- This is the only short fable in the novella, Murder Most Monstrous, unlike my prior novel North of Autumn which is filled with fables. The story relates how Jehanna, a woman who lived in medieval Normandy, willingly gave herself over to the Drakul Torqué.
She said that before she was a vampire, she was a young woman living in medieval Normandy. She said that though her father worked hard, they remained poor. But she dreamed of love that could see beyond her poverty, her imperfect beauty, the humility of her dreams, but always those with greater wealth and beauty went before her.
And then one evening the Drakul Torqué, who was a terrifying and dark figure haunting the villages and towns in those years, visited her. Beauty is eternal, he said, but love is fleeting. When she drove him away, the Drakul was scornful but gave her a rare and expensive gift, a tallow candle in a golden candlestick holder. The candlestick was in the shape of a beautiful woman, just as she imagined herself, and who held the candle on her shoulder. The carved figure seemed to gaze longingly at the candle.
‘Why does she gaze at the candle like that?’ she asked.
‘She is you, my dear,’ said the Drakul, ‘and she gazes at love.’
She hid the candle from her father and mother. They would have told her to fear the candle. ‘A vampire gives no gifts,’ they would have said. She decided she would light the candle, and when the candle had burned to nothing, she would trade the golden candlestick holder and escape poverty and her family.
The light of the candle was the most beautiful she had ever seen.
But she couldn’t let it burn lest her father and siblings discovered it. She tried to blow it out, but it relit itself the moment her breath ran out. She tried to snuff the candle but the flame continued to burn. She hid the flame in one hand and tried to hide it with her shawl. She ran out of the house, into the woods, always with a backwards glance, fearing to be seen or followed.
And then to her horror she saw that as the candle burned down, the candlestick was changing, it’s gold was tarnishing, changing to silver. She tried to break the candle from the candlestick but only caught the fringes of her shawl on fire. She ran to the river, under a bridge, and held the candle beneath the water, but still it burned. The candlestick holder had turned to copper.
‘No, no, no!’ she cried.
She tried everything she could, but the flame burned until the candle was gone. The flame went out and the gold turned to lead. Jehanne screamed with rage and threw the candlestick into the river, then she heard laughter. The Drakul Torqué stepped out from under the bridge’s shadows.
‘Why do you cry?’ he asked.
‘Because the gold is gone!’ Jehanne answered.
‘Is it?’ he asked. ‘And here I thought it was love you desired!’
‘It is!’
‘And yet,’ said Torqué, ‘at every opportunity you tried to put love out, to snuff it, to drown it in the river. You even tried to break the flames of love from the candlestick—the candlestick in your own image!—and all for the sake of gold!’
‘What do you want?’ said Jehanne.
‘Only to give you what you truly want,’ said Torque, lifting her chin. ‘And we both know what that is; and what it is not. Did you not, yourself, see what happened as the candle’s life was spent? As the candlestick’s beauty waned, so did the wick of love. It is ever so for mortal men and women. Love is a fickle affectation that vanishes with youth. Who loves the old, the weak, the imperfect? Why cling to an affectation when you could have eternal youth, strength and perfection?’
upinVermont | May 14th 2023
