Borne in Blood (44 page)

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Authors: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Tags: #Fantasy, #Fiction, #General, #Historical, #Horror, #Occult & Supernatural, #Guardian and Ward, #Vampires, #Nobility, #blood, #Paramours, #Switzerland

BOOK: Borne in Blood
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Text of a letter from Madelaine de Montalia in Athens to Saint-Germain Ragoczy, Comte Franciscus at Château Ragoczy, near Lake Geneva, Yvoire, Swiss France; carried by commercial messenger and delivered thirty-two days after it was written.
To Saint-Germain Ragoczy, my favorite Comte, the greetings of your Madelaine on this, the 19
th
day of November, 1818,
My dearest Comte,
I discover I must thank you yet again. I have today received confirmation that I will be able to sail on the
Evening Star
from Athens to Alexandria as soon as the winter storms have passed. I have sent word ahead to the Imperial Hotel, reserving the suites you mentioned, and providing the copy of your assurances for the manager. I will carry your authorization to draw on your accounts there, although I hope I will not need to encroach on your generosity. As deeply as I long to travel upriver on the Nile, I will be content to remain in Alexandria until appropriate arrangements may be made. Simply being in Alexandria will bring me many steps closer to the Egyptian monuments I seek. I know I would not be going there had you not intervened.
For that reason, I ask you to permit me to find an expedition bound up the Nile on my own. If I linger in Alexandria for too many years, I may change my mind and appeal to you to aid me in my search, but for the time being, I think it behooves me to do all that I may to find an expedition planning to do the sort of work I am interested in undertaking. I am learning to be patient, so I do not insist on an immediate opportunity, but I would rather set out sooner than later. I have money enough to purchase my passage and then some, which should suffice to persuade any antiquarian of my usefulness.
Here in Athens there is much excitement over the success of the Serbian Obrenovics leading the recent uprising against the Ottoman Turks, as well as his supplanting of the Karageorgevics. While many applaud Milos Obrenovic’s audacity, others are outraged at his murder of Kara George. The feud developing between the families promises to spread out through the Balkans, and may lessen what remains of the Turkish hold on the region. Everyone in Athens has an opinion on the matter and will discuss it at the slightest opportunity. There are many here in Athens who believe the Ottoman Empire must collapse, and that the sooner that happens, the better it will be for everyone, including the Turks. While I do not agree completely, I am fairly certain that the Ottoman Empire cannot continue on as it has been for much longer. If the Serbs can separate themselves and their territory from the Ottomans, so can many of their client countries, including Greece.
No, I have no wish to become part of any insurgency; escaping the Terror was enough to convince me that revolutions are as likely to destroy the supporters as the opposition. I would much prefer to be allowed to do my work in peace. Yet I listen and I know what I am seeing: this reminds me of Paris before the Bastille was stormed and those six unfortunates were rescued. I can feel it in the air, which is one of the reasons I am glad to be leaving this place in three months or so. I will be traveling with Missus Neva Colchester, who is a very respectable widow of thirty-eight summers, going to Egypt to be a governess to the children of Sir Beresford Rollo, the diplomat. If my reputation is to be protected, I am sure she is more capable of preserving it than almost anyone I have met. I understand her husband was an officer in the British Army, killed in the Peninuslar Campaigns against Napoleon. She has said he left her with a small legacy and a house north of London which she cannot afford to occupy alone, and no one in her family who wishes to share it with her. So rather than sink into genteel poverty, she has decided to put her education to good use. Her work in Egypt is supposed to last for five years with the possibility of extension if she proves satisfactory.
I tell you this so you will not think I have lost all regard for the good opinion of others. I have not and I will not flout customs out of vexation or botheration. But I find I am chafing at the limitations that are so much imposed in this part of the world. I have always assumed I could find a way to accommodate expectations, but in this part of the world, I will not go about swathed in a kind of tent, looking out at the world through a small screen in front of my eyes. As shocking as many of the Greeks and Turks think it, I will continue as I have done from my first journey to Asia Minor: I will dress and conduct myself as a European scholar. And I will make a point of going to church, to show I respect religion. It is fortunate that the tales of vampires being unable to tolerate religious places is untrue, or I would find my sojourn here much more difficult.
Saint-Germain, I do miss you. I miss you as I miss my heartbeat or the hunger for food. Every day I think of you, and I wish we could spend more time together. I comprehend your reservations about such an attempt, and in the rational part of my mind, I share those reservations. But when it is late and the moon is low in the western sky, I cannot help but regret that it must be so. For no matter whom I choose to love, nothing will ever supplant my love for you: I will always be reminded of you, of your gentleness as passionate as any work of van Beethoven or von Weber. All that I am I am because of you. Nothing will ever change that, nor would I want it changed. From now until the True Death, you will be first in my heart, as dear to me as the life you have given me, and my soul.
