Though they came knocking, claiming their turns with the “live one,” Mister Pérouse wouldn’t let Théo or Jacques in. “Mais, monsieur,” they’d protest, their voices muffled through the door. “Arianne hasn’t bled for decades—”
My master wouldn’t hear a word against her. “Patience, les gars. I won us three filles this time, non? The two youngest are yours—take them as gifts. Pour vous remerciez.”
The men said nothing.
“Aha,” said Mister Pérouse, sighing, rolling off me. “You’ve opted for the weakling’s fare—sucking a few hours’ of youth from babes—and now you’re here to challenge me? Mais c’est drôle! You want the Prime’s share? You haven’t the patience. Mon dieu, our houseful of little changed ones prove you have not the patience. A few short human years—what is that to us? A blink, no more—and Adelaide’s sisters could have been yours for breeding. To start your own empires, peut-être? They’ve many years of blood in them, these girls; many chances of bearing true kin. Can’t you see the benefit in that? Our numbers increased with children born, not simply made? Reinvigorating our bloodlines, les gars. Extending it, drawing power direct from the fountainhead. From our newborns right back to Adam’s kin, comprends? Linked all the way back to the source.”
I didn’t hear the men’s responses. My eyelids drooped; I pulled a chenille blanket up to still my shivering. If the past few evenings were any indication, Mister Pérouse would want another round with me before morning. I needed sleep more than information.
By the end of the week my master looked healthier, stronger. Ten years younger, more than fit to squash Jacques and Théo if they razzed him without the protection of three inches of oak to save them. His back was straight, step springy, as he set me in the chamber maid’s closet adjoining his apartments, and told me to get cleaned up for school.
“You must learn to speak properly, Adelaide, if you are to raise our child to prominence. I will not have my heir speaking like a pécore for all his mother’s failings. Fine soaps will only scrub so much of the yokel from you, chèrie.”
I didn’t want to wash, I wanted to go home. But the windows were blocked, the outer doors bolted; my freedom subject to Mister Pérouse’s whim. And for the first time since my arrival he fancied I could be let out. I could see other people. So I rubbed myself raw with the soap and sponge he provided, then slipped on a uniform so misshapen a hundred other girls might’ve worn it before. I folded my nightie and stuffed it beneath the low pallet I’d sleep on when my master had no other use for me. The shift was soiled and smelled rotten, but it was my last tie with Ma. I didn’t want to look at it, couldn’t bear to throw it away.
I don’t know what happened to Harley’s clothes. Like me, he was now dressed in a drab copy of the other children’s outfits. Unlike me, he looked content to be so.
“You okay?” His neck was swaddled with bandages, and the sun was fading from his skin. Veins were visible in his eyelids and temples and he smelled of sour milk. I brushed my hand through his hair, trying to ignore the hints of grease I found there, and pulled him close. He returned my embrace quickly then stepped away, too embarrassed to be seen hugging his sister with so many eyes watching. The other children were too occupied with their tasks to notice. Some recited poems in my master’s language; some tidied the beds, then arranged folding screens to separate sleep and work areas; some clambered high up the walls, scaling the bricks from gallery to gallery under Dr. Jeffries’ watchful eye. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t see any ropes. Catching my perplexed gaze, Harley shrugged and rubbed his hand along his jaw, so much like his father it hurt.
“Mister told us about Ma,” he said. “Beth and Miah ain’t took it so good—Miss Arianne gave them medicines so’s they’d calm down. They’re a lot better now, though.”
“And you?” I asked.
Again, that shrug. Who was this boy? The Harl I knew got fired up if he didn’t get his way; if he thought Ma spent more time with us girls than with him. And now that she’s dead? A shrug. It didn’t make sense.
“My gums is sore,” he said, almost sheepishly.
“Give us a look.” To my surprise, he peeled back his lips and opened his mouth. I couldn’t trust what I saw: it wasn’t bright enough where we were standing. I drew Harl over to the first long dining table, and sat him close to the lamp. The results were the same.
His incisors, top and bottom, were more than twice their usual length. I explored their rough edges, hoping touch would prove their appearance a trick of the light.
Gently, I positioned my forefinger behind the tooth and pulled towards me. It had grown far too sharp, far too long. I tried again, just to be sure it was real, and as I did so a pearl of creamy liquid, like snake venom or dandelion milk, beaded on my fingertip.
“That hurt?” I asked, tugging, watching the drop grow fat and heavy. The syrup spilled over, soon began marbling with red. Harley’s blood oozed down the length of my finger and pooled, ghosted with white fluid, in my palm.
“Nuh.” He shook his head, unintentionally snicking my digit in the process.
“Watch it,” I said, snatching my hand away, sucking to stem the flow—
—being leached from my neck. No; Harley’s neck. Energy sapping from my body, pulsating. Teeth stinging like horseflies in the dip beside my collarbone, the crook of my elbow. Smiling faces, kissing, drinking. “He tastes like swimming,” a high voice says. That’s Nellie Porter, maybe. Or Ike. No: Ike’s at my feet, draining the webbing between my toes. They like me, I think—Harl thinks: and, They need me. I’m warm, so warm the room is fuzzy. I’m sleepy, so sleepy. I can hardly feel the table beneath my back. My plate is broken; rare beef from dinner squelches under my hip. “He tastes like sunshine,” says Alistair. I giggle. My friend is giving me a hickey, and now there’s a fire in my belly. A hunger. I sit up, nip him on the shoulder. Barely break the skin. “That’s enough.” Dr. Jeffries claps, whistles ’til the tingling stops. “End of lesson.” The small mouths pull away, melt into the room’s dim corners. The doctor keeps Ike and Alistair back. “What have I told you? Stun with the jus; drink only enough to make you feel strong; bite hard to inject your charge. Don’t be greedy: no killings within the Haven.” My head is woozy, I can’t lift it to see where they’ve gone. Too heavy. “No killings in the family—”
“When did this happen?”
Harley looked at me like I’d gone crazy. “What?”
“This—” I licked the last trace of Harley’s venom-laced blood from my finger. “This.” I yawned, felt a prickling in my lips. “The biting, them other kids—”
“Oh, that.” Harl crossed his arms, flicked a lock of hair from his eyes. “Ain’t nothing. You know, it happens.”
I wasn’t convinced by his cool demeanour. Again, I tasted the blood and milk from Harl’s tooth, and it hit me like a kick to the ribs. The scent of cedar and hot dirt. Bullfrogs at the bottom of gullies on our land like croaking men clearing their throats. Ma’s chamomile shampoo. Her soft singing lifted on bathroom steam. Pure, unrefined memories of home. The other children had tasted these moments. Ingested them. And Harl hadn’t stopped them.
“I can’t believe you’d let them do that to you,” I hissed, emphasising the word let. “You ain’t even tried to stop them—not even a little bit!”
Harl sighed, and for the third time his shoulders rose and fell noncommittally. He looked empty. Emptier. “I can’t always fight, Ada. Not always.”
Beth kicked me in the shins when I took her face in my hands, drew her mouth to mine, and sucked blood and venom from her teeth. Where Harl’s fangs had grown close together, adding a rat’s angular profile to his already narrow features, Beth’s had sprouted from her canines. Blunt but strong. When the hanging lights reflected in her dark eyes, she was no longer a seven-year-old girl but a feral cat.
I dragged her behind a folding screen, checked that no one co
uld see us, and sat her down on the foot of a cot.
“This ain’t—isn’t—my bed, Ada. I mean, Adelaide. Mine’s over there—”
“Quiet,” I hissed, grabbing her face again and drinking. I stopped the instant the flavour of her memories shifted from ash to honey, when the liquid was more red than clear. My mouth was numb from her poison; it itched down my throat, made me woozy. Beth bit my lip as I pulled away—then immediately asked what had happened, why was there blood on my chin? Exhaling, I swallowed visions of her and Miah smothered in a swarm of grabbing hands; suckling at Arianne’s shrivelled neck and breasts. Something was missing, and it wasn’t just my sister’s memory of the past thirty seconds.
There was no essence of fear. Not in Beth, not in Harl. Tinges of sorrow seasoned the cloudy blood I drank, yet it wasn’t overwhelming. It wasn’t purely their own. They felt Ma’s loss, I could taste it. But not acutely, not like I did. That sadness was buried in them, beneath dozens of other, foreign sadnesses. Those they’d adopted from their new playmates.
