and the loss of a certain patience. There was something dreadfully sensual about her lounging on the settee in a tiny nightgown of lace and stitched pearls; she became an eerie and powerful seductress, her voice as clear and sweet as ever, though it had a resonance which was womanish, a sharpness sometimes that proved shocking; After days of her usual quiet, she would scoff suddenly at Lestat's predictions about the war; or drinking blood from a crystal glass say that there were no books in the house, we must get more even if we had to steal them, and then coldly tell me of a library she'd heard of, in a palatial mansion in the Faubourg St.-Marie, a woman who collected books as if they were rocks or pressed butterflies. She asked if I might get her into the woman's bedroom.
"I was aghast at such moments; her mind was unpredictable, unknowable. But then she would sit on my lap and put her fingers in my hair and doze there against my heart, whispering to me softly I should never be as grown up as she until I knew that killing was the more serious thing, not the books, the music.'Always the music... ' she whispered.'Doll, doll,' I called her. That's what she was. A magic doll. Laughter and infinite intellect and then the round-checked face, the bud mouth.'Let me dress you, let me brush your hair,' I would say to her out of old habit, aware of her smiling and watching me with the thin veil of boredom over her expression.'Do as you like,' she breathed into my ear as I bent down to fasten her pearl buttons.'Only kill with me tonight. You never let me see you kill, Louis!'
"She wanted a coffin of her own now, which left me more wounded than I would let her see. I walked out after giving my gentlemanly consent; for how many years had I slept with her as if she were part of me I couldn't know. But then I found her near the Ursuline Convent, an orphan lost in the darkness, and she ran suddenly towards me and clutched at me with a human desperation.'I don't want it if it hurts you,' she confided so softly that a human embracing us both could not have heard her or felt her breath.'I'll stay with you always. But I must see it, don't you understand? A coin for a child.'
"We were to go to the coffinmaker's. A play, a tragedy in one act: I to leave her in his little parlor and confide to him in the anteroom that she was to die. Talk of love, she must have the best, but she must not know; and the coffinmaker, shaken with the tragedy of it, must make it for her, picturing her laid there on the white satin, dabbing a tear from his eye despite all the years...
"'But, why, Claudia...' I pleaded with her. I loathed to do it, loathed cat and mouse with the help less human. But hopelessly her lover, I took her there and set her on the sofa, where she sat with folded hands in her lap, her tiny bonnet bent down, as if she didn't know what we whispered about her in the foyer. The undertaker was an old and greatly refined man of color who drew me swiftly aside lest'the baby' should hear.'But why must she die?' he begged me, as if I were God who ordained it.'Her heart, she cannot live,' I said, the words taking on for me a peculiar power, a disturbing resonance. The emotion in his narrow, heavily lined face disturbed me; something came to my mind, a quality of light, a gesture, the sound of something . a child crying in a stenchfilled room. Now he unlocked one after another of his long rooms and showed me the coffins, black lacquer and silver, she wanted that. And suddenly I found myself backing away from him out of the coffin-house, hurriedly taking her hand.'The order's been taken,' I said to her.'It's driving me mad!' I breathed the fresh air of the street as though I'd been suffocated and then I saw her compassionless face studying mine. She slipped her small gloved hand back into my own.'I want it, Louis,' she explained patiently.
"And then one night she climbed the undertaker's stairs, Lestat beside her, for the con, and left the coffinmaker, unawares, dead across the dusty piles of papers on his desk. And