A Taste of Blood Wine

by Freda Warrington

  How could Karl not believe in God?

  The blood he had taken from Ilona would sustain him long enough for his purpose and he only had to hold her a little while, until she fell asleep…

  He drank again. She moaned faintly and he stroked her hair. God, how she loved him, this one. He would make it up to her.

  She lay rigid in his arms and he thought she was beyond speech, but as he looked at her he saw the faintest scintillation of anger in her eyes. Her lips parted stiffly and she said, "Ask Pierre."

  He had to lean close to hear her. "Ask him what?"

  Her expression was etched clearly on her shadowed face; vindictiveness, the sour pleasure of a small triumph in defeat. "Ask Pierre where Karl is. He's known all this time." She gave a painful laugh, then the smile froze on her face.

  "No, that's impossible. He would have told me. Ilona!"

  He shook her, but she didn't respond. She had waited until the very last moment to give him this tormenting piece of information. Now nothing would drag from her what she knew.

  "Why didn't you tell me?" he roared.

  He cursed her, but there was nothing he could do—unless he took her below, gave back the blood he had stolen. But then she would not be a lure to trap Karl… As a minor act of revenge, it was effective.

  Clutching her weightless form, he walked on until he saw the rows of folded black shapes against the whiteness. He kept them all together, so that he would never lose anyone. The perpetual swirl and change of the Crystal Ring sometimes made them hard to find, but the magnetic patterns always led him to them eventually.

  They were like cocoons, or mummified things. Pitiful really, but he remembered each one by name, remembered their individual vampire beauty. Here were two he had known; Katerina and Andreas, whom he had had to punish for showing deeper loyalty to Karl than to their master…

  He stared at Katerina's frost-pearled dark face. Her body seemed no more than folds of black parchment, paper-delicate but frozen hard as a fossil. Yet he trawled his fingernails all down the length of her form, lost for a few moments in a well of memory. How she'd hurt him. How they all did.

  This was the paradox of the Crystal Ring; it gave vampires the freedom of the world—perhaps even gave them their existence—but any who lingered too long risked being overcome by cold and exhaustion. Then, if they lost the strength to escape, they sank into a kind of hibernation.

  Immortals could be killed with difficulty, but Kristian believed that death was God's to inflict; and God had chosen to let vampires live forever. This was far preferable. This way, Kristian held both the power of life and the power of oblivion over his brood.

  Some had been in the Weisskalt for centuries, some only a few years. They were all the ones who had not turned out as he had hoped, or who had crossed him, or broken his heart. Some he might wake one day, when he felt they had learned their lesson; others must sleep forever.

  Tenderly, he laid Ilona alongside them.

  ***

  "Mind your step, Herr von Wultendorf," said George Neville. "The stairs are rather steep."

  "Please, call me by my first name," said Karl, following him down into the darkness. Behind him came Dr Neville's assistant, Henry Millward, and his daughter Madeleine, her heels clicking lightly on the brick treads. "I so enjoyed your lecture last week."

  "Ah, but did you understand it?"

  "I believe so," said Karl. "If I did not, it's a failure of my intellect, not of your exposition. You made a complex subject very clear."

  "You speak such beautiful English!" said Madeleine. At the base of the steps, Dr Neville flicked a switch and light fell coldly on bare walls and water pipes, gleamed on fragile structures of glass and metal and on tangles of wire that hung from the ceiling like jungle creeper. The cellar was a cave of mysteries. The new, the unexplored, had not lost their power to fascinate Karl.

  "Well, erhm—Karl, here we are. The Neville laboratory," said the scientist with ironic pride. "Not quite the Cavendish, but we've achieved some fine results here."

  Henry, a large and dishevelled man with glasses and springy brown hair, crossed to the far side of the room to adjust a piece of apparatus—more out of nervousness than necessity, Karl thought. Madeleine stayed close to Karl, almost touching him.

  "Grim, isn't it?" she said with a mock shiver. "I never come in here if I can help it. It's a wonder Henry, Father and Charlotte don't take root down here, like mushrooms."

