Work Text:
“A comet passed over the countryside, the night that I met you. You did not see it. You were asleep.”
The once-Countess Mircalla paused, her pen poised over the inkwell, and a frown like a slow, dark thundercloud passed across her brow. Her room was unlit by any candle. The window, instead, was thrown open and the moon cast its light across her desk. It poured its blue pale shadows over the manor house in which she had been hosted these last three months.
Writing was a trial for Mircalla, as it had been ever since she climbed out of her grave in the autumn of 1698. Her joints ached as if there was a winter in her bones no matter the season, no matter the weather. She moved slowly because of this; as unathletic as she may have been before, she was now utterly exhausted by even the mildest exercise. The repetition of her pen across the page was therefore a torment to her, and to the many throbbing joints of her clenched fingers.
And yet the effort was in service of her noblest passions. And she had withstood such misery for so many smaller, vainer things.
She went on—
“A comet passed over the countryside, the night that I met you. I believe it to be the selfsame star that burned in the sky over Caesar’s assassination, a harbinger of the coming empire. An omen rising, as Ovid tells us:
To make that soul a star that burns forever
Above the Forum and the gates of Rome
Laura, my beautiful cousin, my principal star. Ghost of my haunted nights. I have known you since my childhood, when your beautiful pale terror filled my dreams. I saw you then as a young woman, your blue nightgown all around you like a fog across the shore, rising to swallow ships and sailors alike. I woke shaking, euphoria like terror in my child heart. I knew even then that you would be the great triumph of my life, although in that time, you had not yet been born.
How is this possible? The night my carriage overturned and I met you, my mother made your family swear never to ask me my history, and I have likewise sworn never to speak a word of it to you, no matter how you press me. Beautiful Laura, curious Laura. You press me so.
But the time is coming—I can feel it—we are on the cusp of a great becoming, as magnificent as the apotheosis of Caesar. An era of waiting is at last at its end. You are the door to which my whole life has been leading me.
I will tell you the truth now. In writing, where my mother cannot hear it. In the dark, where your father cannot see it. I will write it all down for you, and I will give you all the truth you thirst for, because you must know—you must know—the truth, if you are to take me hand in hand through that fateful door. I have loved girls fast and slow, sweet and burning, I have loved girls for summers and for fortnights, but all love so far must pale in comparison to you, for you and I were arranged by that deathless bridemaker, Fortune.
You have known me as Carmilla, but my first name was Mircalla.
I was born here, hardly any distance from the manor you now call your home. My father was a count, tracing his lineage back as far as the days of Charlemagne. My mother was called a great beauty, even by the time when I was reaching my own majority. My darling Laura, what do you think is the most important quality for an aristocrat to cultivate?
My father would say that the most important quality in an aristocrat is firmness of temper. It is essential that one not be provoked, nor goaded, nor swayed from one’s course. My father was not personable, not to me and not much to others. He had little time for his one child, daughter as I was. The line that had withstood time since the days of Charlemagne would die out with my marriage, and he did not like to be reminded of it.
My mother was my principal companion in childhood. She would have her dressmaker fashion us dresses from the same cloth, large and small, so that we seemed to be two of a kind wherever we went. The effect was that although we are not much alike, her arrangements emphasized what few features we share in common. She rarely lent me to the society of other girls, or even governesses, when she could avoid it.
We kept fond company in this way until I was eighteen, my mother and I, only troubled at brief intervals by my mother’s temper.
Mother would say that the most important quality in an aristocrat is beauty—for what is evil that is also beautiful? Only goodness may cultivate beauty. In no other soil will it grow.
My Laura, you must be good, for you are so beautiful. You must be true and faithful. When you understand my story, you will not love me less.
My mother, for she is at the heart of all this, had a lifelong friend by the name of Adelaide whom she visited many times over the course of my youth. My mother did a great deal of traveling, for my father was fragile of health and would not trust anyone but my mother to relay his wishes in political dealings, nor to handle his investments. He was very nervous in temperament, and often the only council that could sway him was my mother’s. Adelaide lived along the route home from Graz, and we often stopped off with our small retinue to rest while mother caught Adelaide up with all the recent news from the capital.
I remember that Adelaide’s house was always full of beautiful things—ivory carved into the shapes of trees, jade, lacquered wood. Or, perhaps not always. When I was at my youngest, I seem to remember the house was then more plain. Neither Adelaide nor her husband had come from any great standing, quite like my mother, in fact. But my mother had the good fortune to have married well.
