Sustenance (46 page)

“Who knows? I think he’s looking for a job there; he surely isn’t finding one here in France, unless he changes his mind about doing a book for Eclipse,” said Charis, bending down to set her plate on the blanket, then hunkering on her heels in order to decide upon a position that would make her comfortable. “Axel Bjornson says his apartment has been bugged again. Steve confirms it, and is planning to get around to check all of us for bugs this next week.” Gradually she sat down and put the plate on her thighs.

“I’m pleased to hear he’s being so diligent.” He shaded his eyes with his free hand. “I’ll schedule a check on the print-shop as well. Anything else?” Szent-Germain asked, thinking he would do well to warn Rogers of these developments.

“Well, Elvira believes she’s pregnant but hasn’t told Jesse.” She took a small sip of the white wine in her glass. “She told me shortly after we arrived, when she pulled me aside to talk. I know she’s told Willie, and maybe even Mary Anne. I think she wants Jesse to find out from some source other than herself.”

“How far along is she?”

“Not very; she’s two weeks late with the curse.” Charis picked up one of Wilhelmina’s deviled eggs and ate half of it.

“Then she might not be pregnant; a miscarriage can throw the cycle off-schedule for some women.” Memories of Zilphah and Orazia flitted through his mind, though only one had suffered a miscarriage.

“I don’t think that would be any consolation to her,” said Charis. “She wants a child and she’s ignoring the risks. Jesse wants one more than she does, according to her.”

Szent-Germain nodded once. “It’s not an easy thing to get over.” His eyes were fixed on the middle distance.

“A miscarriage or wanting a child?”

“Either, or both,” he answered, and lay back again.

After a short silence while she nibbled at her food, she said, “I’m sorry you can’t have any of this. It’s pretty good, most of it.”

“I’m glad you enjoy it,” he said.

Another silence fell between them. Then she said, “How will I explain to Arthur and David, when I’ve Changed to your life?”

“You’ll know better when the time comes,” he said, not wanting to remind her yet again that she would have to die before the Change could occur. “It will depend on how old your boys are and how they feel about you when it happens.”

“But they’ll want some explanation, won’t they? After the divorce, becoming like you will be difficult for them to accept, won’t it? Worse than divorce, in a way. Who knows how long it will be until they and I meet again? They’ll be curious, don’t you think?”

“If any of these concerns distresses you, you can still change your mind and limit the risk that comes with revealing the nature of your … transformation. I won’t hold that against you.” He had a brief, intense recollection of Tulsi Kil, and of Gynethe Mehaut.

“But there could still be a risk of Changing, couldn’t there?”

“A remote one,” he said, then tried to quiet her consternation. “If you do not want to Change, you can order yourself embalmed, and you will die the True Death as surely as if your head were removed or your nervous system were destroyed.”

She shivered a little. “That sounds so … so final:
head removed, nervous system destroyed.
Those are stark prospects.”

“That they are. Bear in mind that once you Change, you will look the way you are when you die for a long time, and in time, as your sons become old men with children and grandchildren of their own, you will seem as young as the day you died. For we age very slowly, and that could make continuing contact with your boys awkward, not just for you—it could be troublesome for Arthur and David.”

“I get that.” She took up a round of bread with pate spread on it. “Do I have to tell them what I’ve become?”

“Do you mean a vampire?” he asked, and saw her cringe. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“I don’t want to lie to my children,” she said, indignation showing in her posture.

“You don’t have to explain anything unless they insist, and even then, you may prefer to keep some details to yourself. You may tell them—and it is the truth, by the way—that you have received provisional immortality, or some other such definition. How and why this happened would be your choice to make.”

“That’s easy for you to say; you don’t have children,” she observed, and wished in the next second she had not spoken.

“No, I have no children. But I had a ward. She never knew what I am.” His voice had dropped, and his enigmatic gaze struck her as deeply as the sight of his scars had done.

“And does she ask you nothing now?”

“She asks me nothing because she is dead,” he said, his voice so flat that she felt more appalled than she thought was possible. “She was killed in Munchen more than twenty years ago. There was a large riot—broken windows and vandalized autos—and she was killed. There were others killed and many hurt; she probably hadn’t been singled out, but she was still dead.” He closed his eyes in a fruitless attempt to shut out the image of the five Brown Shirts who had attacked his ward, probably because she had a Russian accent, if they had any reason at all. He continued, “At least it was over quickly; she didn’t have to suffer very long.” His thoughts flooded with memories of Laisha Vlassevna, how cruelly she had been killed, and what he had done to her killers in retribution. “They used a rifle-butt to smash her skull.”

