6 March 1820

6 March 1820 is the date of a journal entry that places Glynis Wright’s private record beside the previous night’s hunt with Vlad Dracula. The date matters less as a marker of a single turning point than as a window into her unsettled life on the road: she can hunt apart from the other brides, yet remains subject to Vlad’s commands and recoils when his account of their violence exposes what their shared existence demands.

The dated entry and its circumstances

The entry opens with Glynis awake before Vlad in the evening. He sits across from her with his eyes closed, and she is not certain that he is truly asleep. She retrieves her journal from a hiding place in her small travel case and writes about the previous night. The scene makes the act of recording itself part of her precarious circumstances: her account is private, but it is written in the presence of the person who controls her.

The journal has already served as a place to name injuries she cannot otherwise resolve. In an earlier entry, Glynis describes writing about her rape and the brides’ first feast upon her; the memory fills her with rage, and she hides from them for three days before being found and beaten. By March 1820, she is still using the journal to preserve her own account, even while she remains vulnerable to discovery and punishment.

The previous night’s hunt

The entry returns to a stop on the outskirts of a small village. Glynis feels the approach of the hunt in her heightened senses and prepares to leave the carriage, removing her coat and bonnet so she can move freely. Unlike earlier feeding within the castle, she is excited by the prospect of hunting without her vampire sisters and no longer having to wait for them to feed first.

Vlad helps her down from the carriage, then limits her freedom with a precise instruction: she is to take one mortal and return. The episode thus joins an apparent permission to act independently with an order that defines the permitted scope of that independence. Glynis’s pleasure in the hunt and her obedience to Vlad coexist; neither cancels the other.

Violence and recognition

The entry’s account turns from the hunt to a revelation about Vlad’s own feeding. He admits that he took the blood of a woman and her unborn child. Glynis’s response is immediate: she freezes, pulls him away, demands that he repeat what he said, and then attacks him with her fists when he confirms that he killed them. She calls the family innocent and condemns the continuing deaths.

Vlad answers by treating killing as the shared condition of their existence, insisting that they are the undead and that they feed and kill. His words do not reconcile Glynis to the act. The exhilaration of her own feeding drains away; she feels cold and dead, and tears come as Vlad kisses her. The contrast is central to the dated account: the hunt has offered Glynis a rush of power, but Vlad’s disclosure makes that power inseparable from the violence and moral injury she resists.

Freedom, dress, and imposed identity

The entry belongs to a longer struggle over what freedom means for Glynis. Before her transformation, she had described wanting to live as a woman without the restrictions imposed on her, rather than simply wanting to become a man. After becoming a vampire, she finds herself confined by a different authority: she resents the costume Vlad requires her to wear and recognizes the irony of escaping one restrictive society only to be trapped in another.

Clothing repeatedly makes that control visible. When summoned to Vlad’s library, Glynis chooses her own blue Italian silk gown and does without a corset, a small act of bodily preference amid imposed demands. For the journey to Buda, Vlad dictates which clothes and jewels she may take so that Andrew Wright will believe the family’s possessions were lost in an accident. He also arranges veils to conceal her appearance from her brother. Glynis finds the heavy veil frustrating and tears it from her face before Andrew’s arrival, unwilling to accept that she must meet him through layers of organza and lace.

At an opera appearance, a black-and-gold gown and the presence of Andrew and Vlad sharpen the contrast between her former human attachments and her undead marriage. Glynis feels radiant and, for a moment, alive as the Countess Dracula, even though she knows that this surface presentation does not alter what she has become. Across these episodes, dress and concealment express a conflict over who controls the image she presents and the life she inhabits.

Wider histories of power

The date also sits within a narrative shaped by competing accounts of power and captivity. Vlad tells Glynis that, as a vampire, he is restricted by the curse of daylight; though he commands the territory around his castle, he cannot recover the political influence he once held as a mortal prince. His ambition to leave his country and regain a place in the wider world is also visible in his plans and in his human agent Stephen Sheridan, who admires Vlad’s ability to turn a dangerous predicament to his advantage while admitting that he fears him.

A separate recollection by Cneajna reaches further into the past. After murdering Piroska, she was confined at Visegrád, where she found peace but not happiness. There she met Vlad Dracula, then another prisoner, and came to love him; he later married Ilona Szilágyi for political reasons and promised to return for Cneajna. That history echoes the present entry’s entanglement of desire, confinement, and authority without belonging to the events of 6 March itself. The diary date gives Glynis’s immediate experience a fixed point, while the surrounding narratives show how the same structures of power recur across Vlad’s mortal past and his vampire household.