by Tom Holland
Rebecca struggled not to lower her eyes before the vampire’s gaze. Again, the question she wanted to ask died on her lips. ‘Why haven’t you killed me, then?’ she murmured eventually. ‘Why haven’t you drained me like you drained that poor man by Waterloo Bridge?’
Lord Byron’s face seemed frozen into ice. Then, faintly, he smiled once again. ‘Because you are a Byron.’ He nodded. ‘Yes, indeed a Byron.’ He rose to his feet. ‘Because you have my blood in your veins. Mine - and another soul’s.’
Rebecca swallowed. ‘So did my mother,’ she said at last. Her voice sounded distant and frail in her ears.
‘Yes.’
‘She too - once - she came looking for your memoirs.’
‘I know.’
‘What happened to her?’
Lord Byron made no answer. In his eyes, pity and desire seemed mingled as one.
‘What happened to her? Tell me! What happened to her?’
Still Lord Byron did not reply. Rebecca licked her lips. She wanted to repeat her question in a howl of anguish and accusation, but her mouth was dry and she couldn’t speak. Lord Byron smiled as he stared at her. He glanced at her throat lingeringly, then rose and limped across the room. He held up a bottle. ‘You are thirsty. Can I offer you wine?’
Rebecca nodded. She glanced at the label. Château Lafite Rothschild. The best, the very best. She was offered a glass - she took it and sipped, then gulped the liquid down. Never had she tasted anything half so good. She glanced up. Lord Byron was watching her expressionlessly. He drank from his own glass. No sign of pleasure or taste crossed his face. He sat back in his chair, and although his eyes glittered as brightly as before, Rebecca could see now how behind the gleam the eyes seemed dead.
‘Even now,’ he said, ‘I could almost wish you hadn’t come.’
Rebecca stared at him in surprise. ‘The bookseller said . . .’
‘The bookseller. Forget the bookseller.’
‘But . . .’
‘I have told you - forget him.’
Rebecca swallowed. ‘He said that you had been waiting for me.’
‘Yes. But what does that mean? It is the torture we desire which is the cruellest of all.’
‘And the bookseller knew this?’
Lord Byron smiled faintly. ‘Of course. Why else would he have sent you to me?’
His lassitude seemed suddenly terrible. He closed his eyes, as though to avoid the sight of Rebecca’s life. The dog stirred and licked at his hand, but Lord Byron stayed motionless, a mockery of his own seeming loveliness and youth.
‘What were you hoping for tonight?’
‘Hoping for?’
‘Yes.’ Rebecca paused. ‘By the tomb, tonight. You had been waiting for me. What had you been hoping for?’
A look of terrible pain crossed Lord Byron’s face. He paused, as though waiting for the murmur of some answer from the dark. He was staring beyond her, Rebecca realised, into the blackness from which the dog had come. But there was no movement from there now, nothing but stillness, and Lord Byron suddenly frowned and shook his head. ‘Whatever I hope for,’ he said, ‘seems not quite ready to happen yet.’ He laughed, and of all the sounds she had listened to that night, Rebecca had heard nothing that did more to strike cold into her blood. ‘I have existed for over two centuries,’ Lord Byron said, staring at Rebecca, but again, it seemed, still speaking to the darkness beyond.
‘Never have I felt further from the life I once possessed. Each year, each day, has forged a link in the chain - the weight of my own immortality. That burden, now, I find insupportable.’
He paused, and reached for his wine. He took a sip, very delicately, and closed his eyes, as though in mourning for its forgotten taste. His eyes still shut, he drained the glass, and then slowly, without a trace of passion, dropped it so that it shattered on the floor. The dog stirred and growled; from the far corner of the room, several birds rose and fluttered in the air. Rebecca had not seen them before - she wondered what other creatures lurked, waiting in the darkness behind her chair. The birds settled; silence returned; once again, Lord Byron opened his eyes.
‘It is singular,’ he said, ‘how soon we lose our memories, how soon their lustre fades. And yet, seeing you here now, I remember how existence was once fresh.’
‘And is that so great a torture?’
‘A torture and delight. Both the greater for their intermingling.’
‘But they are rekindled now, aren’t they - these lights of your memory?’
Lord Byron inclined his head gently. There was a flicker of movement from his lips.
