by Johi Jenkins
“My love,” I said. “You are captivating.”
“Thank you,” she replied, and looked down, almost blushing.
Her uncharacteristic bashfulness melted my heart. I took her hand and pulled her to my room. “This is your room, too,” I said. “All of this house. It is yours.”
She entered and looked around, in awe. The master suite was larger than her chamber, and because one of its walls faced the front of the house, those windows were large with elaborate designs. The bed was covered in ornate blankets.
I followed her as she walked the length of the room, looking at all its furnishings. She then paused next to the bed and turned to look at me with wonder in her face. I guided her to sit on the edge of the cot and I sat next to her, kissed her cheeks softly. I could feel her tension.
“Be not afraid, Charlotte.”
“I….”
“Tell me what is on your mind,” I whispered at her ear while I kissed the base of her neck. She trembled in my arms.
“I have a hundred different expectations…” she said in a small, almost frightened voice. “I am the first sister to marry, and Pauline is no help. I have heard very little of what to expect, and what little there is, is frightening…. But I am with you, and I am happy.”
Oh, right. I had never been with a virgin before, but my overly informant brother had explained to me that there would be a noticeable difference. That she would cry out in pain and feel uncomfortable.
“I am also nervous,” I admitted. I was nervous she would hate it. “But I am happy as well.” We had triumphed. We were married. And we had this house. It was a sweet victory, and I could hardly keep my desires in check, waiting for her.
“Will it hurt?” she whimpered.
I took her face in my hands. “I will never hurt you; I promise.”
And I didn’t.
Gently and leisurely, one kiss at a time, my bride and I became one on our wedding night. It was hard for me to control my impulses with the exertion of having to go slow when what I wanted to do was bury myself inside her. But my love for her put her happiness and pleasure before any of my own emotions. And it was rewarding to ultimately see her twisting with pleasure, crying out my name, the passion of our embrace consuming both of us.
“I love you, Corben,” she cried.
“Charlotte,” I gasped. “God, I love you. And I promise, I will always love you.”
***
That first night I woke up to shuffling near me. Charlotte was just getting back in bed, slipping under the covers of my bed—our bed. The master suite would be forever ours. Her own quarters would remain the place that housed her earthly possessions. Her bed was to lay untouched one door away.
After a second my entire night came back to me. The sweet feeling of contentment and happiness traveled up and down my body and ended in a smile on my face and a very instant erection. I draped an arm across my wife’s body and pulled her back to my chest.
“Did you just get in?” I asked her softly.
“Yes. I stepped out briefly,” she whispered.
“Where did you go?”
“I went to the garden. I got up to see the sunrise.”
“Oh. Is that something you do often?”
“No. Just today. It was my first sunrise as your wife and I wanted to witness it. I like the sun rising. It makes me think of continuity. Eternal things. No matter what happens, the sun continues to rise in the East.”
I was moved by her words. “I would have come with you.”
“You looked like an angel as you slept. I could not bear to wake you.”
“My love, I will always prefer to be with you rather than rest alone. I have wanted to never be away from you since I saw you dancing at your father’s place.”
She smiled and leaned in to kiss me briefly on the lips. “I have wanted you since I first met you,” she said.
I smiled back. “You were just a girl of fourteen years. How could you want me?”
“I had never seen such a handsome person in my life. I have been attracted to you for years while you enjoyed other pretty girls’ attentions.”
“Mrs. Ashby,” I said, pretending to be stern. “What other girls? There has never been a woman in here”—I placed her hand over my heart—“that owns me as you do.”
“Mr. Ashby, the way you carry on, you may just end up killing your new wife out of happiness.”
I pulled her closer and gently bit her earlobe. She let out a little moan accompanied by a shiver. “Charlotte,” I breathed on her neck. “Do not speak of dying. If you die, I may just die myself, to follow you.”
“Then I will not speak of it. We shall never be without the other, and today is the first day of our life together.” She smiled at a new thought. “What is something that you have always wanted to do? We can do anything.”
I looked at her and returned her smile, but I didn’t quite agree. The one thing I had always wanted to do was take back that time with Madeleine. But it would be a secret I would take to my grave.
Instead I said, “I would say learn French, so that I could talk to you and have no one else understand us. It would be like our secret language.”
“We can do that!” she said happily. “I will teach you.”
“So we shall,” I said, returning her smile. “How about you?”
“My dream is silly. I have always desired… to become a nurse.”
I laughed. The eldest daughter of Baron Jean-Luc de Mayes, one of the richest women in the region, who could choose to spend the rest of her days doing absolutely nothing in some fancy watering hole… she wanted to be a nurse. “That is not a silly dream. It is honorable. Whatever makes you feel that way?”
“I respect the occupation. I always helped take care of my sisters when they would fall ill. I would have wanted to study medicine, but my papa would not allow it.”
“You can study now. We can find a tutor and you can study with him.”
