Transylvania

Dougie awoke early. This was rare; something wasn’t right.

He actually hadn’t slept well at all. His soft dreams had been tainted and infected with his father and the words he had spoken hours before; his small, teenage body had twisted and contorted in the night so that the sheets had cocooned him in damp, cotton ropes. He lay now, breathless, in the dark and staring up at the roof of his four-poster. His palm was clasped to his forehead as his chest rose and fell, sternum straining against the sheets that bound him in his twisted position. His arm collapsed onto the downy pillow, and he groaned.

He reached over and lit a candle, drawing some comfort from the soft flicker that illuminated the room, before leaning back into his pillow and frowning. The house was quiet, but not silent. Dougie could hear mumbled words coming from floors beneath him, and though he kept still so he could concentrate on them, he could not work out who the voices belonged to.

It was though a stopwatch was ticking away in his mind – a stopwatch that grew more persistent with each passing second. He had a nagging feeling in the back of his head that he should do something to stop the timer reaching the point where it was going to cease ticking.

Tiredness battled with Dougie’s urge to identify the speakers below him, and eventually won. He drifted in and out of sleep, eyelids fluttering in dream as dashes of memories hovered just outside conscious reach. His blonde tresses stuck out at odd angles else to his forehead, and he hadn’t been this hot in winter since the fever he’d had as a child. Yet he was unaware of this, and as he surrendered to the waves of weariness, the voices grew louder beneath him.

*

“Doug!”

For the second time that morning he awoke sharply – but this time, the sun was in his eyes and his heart was in his mouth. He fumbled with his bed sheets blindly, trying to work out where the noise was coming from, and before he knew it he was flat on his front on the floor.

“Doug!” The voice called again, accompanied by a sharp tap on the window. Dougie felt the heat drain from his face; if the addressee of his letter had come to find it again this morning, he’d get caught for certain…

He picked himself up off the floor, disentangling himself from his bedclothes, and raced to the window, throwing open the curtains. But instead of encountering a freckled face that was permanently illuminated with joy and a bold smile, he found a rather still figure whose expression was etched with the deep concentration it took to keep balanced on the windowsill. Dougie sighed in relief but peered at the arrival curiously as he opened one side of the large window, allowing Harry Judd to climb into the room.

“Morning, Doug,” Harry sighed, flexing his fingers. “You could have responded a bit quicker, you know, I’ve been sat up there for far too long to be comfortable.”

“I was asleep, Harry - and when people visit each other, the usual custom is to use the front door,” Dougie replied in greeting, raising an eyebrow at his other best friend, one that was much higher up in the social circle than Tom was. “I see you desire to be different today. Didn’t you feel like enduring my father’s conversation this morning?”

“It’s not so much that,” Harry said, stepping over the mess of linen on the floor, “but then again I imagine he’s not in the most pleasant of moods today.”

Dougie shifted his feet from side to side. “You might be right, there,”

Harry grinned, keeping his bright blue eyes on Dougie. “Tom was listening at the door for most of the conversation last night. He told me you really held your own…”

“I’d prefer not to talk about it,” Dougie replied stiffly, making Harry chuckle affectionately, but the younger boy broke out of his irritation quickly. “Is that why I’m waking up to find you at my window today? You’ve spoken to Tom overnight?”

Harry nodded, serious now. “He snuck out last night to deliver a letter to me – he wouldn’t be allowed in the house to talk in person in the early hours and you know how fussy he gets when it comes to breaking rules. But in the letter he told me everything that had happened and what we – or I – must do to prevent anything further happening to you. Your father is a powerful man – efficient, devious, and quick.

“This is why I’m avoiding him at the moment. Tom thinks he theorises that our servant friend is in on it, and if he suspects me as well then he’ll ban me from seeing you, and then you’re stuck. I need -”

“Wait – what?” Dougie spluttered, interrupting Harry’s flow of explanations. “He knows about Tom? How?”

