Descent Into Madness (18 page)

              Yet her compassion extended from the page to the cities poor. She welcomed the needy with open arms – and a bottomless heart – as she fed, washed, and clothed them in droves. While her exterior was calm, her patience was short for the ignorant of mind; those who never questioned, never wondered, never showed concern.

              After the wedding, Aleksandra took residence with Wesley and me. Her father allowed it without question. Viktor and I would spend most nights together while Wesley entertained Aleksandra, educated her. I did not speak of England, the memories of my life there were too painful; but Wesley filled her head with exotic images and tales, of lands and times long forgotten. She begged me to take her back. She wanted to explore, to travel beyond the borders bordering the school’s village. Wesley would argue with me, offer to go himself, but still I refused.

              Her studies in philosophy and religion, her readings of Aquinas, Heraclitus and Ephesus, even of Diotoma of Mantinea were no match for Wesley. Their debates, in those earlier days, were something to watch and rival. For hours, the two would toss words, truth fueling their passionate exchanges. In the end, regardless the winner, they would come together as friends, embracing each other with warm smiles.

              Then Wesley left, as we all eventually do. He was running – hiding, but from what I could never have guessed.

              My eyes were blind in those days. All I could see was Viktor, once a noble, youthful man with ebony hair and piercing eyes. Now all that remained, time having waged its war and won, was a frail, ill and fading remnant of the man I loved.

              I had seen people die; I had caused them to fall. I had seen kings and noble families succumb to sickness; and witnessed indescribable tragedy. Time has blurred past my eyes in strokes of brilliant color, yet I have failed to feel it. In the year 1560, at the end of February, a light in my soul – if I still had a soul – extinguished and became an angel circling above me.

              He rallied until nightfall, waiting to die in my arms.

              I gently slid my fingers over his face, over the wrinkles. They were the same wrinkles I had touched years before, yet they felt different. His eyes glazed over in death’s shade, mere grayed orbs in sunken sockets, but he could still hear me as I sung him to his sleep. His breathing became shallower as his heartbeat dimmed.

              The hours stretched before me, one agonizing moment after another, as I held him, as I talked to him of the past. When I thought the end was imminent, when I nearly succumbed and brought him into my world, his mind spoke.

              “You will never be without me, Bree.”

              My tears marked his face as I leaned over it, kissing his forehead, his eyes, his cheek.

              “I will never forget you, Viktor. Never,” I whispered to him. “I love you, and I always will. Dying will not change that.” As his hand found strength, he reached for my face and stroked my cheek. Then with one last raspy breath, an unforgettable sound now eternally trapped in my ear, he fell limp in my arms.

              That night I vowed I would never love anyone else the way I had loved him.

FIFTEEN

Y
ou must carry on,” Sr. Veronica whispered in my ear. She was resplendent, the sun vibrating off her black veil. Her gown crumpled slightly in the summer breeze. The sun was beginning to set as we carried water from the well. We were naïve, sealed off from the world, promised to a higher power. We believed that evil’s villainous grasp could not touch us. Our minds were lost and jumbled in theological theory, in absolution via confession, in being good and proper. We had no concept of true evil. Or what it could do.

              The second to last load of water weighed a ton on our shoulders as the sweat cascaded down our foreheads, stinging our eyes with each glistening bead. We could speak freely out here next to the well, far from the prying ears preparing the evening meal.

              “Is this our punishment for being the youngest?” I asked her with a chuckle.

              “I believe Sister Margaret wishes this to be our penance for having once lived in luxury.”

              “Well,” I told her, “that life is long gone, is it not?” Sr. Veronica nodded. “And we will never see it again.”

              “Oh, yes we will,” she replied, her face aglow in the fading golden sunset, “When we get to Heaven.”

              The forlorn reality stung into my pale flesh as night dawned, awaking me from the memory of her, of those innocent days. She had reached her Heaven, I only assumed, while I lived in my Hell night after endless night.

              Wesley had been right. Again. I should have listened to him and never returned to Russia. The visage of the man I cherished, the mortal I had allowed to love me, would have remained that of my handsome hero. Now when I thought of him, when I gazed onto Aleksandra’s face, I saw his frail body slumped in my grasp. I saw the man who struggled for life, who struggled for clarity behind Deaths shadowed veil.

              This memory left an acrid aura in the air and a bitter taste in my mouth, a taste that blood could not relieve.

