Connecticut Vampire in King Arthur's Court

by Hall, Ian

  I felt my shoulders slump. “Back in the caravan.”

  “You go get them.”

  “I cannot.”

  She stamped her foot hard on the floor. “You get them!”

  “Your Grace, I cannot.” I looked at her, and sighed. “I can lift a person, yes, but not large cases of clothes. I simply cannot get them.”

  She seemed at last to get the idea. “How long are they gone?”

  “Maybe two, three weeks.”

  “Argh!” Again the stamped foot.

  “Perhaps there’s clothes at the castle?” I pleaded.

  Well, didn’t that make a change. She instantly forgot her tantrums, focused on me, and felt forward with her hands. “Show me.”

  With two servants from the gatehouse walking behind us, I led the Princess up to the castle. In time we went through every single bedroom, and Catherine found three dresses that she declared suitable to wear, even though the fashion wasn’t close to her Spanish gowns. I’m pretty certain that one of them had been Lady Jane’s.

  Once she’d been placated slightly, she then demanded a tour, and soon we were in the kitchen, where the smells of both meats and cake mixed with heady delight.

  The new cook, arrived from Haddon Hall, looked up, her face dusted with flour, but beaming with smiles. She curtseyed for the Princess.

  “Care to taste, Your Highness?”

  And taste, she did.

  With Princess Catherine somewhat mollified, I decided that I had the time to go get my Lady Jane from the caravan. By now the route felt pretty engrained in my mind, but again I got to Oxford without finding the coaches on the road.

  The main staging inn, however, the Chancellery, where we’d stayed so many months ago proved a veritable hub of activity. Two guards stood outside, and when I approached, they looked so grateful to see a familiar face.

  “The Prince an’ Princess been taken, sire,” one said.

  “Word’s gone to London!” spouted the other.

  “Who’s in charge?” I asked.

  “That’s it, y’see. There ain’t no one in charge.” He shook his head. “Old Percy’s never had this ‘appen before, he’s the ‘manager’, so to speak, but he’s taken to the drink.”

  I nodded thanks, and walked past them into the inn.

  Instantly I was met with a host of ladies, Jane amongst them, Isabella screaming at me.

  “Ladies!” I roared, and got rewarded with a modicum of quiet. “Prince Arthur and Princess Catherine have ridden ahead to Ludlow by horse.”

  Incredulous faces stared back at me, so I spent the next fifteen minutes going round everyone in the caravan, and the owners of the Chancellery, telling them to calm the fuck down, and that the situation was A-1, normal, and to get the caravan back on the road tomorrow and get moving to Ludlow.

  So much vampire persuasion, in fact, that I needed a good strong drink afterwards.

  “When did the messenger depart for London?” I asked Lady Jane.

  “Just this morning.”

  So I went out, chased the man down, stopped the message, and got back in time for afternoon tea; which, with all my running around rural England, I actually needed.

  Then I ‘catnapped’ Lady Jane, put her to sleep, had a little pull on some dark red stuff from the convenient artery on her neck, and slightly refreshed, I pulled her onto my shoulder and sped to Ludlow.

  Past the guards at the gate, up into the main keep, bam, onto my bed.

  Again, all in a day’s work.

  I walked downstairs, hoping for a quiet drink, but as I neared the dining room, it became obvious that Ludlow seemed to be in full celebration mode.

  As I rounded the last corner and looked through the huge arch, to my surprise, I found everyone sitting at one large table, the royal couple, head guards, Phillipa, and some of the servants. Everyone eating, drinking, and getting along famously.

  Prince Arthur, in particular, looked very happy, and engaged in more conversation than I’d ever seen him before.

  Considering her absence of retinue, Princess Catherine seemed very much at home at the dining table, and expecting a frosty reception, I was surprised when she waved me towards the table, shouting a greeting over the throng.

  “Merry Christmas, Master DeVere!”

  Her words held a heavy accent, but it showed on her face that she wallowed in being able to say them.

  I walked around the table, toasting people, shaking hands, and when I came to the Prince, he simply rose, and embraced me. “Merry Christmas, Richard.”

