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carmillaSUMMARY: As Villefort slowly recovers from his wounding by Bertuccio, he remembers the affair that brought him to where he is.
WARNING: Graphic violence.
Villefort was dreaming of knives. Just at that moment, he was lying on a bed of them like some Oriental conjurer, suspended on a thousand points of agony, and feeling them dig deeper into his flesh each time the coach hit a rough patch of road. Three miles back, he had been scrambling through a forest of black trees with blades for leaves, his wrists torn and bloody. When he had first left Auteuil, his dreams had told him that the Corsican's dagger was still buried in his flesh, beyond the skill of any doctor to remove it, and that its point was inching towards his heart like some malevolent parasite, and he had cried out so terribly and torn so fiercely at the dressing on his wound that his servants had been obliged to restrain him. Now he was quieter, only whimpering a little when some pothole or loose stone in the road jolted him against the side of the carriage.
Hermine's shawl was wrapped around his arm from elbow to wrist, still sticky with his blood from when she had used it to staunch his wound. His fingers twitched and clutched at it as he dreamed, although he no longer remembered what it was.
~
Hermine de Nargonne was pretty, which was well enough, and unpretentious in her manner, which was unusual for a Parisian girl of seventeen summers. But it was the shrewdness of her questions, especially on matters of business, that Villefort found compelling. He had not looked forward to the dinner party at which he was to be seated next to her, and had expected to find the conversation of so young a woman hopelessly insipid. Instead, he was intrigued to discover that that pretty visage hid the mind of a born speculator; and not a reckless speculator either.
On further enquiry, he found that she had acted as secretary to her late father, who had taught her the rudiments of business at first simply to keep her from idleness, and later with genuine pleasure as their lessons revealed that she had some talents in the area.
"My father was a great admirer of yours, M. le Procurer," she said, flushing slightly and looking down at her lap. "To have survived two revolutions, and with such integrity that neither side could rebuke you for it! Few men are capable of such real accomplishment as that. At least, so he said," she added hastily, and met his eyes with a small smile and a brief, searching glance.
This display of patently false modesty was the first time that Villefort saw her play-acting as a girl of her station was expected to do. He found, nonetheless, that he was not displeased by it.
~
As his coach reached the outskirts of Paris, Villefort was in a garden - the greenest, wildest garden he could ever recall having seen. A riot of coloured flowers pressed around his ankles, and a tendril of some ground creeping vine was crawling around the handle of his spade. Frowning, he shook it free, and returned to his task.
He felt as though he had been digging forever.
Grunting, he braced himself, and tossed the last handful of earth out of the hole he had been excavating. It was empty, just like all the others he had dug so far. He cast around in the soil for a moment or two, hoping for an epiphany, and then braced his hands on the edge of his pit and dragged himself free of it. He retrieved his spade and chose a new patch of ground, neatly beheading a bright yellow flower as he forced the blade down through the sod. Briefly, he wondered what he was searching for, but the thought flitted from his grasp before he ever got a firm grip on it.
~
For all that she knew how to be artful as well as any woman Villefort knew, Hermine was charmingly frank in her attempts to make herself his mistress. She never missed a gathering that she knew he was going to attend, and availed herself of every possible opportunity to make conversation with him. She wore her best jewels, no matter how humble the occasion. Even had she done none of this, the mix of honesty and a sort of laughing self-deprecation in her flashing blue eyes when she looked at him would have been invitation enough.
The only exceptions to this rule were those rare times when Hermine was escorted by her husband. M. de Nargonne was a sedate man in his early sixties, quite unsuited in Villefort's eyes to so young, so attractive and above all so intelligent a wife. But when they appeared in public together she gave the lie to such ideas. Mme. de Nargonne clearly doted on her spouse, bringing him refreshments, gently soliciting after his comfort, hanging on his every word. Courtiers and old soldiers alike were known to sigh over such obvious tenderness. It was an admirable performance, and Villefort even heard a particularly venom-tongued old woman of his acquaintance remark that it was heartening to see such proper devotion to her husband on the part of a young married woman.
