The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

Or, is it take God's grace

for themselves?

Jean-Guy feels himself start to reel, and rams his fist against the apartment wall for support. Then feels it lurch and pulse in answer under his knuckles, as though his own hammering heart were buried beneath that yellowed plaster.

Pistol thrust beneath his coat's lapel, Jean-Guy steps towards Dumouriez's door — only to find his way blocked by a sudden influx of armed and shouting fellow citizens. Yet another protest whipped up from general dissatisfaction and street-corner demagoguery, bound for nowhere in particular, less concerned with destruction than with noise and display; routine "patriotic" magic transforming empty space into chaos-bent rabble, with no legerdemain or invocation required.

Across the way, he spots La Hire crushed up against the candle-maker's door, but makes sure to let his gaze slip by without a hint of recognition as the stinking human tide, none of them probably feeling particularly favourable, at this very moment, towards any representative of the committee who as they keep on chanting — have stole our blood to make their bread

(a convenient bit of symbolic symmetry, that),

sweeps him rapidly back past the whore, the garbage, the cafe, the row itself, and out into the cobbled street beyond.

Jean-Guy feels his ankle turn as it meets the gutter; he stumbles, then rights himself. Calling out, above the crowd's din —

"Citizens, I" No answer. Louder: "Listen, Citizens, I have no quarrel with you; I have business in there" And, louder still: "Citizens! Let me pass !"

But: no answer, again, from any of the nearest mob-members: neither that huge, obviously drunken man with the pike, trailing tricolor streamers, or those two women trying to fill their aprons with loose stones while ignoring the screaming babies strapped to their backs. Not even from that dazed young man who seems to have once however mistakenly thought himself to be their leader, now dragged hither and yon at the violent behest of his "followers" with his pale eyes rolling in their sockets, his gangly limbs barely still attached to his shaking body.

The price of easy oratory. Jean-Guy thinks, sourly. Cheap words, hasty actions; a whole desperate roster of very real ideals and hungers played on for the mere sake of a moment's notoriety, applause, power

— our Revolution's ruin, in a nutshell.

And then

a shadow falls over him, soft and dark as the merest night-borne whisper, but one that will lie paradoxically heavy across his unsuspecting shoulders, nevertheless, for long years afterwards. His destiny approaching through the mud, on muffled wheels.

A red-hung coach, nudging at him — almost silently — from behind.

Perfect.

He shoulders past the pikeman, between the women, drawing curses and blows; gives back a few of his own, as he clambers on to the coach's running-board and hooks its nearest door open. Rummages in his pocket for his tricolor badge, and brandishes it in the face of the coach's sole occupant, growling —

"I commandeer this coach in the name of the Committee for Public Safety!"

Sliding quick into the seat opposite as the padded door shuts suddenly, yet soundlessly, beside him. And that indistinct figure across from him leans forward, equally sudden a mere red-on-white-on-red silhouette, in the curtained windows' dull glare — to murmur:

"The committee? Why, my coach is yours, then"

Citizen .

Jean-Guy looks up, dazzled. And notices, at last, the Prendegrace arms which hang just above him, embroidered on the curtains' underside — silver on red, red on red, outlined in fire by the sun which filters weakly through their thick, enshrouding velvet weave.

1815

Jean-Guy feels new wetness trace its way down his arm, soaking the cuff of his sleeve red: his war-wound, broken open once more, in sympathetic proximity to what? His own tattered scraps of memory, slipping and sliding like phlegm on glass? This foul, haunted house, where Dumouriez — like some Tropic trapdoor spider — traded on his master's aristocratic name to entice the easiest fresh prey he could find into his web, then fattened them up (however briefly) before using them to slake M. le Chevalier's deviant familial appetites?

Blood, from wrist to palm, printing the wall afresh; blood in his throat from his tongue's bleeding base, painting his spittle red as he hawks and coughs all civility lost, in a moment's spasm of pure revulsion on to the dusty floor.

Spatter of blood on dust, like a ripe scarlet hieroglyphic: liquid, horrid, infinitely malleable. Utterly uninterpretable.

I have set my mark upon you, Citizen .

Blood at his collar, his nipple. His

( — groin).

My hook in your flesh. My winding reel.

Jean-Guy feels it tug him downward, into the maelstrom.

1793

The coach. Prendegrace sits right in front of Jean-Guy, a mere hand's grasp away, slight and lithe and damnably languid in his rich, red velvet; his hair is drawn back and side-curled, powdered so well that Jean-Guy can't even tell its original colour, let alone use its decided lack of contrast to help him decipher the similarly pallid features of the face it frames. Except to note that, as though in mocking imitation of Citizen Robespierre, the chevalier too affects a pair of spectacles with smoked glass lenses

though, instead of sea green, these small, blank squares glint a dim — yet unmistakable — shade of scarlet.

Play for time, Jean-Guy's brain tells him, meanwhile, imparting its usually good advice with uncharacteristic softness, as though, if it were to speak any louder, the chevalier might somehow overhear it. Pretend not to have recognized him. Then work your pistol free, slowly; fire a warning shot, and summon the good citizens outside

… those same ones you slipped in here to avoid, in the first place —

to aid you in his arrest.

Almost snorting aloud at the very idea, before he catches himself: as though an agent of Jean-Guy's enviable size and bulk actually need fear the feeble defences of a ci-devant fop like this one, with his frilled wrists and his neat, red-heeled shoes, their tarnished buckles dull and smeared — on the nearest side, at least — with something that almost looks like

blood?

Surely not.

And yet

"You would be Citizen Sansterre, I think," the chevalier observes, abruptly.

Name of God.

Recovering, Jean-Guy gives a stiff nod. "And you the traitor, Prendegrace."

"And that would be a pistol you reach for, under your collar."

"It would."

A punch, a kick, a cry for help, the drawing forth of some secret weapon of his own: Jean-Guy braces himself, a match-ready fuse, tensed to the point of near pain against any of the aforementioned. But the chevalier merely nods as well, undeterred in the face of Jean-Guy's honest aggression, his very passivity itself a form of arrogance, a cool and languid aristocratic challenge to the progressively more hot and bothered plebian world around him. Then leans just a bit forward, at almost the same time: a paralytic blink of virtual non-movement, so subtle as to be hardly worth noting; for all that Jean-Guy now finds himself beginning barely recognizing what he does, let alone why to match it.

Leaning in, far too slow to stop himself, to arrest this fall in mid-plunge. Leaning in, as the chevalier's red lenses dip, slipping inexorably downward to reveal a pale rim of brow, of lash, of eye socket. And leaning in yet further, to see — below that —

— first one eye, then another: pure but opaque, luridly empty. Eyes without whites (or irises, or pupils), the same blank scarlet tint — from lower lid to upper — as the spectacles that masked them.

Words in red darkness, pitched almost too low to hear; Jean-Guy must strain to catch them, leaning closer still. Places a trembling hand on the chevalier's shoulder, to steady himself, and feels them thrum up through his palm, his arm, his chest, his wildly beating heart: a secret, interior embrace, intimate as plague, squeezing him between the ribs, between the thighs. And

deeper.

Before him, the chevalier's own hand hovers, clean white palm turned patiently upward. Those long, black-rimmed nails. Those red words, tracing the myriad paths of blood. Suggesting, mildly

Then you had best give it to me, Citizen, this pistol of yours. Had you not?

Because: That would be the right thing to do, really. All things considered.

Do you not think?

Yes.

For safety. For safe-keeping.

. . . exactly that, yes.

Such sweet reason. Such deadly reasonableness.

Jean-Guy feels his mouth drop open as though to protest, but hears only the faint, wet pop of his jaw hinges relaxing in an idiot yawn; watches, helpless, as he drops the pistol — butt-first — into the chevalier's grip. Sees the chevalier seem to blink, just slightly, in return: all-red no-stare blurred by only the most momentary flicker, milky and brief as some snake's nictitating membrane.

And

"There, now," the chevalier observes, aloud. "That must suit us both so much better."

Must it — not ?

A half-formed heave, a last muffled attempt at a thrash, muscles knotted in on themselves like some mad stray cur's in the foam-flecked final stages of hydrophobia — and then, without warning, the chevalier is on him. Their mouths seal together, parted lip to bared, bone-needle teeth: blood fills Jean-Guy's throat, greasing the way as the chevalier locks fast to his fluttering tongue. His gums burn like ulcers. This is far less a kiss than a suddenly open wound, an artery slashed and left to spurt.

The pistol falls away, forgotten.

Venom spikes Jean-Guy's heart. He chokes down a numbing, stinging mouthful of cold that takes him to the brink of sleep and the edge of climax simultaneously as the chevalier's astringent tongue rasps over the inflamed tissues of his mouth, harsh as a cat's. Finds himself grabbing this whippet-slim thing in his arms by the well-arranged hair, anchoring himself so it can grind them ever more firmly together, and feels a shower of loose powder fall around both their faces like dirty city snow; the chevalier's ribbon has come undone, his neat-curled side-locks unravelling like kelp in an icy current. At the same instant, meanwhile, the nearest lapel of his lurid coat peels back deft as some mountebank's trick — to reveal the cold white flesh beneath: no pulse visible beneath the one flat pectoral, nipple peak-hard but utterly colourless

Oh, yes, yes, yes

Jean-Guy feels the chevalier's hands — clawed now — scrabble at his fly's buttons, free him to slap upwards in this awful red gloom. Then sees him give one quick double thumb-flick across the groove, the distended, weeping velvet knob, and send fresh scarlet welling up along the urethral fold faster than Jean-Guy can cry out in surprised, horrified pain.

Name of death and the devil!

The chevalier gives a thin grin of delight at the sight of it. His mouth opens wide as a cat's in flamen, tasting the slaughterhouse-scented air. Nearly drooling.

People, Revolution, Supreme Being, please

Lips skinning back. Fangs extending. His sleek head dipping low, as though in profane prayer

oh, God, oh, Jesus, no —

to sip at it.

More muffled words rippling up somehow through the femoral knot of Jean-Guy's groin, even as he gulps bile, his whole righteous world dimming to one pin-prick point of impossible pain, of unspeakable and unnatural ecstasy as he starts to reel, come blood, black out.

Ah, Citizen, do not leave me just yet. Not when

we are so close

— to meeting each other, once more.

In 1815, meanwhile: Jean-Guy looks up from the bloody smudge now spreading wide beneath his own splayed fingers to see that same familiar swatch of wet and shining scarlet resurface, like a grotesque miracle, above his gaping face. Dumouriez's death stain, grown somehow fresh again, as though the wall — the room, itself — were bleeding.

Plaster reddens, softens. Collapses inward, paradoxically, as the wall bulges outward. And Jean-Guy watches, frozen, as what lies beneath begins to extrude itself, at long last, through that vile, soaked ruin of chalk dust, glue and haemoglobin alike: first one hand, then another, one shoulder, then its twin. The whole rest of the torso, still dressed in the same rotten velvet equipage , twisting its deft way out through the sodden, crumbling muck, grub-white neck rearing cobra-like, poised to strike, grub-white profile turning outward — its lank mane still clotted with calcified powder, its red-glazed glasses hung carelessly askew once more to cast empty eyes Jean-Guy's way

This awful revenant version of M. the former Chevalier du Prendegrace shakes his half-mummified head, studying Jean-Guy from under dusty lashes. He opens his mouth, delicately, pauses, then coughs out a fine white curl, and frowns at the way his long-dormant lungs wheeze.

Fastening his blank red gaze on Jean-Guy's own. Observing:

"How terribly you've changed, Citizen." A pause. "But then — that is the inevitable fate of the impermanent."

"The devil," Jean-Guy whispers, forgetting his once-vaunted atheism.

"La, sir. You do me entirely too much honour."

The chevalier steps forward, bringing a curled and ragged lip of wall along with him; Jean-Guy hears it tear as it comes, like a scab. The sound rings in his ears. He puts up both palms, weakly, as though a simple gesture might really be enough to stave off the — living? — culmination of a half-lifetime's nightmare visions. The chevalier notices, and gives that sly half-smile: teeth still white, still intact, yet jutting now from his fever-pink gums at slight angles, like a shark's but could there really be more of them, after all these years? Crop upon crop, stacked up and waiting to be shed after his next feeding, the one that never came?

They almost seem to glow, translucent as milky glass. Waiting

— to be filled.

"Of course, one does hear things, especially inside the walls." the chevalier continues, brushing plaster away with small, fastidious strokes. "For example: that — excepting certain instances of regicide your vaunted Revolution came to naught, after all. And that, since a Corsican general now rules an empire in the monarchy's place, old Terrorists such as yourself must therefore count themselves in desperate need of new positions."

Upraised palms, wet and red; his "complaint" come back in force, worse than the discards in Dumouriez's long-ago corpse pile. Jean-Guy stands immersed in it, head swirling, skin one whole slick of cold sweat and hot blood admixed and far more blood than sweat, all told. So much so, he must swallow it in mouthfuls, just to speak. His voice comes out garbled, sludgy, clotted .

"You" he says, with difficulty. " You did this to me"

"But of course, Citizen Sansterre; sent the girl to the window, tempted you within my reach, and set my mark upon you, as you well know. As I —"

Told you.

Or do you not recall?

Sluiced and veritably streaming with it, inside and out: palate, nipples, groin. That haematoma on his wrist's prickling underside, opening like a flower. The chevalier's remembered kiss, licking his veins full of cold poison.

(If I can't stop this bleeding, it'll be my death.)

Numb-tongued: "As you did with Dumouriez."

"Exactly so."

Raising one clawed hand to touch Jean-Guy's face, just lightly — a glancing parody of comfort — and send Jean-Guy arching away, cursing, as the mere pressure of the chevalier's fingers is enough to draw first a drip, then a gush, of fresh crimson.

"God damn your ci-devant eyes!"

"Yes, yes." Quieter: "But I can make this stop, you know."

Me. And only me.

Seduction, then infection, then cure — for a price. Loyalty, till death

And — after?

How Prendegrace trapped Dumouriez, no doubt, once upon a long, long time past; or had Dumouriez simply offered himself up to worship at this thing's red-shod feet, without having to be enticed or duped into such an unequal devil's bargain? Coming to Prendegrace's service gratefully, even gladly; as glad as he would be, eventually, to cut his own throat to save this creature's no-life, or spray fresh blood across a wet plaster wall to conceal the thing he'd hunted, pimped and died for, safely entombed within?

And for Jean-Guy, an equally limited range of choices: to bleed out all at once in a moment's sanguinary torrent, and die now, or live as a tool, the way Dumouriez did and die later .

Minimally protected, perhaps even cherished; easily used, yet just as easily

discarded.

"There can be benefits to such an arrangement," Prendegrace points out, softly.

"He sacrificed himself for you."

"As was required."

"As you demanded."

The chevalier raises a delicate brow, sketched in discoloured plaster. "Me? I demand nothing, Citizen. Only accept — what's offered me."

"Because you aristos deign to do nothing for yourselves."

"Oh, no doubt. But then, that's why I chose you: for being so much more able than me, in every regard. Why I envied and coveted your strength, your vital idealism. Your"

Life.

Jean-Guy feels the monster's gaze rove up and down, ap-praisingly — reading him, as it were, like —

Hoarse: "A map."

The chevalier sighs, and shakes his head.

"A pretty pastime, once. But your body no longer invites such pleasantries, more's the pity; you have grown somewhat more — opaque — with age, I think."

Taking one further step forward, as Jean-Guy recoils; watching Jean-Guy slip in his own blood, go down on one knee, hand scrabbling helplessly for purchase against that ragged hole where the wall once was.

"What are you?" he asks. Wincing, angrily, as he hears his own voice crack with an undignified mixture of hatred —

fear ( — longing?).

The chevalier pauses, mid-step. And replies, after a long moment:

"Ah. Yet this would be the one question we none of us may answer, Citizen Sansterre, not even myself, who knows only that I was born this way, whatever way that might be"

Leaning closer still. Whispering. Words dimming to blood-thrum, and lower, as the sentence draws to its long-sought, inevitable close.

"Just as you were born, like everyone else I meet in this terrible world of ours, to bear my mark —"

or be my prey .

With Jean-Guy's sight narrowing to embrace nothing but those empty eyes, that mouth, those teeth : his disease made flesh, made terminal. His destiny, buried too deep to touch or think of, till it dug itself free once more.

But

I am not just this, damn you, he thinks, as though in equally silent, desperate reply not just your prey, your pawn, your tool. I was someone, grown and bred entirely apart from your influence: I had history, hopes, dreams. I loved my father, and hated his greed; loved my mother, and hated her enslavement. Loved and hated what I saw of them both in myself: my born freedom, my slave's skin. I allied myself with a cause that talked of freedom, only to drown itself in blood. But I am more than that, more than anything that came out of that more than just this one event, the worst — and most defining — moment of my life. This one encounter with

you.

Stuck in the same yearning, dreadful moment through twelve whole years of real life — even when he was working his land, loving his wife, mourning her, mourning the children whose hope died with her. Running his father's plantation, adjudicating disputes, approving marriages, attending christenings; watching La Hire decline and fall, being drunk at his funeral, at the bal , at his own wedding

Only to be drawn back here, at last, like some recalcitrant cur to his hidden master's call. To be reclaimed, over near-incalculable distances of time and space, as though he were some piece of property, some tool, some merest creeping

slave.

Marked, as yours. By you. For you.

But — this was the entire point of "my" Revolution, Jean-Guy remembers, suddenly. That all men were slaves, no matter their estate, so long as kings and their laws ruled unchecked. And that we should all, all of us, no matter how low or high — or mixed — our birth either rise up, take what was ours, live free or die .

Die quick. Die clean. Make your last stand now, Citizen, while you still have the strength to do it

or never.

"It occurs to me," the chevalier says, slowly, "that after all this we still do not know each other's given name."

Whatever else, Jean-Guy promises himself, with one last coherent thought, I will not allow myself to beg.

A spark to oil, this last heart's flare: he turns for the door, lurching up, only to find the chevalier upon him, bending him backwards by the hair.

Ah, do not leave me, Citizen.

But: "I will ," Jean-Guy snarls, liquid, in return. And hears the chevalier's laugh ring in his ear through a fresh gout of blood, distant as some underwater glass bell. That voice replying aloud, as well as — otherwise —

"Ohhhh I think not."

I have set my mark upon you.

My mark. Mine.

That voice in his ear, his blood. That smell. His traitor's body, opening wide to its sanguine, siren's song. That unforgettable red halo of silent lassitude settling over him like a bell jar once more, sealing them together: predator, prey, potential co-dependents.

This fatal Widow's kiss he's waited for, in vain, for oh so very long Prendegrace's familiar poison, seeping into Jean-Guy's veins, his heart. Stopping him in his tracks.

All this — blood

Blood, for all that blood shed. The Revolution's tide, finally stemmed with an offering made from his own body, his own — damned —

soul.

Prendegrace raises red lips. He wipes them, pauses, coughs again — more wetly, this time. And asks, aloud:

"By your favour, Citizen what year is this, exactly?"

"Year Zero," Jean-Guy whispers back. And lets himself go.

Good Lady Ducayne

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1837-1915) was one of the most sensationalist and bestselling Victorian authors. Although her best-known work is probably Lady Audley's Secret (1862), a melodramatic tale of madness and murder, she also turned out dozens of novels and numerous short stories often anonymously or under various pseudonyms, in addition to editing two of her husband's publications: the monthly magazine for ladies , Belgravia, and the Christmas annual The Mistletoe Bough.

" If I could plot like Miss Braddon, I would be the greatest writer in the English language," wrote Vanity Fair author William Makepeace Thackeray, while Arnold Bennett described her in 1901 as "part of England" .

Her other books include a variation on the Faust legend , Gerard, or The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1891), and the collections Ralph the Bailiff and Other Tales (1862) , Weavers and Weft (1877) and My Sister's Confession (1879). More recently, eighteen of her best supernatural stories have been collected by editor Richard Dalby in The Cold Embrace and Other Ghost Stories, published in 2000 by Ash-Tree Press .