“You
saw
it?” she asked, trying to imagine what that had meant to him.

“I wasn’t near enough to stop it.”

Charis finished her wine. “I’m sorry I brought it up. It never occurred to me that you might have been … like a parent.”

“It surprised me, as well,” he said, his tone becoming gentle again.

She moved a little nearer to him, as if consoling him with her presence. “I can’t think how you stand it. I shouldn’t have brought it up. I’m sorry—but I know I couldn’t bear it if anything should happen to my boys.”

There was a burst of laughter from the Coven members at the table under the porch, and Elvira shouted over the gaiety, “It won’t take that long, it won’t.” She was moving around the table, sampling bits of what remained of the picnic. Nugent had brought half a dozen folding chairs from the side of the house, and now they were occupied by the Kings, diMaggio, McCall, Bjornson, and Nugent himself, where they were exchanging tales of faculty politics and student misbehavior with a kind of nostalgia that was painful to watch.

Charis did not allow herself to be distracted by the bittersweet jollity. “I … I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” he said, and went on as if unable to stop himself. “She was around thirteen when it happened; she had been orphaned by the Great War, or so it appeared. Whatever questions she may have had about my true nature, she never asked them.” That was not quite true: Laisha had challenged him once; his chagrin from that confrontation was still with him; he had told Laisha that he was very old, and she accepted that for the time being, which was all the time they had had together.

Charis set her plate of food aside, her appetite reduced to nothing. “Would you have told her, if she didn’t ask?”

“At some point, yes; I would have had to.” He thought back to some of the explanations he had rehearsed in his mind but had never ventured to use.

“Do you miss her?” She held up one hand. “That’s a foolish question. Of course you do. How could you not?” She drank some of her wine. “Does long life make it easier to bear, does it soften the blow?”

“No, but the passing of time does, or it always has before; I haven’t lost anyone so young and so close to me, and it may take longer to release her than some memories.”

“You must treasure your memories,” she said by way of indirect apology.

“Memories are slippery things. There are decades of my vampire life from when it began that I am not at all certain are as accurate as I want to believe them to be. They are quite offensive, but not as profoundly atrocious as I fear my acts may have been. Who knows how those ancient recollections might have shifted if Rogers weren’t with me to keep the memories clear for me.” Rogers’ predecessor, Aumtehoutep, had not known Szent-Germain until he had walked the earth for more than eleven hundred years, and he had not often challenged Szent-Germain on matters of his past.

She offered him a baffled stare. “How do you mean?”

“Rogers has been with me about half my undead years, and he remembers many things I might have forgotten, or that could shift in my mind, to spare myself the pain and ignominy of some of the things I did long ago—or a few more recent acts, for that matter—things that I cannot recall without distress; I sometimes believe that I have allowed the centuries to ameliorate the horror of what I did so that I can endure to revisit the past without untenable shame. Some capacity for that kind of murderous fury remains within me, whether I want to admit it or not.”

“You couldn’t have done anything … too reprehensible,” she said, uncertainty coming over her.

“Why not?” There was something in his conduct—so remote that Charis felt chilled by it—that gave conviction to what he said. “They slaughtered my family, ran my people out of the Carpathians, and enslaved those of my people they were able to capture. It was a harsher time then, and I had not yet learned to honor the brevity of human life.”

This time, when he stopped talking, she got up, saying, “I’ll just go and have Jesse refill my glass,” and did not wait for him to respond before she left him under the willow with only his memories for companions.

TEXT OF A LETTER FROM JAMES EMMERSON TREE, CURRENTLY LIVING AS T. J. EMMERSON IN TORONTO, CANADA, TO GROF SZENT-GERMAIN, IN CARE OF ECLIPSE PUBLISHING IN PARIS, FRANCE; SENT BY AIR LETTER AND DELIVERED THREE DAYS AFTER IT WAS WRITTEN.

c/o Gemma McCrorie Literary Agency

Suite 47, DeVere Building

Queen Street at Edmonton Road

Toronto, Ontario CANADA

September 6, 1950

Dear Saint-Germain,

I was pleased to hear from you last week, and having thought about your present difficulties, I’ll now try to answer your questions: I have to admit I hadn’t realized how far the current paranoia has spread.

