The Vampire Armand (The Vampire Chronicles 6)

I stayed there for four nights.

Again, I was delivered.

This time I found myself, groggy and in dishabille, barely covered by a thin torn cream-colored silk shirt. I lay on a couch brought from the very brothel, but this was my Master's studio, and there he sat, not far away, painting my picture obviously, at a small easel from which he took his eyes only to dart glances at me.

I asked the time of day and what night it was. He didn't answer.

"And so you're angry that I enjoyed it?" I asked.

"I told you to lie still," he said.

I lay back, cold all over, and hurt suddenly, lonely perhaps, and wanting like a child to hide in his arms.

Morning came and he left me, having said nothing else. The painting was a gleaming masterpiece of the obscene. I was in my sleeping posture cast down on a riverbank, a fawn of sorts, over which a tall shepherd, the Master himself, in priestly robes stood watch. The woods around us were thick and richly realized with the peeling tree trunks and their clustered dusty leaves. The water of the stream seemed wet to the touch, so clever was the realism of it, and my own figure appeared guileless and lost in sleep, my mouth half-open in a natural way, my brow obviously troubled by uneasy dreams.

I threw it on the floor, in a rage, meaning to smear it.

Why had he said nothing? Why did he force me to these lessons which drove us apart? Why his anger at me for merely doing what he had told me? I wondered if the brothels had been a test of my innocence, and his admonitions to me to enjoy all of it had been lies.

I sat at his desk, picked up his pen and scribbled a message to him.

You are the Master. You should know all things. It's unsupportable to be Mastered by one who cannot do it. Make clear the way, shepherd, or lay down your staff.

The fact was, I was wrung out from the pleasure, from the drink, from the distortion of my senses, and lonely just to be with him and for his guidance and his kindness and his reassurance that I was his.

But he was gone.

I went out roaming. I spent all day in the taverns, drinking, playing cards, deliberately enticing the pretty girls who were fair game, to keep them at my side as I played the various games of chance.

Then when night came, I let myself be seduced, ho-hum, by a drunken Englishman, a fair freckle-skinned noble of the oldest French and English titles, of which this one was the Earl of Harlech, who was traveling in Italy to see the great wonders and utterly intoxicated with its many delights, including buggery in a strange land.

Naturally, he found me a beautiful boy. Didn't everyone? He was not at all ugly himself. Even his pale freckles had a kind of prettiness to them, especially given his outrageous copper hair.

Taking me back to his rooms in an overstaffed and beautiful palazzo, he made love to me. It was not all bad. I liked his innocence and his clumsiness. His light round blue eyes were a marvel; he had wondrously thick and muscular arms and a pampered but deliciously rough-pointed orange beard.

He wrote poems to me in Latin and in French, and recited them to me with great charm. After an hour or two of playing the vanquishing brute, he had let on that he wanted to be covered by me. And this I had very much enjoyed. We played it that way after that, my being the conquering soldier and he the victim on the battlefield, and sometimes I whipped him lightly with a doubled-up leather belt before I took him, which sent us both into a tidy froth.

From time to time, he implored me to confess who I really was and where he might afterwards find me, which of course I wouldn't.

I stayed there for three nights with him, talking about the mysterious islands of England with him, and reading Italian poetry aloud to him, and even sometimes playing the mandolin for him and singing any number of the soft love songs I knew.

He taught me a great deal of rank gutter-tramp English, and wanted to take me home. He had to regain his wits, he said; he had to return to his duties, his estates, his hateful wicked adulterous Scottish wife whose father was an assassin, and his innocent little child whose paternity he was most certain of, due to its orange curly hair so like his own.

He would keep me in London in a splendid house he had there, a present from His Majesty King Henry VII. He could not now live without me, the Harlechs to a man had to have what they must have, and there was nothing for me to do but yield to him. If I was the son of a formidable nobleman I should confess it, and this obstacle would be dealt with. Did I hate my Father, perchance? His was a scoundrel. All the Harlechs were scoundrels and had been since the days of Edward the Confessor. We would sneak out of Venice this very night.

"You don't know Venice, and you don't know her noblemen," I said kindly. "Think on all this. You'll be cut to pieces for giving it a try. "

I now perceived that he was fairly young. Since all older men seemed old to me, I had not thought about it before. He couldn't have been more than twenty-five. He was also mad.

He leapt on the bed, his bushy copper hair flying, and pulled his dagger, a formidable Italian stiletto, and stared down into my upturned face.

"I'll kill for you," he said confidentially and proudly, in the Venetian dialect. Then he drove the dagger into the pillow and the feathers flew out of it. "I'll kill yo

u if I have to. " The feathers went up into his face.

"And then you'll have what?" I asked.

There was a creaking behind him. I felt certain someone was at the window, beyond the bolted wooden shutters, even though we were three stories above the Grand Canal. I told him so. He believed me.