The following novella originally appeared in The Strand Magazine, just a year before Bram Stoker published Dracula. It was one of the first tales to feature an unconventional incarnation of the undead, in which a non-supernatural vampire exploits a dependent relationship with her victim. It also has some interesting things to say about the role of women in British society at that time

I

Bella Rolleston had made up her mind that her only chance of earning her bread and helping her mother to an occasional crust was by going out into the great unknown world as companion to a lady. She was willing to go to any lady rich enough to pay her a salary and so eccentric as to wish for a hired companion. Five shillings told off reluctantly from one of those sovereigns which were so rare with the mother and daughter, and which melted away so quickly, five solid shillings, had been handed to a smartly dressed lady in an office in Harbeck Street, London, W, in the hope that this very Superior Person would find a situation and a salary for Miss Rolleston. The Superior Person glanced at the two half-crowns as they lay on the table where Bella's hand had placed them, to make sure they were neither of them florins, before she wrote a description of Bella's qualifications and requirements in a formidable-looking ledger.

"Age?" she asked, curtly.

"Eighteen, last July."

"Any accomplishments?"

"No; I am not at all accomplished. If I were I should want to be a governess — a companion seems the lowest stage."

"We have some highly accomplished ladies on our books as companions, or chaperon companions."

"Oh, I know!" babbled Bella, loquacious in her youthful candour. "But that is quite a different thing. Mother hasn't been able to afford a piano since I was twelve years old, so I'm afraid I've forgotten how to play. And I have had to help mother with her needlework, so there hasn't been much time to study."

"Please don't waste time upon explaining what you can't do, but kindly tell me anything you can do," said the Superior Person, crushingly, with her pen poised between delicate fingers waiting to write. "Can you read aloud for two or three hours at a stretch? Are you active and handy, an early riser, a good walker, sweet-tempered, and obliging?"

"I can say yes to all those questions except about the sweetness. I think I have a pretty good temper, and I should be anxious to oblige anybody who paid for my services. I should want them to feel that I was really earning my salary."

"The kind of ladies who come to me would not care for a talkative companion," said the Person, severely, having finished writing in her book. "My connection lies chiefly among the aristocracy, and in that class considerable deference is expected."

"Oh, of course," said Bella; "but it's quite different when I'm talking to you. I want to tell you all about myself once and for ever."

"I am glad it is to be only once!" said the Person, with the edges of her lips.

The Person was of uncertain age, tightly laced in a black silk gown. She had a powdery complexion and a handsome clump of somebody else's hair on the top of her head. It may be that Bella's girlish freshness and vivacity had an irritating effect upon nerves weakened by an eight-hour day in that overheated second floor in Harbeck Street. To Bella the official apartment, with its Brussels carpet, velvet curtains and velvet chairs, and French clock, ticking loud on the marble chimney-piece, suggested the luxury of a palace, as compared with another second floor in Walworth where Mrs Rolleston and her daughter had managed to exist for the last six years.

"Do you think you have anything on your books that would suit me?" faltered Bella, after a pause.

"Oh, dear, no; I have nothing in view at present," answered the Person, who had swept Bella's half-crowns into a drawer, absent-mindedly, with the tips of her fingers. "You see, you are so very unformed so much too young to be companion to a lady of position. It is a pity you have not enough education for a nursery governess; that would be more in your line."

"And do you think it will be very long before you can get me a situation?" asked Bella, doubtfully.

"I really cannot say. Have you any particular reason for being so impatient — not a love affair, I hope?"

"A love affair!" cried Bella, with flaming cheeks. "What utter nonsense. I want a situation because Mother is poor, and I hate being a burden to her. I want a salary that I can share with her."

"There won't be much margin for sharing in the salary you are likely to get at your age, and with your — very — unformed manners," said the Person, who found Bella's peony cheeks, bright eyes and unbridled vivacity more and more oppressive.

"Perhaps if you'd be kind enough to give me back the fee I could take it to an agency where the connection isn't quite so aristocratic," said Bella, who — as she told her mother in her recital of the interview was determined not to be sat upon.

"You will find no agency that can do more for you than mine," replied the Person, whose harpy fingers never relinquished coin. "You will have to wait for your opportunity. Yours is an exceptional case: but I will bear you in mind, and if anything suitable offers I will write to you. I cannot say more than that."

The half-contemptuous bend of the stately head, weighted with borrowed hair, indicated the end of the interview. Bella went back to Walworth tramped sturdily every inch of the way in the September afternoon — and "took off" the Superior Person for the amusement of her mother and the landlady, who lingered in the shabby little sitting-room after bringing in the tea-tray, to applaud Miss Rolleston's "taking off".

"Dear, dear, what a mimic she is!" said the landlady. "You ought to have let her go on the stage, mum. She might have made her fortune as an actress."

II

Bella waited and hoped, and listened for the postman's knocks which brought such store of letters for the parlours and the first floor, and so few for that humble second floor, where mother and daughter sat sewing with hand and with wheel and treadle, for the greater part of the day. Mrs Rolleston was a lady by birth and education; but it had been her bad fortune to marry a scoundrel; for the last half-dozen years she had been that worst of widows, a wife whose husband had deserted her. Happily, she was courageous, industrious and a clever needlewoman; and she had been able just to earn a living for herself and her only child by making mantles and cloaks for a West End house. It was not a luxurious living. Cheap lodgings in a shabby street off the Walworth Road, scanty dinners, homely food, well-worn raiment, had been the portion of mother and daughter; but they loved each other so dearly, and nature had made them both so light-hearted, that they had contrived somehow to be happy.

But now this idea of going out into the world as companion to some fine lady had rooted itself into Bella's mind, and although she idolized her mother, and although the parting of mother and daughter must needs tear two loving hearts into shreds, the girl longed for enterprise and change and excitement, as the pages of old longed to be knights, and to start for the Holy Land to break a lance with the infidel.

She grew tired of racing downstairs every time the postman knocked, only to be told "nothing for you, miss," by the smudgy-faced drudge who picked up the letters from the passage floor. "Nothing for you, miss," grinned the lodging-house drudge, till at last Bella took heart of grace and walked up to Harbeck Street, and asked the Superior Person how it was that no situation had been found for her.

"You are too young," said the Person, "and you want a salary."

"Of course I do," answered Bella; "don't other people want salaries?"

"Young ladies of your age generally want a comfortable home."

"I don't," snapped Bella: "I want to help Mother."

"You can call again this day week," said the Person; "or, if I hear of anything in the meantime, I will write to you."

No letter came from the Person, and in exactly a week Bella put on her neatest hat, the one that had been seldomest caught in the rain, and trudged off to Harbeck Street.

It was a dull October afternoon, and there was a greyness in the air which might turn to fog before night. The Walworth Road shops gleamed brightly through that grey atmosphere, and though to a young lady reared in Mayfair or Belgravia such shop windows would have been unworthy of a glance, they were a snare and temptation for Bella. There were so many things that she longed for, and would never be able to buy.

Harbeck Street is apt to be empty at this dead season of the year, a long, long street, an endless perspective of eminently respectable houses. The Person's office was at the further end, and Bella looked down that long, grey vista almost despairingly, more tired than usual with the trudge from Walworth. As she looked, a carriage passed her, an old-fashioned, yellow chariot, on cee springs, drawn by a pair of high grey horses, with the stateliest of coachmen driving them, and a tall footman sitting by his side.

'It looks like the fairy godmother's coach, thought Bella. I shouldn't wonder if it began by being a pumpkin.'

It was a surprise when she reached the Person's door to find the yellow chariot standing before it, and the tall footman waiting near the doorstep. She was almost afraid to go in and meet the owner of that splendid carriage. She had caught only a glimpse of its occupant as the chariot rolled by, a plumed bonnet, a patch of ermine.

The Person's smart page ushered her upstairs and knocked at the official door. "Miss Rolleston," he announced, apologetically, while Bella waited outside.

"Show her in," said the Person, quickly; and then Bella heard her murmuring something in a low voice to her client.

Bella went in fresh, blooming, a living image of youth and hope, and before she looked at the Person her gaze was riveted by the owner of the chariot.

Never had she seen anyone as old as the old lady sitting by the Person's fire: a little old figure, wrapped from chin to feet in an ermine mantle; a withered, old face under a plumed bonnet — a face so wasted by age that it seemed only a pair of eyes and a peaked chin. The nose was peaked, too, but between the sharply pointed chin and the great, shining eyes, the small, aquiline nose was hardly visible.

"This is Miss Rolleston, Lady Ducayne."

Claw-like fingers, flashing with jewels, lifted a double eyeglass to Lady Ducayne's shining black eyes, and through the glasses Bella saw those unnaturally bright eyes magnified to a gigantic size, and glaring at her awfully.

"Miss Torpinter has told me all about you," said the old voice that belonged to the eyes. "Have you good health? Are you strong and active, able to eat well, sleep well, walk well, able to enjoy all that there is good in life?"

"I have never known what it is to be ill, or idle," answered Bella.

"Then I think you will do for me."

"Of course, in the event of references being perfectly satisfactory," put in the Person.

"I don't want references. The young woman looks frank and innocent. I'll take her on trust."

"So like you, dear Lady Ducayne," murmured Miss Torpinter.

"I want a strong young woman whose health will give me no trouble."

"You have been so unfortunate in that respect," cooed the Person, whose voice and manner were subdued to a melting sweetness by the old woman's presence.

"Yes, I've been rather unlucky," grunted Lady Ducayne.

"But I am sure Miss Rolleston will not disappoint you, though certainly after your unpleasant experience with Miss Tomson, who looked the picture of health — and Miss Blandy, who said she had never seen a doctor since she was vaccinated "

"Lies, no doubt," muttered Lady Ducayne, and then turning to Bella, she asked, curtly, "You don't mind spending the winter in Italy, I suppose?"

In Italy! The very word was magical. Bella's fair young face flushed crimson.

"It has been the dream of my life to see Italy," she gasped.

From Walworth to Italy! How far, how impossible such a journey had seemed to that romantic dreamer.

"Well, your dream will be realized. Get yourself ready to leave Charing Cross by the train deluxe this day week at eleven. Be sure you are at the station a quarter before the hour. My people will look after you and your luggage."

Lady Ducayne rose from her chair, assisted by her crutch-stick, and Miss Torpinter escorted her to the door.

"And with regard to salary?" questioned the Person on the way.

"Salary, oh, the same as usual — and if the young woman wants a quarter's pay in advance you can write to me for a cheque," Lady Ducayne answered, carelessly.

Miss Torpinter went all the way downstairs with her client, and waited to see her seated in the yellow chariot. When she came upstairs again she was slightly out of breath, and she had resumed that superior manner which Bella had found so crushing.

"You may think yourself uncommonly lucky. Miss Rolleston," she said. "I have dozens of young ladies on my books whom I might have recommended for this situation — but I remembered having told you to call this afternoon — and I thought I would give you a chance. Old Lady Ducayne is one of the best people on my books. She gives her companion a hundred a year, and pays all travelling expenses. You will live in the lap of luxury."

"A hundred a year! How too lovely! Shall I have to dress very grandly? Does Lady Ducayne keep much company?"

"At her age! No, she lives in seclusion in her own apartments — her French maid, her footman, her medical attendant, her courier."

"Why did those other companions leave her?" asked Bella.

"Their health broke down!"

"Poor things, and so they had to leave?"

"Yes, they had to leave. I suppose you would like a quarter's salary in advance?"

"Oh, yes, please. I shall have things to buy."

"Very well, I will write for Lady Ducayne's cheque, and I will send you the balance — after deducting my commission for the year."

"To be sure, I had forgotten the commission."

"You don't suppose I keep this office for pleasure."

"Of course not," murmured Bella, remembering the five shillings entrance fee; but nobody could expect a hundred a year and a winter in Italy for five shillings.

III

From Miss Rolleston, at Cap Ferrino, to Mrs Rolleston, in Beresford Street, Walworth, London.

How I wish you could see this place, dearest; the blue sky, the olive woods, the orange and lemon orchards between the cliffs and the sea — sheltering in the hollow of the great hills — and with summer waves dancing up to the narrow ridge of pebbles and weeds which is the Italian idea of a beach! Oh, how I wish you could see it all, Mother dear, and bask in this sunshine, that makes it so difficult to believe the date at the head of this paper. November! The air is like an English June — the sun is so hot that I can't walk a few yards without an umbrella. And to think of you at Walworth while I am here! I could cry at the thought that perhaps you will never see this lovely coast, this wonderful sea, these summer flowers that bloom in winter. There is a hedge of pink geraniums under my window, Mother a thick, rank hedge, as if the flowers grew wild and there are Dijon roses climbing over arches and palisades all along the terrace a rose garden full of bloom in November! Just picture it all! You could never imagine the luxury of this hotel. It is nearly new, and has been built and decorated regardless of expense. Our rooms are upholstered in pale blue satin, which shows up Lady Ducayne's parchment complexion; but as she sits all day in a corner of the balcony basking in the sun, except when she is in her carriage, and all the evening in her armchair close to the fire, and never sees anyone but her own people, her complexion matters very little.

She has the handsomest suite of rooms in the hotel. My bedroom is inside hers, the sweetest room all blue satin and white lace white enamelled furniture, looking-glasses on every wall, till I know my pert little profile as I never knew it before. The room was really meant for Lady Ducayne's dressing-room, but she ordered one of the blue satin couches to be arranged as a bed for me — the prettiest little bed, which I can wheel near the window on sunny mornings, as it is on castors and easily moved about. I feel as if Lady Ducayne were a funny old grandmother, who had suddenly appeared in my life, very, very rich, and very, very kind.

She is not at all exacting. I read aloud to her a good deal, and she dozes and nods while I read. Sometimes I hear her moaning in her sleep as if she had troublesome dreams. When she is tired of my reading she orders Francine, her maid, to read a French novel to her, and I hear her chuckle and groan now and then, as if she were more interested in those books than in Dickens or Scott. My French is not good enough to follow Francine, who reads very quickly. I have a great deal of liberty, for Lady Ducayne often tells me to run away and amuse myself; I roam about the hills for hours. Everything is so lovely. I lose myself in olive woods, always climbing up and up towards the pine woods above and above the pines there are the snow mountains that just show their white peaks above the dark hills. Oh, you poor dear, how can I ever make you understand what this place is like you, whose poor, tired eyes have only the opposite side of Beresford Street? Sometimes I go no further than the terrace in front of the hotel, which is a favourite lounging-place with everybody. The gardens lie below, and the tennis courts where I sometimes play with a very nice girl, the only person in the hotel with whom I have made friends. She is a year older than I, and has come to Cap Ferrino with her brother, a doctor or a medical student, who is going to be a doctor. He passed his MB exam at Edinburgh just before they left home, Lotta told me. He came to Italy entirely on his sister's account. She had a troublesome chest attack last summer and was ordered to winter abroad. They are orphans, quite alone in the world, and so fond of each other. It is very nice for me to have such a friend as Lotta. She is so thoroughly respectable. I can't help using that word, for some of the girls in this hotel go on in a way that I know you would shudder at. Lotta was brought up by an aunt, deep down in the country, and knows hardly anything about life. Her brother won't allow her to read a novel, French or English, that he has not read and approved.

"He treats me like a child," she told me, "but I don't mind, for it's nice to know somebody loves me, and cares about what I do, and even about my thoughts."

Perhaps this is what makes some girls so eager to marry the want of someone strong and brave and honest and true to care for them and order them about. I want no one, Mother darling, for I have you, and you are all the world to me. No husband could ever come between us two. If I ever were to marry he would have only the second place in my heart. But I don't suppose I ever shall marry, or even know what it is like to have an offer of marriage. No young man can afford to marry a penniless girl nowadays. Life is too expensive.

Mr Stafford, Lotta's brother, is very clever, and very kind. He thinks it is rather hard for me to have to live with such an old woman as Lady Ducayne, but then he does not know how poor we are — you and I — and what a wonderful life this seems to me in this lovely place. I feel a selfish wretch for enjoying all my luxuries, while you, who want them so much more than I, have none of them hardly know what they are like — do you, dearest? — for my scamp of a father began to go to the dogs soon after you were married, and since then life has been all trouble and care and struggle for you.

This letter was written when Bella had been less than a month at Cap Ferrino, before the novelty had worn off the landscape, and before the pleasure of luxurious surroundings had begun to cloy. She wrote to her mother every week, such long letters as girls who have lived in closest companionship with a mother alone can write; letters that are like a diary of heart and mind. She wrote gaily always; but when the new year began Mrs Rolleston thought she detected a note of melancholy under all those lively details about the place and the people.

'My poor girl is getting homesick,' she thought. 'Her heart is in Beresford Street.'

It might be that she missed her new friend and companion, Lotta Stafford, who had gone with her brother for a little tour to Genoa and Spezia, and as far as Pisa. They were to return before February; but in the meantime Bella might naturally feel very solitary among all those strangers, whose manners and doings she described so well.

The mother's instinct had been true. Bella was not so happy as she had been in that first flush of wonder and delight which followed the change from Walworth to the Riviera. Somehow, she knew not how, lassitude had crept upon her. She no longer loved to climb the hills, no longer flourished her orange stick in sheer gladness of heart as her light feet skipped over the rough ground and the coarse grass on the mountainside. The odour of rosemary and thyme, the fresh breath of the sea, no longer filled her with rapture. She thought of Beresford Street and her mother's face with a sick longing. They were so far so far away! And then she thought of Lady Ducayne, sitting by the heaped-up olive logs in the overheated salon — thought of that wizened-nutcracker profile, and those gleaming eyes, with an invincible horror.

Visitors at the hotel had told her that the air of Cap Ferrino was relaxing — better suited to age than to youth, to sickness than to health. No doubt it was so. She was not so well as she had been at Walworth; but she told herself that she was suffering only from the pain of separation from the dear companion of her girlhood, the mother who had been nurse, sister, friend, flatterer, all things in this world to her. She had shed many tears over that parting, had spent many a melancholy hour on the marble terrace with yearning eyes looking westward, and with her heart's desire a thousand miles away.

She was sitting in her favourite spot, an angle at the eastern end of the terrace, a quiet little nook sheltered by orange trees, when she heard a couple of Riviera habitues talking in the garden below. They were sitting on a bench against the terrace wall.

She had no idea of listening to their talk, till the sound of Lady Ducayne's name attracted her, and then she listened without any thought of wrong-doing. They were talking no secrets — just casually discussing a hotel acquaintance.

They were two elderly people whom Bella only knew by sight. An English clergyman who had wintered abroad for half his lifetime; a stout, comfortable, well-to-do spinster, whose chronic bronchitis obliged her to migrate annually.

"I have met her about Italy for the last ten years," said the lady; "but have never found out her real age."

"I put her down at a hundred — not a year less," replied the parson. "Her reminiscences all go back to the Regency. She was evidently then in her zenith; and I have heard her say things that showed she was in Parisian society when the First Empire was at its best — before Josephine was divorced."

"She doesn't talk much now."

"No; there's not much life left in her. She is wise in keeping herself secluded. I only wonder that wicked old quack, her Italian doctor, didn't finish her off years ago."

"I should think it must be the other way, and that he keeps her alive."

"My dear Miss Manders, do you think foreign quackery ever kept anybody alive?"

"Well, there she is and she never goes anywhere without him. He certainly has an unpleasant countenance."

"Unpleasant," echoed the parson. "I don't believe the foul fiend himself can beat him in ugliness. I pity that poor young woman who has to live between old Lady Ducayne and Doctor Parravicini."

"But the old lady is very good to her companions."

"No doubt. She is very free with her cash; the servants call her good Lady Ducayne. She is a withered old female Croesus, and knows she'll never be able to get through her money, and doesn't relish the idea of other people enjoying it when she's in her coffin. People who live to be as old as she is become slavishly attached to life. I dare say she's generous to those poor girls — but she can't make them happy. They die in her service."

"Don't say they, Mr Carton; I know that one poor girl died at Mentone last spring."

