Glynis begins her secret affair with Ignatius

Glynis Wright begins her affair with Ignatius in Buda, where a moment of physical vulnerability turns into an intense mutual attachment. The relationship offers her a form of intimacy beyond her compulsory bond to Vlad Dracula, but it remains precarious: Glynis must return to Vlad, and the lovers can only plan their next meeting in secret.

The Beginning of the Affair

Glynis’s longing for a life beyond the limits imposed on her precedes her meeting with Ignatius. Before the supernatural imprisonment that now defines her existence, she had insisted that she wanted to live as freely as a man, without the constraints placed on women. As a vampire in Vlad Dracula’s castle, she finds herself trapped in another restrictive order, subject to his commands and frustrated even by the clothing he requires her to wear. Her affair with Ignatius begins against this background of denied autonomy: desire becomes not simply an escape into romance, but a private experience she chooses for herself.

The first encounter is marked by reciprocal vulnerability. When Ignatius bites Glynis, she experiences the act as profoundly pleasurable, unlike the bites she has known from other vampires. She responds by kissing the blood from his mouth, and he answers her desire before telling her to drink from him. Glynis feeds from Ignatius’s throat, taking in his powerful blood as her wounds close and heal. The exchange is at once sensual and supernatural: each gives the other access to the body, while the blood carries a force that distinguishes their intimacy from ordinary human courtship.

Their passion soon overtakes the formal distance between them. They kiss ravenously, and Glynis barely notices as they undress one another. In the midst of this encounter, she asks for his name; only then does he identify himself as Ignatius. Naming him does not cool the intensity. They continue their embrace, and Glynis understands the experience as a kind of lovemaking she has not known before. The relationship has moved beyond a single exchange of blood into an emotional attachment, but its circumstances remain unequal to that freedom: Ignatius fears that she will leave and not return, because she must go back to Vlad Dracula.

A Promise of Return

The encounter ends not with a secure escape from their circumstances but with a promise shaped by them. Glynis tells Ignatius that she is not someone who lets a man take her to bed on a whim; she then admits that he has taken her heart and that she fears she will never recover it. Ignatius answers that she has taken his in turn. Their mutual declaration gives the affair emotional weight, but it does not remove the danger that frames it: Glynis remains bound to return to her Master, Vlad Dracula.

Clinging to Ignatius, Glynis swears she will come to him again, though she cannot name a date or time and expects it will be difficult to slip away. Ignatius redirects her from his own haven and proposes a clandestine meeting one week later at a small hotel near the river, in the Cathedral’s shadow. He specifies the garden by the fountain and the hour: midnight. Glynis agrees to find a way to be there, and Ignatius promises to wait until dawn. The precise arrangements turn their attachment into a secret plan, while its uncertain execution leaves the lovers suspended between a chosen intimacy and the obligations that can pull Glynis back to Vlad.

Private Attachment and Public Role

The secrecy of Glynis and Ignatius’s relationship matters because Glynis’s life in Buda is also being arranged as a public performance of her place beside Vlad Dracula. At the opera, she descends in a lavish black-and-gold gown to meet Andrew Wright and Vlad, the man who claims to be her husband. Glynis registers the contrast between Andrew’s goodness and Vlad’s menace, yet feels radiant and, for that evening, like Countess Dracula. The scene does not mention Ignatius, but it clarifies the social identity surrounding the affair: in public, Glynis is displayed as Vlad’s wife, while her attachment to Ignatius belongs to a hidden life that cannot openly displace that role.

The resulting tension is not resolved by the lovers’ promise. Their intimacy gives Glynis a relationship she has entered through her own desire, but it does not make her free to remain with Ignatius or openly acknowledge him. The meeting arranged for the following week is therefore more than a romantic appointment: it is a fragile attempt to preserve a private bond inside a life governed by Vlad’s authority. The affair begins not as a completed escape, but as a secret commitment whose continuation depends on Glynis finding a way to return.

Secrecy Within Vlad’s Arrangements

The affair takes shape within a life whose apparent freedoms Vlad Dracula carefully manages. In Buda, he arranges for a dressmaker to make Glynis a veil so that Andrew Wright will not recognize her transformed appearance, and insists she wear it whenever she is near her brother. The organza and lace become another restriction: Glynis tears the veil from her face in frustration, unable to bear the thought of seeing Andrew through it. Her private attachment to Ignatius thus belongs to a wider struggle over who may see her and how she may appear, even though the veil itself is intended to conceal her from Andrew, not identified as a device for hiding the affair.

Vlad also presents Glynis’s move to Buda as a grant of freedom, promising that she may hunt independently and learn the powers of the night. But he makes that permission conditional on her loyalty and on her preparation to become his true bride, and reminds her that she must answer his Beckoning. Against this arrangement, her commitment to return to Ignatius is a choice made inside a life whose movements and future Vlad claims to direct. The affair’s significance lies not in a proven escape from his control, but in the intimacy Glynis and Ignatius choose despite the constraints surrounding her.