The Bride of the Immortal (39 page)

“I witnessed what Adrijan had done to stay alive for so many years but to make matters worse, I had driven him into doing it early.”

The tomcat sniffed at her tears and Mairin gently nudged him away.

“We are a good match, you and I. We are both silly, but you are at least cute and can be forgiven.”

Therry meowed as if he were trying to approve of what she had said.

“I’ve decided to see this through until the end. Perhaps I can sustain Adrijan’s life too so that he won’t have to… help anyone to pass away for a while. Will you support me, Winther?”

Mairin slipped under the blanket and was glad when the kitten joined her soon after.

Vivian took a sip of whiskey before continuing. He felt that he owed Adrijan to tell him the truth about Magdala. Perhaps he should have done so earlier, but he had always lacked the strength.

“Did you know that Magdala was already a widow when I married her?”

“A widow? But wasn’t she still young when… Ah, a young girl fed to an old man, was it?”

Adrijan’s voice made clear that the idea alone was repulsive to him.

“You don’t consider yourself the very same regarding Mairin, do you?”

He surely thought his brother capable of having such a thought.

“Maybe.”

“Don’t. Firstly, you don’t look it and secondly, you’re not a lecher.”

Adrijan shrugged.

“Well, perhaps you sometimes do behave like an old man regarding her…” Vivian observed, earning a warning glance. “… more often though, you behave like a teenage boy,” he added, disregarding it.

“We were talking about Magdala,” Adrijan reminded him peevishly.

“Very well.”

Vivian took the hint.

“Hmmm. Shortly after my father had died, she was offered to me by her mother in law. Magdala’s mourning period had just passed and the crone was in a hurry to put her to good use.

As prince of
Mondstein
castle I had always been surrounded by women but unlike the man who had
spawned
me, I neither forced myself on anyone, nor did I feel the need to father a horde of bastards.”

The moment he had said it, Vivian realised that his choice of words hadn’t been very considerate towards his half-brother. He awkwardly paused, expecting some kind of reaction from Adrijan but he just looked at him without as much as batting an eye. Vivian cleared his throat.

“Growing up in
Mondstein
castle I had witnessed the results of a political marriage of convenience and didn’t want the same for me. Therefore I had decided not to agree to the marriage, unless I at least liked the girl.”

“Which you did,” Adrijan commented.

Vivian nodded. “I was invited under the pretext of taking a look at the mansion and the land surrounding it. Magdala had inherited it from her late husband but with what he had left her, she was hardly able to sustain it. Quite frankly I don’t think she had anything to do with its administration at all.”

Vivian took a few steps away from the statue and sat down on the ground, grateful for the comfort a heated floor had to offer.

“Is it still in your possession?” Adrijan asked, hunkering down beside him.

Vivian remembered the day when Magdala had revealed everything to him. In a fit of rage he had sent her mother in law away and dismissed all her servants. After the mansion had been cleared he had ordered to raze it to the ground.

“Yes. I spontaneously decided to turn it into wood land,” he paraphrased the incident.

Adrijan raised his eyebrows.

“Anyway, I fell in love with Magdala the moment I set my eyes on her. Her mother in law unnecessarily had done her best to make her look ‘pretty’ – and by ‘pretty’ I mean the way patisserie is served in a renowned five-star hotel: if you are able to imagine it without décor you realise that you are indeed looking at food.

To me Magdala was the embodiment of beauty. I only saw what lay underneath the distracting pomp. Her petite figure, the long straight hair, the flawless skin like porcelain, her faintly glowing cheeks and those eyes that were as blue as the summer sky…”

As Vivian described his first bride it felt like
she
was standing before him instead of the horribly lifeless statue.

“The mere sight of her would have been enough to turn a rational man into a poet.

From that day on I loved her, unaware that she feared the connection to me more than anything, even more than staying with her abusive mother in law.”     

“Yet she agreed to marry you.”

“Mhm. As beautiful as she was, there was something she lacked. There was no will to fight, no spirit, no resistance. She seemed like a doll, an astonishingly pretty one.

To my own shame I have to admit that I didn’t realise it then. I thought she was shy, perhaps still suffering from the loss of her late husband. I didn’t suspect at all that I was torturing her by accepting her as my bride. On the contrary, I was convinced that I could rid her of all her worries and anxieties.”

“So you didn’t even attempt to get to know her better before getting married?”

“No. No, I wanted her, no matter what. If that had been asked of me I would’ve handed my kingdom to the crone in exchange for Magdala. I was such a naïve fool.”

Adrijan apparently refrained from commenting and awkwardly emptied his glass.

“A grand wedding followed – one that had it all. To make it possible I had agreed on hiding the fact that Magdala had been married before. Despite the secrecy everything seemed so perfect to me. With Magdala by my side, I felt like a different man.”

Vivian had never forgiven himself for his ignorance. No matter how young and inexperienced he had been, he had always despised himself for not noticing her fears earlier.

“Not once during the ceremony did she smile. No present that was offered to her, regardless of its value, elicited her more than a polite gesture or a nod. The splendid festivities passed and she, who was celebrated, hardly took notice of them. Still, I continued to misinterpret her feelings and believed her behaviour was only natural. Wasn’t it understandable to be nervous? Wasn’t I excited as well?”

