CATHERINE PART 1

 CATHERINE PART 1

Lady Catherine Fox, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of a small, independent nation, is one of my favourite role-playing game characters ever. I played her in a Vampire: Dark Ages campaign many years ago. She strives towards good behaviour but often fails due to her own temperament, temptation and the actions of others. Catherine learns her lessons, however, sometimes the hard way.

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The bedchamber door, as ever, creaked as it opened.

Lady Catherine Fox stared at the brocaded, heavy velvet canopy of her four-poster bed. The curtains surrounding the bed were drawn and prevented her seeing her visitor but Catherine knew who was there. Her lady in waiting, Dame Mella Kalsten. Catherine heard a silver tray being placed on the low table at the foot of her bed. The delicate chink of fine china and the rattle of obscenely expensive silverware were as familiar to Catherine as her own heartbeat.

Soft footsteps padded around the room and Catherine could follow, almost predict, their path from the door, to the table, to the window. The next sound was the metallic screech as the brass-ringed curtains covering the window – correction, arrow slit, Catherine reminded herself – slid along the wrought iron rail as the curtains were opened. There was a polite cough, followed by “Good morning, milady.” The young woman sighed inwardly as her day began in the same way as it had for the last ten years of her life.

“Good morning to you, Dame Mella,” Catherine answered, as politely as she could manage. Which, the young woman conceded, was not very polite. Her head ached and something else, a feeling of guilt, gnawed in her heart.

She had pushed herself too hard the previous night, reading by candlelight until the late moonrise had peeked through the arrow slit and brought a silvery glow to her work. Catherine had dusted her vanity table with salt and drawn a stylised picture of a fractured heart in the pure white crystals. Into one half of the heart she had written “E”, for Erik, while in the other half she had scattered shredded rose petals, representing, of course, herself. The petals had been insanely expensive as roses were not flowering at this time of year and she had had them secretly imported from the southern lands where Summer still blossomed.

Catherine remembered reading and rereading the book she had borrowed from her mother's collection. It had called for the blood of the unrequited lover to be spilled onto the petals. She tested the edge of the knife against her thumb and balked as the steel scraped against her skin. Catherine had gasped as she pressed the blade harder but could not bring herself to draw her own blood. Instead, she had spat in a most unladylike fashion and mixed her spittle into the petals. She had tried to clear her mind and meditate on the thought of Erik, the tall, strong, red-haired Kal-Pyrran trader who frequently visited the market. Meditate was a rather flattering term, Catherine realised. Brooded would be more accurate, particularly when her thought strayed to the sight of Erik with one of the town's more costly doxies. She forced the dark thoughts of vengance from her mind and sprinkled more salt over the crack between the two halves of the fractured heart. With the tip of her finger, Catherine traced a spiral out from the centre of the heart, mixing the petals and spit with Erik's rune.

“Make us one,” she had whispered but in the back of her mind the thought had risen unbidden: and poison his whore's heart.

When the spell was complete, Catherine had cleaned her vanity table and retired to bed, perhaps only two hours before cock-crow. She had slept fitfully and nightmares had haunted what little sleep she had.

Now Catherine could hear Dame Mella bustling about her room. She heard her wardrobe being opened and the rustle of silks and velvet as the older woman sorted out clothing for her day. Catherine knew she had the right to order her lady in waiting from her rooms and to take her breakfast, ablutions and dressing in solitude. She had exercised this right just once, three years ago on the day of her sixteenth birthday, and the scolding her father had given her scared Catherine even now.

Lady Catherine Fox swallowed her pride, her fear and her guilt, opened the curtains and swung herself out of bed.