Descent Into Madness (19 page)

              “We could both benefit from a good rest.”

              She has achieved her rest, I thought as I returned, the Parisian night beckoning me home. Aleksandra was moaning, lying on the floor, gripping at the pain seizing her body. Her life was almost over. Watching her, I remembered that agony. It was the last pain I felt as a human, and I realized I could benefit from a good rest now. Sr. Veronica had gotten hers, after all.

SIXTEEN

I
n the woodlands of Wiltshire stands Lacock Abbey – a stone fortress, a testament to the everlasting British country society.  A lifetime ago, I ate fresh blueberries and picked roses from its quaint gardens. The lilac bushes grew wild then, the fragrance calming the rushing imagination of youth. 

              The sun warmed me as I worked in the lawn, toiling fresh fruit from the garden. The musky scent of earth reminded me of my fleeting mortality.  

              Before the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536, Lacock Abbey had been a convent. My convent.

              There I had known blissful innocence.

              It was not so in 1562, when the once tender and pure Russian princess Aleksandra Vladislov had become a timeless fixture for her people through the vampiric gift. She was now, unlike her mother country, unchangeable – a living time capsule.

              Our time in Paris was short lived. Three nights after Aleksandra received the dark gift, we left for my beloved England.

              Lacock Abbey now stood resplendent against the moonlit sky. The stars glistened against freshly fallen dew collecting on the rose bushes. The centuries changed nothing of the grounds. Time stood motionless as my eyes misted with memories of Sr. Veronica and me wasting the hot nights before bed, dipping our toes in the fishpond, or picking lilacs to sell in the village. Lacock Abbey was persistent in its resistance to the natural evolution of time.

              A faint light shone from Sharington’s Tower that night. Henry VIII sold the abbey to Sir William Sharington, who demolished the church, destroying my sacred history, turning the abbey into a home. Sir William stored wondrous treasures in the tower he had built, and that night he stood amongst the glimmering jewels, surveying his legacy.

              I snuck into the warming room. During my time there, the warming room was the only place in the nunnery in which we kept a fire. No fire raged that night, though. A lone torch hung on the wall but remained unlit.

              Sr. Veronica’s voice whispered from the corner. “If we allow the fire to dim, we will be frozen by morning.”

              I swung around, yet she was not there. Her voice was but a fading fingerprint, a ghost still trapped between time and the limestone walls.

              “I failed you,” I whispered into the nothingness surrounding me. “I failed all of you.” No one remained to comfort me. Even the familiar stone walls, holding their memories and their ghosts, were foreign and removed. I no

longer belonged there. My presence seemed perverse and I left as silently as I had come.

              England, every bit of it – the sound of the Clydesdale hooves on the cobblestones, the aroma of mince pie, the laughter from the pubs – was all wrong. This was no longer my England.

              I stayed in the West Country. The eerie calm of Savernake Forest in the darkness of midnight was dreamlike, but the absence of the golden sun left the forest’s spectacular fauna and flora to the realms of imagination and memory. As a child, there was an old oak tree the locals called Big Belly Oak. Legend says dancing around the tree naked will summon the Devil himself. We never tempted the myth. Now, I wondered if the Devil would be more afraid of me than I would be of him.

              I was in West Country but a month before venturing to London. Winter was in full throw, snow collecting on the cobblestones: blanketing the rooftops, and obscuring the shop signs. Fire raged in packed pubs and shoeless children froze, begging for pence in the streets.

              The scene – straight from a Dickens’ tale – dripped with despair. I walked to one child, shoeless, clothed in rags that stank of pig dung and were too small for the frail boy’s frame, and dropped a hand full of coins and then another of precious stones. The boy’s eyes, after beholding his new bounty, glistened up at me as if I were Father Christmas. He scurried off, calling to the other beggars and disappeared into a darkened, fog-filled alley. The lost children of London, I thought, would at least eat well that night.

              I went first to the Tower of London: a fortress of imprisonment and elaborate display of royal power. It stood before me, a goliath of brick and mortar. My first evening there I spent lingering on the Tower Green where, eight years prior, Queen Mary Tudor ordered the execution of one Lady Jane Grey. The “Nine Days Queen” roamed the Queen’s Garden at will, enjoying the warm sun on her face; and sleeping contentedly in her state apartment, a comfortable purse at her disposal. The naïve queen, Lady Jane, now resides in the Chapel Royal of St. Vincent ad Vincula, alongside the bodies of Catherine Howard and Anne Boleyn.  

