Perfect Shadows

chapter 5

Anneke was in the study when we got there, and Geoffrey asked after Nicolas. “A messenger has come,” she answered in her low and oddly accented voice. “He will soon return.” She leaned back in her chair, appearing even more in my two-dimensional sight as a Flemish painting in the firelight. I sat over by one of the windows, feeling dejected and confused. I looked out at the night, which was moonless but lit with a glittering profusion of stars. Lost in thought, I was unaware of Nicolas’ return until a hand was lightly laid on my shoulder. “You have a letter, Kit, from Rózsa,” he said in a preoccupied way, handing the paper to me and returning to the fire to speak quietly to Geoffrey. I contemplated the missive for a moment before opening it, and when I did, I stared at it for few seconds in perplexity. There was nothing but meaningless marks on the paper. I stood, shaking, and took a book from a nearby shelf, then another, and another. As I dropped the third, as indecipherable as the first, a cry of torment escaped me, and I glanced around wildly, bringing Nicolas and Geoffrey to my side in an instant. “I forgot,” Nicolas said in great distress.

“I cannot read,” I spat. “I cannot read!” Something Nicolas had said struck me and I stared at him. “You forgot,” I whispered. “So, you knew and you did not tell me, you just left me to find out—”

“We were not sure, but if it were so, we hoped that you need never know, Christopher,” Geoffrey said sternly. “It is the result of the injury to your brain, and you will heal, I promise, but it will take time, mayhap quite a long time. We knew not if you would be able to recall your identity, or even if you would be able to speak or understand speech. You are much, much better off than we had dared to hope, given the nature of your wounds, but you must not press it, and you must let yourself heal. Christopher, you are not alone, you are with your family, protected, here with us,” Geoffrey urged, his voice low, but still firm.

“Kit, my dear friend, I am sorry that my carelessness has caused you such pain. What can I do to make it up to you . . .anything . . . anything. . . .” Nicolas’ voice was hoarse with regret. I clamped down on my emotions, and thrust the letter at him.

“Read it to me,” I said shortly.

Nicolas read:

My dearest Kit,

I hope you can forgive me for not consulting you before making the exchange with you, but that you are alive and reading this is a proof of a sort of consent on your part, after all. Mayhap I have much to answer for, which I will do my best to requite when I see you again, a fortnight or so after the arrival of this letter. Until Twelfth Night then, my love and my thoughts be with you.

Rózsa

He passed the letter back to me and I folded it and tucked it into my doublet without a word, then stood up and left the room. I heard Nicolas calling after me, and Geoffrey’s soft command: “Let him go.” I could not face my room, and I wandered around the hall for a time, but the reminders of my newfound disability were everywhere. I found a heavy cloak near a small side door and slung it over my shoulders before stepping out into the moonless night.

The air was cold and crisp, sliding like silk over the skin of my face, and filled with scents that, being city-bred, I had never noticed before. There were living things that way, wild things in the forest, and over there the stable. If I listened I could hear the occasional stamp and snort of a restless horse.

I was aware of an owl’s silent flight overhead, and heard the tiny shriek of the small creature it caught just short of the wood. My eyesight, or what was left of it, seemed curiously enhanced as well, for though the only light was from the starlight on the snow, I could see perfectly well. After a moment or two I made my way into the woods, following a narrow path that eventually led me to a small clearing, a clearing filled with shadowy shapes that, scenting me, bounded towards me.

Wolves! I felt a moment’s panic even as I realized what these must be. I stood my ground, and soon they were milling all around me, thrusting cold noses into my palms, giving me a lick now and then as I knelt in the snow to shyly pet them. One of the smaller ones began to grow misty, and soon transformed herself into the serving wench who had saved me from a fall earlier. Naked, her long dark hair spilling like ink in the snow-light, she stood still for a full minute while I stared at her, then stepped to my side.

“It is very cold, my lord,” she said in a low husky voice, and slipped under my cloak with me. I held her shivering against me for a time, then realized simultaneously that the other wolves had vanished, and that the girl was barefoot. I dropped the cloak from my shoulders, wrapped it about her and caught her up into my arms in one smooth motion, then turned back to the house, carrying her as effortlessly as if she were a child. As we neared the Hall, she kissed me, and I felt my desires rising and flowing together. I wanted her; I wanted to take her as Rózsa had so often taken me, to feed both my appetites.