              I had been naïve believing I could handle loving a mortal and witnessing his body – the aged lump of bones and skin and blood now tainted by the finality of death – release its soul into the waiting afterlife. What existed beyond now cradled the man I adored. His body, his memories, his words, perished and relinquished to the family mausoleum.

              He existed only now in oil paintings and the memories of others. And sometimes, to the outside world at least, it was as if he had never existed. They mourned him and did something I struggled with, they let him go.

              It was 1561; Aleksandra was but forethought in the minds of Tver’s people. Her own bloodline ceasing to exist with the swift upheaval Viktor’s death caused. His bloodline, without an heir, seceded to a far off cousin.

              We packed Wesley’s possessions when we moved to Paris and they remained that way, sealed off in a cold and lifeless room.

              That room was a void, a time capsule collecting dust, waiting to open, to reveal its secrets. The atmosphere was grayer without him. This reflected in Aleksandra’s brilliant eyes, which dulled some when he left and continued to dim, her light fading as she waited for his return. 

              It was then that I should have seen the future. Yet I was ignorant, still lost in grief. Marriage proposal after marriage proposal, Aleksandra refused them all. Dukes and princes, none could secure her hand.

              She buried herself in books, in dramas, in scientific texts. Her room filled with gadgets and potions, and odorous ingredients that caused my sensitive nose to twitch on more than one occasion. It was uncommon for a woman to behave this way, and rumors circulated. Yet one after another, they fell on her deaf ears. She was distracting herself with knowledge, book after book, and experiment after experiment. I should have realized why.

              It was 1562 when he returned. It was as if sunlight returned to our shadowed world. At least how I remember sunlight feeling as it trickled in through the convent windows, warming me to the soul. It returned to Aleksandra as soon as she beheld him walking through the gardens, approaching the house, the moonlight softly reflecting off his face. He came for her, not me; and she had been waiting for him. The world existed for them; for how long I did not know, and I was just now seeing it.

              She was a tender, innocent nineteen. He had centuries ahead of her. Yet they both saw a commonality, a shared passion. I realized this as I watched him gaze into her eyes as Viktor had often gazed into my own. The smile graced her face in return, her quickened heartbeat granted her a livelihood that had been sorely missing; and it pushed the shadows away. Between them, love blossomed, and I wondered how I could have been so blind as not to see this happening.

              “You are sad,” she told me the night after Wesley returned to us, to her. “What has made you that way?”

              “The sunlight,” I remarked.

              Her hand gently came to rest on my shoulder, and she patted me as one would pat a sickly child. “What is there to miss about the sunlight? There are days – hot days, scorching hot days, when I wish the sun would hide forever.”

              “Never wish for such a thing, Aleksandra,” I answered her. Rain droplets were beginning to fall, gently at first and then in a torrent beating and bouncing off the terracotta fountain in the garden, and slamming violently into the windows.

              “Oh, but I could live as you live… by candlelight. It is a romantic view of the world, mother. Moonlight and candlelight.” Her eyes locked onto the cloudy sky, void of starlight on this dreary night. There was a haunting spark in her eyes, as if the world was hers but only now, only at night, only when it rained.

              “With Wesley?”

              “Yes,” she answered, her sight remaining fixed on the evening sky. “I love him.”

              “He is an uncle to you, Aleksandra.” I remarked in disbelief, yet I knew this revelation was eventually coming.

              “He has never been like an uncle to me,” she said, turning to me, “you have just failed to notice.”

              “Does he love you?” I asked, again knowing the answer. Perhaps I needed to
hear
it. Our eyes, after all, can deceive us.

              “You ask questions you already know the answers to.” She turned to me. “You already know what this means, too. You do not want to accept it, and you will try to talk me out of it, but you know your words will be pointless. I have not entered into this in haste. I never enter into anything in haste.”

              “I need time with this, Aleksandra. Please, can you do that for me?”

              “What is time but mere moments combined to span the centuries, mother? We will soon have a million moments and yet you ask me to delay this wish of mine?” She asked, turning away. “That, I cannot do.”

