A/N: I proofread this chapter over the years to the music Kai Engel, on Free Music Archive. Highly recommend putting on his lighter works while reading this one...
Barnabas' perspective of view.
Chapter 46: My Lady of Dreams Weeps Not
Saturated I am of her, but why can I never have enough? Each and every evening the fall of dusk arrives and when it comes all activity around Collinwood ceases to interest me. It is my lovely bride that beckons to me. Ships upon the ocean, happy birds resting for the night, celebrators of life on the streets and those on the estate that I can perceive in my heightened senses... they are all I wish to blot out regardless of how often my powers force me to acknowledge them. The people and their merriment are nothing to Maggie, my Josette.
As I return to her from bureaucratic signings, meetings, or the heart-warming visits to my loving family at The Great House, my heart leaps to greet the household I find myself in at Collins House, our old home: The Old House. Stepping through the door whose handle is beginning to show signs of the previous knob with needing a certain trick to open it, I look about and much is dim. Only a few candles are left burning. Neither my butler, my daughter, nor my dear friend, Willie, is awake. But there sitting comfortably in my own armchair is my greatest love across time: Maggie Evans, the reincarnation of Josette duPres: Margaret Josette Dupres. My heart... My life... My wealth of existence.
Some handiwork of needlepoint she rested aside, her fingers gently sliding away to fold upon her lap and look up to face me.
"Is all well with the family?" Maggie requested.
"As ever it can be, my darling," I answered her, "and here?"
"As ever we are, my Barnabas," she sighed, happily, "I made more efforts with Sarah's mathematics, and her playthings becoming a little dishevelled thanks to little Caleb Collins, of course."
"The simple life," I observed stepping toward her, "what more meaning it has to us now that we are living in it rather than being deprived of it."
Then I knelt before her, resting my cane by the fire, handling her knees and drifting to feel her thighs over the long dress that she wore. She met my hands then lifted her own to my shoulders, up my neck and into my hair, "No deprivations that I can think of all these years, except," here she smiled, "perhaps the blood I needed to spare during my pregnancy."
"So gravely endured, Josette; All to give our daughter a choice of mortality and then to come to us someday to change that, if she so wishes. She will know how to appreciate it as she matures."
Maggie looked down, then smiled again and, resting her forehead to mine, bespoke "I am satisfied already in knowing how much you consider that hardship."
Closing my eyes as our foreheads met, "Motherhood in the making," this I expressed to her as I waylaid my thoughts of her growth and concerted giving of birth to our child. "Even with our uniqueness of a dark blessing providing the path less painful in our journey, your stamina allures me... astounds me. I watched you each step of the way, and I could only understand telepathically, that which could never be enough for me to fully appreciate what you were going through."
I looked up into her eyes so close to mine, reaching to kiss her lips, finding them, and telling her, "Watching you grow each day with Sarah, her new body stretching your womb, so much more wonder than I could ever know... as much as I wanted to."
"And now she is here, mon demón," breathed my bride.
"And so you are too, mon ange."
Maggie's eyes opened as I voiced those last two words and we moved further apart to better look at each other.
"So... at last you have found a term of endearment for me," she uttered, smiling, leaning her head sideways.
"Only when I knew how to pronounce it properly in your native tongue, Josette duPres."
The blessing of her eyes, her mouth, her radiance growing in that smile granting my new name for her, my angel as I was her demon, gave me the benefit of recognizing... I'd flourished for her.
"And you do well to understand my native tongue now, a 20th Century one."
"Whatever, however I can. I've been trying to understand it long before I awoke, Maggie Evans."
She showed happiness in her simper, subdued and yet expressive to what she was about to say, "Now I suppose we shall have another evening in masterful ravishment, won't we?"
"Why?" I queried, "when we can simply have one another?"
"What do you mean, Barnabas?" Maggie wondered, filaments of firelight dancing over her cheeks.
"We've shared and enjoyed so often, my love. Why believe it needs to go beyond nestling together?"
"Mmm," Maggie seemed to nod without nodding, "you want to make-out like we do in this century, don't you?"
"Ah," I admonished, "we could do that right here. We wouldn't need to go upstairs for it."
"I see," she turned her head down, scraping upper teeth over her bottom lip and tucking away her needlepoint into a craft bag at the side of the chair. The next thing I knew her hand was in mine and we went up the stairs to find our way to the room that had sheltered our love so long and so brilliantly.