The door to the study was closed, though I could hear the rise and fall of voices within as I carried the girl past, and up the stairs to my room, which Jehan was just leaving. He smiled at me, and my burden, but said nothing, just held the door, and closed it behind us. I saw that a tray with a covered dish, wine, and two glasses had been left on the table. I laid the girl gently on the bed, and sat beside her, feeling rather shy, but she smiled at me and unwound herself from the cloak. Moving across the floor with a fluid grace that made me think of music, she poured the wine and returned to the bed, handing me one of the glasses. I viewed it dubiously, but she laughed low in her throat. “It will not harm you, my lord. You may still enjoy the flavor if not the effects. You may take any liquids, and even solid food, if you must do so to avoid drawing attention to yourself, though you will have to vomit that up later,” she told me, and laughed at my expression.

“I have lived all my life with vampires, my lord. There is little about your kind that I do not know.” She took my untasted glass and set it on the floor near her half-full one. “Kit,” she breathed, “I am Sylvie,” and kissed me, working my doublet loose and unlacing my shirt, but my desire had faded, leaving only hunger. Gently I pushed her questing hands away, and she shrugged, smiling with a sort of wry resignation. “I know,” she said softly, “women will never be your first choice, my lord, but you must feed, and not from Jehan again so soon. He is the only one among us who shares your inclinations, so. . . .” she shrugged again. I pulled her close, and pressed my sharp teeth against her throat, felt them pierce her vein, tasted her salt sweet blood as she shivered with the pleasure that my feeding gave her. My own pleasure welled, spilling over in an act even more intimate than that of physical love.

I withdrew my lips from her scented skin, my hunger assuaged, content to hold her until she stirred, which she soon did. She smiled at me again, and reached for the wine. I gave her the full glass and fetched the tray, conscious as I walked that her eyes never left me. The dish held slices of rare beef and several oysters, similar to many of the meals Rózsa had fed me, in return, I suddenly realized, for my feeding her.

Sylvie took a slice of the meat and neatly ate it, not spilling a drop of the juice onto the sheets, while I sampled the wine, which I found refreshing but, as she said, not intoxicating. “These foods are good for rebuilding the blood, you see,” she told me, and tipped an oyster into her mouth. When she finished her meal she set the dishes on the floor and curled up against me.

“You were distressed earlier,” she murmured, resting her head on my chest. “Why?”

“Because I can no longer read, and writing is—was, my life. The man who did this,” I touched the patch covering my right eye-socket, “took more than my vision, and my life. He took my reasons for living,” I growled caustically.” And someday, someday I will meet with him again, and when I do—”

“I will rip his throat out, if you like,” Sylvie offered casually, and I glanced at her to see if she was serious. She was. I shook my head.

“No. No, I’d not want you to soil your teeth on him,” I said, but somehow that matter-of-fact proposition had restored my humor.

“My lord? My lord Prince Geoffrey said you would heal, did he not? And you have healed so much already, you have no reason to disbelieve him.” With a lurching in my stomach, I understood that Sylvie had seen me when I was—it could as easily have been her that I had raped and almost murdered. A shudder racked me, threatening to become a convulsion. She sat up and slapped me smartly on the cheek, replacing the horror that threatened to overwhelm me with pure astonishment. “My lord, Kit, listen to me. It was not your fault. We had no experience to guide us, and anyway, Annette could have changed her shape to escape you! She accepted that it was an accident, as much as the one that later killed her. She was born under an unlucky star,” Sylvie added sadly. “It was always so, from the time she was a child. If a tree limb was going to break it would wait until she climbed that tree, or if a horse was planning to bolt, it would always wait until she was near. It wasn’t her fault, any more than it was yours. It just happened.” I stared at her for a few seconds.

“I thank you for that,” I said.

I irritably pushed my dripping hair out of my face, glaring at the two men who had me backed against the wall, the tips of their swords dancing before my throat, my hand stinging from the forceful blow that had disarmed me. For the last two weeks I had spent as much time as possible in the salle, both in solitary drill, and in practice with Geoffrey and Nicolas, the latter being startlingly agile and deft in his movements for a man of his build. Laughing at my vexation, the two turned away. Geoffrey scooped my dropped weapon off the floor and tossed it over his shoulder to me in a single elegant movement. I caught the sword by the hilt and lowered it slowly to my side. Last week, in a similar situation, I had lost my temper and rushed Geoffrey’s back, only to have the blade knocked out of my grasp for the second time in as many minutes, and it had seemed like hours before my hand had stopped tingling. A few paces distant, Geoffrey spun on his heel. “Excellent! It took us almost twice as long to disarm you, you did not lose your composure, and you did not let our switching hands startle you!”

