Our Blissful Bayou Beginnings Read online

Chapter Four

  The funeral, held in our parlor, was a pitiful affair. Had she still been dead the lack of attendees would have been heartbreaking for me. Only our servants and some of her friends from church attended. I sat near the front, only half-listening to the coffee-colored preacher as I was too concerned with our most recent problem. Her flesh was still warm. She laid in the coffin motionlessly, listening to her own eulogy. Lucky for us people tend to have an aversion to staring at corpses for too long, otherwise they may have detected the slight rise and fall of her lovely chest. But as the funeral progressed my worry over her skin temperature increased. How would I explain that should someone feel the need to kiss her or some such? I hadn’t even thought of it until the service began.

  Even if I had thought of it there wasn’t much I could do, I figured. If our rouse was discovered we would have to simply flee, right then and there. What would people think? My head swam with these thoughts and ones like them. Perhaps it was unusual that I appeared outwardly much more anxious then aggrieved, but I was in the front and no one could see me except the preacher, and he had probably seen the whole gamut of emotions in such circumstances.

  Towards the end of the service an idea came to me. It no longer matter what people thought. We would soon be gone, we would abscond into the ages, disappear into a dizzying maelstrom of metropolises and a linear progression of rural abodes. No longer did it matter what people believed me to be, for none of them would live long enough for it to be of any consequence for me. Empires would fade, dynasties would fall, the world would change into something I could never have imagined; so I reckoned that what I did that day would be of upmost unimportance.

  As soon as the preacher had completed his amens and blessings I rose up and snapped the lid of the coffin closed. I sensed rather than heard Ma Bichette’s surprise at this unscripted turn of events. The noise of it echoed through the house. I turned to the assembled mourners. All eyes were upon me.

  Public speaking had never been a phobia of mine, in fact I enjoyed the attention. Even then, in such unusual circumstances, I knew I had their attention and the part of me that so direly sought attention could not let it go to waste.

  “It is not likely,” I said after a moment of thought collection, “that I could ever find another women so lovely. I do not refer to her physical perfection, something that can be found many times over, but instead to her temperament and character.” Clearly I withheld all truly tender sentiments for our intimate moments. I have heard people emote more over a merely satisfactory steed.

  The preacher nodded solemnly in agreement and I turned back to the coffin. I was not exactly at a loss of words, but the words that occurred to me when I considered that save for a quirk of fate, Ma Bichette really would have had been lost to me, were not exactly the sort of thing I felt comfortable sharing at the time. I ran my fingers over the mahogany coffin, the alternate timeline wherein she was actually dead encroaching on me. Had I not dealt with Alava this would not have been a charade, but instead a terrible reality.

  “She was so abruptly ripped from this world,” I continued, and I was slightly embarrassed to have a waver in my voice. The infringing shadow of her all too real actual death started to suffocate me. It was challenging to remember that I had been spared the naked pain and inside that solid box she was probably rolling her eyes at my faux eulogy. I wanted to end this, to get everyone out, to open it up and feel her inconveniently warm skin again.

  I fell into silence and remained motionless, hoping that people would get the hint and begin to respectfully file out. I raised my eyes from the coffin and stared out the window. We lived on a somewhat busy street and as the mourners filed out into the foyer I watched the blissfully mortal inhabitants of New Orleans walk or ride past my house. Our plan was to dismiss the servants for the rest of the day, replace the weight of her body with bricks that we had collected last night, and then send the coffin on it’s way to be entombed in a local cemetery. Then we would wait until nightfall, descend upon Monsieur Honore, then the next morning I would withdraw all the cash from both our account and be on our way to Florida, which was still under Spanish control, and lie low there for a while and plan our next move.

  One person left, then another, until only the preacher remained in the room.

  “I had known her for some years,” he said to me while I stared out the window.

  “Did you?” I was too distracted by his mere presence to be interested. Ma Bichette had made me promise to get her out of the coffin as soon as possible and I could rightly empathize with her for it must have been terribly claustrophobic in there.

  The preacher began to tell me about what a wonderful person she was and so forth, but I saw something outside the window that caused me to gasp. At first I was certain I imagined it, but at second glance I felt my stomach drop out. At this latest twist I shook my head.

