A Dowry of Blood

by Gibson, S. T.

  “No more running, yes?” you said, voice silky and low.

  “No more running,” I whispered, tears springing to my eyes. What else could I have done? I belonged to you. There was no world for me outside the range of your watchful gaze, no past and no future. There was only this moment, you holding me like a kitten by the scruff while your own blood coursed through my veins.

  You kissed me. Punishingly, until my lips were bruised, until there was scarcely any air left in my lungs. The force of your love nearly drove me to my knees. I was no woman, I was merely a supplicant, a pilgrim who had stumbled across your dark altar and was doomed to worship at it forever.

  I don’t know what I had been thinking, supposing I was strong enough to leave.

  The years ticked by, and our honeymoon with Magdalena became daily domestic life as the world changed around us. A new continent was discovered across the ocean, or rather an old one that the squabbling armies of Europe gave a new name to. Pascal, Newton, and Descartes advanced their theories in the world, much to your rapt delight, and the steam engine revolutionized agriculture and commerce. Europe’s might grew by leaps and bounds alongside her brutality: the cities got bigger and dirtier, imperial expansion became more widespread, and my corsets got tighter and more elaborate.

  By the turn of the eighteenth century, we had traversed so much of Europe that we had seen fine city squares and capital sieges, driven through just as many pastoral scenes of harvest as we had fields razed to the ground by war. The world turned on its axis, ever spinning, ever coming back to where it started, but we did not change. The greatest philosophers Europe had to offer declared that we were in an Enlightened age, progressing from rudimentary darkness into elevated civilization, but I had trouble believing them. The constant warmongering of imperial powers and the brutal capture and trafficking of human beings were dark marks on any claim to enlightenment, as far as I was concerned.

  You remained raptly fascinated by the cyclical rise and fall of the human animal, drawn like a hungry wolf to empires limping along on wounded limbs. And Magdalena remained adamant on corresponding with the greatest minds of any century, trading letters with kings and courtesans and court philosophers. Her intellect was unparalleled, and she craved the stimulation of advising on political matters. Edicts and coronations were like chess pieces to her, and she had an uncanny ability to predict how one head of state would respond to another’s treaty. She seemed to find a sense of purpose in these exchanges, and would sometimes write so many letters in a day that she would pace through our rooms dictating her thoughts to me while I wrote them down for her.

  But she was never permitted to meet with any of these luminaries. You were suspicious of anyone who tried to get close to her. Jealous, Magdalena and I agreed privately. We would never say it in front of you, of course, not wanting to risk rousing one of your dark moods. Magdalena had seen plenty of those by then as well, been left by you on a busy street corner when she said something that offended or berated when she tried to argue about why she should be allowed to hunt alone. You kept her close at hand always, insisting it was because you loved her, because you wanted to protect her and couldn’t stand to be without her.

  As someone who had been loved in this way for centuries, I also knew it was much easier to keep an eye on someone who was close at hand, to guide their mind and direct their steps.

  You made it into an art form, this quiet sort of violence. You were so far into our heads your gentle suggestions so often felt like our own thoughts.

  And after a long time, Magdalena simply thought that there was no use in keeping up correspondence with great minds that would only shrivel and die in a blink of our immortal eyes. Gradually, she retired her stationary and stopped accepting letters. We kept moving, never staying in one place long enough for our nature to be discovered by the locals, but we stopped following her adventurous whim from nation to nation. We travelled by your compass now, following the northern star of your interests. Just like it had been before she came to join our family. And Magdalena, poor lovely Magdalena, began to fade.

  It started with the fatigue, with the long bouts of bone-deep tiredness that had her sleeping not just through the day but through most of the night.

  Her melancholy was palpable, wafting off her like the sticky-sweet scent of death. Soon she lost interest in any of her favorite diversions, even in hunting. I had to take her by the hand and tug her out of the door with me at night to convince her to feed. I once saw you bring a crystal glass of fast-chilling blood to her lips the way you might feed a child, just to get her to eat. You murmured to her in Greek, a language that sounded arrestingly tender and intimate to my ear, and urged her to find the will to get out of bed.

  I would lie in the dark next to her on bad days, smoothing her curls and humming to her snatches of the songs my grandmother used to sing to me. Sometimes she would smile at me, or cry. Other times, she simply looked past me as though I wasn’t even there. Those were the most difficult.

  “What’s wrong, my darling?” I asked quietly on a particularly bad evening. Two days prior she had been on top of the world, giggling at your jokes and preening in the mirror and stalking the streets like a beautiful panther out to find her nightly prey. She had been ablaze, barely needing any sleep and so full of ideas that she could scarcely string them together into a sentence. But now, she could barely bring herself to brush her own hair.

  “You’re acting as though you have no interest in living anymore,” I whispered, my voice breaking.

  Magdalena looked at me with empty eyes.

  “I want to live,” she whispered back. Probably too afraid that you would hear from your rooms next door. “But I want to live in the world, not on the outskirts of it. The days just go on and on, Constanta, they never change… I’m tired.”