“I didn’t have the time to be startled!” I replied, trying to keep the annoyance out of my voice. I mopped at the sweat on my forehead with a sleeve that was itself soaked, and looked forward to the bath that I knew Jehan would have waiting for me, but as I started to leave the salle Geoffrey called me back.

“Rózsa will be here sometime tonight, Christopher, or tomorrow at the latest. She knows about—”

“My illiteracy?” I interjected bitterly.

“Your difficulty,” Geoffrey continued smoothly, ignoring the resentment in my voice. “I took the liberty of informing her. Go now, and have your bath. You are progressing quite well. Give yourself some time.” I just shook my head and left for my room, where I found Jehan curled up in my bed, waiting for me. It never ceased to amaze me that a man so tall could wind himself into such a small space. The bath water had cooled just enough to be tolerable, and Jehan watched me with bright feral eyes as I undressed. I eased into the hot water, closed my eyes with a sigh, and heard Jehan stirring on the bed.

“Master Kit? Shall I wash your back? I’d like that,” he added when I failed to answer right away. The complex interdependencies between the vampires and the wolf-folk troubled me. On the one hand they were perfect servants, well cared for and never fed from against their will, but the carnality inherent in the feeding itself led to a familiarity in relationships that I felt entirely too comfortable with, and given their sensual natures, they were ever eager for the union and the erotic pleasure. I shook my head impatiently suddenly recalling my father’s wise words of years ago: “What’s not broken needs no mending.”

“Yes, Jehan, I would like that, and a shave as well, an it please you,” I answered, and relaxed beneath the big man’s hands. In only a fortnight I had learned not only to be comfortable with the ministrations of servants, but had come to depend upon them. Later, resting against Jehan in the opulent bed, I fed.

I woke alone and dressed quickly in the clothing Jehan had left for me, garnet velvet the color of blood for the trousers and doublet, silk white as the sun on snow for the shirt, and a deep falling band of Italian needle-lace. I paused before pulling on my boots to stroke the fine silks, with an abrupt memory of the shabby clothing and coarse scholar’s gown of my Cambridge days, the unfashionable cropped hair and detestable caps. My family had sent me clothing of good woolen and linen stuff, hardly worn, some of it, but I’d pawned most of it. Some of the money went to buy books of my own, and a pang of loss went through me for those forfeited volumes, and the maps I had painstakingly hand copied when the atlas edition had proved too dear for my means. Relentlessly I followed the thread of the memory—some of the coin had gone for less honorable purposes. What was that little puff-adder’s name? John? No. James? Well, no matter. He was the son of some country knight, come to Cambridge the term after I had taken my Bachelor’s degree. He was so worshipful and full of admiration for the new Dominus, and so lonely and lost. He had played me like a trout, and landed himself in my bed one night when the room’s other occupants were absent.

It had been a heavenly night, but a hellish morning, for the boy demanded money from me to keep quiet about the affair, and I had paid him, fearing at best to be stripped of my degree and turned out of college, and at the worst to be imprisoned, tortured, and executed, the punishment meted out for sodomy, as a crime against both church and state. I had been much relieved when the young man’s elder brother had subsequently died, and the family demanded the youth’s immediate return, but the incident had left me with a violent antipathy for extortionists and cozeners. With a blistering clarity, I recalled seeing the boy a year or so later, leaving Sir Francis Walsingham’s via the back door, the day of my fateful interview with the secretary—the reason that Tommy had been waiting for me, to seduce me into Walsingham’s circle of spies. That man had had a mind as twisted as a tightrope. I shook myself out of my reverie and went downstairs to the study, where a strange young man lounged before the fire, his gold and flame-colored brocaded tunic and venetians almost eclipsing the firelight as he turned to face me.

“Good evening, Kit,” Rózsa said.

Not long after, in the curtained recesses of my bed, I raised myself on my elbow and looked at my companion. Her hair lay over the pillows in a pool of jet and coppery bronze, a fine contrast to her milk white skin. She reached a lazy hand out, trailing her fingers over my chest and down. “I was afraid that you would be angry with me,” she said softly, not looking at me.

“Angry because you saved my life, when I was too reckless and forward to even see the risks I ran?”

“It is—customary—to give a choice, and not to thrust this gift on one who may be unwilling or unable to accept it. A breach of ethics, you see, and Geoffrey was less than pleased with me, although he did admit that your survival indeed implied a sort of belated consent.” She smiled briefly. “He has read your works, such as were available, the manuscript copies you gave to us, and was himself unwilling that you should be cut off so early and so unfulfilled.” As she finished I stirred uncomfortably.