              “Time? What do you know of time?” I demanded. She paused in her step, her left foot catching at the toe, her heel finally finding rest as her body pivoted toward me.               “Time is an endless blur once you are immortal. Eternity, Aleksandra, it’s a wave of color bleeding into itself, yet with distinct edges, distinct frames that pause – shortly – allowing oneself to reflect on the multitude of such instance; until one night, you’ll discover you’ve lost yourself – bit by bit, leaving little pieces scattered throughout the centuries. Lost, my child; that is how one eventually feels after having witnessed ages pass. Lost. Alone. Tired.”

              “Would you change one second of this eternity Wesley has provided you?” Aleksandra asked. “Would you erase Aksel?” Her eyes grew misty and her lip, the bottom one with the freckle that swam in its center, quivered. “Would you erase my father?”

              “I loved them, Aleksandra. Their fates, both of them, haunt me.” I stepped closer and laid my hand on her shoulder. Her eyes moved downward, averting my glance. She was but an innocent, a child, so pure. Nineteen could have been ten, but she surpassed the ages. “And there has not been a night where I have not longed for the peace a natural death would have afforded me.”

              “To grow old?” she asked, her voice subdued by our closeness.

              “Aleksandra, peace comes with age.”

              “You are old now, older than you could have ever been being a mortal!”

              “Yes, then why am I not at peace?”

              I had left her that evening standing at the window, glancing up at the stars. My words gave her pause, but not long enough. She came to me three nights later. “This is what I want,” she stated. I did not deny her.

              At first when my teeth pierced her tender flesh, the pulsating blood a siren’s call, and she struggled. Then it rushed into my mouth, the crimson river, lulling me deeper with each rhythmic gush into the shadowy veil now covering my eyes. The tunnel stretched before me, the vague and familiar place I had been too many times before. Her thoughts inundated the darkness, ricocheted, screamed; but I pushed them far beyond my reach. I could not know these things, these precious jewels in her mind, in her heart. Then Viktor’s face flew at me in the darkness, faster than a shooting star, and hung on my tongue. I drew away, the image of him filling the tears now dripping down my ashen cheeks.

              “Am I dying?” Her breath was hot on my palm as I cradled her head.

              “No, but you will wish you were.” I drew my head to her neck once more, the vein now placid against her ivory skin. “Aleksandra,” I whispered, “this is going to be the worst pain you have ever felt. Are you sure you want this?”

              “The light… it is fading,” she struggled, her rasping voice dimming in the moments before death. “Help me, mother.”

              Then my teeth sank deeper and drained the last vital drop of life from her body. As the body died, as the heart stopped beating, and the air squeezed from her lungs, I slumped against the wall, releasing her. My body now lay burdened with the weight of her; burdened by her blood collecting in my immortal veins, which now invaded my cursed cells. Her gasping faded with the candlelight. My vision faded with it.

              Her blood intoxicated me; lured me into hidden pathways where my haunted memories reside. As my vision dimmed, her forbidden essence swimming inside me, those memories were unrelenting. They demanded my presence. And the years I spent resisting them mattered less and less with each drop of her blood. The gate was open.

              The crisp autumn air wafted through the halls, and the stones felt cool beneath my bare feet. The wool brush scratched its way through the soapy layer, scrubbing away the collected dirt and grime. The sun, slipping through the cloister windows, burned through my black habit as my hands shriveled from the dirty water.

              “We will be in the scriptorium tonight,” Sr. Veronica remarked, walking past me.

              I whispered as she walked by. “You will have us both in Mother’s office if you are not quiet.”

              The morning was long, scrubbing and mopping, but it was similar to the previous morning. And, the morning before that. Life would continue on this way until we died. The predictability of it, the mundane, drove me silently mad. I would push this feeling back, hiding it.

              That night, though, was longer. I had been quiet while we sat copying by candlelight. She noticed this as she noticed everything about me, all the time. The candlelight flickered and dimmed as the hours passed. The morning would be creeping over the clouds soon and my eyes grew weary, blurring the colored ink spread across the vellum.               “We should retire,” she told me, jarring me from my dozing.

              “Does it seem to you that the night has secrets?” I asked her.                                   

              “Secrets?” She was putting scrolls of vellum on a shelf, extinguishing candles near the window, and straightening the inks.

              “There seems to be something missing that is all. As if the night held a secret, something we cannot see. It is there, you know. Just hidden… hidden and watching.”               “You are delirious with exhaustion,” she whispered, leading me out through the scriptorium door. She quietly latched it, her left arm still firmly braced on my shoulder.