  We did our best to learn to live with Magdalena’s melancholy, which seemed over time to become a fourth person in our marriage. She would be her usual effervescent self for days, sometimes years, but the melancholy always came back, calling on her like an unwelcome old lover disrupting a wedding.

  You determined that moving so often was agitating her distraught mind, so we settled in Berlin at the sunset of the nineteenth century. The newly established German empire was in full flower, with the Kaiser presiding over a capital city stuffed with factories and theatres. The sprawling city center was large enough to hold even your attention for a number of decades, full as it was of wealth and slums, criminals and extraordinary scientific minds, all moving together in a great human sea. You were able to dig your talons into the city’s soft underbelly every night, and Magdalena was able to divert herself with German opera, Parisian revues, and Russian ballet performances any time the darkness started encroaching on her heart. It worked, for a little while. But even a life of perfect leisure was not enough to soothe her desire for true freedom. She wanted, above all, a life unshackled to convention or even the people she loved, and so her light began to dim once again.

  Once, Magdalena slept for days, waking only in fitful spurts to refuse water, refuse food, and whimper to be left alone in the darkness. But on the third day, she pushed herself up from the bed and called for blood. You slaughtered the prettiest of the servants for her, offering up our household’s beloved fatted calf. Eventually, the color returned to her cheeks and the strength returned to her limbs. She returned to us as though she hadn’t been walking the knife’s edge of destruction days ago, smiling that starry smile.

  Your fears, however, were not put to rest.

  “She needs to see a doctor. A psychiatrist, something. She needs treatment, Constanta. To be brought under control.”

  You were pacing the living room, fuming and fretting while Magdalena slept in your bed. The fatigue was coming for her again, and you feared what would happen when it had her completely in its clutches.

  “She’s sick,” I said, as mildly as I could manage, keeping my eyes on my embroidery. I wanted to advocate for her, but I also wa
nted to avoid your wrath. You had been good-humored for a time after you brought Magdalena to live with us, but now your temper was getting shorter and shorter again. “She doesn’t need to be brought under control, she needs the right medicine.”

  “And what medicine might that be?”

  I flicked a quick glance up to you, and then down at the French knots I was stitching.

  “Fresh air. A bracing walk around the city by herself.”

  “When she’s not distraught, she’s agitated and restless. I take my eyes off her for a moment and she gets into trouble; she can’t be trusted.”

  “Equally sharp minds to correspond with,” I went on, swallowing my fear. I had to ask, for Magdalena’s sake. I had to. “A friend that isn’t also a lover.”

  “What does she need strangers putting foreign ideas in her head for, turning her against our kind? She has us both, she has power, she has the world on a platter. She should be grateful.”

  Your voice had the thin insinuation of a threat in it, and my blood went cold at the sound. My mind rushed back to those letters I had found. So many other lovers who had simply disappeared off the face of the earth, wiped clean from your memory except for a few mementos.

  Had any of them been sick like Magdalena, losing their shine when they could no longer dote on you and smile for you every hour of the day?

  “Is that what happened to the others?” I said, before I could stop myself. This conversation had been festering in the back of my mind for years, and I could scarcely believe it was truly happening now. But here we were, at the awful climax of so many smothered arguments. “Were they not grateful enough for you?”

  I bit off the words in a fit of anger, a thousand tiny slights bubbling to the surface in one foolish, reckless moment. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, my blood ran cold. God. What had I done?

  You turned to face me slowly, bafflement and anger written equally across your features.

  “What did you say?”

  I opened my mouth but no sound came out. My practiced stitching stuttered, and I stabbed my thumb with the needle. I barely felt it, I was so scared.

  “Did you go through my things?” you asked, crossing your arms. I was suddenly aware of how tall you were, of how small I was by comparison.

  I shook my head rapidly, my embroidery abandoned in my lap.

  “N-no, I don’t know what you mean. I just... I assumed there were others. Before us. You’ve lived a very long time, my lord.”

  You stared at me for a long time, weighing me like gold that you suspected was little more than painted tin.

  “There were others,” you pronounced eventually.

  The words went through me like an electric shock. I had all the evidence of your past love affairs I needed, but to hear it straight from your lips... It wasn’t the loving that made me sick, it was how much you had hidden from me, and for how long.

  “What happened to them?” I asked, my throat dry. If I had come this far, I might as well ask the question that haunted me at night. There was no unsaying what I had said and I would hate myself forever if I fled the conversation now. “Where are they now?”

  “Fled or dead,” you said, eyes glittering dangerously. Your arms were still crossed across your chest like a child being reprimanded by his governess, but your jaw was set like a warrior ready to strike. It always amazed me, how you could play victim and aggressor at the same time.

  “Who killed them?” I asked, my voice barely louder than a whisper. For a long moment, there was silence, broken only by the ticking of the faithful German clock in the living room.

  You crossed the room to me in long strides, and for a horrible, impossible instant I thought you might strike me. But you went down on one knee instead, taking my wounded hand in your own and fixing me with your heaviest look.