  “Merry Christmas, Your Grace…”

  “No!” He laughed. “Tonight I am simply Arthur.”

  “Very well, Arthur.”

  “This is my wife, Catherine, in whom I am well pleased!”

  The Princess rose unsteadily, and hugged me, showing a little worse for wear of the free-flowing mead. “I learn new English words.” She whispered into my ear. “Me gusta pene!” she giggled. “I enjoy penis.”

  I held her from me, but the mirth in her laughter proved infectious.

  She looked to Arthur, who chatted to Mistress Phillipa, then leant forward to me. “Merry Christmas, Richard. One day I enjoy you penis.”

  Well, that took my breath away, and I smiled, lost for words, and retreated, smiling at her unmitigated gall.

  I found a serving wench and asked her to send two maids upstairs to undress a sleeping Lady Jane. Suddenly, after seeing the look on the Princess of Wales’s face, I felt as randy as hell.

  The royal couple retired soon after, and we all bid them farewell, a four-man guard marching with them back to the gatehouse. I couldn’t help a little feeling of pride in what I’d accomplished in Arthur over five months; from timid boy to rampaging love fiend.

  Well, maybe not quite that far, but you get the idea.

  I had a few more drinks, then retired myself, slowly making my way to the bedroom where Jane lay. I prayed fervently that the girls would have undressed her by now.

  The room lay in total darkness, but as I neared the bed, I heard quiet snores, and rapidly stripped, my body feeling the chill already in the air.

  Naked, next to me, lay Jane, her body facing away from me.

  I embraced her from behind, slipping an arm under her neck, and down to her breast. I could hardly contain myself, and nuzzled my penis at her bottom, my hand lifting her thigh for access.

  I kissed her neck, panting, pulling on her teat, feeling that hardening nipple, so like the Princess’s. Then my fingers found her sex, and I parted her lips, dipped inside – just as I’d done to Catherine on her wedding night. But this night I’d go further.

  I guided the head of my penis between the warm cavernous folds of Lady Jane Winterbrooke.

  “Me gusta pene,” I whispered into her ear as I plunged deeper. “Yes, you little Spanish harlot, you like penis!”

  With my lap slapping into her bottom, I rode her like a prized stallion. Taking what was mine, and giving no regard for her drowsy pleasure. But in my mind I crossed the courtyard, crossed the snowy grass, walked into the gatehouse, threw Arthur out of his bed, and rode a Spanish Princess, my cock delving deep into the depths of Spain.

  As I shot my semen deep into Jane’s body, I carefully drank again from her neck, the second time that day. As I closed my eyes in ecstasy, I saw Catherine looking back at me, accepting every stroke, taking pleasure in my every move.

  As I cast my last drop inside her, Catherine’s mouth opened, each fluid motion of her lips sensuous and beguiling, her dark tongue beyond, coiled as snake, ready to strike. “Merry Christmas, Richard. One day I enjoy you penis.”

  Spent, I lay back on the bed, looking up at the dark wooden beams. I felt exhilarated, and yet ashamed. Somehow, somewhere deep inside me, I’d betrayed a trust. But I also knew that I’d do it again.

  Jane, weakened from my feedings, lay in a deep sleep beside me. Despite my imaginings, I don’t think she’d moved in the whole procedure.

  With my mind racing, I
somehow fell asleep.

  I chased a Princess, and a wild woods woman, and a dancing lady of the court, and yet despite my super-human speed, I never caught any of them.

  December 25th, 1501

  A Winter’s Tale

  And so I settled into the mediocrity of life at Ludlow Castle.

  Sir Gruffydd arrived after Christmas, and met with both myself and Phillipa to inform us of the successful encasement of Eleanor in the nunnery in the Brecons.

  The royal couple lived a very quiet life, and partly because of the season, and partly the location, received no major visitors for many weeks.

  The Lady Jane and I spent a lot of time together, and with the constant accumulation of snow, we all kind of hunkered down for the winter.

