The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [184]
Well, I didn’t come running home. I loved the monastery school.
I loved the chapel and the hymns, the library with its thousands of old books, the bells that divided the day, the ever repeated rituals. I loved the cleanliness of the place, the overwhelming fact that all things here were well kept and in good repair, that work never ceased throughout the great house and the gardens.
When I was corrected, which wasn’t often, I knew an intense happiness because someone for the first time in my life was trying to make me into a good person, one who could learn things.
Within a month I declared my vocation. I wanted to enter the order. I wanted to spend my life in those immaculate cloisters, in the library writing on parchment and learning to read the ancient books. I wanted to be enclosed forever with people who believed I could be good if I wanted to be.
I was liked there. And that was a most unusual thing. I didn’t make other people there unhappy or angry.
The Father Superior wrote immediately to ask my father’s permission. And frankly I thought my father would be glad to be rid of me.
But three days later my brothers arrived to take me home with them. I cried and begged to stay, but there was nothing the Father Superior could do.
And as soon as we reached the castle, my brothers took away my books and locked me up. I didn’t understand why they were so angry. There was the hint that I had behaved like a fool for some reason. I couldn’t stop crying. I was walking round and round and smashing my fist into things and kicking the door.
Then my brother Augustin started coming in and talking to me. He’d circle the point at first, but what came clear finally was that no member of a great French family was going to be a poor teaching brother. How could I have misunderstood everything so completely? I was sent there to learn to read and write. Why did I always have to go to extremes? Why did I behave habitually like a wild creature?
As for becoming a priest with real prospects within the Church, well, I was the youngest son of this family, now, wasn’t I? I ought to think of my duties to my nieces and nephews.
Translate all that to mean this: We have no money to launch a real ecclesiastical career for you, to make you a bishop or cardinal as befits our rank, so you have to live out your life here as an illiterate and a beggar. Come in the great hall and play chess with your father.
AFTER I got to understand it, I wept right at the supper table, and mumbled words no one understood about this house of ours being “chaos,” and was sent back to my room for it.
Then my mother came to me.
She said: “You don’t know what chaos is. Why do you use words like that?”
“I know,” I said. I started to describe to her the dirt and the decay that was everywhere here and to tell how the monastery had been, clean and orderly, a place where if you set your mind to it, you could accomplish something.
She didn’t argue. And young as I was, I knew that she was warming to the unusual quality of what I was saying to her.
The next morning, she took me on a journey.
We rode for half a day before we reached the impressive château of a neighboring lord, and there she and the gentleman took me out to the kennel, where she told me to choose my favorites from a new litter of mastiff puppies.
I had never seen anything as tender and endearing as these little mastiff pups. And the big dogs were like drowsy lions as they watched us. Simply magnificent.
I was too excited almost to make the choice. I brought back the male and female that the lord advised me to pick, carrying them all the way home on my lap in a basket.
And within a month, my mother also bought for me my first flintlock musket and my first good horse for riding.
She never did say why she’d done all this. But I understood in my own way what she had given me. I raised those dogs, trained them, and founded