SHADOWS
Rebecca, who spent most of her time in France and much of it at Sept-Tours, had Matthew's black hair and grey-green eyes. At 64 years old, she still looked about 13. A couple of decades earlier, the novelty of being viewed as a wunderkind had worn off, so Professor Rebecca Bishop-Clairmont quit her job teaching philosophy at the Sorbonne Université, and quickly gained prominence as the brilliant but reclusive novelist Arielle Bishop. It was easier than going through life telling people to just look up the meaning of "bright born," which for some reason tended to put their noses out of joint. Philip never understood why she got so annoyed about people's questions, but as she pointed out, he was one to talk considering he spent half his life wearing a disguising spell. Diana and Matthew both agreed with this logic. To Rebecca's eternal annoyance, Philip just laughed it off. In stark contrast to Philip, Rebecca was interested in cold hard facts—if something was true, then everything else needed to be false, and she found any challenges to that maxim extremely frustrating. If something was right, everything else must be wrong. She wanted answers. Out of all of their children, the fact that it was Rebecca who wound up as a philosopher was a mystery to her parents, although it made a certain amount of sense to Rebecca. As she saw it, if something didn't have a clear-cut answer, that indicated that no one had come up with the right question. Who are exceptionally good at coming up with questions? Philosophers. Quod erat demonstrandum…
Philip, though an extraordinarily powerful weaver, was one of the most laid-back people one could ever hope to meet. He resembled Diana in coloring, and was swathed in a similar nimbus that seemed to get stronger with each passing year, but which he chose to cover with a disguising spell much of the time. It's not that it bothered him or that he wanted to hide the fact that he was a bright born, it was just his preference, which was reason enough for him (if not Rebecca). When the twins had been born, Diana had remarked to Matthew that they were the real chemical wedding, but soon the running joke became that Philip was a chemical wedding unto himself. Though he wasn't shy, he had always lived in his own head. He took to science at an early age, but didn't label it as such. He was curious and tactile, but solitary. He asked few questions because it wasn't answers he was seeking; observation was his objective. As a result, his approach to science and the natural world had a distinctly early modern bent to it which fascinated Diana. Traditional modern scientific truths were disconcertingly infused with vague notions of classical elements, astrology, and transmutation. Even when Matthew got in his ear—ever the empiricist, he could only handle so much whimsy in a scientific context—Philip never completely abandoned what might be seen as discredited alchemical principles. How could he, when he actually could turn lead into gold? As Philip's unique methodology—such as it was—began to coalesce, Matthew began to detect the makings of a seismically important scientist. Philip was currently touring Europe with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Matthew remains baffled, despite the fact that he was Philip's first cello teacher.
During the twins' early years, Matthew and Diana, like any parents, felt fiercely protective of their children. Like any parents, they spent every waking moment worrying about their well-being. Like any parents, they made sure they or a trusted friend or family member kept a watchful eye on them to keep them from getting hurt. Unlike most parents, they were not just worried about choking hazards and electrical outlets, they were also vigilant for signs of supernatural tendencies, which cropped up soon enough. Although Philip was the first to stand, it was Rebecca who soon proved herself to be preternaturally strong and fast. This proved especially challenging because she also had a very quick temper from the time she was a toddler. In those days, Matthew was tormented with fears of blood rage, and with every tantrum, every sulk, every time she threw a block at her brother, he held his breath for worse to come. The blood rage never did manifest itself, but a tendency to dart out of rooms faster than her parents could chase her did, as did a proclivity for indiscriminately biting anything with a pulse in frustration or hunger. Her big brothers Jack and Marcus took it in stride and indulged her, as did Gallowglass, Marthe, Fernando, and, ever the doting grandmother, Ysabeau. Sarah, Baldwin, Father Hubbard, and especially Philip were less amused. While they worked on training Rebecca to say please and thank you, to respect her elders, and to ask first before feeding on someone, they were also dealing with Philip's frequent disappearances and enchantments. While Rebecca possessed moderate magical powers, she didn't use them very much except in retaliation when her brother erected invisible walls to prevent her from stealing his stuffed animals, or froze the flow of his mother's blood while she was trying to feed Rebecca. Philip, on the other hand, was a whole other story.
