In his green gaze I see the same weariness as that of the winepresses; how many day-daughters has he seen? How many times has he indulged his wife’s madness? He must love her a great deal to repeat this scene over and over.
He is very handsome, with chiseled features, thin lips, and dark red hair. Any freckles that might have marred his complexion in life have been long-since faded by his death years.
He nods toward the only place that is set with food—roasted meats, piles of steaming vegetables, a platter of white bread with delicate curls of butter in a small dish by its side. “Sit, it is well past time to eat.”
Our Lady ignores the gibe and seats herself, gaily chattering about how she taught me to embroider and what an apt pupil I am, learning so terribly quickly—it does not seem to occur to her that perhaps I learned well before I was chosen. But then, that is part of her fantasy—refusing to believe that there was any life for me before becoming a day-daughter. I play my part. “Thank you for teaching me, Mother.”
She positively glows. Our Lord gives me a sideways glance, which I answer with a guileless smile and an innocent gaze. After a pause he nods toward my meal, and I carefully serve myself ladylike portions although I ache to scoff down as much sustenance as I can. I’m starving, but eating like a peasant will not make a good impression. There is no servant to attend me—as few witnesses as possible to see them feed, I suppose. A strange delicacy.
The girls move into position, one beside the Lord, the other beside the Lady, both of whom carefully flutter embroidered serviettes into their laps before taking the chubby wrists offered and fastidiously biting through the skin as one might a peach. I glimpse trickles of blood that are swiftly licked away and I concentrate on my own dinner, forcing myself to eat despite a sudden loss of appetite. There is no more conversation until the repast is finished and the winepresses are swooning dreamily, then our Lord says, “Adlisa, as this is your first night, you will be tired. You may retire.”
His inflection tells me this is not a suggestion and, despite the Lady’s disappointed moue, I nod and stand, curtsey, and leave the room. The Steward is waiting outside the door and nods approvingly, but says nothing. It makes me wonder how badly other first nights have gone, that he thinks this meal a triumph.
Out in the garden, the small one behind the manor, between the kitchen door, the stables and the upward slope of the mountainside, I am sketching meadowsweet into the small leather-bound herbal that was my mother’s—the only thing I brought with me, tucked deep into the pocket of my black dress. I run my fingers along the spine, feeling the outline of what has lain hidden there for decades. I carefully reproduce the plant’s appearance and label all its parts; I jot down what I know of its properties, whether it may heal or hurt (it will assuage vomiting, fluxes, and the pain of women’s courses). I leave enough space to make new notes that reflect what I might learn of it in my lifetime (however long or short that might be), just as my mother did and hers before her. I wonder who will have it when I am gone, who will fill the empty pages at the back? I adjust the muslin visage, surreptitiously using it to mop the sweat from my face.
This is my time to myself, before the Lord and Lady rise at nightfall and after I have spent some hours helping the Steward with the tasks needed to keep the manor and the city—the whole demesne—running smoothly. I awaken late, past midday, in order to straddle day and night, eat, then present myself at Oswain’s office, which is a chamber of middling size. I have been put to copying, neatly and tidily, invoices and payment advices into the huge account book that is chained to the broad desk, the record of all the Lord and Lady’s incomings and outgoings during Oswain’s tenure.
Against the opposite wall are shelves lined with other books like it—those to the left are filled with the scribblings of Stewards past; those to the right are blank, awaiting the day when this one is full and the stroke of a pen will begin the process of recording anew.
There are two doors to this room, the one I use daily to enter and exit, and the other of black oak, which I spent most of my time studiously ignoring. It is, I was told severely, the entrance to the undercroft—beyond it lies the night stair leading to our Lord and Lady’s crypt, where they sleep during the day. I shall never see it, I am told.