"Yes, and another poor girl died in Rome three years ago. I was there at the time. Good Lady Ducayne left her there in an English family. The girl had every comfort. The old woman was very liberal to her but she died. I tell you, Miss Manders, it is not good for any young woman to live with two such horrors as Lady Ducayne and Parravicini."

They talked of other things — but Bella hardly heard them. She sat motionless, and a cold wind seemed to come down upon her from the mountains and to creep up to her from the sea, till she shivered as she sat there in the sunshine, in the shelter of the orange trees in the midst of all that beauty and brightness.

Yes, they were uncanny, certainly, the pair of them — she so like an aristocratic witch in her withered old age; he of no particular age, with a face that was more like a waxen mask than any human countenance Bella had ever seen. What did it matter? Old age is venerable, and worthy of all reverence; and Lady Ducayne had been very kind to her. Doctor Parravicini was a harmless, inoffensive student, who seldom looked up from the book he was reading. He had his private sitting-room, where he made experiments in chemistry and natural science perhaps in alchemy. What could it matter to Bella? He had always been polite to her, in his far-off way. She could not be more happily placed than she was — in this palatial hotel, with this rich old lady.

No doubt she missed the young English girl who had been so friendly, and it might be that she missed the girl's brother, for Mr Stafford had talked to her a good deal — had interested himself in the books she was reading, and her manner of amusing herself when she was not on duty.

"You must come to our little salon when you are 'off, as the hospital nurses call it, and we can have some music. No doubt you play and sing?" Upon which Bella had to own with a blush of shame that she had forgotten how to play the piano ages ago.

"Mother and I used to sing duets sometimes between the lights, without accompaniment," she said, and the tears came into her eyes as she thought of the humble room, the half-hour's respite from work, the sewing machine standing where a piano ought to have been, and her mother's plaintive voice, so sweet, so true, so dear.

Sometimes she found herself wondering whether she would ever see that beloved mother again. Strange forebodings came into her mind. She was angry with herself for giving way to melancholy thoughts.

One day she questioned Lady Ducayne's French maid about those two companions who had died within three years.

"They were poor, feeble creatures," Francine told her. "They looked fresh and bright enough when they came to Miladi; but they ate too much, and they were lazy. They died of luxury and idleness. Miladi was too kind to them. They had nothing to do; and so they took to fancying things; fancying the air didn't suit them, that they couldn't sleep."

"I sleep well enough, but I have had a strange dream several times since I have been in Italy."

"Ah, you had better not begin to think about dreams, or you will be like those other girls. They were dreamers — and they dreamed themselves into the cemetery."

The dream troubled her a little, not because it was a ghastly or frightening dream, but on account of sensations which she had never felt before in sleep — a whirring of wheels that went round in her brain, a great noise like a whirlwind, but rhythmical like the ticking of a gigantic clock: and then in the midst of this uproar as of winds and waves she seemed to sink into a gulf of unconsciousness, out of sleep into far deeper sleep total extinction. And then, after that black interval, there had come the sound of voices, and then again the whirr of wheels, louder and louder — and again the black — and then she awoke, feeling languid and oppressed.

She told Doctor Parravicini of her dream one day, on the only occasion when she wanted his professional advice. She had suffered rather severely from the mosquitoes before Christmas — and had been almost frightened at finding a wound upon her arm which she could only attribute to the venomous sting of one of these torturers. Parravicini put on his glasses, and scrutinized the angry mark on the round, white arm, as Bella stood before him and Lady Ducayne with her sleeve rolled up above her elbow.

"Yes, that's rather more than a joke," he said; "he has caught you on the top of a vein. What a vampire! But there's no harm done, signorina, nothing that a little dressing of mine won't heal. You must always show me any bite of this nature. It might be dangerous if neglected. These creatures feed on poison and disseminate it."

"And to think that such tiny creatures can bite like this," said Bella; "my arm looks as if it had been cut by a knife."

"If I were to show you a mosquito's sting under my microscope you wouldn't be surprised at that," replied Parravicini.

Bella had to put up with the mosquito bites, even when they came on the top of a vein, and produced that ugly wound. The wound recurred now and then at longish intervals, and Bella found Doctor Parravicini's dressing a speedy cure. If he were the quack his enemies called him, he had at least a light hand and a delicate touch in performing this small operation.

Bella Rolleston to Mrs Rolleston — 14 April.

EVER DEAREST

Behold the cheque for my second quarter's salary five and twenty pounds. There is no one to pinch off a whole tenner for a year's commission as there was last time, so it is all for you, Mother, dear. I have plenty of pocket-money in hand from the cash I brought away with me, when you insisted on my keeping more than I wanted. It isn't possible to spend money here — except on occasional tips to servants, or sous to beggars and children unless one had lots to spend, for everything one would like to buy tortoise shell, coral, lace — is so ridiculously dear that only a millionaire ought to look at it. Italy is a dream of beauty: but for shopping, give me Newington Causeway .

You ask me so earnestly if I am quite well that I fear my letters must have been very dull lately. Yes, dear, I am well — but I am not quite so strong as I was when I used to trudge to the West End to buy half a pound of tea — just for a constitutional walk or to Dulwich to look at the pictures. Italy is relaxing; and I feel what the people here call "slack". But I fancy I can see your dear face looking worried as you read this. Indeed, and indeed, I am not ill. I am only a little tired of this lovely scene — as I suppose one might get tired of looking at one of Turner's pictures if it hung on a wall that was always opposite one. I think of you every hour in every day think of you and our homely little room our dear little shabby parlour, with the armchairs from the wreck of your old home, and Dick singing in his cage over the sewing machine. Dear, shrill, maddening Dick, who, we flattered ourselves, was so passionately fond of us. Do tell me in your next letter that he is well.

My friend Lotta and her brother never came back after all. They went from Pisa to Rome. Happy mortals! And they are to be on the Italian lakes in May; which lake was not decided when Lotta last wrote to me. She has been a charming correspondent, and has confided all her little flirtations to me. We are all to go to Bellaggio next week — by Genoa and Milan. Isn't that lovely? Lady Ducayne travels by the easiest stages except when she is bottled up in the train deluxe. We shall stop two days at Genoa and one at Milan. What a bore I shall be to you with my talk about Italy when I come home .

Love and love — and ever more love from your adoring,

BELLA

IV

Herbert Stafford and his sister had often talked of the pretty English girl with her fresh complexion, which made such a pleasant touch of rosy colour among all those sallow faces at the Grand Hotel. The young doctor thought of her with a compassionate tenderness her utter loneliness in that great hotel where there were so many people, her bondage to that old, old woman, where everybody else was free to think of nothing but enjoying life. It was a hard fate; and the poor child was evidently devoted to her mother, and felt the pain of separation only two of them, and very poor, and all the world to each other, he thought.

Lotta told him one morning that they were to meet again at Bellaggio. "The old thing and her court are to be there before we are," she said. "I shall be charmed to have Bella again. She is so bright and gay in spite of an occasional touch of home-sickness. I never took to a girl on a short acquaintance as I did to her."

"I like her best when she is homesick," said Herbert; "for then I am sure she has a heart."

"What have you to do with hearts, except for dissection? Don't forget that Bella is an absolute pauper. She told me in confidence that her mother makes mantles for a West End shop. You can hardly have a lower depth than that."

"I shouldn't think any less of her if her mother made matchboxes."

"Not in the abstract — of course not. Matchboxes are honest labour. But you couldn't marry a girl whose mother makes mantles."

"We haven't come to the consideration of that question yet," answered Herbert, who liked to provoke his sister.

In two years' hospital practice he had seen too much of the grim realities of life to retain any prejudices about rank. Cancer, phthisis, gangrene, leave a man with little respect for the humanity. The kernel is always the same — fearfully and wonderfully made — a subject for pity and terror.

Mr Stafford and his sister arrived at Bellaggio in a fair May evening. The sun was going down as the steamer approached the pier; and all that glory of purple bloom which curtains every wall at this season of the year flushed and deepened in the glowing light. A group of ladies were standing on the pier watching the arrivals, and among them Herbert saw a pale face that startled him out of his wonted composure.

"There she is," murmured Lotta, at his elbow, "but how dreadfully changed. She looks a wreck."

They were shaking hands with her a few minutes later, and a flush had lighted up her poor pinched face in the pleasure of meeting.

"I thought you might come this evening," she said, "We have been here a week."

She did not add that she had been there every evening to watch the boat in, and a good many times during the day. The Grand Bretagne was close by, and it had been easy for her to creep to the pier when the boat bell rang. She felt a joy in meeting these people again; a sense of being with friends; a confidence which Lady Ducayne's goodness had never inspired in her.

"Oh, you poor darling, how awfully ill you must have been," exclaimed Lotta, as the two girls embraced.

Bella tried to answer, but her voice was choked with tears.

"What has been the matter, dear? That horrid influenza, I suppose?"

"No, no, I have not been ill — I have only felt a little weaker than I used to be. I don't think the air of Cap Ferrino quite agreed with me."

"It must have disagreed with you abominably. I never saw such a change in anyone. Do let Herbert doctor you. He is fully qualified, you know. He prescribed for ever so many influenza patients at the Londres. They were glad to get advice from an English doctor in a friendly way."

"I am sure he must be very clever!" faltered Bella. "But there is really nothing the matter. I am not ill, and if I were ill, Lady Ducayne's physician —"

"That dreadful man with the yellow face? I would as soon one of the Borgias prescribed for me. I hope you haven't been taking any of his medicines."

"No, dear, I have taken nothing. I have never complained of being ill."

This was said while they were all three walking to the hotel. The Staffords' rooms had been secured in advance, pretty ground-floor rooms, opening into the garden. Lady Ducayne's statelier apartments were on the floor above.

"I believe these rooms are just under ours," said Bella.

"Then it will be all the easier for you to run down to us," replied Lotta, which was not really the. case, as the grand staircase was in the centre of the hotel.

"Oh, I shall find it easy enough," said Bella. "I'm afraid you'll have too much of my society. Lady Ducayne sleeps away half the day in this warm weather, so I have a good deal of idle time; and I get awfully moped thinking of Mother and home."

Her voice broke upon the last word. She could not have thought of that poor lodging which went by the name of home more tenderly had it been the most beautiful that art and wealth ever created. She moped and pined in this lovely garden, with the sunlit lake and the romantic hills spreading out their beauty before her. She was homesick and she had dreams; or, rather, an occasional recurrence of that one had dream with all its strange sensations — it was more like a hallucination than dreaming — the whirring of wheels, the sinking into an abyss, the struggling back to consciousness. She had the dream shortly before she left Cap Ferrino, but not since she had come to Bellaggio, and she began to hope the air in this lake district suited her better, and that those strange sensations would never return.

Mr Stafford wrote a prescription and had it made up at the chemist's near the hotel. It was a powerful tonic, and after two bottles, and a row or two on the lake, and some rambling over the hills and in the meadows where the spring flowers made earth seem paradise, Bella's spirits and looks improved as if by magic.

"It is a wonderful tonic," she said, but perhaps in her heart of hearts she knew that the doctor's kind voice, and the friendly hand that helped her in and out of the boat, and the lake, had something to do with her cure.

"I hope you don't forget that her mother makes mantles," Lotta said warningly.

"Or matchboxes; it is just the same thing, so far as I am concerned."

"You mean that in no circumstances could you think of marrying her?"

"I mean that if ever I love a woman well enough to think of marrying her, riches or rank will count for nothing with me. But I fear — I fear your poor friend may not live to be any man's wife."

"Do you think her so very ill?"

He sighed, and left the question unanswered.

One day, while they were gathering wild hyacinths in an upland meadow, Bella told Mr Stafford about her bad dream.

"It is curious only because it is hardly like a dream," she said. "I dare say you could find some common-sense reason for it. The position of my head on my pillow, or the atmosphere, or something."

And then she described her sensations: how in the midst of sleep there came a sudden sense of suffocation; and then those whirring wheels, so loud, so terrible; and then a blank, and then a coming back to waking consciousness.

"Have you ever had chloroform given you — by a dentist, for instance?"

"Never — Doctor Parravicini asked me that question one day."

"Lately?"

"No, long ago, when we were in the train deluxe."

"Has Doctor Parravicini prescribed for you since you began to feel weak and ill?"

"Oh, he has given me a tonic from time to time, but I hate medicine, and took very little of the stuff. And then I am not ill, only weaker than I used to be. I was ridiculously strong and well when I lived at Walworth, and used to take long walks every day. Mother made me take those tramps to Dulwich or Norwood, for fear I should suffer from too much sewing machine; sometimes but very seldom she went with me. She was generally toiling at home while I was enjoying fresh air and exercise. And she was very careful about our food that, however plain it was, it should be always nourishing and ample. I owe it to her care that I grew up such a great, strong creature."

"You don't look great or strong now, you poor dear," said Lotta.

"I'm afraid Italy doesn't agree with me."

"Perhaps it is not Italy, but being cooped up with Lady Ducayne that has made you ill."

"But I am never cooped up. Lady Ducayne is absurdly kind, and lets me roam about or sit in the balcony all day if I like. I have read more novels since I have been with her than in all the rest of my life."

"Then she is very different from the average old lady, who is usually a slave-driver," said Stafford. "I wonder why she carries a companion about with her if she has so little need of society."

"Oh, I am only part of her state. She is inordinately rich — and the salary she gives me doesn't count. Apropos of Doctor Parravicini, I know he is a clever doctor, for he cures my horrid mosquito bites."

"A little ammonia would do that, in the early stage of the mischief. But there are no mosquitoes to trouble you now."

"Oh, yes, there are; I had a bite just before we left Cap Ferrino." She pushed up her loose lawn sleeve, and exhibited a scar, which he scrutinized intently, with a surprised and puzzled look.

"This is no mosquito bite," he said.

"Oh, yes it is unless there are snakes or adders at Cap Ferrino."

"It is not a bite at all. You are trifling with me. Miss Rolleston you have allowed that wretched Italian quack to bleed you. They killed the greatest man in modern Europe that way, remember. How very foolish of you."

"I was never bled in my life, Mr Stafford."

"Nonsense! Let me look at your other arm. Are there any more mosquito bites?"

"Yes; Doctor Parravicini says I have a bad skin for healing, and that the poison acts more virulently with me than with most people."

Stafford examined both her arms in the broad sunlight, scars new and old.

"You have been very badly bitten, Miss Rolleston," he said, "and if ever I find the mosquito I shall make him smart. But, now tell me, my dear girl, on your word of honour, tell me as you would tell a friend who is sincerely anxious for your health and happiness — as you would tell your mother if she were here to question you — have you no knowledge of any cause for these scars except mosquito bites — no suspicion even?"

"No, indeed! No, upon my honour! I have never seen a mosquito biting my arm. One never does see the horrid little fiends. But I have heard them trumpeting under the curtains and I know that I have often had one of the pestilent wretches buzzing about me."

Later in the day Bella and her friends were sitting at tea in the garden, while Lady Ducayne took her afternoon drive with her doctor.

"How long do you mean to stop with Lady Ducayne, Miss Rolleston?" Herbert Stafford asked, after a thoughtful silence, breaking suddenly upon the trivial talk of the two girls.

"As long as she will go on paying me twenty-five pounds a quarter."

"Even if you feel your health breaking down in her service?"

"It is not the service that has injured my health. You can see that I have really nothing to do — to read aloud for an hour or so once or twice a week; to write a letter once in a while to a London tradesman. I shall never have such an easy time with anybody. And nobody else would give me a hundred a year."

"Then you mean to go on till you break down; to die at your post?"

"Like the other two companions? No! If ever I feel seriously ill really ill I shall put myself in a train and go back to Walworth without stopping."

"What about the other two companions?"

"They both died. It was very unlucky for Lady Ducayne. That's why she engaged me; she chose me because I was ruddy and robust. She must feel rather disguested at my having grown white and weak. By the bye, when I told her about the good your tonic had done me, she said she would like to see you and have a little talk with you about her own case."

"And I should like to see Lady Ducayne. When did she say this?"

"The day before yesterday."

"Will you ask her if she will see me this evening?"

"With pleasure! I wonder what you will think of her? She looks rather terrible to a stranger; but Doctor Parravicini says she was once a famous beauty."

It was nearly ten o'clock when Mr Stafford was summoned by message from Lady Ducayne, whose courier came to conduct him to her ladyship's salon. Bella was reading aloud when the visitor was admitted; and he noticed the languor in the low, sweet tones, the evident effort.

"Shut up the book," said the querulous old voice. "You are beginning to drawl like Miss Blandy."

Stafford saw a small, bent figure crouching over the piled-up olive logs; a shrunken old figure in a gorgeous garment of black and crimson brocade, a skinny throat emerging from a mass of Old Venetian lace, clasped with diamonds that flashed like fireflies as the trembling old head turned towards him.

The eyes that looked at him out of the face were almost as bright as the diamonds — the only living feature in that narrow parchment mask. He had seen terrible faces in the hospital — faces on which disease had set dreadful marks — but he had never seen a face that impressed him so painfully as this withered countenance, with its indescribable horror of death outlived, a face that should have been hidden under a coffin-lid years and years ago.

The Italian physician was standing on the other side of the fireplace, smoking a cigarette, and looking down at the little old woman brooding over the hearth as if he were proud of her.

"Good evening, Mr Stafford; you can go to your room, Bella, and write your everlasting letter to your mother at Walworth." said Lady Ducayne. "I believe she writes a page about every wild flower she discovers in the woods and meadows. I don't know what else she can find to write about," she added, as Bella quietly withdrew to the pretty little bedroom opening out of Lady Ducayne's spacious apartment. Here, as at Cap Ferrino, she slept in a room adjoining the old lady's.

"You are a medical man, I understand, Mr Stafford."

"I am a qualified practitioner, but I have not begun to practise."

"You have begun upon my companion, she tells me."

"I have prescribed for her, certainly, and I am happy to find my prescription has done her good; but I look upon that improvement as temporary. Her case will require more drastic treatment."

"Never mind her case. There is nothing the matter with the girl absolutely nothing except girlish nonsense; too much liberty and not enough work."

"I understand that two of your ladyship's previous companions died of the same disease," said Stafford, looking first at Lady Ducayne, who gave her tremulous old head an impatient jerk, and then at Parravicini, whose yellow complexion had paled a little under Stafford's scrutiny.

"Don't bother me about my companions, sir," said Lady Ducayne. "I sent for you to consult you about myself not about a parcel of anaemic girls. You are young, and medicine is a progressive science, the newspapers tell me. Where have you studied?"

"In Edinburgh — and in Paris."

"Two good schools. And know all the new-fangled theories, the modern discoveries — that remind one of the medieval witchcraft, of Albertus Magnus, and George Ripley; you have studied hypnotism — electricity?"

"And the transfusion of blood," said Stafford, very slowly, looking at Parravicini.

"Have you made any discovery that teaches you to prolong human life any elixir any mode of treatment? I want my life prolonged, young man. That man there has been my physician for thirty years. He does all he can to keep me alive — after his lights. He studies all the new theories of all the scientists but he is old; he gets older every day — his brain-power is going — he is bigoted prejudiced can't receive new ideas can't grapple with new systems. He will let me die if I am not on my guard against him."

"You are of an unbelievable ingratitude, Ecclenza," said Parravicini.

"Oh, you needn't complain. I have paid you thousands to keep me alive. Every year of my life has swollen your hoards; you know there is nothing to come to you when I am gone. My whole fortune is left to endow a home for indigent women of quality who have reached their ninetieth year. Come, Mr Stafford, I am a rich woman. Give me a few years more in the sunshine, a few years more above ground, and I will give you the price of a fashionable London practice — I will set you up at the West End."

"How old are you, Lady Ducayne?"

"I was born the day Louis XVI was guillotined."

"Then I think you have had your share of the sunshine and the pleasures of the earth, and that you should spend your few remaining days in repenting your sins and trying to make atonement for the young lives that have been sacrificed to your love of life."

"What do you mean by that, sir?"