              Not two years prior had Catherine Howard, in 1552, lost her life on the Green; and prior to that, Anne Boleyn in the summer of 1536. One-year prior to Anne Boleyn’s death, Sir Thomas Moore faced the executioner for committing high treason, for refusing to sign the Act of Succession. The blood of England’s past saturated and stained the Green’s soil with bureaucratic corruption. And, I found great relief that I had not been there to witness it.

              The muted blanket of moonlight dulled the Tower Green and masked the Queen’s Gardens splendor, so I traveled instead to Westminster Abbey.
The Early English Gothic architecture, with its pointed arches and ribbed vaulting, reminded me of the things I adore and sorely missed about my mother country. These walls would be testimony to a rich history; the stained glass windows reflections of a religion once embraced by all whom hailed from England, including me.

              I spent an entire evening in front of the shrine of Edward the Confessor. Mary had pieced it together as best she could after its dismantlement during the Reformation. Gone were the elaborate Cosmati swirls that once graced its stone base, the monks’ thoughts revealed. Gone was the golden feretory covering Edward’s coffin.

              A week’s worth of evenings were exhausted combing through the books in Merton College’s library, torchlight in hand. Oxford’s academic jewel is one of the oldest libraries in England. The tomes I held then, the vellum and parchment smooth beneath my fingers; they are now either lost or tucked safely away in locked, glass cases, or hidden in Vatican vaults. But I will never forgot the smell of leather and vellum, of ink, or how the shadows moved against the whitewashed candlelit walls, shifting between the bookshelves and tables. It has been said that if you put an idea in print, it becomes immortal. That is what I witnessed in the library – immortality.

              During those nights, I fell in love with histories and stories from times I had actually lived. I had read of people who were once real to me, but who were now only a sentence in a history book. Names brought into mind images, feelings, experiences, and I realized in the dim candlelight, tucked away beneath of stack of leather bound pamphlets, that history lived within me.

              Aleksandra and Wesley accompanied me to Christ Church one evening, after I had left the books and memories on their shelves. Christ Church was not just a college but also the diocese of Oxford. The Norman pillars and the vaulting choir captivated Aleksandra, who spent an evening sketching their intricacies. The newly reburied remains of Katherine Martyr, the wife of Peter Martyr Vermigili (Regius Chair of Divinity, and Protestant reformer as appointed by Edward VI) and those of St. Fridewside (foundress of a nunnery where the college was formed after the dissolution of the monasteries) now found peace. When the college fell again under Catholic rule, the new dean had been ordered to exhume Katherine’s body, leaving it to rot in a dung-heap.

              We parted at Christ’s Church. For Aleksandra, her new eyes were first beholding the beauty of my mother country. But, for Wesley and me, this was a homecoming – a surreal homecoming where the familiar was saturated in change.

SEVENTEEN

I
’ve lived long enough to realize how lost one can become when fixated on the minutes of each day.

Confronted by your past, life stops in a breath-sucking moment of terror. Where had those moments – all the cherished, fleeting seconds that seemed random and insignificant, gone? Had years really flown by as I stood, an unchanging sentinel, guarding memories, fixating on the mundane particulars of an uncertain future, only for the epiphany to arrive too late to matter?

              I struggled to reattach myself to a past that I knew was gone to me. Forever. Time stole those moments, those years, from me, and ruined my connection to this place.

              We existed in England, nevertheless. Wesley took ownership of an estate outside Winchester. It was rather spacious, a sprawling monument to forest conservation and stout British architecture. A far grander place than we needed, but Wesley never downplayed what he felt was our natural place in society and history.

              The house itself was elegant and modern for its time. Two parlors – evening and morning (the latter unused), a modest ballroom adorned in ivory and marble and hard, darkly stained woods, and three grand libraries. The main dining room’s windows filtered sunlight through its stained glass that played on the white tablecloth, and made music with the crystal goblets. Or, so we were told. At night, the candlelight reflected the colors bouncing off the gilded mirrors weaving a rainbow-aura, and this was sufficient for us.

              It had to be, after all. We seek sustenance in candlelight. In all its golden glow touches, reflects off, bleeds through. Candlelight is our sun.

