Captain Jack Aubrey was quite surprised when after another fruitless morning enquiring after a ship ("Any ship Milord, I'll not stand on my rank to the detriment of the service,") he emerged from the building and saw his worried friend standing by the gates. Jack, shrugging off his own difficulties, took him by the arm, led him across the road to the Red Lion, ordered porter and waited for his friend to speak.

"It is most curious, most strange, Jack, but I have never heard of this gentleman," Stephen started clumsily. "He claims relation to me and I have no reason to doubt it – certainly my paternal grandmother was from the Balkans and from a fine family – and he writes in such an agreeable and friendly manner .....a short voyage for you ....a chance for learned discourse for me. Truly it seems a timely note, but why am I so disturbed by this correspondence?"

Jack, who was used to the roundabout ways of his friend, listened with disguised impatience and then at last asked, "May I see the letter, brother?"

"Oh indeed you may, my apologies... here", replied Stephen distractedly.

To Jack's considerable surprise it was written not on paper but on a soft, vellum-like skin uneasy to the touch, but the content was, he had to admit, courteous enough.

My dear Doctor Maturin

I hope you will forgive the informality of my writing to you without introduction, and beg you allow the familiarity as we are of the same blood.

I have for a number of years heard many reports of your scientific achievement, your skill as a dissectionist and your knowledge of trepanning. I have been proud that my sister's grandson has cut so fine a figure. I too am a scientist sir, inspired by Harvey and his discourse on circulation and would consider it an honour to discuss our mutual interests.

Unfortunately I am cursed with a debilitating complaint that makes it hard for me to travel by day and thus I come to the apotheosis of my correspondence.

In short Sir, I should consider it an honour if you and your particular friend Captain Aubrey (who I hear is a most sanguine gentleman) would bestow upon me a short visit at my castle in Transylvania.

Your obedient servant
and most affectionate great uncle

Vlad

[bat] "This fog has me infernally hipped," Jack Aubrey said, peering forward past the bowsprit into the thick grey cloud which cloaked the waters of the Black Sea. For three days, ever since the schooner Demeter had passed out of the Bosphorus, eternal deep mist had shrouded their journey. "How this Kapitan Krichkoff means to find his port is more than I can understand."

"Brother, you surprise me," Maturin replied, pulling his cloak tighter against the probing cold wet. "I have seen you make landfalls after weeks of storm and months without the merest glimpse of shore and yet, you have told me yourself, you have arrived at your intended destination with no more error than a man walking through fields but a few miles from his own home."

"We've had no sightings of sun nor star for three days, Stephen. Dead reckoning is well and good, but we can barely tell day from night. I just hope this Russian doesn't fetch us up on to a sandbar. I wonder what sort of harbor this Varna is."

"You've never sailed this waters, I collect."

"No. Oh, confound this fog." Restlessly, Jack paced back and forth across the schooner's forecastle, peering port and starboard for any hint of land. Part of his anxiety, Stephen knew, was simply that Jack was unaccustomed to not being in command, his course wholly in someone else's hands.

"Jack, shall I tell you something of Transylvania? I would hazard that it falls somewhat outside of the Royal Navy's usual realm."

"By all means, Stephen. I suppose it must be a most remarkable place. It must have animals and plants and people, too, I imagine. You have visited there?"

"No, but my grandmother -- that is to say, the mother of my father -- she spent her childhood there and often used to speak to us of her homeland. She was not a natural scientist, alas, so I never was able to form a correct idea of even the larger forms of animals, let alone the beetles and lesser birds, though she spoke with great feeling of their wolves."

A dark shape emerged from the fog: Abramoff, the taciturn second mate. "Kapitan he says we anchor in two hours, no more."

"Two hours? Are you quite sure?" Jack asked. "Are we that close to land?" Before the mate could answer, a ghastly lingering howl, more chilling than a November wind, swept across the deck from somewhere ahead. Involuntarily, Jack spun about to look into the formless void. "What was that?"

"I heard nothing," Abramoff answered. "Nothing." And he slipped back into the fog.

