Lucius had only felt that terrified once before, running across the highlands of Scotland as his ermine familiar. A red eagle had swooped over his head, talons extended, in a flash of deathly black before he leapt to safety beneath a rocky outcropping and shivered beneath the frozen rocks. The eagle’s shadow had raced across the smooth, white snow before disappearing.
That was how that boy had looked, like a predator pulsating black.
The memory of what he’d seen in that dank, murderous hut across the Yorkshire moor had haunted Lucius for several centuries. He’d kept the encounter to himself, afraid that if he only spoke of it, he would conjure that unnatural child and his grasping, black aura. But, the thing had found him in the middle of the Spanish Inquisition.
Attracted to the pain inflicted upon humanity for such trifling ideas about dead, ancient religions, the vampire Lucius had been especially enamoured with the prospect of meting out specific and creative tortures: the pear of anguish, thumbscrews, and the lesser known Judas chair. He’d been polishing the point of the aforementioned chair, humming a tune he remembered from the tambourine line of a Roman military procession, when a creature clad in monkish robes had approached him from behind a weeping stone pillar.
At first, Lucius had ignored the feeling of impending doom. He was, after all, in a torture chamber. The sour smell of fear, disbelief, and sick still clung to the air long after the last prisoner was taken to the stakes. A shout had echoed somewhere down the stone corridors, and a torch clattered to the floor. Lucius had dropped his cleaning rag, and his red eyes widened as he turned to face the figure squarely. It removed its hood, and the boy from York, now a young man, appeared. His eyes were a deep-navy blue, and a gouge had sliced the left half of his face. He bled black.
The air left Lucius’s lungs as he transformed to his devilish height with horns, fangs, and talons protruding.
The creature removed a crossbow outfitted with a hawthorn stake from beneath the billowing folds of his black robes. But before he could engage the mechanism, the great King Abaddon stormed down the corridor, flanked by his praetorian guard, Morpheein Cristo, while his sentinel, Harcourt Pinch, flew around the pillars with a screech in the form of his rook familiar.
Whatever the figure was, he’d fled, bursting through a dingy casement window with a wingspan the size of two men. Abaddon had whispered its name: dhamphyr. Vampire hunter. Avenger.
And now, in the brightening sunlight, the ermine’s bones ached with an unforgiving exhaustion, fear, and the scent of betrayal. There she was, his Therese, out with one of those creatures.
The ermine growled. His claws dug into the dirt, and he nipped at the heels of a passerby, sinking his little razor teeth into the sensitive, filthy Achille’s tendon of a porter. The man shouted, jumping almost a metre high, and his basket of lettuce heads dropped to the ground and rolled across the cobbles like the severed heads in the Place de la Revolution.
The ermine, licking the blood from his lips, skittered down a side street. He vowed to leave the imprudent aristocrat, Therese Hortense Bellinger, to the black cloud of fate.
III
In the flower market on the Seine, dappled sunlight shattered across stalks of tulips, lilies, and daffodils. The colours refracted, dreamlike, into vibrant, buttery hues that rivalled cathedral glass, and the din of the crowd buzzed louder than a swarm of honeybees.
Sebastien Benoit Quartermayns, son of a draper, regarded the mademoiselle, Bellinger, beneath the stiff, black brim of his hat. Her eyes, the colour of evergreen, roved a crate of twisted sunflowers and daffodils.
He watched her appraise each brassy, loud petal with a touch of her gloved hand, and he wondered if her fingers bore the mark of her pen. He took her hand as a dusky beetle bit at the stalk of a broad, bell-shaped daffodil.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her eyes crinkling with mirth.
His smile widened as he pulled each finger from her glove, one after the other, in a slow undress. The sun beat down on his dark hat, heating his head as her cheeks flushed. The glove came loose, and he pulled it off.
She laughed as he inspected her hand, turning the palm up to face him. He planted a kiss there.
“Sebastien,” she said.
“I was looking for ink.” He eyed the black stains which had pooled around the edges of her fingernails.
