by Anne Rice
“No need to be concerned at all,” I said. I looked about the room. Too many topics of conversation pressed in on me and I tried to find some order. What had we been talking about? Enemies. I didn’t want to talk about enemies. I started to talk about all that I saw before me, the inevitable Philadelphia wing chairs flanking the marble fireplace, and a tall secretaire punctuating the bookshelves, a lovely piece with inlaid designs and mirrored doors above the flap of the desk.
He was at once brightly happy over this. And something mad occurred to me, that every single time I ever encountered another blood drinker in friendship, it was as if I were meeting and entering an entire world. Seems I’d read somewhere, or heard it in a film, that the Jews believe each life is a universe, and if you take a life, well, then you are destroying a universe. And I thought, Yes, this is true of us, this is why we must love one another, because we are each an entire world. And with blood drinkers there were centuries of stories to tell, millennia of experiences to be related and understood.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking as you read this. All this is obvious. When people suddenly understand love they can sound like perfect idiots, true.
“This enemy is a creature named Baudwin.” Mitka’s voice startled me. “An unsavory creature but a powerful creature, ancient, as ancient perhaps as Marius or Pandora, though I couldn’t myself tell. He was on the prowl in New York at the time that you came there, and made an enemy of Rhoshamandes, and were proclaimed the Prince. I haven’t seen him, however, in over a year.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said. “I’ll meet this Baudwin when the time comes. Let’s not waste these moments on him, though I appreciate the warning.”
There was no need for us to discuss the obvious, that if this Baudwin was of the same age as Marius or Pandora, he would destroy me in a moment with the Fire Gift just as I’d destroyed the mavericks in New Orleans. It was sobering to realize that there might be any number of such creatures whom I hadn’t come to know yet, who knew of me. I liked to believe that I met all of the Children of the Millennia and had a fair idea of who hated me and who did not. But I’d never heard of Baudwin.
“I love your house and all you’ve achieved here,” I said, pushing the darker thoughts from my mind. It was enough to know that Cyril and Thorne were paying heed to every word we said.
“I’m so happy you approve,” he responded. “I wouldn’t call it a restoration, since I have used some modern materials and made some distinctly modern choices, but I’ve done my best to use only superior materials throughout.” He too seemed to forget the darker thoughts and his face was fired with enthusiasm now, and as so often happens, the human warmth and the human lines came back to it, and I could see what sort of man he might have been. Likely thirty years of age, no more than that, and I noted how very delicate were his hands with which he gestured easily, and all of the rings he wore—even his ruby ring—were made with pearls.
“It’s taken me years to acquire the furnishings,” he said. “I remember in the beginning when I first came here in the 1930s, it seemed easier to find the very high-quality survivals from the eighteenth century—paintings, chairs, that sort of thing.”
He talked on easily of the bones of the house being excellent, and the old plaster falling away to leave bare-brick chain walls. Chain walls are walls that went all the way down to the ground rather than a foundation, and I had not heard that term in many years.
“The house was a total ruin when I first happened upon it. You understand I had no idea you were in New Orleans in those times. I knew there were blood drinkers about, but I knew nothing of them until many decades later when I read all of your stories, and I was riding on the old road to Napoleonville when I saw the house on the night of a bright moon, and I swore it spoke to me. It beckoned me to brave the wreckage and come inside, and once I did I knew I must bring it all back to its former glory, so that some night when I finally left it, it would be infinitely better than I’d found it, and I’d left my stamp upon it with pride.”
I smiled, loving the way his voice flowed with such easy sincerity and excitement.
“Ah, you know these old heart-pine floors were never meant to be bare, but we finish them with polymer now and they are hard and have an amber sheen.”
“Well, now there are no vandals to torment you,” I said. “And I’ll see to it that none dare in future. I think what happened last night in New Orleans will be known far and wide. I didn’t leave anyone alive to tell the tale, but such happenings are always known.”
“Yes, they are,” he said. “I knew when they died.” And that shadow came across his face. “I mean no harm to other blood drinkers. If I’d known when I came to Louisiana that you were here and you needed help, I would have come to you. I had been in Lima, Peru, for many years, well, almost since I’d made the crossing centuries ago, and America was so new to me, so startlingly new.”
“I can well understand that you’d never want to leave this house,” I said. “But why don’t you come to Court? I wish that you’d come.”
“Ah, but you see, I have an enemy there, quite an implacable enemy, and I’d be arranging my own demise if I came.”
He said this last with seriousness but not with fear.
“In fact, I must confess I welcome the opportunity to put the matter before you so that perhaps you can prevail upon this enemy to allow me to come to Court and leave me alone.”
“I’ll do more than that,” I said. “I’ll settle the matter. Tell me who this is.”
I liked him. I liked him very much. I liked his lean face and his well-shaped animated lips and his soft blue eyes. His hair, though blond, had a pearl-white look to it; and his eyes had a pearly look as well. His jacket was light blue, and he had chosen pearl buttons for it, and of course there were those rings on his right hand. Why, I wondered, only on the right hand? If a man wears three rings on his right hand, then usually he wears two or three on his left.
