Table of Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Book One: Niccolo I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
Book Two: Hespeth X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
Book Three: Lodovico XXIV
This book is dedicated to
Paul Van Antwerp,
without whose support, patient ear,
exchange of ideas and contributions
this book would never
have been written.
“If there ever was in the world a warranted and proven history, it is that of the vampire.”
—Jean Jacques Rousseau
* * *
Book One
* * *
Niccolo
* * *
I
When I was very young I had a vision of an angel, or at least I thought it was an angel then. My father was a physician, as his father was before him, and we lived in the very heart of fashionable London, in Mayfair, on Bond Street Our house was a dark-brick Victorian terrace house with turrets and oriel windows and it surrounded an enclosed garden shared by the other terrace houses around the square, but closed to the street.
To the best of my recollection the incident took place in the spring of 1856, when I was seven years old. I was able to determine the date many years later because Queen Victoria had just visited the Paris Exhibition, and French bonnets placed very far back on the head had become the rage of the fashionable ladies of London. I had quarreled with my father, although I’m not quite sure over what anymore, and had run into the garden to collect my thoughts. The garden was a mystical place. To begin, the mere fact that it was completely cut off from the bustle of the street gave it an almost religious tranquility. But it was the cool evening fog wrapping around the chestnuts and lilacs that completed the other-worldly atmosphere. It was here, beneath the huge wrought-iron astrolabe that stood in the middle of the court, that I first saw the angel.
I recall quite vividly that I was neither in any sort of reverie that might have evoked such a vision, nor was I given to even the vaguest religious thought at the moment. Instead, my mind was still reeling from the angry words of that argument long forgotten, when suddenly I realized there was a young boy standing before me.
He arrived so suddenly and quietly I scarcely would have noticed his presence had it not been for the slightest rustle of his black silk waistcoat Naturally my first impulse was to run, but when I looked up and gazed at his face for the first time. I was entranced by his unearthly beauty. He had a thin and delicate face with a fine straight nose, chiseled cheeks, and an angular chin. In fact, the delicacy of his features was so striking he might have been mistaken for a woman were it not for his masculine attire. The unsettling quality, a quality I later came to know as androgynous, was only heightened by his reddish-golden hair, which fell in small fleecy ringlets to his shoulders, gently framing that pale and fragile face. I must add that my first impression of this being was that he was a boy, but there was an ineffable something about his presence that suggested he was older, possibly seventeen or eighteen. Perhaps it was the dreamy and almost sad intensity of his immense dark: eyes. Or perhaps it was the regal and deathly still way he held his head as he returned my gaze.
As I stood mesmerized by the stranger I slowly realized that I had seen his face before. However, there was something odd about this sense of recognition. I was certain I had never actually stood in the presence of the young man until this very moment. My recognition was more like the familiarity you feel when you see a famous person on the street whom you’ve only previously known from newspapers or daguerreotypes. And then it came to me—the long, curly hair, the pale, androgynous face. This was the countenance of an angel, none other than the angel in Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks. I knew it well for I had spent many hours standing in front of that haunting masterpiece in the National Gallery. The Virgin is depicted kneeling in a gloomy enclosure of jagged rocks with her right arm around the infant St. John the Baptist. Her left hand is extended protectively over the head of the seated Christ Child, before Whom John’s hands are folded in prayer; and to the extreme right of the painting is a beautiful kneeling angel: The most disarming aspect of the London Madonna of the Rocks (for Leonardo painted two versions of the work— the second hangs in the Louvre) is that the entire landscape is pervaded by a ghostly and supernatural light. The twilight upon the pallid complexion of the young man created exactly the same effect, and I knew beyond doubt he was the angel in the painting.
I have no idea how long we stood facing each other. Before any words passed between us the young man vanished. In the dim and misty light of the garden I could not tell whether he actually faded away or merely crept into the shadows. If he did steal away by natural means he did so with a skill and stealth unmatched by any human being I had ever encountered. One moment he was there and the very next instant he was gone. No crunch of gravel betrayed his exit, no rustle of lilac.
I was so thrilled by the appearance of the angel I immediately ran into the house and made my way upstairs. Without realizing what I was doing I burst through the doors of my father’s bedroom. The moment I stepped inside, the impropriety of my deed dawned upon me and I found myself confronted by all the overwhelming things which comprised the presence of my father. My father’s bedroom was large and dark, save for a small circle of light cast by the fireplace on the opposite end of the room. The air was musty and cool, and heavy with the dry, burned-cork smell of my father’s Fribourg and Treyer pipe tobacco. The walls were a dark reptilian green and sparsely scattered with bleak and gray watercolors painted by aunts in the Highlands, and a bed occupied most of the area in the center of the chamber—an immense dark bed, a monster, a tomb, shadowy with dusty and ancient bed-curtains.