"Oh, Lady Ducayne, need I put your wickedness and your physician's still greater wickedness in plain words? The poor girl who is now in your employment has been reduced from robust health to a condition of absolute danger by Doctor Parravicini's experimental surgery; and I have no doubt those other two young women who broke down in your service were treated by him in the same manner. I could take upon myself to demonstrate — by most convincing evidence, to a jury of medical men — that Doctor Parravicini has been bleeding Miss Rolleston after putting her under chloroform, at intervals, ever since she has been in your service. The deterioration in the girl's health speaks for itself; the lancet marks upon the girl's arms are unmistakable; and her description of a series of sensations, which she calls a dream, points unmistakably to the administration of chloroform while she was sleeping. A practice so nefarious, so murderous, must, if exposed, result in a sentence only less severe than the punishment of murder."

"I laugh," said Parravicini, with an airy motion of his skinny fingers; "I laugh at once at your theories and at your threats. I, Parravicini Leopold, have no fear that the law can question anything I have done."

"Take the girl away, and let me hear no more of her," cried Lady Ducayne, in the thin, old voice, which so poorly matched the energy and fire of the wicked old brain that guided its utterances. "Let her go back to her mother — I want no more girls to die in my service. There are girls enough and to spare in the world, God knows."

"If you ever engage another companion — or take another English girl into your service, Lady Ducayne, I will make all England ring with the story of your wickedness."

"I want no more girls. I don't believe in his experiments. They have been full of danger for me as well as for the girl — an air bubble, and I should be gone. I'll have no more of his dangerous quackery. I'll find some new man — a better man than you, sir, a discoverer like Pasteur, or Virchow, a genius to keep me alive. Take your girl away, young man. Marry her if you like. I'll write a cheque for a thousand pounds, and let her go and live on beef and beer, and get strong and plump again. I'll have no more such experiments. Do you hear, Parravicini?" she screamed, vindictively, the yellow, wrinkled face distorted with fury, the eyes glaring at him.

The Staffords carried Bella Rolleston off to Varese next day, she very loath to leave Lady Ducayne, whose liberal salary afforded such help for the dear mother. Herbert Stafford insisted, however, treating Bella as coolly as if he had been the family physician, and she had been given over wholly to his care.

"Do you suppose your mother would let you stop here to die?" he asked. "If Mrs Rolleston knew how ill you are, she would come post haste to fetch you."

"I shall never be well again till I get back to Walworth," answered Bella, who was low-spirited and inclined to tears this morning, a reaction after her good spirits of yesterday.

"We'll try a week or two at Varese first," said Stafford. "When you can walk halfway up Monte Generoso without palpitation of the heart, you shall go back to Walworth."

"Poor Mother, how glad she will be to see me, and how sorry that I've lost such a good place."

This conversation took place on the boat when they were leaving Bellaggio. Lotta had gone to her friend's room at seven o'clock that morning, long before Lady Ducayne's withered eyelids had opened to the daylight, before even Francine, the French maid, was astir, and had helped to pack a Gladstone bag with essentials, and hustled Bella downstairs and out of doors before she could make any strenuous resistance.

"It's all right," Lotta assured her. "Herbert had a good talk with Lady Ducayne last night, and it was settled for you to leave this morning. She doesn't like invalids, you see."

"No," sighed Bella, "she doesn't like invalids. It was very unlucky that I should break down, just like Miss Tomson and Miss Blandy."

"At any rate, you are not dead, like them," answered Lotta, "and my brother says you are not going to die."

It seemed rather a dreadful thing to be dismissed in that offhand way, without a word of farewell from her employer.

"I wonder what Miss Torpinter will say when I go to her for another situation," Bella speculated, ruefully, while she and her friends were breakfasting on board the steamer.

"Perhaps you may never want another situation," said Stafford.

"You mean that I may never be well enough to be useful to anybody?"

"No, I don't mean anything of the kind."

It was after dinner at Varese, when Bella had been induced to take a whole glass of Chianti, and quite sparkled after that unaccustomed stimulant, that Mr Stafford produced a letter from his pocket.

"I forgot to give you Lady Ducayne's letter of adieu!" he said.

"What, did she write to me? I am so glad — I hated to leave her in such a cool way; for after all she was very kind to me, and if I didn't like her it was only because she was too dreadfully old."

She tore open the envelope. The letter was short and to the point:

Goodbye, child. Go and marry your doctor. I enclose a farewell gift for your trousseau.

ADELINE DUCAYNE

"A hundred pounds, a whole year's salary — no — why, it's for a — . A cheque for a thousand!" cried Bella. "What a generous old soul! She really is the dearest old thing."

"She just missed being very dear to you, Bella," said Stafford.

He had dropped into the use of her Christian name while they were on board the boat. It seemed natural now that she was to be in his charge till they all three went back to England.

"I shall take upon myself the privileges of an elder brother till we land at Dover," he said; "after that — well, it must be as you please."

The question of their future relations must have been satisfactorily settled before they crossed the Channel, for Bella's next letter to her mother communicated three startling facts.

First, that the enclosed cheque for one thousand pounds was to be invested in debenture stock in Mrs Rolleston's name, and was to be her very own, income and principal, for the rest of her life.

Next, that Bella was going home to Walworth immediately.

And last, that she was going to be married to Mr Herbert Stafford in the following autumn.

"And I am sure you will adore him, Mother, as much as I do," wrote Bella. "It is all good Lady Ducayne's doing. I never could have married if I had not secured that little nest-egg for you. Herbert says we shall be able to add to it as the years go by, and that wherever we live there shall be always a room in our house for you. The word 'mother-in-law' has no terrors for him."

Lunch at Charon's

Melanie Tem

Melanie Tem is an adoption social worker who lives in Denver, Colorado, with her husband, writer and editor Steve Rasnic Tem. They have four children and three grandchildren.

Her nine novels include Prodigal, which won the Bram Stoker Award for first novel , Revenant, Black River and The Tides. Two more novels are forthcoming from Leisure Books, and her recent short story appearances include Dark Terrors 5 , Museum of Horrors and Extremes 2.

About "Lunch at Charon's", the author explains: "My eighty-three-year-old friend is expected to be flattered when people tell her she doesn't look her age. My twenty-five-year-old friend weeps over the first crow's feet at the corner of her eye. My sixty-year-old friend says his body has betrayed him because it's slowing down. Hardly anybody wants to call death out of the shadows and make friends with it.

"All this has something to do with the vampire mythos, I think, and also something to do with the genesis of this story."

Amy Alghieri is dead. That's three out of four. Leaving only me.

I heard about Amy at the gym this morning. She didn't work out — obviously — but she and my personal trainer Vonda were close; Amy'd been Vonda's physics professor in college, and a friendship had developed. "A massive stroke," she told me, keeping a critical eye on my workout. "Out of the blue. She was in the grocery store and just collapsed. The baby was in the grocery cart."

Chills raced through me, as happened whenever I heard about something like this: how could you protect yourself against lightning from a clear sky? Reminding myself that what had happened to Amy might not be as random as it seemed only made my horror more complicated. "God," I panted, grimly maintaining the rhythm of the arm curls and the breathing that supported them, "that's awful."

"Come on, Madyson, focus. Push it."

My given name is a dowdy, old-fashioned moniker common to women of my generation. I think of Madyson as my taken name. Madyson: young, fresh, more appropriate for someone in her twenties than nearing fifty, to go with my taken body and, presumably, my taken soul. I like the sound of it, the way it looks on the page. I like the y . I like what it projects about me.

I obeyed Vonda's command and managed to extend my arms ten more times with the weight, heavier than any I'd pressed before, steady in my hands. The burn across my shoulders and pecs was gratifying. Between controlled inhalations and exhalations I said, "That's terrible."

Vonda sat, eyeing me critically, trying to do her job but, I saw now, trembling and exhausted. By this point in the workout she would ordinarily have given me both encouragement and instruction; although I understood, of course, why she hadn't this morning, I found myself working harder, pushing harder, going a little beyond the goals she'd set for me, in hopes of catching her attention. It wasn't approval I craved from her so much as assurance — that I was strong and healthy, that I was looking good, that I was doing everything I could.

"She was dead before the paramedics got there."

"Wow." I shuddered, and added quite sincerely, "That's really tragic."

"You never think of somebody in their forties having a stroke."

"It happens," I said carefully, getting up off the mat.

Vonda gave me a quick one-armed hug, the equivalent of men swatting each other's butts. "Okay, you can go to the sauna now."

She turned to leave me for one of her other charges, but I stopped her by demanding shamelessly, "So, how'd I do?"

I had to settle for a distracted, somewhat impatient, "Fine, Madyson. You did fine." She gave me a dismissive wave and strode across the gym. I glared after her, thwarted and insulted, soothing myself with the vitriolic thought that the only interest I had in a relationship with this lithe and self-sufficient young woman was what I could get from her. In the locker room I stripped, noting with pleasure the firmness of my new breasts and the tautness of my ass, revelling in the appraising glances of the other women and thinking about the last time I'd seen Amy.

We met for lunch at Charon's to say goodbye to Kit. We didn't quite acknowledge that. We said it was because Denise was in town and the four of us hadn't been together since she'd moved to Austin. Even when Amy called me to set it up, she didn't say, "This might be the last chance we have to see Kit."

Denise and I had snagged a window table, and I saw Kit's Beemer pull up, her husband behind the wheel. He parked in the handicap space by the door and went around to help Kit out; she hadn't even opened the door. It took long minutes for her to manoeuvre on to her feet and, leaning on Jerry and visibly off balance, long minutes more before they made it into the restaurant. When a few days earlier I'd spent the evening at her house, she'd felt papery in my arms, like an origami flower; her fingers on my shoulders, though, had been unnervingly strong, a death grip already. Her bones had seemed about to snap under my very light massage, but she'd sighed that it felt so good; fascinated by her absolute hairlessness, I'd rubbed her legs for a long time, gently, envying their incredible smoothness, tempted to lay my cheek against her calf.

Kit had never been beautiful, but her exuberant nature had made her very attractive to a lot of people. We'd met the year we both turned forty-three. She'd just taken up skiing and was learning to clog dance. My breasts had begun to sag and more often than not my lower back hurt. We were in a yoga class together. We took to practising between classes at her house or mine. When we helped each other with poses — her arm against the small of my back, my hands at her ankles and knees I first marvelled at, then absorbed, then siphoned off the energy I needed. I knew her heart was failing about five years-before she did.

Denise had not commented on my appearance beyond a generic, "Hi, Madyson! It's so good to see you! You look great!" while we hugged hello, the kind of thing women routinely say to each other with hardly any actual referent. Most people are surprised by how young I look; Denise said nothing about it. She did not look young. She looked our age. Healthy and strong, I had to admit, but thirty pounds heavier than I'd have settled for and with wrinkles and greying hair it would have been easy to get rid of. The longer I live the less I understand women like her. They give me the creeps.

"There's Kit," I said.

"Where?"

"With the red turban."

"My God." There was a pause while we watched Kit waft the short distance to the door. She hardly seemed to be touching the ground. "She's really sick, isn't she? She's really dying." Her voice broke.

I said, "Yes."

For a moment Denise hid her eyes. I noted the stubby fingernails, clean and coated with clear polish but entirely functional, the nails of a middle-aged mother and grandmother who cooked and cleaned and gardened and played and otherwise put her hands to use. Her lack of self-consciousness about her hands was disgusting, and I looked for solace to my own slim, smooth, tastefully ringed fingers on my glass of iced tea. To my horror, the polish on the right thumb had a minuscule but perfectly obvious chip, and on the left ring finger the cuticle was not perfectly smooth. For the rest of the lunch I did everything possible not to draw attention to my hands, which were usually one of my best features; I'd have to make an emergency call to my manicurist as soon as I got home, since obviously I couldn't wait for the standing weekly appointment.

"It's such a shock to see her like this," Denise said. "You've been with her all through it so you must be almost used to it, but I didn't imagine this. What am I going to say to her?"

Amy came up behind Kit and put a thick arm around her thin waist. Always on the chunky side, Amy had put on even more weight since the last time I'd seen her. Maybe she wouldn't be called obese in any clinical sense, and she certainly wasn't slovenly; her turquoise dress looked nice, and her loose chignon accentuated her flawless skin and wonderful green eyes. But she was fat. The contrast between them was breathtaking: Kit translucent, ethereal, used up; Amy substantial to a fault.

Under the table I rested my hands on my own flattened belly, murmuring to Denise, "I think I'd kill myself if I looked like that." Denise looked at me as if this were a bizarre thing to say.

When Kit and Amy approached the table, Denise sprang to her feet, smiling and over-enthusiastically exclaiming, "Hi! Amy! Kit! It's so good to see you! You look great!" She hugged Kit first, very gently, and pulled out a chair for her. After Amy settled her into it, she and Denise embraced; from the stiff angle of Amy's upper body I guessed she was taking pains not to compromise her hair or make-up or clothes just for the sake of human contact, and my estimation of her rose a few notches. Denise, on the other hand, hugged her fiercely, and spent the rest of the lunch with one side of her hair sticking out. How any woman could care so little about her appearance is beyond me.

I smiled at Kit and touched her skeletal wrist. I really did care about her. "Hi," I said softly to her, under the din Denise was making. "How are you doing, sweetie?"

The others had taken their seats before Kit had gathered herself to answer, "I'm tired, Madyson. I don't have much left. I'm almost done."

Without brows or lashes, her facial expressions were all but impossible to interpret, but I thought she looked at me then as if she suspected something, unlikely as that seemed. Guilt broke through and set my stomach roiling, followed by the terror that is never far away. Mortality, which is to say death, took its place with us at the table, and I hurriedly excused myself. As I passed behind Kit, I touched the chill back of her neck, in a gesture of love and apology, gratitude and farewell.

Charon's has a truly remarkable ladies' room. In the spacious anteroom are three-way floor-length mirrors, a long vanity with tissues and cotton balls and individual mirrors, dispensers for lotions and astringent cleansers, little squirt bottles of antistatic and hairspray, nail buffers, a vending machine dispensing individual vials of various scents at a cost per ounce as exorbitant as if it were Parisian perfume. The lines for Charon's ladies' room often stretch out the door.

That day only two or three other women were ahead of me, and while I waited I took stock. I'd checked myself at home, of course, as part of my morning regimen, and again at the gym, but you couldn't be too sure. Under cover of smoothing my clothes, I assured myself that the work on stomach, breasts and buttocks was holding. Thighs below the leather mini-skirt were firm and free of varicosity. There was no loose flesh on the backs of upper arms, no crow's feet at the corners of my eyes or mouth. All exposed skin, of which there was a considerable amount, was taut and moist. My hair swung nicely in the simple, youthful shoulder-length bob my hairdresser had recommended, his expert highlights creating exactly the right aura of light and lightness around my face. Although I was still not entirely satisfied with my lips and nose, my brows arched perfectly and my breasts finally were the size and shape I wanted.

But as I regarded myself in every possible mirror and combination of mirrors, I saw death encroaching. Saw my organs ageing, my hair greying and thinning, the skin of my elbows wrinkling like dried fruit. Saw the crabwalk of deterioration advancing.

The effort it took to keep all this at bay — one day, one procedure, one friend at a time — was staggering. I could scarcely do anything else.

When on the way back to my friends I caught sight of Kit, faintly nodding at something Amy was saying, I realized I'd had the fantasy that in the time I was absent she'd have slipped away; at the same time, I'd been hoping she'd still be available to me for a little while. Love for her brought tears to my eyes; careful not to smudge my mascara, I dabbed them away. It was plain to see that Kit was now quite beyond my reach. So, regretfully but without hesitation, I turned my attention elsewhere.

Denise had a hefty lunch, including dessert. Amy and I had salads. We chatted stiffly; it was hard to come up with safe conversation with Kit among us. Talking about the future, even next week, seemed ghoulish. Talking about the present made Kit's illness the elephant at the table nobody could forget but nobody mentioned. Talking about our shared past reminded us of what was gone. Kit didn't take part in the conversation much and, although she ordered something, she didn't eat, just took a sip of water now and then, slowly and with great care.

Denise was into a somewhat manic recounting of her recent expedition climbing Colorado's fourteeners. "Not bad for a fifty-one-year-old grandmother, huh?" she crowed more than once. Amy was looking increasingly pained. I guessed that Denise was desperate to fill silence, to talk about anything other than the elephant, but I allowed myself to half believe that her insensitivity justified what I was about to do.

I stopped behind her and laid my hands on her shoulders. She took it as a warning, which in part it was, and hesitated, then brought her story to a clumsy conclusion and stopped talking. Energy was racing through her body like white water. I pushed myself into the stream. She winced. I massaged her shoulders tenderly, employing techniques I'd learned from Vonda to loosen tight muscles and release tension, but my purpose was not to heal.

"Oh," she moaned, wriggling her shoulders sensuously. "That hurts."

"Should I stop?" But I didn't stop. I increased the pressure along her trapezius, then found a knot under her left shoulder blade and dug my knuckle in. She gasped and arched her back. I held steady. After a long moment she relaxed under my hands. I felt the underlying defences of her body open to me, and we had the first of our exchanges. For me it was like a blood transfusion. For her, it was slow poison.

I released the pressure, swept my hands lightly over her back, and left her with a little pat of affection and regret. She said, "Wow, Madyson, you have really strong hands," and just sat there for a while.

Kit asked Amy, in a voice strong enough to make me wonder if she might have something more to offer me after all, but, tellingly, with no energy to waste on segue, "When do you get your baby?"

Amy hesitated and looked at me, not sure she ought to go there. I shrugged. "I leave Thursday," she finally said, almost apologetically.

Denise, who'd been staring off into space, roused herself. "Baby?"

"I'm adopting a baby girl from China." Amy kept glancing at Kit and spoke with some reluctance, but the excitement that broke through was contagious. "She was a foundling so they aren't certain of her birth date, but she's about eight months old."

"A baby? At your age? At our age?" Denise shook her head in amazement and, I thought, disapproval. I disapproved, too, but not on the basis of age; while I doubted her weight was a serious health hazard, it seemed to me that one of the criteria for adoption ought to be appearance. After all, who would want a fat mother?

Amy started to defend herself, but I spoke first. "If you can climb fourteeners, at our age , why shouldn't Amy be able to adopt a baby?"

"Climbing a mountain takes a long spurt of energy. Raising a kid takes energy twenty-four — seven for at least eighteen years." Denise raised her water glass in Amy's direction. "I could never do it. I'm too old. More power to you, girlfriend."

"Maybe," I said, recklessly, "this is what they mean when they talk about women discovering new power and vitality in middle age." Then, suddenly, we were all not looking at Kit, and I was ashamed of myself, and at the same time I was filing away for future reference the images of Amy's reservoir of maternal energy and — daringly, appallingly — of the raw life-force this baby would bring.

Amy asked me quietly, "Do you see Vonda?"

"Every day at the gym. I saw her this morning."

"How is she?" There was a wistfulness in her tone.

"Fine," I said. "Great."

Amy poked at the remnants of her salad with her fork. "She's stopped calling."

I didn't know what to make of this. "She's pretty busy," I tried. "Don't take it personally." This admonition had always struck me as specious, since impersonality was exactly what the complainant was objecting to. But talk of lost connections seemed cruel in the presence of Kit, who was about to lose them all, and I didn't want to encourage Amy to go on.

She went on anyway. "Vonda's going to be my daughter's godmother. She's in my will as the person to raise her if anything happened to me."

"I didn't realize you were that close."

"I thought we were. And, you know, she's young." She glanced wryly in Denise's direction.

"I'll tell her to get in touch with you."

"No!" She was adamant. "Don't do that."

"I'll tell her you said hi."

"No," she insisted, no less emphatically but lowering her voice. "Don't do that, either. If she doesn't want to see me for some reason that's up to her. I still think she'd be a good mother for Phoebe if something happened to me. My lawyer would contact her. Not that anything's going to happen to me." She gave a nervous little laugh, the way people do.

"Well," I said, "we never know." My attention had swung back to Denise and to Kit, making this comment sound more dismissive than I'd meant it to be. Amy didn't say anything more about Vonda; she didn't, in fact, say anything more to me for the rest of the lunch.

