Fiend, page 6
part #3 of Voice of Blood Series
“That is Georgina’s bedchamber. I do not share it; you will find that she usually sleeps with me, in my room. This can be your room.” We had gone up the stairs to an upper floor, and Maria flung open the doors to a dark, musty-smelling chamber that had obviously not been entered for some time. Under a layer of dust, furnishings slumbered under white shrouds. I was childishly happy to note the presence of what could only be several bookshelves, and a window facing southeast, perfect for catching the painterly early rays of the sun.
Down the hall. “This is my own bedchamber. Do not enter uninvited.” She did not have to say aloud what the consequences would be; I felt something like hands gently wrapping around my neck.
I swallowed, to reassure myself that I still could. “I would never dare to presume.”
“Of course you wouldn’t. You’re a very well brought up and intelligent young man. Most of the rest of the space on this floor is reserved for our wardrobe; I enjoy finely made gowns and shoes, and believe in giving them adequate space.”
“Do not wear Maria’s gowns uninvited,” Georgina put in, pinching my buttocks and kissing the top of my head, which, standing, perfectly met her lips. “You might, I’m afraid, be unable to give them . . .” She ran her fingers along my chest. “Adequate space.”
Down the stairs. In the little courtyard at the center of the house, wire cages housed pigeons and doves, half a dozen laying hens, and seven or eight small, plump rabbits. “Maignot looks after these; you do not have to concern yourself with them.”
“We get new ones all the time, so don’t get sentimental.”
“I understand,” I said.
“This is the upstairs parlor,” said Maria, throwing open the doors to a space almost wide enough to be a ballroom, hung with blue damask and dominated by a vast, heavy glass chandelier that hung so low I could almost touch the bottom-most ornament. “Occasionally, we entertain; in those situations, I expect perfect manners, or I shall be unpleasantly stern.” Georgina ruined the effect of this warning by breaking into giggles again and pretending to strangle herself. Maria strode up to her with a suddenness that led me to believe that a blow was at the end of her progress, but to my surprise, instead caressed and pulled at Georgina’s hair. “Can you not be serious for a moment? Will you spoil the boy?”
“What does it matter?” Georgina retorted. “He will obey. Look at him. Look at those beautiful innocent eyes. He is ideal.”
Maria looked. “No one is ideal,” she said, “especially not a man. Particularly a young man.”
“Oh, don’t be bitter, my diamond.”
Their lips touched. I looked away, struggling to contain my instinctive shock. I had seen glimpses of their closeness through Georgina’s thoughts, but to witness this with my own eyes—two women, kissing as tenderly as comfortable spouses—mingled horror and excitement. I was a fool, of course; had I not committed such unnatural acts, and much more so, myself? But this was different, exotic, strangely stirring.
The tour continued. “This is the kitchen. This is the downstairs parlor. This is the pantry.” The pantry was bare but for several stone, glass, and porcelain bottles. Maria noted my expression of dismay. “We have little need for food in the house. Two doors down, you will find an exceptional little restaurant that should satisfy whatever needs you have. Give them my name; there is no better credit in all of Paris.” Maria turned to me with a gracious smile. “I will take you there once you have some clothing that is not a disgrace.”
“You are too kind, madame.”
“Too kind to allow anyone to imagine that, the way you look now, you could have anything to do with me.”
I had not had a bath, if one did not count ten-second-long frigid dips into the river, in over a year. I thought my skin was going to simply crumble and flake off entirely, particularly with the vigor with which Georgina scrubbed me. Maria stood a safe distance away from the splashing, watching with amusement that did not show on her face, but tickled my mind until I howled with laughter. “Poor Orfeo,” Georgina purred, polishing my naked skin with a handful of twine, wound around her hand and saturated with tallow soap. “I fear that you may dissolve. There’s been nothing holding you together but dirt.”
Liliane returned with bread, bacon, and cheese from the restaurant, laid it all out with a bottle of wine and a glass, and curtsied to Maria and Georgina. “Monsieur Flay will be around tomorrow to outfit young Monsieur, and Monsieur Vieux-Ypres to fit young Monsieur for boots. Madame Eurite thanks you for the gratuity. May I be released?” Liliane asked in her timorous voice.
