Carmilla Varno: Counsel And Creature

Candlelight was illegal in the lower levels of the Carmilla Club. Maren Ashford had read the municipal ordinance twice on the train down, a quaint little statute from 1897 that the building's owners had never bothered to repeal, because the building's owners had never bothered to recognize the municipal government that wrote it. So the corridors descended in amber pools, each sconce set into paneled oak that drank the light rather than gave it back, and the stair treads groaned beneath her borrowed heels like a living thing shifting in its sleep.

Carmilla Varna walked half a pace ahead, her black dress a column of unruffled silk, her silver hair pinned in a coil so tight it looked structural. She had not offered her arm. She had not looked back. She moved the way old money moved, through space that already belonged to her, and Maren found herself counting steps just to feel grounded, one, two, three, the fourth one creaking, the fifth one silent because her weight had not yet committed to it.

"You are thinking loudly," Carmilla said, without turning. Her voice was low, accented in a way Maren could not place on the map, something between a Viennese drawing room and a Bucharest side street. "I can hear the questions from here."

"I was thinking about the stairs," Maren said. It was not quite a lie. The stairs were thinking-worthy. They curved in a way that no fire code would have permitted, narrowing as they went down, so that by the time they reached the third landing, Carmilla's shoulders nearly brushed the walls on either side, and the air had thickened with the smell of old paper, stone, and something underneath both, sweet and a little foul, like fruit left too long in a bowl. "How old are they?"

"Older than your country. Be specific with your next question, Miss Ashford. I do not enjoy guessing."

Maren swallowed. She had practiced this meeting in her head for six weeks, ever since the letter had arrived on cream stationery with no return address, postmarked New York, addressed in a hand that had not quite learned to let go of the nineteenth century. You are invited to call upon Mrs. Varna at your earliest convenience. Personal matters. Discretion assured. The letter had not smelled of anything. That had been the first warning. Anyone who could keep perfume off cream paper was trying.

They reached a landing and stopped. Carmilla turned, finally, and Maren saw her face in full for the first time since the foyer. The matriarch was handsome rather than beautiful, her mouth set in a line that suggested she had smiled once, long ago, and found the experiment inconclusive. Her eyes were pale, almost colorless in the low light, and they examined Maren with the patience of a jeweler examining a stone that might, if cut correctly, become valuable.

"Three things," Carmilla said. "First. You do not speak of what you see below this floor to anyone outside the building. Second. You do not touch anything in the cellars without my explicit permission, and I am not feeling generous with permission tonight, so keep your hands at your sides. Third. The man you are about to meet has not had a new face in his presence in forty-seven years. He will be rude. He will test you. You will not rise to it, or I will have you removed, and we will be done."

"Removed by whom?"

"By Julian, most likely. He is stronger than he looks. Do not let the waistcoat fool you."

Carmilla turned and continued down, and Maren followed, because there was nothing else to do with her body that made sense. The next corridor was paneled in a darker wood, walnut perhaps, though the grain ran in patterns she did not recognize, too regular to be natural, too patient to be machined. The carpet underfoot was thick enough to muffle her heels entirely, and the silence that resulted was worse than the creaking, because it meant she could hear her own pulse, and she could hear Carmilla's, and the two rhythms were not the same.

At the end of the corridor, a door stood ajar, spilling yellow light and the low murmur of a man arguing with himself. Carmilla pushed it open with the back of one finger, as though the wood might bite.

The room beyond was a cellar made to forget it was a cellar. Bookshelves climbed all four walls, floor to ceiling, and the ceiling itself was painted to look like a sky she had never seen, deep indigo with stars that did not correspond to any chart she had studied as a girl. A long oak table dominated the center, cluttered with glassware, candles in iron holders, and a small menagerie of dead things arranged on silver trays, each one pinned with a label in a tight, impatient hand. The smell of preserving fluid hit her first, then the underlying sweetness of old paper, then something fainter, copper and salt, rising from a basin in the corner that she chose not to look at directly.