The first thing I noticed was that there were several evening visitors in the room, old friends and colleagues of my father. My father was ill and they often met with him in his bedchamber. They either sat or stood around the fireplace in casual but dignified poses. Some boasted gold watch chains and others possessed huge beards, beards like old Russian patriarchs. I always disliked my father’s friends. Like his bedchamber they stank of pipe tobacco. They were always calm and smug and they greeted everything with a sort of priggish amusement.
In the midst of the crowd loomed a chair different from all the rest, a tall chair of elaborately carved black oak, which enclosed its occupant like a huge seashell. The chair was positioned with its back facing me, but through its cabriole-leg hooves I could see the dark green brocade pillar of my father’s evening robe.
The group had been laughing, but after I burst in they all grew silent and gazed in my direction. I padded across the room and stood before my father’s green-robed legs. In the dark alcove of the chair something rustled.
“Step closer so I can see you,” he said solemnly.
I obeyed.
As I took an intrepid step forward I became aware of another smell mixing with the heavy aura of tobacco.
“Closer still.”
I moved into the very womb of darkness, just inches away from my father’s cool presence, and the other smell enveloped my face like a warm mist. It was a different smell, not at all like old tobacco, or the distincti
ve animal scent of my father. It was oddly pleasant and I recognized the familiar aroma of red Bordeaux, an encircling fog of fine claret that often hovered about the darkness where my father sat. I noticed several of the men held large round glasses. Everyone was silent.
“Have you come to apologize?”
“No, Papa.”
Nothing...
“I’ve seen—”
I cut off abruptly and gazed into the darkness. No eyes or face. No glimpse of large and powerful hands. Only the warm, wet fog of claret. And silence...
“I’ve seen an angel,” I managed to blurt out.
For a long time there was no answer, and then, without a hint of emotion his voice asked, “Where?”
“In the garden. Beside the astrolabe.”
Once again I stood in the stony presence of an unseen judge. I shifted my weight nervously and felt my palms grow damp. From the darkness one of my father’s friends chuckled derisively and there was movement Here a foot scuffed across the carpet. There a glass tapped against a ‘able.
“And how do you know it was an angel?” my father asked dispassionately. “Did he have wings, and if he had wings, did he have teeth? Were they very large wings?”
There was more laughter.
“No!” I exclaimed. I proceeded to relate the entire incident. I breathlessly described the young man with exacting detail and explained how magically he had both appeared and vanished. I told him he resembled the angel in the Madonna of the Rocks and how unearthly the moonlight seemed upon his face. Indeed, I was so excited by the occurrence that I’m sure I glowed with the fiery conviction of the visionary, and when I finished there was an uneasy silence in the room.
With this Father quickly sat forward and for the first time his face entered the circle of firelight. He had a hard face, thin and drawn, with closely cropped white hair and a small, graying mustache above his solemn lip. He was handsome, but age crept in around the corners of his face. His eyes were pale, pale blue, almost gray, like drops of dew on the edge of a razor, and the heaviness of wine crept in his breath.
“There are many incredible things in the world,” he said with slow and measured breath. “Dr. Livingstone’s crossed the Kalahari. We can inject medicine beneath the skin with a hypodermic syringe and they’ve crisscrossed the country with railroads.” He glanced around the room at his friends, seeing that they waited quietly for his judgment.
“... but there are no angels.”
I was stunned. I could scarcely believe that he was so blindly disregarding what I had seen, experienced. “No!” I cried, but my voice was quickly swallowed by the stale air and the crackling of the fire. Again there was an anxious silence in the room.
“There are no angels,” my father repeated and finally broke the spell. I looked into his eyes. He gazed back at me. The greater will had won and the other men in the room began to chuckle once again.
“Admit it. There are no angels.”
I burst into tears and struggled to shake my head.
“Admit it!” he repeated again, and slowly, agonizingly, I nodded.
I turned and quickly left the room as my father resumed his phlegmatic silence. The glass of claret lifted into the darkness.
Later that evening I managed to locate a book of my father’s containing an engraving of the Madonna of the Rocks and I stared at it for hours. There was no mistake: The face of the young man in the garden was exactly the same, down to every last line, as the face in the painting. I fell asleep that night telling myself over and over that I had seen Leonardo’s angel in the garden, but I never mentioned the incident to anyone again.
II
In the years to come I learned that there were many more simple facts of life than the one my father tried to teach me that evening—that the sons of prominent physicians did not see angels. So many layers of Victorian propriety were placed upon me. So many rights and wrongs. I suppose you have to have lived in genteel society to understand how pervasive and intimidating all of its rules were. Veneer upon veneer of propriety. I believed in the rules because everyone else seemed to believe in them, until two very different people altered my faith in two very different ways.
The first, oddly enough, was the same person who had created my faith, my father. For a long time I respected my father. He was tall and stolid; without desires or complaints. I was hurt by his decisions and his cruelties, but I trusted that he knew more than I did.