“I don’t remember,” I said shortly, and then elaborated at her questioning look. “I remember very little of my life before I met you. Sometimes a memory will come out of nowhere, but I cannot make them sequential; they remain scattered events. Grievous events, mostly, things that hurt or frightened me, a few moments of rage, less of joy. I do not remember writing the poems and plays at all, though I have glimpses of the audiences at some of the performances. But my day-to-day life is gone. I came from a large family, but I cannot remember my mother’s face or my sisters’ names. Mary? Alice? Eliza? I know not. I can remember some of the lengths to which I felt driven, but not the why or the how. I know that I was angry and scoffing, but cannot feel what I was, but that I was somehow someone else, a stranger,” I broke off with a crooked smile, and a sidelong look. She looked abstracted, and did not smile.

“That is at least partly because you are someone else,” she said carefully.” These changes are not just of the physical. We, all of us, except perhaps Geoffrey, change somewhat, and even he has, by all accounts, mellowed. Dying gives one a different perspective on life, you might say. The injuries that you suffered have taken more from you than is common, ’tis true, but what cause have you to be angry, what cause have you to fear? You have no need for patronage, no need to earn your way, because your survival has earned it for you. We are responsible for you in ways that the world could never understand, and you are responsible to us,” she paused, and frowned slightly before continuing. “You need not remember your family because we are your family now.

“I took the responsibility of your new life when I chose to make the exchange with you, and you will do the same when you face that decision. You have set about a new schooling, learning to be a prince, for such you are,” she said, and her voice was bitter. The day trance claimed me before I could ask her what was wrong.

The next evening, I woke to find her watching me, tears beading her lashes like tiny brilliant diamonds. When I reached a tentative hand to touch her cheek she drew away from me and turned her head.

“You were so very like him,” she sighed.

“Like whom?” I asked gently, and she rose upon her elbow to gaze at me before replying.

“My love, my first love, George Boleyn,” she whispered the name, then smiled as if at her own foolishness and said it aloud. “I was at the court of Her Majesty’s father, Henry. Good King Hal! Bluff King Hal! He was a monster of appetites and self-righteous self-love. Oh, he wasn’t the gross and bloated beast then that he later swelled into, but the cruelty and the selfishness were there. I had not been long a vampire when I came to the court, where Nicolas had business, and I had never been in love.

“Anne was Queen in fact, if not in name, and the most dazzling members of the court, the poets and musicians, swarmed around her. Wyatt, and Norris, and George her brother, but none of more wit and ability than Anne herself. The King still doted on her then, and the future seemed so bright.

“George was clever, with a vicious tongue and a slashing wit, but as quick to laugh as to quarrel, and much taken with the foreign lady so suddenly in their midst. They were not long out of the merchant class, the Boleyns, and Nicolas, under various names, had been doing business with them for years. As a favor to him I was presented to Anne, and, in her mercurial way, she took a fancy to me though as a rule she much preferred the company of men. George would ever love where his sister did, and soon he and I were lovers. He was my first love, and the thought that he would age and die while I would live on unchanged was unendurable. We made the exchange, and I foolishly thought that our future was secure.

“Nicolas and I left England soon after, intending to return in the fullness of time, but—” her voice broke, and she choked back a sob before continuing. “Anne did not produce the expected son, and Henry was not a man to be thwarted, but rather one to turn upon any whom he felt had misled or betrayed him, however much he may have pretended to care for them. He hated George, as did others: the aging Henry for his youth and beauty, the others for his pride and superior intellect. That was not enough to condemn him, though, so George was accused by his wife, a sour and insanely jealous bitch, of incest, of adultery with his own sister!

“When we returned to England they were dead. Anne, George, Norris, Brereton, all the brilliant youth of Henry’s court, so that he might wed a placid jade with a face like cream and all the wit and sparkle of a farm-house cheese. He had them beheaded, you see. And so I lost my love forever.

“Then so many years later I saw him again, swaggering through the London streets, a poet and a playwright. You, Kit, were so like him as to make one think of miracles, if one did not remember that the Boleyns, like the Marlowes, were a Kentish family. George had at least one bastard, and I know that he provided for the child, arranging for either apprenticeship or dowry, depending upon the child’s sex, which I never knew.”