Sometimes, when I finish my duties early, I go to the far end of the manor house, to where the stone tower of the library sits. I read the history books, the tales of how the estate grew into a village that grew into a town and finally a city. I read the stories of how the Lord and Lady became, of the dark man who passed through Caulder and left his mark in their blood, taking their only child and leaving them to wander forever. I read the diaries of the long-dead Stewards, the lists of the very first orders given to ensure the safety of the newly reborn Lord and Lady—such as the scouring of the hawthorn trees and the garlic plants, the burning of the tiny wooden church and how the priest was thrown on the pyre as extra kindling. How the system of pricing was established so that people were properly compensated for the service they paid to their overlords. Our Lord and Lady have long understood that a gentle hand and a slow corruption will keep them in position much longer than repression and tyranny; that ensuring the population is contented, compliant—bovine—is the way to retain power.
Make lives, for the most part, enjoyable; all it costs is a little blood. And if any should question, if any should complain too loudly, or say “I do not wish to make this bargain for my child’s life,” then their voice is silenced. But cunningly—an outspoken individual can be made to seem a thief, a law-breaker, a disturber of the peace, so that when they are taken away, it is in broad daylight and all might see that this is not some secretive retribution, but an open and honest operation of the law of the land. The punishment is delivered not by the Lord and Lady, no, but by the council of our fair city, so we might think ourselves self-determining, living and thriving under a system fair and equitable.
Other times, all this reading hurts my head, all the knowledge I gain of consequences and injustices, of loss and mourning disguised as justice, of my sisters fed to an unnatural hunger, settles in my chest and swells there, making it hard to breathe. Those are times when I take to the herb garden and let myself think on nothing but the plants, on keeping my hand steady and my drawings accurate. As I add a few more veins to a leaf my fingers, too long clenched, spasm and I drop the pencil. It rolls under the meadowsweet and I kneel to locate it below the lush foliage.
At the base of the bush, quite well hidden, I find a tiny white flower, which I recognize but have never seen, at least not in its true form. I flick to a page in the back of the herbal, one that’s folded in on itself and tucked behind the endpaper so only a sharp eye will see it. My grandmother’s etchings of the garlic plant. Her notes tell me there will be bulbs beneath the earth. The flower is shrouded by the meadowsweet; no one will expect it, no one will know. It makes me lightheaded with possibilities. All the time spent planning to gain a place in this manor house, all the recent weeks looking for weaknesses, for some idea of how I might take my revenge and here is this unlooked-for boon, something for which I’d never thought to hope.
“Will you help?” A soft voice almost scares me to death and I look up, stricken. Rikke’s gentle smile fades. She kneels beside me before I can rise, distract her, turn her attention elsewhere. “What is it, Adlisa?”
And she catches sight of the tiny white flowers and the pupils of her gray eyes dilate as if she’s taken a dose of belladonna. And I see that she knows what it is as no one from this city should. My heart hammers, then she climbs slowly to her feet, knees cracking and creaking, her white hair lifted by the breeze that seems to have started just for us. She makes sure the stalks of the meadowsweet cover the nascent blossoms, then offers her hand to me, and repeats, “Will you help?”
I nod, scramble up.
“Another set of hands on Our Lady’s new dress will make the work go faster. And then you may help with dinner if you wish,” she says. As we mo
ve toward the kitchen door, she lowers her voice and adds, “Be careful, Adlisa.”
And I wonder at her. She can’t have been born here, recognizing a plant that has not been seen in this area for hundreds of years. Do I perhaps remember she arrived here some years since and the Steward claimed her as his cousin? Our visitors are few and far between, and none come without invitation. Will she tell Oswain what she has seen?
In the library, on the third floor, there are many books of strategy and philosophy, well-read, their pages thumbed, markings made in the margins, all by the Lord’s hand. After the first few weeks as a day-daughter, I settled myself at the desk opposite the arched window, the one that looks out across the valley, and piled tomes in front of me—where the Lord might find me. He’d raised his brows and asked if I understood what I was reading; it was the first time he showed any interest in me beyond a polite “Good evening, Adlisa” and “Good night, Adlisa,” beyond humoring his Lady.
“Some of it—the strategies mostly. I enjoyed Deor’s Art of War best so far. The philosophy, though—it’s beyond me.” I shrugged, fingers resting on the cover of the Angelic Bergevilde’s Philosophies and Mores.