‘Can you bear to extinguish them again?’ Rebecca asked. ‘Or is it not better now to tend their flame?’
Lord Byron smiled.
Rebecca watched him. ‘Tell me,’ she said.
‘Tell you?’
‘You have no choice.’
The vampire laughed suddenly. ‘But I do. I could kill you. That might allow me to forget for a while.’ There was a silence. Rebecca knew that Lord Byron was staring at her throat. But still she waited, strangely distanced from her fear. ‘Tell me,’ she repeated softly. ‘Tell me how it happened. I want to know.’ She paused, thinking of her mother. She sat frozen. ‘I deserve to know.’
Lord Byron raised his eyes. Slowly, he began to smile again. ‘Yes, you do,’ he said, ‘I suppose you do.’ He paused, and again stared past Rebecca into the darkness beyond. This time, she thought, there was a faint sound, and Lord Byron smiled again, as though he had heard it too. ‘Yes,’ he said, still staring through Rebecca, ‘it should be done this way. You are right. Listen, then, and understand.’
He paused, and folded his hands. ‘It happened in Greece,’ he said. ‘On my first journey there. The East had always been the most fertile island of my imagination. And yet my imaginings had never even skirted the truth, never even dared draw vaguely close to it.’ His smile faded, as the blankness of lassitude returned again. ‘For I believed, you see, that if a doom were to fall upon me, it lay dormant already within my own blood. My mother had warned me that the Byrons were cursed. She hated them, and loved them, for what my father had done. He had charmed her, married her, then bled her of her wealth - a vampire in his own way, and therefore I suppose, though I never met him, a true father to me. Left penniless, my mother would often warn me against the inheritance that flowed in my blood. Each Lord Byron, she would say, had been more wicked than the last. She told me of the man I was to inherit the title from. He had murdered his neighbour. He lived in a ruined abbey. He tortured cockroaches. I had laughed at that, to my mother’s rage. I vowed that when I became Lord Byron, I would put my patrimony to more enjoyable use.’
‘And you did.’ Rebecca didn’t ask, merely stated a fact.
‘Yes.’ Lord Byron nodded. ‘Indeed, I fear I became quite dissipated. I loved the abbey, you see, and the shivers of romantic gloom it sent up my spine, for, on the whole, I was then so far from being gloomy or misanthropical that I found my fear merely an excuse for revelries. We had dug up the skull of some poor monk, and used it as a drinking bowl - I would preside in my abbot’s robes, while, with the help of assorted village maidens and nymphs, we lived in the style of the monks of old. But the pleasures even of sacrilege can fade - I grew satiated with my dissipations, and boredom, that most fearful curse of all, began to dull my heart. I felt a longing to travel. It was the custom then for men such as myself, well-bred and hopelessly in debt, to perform a tour of the Continent, long seen by the English as the most suitable place for the young to take rapid steps in the career of vice. I wanted to sample new pleasures, new sensations and delights - everything for which England was too narrow and tight, and which I knew, abroad, would be easy to procure. It was decided - I would leave. I felt little regret for England as her white cliffs slipped away.
‘I travelled with my friend Hobhouse. Together, we crossed Portugal and Spain, and then on towards Malta, and beyond that, Greece. As we neared the Greek shore, a purple band gl
immering across the blue of the sea, I felt a strange presentiment of longing and fear. Even Hobhouse, who was seasick, paused in his vomiting to look up. The gleam, though, was soon lost, and it was raining as my feet touched the soil of Greece. Preveza, our port of arrival, was a wretched place. The town itself was ugly and drab, while of its inhabitants, we found the Greeks servile and their Turkish masters savage. Yet even in the drizzle, my thrill of excitement never wholly died, for I knew, riding through the dismal streets below the minarets and towers, that we had left our old lives far behind, and stood now on the rim of a strange untested world. The West had been abandoned - we had crossed into the East.
‘After two days spent in Preveza, we were happy enough to leave. It was our intention to visit Ali, the Pasha of Albania, whose daring and cruelty had won him power over Europe’s most lawless tribes, and whose reputation for savagery was respected by even the most bloodthirsty of the Turks. Few Englishmen had ever penetrated Albania; yet for us, the lure of so dangerous and poetical a land was all the greater for that very cause. Yanina, Ali’s capital, lay far to the north, and the road that led to it was mountainous and wild. We were warned, before we left, to beware of the klephti, Greek mountain bandits, and so we took, with our manservant and our guide, a bodyguard of six Albanians, all armed with pistols, long guns and swords. When we at last set off, it was, as you can imagine, in a most romantic state of mind.