One day I was playing outside the east mom of the house when I discovered a small low window I hadn’t really noticed before. Originally some sort of pipes had entered the wall through the opening, but now a small square of paper had replaced one of the tiny panes. Numerous layers of paint had made the paper hard and shiny like a lacquer box and on impulse I reached out to touch it.
I must have pressed too hard, for one of my fingers inadvertently poked through the surface. It was as thin and fragile as an egg shell and as I stepped closer to examine what I had done I noticed I had a clear view of my father’s office from a vantage point about twelve inches above the tiled floor. Through the peephole towered glass cabinets of medicaments. There was a bent-wood hat rack with a white jacket hanging on it and a padded and buttoned black leather examining table.
To my surprise, as I watched, my father entered the room followed by one of his prim and stately Victorian patients, a woman with a bird on her immense hat. Her bodice and brown velvet jacket were tight and from her high collar and neck blossomed a cavalcade of white ruffles. Her deep maroon dress fell in voluminous tiers of lace and frills and the bulk of it revealed the presence of numerous petticoats and undergarments.
I would have turned away except that I knew Father was not going to examine her. Father never examined his female patients unless his nurse was present, and he had just sent the nurse to the chemist’s.
The woman daintily stepped upon the metal footstool and when she did this I noticed she wore frilled pantalettes on her legs and tightly laced brown suede boots. She paused for a moment, gently lifting her skirts a little, and then she sat down on the table.
Neither she nor Father said anything.
To my surprise, Father seemed to be ignoring her. He busied himself from cabinet to cabinet, but when he turned back around his hands were always empty. Even when he approached her and briefly placed his hand upon her shoulder, he did not look in her face or speak. Then he clumsily dropped a small metal container on the floor and fell to his knees to search for it.
What happened next was very strange. Even though the metal container was in full sight under the table, Father continued to grope around as if he could not find it. He muttered something, and then, awkwardly, his shoulder became entangled in the woman’s capacious skirts.
I watched terrified, hypnotized, as he grumbled and lifted one of her legs to free himself. The kind lady remained sedate through all of this, and gazed blankly off into space as if nothing were happening. Then he lifted her other leg and in a slow and breathless ritual he began to peel back her slips.
I remained frozen with uneasy fascination as he lifted each one of her petticoats. I was amazed, delighted, appalled, as layer upon layer of fabric was drawn back. And then, in the ample billows of her clothing, I caught a glimpse of sweated hair, and father’s powerful hands on the inner surface of her pale, smooth legs.
He moved slowly, pressing in to the copious undergarments.
She continued to gaze off into space, oblivious.
They finished quickly and it wasn’t until the woman stood to leave that I became aware of something else. Indeed, every time I returned to peer through the fragile hole in the egg-shell window I noticed it. It was faint, languorous, a gentle but oppressive whisper of my father’s stale tobacco smell. It delineated his territory. It warned, like blackbirds impaled on a fence around a field of rye.
There is one other incident I always remember when I remember my father. It was a simple incident. Very simple. Just a fragment. It occurred one night when I was abs
entmindedly peering out my bedroom window and happened to notice Father rushing out into the garden. It was strange. I knew something was wrong because Father’s shirt was unbuttoned and half off him. Throughout my entire life I don’t think I ever saw Father with his collar button undone, let alone his entire shirt. Not only that, but he also seemed to be looking for something. He madly circled the astrolabe and searched the bushes. Had he imagined he’d seen something, something that had alarmed him? He turned about, clenching his fists.
When he glanced up past my window and I saw his face for the first time, I became truly frightened. It wasn’t Father’s face that I saw. There was something strange in his expression, something furtive and anxious, like an animal being stalked. The wind ripped at his shirt, and he struggled to stand against the wind as he continued to search, scanning the chimneys and the treetops.
Dare I consider it? Deep inside him had he always believed and feared? Was he looking for something, someone, he dared not admit existed? Perhaps he had imagined it. Seen a shadow. Watched a tree branch grow into a man. Whatever it was, it had triggered more than just alarm in Father. It had broken a wall, released a flood of dark and monstrous fears, and now as he stood there he was in momentary danger of being swept away.
It is Father’s eyes that I remember the most. They were wide and not quite human. And, yes, deep in those pale and omniscient eyes was an unmistakable terror.
My father’s façade of propriety taught me many other things besides the fact that children don’t see angels. Oh, yes, it taught me the decorum required when dealing with a viscount or a baronet to ensure their patronage, the proper investments to make, how much money to donate each year to the Salvation Army, and the discipline and ambition to go on to medical school. In short, it taught me everything necessary for material survival. For this I thank him. But my father was so adverse to anything outside the beaten path of tradition that his fear instilled in me a constant watchfulness and concern. I was never against going along with tradition and using it, but I never wanted it to use me. I never wanted to be afraid to do something because it wasn’t proper and I never wanted to forget the face of the angel.
The Delicate Dependency: A Novel of the Vampire Life Page 1