  “What is he doing here?” I said aloud, cutting off the preacher.

  “Pardon?”

  I turned from the window and swiftly exited the parlor. I felt no animosity for my father in the least, but I did not exactly feel warmth or affection for him either. Simply put, we were two different people. While he did not hold me in contempt, at least not openly, for my lack of enthusiasm for the life of a planter, he did not embrace with vigor my choice of career either. He was a boisterous, generous man, as opposed to my guarded and sentimental nature, and while we didn’t exactly clash neither did we see eye to eye.

  He had never met Ma Bichette, obviously, but as I stepped out on the front porch I realized belatedly that word of my dash into madness must have reached him. The stable boy took the reins from him as my father gracefully dismounted his brown gelded Morgan. He strode up the porch to where I stood, silently trying to gauge his mood. While I could push aside the preacher and the servants and the police force I would not be able to do so with my father.

  “Now, mon vieux, you don’t look as bad as everyone is saying you are!” Father said to me as he climbed the steps.

  I wondered how exactly I looked. It certainly was not carefree. “What are people saying?”

  Father put his arm around my shoulders. He was a good head taller than I am. I am not a short man either, mind you. “Now, don’t concern yourself with rumors.”

  I turned and walked back into the house. Father would not have made the several hour journey by horseback just for a quick hello. No doubt he saw it as his duty to comfort me in his own way. He intended on staying at least for supper and by that time I intended to be on the road with Ma Bichette. Before I could think of what to say to possibly dissuade him from his intentions, he caught sight of the closed casket. The preacher was no where to be seen.

  “Ah, so that was true,” he said in a much more gentle tone than he had been using. “I am sorry.”

  I was sick to death of hearing that. That people were sorry that the love of my life was dead. Just sorry, nothing else. But I don’t suppose there is anything they could have said that would have given me any sort of genuine relief anyway. “She is dead, yes,” I said. My voice sounded hollow, mostly because I was extremely weary of this charade. I could only imagine how weary Ma Bichette was of being a corpse.

  There was a few moments of silence. I guessed that Father was debating on whether or not to ask me if I had indeed rode around with her body in my saddle, since the first part of the rumor was indeed true. He decided to approach it in a roundabout way. “That bay of yours, the Narragansett, she can gait a great distance without tiring, correct?”

  I plopped down into the settee in the parlor. “That is the selling point of them.”

  Bess appeared from nowhere. “Shall I bring anything?”

  “Yes, coffee,” Father imperiously ordered.

  Bess turned to go. “Claret as well,” I said in a forceful way that I hoped echoed the authority of Father. It was a far too early to start drinking, only around one in the afternoon, but if there had ever been a situation in my life that I needed
the cradling touch of alcohol this was it.

  Father sat across from me. He eyed the coffin and we sat in silence. I stared at the clock. After Bess brought us our refreshments Father spoke up. “When your mother was dying, she made me promise to remarry,’’ he said. His tone was casual, as if this was something we had discussed before as opposed to the first time I’d ever heard him mention my mother. “She did not think it fair that you and your sister grow up without a mother of some kind.”

  Despite the stress I was under my curiosity was piqued. Somewhere in the back of my mind I realized that this would probably be the last time I would see Father. “But you never did.” I took a long sip of wine.

  “No.” Father stirred in a spoon of sugar. “Do you understand why now?”

  I blinked several times. “No one could ever take her place.”

  “Precisely.” He sighed. “I am not ashamed of what you did. It’s all over the plantation, that young master has taken leave of himself, young master has been possessed, young master has killed himself out of grief. That last rumor I thought I should investigate further.”

  “Obviously it isn’t true.” Obviously that was a lie. I flicked my eyes towards the coffin. “I am feeling much better now.”

  “You don’t need to lie for my sake.”

  I finished the rest of my wine in one swallow. “You want to hear the truth? Fine.” I poured another glass, twice as much as Bess had allotted me. “It’s awful. I feel awful. I wish I had died, not her.”

  “It will get better.”

