Mrs. Dracula: Vampire Anthology Read online

  He knows of a library; his French is passable, his Flemish non-existent, but here there will be books he can read in English. Pure luxury. He heads to the Toc H club on Gasthuisstraat and spends the day immersed in books, occasionally treating himself to a cup of real English tea. This makes him happier than he has been for months.

  She is waiting for him in the twilight when he steps out of the library, blinking owlishly in the cool air. She stands beneath an iron street lamp. The lamp is unlit and will remain so until after the war. Her skin – so white – glows in the fading light.

  His heart skips a beat when he sees her. She doesn’t smile. Her crimson lips are set in a frosty line, but he imagines he can see something alive in her eyes.

  “Bonjour madam,” he says. His voice sounds bolder than he feels. He is excited to meet her again.

  There is a beat while she regards him. She frowns. “Good evening.” Her response is clipped and without warmth. He stands in front of her, a respectful distance, looking down. Their eyes lock and they stare at each other, perhaps both trying to read the other’s intentions. They remain that way for too long.

  “My name is Francis,” says Francis eventually and extends his hand.

  She studies his hand for a moment before raising her fingers to meet his. He lifts her gloved hand to his mouth and kisses it.

  “Elizabetta,” she says.

  “Where are you from, Elizabetta? Not from Belgium originally?”

  “Romania,” she says without artifice. She has no desire to lie. She is his enemy. He needs to understand that.

  Francis nods at this news, wondering if this explains her aloofness. “Would you like …” He gestures helplessly down the street, unsure whether to invite her for a glass of wine or to supper. He is famished, and would eat, but she is a married woman, and he is unsure of the etiquette for escorting a woman to dinner in her husband’s absence. He knows that in England, a woman of a certain class would not enter a drinking establishment at all. But the war makes all things equal. He is at a loss, his lack of experience and his youth speaking volumes.

  “No,” she says. “I would not like.”

  Francis is on the verge of panic. He recognises that he is young, naïve, and clumsy but he hopes she sees something else in him too. Finally her façade cracks, and she smiles to take the sting out of her words. Her teeth are a bright white.

  “Well,” Francis begins, confused about how to proceed. He has been taught to take the lead where women are concerned.

  She does not appear to be one for convention however. She rescues her hand from his, and then tucks her arm under his. “Please. Join me,” she says, and Francis understands it is a command not an invitation. She walks quickly, dragging him along the street until he falls into step beside her.

  “You are a musician?” she says, surprising him.

  “Yes. Well, I was. Before the war. I was studying music. How did you know?”

  “I didn’t know. I guessed. I could tell by your hands. I am very good at reading people’s hands.”

  “I play the violin and the piano, and the cello less well.”

  He allows himself to be pulled into a side road. The street is lined with huge oak trees that remind him of home. The houses here are grand; early nineteenth century, tall but terraced. Finally, she halts outside a dusty door, thick lace hanging at the parlour window. “Go up,” she instructs, and he climbs the stone steps. She gestures, and he turns the handle. The door opens, a little reluctantly, juddering as he pushes against it. Inside, most of the house is in darkness, but one lamp burns at the back of the passage, the steps beyond leading down into the kitchen.

  He waits for Elizabetta. She pushes the front door closed with ease, and then opens the second door into the back room, stepping back and allowing him to enter first. A fire burns in the grate inside, and Francis almost skips in, glad to be out of the cold and the darkness. He heads for the fire and warms his hands.

  “One moment,” she says and disappears into the depths of the dark house while he remains where he is.

  When she returns she is carrying a lamp and a basket of bread. He watches her cross the vast room. The lamp illuminates a baby grand piano, covered by a claret-coloured velvet throw. The keys are exposed, as though she knew he would play. The top of the piano is closed and set with a picnic.

  Francis gawps at the display and joins Elizabetta by the piano.

  She laughs at his expression. “Your eyes are so wide,” she says. “What is it you like? The piano? The food?”

  He takes in his surroundings, and then his eyes rest on her.

  “All of it,” he says.

  She stands in the shadows and watches as he devours the spread she had readied for him. At first he beseeches her to join him, he can’t possibly eat it all. But it is not bread and cheese, or the rabbit and turnip pie, that she hungers for, not the fine wine from her cellar that she thirsts after. She can hear the blood singing in his veins. It is rich and pure, a fresh young vintage. It is clean.

  She desires him, his life blood at least.

  When he finishes the food, she hands him a cloth, and he wipes his hands and mouth. They move the debris from the piano, remove the velvet covering and lift the lid. She gestures at the piano stool. He thumps the stool and dust billows in the room, sparkling in the light from the fire. He pretends to check his bow tie, and waft his coat tails, and then he sits at the piano.

  He hesitates momentarily, his fingers hovering over the keys, and Elizabetta wonders how long it has been since he last played.

  He may be a little rusty, but he is superb. He opens with some Chopin, ‘Heroic Polonaise’, noble and rousing, but it doesn’t suit the mood or her sensibilities. He stops, and she fears he will not resume, but after some thought he begins to play once more. He has a vast knowledge of music, that much is obvious. A catalogue of scores is stored in his memory. He plays a couple of pieces of music from ‘Petru Rareş’ by Eduard Cardella, and moves on to ‘Dochia’. He is unsure at times, but improvises and plays with growing confidence.

