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The Blood Like Wine

SARAH A. HOYT

==========

He stood by my hotel bed yesterday.

In the cool artificiality of a twenty-first-century hotel suite, with the curtains shut tight against the harsh

light of day, beside the massive, white wardrobe, Francois stood.

He wore his best suit of blue silk—long jacket edged with lace, and tight knee-length breeches that

molded his tall, muscular body. His golden curls fell to his shoulders, and his dark violet eyes were oh so

infinitely sad.

He walked to the bed and opened his lace collar with a gloved finger, revealing the red line where the

guillotine had separated his head from his body.

And he said nothing. Nothing. And yet, I knew all too well what he meant.

He vanished when I sat up. He always vanished. Like cherished smoke, like unreachable paradise, like

longed-for death.

I sat beside the small desk and smoked my mint-laced cigarettes till sunset turned the world outside as

dark as my hotel room.

Then I’d showered, dressed in my fuck-me-red dress, which went with my fuck-me-red painted nails,

and with my blood red high heels, pulled back my straight, golden hair, got into my black sports car and

hit the road.

I’d made contact. I had the address. I would do what Francois wanted.

I always did what Francois wanted. It was all I had left.

==========

We’d met when we were both seventeen. Which is not to say we were the same age. Born in Faubourg

Saint-Antoine, where rats outnumbered people ten to one, where the streets were so narrow and the

houses on either side so high that the sun never touched the shit-layered streets, I’d had no time for

childhood.

But I was one of the lucky ones: I’d survived.

By twelve, I was an orphan. My mother died giving birth to me. My father, a poor cobbler, died of

desperation and tiredness in 1786.

I didn’t know the date then, but I know it now. I didn’t know how to read then, but I know it now.

Look at the gifts death has heaped upon me.

They said that my father died of a fever. All were fevers, then, and it might have been anything at all: a

cold, an un-healed sore, tuberculosis or cancer. All of it then was .a fever—stinking sweat upon the dirty

bedsheets, a struggling voice, breathing that sank slowly, slowly, into a harsh rasp at the throat. Then

nothing.

The neighbor women had looked after my father in his last days, community being the only palliative for

the harsh, grinding poverty of peasant France.

Just before the end, I was admitted to the small, dim room at the back of the house and allowed near the

dank little pile of bedding, where my father lay.

His grey hair had grown all white through his illness, and his face had sunken, the skin drying and

stretching, till it looked like parchment layered over the skull. His aquiline nose looked sharper, and his

dark brown eyes smaller, opaque, lost amid the yellow skin, the white hair, the sharp nose.

He smiled and it was the smile of a skull, his irregular teeth gaping at me as I approached.

The hand that stretched out of the pile of covers and grasped my small, soft hand looked more like a

claw, with long, yellowed nails. And there was the smell of death in the breath that flew past my face as

my father spoke..

“Sylvie,” he said. His eyes were soft, sadly sweet when he looked at me. “Sylvie, my daughter, you are

too beautiful. Marry someone soon. Marry one of our neighbors. Don’t let your beauty lure you outside

your sphere. That beauty can be a curse.”

Uncomprehending, I listened. Uncomprehending, I held his hand.

Though girls little older than I were often married, I had no thought for such a thing. As for leaving the

neighborhood, I dreamt about it every day and every night and prayed upon it to any listening divinity as I

told the beads of my rosary with the other women at my father’s wake.

I knew I was beautiful and looked older than I was. I’d often seen the effect of that beauty in the lingering

glance of passing coachmen, in the appreciative look of merchants in the weekly market.

I dreamt of leaving behind the small, dark streets, the smell of stale smoke and shit, the memory of my

father’s rasping breath sinking lower and lower into nothing.

He was thirty-two when he died. I had no intention of dying young.

==========

Leaving the hotel parking lot, I drove away into darkness.

In the eastern United States, where I had lived for a time, as the sun went down other lights came up:

neon lights of gas stations and drive-throughs, lights that shone on billboards, lights of hotels and motels

and restaurants. All of them shone from the side of the road, turning the night into a continuous sunset and

reminding me of what I could no longer experience.