Adrijan put a hand on Vivian’s shoulder. “Don’t torture yourself, brother,” he said sternly.

“But I must…” he replied.

Adrijan got up to fetch another bottle of spirits and after he had filled his own glass to its brink he handed the rest to Vivian. Although the end of Magdala’s story was already set in stone, he could see that his brother was experiencing the past as if it were something that was still happening to him. Silently he returned to Vivian’s side.

“To me it seemed like the shortest and the longest day at once. Short, because she was with me and therefore no duration of time could have been sufficient, and long, because I wanted to be alone with her as soon as possible, yet there were so many heartbeats to endure until I would be able to. How different it must have been for her, the whole day being a gruesome preparation for her nightmare.

Eventually the moment had come when we were expected to retreat to my chambers. I had never felt this kind of excitement, this kind of anticipation. She sat there in the faint candle light, evanescent in comparison to the monstrous bed, watching me undress. On my request she rose from the mattress, obediently loosened the lacing of her nightgown and let it slide to the ground. I remember that she remained standing where she was, with the cloth around her ankles.

As I went to her side I noticed her shivering yet I wanted to let my eyes linger on her a little while longer. I was set on taking my time, on taking her in bit by bit, on extracting the whole sweetness of the moment – a moment as precious as it is unrepeatable.

I unknowingly tortured her, Adrijan.

I undid her hair, gently and slowly and still she wouldn’t move at all. I let the gold flow over her body, and allowed the long, silken strands to freely travel down over her shoulders, breasts and hips.”

Adrijan took a deep breath, hoping his brother wouldn’t go into detail much further. Was this really necessary?

“Adrijan, I swear Aphrodite herself would have gone green with envy at her sight.

With the last bit of self-control I managed to refrain from taking her then and there, and seeing that she was shaking and knowing about my own desire, I wrapped her into a blanket and carried her to bed as cautiously as if she were a baby bird.

I lay down beside her, held her, without removing the protection I believed the blanket offered to her. I caressed her hair and tried to warm her but she wouldn’t stop trembling.”

“Didn’t you ask her about her feelings, about what was wrong?”

In Adrijan’s opinion the whole custom of a wedding night in the manner Vivian had described it was wrong. Would Mairin make the same experience and undergo the same fears? Why would anyone want to force such a thing to happen?

“Talking to her only seemed to worsen the state she was in. No matter what I did, she wouldn’t relax. No matter what I said, she wouldn’t reply. Eventually I stopped torturing her. I decided not to make her my wife that night and only held her in my arms until we both fell asleep.”

“You made the right decision then,” Adrijan noted.

“Luckily. But what I did, wasn’t enough. I shouldn’t have let it happen in the first place.”

“Hm, hm.”

Adrijan agreed but didn’t want to make matters worse by telling his brother.

“How did you manage to get closer to her then?”

“By not forcing her into doing something she obviously didn’t want I slowly gained her trust. Night after night I repeated the same procedure, just holding her until she would fall asleep and during the day I tried to spend as much time with her as possible. In the beginning our conversations were limited to a monologue on my part, but as the days went by she slowly started talking to me. I can’t tell you what kind of happiness resulted from every success, however small it was.

In our wedding night I had managed to put the blame of Magdala’s behaviour on the fact that she had hardly known me. Soon it became clear to me though, that there was something else behind it and I cautiously asked her former mother in law about my young wife. The old crone pretended not to know anything.”

“It was about her late husband, wasn’t it?” Adrijan guessed.

“Mhm. One night Magdala had a hysteric fit. I had never seen her shed a tear before but that night they wouldn’t stop flowing. She was hyperventilating so much that I was worried not only about her mental well-being.

Magdala claimed that she was stained and in tears kept repeating that she longed to die. She said that there was nothing that could change her mind, that she couldn’t bear the ignominy any longer and that I should rid myself of her as soon as possible. Magdala went as far as asking me to take her life but of course I had no intention of murdering my only love.

Again I held her and rocked her in my arms, continuously assuring her of my feelings and that I didn’t care about the past as long as she stayed by my side.

Although the horror remained, her tears slowly ebbed away and she started to tell me how she had been abused by her husband. He had beaten her, choked her, taken her against her will. She described to me how much she had feared the moment the corners of his mouth had dropped, how she had instinctively drawn her head between her shoulders, awaiting the next hit. Her mother in law and the servants had known about it but nobody had done anything to help her.

As she progressed with her story she started to calm down but her voice also turned cold and distant. She described every kind of pain she had endured in such a great detail that I was struck with horror. When she had still had the strength to resist she had tried to run away but he had gotten hold of her and had made her regret it dearly. Once he had broken her will to fight, she had been caught in an endless downward spiral.”

Adrijan observed Vivian take a sip of whiskey and noticed that his grip around the bottle was stronger than necessary. His knuckles showed all white.

“When there was nothing left to tell,
I
was the one who was shaking.

I was cursing the fact that her husband had died – only for the reason that I wanted to kill the prick myself. I wanted to watch him bleed.”