  The muted celebrations at the end of the year came and went, and at last, in the early days of January, the caravan eventually arrived.

  Of course, the ladies went wild.

  Suddenly after spending weeks in the same clothing, their wardrobes were abundant and overflowing again.

  But their high spirits were dampened in the middle of the month with the news that the Princess Catherine had indeed taken her monthly ‘curse’, and no heir would be forthcoming.

  Life goes on, and in the depths of winter, there’s little else to do except eat, shag and sleep, and when it comes down to it, when you don’t actually have to work for a living, it’s not a bad life to have.

  One by one, I interviewed every person working at the castle. I used my vampire hypnotism thing to its best use, and interrogated everyone mercilessly. Four of the guards, including Jethro, were loyal to the King to such a degree that I counted them as spies.

  On one of my quiet walks around the castle, I caught one of the chambermaids passing on tales of the goings-on in the gatehouse bedroom to a guard, who then wrote it all down. I mean, normal guards can’t write, not in this day and age.

  That night, as he walked sentry duty, he had a terrible accident.

  “He must have slipped on ice or something,” I said next day, looking at the corpse with his neck bent at a very unnatural angle. His body was encrusted in fresh sparkling morning frost.

  “Well, it is slippery up there on the battlements,” Gruffydd agreed, looking up at the high tower. His tone left no doubt that he doubted his own words. “Not much blood though.”

  With the guard’s note already in my pocket, and the twin marks of my canine teeth already gone from his neck, I walked away; satisfied that another leak had been dealt with.

  Near the end of the month, I received a letter from Charles Banner, Sir Harry Vernon’s clerk. Very detailed, very precise; two thousand and eighty-three guineas had been the tax taken from the Welsh Marches last year. According to Banner, Sir Harry intended to send me just over a thousand. I mentally promised him a visit when the weather improved.

  I met with the Princess each morning, and sometimes together, sometimes with the Prince, she practiced her English, and perfected her pronunciation.

  In the whole month of January, we had just two visitors; Sir William Uvedale and Sir Richard Croft, both old boys, but both so obviously fond of and loyal to Prince Arthur.

  They came from the court at Windsor castle, and brought tales of the King and Queen, and Arthur’s siblings.

  Initially I thought Arthur would feel homesick, but as the tales were told, he just looked grateful not to be there, to be on his own.

  The evenings brought out historical stories of battles and bravery, as Sir William and Sir Richard jousted with Sir Gruffydd’s tale of his father’s fighting alongside King Henry.

  Then, of course, they left, and life settled down again.

  In February, Thomas Linacre returned, and announced that he would instruct the Princess on English history. I requested permission to join their studies, and since I’d lived in the ‘Low Countries’, and thus missed the history, I was warmly invited.

  But if I’d hoped for a quick run-through of the last hundred years, I felt disappointed. In my opinion Thomas went into far too much detail. Not only did he tell of every event, but also how it influenced the surrounding nations, the resultant power base shifts, and so into infinitesimal detail that I soon tuned out most of what he said. His voice also rarely differed beyond a monotone, and subsequently the lesson’s content became stale and uninteresting. But to her eternal credit, the Princess never seemed to share my sentiments, always retaining the best mix of interest and asking the searching questions.

  It proved all very well, going into such great details of lineage, but his teaching manner felt far too boring and I found myself catching only the bullet points.

  Okay, Arthur’s father, Henry the seventh, had ended the War of the Roses at the Battle of Bosworth Field, defeating Edward the third. To unite the country, and end years of war, he married the Princess of the other side. Then, to continue the unification he had called his first son Arthur after England’s mythical legendary King, the name also be neutral to both sites.

  Of course it all got very complex, but I did gather that Princess Catherine, through her mother, technically had a more legitimate claim to the English throne than Arthur did.

  While the tables of the lineage were all very well, they only served to prove how ignorant I actually was. I listened along with the Prince and Princess, but lived in a very different world. The world of international politics would never be my strong point.

  But with February, there also came a storm of a different kind. As we headed towards the feast of St. Valentine, news came to the castle of a spreading illness, a malady simply called the ‘sweating sickness.’