              A dense forest encircled the property with a modest pond only a short walk from the house. Eventually Wesley had a pebbled lane installed; yellow and white imported Italian stone, which led a path to the main gate, circled around to the back patio and ended in the fountain garden to the east of the house. He called this his chemin de soleil – sun path – and lined it with nerium oleander and lilac. The fountains – the trickling aqua over marble, gently gushing sprays of water sprouting from cherubim mouths – mingled amongst rose bushes and stone benches. Walking this path on warm, summer evenings, or sitting in the fountain garden – the scents could be intoxicating.

              For ten years, we lived a stolen life.             

              Near the end, when all talk turned to the New World, to exploration and new beginnings, Aleksandra and Wesley’s wanderlust set in. Stationary and stagnant are not the traits of my kind. We are a nomadic people.

              I had no urge to travel, though, keeping to my own country.

              It was 1572 and Wesley and Aleksandra ventured toward Paris and then on to Rome. They settled for a few years in Dublin to observe, as Wesley often wrote, “the

Calvinistic tendencies running rampant.” However, they never really s
ettled
in any one place for long.

              Occasionally, they would return. A month here and a month there, but never long. Until the winter of 1612,when they returned for three years.

              I once spent seven months, during our years apart, in the city of Exeter, in the county Devon. It was Isca when the Romans settled this fine, rugged land. They had invaded southwestern England in 50 AD. Since then, Exeter has survived a seventh century German invasion, an 8
th
century Danish raid, and stood no chance against a Norman siege in 1068. Even Henry VIII’s religious civil war against parliament could not shake the town’s second century Roman wall.

              Neither could it tumble Exeter Cathedral. The first stone was set in 1112, twin Norman towers were built, flanking an expansive Gothic vault, and provided Saint Boniface a place of solitude. There he converted northern Germany to Christianity. There, history happened. 

              My travels to York were also plentiful with Aleksandra and Wesley gone. In my former life, before the Dissolution of the Monasteries, before Wesley turned me, York served as a monastic retreat. Many religious houses and hospitals existed within the city’s walls. After Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, though, the religious landscape was in turmoil. On November 5, 1605, Guy Fawkes, a Roman Catholic restorationist, was caught and arrested while guarding hidden explosives under the House

of Lords. An assassination attempt was thwarted, saving King James I and Protestant officials.

              When I visited, the city seemed lost, in transition. Much like myself.

              I spent countless nights sitting on the bank of the Ouse River watching ships sail through the calm waters. When the Romans settled the city, they named it Eboracum. It had been a stronghold until 400 AD, when the fighting in Gaul placed a strain on Roman resources. The Roman Legions were withdrawn, sending the town into a spiral of change. Anglo Saxon tribes filtered the area, seized control, and Christianity spread. With the Viking invasions, the city became a crucial port in the Norse trade routes. Eventually, William the Conqueror took possession of the city.

              With time, York became the capitol of northern England. Its growth was halted in the 1400’s with the War of the Roses, but, as everything will do in time, the city rose like a phoenix from the ashes of its past. 

              My phoenix came to me in Bath, though. It was my ninth trip to the city and one I thought would go as uneventful as the previous eight had.

              Standing amidst the rubble of Bath Abbey – the crumbling stone, the broken glass parables – a reminder of Henry VIII’s treason against his country, a feeling tickled my throat. A subtle, familiar scent wafted from the desiccated tombstones, hidden in overgrowth and forgotten. I sensed movement in the shadows, an unnatural movement – slow, deliberate, stalking me.

              It stopped near the chapel wall.

              I called to it. “Come out from the shadow.”

              Shards of glass crunched under its footsteps.

              “Is that you?” It asked.

              “Who is there?” I questioned as I leaned into the blackness. “Come out.”

              “You will never change,” it spoke as the figure moved from the darkness. The light caught on its chin until the image before me morphed into a man.

              “Aksel?”

              His hand reached for my hair and I let his fingers slip through the strands. His fingers caressed my cheeks and traced my lips, before I caught them, holding them in my own.

              “What are you doing in Bath?”

              “I have searched for you. You are difficult to find.”

              “Why?”

              He moved from me, sitting on the edge of the crumbling chapel wall. His hair was tousled and messy. His tattered clothing pulled at the seams from wear.

              “Where is Evelyn?” I asked.

“She grew up,” he said, resting his face in the palm of his hands. “She no longer needed me.” He stood looking up into the starlit sky. “She fell in love, Bree. Evelyn and her lover – once joined in the blood, they quickly began making more. Now they have a little coven in Paris. There must be thirty by now, if not more. Can you imagine?”