  The folk music of her homeland stirs the muddy water of her memories. It reminds her of life before immortality, when she had a mother keen to marry off her daughters. She recalls dressing in white, a symbol of her purity, and attending a dance where she was introduced to the Count. He was handsome, charismatic; he courted her, lured her in. Casting her mind into the past, she retraces their dance steps, reminisces about how lightly the Count held her hand as he drew her across the floor, how gentle he was. He took full advantage of her youth and innocence, and she remembers the pain of the knowledge of her new immortality but also the joy of loving that man at a time when they were free, when they weren’t hunted. Before they were forced apart. Tears roll down her cheeks and suddenly she longs for that time, for before …

  The piano is quiet and Elizabetta comes to, alarmed at her sudden show of vulnerability, at the risk that he has seen her as her true self and not her youthful projection. Francis studies the thoughts cross her face at that precise moment, and he frowns. She shakes her head, scared of what he has witnessed. She steps out of the shadows, in control, appearing young and confident once more, and wipes away the remnants of her tears.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “The music moved me. I remembered my life.”

  “Before?” he says as though he has read her mind, but she understands that the word is a constant refrain among the current generation too for they too are cursed with lives that are divided by the alternate reality that is war. There is no now, only ‘before’ and ‘after’.

  She nods sadly.

  “Please,” she says. “Play again.”

  “Something a little more stirring?” he asks, but she shakes her head.

  “No. Something that makes us … feel.”

  They lock eyes. Of course. Isn’t that what they both desire? Validation. They live, and they matter, if only to each other at this time and in this place.

  She has a sudden longing f
or this empathetic young man, something that hasn’t happened to her since the Count. She finds Francis interesting, particularly the long thin fingers on his pale hands, a perfect match for his long, slender neck with its prominent Adam’s apple. She imagines running her forefinger down his throat and for a second pictures herself in her true form, puncturing the skin with her finger – an elongated talon of a digit – and watching his blood well up and ooze around the wound. Her eyes roll back in her head as she imagines bending her face to his, lapping gently at the scarlet flow, suckling on his vitality and goodness. She shudders in delight at the thought of increasing her ardour and draining him of every precious ounce of life.

  But unusually, she also entertains the thought of keeping him with her forever, her new immortal companion.

  When the music comes to a halt once more, she returns to the present and finds herself hovering behind him, one hand on his shoulder, the other caressing the smooth place between his ear and his shirt collar. She has scratched him with her nail, but not enough to break the skin. She can smell the copper tang of his blood through the thin veneer of skin remaining beneath the scratch.

  His pulse throbs beneath the palm of her hand. It beats firmly, quickly. He is hot. She sees the flush of his cheek. He desires her, and yes, she desires him. She could take him to her bed. She could finish this now.

  Or she could start forever with him, this night.

  He moves his right hand on the keys, by mistake, and the piano trills lightly. It is melodic and beautiful and reminds her of his gift.

  Francis gets to his feet. He turns to her, and she sees the look of longing in his eyes. He stoops slightly, leans towards her. She eyes his neck hungrily, then looks at his mouth, his lips are parted, his eyes full of yearning. She makes her decision.

  Elizabetta pushes him away roughly. She is strong. He crashes backwards into the piano and cries out in pain even as the piano thunders in response. He stares at her in confusion, and she screams at him, one word, many voices: “Go.”

  He doesn’t need to be told twice. She draws herself up, hovers above the floor, watches as he stumbles away from her, dashes out of the room and for the front door. He hesitates momentarily to look back at her, but she is already there behind him, her face a mask of hatred, her eyes black and blooded. He shrieks in consternation, tumbles down the steps and races down the street heading for the safety of town and his billet, not too far away.

  She watches him go and is about to turn back into the house when something flits in the shadows – there and gone, as fast as lightning. Her eyes narrow in hatred.

  She howls and the sound ricochets around the neighbourhood. It is two in the morning and not many lie awake, but those who are, find their bowels turned to ice.

  She waits for an answering howl, but nothing is forthcoming. That tells her all she needs to know. Who goes there? Foe not friend.

  She steps out into the night. She is a supreme huntress. Her kind would do well to remember it.

  Francis huddles under the covers. He shivers with the cold. He has left his great coat at Elizabetta’s house. He wonders at his folly, and whether he can safely retrieve the coat in the morning. Does he dare? He is not sure whether he is most scared of his commanding officer’s displeasure at the loss of part of his uniform, or of returning to Elizabetta and facing her wrath. It is a too close to call.

  What happened at the house? His mind replays the memories. It had all been going so well. Swimmingly, the chaps would say. His fingers caressing the piano keys, his mind stroking Elizabetta’s skin. She was intoxicating, alluring. And then she had switched personalities, become a raving banshee.

  He remembers the look on her face when he turned at the door, and he trembles. He’d envisaged her as an aged hag, the lines deeply engrained in her sallow skin, her raven hair turned wild and white in his imagination. How could this be? He can’t process his memories and reinvents what surely happened. It must have been the wine, a bad barrel. She had demanded he take his leave, of course she had. He had overstayed his welcome, overplayed his hand. She was a married woman after all.