She sighed. “No… it is too late now.” Then she looked at me and her eyes brightened. “Instead, I will teach you French. And I will devote my life to loving you.”
I kissed her. “As I will mine,” I promised her.
4. Toxicity
Our happiness did not wane in the first year of our marriage. Now seventeen years old, Charlotte was expecting our first child.
“Alexandra,” she crooned to her belly every day.
I didn’t mention that there was of course an equal chance that Alexandra may be a boy, because she would hear nothing of it.
“I just know, I am the mother of a petite fille,” she would say. Little girl.
Her happiness was contagious, and so vast. She created a screen of harmony so thick that I had no way of foreseeing it would come crashing down around us in less than a year.
She was almost nine months pregnant, a few weeks short of our first anniversary, when I first noticed signs of her illness. Charlotte started to walk less and less, staying holed up in her rooms with her maid. I was clueless, and attributed her paleness to exertion from carrying a baby. Her belly was huge, and she was so tiny.
One morning as I came back from riding, I caught her maid crying softly in the servants’ kitchen. She was preparing something by the fire and swirled the spoon sadly. It smelled like tea, a strong herbal infusion.
“Sara,” I called to her. “What is the matter?”
She jumped when she saw me. “I am sorry,” she said, and started sobbing in earnest.
“Speak to me, child. What is troubling you so?”
“The mistress… she is sick, Master.”
I automatically looked up in the general direction of our bedroom and almost dashed to my wife, until I remembered I had seen her not two hours before and she had been fine. “Sara, I saw her this morning. She is well; she only tells me she is tired.”
Sara didn’t look me in the eye. “I am not as confident as the mistress, Master.” Her nose was red and I could tell her eyes were bloodshot. Her devotion to C
harlotte moved me.
“She rests in bed, and will feel better soon,” I said, more for her benefit than mine.
“I pray your words are true. I am preparing her herbal medicine.”
I eyed the liquid in the pot. “This is medicine?”
“Monsieur, these are special herbs that I learned to use from my mother. She is a healer.”
A healer back then was the equivalent of a person that practices natural medicine in modern times; preparing herbal remedies and the like.
I left Sara to her tea and ran to see Charlotte. I was relieved to find her in the same condition as she had been that morning, not worse as Sara had led me to believe.
“Do not worry, my love,” Charlotte said when I told her about her maid’s fears. “Sara’s teas are helping. It is probably just a bug.”
But it was not just any bug. The apothecary came and went, gave her medicine, but she would not get better. After another week her condition had not improved and in fact was quickly deteriorating. The baron’s most eminent physician was called from London, and declared she had an infection. Her family visited but her stepmother and younger sisters were kept away. Only her father entered the sick room.
By then I was cold with fear and would not leave her bedside. The baron took me aside. “Fils, let us talk in your study.”
When he called me fils, or son, I immediately knew there was something wrong. Confused and frightened, I got up and called Sara to her mistress’ side. Then I went downstairs, my father-in-law following me to my study. I slumped in a sofa. He closed the door behind me and sat next to me.
“Fils, my dear Charlotte has always been a sickly child. In the last few years she has been concealing her spells of sickness, downplaying her condition. But I should have known that she never fully recovered.”
“Condition! What condition?”
“She has never had a strong heart. As a child she had frequent fainting spells. Her physicians told her she should never carry a child; that it would be too much for her frail body. I had seen her much improved these last years, but now I believe she might have only been hiding the truth from us. To let her get her way, and become a mother. As a little girl, she always wanted to be a mother. Probably because… she never met hers.” He cast his head down.
My wife had a heart condition and I never knew.
“You should have told me,” I moaned. “I would have prevented it. But perhaps she will get stronger. She is so close—she has carried our child for nine months.”
“She has… but this fever, it is a sign of her frail immunity. If she does not recover, this illness could claim her life…” the baron said, his voice suddenly thick with emotion.
“You do not know that,” I said, but I had thought of the possibility many times. It consumed me, but I refused to accept it. “You cannot know that.”
“There is…” he murmured something.
“What?”
“There is someone who may be able to help,” he said timidly.
“Who?” I practically yelled. “A better physician?”
“A woman… a sort of medicine woman. Her name is Deborah.”
My enthusiasm vanished. “What can this Deborah do that your physician cannot?”
“She is special. She is….” He sighed and shook his head. “She has healing faculties. She can heal.”
“What? What kind of healing? And how come I have never heard of this woman? Why has she not been contacted?”
“She is very reclusive. But she will come,” he added, answering my next question before I could speak it.
“What makes you so sure?”
“There is something… I should tell you. You should know. Deborah… she is Charlotte’s birth mother.”
I froze and looked at him, unbelieving. Charlotte’s mother was dead, supposedly. The baron had been a widower; that’s why he had married his wife. But that was a different matter. If what he claimed was true, I needed this Deborah. I wanted to believe she could help. I was ready to try anything.
