“But these were the signs. She grew cold to Lestat. She fell to staring at him for hours. When he spoke, often she didn’t answer him, and one could hardly tell if it was contempt or that she didn’t hear. And our fragile domestic tranquility erupted with his outrage. He did not have to be loved, but he would not be ignored; and once he even flew at her, shouting that he would slap her, and I found myself in the wretched position of fighting him as I’d done years before she’d come to us. ‘She’s not a child any longer,’ I whispered to him. ‘I don’t know what it is. She’s a woman.’ I urged him to take it lightly, and he affected disdain and ignored her in turn. But one evening he came in flustered and told me she’d followed him though she’d refused to go with him to kill, she’d followed him afterwards. ‘What’s the matter with her!’ he flared at me, as though I’d given birth to her and must know.
“And then one night our servants vanished. Two of the best maids we’d ever retained, a mother and daughter. The coachman was sent to their house only to report they’d disappeared, and then the father was at our door, pounding the knocker. He stood back on the brick sidewalk regarding me with that grave suspicion that sooner or later crept into the faces of all mortals who knew us for any length of time, the forerunner of death, as pallor might be to a fatal fever; and I tried to explain to him they had not been here, mother or daughter, and we must begin some search.
“ ‘It’s she!’ Lestat hissed from the shadows when I shut the gate. ‘She’s done something to them and brought risk for us all. I’ll make her tell me!’ And he pounded up the spiral stairs from the courtyard. I knew that she’d gone, slipped out while I was at the gate, and I knew something else also: that a vague stench came across the courtyard from the shut, unused kitchen, a stench that mingled uneasily with the honeysuckle — the stench of graveyards. I heard Lestat coming down as I approached the warped shutters, locked with rust to the small brick building. No food was ever prepared there, no work ever done, so that it lay like an old brick vault under the tangles of honeysuckle. The shutters came loose, the nails having turned to dust, and I heard Lestat’s gasp as we stepped into the reeking dark. There they lay on the bricks, mother and daughter together, the arm of the mother fastened around the waist of the daughter, the daughter’s head bent against the mother’s breast, both foul with feces and swarming with insects. A great cloud of gnats rose as the shutter fell back, and I waved them away from me in a convulsive disgust. Ants crawled undisturbed over the eyelids, the mouths of the dead pair, and in the moonlight I could see the endless map of silvery paths of snails. ‘Damn her!’ Lestat burst out, and I grabbed his arm and held him fast, pitting all my strength against him. ‘What do you mean to do with her!’ I insisted. ‘What can you do? She’s not a child anymore that will do what we say simply because we say it. We must teach her.’
“ ‘She knows!’ He stood back from me brushing his coat. ‘She knows! She’s known for years what to do. What can be risked and what cannot. I won’t have her do this without my permission. I won’t tolerate it.’
“ ‘Then, are you master of us all? You didn’t teach her that. Was she supposed to imbibe it from my quiet subservience? I don’t think so. She sees herself as equal to us now, and us as equal to each other. I tell you we must reason with her, instruct her to respect what is ours. As all of us should respect it.’
“He stalked off, obviously absorbed in what I’d said, though he would give no admission of it to me. And he took his vengeance to the city. Yet when he came home, fatigued and satiated, she was still not there. He sat against the velvet arm of the couch and stretched his long legs out on the length of it. ‘Did you bury them?’ he asked me.
“ ‘They’re gone,’ I said. I did not care to say even to myself that I had burned their remains in the old unused kitchen stove. ‘But there is the father to deal with, and the brother,’ I said to him. I feared his temper. I wished at once to plan some way to quickly dispose of the whole problem. But he said now that the father and the brother were no more, that death had come to dinner in their small house near the ramparts and stayed to say grace when everyone was done. ‘Wine,’ he whispered now, running his finger on his lip. ‘Both of them had drunk too much wine. I found myself tapping the fence posts with a stick to make a tune,’ he laughed. ‘But I don’t like it, the dizziness. Do you like it?’ And when he looked at me I had to smile at him because the wine was working in him and he was mellow; and in that moment when his face looked warm and reasonable, I leaned over and said, ‘I hear Claudia’s tap on the stairs. Be gentle with her. It’s all done.’
“She came in then, with her bonnet ribbons undone and her little boots caked with dirt. I watched them tensely, Lestat with a sneer on his lips, she as unconscious of him as if he weren’t there. She had a bouquet of white chrysanthemums in her arms, such a large bouquet it made her all the more a small child. Her bonnet fell back now, hung on her shoulder for an instant, and then fell to the carpet. And all through her golden hair I saw the narrow petals of the chrysanthemums. ‘Tomorrow is the Feast of All Saints,’ she said. ‘Do you know?’
“ ‘Yes,’ I said to her. It is the day in New Orleans when all the faithful go to the cemeteries to care for the graves of their loved ones. They whitewash the plaster walls of the vaults, clean the names cut into the marble slabs. And finally they deck the tombs with flowers. In the St. Louis Cemetery, which was very near our house, in which all the great Louisiana families were buried, in which my own brother was buried, there were even little iron benches set before the graves where the families might sit to receive the other families who had come to the cemetery for the same purpose. It was a festival in New Orleans; a celebration of death, it might have seemed to tourists who didn’t understand it, but it was a celebration of the life after. ‘I bought this from one of the vendors,’ Claudia said. Her voice was soft and inscrutable. Her eyes opaque and without emotion.
“ ‘For the two you left in the kitchen!’ Lestat said fiercely. She turned to him for the first time, but she said nothing. She stood there staring at him as if she’d never seen him before. And then she took several steps towards him and looked at him, still as if she were positively examining him. I moved forward. I could feel his anger. Her coldness. And now she turned to me. And then, looking from one to the other of us, she asked:
“ ‘Which of you did it? Which of you made me what I am?’
“I could not have been more astonished at anything she might have said or done. And yet it was inevitable that her long silence would thus be broken. She seemed very little concerned with me, though. Her eyes fixed on Lestat. ‘You speak of us as if we always existed as we are now,’ she said, her voice soft, measured, the child’s tone rounded with the woman’s seriousness. ‘You speak of them out there as mortals, us as vampires. But it was not always so. Louis had a mortal sister, I remember her. And there is a picture of her in his trunk. I’ve seen him look at it! He was mortal the same as she; and so was I. Why else this size, this shape?’ She opened her arms now and let the chrysanthemums fall to the floor. I whispered her name. I think I meant to distract her. It was impossible. The tide had turned. Lestat’s eyes burned with a keen fascination, a malignant pleasure: