Sustenance

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  “Is this actually over? Is it really so simple?” Bethune was asking Hawsmede, who answered, “Probably not. It is usually just the first salvo.” With that comforting statement, he turned to Szent-Germain. “A well-played opening round, Grof.”

  “Then you should be doubly pleased. You have both been most helpful,” he said, shaking hands with them in turn.

  From the study door, Rogers called out, “It is getting late.”

  “Yes. Gentlemen, excuse me.” He raised his voice a little. “Thanks to all of you.”

  “Grof,” said Merryman as Szent-Germain went toward the study and the rear stairs, “I don’t want to belabor the obvious, but you have some very powerful enemies.”

  “Yes; and I thought I knew them all,” he replied before Rogers closed the door.

  TEXT OF A LETTER FROM RUSSELL MCCALL IN PARIS TO E. J. DAVID PEARCE-WILSON IN LONDON, DELIVERED THE DAY AFTER IT WAS WRITTEN.

  October 21st, 1950

  Dear David,

  Thanks for the Christmas invitation. Please tell Tamsin that I say thank you, yes, I’d love to come. Most of the Coven this year is having Christmases away from Paris, and I was feeling very much rootless. I had an invitation to dine with the Kings on Christmas Day, but they’re glad that you sent your invitation. Tell all your family for me I will be happy to bring along some fine French vintages, a wheel or two of cheese, and a brace of smoked ducks; if they have any other favorites, they should let me know. You English have been on short rations for far too long: live a little.

  The weather has been miserable here—cold, damp, and foggy. You know how dreary Paris can be in the winter—it’s almost as bad as London. I was ready to drive all the way to Switzerland just to see the sun, but I couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm. The prediction promises warming, but you know how unreliable the weather reports are. I’ll make arrangements for the ferry. I think I’ll want to have my car with me, just in case. I’ll plan to arrive a day after you and the family motor down to Oakley Green. I’ll plan to be with you for ten days, if that’s convenient.

  I am still working on that book for Eclipse Press. I find it harder to do than I thought it would be. So much of what I want to describe turns out to be difficult to communicate. I’ve been trying to figure out how I work out reporting on a riot or a battle so that it doesn’t seem as chaotic as it actually is. Experience has a lot to do with it, but there’s more to it than that, and it’s important to recognize the hubs that develop during such events. But how to distinguish between a true hub, where those with an agenda in the fight make every effort to see that it goes their way, and a group of men driven together by circumstances, whose only purpose is to get out whole and alive.

  Perhaps you can tell me if there is a library in the west of London that has information on your various nobles. I’d like to do a little more research on that Lord Weldon fellow. He has me puzzled. Szent-Germain told me, when I asked him about Weldon, that he was given to taking risks, and that considering how things stand in China now, it might not be a very safe place for him to visit. Szent-Germain is probably going to send an inquiry to the British and the Chinese ministries in charge of keeping track of travelers. There may be a story in this, but I’m not holding my breath. I’d just like to know more about the guy. He sounds like the very model of a modern English eccentric (sorry to mess up the meter). I won’t let it eat up all my time, but enough to get the basics.

  I’m looking forward to seeing you and Tamsin and the kids. It sounds as if you’re all getting back to relative normal. It’s good to know that your town house can be safely rebuilt and that the insurance will actually pay for it. If the bomb that wrecked your neighbor’s house had fallen on yours instead, you might not be so lucky. I’d be delighted to have a tour of the town house, to see how the work is coming. I hope you find some way to restore your garden, as well. It was lovely.

  I’ll send you a wire when I’m en route to the coast; it should give you sufficient warning.

  Cordially,

  Russell McCall

  3

  SZENT-GERMAIN LAY stretched out on top of the bed, his white silk shirt open at the neck, his slacks of gray flannel only slightly wrinkled. Despite the chill in the room, his small feet were bare and he showed no sign of being cold; not even his breath steamed in the frosty dawn light. Their long night of opulent love-making had left him wonderfully restored; he was also keenly aware that Charis was less gratified with the vampire life that lay ahead of her than she claimed to be, and that niggled at him, robbing him of the sweet lassitude he usually experienced after such a night as they had had. Too many questions churned within her for their intimacy to have been unmitigated rapture for either of them, a realization that troubled him. He braced himself for more questions when she woke, certain that she would want more explanations from him than she had gained so far.

  Beside him, under the duvet, Charis was asleep, although the sky was growing bright in the east and the sounds of the Orleans horse farm that had once been Olivia’s were beginning to fill the morning; as if to prove the point, a cock offered his doodle-doo fanfare to the coming sun from the courtyard of the ancient holding. The ground floor had been built a millennium ago and, despite attempts to modernize it, was dark and inconvenient in about half the rooms. The upper floor of the house had been rebuilt after a regional skirmish a century before, and could boast this bedroom, a much smaller bedroom, a library, a laboratory, and a lavish bathroom that had been refitted three years ago, something which made the staff very proud. Although it was cold and there was a biting wind blowing, there was a festive spirit in the air; it was the last day of 1950. Szent-Germain and Charis had driven down from Paris the evening before—Charis had driven the Jaguar most of the way—and were planning to spend a day or two enjoying the countryside before returning to their respective flats in Paris. It would be a pleasant way to welcome in the New Year, away from the holiday chaos, assuming the clear weather held. All but two of the household staff would be gathering with their families in four hours’ time, leaving La Belle Romaine to the two of them. He would order a meal for Charis, one that cooked slowly and would be ready by sundown, since he knew only the rudiments of cooking.

  Charis woke suddenly, sleep-flustered and groggy. “So we did come here,” she said after looking around the room and out the window. “I thought perhaps I’d dreamed it.” She looked over at him. “Thanks for letting me drive.”

  “My pleasure,” he said at once.

  “That was what made me think it was a dream—that you let me drive.”

  “As to that, I can’t say: you may very well have dreamed about it, but yes, we are at La Belle Romaine, and the staff will soon be up. There is a kind of fete that La Belle Romaine provides for the staff and their families at home on New Year’s Eve, and the staff will be busy with it this afternoon. Don’t worry, though, Valerot will have issued instructions that we’re not to be disturbed, and we will enjoy our own celebration.”

  “Just like that?” she asked, surprised at his confidence. She snapped her fingers. “Just this, and it’s done?”

  “You seem startled,” he said, a bit astonished at her question.

  “Well, you aren’t here very often, and servants can be unreliable when that happens, or so I’ve read; folk-tales are full of them, and so is history. How do you maintain this kind of loyalty? You know, all those weasels and martens in folk-tales, the ones in the households of lions and bears? You know what delight the weasels and martens take in getting the best of their masters, but you are confident that your staff will uphold you, in spite of all the cautionary tales you must have heard through the centuries you say you’ve lived. And the history of Western Europe in the Dark Ages.” She did not speak to ameliorate the alarm she might have caused him, but added only, “Don’t you ever worry about your servants? If nothing else, aren’t you worried they might find out about you?”

  A streak of a memory brought the Vidame de Silenrieux’s pages, which he qu
ickly banished from his thoughts. “Not Valerot and Pensjour and Chansant: they are as staunch as Horatius at the bridge. I and my … family have been their employers for generations. If they have suspicions of me, they keep them to themselves. They are well-paid and they uphold the standards of earlier times by being steadfast.” Seven generations so far, he reminded himself, had served Olivia’s place, but many, many decades since she had died the True Death in Roma. “Beyond that, Valerot worked with me during the war, while I was at Montalia; he ran a group of locals who had hiding places for those escaping from the Nazis. Orleans was a central place for escapees and refugees to come, and the Nazis had other demands on their time than chasing down the people outside of the cities. Depending on where the refugees were bound, Valerot would pass them on to me or to Castelene in Toulouse. We’d had a man in Nice, but he was discovered and took poison before he could be interrogated. There are narrow pathways through the mountains—hunters and herders use them, and smugglers—that the Nazis could not locate effectively, and that helped all of us. We’re not quite five miles from Orleans here, and there are a dozen large farms near here that provide a sort of protective barricade around La Belle Romaine, which made sudden aggress on this place … shall we say impracticable? Between Valerot and me, we must have had over a hundred people through here by war’s end. I’d hoped it would be more, but Valerot was satisfied, for we only lost one. For those bound south, coming in from Austria, I kept in contact with Genova and Venezia and Trieste, making arrangements so that there would be safe places to escape to. So, yes, I trust my servants.” He leaned over and kissed her upper lip, slowly and deliciously. “For now, let us devote our thoughts to the future.”