Philip rarely displayed any vampire tendencies. He loved his sleep and the very thought of drinking blood was revolting to him. One afternoon after his nap, Matthew came into his room to find his two-year-old child missing from his crib. Terror blazed within him, and he roared, Philip! and fled through the door at top speed to hunt down the intruder. Here I am! sang a toddler's voice, and Matthew returned to his room to find his son perched on the tester of his bed serving imaginary tea to a circle of stuffed animals. It's a party! he explained proudly. Diana came running into the room having heard Matthew's cry, and she followed his eyes to where Philip sat. They glanced at each other in astonishment. They were in for it now. Following that episode, they were not only chasing two precocious toddlers around on foot, but their home started to resemble a bouncy castle what with all of the flying and jumping Diana and Matthew had to do to retrieve Philip from the various beams, shelves, and light fixtures that took his fancy. Philip was not a willful child; he just found the ability to fly so mundane that he never understood the fuss everyone seemed to make about it. And then, he discovered timewalking. Sarah had come into town for the twins' fourth birthday. They were blowing the candles out when Philip disappeared out of nowhere. Matthew and Diana were beside themselves with worry. How on earth would he make it back to the present when his grasp of "yesterday," "today," and "tomorrow" was still tenuous? They were frantically trying to come up with ways to find him. Could Diana devise some sort of spell? Should Matthew mobilize the Knights of Lazarus to mount a search? To Matthew's ire, Sarah treated the occasion with the same pride and excitement as she had with his first steps. Moments later, Philip reappeared in his chair. When his parents hugged him and fawned over him and asked where he had been, he explained that Granny Sarah told him if he went back to his birthday party, he could eat his cake. They looked at Sarah accusingly. It turned out that two days before, Philip appeared to Sarah when she was unpacking. They'd had a nice chat, read some stories, and Sarah sent him back on his way. Matthew was livid at Sarah for keeping this to herself and letting them worry, but Sarah flippantly commented that she had to deal with the same thing when Diana was a child so why shouldn't they have to do the same? Diana, while irritated with Sarah, tried to placate Matthew, but he'd have none of it. Rebecca found the entire spectacle in very poor taste. Matthew stormed out of the house and returned five hours later having killed a stag.
Matthew and Diana's days were long and challenging. Rebecca was sleeping less and less, and Matthew was even known to steal a nap here and there when the kids were small, for which he received endless grief from the other vampires in his family. He and Diana were constantly exhausted, usually worried, and often frustrated beyond measure, but on the other hand they had never laughed so much, never felt so united, never felt so infatuated with each other. They spent a majority of their time divided between France, Oxford, and New Haven, while also spending significant time in London, Amsterdam, New Orleans, and Venice, where Diana occupied the de Clermont seat on the reformed Congregation. As a result of their international upbringing, the twins developed the quirk of adapting their accent to whatever location they resided in at the time, although Rebecca favored the French "maman" and "papa" when addressing her parents, while Philip gravitated to the American "mom" and "dad." Jack preferred "mum" for Diana and called Matthew either "dad" or by his name. Jack primarily divided his time between Sept-Tours and Clairmont House in London, but he spent good amounts of time in New Orleans as well.