It was 1697. The Ottomans were discussing peace. The Russians were taxing beards. A great alchemist whose work I had followed died in Germany. There was not much to render it remarkable upon a national stage. And yet, for me, it was the most miserably remarkable year.
The event that had led to my misery, in the summer of my seventeenth year, transpired while we were at a visit to that friend, who had a daughter of her own close in age to me. I had become enamored of the girl, which my mother encouraged, for she did not like me to spend time with my more boyish admirers. On this occasion, my mother had expected us to be away in Graz for several weeks, but the sudden mysterious departure of the eastern viscount whom she had gone there to meet, only days after our arrival, had led us to shorten our stay in the city. It was rumored that he had made bad dealings, and his creditors had found out. His disappearance was quite ominous.
Three days therefore passed with Adelaide and her daughter, in very good humor as was normal for us on such visits. But on the third day, with the arrival of a letter forwarded from Graz, the air between mother and Adelaide became sour. No one could hear what was said behind the doors of either lady, but the tenor was unmistakably hateful. We all moved skittishly around the edges of rooms, careful not to draw their ire.
After some consideration, I thought that I should prevail upon my mother to take cheer and mend whatever wounds had been opened by our visit, and so I gathered up my courage and approached the wing which she had been haunting like a storm for days in her isolation. I had just approached the door to the sun-room with a little pressing of flowers when I heard her voice strike out, as if to cut some unseen victim with words alone.
“How could you misuse me so?” she demanded of the empty room. “Cheat! Worm! And you send me letters—!”
I had frozen there, outside the door, when I heard the sharp rustling of skirts bearing down on me from the other direction. I was in such a panic not to be caught in the midst of either woman’s temper that I threw myself behind the curtain and hid there. Adelaide passed me by without pause, fixated as she was on my mother. The doors of the sun-room were thrown open.
“I will not be wrecked on your stubborn reef,” said Adelaide, as if they had been arguing for several minutes and not occupying opposite ends of the house.
“No,” said my mother, “you will be a rat from the ship! All these years you never complained, not while it was benefiting you, but now I am to be called a reprobate?”
“You should have known better than to involve the viscount,” said Adelaide, “you should have known that men never stand by women when there’s fortune to be gained! I should have begged you reconsider, but I was too blinded by your confidence. I have been blinded by you for too long. You should have stopped a year ago, ten years ago!”
I think this was when the miniature stone lion was broken—I only saw the shattered body some time later, but this was when the tenor of their voices took on a new and livid brightness.
My mother said, “Without my doings, you would still be cutting down old coats to keep your daughter dressed!”
More was said, but I had become so distressed by all of it that I could scarcely breathe, and the rest fell upon my ears as a distant roar. The last thing that I recall, before Adelaide stormed past me, was her saying to my mother: “I will get off this ship of yours, if it is the last thing I do.”
I saw nothing more of my mother for another three days. In my desire for comfort I drew closer to Adelaide’s daughter, refuged myself in her tenderness, and hid us away in the quiet of her room. Laura, I hope you will not be jealous, and forgive my youthful weakness. I hardly remember her now. That love was but a candle to the astronomical blaze of our star, as have all my other loves been before you. You will be my last love, I am convinced of it, and my greatest. I mention it only here at all so that you will understand my abject misfortune, in the year 1698.
It was on such an occasion, as my mother came to retrieve me, that my mother discovered our uncommon warmth and—some would say—unnatural fondness. The house was cast into a great uproar, and in the midst of it I was dragged from the house and put away in the carriage, to see no more of the girl whose companionship was then my most tender solace. I did not know then that I would see her once more, or else I might have taken some small consolation from dreaming of that reunion.
Laura, you are a well bred lady yourself, but you have never been one of great society. There is a purity in you, untainted by the wickedness in which good Christian women so love to indulge. Here in your quiet county, you do not contend with the machinations of womankind, nor the cruelty of men. Perhaps you can imagine the sound of gossip, but you cannot understand the oppressive atmosphere of it—the stifling paranoia, the glares, the smiles—until you have felt it break upon you like an endless battering of surf.
For months after the arrival of the dreadful letter, my mother’s temper filled the house as if a sulfur from the chasms of the earth, choking all of us. She was not welcome anywhere and her travels all stalled, trapping her within the house. The staff lived in fear, as did I. I hardly left my room, reading La Lettre à Otto Sperling and corresponding with my admirers almost obsessively. No sooner would I receive a letter than I would draw out my pen to reply. Even my father eventually detected the change in atmosphere, and his nervous disposition was sent into frenzy.