“Wait!” I said. “Before you go—isn’t there a cook here? A woman named Jeanne, married to a man named Herbert?”
Liliane’s face was even paler than the starched cotton of her bonnet. “Madame Jeanne is dead,” she whispered.
“You may go,” said Georgina. Liliane hitched her skirts and galloped for the door.
Maria looked annoyed. “Why did you have to ask that, boy?” she demanded.
“I—I wanted to thank her, that is, Madame Jeanne, for it was her who . . . she was the one who mentioned . . .”
“Has Liliane any family?” Maria asked Georgina, ignoring me.
Georgina shook her head no, idly wringing soapy water from the hem of her dress.
“Good. Would you mind taking care of her?”
“Not at all, my diamond,” Georgina said, kissing Maria on the lips again and, still with a skip in her step, disappearing from the room.
I sat, suddenly very cold though I sat near the fire, swaddled in a long sacking-towel like a deposed Roman in his toga. “You’re going to kill her, aren’t you?” It wasn’t really a question.
Maria gently laid one gloved finger against my lips, and the chill passed from my body, leaving me feeling cozy and sleepy. “Ssh,” she said. “Eat your supper and thank Providence.”
I wondered, for a moment, why I felt less horror at the thought of that young woman being killed than I had at the death of a thoughtless, soulless dove. But all too swiftly, that moment passed.
Intoxication
Was I not happy for a time? Blissfully happy, where each day was such a joy that I sprang out of bed with a laugh? Love and security are illusion, but the most tangible illusions known to man, more absolute, more concrete than the air we breathe or the ground we tread.
Hardly ever did pasha or princess receive such lavish treatment as I did at the hands of Maria and Georgina. I had sleek, simple, unostentatious clothing tailored in imitation of London’s Mr. Brummel, with whom Georgina had developed an infatuation upon his arrival in France the previous year. The women took great joy in selecting my clothing and accessories, and dressing my hair, as little girls concentrate on the toilette of their dolls. Georgina bought me all the books and periodicals I desired from the booksellers near the Sorbonne, and I read Byron’s Childe Harolde with a melancholy sigh for the beauty of Geneva, and a cynical smirk, regularly cursing the poet as though he were an old friend. I had expensive paints, acres of paper, and camel-hair brushes. I dined daily on the exquisite fare served at the restaurant around the corner—meats, cheeses, and, the restaurant’s signature dish, a potato soup so subtle and rich that men came from the far-flung edges of the city to eat it. By the end of the first month, my favorite table, the one with the view of the kitchen as well as the street, was set aside as soon as I approached. “It’s the young Macaroni!” they called me. They loved me all the more for their general resentment of Italians, since none of them had ever met an Italian before, and thus I was the exception that proved the rule. I felt that I had become a tremendous success in the world at an age befitting my precociousness. Why should I not live in luxury, the companion of sublime women, celebrated for my wit (which was mostly just stupidity), artistic, intellectual, and nearly completely idle?
I did actually perform in my role as secretary. Maria was adamant about managing anything to do with money, but she did make me address all her envelopes and correspondence, as my practiced and artistic handwriting was much better than her awkward, impatient scribble.
Georgina had sustained a relationship through the mail with her brother Jozef, but needed assistance in creating the outlandish lies that she wrote about herself, both to entertain him and to keep from revealing the actual details of her life. So far, she had told him she had been married to an Indian prince who beat her, and then she fled from him, only to fall in love with a Gypsy adventurer, who happened to come into an enormous inheritance from a past lover, and now they had settled in a secret château carved from the side of Mont Blanc. “Jozef either believes what I have written to him, or he doesn’t really care, as long as he gets his monthly installment of romance,” Georgie sighed. “But I’m starting to run out of ideas. You’ve read a lot; help me make something up. Remember, it cannot be too fantastical, and I can never be in danger by the end of the letter; we don’t want him coming to Paris to try to rescue me. Jozef is pretty stupid, but he really does love me, and at least he can appreciate a good story! He is the finest brother a girl could have. Oh, Orfeo, don’t cry. Here, let me comfort you.”
