by Johi Jenkins
“Sara is here for your pleasure. Our pleasure,” she said against my neck. “All of her.”
“No,” I whispered, protesting weakly.
“Yes,” she insisted.
“What is wrong with her?”
“Nothing is wrong with her. Is there, dear Sara?”
“Nothing is wrong, Master,” Sara said, sounding more aware than she appeared to be. And then she started lifting her gown over her head.
“Sara!” I looked away from her naked body with some difficulty. “Charlotte, what are you doing? This is wrong.”
“How?” Her voice was low and sultry. Slowly, she lifted her own gown off her body. My body responded despite my reservations, and I could feel the blood pumping to my groin. “There is nothing wrong with pleasure,” Charlotte continued. “As your wife it is my duty to fulfill your life with pleasure. And I, mon amour, am here to do just that.”
She pulled Sara forward and caressed her face gently. She leaned in as if to whisper in Sara’s ear, but started kissing her instead, pressing her lips softly along the soft curve of her neck. One of her hands moved over Sara’s bare chest, cupping her breast briefly and continuing down. Sara leaned back into Charlotte’s other hand at her back; her eyes closed and her mouth opened, her face twisted with desire as Charlotte worked her magic. I followed the trail of Charlotte’s fingers down until they disappeared amongst Sara’s dark curly hairs. Sara gasped and moaned.
“You want me,” Charlotte whispered, I’m not sure if to Sara or to myself. But her dark eyes were fixed on me. “You want both of us.”
Yes, I did. I was as much under a spell as was Sara. And I was undeniably aroused.
“This is wrong,” I repeated, in a weak attempt at protesting what she was doing.
“This is right.”
“Charlotte, what do you want from me?”
She smiled wickedly and leaned into me, her hands still working Sara. She kissed me briefly and whispered over my lips, “I want your child, mon coeur.”
I looked at her, alarmed, then at Sara, and I finally understood.
“Sara will give me one,” she said. “Will you not, my dear?”
“It would be… my honor, Madam,” Sara gasped, moaning. “Master… please.”
Charlotte gently pressed her down on the bed beside me. She leaned into her and kissed her lips. The sight alone was enough to make me forget my inhibitions. But Charlotte wasn’t done. She looked up at me with pleading eyes.
“Please, my love. I want this. I need this.”
I pretended to think about it for another second, and then I readily yielded.
***
It was… an interesting night.
I wish I could say I put up more resistance than I did, but I had always been a fool for my wife and her every wish. And she knew that she was everything to me, that I loved only her; there was no question in her mind. And she really wanted a child.
They must have carefully planned the scheme, because Sara became pregnant from that one time we lay together. I never touched her again. And she never acted differently around me; I never caught her looking away embarrassed, she never even looked like she remembered our night together with Charlotte. Even as her belly grew and grew—it was as though she had forgotten how the baby had gotten there in the first place. But she was never unhappy. And Charlotte was ridiculously happy.
From the very beginning Charlotte envisioned herself as the baby’s mother. The two of them had an agreement, in which Sara acted as a surrogate and received substantial compensation from her mistress in return for her child. When was this arrangement reached, and what were the exact terms, I never knew; yet it seemed to work for both of them. And Charlotte did take good care of her maid, not just financially. She moved Sara to Charlotte’s own bedroom next to ours. She invited her to eat at our table every night, kissed her belly, tended to her every discomfort. And nine months later, when the day came, Charlotte delivered the baby—a beautiful girl—and even named her: Alexandra, like our lost child.
Again Charlotte was whole. She kept Sara near for nursing the baby, but she would not let anyone else near her. She was incredibly overprotective, and I guessed it was because she had lost one baby before and refused to let anything happen to this one. Her life had a new purpose, to take care of the infant.
My daughter.
8. The Beginning of the End
I was hardly allowed to hold the baby. Charlotte barely put her down; she was in love with Alexandra as though it was her own child. Only Sara was allowed to hold her when Charlotte slept during the day—she wouldn’t trust anyone else to take care of her baby. And while Sara loved the child, she acted like a nanny, or an affectionate aunt, rather than a birth mother. To her, Charlotte was the mother. We told everyone we had adopted a baby, and no one even questioned who the birth parents were. We were an odd family but we were happy.
But in my household, happiness never stuck around for long.
It all started when my mother fell ill. She had caught what we all thought was a bad cold. It didn’t occur to me at first to ask Charlotte if she could heal her, because as far as I knew, Charlotte only healed people that were either very ill or dying. But I underestimated my mother’s condition. I thought people did not die of colds; that she would be alright in no time.
Yet her health declined sharply about a week after she fell ill. The physician finally shook his head and declared that my mother may not recover. The thought of her imminent death shocked me, and I was finally moved into action. I asked Charlotte to help her the way she helped everyone else.
“You have cured more sick people than the most prominent physician in the country. You cured the man with typhoid. You can save her,” I reminded her. “Your way.”
But to my dismay, Charlotte shook her head. “My love, I… I do not think that is a good idea. Your mother is not young,” she said. “I have tried to heal old people… but I only ended up killing them faster.”