  “You’re young, unschooled in the ways of love. Love is violence, my darling, it is a thunderstorm that tears apart your world. More often than not, love ends in tragedy, but we go on loving in the hopes that this time, it will be different. This time, the beloved will understand us. They will not try to flee from our embrace, or become discontent with us.”

  You brought my thumb to your mouth and suckled off the blood, as gently as a mother might bandage her child’s bruised knee.

  “Love makes monsters of us, Constanta, and not everyone is cut out for monstrosity. My other lovers went mad, they railed against me and rebuffed my affections, they endangered our lives with foolish trysts with humans and they betrayed my trust. They had to be put down, my love, like a horse with a broken leg. It was a mercy. I swear to you. Do you understand?”

  I nodded slowly, every appendage heavy and numb. I could barely breathe. Put down , you had said. Like an animal.

  You swept a strand of my hair behind my ear and rubbed the line of worry from between my brows, rearranging my face into a picture that pleased you.

  Then you took my jaw in your hand and squeezed so hard that tears sprang to my eyes.

  “Good,” you said, your voice suddenly dark. “Now stay out of my room.”

  That was your final word on the matter. You left me alone in the living room, shaken and on the verge of tears. I pressed my hand to my mouth to smother a shriek of horror. I knew then I was truly trapped with you, and any pipe dream of running away was nothing more than a flight of fancy. If I ran, you would track me down, and you would do to me what you had done to those other husbands and wives. I shuddered at the thought, sobs threatening to tear out of my chest.

  I was shackled to you by iron bonds, and so was my darling Magdalena. There was no way for me to wriggle away without damning her to your anger, and so I resolved to stay. To watch and to listen, and to wait for a perfect moment sometime in the future where Magdalena and I could breathe the free air together.

  You ushered us out of Berlin quickly after that, as though the whole city had been spoiled by Magdalena’s continued illness. She sat at the divan and stared out the window, sallow and wan, as you ordered the house to be packed up with utmost expediency. I found myself powerless, wringing my hands while you brooded and Magdalena languished and strange men took my paintings down from the wall. I had no idea how to help either of you. The best I could do was quietly crawl into Magdalena’s bed and nuzzle her nearly-comatose form for an hour or so each day, and to sit with you as you took your fill of the morning news, listening to you read interesting headlines aloud. Neither of you would be consoled back into a smile. I learned to be content with my own company, to not take Magdalena’s every dark mood as mine to fix. She had an illness, the doctor you hired had said. A feminine hysteria resulting in listlessness and ennui.

  I thought, perhaps, it was simpler than that. I thought that she was simply fading the way flowers denied sunlight droop and die. Magdalena lived for her freedom, and with it taken away from her, life lost its luster.

  You never were able to give her her beloved freedom, since letting her roam freely was strictly against the design you had for our lives. But you were able to augment her joy for a time with a force so powerful it may as well have been the sunshine and free air she gave up to be one with you. A force of pure, unfettered joy.

  I just never expected to have to travel all the way to the cold reaches of Russia to find him.

  PART THREE

  Alexi, our sunlight, our destroyer. My prince cast in marble and gold. We could have endured a hundred years more, clinging to each other even as we tore each other’s throats out, had it not been for Alexi. He was the antidote to our miseries, a short-lived splash of sweetness in our bitter lives. With Alexi in the mix, our household knew levity again. At least for a short while.

  He was as inevitable as a revolution, and heralded in just as much violence.

  It was autumn in Petrograd, in the heady October of 1919. The Tsar had been shot dead by the Bolsheviks only a year prior, and the vast Russian empire had fallen into civil war just as rebuilding efforts had begun to get underway. The nation wrestled wi
th itself, struggling to define itself in a fast-changing world hurtling towards an ever-shifting destiny. But, despite her wartime scars and explosive temper, Russia was still a beautiful, mysterious ideal in your mind, the source of so much of your beloved philosophy and literature. You wanted to study the intricacies of all the political schools and systems battling for dominance. You believed that strife brought the soul of mankind to the surface of society, and you wished to chart the height and breadth of it for your studies.

  “Are you sure it’s safe for us here?” I asked as we stepped off the steaming train. The Petrograd station was a swirling watercolor of browns and brass, echoing with the shouts of newspaper sellers and merchant women.

  I breathed in the scent of the city deeply. I tasted hot bread, oiled machinery, and the tang of fresh blood ground into the cobblestones. This was a city on the edge of self-realization, or of dissolution. No wonder you were drawn irresistibly into her milieu.

  You cupped my face in your hands, your silhouette wreathed like a devil in brimstone smoke by the steam pluming from the train.

  “We’ve waltzed through a hundred tiny apocalypses, you and I, walked unharmed through the ash of countless crumbling regimes. We feast on the ruin of empires, Constanta. Their destruction is our high feast day.”

  I pressed my lips together. Where you saw glorious progress, I only saw war, famine, and desolation. Humans had learned in recent years to make machines so ferocious they could blow a person to bits, vampire or no. I wondered if we should be more concerned about the way the world was tilting.

  Magdalena emerged from the train, squinting against the thin dawn light. We would have to hurry to our apartments for a long sleep before the sun was at its full height. You kissed her gloved hand.