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I started to cry again though I knew she wasn’t condemning me. And then she took out a handkerchief and opened it to reveal several gold coins.

“You’ll get over this,” she said. “For the moment, death is spoiling life for you, that’s all. But life is more important than death. You’ll realize it soon enough. Now listen to what I have to say. I’ve had the doctor here and the old woman in the village who knows more about healing than he knows. Both agree with me I won’t live too long.”

“Stop, Mother,” I said, aware of how selfish I was being, but unable to hold back. “And this time there’ll be no gifts. Put the money away.”

“Sit down,” she said. She pointed to the bench near the hearth. Reluctantly I did as I was told. She sat beside me.

“I know,” she said, “that you and Nicolas are talking of running away.”

“I won’t go, Mother …”

“What, until I’m dead?”

I didn’t answer her. I can’t convey to you my frame of mind. I was still raw, trembling, and we had to talk about the fact that this living, breathing woman was going to stop living and breathing and start to putrefy and rot away, that her soul would spin into an abyss, that everything she had suffered in life, including the end of it, would come to nothing at all. Her little face was like something painted on a veil.

And from the distant village came the thinnest sound of the singing villagers.

“I want you to go to Paris, Lestat,” she said. “I want you to take this money, which is all I have left from my family. I want to know you’re in Paris, Lestat, when my time comes. I want to die knowing you are in Paris.”

I was startled. I remembered her stricken expression years ago when they’d brought me back from the Italian troupe. I looked at her for a long moment. She sounded almost angry in her persuasiveness.

“I’m terrified of dying,” she said. Her voice went almost dry. “And I swear I will go mad if I don’t know you’re in Paris and you’re free when it finally comes.”

I questioned her with my eyes. I was asking her with my eyes, “Do you really mean this?”

“I have kept you here as surely as your father has,” she said. “Not on account of pride, but on account of selfishness. And now I’m going to atone for it. I’ll see you go. And I don’t care what you do when you reach Paris, whether you sing while Nicolas plays the violin, or turn somersaults on the stage at the St.-Germain Fair. But go, and do what you will do as best you can.”

I tried to take her in my arms. She stiffened at first but then I felt her weaken and she melted against me, and she gave herself over so completely to me in that moment that I think I understood why she had always been so restrained. She cried, which I’d never heard her do. And I loved this moment for all its pain. I was ashamed of loving it, but I wouldn’t let her go. I held her tightly, and maybe kissed her for all the times she’d never let me do it. We seemed for the moment like two parts of the same thing.

And then she grew calm. She seemed to settle into herself, and slowly but very firmly she released me and pushed me away.

She talked for a long time. She said things I didn’t understand then, about how when she would see me riding out to hunt, she felt some wondrous pleasure in it, and she felt that same pleasure when I angered everyone and thundered my questions at my father and brothers as to why we had to live the way we lived. She spoke in an almost eerie way of my being a secret part of her anatomy, of my being the organ for her which women do not really have.

“You are the man in me,” she said. “And so I’ve kept you here, afraid of living without you, and maybe now in sending you away, I am only doing what I have done before.”

She shocked me a little. I never thought a woman could feel or articulate anything quite like this.

“Nicolas’s father knows about your plans,” she said. “The innkeeper overheard you. It’s important you leave right away. Take the diligence at dawn, and write to me as soon as you reach Paris. There are letter writers at the cemetery of