the throne and had himself crowned Carol II.
European dictators were in vogue in those years, and so Carol II dissolved the parliament and ruled as an absolute monarch. Which was absolutely a mistake. He was forced to abdicate in 1940, and Michael, now nineteen, was put back on the throne.
Michael reigned until 1947, when the Communists forced him to abdicate. He settled down in England with his new wife, a French princess named Anne, and went to work as a commercial airline pilot.
Romania suffered under a succession of Communist rulers. The last one, Nicolae Ceausescu, was the worst of the lot. A popular uprising drove him from power in 1989. He and his equally hated wife, Elena, were arrested, tried in a makeshift courtroom, and executed just outside the door.
Today, Romania has an elected president and parliament. It also has a small gaggle of royalists who want to bring the monarchy back. They want a British-style king or queen who presumably would clank around in a turnip-shaped carriage and wave at the people. The website, however, reported that Michael I had little interest in getting his old job back.
My scroll bar had reached the bottom of the page. I slapped my computer on the side of the head. “Don’t stop there you lazy son-of-a-bee!”
My screeching brought Eric back to the real world. And he wasn’t happy about it. “What is your problem?”
“This damn website only lists one pretender,” I said. “You’d think there’d be oodles.”
“Well, Maddy, there are oodles of other websites.”
“I can’t spend all day playing with this thing, Eric. I have a cabbage waiting for me at home.”
Eric dog-eared his comic book. “See all these underlined words in blue sprinkled throughout the text? Those are called links. When you click on a link, another site with more information on the topic comes up.”
I clicked on Michael I. Another site appeared. “Well, look at that!”
He told me to “enjoy” and went back to his superheroes. I started scrolling and reading, and taking notes on the back of a corporate missive outlining the most recent changes in our medical coverage: Michael and his wife had four daughters. None of them were named Violeta. None of them were within twenty years of being old enough to be Violeta.
That website was a dud. But it did have a very useful link to the genealogy of the Romanian royal family. It listed every king, queen, prince, princess, count, and countess going back to the first Romanian king, Carol I. And among them was a Violeta!
My giddiness was short-lived. “Wouldn’t you know it,” I grumbled. “This Violeta was born in 1873. Which would make her fifty years too old to be our Violeta. And unless she was one of those vampires from Transylvania, much too dead to be our Violeta.”
I took notes on her nonetheless: Her full name was Violeta Dragomir. She was the daughter of a Romanian cavalry officer of low nobility, and not from the principality of Transylvania, but Moldavia. When she was seventeen, she married Prince Anthony, the twenty-one-year-old son of King Carol I. Prince Anthony died when he was twenty-three and Princess Violeta slipped into oblivion.
I asked Eric how I could find out if Violeta was a common name in Romania. He looked at me like I was a Ph.D. candidate in English who’d forgotten how to spell cat. “Duh—Google female Romanian names.”
I typed it in. Several websites agreed that Violeta was a rather common name in Romania. Next, I Googled her last name. Bell didn’t sound very Romanian to me, but you never know. Again I got several websites with long lists of Romanian surnames. Bell wasn’t on any of them. Neither was Bellescu, or Belleanu, or Bellici, or any other names that might be Americanized to Bell. “You do any of that research on Violeta yet?” I asked Eric, with a pretty good notion of what the answer would be.
“It’s only been four days, Maddy.”
“I was just wondering if she was
European dictators were in vogue in those years, and so Carol II dissolved the parliament and ruled as an absolute monarch. Which was absolutely a mistake. He was forced to abdicate in 1940, and Michael, now nineteen, was put back on the throne.
Michael reigned until 1947, when the Communists forced him to abdicate. He settled down in England with his new wife, a French princess named Anne, and went to work as a commercial airline pilot.
Romania suffered under a succession of Communist rulers. The last one, Nicolae Ceausescu, was the worst of the lot. A popular uprising drove him from power in 1989. He and his equally hated wife, Elena, were arrested, tried in a makeshift courtroom, and executed just outside the door.
Today, Romania has an elected president and parliament. It also has a small gaggle of royalists who want to bring the monarchy back. They want a British-style king or queen who presumably would clank around in a turnip-shaped carriage and wave at the people. The website, however, reported that Michael I had little interest in getting his old job back.
My scroll bar had reached the bottom of the page. I slapped my computer on the side of the head. “Don’t stop there you lazy son-of-a-bee!”
My screeching brought Eric back to the real world. And he wasn’t happy about it. “What is your problem?”
“This damn website only lists one pretender,” I said. “You’d think there’d be oodles.”
“Well, Maddy, there are oodles of other websites.”
“I can’t spend all day playing with this thing, Eric. I have a cabbage waiting for me at home.”
Eric dog-eared his comic book. “See all these underlined words in blue sprinkled throughout the text? Those are called links. When you click on a link, another site with more information on the topic comes up.”
I clicked on Michael I. Another site appeared. “Well, look at that!”
He told me to “enjoy” and went back to his superheroes. I started scrolling and reading, and taking notes on the back of a corporate missive outlining the most recent changes in our medical coverage: Michael and his wife had four daughters. None of them were named Violeta. None of them were within twenty years of being old enough to be Violeta.
That website was a dud. But it did have a very useful link to the genealogy of the Romanian royal family. It listed every king, queen, prince, princess, count, and countess going back to the first Romanian king, Carol I. And among them was a Violeta!
My giddiness was short-lived. “Wouldn’t you know it,” I grumbled. “This Violeta was born in 1873. Which would make her fifty years too old to be our Violeta. And unless she was one of those vampires from Transylvania, much too dead to be our Violeta.”
I took notes on her nonetheless: Her full name was Violeta Dragomir. She was the daughter of a Romanian cavalry officer of low nobility, and not from the principality of Transylvania, but Moldavia. When she was seventeen, she married Prince Anthony, the twenty-one-year-old son of King Carol I. Prince Anthony died when he was twenty-three and Princess Violeta slipped into oblivion.
I asked Eric how I could find out if Violeta was a common name in Romania. He looked at me like I was a Ph.D. candidate in English who’d forgotten how to spell cat. “Duh—Google female Romanian names.”
I typed it in. Several websites agreed that Violeta was a rather common name in Romania. Next, I Googled her last name. Bell didn’t sound very Romanian to me, but you never know. Again I got several websites with long lists of Romanian surnames. Bell wasn’t on any of them. Neither was Bellescu, or Belleanu, or Bellici, or any other names that might be Americanized to Bell. “You do any of that research on Violeta yet?” I asked Eric, with a pretty good notion of what the answer would be.
“It’s only been four days, Maddy.”
“I was just wondering if she was
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