So you have encountered the current zeal of US security: my sympathies. There is a fatal taint of Puritanism in a large portion of the US national character—I sometimes feel a touch of it myself—that sees argument with their position as heresy, and deliberate ignorance as purity. They proclaim their love of the Constitution without comprehending its principles, just as they seek to view the document as Christian Holy Writ, ignoring the First Amendment’s provision regarding freedom of religion, and its reaffirmation in the decisions of the Supreme Court—off the top of my head I can’t recall which decisions are crucial—which do not permit the establishing any state religion, and which also prohibit any religious test being a requirement for holding public office.

It is those links to Puritanism that present an opponent as a devil, not just a military or political adversary. As the Puritans justified hanging upstart women for being witches, so now the government uses the specter of Communism to justify the expulsion of those whose opinions do not march with the majority of their countrymen. Not that most know anything more than the demonic interpretation of Communism. They have no knowledge of Marx’s theories, and refuse to explore them for fear of contamination. They believe that Communism is soul-numbing, godless, and dehumanizing but that it is so highly contagious that anyone even remotely connected to it is in danger of being seduced by it. It pains me to speak so about US citizens, having been one myself, but it is apparent that they have been frightened into embracing the exaggerations and mythologies the so-called Right has been spreading since before the war ended.

You’re correct, of course; I have had a few run-ins with the security division of the government, in my own name. As an overseas reporter, I was exposed to certain workings of the security agencies, and was put on a watch-list for endorsing some of the actions of the French Left, which in turn propelled me into other sorts of writing. No more reportage. T. J. Emmerson didn’t come into being until I Changed during the war, and, as you know, T. J. Emmerson is a Canadian. Because James Emmerson Tree was “known” to have perished in France while covering the fighting for the
Detroit Free Press,
I had few options about returning. So rather than practice journalism, I now write juvenile adventures, and live a very quiet life here in Toronto. In this regard, I was most fortunate to have your good tutelage at Montalia, and although at the time I was let down by Madelaine’s absence, I believe that the intervening eight years have brought me into a greater appreciation for what this Change has wrought in me, and what I will need to do to preserve myself from close scrutiny, which in these days of photography and fingerprints, is not readily avoidable.

If the foregoing seems too prejudiced to you, I ask you to wait another year before discounting my opinions. I believe you will find that the fear I mentioned is insidious as well as deplorable, and that you will need to be inclined to be cautious as well as alert.

Sincere good wishes,

T. J. Emmerson

6

L
YDELL
B
ROADSTREET’S
desk was laden with files, all conspicuously stamped
SECRET
in red ink, which, harried as he was, he regarded with pride, and a niggle of dismay. The last few weeks had seen a step-up in activity concerning the Ex-Pats’ Coven in France, and all the efforts were starting to show how much his dedication had accomplished. Perhaps he was finally being given the credit he had earned in singling out this group for increased surveillance. He decided that it was a favorable omen to have submitted all his project summaries on the Equinox, two days in the past, for that would mean equal weight would be given to what he predicted was coming with what had already happened, which would give him six months to prove his case. And he knew he would need those six months. There was so much to
explain
, so much to
account for.
He raked his fingers through his light-blond hair, as if he could dredge up a solution from his brain through such action. He had, he reminded himself, delivered four large binders to Deputy Director Manfred Channing’s home a little before nine
P.M
on the Autumnal Equinox, filled with information about Ex-Pats’ Coven friends and relatives still living in the US, with recommendations as to how these connections could be used to Agency advantage. Then he had almost held his breath for a full day, but when no complaint was forthcoming, and no rescinding of his orders, Broadstreet felt the first, timid thrill of success. The completion of that phase of the project marked one conclusive event with another—one political, one astronomical—and though he still had an hour’s work to finish up, he allowed himself the luxury of putting his feet up while he drank his coffee. It was a cool evening with the threat of rain in the air, the sky scumbled with leaden clouds, their lowering underbellies lit up by the lume of the city. He allowed himself ten minutes to luxuriate in the glow of his success.