The White Tyger

Chapter One A Radioactive Incident She lay dozing in a bed of pine needles in the Mogosoaia woods, wrapped in a gray shawl against the chilly summer night. In her hand was a letter from her aunt Aegypta, gone now five years. Ma petite chere . . . Waiting for darkness, surrounded by enemies, she lay on the west bank of the Colentina River in a stand of old trees, nineteen kilometers northwest of Snagov Portal, the tram line, and the broken wall of Bucharest. But in her dreams she was far away. Miranda had discoveredor was it a coincidence?that if she closed her eyes like this, with the onionskin pages of her aunt's final letter clasped between her fingers, images would come to her in the moment before sleep, images that were new to her, though on waking, she could recognize them as memories. At that instant she imagined her seventh birthday party, which she had celebrated in Mamaia by the seaside. English fashion, her aunt had arranged a picnic on the sand dunes with the servants' children, and there had been small cakes and ices. The Chevalier de Graz had stood above them, guarding against an accident or an assault, though he was dressed in his best uniform and ornamental braid. Now he also stood watching her, twelve or even seventeen years later, scruffy and disheveled but still vigilant. In his left hand he held her father's pistol. His right hand ached from his wound. He was looking toward the river and the ford, where under moonlight they would learn if they'd escaped their pursuers' net. There was nothing for him to do but wait and watch till then, and take a confused comfort in Miranda's presence. Bending down in the uncertain light, de Graz could just make out the small French words under her thumb: . . . si vous etes comme je crois . . . If you are as I think a princess of Roumania . . . A lock of her dark hair had fallen over her face. She mumbled something. The letter slipped from her fingers and fell open. But de Graz was more interested in studying her cheek and lips, feeling the tug of small emotions he didn't understand. He would have scorned to read further even if he'd been curious, even if he'd been able to decipher in the half-light Aegypta Schenck von Schenck's tiny handwriting. Casting his mind forward into the next hour, biting his lips with a nervousness that nevertheless contained an admixture of wordless joy, he would not have had the patience for an abstract argument of any kind: My dear niece, by this time you must suspect that there is more to the world than the evidence of your senses. By this time you might picture to yourself our globe with its little circle of illumination, a circle with its center in Great Roumania, and showing at the limit of its bright circumference the nations of Africa and Asia, and to the west the North American wilderness, dark and trackless beyond the Henry Hudson River. Closer to home we find the Byzantine Turks, and Russia, and the German Republic with its tributary states. We find barbaric Italy and unpopulated France, and Iberia behind the curtain of ice mountains. In the North Sea there are the submerged remnants of the British Islands, a proud nation once. You know all this. It is what everyone knows, every shopkeeper and office clerk. I want to bring you news of another country just as real as these, but it is nevertheless hidden or secret, a landscape of the heart, you might call it, or of dreams, but whose influence can be seen in every natural phenomenon. This is a country that the dead can visit and not only the dead. My dear, though in the ordinary world you must sometimes feel feeble and alone, please take consolation in imagining yourself a personage of terrible importance in this secPark, Paul is the author of 'The White Tyger', published 2008 under ISBN 9780765354341 and ISBN 0765354349.