Julian Thorne stood at the far end of the table with his back to them, measuring something into a beaker with a glass pipette. He was tall, narrow in a way that suggested the bones had been designed for a larger man and then scaled down, and his waistcoat was indeed a disaster, plum velvet with silver buttons that had been polished until they caught the candlelight like small moons. His hair was dark, too long, tied back with a ribbon that matched nothing. He did not turn when they entered.

"The 1879," he said, addressing the beaker. "You are late. I have been waiting since the equinox."

"It is March," Carmilla said.

"Then I have been waiting since the previous equinox, which is worse. Sit her down. Do not let her touch the tray on the left."

Carmilla pulled out a chair for Maren, an unexpected courtesy that felt more like a warning. Maren sat. The chair was older than her grandmother, and it received her weight with a creak of professional resignation. She kept her hands flat on the table, away from the trays, away from the basin, and watched Julian Thorne finish his measurement with three precise drops, set the pipette down, and finally turn.

His face was younger than she had expected, the kind of young that happens to a person who has stopped counting. His eyes were dark and quick, and they settled on her with the focus of a man who had spent a long time looking at small things and now had something larger to examine. He studied her the way Carmilla had not, not for value but for shape, as though he were trying to determine what category of creature she might belong to.

"Miss Ashford," he said. "Maren. May I call you Maren? I am going to call you Maren regardless. Carmilla, she is smaller than I expected."

"She is exactly the size she is."

"Yes, that is what I meant. Smaller than that. The photographs did not do her justice, or rather, the photographs did her too much justice, which is a different problem." He came around the table and took the seat opposite her, moving with a kind of contained haste, as though stillness cost him something. Up close, she could see that his hands were stained, fingertips yellowed with old nicotine and something darker, ink or iodine or both. "You smell of library dust and cheap camphor. You have been reading. What have you been reading?"

"I was not aware that was the first question."

"It is always the first question. Everything else is follow-up. The reading tells me what you think the world is made of, and then I know how disappointed you are about to become."

Maren kept her face still. She had been warned he would be rude. She had not been warned he would be fast.

"Lately," she said, "I have been reading about inheritance law in the old Austro-Hungarian provinces. And about the Varna family specifically, insofar as anything has been written down, which is not much, and most of it is wrong."

Julian's mouth twitched. It was not quite a smile, but it was the place a smile would have been if he had been willing to commit.

"Wrong how?"

"Wrong about your role here. The accounts suggest you are an employee. The paperwork Carmilla sent suggested a consultant. Neither of those is right, is it?"

Behind her, Maren heard Carmilla exhale through her nose, a small, controlled sound of either approval or annoyance, impossible to tell which. Julian leaned back in his chair, and it groaned under him, and he did not seem to notice.

"No," he said. "Neither is right. I am the thing that Carmilla keeps in the basement because the alternative is putting it in the garden, and the garden has opinions." He laced his stained fingers together on the table and looked at her with the expression of a man about to open a jar he suspected was empty. "I am the sommelier. I have been the sommelier since the Treaty of Berlin. I have been many things before that, and I will be many things after, but in this house, for these purposes, I am the sommelier, and I am here to decide whether you are the kind of woman who can be trusted with a bottle of something very old."

"Sommelier of what?"

"Of everything," he said. "Of the things that go in glasses, and the things that do not, and the things that would prefer not to be in glasses at all but have been persuaded. Carmilla, does she know what she is here to inherit, or have we decided to make it a game?"

Carmilla moved to the sideboard and poured herself a small measure of something amber from a decanter that had no label. She did not offer any to Maren. She did not offer any to Julian. The pour was strictly for her own benefit.

"She knows what she was told," Carmilla said. "What she was told is not the same as what there is."

"That," Julian said, with a glance at Maren, "is the most honest thing she has said in a century. Welcome to the lower levels, Miss Ashford. Mind the tray on the left. It bites."

The tray did not bite. Maren checked. It sat on the sideboard with the resigned dignity of silverware that had long ago been informed it was ornamental and had accepted the demotion. The edge was slightly tarnished, the handle shaped like a heron in mid-step, and there was a faint smear of something dark at the rim that might have been wine or might have been a polite residue of whatever Carmilla had been drinking. Maren did not pick it up.