Villefort appreciated this unlooked-for discretion best of all Hermine's good qualities. They were lovers by the end of the first month, and regularly spending days at a time together by the end of the fifth.
In the course of his everyday existence, Villefort had given little consideration to sin, except in the feeble, grovelling forms in which it presented itself during his professional life. Having broken his marriage vows for the first time since he made them, he might have been expected to begin to think on it; but in fact, he could never see the connexion in such a light. For a girl both beautiful and accomplished to have given herself to him so willingly, and without even a hint of mercenary aims! Surely she was not a temptation but a reward, recompense for his self-control over all these years. Alone of all his peers, he had never bought a woman; God had noticed, and had smiled.
~
Hermine was childlike in her sleep, with those knowing eyes closed and her limbs unselfconsciously slack and sprawling. Her breasts gently rose and fell with her slow, deep breaths. Seen like this, her naked body was not exciting but rather touchingly vulnerable, and Villefort was filled with a sudden urge to cover it with something, to hide her from the world.
He could not move from his chair.
Panic flooded over him slowly, from the toes up.
He could not move from his chair; he could not even feel the limbs he was trying to move. He wanted to cry out, but he could not speak. His left eyelid twitched and fluttered and throbbed with a damning inevitability, and he knew, long before he could admit it to himself, exactly what had happened to him. In a paroxysm of denial, he tried desperately to get up, to run, to flail his unresponsive arms about and cry out for help.
The servants who were tending to Villefort in his room in Versailles frowned, and tucked the blankets more tightly around him. They had strict instructions to keep him quiet while his fever was sweated out.
A shadow cast itself over Hermine's bed. She muttered fretfully and turned over, but did not wake. With an abruptness that left no room even for fear, Villefort was aware that somebody else was in the room. He smelled damp night time earth and his own sweat; it was the Corsican.
Somehow, he knew what must happen next, but it was still an ugly shock when the dagger ripped into Hermine's side. She cried out in her sleep but did not wake, rather pressing her head further into her pillow as if she sought refuge from a nightmare. Blood slicked over her stomach and thighs, forming a damp, spreading pool beneath her. The Corsican chuckled, and covered her arms and breasts with shallow nicks, and she screwed her eyes shut and whimpered but still did not come to consciousness.
Still Villefort struggled to stand, to call out to her, although he knew quite well that there was no escape from this prison of a body. When the Corsican dragged Hermine onto her back, he was sure he made some guttural, strangled noise of protest. For certain the man looked up at him then, and smiled, and sank his knife to the hilt in Hermine's stomach, three times in quick succession. He must have vanished thereafter; Villefort didn't notice.
He sat for what seemed like hours, watching Hermine's thrashings and sobs grow feebler and feebler, until it occurred to him that the muscles of his eyes were still under his control.
He closed them.
~
Hermine sighed and bucked against his hand, reaching her completion a few minutes after his own. For a few minutes she faced the wall, panting, before rolling over and pressing a kiss to the side of his mouth. This accomplished, she slumped back against her pillows and stared at the ceiling, her face somewhere very far away.
Villefort trailed a hand down her side, pleased that she still gave a little shiver of pleasure under his touch. Five months gone, her body was beginning to show the effects of pregnancy. Her breasts, which had been small and delicately formed, were softer and fuller; her waist had thickened too much for fashion, although not so much that she needed to seek seclusion yet.
He couldn't help his sense of greed, staring at her newly rounded flesh. Naturally, he loved his dear sweet Valentine, but he longed for a son; surely Hermine, proud of her strong body and her steely will, could give him nothing else.
"You're so good to me," she said, after a long silence. There was nothing happy in her voice, only a sort of resignation. "And I can talk to you, as well as I can ever talk to anyone. I shall miss you."
"Miss me? We'll be together again within the week."
"I meant later. When we are - no longer what we are now, to each other."
He raised his eyebrow. "You mean to leave me, then?"
"I mean nothing. But you know I read cards." Her hand settled uneasily on her abdomen. "They don't tell me anything good."