While Georgina and I satisfied each other’s sensual desires, she would not fall into slumber with me, though we lay in her room. I never saw her leave, but each evening I saw her emerge with Maria from Maria’s locked bedchamber, both of them as alert as though sleep never touched their brows. A flicker of jealousy rose within me and was as swiftly smothered, as Georgina flew at me, took me in her arms, and slipped her tongue into my mouth. “Oh, my precious, are you ready?” she whispered in my ear, and immediately I was.
But she never slept with me. Each afternoon I would wake alone. I could not help thinking of Lorenzo, and without the direct interference of Maria or Georgie to distract me, I could. It was agony. Why did no one sleep with me? What was wrong with me that I had to be left to wake alone in a strange bed? The house was cavernous and silent without the sounds of their voices; the servants remained in their rooms until called for, and then kept their interactions to a minimum. I tried to counter the silence by walking noisily and talking to myself, but it only made the smothering quiet press inward, and increased my feelings of isolation.
There was no solution but to leave the house until they had risen. I dressed myself in my handsome, hollow clothes, left an unnecessary note, and went to the restaurant to drink coffee-and-brandy and read the newspaper, underlining the words I did not know. Despite my black broadcloth coat and immaculate short hair, despite the friendly shouts of the waiters and the appreciative smiles of the ladies, without Georgie’s bawdy jests, without Maria’s stern nobility, I felt unkempt, empty, and aimless.
After some hours, I raised my head and took a deep breath of air suddenly rich with information and sweet with promise. My tense shoulders unknit themselves. I stood up, left my cup and newspaper, and rushed home to fall into Georgina’s arms, to feel the sweet prick of her teeth on my skin, the warm waves of pleasure and approval washing in a tide from Maria.
I greatly preferred going about in the company of the ladies, with their exceptional beauty and grace, fiery intelligence, and bold tongues. I learned not to laugh too loudly when they told me the thoughts of the people seated across the room from us, and listening to their well-nuanced bickering and love talk filled me with adoration. They were openly affectionate with one another, and delicately, sometimes playfully, condescending to me. I would respond with a quote from Swift or Lucian about the empty prattling of women, and they would pet me and call me their little Diderot. We all played our roles.
When we went out together, they would allow me to have my male prerogative in setting a pace or ordering supper, but they would silently send me hints and steer me toward one choice or another. I did not mind deferring to them; they knew this city, they understood fashion in a way still unknown to a Piedimontese farm boy, and Georgina didn’t care what wine I chose. Maria did not drink wine or consume food. She merely watched us as impassively as though we were animals chewing cud. “The smell is enough to satisfy me. I live on blood, and blood alone.”
Georgina did not eat anything but oysters, escargots, and soup, and those things only occasionally; but she understood the importance of dining with company. “One digests better with conversation,” she said. “And we must, we simply must, fatten you up, little hare. You’re so skinny, you’re nearly transparent!”
“He is no hare,” Maria interjected. “He is a little dog. An Italian greyhound, sharp-eyed and ready to kill on your command.”
“Or sit on my lap and behave,” said Georgina with a laugh.
I laughed too. “Let it be so,” I said, raising my glass. “The time of the skinny little hare comes to an end; introduce the era of the greyhound.”
I thought to myself: Good-bye, Elena. Good-bye forever.
I first tasted absinthe on the night of February eleventh, 1817. I saw the date on a calendar at the tavern on the Rue du C—, and on the newspaper spread across the top of the absurdly small café table, and in every way, it was February eleventh. Outside the wind whistled and dashed tiny particles of frozen snow against the window and underneath the door, where it melted before the fireplace, then evaporated into steam. That night, I went out with Maria, without Georgina. Georgie had been gone before either of us awoke for the “day” at half past five in the evening; by Maria’s tensely calm expression, I knew she was unhappy. Still, she joined me when I said I wanted to go out, leading me to this strange café, with its doll-sized tables and the steamy reek of smoke.
We sat for a long time without speaking, I with my ale, an empty glass before her. She wore indigo that night, with a violet cloak, trimmed with black fox. The cloak’s hood had disordered the careful curls, done in a classical style, around her face, and they hung as loosening coils of gold natural silk. I felt like a child, helpless before an adult displeasure I could not understand, only feel.