  I could see Ma Bichette’s face, screwed up with impatience and frustration, as she listened to Father and me talk. That was never a good mood to have her in. “What was Mother like?” At least I could demonstrate to her that I was using my time wisely.

  The memory that the question brought up caused noticeable wistful pain in the corners of his eyes. “Very much like you. A soft-hearted intellectual idealist.”

  I frowned. “Oh.”

  “No, I didn’t mean that as an insult.” Father sighed deeply. “She was a wonderful woman.”

  “Papa, I wish the world was a different place. I wish that I hadn’t have had to hide our love. I wanted to marry her, not Louisa,” I said, suddenly overwhelmed with having had to have hide all my feelings as well as everything else. I started to feel a tinge of sadness over the necessity of severing all ties with family. Only then had I begun to really know who Father was.

  “I am sorry, but that is the way things are. They are that way for a reason.” He stood up as well.

  Trying to tell him that the only reason things were that way was just only because the world was, and is, a terribly unjust place was an argument that we had many times before. I was not about to have it again. Instead I just chugged my claret.

  “May I see her?”

  “No.” I felt an explanation was not required. After all, young master had lost his mind.

  “You should not be alone at this time,” Father said, almost to himself. “Do you have any idea of who did it?”

  “What does that matter? She’s dead.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “No, I do not know who did it.”

  Father shook his head slowly. “You may have educated yourself into quite a slippery little eel, but I can still tell when you are outright lying.”

  I felt my face glow warm.

  Father lowered his voice so that the servants would not overhear. “Have you got something planned?”

  “No, no, of course not. You know me, what would I ever do about it, hmm?”

  “Listen,” Father continued, eyeing me with suspicion, “it is not worth it. Think about her. Is this what she would want you to do?”

  Yes, this is exactly what she wanted me to do. She had come up with a good chunk of the plan. “Father, you know me, you know that would not-”

  He interrupted me, his voice slow yet firm. “I know that you are an emotional little gosse. When I heard that you had gone galloping into the bayou with her corpse, oh, I believed it. I am quite happy to see that you had not killed yourself, for I believed that too. And I believe that you would feel obliged to finish this yourself, should you know who is responsible.”

  “I have faith in the legal system,” I said after a moment. “He’d hang.”

  “You know that it is a he?”

  I avoided Father’s stare. “It is a guess.”

  Father sighed again. “You are the only family I have left in these parts. I know that we are not of the same mind, but it would pain me greatly if something happened to you.” He took a cigar case from his breast pocket. “You will hate hearing it now, and believe me, I understand, but you need to move on. Do not make this your defining characteristic. Do not become me.”

  Oh, how I wish that he had delivered that sound advice sooner and even more do I wish that I had not been too much of a fool to take it. I wanted to tell him what had happened, I wanted to admit what I had done, to let him know that there was such things as witches and afterlives and horrible little cat monsters. That he was right, that I had killed myself and that I was planning to take my own revenge. I always have had this need to come clean, to be punished for what I have done. That is why I am writing this now. My full fledged confession, of all the sins I have committed, laid out for your reading pleasure, for you to either believe or dismiss at your leisure. Of course, you will not believe me. That’s the earthly punishment for me, that I have lived and continue to live this incredible life, that maybe because I have seen so much of history first hand that my opinions matter more than the average persons’, that I could be of great use to the world-but no one will believe me.

  The hours passed at a snail’s pace for me. Father would not leave me alone for more than a moment. Apparently he believed that the best remedy for my current sorrow was a second shadow. Finally around dark he excused himself to retire to bed. Thankfully years of being a planter had him accustomed to awaking before dawn and he simply could not stay awake past nine in the evening.

  As soon as he had ascended the stairs I scampered into the parlor and pulled the drapes shut and cracked the coffin open. “Oh, Ma Bichette, I am sorry, I could not get rid of him.”

  She stared at me, wordless rage boiling in her eyes. “You! Could! Not?” she hissed at me.

  The house was silent, save for the shuffling footsteps of Father above us on the second floor. I had dismissed the servants that afternoon and they were off visiting. I pulled the lid of the coffin open and scooped her up in my arms and lifted her out. “No,” I whispered. “He is a forceful man.”

