Genevieve 02 - Genevieve Undead

by Jack Yeovil

  Inside, it was wet but at least the rain wasn't whipping his face. It sounded like a thousand drum beats on the wooden roof of the coach.

  There were two passengers, the man with the pistol and a young woman. He was past middle age and had once been sleek and corpulent, and she was in her twenties and probably attractive.

  Her face was lovely, and she had a mass of coppery gold ringlets.

  They must have been expensively dressed when they set out on their journey. Now, they were as wet, muddy and bedraggled as the meanest peasant. Nature was as great a leveller as the revolution. The passengers were obviously afraid of him, and shrank together, clutching each other.

  'What manner of fiend are you?' the man asked.

  'I'm not a fiend,' Kloszowski said. 'I'm just lost in the rain.'

  'He's a cleric, Ysidro,' said the woman.

  'Thank the gods,' the man said. 'We're saved. Exorcise these daemons and I'll see you're richly rewarded.'

  Kloszowski decided not to tell them his robes were borrowed. He'd seen the light outside, but no daemons.

  'This is Ysidro d'Amato,' said the woman, 'from Miragliano. And I'm Antonia.'

  'Aleksandr,' Kloszowski said.

  Antonia was less scared than d'Amato and better able to deal with the situation. He knew straight away that she wasn't a parasite.

  'We were travelling when this storm blew up,' she said. 'Suddenly, there was this burst of lightning, and the coach turned over'

  'Daemons,' gasped d'Amato. 'There were daemons and monsters, all after my after'

  He shut up. He didn't want to say what he thought the daemons were after. When the man was dried off and tidied up, Kloszowski imagined he wouldn't much like Ysidro d'Amato. The name was familiar, and he believed he'd heard it during his stay in Miragliano.

  'There's a house ahead,' Antonia told him. 'We saw it through the trees before it got dark. We were trying to get there, to get out of the storm.'

  Lightning struck, near. Kloszowski's teeth were rattled by the thunderclap. The blue ball had grown, and was all around the coach. Its light was almost soothing and made him want to sleep. He fought the impulse. Who knew what might happen if he were to close his eyes.

  'We'd better make a dash for it,' he said. 'We can't stay out the storm here. It's dangerous.'

  D'Amato hugged a valise to his chest like a pillow and wouldn't budge.

  'He's right, Ysidro,' said Antonia. 'This light is doing things to us. We must go on. It's only a few hundred yards. There'll be people, a fire, food, wine'

  She was coaxing him as if he were a child. He didn't want to leave his carriage. The wind pulled the door open, slamming it against the side of the coach, and rain came in as if thrown from buckets. The face in the light was very definite now, with a long nose and chasms for eyes.

  'Let's go.'

  Kloszowski tugged Antonia, and they broke out of the carriage.

  'But Ysidro×'

  'He can stay if he wants.'

  He pulled the woman away from the broken coach, and she didn't struggle much. Before they'd gone ten steps, d'Amato stuck his head out of the door and emerged at a run, valise still in a tight embrace.

  He was a fat man, not light on his feet, but he splashed enthusiastically as he staggered, and both Kloszowski and Antonia were able to catch him before he fell. He shook free of them, trying to keep them away from his valise. It was obviously a favourite toy.

  'It's this way,' said Antonia, pointing. The road was rising slightly, and curving. Kloszowski couldn't see anything in the wet darkness.

  'It's a huge place,' she said. 'We saw it from miles away.'

  D'Amato was standing transfixed, looking into the empty eyes of the blue face. Antonia pulled at his elbow, turning him round. He shook his head, and she slapped him. Hard. He woke up, and began to walk with them.

  Together, they struggled into the darkness. Kloszowski wanted to look back, but didn't. He felt he would never be warm again.

  It was impossible to see clearly, but the firm road beneath their feet was as good a path as any.

  'They can't have it,' d'Amato was muttering. 'It's mine, mine'

  There was cold water between Kloszowski's eyes and eyelids, and ice forming inside his skull.

  'Look,' Antonia said.

  There was a wall along the side of the road, partly carved from the mountainside, partly built from great stone blocks. Now, they were standing by a set of huge ironwork gates, rusted and sagging. They could easily get through between the railings. Beyond was the outline of a huge house, and there were faint lights.

