The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [341]
I looked for a packet from Roget but there was none, and I became angry suddenly. Surely he would have written by now. I had to know what was going on in Paris! Then I became afraid.
“What the hell is happening in France?” I murmured. “I’ll have to go and find other Europeans. The British, they always have information. They drag their damned Indian tea and their London Times with them wherever they go.”
I was infuriated to see her standing there so still. It was as if something were happening in the room—that awful sense of tension and anticipation that I’d known in the crypt before Armand told us his long tale.
But nothing was happening, only that she was about to leave me forever. She was about to slip into time forever. And how would we ever find each other again!
“Damn it,” I said. “I expected a letter.” No servants. They hadn’t known when we would be back. I wanted to send someone to hire musicians. I had just fed, and I was warm and I told myself that I wanted to dance.
She broke her stillness suddenly. She started to move in a rather deliberate way. With uncommon directness she went into the courtyard.
I watched her kneel down by the pond. There she lifted two blocks of paving, and she took out a packet and brushed the sandy earth off it, and she brought it to me.
Even before she brought it into the light I saw it was from Roget. This had come before we had ever gone up the Nile, and she had hidden it!
“But why did you do this!” I said. I was in a fury. I snatched the package from her and put it down on the desk.
I was staring at her and hating her, hating her as never before. Not even in the egotism of childhood had I hated her as I did now!
“Why did you hide this from me!” I said.
“Because I wanted one chance!” she whispered. Her chin was trembling. Her lower lip quivered and I saw the blood tears. “But without this even,” she said, “you have made your choice.”
I reached down and tore the packet apart. The letter slipped out of it, along with folded clippings from an English paper. I unraveled the letter, my hands shaking, and I started to read:
Monsieur, As you must know by now, on July 14, the mobs of Paris attacked the Bastille. The city is in chaos. There have been riots all over France. For months I have sought in vain to reach your people, to get them out of the country safely if I could.
But on Monday last I received the word that the peasants and tenant farmers had risen against your father’s house. Your brothers, their wives and children, and all who tried to defend the castle were slain before it was looted. Only your father escaped.
Loyal servants managed to conceal him during the siege and later to get him to the coast. He is, on this very day, in the city of New Orleans in the former French colony of Louisiana. And he begs you to come to his aid. He is grief-stricken and among strangers. He begs for you to come.
There was more. Apologies, assurances, particulars … it ceased to make sense.
I put the letter down on the desk. I stared at the wood and the pool of light made by the lamp.
“Don’t go to him,” she said.
Her voice was small and insignificant in the silence. But the silence was like an immense scream.
“Don’t go to him,” she said again. The tears streaked her face like clown paint, two long streams of red coming down from her eyes.
“Get out,” I whispered. The word trailed off and suddenly my voice swelled again. “Get out,” I said. And again my voice didn’t stop. It merely went on until I said the words again with shattering violence: “GET OUT!”
4
DREAMED a dream of family. We were all embracing one another. Even Gabrielle in a velvet gown was there. The castle was blackened, all burnt up. The treasures I had deposited were melted or turned into ashes. It always comes back to ashes. But is the old quote actually ashes to ashes or dust to dust?
Didn’t matter. I had gone back and made