Jane Slayre Read Free Page A

indeed, unless a particular noble the Reeds fancied came to visit. It was one of the largest and stateliest chambers in the mansion. I could not see well in the dark, but I remembered the layout from coming in once on an afternoon before Bessie came to fetch me and said it was too early to be up and I had best return to my own chamber.
    A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre. An ample cushioned easy chair sat near the head of the bed, white, with a footstool before it, looking like a pale throne. The two large windows, with their blinds always drawn, were half shrouded in falls of similar drapery. The carpet was red. The table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth. The walls were a soft fawn colour with a blush of pink in it. The wardrobe, the toilet table, and the chairs were of darkly polished old mahogany.
    The room was chill because it seldom had a fire; silent, due to the remote location far from the nursery and kitchen; solemn, because it was known to be so seldom entered. The housemaid came here on Saturdays to wipe from the furniture a week's worth of dust. Mrs. Reed herself, at far intervals, visited it to review the contents of a secret drawer in the wardrobe, where were stored divers parchments, her jewel casket, and a miniature of her deceased husband; and in those last words lies the secret of the red room--the spell that kept it so lonely in spite of its grandeur.
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    Mrs. Reed had been a vampyre nine years. In this chamber she breathed her last mortal breath at her husband's side. Here, Mr. Reed had bitten her and transformed her, as he had been attacked and transformed on the road home from his sister's--my mother's--funeral. Bessie said that Mrs. Reed didn't want her husband to suffer through the curse of immortality alone, but I suspected that Mrs. Reed cherished the idea of eternal life more than she even cared for her husband.
    It seemed Mr. Reed alone suffered agonies over his new soulless state. He had never been much for the hunt, and being required to kill to feed his cravings left him feeling forlorn and most unsettled, according to Bessie's assessment, though she was fairly new to the Reeds' service at the time. Mrs. Reed suffered no such pangs of conscience. She adjusted to her new situation as easily as learning a new mode of dance for a society ball, but her husband remained morose.
    Mr. Reed, trusting in Mrs. Reed's ability to maintain the household and provide proper care for his children and infant niece, enlisted a mercenary to drive a stake through his heart, turning him instantly to a pile of fine dust, thus ending his earthly tortures in the very room where he'd turned his wife into a vampyre. A sense of dreary consecration had since guarded the red room from frequent intrusion.
    Unable to contemplate eternal life without her darlings, it was not five years before Mrs. Reed gave in to John Reed's pleading to make him a vampyre, too. Georgiana and Eliza followed. Aside from turning her children, Mrs. Reed stayed true to the last promise she made Mr. Reed, to never turn another living being to her own altered state--most especially not me, for I did not deserve, nor want, the honour.
    My seat, to which Bessie and the bitter Miss Abbot had left me half-conscious, was a low ottoman near the marble chimneypiece. The bed rose before me. To my right was the high, dark wardrobe, with subdued, broken reflections varying the gloss of its panels. To
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    my left were the muffled windows and the empty frame of what I guessed had once had been a great looking glass. I was not quite sure whether they had locked the door, and when I tried to move to check, I fell to the floor.
    All looked colder and darker from my low vantage point. I struggled to my knees, crawled to the window, clutched the curtains, and tore them open before I fell back again to the carpet. I slept, perhaps an hour or more, but