  Kloszowski stood back, and looked up at the gates. This must be a substantial estate. A family of the parasite classes would live here, sucking the lifeblood from the peasantry, grinding their bootheels into the faces of the masses.

  In the scrollwork at the top of the gates, a word was picked out. It was the name of the estate, and probably the name of the family.

  UDOLPHO.

  Kloszowski had never heard of it.

  V

  Word of the duel had reached Schedoni, Ravaglioli's father-in-law and Old Melmoth's son, and his disapproval hung over the dinner table like marsh gas. The old man, reputedly a notorious libertine in his nearly-a-century ago youth, sat at the head of the table, still waiting to inherit a position as head of the household from his bedridden father.

  At his side was the empty chair and place always maintained for his wife Mathilda, an invalid whom Genevieve had never seen, and beside them were the two outsiders upon whom the family most depended, Vathek the lawyer and Dr. Valdemar, the physician.

  Both had lived at Udolpho forever, and both had gained the family look, long faces and deep-set eyes. Valdemar was bald but for three cultivated strands pasted across his shining scalp, while Vathek was so thickly-haired that his eyes seemed to peer from a black ball of fur. At separate times, it had been rumoured that Vathek or Valdemar were either Schedoni's long-lost brother Montoni×Pintaldi's alleged grandfather×or the result of an adulterous or incestuous union contracted by Schedoni in his wild days. None of the rumours had ever been proved or disproved.

  Vathek and Valdemar hated each other with a fervour that went beyond any emotion Genevieve could conceive of nurturing, and each was convinced the other constantly plotted his death. The currently favoured means of murder was poison, and neither had touched food of whose provenance they were even remotely uncertain for some weeks. The lawyer and the doctor stared at each other over full plates of meat and potatoes, each silently daring the other to take a perhaps contaminated mouthful. Vathek was charged with the custodianship of the will, but it was Dr. Valdemar's duty to keep Old Melmoth alive long enough for it to be finished and signed.

  Old Melmoth, who still held court in his master bedroom, was well over a hundred and twenty, and preserved long past his expected death by Dr. Valdemar, who had travelled many years ago in Cathay, Lustria and the Dark Lands, in search of the magical ingredients necessary for the prolongation of life. He was a blasphemer and a sorcerer, her aunt said. But Old Melmoth was still alive, chuckling over each new intrigue in the unfolding saga of his family.

  At the other end of the table, Ravaglioli sat opposite Pintaldi, pouring himself a generous goblet of wine while his wife Flaminea glared disapproval at him. She was the last remaining adherent of Claes Glinka's long-discredited Moral Crusade, and disapproved of most earthly pleasures. The family had to have someone to criticise its morals, and Flaminea had elected herself, taking every opportunity to preach damnation. A few months ago, she'd taken a hammer to the indecent sculptures of the Hanging Gardens, and destroyed, in the name of modesty, many priceless and irreplaceable works of ancient art. After that, the will, apparently, had been severely rewritten against her interests and her crusade had relaxed minutely. Ravaglioli, who had long since ceased to share his wife's rooms, made an exaggerated display of drinking, sloshing the wine around in his mouth and sighing with satisfaction as a mouthful slipped down his throat.
Aunt Flaminea snorted her disdain, and carved her meat into tiny pieces with deft, cruel cuts of her serrated eating knife.

  Genevieve was seated next to the empty chair that had been Flamineo's. He had been her father, and Flaminea's brother, before his still-unexplained death. On her other hand was a throne-like piece of furniture, decorated with intricate carvings of which Flaminea definitely did not approve, occupied by her father's fleshly uncle, Ambrosio, a monk of Ranald who'd been expelled from the Order of the Trickster God for an excess of vices. She edged her chair towards her late father's place, specifically to keep her unprotected knee and thigh out of range of Ambrosio's creeping fingers.

  Ten feet away, across the table, were the beautiful twins, Young Melmoth and Flora. Pintaldi's ten-year-old offspring by a woman of dubious humanity, their ears were slightly pointed. Their curls fell on thin, delicate shoulders. The twins rarely spoke, save to each other. They had finished eating, and were sitting quietly, unnervingly blinking in a synchronized pattern.

