I woke in the small bedroom, in the dark. I looked for Laurent with my hands across the covers, but found myself alone. Sitting up in the dimness, I saw that a note had been left for me, but I couldn't read it. I took it and walked carefully out of the room, holding onto the wall.
In those days, dark was truly dark. There is a silence to deep darkness, which now is difficult to find. These days, there is always some electric noise far distant -- a turning ceiling fan, or the low rumble of a refrigerator. Then, we had none of it, and a vampire could stand quite still in a room, in such darkness as closing one's eyes made no difference, and lie in wait for a noise which might give prey away. I stood quietly in the sitting room for a sound to catch my ear, and soon heard the rhythmic hush of sleeping breath.
I saw Laurent there, sleeping by himself in the yellow bedroom. Rather than disturb him, but reassured, I took my letter through the scullery towards the back of the house to hold the paper up to the pale moonlight reflecting weakly there. I made out a few words, such as my name, and "love" and "here", but mostly studied the tight letters and the scrolling signature towards the bottom. It was cold and damp by the scullery window, and I felt the chill which Laurent had earlier complained of, and some dizziness. Mercifully, there was a perfect lightness in my lungs, and no pain.
By my feet, there was a basket of washing and I knelt to look through its contents for something warm to wear. I had by then a few bespoke garments of my own, laid on by Laurent by way of his own tailor, but nothing terribly insulating. Towards the bottom there was a fox fur throw, and I wrapped it around myself. I sat on a stool by the sink with my head lowered, comforted to sit in a small space. I think that all who are old fear the uncertainty of wide, lonely spaces. It is far too like the abyss. I huddled there for some time, mind wandering lazily between thoughts of Laurent dreaming and blood.
In the morning, my master found me as he walked the house to draw the curtains. He stroked the fox fur and wound a curl of my hair around his finger. He offered me his hand and I took it, feeling somewhat melancholy. Even now, I often suffer from insomnia, and lie awake at night without relief. When left too much to myself, I tend towards sadness. I suppose it is part of my character, brought on in late childhood and with me ever since. His hand held mine loosely.
In the weak light, Laurent took the letter from me and read it, and I ached to be able to read. "It is an invitation from our friend Valentin. There is a fete for Shrove Tuesday this evening, and then drinking and gambling at his salon. See here, no one is sore at all. Society quite loves you. You gave them such a thrill, almost killing V. Will we go, you and I? Valentin says he will simply die if you refuse. Shall we?" he asked.
I shook my head and drew the fur up to cover my chin, in no condition to attend a fete.
"Don't you think the excitement will cheer you a little? Do you mind terribly if I go alone?" he asked.
When I didn't respond, he took me to bed, beating the pillows into shape and drawing the covers back for me. I could no more go out than read the invitation, impossible in my condition, with little blood and feeling low.
"Will you take ashes tomorrow? For Ash Wednesday. I will help you to the parish church if without them you would be distressed," he said.
"I don't know," I said. I had lost my sense of time completely.
When he had seen me tucked in tightly, he asked if I would like to travel away from the city, perhaps to the coast, where I had grown up and been happy as a boy. When I didn't respond to that either, he went to the secretary desk and opened its small drawers until he found my rosary, and put it in my hand.
"I will go alone then. Pardon me. It will be the last opportunity to do so until after Easter. Tell me if there is anything you need and I will get it for you."
"Truthfully, I would like a loaf of bread. Only to smell it. It would comfort me," I said.
He sat on the coverlet and stroked it gently. "I will look for bread, pet. Lately, there has been some rioting across the Seine. Perhaps it has been put down by now. The price of bread has been quite high this Winter. What sort of grain do you like?"
"Rye."
"I will look for it. Try to sleep."
"Are they dying? Is it a famine?" I asked.
"I don't know. I suspect that the people are always dying, pet," he said. He seemed sincere. "Be safe while I am gone. If some intruder comes, make no sound. You seem quite weak to me, but you will be alright given time."
"I wouldn't like to see Dasius," I said, the name feeling foreign and awkward in my mouth.
"Don't worry about that, pet. He has left us."
He rose to leave and I tried to catch his sash, because I saw around my melancholia that he was fretting, but he moved too quickly for me. Soon, the door was shut behind him.
Far later on, when it no longer mattered, I would come to know that he was seeing lovers in the city, and sometimes I would smell them on his clothes, and sometimes I wouldn't. He had many contacts to keep up, and often spent whole mornings calling at various houses. In those days, young gentlemen often slept late, having conducted their networking all through the night, and he visited them at their noon repast, so that they might see him by daylight and know him as a man, flesh and blood, rather than as a specter kissing throats by night. Specters don't need silver. Men do. At the time, he thought it none of my affair.
For all of that day, February 6th, 1742, Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras, he called on gentlemen in the city, and that evening, went to the fete at Valentin's, this I know because he told me later. As for me, I slept finally, and when I woke, was not alone.
It's true that I was weak, and that lack of blood causes a certain inertness and brittleness of spirit, so at first, noticing that there was someone near me, I didn't move. I flicked my eyes one way and then the other, completely still, listening. I could hear the lolloping of a heart beating in flesh and listened to it for a minute, pretending to slumber.
For the first few days when I had woken from the transition, Laurent had slept curled next to my body, and I had listened to his heartbeat, so I knew the one in bed with me was not him. When I finally moved, and woke the stranger, I saw that it was Valentin, without his powder and other fine things, and it froze me. For a moment, I wondered if I had slept more than one day, because it confused me that he would be in my bed, rather than at his own fete, entertaining. I thought perhaps that Laurent had met him there, and brought him home to me.
