The Dark Blood of Poppies

by Freda Warrington

  He seemed his normal self again. Charlotte was inexpressibly relieved. In a way she loved the exquisite tenderness of caring for him, yet to see him vulnerable distressed her.

  “Will Cesare and Simon leave us alone, from fear of Violette?” she asked. “Or will it make them angrier?”

  “As Violette said, the time will come,” he sighed.

  “What did she mean, ‘one last ballet’?”

  Karl shook his head. “If only we could vanish and live quietly, like Stefan or Rachel…”

  “I wish we could, too,” Charlotte sighed. “But we can’t.”

  “We steal life to live,” said Karl, “yet we still hold the principle of protecting life against tyranny. Who can fathom us? Well, we’re not allowed to thank Violette, but…” He took Charlotte’s hand and kissed the inside of her wrist where his fang-marks were fading.

  “Beloved,” he said softly, “thank you.”

  * * *

  When the blizzards abated, the sun appeared as a pale yolk in a blue eggshell, and the town glittered under a crust of sugar. Children skated on the river. Enthusiastic tourists, muffled against the cold, were everywhere, taking photographs.

  Karl watched them with pleasure, with detached, dual appreciation of them as objects of fascination and as potential prey. How lovely, the Austrian winter.

  Violette had ensured that all traces of the fire were obliterated. Builders and carpenters worked flat-out for Madame Lenoir. Damage was repaired, walls scrubbed clean and repainted, inside and out. New doors with stronger locks, fire escapes and alarms were installed. Extra seamstresses were taken on to replace destroyed costumes. Then Violette brought her corps de ballet and staff home, continued rehearsals for Witch and Maiden as if nothing had happened. The fire, she told everyone, was an accident.

  But the acrid smell of smoke lingered, and the atmosphere, Karl noticed, had changed. Joyful innocence had gone. Everyone was serious, loyal, and driven.

  In the studio, the dancers wore woollen leggings and took greater care to warm up before rehearsal. Violette wanted no pulled muscles if the ballet was to open in early spring.

  Karl and Charlotte had little to do but watch over the household, to cast their senses wide for human or vampire threats. Karl thought Fyodor might return to complain of Simon’s heartlessness, but no one came.

  Whether Cesare was too nervous to attack, or trying to make Violette complacent, Karl was unsure.

  He’d lived too long to fall prey to prosaic boredom; but all the same, he wished they were not bound here by a sense of duty. He longed to leave Cesare to his games, take Charlotte far away and forget it all. But for Charlotte’s sake, from love and loyalty and knowledge of what was right, Karl stayed.

  “There’s only one way to end Witch and Maiden,” Violette said one day. “Anna and Siegfried trick Lila. Pretending to make up their quarrel, they invite her into their cottage, where she is trapped and killed. Children reunited with mother; everyone lives happily ever after. And a glorious death scene, of course.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” Charlotte said, but gave Karl a dubious look.

  Later, as he and Charlotte walked through wind-sculpted white streets towards the old town, Karl said, “The ballet is about Lilith, is it not? Lila is the witch and outcast, as Violette sees herself.”

  “That’s what she told me,” said Charlotte.

  “Then you can read her fate in the ending she’s chosen.”

  Charlotte looked sideways at him, her eyes large with anxiety. “In what way?”

  “She isn’t going to fight Cesare and Simon. She doesn’t want to win. She wants, or thinks she deserves, to die. The last ballet, a blaze of glory, then…”

  Charlotte said nothing for a long time.

  “And an enemy trapped by a pretence of love?” she whispered eventually. Worst betrayal of all. Ghosts of Kristian and Katerina flickered between them. “Does she fear that from us?”

  “Yes. I think that’s why she sometimes provokes us so severely. Prophecy fulfilled.”

  “Why is she like this?” Charlotte asked softly. “Josef’s explanation was plausible, but it doesn’t ring true. There’s something more.” She caught Karl’s arm. “How did Lilith and Simon become as they are? Could it happen to us, if we let it?”

  “Beloved, don’t.”

  “Perhaps it’s already happened, and we’re just playing out some role for the Crystal Ring.”