For a few moments Beth was bright and happy, the way she’d always been at home, and I knew it was because of me. When she sat on my lap, wrapping her scrawny arms around my waist, the hug she gave was genuine. Threading her fingers through my hair, she seemed content. Harley loitered by the closest pillar and watched us for a while, not joining in but not discouraging. I wanted to ask him to come sit with us, to hide beneath the blankets, to help keep the ghosts at bay.
But at that moment Arianne strode past a gap between the screens concealing us from the common room, leading by the hand the boy who’d carried Harley the day we’d arrived. His eyes were glazed, a silly smile plastered on his face. His feet scuffled along the floor as though too heavy to lift.
Four steps later, the clunking of Arianne’s heels stopped. Four more steps brought her back, her glare so sharp I winced. She released her companion’s hand, then pushed the screen away, sending it clattering to the floor.
“Va t’en!” she growled at Beth, her gaze never leaving mine.
She wrenched Beth from my lap, slapped her bottom. “Go!”
Harley shrank from Arianne’s wrath, inched away to avoid drawing her attention. As it was, he could have tap-danced and she wouldn’t have noticed: her crimson-eyed stare was reserved for me.
“Stay away, you espèce de salope! You’ll have your own soon enough—these are not for you.”
I rose clumsily. “Arianne—”
She held up her hand to silence me. “Non—not a word, petite bête. The classroom, you can enter. Do not come behind here again.”
As though on cue, Dr. Jeffries called us to our lessons. Diction and composition first; then while the other children climbed, learned techniques of stealth, and practiced bleeding each other on the table, I was isolated from the group. Taught to pore over books tracing the history of Mister Pérouse’s people. By the time the tutorials were over, I was shaken—and Beth’s posture had stiffened. When I crossed to her circle of desks, she looked at me as she would a stranger. Her mouth twitched, barely suppressing a hiss.
Harl had drifted away to join Alistair and the other boys. His footsteps already more like floating than walking.
For the next two years I did what I could for Harley and the girls. I’d milk them whenever they let me; whenever Arianne was away; whenever Mister Pérouse released me from our rooms. I dreaded the coming of my bloods, not because it meant I’d have to endure my master’s attentions—these moon-time visits were exercises in stamina on his part, and I’d become expert at being and not being there while they lasted—but because it meant I was kept away from the kids.
Twice it seemed Mister Pérouse’s work had paid off: my periods stopped, the second time for twelve weeks. My master, already confident in his role as Prime, now strutted like a peacock as he gave Théo and Jacques their instructions; directing them to tackle Tapekwa County next, to find themselves suitable mates in Napanee. To steal farmers’ young, the more isolated the better, to become pupils of Mister Pérouse’s school. Fatherhood, it seemed, made him benevolent.
He let me wander wherever I wanted, the child in my womb almost as good as a skeleton key. Whispers followed me as I roamed the hallways, or dropped in on Dr. Jeffries’ classes. “Breeder,” the children would say, perhaps at Arianne’s bidding. Perhaps not: often the jealousy in their words rang too true to be second-hand. “Breeding enculeuse.” They taunted me for doing what they couldn’t yet do—their metabolisms so slow now fifty years would pass before they hit puberty. Sometimes I think Harley joined in, just to be one of the crowd. But with Mister Pérouse’s spawn in my belly, none of them could do more than jeer. Even Arianne was compelled to leave me alone. And when her back was turned, I’d inevitably make my way to one of two places: the front doors, to test the locks; or the dormitory behind the screens, to draw poison from my sisters’ mouths.
In these quiet moments, the girls would become themselves again; all smiles, crass jokes, and innocence. Hearing them giggle, anxiety would seep from my body and I’d weep with relief.
At the Haven, joys like these were always short-lived.