‘We had soon left all traces of habitation behind us. This, we were to find, was not strange in Greece, where a man could often ride for three, sometimes four days, and never find a village able to feed himself and his horse, so wretched was the state to which the Greeks had been reduced. But what we lacked in human intercourse was made up for by the grandeur of the landscape and the beauty of our route, which was soon winding high and mountainous. Even Hobhouse, generally as capable of being moved by such things as a tobacco bung, would sometimes rein in his horse to admire the peaks of Suli and Tomaros, half-robed in mist, clothed in snow and purple streaks of light, across which the eagle soared, and from whose distant jagged crags we would sometimes hear the howling of the wolf.
‘It was as the afternoon began to darken with a gathering storm that I first mentioned to Hobhouse that I was afraid we might be lost. He nodded and glanced around. The road had narrowed until the rocks above us were precipitous; no other traveller had passed us now for almost three hours. Hobhouse spurred his horse forwards and rode up to the guide. I heard him ask where our shelter was to be for that night. The guide assured us both that we had nothing to fear. I gestured at the storm clouds massing above the peaks, and shouted at him that it wasn’t fear, merely a desire to avoid a drenching, that made us eager to reach some sheltering place. The guide shrugged, and muttered again that we had nothing to fear. This, of course, at once persuaded us to send three of our Albanians ahead, while the others were dropped behind to cover our rear. Fletcher, the manservant, began to mutter up his prayers.
‘It was as the first heavy drops of rain began to fall that we heard the crack of a gunshot. Hobhouse swore violently at the guide, asking him what the devil it could be. The guide stammered some nonsense, then began to shake. Hobhouse swore again, and drew a pistol out. Together, the two of us spurred our horses and galloped down the defile ahead. Round a sharp outcrop of rock, we saw our three Albanians, their faces white as chalk, shouting amongst themselves, struggling to rein in their nervous steeds. One of them was still holding a gun; it was evidently he who had fired the shot. “What is it?” I called to him. “Are we under attack?” The Albanian said nothing, but pointed, and his two companions both fell quiet. Hobhouse and I turned to look. In the cliff’s shadow was a grave of earth. A rough stake had been hammered into it; nailed to the wood hung a bloodshot head. Its features were remarkably pale, but at the same time quite fresh.
‘Hobhouse and I dismounted.
‘“Extraordinary,” said Hobhouse, staring at the head as though it were some interesting antiquity. “A peasant superstition, I suppose. I wonder what it means?”
‘I shivered, and drew my cloak round close. It was dark now, and the rain was starting to fall hard. Hobhouse, whose belief in spirits began and ended with brandy punch, was still staring at the damnable head. I pulled him by the shoulder. “Come on,” I said. “We should leave this place.”
‘Behind us, the Albanians had been screaming at the guide. “He has tricked you,” they told us. “This is not the way. This is the way to Aheron!”
‘I glanced at Hobhouse. He raised an eyebrow. We both recognised the name. Aheron - the river believed by the ancients to take the damned to Hell. If it did lie just ahead, then we had strayed a long way indeed from the Yanina road.
‘“Is this true?” I asked the guide.
‘“No, no,” he whined.
‘I turned to the Albanian. “How do you know that we are close to the Aheron?”
‘He pointed to the stake, then spoke a single word I didn’t understand: “Vardoulacha.”’ Lord Byron paused. He repeated the word slowly, sounding the syllables. ‘Vardoulacha.’
Rebecca frowned. ‘What did it mean?’ she asked.
Lord Byron smiled at her. ‘As you can imagine, I asked the guard the very same question. But he was too crazed with fear to make any sense. He just kept repeating the same word over again, “Vardoulacha, vardoulacha, vardoulacha.” Suddenly, he screamed at me. “My Lord, we must turn, go back!” He stared wildly at his companions, then began to gallop back up the road.
‘“What the devil’s the matter with them?” asked Hobhouse, as the other two Albanians followed the first round the outcrop of rock. “I thought the beggars were meant to be brave.”