"You're afraid? But you're young and strong - there's no reason childbirth should be too great an ordeal for you."
"I don't know what I'm afraid of! Not dying. I don't think I'm afraid of dying. But as much as I want to meet him, I think this child was a bad omen for us."
"Why?" (So she was sure the child was a boy too - Villefort tried to keep the pleasure out of his voice.)
"Because he is a consequence." She sighed, and twined a hand through his hair. "There were never consequences for us, before." After a moment, she smiled at him. "You don't show it, but you're laughing at my superstitious nature. Very well. Time will prove me right, or not. Perhaps I shouldn't dwell on it."
Villefort smiled as she drew his hands to her again and her hungry mouth sought his; clearly, whatever her fears might be, she meant to enjoy him while she had him.
~
Every muscle in Villefort's body ached from his long hours of labour, and he still had not found what he was searching for. His hands were calloused; his spade seemed practically a part of them.
He pressed the edge downwards with as much force as he could manage, and underneath it the skin parted with slow, elastic resistance, before giving way all of a piece. Stamping down on the spadehead, he broke through the spine with a sickening crack and levered the lump of flesh to one side.
There was another headless corpse beneath the one he had just dug through. There seemed no end to the things; the walls of his pit were bleeding sluggishly, reaching nearly up to waist. As he scrambled out of the hole, the blood soaked through the knees of his trousers and seeped in at the edges of his boots. It was an inconvienience, nothing more. He had work to do. Finding a new patch, he began to dig again, seperating a woman's arm from her body at the elbow.
He could not tell how long he had worked before it came to him where he was. He had only been a small child during the Terror, but the mass graves of the guillotined had, at the time, left a fearful impression on his mind.
'I am not digging a grave, I am digging in a grave,' he thought to himself, and somehow the thought was comical - and by his bedside, the woman hired as his nurse shuddered to hear his hoarse, croaking laugh.
~
Villefort's knuckles ground together as Hermine clutched at his hand, and perhaps for the first time in his life he felt totally helpless. Helpless against her pain; helpless against his own ignorance, too. When Renée had given birth, a competent doctor's assistant had kept the man of the house far from his wife's chamber. He was scared of Hermine's pain; there was nothing to tell him whether or not it was normal. She could not help him. She moaned when she did not scream and her breath came in hitches, and her wide-open eyes were so blank she might as well have been unconscious. The little nurse they had hired could be trusted not to betray them, as her French was very limited, and to treat Hermine as well as she knew how; as a midwife she was scarcely more use than Villefort himself. He held a wetted cloth against Hermine's forehead and wondered again whether there was a doctor he could have trusted or bought, and whether there were any within reach who could save her life, if it came to that.
At last, the crisis came; she gave a few grunts of effort and cried out again, and between her legs there was a fresh rush of blood. The nurse darted forward, and shortly after placed a small bundle in Villefort's arms. He barely noticed what he held, for he had only then dared to look at Hermine's face again. She was frighteningly pale, but that awful, agonised tension had receded; perhaps she would be spared, after all.
Abruptly, he realised that he was holding his breath, waiting to hear the baby's cries; the still, grey thing in his hands gave none.
~
He had been at Versailles a month and a half before the dreams stopped, and two before he fully recovered the use of his voice. Anything much in the way of motion was still beyond him, but with a little effort he managed to read.
The papers gave him no news of Hermine. He allowed himself the small confort that if she had died, he would have heard of it; for the time being, he dared not enquire further.
From time to time he thought of those fears she had expressed to him, and though he tried to laugh at himself for giving credence to a woman's superstitions he found it difficult. Such a string of misfortunes: M. de Nargonne's discovery of the pregnancy and subsequent suicide; the stillbirth; the Corsican in the garden. Any man might see the hand of an avenging God in such a terrible sequence.
But then, Hermine was not dead; nor, it seemed, was she disgraced. He himself was promised a full recovery within the year. The baby was dead, and that was all; perhaps the consequences had died with it.