“I said that he theorises, at this moment in time, for he has no proof,” Harry continued impatiently, running a hand through his dark hair. “But we are your best friends and if we don’t know who you’re conducting a scandalous affair with, nobody will.”

Dougie snorted. “I’d hardly call it scandalous.”

“Dougie, be serious,” Harry pleaded. “Just look at how your father reacted. You are the Earl’s son, and you’re seeing the oldest child of a poor farmer from the outskirts of town. Its social chalk and cheese! Not to mention the fact that you’re both – well, that you’re both boys, Doug.”

He spoke the last part softly, afraid of hurting his friend’s feelings. Dougie bent down to pick up his sheets and threw them with more force than necessary back onto the bed. He turned his back on Harry and rooted through his wardrobe for a fresh change of clothes, feeling irked – not by Harry directly, but by the connotations of his words. He closed his eyes and sighed. Didn’t Harry think he’d gone over this many times before in his head?

“Why are we going this way?” The blonde asked the brunette, who was cheerfully weaving his way through the crowd ahead of him. “Doesn’t this go to the food market?”

“You bet it does,” was the shouted reply. “The best for miles around – not that I’ve ever really been that far, of course.”

The shortest of the pair said nothing in reply, but kept following his lead, struggling slightly to keep up. He ducked his head, his eyes shielded from the sun by the scruffy borrowed cap on his head – but the action was more to disguise his features from the public.

“I think it’s time for you to taste something other than all those ridiculously garnished, fancy meals your friend Tom cooks for you up there.”

“But Tom doesn’t cook –” Dougie’s reply was stifled by a large toffee apple which was suddenly being forced between his teeth. He choked a little and removed it, staring up at the reason it had come to be there. The reason gave the grin Dougie had come to associate as his trademark, and grabbed his new companion’s hand to stop him getting lost in the throng of peasants.

A shock of electricity shot through Dougie’s nerves as soon as their palms connected. He took a breath – this wasn’t something that had ever happened with his friends, Tom and Harry, he knew that much. But then, Dougie had never felt quite this way around those two; he was often overcome by a sensation of recklessness, like he could do anything, whenever he was with his newfound friend. It was freeing to spend time with somebody in the dirty streets and the open fields instead of the grounds of his grand house or Harry’s equally large one, but Dougie was sure that there was more to it than this.

It had only been a few weeks since they first met. It was a few weeks during which Dougie longed to break out of his house more than ever, and a few weeks during which Tom had been most suspicious of his friend’s new love of muddy places (for he often had to collect Dougie’s laundry, which contained trousers bearing crumbling, dirty ankles and splatters of sludge) but had not yet managed to extract the secret from him. But each time Dougie had encountered the farmer’s son in the street after spotting him on the rooftops, he’d stopped to talk with him for a bit of light relief – and before he had known it, they were arranging to spend days together as true friends, sneaking round areas of town and country that the Earl’s son had never been allowed to venture to.

A heavy gobbet of water burst from its jewelled shape on Dougie’s nose as he took a chance peek up at the summer sky. A crack of thunder bellowed through the market as the rain began to pelt more heavily on fruit-sellers and fish-mongers alike, and he felt a strong force tug on his arm. He let himself be pulled and jostled, his feet sliding on the soon glistening cobblestones and his hair turning curly with the humidity. He laughed in exhilaration, a soft sound that made the brunette in front turn and grin. Dougie had no clue as to where they were going, but trusted and hoped it was somewhere sheltered as his clothes started to become saturated and he’d have to devise a lie for Tom and his parents as to why he’d been out in this weather.

“So is this the great taste of the town you wanted me to try?” Dougie laughed breathlessly as the pair eventually slowed to a walk, tossing up the confectionary he was still clutching before catching it casually and taking a small bite of its sugary coating. “Because even the rich have toffee apples, you know.”

“You learn something new every day,” beamed the freckled face, raindrops slithering down his cheeks. They were out of the market now, down a side alleyway Dougie had only briefly been down once before. Brick towers loomed over them on either side as they walked, before Dougie recognised the direction they were heading in. Before long they were out of the cemented labyrinth and heading up a dirt track, climbing the hill through the accumulating slushy mud and increasing rainfall.