  She reached out and touched his face. “I’m sorry to have wakened in such a mood. I think it must be holiday blues. I can’t help being homesick.”

  “No apology necessary,” he assured her.

  Another cock, this one farther away than the first, heralded the morning energetically, and this time, a chorus of doodle-doos answered him.

  “They’ll probably crow all day. My grandfather’s certainly did,” said Charis. “The country’s so quiet, the roosters are loud by comparison.”

  “There are other sounds to listen to: you can hear the horses starting to move in their stalls. They’re hungry and restless. So a handful of grain now, and a turn-out in the central arena will allow them to get the fidgets out of their feet before breakfast. They have a light grooming before their breakfast. It’s frosty out, and the grooms will have to watch them so the cold doesn’t cause problems for them. Once they’re back in their stalls, they’ll be groomed again, and given a mixture of chopped apples, hay, and crimped oats.”

  “Do you blanket them? My grandfather—the same one with the chickens—who lived near the New Mexico border in Colorado, thought blanketing was being too cautious, that it softened up the horses and kept them from growing a good winter coat. He was of the opinion that horses need their winter coats for more reasons than cold. He got snow every winter, but he kept the horses in the barn and the barn in good repair. He thought that was enough warmth for them. His horses were shaggy from the beginning of October until the end of April.” She did her best to smile. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m trying to make up for being silent while I drove.”

  “You have no reason to be sorry. About the horses: it seems to me that if you put an extra blanket on your bed to sleep, you should show the same courtesy to your horse.” He touched her hair, which made a tangled halo around her smiling face.

  “I don’t think you could change his mind,” she said, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “Are you really going to have a sip of champagne tonight? You did tell Valerot you might.”

  “Probably not. I like the ceremony of it more than the taste, or the results of the taste.” He tweaked a stray strand out of his way and kissed her again, deeply, lingeringly; she gave him a muzzy smile as she moved back from him, using her pillows to prop her up.

  “Is M’sieur Valerot preparing breakfast for … me?” she asked as she yawned.

  “The cook, Sibelle, will be making breakfast for the staff, but if you like, I’ll send down an order now; it will take a while to get here. You may want to put on your peignoir for it; Valerot can serve it to you here, if you like. You needn’t dress or neaten up beyond that unless you want to.” He waited for her to respond.

  “Oh. Oh, yes; the staff eats first, don’t they? Of course. You said they have a celebration later that they need to prepare for. No problem, I’ll be happy to wait.” She offered him a slow, provocative smile. “I’m sure we’ll find something to do.”

  He returned the smile. “Very good.” He turned his head toward the window, where the morning light was much brighter: the sun was rising. “By the way, unless you mean to insult him, call him either Valerot, which is his first name, or M’sieur Bartimy. He’s very old-fashioned about that.” He looked around, and considered the Franklin stove that fronted the much older fireplace. “Would you like some heat? I can have a fire going in a short while.”

  She sat up in bed, and almost at once pulled the duvet around her as gooseflesh sprang up on her shoulders and arms. “Yes, please. It must be about fifty degrees in here—Fahrenheit. I don’t see how you can stand it. It feels like it’s freezing, and you aren’t bothered.” Then, before he could speak, she said, “That’s right: it’s one of those things, isn’t it? One of those things that vampires do, like having a faint smudge for a reflection.”

  “Yes.”

  She dropped back down on the pillow, pulling the duvet with her. “I’d like it if you’d take off your clothes when you come back to bed.”