Kit died less than a week later. Her husband called me at work and said if I wanted to say goodbye I better come now. I went; how could I not? She raised up out of the bed towards me, her face already stretched into a rictus grin, and moaned as if in warning or terrible acknowledgment. She seemed to be reaching for me, but it was easy to avoid her grasp. Kit was my friend and I longed to be of comfort, but I couldn't risk touching her now; who knew what might flow into or out of me?

There were things I might have said to her if Jerry hadn't been in the room, silently distraught and furiously protective. "Goodbye, Kit," I whispered. "Thanks for being my friend." If she heard me at all, she would know what I meant.

The memorial service was several months later. Denise came back for it, and she and Amy and I went together. Amy brought her new daughter Phoebe, who'd been malnourished in the orphanage and sickly since she came home; solemn, dwarfed by her mother's bulk, the baby fussed almost inaudibly during the service. Despite the panic that was making my skin crawl and my breath come short as the eulogies went on and on, I didn't ask to hold her; it was too soon, I wasn't quite that desperate, and her life-force, though pure and sweet because it was so new, wasn't strong enough yet to be worth much to me.

Denise was pale and noticeably thinner than she'd been at Charon's. Climbing the chapel steps, she had more trouble catching her breath than her tears would account for. She said she hadn't been feeling right and had a doctor's appointment the next week. Probably nothing, she said, but she had a six-day, 500-mile bike tour in less than a month, and she needed to be in shape for that.

I was one of the people who got up and spoke about Kit. I meant everything I said. I would miss her terribly. She'd had a profound effect on my life.

After the service there was high-intensity sort of mingling. I avoided the photo display of Kit on a lace-draped, daisy-laden table — Kit as a beaming baby, Kit in a high school cheerleader outfit leaping in a high split, Kit in a glamour shot and made what I hoped was creditable small talk with people I knew. Phoebe got a lot of attention; it was good, someone observed, to have a baby at a funeral, to remind us all that life goes on. That the life-force is eternal and infinite, and infinitely available.

Meaning to introduce Amy to a man I'd known casually for years, I could not remember his name. The older I got the more frequently names were eluding me, but this was the most public example so far, and I was mortified. He laughed with a sort of pained graciousness, supplied the name, shook Amy's free hand, made some wry joke about losing brain cells as we get older.

No . I thought but did not say. It is not going to happen to me .

"But you're not as old as I am, are you, Madyson?" he amended, peering at me in admiration and, I thought, some bafflement, because we both knew I was.

"I don't know," I lied. "Anyway, you're only as old as you feel, right?"

People said nice things to me all afternoon, a weird but gratifying phenomenon for a memorial service. "You look great, Madyson." "You look younger every time I see you!" I thanked them lightly and tried to settle on just the right way to think about Kit.

At one point Denise said something about her grandchildren, and the woman she was chatting with affected shock and protested that she didn't look old enough to be a grandmother which was patently false, and Denise just smiled and said, "Well, I am. Twice." There was an awkward silence while both the other woman and I waited for her to express thanks. When that didn't happen, the conversation trailed off and the woman found somebody else to talk to.

"I don't know why," Denise muttered, "people assume it's a compliment to say you look younger than you are."

I was taken aback. "Well, nobody wants to look old."

"Why not? Why is young better?"

Because it's further away from death . But saying that would have led us into a discussion I couldn't risk. I put my hand on her arm and pointedly surveyed the fine wrinkles, the greying hair, the unreconstructed breasts, and told her with only mild sarcasm, "I wish I could be like you, Denise. It must be liberating not to care about such superficial things."

She shot me a sharp glance but didn't take up the challenge. I maintained the contact between us as long as I could get away with, and felt her shudder and sway. "It's so hot," she gasped, and, indeed, her face was suddenly glistening with sweat. "I've got to get out of here."

"Are you okay? Do you need me to drive you home?" I asked boldly, hopefully.

But she shook her head and made her way out of the room, pausing only to hug Kit's husband. Refreshed, I scanned the crowd for somebody I hadn't talked to yet who would tell me, verbally or otherwise, how good I looked. I was one of the last to leave. When I embraced Jerry, he was weeping, but I also felt him having to force his gaze away from my cleavage.

A few weeks later I called Denise in Austin to find out what the doctor had said. I wanted to know, and I wasn't likely to hear through the grapevine since she lived so far away and the only mutual acquaintance we had now was Amy. "It's my heart," she told me in an affectless voice. "There's something wrong with my heart." My own heart was pounding; I laid my hand over it in a sensual caress.

"Oh, Denise, honey, I'm sorry."

"It's ironic, isn't it?" She gave a bitter laugh. "There I was thinking I was saying goodbye to Kit, and I was already sick and didn't even know it."

"It can happen to any of us," I said, lamely and disingenuously, adding silently, not me .

When I called her again a month or so later, there was no answer, and I have never heard from her again. Since there's nobody I know to call or who would know to call me, it's not likely I'll find out what happened to her, although certainly I can guess. It haunts me. I can only hope she had someone with her, children or grandchildren, climbing partner or a better friend than me.

After Kit's memorial service and Denise's departure, I felt great for quite a while. I increased my workouts to three hours a day, and Vonda was pleased with my progress. I started going to a spa once a month for a full-body cleansing. I had my colours done and was shocked to discover that the particular shades of blue and green I'd been favouring actually could make me look older, the recommended adjustments made a huge difference, and I replaced almost all my wardrobe. I embarked on a new relationship with a thirty-year-old man I met at the gym; he thought I was thirty-five and joked incessantly about how much better older women were in bed.

I also started doing brain exercises, crossword puzzles and foreign language tapes and repetitions of number sequences forward and backward before I fell asleep. This was less successful than the efforts to keep my body youthful. I still seemed to be forgetting names more than I used to, if someone spoke to me while I was on the phone I'd lose both conversations, and about once a week I seriously misplaced my keys. This would not do.

Amy seemed glad to hear from me and readily agreed to meet me for a drink. I went to her office, enjoying the chance to stroll across the campus. Critically observing every young woman I passed, I repeatedly judged myself acceptable, and more than one young man barely out of adolescence glanced at me in a way I took to be admiring.

Amy was with a student. Through the half-open door she saw me and raised a hand in greeting. Her smile, I had to admit, was radiant, even within the excess flesh. She looked exhausted, though, and I worried that I might have waited too long, that the demands of her life might have used up her reserves and rendered her inaccessible to me. I took a seat in the hall outside her office, like any student in need of intellectual transfusion, and passed the next quarter-hour considering my options for a contingency plan. Now and then, I caught pieces of their dialogue; the fact that it was almost completely incomprehensible to me was both frightening and reassuring.

When the student emerged, I took his measure, wondering somewhat wildly whether I'd be able to find him again if I needed him. Studying notes he must have taken during his session with Amy, he hardly glanced at me. Amy came to the office door, even bigger than when I'd seen her at the memorial service, but surprisingly graceful. She held out her hand. Breathless at my good fortune, I rose and took it. Her grip was strong. She covered my hand with her other hand. "It's so good to see you, Madyson," she told me with more fervour than I'd expected, and it crossed my mind to wonder what it was she wanted from me.

It didn't take long to figure it out. After months of single motherhood and freshman physics classes, she was craving adult conversation. But it was more than that. Amy was lonely. Having a child had made her more rather than less aware of how much she ached for a partner. She wanted us to be friends, not just friendly acquaintances; she wanted us to be lovers.

I couldn't do that. I couldn't have been close to someone who looked like that anyway, and my own circumstances made it completely unthinkable. What I had to do to survive was bad enough when love wasn't involved. Which was why, for me, love was never involved.

It was possible that I'd already got what I needed from her long handclasp, and I considered pleading sudden illness and making my escape. But I reminded myself of the alarming memory lapses, the decreased ability to concentrate, all the unmistakable symptoms of intellectual decline. I had to take care of myself. I had to take advantage of opportunities as they presented themselves.

Amy took my hand again as we strolled the few blocks to her house. My embarrassment at being seen holding hands with a fat person was outweighed — but only just — by the infusion of energy tingling through my palm and up my wrist. I longed to kiss her, my tongue a siphon in her mouth, although the image repulsed me. I longed to take her head in my hands.

Phoebe was asleep. We were both displeased, Amy because now the child likely wouldn't sleep through the night. After the babysitter left, Amy invited me to make myself comfortable in the living-room while she went to check on her daughter, but happily agreed when I asked if I could come with her. We went into the little girl's room hand in hand, like proud parents who couldn't quite believe their good fortune.

I'd read that the brain development of a child in the first two years of life is so dramatic that if we could keep up that pace for the rest of our lives we'd all be mental giants. I gazed at beautiful little Phoebe in her crib. I reached to stroke her hair.

"Don't!" Amy's whisper was explosive, and she caught my hand. For a moment I thought she'd somehow divined that her child was in terrible danger from me. But she just squeezed my hand affectionately and murmured close to my ear, "Don't wake her. She'll be up all night." I nodded, and we tiptoed out of the child's room together.

Despite intense arousal — part horror, part need and gratitude that it would be met, part a disturbing kind of joy — I could not bring myself to respond to Amy's goodnight kiss. I allowed it, though, another moral compromise. Her mouth lingered softly on mine. I all but sank into the billows of her body. I maintained the physical contact as long as I could stand it, absorbing so much from her that I was weak and trembling by the time I pulled away. She smiled tremulously at me and murmured, "Call me." As I left I heard Phoebe cry out for her.

I hadn't seen her since then, and now I never would. When I emerged from the steam room and had settled myself on to the massage table with my face in the terry-covered cradle and my open-pored naked body ready for Vonda's manipulations, I asked, "Where's her daughter?" I'd hoped never to have to ask this question, but it had probably been inevitable. "Phoebe," I added, gratified that I had not forgotten her name. "Where's Phoebe?"

"She's with me."

Her thumbs and then her elbow found that deep tender spot under my left shoulder blade, and she bore down. Through the exquisite pain I hoped I wasn't inadvertently taking anything from her through this kind of contact; I needed my personal trainer and massage therapist to be strong and focused. As the muscle started to loosen and warmth seeped into the pressure point, I gasped, "Are you raising her?"

"I'm her godmother and guardian. It's in Amy's will."

The massage wasn't as good as usual; Vonda's mind was obviously somewhere else, and so was mine. My various aches and pains — Iliac crest, glutes, lower back, feet — seemed to have multiplied and amplified and become more resistant since the last time. I kept thinking about Amy, and Kit and Denise. I kept thinking about Phoebe, whose primal will to survive must be fierce.

"Okay," she told me after a while, without, I thought, much interest. "Flip over on your back."

I didn't draw the sheet up over my beautiful breasts. She gave no sign of noticing. Her fingers shook slightly from the pressure she was putting under the back edge of my skull, stiffened fingers relieving tension in my head and neck as if they were holes drilled into the bone, but it was the weight of my own head that generated the response rather than any direct intention on her part. She let go too soon.

"There you go, Madyson."

I lay on the table for a few minutes after her hands left me, noting with resentment and panic that my body felt neither relaxed nor supple. I was paying her good money. She owed me more than this.

"Now that I'm a mother," Vonda said, as though she were talking about the weather, "I'm not going to work here any more. We can get by without what I make, and Phoebe needs me. She's just lost her mother."

Bereft, I managed to ask, "When are you leaving?"

"Today's my last day. You're my last client."

I could not let this happen. Vonda was a young, vital woman with plenty more to give. Carefully, raising myself on one elbow, I said, "I'll miss you."

"Thanks. I'll miss this place, too. Sort of."

"I hope we can keep in touch."

There was a pause, and I expected either no acknowledgment of my overture or one of those responses like "we'll have to get together sometime" designed to be rejecting without quite admitting it. In either case, I'd have pressed. But, to my pleasant surprise, I didn't need to. Vonda looked up at me almost shyly and said, "I hope you mean it, Madyson. I'd like that."

Heart pounding, I suggested, "Let's have lunch. Tomorrow. There's this great little place I know. Charon's. Let's meet there."

"Great." Vonda nodded happily. "I'll see if the day care can keep Phoebe another half day."

"No!" She raised her eyebrows at my vehemence, and I hastened to moderate it. To control and conceal how much I needed to touch that little girl, to cradle and kiss her, to stroke her baby skin and hold her against my heart and infuse myself with all that raw new energy. "No," I repeated, with great effort calming my demeanour. "I'd really love to see her. Please. Bring her along."

Forever, Amen

Elizabeth Massie

Two-time Bram Stoker Award winner and World Fantasy Award finalist Elizabeth Massie is the author of numerous horror short stories and books. Her most recent novels include Welcome Back to the Night, Dark Shadows: Dreams of the Dark (co-authored with Stephen Mark Rainey) and Wire Mesh Mothers. A collection of the author's short fiction , Shadow Dreams, was recently released .

For young adult readers she is also the author of the Daughters of Liberty trilogy, the Young Founders series , The Great Chicago Fire: 1871, Maryland: Ghost Harbor, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Power of Persuasion. Her teleplay , Rhymes and Reasons, was the recipient of a 1990 Parents' Choice Award .

"In creating 'Forever, Amen,' I considered immortality blessing or curse? and its various manifestations," says Massie. "Vampirism, reincarnation, time travel. The appeal of living for ever is darkened when the future is discovered to be no better than the present or the past, when progress is only technical and not humanitarian, and civil people pound their chests and boast of their foul-smelling goodness. Where is one to go then? Where is one to run?"

Then Pilate went out to the people and saith unto them, Behold, I have found no fault with this man. The chief priests and officers cried out, Crucify him!

Pilate held forth his hand towards Jesus, who bore a crown of thorns and purple robe, and saith, I may release to thee a man on this day of feasting. Whom will ye that I release, the man Barabbas or this man Jesus?

And the crowd cried, Give us Barabbas! Jesus must die!

When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing to save the man Jesus and that Jesus was indeed to die to please the crowd, he offered the execution of noble captives, to have the man's wrists slashed with sword and thus causing him to bleed quickly unto death. But from the crowd called up the man Andrew, son of Phinneas the shepherd, who said, Jesus must suffer for his words! Crucify Him! The crowd joined in the mocking call, He must suffer for his words!

Then Pilate went from the crowd and washed his hands, and turned Jesus to the officers and soldiers, who gave unto Him a cross and bearing such went all unto the place of the skull which is called Golgotha:

Where they crucified Him, and two others on either side with Jesus in the midst.

Book of Trials, 7:23-8

Danielle stood against the rough wall, her red eyes turned furiously towards the shrouded figure on the gurney. Marie and Clarice were gone, spun away with dour exasperation and vanished through the small ceiling-high window of the cellar. Their words still echoed in the room like late-season flies caught in a bottle.

Marie: "He is not Alexandre. He is nothing. He is less than nothing."

Clarice: "It's done. Come with us. Sister, take my hand. It stinks in here."

Marie: "Look if you must, but be done with it, and then come."

Danielle had pressed her gloved hands to her ears and shook her head. No .

Marie: a sharp snapping of the fingers as if Danielle were a dog to obey her mistress, and Danielle had simply said, "Leave me be." Marie and Clarice had done just that. They thought their companion mad, not a good thing for a creature of the night. Madness could only lead to foolishness and carelessness, and with carelessness, destruction. They had left their mad friend to her own fate.

Danielle stared at the soiled sheet, the sharp protrusions beneath the cloth where the nose and chin were, the feet. Softer mounds of the shoulders, the fisted hands, the groin. Light from lanterns, hung in this subterranean room by the men who had departed here just minutes ago, sputtered from ceiling hooks. Water pipes dripped puddles on to the dirt floor. Spiders and their webs, left in corners by the hasty custodian the day before, held still as if pondering the strange and recent occurrence.

"Alexandre?" Danielle said softly, tasting the cold of her breath as it passed through her incisors, her protruding canines. "Why can that not be you?" She took several steps forward, her chin dipping down as if her face were dread to see beneath the sheet. So much she had witnessed in all these many years, so much terror and viciousness and death, yet this one was almost beyond her ken.

"Why can that not be you?" she repeated, then touched her own face. "Is this not me? Am I not still walking this squalid earth in the form of a young woman though I am 117 years of age?"

The sheet stirred slightly. Danielle gasped and put out her hand to find that it was just a current of air passing though the damp brick room, travelling from one ill-hung door to another on the other side.

Was this world not spattered with such as her, existing in conjunction with mortals who most often believed their own reality was the sum and total? And so what incredulous magic could not happen, what damnable curse was impossible?

The room was hot and rancid, foul human scents coiling like smoke from the floor, the walls, the chairs, the gurney. The men who had been here just minutes ago had stunk at first of excitement, and then disgust. They claimed for themselves the crown of civility, yet winced and vomited at the result of their infinite goodness.

"Is this not me?" she repeated. "Look and see that flesh which you once loved." She shook her head, warding off the stench, then ripped her gloves from her hands and threw them to the floor. She clutched at the frilly bodice of her dress, and ripped it from neck to waist. Her dagger-sharp nails raked the white skin of her breast as she did, leaving long, bloodless skin-lips gaping silently in the air.

Cursed costume of the modern, nineteenth-century woman! Such prudes, such whores, tied up and trussed and playing at seduction with their prim dress, not knowing what it is to be wholly female! Ah, but she had known! Alexandre had known her femaleness and she his maleness, and had revelled in the wonder of it all.

She tossed the ripped cloth aside. Then she wrenched off the rest of her garb — the leg-of-mutton sleeves, the full muslin skirt, the petticoat, cotton stockings, garters, buttoned shoes. All were hurled away. The hat, the hairpins, the ear bobs. Her auburn hair fell free about her shoulders.

Danielle closed her eyes and caressed her cold skin. She traced the length of her arms and torso, feathering the soft hairs on her chilly stomach, strumming the already healing skin-lips on her breasts.

She had been naked when they had taken away Alexandre from her the first time. Lying in a stall of the weanling barn they'd been, Danielle leaning gaily into the wiry hair of Alexandre's chest and laughing at the prickling straw in her hair and in her back. She had picked up a yellow stem and had ticked his chin and his nose. He had kissed the straw and then her fingers. He had wrapped his arms around her waist and nestled his chin into her neck, his tongue playing easily along the tender flesh there.

"You were tender and true," she said, her brows knotted and her lips trembling. "But only one wrong named to you, as any human would have who has lived past infancy. How, then, did this curse come to you?"

Beneath the sheet, Alexandre did not move. Danielle took several more steps, across the uneven and cold floor, and grasped the sheet that covered her beloved.

The handsome, tattered young man arrived at Bicetre on a frosty, late March morning in 1792, appearing like a spectre beneath the shadows of the pear orchard behind Paris's infamous hospital and prison. The sky had rained not an hour earlier, and the rain had been cold and severe, drilling chilly puddles into the ground and knocking branch tips from the naked trees. Shivering droplets hung triumphantly to the fur of the animals in the paddocks and to the emerald leaves of the boxwood shrubs that lined the narrow dirt pathways.

The brick institution of Bicetre was large, dark and filled with most unpleasant business — that of madness, of loneliness, of anger, desperation. Of screams. Of silence. Bright, curious doctors ministered to the sick. Hardened officers tended the miscreants.

In the shadow of the great place, flanking its west side, was a four-acre plot on which animals and vegetables were raised for the use of Bicetre's personnel, patients and inmates. It was called appropriately the Little Farm. Fenced paddocks monitored the cows and sheep and pigs; in a small hutch nested chickens and pigeons. Several gardens bordered with woven vine fences offered up turnips and beans in the warmer months. A tiny grove of pear trees held sentinel near the stone wall where, beyond, the citizens of Paris pounded back and forth in the rhythm of their individual and now collective lives.

Danielle, one of three young maids employed to tend the animals and gardens and assist in meal preparations, had been in the paddock on a stool, scrubbing the udder of one poorly producing cow and slapping flies from her face when she saw the man amid the naked pear trees and thought, My God, but he is beautiful! Thank you for this gift today! She left the stool and the muddy bovine for the orchard, stopping several yards away and drawing her wool shawl about her shoulders.

"Good morning," Danielle said. "Are you lost?"