But out west the sun went down and night came on, like a blanket obliterating all life, all reminders of life.

Driving at night, between Denver and the little town of Goldport nestled up against the Rockies, I saw no

light.

No reminders of lost dawns moved me; no memories of past noons disturbed me. No sharp, aching

mementos of Francois’s golden hair glimmering in the sunlight.

There was nothing in the world, nothing, except the shiny black highway unrolling in the headlights of my

black sports car like a lazy snake, and the loud music drowning out my thoughts.

Here and there, clusters of distant, twinkling lights looked like stars fallen to Earth, like a Christmas tree

in a cemetery.

I lit a cigarette from the end of the other, threw the spent butt out the window, my nails flourishing briefly

in my field of vision, looking like claws dipped into fresh blood.

Smoke enough of these and they would kill you. That’s what the surgeon general said. But his promises

failed me.

What would he know? I’d died in November 1793, when terror reigned on the streets of Paris and

blood flowed like wine over the stained boards of Madame la Guillotine.

My face in the mirror looked back at me, triangular, small, pink. Too pale. My grey eyes showed dark

circles all around, the circles of those who hadn’t slept for too long. The circles of the damned.

I looked twenty, as I had over two centuries ago. Twenty and still as pretty, still as slim, still as delectable

as I’d been when the revolution had washed over Paris like a madness and drowned me in its waves.

Then, as now, my beauty bought luxuries: travel and fine clothes, a beautiful house, transportation.

But transportation now was a sleek new Viper, a horseless carriage that sped silently through the night,

devouring the never-ending snaking road, and yet still incapable of taking me away from my guilt, from

my fear, away from Francois’s accusing violet eyes, his eyes that found me every time.

==========

I caught Francois as one caught a fever. And fevers in those days came at a galloping speed, carried by

the impetuous horses of madness.

At seventeen, I had left my miserable origins far behind.

I was beautiful, admired, the mistress of a member of the representative assembly, the hostess of a

fashionable philosophical salon.

I’d clawed my way out of Faubourg Saint-Antoine, climbing over the backs of rejected lovers, over the

proffered purses of eager new ones.

In my salon, with its satin-covered walls, its velvet-covered couches, gathered the fine flower of thinkers

in France.

Not the fire-breathing revolutionaries, not the scabby sans culottes.

No. To my nightly assemblies came younger sons of nobility, well-dressed young lawyers, the heirs to

bourgeois purses.

Their arguments spoke of Arcadia, of the natural man, the noble savage that never existed anywhere but

in the dreams of well-brought-up men.

And I, little Sylvie, who still didn’t know how to read and knew scant of anything else, listened to their

arguments, never letting them guess my ignorance, never telling them that uneducated men were not near

to angels and that nature was very far from nurture.

I sat and listened, and was bored, and dared not talk truthfully to any of them—not even my patron, who

paid the bills for my fashionable town house, my fashionable wardrobe, my carriage and my maid. None

of them knew about the dark, dank house of my upbringing, or of the sound of rats, rustling close to the

walls, or of my father in his deathbed, with the smell of death and sweat, and his rasping breath, and his

unheeded advice.

And then there had been Francois.

He’d appeared at the salon one night, brought by someone whose name I don’t remember, as I no

longer remember the names of my many patrons.

But him I’d never have forgotten, even had our destinies not entwined in blood and guilt.

Francois was tall and so pale that the light of candles shone on his skin with the subdued richness of fine

silk. His features were finely chiseled, just one square chin, one sharp nose short of effeminate.

His fine golden curls spilled like molten metal to his waist and highlighted the squareness of his shoulders,

the narrowness of his waist, the masculine beauty of his long, muscular legs.

He walked like angels must walk in paradise—with effortless grace, like a dancer who has forgotten

steps and yet moves to the sound of unheard music.

Francois, someone told me his name was. Francis. He was the son of the marquis of something or other.