Eternally,
Madelaine
 
 
T
ext of a letter from Hero Iocasta Ariadne Corvosaggio von Scharffensee at Obenzemmer to Saint-Germain Ragoczy, Comte Franciscus in Iraklion on Crete; carried by commercial courier and delivered forty-nine days after it was written.
To the most excellent Comte Franciscus, Hero von Scharffensee sends her fondest greetings on this, the 7
th
day of May, 1823,
My dear Ragoczy,
Your attorney and factor, Reinhart Kreuzbach in Speicher, informs me that you are still traveling, so I have asked him to arrange for a courier to bring this to you wherever you may be. I would just as soon continue to keep Gutesohnes here, so Kreuzbach will engage a commercial courier to bring this to you.
It hardly seems credible that two years have passed since I last saw you, but so it is, and I am sorry that more was not possible. I am so grateful to you for bringing the sad news about my father to me directly rather than entrusting it to Gutesohnes or some other hired servant. I have finally found an official to help me to arrange a Christian—albeit Orthodox—burial for him and his companions, which his executor is unwilling or unable to do. I thank you for the introduction to your Turkish factor, who has proven most reliable in these negotiations, and willing to do all that the Ottomans require to bring this sad episode to a conclusion. I suspect that this smoothing of obstacles is your doing, too, and I add that to my reasons for gratitude.
I am troubled by the news in Europe. Just when I see a glimmer of hope, there is an uprising, or a plot, or an assassination. The last three years have been tumultuous ones, what with a new King of England, a new heir in France, a revolution in Spain, an attempted revolt in Naples, a war of Independence in Greece, Bolivar and de San Martin victorious in South America, Mexico casting off the Spanish yoke, West Africa and Haiti up in arms, Brazil emancipating itself from Portugal. The recitation alone is exhausting; the actuality is undoubtedly dangerous. Even the mad rush to Egypt, thanks to Champollion’s work on the Rosetta Stone, is tiring to contemplate.
On a lighter note, I have hired a second tutor for Hedda, who is now fourteen, and beginning to show promise. She has an ear for languages and so I have expanded her instruction to include Dutch, Czech, Greek, and Spanish in addition to the French, German, Italian, and English she already knows. I would like to enroll her in some advanced school in two or three years. I know the Università of Padova has graduated women from time to time, and I seek your advice if this might be worth pursuing for Hedda. She is reluctant to leave Obenzemmer, and has said she would like to remain here doing her own studies, but I hope against hope that perhaps she will decide to broaden her horizons and seek a wider world for herself, for as awkward as life may be for educated women, it is preferable, I think, to do as much as one can to improve the state of other women than to accept the strictures of society and remain dependent creatures.
I have, as you may imagine, been reading the work of Mary Wollstonecraft. I agree with her wholeheartedly, and were I less hideous to look upon, I would do more to help vindicate her stance by teaching young women more than needlework and how to address members of the peerage. I have also read her daughter’s book
Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus.
As innovative as the novel was, I prefer the mother’s work to the daughter’s, although for Hedda, it is the opposite. In fact, Hedda has proposed that she may turn her hand to fiction one day. She declares she would like to write a roman-à-clef about her childhood and all that she experienced in the time she was with the Graf von Ravensberg. I am of two minds for such a project, for I fear raking through such coals could ignite more fires than creative ones. But she has said that she remembers her ordeal every day, and hopes that writing may provide an exorcism of sorts for her. She has already stated an aversion to marriage, which is an imprudent position for such a young woman as she is to take. If you were here, I would implore you to talk with her, but as you are gone, I have asked Herr Kreuzbach to discuss the advantages and disadvantages inherent in such a manner of life. He has been instructed not to discuss any aspect of marriage, for that would surely turn her against anything he says.
Pasch Gruenerwald has become head-man in Zemmer, and has instituted a regular patrol in the region. Every week we are visited by a courier who makes a report to Zemmer, and if aid is needed, or trouble suspected, there is quick action for a response. This has made market-days far more pleasant than they have been in the past, for they are guarded, and where needed, Zemmer’s guards provide escorts for those bringing livestock or produce to market. We have had good harvests the past two years, and that has supplemented your most magnanimous provisions for us. Now that the journey to and from Zemmer is protected, the field-hands are much more willing to trudge the two leagues to work here, and so we have enlarged our plantation. In time we may be able to become fully self-supporting.