  “You are undead!” she said to me, a bit more loudly than I would have liked. “You must learn to be more assertive, otherwise this is not going to work out, is it?” That is still her favorite flaw of mine to pick at, that I am not assertive enough. Fortunately or not, however, she is for the both of us.

  “Hush,” I ordered and set her down. Quickly we piled the bricks we had secreted away in a cabinet into the coffin. I kept a lookout on the stair, lest Father return, as Ma Bichette quickly changed out of her burying costume and back into her pink dressing gown.

  Apparently just being out of the coffin was enough to put her back in a good mood. “I’m just starving, do you suppose there is anything to eat in the kitchen.”

  “I will have to check.” I went to the kitchen and hunted up some bread and jam.

  “It looks like I will have to become a proper little housewife,” Ma Bichette said lightly as she began to eat. We had agreed that having servants in the future would only serve to complicate matters. It was an agreement we would break, but at the time it seemed like an easy enough commitment.

  An image of her kneading bread came to me. At the mere idea of it I smiled. The promise of a cozy little home on the frontier where no one cared who we are was my new goal. However, the image was soon shattered because next to the freshly baked bread there was a raw human heart.

  The despair vis
ibly washed over me. She noticed and stopped eating. “Ah, mon canard, don’t be like that,” she said and embraced me. “I was thinking in there today, that nothing we can do to change things, so we may as well enjoy ourselves, monsters or not.”

  That was a suspiciously upbeat thing to say. But Ma Bichette is a very different person than myself in many ways. “I suppose,” I mumbled and she stood on her tiptoes and kissed me on my cheek. I do not know if I had mentioned it before, but she is a rather short woman. Alava would have to have quite a few alternations done on the gowns.

  We waited until one am or so, then stole out into the night. One thing that you could not really understand is the level of darkness that existed, even in a good sized city, before the introduction of electricity or even gas lamps. At this late hour the city was cast into an inky darkness. Since it was the new moon only the stars glowed in the sky and most buildings were dark, save for the occasional yellow gleam from a window. The streets were fairly deserted, but just to be safe Ma Bichette wore a bonnet and tailed behind me so it wouldn’t be obvious we were together.

  She followed me to the Honore household. Not a smudge of light came from any of the windows and I relaxed somewhat. I stood across the street from the house and felt Ma Bichette touch me from behind. “Ready?”

  I was not going to get more ready, at least. “Yes.” With some degree of difficulty we managed to scale a large elm tree that grew along side the house, and with what we hoped was stealth stepped onto the roof. Knowing that underneath our feet slept Louisa, her parents, and her spinster sister Josephine, we trod as lightly as possible.

  All the windows were tightly sealed, save for the hallway window, which was slightly ajar in order to air out the home. Since I was supposed to be at my own home we decided I could not risk being seen. So from that point forward the scheme was completely in Ma Bichette’s hands, at least until the time to tear out Monsieur’s Honore’s heart came. I insisted on doing that myself. As I watched her hang off of the eave and gently pry the window open the bloodlust bubbled up in me again. I pressed my lips together and commanded myself to be patient.

  Posing as a ghost, Ma Bichette would, either through words or bodily force, command Madame Honore to leave the room while she exacted her due vengeance. Then she would lock the bedroom door (we had discovered that our enchanted hands worked both ways), open the window, at which point I would enter and then use the dagger I had under my coat to tear out his heart.

  Ma Bichette wanted him to die in terror, as she had, and she desired to look into his eyes as it happened. Obviously, it retrospect, it was not the best plan. Later, once we had honed our hunting skills, we would mirthfully reminisce on the stupidity of our amateurish first few hunts, but at the time our nerves were tightly drawn, or at least mine was.

  A rider galloped by. I knew that we were very likely to draw attention and was scoping out the alleyways from the roof top when I heard a muffled scream from below me. A moment later a window was ripped open.

  I hastened to the sound and was about to drop down when I heard Ma Bichette. “And, let no one disturb my revenge!” That was a phrase we had worked out, lest something go wrong. I held back.