She had learned, in the years since her mother's death, not to pick up trays in other people's houses.

"You have questions," Carmilla said, from the window. She had moved there without sound, the way large birds moved, or the way very old women moved when they had spent a long time learning which floorboards sang. "You have had questions since the reading of the will. I can see them sitting on you like birds on a scarecrow. Ask them, and be quick about it. I have correspondence."

Maren did not ask them. Not yet.

The study was larger than the ground floor of the cottage she had grown up in, and it had the same feeling of a room that had been arranged by a person who considered comfort a personal failing. The bookshelves climbed to a ceiling painted in a pattern of interlocking leaves that might once have been gold and was now the color of a candle that had been left to weep. The desk was mahogany, and the leather on its surface was so worn that the wood beneath showed through in pale ovals where a hundred years of elbows had rested. A globe stood in one corner, the seas painted a green that no sea had ever been, and the continents slightly misshapen, as though cartography had been a suggestion rather than a discipline.

At the far end, a door stood ajar, and through it Maren could see the edge of a corridor, and the corridor was dim, and somewhere in the dim there was the smell of paper, of the dust that came off very old paper, and something else beneath it, faint, like the ghost of a flower that had been pressed between two pages and forgotten.

"I was told," Maren said carefully, "that my mother left me this house."

"You were told correctly."

"I was told that I am the only heir."

"Also correct. The Varna line is, for the moment, a single thread. It has been longer than you would imagine, and shorter than I would like." Carmilla turned from the window. The light behind her was the thin autumn kind that made everyone look like a portrait of themselves. "I have no children. I had a brother, who is dead. I had a sister, who is also dead, and whose death I will discuss when I have had more of this." She lifted the glass. The amber caught the light and did not return it. "Your mother was my sister's daughter. You are the last of us. The last of any of us. This pleases no one, but it is the case."

Maren sat down. The chair received her with the courtesy of furniture that had been informed of her arrival in advance. She put her hands on her knees to keep them still.

"I was told," she said, "that my mother died of a fever."

The room was quiet in a way that rooms are quiet when they have been listening for a long time.

"Yes," Carmilla said, after a pause that was not hesitation but selection. "You were told that."

"Is it true?"

"It is as true as anything is, in this family. Fevers are convenient. They do not require explanations. They do not require that the living sit down with the dead and have a conversation they would prefer not to have." Carmilla set her glass on the windowsill, where it sat in a ring of old dust that matched its diameter exactly. "Your mother did not die of a fever. Your mother died because she opened a door that had been closed for a very long time, and what was behind the door was not pleased to be seen. I am sorry. I have been sorry for nineteen years. I have practiced being sorry until I am very good at it. It does not bring her back. It does not bring anything back. It is, however, the truth, and you have come all this way, and I am told that the young prefer truth to comfort, though I have never understood why."

Maren heard herself say, "What was behind the door?"

And Carmilla looked at her for a long moment, and then she laughed, and the laugh was not unkind, but it was the laugh of a woman who had heard something she had been waiting to hear.

"You," she said, "are precisely her daughter."

She crossed the room to the door that stood ajar, and she opened it fully, and the smell of old paper came out into the study like a slow exhalation. The corridor beyond was narrow, and the lamp at the far end was already lit, though no one had been there to light it.

"Come," Carmilla said. "I will show you the deeds. You will not understand them. That is all right. Understanding is not required. Presence is required. Bring the lamp from the desk. The one in the corridor is sentimental and unreliable."

Maren brought the lamp.

The corridor was short, no more than twelve paces, and then it opened into a small room that had no windows. The walls were lined with shelves, and the shelves were lined with boxes, and the boxes were labeled in a hand that was not Carmilla's, a tighter, more impatient hand, the letters slanted as though they were trying to get somewhere before the writer changed her mind. Some of the labels had faded into suggestions. Some of them had been written over. One, near the bottom, had been crossed out entirely, and beneath the cross-out, in a different ink, someone had written: "Do not."