[bab] Two hours later, and Jack had heard a very great deal about Transylvania, about the iniquity of foreign rule and the Soldan of Byzantium. Later, in the white washed privacy of a nook in Il Redu Leonu di Varna, he heard of Stephen's suspicions concerning Ambramoff and Krichhoff, the obscurity and succinctness of whose discourse surely marked them as secret agents of the Tsar. On the next day Stephen turned to the prevalence in Central Europe of the myth of the metamorphosis of humans into beasts, illustrating his talk a recitation in their entirety of some very interesting works of Apuleius and Ovid and then of a less interesting work by Kafka.

On the following day Stephen was eloquent on ancient Dacia, indeterminate boundaries and the feudal rulers of the intermontane lands - their achievements and their barbarities.

By the evening of the third day they had travelled beyond the Danube and high into the Carpathians and there the fog lifted at last. Scrim by scrim it receded to reveal, by the light of the full moon, a silvery stream and the outine of its attendant hills and valleys, till all lay shimmering below them - vineclad slopes, orchards flowering white in the moonlight, deep forests, sheer cliffs, ravines, vaporous cataracts and castellated ruins. Over the surprisingly noisy howling of wolves, the post horn sounded from time to time before the coach dashed through dimly lit, secretive villages or overtook young men trudging home from trysts in uncommonly large armed groups with outriders and singing loudly. Could it be to keep their spirits up?

"Have you ever seen anything more beautiful, brother, without it be at sea?"

"I have seldom seen such wild Romantic vistas".

The coach entered the dark forest and Jack returned to the world of the everyday, "Would you be so kind, old Stephen, as to continue with what you were telling me of your ancestor, Vlad the Impala?"

[srz] The moon's disk reappeared, now high in the sky, from behind the nearly vertical rim of a narrow valley into which the coach had passed, its four matched grays grown quite skittish, the coachman laboring to recall them to their task. Stephen responded, thoughtfully, "There's very little to tell, brother. At least, little which can be stated with any great degree of certainty. Our correspondent, my great uncle, is said to be the patriarchal Vlad's great-great-great-grandson; truth be told, however, that branch of the family genealogy is quite vague."

"I see; and this curious title: 'the Impala'? It would seem more appropriate in one who spends his time on the African veldt." Jack paused to wonder, briefly, if a man of his time and place might reasonably be expected to have knowledge of the African veldt.

"You have hit upon the essence of the thing," said Stephen, under no such compunction, "For there is very little doubt that the honorific derives not from the name of a ruminant quadruped of the sub-Saharan grasslands, but rather is a rough transliteration; a corruption of the entirely more...sinister, Transylvanian word 'impfahluhr', literally translated 'in pale hour', but more freely as 'the hour of midnight during the full moon' -- which in turn comes, circuitously enough, from the German 'festnageln', to nail down."

Jack shivered uneasily, he supposed from the clammy, chill, ancient forest air which had penetrated the thin walls of the coach. "Should you like some of this tea, Stephen, that the coachman has so thoughtfully provided us? And in a most charmingly decorated teapot, too -- just have a look at these ..."

[dac] little bats around the spout and the clove of garlic shaped lid - how unusual!"

"Indeed it is brother but I think I shall wait, I spy lights ahead, indeed they are so high up I cannot fail to presume they originate from my great uncle's castle. Why I hazard we shall be there within the hour.

Meanwhile at a large stately home outside Bath the Elusive Scarlet Pimpernel has breakfast with his trusty lieutenant Lord Wesley

"You know Patrick, there just aren't the aristos to save anymore", said Sir Bruce Blakeney as he sifted through post captured by one of his agents, "Not a single count to be smuggled, duchess to be rescued or peer imported"

"And this is the last letter" said Lord Wesley handing Sir Bruce a note with an Imperial seal hanging from it,

"Quite so" said Sir Bruce looking at the seal, "Take him outside Patrick there's a chap and give him some fish whilst I read the note".

Sir Bruce felt his blood quicken as he opened the dispatch:

Top Secret Imperial Memo (3rd copy)
To the Grand Count Vlad Impala of Dracula Castle

My dear Count I am so glad you liked the Royalists I sent you, I hate to impose upon your busy schedule but I wonder if I could prevail upon you to do a service for France. A despicable agent by the name of Maturin and his particular friend a Captain Jack Aubrey are a thorn in the Imperial French side, I wonder, could you see fit to lure them to your castle and dispose of them in your own ineffable way?

Oh, by the way, could I possibly have back the guards who escorted the Royalists?

Napoleon