The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice Read Free Book Online Page B

her nose and lips, were beautiful to look at. Then she looked back at me and in the same steady voice without undue emotion she said:
    “I’ll never leave here. I am dying now.”
    I was stunned. The little shock before was nothing to this.
    “I’ll live through this spring,” she continued, “and possibly the summer as well. But I won’t survive another winter. I know. The pain in my lungs is too bad.”
    I made some little anguished sound. I think I leaned forward and said, “Mother!”
    “Don’t say any more,” she answered.
    I think she hated to be called mother, but I hadn’t been able to help it.
    “I just wanted to speak it to another soul,” she said. “To hear it out loud. I’m perfectly horrified by it. I’m afraid of it.”
    I wanted to take her hands, but I knew she’d never allow it. She disliked to be touched. She never put her arms around anyone. And so it was in our glances that we held each other. My eyes filled with tears looking at her.
    She patted my hand.
    “Don’t think on it much,” she said. “I don’t. Just only now and then. But you must be ready to live on without me when the time comes. That may be harder for you than you realize.”
    I tried to say something; I couldn’t make the words come.
    She left me just as she’d come in, silently.
    And though she’d never said anything about my clothes or my beard or how dreadful I looked, she sent the servants in with clean clothes for me, and the razor and warm water, and silently I let myself be taken care of by them.

3
    I BEGAN to feel a little stronger. I stopped thinking about what happened with the wolves and I thought about her. I thought about the words “perfectly horrified,” and I didn’t know what to make of them except they sounded exactly true. I’d feel that way if I were dying slowly. It would have been better on the mountain with the wolves.
    But there was more to it than that. She had always been silently unhappy. She hated the inertia and the hopelessness of our life here as much as I did. And now, after eight children, three living, five dead, she was dying. This was the end for her.
    I determined to get up if it would make her feel better, but when I tried I couldn’t. The thought of her dying was unbearable. I paced the floor of my room a lot, ate the food brought to me, but still I wouldn’t go to her.
    But by the end of the month, visitors came to draw me out.
    My mother came in and said I must receive the merchants from the village who wanted to honor me for killing the wolves.
    “Oh, hell with it,” I answered.
    “No, you must come down,” she said. “They have gifts for you. Now do your duty.” I hated all this.
    When I reached the hall, I found the rich shopkeepers there, all men I knew well, and all dressed for the occasion.
    But there was one startling young man among them I didn’t recognize immediately.
    He was my age perhaps, and quite tall, and when our eyes met I remembered who he was. Nicolas de Lenfent, eldest son of the draper, who had been sent to school in Paris.
    He was a vision now.
    Dressed in a splendid brocade coat of rose and gold, he wore slippers with gold heels, and layers of Italian lace at his collar. Only his hair was what it used to be, dark and very curly, and boyish looking for some reason though it was tied back with a fine bit of silk ribbon.
    Parisian fashion, all this—the sort that passed as fast as it could through the local post house.
    And here I was to meet him in threadbare wool and scuffed leather boots and yellowed lace that had been seventeen times mended.
    We bowed to each other, as he was apparently the spokesman for the town, and then he unwrapped from its modest covering of black serge a great red velvet cloak lined in fur. Gorgeous thing. His eyes were positively shining when he looked at me. You would have thought he was looking at a sovereign.
    “Monsieur, we beg you to accept this,” he said very sincerely. “The finest fur of the wolves