Maren looked at it. The cross-out had been done with a vigor that had left a furrow in the paper. The "do not" had been written with a steadier hand, and the ink was older.

Carmilla pulled a box from the second shelf and set it on the narrow table in the center of the room. The table was also covered in paper, and she moved the paper aside with the practiced efficiency of a woman who knew exactly which sheet was which and did not need to look.

"The deeds," she said, and lifted the lid.

The box was full of them. They were tied in bundles with ribbon that had once been red and was now the color of a memory of red, and each bundle had a year written on a slip of card tucked into the knot. 1840. 1841. 1842. 1843. 1844. The years continued, patient and uninformative, all the way to the front of the box, where the most recent bundle sat in a ribbon that was still faintly red.

"Property," Carmilla said. "That is the assumption. That is what the solicitors tell themselves, and what the tax office is told, and what is written in the summary at the front of the inventory. Property. Houses, lands, tenements, hereditaments, messuages, and all that legal Latin which exists to make a small thing sound as though it has been measured. But you are not a solicitor, and I am not going to insult you with the summary, because you did not come all this way for a summary."

She untied the 1840 bundle and spread the deeds on the table, and Maren leaned in, and the lamp leaned with her, and their shoulders brushed, and Carmilla's hand was on the map.

The map was at the bottom of the bundle, folded into quarters, and when she unfolded it, the paper made the sound of something that had been holding its breath for a long time. It was a survey of the estate, drawn in ink that had gone brown at the edges, and the estate was larger than Maren had imagined, stretching out in all directions from the house in a series of fields and copses and one long, dark line that might have been a river or might have been a road.

"There," Carmilla said, and her finger came down on a point near the center of the map, where a small square had been drawn, and beside the square, in the same impatient hand that had labeled the boxes, a single word: "Cellar."

And Carmilla's hand was trembling.

It was a small tremor, the kind that could be blamed on age, on the cold, on the weight of a morning, on the difficulty of holding a magnifying glass over a map in a lamp-lit room. It was the kind of tremor that explained itself before it was questioned. Maren had seen it in other old women, in the vicar's wife, in her own governess toward the end, when the muscles had simply begun to forget their orders.

But Carmilla's hand was not trembling with age.

Her hand was trembling the way a hand trembles when it is being very careful not to do something it wants to do, and Maren could feel the effort of it through the brush of their shoulders, a stillness that was costing her something, a control that was being held in place by a woman who had held a great many things in place for a very long time.

"The cellar," Maren said.

"The cellar," Carmilla agreed, and did not move her hand.

"What is in the cellar?"

"What has always been in the cellar, and what your mother went down to see, and what came up the stairs behind her when she was not looking." Carmilla's voice was even. Her hand was not. "What I have kept fed, and what I have kept quiet, and what I have kept in the dark because the dark is the only thing that holds it. The deeds will tell you the property. The map will tell you the shape. Neither will tell you what is underneath the shape, because what is underneath the shape is not the kind of thing that fits on a survey."

She lifted her hand from the map, finally, and the trembling stopped the moment she set the glass down, as though it had been the glass that was doing it, as though the glass had a tremor of its own and had been lending it to her.

"I have shown you the deeds," she said, "because you are the heir, and the heir must see the deeds, and because Julian insisted that it be done in the proper order, with the proper documents, in the proper room, with the proper lamp, and I have accommodated him, as I have accommodated him in everything, because he is very good at his job and very bad at knowing when to leave a house."

She straightened the deeds on the table, and her hands were steady now, and her face was the face of a woman who had decided to be made of stone for the rest of the afternoon.

"The next thing," she said, "is the cellar. But not today. Today you have seen the deeds. Today you have met Julian. Today you have been given a glass of something you did not drink, which is a Varna tradition, and which I will not explain. Tomorrow, if you are still here, and if you are still willing, I will take you down."

She looked at Maren, and her eyes were dark, and her mouth was a line that had been drawn with a ruler, and somewhere in the line there was the smallest suggestion of something that might, in a different light, in a different house, in a different life, have been called a plea.