  Karl smiled a little and looked at her. She was a lovely girl, very confident of herself; that in itself was intriguing. The radiance of her eyes, the blood in its fine mesh of capillaries glowing through her translucent skin, the way the red highlights shifted on her hair, held his gaze like a work of art. Even the straight and shapeless clothes of these days had a kind of elegance about them, a freshness and freedom. He watched Madeleine, unable to help himself, and she basked in his attention.

  "It may not be luxurious, but it's perfecdy serviceable" said Neville. With his hands pushing his jacket pockets out of shape, he had more the look of a gentleman farmer than a scientist; a mathematician, physicist and doctor of philosophy. "The reason I set up my own laboratory is that they are positively fighting for bench space in the Cavendish. You wouldn't believe how small a budget they have to survive on. So I decided to equip my own cellar and free the space for someone else—not to mention taking Henry out of their hair." He chuckled. "Anyway, have a look round."

  Karl breathed in the mingled odours of dampness, strange gases and metals. A generator hummed in the background. There were sturdy wooden tables pushed together and forested with clamp stands and vessels, a glass-fronted cupboard crammed with bottles, tubing, Dewar flasks, a wooden filing cabinet pilled high with books. More books were stacked untidily on shelves alongside bits of discarded apparatus. Beneath, on a desk that was scattered with papers, the only objects that had been placed with any care were three framed photographs.

  Karl paused to study them. One, the caption informed him, was of a scientific conference before the War; there was George Neville in an illustrious group that included Rutherford, Thomson, the Curies, Einstein. Another was of the Neville children, three small girls and a fair-haired boy who already had the look of an officer. The third showed a lovely Edwardian woman with a toddler on her knee, both clear-skinned and wide-eyed, fixed forever in shades of grey. Across the corner of the frame hung a crucifix apparently made of tightly-woven hair.

  "It's dreadfully untidy in here, Father," said Madeleine. "How can you work in this mess?"

  "I know exactly where everything is."

  Henry looked up from his work. "Oh no, this is what happens when Charlotte isn't here." He seemed shy, a touch Bovine, the rays of his intelligence focussed on too narrow a field. "She keeps us in order. We really can't cope without her."

  Karl had seen Charlotte briefly at the party where he had met Madeleine; a fleeting gazelle who had caught his attention briefly but made no real impression on him. He said, "I trust she's not unwell."

  "Got the blasted flu, so I packed her off to her aunt's house in Hertfordshire to convalesce," said Dr Neville. "That's if it is the flu."

  "Oh?"

  "Well, her aunt insisted on dragging her around London all spring, but she's a quiet girl, hates all that nonsense. It was bound to make her ill. I shouldn't have allowed it. Anyway, Charlotte is the academic one. Fleur and Madeleine aren't that way inclined at all, are you, m'dear? Nor my son David, too much the outdoor type. No, Charlotte's indispensable." He indicated the photograph of mother and baby. "That's her with my late wife Annette. Grown up to be the image of her mother, my brains and Annette's looks."

  There was a faint shifting of the air. Karl looked round to find that Madeleine had gone.

  "Oh, don't mind her," George Neville said off-handedly, apparently construing nothing from her departure. "Henry, light the Bunsen and put some water on to boil, there's a good chap."

  "Right-o, Professor." Henry went obediently to the s
ink, filled a metal beaker and placed it on the tripod over a blue jet of flame.

  Neville gave a dismissive chuckle. "He will insist on calling me that. You must understand it's only a nickname. I'm not a professor, though I was nearly elected to a physics chair in 1919; dashed influenza epidemic got me and I almost died of it." He tapped his chest. "Never been quite right since. Anyway, Trinity made me a lifetime research fellow instead and it suits me better. I do just as much lecturing and coaching as I want, and the rest of my time's my own to play with atoms and numbers."

  He led Karl round the laboratory, showing him various pieces of equipment; a vacuum pump, a gold-leaf electroscope, a liquid air machine, a Wilson cloud chamber, a scintillation counter. The devices with which wondrous discoveries had been made looked smaller and more primitive than Karl had imagined.