I must confess that very door, even walking towards it, led me to jumps in my pulse that I still wish Josette understood. Seeing her door, seeing the knob turn to allow me entrance was something that gave so much startling pleasure I can scarcely explain it. I have to understand that she knows, my Josette, but she so seldom acknowledges that she knows that this single thing alone drives me wild.
"Will you ever understand how your invitation to the room I made for you drives me mad, my love? Will you never believe that blue tenderness is something of Heaven to me? You never will, will you, Josette? You will continue to exhaust me by allowing my entrance without formally admitting that you invite me, as your husband, to pass through the door."
Of this room I beheld old curiousities. When I went through so much to keep it sacred, when I helped to craft its particulars in our youth for what Josette might especially feel welcome in, and what would make a man's exertions, meaning mine, easier for her, all of this was so strange to bestow on her nearly two centuries past the time I'd ventured to make it hers. I suppose I have a mysterious kind of luck in finding out what comes of that long a wait.
"I'd thought of that, too," Maggie expressed to me, hearing my thoughts, "Connection between us, taking on human form again, being in this room in physical stability, mon demón," and then she went to lock the door behind us, "Locking isn't necessary, of course, but it's always best to be on the safe side and not have to worry about it later."
"But of the room," I began to question as she removed my clothing and I removed hers, "You had wondered as I wondered, hadn't you?"
"I did. Even as a spirit, but before that, I recalled the letters we wrote to one another about it, what I wanted and what you could provide."
"Provide," I smiled, as shirts were gone and lower regions were bared, as carelessly as often it happened, "not all of our correspondence dwelt in the superficial, the inanimate."
She smiled back, "No. Provisions were to be made by yourself, and, as I wrote, it would hardly be you," her tones lowered, "all alone."
"And that was often my worry," I told her, handling her into my arms and reaching the bed together, "that women were too delicate and men, such as myself, were too abrasive."
"All that warning to find out nothing of the kind was to be?" Her warmth so genuine and touch so virile, it was that funny-love coming to us in this gesture of tenderness now.
"Nothing of the kind could be," I told her, as we bedded down beneath the sheets, "when it comes to you. Other women were as fragile and delicate as the bearing of the times so imposed them to be. You had both the delicacy and the strength. All that could throw you into uncertainty was the confusion in what confused us all: our curses."
"Dark blessings," she corrected, "or so we've learned to create in the fear of supposed curses, my dearest."
Here began our kisses and our arms found each other to wrap about our torsos, physically sharing in that moment. The word "Our" dwelling in my mind heavily as of late; 'Tis the symbiosis of these forces between us that make them so wonderful, dancing not for the sake of the dance but for the sake of being together.
Again she could hear thoughts I was merely feeling rather than really putting into words, and she had explanations prepared before I could ever have guessed that she did,
"Good," she bespoke.
"What is?" I inquired, breathing with delectation about her generous face.
"Less worship of me," she interred, "more adulation to us."
"To mean we are as one... as I often wondered we could be?"
"To mean we are as one as we have been for many years, Barnabas. You simply didn't notice."
She had me, but I preferred to sink my head into her pillows and want to be so separated in order to adore her beauty as I had done in these years. I kept loving, kept adoring the knowledge that those years would continue to add together into more and more and more time shared with her, my ever-loving and faithful bride. Allow her to laugh at me all she likes. I am in the constant enjoyment of that as well.
Her lips upon mine let her speak to me with her psyche, "The room, Barnabas. You wished to understand it."
I released my lips from hers, touching her face, wending my fingers into her hair, "Yes, Maggie. The room. Let us dwell here now," I lay there naked with her and found her hand beneath the covers.
She shifted herself upright against the backboard of the bed, staying a cushion behind her back so that she would be comfortable, "It is there in the candles burning down, the little table by the window, the curtains, the loveseat, the vanity, indeed the very shape of the windows themselves, my love."
Then she hunkered into place beside me so that our length was about even with each other and she could look into my eyes easily while wiggling her toes against mine. I wriggled my own in kind against hers.
"It wasn't easy to do, you know." I confessed.
"I know, Barnabas," she admitted, "But that last letter you wrote finally arrived to me... how you'd arranged all the pieces that I wanted in this room. Such silly things now in that perfect silver, like the grooming tools,"
"Nothing less would do, Josette," I urged.
"Not back then, no," she confirmed, drifting the back of her fingers along my cheek, "but there was something you could never buy to put into this room."