The man raised his hand in tentative greeting — a fine, strong hand it was, a working man's hand with dark knuckle hair and calluses — and said, "Not now that I've beheld you." He smiled, and Danielle could see that his teeth were fine and white. Her mother, before she had died, had told Danielle that good teeth meant a good heart.

Danielle didn't back away nor did she turn her gaze to the ground as the finer of France's daughters would have done in the presence of a strange man. She was not a maid in the sense the Maid of Orleans had been; Danielle had had her lovers, most of them young doctors at Bicetre and an occasional nurse, who brought her to their private offices within the heavy walls of the institution, made over her lush body on firm, practical sofas, then laughed at her and sent her back to the barn with a slap to the ass. The Revolution stated there was to be no more class distinction, and Paris had turned nearly upside down with its fervent attention to la chose publique , "public things" which had to be monitored for counter-revolutionary thought and action, yet Danielle and her sister maids at the hospital farm found their lives little changed. The gnats and flies were as thick as before, the cows as dirty, the pears in the orchard as worm-ridden, and the doctors as lustful towards girls in maid garb.

The young man beneath the pear branches was quite handsome, with dark hair, a black beard, and gentle, crinkling eyes. He had obviously scaled the stone wall, and had torn the knee of his breeches.

"Are you thirsty, sir?" Danielle asked. The man nodded, and she led him past the dirty cow and the stool to the well. Here he put down his worn leather satchel and drank countless dipperfuls which she supplied from the dented tin bucket. Her fingers brushed his once as she passed the dipper, and the hairs on her knuckles stood up at attention.

"What brings you here?" she pressed as he sipped. "You're not a lost patient with a simple mind, are you, to stumble back to the hospital from which you were attempting escape?"

He saw that she was joking, and he smiled broadly and shook his head.

"No," he said. "I'm from the north, and have come to Paris for work as my home and shop were burned in a fire just a week ago, leaving me without means. I am a cobbler by trade. An accident it was, with the wind knocking a lantern from the window on to the floor. Christ, such a loss." He paused to wipe stray drops from his beard. "But I cannot make it over, cannot make it right. So I brought a few things with me to the city. From the road I spied soft and browned pears, hiding in the tall grass from last autumn, and climbed the wall in hopes of plucking some without being spied. Then I saw you and was glad I'd been seen."

"Rotten pears!" Danielle raised a brow. "The third estate cannot say they eat such things now, for dire poverty is of the old time! Shush!"

"They cannot say, but they certainly can eat, yes?"

Danielle smiled, then tipped her head. "This is a hospital, and a prison. There are shoes always in need of repair. I would think you could find work here, if you would like?"

"I might like that very much," said the man.

Up the boxwood-lined path from the pigs' paddock strolled the two other maids, Marie and Clarice, each steering a waddling sow with a stick. But they only smiled at Danielle, allowing their friend her time, and trudged on to the stoop and rear door that led to Bicetre's kitchen. The pigs were poked and prodded into small wicker cages by the door, where they would await a fate their grub-fed brains could not fathom.

Danielle offered the man a place to rest in the empty weanling calves' barn and left him alone several hours until she found a spare moment between her farming and kitchen duties. She carried with her a slab of ham, some bread, and a bottle of wine beneath her skirt, pilfered from the enormous cellar beneath the kitchen. The two shared food and drink in the straw. And then kisses, caresses. She learned that he was Alexandre Demanche, twenty-two, an orphan raised in the countryside outside Beauvais. He had been engaged but never married, for the young woman had died of consumption three weeks before they were to wed. Alexandre learned that she was Danielle Boquet, born in Paris to a patient at Bicetre who expired during childbirth, leaving Danielle to be raised by various matrons about the institution who taught her to cook, garden and manage livestock. In all her nineteen years, she had only set foot off Bicetre's property to attend weekly mass. She was, she admitted, afraid of the city and its people, but felt safe behind the stone walls of the Little Farm.

In the morning Danielle presented Alexandre to Claude LeBeque, the pudgy little man who was in charge of the massive loads of laundry produced within the thick walls of the hospital and prison. She stopped him at the hospital's front gate. Behind him on the street milk carts and fish wagons rattled back and forth in the cold spring sun, and children were tugged behind mothers with baskets on their arms and hats pinned to their hair.

LeBeque pulled at his substantial, red-splotched nose, then sniffed at being detained. "This man needs work? You're good for what, Monsieur?"

"Good with shoes," said Alexandre.

"So you say?"

"Someone must supply clothing and shoes to the inmates," said Danielle. "Who would that be?"

LeBeque pulled his nose again, then a small smile found his cracking lips. He dabbed at his fleshy forehead with a filthy handkerchief and purred, "That would be me."

Alexandre stepped forward. "I understand this place houses a good many people and therefore, I suspect, a good many shoes. I mend shoes and I make shoes. Have you a need for such as myself?"

LeBeque shrugged and raised a brow in a way that seemed to tease. "Oh, I might find a place for you. I'll send word soon. Don't go too far, sir."

With permission to stay on the premises and await hiring, Alexandre made a tidy bunk for himself in the empty barn. He used a blanket Danielle brought from her own room in the cellar and rolled his cape into a pillow. She helped rake and toss out the mouldy straw and pile up fresh that she'd brought in from the sheep's shed. A roost of swallows, perturbed at losing nesting space, squawked, swooped, and evacuated with a swirl of scissored tails and batting of sharp wings.

From his satchel he removed a journal, pen, ink well and pouch of ink powder and placed them on a protruding beam. A small black volume, tied shut with a string, joined these items on the shelf.

"I will call this home for now," he said with a touch of resigned satisfaction.

Danielle linked her fingers together and said, "Take rest. I will come back to see you as soon as I am able."

Bearing a beeswax candle encased in a sooty lantern, Danielle sneaked out from the hospital to join him that evening when duties were done. Madame Duban, the head cook, demanded that the girls in her charge retire to their cots in the cellar at nine, and had always threatened dismissal at any hint of disobedience. But Danielle would not be denied, and when the old woman was snoring soundly in her spinster's bed, Danielle took several bits of bread and the light and crept outside into the tainted glow of the Paris moon. She followed the path to the barn, happy that the little building would not be needed for another few weeks when the first of the spring calves were old enough to wean and were placed in the barn to keep them from their bawling mothers.

The lantern was hung on a rusting latch on the stall door, and then Alexandre drew Danielle to himself with gentle strokes to her auburn hair. "My sweet," he said into her neck. She kissed his arms and the backs of his solid hands, then moved them across her body to the warm and secret places beneath her loose-fitting blouse and simple wool skirt. They loved until late, when she brushed off her skirt and hurried back to her cot beneath the hospital's kitchen.

Monsieur LeBeque appeared on the path near the barn the following morning. Danielle was milking one particularly ill-tempered cow and Marie was beside her, pouring milk into the churn for tomorrow's butter. The chubby man had spruced himself up since the previous morning. He had combed his thinning hair and had put rouge on his cheeks. It seemed as if the ruffled shirt he wore had seen the inside of a wash tub as recently as a week's time. He planted his cane tip into the dirt beside Danielle and demanded, "Where is the young cobbler you brought to me yesterday?"

Danielle paused in her squeezing. "You have decided to hire him?"

The man stamped his cane and frowned. "You mean to question me?"

"No, sir," said Danielle, and looked away long enough to roll her eyes in Marie's direction. Marie put her hand over her mouth so as not to giggle. "He sleeps in the calves' barn, sir."

"And where is the calves' barn?"

Danielle pointed down the path.

An oily nod and the man meandered off up the path. "He shall be employed," whispered Danielle as she began squeezing again. The thin stream of milk sizzled into the bucket; the cow's tail caught her across the cheek. "He shall be able to stay here!"

"You take care, now," said Marie. "He'll be busy and so will you. He's not a doctor to make excuses for your absences. Madame Duban may be old but she can smell the scent of sex like a horse can smell fire."

Danielle grinned. "Then I'll steal some of her cheap perfume. And we'll make time. And aren't you just jealous?"

Marie put the empty bucket down by Danielle's stool and put the wooden churn lid in place. "I have my fun, don't worry about me."

The girls laughed heartily.

With the onset of April, planting time arrived. The Little Farm's plots were ploughed by one of the imbecile boys from the hospital who was strong enough to guide the sharp furrowing blade behind the old sorrel gelding. The girls followed with bags of seeds on their hips, sprinkling the soil and covering up the grooves with their bare feet. It took several days to put in the rows of beets, cabbage, beans and onions.

Yet her days were more pleasant, in spite of back-bending work and the flies, for at night she sneaked to the barn to make love with Alexandre on the blanket in the straw. Each encounter was a flurry of heat and joy, followed by the muffle of pounding hearts and the sounds of Paris's night streets. When lovemaking was done and their passions spent, Danielle lay in his arms and asked him about his day. How many shoes had he repaired, how many new pairs had be requisitioned? Had he a cobbler's shop within the institution, or did he carry with him tools from room to room? What was it like in the prison? She had seen only the kitchen and the cellar; did the men foam at the mouth and chew off their fingers?

But Alexandre gave up little detail. He had a wooden work-box with tools, purchased for him by Monsieur LeBeque, which he took around with him when he was called for repairs. Monsieur LeBeque himself had requested a new pair of boots for which he supplied the leather. "It is work I know," Alexandre said simply. "I shall do it until I must find something else."

"Why would you need to find something else?" asked Danielle. "I know your lodging is poor, but surely they shall find a room for you soon."

"I do not want a room, I want this barn and you."

It was on the fourth night that, lying against Alexandre's chest, her fingers probing his nipples, she looked at the makeshift shelf and said, "What is that book there, my dearest? The black leather?"

Alexandre wiped his mouth and then his chest, pushing Danielle's fingers away. "It's a Bible."

"You?" marvelled the maid. "A God-loving man? I've yet to hear you preach to me, only to cry into my shoulder, 'Dear God, dear God!' in the height of your thrusting!"

Alexandre didn't return her laugh. His jaw tightened, drawing up the hairs on his chin. "Don't blaspheme."

"I'm not, Alex," said Danielle. Pushing up on her elbow, she took the book from its beam and brought it down to the hay. "I was raised a Catholic, I know the wages of blasphemy, at least in the eyes of the clergy."

"Put it back, please," said Alexandre. He held out his palm, and the insistence in his voice taunted Danielle and made her laugh the more. She sat abruptly and flipped open the pages. "Book of Temptations? Book of Trials? I've not seen these in a Bible. What is this, truly?"

Alexandre shoved Danielle viciously against the stall's scabby wall and snatched the book away. "I said put it back! Do you not know what to leave alone?"

Danielle blew a furious breath through her teeth. "Oh, but I do now, Monsieur Demanche! It is you I shall leave alone!" She scrambled to her feet, knocking straw dust from her breasts and arms. "I'm never worth more than a few days, anyway! Ask the doctors!"

But Alexandre's face softened, and he grabbed her suddenly by the wrist and said, "Don't leave me. I've been alone always. Please, dearest Danielle, I'm sorry." His voice broke and went silent. And she held him again then, and knew that she loved him.

The following day, a cloudy Sunday, Danielle, Marie and Clarice attended mass under the stern supervision of Madame Duban at the Chapel of St Matthew three blocks over, and then returned to Bicetre, for in spite of the Lord's admonition to remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy, there were chores on Sunday as on any day of the week. Danielle had peered inside the barn before madame had ushered them out the gate of the stone wall, hoping to convince Alexandre to join them, but the man was not there.

Surely he hasn't shoes to mend on Sunday, she thought. Perhaps cows' udders cannot wait, but a man's bare feet can.

They returned in the mid-afternoon, and the barn was still empty. "Perhaps he's gone to his own church," Danielle said to herself as she gathered her stool and buckets and settled down by the pear trees. "His own peculiar Bible, perhaps his own peculiar religion. No matter." She selected the first of the four cows and brought her down for the milking. The teats were slathered in faeces, and she spent a good five minutes scrubbing off what she could. Shortly afterwards, Marie came out and took her by the sleeve. "Do you know what they've brought to Bicetre? Do you know what they have set up in the courtyard on the other side of the hospital?"

Danielle shook her head.

"Guess!"

"No, Marie."

"The Louisette! The beheading machine! It's been brought from the Cour du Commerce on the rue Saint-Andre-des-Arts to us this very morning. Madame Duban told me just a moment ago that as she was crossing the courtyard the wagon came in, bearing the beams and blade. They mean to test it on sheep, and on the unclaimed corpses of prisoners and patients to see if it is ready."

Danielle let go of the soft teat and brushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear. "I should like to see it," she said. "The Assembly promised the poor should have the right to a quick death as do the wealthy. No more rack or garrote for those who are covered with an honest day's filth. How can we get to see it, Marie?"

"I don't know. Unless you'd like to go as one of the corpses. I could tell Madame Duban about your trysts with Alexandre and she would choke you for certain."

"Ah!" screeched Danielle gleefully, and she flicked milk from her fingers at her friend. "You are dreadful!"

When there was no more milk to be had from this cow, Danielle led her back to the paddock to get the last of the four who were producing. She hung the bucket on the fence post and kicked at the wall-eyed creature. "Come on, you little slut," she said. "I let you have your peace until last. And don't flare those nostrils at me."

"Danielle!"

Danielle whirled about. Alexandre was there, hands on his hips, a line of sweat on his forehead.

"Dearest!" said Danielle. "I'd come for you for mass, but you weren't there. Where have you been?"

"Shoes for Monsieur LeBeque," said Alexandre. "He's been after me these past days to come measure a new pair for himself and this morning insisted I take care of that business."

"Indeed? Shoes on Sunday? God will not approve, I can tell you that."

"Nor do I," said Alexandre. "Come with me to the barn. I must speak with you." He glanced around anxiously, to the pear trees, the wall, the kitchen door up the path.

"I've got milking," said Danielle. "The cook makes a great deal of bread on Sunday afternoon to last the week, though we aren't supposed to labour on the Lord's Day. It cannot wait. But I'll come tonight as I've always"

"Tonight I shall be gone."

"Gone? Beloved, no, you cannot"

"And you with me, yes? Dearest Danielle, I could not leave without you, but we must be careful."

"Why? What has happened?"

"Come to the barn. I won't speak of this in the daylight. There are eyes and ears we may not see, and which we do not want to know our business."

Danielle's heart kicked, and her arms tightened. What had happened? She didn't want to know, but she had to know. She latched the gate to the cows' paddock and followed Alexandre to the barn.

Huddled in the back stall, Alexandre took Danielle's hands in his. "I've made an enemy with Monsieur LeBeque. He is furious that I've spurned his advances."

"He wanted you?" Danielle's eyes widened. "I thought the man married."

Alexandre made an exasperated sound in his throat. "Married, to show the world his respectability," he said. "The man spouts words which he feels are acceptable to those whose status at this place is above him. But then I've seen him take patients from their cells to his own room, and have seen the fear in their eyes as he closes the door. He's pulled me aside and has tried to charm me with hideous quotes from writings of Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade, thinking, perhaps, that I was as twisted a libertine as he fancies himself. This afternoon, as I sat in the laundry room nailing a sole back on to an officer's boot, LeBeque staggered in and said it was time to pay for my employment."

"Dear Lord!"

Alexandre put a finger to her lips. "Shh, my dear, don't fret. I said I would have nothing to do with a man who so cruelly and freely used others. I pushed him away, and said I would be gone by tonight, and he could keep the pay which is owed me and shove it up his own blustery dung hole."

"You didn't? Sweet Mary! You're in trouble!"

"I think if I leave quickly, the man will forget anything about it. He's not bright, and he's got many around him who he can use much more easily."

Danielle wiped her eyes and dragged her fingers through her hair. "Yes, leave. I have little here that I need to take. I will get it right away and return before you can blink three times."

Alexandre closed his eyes, then opened them, and drew her to himself. "To have you, my only love, will make any journey a pleasure, any struggle a joy." He kissed her forehead, her ear, her cheeks. His breath on Danielle's lips made her body arch into his. Instinctively she shed her blouse and skirt and nestled into him and into the straw. "Love me quickly, dearest, most darling, for one last moment before we"

The barn door was yanked open and the dusty room was filled suddenly with a swirl of dim afternoon light. Three men in breeches and crumpled jackets burst in, stopped short, and stared at the couple in the shadows.

"Ah, love amid the manure!" cooed one, his tone dark and ugly, his blue eyes frosty with contempt. "I remember it well when I was young."

Danielle snatched her blouse and held it before her. Alexandre jumped to his feet and grabbed the pitchfork that was leaning on the stall door.

"Get the hell out of here!" he shouted.

"Such an order from such a criminal!" laughed a second. He was a bald man with a greasy moustache and boils on his chin. "To make demands of us!"

"Criminal?" said Alexandre.

"Nearly killed LeBeque, knocked his skull and almost cracked it open," said Blue Eyes.

Danielle stared at her love, stunned. "Criminal?"

"You make a mistake," said Alexandre. "I pushed the man away, but I did not harm him in any way!"

"Pushed him away, and down against the fire grate," said the man with boils. "I found him dazed and bloody, wailing that the cobbler tried to murder him. Came up behind him and struck him what he'd hoped was a deadly blow! But you are not so lucky, my friend, and we've come for you."

The three men fell on Alexandre then, knocking the pitchfork across the stall, and in spite of his struggles, Alexandre was pinned with his arms back. Blue Eyes tied the hands with a rope. Alexandre tried to kick and knock the men off, but they wrenched the rope upward and his shoulders popped noisily. Alexandre paused in his struggling. His teeth were set against each other and his eyes wide with rage. "Monsieur LeBeque is abed now," hissed the man with boils, "tended by one of the best surgeons at the hospital. But he made demand for you to be done with and out of his sight."

Danielle saw hope. "We are leaving," she said as she slipped into her sleeves and fumbled with the hooks. "Please, do you hear me? We will be away from Bicetre in but a minute, if you just let Alexandre go!"

"No, girl, we've other plans. Plans from Monsieur LeBeque himself. They have a few corpses from the hospital morgue, but the cobbler shall be the first live one to experience the Louisette, the first to feel the kind, cold bite."

" Dieu a la pitie !" screamed Danielle.

Alexandre began to writhe again. Danielle saw the world swaying violently, but she held tightly to the wall so she would not fall. "No, you cannot do that! He's not been tried, nor convicted!"

"Convicted enough," said Blue Eyes. "And he should be pleased! Why, this is the method of execution provided by the Assembly. This is the humane way of putting to death those who deserve it. No rack for him. No slow, piteous strangulation in the garrote! We are a civilized society now."

"Stop!" wailed Danielle. "Sweet mercy in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and all the saints!"

Suddenly Alexandre looked back over his shoulder at the black volume on the beam. Danielle thought he was going to ask for it, to carry it with him as a charm against harm. But he said, instead, "I remember. Oh, God. I remember now!"

The men struck out at Alexandre's heels to make him move, and tugged him from the barn. Danielle tugged on her skirt and stumbled after. "What do you remember, fool?" asked the man with the boils.

But Alexandre was addressing Danielle, as if he thought she would understand. "I remember the blade on my throat, the quick slash, the smiles of those sunburned faces. Ah, civilized, they said! We are indeed a humane society!"

"Alexandre?" cried Danielle.

"He's mad with fear," laughed Blue Eyes. "He's soft in the mind now. Maybe we should just lock him up in the hospital? But no, we've got our instructions. We should gag him, though, to keep his tongue silent."

Alexandre looked at the sky, the grey and cloudy sky which was threatening an early April rain. His eyes reflected the grey, and his teeth were barred in anguish. "I remember now! Why again? Why again? Forgive me, and no more!"

"Madman!" laughed Blue Eyes.

The third man, who had said nothing up to this point, mumbled simply, "Shut your mouth," and he drove his fist into Alexandre's jaw. Alexandre doubled over, groaning and spitting. Then the man pulled a handkerchief from his front jacket pocket and gagged Alexandre tightly. Then the man with boils pointed a finger at Danielle. "Stay here, wench. We've no patience for your whining!"

They dragged Alexandre from the Little Farm and around the north side of the huge brick building. Danielle ran after, staying back so they would not see her.