  “Or are we playing a role, simply in being vampires?” Karl said thoughtfully. “No, I don’t accept it. Saying free will is an illusion is like believing in Simon’s and Kristian’s God. It negates our independence, which would leave us no will to fight.”

  And in the bright crisp day he felt darkness; the crushing machinery of fanaticism rumbling towards them, like the dark tumour in the Crystal Ring.

  There are ways to flee, or surrender, or die, Karl thought; but no way to win.

  * * *

  As Ireland’s lush hills rose around her, as soft as cloaks, Robyn kept asking herself, What am I doing here?

  Sebastian had his arm around her, but she was cold. He insisted on making the last stage of the journey on foot and she’d never before felt so invaded by the elements. Wind, mist, drizzle: at least it wasn’t snowing – yet. Dusk faded through thick layers of cloud. The landscape was saturated, brooding, mystically silent.

  He’d travelled the Atlantic with her from Boston to Cork. She hadn’t expected his company. She knew he could move invisibly through some mysterious ether, so why was he on board the ship? He often disappeared on the voyage, and she knew he was drinking the blood of some poor passenger or crew member. The number of unexplained illnesses had been alarming.

  This disturbed her terribly. When he came to her, she knew what he’d been doing… yet there was no clue in his appearance or his manner. He was composed, elegant in his mildly bohemian way, with the same candid, affectionate light in his eyes. Perhaps a faint flush of colour in his cheeks. And Robyn still couldn’t resist him. Her own sinful knowledge almost unhinged her at times.

  They travelled on false documents that Sebastian had obtained with no apparent difficulty. Robyn was now an Irish Bostonian called Maeve O’Neill. Vampires, it seemed, could seduce whatever they needed out of humans: blood, money or forgery. Now no one could trace them… Not a comforting thought, Robyn reflected.

  Everything must be done in secret.

  “After we disembark at Cobh,” Sebastian had said, “no one will see us together. I shall disappear. Go and eat, then at dusk hire a car to Lismore in County Waterford. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Where, exactly?”

  “I’ll find you,” he said, smiling.

  Uneasy, she did as he said. At Cobh harbour she found a garage with a garrulous, obliging driver willing to chauffeur her anywhere. She ate lunch in a public house, then passed the time wandering along the waterfront, gazing at the charming houses and the great silver-grey cathedral.

  She had expected Ireland to feel like home, but it was a foreign country, she realised as the car carried her along narrow roads. The trees were leafless, but the pasturelands were a rich saturated green, the air like iced honey. They drove past low, white-washed cottages where she saw old men leaning on half-doors to watch the motor car go by, saw children’s faces in windows no bigger than handkerchiefs.

  Time and again they had to stop for slow traffic. Horse riders, bright carts drawn by donkeys, herds of cattle; everyone had all the time in the world. Robyn saw a girl in long skirts, carrying a baby in a shawl. She carried herself like a princess, not a peasant.

  In the distance, the mountains were grape-blue against a vast sky.

  The driver kept up a running commentary all the way, but Robyn was listening to something else. Music in an eerie key, emanating from the land itself.

  They turned a corner and she saw a great castle poised on a forested rock. The castle floated on darkness like the moon, remote, enigmatic, silvered by the last trace of light. It
s flanks fell, fold on fold, into the black-sapphire depths of a river.

  “What is that?” Robyn gasped.

  “Lismore Castle.”

  “Let me out here.”

  “Are ye sure? Is it not the town you’re wanting?”

  “No, here. I’m being met. It’s all right.” She gave him a large amount of money, enough to make his eyes stretch. “A little extra, to tell no one you brought me here.”

  The driver nodded and tipped his cap knowingly.

  The car had barely turned and driven away, leaving her on the roadside by a wooded shoulder of rock, when Sebastian appeared beside her. She was relieved, and scared. It had taken two hours to travel thirty miles.

  “It’s a long walk, but there’s no other way to reach Blackwater Hall without anyone knowing. It’s easy for me to come and go, but not for you.”

  “I’m out of my mind,” she murmured. “I’m alone with a vampire, and no one in the world has the remotest idea where I’ve gone.”

  Sebastian did not reply.