  The dinner party was completed by Christabel, Ravaglioli and Flaminea's daughter, as dark as Genevieve was fair, who was at Ambrosio's other side, her fork ready to deal with any exploratory graspings. She'd been educated in the Empire, at the academy in Nuln, and was recently returned to Udolpho, scandalising her mother with the habits she appeared to have acquired during her time away from the family estates. Once, after a dispute about the ownership of a bonnet, Christabel had ominously told Genevieve that she had taken a course under Valancourt, the master swordsman, and would be only too pleased to give a demonstration of her carving skills. Genevieve knew also that her cousin was a devotee of weirdroot, and often sought escape from the cold, stark walls of Udolpho in juicedreams. Just now, she was eating languidly, her hands not quite co-ordinated, and Genevieve suspected she'd been chewing the root earlier.

  Genevieve looked up and down the table. It was hard to keep track of her family, to remember their relationships to her and to each other. Sometimes, they changed, and a relation she believed to be her uncle would turn out to be her cousin, or a cousin would become a niece. It was all to do with codicils to the will, which changed everything.

  Beyond the tall windows, lightning forked.

  Odo Zschokke, the chief steward, served as head-butler, supervising the three maids×Lily, Mira and Tanja×as they brought course after course to the table. Zschokke was seven feet tall, with broad shoulders only now bowed by years. He had been the captain of the Udolpho guard during the last major family war, when Old Melmoth's now-dead necromancer brother Otranto had raised daemons and the dead in an onslaught upon the estates.

  Zschokke had sustained wounds from a Slaaneshi daemon's claw that carved three deep grooves diagonally across his face, twisting his nose, tearing his lips and making his eyes seem to stare through the dead skin bars of a cage-mask. His voice had been torn from him, but he was still a capable man, and Old Melmoth trusted him more even than Vathek and Valdemar. No one doubted that Zschokke stood to benefit from the will.

  Genevieve didn't want to eat. Her meat was overcooked, grey through to the heart, and she didn't care for vegetables, particularly the black-eyed grey-white potatoes produced by the estate's garden. She took a little red wine, ignoring Flaminea's dagger looks, but it only served to sting her palate. She thirsted, but not for wine, and she hungered, but not for cooked-through beef

  The meal was mainly eaten without conversation. The clatter of knives and forks on plates was backgrounded by driving rain, and the constant crescendo of thunder.

  The storm excited Genevieve, aroused in her a hunting instinct. She wanted to be outside, slaking her thirst.

  The maids took away her uneaten main course, and there was a pause. Zschokke signalled, and new bottles of wine were presented to Schedoni for his approval. He blew dust off a label, coughed, and nodded.

  'I hardly think innocent children should be exposed to such vice and debauchery, father,' snapped Flaminea, thin lips pinching as she enthusiastically chewed her morsels of meat. 'We do not want to raise another generation of sybarites and libertines.'

  Flora and Young Melmoth looked at each other and smiled. Their teeth were tiny and sharp, their eyes nearly almond-shaped. Genevieve had seen them playing games with the castle cats, and could not think of them as innocents.

  She sipped her wine.

  'You see,' Flaminea said, 'my niece is on the slope to degradation already, swilling wine at her tender years, wearing silks and satins to inflame the lusts of vile men, combing out her long, golden hair. The rot has started. You can't see it yet, but it will show on her face before long. Another sixteen years, and her face will be as corrupted and monstrous as'

  There was a loud thunderclap, and Flaminea refrained from naming the name. Schedoni stared her down, and she collapsed in her seat, shut up by her father's glance.

  Genevieve had heard her grandmother was hideously disfigured by disease, and that she was always veiled as she grovelled in her rooms, awaiting Morr's last kiss.

  Genevieve raised her goblet in a toast to her aunt, and drained it. The wine was as tasteless and unsustaining as rainwater.