Her smile faded, and she turned away from him. Adjusting her cotton fichu, she took a few steps away, stopping in front of a barrel of thorny roses. The petals were eaten away at the edges, giving the flowers a ragged, torn look.
Sebastien tightened his grip on his cane. The sounds of the market faded as his anger began to needle him in the pit of his stomach. A twisting, tightening fist seized his insides as the same argument that had plagued them for months reared its head once more. He wondered, with irritation pricking the flesh around his ears, how she could continue to be so foolish in these times of such danger. His head reeled, and his jaw ticked as he approached her from behind, and stood so close to her that each heave of his chest brushed against her back. He pocketed her glove.
With the tip of her bare finger, Therese traced the ripped edge of a rose petal, bleached white from a greedy, stag beetle’s appetite.
Sebastien leaned down, and he put his lips to the edge of her ear. He wanted nothing more than to banish the argument forever, but his pleas for her safety remained ignored, and it gripped him in fear and anger unmatched. Her hair smelled like powder, and a lock which had come loose from beneath her white cap caressed his cheekbone. Beside the graceful curve of her neck, he eyed the crowd and the full, bursting colour of the flower market. Her very proximity confused his anger.
He whispered, “Therese, it’s not safe.” He felt her tense.
She lifted her hand above the roses, and her fingers clenched into a fist as he continued.
“It’s not safe to write those things now,” he said, with a plea to soften his voice. If they’d been alone, he would have seized her in passion, rage, and panic that she would soon disappear into the ravenous maw of the Jacobin state if he failed to hold on to her tight enough.
She sighed, although he suspected she meant it as a scoff, and her hand uncurled. Plucking a rose from the barrel, she turned to him. Her eyes glimmered, the pupils tiny pinpricks draped in the most determined black.
“They can’t keep doing it, Sebastien. It’s devilish,” she whispered. Her face had somewhat paled. “It’s murder,” she hissed, sidestepping away from him again.
He gripped her arm, gently. The whites of her eyes watered, turning pink as she stared up at him with an opened mouth. He put his hand against her cheek. Several tears escaped from the corners of her eyes as she closed them. With a heaviness in his spirit, Sebastien watched her tears trail down her powdered cheeks, and he wiped them away with his thumb before they disappeared into the ecru lace of her neckline. Her skin was warm, and she kept her eyes shut as he held her close.
“But they are doing it,” he said. “And they won’t hesitate to send you off to the guillotine, too.” His throat tightened after he said it like the words were a portent and a poison.
She looked up at him with a pinched face, her tears quickly dissipating, replaced with a dry anger as she shook off his grip and hastily wiped away the moisture at the corners of her eyes.
“Someone has to resist them. If we don’t,” she said, glancing around, “then we are cloaked in blood as red as this.” She offered him the rose. One of the thorns had pricked the pad of her index finger.
He choked on the bitterness in his soul, and took the rose from her, tossing it into the barrel along with the others. Pressing his finger to the cut on hers, a jolt of lightning raced through him, and his hands suddenly buzzed with a strange electricity.
She put her bare hand to his cheek, and her touch calmed him for a moment before she spoke.
“Sebastien, this is the life I’ve chosen for myself. I thought it’s what you wanted, too. Weren’t we supposed to do this
together?”
He shook his head, and panic seized his chest. He hated admitting his cowardice, but he wasn’t ready to die yet.
“In the beginning, yes. But I never expected it to turn into this, with entire families spying on each other, turning each other in. You can’t ask me to give up living with you for a country that doesn’t care whether we live or die.” He glanced around the crowd again, biting his tongue for his voice had become too loud. A few metres away in the shade of a storefront awning, the pockmarked flower merchant glowered at him with suspicion from beneath his wide-brimmed hat before pulling a curved pipe from his pocket.
Sebastien averted his eyes. After a moment, he said quietly, “Let someone else do it. Anyone but you. For my sake, and your father’s,” he said.
Therese grimaced, removing her touch. He hated the way she looked in such anguish, torn between principle and owning the responsibility of caring for another’s heart.