I think now of the things that concerned me at that time—whether a girl would dare answer my letter, whether this miasma of scandal would prevent me from eventually making an advantageous marriage, whether the staff would keep order or fragment into chaos beneath us—and they all seem so petty, so distant to me now. I have not lived that life in such a long time. Staff? Husbands? Society? These cause such distress, such pressure, and yet without them what life is there?
Without consequences, without responsibility, one cannot really say that one is a participant in the world. Rather it flows beneath her, like a tumultuous river, only half transparent.
On the first cold day of autumn, while the frost was still white on the fields, my mother took her own life. There was a great and terrible hush on the manor, strangling, as if any disturbance might cause the floor itself to break beneath us, and cast us all as one into the pit of the earth. It was eventually revealed to me, by a dour Lutheran minister, that my mother had been discovered in the scheme of embezzling my father’s money. All across Germany, wherever we stopped on our visits, money had changed hands. The viscount had come forward with some letters proving it, almost certainly in the hopes of clearing his own guilt in his petty schemes. I think now he had been attempting to extort my mother to pay off his creditors, and Adelaide as well, perhaps.
My father’s nervous temperament unraveled entirely. He hardly ate, never slept, and wandered the halls in a savage silence, wild eyed. He complained to his physician of fitful sleep, interrupted by nightmares. In the stillness of the house, at times I could hear his shout of terror as he came awake at strange hours. All through the winter, he was restless and unsettled, moving constantly, coming and going. But then, in the spring of 1698, the very heights of his torpor seemed to plummet to equal depths. A profound languor stole over him, and a bloodless fragility, and as the first spring flowers bloomed over the county I watched my father waste away until there was hardly enough man left to bury.
And then I was Countess. Finances, left in ruins, were bequeathed to me to sort out. I had many admirers, still, for my letter writing had been most affectionate and urgent in my isolation. It was a hellish time, and I called on whoever I could that would let me borrow their assistance for a week or a month. There was a Moravian, then, a most ardent admirer of mine, who began to correspond with me in earnest and suggest certain solutions to my misery. He was a nobleman, and although my mother would not have liked it, most here agreed he would be a suitable match. I thought then indeed that I might marry him, although I was very little enamored with his character, for the help was so sorely needed and I was so tired at all times.
And then, Laura, I saw the cat.
I was about on the far property, seeing to an issue with one of the renting tenants. I had been struggling with the renter for some hours by the time we reached grudging accord, and night had fallen while I was out. On the long walk home, I thought to pass by my mother’s grave—for, as a suicide, she could not be buried on church ground, and instead we had placed her in a shaded spot at the bottom of the manor grounds. It was on my way to the very place, just as I left the canopy cover of the roadside, that I saw the cat. Its great blue eyes stared at me from the brush that had begun growing over the grave. Hollow eyes, like chips of glass, mounted in a face that was as grey and cruel as winter itself. Looking upon it I felt a terror, like a shout in the night, that struck me to the bone. I confess I ran the whole way home, my errand discarded with my dignity.
After that I began to sleep more fitfully. Summer waned. I grew tired, as you must now be feeling, Laura. I understand the foreign infirmity which is even now overtaking your body. I've seen in you, these last few weeks, an echo of my own self those many years ago. I grew feverish. You will, soon, as well. You will grow pale and thin, you will shake when you reach for the cup your governess brings to your bedside. All this, too, I have felt. Don’t be afraid, Laura. I am with you.
I dreamt of my mother. Of her grave, covered in translucent frost. She was dressed in mourning, stiff and smelling of those chemicals which lend the clothes of mourners their particular shade and texture. In my dreams, she reached for me and took my chin, regarding me with her unsmiling visage. In the moment her fingers touched me, I felt such a cold as I have never felt in a dream, as if wet ice was pressed to my very skin.
“My darling child,” she would say to me, “will you not care for your poor mother? Will you not return the blood I lent you in your birth?”
You probably have been told that damnation grows from the seedbed of a suicide’s grave. Great calamity, disease, ruination. Have cheer, my Laura, for it is not so. If not for my mother’s doing, I should not be here to bask in your sweet presence so many years after my death, preserved at just such the hour of my youth where I now meet you.
Of the noble line that had existed since the time of Charlemagne, only I then remained. I cannot express to you my loneliness in those days. It is a terrible thing to be alone in one’s illness. I will not let you suffer like that, my Laura. I never shall permit anyone I care for to suffer alone.
