Silk

Anna could still remember the first time very clearly. It is often the way with first times: the memory can over-rule all subsequent events and leave them as bitter after-tastes, a shadow of what came before. But she had never yet been disappointed, and so each year she looked forwards to Christmas with a childish glee quite unbecoming for a princess.

She had been five years old, that first time. Anna remembered the dull pomp of the church as it moved into the season of Christ's birth, the activity of the villagers as they strained to gather food enough for the celebrations. Giving gifts to mark the birth of Jesus is an almost alien thing for the Orthodox, but her father would often present her and Velkan with a trifle: a foreign coin, a toy horse whittled from wood, the coloured fletching from a broken arrow.

She supposed that, looking back on it, her father was trying to prepare her and her brother for their future life: one of hardship and struggle against Dracula. She was never raised to understand her own beauty, or even to regard her gender as being different to her brother's. Without the influence of a mother, she looked instead to her father to provide her with all the guidance she needed in life.

So that first time lingered in the mind.

The snow had been falling steadily for the past two months, and although it was a sight she would never take for granted, the novelty of snow had worn off. She sat up in bed and watched the pattern of ice on the windows, the hard, fragile breath of frost curlicued across the glass. It filtered the light, made everything seem a touch unreal, a blue moment that reminded her more of evening than morning. And then she'd seen it, placed carefully on the foot of her bed amidst the rumpled blankets: a small parcel, wrapped in coloured paper and bound with ribbons.

Anna pounced on it eagerly, dragging the parcel up the bed so that she could study it. The paper was silver, as cold and brittle as the frost outside, and it crumpled and crackled in her hands. The ribbons were scarlet, wrapped three times around the parcel. She worried at the knot for a moment before biting through the ribbon, too impatient to wait for scissors or a knife to cut open the knot.

Inside lay a piece of cloth – fine, soft, slippery fabric, the like of which she had never seen before. It was as scarlet as the ribbons, flowing over her hands as she pulled it free of the paper. Anna knew only of warm fabrics, from the woollen and velvet gowns she wore for best to the linen and hide that she wore to run around the forest with Velkan. This was something new – a cold fabric, one that disdained rough handling. Already she had creased it, just from holding it so tightly.

Later, she would learn that this fabric was silk – a not unknown commodity, but rare enough in Transylvania. The nobles of Hungary and Romania wore it as if it were cotton - but then, they were wealthy beyond the dreams of the Valerious: for despite their titles and fine house, all the money the Valerious had ever accrued went into fighting the bane of the family's existence: Dracula.

That first gift had just been a scrap of silk; enough for her to wrap around her wrist or to tie back her hair. She had it still, sewn into the pockets of one of her redingotes. For a while she carried the scrap with her everywhere, until her father noticed it and asked where she had chanced upon such a thing.

When Anna had told him of the parcel on her bed, he had frowned and sent her away. She thought no more of it until next Christmas, when another, identical, parcel appeared. This time it contained a square of pale blue silk. It did not suit her colouring, but it was so pretty that Anna wrapped it around her toy horse like a caparison.

The third Christmas, Anna was obliged to share her room with a nursemaid, who kept anxious watch over her charge. Lying in bed and feigning sleep, Anna watched the nurse linger beside the window, one hand to her throat where a crucifix was on prominent display. Despite the nurse's presence, another parcel of silk was found at the foot of the bed.

Anna was ten years old when she first saw one of them. Her father had closed the external shutters to her bedroom windows. She had complained about it, saying that she wanted to look out and see the frost, but he had refused to bend – and so even in the early morning, the room was as gloomy as midnight, lit only by wavering candles that had all but burned down to puddles of wax overnight.

At the foot of her bed was the silver-wrapped parcel, but beside it was seated a woman so light and graceful that she scarcely made the bedcovers dip beneath her weight. The woman was so beautiful that Anna could not help but stare. Accustomed to the looks of the villagers around her, she had never before seen true voluptuousness. The woman's dress was cut close to her body, revealing rather than concealing, and her skin glowed as pale and pink as the inside of a sea-shell. And her hair! A tumbling mass of red curls that, at first, Anna took to be as messy as her own, but which later she realised had been most artfully arranged.

The woman smiled at her, charming and gracious. "Hello, Anna."

"Who are you?" Anna asked, curious but unafraid.

"My name is Aleera. My sisters and I have a gift for you. See?" She indicated the parcel beside her, but for the first time, Anna was uninterested. She was fascinated instead by the woman in front of her.

"Your sisters?"

Aleera's smile deepened. "Of a sort. But come, open your gift! We spent a long time choosing the cloth, and hardly ever do we get the chance to see how you receive it. I hope you like it. This year, it was my choice."

Anna took the parcel as it was nudged towards her, determined that she would like the silken gift even if it were ugly. Of course it was not ugly at all, but looked as if it had come from Aleera's own costume: a long swathe of silk in delicate shades of mottled pink, trimmed with gold thread.

"It's beautiful," she said honestly. "Thank you."

Aleera dipped her head in acknowledgment. "You are welcome. I shall pass on your thanks to my sisters."

She rose to go, but Anna stopped her momentarily when she asked, "Why do you bring me gifts?"

Aleera gave her a slow smile. "Because one day, we hope that you will be our sister, too. We have waited a long time for you, Anna Valerious."