  “You know I cannot do it,” he said, rising and going toward the stove.

  “I know you will not do it,” she countered. “The scarring is bad, and I don’t like to think how you came to have so much, but it doesn’t ruin the mood for me,” she went on, more gently.

  “I can’t risk having any of the staff see them: they know my supposed great-uncle had severe scars, and so they mustn’t see these. That would lead to comparisons that would not be helpful; I am inclined to err on the side of caution, as the previous owner did.”

  “Olivia,” said Charis.

  “No. She died the True Death in 1658, in early December. When Niklos Aulirios, who had been her bondsman—”

  “Like Rogers?” she interjected.

  “Yes. Like Rogers. When he inherited this place from Olivia, he ordered a number of changes made, including hiring many new servants and pensioning off the old, and I have followed his example when I was left Olivia’s estates by Niklos. He didn’t stay here often—too many memories—but he kept it up to honor her.”

  “What became of him?” Charis asked, interested in spite of the pang of jealousy she felt toward the long-dead Olivia.

  “He was executed by Napoleon’s soldiers after the Egyptian campaign. He was accused of robbing the old tombs.”

  “And was he? robbing the old tombs?” she asked before she could stop the words.

  “No, he was not. He was helping to show Madelaine where the tombs were.” He shook his head once, sadly. “He was serving as her scout, preparing maps for her before she arrived.”

  “It sounds pretty weird to me,” she said, reaching out and taking his hand.

  “It’s a reasonable precaution.”

  “Like lining the soles of your shoes with your native earth,” she said.

  “Very similar. I recommend it to all vampires who want to be part of humanity.”

  “Which you do.”

  “Which I do,” he confirmed.

  “But that requires many disguises over time, doesn’t it? You’re at risk if you don’t come up with plausible identities.” She held his hand more tightly, thinking for the first time that this was how she would have to live when she became what he was.

  “I have found it prudent to make preparations for the next … manifestation. Madelaine always has wills drawn up leaving
her property to her niece or cousin, so that the new identity is established before she needs it. I often do similar things, as do almost all those of my blood who survive.”

  “Is that what you’re doing here? Are you preparing to go away? Are you teaching me how to prepare another … persona?” Charis asked, repelled and fascinated at the same time.

  “Yes, in part,” he said, and was drowned out by a sudden eruption of doodle-doos. “I can show you various ways to achieve this,” he offered. “I’ve had a long time to get used to making such changes.” He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it, then rose to attend to the stove. “If there’s anything else?”

  “Rogers tells me you change your name from time to time. Why?”

  “So that I can create a smokescreen for my existence, so that I will not have to vanish into the wilderness of Russia or Africa or America, or spend a generation or so in a remote—” He thought back to Lo-Yang, to Upper Egypt, to Delhi, to—

  “Or your cover would be blown? Does that bother you, like Rumpelstiltskin?” Charis suggested, cutting into his memories.

  “I have no skill to turn straw into gold,” he admitted with a wry smile, “but I comprehend his predicament.”

  “It’s Rumpelstiltskin or the King of Elfland, I suppose.” She paused, shocked at her accusation, then went on plaintively. “But when we first got here, you were speaking of touching, the touching we shared last night. I would like so much to be touched. All of me this time.”

  He paused in stoking the stove with the cut trunks of ancient trees, atop a kindling bed of dry leaves and clusters of twigs. “You know that is impossible,” he said flatly. “All of you … with one exception can be done, this evening.”

  “You can’t do the act of life. I’m beginning to appreciate that you weren’t kidding when you told me, though it seems a pretty big stretch to me, to be so sensual and not ever be hard. But that was my mistake; you weren’t exaggerating to make a point. I thought it meant that you needed special circumstances to perform, and that they might not be as pleasant as what we do now.” Her perplexity was apparent now as she pressed on. “The blood remains in your veins, however slowly it may flow, and that … incapacitates you, according to what you’ve told me. I understand all that. I get it. Dead-but-not-dead, alive-but-not-alive. I get it. It’s just so unfair.”