Chapter Text
Her need for books predates her need for blood.
She suffers years of clumsily sneaking around her mother’s harsh patrols of the library doors before her steps become sure and silent as the night she now prowls. She risks days of suffocation clutching a sputtering candle in the servant quarters cupboard while her teachers search for her on the landings above before she gives up the need for both breathing and light. She learns to sew, not to gain the long absent approval of her mother, but to create a pocket in her petticoats just big enough to carry with her a secret, extraordinary world as she trudges through her ordinary one before her own life becomes a thing of stories.
She’s indiscriminate, falling into each story like falling in love. It’s love for the sake of love – splendid, merciless, and enflaming, until she loses sight of the world around her and gives herself over to the words.
She sails with the Greeks to the walls of Troy, and feels the walls around her shake with the feet of a thousand marching soldiers as she shakes with emotion at Achilles’s grief and Priam’s pleas. She struggles through Measure for Measure. Her English is mediocre, at best, but the poignant verses ignite a thirst in her for more, and she trades skipping English lessons for skipping sleep until the dreams she does have are sprinkled with Shakespearean phrases and thoughts of London’s Globe Theater. She waltzes along with Simplicius and Herr Peter Squenz and Don Quixote through their comical, dangerous adventures across continents, and longs to see the sea and meet the mermen of legend, or join an acting troupe and play the part of Thisbe, or to fight her own windmills on the Dutch coast.
She is shaped by her books. She doesn’t need a list of rights and wrongs, a table of dos and don’ts: she needs books, time, and silence, in a life that is too loud, moves too fast, and demands too much.
When her mother turns a cold shoulder and scoffs at her dreams, she learns to keep them to herself, and returns to the refuge she’s built for herself in the library – or, at times that she’s learned to cherish in their slowly diminishing frequency, to her father’s arms. He welcomes her presence, night or day, rain or shine, and the smile he gives her when she shyly offers the book hidden behind her back becomes as comforting and heartening as his warm and deep voice when he lets her cuddle into him and he reads to her.
The reading sessions become rarer as she gets older, not by either of their own wills, but by her mother’s disapproving admonishments and snide suggestions of indecency that the servants will surely rumor about. Her father turns her away with sad eyes and she learns not to ask anymore. It isn’t until she’s older that she understands why, and she starts to hate her mother with a quiet kind of resentment strengthened by every day that her body changes and her mother increases her rigid control over who she sees and who she’s alone with.
Still, even years later, her father is the only one who doesn’t purse his lips when he comes across her huddled into an alcove of her room with a small volume on her lap, but smiles indulgently and sits down next to her.
“Don’t let your mother see how you’re crinkling your dress, Mircalla.”
She smiles and nods absentmindedly, and turns another page of Sappho’s poems. She read it a few years ago when she was learning Greek, but her teachers had only selected the dry verses about age and wisdom and nature, and skimmed over the rest with a stern That’s not for little girls, Lady Karnstein.
Well, she isn’t little anymore. At eighteen, her parents have already begun the search for her future husband, and she thinks it’s about time she learned a little more of love.
“What are you reading, darling?”
“Sappho’s poems. The ones about love.”
His smile widens. “Ah, ‘that loosener of limbs, that bittersweet creature against which nothing can be done.’” She frowns curiously. “You’ll get to that part. Where are you now?”
“Hymn to Aphrodite.”
“Mmhmm,” he hums thoughtfully, reading over her shoulder.
She traces the beautiful words with her fingers. “Will someone someday think and speak of me as Sappho does of Aphrodite?” she asks, her voice trembling with reverence.
He laughs, a deep rumbling sound she could never get enough of. “No, my darling. Sappho is a woman.”
The world pivots.
“Oh.”
He places a kiss on her forehead. “But someday your husband will love you as much as I do.” She holds his gaze, and he tilts his head fondly. “And hopefully be as lenient as I am when it comes to taking books from their proper place…”
Her fingers tighten on the cover and she cringes guiltily. “I’m sorry, Papa.”
He stands to leave and winks down at her. “Just don’t let your mother catch you.”
The candle sputters at the gust of air as he leaves the room. She reads the verse again, and her heart flutters faster than the dancing shadows that the crackling candle sends across the page. She reads until the candle dies, and then she traces the words with her fingers and stares into the dark with wide, open eyes that barely sleep a wink when her handmaiden finally pries the book from her fingers.
The next morning, she shuffles silently to the library, book in hand, ready to set it back on its shelf. But by the time she gets to the right place, she feels wrong. She throws a skittish glance over her shoulder at the world that’s tilted on its axis, knowing that though the ground may suddenly feel askew, the path she has to walk has not changed – and she feels utterly unprepared. Her fingers tighten on the book and she takes a cautious step back.
“Ah, Mircalla, there you are.”
She jumps in surprise, already fickle heart shooting into her throat like she’s been caught doing something wrong – thinking, doubting. She supposes she has.
She quickly hides the book behind her back.
“Good morning, mother.”
Duchess Karnstein looks down on her sternly. They’re the same height by now – same build, same complexion – but it’ll never take away from how looking down seems to be the only way her mother will ever look at her.
“Back to reading, are we?”
Carmilla doesn’t miss the way her lip pulls back in subtle distaste, and her own lips twitch in irritation. She simply nods. She’s learned acquiescing is the most prudent – if least satisfying – course of action.
“The tailor will arrive this afternoon. Do not make him wait, do you understand?”
She agrees with a dutiful Yes, mother, and tries to remember she loves balls – the perfumed halls, the flashes of color and smiles, the warmth and quiet rebellion of being pulled against a strong man’s chest as he leads her in a waltz. But when her mother turns on her heel and leaves her in the usually comforting solitude of the library, her thoughts don’t linger on expectations and hopes for next week, but on the secret words still hidden behind her back.
The small book presses against her leg through the pocket beneath her petticoat and feels more like a treasure than her mother-approved tightly-corseted and broadly-necklined dress that the guests gaze at with envious eyes at the ball the next week. She remembers the book’s words as her dance card fills with strangers’ names and feels the weight of it as she waltzes with potential suitors. She barely registers the scandal of the waltz.
The book feels like a betrayal – the comfort and knowledge that it promised replaced by a spooked kind of uncertainty she can barely name. It broke shackles she didn’t know she had, and opened her eyes to the existence of a dozen more. Her sudden freedom is worse than her blissful ignorance, and she pulls pulls pulls against the chains until she escapes outside with gently begged leave and sweetly uttered excuses. She finds herself alone in the sprawling gardens of the estate, free from the pressure of who she’s expected to be, who her mother expects her to be, that’s stifling to the point she thinks it may kill her.
Solitude and books – even under the cover of darkness – are all she needs.
Later, when gruff, jealous hands muffle her screams for help and the knife to her throat cuts deep, she knows she was right. Her beauty, her charm, her singing – the things her mother valued – are the things that kill her in the end. She also knows – the last thing that crosses her mind as she chokes on her own blood while her father’s searching shouts of her name sound in the distance – that the lifeless book she reached for with shaking, chilled hands will be what the world will think was her downfall.
Slowly, her fingers loosen.