Ch 5

Frustration is something I know well. When Julia denied me a soft moan and a gentle caress, it was no great burden I hadn't carried for years in the past. She is good company at night, but that wasn't what I needed from her. I had wanted much more.

She knew it. I find her mind intriguing, though we both prefer the masquerade that our desires are purely physical. Anything else would seem rash for a woman with enough of an inheritance from her dead father and the money left behind by her spouse to wed a man who fears the light of day as much as Dracula himself.

Well before we began our secret engagements, I knew of Julia's husband. I did not know him personally as only Madeline, Meg and sometimes Charles speak to the neighbors, but I had heard him many times. His name was Louis Seuratti, and he was an utterly piggish man. All he needed was a tail and he would have been fit for the swine pen.

In the days before a rope around his fat neck down to meet the devil, he woke me during the night. The cracks of his hand against Julia's face certainly had to wake half the houses in the summer time, but not once did any man rap upon the door or notify the gendarmes. He was large; a barrel-chested former naval officer with his share of women tattooed on his arms and the smell of a brewery leaving his mouth. None dared to trifle with Monsieur Seuratti. He was a violent man with a trained arm in combat, the sort of man who had absolutely no business harming a woman or child. And yet he did, sometimes several times a week with no fear of reprecussions as his uncle also worked for the commissioner in Paris. Even if someone did call for help, it was likely no officer would appear at the door to stop his heavy hand from flying.

In the three years the Seurattis lived behind my house, I grew tired of Julia begging her husband to stop in the middle of the night, of hearing little Lisette wake crying while her parents argued or her father drunkenly beat her mother. He did many things to Julia, things which I heard from my desk as I sat late into the night writing music. He swept the songs right out of my mind each time he struck her...or worse. Some nights she would plead, her voice filled with panic that slowly turned to acceptance. Not once did he stop. He took what he wanted and had no shame in doing so. My work suffered because of him, my music became flat.

Julia, I think, still has no idea that the rope around his neck was no small accident. Perhaps she doesn't know better. She is an educated woman though I doubt her extensive reading has taught her that if he had hung himself there would have been marks around his ears where the rope rode up as he danced at the end. Instead there was only a thick bruise where he was strangled.

He took three years away from my music. I saved my craft, my art and nothing more. What a terrible liar I am that I cannot even convince myself that I did it for the sake of song and not this woman.

For a woman. The very thought makes me want to retch at such a romantic and absurd notion. Love is nothing more than a lie, a feeling that comes and goes. True love. What ever does that mean?

Still, I wish I had killed him the first time I heard Julia cry.

I sat in her kitchen and waited for her to return to the parlor and read a while. She would find nothing more galling than me at the table having helped myself to a cup of tea, which I had. I was even so spiteful as to use the very last tablespoon of honey in the cupboard.

The clock chimed 12 and I knew that I was only wasting time. She had retired for the night. Leaving the cup and saucer on the table, I quietly walked out the back door, down the stone path shadowed by trees and into my own yard. I stood for a moment and stared at the darkened room where I longed to be entwined in her arms.

I would blame her in the end if my plans went awry and my demands were unfulfilled.

Curse her and the upper hand she held over me and my primal needs.