If such was the justice of God, Villefort told himself, he had no reason to fear it.
WARNING: Graphic violence.
Villefort was dreaming of knives. Just at that moment, he was lying on a bed of them like some Oriental conjurer, suspended on a thousand points of agony, and feeling them dig deeper into his flesh each time the coach hit a rough patch of road. Three miles back, he had been scrambling through a forest of black trees with blades for leaves, his wrists torn and bloody. When he had first left Auteuil, his dreams had told him that the Corsican's dagger was still buried in his flesh, beyond the skill of any doctor to remove it, and that its point was inching towards his heart like some malevolent parasite, and he had cried out so terribly and torn so fiercely at the dressing on his wound that his servants had been obliged to restrain him. Now he was quieter, only whimpering a little when some pothole or loose stone in the road jolted him against the side of the carriage.
Hermine's shawl was wrapped around his arm from elbow to wrist, still sticky with his blood from when she had used it to staunch his wound. His fingers twitched and clutched at it as he dreamed, although he no longer remembered what it was.
~
Hermine de Nargonne was pretty, which was well enough, and unpretentious in her manner, which was unusual for a Parisian girl of seventeen summers. But it was the shrewdness of her questions, especially on matters of business, that Villefort found compelling. He had not looked forward to the dinner party at which he was to be seated next to her, and had expected to find the conversation of so young a woman hopelessly insipid. Instead, he was intrigued to discover that that pretty visage hid the mind of a born speculator; and not a reckless speculator either.
On further enquiry, he found that she had acted as secretary to her late father, who had taught her the rudiments of business at first simply to keep her from idleness, and later with genuine pleasure as their lessons revealed that she had some talents in the area.
"My father was a great admirer of yours, M. le Procurer," she said, flushing slightly and looking down at her lap. "To have survived two revolutions, and with such integrity that neither side could rebuke you for it! Few men are capable of such real accomplishment as that. At least, so he said," she added hastily, and met his eyes with a small smile and a brief, searching glance.
This display of patently false modesty was the first time that Villefort saw her play-acting as a girl of her station was expected to do. He found, nonetheless, that he was not displeased by it.
~
As his coach reached the outskirts of Paris, Villefort was in a garden - the greenest, wildest garden he could ever recall having seen. A riot of coloured flowers pressed around his ankles, and a tendril of some ground creeping vine was crawling around the handle of his spade. Frowning, he shook it free, and returned to his task.
He felt as though he had been digging forever.
Grunting, he braced himself, and tossed the last handful of earth out of the hole he had been excavating. It was empty, just like all the others he had dug so far. He cast around in the soil for a moment or two, hoping for an epiphany, and then braced his hands on the edge of his pit and dragged himself free of it. He retrieved his spade and chose a new patch of ground, neatly beheading a bright yellow flower as he forced the blade down through the sod. Briefly, he wondered what he was searching for, but the thought flitted from his grasp before he ever got a firm grip on it.
~
For all that she knew how to be artful as well as any woman Villefort knew, Hermine was charmingly frank in her attempts to make herself his mistress. She never missed a gathering that she knew he was going to attend, and availed herself of every possible opportunity to make conversation with him. She wore her best jewels, no matter how humble the occasion. Even had she done none of this, the mix of honesty and a sort of laughing self-deprecation in her flashing blue eyes when she looked at him would have been invitation enough.
The only exceptions to this rule were those rare times when Hermine was escorted by her husband. M. de Nargonne was a sedate man in his early sixties, quite unsuited in Villefort's eyes to so young, so attractive and above all so intelligent a wife. But when they appeared in public together she gave the lie to such ideas. Mme. de Nargonne clearly doted on her spouse, bringing him refreshments, gently soliciting after his comfort, hanging on his every word. Courtiers and old soldiers alike were known to sigh over such obvious tenderness. It was an admirable performance, and Villefort even heard a particularly venom-tongued old woman of his acquaintance remark that it was heartening to see such proper devotion to her husband on the part of a young married woman.