How could I have known what was about to happen to me? I was lightheaded, clouded with sleep. I reached for Valentin, and without a word, he kissed the side of my nose, which seemed intimate. His lips lingered there, and I saw that he was shivering, and wanted me, and that his skin was so pale that he seemed near death, but it was dark, and I was not worried about color.
His skin was hot to the touch, and he seemed bathed in a sheen of sweat, which I barely noted, taking him by the arm. When I touched the place where I had bitten him, the week before, he made an intake of breath, as if burned. The wound was still tender. But I dispensed with seduction, because I needed the blood, and because he seemed weak and different somehow. No alarms warned me. No instinct lit.
Arsenic has no taste, no color, no odor. A drop on the tongue brings luminous paleness, so fashionable in that time. Too much for too long, and the user begins to smell of garlic and the hair begins to fall out. A small poisoner's drought, taken all at once, begins to take effect in half an hour, confusion, a blinding headache. Over time, the victim develops motor control problems, muscle spasms, followed by uncontrollable seizing, and eventually, organ failure. Death comes terribly slowly for those poisoned over time, invisibly. The luxury of a long death had not been planned for me.
The poison in the blood invaded me without my ever having known that it was there, and in such quantity that he must have taken it just as I had awoken, to show so little sign. Perhaps it had been the movement of throwing back the drought which woke me. He was stone dead before my lips left his skin.
I remember holding onto his body, thinking, still cloudy, still confused, have I killed him? Did I do this? Before my head seemed to split in half, as if I had been hit by an ax blow, infinite times more painful than the shock which had met me at my first blood. The room lit with white light and my hands went to my eyes, trying to cover them. I heard myself make sudden desperate noises, and as if separated from my body, felt myself try to stumble out of bed, becoming tangled over my legs, which felt of shattered glass. My entire body went numb with pins and needles, and I was all head, crying out in fear, touching my hair to see if I had been hit, because I had no idea yet that I had been poisoned. My thoughts were scattered. I thought, what have I done wrong? And there were feet in silk stockings and plain French heels standing in the doorway, and I hadn't even realized that I was on the floor.
When the figure in the doorway knelt to call to me, I had no horror left that it was Dasius, only thinking he would help me, but he made no move to do so. His face was impassive, completely without expression or love. So it had been him who had done it to me, I knew, darkening my doorway, ready to watch me die for taking his master away. I knew even in that moment that Dasius was responsible for my poisoning, that he and a suicidal Valentin had worked together to bring about the excuse of a grand fete to lure Laurent away, so that I would be alone and vulnerable. Dasius studied my face, as if to memorize my features in their rictus of agony. He was a figure like Death.
A first it was my fingers which began to twitch. Even today, I cannot feel my fingertips, understand? Even today, if you cut my hair, there is arsenic in every strand. Dasius had given Valentin a dose to drink which was enough to kill an entire household of courtiers. Valetin, in dying, bled from every orifice, the delicate vessels in his eyes and nose liquified with arsenic. If it had been light, I would have seen his eyes bloodshot as if in the last bloody throws of tuberculosis, which I would have recognized as death itself. Shivering which I had read as anticipation of the bite had been the beginning of all-over twitching, a collapse of the nervous system, which shortly began to take me.
I begged for Death to help me, and Dasius is still living today because of a last moment change of heart. He has since tried to tell me that he was quietly mad in the weeks after my making. He has told me that he had been going quietly mad for years, hoping that Laurent would softly kill him. He has tried to explain it all away by confessing that loneliness had made him wish to die, and that he couldn't stand me with Laurent, for love of me. Killing me, he had thought, would not only result in his own death at Laurent's hands, but destroy our master's peace of mind. When asked why he doesn't kill himself, he says that it is because he believes in the same God as me, and that he would rather suffer damnation than a suicide's perpetual limbo of confusion and wandering in fog.
But is that not what he has given me? It is difficult for me to collect my thoughts. There is a certain fogginess to my senses at times. I touch with my whole hand. When my young lover kisses my fingertips, I feel nothing. Mon enfant has told me of confused spells of wandering which I cannot remember, of following me through the garden on cool mornings, and recounts conversations had as if with my ghost. At times, the twitching returns, and no amount of blood-letting will stop it. These days I still it with a cigarette, which wonderful lover will light, cooing at me as if I am a child. I travel badly, and there is a gap in memory lasting months after Dasius dragged me into the washroom off that small bedroom. He has robbed me of my innocent early life, and of what health I had left.
Understand, his change of heart was not to save my life, but to save his own.
I began to hack and gutter, coughing blood from burst blood vessels in my lungs and throat, beginning to convulse. He ran a bath of cold water, stripping me, and commenced to desperately wash my skin, with a poisoner's knowledge of remedy. He opened my veins and begged my insensible head to drink from him, but I had no ability to hear him or do more than make fearful choking sounds of pain and terror, my feet slipping in my own blood. When it seemed that I would die, and that I was conscious of it, he desperately wept.
But I didn't die, because Laurent returned then, and measured the situation quickly, and because when my lips touched my master's throat, shivering with fear of convulsions past and approaching, his skin was hot enough to burn. He had broken every promise made to me of earnest love and devotion, had taken human blood to drunken excess at the fete, and for a moment, while still lucid, the sense of betrayal was so great I lost all will to live.