  "And this is the mass spectrograph." Dr Neville rested his hand on a black cylinder mounted on a wooden stand and connected to the thick coiled arc of an electromagnet. "We use it for separating isotopes. This is what we're working on at present, the structure of radioactive elements. From studying the very tiniest components of matter we hope to understand the processes that take place inside stars. The ultimate aim is to uncover the laws that govern the universe itself, the whole of nature." He gazed into the air, then his attention snapped back to Karl. "Dashed ambitious, eh? What it really consists of is a lot of infuriating fiddling about and infinite amounts of patience, which I lack. I'm a bad experimenter, really. That's why I need Henry and Charlotte to carry on with things if I want to go off into a flight of speculative thought about something. Still interested?"

  "Naturally," said Karl. "More than I can say."

  "I gather you're a musician."

  "I was."

  "Never studied science at all?"

  "I have, but not at university. Only as a layman."

  "But now you want to become a scientist?"

  "No," said Karl. "Like you, I simply want to understand the universe."

  George Neville was staring at Karl, a faraway look in his eyes. His irises were milky silver. "You see, you could—ah—you could apply to one of the colleges and start with the mathematical tripos, but… "

  "What I should like is to learn from you, Dr Neville," said Karl. "If I could work alongside you, share in your discoveries as you make them, there could be no better path towards knowledge."

  It was a presumptuous request, Karl knew. It might be refused, but he doubted it. Although some people would sense something about him that made them uneasy, most were drawn to him without knowing why. And he could sense Neville already developing a baseless but unquestioning trust in him. The ease of it made him feel a little sad.

  Even as Karl stood there making conversation, he was conscious of Henry and Dr Neville not only as men but as potential prey. Their breathing, salty warmth wreathed through the electrical tang of the cellar. Karl was aware of his own fangs, the sharp canines that appeared no different from those of humans while they were retracted. Yet even if he had let them slide out to their full length—bared them, as if to say see, this is what I am!—they were only the most superficial indication of the chasm that lay between himself and mortals.

  He would not touch these people. It was their knowledge he needed, not their blood. But the temptation was still there, a dark organic pull that had to be suppressed.

  Then Dr Neville said, "How are you at glass-blowing?" Karl smiled. "I don't know, I've never tried."

  "You may laugh, but we have to make all our own equipment. Making a good cardboard strut for a photographic plate is just as important as intricate mathematical reasoning. And a damn sight more useful. Isn't it, Henry?"

  "Or the stamina to sit up all night counting alpha-particles until your eyes fall out," said Henry, sounding hostile.

  "I should be happy to do whatever was required of me."

  "I can't pay you anything."

  "I was not asking for a job, Dr Neville. On the contrary, if you need resources for your laboratory… "

  Neville looked startled. "Well, I couldn't possibly accept payment, but I dare say the Cavendish might be grateful for some new equipment. Oh, don't look like that, Henry; your salary's not in danger." His gaze switched suddenly to the Bunsen burner. The water was boiling vigorously, Henry having forgotten all about it. "Oh, rescue that water, would you, Karl? You're nearest."

  Karl half-turned and folded one slender, white hand around the beaker and stood holding it as the physicist went on, "I just have a feeling about you, von—er, Karl. Normally I wouldn't dream of taking on someone with no formal qualifications, but to encourage someone with such a thirst for knowledge as you obviously have would be a delight. And then there's the most important qualification of all."

  "Which is what?"

  "The ability to make a good cup of tea. There's a teapot around here somewhere. We often brew up down here; saves bothering the maid, y'see, especially since Sally sprained her ankle coming down the stairs once. Adds a nice schoolboyish touch, I think. Henry, sort the tea out, will you? What are you staring at?"

  Then Dr Neville stopped, opened and closed his mouth like a fish. It was only then that Karl realised why they were staring. He had picked up the beaker of boiling water in his bare hand and was still holding it. He felt the heat but disregarded it, knowing it could not harm him and forgetting how extraordinary it must look.