I almost heard her answer to my question of what that was, but I shielded it from my mind. I wanted to hear her vocally answer what I was asking, "What would that have been?"
"What I have now," she purred, reaching for me, "You... in it."
And with our kiss, that demonstrative understanding of her love for me enveloped my being. Belief and disbelief once again warring it out in my heart, but the winning element was the proof in all she had done to reach me. Tasting her, holding her, the beauty of her soul drifted through in our sharing of memories. Years ago, Maggie knew what might befall me in my journeys through time once again, but she felt the risk was important and trusted me to make the right decisions with what help would be available, and to learn of even more trials she had suffered in previous times to unite us, knowing they would fail, but recognising their importance to accomplish what we had in these modern days, our future... our now.
Together we shared thoughts, the making of this room. The peacock fanned grate shielding the fireplace which crackled behind us, the wall sconces holding blue tapers, later white, and then blue again, to illuminate our wedding chamber during the nights we didn't demolish it with our passion... the candelabra at the night stand to shine upon pages of books we now had the time to read to each other in ways we'd forever wished to read them together. The best part of all being poetry, not because they were her favourites, but for the sake it was my voice reading them to her. She claimed I could read listings in the telephone directory and it would be endlessly romantic to her. I never knew I had such prowess! (And why would I? I was in existence long before such inventions were conceived.)
Chairs, too, entered our joined construction of this room. The love seat where I had finally kissed her hand and she never recoiled but looked at me with the love I'd so longed for her to receive, patting my own hand in the reassurance she could no longer fear me, but being the same Josette that was ready to renounce all danger of her long voyage, whether by sea in 1795 or by spirit toward 1967.
"I am yours," she'd tell me, "and you are mine. We are each others', Barnabas."
I smiled in as winsome a way as I knew how in the twilight-dark of our candle-lit chamber, "Is there anything more to add to this room, Josette?"
"Beyond ourselves?" she asked, "No. Giving birth to our daughter here accomplished everything that needed to be, did it not?"
"It did," I admitted, faithfully. For the briefest spell all in the room, which was so very ornate, seemed silly. But then I drifted my fingers down her neck and throughout her midline, coming along her hip again and she experienced the enjoyments of this pleasure I proposed by shifting rapidly, breathing in small gasps and smiling as I rested my hand within hers. She coiled her fingers betwixt mine as we lay there.
Resting my head upon her chest, I was a part of her. I was with her always. She spoke to me with her beloved heart beating at my ear. She echoed vibrations of my spirit within her very breath as I listened. There was something further in being "one" within her – she... unified a paroxysm of spirit – something beyond our personal, individual beings. We were symbiotic.
Sliding in and out of consciousness throughout the morning hours and in to the afternoon I was constantly rewarded with the fulfilment of her skin upon mine, the blend of sensations, my legs along hers, my knees rubbing beneath her thighs, my chest and stomach pressed to her back and gliding my hands down her arms to find our clasping, slivers of sunlight almost hidden in the tiniest pockets of the boudoir. My chin settling at her shoulder, nesting in the soft tresses of her rich beautiful hair…
In the drifting between wee-hours and dusk-light I heard a faint wisp of her thoughtfulness wonder in my glorying to the fortune of her. She was listening to my asking, sending coils of my heart streaming upwards to the Heavens, how I ever deserved her presence, much less her matrimony. Her answer was soft, almost a blink,
"By you, Barnabas, being yourself..."
"But... who am I without you, mon ange?"
"And who would I be without you, mon demón?"
"We might be nothing."
"Yet we are everything – together."
"Aren't we?"
"Yes. Aren't we?"
And so it was in so many nights and mornings together. This gift of vampirism that was as much a part of us as it was in the human race as a whole. We were but an amplified creation of the same thing that swirled all around us amid the commerce and the dispensing of goods to those who would never see the faces of those it came from, that which it was produced by.
All the objects of Josette's room arrived from this very same source. It is true it was by the care and understanding between Her and I in the communication we had, to plan our desires of what this room would be together but, in effect, this room was the making of the human race too, creating so much to be bought from others who would survive from our own monetary offerings.
Still, we slept in this knowledge that, however small, we would make a difference in changing the helplessness of how tragically our world worked. After all, we were the demon who made love to the angel together. And together, in whatever small ways, we maintained our delight and had produced a child that might follow in our footsteps.
A/N: And that's "all she wrote". Let me know what you enjoyed. If you can... weird and strange as it may be... I'm sure it's still Dark Shadows...