"If you are still willing," she said again, quieter, and the lamp guttered once, and the shadows leaned in, and the map lay between them with its single word, and the word was waiting, and the cellar beneath the word was waiting, and Maren felt the waiting rise up through the floor and into the soles of her boots like a pulse.

A bell rang somewhere in the house, low and bronze, and Carmilla rose from her chair with the practiced grace of a woman who had answered bells for longer than most people had lived.

"Dinner," she said, as if the word itself were a verdict she had reached after careful deliberation. "In my private parlor. Not the dining room. The dining room is for guests and lawyers and people who want to be impressed. You have already seen the deeds. You do not need to be impressed."

Maren followed her through corridors that smelled of old wood and lamp oil, past portraits of Varnas whose eyes tracked them with the polite disapproval of the long dead, up a narrow staircase that creaked on the fourth and seventh steps as though it were keeping a private count.

Carmilla's private parlor was small, and warm, and nothing like the library. The walls were papered in a faded green that might once have been the color of new ferns and was now the color of memory. A fire burned in a small grate, and the mantel held a single photograph in a silver frame, turned slightly away from the room so that a casual visitor would see only the dark backing. A round table had been set for two with white linen and heavy silver and two candles in brass holders, and the candles threw a light that was kinder than the one in the library, a light that forgave the shadows instead of sharpening them.

"Sit," Carmilla said, and Maren sat, and a woman Maren had not seen before brought in a tray, and the woman set down bowls of soup that smelled of dill and smoked paprika and something deeper, something that lived in the earth, and the woman left without looking at either of them.

Carmilla lifted her spoon. She did not wait for Maren to begin. She ate the way she spoke, in small precise motions, and the only sound for a while was the clink of silver against porcelain and the soft complaint of the fire.

The soup was extraordinary. It tasted of forests, of cold streams, of a kitchen that had known this recipe for longer than Maren had been alive. Maren tried to name the spices and gave up, and ate, and felt the warmth of it settle into her chest, and thought that whatever the cellar held, whatever the word on the map meant, this was also part of the house, and the house was also part of the answer.

When the bowls were empty, Carmilla set down her spoon and folded her hands on the linen and looked at Maren with an expression that Maren could not read, an expression that seemed to be made of several expressions stacked one on top of the other, like sheets of old paper.

"You may ask me one question," Carmilla said. "Before the cellar. Before tomorrow. One question, and I will answer it truthfully, or I will tell you that I will not, and you will know which by the way I say it."

Maren considered the offer. She could ask about the creature, or the sigil, or the count, or the sealed rooms, or the photograph on the mantel that faced the wall. She could ask why Carmilla had sent for her, an orphan with no money and no standing and no particular claim to anything except a name her mother had whispered in a room that smelled of lilacs.

She asked the question she had been carrying since the first night, the question that had no practical use and no strategic value and no place in any proper accounting of the situation.

"Are you lonely?"

The fire popped. A log shifted in the grate, sending up a brief shower of sparks that rose and died and left the air smelling of resin. The candles did not flicker. The photograph on the mantel stayed turned away.

Carmilla did not move. Her hands stayed folded. Her shoulders stayed where they were. Her face stayed where it was. For one breath, then two, then three, she was stone, she was the Varna matriarch, she was the keeper of the ancestral secrets and the old debts, she was the woman who had looked at a map for a hundred and fifty years and never once looked away.

Then something in her gave way.

It was not a large giving way. It was not a collapse, or a confession, or a dramatic unburdening. It was a single hairline crack in a porcelain cup, a fracture so fine that you would miss it if you were not looking, and so deep that once you saw it you could not stop seeing it. Her mouth softened, by a degree. Her eyes, which had been dark and flat and polished, went suddenly liquid, and for one heartbeat, one single devastating heartbeat, Maren saw the woman underneath the matriarch, the woman who had outlived a daughter and a creature and a hundred and fifty winters and had sat in a green parlor eating soup alone and setting a place for a stranger because the stranger was the only person left who might understand.

"Yes," Carmilla said.