I couldn’t read his mind as he looked at me, but I knew he was pondering this enemy, and I admired the way that he could keep his thoughts veiled. His expression was attentive, and pleasant. Finally he spoke.
“Arjun,” he said in a soft voice.
“Well, of course, I know him.”
“Yes…I’ve read…in the two books. And he is there at Court, isn’t he? He’s with the Countess De Malvrier.”
Countess De Malvrier was an old name for Pandora, a name that belonged to an earlier existence and a name she never used now. And yes, Arjun was at Court with her and, to the best of my estimation, making her life rather miserable.
Arjun had been roused from the earth by “the Voice,” who happened to be the spirit, Amel, inside of us, coming to consciousness and desperate to destroy some of those vampires connected to him. But all this was history now. And Arjun, unprepared for and uninterested in the modern age, lodged at Court rather like a patient in a madhouse, gazing about him with menacing eyes and clinging always to Pandora.
There had been times when he seemed restored, pleasant, ready to begin to embrace a new existence, but these periods had become infrequent, and Arjun frightened many of the other vampires who lacked his age and power.
“I’ve read the latest books over twice,” Fontayne said. “And I have the hope that Arjun has softened towards me, but I wouldn’t want to put this unexpectedly to a test.”
“Why is Arjun a threat to you?” I asked. “Explain the whole thing. Give me as much as you can so that I can talk to him and really obtain a resolution.”
A sudden memory surprised me—of that maverick in New Orleans demanding of me in a rage, “By what authority do you do this to me?”
I felt a shiver and tried to shake it off. “I want to be of help,” I said.
“You have the authority of the Council of Elders behind you,” he said now with great sympathy. He reached out for my hand.
“That is the source of your authority and also the needs of the entire Court.”
I liked him so much. I saw no reason to conceal it. His generous expression, his easy speech, all this was pleasant, as was his house with its books gleaming on the shelves in the gentle light.
“I have my doubts,” I said. “But I behave as if I had none, and I’ll behave that way with Arjun, if you’ll put the case before me.”
“Of course. I assure you I’m innocent of any wrongdoing,” he said. “I have never done anything intentional to displease Arjun.”
“So let me know what happened.”
“I was in Saint Petersburg in the 1700s,” he said. “Great Catherine was enchanted with European society then, and my father had been a Parisian, and my mother a Russian countess. Both were dead, however, when I sought a position serving Catherine’s court. I spoke Russian and French naturally, and also English as well as I speak it now. I gained a position almost immediately as a translator and later working as a French tutor to a noble household, and from there I answered the advertisement of the Countess Malvrier. Hers was one of the most lovely houses in Petersburg then, on the English Embankment, entirely new and lavishly furnished, but she was reclusive and seldom appeared in society and never invited anyone into her home.
“My first meeting with her was shocking. She had me come up to her bedchamber. She was wearing a simple nightgown of white gauze and in her bare feet, standing by the fireplace, and she asked me to brush her hair.
“I was stunned. There were female servants all over the house, and plenty of male servants too. But I hadn’t the slightest intention of refusing her. I took the hairbrush and I brushed her hair.”
I saw it as he spoke. I saw Pandora etched by the light of the fire. I saw that she was trembling, and her face was drawn and her eyes were large with hunger and pain.
“She wanted me to be her librarian, she said, and to go through boxes and boxes of books. Seems she’d collected these books over many years and from all over the world. Now I know of course that she’d been collecting them for centuries. She asked me to put these books in order, to fill the shelves of her drawing rooms with them.” He stopped and gestured to his own library. “This is so small by comparison, but then those Russian houses were so very grand. There was unimaginable wealth in Russia then, and such a great appetite for European art.”
“I can imagine it,” I said. And again I saw Pandora looking straight at me as through his gaze. I saw Mitka standing behind her with the brush in his hand. Her hair was long, brown, rippling with waves, falling over her shoulders as if she were an illustration in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. I could smell a heady incense in the room, something Eastern and exotic and intoxicating. The only illumination came from the flames of the fire.
“Yes,” he went on, “and finally she said that even more important was that I read to her in French, that I read the works of Diderot and Rousseau. She wanted me to read scientific works to her in English—and to know about all things European but most especially the Enlightenment, le Siècle des Lumières. She abruptly stopped talking of this and asked me to explain John Locke to her, and what was the appeal of David Hume? She wanted to know all about Voltaire.
“Of course none of this in itself was out of the ordinary really in that the Empress Catherine was in love with all of these very same European writers and thinkers, and all the Court was cultivating an interest to follow the Empress, whether they cared about such things or not.
“Seemed for months on end I read to her, aloud, nightly, sometimes from sunset to the early hours of the morning. Of course I never saw her in the day and I wasn’t surprised. I usually worked on ordering the library until noon. Then I’d sleep, and sometimes especially in winter she woke me well before I was supposed to be called.