Jack found his calling when he became a big brother. After centuries of violence and cruelty and manipulation, along came these pure, beautiful little lives who knew nothing of pain or struggle, and never would if he had anything to say about it. They were balm to him. They were the only people he loved who saw nothing of the monster in him. They weren't scared of him, they weren't worried about him, in their eyes he was safety and stability, no different to Matthew or Diana or anyone else in the family. Jack grew into his expectations, and became babysitter, protector, coach, and confidant to his little siblings. Control over his blood rage was still a daily struggle for him, as it would surely be for the remainder of his life just like it was for Matthew. Retraining his mind and body was an arduous journey, sometimes rewarding, sometimes devastating. While he learned what worked for him to keep himself healthy—his music, his artwork, his family—there was still no medical treatment so there were occasions where the rage flared up without warning. He recovered from one such episode in New Orleans, where he and Marcus retreated together to Marcus's house in the Garden District. Jack spent much of his time alone, cursing the blood rage, and cursing himself. One evening, Marcus had some of his children and grandchildren over, and Ransome brought a friend of his with him, a long, strong, sultry vampire named Evelyn who he'd just hired to sing at his club. She'd been sired in the 1930s in Birmingham, Alabama, and was a force to be reckoned with. She was kind and giving and saw the best in people, and she was also confident, protective, and held those around her to the same standard she demanded of herself. She and Jack found themselves sequestered on the upstairs balcony, sipping bourbon and sharing stories. She told him about how life had changed for a southern Black woman over her 150-odd years of life.
Despite her relative youth, Evelyn was no stranger to tragedy. She grew up in Jim Crow south during the Great Depression. At 21, she met and fell in love with a vampire, Moses Bartlett, who had been sired while enslaved on a cotton plantation. After the Civil War granted him his emancipation, he had taught himself to read and write, and ten years later was a member of one of the first graduating classes at Howard University. He quickly rose to prominence, serving two terms as an Alabama state senator and travelling the country alongside such luminaries as Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass. By the end of his second term in office, his state had been gerrymandered beyond recognition in a deliberate—and successful—attempt to vote him and other African American statesmen out of office. He subsequently opened a store, which was burned to the ground alongside many other successful Black businesses. By the time he met Evelyn, he had lost the right to vote, he had been unjustly imprisoned on a manufactured charge of raping a white woman, and he fled north after an unsuccessful lynching attempt exposed him as something more than human, placing him in even greater danger. He ended up in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was exposed to a new, magical musical style known as "ragtime" which stole his heart. Thirty years after he taught himself to read and write, he applied that same commitment and determination in his study of the piano. He performed all over the Midwest, his vampiric sleeping habits conducive to endless practicing and late-night gigs. Over time, he began to hear talk of the next new exciting musical development coming out of New Orleans. Intrigued, he decided to venture back south and pay the city a visit. The first night he was there, he encountered a raucous brass band playing the most outrageous music he'd ever heard. He'd found his new home. He never returned to St. Louis, and the only extended period of time he spent away from the city was when he fought in France when the U.S. entered The Great War in 1917.
Evelyn had spent most of her life in abject poverty, the daughter of a sharecropper and a seamstress. As the years wore on, their farm was in a constant state of decline, exacerbated in 1929 by the onset of the Great Depression. The invasion of the boll weevil into their crops in 1931 finally sealed their fate and the farm failed. Evelyn's father worked odd jobs as he could find them, and Evelyn found work in a factory in town. During this time, she befriended her coworkers and learned how to drink, dance, and flirt in the basement jazz clubs of Birmingham. She also learned that she had a gift for singing, and before long she was supporting her family on her earnings as a performer. When she wasn't on stage, you could count on her being in the audience, going to as many clubs as she could to see all of the guest musicians. One night, she was taken with the piano player of a visiting swing band from New Orleans. She ended up joining them onstage and, with no rehearsal, fell easily into their rhythm and style and sang as though she'd played with them forever. The piano player was enchanted by her talent, beauty, and fearlessness, and he asked her that night if she would like to join his band permanently and move with him to New Orleans. She wasn't about to pass up the chance to follow a handsome and charismatic musician to the birthplace of jazz, and she left with him that very night. It wasn't long before they fell deeply in love. He revealed himself as a vampire early on in their relationship and the idea that she could stay with him forever was a miracle to her. In 1938 they married in her hometown of Birmingham and he sired her on their wedding night. They spent their happy days making music and traveling the country with their band to New York, Kansas City, Chicago, and more. When the US entered World War II in 1941, he joined the army and went abroad to fight on the Western Front with the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion, the same regiment he fought with in World War I. In 1944, Evelyn received a telegram informing her that her husband, the charismatic jazz musician she was going to spend the rest of her eternal life with, had been killed in the Ardennes just six years after they'd met.