As I write this, your health has not yet made its final decline. You will lose strength, first. And then you will begin to shake, first at the fingers. Soon the tremors will reach deeper into your limbs. Your mouth will turn blue, like the pressings of violets which I have left for you in all our secret books and hiding places, my tokens of affection which so please you. Your extremities will begin to grey. In this, all is well. Do not be frightened. It all, soon, will pass.
I remember the sound of pebbles hitting my coffin lid, like rain against the roof of a carriage. It was October: damp, chill, smelling of smoke. My hand broke the dirt of the churchyard first. And then, coughing and spitting, my lungs full of mud, I was drawn up from the earth by the hand of my mother—cold, like ice, and wet.
It is very important, you must understand, that someone you love is waiting for you at the end of all your suffering. This must be the appeal of the great Christian lie, salvation. I wouldn’t know. The only salvation I have ever felt was the chill hand of my mother, drawing me up from the earth.
I think it is most unremarkably natural for one to support one’s parent, in a certain stage of life. My poor mother, since her burial, feels no warmth—no fire, no spark, no beam of sunlight warms her frigid limbs. I am both more hearty in flesh and also less cunning of spirit, which is also the natural state of a child to one’s parent. Based upon his later research, my Moravian admirer told me that those like my mother feed firstly on their own family, and beyond this circle of influence they have little power. It is common wisdom, among the peasants, that such specters walk their own houses first, their strength at its most profound among their own flesh and blood. But I have never found myself so confined, or else I could not have taken Adelaide’s daughter in the night—her locks open to me, her familiar bed warm to my skin, her breath so sweet—
But see how I have omitted her name, for you? All my many sweet sparrows, my many charming maidens, they are only fleeting sparks across the hearthstone compared to you. Do not hate me for my kind pity, which is the best of me—is it not the greatest sin to let any creature die unloved? What bliss, what intimate bliss, might in a moment compensate for the loss of many unhappy years? It is better to be loved fiercely and wholly, to burn brightly and quickly, than to languish in slow, loveless decay.
I shall come to the point, now, for the strength of this body fades too quickly. My cousin, my imperial star. For more than a hundred years I have been caught in this twilight of a life, neither girl nor woman, not wife, not mother, not matron. And yet I am joyful, at last, and full of hope. I remember you in that childhood vision, your nightmare beauty surpassing all things, the touch of your hand over my heart like a line of fire through the quick of me. These portents fill me with rapture, with longing, when the light catches you in such a way and I cannot help but to take hold and clench your hand, breathless with anticipation.
So far you have been charming, impatient, poised, with a warmth of light like the spring, and very dear to me. But soon the time is coming when all that has been promised to me will be at last revealed. On the night my carriage overturned, this of course at my mother’s arrangement, a comet passed over the countryside. You did not see it. You were asleep. Your head was on my lap, as the night’s excitement had worn you to exhaustion, and we waited together in the window while your staff made up the bed for a guest at such late and sudden notice. It burned, red in the sky, like the diadem on the brow of Caesar’s blessed marble.
My mother would have you die, as all the others before you. But I have faith, Laura. A new day is coming, at last, and you are the harbinger of its dawn. Laura, my love, my destiny, your taste is sweet still in my mouth. What strange and terrible joy it is, to be at last within my reach of you.”
The Countess Mircalla, hands now trembling with an exhaustion so profound that the letters barely retained their integrity beneath her pen, paused in her efforts a final time.
Elsewhere on the continent, her mother would be making arrangements with the next fine family to secure her summer's host, perhaps in Bohemia, or back among the Parisians. Her mother delighted in the ruin of respectable families, as she had delighted in the ruin of Adelaide’s. As she had delighted in—no, not her own. She hadn’t meant to destroy their family; she couldn’t help her nature. Mircalla was certain, quite certain, that if her mother could have saved the Count Karnstein, she would have done it, just the same as she saved Mircalla all those years ago. Why else lift her up from the earth? Why else make arrangements for her, even now, in Paris or Bohemia?
But Laura! With Laura, at last, everything would change. In her mother's cold shadow, light would break. There would be no need for another mayfly bride, no Paris, no Bohemia.
Painstakingly, each sweep and line on the page a new flavor of misery, she signed the letter—Your Beloved Carmilla
She sat back, shaking out the ache in her hands, and smiled up at the setting face of the moon.
Yes. After Laura, there would only, at last, be freedom.