  He finally sleeps, and in his dreams he imagines her entering the room, standing over him, watching him while he tosses and turns and mumbles in his sleep. He calls to her, and she catches his hand and kisses his throat.

  When he awakes in the morning, his great coat is hanging from a hook behind the door.

  Francis hitches a ride back to the Salient the next morning on the back of a supply wagon. He sits up front alongside a verbose private from Liverpool and studies the old nag’s back end as it hauls them farther away from Poperinge.

  The private, Wilf he says his name is, is full of gossip, some of it lewd, some of it sensational. Francis nods and joins in where he can get a word in edgeways. Wilf whistles when Francis tells him he’s had forty-eight hours leave.

  “Forty-eight hours? Did you hear about the murders?” Wilf asks.

  “Murder?” Francis remembers the man in the alley behind Le Papillion Bleu. Of course. How could he have forgotten? It was as though Elizabetta had chased his memories away. He thinks about Elizabetta again, ruing how the night ended.

  “Murders.” Wilf emphasises the s. “Three apparently. On Wednesday night, it was some chap in a bar. Last night, it was some fusilier, from Rhyll or somewhere, and some young lass apparently. A dancer in one of the clubs.”

  “How did they die?”

  “Had their throats cut or some such!” Wilf exclaims. “The bizzies are looking for the killer. I expect they’ll be wanting a chat wi’ you.”

  “I expect so.” Francis can hear the guns in the distance. He slumps in his seat. “Well, they know where to find me.”

  Wilf laughs loudly. Gallows humour. When you’re surrounded by the dead and the dying, you have to find humour in the bleakest of situations, otherwise you would never cope.

  Francis waves Wilf off and heads back to his unit. His destination is in sight now. He can hear the sharp crack of rifles farther down the line. Men are dying within half a mile of where he walks. Black clouds of acrid smoke roil on the horizon, making his eyes sting. Or at least that is his excuse for the water that runs from them.

  He had been naïve to think he would make a difference by signing up. He knows that he will spend the rest of his life lamenting all he’s seen, everything he’s witnessed here on the front line. He should have remained at home and brought beauty into the world through his music, maybe had children with Lottie. But shouldn’t he first ensure a world that is safe for them to grow up in? Francis sighs. Idealism will kill you, but still, he needs to believe that every death makes a difference.

  There is a renewed purpose among the officers. Orders demand they capture enemy territory without further delay – and at any and every cost. The weeks and months of stagnant waiting in the trenches are over. The recruitment drive at home, the women in munition factories, everything and everyone has mobilised for a final push. Reinforcements have been drafted in as a priority, and now there is constant daily heavy bombing of the German line. The strategy appears to be one of obliterating the enemy using heavy artillery, before the ground soldiers go in to finish them off.

  Francis is haunted by his encounter with Elizabetta. Lottie has all but disappeared from his mind, and he recognises that when he returns to England he will have to break their engagement. It wouldn’t be fair on her to pretend. Poor Lottie, she is a shrinking violet in comparison to Elizabetta’s dark rose.

  Francis finds himself longing for Elizabetta, her rage – and his fear – are conveniently forgotten. She occupies his thoughts, and he drifts through the busy days in a somnambulant reverie. He puts in for more leave. He is owed it, and he must see her again before the big push.

  Elizabetta climbs onto the roof of her house and balances easily by the chimney stack. She looks out over the town. It is a clear night, cold, and she can see miles into the distance. Both sides are active tonight. Fires are burning in the far distance. The very a
ir seems to shake and vibrate as mortars pound into the earth and explode.

  A sleepless night for Francis, she thinks. This morning she had received a letter from him. She read it over and over, memorising the words he’d carved on the page, caressing his looping handwriting, as creative and artistic as she would expect from him. The paper carries the faint scent of sulphur, and if she inhales deeply she can smell his natural musk too. She likes it.

  My dear madam,

  Elizabetta – I don’t know how to address you, and yet you are, dare I say so, suddenly incredibly dear to me. You are all I think of. You inhabit my thoughts every hour of the day, and when I sleep, I dream of you. During the hours of sunlight, you are lost to me, and yet, at least in my dreams, you are present and I can reach out and touch you.

  Alone at night, when I am keeping watch, I think I sense you close by, and I will this to be so. You are my own guardian angel.

  I can only apologise if you thought me too forward at our last meeting, or if I angered you in some way. I wished to kiss you, to meet your sweet lips, with my own, and yet, I cannot know your circumstances and would never dare to presume.

  However, I fear I am all but lost without you.

  If you would forgive me my trespass, I would make it up to you. Please allow me to call on you when I next receive leave. If you can find it in your heart to reply fondly to this missive, I would be delirious with happiness.

  Dear Elizabetta, if I receive no word I will endeavour to be patient but please expect me to call on you, no matter what.

  Your loving servant,

  Francis

  He is daring, she thinks. She tucks the letter against her bosom and is afraid of what this means, for her, for him, for them both.