A Dance in Blood Velvet by Freda Warrington Read Free Book Online Page A

be mere food. Never.
    Charlotte remembered John Milner with mixed feelings.
    Leaning close to Karl, she said, “I ought to feel guilty.”
    “Why?”
    “It was that man, Milner, who suggested we see Ballet Janacek.”
    Karl’s eyebrows lifted. “You are not still thinking about him, are you?”
    “I’m only concerned that he might not forget. He could still return to David and tell him... something. Or if he doesn’t go back, David may think the worst. Will he send someone else? Must we vanish from human eyes completely?”
    “No,” Karl answered firmly. “No one has the power to make us live as fugitives, not even the people we loved. The human world can’t touch us.”
    He was right, and he was wrong, but it didn’t matter. Calmness flowed into her from his amber eyes, and for the thousandth time his beauty struck her as if she’d never seen him before. Red and honey lights in his hair; rain beating against a window in another time, while the touch of his fingers soothed her into believing that her fall from grace would be divine.
    “I know,” she said. “But I don’t want David to keep torturing himself.”
    “Then write to him yourself,” said Karl.
    “What’s the point?” Charlotte said, resigned. “As you once told me, it’s not fair to hope they’ll forgive me. What we did can never be forgiven.”
    “No,” he said. “It can’t.”
    His fingers were twined with hers, and the murmur of the audience electrified her. At this moment she was so blissfully happy that she could forget what she was, forget the thirst. She was no longer outside the crystal world she’d first glimpsed in Karl’s eyes; she was inside, wrapped in velvet and golden light.
    “What are you thinking?” he asked.
    “That I’m perfectly happy.”
    He smiled. “And so am I, beloved,” he said, kissing her hand. “These moments are worth any pain. They are what we live for.”
    He spoke her thoughts.
    As the house lights dimmed, suspending them in crimson darkness, Karl looked at the programme. It was easy to forget that their ability to read in the dark looked strange to humans. “A small company, based in Salzburg,” he said softly, “with dancers from all over Europe. Director and choreographer, Roman Janacek. The prima ballerina, Violette Lenoir, comes from Anna Pavlova’s school in England. The critics are calling her the ‘new Pavlova’.”
    “Well, they would,” said Charlotte. “They always make such claims.”
    “And they’re always wrong,” said Karl.
    As he spoke, Charlotte experienced a flash of anxiety. She was too new a vampire to have left her insecurity behind. What if Karl is captivated by another mortal, as he once was by me? One of the dancers we’re about to see. What would I do?
    Music was flowing around them, the curtains sweeping open onto a faked yet vividly real otherworld. Charlotte relaxed and let the story take her.
    And found herself completely unprepared for her reaction.
    She was spellbound. This Giselle was the most moving interpretation she’d ever seen. Janacek took liberties, imbuing the traditional choreography with breathtakingly fluid emotion. His risks paid off; the result was timeless, ethereal, raw.
    Pain threaded through every joy; Giselle’s fragile happiness, then her collapse into grief as her lover deceived and betrayed her. Every nuance seemed to have deeper significance that struck right to Charlotte’s soul. And the heart of the enchantment was Giselle herself.
    Violette Lenoir’s dancing was transcendent. As she moved from innocence into passion, despair and death, Charlotte travelled with her. When Giselle died, Charlotte wept.
    At the interval, it was all Charlotte could do force herself back to reality.
    Karl smiled at her and said, “I wonder why it is so delicious to be made unhappy?”
    In the second act, through darkness and moon-white mists, Giselle came back from the tomb.
    Luminous in white and silver, she rose and whirled across the sweep