“How so?” I asked. This was news to me.
“I believe the body heals with the help of my blood,” she explained. “But if the body is too frail, it might not be able to bear the additional stress. There my blood is of no help. The effort to heal her may just cause her heart to fail.”
I considered this for a moment, but not for too long. “She is going to die, regardless,” I said. “Please help her.”
My wife smiled at me and I saw a mixture of love and pity in her eyes. “I will try, for you. After your brother leaves her room tonight.”
Thierry had finally come back to Brunsfield when our mother’s condition worsened, some days before. I had not seen him for two years. I had finally seen him at the Great House after visiting my mother one evening; he was staying there and I had not been informed. When I first saw him I tried to catch his eye, but he ignored me. He looked so different; he was paler than I remembered, his dark hair was longer and disheveled, and his expression was grave. His green eyes looked lost and were hard to read. I didn’t know what was on his mind—my transgression? Was he still mourning his wife? Or was he worried about our mother? Whatever it was, I could tell he had not forgiven me.
Charlotte left late in the evening to heal my mother while I stayed behind worried sick. She wasn’t gone for two hours when she returned with a somber face, dragging a dazed Sara. The maid’s eyes were unfocused, and she couldn’t hold herself up.
“What is the matter with Sara?” I immediately asked when they came inside.
“I am sorry, my love. Your mother is dead,” Charlotte announced as she came in, ignoring my question. She led Sara towards a chaise. “And this one is almost gone.”
“What!”
“Your mother. Her body did not endure the substantial healing by vampire blood, and she passed away.” She bowed her head. “I really am sorry.”
“I… I understand,” I said, not meeting her eyes. I didn’t know what to feel. I knew this was a possibility, and I was the one who had forced Charlotte to do
it. If anything, it was my fault, not hers. “I do. Thank you for trying, regardless.”
“I promised you I would.”
Then I turned my eyes to Sara. “So what is wrong with her?”
Charlotte frowned. “Sara was at the Great House, doing what, I do not know. I did not know she was there. She came to see me when I was announced inside. She must have thought I was just visiting Mrs. Ashby and followed me to her bedchamber. So I asked her to make Mrs. Ashby a tea, but of course I only asked to keep her out of the chamber while I attempted to heal your mother. I had ordered her to leave me alone, but a few minutes later she came back into the room and saw what I was doing. The wound in my arm, the blood on your mother’s lips I had tried to feed her. She called me a demon and started to scream. She would not listen.”
“What did you do to her?” I asked, bending over the chaise and touching Sara’s face. She was cold and had an absentminded expression on her face. “Did you hurt her?”
Charlotte’s eyes darkened. “I did not strike her. I tried to hypnotize her… to convince her that she had not seen anything out of the ordinary. Yet this is what became of her. She must have been in great shock.”
“Maybe your hypnosis does not work on her.”
She glibly chuckled. “My hypnosis works perfectly on her.”
Oh.
At that moment many things became clear to me. “You have done this before.”
“Yes.”
“When you brought her to me, the night she conceived.”
“Yes.”
“And while she carried Alexandra, and afterwards—does she even remember?”
My questions came out rather more sharply than I intended. But Charlotte didn’t even flinch.
“I took great care of her, and paid her well,” she said. “But I had to make her forget. No one knows she carried our child. Not her, not even the servants. I had to do it to protect Alexandra.”
To make someone forget she carried a child for nine months—how much did her brain suffer?
“Will she recover?” I asked.
“She will, I think. I hope. She has never reacted like this before,” Charlotte said, not sounding too worried.
I wanted to ask her more; the details of her hypnosis. How did it work? How often did she have to do it? It pained me to think of Charlotte abusing Sara this way.
Charlotte misunderstood my somber expression, and hugged me. “I am truly sorry about your mother.”
I tried to forget about Sara, and I hugged my wife back. “Thank you. For trying to save her anyway.”
She took a step back and picked up Sara as though she weighed nothing. “How is Alexandra?”
“She sleeps. Gulya is with her.”
“Good. I will deal with Sara.”
And with that she left, taking Sara with her. The entire time Sara mumbled things I didn’t catch. Despite Charlotte’s reassurances I was nervous about the young maid’s condition.
In the next few days the Great House prepared for my mother’s funeral. I tried to talk to Thierry, but he still wouldn’t see me. I wrote him letters that he didn’t answer. I wanted to know if he blamed me for his wife’s death, despite the fact that two years had gone by since the “accident”. But deep down, I just missed my big brother. I needed him. I wanted him to meet my daughter. But he never came.
Sara had not recovered during this time, so I had to send a note to her family vaguely describing her condition and how she had changed “without explanation” and was unfit to take care of her mistress. I let them know we would provide adequate care until she recovered. They lived in Charlotte’s family’s neighborhood, within ten miles of Garfield Park. I offered them our carriage if they wanted to visit.
But before I received a reply to my letter, my dear Charlotte killed Sara.
***
“What the devil?”
I started in shock as Charlotte came inside my study, an obviously dead Sara in her arms.
“Hush, Corben,” she said shortly. “It was only a matter of time. You have seen her these two days. She has not been in her right mind.”
