“It was painted to celebrate my presentation at court. The painter claimed to have been employed by the Queen of Scots, to design her embroideries, but had fallen to traveling the country and painting portraits. Indeed, the embroidery is rather better rendered than my features!”
“You were presented as a boy?” I was fascinated.
“And danced with the queen, who told me that I was a likely lad,” Rózsa laughed, “and presented again the next night as a girl and she quite enjoyed the prank, though she claimed to have known the truth all along!” I took a candle to examine the painting more closely.
“The face is not very like,” I agreed. “Except for the eyes.” I stared at them and they stared back, ancient, knowing eyes in an adolescent face. I turned to find the originals fixed upon me, their expression no more readable than the painted ones. She smiled and changed the subject again, asking me about my plays, especially Faustus.
This naturally turned the conversation to the arcane, to Doctor Dee, and to Ralegh’s so-called School of Night, to the references I had used for the play and thence onward to superstition, the Fairy faith and other heathen religions.
“Did you know that it is the dark of the moon and that this is Walpurgis Nacht?” Rózsa said abruptly. “The people of the Empire believe that all the devils walk this night and the witches have free rein. It’s one of the great Sabbats, you know, called Beltane here in England.”
“How do you know so much about witches,” I asked idly. She turned her dark, enigmatic eyes on me.
“That is what my parents were burned for, in Spain.”
The thunder was still exploding in cannonade overhead when I went to my chamber an hour or so later. It was only a matter of minutes before Rózsa joined me. I lay on the bed, stripped to shirt and hose and watched her undress in the flickering light of the candles. In her shirt she went to a cupboard and returned to the bed with a small, carved stone pipe and a cake of a greenish-brown substance. I admired the pipe, carved in the shape of a dragon, the bowl formed of its open jaws and its tail for the stem. She filled the pipe from the block and lit it with a taper. I sniffed. “What is it? It’s not tobacco,” I said, and watched as she held the smoke she had inhaled and then let it out slowly.
“It’s hashish, from Turkey. It’s better than tobacco,” she answered, handing the pipe to me. I had eagerly embraced and ardently loved Ralegh’s “nymph”, tobacco, but after a time I had to agree: this was better. I felt as if I were floating a few inches above the bed, as if her hands left trails of sensation across my skin, like shooting stars against the void, as she stripped away my hose and shirt. I watched dreamily as she kissed my fingers and wrist. Our eyes met and locked as she bit into the vein there. The anticipated bliss began to well in me, and my stomach knotted as I realized that it was the bite that gave the pleasure, and that she was sucking on the wound that she had made. She was drinking my blood.
She left my wrist then and kissed my lips. I could taste my blood in her mouth and it excited something within me, something twisted, corrupt, that had lurked in my soul, only hinting at its presence before, but now forever exposed—flinging away salvation, embracing damnation, I reveled in it and rolled over, pinning her beneath me, thrusting myself into her with a violence that was only rivaled by her own. She scored my back with her nails, then buried her hands in my hair, relentlessly pulling me down, pulling my head back to expose my throat.
I could feel her sharp teeth entering the vein. The depravity of it forced my climax and I nearly blacked out. Only dimly conscious, I felt her slip from me and return a minute later with a goblet of ruby-red Venetian glass, a dragon entwined about its stem. It was filled to brimming with a dark liquid. “I would not have thee die. I could not endure to lose thee a second time,” she said, inexplicably, and handed me the glass. As I raised it to my lips I saw the rapidly closing cut she had