‘There was a distant rumble of thunder, and then, over the jagged silhouette of Mount Suli, we saw the first fissure of lightning stab. Fletcher started to cry. “Damn it,” I muttered. “If we wanted to be tourists, I knew we should have gone to Rome.” I wheeled my horse. “You,” I said, pointing at the guide, “don’t move from here.” Hobhouse was already riding hard back up the path. I followed him, then galloped on ahead. For almost ten minutes we rode through the rain.
‘The darkness now was virtually impenetrable. “Byron,” shouted Hobhouse, “those other three . . .”
‘“Which other three?”
‘“Those other three guards - where are they gone, do you think? Can you make them out?”
‘I peered into the rain, but could scarcely see as far as my horse’s ears.
‘“Damnedest thing,” muttered Hobhouse. He wiped at his nose. “Still - something to tell the fellows back home, I suppose.” He paused, and glanced at me. “If we manage to get home to tell them, that is.”
‘At that moment, my horse stumbled, then reared up, whinnying in fear. Lightning lit the path ahead. I pointed. “Look,” I said.
‘We trotted slowly up to where the three bodies lay. Their throats had all been cut. There was no other mark on them. I reached for the cliff and took a handful of earth. I leaned from my saddle and scattered the soil over the corpses, then watched as the soil was washed away.
‘Dimly, through the thudding of the downpour, we heard a scream. It rose and pitched, then faded into the rain. We pressed our horses forwards. I almost trampled a fourth corpse, and then, down the path, we found the final two members of our bodyguard. As with their companions, their throats had been cut. I dismounted, and kneeled beside one to touch the wound. Thick purple blood slipped over my fingertips. I looked up at Hobhouse. “They must be out there,” he said, gesturing vaguely with a sweep of his hand, “somewhere.” We both stood and listened. We could hear nothing but the beating of the rain upon the rocks. “Quite a scrape,” said Hobhouse. “Yes,” I said.
‘We rode back to where we had left Fletcher and the guide. The guide had vanished, of course; Fletcher was offering bribes up to his god. Hobhouse and myself, already quite convinced enough of the Almighty’s hostility to us, were agreed that we had no choice but to ride on through the storm,
and hope to find shelter before a knife found us. We headed towards Aheron, while angry clouds poured the vengeance of the skies upon us, and lightning gilded the torrents and spray. Once, a shepherd’s hut seemed to loom out from the dark, but when we cantered forwards, we saw that it was only a Turkish tomb, with the Greek word for freedom, eleutheria, chiselled across its face. “Perhaps it’s lucky we still have our foreskins,” I shouted out to Hobhouse. “Perhaps,” he nodded back. “But I feel now they are all savages, the people of this hellish land. I wish we were in England.”’ Lord Byron paused and smiled at the memory. ‘Of course, Hobby never was a good traveller.’
‘While you were?’ Rebecca asked.
‘Yes. I never sought out strange lands, and then complained because they weren’t like Regent’s Park.’
‘But that night . . .’
‘No.’ Lord Byron shook his head. ‘Maybe it was odd, but agitation of any kind always gave a rebound to my spirits and set me up. Dullness, that was what I feared. But up on the mountains, peering through the storm for the bandit’s dagger - yes - the excitement of that took a long time to fade.’
‘But it did fade?’
‘Yes.’ Lord Byron creased his brow. ‘Yes, it did at last. The fear remained, but it was no longer an agitation, merely a dullness, and Hobhouse was affected by it in just the same way. The further we rode, the more physical it seemed to become, as though it were something like the rain, through which we had to force ourselves to go. It was ahead of us, an emanation of something, whatever it was, draining away our spirited-ness. Fletcher began muttering his prayers again.
‘Then Hobhouse reined in his horse. “There’s someone up ahead,” he said. He pointed into the drizzle of the dying storm. “See?” I looked. I could just make out figures, but nothing more. “Where are you going?” Hobhouse called, as I spurred my horse down the track.
‘“What choice have we got?” I shouted back. I cantered through the rain. “Hello!” I shouted. “Is anyone there? We need help! Hello!” There was no answer, except for the drizzle pattering on the rocks. I stared around. The figures, whatever they were, had disappeared. “Hello!” I called again. “Please, hello!” I reined in my horse. Ahead of me now, just faintly, I could hear a rumbling sound, but nothing else. I slumped in my saddle, and felt fear, like paralysis, numbing every limb.