  He took her past the castle, over a bridge to the far bank of the river, and into a dew-drenched field. The ground rose slowly. Robyn was soon out of breath, but Sebastian seemed disinclined to let her rest. He led her through a copse studded with rocks and treacherous hollows; she could barely see, but he guided her surely. They walked for three hours. The moon peeped through the clouds and the landscape changed subtly. Its contours were mellower, sure sign of man’s intervention. There were sweeps of grass, magnificent lone trees, copses, a lake and river gleaming like milk in the vaporous gloom.

  “We’re on the estate now.” Sebastian sounded excited. “You’ll see the house in a moment.”

  Must be quite wonderful, thought Robyn.

  They came around the skirt of a hill and there it stood: a great mansion, broodingly desolate and ugly. Three storeys with tall imposing windows, a soaring pillared portico. The walls were mottled and crumbling. The windows, fogged like cataracts with dirt, stared indifferently at long-neglected gardens and stables.

  Robyn couldn’t speak for disappointment. What a hideous pile! Just as well she didn’t put this thought into words. Sebastian was clearly enraptured.

  “Was this your home?”

  “I never lived in it,” he said, “and I don’t legally own it. After I left – vanished, undoubtedly wanted for murdering my wife and her lover – the Hall was confiscated and given to some English Protestant family. But I built it. I still feel it’s mine. It is mine.”

  He led her across a weed-infested drive and through an archway with carriage houses and storerooms on either side. The arch gave onto a courtyard overlooked by rows of grim windows. Sebastian led her to a small door of thick, aged wood. “The house hasn’t been lived in since 1864. The last owner was an eccentric bachelor who left no progeny. So the distant relatives who inherited the place care nothing for it. Daren’t even come here. Strange folk, that family.”

  He lifted the latch and the door swung open. Inside was a huge grim kitchen with floor-to-ceiling cupboards, a black range, a cracked sink full of debris; fallen plaster, broken glass, leaves, rust, cobwebs.

  “It’s colder inside than out,” she said, hugging herself.

  He turned away with a faint look of disapproval. “No one’s touched this place for over sixty years. When the bachelor died, the executors locked it up and left.” He went to the kitchen table, took matches from his pocket and lit candles in a branching candlestick that was more black oxide than silver.

  “I shall have to get oil for the lamps,” he said. “I forget humans need light, because we don’t. But we find it pleasant.”

  He picked up the candelabrum and turned away. She followed him, shivering, through a narrow passageway. “How often do you come here?”

  “Once a year, once every ten years, as the whim takes me.”

  “But you think of this as home?”

  He glanced at her with a wry smile. Candlelight gave his face sinister illumination. “I’m the ghost, dear. I was the reason the family moved out.”

  They emerged into a square hallway with a stairwell looming up into the shadows. As Sebastian led her up the first flight, candle flames threw a spectral glow over dust-covered banisters, wooden panelling, portraits in thick gold frames on discoloured walls. On the half-landing, light gleamed on the treacly wood of twin double doors. Sebastian opened the left-hand door and ushered Robyn into the room beyond.

  A cavernous space opened around her; a room of eerie grandeur with a ceiling of carved and painted plaster, two storeys high. An impressive fireplace at the far end was surmounted by a coat of arms. Two rows of long windows filled the right-hand wall, one above the other, the lower ones hung with dusty-red velvet curtains. Faded rugs lay on bare floorboards. She saw a full-sized billiard table covered by a sheet, glass cases full of posed dead animals. One, directly in front of her, contained a huge crocodile skull. All along the walls were the antlered heads of stags, staring out with black marble eyes. And countless dark portraits of ancestors, fixing their painted gazes on hers.

  “This is the salon,” said Sebastian. “Or the madman’s museum.” Placing the candle holder on a table, he began to light more candles around the chamber. She walked slowly through the great room, fascinated and repulsed by this surfeit of taxidermy. Case after case of finches, owls, birds of prey, and gulls lined the walls; and then mammals, reptiles, amphibians. Astonished, she forgot everything else. Then she came upon butterflies. Even in half-darkness they glowed with preternatural intensity, sulphur-yellow, electric blue, iridescent green… faerie creatures pinned in rows.