Thank you for your invitation to visit Château Ragoczy at any time. I may do so in the fall; Hedda and I will be traveling in the summer—since you and I never got to Roma to attend the opera, I have arranged that Hedda and I will do so. My twins have been asked to join us, but I anticipate they will decline the invitation. For such travel, I have the veil studded with diamonds you gave me when we moved here, and that should serve me very well. If you should be in Roma then, it would be a delight to see you again. That is for later, of course, and only if fortune should allow our paths to cross. Until that time
My fondest love,
Hero von Scharffensee
 
P. S. We have received word that Wallache von Ravensberg is dead, killed while hunting when his own gun misfired. Hedda is sure it was suicide.
 
The first part of the nineteenth century in Europe was dominated by one figure: Napoleon Bonaparte, whose military campaigns took him, and his long-suffering armies, from Egypt to Moscow to Spain before he was brought to heel. The semi-exile of Napoleon to the island of Elba in 1814 ended in 1815, when he returned to France to lead a popular uprising against the Bourbon rulers. His defeat in the summer of 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium was final, both militarily and politically; he was sent to the island of St. Helena in the south Atlantic Ocean to live out the remaining six years of his life.
His departure left scars on Europe that required more than a generation to heal, and thousands of former soldiers without jobs or prospects. There were also record numbers of refugees, widows, and orphans cast adrift in the tumultuous societal confusion that marked the end of Napoleon’s ambitions, and their presence made a significant impact on every level of European communities, few of which discovered an equitable way to deal with the ruined families. To make this more difficult, women had no legal recourse to raise their own children unless specifically provided in the terms of the marriage and reiterated in the husband’s will, so many families were shattered as male relatives claimed or abandoned children as suited their purposes. Almost no women owned property or controlled their own money; without male relatives to support them, widows often found themselves without means of survival, caught between penury and prostitution in one form or another.
In 1816, just as the magnitude of the European disaster was beginning to be assessed, a year of severe weather took hold of most of the world as a result of the volcanic eruption in Indonesia the year before. Poor harvests, freezing conditions well into June, and outbreaks of typhus and cholera throughout Europe as well as one of ergotism in France oppressed the population as war had not been able to do. Although 1817 saw a lessening of the crisis, the winter was still colder and longer than usual, and harvests were significantly reduced throughout the temperate zones on the planet.
Yet all was not defeat and gloom: the early years of the nineteenth century saw the (re)invention of the steam engine and its immediate offspring, the steam locomotive and the paddle wheeler. The velocipede, and the Celeripede, the immediate ancestors of the bicycle, were invented to help ease the traffic congestion in the burgeoning cities. The first tentative steps toward what would become mass transit systems appeared in European and British commercial centers. Scientific experimentation was also on the rise, as were new studies in linguistics, mathematics, astronomy, antiquarian studies (called archeology after 1890), and biology. Experiments in electricity were becoming more acceptable to the scientific community. In 1817, cadmium, lithium, and selenium were all identified as elements. In 1816, Krupp steel began producing low-grade files in Essen, and by 1836 was leading the industry in high-grade cast steel. Although many universities were growing in size and influence, a significant percentage of the most active scholars were not directly associated with universities, but were involved in independent studies sponsored by wealthy patrons on subjects that were the areas of interest for the wealthy men themselves. Beethoven, Schubert, and Rossini were among those composing for a growing audience, and Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats were all writing: 1818 saw the publication of both Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus
and John Polidori’s
The Vampyr.
After a very long moribund period, education and literacy for the middle class and yeomanry was on the rise; even education for women was possible for a fortunate few, with schools established especially for girls of upper-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds. In America, Harper and Brothers Publishers and the Harvard Law School were both founded in 1817.
Medicine, although not as haphazard as it had been in previous centuries, was still fairly primitive: surgical instruments were not washed for procedures, let alone sterilized; “bleeding” was common practice and used fairly indiscriminately; epidemics were often regarded as supernatural in origins. But the climate of scientific inquiry was making inroads in many disciplines, including the practice of medicine; vaccination had been around since 1796, and its benefits were largely accepted. Studies into the workings of the body were increasing, as were related experiments that contributed to new theories of human origins.
The map of Europe was quartered somewhat differently then than now: Germany was not yet united, nor was Italy; Prussia held several territories in Germany, which operated under a taxation union but were held together by little more than convenience. Part of what is now France south of Lake Geneva was then nominally Swiss. By 1816, between the pressure of national aggression and scarcity due to bad weather, long-running regional rivalries started up again, and only the loss of Napoleon left a military vacuum that was sufficient to slow any sudden renewal of ancient hostilities.
