"Damn it, " I said. "I expected a letter. " No servants. They hadn't known when we would be back. I wanted to send someone to hire musicians. I had just fed, and I was warm and I told myself that I wanted to dance. She broke her stillness suddenly. She started to move in a rather deliberate way. With uncommon directness she went into the courtyard. I watched her kneel down by the pond. There she lifted two blocks of paving, and she took out a packet and brushed the sandy earth off it, and she brought it to me. Even before she brought it into the light I saw it was from Roget. This had come before we had ever gone up the Nile, and she had hidden it!
"But why did you do this! " I said. I was in a fury. I snatched the package from her and put it down on the desk. I was staring at her and hating her, hating her as never before. Not even in the egotism of childhood had I hated her as I did now!
"Why did you hide this from me! " I said.
"Because I wanted one chance! " she whispered. Her chin was trembling. Her lower lip quivered and I saw the blood tears. "But without this even, " she said, "you have made your choice. " I reached down and tore the packet apart. The letter slipped out of it, along with folded clippings from an English paper. I unraveled the letter, my hands shaking, and I started to read:
Monsieur, As you must know by now, on July 14, the mobs of Paris attacked the Bastille. The city is in chaos. There have been riots all over France. For months I have sought in vain to reach your people, to get them out of the country safely if I could. But on Monday last I received the word that the peasants and tenant farmers had risen against your father's house. Your brothers, their wives and children, and all who tried to defend the castle were slain before it was looted. Only your father escaped. Loyal servants managed to conceal him during the siege and later to get him to the coast. He is, on this very day, in the city of New Orleans in the former French colony of Louisiana. And he begs you to come to his aid. He is grief-stricken and among strangers. He begs for you to come.
There was more. Apologies, assurances, particulars . . . it ceased to make sense. I put the letter down on the desk. I stared at the wood and the pool of light made by the lamp.
"Don't go to him, " she said. Her voice was small and insignificant in the silence. But the silence was like an immense scream.
"Don't go to him, " she said again. The tears streaked her face like clown paint, two long streams of red coming from her eyes.
"Get out, " I whispered. The word trailed off and suddenly my voice swelled again. "Get out, " I said. And again my voice didn't stop. It merely went on until I said the words again with shattering violence: "GET OUT! "
4
I dreamed a dream of family. We were all embracing one another. Even Gabrielle in a velvet gown was there. The castle was blackened, all burnt up. The treasures I had deposited were melted or turned into ashes. It always comes back to ashes. But is the old quote actually ashes to ashes or dust to dust? Didn't matter. I had gone back and made them all into vampires, and there we were, the House de Lioncourt, whitefaced beauties even to the bloodsucking baby that lay in the cradle and the mother who bent to give it the wriggling longtailed gray rat upon which it was to feed. We laughed and we kissed one another as we walked through the ashes, my white brothers, their white wives, the ghostly children chattering together about victims, my blind father, who like a biblical figure had risen, crying:
"I CAN SEE! " My oldest brother put his arm around me. He looked marvelous in decent clothes. I'd never seen him look so good, and the vampiric blood had made him so spare and so spiritual in expression.
"You know it's a damn good thing you came when you did with all the Dark Gifts. " He laughed cheerfully.
"The Dark Tricks, dear, the Dark Tricks, " said his wife.
"Because if you hadn't, " he continued, "why, we'd all be dead! "
5
The house was empty. The trunks had been sent on. The ship would leave Alexandria in two nights. Only a small valise remained with me. On shipboard the son of the Marquis must now and then change his clothes. And, of course, the violin. Gabrielle stood by the archway to the garden, slender, longlegged, beautifully angular in her white cotton garments, the hat on as always, her hair loose. Was that for me, the long loose hair? My grief was rising, a tide that included all the losses, the dead and the undead. But it went away and the sense of sinking returned, the sense of the dream in which we navigate with or without will. It struck me that her hair might have been described as a shower of gold, that all the old poetry makes sense when you look at one whom you have loved. Lovely the angles of her face, her implacable little mouth.
"Tell me what you need of me, Mother, " I said quietly. Civilized this room. Desk. Lamp. Chair. All my brilliantly colored birds given away, probably for sale in the bazaar. Gray African parrots that live to be as old as men. Nicki had lived to be thirty.
"Do you require money from me? " Great beautiful flush to her face, eyes a flash of moving light-blue and violet. For a moment she looked human. We might as well have been standing in her room at home. Books, the damp walls, the fire. Was she human then? The brim of the hat covered her face completely for an instant as she bowed her head. Inexplicably she asked:
"But where will you go? "
"To a little house in the race Dumaine in the old French city of New Orleans, " I answered coldly, precisely. "And after he has died and is at rest, I haven't the slightest idea. "
"You can't mean this, " she said.
"I am booked on the next ship out of Alexandria, " I said.
"I will go to Naples, then on to Barcelona. I will leave from Lisbon for the New World. " Her face seemed to narrow, her features to sharpen. Her lips moved just a little but she didn't say anything. And then I saw the tears rising in her eyes, and I felt her emotion as if it were reaching out to touch me. I looked away, busied myself with something on the desk, then simply held my hands very still so they wouldn't tremble. I thought, I am glad Nicki took his hands with him into the fire, because if he had not, I would have to go back to Paris and get them before I could go on.
"But you can't be going to him! " she whispered. Him? Oh. My father.
"What does it matter? I am going! " I said. She moved her head just a little in a negative gesture. She came near to the desk. Her step was lighter than Armand's.
"Has any of our kind ever made such a crossing? " she asked under her breath.
"Not that I know of. In Rome they said no. "
"Perhaps it can't be done, this crossing. "
"It can be done. You know it can. " We had sailed the seas before in our cork-lined coffins. Pity the leviathan who troubles me. She came even nearer and looked down at me. And the pain in her face couldn't be concealed anymore. Ravishing she was. Why had I ever dressed her in ball gowns or plumed hats or pearls?
"You know where to reach me, " I said, but the bitterness of my tone had no conviction to it.
"The addresses of my banks in London and Rome. Those banks have lived as long as vampires already. They will always be there. You know all this, you've always known... "
"Stop, " she said under her breath. "Don't say these things to me. " What a lie all this was, what a travesty. It was just the kind of exchange she had always detested, the kind of talk she could never make herself. In my wildest imaginings, I had never expected it to be like this-that I should say cold things, that she should cry. I thought I would bawl when she said she was going. I thought I would throw myself at her very feet. We looked at each other for a long moment, her eyes tinged with red, her mouth almost quivering. And then I lost my control. I rose and I went to her, and I gathered her small, delicate limbs in my arms. I determined not to let her go, no matter how she struggled.