  She opened the drawer of a cabinet and found scores of monstrous beetles attached to cards.

  “Sebastian.”

  He didn’t answer. He was brushing dust from a display case. The dust, though thick, was nothing compared to the grime of the kitchen. It struck her that this place had not been entirely neglected for sixty years. Someone had looked after it.

  She circled the room, finding new treasure in every cabinet: shells, minerals, fossils, birds’ eggs. The journey was haunted, grotesque, filled with the whispering of all the unknown lives on the walls above her, a thousand eyes watching from the darkness. And the vampire in black, his face lit from below by wavering flames, his pale hands resting on the dark glass; expressionless, aloof, his lowered eyelids forming two black crescents against the fine skin. Death in repose.

  When she came to his side, she looked through the glass that he’d cleaned and saw hundreds of ancient coins on bottle-green velvet.

  “Who brought all this here? Not you?”

  Sebastian was contemplative, as if he’d forgotten she was there. Perhaps he wished he was alone.

  “Not me. The whole family was eccentric. The last one to live here was an obsessive collector.”

  “So all these things were left here when he died?”

  He nodded. “And after his heirs deserted, I decided to look after the place a little.”

  He walked away. Robyn followed. He looked completely at home here. She could imagine him in sombre Victorian clothes, or in an eighteenth-century tailcoat, white lace at his wrists, drifting from room to room; the solitary lord of the manor, eternally in possession, while the other inhabitants were mere tenants – and knew it. She imagined their insecurity, their paranoia. A woman’s voice, low and frightened.

  “He was there again in the library, Father. I didn’t see him but I felt him. This house is so cold. It hates us!”

  Now Robyn was the one who felt utterly out of place.

  Another double door led to a drawing room that was insistently golden; wallpaper, frames, curtains, the scrolled woodwork of chairs, all gold. Sebastian pulled off dustsheets to reveal chairs lush with needlepoint roses, tapestry stools and fire screens. Too many ornaments: clocks, statuettes, stuffed birds under glass domes, black onyx elephants. More glass cases filled with shining semi-precious stones. More paintings and huge mirrors rimmed with gilt.
r />   “This is how the family left it,” said Sebastian. “I rarely move anything.”

  He led her through a library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a fireplace flanked by two chaises longues, paintings of racehorses on the walls. Beyond lay a snug, a room more ugly than cosy with its green wallpaper mouldering and falling away, its velvet hangings turning grey with age. There were cabinets full of porcelain that Robyn guessed was priceless.

  “The family’s taste was lamentable,” Sebastian murmured. “The house is not as I would have had it, but after all this time it would seem sacrilegious to change anything.”

  He led her in a circuit through a grand dining room with marble pillars, a smaller breakfast room, and back to the salon. Everywhere was the same decaying grandeur. The house smelled of damp and mildew, emanating a dank chill that seeped into her bones.

  She would rather have settled in the gilded drawing room, which had a semblance of homeliness, but Sebastian seemed to favour the salon. Standing in front of the fireplace, he faced Robyn and removed her hairpins so her hair fell loose over her shoulders.

  “There are old clothes here, too. I hate modern clothing. I’ll find you something to wear, a tight bodice and long skirts…”

  Her throat went dry. She looked into his eyes, which glowed intently under his soft dark hair. His hands were firm on her shoulders. “So I can’t run away?”

  A shadow creased his brow. “Why would you be wanting to run away?”

  “Just a joke. It’s quite… extraordinary here.”

  “I’m glad you think so.” He glanced at the wedding-cake ceiling. “By the way, don’t go upstairs for the time being.”

  “Why not? Will I find the skeletons of other women you’ve brought here?” Her attempt at grim wit didn’t seem remotely funny. Fear clenched a fist round her throat. No joke at all. Sebastian could tell any lie, assume any disguise.

  He seemed distracted. He didn’t react to her remark, and his attention was still on the room.

  “You are the first and only person I’ve brought here,” he said softly. “If you want to go up, you can. I’ve done no work upstairs, so you’ll find it damp, dirty and generally unpleasant. That is all.”