Villefort appreciated this unlooked-for discretion best of all Hermine's good qualities. They were lovers by the end of the first month, and regularly spending days at a time together by the end of the fifth.
In the course of his everyday existence, Villefort had given little consideration to sin, except in the feeble, grovelling forms in which it presented itself during his professional life. Having broken his marriage vows for the first time since he made them, he might have been expected to begin to think on it; but in fact, he could never see the connexion in such a light. For a girl both beautiful and accomplished to have given herself to him so willingly, and without even a hint of mercenary aims! Surely she was not a temptation but a reward, recompense for his self-control over all these years. Alone of all his peers, he had never bought a woman; God had noticed, and had smiled.
~
Hermine was childlike in her sleep, with those knowing eyes closed and her limbs unselfconsciously slack and sprawling. Her breasts gently rose and fell with her slow, deep breaths. Seen like this, her naked body was not exciting but rather touchingly vulnerable, and Villefort was filled with a sudden urge to cover it with something, to hide her from the world.
He could not move from his chair.
Panic flooded over him slowly, from the toes up.
He could not move from his chair; he could not even feel the limbs he was trying to move. He wanted to cry out, but he could not speak. His left eyelid twitched and fluttered and throbbed with a damning inevitability, and he knew, long before he could admit it to himself, exactly what had happened to him. In a paroxysm of denial, he tried desperately to get up, to run, to flail his unresponsive arms about and cry out for help.
The servants who were tending to Villefort in his room in Versailles frowned, and tucked the blankets more tightly around him. They had strict instructions to keep him quiet while his fever was sweated out.
A shadow cast itself over Hermine's bed. She muttered fretfully and turned over, but did not wake. With an abruptness that left no room even for fear, Villefort was aware that somebody else was in the room. He smelled damp night time earth and his own sweat; it was the Corsican.
Somehow, he knew what must happen next, but it was still an ugly shock when the dagger ripped into Hermine's side. She cried out in her sleep but did not wake, rather pressing her head further into her pillow as if she sought refuge from a nightmare. Blood slicked over her stomach and thighs, forming a damp, spreading pool beneath her. The Corsican chuckled, and covered her arms and breasts with shallow nicks, and she screwed her eyes shut and whimpered but still did not come to consciousness.
Still Villefort struggled to stand, to call out to her, although he knew quite well that there was no escape from this prison of a body. When the Corsican dragged Hermine onto her back, he was sure he made some guttural, strangled noise of protest. For certain the man looked up at him then, and smiled, and sank his knife to the hilt in Hermine's stomach, three times in quick succession. He must have vanished thereafter; Villefort didn't notice.
He sat for what seemed like hours, watching Hermine's thrashings and sobs grow feebler and feebler, until it occurred to him that the muscles of his eyes were still under his control.
He closed them.
~
Hermine sighed and bucked against his hand, reaching her completion a few minutes after his own. For a few minutes she faced the wall, panting, before rolling over and pressing a kiss to the side of his mouth. This accomplished, she slumped back against her pillows and stared at the ceiling, her face somewhere very far away.
Villefort trailed a hand down her side, pleased that she still gave a little shiver of pleasure under his touch. Five months gone, her body was beginning to show the effects of pregnancy. Her breasts, which had been small and delicately formed, were softer and fuller; her waist had thickened too much for fashion, although not so much that she needed to seek seclusion yet.
He couldn't help his sense of greed, staring at her newly rounded flesh. Naturally, he loved his dear sweet Valentine, but he longed for a son; surely Hermine, proud of her strong body and her steely will, could give him nothing else.
"You're so good to me," she said, after a long silence. There was nothing happy in her voice, only a sort of resignation. "And I can talk to you, as well as I can ever talk to anyone. I shall miss you."
"Miss me? We'll be together again within the week."
"I meant later. When we are - no longer what we are now, to each other."
He raised his eyebrow. "You mean to leave me, then?"
"I mean nothing. But you know I read cards." Her hand settled uneasily on her abdomen. "They don't tell me anything good."