And before Anna could ask anything more, the external shutters slammed open, and Aleera opened the window and jumped out of it as easily as if she were leaping into a pool. Anna knew that her room was three storeys above ground, and so she hurried to the open casement to peer out into the flurry of snow that whirled the air outside. If she had thought to see that beautiful body lying crumpled on the hard earth, then she was mistaken. Of Aleera there was no sign at all.

Over the next few years, Anna came to anticipate the visits from the three sisters. Aleera had been followed by the slim, elegant Verona – black-haired, cat-faced, refined beyond nobility. She would speak of her homeland, but without passion - just a recital of incidents and events, for she knew that she, and not Italy, was the object of Anna's fascination. Verona gave her a silk blouse the colour of claret, with dozens of tiny, cloth-covered buttons.

After Verona there came Marishka, blonde and self-assured to the point of arrogance, and with a playful temperament that sometimes bordered on cruelty. She would stare at Anna's body with a thoughtful, assessing look, and then would make some disparaging comment accompanied by a tinkling of laughter, so that Anna never knew whether Marishka meant her spiteful words or not.

And over time, Anna recognised a pattern to the silken gifts. Verona, closest of all the three sisters to her own colouring, gave silk in rich, striking colours that would perhaps be more suited to velvet – green, crimson, purple. Marishka would be alternately meagre and extravagant, giving one year a silk-edged handkerchief and another year sending an entire bale of raw silk. Aleera always favoured soft, warm hues such as pink and gold, and it was the Christmas of her sixteenth year when the parcel contained a silk chemise of palest rose.

Aleera had smiled encouragingly when Anna opened the parcel. "Try it on. I made it with my own hands."

Anna looked closely at the fanciful confection. The stitching was so tiny and tight it was almost invisible. "You are a skilled seamstress, Aleera! I am sure there is nobody in the village who could match you."

"Nobody in all of Romania, my dear," Aleera said, rather smugly.

Anna fingered the underwear with reverence, for in all honesty she would rather look at it than wear it. The sisters' gifts had begun to take on a meaning beyond their earthly worth, and so whenever she looked at or touched one of the pieces of silk, she automatically thought of the woman who had given it to her.

"Try it! I want to see if I judged well with the measurements," Aleera insisted. She reclined upon the bed, her hair over her shoulders and her expression open and animated, just as if she were one of the young women of the village gossiping around the well with her friends. Indeed, she looked no older now than she had done when she had first appeared to Anna six years ago: still beautiful, her hair still glossy with vitality, her flesh still firm and ripe.

Anna made a helpless gesture. "I promise I shall try it on later."

"No, do it now!" Aleera's eyes flashed suddenly, almost changing colour, and her voice, usually so soft, became harsh for an instant. She recovered herself quickly, and smiled, saying: "Later, I may not be able to see you. How will I know if the gift has been a success unless I see you wearing it? You cannot be embarrassed, surely?"

"Of course not," Anna said hurriedly. "But…"

Aleera pouted. "Very well. I shall close my eyes. But you need not be shy! One day we will be sisters, you and I – just as I became the sister of Verona and Marishka."

"You never did tell me what you meant by that," Anna said as raised her nightdress and began to wriggle out of it. "You are certainly not related by blood."

For some reason this remark drew peals of laughter from Aleera. "Oh, my love, you are so amusing! By blood we are bound, yes, we are. But it is by marriage that we are related; for you see, we all love the same man."

Anna paused in the act of slipping the chemise over her head. "How is that possible? It is against God's law that a man should have three wives."

Aleera opened her eyes. "Not every man follows such a law."

"You said you would not look!" Anna tugged the garment over her head to cover herself, blushing furiously. "And anyway, do you not get jealous of the others? I know I would be. I can scarcely bring myself to share my brother, and he is only my brother. A husband I know I could not share."

Aleera jumped up from the bed and clapped her hands; delighted by the way the silk chemise hugged Anna's body. "I knew it would fit! I am so pleased. But here, the strap on your left does not lie quite as it should. Let me help you."

Anna instinctively raised her hand to move the strap herself, but suddenly Aleera was beside her. She did not know how the other woman could have moved so quickly, but there she was, her nails very sharp and red against the thin delicate silk and her own pale skin.

Aleera fixed the strap and then fussed with the neckline, smoothing down the silk with gentle movements. Her fingertips brushed Anna's skin, the swell of her breasts. Anna said nothing, but felt a flicker of heat run through her at the touch. To stave off the sensation, she said loudly, "You have not answered me. If you love your husband, how can you bear to share him?"

"Oh," said Aleera carelessly, a small smile upon her lips, "we have our little ways of coping with jealousy."

Anna was certain, suddenly, that she did not want to know what this entailed.

"Your husband must be a – a remarkable man," she said, her voice tight as she held her breath as, with a languid caress, Aleera trailed her hand across Anna's breasts.

"He is." Aleera stepped back, withdrawing her hand, and surveyed Anna critically. "You look quite lovely, my dear. Soon you will be ready to meet him."

"Him?" Anna echoed, confused.

Aleera smiled, and her strong white teeth glinted. "My husband, of course. Have you not been listening to us all this time? We want you to be our sister. The fourth Bride of Dracula."

Even now, long years after the event that had brought the realisation that the women she thought of as her friends were actually her enemies, deadly killers in thrall to the creature that her family had sworn to destroy, Anna still looked forwards to Christmas. The gifts had not stopped. Each year brought a new parcel, a new piece of silk; and each year, one of the Brides would entreat her to join them.

It was not just the lure of the silk that made Anna fear that one day she would say yes.

end