I sniffed at a wisp of smoke curling from a table farther back. “I know this smell,” I said to Maria, attempting to distract her.
“Do you? A whelp like you, familiar with the scent of hashish?” Her lips moved, but I heard her voice in my head, unhindered by the raised voices of the café patrons.
“Is that what it’s called?” I mused. “Lorenzo—”
“Do not speak his name,” said Maria. “You are here now.”
“Yes,” I said. I saw, in my mind, the letters of his name, evaporating one by one, like sublimating ice.
“Do you have desire for hashish?” she asked. “We can easily procure some.”
I shook myself. “No, I want to drink. I want to get drunk. And this ale is leaving me unsatisfied.”
“Allow me, young man.” She rose with a conspiratorial smile, and I watched her float through the room away from me, swallowed in the shadows and smoke. I traced my fingernail over the newspaper, rippled and rumpled, having been wet by the freezing rain. February eleven. I had been in the possession of the vampires for eight weeks, and somehow I was still alive, and better off than I had ever been before. I could not hate my tutor for delivering me from Campania; I was seized with a sudden urge to run to the church of St. Sulpice and offer a prayer in thanks to him. But before I could act on this, Maria returned with a waiter. The waiter bore a bottle, a glass, and a fork. I stared at him, then at Maria. “What is this?”
“You have drunk enough wine; you should try absinthe. I think you will like it.”
My first taste was horrid enough to make me fear the second. Maria almost laughed at me, and she and the waiter shared a knowing smile. “Be steadfast, little greyhound,” she said, “be steadfast. The reward will come.”
“How do you know?” I grimaced. I did not know how I would ever cleanse the harsh, medicine-sweet taste from my mouth; perhaps with a slice of blue cheese?
“I have drunk much wormwood liquor in my time,” she replied. “It is an aid to childbearing.”
Hurriedly, I tossed down the rest of the glass, and the waiter obligingly prepared another, this time with a larger lump of sugar. I stared at the bubbling sugar, melting under a blue flame, until the waiter extinguished this little torch with his water pitcher. How wonderful is the smell of roasted sugar! The first taste from this glass was so far removed from the previous unpleasantness that I barely conjoined the two experiences in my mind.
“Childbearing?” I asked.
“I bore seven children,” Maria said. “I lost four of them in infancy.”
My eyes grew wide. Seven! “And what of the survivors?”
She shrugged. “They are long dead now,” she said with a tinge of regret.
“So once upon a time, you did have a husband.”
Her mouth shifted gently, as though she savored the anise poison sugar along with me. “We were never married,” she said. “I was a mere consort. More than anything, I was owned; I was a possession of that man. He, too, is long dead, and I regret it not. He was a stranger but for those times where he lay upon me. He was a soldier, and more often went to command battles. It was a blessing when he went away, and a struggle when he returned. He was nobility. He needed sons; I bore him sons. The arrangement was mutually advantageous.”
“But there was no love,” I said.
She smiled. “Ah, that is where you are wrong, little greyhound. There was love. I cannot live without love, and I never have. There was not love between the man and me, no. Of course not. That has nothing to do with begetting children; not now, not then. You well know this.” She stroked the edge of her furled fan. “And I loved my sons—my strong, handsome, warlike sons. But their affection was reserved for their father and for the country; it is not manly to dote upon one’s mother, only to defend her home and her virtue. That is a form of love. But I cannot live on filial duty. I need a love of my own. And I found it. Again and again. Through all the changes, all the battles, all the shifts in power, I found love.”
I gazed at her. In the shifting golden firelight, my eyes misted from drink, she appeared more human than I had ever witnessed, and she took my hand. In my mind I saw glimpses of her sons in their armor, of the château where she bore them, of the fresh faces of the women who cradled her lonely head upon their breasts—and realized with a start that their clothes and hair were completely unfamiliar to me, that the language they spoke was not the French I knew but something called Lorrain, which I understood without understanding. And then the English came in a great confusion, and through the confusion slipped Maria, free.