“I didn’t care. I adored her. I fell in love with her. She told me that she did not want for this to happen, and that her lover was demanding and cruel, and might appear at any time. I won’t dwell on this, but I did have fantasies of killing him. But I assure you, I never sought really to harm him. All this was, well, poetic.”
I laughed. “I understand,” I said. He smiled gratefully and continued:
“When he finally did appear, I hated him immediately. He was Arjun; he dressed then entirely as a Russian, and the first time I saw him he was piled in furs and wearing leather gloves and had just come in from a storm. It was close to midnight and I was talking softly to the Countess about a possible trip to Paris, assuring her that she would love such a thing, and she kept saying what she always said to any of my suggestions, that it was absolutely impossible, and that I must make Paris real to her, and I was doing my best to describe it when in came Arjun.
“He told me to get out of his sight immediately, and thereafter for the next year, I saw the Countess only in the library and when she was appropriately dressed, and then only for about three hours of an evening before she and Arjun went out.
“I was fiercely jealous but kept it to myself. After all, I had no title, didn’t come from a great family, and had only a small income that was less than half of what I was being paid for my work.
“I did everything I could to stay out of the way of the master when he was home, to appear busy regardless of the hour, and to keep to my room whenever I could. But this wasn’t enough. Often when the master appeared I was told to go out.
“Alas, we still encountered one another, once at the ballet, another time at the opera, and then again at a ball. Then it became all too clear that I was going to run into Arjun wherever I happened to go in Petersburg, and finally one night when I came home unexpectedly and caught the master and the mistress in the middle of a huge argument, Arjun turned to me, and in a fit of snarling rage, drew his saber and ran me through with it. I couldn’t move or speak. The blood was pouring out of me. He was laughing. He had the servants lock me in my room.
“I was dying, there was little doubt of that, and I was in a rage that no physician had been sent for, but within a few minutes I was too weak even to get off the bed. I thought this was the end, and as I was thirty-four years of age, I was bitter and disconsolate and in a lot of pain.
“Suddenly I heard loud voices on the floor below and then the sound of the great front door of the house being slammed, and I knew that the murderer had gone out. Perhaps now, I thought, someone will help me.
“Within seconds, the door of my room opened and the Countess was there. She examined my wound and then she very simply told me to trust her in what she did next and I would have the power to live until the end of time.
“I almost laughed. I remember I said, ‘Countess, I will settle right now for living through this night.’
“I couldn’t even form a sensible question to all this, when she lifted me in her arms and began to draw the blood out of my wound and into her own mouth. I fainted or went into a swoon.
“I don’t recall seeing anything, or knowing anything, or having any veil lifted on the mysteries of life, only a kind of warm ecstasy and then a drowsiness in which my death seemed inevitable and a fairly simple step. I tried to make some sense of what she had done to me, and I decided she was trying to make it easy for me to die, and she certainly had. I no longer cared. Then she lifted me up again and this time she tore open her left wrist with her teeth and forced my mouth against the gash.
“You know what this was like, the taste of her blood. And the sudden ravenous thirst triggered in me by this. I drank the blood; I drank it as if it were wine going down my throat; and I heard her voice speaking to me, low and steady, without stop. She told a simple story of her life. I don’t recall expression in her voice, or even a cadence. It was like a golden ribbon unfurling, to listen to her, and feel this blood coursing into me, as she went on about the great blood drinker who had made her, Marius, and how deeply she loved him and how they’d been lost to one another, and how she had traveled the world
. She spoke of powerful blood drinkers like herself. And some of those names I’ve found since in your books. Sevraine was the name that I most distinctly remember. She spoke of seeking refuge in the halls of the Great Sevraine. At some point, she spoke of India, of temples and jungles in India and of encountering the Prince Arjun and of bringing him over, and of how he had become the cruelest of lovers, giving her the worst torment she’d ever known.
“There came a moment when I was no longer drinking blood. I was seated on the side of the bed looking at her as she hastily put me in a long fur-lined coat to hide my bloodstained garments and then we went out into the night.
“The predicable things happened. I took my first victim. A poor beggar all but dead from the cold. I died the death, as she put it, the vile fluids streaming out of me, and then it was home again in haste to my rooms, where I bathed and dressed in fresh garments, and then she took me into the closed-off east wing of the house, and found a hiding place for me and told me not to stir from that spot until it was safe. She had explained to me about the paralysis that would come over me when the first light shone in the sky. And I slept that strange unearthly sleep we know in which I dreamed of her, and of embracing her, and of a passion that had no real meaning for her, wanting her desperately and vowing to take her away from Arjun.
“Arjun went into a rage when he learned what she had done. I could hear him easily when I finally opened my eyes. It seemed he was destroying the entire house.
“I couldn’t listen to this and do nothing, though she’d told me of his immense strength and the powers he had to destroy with his mind, though she’d warned me that he and she both possessed the power to burn objects and persons at will.
“I came out of my hiding place and rushed towards the central portion of the house, determined to fight him to the death.