  “You! You!” yelled a voice I recognized as Louisa. “Were you not enough of a problem to me alive? Must you still plague me? And my poor father? Oh, Papa!”

  “Get out of here!” Ma Bichette growled at Louisa. She had quite an aptitude for theatrics and was speaking in a gravely, ghostly meter. “I only want the life of my killer!”

  “Spirit, I demand that you leave in the name of Christ!”

  “No, you leave!” Ma Bichette spat at her. I caught a rise of panic in her voice.

  I heard a male voice moan, then pounding on the door.

  “You are no spirit! You are flesh” Louisa said, then I heard a clatter of metal and a gasp from Ma Bichette.

  “Demon! Demon! Unholy beast!” Louisa screamed at the top of her voice. The pounding on the door grew frenzied. “Spare me! Spare me! I beg your forgiveness!”

  Ma Bichette clearly had figured it out by this point. “Did you think I would not discover that you had done it? Did you think that the grave could stop me from letting your sins known?”

  I never would have guessed that mousy, shy, pious Louisa had killed Ma Bichette. For someone who clothed themselves in the shroud of piety, forgiveness, and love she certainly had no reservations about killing a woman, someone who’s only crime was that I loved her more. I was rather naïve then, more than happy to take people at face value. Since I was a lawyer I was aware that such things happened, although this was my first real encounter with duplicity in my personal life. I was too shocked to move. Dumbly, I listened to the drama unfolding beneath me.

  Ma Bichette was a bit quicker on the uptake than I was. “Confess it! Confess to Rémi what happened!” Why she was saying this I hadn’t a clue. Oh, I should have mentioned before that my name is Rémi, although I could not fathom why in the hell Ma Bichette wanted Louisa to tell me this later since I was obviously listening now. The simplicity of our murder plot had been twisted and mangled and I no longer had control over the situation. “Do this and I will spare you!”

  “Yes, yes, I will,” Louisa agreed.

  “Leave!” Ma Bichette ordered, her imperious tone squelching her scary voice. “Leave this house!”

  A thundering of footsteps later I heard Louisa shout- “The door, you have sealed it with your evil magic! Release me!”

  “I think it would be easier to kill you!” Ma Bichette hurled at her. The rage in her voice was remarkable, I had never heard anything like it from her. “You stole my life from me!”

  Louisa plead. “Everything would just be easier if you were dead!” At that lame excuse I was prodded out of my shocked state. Louisa’s selfishness sickened me. It was one thing to be disgusted with your fiancé’s mistress, it was quite another to decide that her life was something you could take just because you wanted the problem gone.

  “That is not the truth and you know it!” Ma Bichette has an intuitive grip of when people were being deceitful. “You must reveal all, before me and the Lord, Louisa, or you will never be forgiven!” She is also a master manipulator.

  “Please! Please! Release this door!” Louisa yelled over the faint and frantic cries of Josephine in the hallway.

  “All of it!” Ma Bichette demanded. “Confess! Be forgiven!”

  “You had bewitched Rémi, you! A filthy whore and an unworthy negress! You would never let him marry me! Father told me that Rémi had finally told him that he would not marry me, that he would rather live his life in sin with you! The shame of it! To be rejected in favor of a whore!”

  “Call me a whore again and I will run this blade through you!” Ma Bichette’s anger was at a boiling point.

  “Forgive me!”

  “Keep talking!”

  “The night before I snuck into your house and poisoned your eau de toilette. But it didn’t work the way it should have, it wasn’t enough or something. I had my maid enquire your cook about your health when they were at the market together. You were only ill, and it was supposed to kill you immediately. I was not going to try that again, I knew I must be more direct. I disguised myself as a boy and I snuck in into your house. It was easy, you were weak, it was dark in your room.” Louisa said all of this very quickly.

  My imagining of her murder was rapidly altered. Instead of a massive man looming over her instead I saw Louisa’s figure, not too much larger then Ma Bichette’s slender frame, effortlessly choking her with one hand and holding a towel against her face with the other. I tried to come to grips with Louisa’s claim to love me and then her actions which ultimately have caused me so much pain. I never gave the pain I bestowed to Louisa much thought, granted, but what I did was nothing compared to what she had done to me.

