In The Name Of Love

Chapter 11

I really wanted to get out of the smart clothes, but Mircea took me straight up to the family kitchen. Though Elisabeta hurried up over to the family wing so that she could get dinner done for a decent time Mircea and I took our time. This time I was able to look at some of the detailed art as we passed it, take stock of the antique bits of furniture and pick out some of the types of flowers in the displays we passed. I saw my reflection in polished marble, felt the satin, cool wood of well used banisters, took stock of the views over the private gardens which were being tended by a few gardeners.

The door that we went through to get to the family wing wasn't the same one that I'd been using all day. Mircea said that there were ten floors of the 'suite' as he called it. It was about five times the size of my parents home, and that was considered a big farm house. Most of the rooms were guest suits and took up the top seven floors, but the other three that were above ground were lounges, a few libraries (he said the inscriptions on the doors all said 'study'). There were a couple of basement rooms for family use as well. One had been turned into a full length swimming pool, heated of course, and gym. The other was a series of less formal chill out rooms – cinema, quiet room, games room, snooker/pool room.

We walked through a carpeted hallway into a carpeted lounge and through an arch was a kitchen and there was probably a dining room through there somewhere too. Apart from the height and size of the rooms, they were like those found in any house with modern furniture and technology. There was not a portrait of a politician or past monarch in sight and there were actually carpets rather than rugs.

I really wanted to sink into the leather sofa, but Mircea was still holding my hand when he walked into the kitchen.

"Costică!" he exclaimed, dropped my hand and ran over to his cousin.

Costică, which was short for Constantin, was a five or six years younger than us, I couldn't remember which. A year into the war, when he was nine, Constantin had been really badly injured. The town he lived in had been evacuated before the Bulgarian forces moved in, but the vehicle he'd been in had been hit with some kind of explosive and he was the only person to make it out alive. That's not to say he'd had good chances of survival. Having been thrown twenty feet into a brick wall head first he should have been dead and he broke a few vertebrae, his jaw had been shattered and an eye socket.

I went to surprise Mircea on his birthday a few months ago. I took a cake to his house, had twenty one candles on it and I took stuff over to cook for dinner. When I got there I found him crying on the phone. Constantin had just woken up from the coma he'd slipped into and they were talking to one another.

Now fifteen or sixteen Constantin was pretty diminutive in stature, shorter than me and I wasn't overly tall, but looked lively and excited even though sadness entered his eyes when he saw Mircea. He was in jeans and a baggy t-shirt, and was, curiously, speaking German with a German accent. Suddenly I remembered that Mircea said he'd been learning the language at the time of the accident and when he woke up it was the only language he could speak. The accent he picked up from his German teacher.

He spoke sadly to Mircea for a little while about how so much had changed, how Mircea had changed and got older, how being awake sometimes felt like a dream and he was sometimes afraid to go to sleep in case he didn't wake up. So that I wasn't intruding I went back into the lounge and put the TV on low, but I listened to their conversation more than I paid attention to the TV I couldn't understand. After a while though their tones turned happy and Elisabeta joined in the conversation.

Dying for a drink I went into the kitchen.

"Costică, this is Anwyn," Mircea said as I came through the door.

Costică turned to me. His face was scarred from surgery, but that was less disturbing than how wide his working eye opened and how far his jaw dropped. I knew that I looked a lot different to all the people here and I was in smart clothes and I'd had my hair professionally styled, but that was seriously no excuse. I wasn't that attractive.