  By messenger, we learned that the disease had already been rampant in Hereford for a week and seemed to be spreading north at a prodigious rate. Initially, I did nothing, there seemed no immediate threat, and Hereford lay over twenty-five miles to the south.

  But when the sickness was reported in Leominster, then nearby Tenbury Wells, I took action.

  To everyone's chagrin, I placed a cordon around town, policed with the Prince’s guards. The instructions were simple; no one in and no one out. No exceptions.

  For a secondary tier of defense, inside the cordon round the town, I also closed down the castle. Never before had the thick battlements walls tried to resist such an insidious enemy.

  “Exactly what are you trying to do?” Arthur asked as he watched me direct the soldiers to close the gates.

  “I’m establishing a perimeter,” I said, pointing to the inside of the outer walls. “If I can halt the spread of the disease to just the town, it might pass us by. I don’t want to tempt fate, but I’m not sure if your health could handle such an attack.”

  “But surely such a disease would just fly in the window?”

  “That depends on the disease’s method of transfer. If it’s an airborne contagion, yes it would,” I said. “But if it passed from person-to-person through contact, then perhaps just by locking the gates we can stop it spreading into the castle.”

  “You are a strange man, Master DeVere.” The Prince gave a wry smile. “But it also seems quite logical.”

  “With respect, your Grace, I have experience of such outbreaks in the Low Countries. With such safeguards in place, some towns were able to avoid contagion completely.”

  The actual town of Ludlow remained clear for another six days, then we got news from beyond the castle walls; the disease lay insidiously amongst us. One family fell prey, then two, then the whole southern half of the town. I stood on the ramparts with Gruffydd, and with pain in my heart and a tear in my eye, I refused to send aid outside the castle. “We would just compromise ourselves.”

  “So we leave them to die?” I think he spoke the words because he felt he had to; his tone held no conviction.

  “Hopefully there’s more hope than that; we leave them to fight.”

  Three days later, we seemed to have our first case inside the castle: a servant girl.

  Again, I used isolation as my main hold against sp
reading, I felt as if I had no other recourse. I watched from fifty feet away, as the teenager succumbed to the virus, and took to a soon soaking bed.

  I had a fear that the castle walls would never hold it back, but perhaps we were undone by some deed of personal loyalty, I’ll never know. Somehow the disease had gotten inside, hitting servants first, then the ladies in waiting, then Sir Gruffydd and the royal couple themselves.

  In two days, the castle had been well and truly ransacked; after the initial onset of the disease had spread, it seemed that Phillipa, two soldiers, and I were the only ones immune from attack.

  So all four of us did triple and quadruple duties. Since everyone else now had the disease, further quarantine seemed pointless; I mopped the forehead of poor Lady Jane then helped make soup in the kitchen.

  I gathered wood for the fires, and spooned gruel past protesting lips.

  I held the hand of Catherine of Aragon and listened to her fevered rantings in Spanish.

  Then slowly one by one, the sick’s fate seemed to be called by the flip of a coin. One fell dead, while another climbed from bed, ready for work.

  Once we’d passed our first week, it seemed that my initial estimate of the survival rate had been a little high; one person in three died.

  Apart from overseeing the main cooking, Phillipa stayed mostly in the gatehouse with the Prince and Princess. I spent most of my time in the castle, making soup, brewing herbal teas, and nursing my love, Lady Jane. Every minute seemed like an hour. Every hour stretched for a day. Victims, too weak to move, mourned and craved what little attention we could provide.

  The title of ‘sweating sickness’ proved indeed an description for such a disease. It struck quickly, flooring the victim in hours, forcing them to bed and inducing such a myriad of sweats that it proved impossible to find order within.

  I tried to rotate my attentions around everyone who had contracted the illness, but I’m certain I missed some. I’m also quite certain that I gave both priority and preference to Lady Jane. I mean, part of me is still human.

  At the end of March, the Princess’s maid, Isabella, had died from the disease, but we kept the news from Catherine, in case if affected her recovery.