I never had a good ear for noble names. But I had a good eye for a well-cut manly figure. And I had

learned the persuasive words, the easy laughter, the fan carelessly waved towards him so as to give him a

scent of my perfume, the tilting forward that allowed him sight of the deep crevice between my round,

silk-cradled breasts, the laying of a well-manicured, soft hand on his arm.

By the end of the night, sweet Francois was mine.

I drove out of the highway at the exit for Goldport, a small mining town that time had forgotten, nestled

amid the Rockies.

Closed mines had given way to casinos and to motels and hotels of all descriptions.

The town itself looked like a splash of neon amid the dark mountains. I fished for my sunglasses from the

passenger seat, and put them on, to mitigate the glare to my dark-loving eyes.

The Good Rest Motel consisted of several rectangular buildings, painted gingivitis-pink, nestling amid

improbably tall pines at the entrance to the town.

I took a right by the lighted billboard that advertised king-size beds and a TV in every room, and parked

next to the RVs and trucks beneath the trees.

Cabin number twelve was dark, but the sounds of the television came from it.

At my knock, invisible hands opened the door, with the classical unoiled-hinge shriek of every B-grade

horror movie.

And, from the darkness within, a voice spoke; a voice said, “Ah, Sylvie. Beautiful Sylvie. Still as pretty, I

see.”

I blinked. Pierre, with his dark eyes, his curly black hair still long enough to sweep his shoulders, stood in

the shadows.

The shadows were bright as light to me.

And Pierre smiled at me, the smile of the damned. He wore a white suit, a strange choice for a vampire.

I closed the door behind me. The small room smelled of that dry dust of long-forgotten tombs. It smelled

of Pierre.

But, behind that smell, I could sense another. The smell of blood, the smell of some living thing that Pierre

had fed upon tonight.

That blood, coursing fast in Pierre’s long-dead veins, made me lick my lips, made my heart quicken

within my withered chest.

Pierre stepped back and smiled, his old, evasive smile. “You said you wished to see me, Sylvie? What

did you want?”

“His name is Pierre D’Laubergine,” Francois said.

Francois was twenty—had just turned twenty. The last three years hadn’t been easy for us—for either of

us.

I’d kept my home, but my patron and protection had vanished in the maelstrom of the revolution.

Francois had taken his place for a while, but then even he had lost the power to support me. His lands

were confiscated, his money fast vanishing. He had secured us two small rooms in a middle-class town

house. A far step down from my little town house where I’d held my salon for the luminaries of the more

restrained forms of revolution. But well above Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

Lying naked and perfect in my bed, Francois looked unscathed by three years of living beneath his

station, if above his means.

The suit folded over the foot of my bed was serviceable muslin, in a greyish color. Not black, since black

was assumed to mean one was an aristo, mourning for the king whom the revolution had guillotined two

years ago.

But Francois’s body was still pure white silk, stretched evenly over a muscular frame that would have

suited a workman well enough. Only no workman had ever grown like this, tall and straight, not

deformed. Workmen’s bodies soon became twisted by work and bent out of their intended shape.

Francois was all that could be intended: soft skin and violet eyes; elegant, tall body and golden hah“; a

smell of mint; a lingering taste of fresh apples.

He turned in bed as he spoke and looked intently at me, his square-tipped finger drawing a circle around

my dark nipple. “Pierre D’Laubergine is his name, as I said, and he’s a guard of the city. He said he

could get us passports out of the city, out of the country. We could get as far as Calais, and from there

hire a boat to England. There are still boats. For a price.”

“What… What would the price be?” I asked. I knew he didn’t have much, though he’d never tell me

exactly how much remained of his once-vast fortune. His father had been imprisoned, executed, and the

family lands confiscated.

Yet, Francois paid for our lodging and for our food; but how long would he still have the money?

His broad, sensuous lips twisted in a wry smile. This wry smile was a gift of the revolution, something the

pampered innocent of three years ago would have been incapable of. “Too much money, ma petite . Too

much.”

He pulled me to him. His taut neck tasted of fresh apples and smelled of pure mint. I buried my face in his

Sarah A. Hoyt - The Blood Like Wine.pdf

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