She shook her head. “Cowards,” she whispered. “You’re all cowards.”
“Don’t say that.” He took her glove from his pocket. With a rougher touch than he intended, he regloved her hand. The buzzing in his head grew louder, and the edges of his vision became eclipsed in shadow, despite the cloudless day.
“I can’t even get you to go against your father’s wishes. Why would I expect you to speak out against a group of malcontent, murderous tyrants?” She hissed, her eyes narrowing.
Her petulance wowed, intrigued, and infuriated him. With one last look at her pierced index finger, he shoved the glove over her hand and let go of her. The buzzing shadows in his head began to recede, and he frowned. A scream boiled inside of him, like the steam escaping from a heated kettle.
Everything which had first endeared her to him, now incensed him. Her idealism was folly, her passion, a deadly misstep. It was he who died when she danced so close to danger. And for what? For whom? Sebastien turned his face toward heaven. Did He not hear the falling of the blade? The anguish of thousands?
Sebastien felt impotent to stop her. She wasn’t his wife, and even if she had been, he hesitated to squash the flame within her he so wished to possess for himself.
If he got close enough to the fire which burned inside of her, he wondered if it could beat back the winter that seemed to settle deeper into his bones with every passing year. He couldn’t say with certainty when the feeling had first started. But perhaps it had been the first time his mother had glanced at him with that look of woeful surrender, which he’d come to know so well as he aged into a man.
The first time that look had darkened his mother’s otherwise imperturbable features he’d been a small boy. They were near the ocean at Aquitaine, and the sand was fine and cold and wet beneath his bare feet, dampening the ends of his trousers, while his mother waded in the surf which rolled in slow as fog, but perhaps it was the haziness of his memory which seemed to slow time.
His mother’s dress beaten back by the waves, swirled in the water as the salt spray kicked up. The ocean had wicked up the material of her dress, darkening it slowly.
Sebastien, no more than five, had tugged on the pleat of her skirt near the wet demarcation as a gull shrieked overhead. His mother had turned to look down at him. The sun peeked through the bird’s black-tipped feathers and winked over the locks of her charcoal hair, the same colour she’d bestowed upon his head at birth.
Her face had been terrifying. The bottom of her eyes seemed to pull down lower, wider. The skin around her mouth was stretched thin, losing its contours. Her expression had been thickly laced with the kind of resignation he’d only recognised years later, when the carts clattered down the filthy streets of Paris, full of people in dirty rags and squinting eyes, the carts which led them to the guillotine like hens for the Christmas slaughter. The look on the prisoners’ faces and his mother’s that day, and for so many days onwards, was one of a sad, visceral disappointment. The kind that seized breath, that smashed wit with the clenched fist of iron disbelief.
He caught her glancing at him like that at mundane intervals throughout the years: at midmorning mass, her missal pressed beneath her nose. In the crowded, muddy rue de Franciade on the way to the market. When his father lectured him about the correct way—the absolutely correct way—to sharpen a knife, with both their faces quickly turning red. Sebastien grew to prefer his father’s increasingly haughty look of irritation to his mother’s more chilling expression.
Therese was right. He was a coward, a coward for her, his inglorious hide, and selfish dreams of quiet obscurity, far away from the piercing look of his mother and father. Their looks of ice and fire, of screaming, bloody birth, and quiet, cold death.
Therese’s scowl was unmistakable as she pushed him away, hurrying off, disappearing into the crowd. He watched her go and bit his tongue.
IV
Pierre Francois, finest draper of Montmartre, father of Sebastien Benoit Quartermayns, and husband to Marguerite Lorrette, squeezed the trigger of a powder can. Clay tinted red, drifted through the small room in a shadowy cloud and filled the air with notes of jasmine. Pierre Francois lowered the can and regarded the stiff curls of his peruke. He gave a curt sniff and squeezed the trigger once more as he thought of his deceitful wife and her bastard son.