  Now, with the benefit of centuries of consideration, I know realize that all of this heartache and damnation was caused because I was too much of a co
ward to tell Louisa it was over. All of this was over me, a foolish and spoiled young man who preferred to while away his existence hiding with his mistress than to man up and end my relationship with a woman who was hopelessly in love with me and ultimately harbored a fatal obsession. Regret over his has long since been replaced with self-loathing. I do not contend that fate has been fair to me. But it has been most unfair to my dear little doe. I had condemned her right along side me, again not taking any one else’s feelings into consideration. I still sharply feel regret for that.

  “You motherless whore,” Ma Bichette said to Louisa after her confession. “You damnable bitch, you soulless killer,” she cursed her. “Did it never occur to you that Rémi would have been a terrible husband after that? If you only knew, if you-” Ma Bichette stopped talking, lest she reveal too much of exactly what a horrible husband I would be as an undead ghoul.

  “My love could have helped him recover completely!” Why on Earth Louisa was so madly in love with me I had no idea. I had been nothing but rude to her in the past year or so, and even in our salad days our relationship had been nothing more than polite and silted conversation. How could she be reticent enough to shy away from a kiss from the man she was to marry, yet bold enough to commit a murder? After two hundred years I am nowhere close to understanding women.

  “Rémi doesn’t love you! He loves me! Only me!” Ma Bichette shrieked. All this fuss over me. I honestly do not see it, but then again I am not into men. I wanted to drop in to the room and finally tell Louisa that yes, I only love Ma Bichette. But of course I was too yellow.

  I heard the door being wretched open violently. “Run! Fetch a priest because your father will need his last rites!” Ma Bichette yelled at Louisa as she chucked her over the threshold. I climbed in through the window the moment I heard the solid oak door slam shut.

  Ma Bichette turned to look at me, rolling her eyes in annoyance. I immediately saw what had terrified Louisa so much. Louisa had ran Ma Bichette clean through her stomach with Monsieur Honore’s saber. Several inches of the tip extended out her back. Speaking of Monsieur Honore, he lay on his bed, breathing heavily.

  “Does that hurt?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “It hurt going in, but now it doesn’t.” She gestured to Monsieur Honore. “Well, get on with it.”

  “But he didn’t do it,” I said. My blood lust had been slacken by the resolution of the murder mystery.

  “He knows too much now,” she said and grasped the handle of the saber. “He’s going to die anyway, seeing me gave him a fit of some kind.” She pulled the saber out and gasped.

  She gasped because the way our bodies heal is rather unique. When there is damage of any sort it is instantly healed. For example, should you try to behead me, by the time the blade completely passed through my neck the location of the entry would be completely healed. But for the moment that the trauma is happening we feel it. Physical pleasure works rather the same way, but it really is not so much of a change from the mortal perception. I only feel her touch (or the touches of other women, yes, surprise surprise, throughout the decades of break-ups and reunions I have been involved with other women) when I am touched. La petite mort has suffered for it though, it’s duration cut in half at best.

  I regarded Monsieur Honore. He was in a bad way, indeed. The shock of seeing a “ghost” had been too much for him. No longer conscious, his irregular breathing would be troublesome if we had planned on keeping him alive. At first I was hesitant, but then a hunger for flesh was awoken in me. He had given me such a condescending lecture, and, after all, he had raised a murderer…I pulled out my dagger.

  “Where is Madame Honore?”

  Ma Bichette was examining her stomach in wonder. There was a hole in the fabric yet her skin was unblemished. “Not here.” Later we would find out that she had gone to her son’s home to tend to him in illness. Apparently Louisa had tested out the poison on him first. Louisa had terrible luck with the poison and had not managed to kill anyone with it. “I woke him up and he just dropped. Louisa must have heard me or something, because she was right behind me when I came in here.”

  I braced myself. Of course I had never done anything like this before. My hand shook as I held the knife against his neck.

  “Hurry,” Ma Bichette said. “Mon canard, please hurry.”

  Her sweet voice provided me with just enough encouragement to follow through. I quickly slashed the old man throat, and once he had stopped bleeding profusely I figured he was good and dead.