They did not notice her as she scurried through the stone archway into one of the smaller courtyards within the confines of the hospital. No one spied her as she crouched behind a two-wheeled cart in the shadows and stared, horrified, at the tall contraption erected on the barren centre ground. The three men who held Alexandre drove him to his knees to watch the preliminary beheadings. First, a sheep was locked into the neck brace, and with a swift movement the blade was dropped from the top of the wooden tower and severed the head. It flopped into a basket. From windows in the upper storeys of the hospital came whoops and shouts of the prisoners. Some banged and screamed.

"Better," said the man at the control to the small gathering of witnesses — finely dressed men in hats, ruffled shirts, and heeled, buckled shoes, standing with feet planted apart and hands clasped behind their backs. "The angle of the blade, you see, makes for a cleaner cut." Heads nodded. Genteel faces, concerned with the civility of it all, clearly pleased to be part of the advancement.

Two corpses were beheaded then. One a fat, naked man with wiry red hair, the other a muscular cadaver with only one foot. The already lifeless heads popped from the lifeless necks and, spewing no blood but oozing something dark, dropped into the wicker basket.

"What have we here?" The man at the control turned to where Alexandre was held to the ground. "Who is that there? We're not using it for executions yet. We've got no papers for that man. The first is selected already, a Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier. As soon as the machine is perfected, he shall die."

Blue Eyes said simply, "Just one more test subject, sir. At the request of one of the officials here at Bicetre." He nodded towards a second-storey window, where the visage of LeBeque could be seen, his head wrapped in a bandage, his arms crossed furiously.

"We've got no papers," repeated the man at the control.

"Who's to care?" said Blue Eyes. "He's a dangerous maniac who's been housed at Bicetre for years. He nearly killed the official in the window there. He'd kill you or me were we to unbind him. Who's to know, but you, these witnesses and a few babbling idiots in the windows above."

The man looked at Alexandre, then at the blade which he'd just raised back into position.

"A live one will tell you more of what you need to know," said Blue Eyes. "And then he'll merely be a third corpse."

Alexandre tried to scream around the gag, but only garglings came out. Danielle put her hands over her ears, but could not take her gaze from the dreadful sights.

"Well," said the man, whirling his hand impatiently and pursing his lips as though he had his doubts, though the temptation of a live subject was too much to pass. "All right. Quick, then. This should be our final test."

And they made quick business of Alexandre Demanche. The man was bound at the ankles and placed with much huffing and grunting upon the wooden gurney. His head was slipped through the neck trough, and then secured when the wooden slat above was brought down and locked. Alexandre, still in his gag, strained to look around as the man in charge reached out to release the heavy blade.

He spied Danielle trembling in the shade behind the wagon. His expression screamed what he had spoken back in the barn, though the words did nothing but confuse the already terrified mind of his young lover.

Why again? Why again? Forgive me, and no more!

The blade slid smoothly, an easy rush of air and steel. With a thwack, it found its rest at the bottom of the track, throwing the head neatly into the basket. But this one bled, and profusely.

Danielle covered her face with her forearms and drove her face into the ground.

She returned to the Little Farm when darkness fell. She felt her way rather than saw it, for her eyes were full of the hideous visions of the courtyard. Marie and Clarice were on the path, panicked for the loss of their friend, and when they saw her, they ran to her and held her close.

But Danielle would have nothing of it. She said simply, "I must die."

Marie shook Danielle's shoulders. "What are you saying? Where have you been?"

But then Danielle said, "But should I kill myself I go to hell! Should I live I live in hell!"

"Oh, sweet Mother of God," said Clarice, "what has happened to you, dear friend?"

Danielle broke away, and reached the barn to see if she'd made a mistake, to see if Alexandre was waiting for her in his stall. But the straw was kicked about, and the pitchfork dropped on the floor where Alexandre had tried to protect her. His jacket was in a tangle by the wall. Danielle wailed, picked up the jacket, and clutched it to herself. Her friends stood in the doorway, dumbfounded.

"I must die, too!" she screamed.

"Danielle!" It was Clarice. "Come out of there. Talk to us! You've got us frightened!"

Alexandre's journal was on the beam. But the Bible was gone. Danielle dug through the straw, clawing and sifting the sharp, golden bits, but the Bible was not there. Alexandre had not taken it with him. But it was no longer there. What had happened to it? She wanted it for herself, to take it with her to her death.

Danielle stood, and fled the barn. She knew the answer, as surely as she knew LeBeque and Blue Eyes and the man with boils and the man at the beheading machine would go to hell for their civil and humane test. She shoved past the other maids, saying, "I shall go to the places where the prostitutes wander. I shall make myself available to a murderer, that's what I shall do! I will go to heaven if I'm murdered. For I will not live without him!"

Marie and Clarice tried to grab Danielle to hold her back, but she was too fast, too mad with grief, and they were left clutching air and the first raindrops of the evening.

They followed her. Against Clarice's concerns that they'd be relieved of their duties for leaving Bicetre without permission, they scurried after Danielle, shawls drawn up around their faces. Down one narrow Parisian street after another they went, calling for their friend, but not so loudly to attract the attention of the increasingly frightening citizenry of the streets. The rain let itself go in full force, driving some pedestrians from the roads and leaving only the determined, the tardy and the mad.

Danielle pushed her way to the rue Leon, a small and dismal alley lined with tall, narrow whorehouses, saloons and tenement shacks, some of which leaned precariously on poorly placed foundations. The rain blurred the lights of the lanterns which sat in splintering windowsill. Whores stood in petticoats and stockings in sagging doorways, thrusting their breasts and wiggling their tongues. Drenched clients in coats hurried for the warmth of the diseased temptresses, and vanished into the houses with low chuckles and growls. A skeletal dog limped across Danielle's pathway and wormed its way into a tenement cellar through a cracked window. In the shadows beneath rain-blackened stoops and behind rust-banded barrels lurked eyes that seemed to have no sockets. Teeth that seemed to have no mouths.

Danielle stopped in the centre of the alley. She stared up at the dark, rain-sodden sky and raised her hands as if bidding some divine spirit to save her.

"Kill me!" she said above the drumming of the rain on the cobblestones and rooftops. "Come now, there is surely someone who would relish the chance to satiate a blood lust! Here I am, and there is no one to charge you for my death, for there is no one in this God-forsaken town who would care I was gone!"

She closed her eyes and kept her hands aloft. She took a breath, expecting to feel a plunging knife in her ribs, or a dagger drawn across her throat. Now , she begged silently. Let it be done and over .

She heard nothing, save the giggling of the prostitutes in their houses and the cries of babies in the tenement rooms. She said again, "Here I am! A gift, for free!"

Spattering rain and muted laughter.

Then, "No, I don't want to die. God forgive me." And then again, "Yes, die I must! Release me!"

And then a hand on her forearm and a whisper, "Sister, you're soaked to the skin!"

Danielle opened her eyes to see a pair of red orbs gazing intently at her, mere inches from her own. The skin around the eyes was as white as a corpse's. Danielle gasped and floundered, but the full red mouth smiled and said, "Fear not, dear. I have what you want. You are certainly a young thing, yes?" Cold fingers gently brushed Danielle's hair from her neck and tipped her head to the side ever so slightly.

Danielle could not move her gaze from the red eyes, and she thought for the briefest moment, This is just a painted whore. A whore who kills on the side to assuage her anxieties. That's fine. That's good. A whore may kill more kindly than a man would have.

"I will release you to life that is not life, death that is not death. My gift to you. The gift many of us have asked for because of the dreadful state of our mortal existence as women on earth. Hold, dear, hold now."

Danielle held her breath.

"Danielle!" The scream was from behind, and Danielle tried to look back but the whore with the white face and cold hands held her as strongly as any man.

"Danielle!" It was Marie, somewhere back at the entrance to the alley.

"Shh," cooed the whore, "shh." The white face dipped to Danielle's bare neck. A searing pain shot through the flesh, the muscle, and into the very core of bone. Danielle screamed, but the scream was met with the whore's muffled laughter and the shifting of the rain in the wind.

Then there was warmth and numb peace, and a swirling giddiness that caught her thoughts and threw them like pebbles in the wind. She almost laughed, almost, but then she fell into herself and there was no bottom and no light and she fell and fell and thought, This is death. I shall find you, Alexandre. In the good Lord's paradise, I shall find you!

They settled in Buffalo, New York in February of 1889, when Danielle insisted that the population of Sisters had grown too large in New York City. Marie was tired of moving. So was Clarice. But Danielle was always restless. No matter the availability nor the quantity of prey or the relative safety of their hideouts, she was happy in one place no more than a matter of months, then began insisting they move on. Marie and Clarice, not wanting their friend to venture off on her own, always went along.

They had stayed in Europe for over eighty years, moving from Paris to Lisbon to London and countless smaller cities and towns, taking the blood they needed to survive, meeting with other Soeurs de la Nuit — Sisters of the Night — and sharing their stories, their pain. Laughing with them when some memory was amusing, mourning with them when a memory was too harsh.

The Sisters were an order of the undead, much like the lone wolves of their kind but different in their need and sympathy for each other. They lived on the blood of others, most often the blood of thieves and rapists, murderers and wife-beaters. They drank their fill, often passing the dazed man about to their fellows for a share, then killed their victims with a twist to the neck. The Sisters did not have a desire to bring such villains into eternal life with them.

On the rue Leon so many years past, a Sister had heard Danielle's pitiable cries and had come to her aid. Marie and Clarice, who had fallen at Danielle's side, were likewise brought into the world of for ever.

At first they had been unable to accept their new reality, and had hidden in a whorehouse cellar for nine days, trying to go out in the morning but unable, and finding themselves nauseous when presented plates of turnips and pork yet ravenous when offered a drunk card cheat. Danielle had cried for Alexandre; Marie and Clarice had just cried. Yet with increased feedings and encouragement from the Sisters who tended them, they grew into their new selves.

They returned to Bicetre one starry evening, and while Marie and Clarice took out their rage on several doctors who had fucked them and tossed them out, Danielle had gone to the lantern-lit office of Monsieur LeBeque and had tortured the man to near death as his champion the Marquis de Sade would have done, though she, unlike the libertine, took no orgasmic pleasure in the act. When he was reduced to an eyeless, tongueless remnant of a human, clothed in shredded flesh and pawing at the air with raw, nubbed fingers, she drank his noxious blood and twisted his neck about.

But Danielle felt no satisfaction.

For 117 years Danielle had found no satisfaction, no peace. It was she who wandered without purpose, followed closely by her two loyal friends, watched over by them, often protected by them. Yet they knew her restlessness and her longing for what she had once had, briefly, had not drained from her even as her own life had done.

She longed for Alexandre.

She pined for him and ached for him. Her days' sleeps in random cellars and stalls, attics and storehouses, were troubled with dreams. She cried his name out and awoke herself with her cries. Sometimes she would bite her own wrists to relieve the agony of her heart, or to bring her consciousness to a close once and for all, but it could not be done.

There was nothing for Marie and Clarice but to love her, still.

Buffalo was a thriving city in the western corner of New York State. It was Clarice's suggestion once Danielle began making noises that New York City was too crowded with their kind. Not just the loners but the Sisters as well. Marie and Clarice liked the fellowship, but Danielle wore irritable with them very quickly. And so when Marie suggested Buffalo, Danielle was ready to move.

They travelled by train at night, dressed modestly as women of the time were expected to do, in prim grey dresses of wool and satin that pressed their bosoms tightly into their chests, their undergarments that cinched their waists unmercifully. When alone, they dressed as they pleased, and often went naked, but to pass in public they played the charade.

Marie had a brochure in her lap that touted the city's finer points. "They call it the 'Electric City of the Future'," she read, holding the paper to the light of the lamp beside her on the wall. The train jerked constantly, and she had to move her head with the tremors to keep up with the printed words. "More electric lights are in use here than in many other places in the United States. What do you think of that, Danielle?"

"That sounds fine," said Danielle. She picked at the cloth-covered buttons on her bodice, imagining her hands were Alexandre's. His hands were beautiful. She would never forget those hands. Marie continued to read and Danielle heard nothing but the tone of her voice.

Then: "Danielle?" It was Marie.

"What?"

"You've been silent for hours. It's nearly dawn and the train is still miles from Buffalo. We must find a sanctuary."

The Sisters moved gracefully from the passenger car to the storage car. It was here that luggage was stacked, and flats of tools and boxes of foodstuffs and sacks of material and paper. They curled up into three crates filled with nails, and awakened that evening on a loading dock along the Erie Canal. Quietly, they removed themselves before the dockmen got to the crates, and wandered out to Ohio Street to the scents of filthy water and ozone. A railroad track was in the middle of the street, and in the yellow glow of street lights an engine bearing a number of freight cars clacked and rattled past.

It was easy to find the part of town that revelled in drink and sex for money. It was not unlike the seedy sections of any city, except that here the dens and whorehouses sat toe to toe with grain elevators and shipyards. The number of undead was small; Danielle estimated no more than five or six from the vibrations in the air. They were the only Sisters. They stopped outside the gate to a large, canal-side elevator and teased the lone watchman at the gate into letting them in.

"We're from France," cooed Marie. "Just freshly arrived, Monsieur. We've never seen such a structure. It has us quite mesmerized. Please?" She touched her red lips coyly, and winked.

The man, flustered with the attention, said, "I don't do no whores. Go on 'bout your business."

Marie feigned horror at the suggestion. "Whores? Mon Dieu! Sir, we are ladies in the truest sense, sisters come from another land to learn what we may. But if we offend, then we shall be gone." The three turned away, and the man relented.

"Well, then," he said quickly. "I'm sorry, ma' ams. I meant no disrespect. Come in and I'll show you how the grain elevators work here in ole Buffalo." He unlatched the gate and the ladies came through, invited. But his brief introduction to the history of the canal was cut off as the three of them fell on to him and took his blood, then his life. They then found a comfortable hide-away in a small storeroom next to the elevator.

The following days tumbled one into the other. The Sisters slept undetected in the storeroom during the day, pressed like shadows behind old bits of furniture covered in cobwebs and many months' worth of dust. At night they walked Ohio and Erie Streets, dressed like ladies, unthreatening and demure, finding human creatures on which to feed and, when done, throwing the twisted bodies into the canal with the other sewage.

Things were as they had been for a long time. Until early March, when Danielle was pretending to sip coffee at a shop soon after nightfall and she spied through the grease-iced window a fruit peddler on the street pushing his cart and wiping his brow with a large and muscular hand. The man's face was not familiar — a hollow and sunken face it was — and the body thin and unspectacular. But the hands she knew. The hands were Alexandre's. She gasped.

Marie and Clarice, seated at the tiny round table with their friend, reached for her. "What is it?" whispered Clarice.

"Alexandre," said Danielle.

"You're mad!" said Marie. "What blood have you drunk last, that you would think you have seen your dead lover?"

"It's him."

"It's a fruit vendor, for Christ's sake," said Clarice. "Get your wits, and now. Don't lose your head."

Danielle tore free and raced out to the street. The vendor was gone, and she spent the rest of the night tracing his path by his scent and the scent of his rotting pears and apples. But the smells of the Electric City were strong, and mingled, woven together into a brash and stinging tapestry, and she lost track.

They retired when the darkness began to dissolve into day, and for the first time since her rebirth in Paris, Danielle felt a new hope. A new reason to embrace her immortality.

She would be with Alexandre again.

Each subsequent evening she placed herself in the same shop, at the same table, buying a cup of tea she never drank, and gazed out for the fruit peddler. Even when the shop closed at eight, she stood on the corner with her irritable friends, and studied each of the dirt-coated vendors and scraggly, mobile merchants. Surely he lived in Buffalo. Fruit peddling was not a job that took one from town to town. She only stopped in her vigil to tend to her need to feed, then returned beneath the moon or the stars or the rain or the fog to catch her love and his cart.

Several weeks later, at quarter past three in the morning, while Marie and Clarice were seated on a trolley bench com-paring loose stitching in their gloves, there was the shouting of drunken men and laughter from up the street, and then a small crowd stumbled past in a makeshift parade. One man was seated in a fruit cart, another pushed, while the rest danced beside them as if they were celebrating the King of Fools. The man in the cart, nearly out with drink, was Alexandre. Danielle motioned to her friends, and they followed the mob to a rickety tenement house near the railroad station. The men dumped the cart, fruit and all, then stumbled off to the street corner and out of sight.

Danielle hurried to the drunk man's side, pushed away the squashed fruit that covered him, and took his hand in hers. "My love," she said. Her heart hammered as if it were still alive. "My love, I've found you! Alexandre, it's me, Danielle!"

Marie said sternly, "Let it be, Danielle. It is not Alexandre."

But Danielle knew they couldn't believe. It didn't matter that they didn't. She did. She helped the man to his feet, and touched his split lip with her cold finger.

And then a screech from a window above: "William Kemmler, is that you? Get your sorry ass up these steps before I come after you with this hatchet, and I'll do it, you know I will!"

"Fishwife!" screamed Danielle. "You do not know who you are talking to!"

A lantern came to the window, and then many lanterns at many windows, and there were faces peering out and down. Someone shouted, "Fishwife? Tillie ain't Kemmler's wife, just pretendin' to be so they's can fuck and still go to church on occasion!" There was a burst of raucous laughter, and then someone spat, a long, hefty hawk the colour of rust that landed with a phatt in a puddle near Danielle's shoe.

Danielle would let it go for now. For tonight. She would come again where there was not so much attention. For to try to reclaim him now would be careless. And carelessness could bring destruction. She had found him. She would return tomorrow, quietly, as her kind was greatly talented, and speak to him.

And bring him to his senses.

And back to her bed, back to her heart. And unlike the other misfortunates who had fallen under her bite, she would raise him from the dead for herself.

The following evening was clear and cold, with a silver moon riding above the lights of Buffalo like a jealous and forgotten toy. Marie and Clarice warned Danielle to let it go, it was insane to believe her love was reincarnated into a fruit vendor, and when she refused to hear them, they refused to go with her. "We wash our hands of this," said Marie. "We cannot endanger ourselves for your folly, as much as we love you."

Danielle said, "Then do not."

She went to the tenement house and watched from the shadows of a dwarfed maple tree as the occupants wandered in and out. Within minutes, two ragged women came out to the stoop in hats and shawls, their teeth broken and brown, and one said, "You get me some of them cigars if you can, Tillie. If you swipe 'em, we can sell 'em and make us a bit of coin, don't you think?"

Tillie, a skinny thing who could have been twenty or forty, said, "I'll swipe 'em and you can pay like the rest of 'em."

"Bitch!"

Tillie strode from the stoop and the other woman spun angrily and went in the other direction.

Danielle counted to twenty. And then she went to the door of the tenement and waited. A man opened the front door, and flinched when he saw her standing there. She kept her lids lowered so the red of her eyes would not be so obvious. "Hey, honey," he said. "What's a fine-looking wench like you doin' standing here?"

"Waiting for you to invite me inside," said Danielle simply. The man did. She broke his neck in the hall, and stuffed him under the steps. No one was outside the flats to see, and she guessed they might not have cared much, anyway.

Tillie had shouted from a third-floor window, on the left. Danielle trod softly and quickly up the flights of stairs to the flat that surely belonged to William — to Alexandre. The door was locked, but with a simple jerk to the handle it swung open freely. She stepped inside the cluttered apartment.

There were three rooms, set like boxcars one behind the other. Danielle stood in the kitchen. A door to the left led to a parlour. A door to the right led to a bedroom. There was a pot on the cast-iron stove half filled with slop. There was a bedpan on the floor by the table, filled with urine.

"Alexandre," whispered Danielle. "What has brought you to another difficult life? You suffered in Paris, and you suffer here. What, precious love, has so cursed you?"

She moved silently into the parlour. Several framed portraits sat, covered in dust, on a tiny table. The cushion of the blue-upholstered settee had popped its seams, and down oozed from the splits. There was a small shelf on the wall behind the settee. On it was an ink well, a pen, several volumes and a black leather book bound with string.