By current standards, travel was slow: a four-horse coach could expect to travel an average of ten leagues (thirty miles) a day in good weather on good roads. Well-sprung coaches could sometimes manage eleven to twelve leagues (thirty-three to thirty-six miles) in optimal conditions. A man on horseback, with regular remounts, could double that. Private courier services were used by merchants, scholars, and lawyers with increasing regularity, and generally moved at about fifteen leagues (forty-five miles) on good roads in good weather. A few men and companies maintained their own messengers, which also meant maintaining a system of remounts. As the ravages of war diminished, commerce and the notion of progress rushed in to take up the slack left by the military, leading to improved communications and the promotion of railroads within a decade of this story. Commerce with the Americas was expanding steadily, with the result that many East Coast port cities such as Baltimore and Savannah doubled their European trade in less than ten years. Explorations of the Pacific Islands continued to produce increased trade from Tahiti to Japan, which fed a rediscovered European hunger for the exotic. Trade in Chinese ceramics became a major industry for the European markets, as did Indian brasses and textiles, screens and wood-block prints from Japan, and precious woods and gems from southeast Asia. The first, tentative steps toward genuine world trade had been taken.
Fashion had abandoned the wedding-cake excesses of the Louis XVI court, along with aristocratic decadence supposedly stamped out during the French Revolution, in favor of a more classical line, based on Greek and Roman statuary bought or pilfered by ambitious travelers. It worked rather better in women’s clothes than men’s; the high-waisted, gauzy ensembles of the Empire (French), Regency (English), and Jacksonian (American) periods were a significant departure from the elaborate, broad-skirted costumes of the Louis XVI period. By the end of the 1700s men’s coats were narrow, the unmentionables (trousers) ankle-length instead of britches gartered at the knee, and the lower leg booted or silk-stockinged. Elegant austerity rather than gaudy superfluity was fashionable, except for those going to the extremes of fashion: this group of men, called Macaronis in England and America, were known for their colorful and exaggerated clothing and effete manners.
Most prosperous households required a fair number of servants to man them, but the conditions of service were changing. In Europe, slavery was being made illegal in most countries, and bonded-servitude was on the way out. Experiments in electricity would lead to the end of domestic service as it had existed; however, the scientists exploring electricity in this time did not anticipate the vacuum cleaner and air conditioner when they undertook their studies in galvanism. What the social revolutions of the end of the eighteenth century could not accomplish, the technological developments during the nineteenth century did, and set the stage for the vast transitions of the twentieth century—transitions that continue to this day.
Many thanks are due to six friends of Swiss descent who allowed me to borrow family names for many of my secondary characters: Gina, Harry, Loren, Matthew, Serena, and Willis, your generosity is much appreciated; any error I have made in the names you have provided is on my head, not yours. Thanks—in no particular order—are also due to Edward Milner for information on European roads and travel in the early nineteenth century; to Susan Altermaat for information on publishing in Amsterdam during this period; to Emily Burge for her references on the fate of Napoleonic soldiers after their defeat; to J. P. Keel for providing maps and charts on the Napoleonic aftermath, as well as for passing on a number of links to related Web sites; to Doroteo Tordellos for access to her collection of early-nineteenth-century travel guide-books; to Howard Leibermann for information on clothing and textiles in Europe from 1810 to 1825; to Nathan M. Parriser for his material on the state of early-nineteenth-century science and medicine; to Melinda Tapuy for references on Swiss and Austrian law of the period; and to Philippa Veuier for some insights on language-drift present in Switzerland at that time.
At the other end of the process, thanks are due to Irene Kraas, my agent; to Wiley Saichek, who does so much to get my work out on the Internet; to Paula Guran, Web master and designer of my Web site
www.ChelseaQuinnYarbro.net
; to Lindig Harris for her
Yclept Yarbro
newsletter available [email protected]; to Samuella Gonsalves, Pat Derringer, and Doris Seikama, who read the manuscript for clarity; to Libba Campbell, who read it for accuracy; to the
www.Yahoo.com
group; to Peggy, Charlie, Megan, Gaye, Steve, Lori, Marc, Bill, Brian, and Patrick just because; to Maureen Kelly, Sharon Russell, Stephanie Moss, and Alice Horst; and to Paolo deCrescenzo and his Gargoyle Books for the grand time in Italy on Saint-Germain’s behalf; to the Lord Ruthven Assembly and the International Conference for Fantasy in the Arts; to the Canadian chapter of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula and Elizabeth Miller; to the International Horror Guild, for the honor, which surely belongs as much to the Count as to me; to Melissa Singer at Tor, and to Tor itself; to the bookstores and readers who have kept this series going for twenty books so far, and counting.
CHELSEA QUINN YARBRO
Berkeley, California
July 2007

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