“I had wondered why you so favored me. My—tastes? habits? — were no secret, and of a nature to repel most women, I would have thought. You were not the kind of woman to try to cure me of my ‘affliction’ at least. I do have one rather uncomfortable memory of having to leave off frequenting the Anchor, because one of the wenches was sure that the right woman could make me change my ways, and she, of course, was that woman.” I stifled a laugh. “On the other hand, depending upon how one looks at it, one might say that the right woman did indeed make me change my ways.” Rózsa looked at me quizzically for a moment, then joined in my laughter. It did not occur to me until later that her laughter seemed somewhat forced.

The following evening I woke before dark. I dressed and made my way downstairs alone, and followed the sounds of soft voices to the little parlor where I was wont to meet Geoffrey and Nicolas. The door was ajar, and the note of anguish in Rózsa’s voice stopped me even as I lifted my hand to push it open.

“But he’s a stranger! A ghost! I think after all, Geoffrey, that I did much harm in making the exchange with him. Better he should have truly died than to live on a cripple, with only half his wits!” I could hear her pacing, and drew back a little into the shadows of the hall.” He is almost like a child, but a child in a man’s body. It is not just the reading—he is diffident where once he was decisive, hesitant where he was hasty. You did not really know him before, the reckless brilliance, the edge of his humor. To see that razor wit become a sickle of leather! And his present state is souring even his few memories of what he was. He cannot think now what he might have thought then, or how.” There was a muffled thump as she threw herself down on a chair.

“Give him time, sweetheart. I took eleven years to regain my full sensibilities—Marlowe has not had even eleven months,” Geoffrey said, his voice kind, as it never was when he spoke to me. She stood and commenced to pace again.

“Perhaps you are right. I shall return to Paris, to give him more time to heal. I cannot bear to be with him now; I lose my George all over again with every glance at him—I had not remembered that there were worse things than dying!” She was so distraught that she passed me in my dark corner without noticing me. When she had gone I started to slip back to my room, only to find Geoffrey watching me from the doorway. He motioned me in, and I took my accustomed chair. I sat staring at my hands, too stunned to speak. After a moment Geoffrey shifted in his chair.

“I am sorry, Christopher, that you heard that. Rózsa is very upset—”

“Yes. It must be a truly horrifying thing, to throw a lifeline to a drowning poet, and drag a disfigured half-wit back in his place,” I said bitterly, and he raised his hand.

“That is not fair, Christopher, either to you or to Rózsa. I tried to warn her, though she did not want to believe me. But neither has she seen the progress you have already made. You will heal, that I do promise, though it may take a very long time, a very long time indeed. During that time, however, we will—you will be—”

“Put under charge? Given a keeper? Who shall be burdened with that honor? You?” He nodded, and I was angry, suddenly and furiously. We stood at the same moment, and Geoffrey caught my arm, holding me almost effortlessly. I struggled but it was useless. He savagely pushed me back into the chair, no less angry than I.

“Do not spurn us, Christopher,” he hissed. “You have this choice, and this choice only, to live upon my terms, or to die, here and now.” He meant it. I could see it in his eyes. If I so chose, he would kill me before I could change my mind. I looked down, trying to think. “Well?”

“I want to live,” I whispered. “Whatever the terms.” I raised my eyes to his, and he nodded coolly and started to walk away. “But,” I added, and he wheeled to face me. “But, if it is possible, I’d rather not see Rózsa for a time. I’d fain not put her to the strain of another such performance as last night’s; she hid her feelings most adroitly.” He relaxed slightly, and nodded again. He left, and I sat staring at the fire for a long time, still trying to think.



When I was well enough, we traveled to Italy, and there I felt for a time that I had come home. Geoffrey had me drilled in equitation, in swordsmanship and any other discipline he thought necessary to maintain my current social position; I was gratified to find that I mastered my lessons in nobility as easily as I had once mastered grammar and rhetoric. Before long I was able to ignore, if not forget, the pain and sense of failure Rózsa’s words had given me. The injury that had taken so much had at least left my arrogance relatively intact.

When the first year had passed, Rózsa joined us there, and she and I struck an uneasy peace, as of siblings raised apart and meeting for the first time as adults. The plots of plays lay thick as autumn leaves upon the ground there, and I had fretted over my inability to write them until Rózsa had proposed a simple solution: I would dictate, and she would write them down. We had made more than one attempt at this compromise, but I found that whatever spark had fired my talents had burned out of me, and the words I produced were stilted and awkward, worse than any of the “jigging rhymes” I had so despised in my lifetime. I gave the endeavor over to Rózsa, who found that she had a taste for it, and contented myself with collaborating on plots and staging, while she wrote the plays. I wondered at the time if she truly appreciated my help, or if she merely humored the half-wit. I still do not know.