In his youth, Pierre Francois had never been one for idealism, nor did he regard the fairer sex as indeed, fairer. Lorrette was everything he’d ever hoped for in a bride: dismissive, cold, and only concerned for her station and her appearances to the higher echelons of Parisian society. It certainly helped to quell Pierre’s reservations regarding their matrimony that she came with an impressive dowry.
While most young men would have been quite disappointed with the arrangement, Pierre was not. Lorrette’s penchant for rarely speaking to her husband except to inform him that the pigeon cotes needed tending to or that the gardener was late that spring in whitewashing the cellar, quite pleased her husband. Pierre was a man of business, and he preferred to let it leak into his domestic life, taking it over like some blessed sap spilling from the tree of his life, encompassing everything in a sticky, calculating, and stale encasement.
But, he’d been naïve. And how!
He scowled as he set the powder can onto the mahogany console with an impertinent clink. The curls of the peruke shook, and powder flaked from them in a reddish haze.
That . . . woman, he thought with a taste of bitterness on his tongue. Despite her concise demeanor, it’d been a ruse. A terrible trick, and Pierre Francois had born the brunt of humiliation, burying itself deep into his burly chest.
He bit the inside of his lip as he turned the events of that fateful midnight over in his mind, their memory now cold, and his anger along with it. Although the temperature of his rage had lowered, the intensity was still the same, and even now, it began to flare up like shards of growing ice as he pondered the idea of his son—a stranger—who was not of his seed.
Nearly three decades prior, Pierre had awoken some time around midnight with a start, his stomach grumbling. The drapery business he’d inherited from his father, and his father before, and so on through several generations, had grown along with Pierre’s waistline. He glanced out the dusky windowpanes to a night lit by a full moon, and he struck a match on his bedside table and lit a tallow candle. He dragged himself from the bed, donning a pair of soft, sheepskin slippers, and made his way down the servants’ stairwell to the larder for a vittle to quieten his burgeoning appetite.
But when he’d passed his wife’s quarters, her door was open. Although he and Lorrette had never shared a bedchamber for a night, he’d known her habits. Once that woman retired, she never left her boudoir.
A strange feeling overcame Pierre: worry and suspicion, but he dismissed them as his gnawing hunger, even though he’d eaten less than four hours prior. His feet shuffled quietly down the first few steps until he came to the narrow landing. The window casement which adorned the landing was open. He heard something odd, like the tenuous caw of a raven
, or the groan of an opening door, spill through the aperture. A strange smell wafted in through the window, and it reminded him of fresh-cut hay, but it was only early spring.
Pierre glanced behind his shoulder at the shadows above his head. They crept like spiders as he adjusted his nightcap and thought of waking his manservant, Victor, but shook his head and scowled. Pierre was, after all, the man of the house, and he deigned to at least peer out the back and see what was going on, hoping to discern where in God’s country his wife had gone.
His appetite abated when he felt a horrifying cold seep through the old window which faced the back lawn and the grape arbour—a draft, but laced with poison. A shudder of incomprehensible fear swept through Pierre, and a fist tightened around his sternum.
Pierre was terribly familiar with that fist. He’d felt it when he knew a customer would not pay, and he vividly recalled it the one time a drunken man had ambled into his shoppe and fallen against the window display, scattering folds of floral-patterned chenille. Pierre felt that fist the first time he’d laid eyes on the woman who would become his future wife but had brushed the fist aside once he remembered the sheer size of social and political capital she would bring to their future union.
The fist was his intuition.
The steady drip of his fear soon gave way to anger, though, for that was how Pierre and his father, and his father before him, had handled such an inconvenient emotion as fear. He scowled again, shaking his head, and shuffled quickly down the stairs, passed the larder, into the tiny hall and vestibule that housed the westward-facing door that opened to the back lawn and the grape arbour.
Pierre squeezed the latch on the door and opened it but a crack. He lifted the weeping candle, snug within its chamberstick, and squinted into the night, illuminated by the street lanterns hanging from the courtyard walls opposite the property line.
The Heads That Rolled Page 3