"Yes!" hissed Danielle. "It is my love, no doubt!" She took the book from the shelf and dropped on to the lumpy settee. He had not wanted her to look in this Bible, but she could not let it be. She flipped through the thin, yellowed pages and came to a place that had been thumbed to near illegibility.

It was in the Book of Trials. She read:

When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing to save the man Jesus and that Jesus was indeed to die to please the crowd, he offered the execution of noble captives, to have the man's wrists slashed with sword and thus causing him to bleed quickly unto death. But from the crowd called up the man Andrew, son of Phinneas the shepherd, who said, Jesus must suffer for his words! Crucify Him! The crowd joined in the mocking call, He must suffer for his words!

"What has this to do with you, Alexandre?" Danielle wondered aloud. "I don't understand. Jesus, give me understanding so I can help my dearest lover!"

There was thumping at the door, and a woman came into the kitchen. It was Tillie. She saw Danielle through the doorway, and her lips drew back in a snarl. "Bitch!" she shrieked. "Come back to fix my shoe and what do I find here? One of William's whores, no doubt, brazen and bold as a sow, sitting on my very own sofa, she is! Waiting for him to come home, eh? Waiting to suck his little worthless worm for a few pennies, yes?"

Danielle stood slowly. There would be no contest with this woman, but she didn't care to kill her if she didn't have to. "I'm sorry," she said. "I've made a mistake. I thought this was the home of my cousin Randolph Sykes. I beg your pardon, miss."

But the woman was not to be appeased, and she reached for a hatchet that was leaning against the stove.

Danielle held out her hand. "Miss, just let me go. It would be for the best."

"What's the best is that William quit his whorin'. What's best is you die quickly and keep your trap shut about it." Tillie ran her wrist across her nose, sniffed, and stepped into the parlour, hatchet raised.

Calmly: "Put it down."

Tillie's mouth opened wide; she growled and stepped closer. "Down middle o' your head, that'd look good! Part your hair right down the middle!" And the hatchet swung out in an arc, and down towards Danielle's forehead. Danielle stepped deftly to the side and the settee received the full force of the blow. Feathers flew. "Damn it!" screamed the woman. She tugged the hatchet free and spun on Danielle again. Danielle backed into the kitchen. She would come back again, later. She'd been invited into the building so entering would be no trouble.

Suddenly there was panting on the steps, in the hall, outside the door, and she whipped about to see Alexandre standing there, clutching the door frame and panting. He looked past Danielle to the woman with the hatchet.

"You cow!" he cried. "I could hear you wailin' from the street below! What you doin' now, gonna kill some woman who looks like she just got lost?"

"Alexandre," whispered Danielle in amazement.

But the man brushed past her and flew at Tillie, snatching for the hatchet as he clutched her hair with his other hand. "Pig! You can't be trusted with nothin' or nobody! Oughta stick you in the asylum, I oughta! Give me the damned hatchet or you'll find yourself up for murder!"

Tillie jumped away, stumbled against a straight-backed chair and fell to the floor. Alexandre — William — leaped again and grabbed for the weapon. She swung it at him and missed his face by a hair's-breadth.

Danielle stepped into the parlour. She could be cut, it wouldn't matter. But she would not let Alexandre be killed. Not again. She reached for the wavering hatchet just as the man snatched it from the woman on the floor.

"Get back!" he cried to Danielle.

Tillie was up on her feet in a second, and latched on to Alexandre's arm with her teeth. He screamed, and began to strike her shoulder with the blade. Again. Again.

Again.

"I'm sick of you, I'm sick of you, I'm sick of you!" he wailed.

Danielle watched in horror as the woman stumbled past her into the kitchen and fell through the door and down the stairs to the landing. Alexandre, enraged, followed, and planted a solid blow to her head. The woman on the landing stopped moving.

Every flat door seemed to open at the same moment. Screams and curses followed, with fingers pointing at Alexandre and Danielle. "Murderer!" a man cried. "Killer!" screamed a child.

Danielle, dumbfounded, retreated to the apartment and escaped through the window into the mist of the night.

William Kemmler confessed to the murder of his common-law wife, Matilda Ziegler, and was sentenced to death by the state of New York. He was transferred to the prison in Auburn, where in August of 1890 he awaited his execution.

But the execution was to be a civil and humane one, the first one in which electricity would be used to snuff out the life of the convicted. A chair had been built of oak and electrical circuits, and tested on animals to make sure the death would be humane. Though there had been arguments between the two leading moguls of electric power, Thomas Edison and George Westing-house, as to which of the currents — Edison's "Direct Current" and Westinghouse's "Alternating Current" — it came to be through some underhanded manipulation that Edison assured that AC current would be used for the electric chair. Although Westinghouse refused to sell his equipment to the prison for the death machine, Edison arranged for some used equipment to be purchased without his competitor's knowledge and made into the chair. This, Edison knew, would seal in the minds of Americans that AC was deadly, and so DC should be used in homes. Men at Auburn prison as well as reporters in their daily and weekly newspapers began joking that a man put to death in the electric chair would be said to have been "Westinghoused", a term that horrified the developer of the alternating current.

None of this mattered to William Kemmler, however, nor to Danielle Boquet. With her charm and grace she had been able to gain welcome into the prison's main building, but had yet to be invited to enter the cold portion of the death house where her Alexandre awaited his execution. She had the power to kill the guards but did not have the power to force them to offer her entrance.

And so she waited. And she fretted. And Marie and Clarice tried to console her. She went back time and again to the tenement flat in hopes she might find a way to help her love escape yet another death by the great and humane society, but there was nothing. She took the black Bible and kept it close in her skirt's pocket, but reading it did nothing. Explained nothing.

Danielle clung to the exterior wall of the death chamber at night, and during the day slept in a closet of the prison's gasworks. Marie and Clarice stayed with her, assuring her that it was not Alexandre and once he was dead she would come to her senses.

Witnesses arrived at the prison the evening of 6 August, twenty-five men, fourteen of them doctors, anxious and excited to see this new death which would not cause undue suffering. The death chamber itself was in the cellar, and Danielle lay in the steamy, bug-infested grass at one of the windows, staring through the steel bars and glass at the horrific scene playing out below. The witnesses walked in, clutching top hats and gloves, and most of them settled themselves on seats that had been arranged to face the electric chair. Other men stood. And then the warden and several guards entered, with Alexandre between them. A priest, looking bored and disinterested, followed behind in his robe, holding his Scriptures to his chest.

Alexandre glanced about the damp, stark room. His eyes were red-rimmed with lack of sleep and the terror of the impending. The guards nodded at the chair. He walked to it, but could not seem to sit down. A guard said, "You'll like this a lot better than the gallows, boy."

"I must get in," whispered Danielle to her Sisters behind her.

Marie and Clarice, standing a few yards back, said, "You cannot."

Alexandre turned and lowered himself into the chair. Then he sprang up again. "I remember!" he shouted.

"Shut up and sit down," said the warden. "We'll break your arms to do it if we have to."

"No, no, hear me, I remember!" Alexandre's face twisted with dreadful knowledge. "Oh, God, I remember!"

The warden shoved Alexandre into the chair. Guards began securing the leather straps at his legs and arms. But Alexandre continued. "I remember the blade on my throat, the quick slash of the merciful Africans who said I was the first to die a civil death! I remember the blade of the guillotine, and the assurance that the execution would be painless. I remember now! Why again?"

"He's crazed with fear," said one nervous doctor. "Let's have it done!"

"I know why! I am Sula! I am Alexandre! I am William!" said Alexandre. "But I was Andrew, by my own mouth condemning me again and again to that which I would not allow our Lord! A fair and gentle death. A courteous and mild demise!"

A strap was quickly buckled at his waist and a leather harness with electrodes was shoved down on to his head. "Enough babbling!" said the warden. "Shut your mouth, criminal!"

Danielle pressed her forehead to the tiny slit of window and screamed, "Alexandre, then do you remember me?"

All faces spun towards the window. Alexandre stared, his mouth open.

"Alexandre! Let me in!"

Behind Danielle, Marie and Clarice gasped, "No, Danielle, let it be!"

Danielle banged on the steel bars. "Alexandre, please, let me in!"

"Are you an angel, sent by Christ to stop this cycle?" said Alexandre. The guards fumbled with the chin strap, and drew the leather through the buckle. Before they could seal his jaws shut with the strap, he managed, "Angel, come in!"

Marie grabbed Danielle's wrist from behind, and snarled at her, "Do not dare! They will see you for who you are. The priest has a crucifix. We will be done in, Sister!"

Danielle twisted violently, but Clarice took her other wrist and held it firmly. "We will not be destroyed by your carelessness!"

Danielle bit her Sisters, and clawed. She kicked and spun, and the bones of her wrists shattered, but they would not let go.

Inside the cellar, she saw the priest raise his hand for the sign of the cross. He stepped back. A guard nodded to a man at the back of the room. " No !" Danielle screamed, and the witnesses ran their hands through their hair and shifted in their seats, uneasy with the spectacle this had become.

"Now," said the guard.

"No!" cried Danielle. She kicked the bars and the pane of the window. The glass shattered and sprayed the cellar floor with shards.

There was the sound of a rushing trolley, a high-pitched and whining burr that caused the entire room to vibrate. Alexan-dre's body convulsed and strained at the leather straps. Smoke rose from his hair, and then the hair caught fire, crackling and popping in a tongue of orange and blue.

"Jesus," said one witness.

"I pray he's dead already," said another.

The body danced within the confines of the chair, a puppet on electric strings, until the warden nodded and the current was shut off.

Danielle could not move. She lay in the grass, her fingernails dug into her forehead, her eyes staring, staring, taking it in and rejecting it at the same time. Alexandre, dead again.

And then Alexandre moaned. The witnesses gasped and put their hands to their mouths. The warden pointed urgently towards the man at the wall switch, who threw it again, and again Alexandre danced.

It was all done in six minutes. At last Alexandre was dead. Guards gingerly unstrapped him, complaining that he was boiling to the touch, and with coats over their hands for protection, they rolled the body on to a gurney that had waited at the side of the room. They covered it with a sheet. But when a doctor attempted to examine the body, he could not remove the clothing for the heat. The warden escorted the ashen-faced men from the death chamber until the body cooled.

"Half-hour," the warden said. "Let it cool and let the air clear a bit. And get a guard to arrest those women in the yard!"

"I hate you," Danielle said to Marie and Clarice.

"No, you don't," said Marie.

"Oh, but I do," said Danielle. The hands loosened on her wrists, and she was at last able to transform herself to mist to move through the window and into the cellar. Her friends followed.

They stood amid the stench and the death. Danielle was silent for a moment and then said, "I'm cursed as much as he is."

"We are not cursed, Danielle," said Clarice, "we are blessed."

"What is a curse, then? That which you do not want, which you never asked for, yet which will not let you be!"

"It isn't Alexandre," Marie said again. "Come with us. Come with us."

"You don't know anything," said Danielle. And she did not go with them.

She stepped to the gurney and lifted away the sheet. Her love lay there, his sweet face charred half away, his hair blackened and crisp. His beautiful hands cooked into claws. She held one hand and kissed it and cried her tears on to it.

"I would remove your curse if I could," she whispered. She bent to the scorched neck and bit there. The blood had the flavour of charcoal, and it made her vomit.

She heard the men's voices coming towards the chamber. Footsteps pounding the cement of the hall floor. She would go. But she would find him again. She would be keen and sharp, she would have her wits always awake, and be ready. She would follow him and perhaps, save him. Save him for what, she wasn't certain. Save him into what, she couldn't know. But she would find him.

She touched her skirt's pocket. The Bible was gone. It had gone ahead, to find her love once more.

"Until later," she said. On still-lingering tendrils of smoke, she left the cellar. Outside, Marie and Clarice were not to be found. She knew she would never see them again. That was all right. She did not want to burden them. She would do this alone.

She bought a red-eye flight ticket to Virginia from Illinois. She'd heard rumours that the Department of Corrections had decided to allow inmates on Death Row to choose the electric chair or the new, less violent and certainly more civil method of death by lethal injection.

She did not know which condemned man was her Alexandre. She had searched for one hundred years for clues to his new life, and had found nothing. Now, though, she was close. He was there, clothed in another man's skin. She would know him by his hands.

She pushed up the plastic window curtain and stared at the moon. The moon was the same, year after year, century after century. Was it cursed?

"I come, Alexandre," she said to the night.

And if she failed, she would only have to wait again. And she had all the time there was. All the time there would be.

Night Laughter

Ellen Kushner

Ellen Kushner's novel Thomas the Rhymer won the 1991 World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award, while her first novel , Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners,, recently won the 2000 Gaylactic Network Spectrum Hall of Fame Award for Best Fiction pre-1998 (sharing the honour with Nicola Griffith and Theodore Sturgeon) .

Her recent short fiction has appeared in such anthologies as Starlight 2 , Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers, The Essential Bordertown and Peter S. Beagle's Immortal Unicorn. Her work has been translated into French, Japanese, German, Latvian and Catalan .

Since 1996, Kushner has been known to public radio audiences across America as the host and writer of the award-winning programme Sound & Spirit, a weekly hour of music and ideas exploring the myth and music, traditions and beliefs that make up the human experience around the world and through the ages. For Sound & Spirit she has created two albums , Welcoming Children Into the World (Rykodisc, 1998) and The Golden Dreydl: A Klezmer "Nutcracker" for Chanukah (S&S 2000), an original story written and narrated by the author, with music by Shirim .

About the following story, Kushner explains: "Some stories just come to you whole, and this was one of them. I was living in New York City, on the fifth floor of a building festooned with gargoyles. I walked downstairs to the mailbox to see if I'd gotten any rejection letters that day, and by the time I got back up to the apartment, I had most of this story in my head.

"I remember I was thinking, for some reason, about how vampires are always portrayed wearing evening dress, and what if that was not attributable merely to Hollywood silliness; what if it was because they really liked to ?"

The thing is, it's just that you start to hate the daytime. All the bad things happen during the day: rush hour, lines at the bank, unwanted phone calls, junk mail, overworked people being rotten to each other. Night is the time for lovers, for reading alone by lamplight, for dancing, for cool breezes. It doesn't matter if your blood is hot or cold; it's the time for you.

"Come on," I say, tugging at his wrist, "come on, let's have fun!" He holds back, reluctant. "Come on, let's dance!"

All over the city the lights are blinking off and on all the time. Night laughter. "Come on into the night!"

"Crazy," he says, "that's what you are."

Rich night-time laughter bubbles in me. I let a little of it show in the corners of my mouth to scare him. He's scared. He says, "You wanna dance?"

I turnaway, shrug nonchalantly. "Nah, not really."

"You wanna go for a ride?"

"Nah," I lick my lips, trite, unmistakable. "Let's go for a walk. In the park."

"No one's in the park at this hour."

"We'll be. Just the two of us, alone. With the long paths all to ourselves."

He rises, follows. The night is like that.

He's wearing a good suit, the best he's got. The night's the time for dressing up, dressing high, dressing fine. Your real night clothes, those are the pressed black and starched white that a gentleman wore, with maybe a touch of gold or a bright ribbon sash setting it off. And a woman was always sleek and bright, lean and clean as a new machine, streamlined as a movie queen. My dress is like that; it clings and swirls so smooth, so long. I stride along beside him in my spiky heels, like a thoroughbred horse with tiny goat's hoofs. Long ago, in Achaea, God wore goat's hoofs and played the pipes all night long. Pipes of reed, like the mouth of a saxophone, blowing long and lonely down the wind between the standing trees.

The trees of the park are sparse, hanging over us in ordered rows, dark and tall as the street lamps between them, but under the trees is shadow. The circles of light, when you come to them, are bright enough to read by. Little insects buzz and flutter against their haloes.

Bums are asleep on the benches; poor guys, don't even know if it's night or day. I always avoid them. The only thing they want is money; they never knew how to have a good time, or they've forgotten how. I knew someone once who couldn't bear the light of day, quite right. He'd get out of his white jacket and into a velvet dressing-gown, put on dark glasses and retire from the sunrise like poison, while we watched the lights going out in strings across the park, and he'd be making his jokes about what to do with the waking birds and their noise. Owl, I called him, and he called me Mouse. But finally he couldn't take it any more, he took to sucking red life out of a wine bottle with thick glass, green as sunshades, and he lost the taste for real life altogether; now for all I know he's one of the bums on the benches. They know they're safe: we won't touch them if we don't have to.

This man I'm with, he keeps darting his eyes left and right, as if he's looking for a cop or a junkie or a mugger. I take his arm, press up against him. "You're cold," he says.

I flip my silver scarf twice around my throat. "No, I'm not."

Lights from the passing cars streak our path. I tilt my head back, eyes veiled against the glare of sky, the light bouncing off the clouds.

He says, "I think I see my office. There, over the trees."

I lead him deeper into the darkness, towards the boat pond.

He says, "Y'know it's really dangerous in here," coming all the time along with me.

I kick off my shoes, they go shooting up like silver rockets out over the old lake. My feet press the damp earth, soft and cool, perfect night feeling. Not just earth under them; there's old cigarette stubs mouldering into clay and hard edges of glass and a little bird's bone.

Considerately I lean my back against a tree, unwrap my scarf and smile one of my dream smiles.

"Cigarette?" I ask huskily. He fumbles in his pocket, holds the white stick out to me; I just lean there, holding the pose, and finally he places the end between my polished lips. I look up sultry through my eyelashes, and he produces a light.

Oh, the gorgeousness of that tiny flame, orange and strong in the darkness! You don't get orange like that by daylight. I suck it to a perfect scarlet circle on the end of my cigarette, and then I give it back to him, trailing its ghostly wisp of smoke. Automatically he smokes it.

Automatic, still too nervous. He doesn't know how to have a good time! He was a mistake, a good-looking mistake. But then, not every night is perfect. I sigh so quietly only the wind hears me. Frogs are croaking in the pond, competing with crickets for airspace over the distant traffic roar. Another good night, opening itself to me. All you have to do is want it.

"C'mere," I say in my husky dusky cigarette voice. His tie so neatly tied, his shoes so clean they catch the little light on their rounded surface He walks towards me. The expression on his face is steadier, more hopeful: here at last is something he thinks he'll understand. He buries his face in my neck. My white arms glow around his shoulders.

He's all pressed into me now, I'm like sandwich filling between him and the tree. There's bubble of laughter in my throat; I'm thinking, What would happen if I swiftly stepped aside and all his hard softness were pressing against bark? But I just shift my weight, enjoying the way he picks up on it, shifting his body to conform to me. Now he likes the night. Now his hands have some life in them, running the maze between my dress and my skin. With my fingertips I touch his ears, his jaw, the rim of his collar, while he presses, presses, his breath playing like a brassy syncopated band, his life pulsing hard, trying to burst through his clothes. Owl always said, Let them do that.

He's working my dress up around my waist. His hands are hot. Ah, he's happy. He's fumbling with his buckle. I breathe on him and make him laugh.

"Fun?" I ask.

"Mm-hmm."

"You're having a good time now."

I tickle the base of his throat and he throws back his head, face joyous in the mercury-coloured cloudlight. Night laughter rises in me, too strong any more to be contained. It wells through my mouth and fixes on his throat, laughter hard and sharp as the edge of a champagne glass, wet and bright as a puddle in neon.

It's fun, it's wild, it's night-blooming orchid and splashing fountains and the fastest car you've ever been in, speeding along the coast It's life .

He hardly weighs anything now. I leave him under the tree; the bums can have what he's got left. I take a pair of slippers out of my bag; it's after midnight, but I won't be running home barefoot, not like some unfortunate fairy-tale girl. Midnight's just the beginning for me.

In the distance a siren goes wailing by. Unsprung trucks speed across town, their trailers pounding as though they're beating the pavement to death. Moonlight and street light blend on the surface of the water.

I pass under the big statue of the hero on the horse, and walk jaunty and silent-footed among his many lamplit shadows. Around the bend I see a white gleam, too white and sharp to be anything but a pressed evening jacket. For a moment I think that it is Owl again. But his face, when he turns to look at me, is different.