in that tiny space, and I wished he would wander out to the balcony instead), watching with frank curiosity. Where the book should have been was a gap like a missing tooth. I froze: surely my father would never, ever steal a book, so who could have taken it? But a second later I recognized the volume a hand’s length away. Someone had certainly moved it since I’d been there last. Had my father returned for a second look? Or had someone else taken it off the shelf? I glanced suspiciously at the skull in the glass case, but it gave back a bland, anatomical gaze. Then I lifted the book down, very carefully-there was the tall, bone-colored binding with a black silk ribbon protruding from the top. I laid it on the table and found the title page:Vampires du Moyen Age, Baron de Hejduke, Bucarest, 1886.
“What do you want with this morbid rubbish?” Barley was gazing over my shoulder.
“School paper,” I mumbled. The book was divided into chapters, as I remembered:“Vampires de la Toscane,” “Vampires de la Normandie,” and so on. I found the right one at last:“Vampires de Provence et des Pyrénées.” Oh, Lord, was my French up to this? Barley was starting to look at his watch. I ran a quick finger above the page, careful not to touch the magnificent type or ivory paper.“Vampires dans les villages de Provence -” What had my father been looking for here? He’d been poring over this first page of the chapter.“‘Il y a aussi une legende…’” I leaned closer.
Since that moment, I have known many times what I first experienced then. Until then, my forays into written French had been purely utilitarian, the completion of almost mathematical exercises. When I comprehended a new phrase it was merely a bridge to the next exercise. Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light. Since then I have known this moment of truth with other companions: German, Russian, Latin, Greek, and-for a brief hour-Sanskrit.
But that first time held the revelation of all the others.“‘Il y a aussi une legende,’” I breathed, and Barley suddenly bent to follow the words. What he translated aloud, however, I had already taken in with a mental gasp: “‘There is also a legend that Dracula, noblest and most dangerous of all vampires, attained his power not in the region of Wallachia but through a heresy in the monastery of Saint-Matthieu-des-Pyrénées-Orientales, a Benedictine house founded in the year 1000 of Our Lord.’ What is this, anyway?” Barley said.
“School paper,” I repeated, but our eyes met strangely over the book, and he looked as if he were seeing me for the first time. “Is your French very good?” I asked humbly.
“Of course.” He smiled and bent over the page again. “‘Dracula is said to visit the monastery every sixteen years to pay tribute to his origins and to renew the influences that have allowed him to live in death.’”
“Go on, please.” I gripped the edge of the table.
“Certainly,” he said. “‘The calculations done by Brother Pierre de Provence in the early seventeenth century indicate that Dracula visits Saint-Matthieu in the half-moon of the month of May.’”
“What is the moon now?” I gasped, but Barley didn’t know either. There was no further mention of Saint-Matthieu; the remaining pages paraphrased a document from a church in Perpignan about disturbances among sheep and goats in the region in 1428; it wasn’t clear whether the cleric-author blamed vampires or sheep rustlers for these problems. “Odd stuff,” Barley commented. “Is this what your family reads for fun? Do you want to hear about vampires in Cyprus?”
Nothing else in the book looked relevant to my purposes, and when Barley glanced at his watch again, I turned sadly away from the enticing walls of volumes.
“Well, that was cheerful,” Barley said on the way down the staircase. “You’re an unusual girl, aren’t you?” I couldn’t tell how he meant this, but I hoped it was a compliment.
On the train, Barley entertained me with chat about his fellow students, a pageant of madcaps and scapegoats, then carried my bag onto shipboard for me above the oily gray water of the Channel. It was a bright, chill day and we settled into the vinyl seats inside, sheltered from the wind. “I don’t sleep much during term,” Barley informed me, and promptly dozed off with his coat rolled into a ball under one shoulder.
It was just as well for me that he slept for a couple of hours, because I had a lot to ponder, matters of a practical nature as well as a scholarly one. My immediate problem was not a question of links among historical events but of Mrs. Clay. She would be waiting all too solidly in the front hall of our house in Amsterdam, full of smothering concern for my father and me. Her presence would keep me housebound at least overnight, and if I didn’t appear after school the next day, she would be on my trail like a pack of wolves, probably with half the police force of Amsterdam to keep her company. Also, there was Barley. I glanced at his sleeping face across from me; he was snoring discreetly against his jacket. Barley would be headed off to the ferry again as I left for school tomorrow, and I would have to be careful not to intercept him on the way.
Mrs. Clay was indeed home when we arrived. Barley stood with me on the doorstep while I searched for my keys; he was craning admiringly at the old mercantile houses and gleaming canals-“Excellent! And all those Rembrandt faces in the streets!” When Mrs. Clay suddenly opened the door and drew me inside, he almost didn’t make it in after me. I was relieved to see his good manners take over. While the two of them disappeared into the kitchen to call Master James, I hurried upstairs, calling back that I wanted to wash my face. In fact-the thought made my heart beat with guilty rapidity-I intended to sack my father’s citadel at once. I would figure out later how to deal with Mrs. Clay and Barley. Now I had to find what I felt sure must be hidden there.