  Ambrosio had shown some interest when the subject of inflamed lusts was raised, and his swollen, purple-veined face wobbled as he licked his lips, his hand under the table fastening upon the upper thigh of Lily, the maid pouring his wine. A smile spread over his features as he reached higher, and Lily betrayed no sign of the attentions he was paying to her. A thin string of drool dangled from the cleric's mouth. He wiped it away with a finger.

  Schedoni drank, and surveyed the family and its retainers. His face was the template from which everyone else around the table×even the beautiful Christabel×seemed to have been struck. But before Schedoni, the long nose and deep eyes had belonged to Old Melmoth. And before Old Melmoth, there were generations of the House of Udolpho, all the way back to Smarra's father, the Black Cygnet. There was a portrait of the pirate, standing aboard the deck of his vessel supervising the execution of an Araby captain, and he too bore the Udolpho features. He must have been the originator of the line, Genevieve realized. Before the pirate, there had been no family. It was his stolen fortune that had created the house.

  Ravaglioli and Pintaldi were arguing quietly, their old quarrel revived again, and making threatening gestures with their dinner knives. Once Pintaldi had ended an argument by thrusting a skewer into Ravaglioli's throat between the meat course and the game, and then, with a flourish, taken his soup spoon to the other man's eyes. Ravaglioli had not forgotten or forgiven that.

  'After dinner, I shall play the harpsichord,' Christabel announced. She was not contradicted.

  Genevieve's cousin had learned music in Nuln, and possessed a pleasant although not outstanding voice. At the academy, she had also begun to get the measure of her own charms, and was clearly more than a little frustrated to be removed from the society of the Empire back to Udolpho, where her opportunities for breaking hearts were severely limited. Since she had driven Praz the gamekeeper to suicide, there had been no one to torment with her sable-black hair, liquid eyes and silky skin. She spent much of her time wandering the broken battlements of Udolpho, fretting and plotting, shroudlike dresses flapping in the breeze, petting the ravens.

  'In Nuln, my playing was often praised by the Countess Emmanuelle von Lie'

  Christabel's boast was interrupted by thunder and lightning. And another crash of noise. At once, it was colder and wetter. Everyone in the great hall turned to the floor-to-ceiling windows which had just been blown in. Rain was pouring into the hall like shot, and stung on Genevieve's face. The wind screamed as the candles placed down the spine of the table guttered and went out. Chairs were pushed noisily back, Flaminea gave a polite little squeak of fright, and hands went to swordhilts.

  It was dark, but Genevieve could make everyone out. Her eyes were fine at night. She saw Zschokke moving slowly, as if in a dream, across the hall, reaching for a lantern. One of the maids was wrestling with the o
pened windows, forcing them shut. The wind and the rain were shut off, and the light came up again as Zschokke turned up the wick of the lantern. There were strangers, dripping wet, standing behind Schedoni's huge chair. While the windows were open, someone had come into the hall.

  VI

  The company was gloomy, with funereal clothes and long faces, and their great hall was ill-lit and dusty, the upper walls covered with filth and cobwebs.

  Some of the diners looked barely alive, and they all had an unhealthy pallor, as if they'd lived all their lives in these shadows, never emerging into the sunlight. There were two pretty girls among them, though, a pale, lithe blonde and a lush, dark-haired beauty. They immediately excited Kloszowski's revolutionary interest. Trapped like Olympia and Julietta by the conventions of their class, they might make enthusiastic converts to the cause.

  'We were lost,' he explained. 'We made for your light.'

  Nobody said anything. They all looked, hungrily, at the newcomers.

  'There's a storm outside,' said Antonia, unnecessarily. 'The road is washing away.'

  'They can't stay,' said a thin old woman, voice cracking with meanness. 'Outsiders can't stay.'

  Kloszowski didn't like the sound of that.

  'We've nowhere else to go. There's no passable road.'

  'It would be against his will,' the woman said, looking up at the shadowed ceiling. 'Old Melmoth can't abide outsiders.'

  They all thought about that, looking at each other. There was an ancient man, a halo of cotton-spun white hair fringing his skull, at the head of the table. Kloszowski took him to be in charge, although he didn't seem to be this Old Melmoth. By his side stood a tall, scar-faced servant, the muscle of the family, typical of the type that leaves their own class and helps the aristocracy keep his brothers and sisters in chains.