He questioned me about the Deor, trying to trip me up—but I have studied the book, more than once. My father had a copy—old, tattered, inherited from a grandparent I never knew—and I’ve read it cover to cover and back again. I particularly liked how it speaks of infiltrating the enemy’s camp, sowing trust in order to reap revenge; how to make your adversary expect a warm hand in the dark, but find only cold steel. Oh, I know my Deor.
Tonight we discuss Leofgod’s Military Tactics and the Lord shows his age—the book is three hundred years old if it’s a day and it was ancient before the Lord himself became what he is. He is of a generation that believes battles are won on fields watered with blood and filled with men soon to become corpses, with weapons that catch the sun, while monumental music provided by drummers and buglers thickens the air. That land must be gained and lost several times before a victor is named. That all war should be out in the open, frank and honest. Deor’s advices have passed him by—he has read them but finds them … ungentlemanly, and as such he has let them slip away like lightly held thoughts.
We debate the relative merits of the tacticians and I do not let him win. We argue to a stalemate and he sits back in his armchair with a satisfied air. He sees me, at last, as something other than an ephemeral day-daughter, a creature whose lifespan is determined entirely by how long Our Lady remains fixated on me. I smile brightly, thinking only that he is one of those men who have never had to ride to war and cannot know that strategy survives only so long as one has no contact with the enemy.
He offers me his arm to go to dinner and I think, foolishly, how pleased My Lady will be to see that at last we are friends, for she has spent so much time trying to encourage him to pay attention to me.
“You’re late,” snaps she when we enter the dining room. The winepresses—the same ones who witnessed my first triumphant meal here—cover their smirking smiles with raised hands. I can see the tiny scars around their wrists, cicatrices like bracelets.
“My apologies, my love,” says the Lord smoothly. “Our daughter and I lost ourselves in the heat of intellectual intercourse.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention as he leads me to my seat before taking his own at the head of the table. My Lady looks daggers at me from across the silver filigree candle tree; she seems thinner, whiter, not quite well. Her eyes catch the tips of the flames and flash red. My Lord reaches out and strokes my hand—I pull away without thought. I fear it’s too late to appease My Lady, for something has begun here that I had not foreseen. So smug I have been, that I too have forgotten that a strategy survives only so long as one has no contact with the enemy. I see now that I was merely her mouse to be dangled in front of the cat to torment it—not to make friends with it.
“Your hair,” she begins, “is ghastly, Adlisa, all dressed and pomaded like a harlot.”
No matter that the coiffure is one she herself has asked me to wear.
“And your skin is looking … golden,” she says with distaste. “You have been outdoors without your visage.”
I have not—I am as anemic-pale as I ever was.
“And that dress is ugly. The color does not suit you, it makes you look jaundiced.” That the dress was an especial present from her, seems to make no mind as she warms to her topic. I am lazy and tardy, selfish and slatternly in my person, ignorant and ungrateful, and I do not truly love her.
My Lord says nothing, merely smiling slyly and affixing himself to the wrist of this evening’s fat girl—they have favorites, he and the Lady. I’ve noticed that they do not share, do not swap; always the same seven girls each, in the same order each week. He watches us over the barrier of porky pink flesh, and I rethink my opinion of him. Perhaps he has not dismissed all of Deor’s lessons out of hand.
Answering back, trying to defend myself, will do no good. My only choice is to burst into tears, which I summon by thinking of my lost sisters. My Lord, overthrown by a woman’s weeping—our surest weapon against which no man has a defense—tidily finishes his meal and leaves the room. Out of his presence and shocked by my sobbing, Our Lady is contrite, tender, motherly.
“Oh, Adlisa, come here,” she cries, pushing back her chair so I may sit at her feet, my head in her lap. She caresses my hair. “I’m so sorry, my darling—I’m a terrible mother. A terrible person. How can I say such things, such cruel things?”
“No, no Mother, you are the kindest, sweetest woman. I give thanks every day that you chose me,” I aver, words sticking my throat. “I did not mean to displease you, only I thought you would be happy, to see Father and I as friends.”