When I didn’t reply, he kept going. “I could not marry Charlotte’s mother, and she could not raise a child alone, so I… I took Charlotte and invented a wife that never existed, and pretended she passed.”
His excuses barely registered with me. “You say she can heal?”
“Yes.”
I was suddenly angry at him, but not for having lied about Charlotte’s mother. I was angry he didn’t mention the healer before. Charlotte was dying.
“Can she really help her?” I demanded.
“She may; she may not. Only she can tell.”
“Why have you not called for her? Are you… ashamed?”
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I am afraid it could hurt my daughter if… the origin of her conception and birth was generally known. No one knows the truth. Not even Charlotte. No one could know, for her sake. It was the only way I could give her a standing in society. I am sorry I lied to you.”
“About her real mother? That scarcely matters to me. Only her life matters. Where is this Deborah?”
“She lives within ten miles of Garfield Park. I brought her also when I came to England with my family. She would not stay away from—”
“Bring this woman so that she may try to save Charlotte!” I interrupted him. “I swear I will keep your secret. Just call for her, please!”
The baron readily agreed, and his servant was dispatched immediately to the elusive Deborah. She arrived the next night.
Deborah turned out to be an impressive woman. Tall, with long black hair. She was imposing; the opposite of her petite daughter. There was something almost intimidating about her, as if she radiated authority; but her demeanor was kind, concern etched in her face. No angry words were exchanged between her and the baron. All she demanded was to be left alone with her daughter.
A short time later she called for me. I alone entered the sick room. Deborah’s face was flushed with emotion, but her expression was blank. Her eyes were red-rimmed.
“Monsieur. She is on her deathbed. I cannot help her,” she said in a thick French accent.
Her words were like a punch in my gut. I crumpled in a chair behind me. The despair choked me, and I felt moisture in my eyes. I heaved, and it sounded like a horrible sob from my half empty soul.
“But hope is not lost yet,” she whispered.
I looked up at her questioningly.
“She might be saved in a different way.”
“What way? Tell me. I will do anything.” I couldn’t bear the thought of losing my wife.
“She will never be the same.”
I looked at her through my clouded vision. “What are you saying? What will she become?”
“Her body will change. She will cease to be as she has been. Yet she will remain the same person she is.”
I had no idea what she meant. “But she would live?”
“She would live, stronger than she is now.”
“Then what is the problem?” I asked almost impatiently. “Do what must be done. But… the child?”
Her face prepared me for the bad news. She shook her head slightly. “We will attempt to save the baby, but—”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“The healer I shall procure, and myself. But be warned. The baby… I do not feel movement. We will deliver it. It is all we can do.”
“How…?”
“By cesarean incision.”
“An incision! But she is not in a condition to—”
“She will be fine, Monsieur. And regardless, the child will surely die if Charlotte dies,” she reminded me.
After a pause I repeated gravely, “Do what you must.”
“I must borrow your horses. I will be back tomorrow evening.”
I returned to Charlotte’s side. She was not conscious, and kept mumbling our child’s name, as well as my name. She did not respond to my calls. I didn’t care. As long as she breathed.
The next night Deborah returned. She brought a man
she introduced as Argus. I fought to conceal my reaction upon seeing him; he unnerved me so. He had long matted hair and a fierce look in his eyes. His skin was paler than Charlotte’s, even as she lay dying.
“Welcome to my home, sir,” I addressed him, even though he did not look like a sir. He just exuded power, and I felt he was to be addressed like my superior. “What will you do to save her?”
He ignored my greeting. He only answered, “She will become like me.” And he smiled.
“Like you?”
I wasn’t sure I liked what I heard, and for the first time I questioned my rashness in allowing a woman I barely knew to bring this man in an attempt to save my wife. There was something deeply menacing about this Argus, and I didn’t like the idea of Charlotte being remotely like him. Why had I listened to Deborah?
He looked at me with stony eyes, probably sensing my fear. “Deborah is a witch, and I owe her this favor. Do not question me,” he said coldly.
A witch?
I looked from him to Deborah and back to him. Was that what he was? Some kind of sorcerer?
“No,” he said, answering my unspoken question. Was that his trick? To read minds? A wicked smile spread on his face. “Yes. And I am a different kind of creature. You must have heard of vampyres?”
I gasped. Images of depictions in books and old stories came to my mind. Pale, blood-sucking monsters that could control minds.
“Not everything they say is true. But some of it is,” Argus said with a wink.
“She will become a monster?” I cried out, almost panicking.
“She will live,” Deborah said, cutting me off. “Please leave, Monsieur.”
Then they kicked me out of Charlotte’s bedroom, and spent hours locked away while I almost died of anxiety.
When I had made sufficient noise and they allowed me in, I almost fainted. There was a bloody mess on the bed. I gasped at the scene before me. Charlotte’s abdomen was exposed and bloody, a cut visible even though one of the two crazy people in the room had tried to bandage it. It was obvious what they had done.
“The baby! How is it?” But I knew my answer. I had not heard a baby’s cry.