Something about Evelyn made Jack feel unaccountably safe. Maybe it was her willingness to share her story with him in such painful detail, maybe it was because he connected to the tragedy in her past, maybe it was her frank and forthright manner of speaking. Whatever the reason, in that one evening he'd revealed to her the high and low points of his life, telling her things only Matthew and Father Hubbard knew. She listened without pity or judgment. She barely spoke a word when he was telling her his secrets. When he went silent, Evelyn admitted that she had heard about the blood-raged killer who tore through Europe a few years back, and found it hard to believe he was the culprit. She also looked in his eyes and told him something he'd never heard before: that the blood rage wasn't his biggest problem. His biggest problem was his self-hatred. By sunrise, they were mated.
In the beginning, Evelyn was a thorn in Matthew's side, but Diana adored her. Matthew was wary of her different approach to Jack and his blood rage, and also turned off by her impatience with his brooding. He grumbled to Diana, asking how it was that his children always ended up choosing difficult partners, and Diana pointed out that the partner that he himself had chosen wasn't exactly a docile little lamb, and not-so-subtly hinted that not every woman with an opinion is difficult. The make-up sex was marvelous.
Philip's partner Violet, on the other hand, delighted Matthew from the start. She had a wry sense of humor and a pervasive naughtiness about her that, for reasons he couldn't explain, Matthew found utterly hilarious. No one could make him laugh quite as much as she did. The daughter of a witch and a daemon, she was no stranger to the supernatural, but she could never have imagined what was in store for her when she married into this family. After having grown up in a working-class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago to a witch father who was a fireman (makes sense when you think about it, she'd say) and a daemon mother who worked as a teacher, travelling to Sept-Tours to meet Philip's family was surreal to say the least. The sight of the ancient family castle was imposing enough, but it soon became apparent that she was effectively marrying into a royal family. When she accused her fiancé of being a prince, he rolled his eyes and told her that was ridiculous. When he was greeted as "milord" upon his arrival, Violet cast him a sidelong glance that spoke volumes and made Philip cringe. Every time she turned a corner, she was greeted with a family crest or a throne or a suit of armor. So I assume this grandmother of yours is going to be wearing a tiara? she asked drily. Ysabeau doesn't have a tiara, he replied in triumph. Of course I do, Ysabeau said flippantly, appearing out of nowhere. It is in the armory in the fourth tower. I haven't had occasion to wear it for over a century, dieu merci. It is very heavy and uncomfortable. Milord Philip would be happy to show you where it is, I am sure. You may put it on if you wish, but it will be a bit too formal for tonight's banquet. Philip was mortified, and it only got worse when she found out he and most of his other relatives were knights. This all culminated in a trip to Les Revenants with its massive moat and drawbridge. Meanwhile, his mom had a tree growing out of her face and words would appear on various parts of her body any time Violet asked a question about the Philip's childhood. But she handled the whole thing with an admirable combination of respect and humor, and she saw through the pomp and grandeur to see the family's great warmth and love. They all grew fond of her and enjoyed the injection of modern and, let's face it, plebeian, energy she brought to the family.
Philip and Violet flew into Paris where the de Clermont family helicopter waited to take them directly to Les Revenants, where Ysabeau, Marthe, and his siblings waited for their arrival. They greeted each other with the quiet sorrowful happiness typical to family reunions brought on by death.
Rebecca kissed him on both cheeks, and said, "I'm glad you're here. Maman has been asking for you." Philip squeezed Violet's hand comfortingly, and then walked up the stairs to say goodbye.