Soon it became clear that my understanding of the girls’ happiness didn’t quite match their reality. Though he wouldn’t admit it, Harley could remember our other life: Ma and her friends, the itch of newly-sewn garments, the brush of wind on our sunburnt faces. But Miah? She was three when we came here. Now five, she’d spent nearly half her life in this place. This was what she knew, this was her home. No doubt she’d be as fond of the fields and the sun as she would a stake through her heart. She thought it a game when I drew sap from her baby teeth, a romp like the ones she enjoyed with the other kids. She didn’t know any different: she’d snap at my cheeks, then wait for my reaction, just as she would when seeking her classmates’ approval. None of the children looked more than a week or two older than when we first arrived, while I continued to grow up as well as out. Beth and Mia laughed at the changes in my height and in my figure—and when they did, I’d pluck at their fangs until my fingers were thick with scratches. Always, I came away from these meetings coughing up dust.
I didn’t realize I could give something back, return parts of their memories, until I miscarried the second time. Arianne had sniffed the truth of my loss before I was aware of it myself—her knowing laugh was triumphant and bitter. Her teeth were so sharp; her hunger was sharper. The scent of my baby’s death beguiled her. She followed me so close, waiting for the blood to flow, that Mister Pérouse sequestered me in his rooms three days early.
The pain of expelling the foetus kept me bedridden that whole time.
My master’s old mattress had long ago conformed to my shape. I aligned my back with the contour earlier versions of me had made, and tried to ignore the sound of his jaw cracking as he devoured the remnants of our failure. I imagined it was all the same to him; he benefitted whether the child stayed in my belly or was digested in his. I convinced myself he wouldn’t be angry for something beyond my control. And for a moment, I almost believed it.
Sucking the blood off his fingers, Mister Pérouse’s face was pure joy, almost handsome. He actually smiled as he leaned back. I didn’t know how to react. Then he exhaled, and disappeared.
Disappeared.
Two years ago, I’d have leapt from the bed right then. Tried my hand at the door, tried anything to get free. Now I was smarter—I knew this wasn’t the right time. He’d never done this before, never just dropped out of sight, but he wouldn’t have left me this way. I froze while my gaze darted like two frightened goldfish. That’s it.
Body tense, I sat up, suddenly gasping. He’s not gone.
I can still hear him breathing.
I felt his weight on the mattress before I saw his shadow reappear, growing from pale grey to charcoal across the floor, his youthful features brightening back into view.
“Merveilleux,” he
whispered, actually grinning. “See what we can do, Adelaide? The two of us together?”
I tried to smile, I honestly did. But if devouring the hint of a child meant he could vanish at will, what would happen when I carried one to term. . . .
My master’s expression darkened at my silence. He fingered the puckered wounds his teeth had left; two deep blots of red, oozing far below my navel. In that instant, he looked so much like Arianne I gasped.
“Stay away from those children,” he said, the taste of my milkings rancid on his breath.
“I wi—” He crushed the lie from my mouth, his kiss a punishment, not a reward. Out of habit, I ran my tongue up and down sharp fangs, sucked. He gouged at the insides of my lip, pierced the soft palate, scraped until blood from my shredded gums mingled with that from my womb. Blended with the potent serum stretching like cobwebs from the tips of his teeth.
Oh, what a feast of visions.
In his mouth I tasted the incoherent feathers of our unborn baby’s thoughts. I sampled my agony, distilled in his venom. But there was more, much more: Miah’s giggles as Ma tickled her feet; Beth’s disappointment when the birthday cake she’d baked for me sank in the middle, a cool draught from the chimney flue ruining her hard work; and Harley, confident as only ten-year-old boys can be, leaping from high rocks into the black waters of a quarry on the edge of our property. Their joy, their recollections, trapped in Mister Pérouse’s bloodstream.
He’s bitten them, I thought, and in the same moment, These are moments I’ve tasted in their teeth.
Which did he get from their necks? Which from the depths of my belly?
My head spun with the power of his sedative, but I lapped at his fangs until my jaw ached. I swallowed all the memories he’d stolen. Kept drinking until their tone changed, deepened. Aged with Mister Pérouse’s years. I gulped his love for Arianne, as a mother or wife, I couldn’t tell; slurped the certainty that Théo—his own cousin!—was kept close for enmity more than friendship; savoured all the small vipers in Dr. Jeffries’ schoolroom, now knowing they were offspring he had made not fathered. Just like Harley, me, and the girls, they all came from poor families, single mothers—humans my master deigned unworthy of raising children. I drank it all in, this and more, until I was too drowsy to move. Until all I could feel was a weight like lead in my guts.
Bluegrass Symphony Page 10