Because you attempted to hypnotize her and it did not work. Because you have been doing it for a year and must have fried her brain. But I kept my opinion to myself. Instead, I said, “I thought you said she would recover?”
“Alas, I have been proven wrong.”
“What happened?”
“She had no desire, or will, to do anything. She did not even clean herself. So I was attempting to undress her in order to bathe her—the mistress washing her maid, imagine that!—and she went into a frenzy. Again she accused me of being a demon, a monster…. I paid no attention to her, and tried to calm her down. But then she ran to Alexandra’s crib and took her.” Her eyes became cold and unforgiving. “She attempted to throw herself out the window. With Alexandra in her arms.”
I recoiled at her words. I had to remind myself that I had just heard the baby’s cry in the past hour. Alexandra was fine.
But Sara was dead.
“And what happened then?” I asked quietly.
Charlotte looked down at the lifeless shape in her arms. Her cold expression had softened, and she gently brushed off a hair that had fallen across Sara’s face. When she spoke, her voice was almost sad. “She jumped. I grabbed Alexandra and let Sara fall.”
“And she died?”
“After I put Alexandra back in her crib, I jumped down after Sara. I found her dead.”
I wanted to believe Charlotte, but something about her account sounded like a lie. Or rather, it felt like she was purposely leaving out details. The nursery was on the second story of the cottage. Would the fall have killed Sara? But I didn’t question her.
Charlotte buried Sara’s body in the woods behind the house and I pretended I wasn’t disappointed, or suspicious, of what had transpired.
The next day was my mother’s funeral at high noon. Charlotte attended the burial but wore a veil over her eyes. When it was over she immediately retired to our bedroom to rest.
That was the time they chose to attack.
***
They were four men holding pitchforks. Real pitchfork-wielding townsfolk, like in the monster stories. Unfortunately I had no idea what they were up to. The sun was still up, so I could clearly see them approach my gate. I was outside already, still dressed in my funeral clothes, so I decided to greet them like a good neighbor. What did I know about their intentions to stab me with their tools? I thought they were just farmers. I called out to them as I approached.
“How do you do?” I started to say.
They didn’t even let me finish. The tallest one tackled me to the ground and punched my face, then held me down as I struggled to get up. The others approached and took turns kicking my sides. My defense instinct took over, even if there was no way I could win a fight of four against one. But I managed to kick one of them in their inner thigh, which only made them hit harder.
“Stop! Why are you doing this?” I cried out breathlessly.
“For our sister,” one of them said, in an accent that reminded me of Sara. Her country English had been just slightly more peculiar than the average maid’s. And then it finally registered that they must have been Sara’s family and were punishing me for her death.
I tried to shout some pathetic excuse in my defense, but no words came out. They were dragging me to a nearby copse of trees shielded from the house and the road. Helpless, I asked them to stop again, but it only seemed to enrage them more. My muffled screams reached no one but them. One of them hit my head with something hard, probably the wood handle of a pitchfork, and I almost blacked out. But not before I managed to feel the sharp steel entering the soft flesh near my stomach.
It had taken a few minutes, but that was when I finally became afraid—the first time I considered my death. They weren’t just beating me. They were aiming to kill me.
And then I heard a loud voice boom over the ringing in my ears.
“Lay yo
ur arms down and step away from him.”
My brother’s voice. Thierry.
I had not heard his voice in over two years, but that was unmistakably my big brother.
My attackers scrambled away from me and turned in the direction of his voice. I looked up with difficulty and saw him standing gloriously by the gate, in funeral clothes, aiming his flintlock musket at them. He was far away, but I knew my brother’s impressive aim with his weapons. They didn’t. Someone barked a command that I could not make out, and a few seconds later a shot exploded through the early evening, followed by the thud of a large body collapsing next to me. I heard gasps and grunts and more barking voices, and then their heavy footsteps as they ran towards Thierry. I struggled to lift my head and see. Before they reached him, he had reloaded his weapon and shot again, felling another. And he didn’t stop—he unsheathed a sword, disposing of the other two in less than a minute in a beautiful, macabre dance. A dry chuckle escaped me, and then I winced because it hurt as hell. But I was delirious, and found it comical that Thierry’s obsession with hunting and swordplay had saved my life. Or at least prolonged it for short while.
After another minute he reached me, and I felt his arms cradling me gently. I looked up at him and found an alarmed expression on his face. I tried to thank him but he shushed me.
“Save your strength, brother,” he said softly.
What strength? I was dying. And I had to tell him. “But I… I need you to know… I am so sorry that I hurt you.” My voice was barely above a whisper, but he heard me. I was still focused on his face, and watched as his eyes moistened.
“I forgive you.”
I could feel my life draining out of me. It should have been terrifying, but I was suddenly at peace.
“Thank you. I needed to say… before I….”
“No, do not speak of it. I have to bring you inside, then I will send for the medic.”
The medic! Only then did I remember Charlotte. “No—bring me to Charlotte. She is sleeping inside. Upstairs.”
“Yes. I will call for your wife. But also for the medic—”