  The unpleasant scene distressed Ma Bichette some and she pointedly avoided me while I went through the almost comical motions to extract the heart. Today I can do it with better than surgical precession and in less than a minute. The trick is to cut directly below the sternum and fish it out from below with a powerful grip, deftly avoiding the lungs and other viscera. But even if I had had experience in the field of murder it was unlikely that I would have with heart extraction, so that night I blindly tried to hack, then pry, my way through the rib cage.

  Once I finally had gotten the bulk of it out it was pretty mangled. I was saturated in blood as I turned to Ma Bichette. “Bon appitite.” I held out her share.

  She stared, wide eyed, at the organ as I pushed it into her hands. It was odd. She had been so confident in dealing with Louisa, but for some reason holding a human heart caused her to blanche. Women. Her face was fraught with trepidation as she beheld me devour it.

  “What does it taste like?” she asked after I gobbled it down.

  I wiped my mouth on the back of my sleeve, violating one of the first maxims of etiquette I had been taught. Murder, cannibalism, spitting in the face of God Himself, breaches of basic decorum; I was breaking all the rules tonight. “Not terrible. Gamey.”

  Ma Bichette sniffed the heart. Then she held it to her mouth and looked directly at me. Her tongue darted out and licked it.

  “Didn’t you say we should hurry?” I picked my dagger up and wiped it off on the sheets. Nowadays I must be much more careful about leaving behind evidence, but short of leaving a signed confession there isn’t much they could do back then.

  She glanced towards the door she had locked. Then, steeling herself, she jammed the heart in her mouth and furiously chewed at it. They don’t taste horrible, not like, say, brains do (no, I have not eaten human brains, technical zombie that I may be, but before the days of supermarkets yes, people used to eat all kinds of terrible things). It’s a big muscle, really, and the most unpleasant part is the thick and chewy valves. Cooked it tastes much better, and should you be interested I can list some recipes in the follow up volumes.

  Her perfect lips dripped blood. I would taste blood on them ever after, even when she hasn’t feasted. Not that I am complaining. After all, I am a blood craving monster. She managed to form a smile. “Now, that wasn’t too bad.”

  We slipped back out the window, this time simply dropping to the ground. She rolled gracefully but I had a brief jolt of pain in my ankle when I landed. We briskly walked home. I was glad that the night would hide the blood that drenched my clothes.

  “Why did you ask Louisa confess to me?” I asked in a hushed whisper as we strode through an alley.

  “She’s your fiancé, she’s your problem,” Ma Bichette answered, a joke of which I was the butt of twinkling in her eyes. This was the beginning of her payback for not being consulted on her immortality. “After all, I am dead. You can devote all of your attention to her now.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  “Oh, you seem good enough at making your own decisions.” She squeezed my hand. “I did just not want to kill her, you know. That is too easy. Likely she would not go directly to Hell, because she is clearly mad with jealousy. No, I think that should she live and be forced to be judged by her own world, that would be fitting.”

  “She might find sympathy,” I pointed out.

  Ma Bichette laughed. Her sense of humor had been summoned back from the other wo
rld as well. “Possibly. But she will never find a husband. Who wants a wife who will kill your mistress?” She chuckled darkly. “It is so important to her to be married, I think, just like it is for all of them. Not to puncture your ego, but it was not you Louisa is in love with but the idea of marriage and children and all the nonsense that goes with it.”

  “And yourself? What idea are you in love with?”

  “Just you.”

  I felt immensely gratified and for a moment all my worry dissipated. I put my arm around her waist, despite the risk that we may be seen. “So what shall we do about her?”

  “You, mon canard, not me.”

  I wanted to punish Louisa. Simply killing and eating part of her father wasn’t enough, she’d get over that because apparently she was a remorseless lunatic. But she cared for her own well-being, and Ma Bichette had promised her forgiveness only if she confessed to me. A devious idea came to me.

  “Nothing. I will not even hear her out. Nor will I see her. I must see Alava tomorrow, but as for Louisa, she can spend the rest of her days searching for penance. I will not grant it to her.”