Chapter 1

"And though you may not be able to imagine what I was like, I did live. More importantly, I loved."
[I wrote this for you – The future is the past waiting to happen]

I remember the exact date of my becoming a vampire because it was a month after my twenty-fifth birthday, shortly after the death of my mother. I was the oldest of three daughters - my two sisters, Viola and Marigold were two and four years younger than me, and the three of us were the pride of our loving parents. Come to riches thanks to an influential nobleman called Raoul, my father owned an estate south of London. This meant that we were a lot better off than many other families that age: we had property, money, and if not a title, my father at least had a good reputation and, especially in Raoul, very powerful friends. I knew my father had always secretly been suspicious, if not afraid, of the tall man with the flaxen hair and ice-blue eyes, but Raoul treated my family with the utmost respect - especially my sisters and me. From the moment I met Raoul for the first time, as a young girl, I instantly had a crush on him for the way he called me "Little Rose" and treated me like a real lady.

My childish infatuation with our benefactor lost its focus when I was introduced to his ward Maël, an impossibly handsome French boy with eyes so dark you couldn't distinguish his irises from the pupils. Without knowing what was happening to me I soon found myself drawn to the boy who couldn't be much more than two years my senior, but still seemed so much more educated and mature than the boys I knew from my home village.

When I was old enough, that is to say about sixteen, my father often took me to London where I attended all sorts of societies. I was introduced to different kind of people - businessmen, as you would call them today - and my father's many relations had taught me how to listen very closely and to pay attention to what people said, and how they took it. Most of all, it taught me how to read between the lines and to look beyond peoples' words in order to find out what they were really trying to communicate. My father had raised me to be sociable, and everybody thought me to be well-spoken. I was polite, but knew how to make a point - at least this was what I was told quite often.

Usually, there were several young women present, but I never really found the right connection amongst them. Their often shallow conversations bored me, and I believed that many of them thought I was too bold getting involved in also the gentlemen's conversations. But no matter who my father introduced me to, whenever Maël was present I didn't have eyes or ears for anybody else.

The boy I had first met when I was a fourteen year old girl had grown into a young man of exquisite taste and, of course, looks. Along with his former shyness, he had lost his French accent completely, and spoke with a velvety, resonant voice that completely lacked the flattering tone men usually adapted when talking to women. He was perfectly polite and charming without having to flatter anybody. And then there was a dark, secretive side about him that I found intriguing - a curiosity that, eventually, got things started that I so much later regretted.

As unknown and inexperienced as I might have been in these matters, I very soon understood that too much of his society might end up being dangerous for me. When my parents started pressing me on the matter, however, the sense of danger became more and more irresistible to me. Eventually, my father forbade any private contact and wouldn't let Maël out of his sight whenever he and Raoul visited our estate.

Even though we had never been romantically involved - or so I believed - Maël would sooner or later occupy my mind to an extend I was beginning to feel ashamed of: dreams I wasn't supposed to have, let alone understood, and feelings I couldn't have known about. I never told anyone, not even my sisters who also were my closest friends, but then again something always prevented me from sharing my feelings with anyone. Loving him - and I was young enough to believe I did - was a secret, and some dreamlike thought in my head made it a dark one.

I met other men, eventually, and by the time I was 19 I found myself away from my beloved home village, having left behind my family and living 200km far away from home, married to a man I loved cordially, but never, I realised later on, truly romantically. Maybe it was that I was too headstrong and impulsive for the soft-spoken, very intellectual man who loved me so dearly. I knew that Giles would do anything to make me happy, and it wasn't like I didn't appreciate his devotion, but in the few years of our marriage, I often felt I missed something. I felt guilty - after all, I was lucky to have married for love and friendship rather than profit. My mother assured me that I was still too young to really understand what being a wife meant, and that I would grow into it. But two years of marriage passed and we began to face problems nobody could have foreseen - I was denied my dearest wish to raise a family. I had hoped raising children would bring me closer to Giles, had, in fact all my life wanted to have children of my own, but even though we tried - for years, even - we weren't blessed with any.

Bitterly disappointed I distanced myself even more from my husband and began feeling increasingly lonely and homesick. With travelling being expensive the only times I could see my whole family was for Christmas. In the past years, both my sisters had got engaged and married: Viola, two years younger than I and soon turning 23, was married in Europe, while Mary, the youngest of us, had married a rather rich man from Scotland.

We wrote each other letters on a regular basis (one of the benefits of Raoul's had been our education in reading and writing when we were children), and I often poured out my heart, so I felt heartbroken when first Mary, then Viola told me they were expecting. And yet it was the message about the death of my mother that crushed my spirits entirely a while after my twenty-fifth birthday.

After a long and, on Giles's part, surprisingly heated discussion about whether or not we could afford to travel back to London in order to visit my family, it was decided that I was going to go there on my own.

I had always suspected Giles's and my story simply wasn't destined a happy ending, but I had never expected it to end tragically - for not only did I never arrive in my hometown, I also never saw my husband again after my departure.