              “That sounds dreadful; why would I want to imagine such a thing?”

              “It is.” His eyes met mine. “I want to be with you, Bree.”

              “Askel, stop, don’t speak those words.”

              “No. I do! Please.” He moved closer and forced his hand into mine. “I’ve searched for you. Twenty years, Bree, for twenty years I’ve wandered this globe looking for any sign of you. Any mention of your name, of our kind. Bree, please, do not turn me away! We must come together, for our sanity and companionship. Bree, eternity, it drags on so, does it not?”

              “I just cannot, Aksel. I cannot. I will not.”

              “Please, Bree.” His fingers stopped the tear sliding down my cheek.

              “You cannot stop them all, Aksel.”

              “I can try,” he said.

              “I cannot love you again,” I told him. “I will never, ever, love again. And I will not pretend to. Not even to pass the centuries in peace with you. There’ll be nothing but strife, growing yet another chasm between us. Just give it time, Aksel. It will happen again. And this time,” I said, turning my cheek from his view, “this time our love will not be there binding us to the other. Loneliness is not enough.”

              “He must have been someone extremely special.” He spoke with knowledge and understanding. “Bree,” Aksel’s fingers gingerly crept against my chin as he turned my face toward his, “I am not trying to replace him. It is apparent that no one will ever replace him.”

              I spent the rest of the evening telling Aksel about Viktor. It had been too long since I smiled with the mention of his name. Far too long had I buried his memory inside my heart.

              “I can still feel him in here.” I pointed to my breast. “I may have no heart beat, but that doesn’t mean I do not have a heart.”

              Centuries passed and Aksel traveled with me. My faithful companion, my friend.

              In the winter of 1612, when Wesley and Aleksandra returned, we all left the fog stricken land of England for the Mediterranean.

              We spent an entire summer in Athens, weaving our way through ruined temples. Aksel adored the Library of Hadrian on the north side of the Acropolis. The architecture amused him, the materials used to create the structure, the artisanship. He knew its history as well as his own. There was special significance to the Western Wall because, unlike the other three walls, which were limestone, the Western Wall is Pentelic marble, and decorated with an elaborate row of Corinthian columns. He told us that Pentelic marble came from the quarries of Mount Pentelikon in Attica. We found his facts amusing, but I could not share his passion for stone.

              I enjoyed walking through the Kerameikos instead of taking part in his Greek architecture lessons. In 431 BC, Pericles had given his famous funeral oration there. As a child, I learned its call for democracy and freedom. Aksel never understood my desire to linger there in the wee hours before dawn. Morbid. That is what he called my fascination with the place.

              Before we knew it, a year of Mediterranean midnights had passed as we traveled throughout Greece. Mykonos. The Pan-Hellenic sanctuaries. The birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, as Poseidon revealed it – the island of Delos.               The legend of how Delos grew from the sea is one of jealousy, of betrayal, of human nature. When Leto, the goddess of motherhood, became pregnant with Zeus’s child, Hera, Zeus’s wife and queen of the god’s, raged with jealousy. She exiled the pregnant Leto, forbidding her to give birth on Earth. As labor neared, Zeus, besot and desperate, appealed to Poseidon for intervention. Poseidon then parted the sea, revealing the island of Delos, and Leto gave birth to the twin god’s Artemis and Apollo.

              The Venice of Greece, Mykonos, a sparsely vegetated island surrounded in deep, sapphire seas, with cresting pearlescent waves stands as the legendary battleground for Hercules and the giants. The monolithic rocks scattered through the island were believed to be petrified remnants of the giant corpses, having fallen in battle and cursed to serve as eternal reminders of Hercules’s power. 

              While breathtaking under a star drenched sky, I felt no connection to the place and quickly left it for Crete.

              Even on the darkest of nights, the sweet aroma of olive trees and orange groves, of cedar forests and sunshine followed us on Crete. The Aegean Sea stretched before us, vineyards grew at our feet, and cedar and palm forests wildly inhabited my nightly walks.

              I recall now a spot near the edge of an olive grove, the grass grew knotted, and sand blew in from the coast. The waves crashing at night could be deafening, drowning out the world, drowning out the past and all future cares. There existed a few hours each night, right before dawn as tomorrow edged into today, when we would all separate, going our own ways before surrendering to sleep. Aleksandra read. Wesley explored. Aksel wandered about. And I would always sit at the spot near the edge of the olive grove, gazing into the Aegean’s azure waters.