"You're afraid? But you're young and strong - there's no reason childbirth should be too great an ordeal for you."
"I don't know what I'm afraid of! Not dying. I don't think I'm afraid of dying. But as much as I want to meet him, I think this child was a bad omen for us."
"Why?" (So she was sure the child was a boy too - Villefort tried to keep the pleasure out of his voice.)
"Because he is a consequence." She sighed, and twined a hand through his hair. "There were never consequences for us, before." After a moment, she smiled at him. "You don't show it, but you're laughing at my superstitious nature. Very well. Time will prove me right, or not. Perhaps I shouldn't dwell on it."
Villefort smiled as she drew his hands to her again and her hungry mouth sought his; clearly, whatever her fears might be, she meant to enjoy him while she had him.
~
Every muscle in Villefort's body ached from his long hours of labour, and he still had not found what he was searching for. His hands were calloused; his spade seemed practically a part of them.
He pressed the edge downwards with as much force as he could manage, and underneath it the skin parted with slow, elastic resistance, before giving way all of a piece. Stamping down on the spadehead, he broke through the spine with a sickening crack and levered the lump of flesh to one side.
There was another headless corpse beneath the one he had just dug through. There seemed no end to the things; the walls of his pit were bleeding sluggishly, reaching nearly up to waist. As he scrambled out of the hole, the blood soaked through the knees of his trousers and seeped in at the edges of his boots. It was an inconvienience, nothing more. He had work to do. Finding a new patch, he began to dig again, seperating a woman's arm from her body at the elbow.
He could not tell how long he had worked before it came to him where he was. He had only been a small child during the Terror, but the mass graves of the guillotined had, at the time, left a fearful impression on his mind.
'I am not digging a grave, I am digging in a grave,' he thought to himself, and somehow the thought was comical - and by his bedside, the woman hired as his nurse shuddered to hear his hoarse, croaking laugh.
~
Villefort's knuckles ground together as Hermine clutched at his hand, and perhaps for the first time in his life he felt totally helpless. Helpless against her pain; helpless against his own ignorance, too. When Renée had given birth, a competent doctor's assistant had kept the man of the house far from his wife's chamber. He was scared of Hermine's pain; there was nothing to tell him whether or not it was normal. She could not help him. She moaned when she did not scream and her breath came in hitches, and her wide-open eyes were so blank she might as well have been unconscious. The little nurse they had hired could be trusted not to betray them, as her French was very limited, and to treat Hermine as well as she knew how; as a midwife she was scarcely more use than Villefort himself. He held a wetted cloth against Hermine's forehead and wondered again whether there was a doctor he could have trusted or bought, and whether there were any within reach who could save her life, if it came to that.
At last, the crisis came; she gave a few grunts of effort and cried out again, and between her legs there was a fresh rush of blood. The nurse darted forward, and shortly after placed a small bundle in Villefort's arms. He barely noticed what he held, for he had only then dared to look at Hermine's face again. She was frighteningly pale, but that awful, agonised tension had receded; perhaps she would be spared, after all.
Abruptly, he realised that he was holding his breath, waiting to hear the baby's cries; the still, grey thing in his hands gave none.
~
He had been at Versailles a month and a half before the dreams stopped, and two before he fully recovered the use of his voice. Anything much in the way of motion was still beyond him, but with a little effort he managed to read.
The papers gave him no news of Hermine. He allowed himself the small confort that if she had died, he would have heard of it; for the time being, he dared not enquire further.
From time to time he thought of those fears she had expressed to him, and though he tried to laugh at himself for giving credence to a woman's superstitions he found it difficult. Such a string of misfortunes: M. de Nargonne's discovery of the pregnancy and subsequent suicide; the stillbirth; the Corsican in the garden. Any man might see the hand of an avenging God in such a terrible sequence.
But then, Hermine was not dead; nor, it seemed, was she disgraced. He himself was promised a full recovery within the year. The baby was dead, and that was all; perhaps the consequences had died with it.
If such was the justice of God, Villefort told himself, he had no reason to fear it.