The word was so small it barely disturbed the air. It was the quietest word Maren had ever heard, and the heaviest.

"Yes," Carmilla said again, and her voice was not cold, and her voice was not measured, and her voice was the voice of a woman who had just set down a weight she had been carrying for so long she had forgotten that she was carrying it. "I am lonely. I have been lonely for longer than you can count, and I have been good at it, and I have made the loneliness into a room I can live in, and I have put a lock on the door, and I have thrown away the key, and I am telling you this because you asked, and because no one has asked me in a very long time, and because tomorrow I will take you into the cellar and you will see what I have kept, and I would like for there to be one person in the world who knew that I was lonely before they saw the thing that I am."

The crack in the cup closed. The porcelain was whole again. Carmilla's mouth became a line, her eyes became dark, her hands became steady. She reached for the bread and broke it, and the sound of the breaking was ordinary, and the smell of it was ordinary, and the parlor was ordinary, and the evening was a woman and a girl eating bread in a green room in a house that held a creature in its cellar, and the bread was warm, and the fire was warm, and the loneliness was still there, held carefully inside a room with a locked door.

"Eat," Carmilla said. "There is cheese. And there is a small cake that the cook makes when she is feeling optimistic, which is not often, so you should have some while you can."

Maren ate. The cheese was sharp and the cake was dense and faintly sweet and tasted of almonds and something she could not name, and they did not speak of loneliness again, and they did not speak of the cellar, and the conversation moved to small things, to the weather, to the garden, to the cook's temperament, to a book Carmilla had read three times and could not bring herself to read a fourth, and Maren listened and answered and watched the woman's hands, which were elegant and careful and never quite still, and thought that the hands of a lonely person were always in motion, reaching for something, placing something, adjusting the distance between themselves and the rest of the room.

When the cake was gone, Carmilla poured tea from a pot that had been warming on a side table, and the tea was dark and smelled of bergamot, and she handed Maren a cup with both hands, and the gesture was so formal and so tender that Maren felt her throat tighten.

"You may sleep in the blue room," Carmilla said. "The blue room is at the end of the east corridor. The bed is made. The window looks over the orchard. If you hear something in the night, and you will, do not investigate. The house makes sounds. The house has always made sounds. I will be in my room, and Julian will be in his, and the creature will be in the cellar, and we will all be where we are supposed to be."

She stood, and Maren stood, and they faced each other across the small table with the empty cake plate between them, and the fire was low, and the candles were low, and the photograph on the mantel was still turned away.

"Thank you for asking," Carmilla said. She did not say what she was thanking her for. She did not need to.

Maren climbed the narrow staircase, past the fourth step and the seventh, and found the blue room, and the bed was made, and the window looked over the orchard, and the orchard was silver in the moonlight, and she lay down with her boots still on because she did not trust the house enough to take them off, and she listened to the sounds the house made, which were the sounds of an old building settling into its bones, and somewhere beneath the sounds, very far down, she heard the cellar door exhale, and she closed her eyes, and she did not investigate.

In her own room, at the end of the west corridor, Carmilla Varna sat before her mirror and removed the pins from her hair, one by one, and set them in a line on the vanity, and the line was very straight, and her hands were very steady, and in the mirror she watched her own face, and the face watched her back, and between them was the same woman, and the woman was lonely, and the woman was the matriarch, and the woman had set a place at her table for an orphan girl and had been asked a question she had not been asked in a hundred years, and the answer was still in the room, small and heavy, sitting on the linen like a fallen crumb.

She turned the photograph on her mantel so that it faced the room. The woman in the photograph had dark eyes and a mouth that was almost a smile. Carmilla looked at her for a long time, and then she blew out the candle, and the room went dark, and the house went on, and the cellar held its breath, and the night came down over the Varna estate like a hand closing gently over a flame, and somewhere in the orchard an owl called once and did not call again, and the blue room held Maren, and the green room held Carmilla, and the cellar held the word, and the word waited, and the morning would come, and the morning would bring the stairs, and the stairs would bring the heir down into the place where the family kept its oldest promise.