She slips to the floor, her silken apricot skirts pooling around her, and holds my face close to hers. As she speaks I catch the rankness of old blood seeping up from her stomach. She has not fed yet—she is paler than usual, and she would smell differently if she had—meatier, wetter. “You must not trust him, Adlisa. You must not. That was the mistake the others made, thinking him harmless, a kind father. But if you trust him, he will … then I will …” She does not finish the thought, but rocks me back and forth as if I am a child and not almost a woman grown. She emits little moaning sounds that make the skin on my spine shiver and pucker. In the end, I gently pull away and call to the untapped winepress.
“Our Lady is thirsty. Our Lady hungers. My Mother must be fed,” I say and there is a grudging admiration in the girl’s eyes, to see that I have salvaged myself at least for this night. She comes close and the scent coming off her skin is faint but I can detect it because I am looking for it. She offers her wrist, and Our Lady bites into it as if she is starving.
I stay until she is sated and the drinking vessel has all but passed out. Our Lady, despite her repletion, does not seem any stronger. I help her up and take her to lie on the chaise in her solar, where she drifts into an uneasy sleep until such time as Rikke or one of the lesser maids will wake her and escort her to the night stair before the day dawns.
“A visitor arrived for you this afternoon, My Lord. He has conducted previous correspondence with your good self, I believe.” The Steward’s tone tells precisely what he thinks of this visitor, a blond man perhaps in his mid-forties—vain, I can tell, for he wears makeup as women do to try and fill the furrows time has made in his face. I watched him, surreptitiously, from the kitchen while I was helping Rikke prepare for the evening meal.
Some of the day-daughters, she has told me, have determinedly refused to undertake such tasks, acting as if they’re born porcelain ladies and not temporarily elevated earthenware, but I have ever been willing to assist with meals for the entire household, taking it on myself to season the rich, meaty stews and roasts for the winepresses.
The sound of smashing drew my attention away from the visitor—Rikke, standing behind me, eyes wide, expression disbelieving. When I asked her what was w
rong, she stooped to pick up the shards of the terracotta jar, shook her head.
“I thought …” she began and shook her head again, summoned a smile. “I thought I knew him, from a long time ago. But that’s not possible, is it, with him unchanged?”
We gave each other a shaky grin—do we not live in the shadow of the unchanging?
The man was very handsome, his eyes terribly blue as they watched the slow spin of the Steward’s Gaze at Oswain’s chest, but lacking in warmth, cold as the depths of a sapphire are cold, and his lips were very full, overripe, and I did not trust his mouth. Everything he is resides there, in its petulance, its greed, its formation of want. I do not think him a friend to the Lord, but rather someone who wants something—and who resents having to ask for it. He does not wear the cloak of a supplicant well. Oswain gave him a guest room, for it is winter now and the Lord has been rising late—the Lady later still—and left him there to wait until someone came to lead him to the library for an audience.
I had not heard My Lord enter the Steward’s office, but then one seldom hears either of them if they do not wish it so—although the Lady has become slow, more heavy-footed of late, liable to send vases and suits of armor crashing to the floor without any effort at all. Lord Edward stands in front of the great desk where Oswain sits hunched over one of his ledgers, while I sort a stack of invoices into their proper order at a smaller desk in one corner. I have been avoiding him, this strange father-figure, since that night when all my intricate planning seemed to go astray, when my steps appeared to leave the sure path I’d been so careful to stay on, and I could not divine the why of it.
The library at night has been off-limits by my own design, and each evening I wait in the Lady’s solar until she rises, then help her to the dining room. She is weakest and most disoriented after waking, so when I’ve seen her safely to her seat, I take a small sharp knife and tap the veins of her winepress, letting the thick rich red trickle into a crystal glass. It is still warm with an echo of life vibrating through, enough to give her some strength, but one must be quick for the heartbeat rapidly fades. Her mystery ailment has made her too feeble to feed straight from the source until she has had a little taste to energize her, to remind her that the claret is what she craves. And as I render this service, our Lord eyes me with displeasure but says nothing; his mood has deteriorated with Our Lady’s health. He no longer addresses me directly, but follows me with a gaze that broods and promises punishment.
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 66