“I wish I lived somewhere like this, sometimes.” Dougie claimed quietly as they reached the top of the road, looking down onto a quaint farm in the valley.

“Youdo live on a hill – and you have the best view of the county for miles,” his companion stated, sitting down on the grass to face the view. “What more can you ask for?”

Dougie sighed, seating himself close to the other boy. “You probably won’t understand this, but some days I’d trade it all in to live somewhere where all eyes aren’t on you, where you aren’t waited on hand and foot, where you’re not expected to be an angel twenty-four hours a day.”

There was a short silence. “Then it’s settled. I’ll go and live with your parents and become spoiled, and you can come and help my father herd sheep and cows.”

Dougie smiled slightly, looking up into a pair of thoughtful, azure eyes, into which spidery strands of hair were feeding raindrops. His chest clutched tight and he fidgeted with his trousers, eyes darting down to his knees. Had he finally found someone who appreciated his way of thinking? Maybe he didn’t fully understand, being at the opposite end of the social spectrum - but at least he wasn’t like Harry who sometimes took being exceptionally wealthy for granted, or the usually grateful Tom whom Dougie occasionally suspected of wishing it was he who was waited on, instead of the other way round. He took a deep breath and opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Instead, he lifted the toffee apple to his lips and took a tiny bite, scraping the caramel off with his teeth. He looked at it musingly.

“Toffee apple? The real taste of the town, huh?” Dougie asked, re-phrasing his previous question to change the subject. He received no answer, and so bit another minute chunk of sugar from the fruit and swallowed. His hand was trembling slightly, and he didn’t know why.

He twisted his head to the side, and found his companion closer than he’d originally thought he was. His hand froze halfway en route to raise the toffee apple to his lips again, and suddenly found the rain dripping from the dark curls before him very interesting.

“No,” the older of the pair replied, speaking just loud enough for Dougie to hear over the splash of the rain. “That’s… not what I wanted to show you.”

“Then what?”

The apple was knocked to the earth and rolled down the hill. The hand that had held it became entwined with another and was pushed to the ground and before Dougie knew it he wasn’t tasting toffee anymore, but something far sweeter. He thought his lungs were being crushed by his ribcage as he couldn’t seem to breathe anymore, head spinning and heart skipping beats like his cardiac muscle was about to fail. His lips parted to try and coax oxygen into his body, but all he received was a gentle squeeze by another pair.

“Danny…” Dougie whispered in feeble protest, moving his head to the left, but a hand steered it back. Dougie’s eyes flitted over the paler, freckled visage mere inches from his own, both of their chests taking irregular breaths beneath their sopping shirts. Why was he objecting? He knew it was wrong, in everyone else’s eyes – but it didn’tfeel wrong to him. In fact, he thought he’d rather like to lean in that bit closer, let the water on his face run between their touching faces, feel the chill of a nose beside his in contrast to warm lips pressed up against each other…

He answered the look in the other boy’s eyes by closing the gap between them.

“Doug, stop daydreaming.”

Dougie snapped out of his trance at the urgent tone in Harry’s voice. “What?”

“Someone’s coming.”

The blonde focused his senses and heard quick footsteps on the stairs. He threw a shirt over his head and sat down next to Harry on the untidy bed, staring at the door, when the footsteps halted outside it and paused uncertainly. Dougie had a sick feeling in his stomach; he somehow knew this wasn’t good.

“Come in,” Dougie replied to three raps on the door, and the handle slowly turned. Tom crept into the room, an entirely sombre look on his face and his gaze directed at the floor. His face was half hidden by his fair mop of hair, but Dougie noted a faint red tinge round the bottom of his eyes. The servant took a breath as if trying to prepare himself, and finally made eye contact with Dougie.

“Your father wants to talk to you in his study, Doug. Harry – you and I have got some thinking to do, and quickly.”