  "Your hand!" Neville exclaimed.

  Karl set the vessel down. They both hurried over to him, flustered. "My God, I forgot to tell you to pick it up with tongs! Have you burned yourself?"

  Karl turned his hand over and gave it a perfunctory inspection, moving away from them as he did so. "No, it is all right. I didn't even notice."

  Dr Neville touched the edge of the beaker and snatched his hand away. "Ouch! It must have scalded you. I'm most dreadfully sorry. This is your fault, Henry: if you'd been paying attention—! Better run it under the cold tap to make sure."

  Karl went to the sink and did as he asked, only to avoid an argument. This was the danger, that some small sign would give him away. His immunity to things that would harm humans he took so much for granted that it was too easy to forget. Yet it was no danger, really. Men were always swift to seize on a rational explanation where the irrational was too outlandish to be considered.

  "Are you all right?" George Neville said weakly.

  "Perfectly."

  "I don't see—"

  "I have tough skin," said Karl, "from playing the cello."

  ***

  Charlotte was running away.

  Influenza had laid her low for two weeks. Normally she would have soldiered through it, but this time she gave herself into the kingdom of fever and dark dreams as if into the arms of a lover. Illness became a veil to hide her from the world.

  But now she was nearly better. Her father had sent her to Parkland Hall to convalesce. She always had mixed feelings about staying here—she loved the house and grounds, disliked her aunt—but this time she had welcomed the chance. It meant she would miss Karl von Wultendorf's visit to Cambridge, as if the longer she delayed meeting him, the more likely he was simply to disappear.

  She knew her anxiety was irrational, but it had grown into something beyond her control—while the delusions of a high temperature, which had protected her, had also seemed intimately connected to the fear. There was a dark web on her that she could not shake off.

  What's wrong with me? she thought, alone in a bedroom that was very different from her room at home; twice the size, all blue and gold with a four-poster bed and brocaded hangings. Why, when I have so much, do I feel so empty?

  Convalescence had given her too much time to think. She leaned on the windowsill and stared out, too listless to move although she had been there for two hours. A late summer haze shimmered over the trees, drifting like silver gauze over a distant lake, blurring the horizon into the sky. The landscape looked as she felt; blurred, torpid, dull.

  One thing she loved abov
e all about Parkland Hall was the garden. Her window overlooked a broad lawn, edged by a stone balustrade on which roses and wisteria twined, shaded by a vast plane tree. On the far side, exactly one hundred steps swept down through a belt of silver birch, laburnum, conifers and rhododendrons to another lawn, an Italianate layout with formal flowerbeds and a fountain at its centre. Beyond that was a steep drop into semi-wild woodland. To either side, hidden from her view, were other formal layouts, water gardens, mazes; and then the wild gardens that she loved the best. They were shadowy and mysterious, set with statues and follies that had been gathering lichen and ivy since the eighteenth century.

  As a child, her moments of true happiness had been spent exploring the grounds alone. They still were, if she were honest. It was like stepping into another time. She could forget everything there, even herself.

  Charlotte felt like a fugitive fleeing from some unseen beast. Yet however fast she ran it was always gaining on her with soft, slow footsteps. And the beast was real life.

  A marquee was being erected on a side lawn to the right of the house. From here she could just see the white walls flapping in and out, men hauling on the ropes, and members of the Hall staff going to and fro. The butler, Newland, was supervising. Tomorrow was Madeleine's nineteenth birthday party, and the world—so it felt—would be descending on Charlotte's refuge.

  She would have to endure it, for Madeleine's sake. At least Anne and David would be here.

  "I dare say I'll survive," she told herself. "Think about Maddy instead of yourself, idiot."

  A noise behind Charlotte made her start.

  "Talking to yourself? I sometimes wonder about you, dear, I really do."

  Aunt Elizabeth came into the room, angular and elegant in a dress of gold silk voile, a sash round her hips and a wide-sleeved jacket of the same colour. She had the type of strong-boned face that didn't seem to age, although she was only five years younger than Charlotte's father. She wore her dark hair in a youthful bob.