Chapter 3: Bitter Beginnings

I was 14 when I met Kinsleon. My parents saw him only in glimpses with no context of our relationship. We were poor as dirt due to the injuries they endured from The Great Boston Fire of 1872 which took our home when I was 1 and the financial crisis the next year which took Dad’s steady livelihood as a merchant. We lived by the train tracks because Mom always said we’d still have a home if we’d been closer to the train station where the additional fire engines had been brought in. She never left the house due to shame of her heavily scarred face, instead she was a seamstress from home and dad worked the business end of it, delivering her creations, getting materials, taking payment, trying to drum up more business. They tried to teach me either end of it, but I was truly horrendous. I stabbed my thick little fingers so often I stained the cloth with my own blood every time. Dad thought it was funny. He tried to teach me the business side of things despite Mom’s protests that it was not “appropriate for a young lady”. I was no good at that either, I would drive business away 9 out of 10 times. They briefly tried to put me in school, but I picked fights and threw a fit when the teachers tried to separate me from the boys. It wasn’t for a lack of liking girls, I liked them too much as my pious teacher noted, but I didn’t fit in with them very well. The boys were told not to make friends with me, so I had no one except for the one kind girl in class who tried to befriend me. She barely spoke, so I never knew much besides that her name was Hazel and that she lived with our teachers, the nuns.

Mom encouraged the friendship even after the school told me to leave and come back when my behavior matched my peers. Hazel was obedient, kind and docile, everything I wasn’t. Everything my mom wanted in a daughter. Hazel took me to church with her one early morning, and that’s when I met him. Kinsleon, who appeared much too young to have hair that white, curly beneath his top hat, wearing luxurious clothes so fine my eyes had never seen anything like it before. Blue-green embroidered patterns in his black vest caught the light and dazzled me. He was speaking to the priest under the god rays pouring in from the stained glass windows above him. Dad told me to keep an eye out for types like him, to see if they were in the market for a tailor, but more importantly I was drawn to how important he seemed, how he dominated the room with his presence. I had never once felt important, and I suppose I wanted a taste. 

“Who’s he?” I asked Hazel in a quiet tone that surprised her, back then when I spoke it was loud and gregarious. 

“That’s Mr. Kinsleon Gregory the VI, he’s the only Irishman allowed in this building and that’s only because of how wealthy he is. Don’t worry, he’s not a drunk, Sister Elisa told me he’s a proper gentleman.” She whispered. In those times prejudice against any foreigner or dark skinned person was severe, but money has a funny way of making people overlook their own bigotry. Temporarily, anyway. 

I marched over to him, Hazel squeaked out her dissent “Caroline no!” I wish I had listened to that sweet girl, but being rebellious to a fault I was emboldened instead of discouraged, especially since she called me the name I hate. 

As I got closer I realized just how tall he was. 6 foot was particularly tall for the time, and the hat certainly added to his stature. The priest looked at me disapprovingly as I came towards them, Kinsleon looked bemused. 

“You look like a bird!” I said, trying to be complementary.

“Pardon me, miss?” he said, taken slightly aback at the odd comment.

“A bird! With your flashy colors and how slight you are you look like if you stepped upward you’d fly!” I laughed “Are you moving here? My mom’s a great seamstress, you should see what she could make you. She doesn’t have a lot of patrons but I swear she’s the best, and besides that would mean she could focus more on your clothes than any other tailor or seamstress-” I blabbered on unselfconsciously without giving pause for any answers as the priest slowly turned red with anger. 

“Ms. Caroline Finch! You are disturbing our honored guest, prithee take your seat at once!” the priest said, enunciating ‘disturbing’ with ferocity. I mouthed ‘prithee’ with a look of annoyance, and Kinsleon burst into laughter.

“No, no, Father Joseph I am finding you denomination to be delightfully lively. Caroline, was it? Please do see me after service, I’d love to hear all about you and your mother’s business.” he smiled at me with mirth in his eyes, and my heart soared with excitement. He was the only man to not find me overbearing and annoying. The priest gave him an anxious look, and gave me a disapproving glower before going to the podium and beginning service. I returned to Hazel who was pink in her cheeks and looked in a state of panic. I later learned the nuns punished her for “letting” me interrupt the adults speaking. And punished her for anything and everything, for that matter. 

That was the beginning of the end. He was charming, and I didn’t mind that he insisted on calling me Caroline so much, it fit his high class speech patterns so well and I was anxious to please. That he gave me attention was all I cared about. I was so often alone, and when I wasn’t I was told that I was speaking wrong, or that I was too gregarious, or that the subject I chose was unbecoming. 

He told me “You are truly captivating, I’m absolutely enamored with you.” Though I didn’t know what it meant, it excited me that he saw me as who I wanted to be, special, unique in a beautiful way instead of in a rejectable way as I had grown to believe I was. He told me I was gorgeous, though I never believed him. Due to my impoverished upbringing I was small and had yet to reach puberty, and could have passed for a 10 year old. He treated me like an adult, “You’re so mature for your age, I would say in your mind you’re almost the same as me.” It was a flattering lie, drew me closely to him, I was addicted to the confidence he gave me. I never wanted that feeling to leave. 

My parents were too busy to notice I spent all my time with him. I claimed to have made friends with other church kids, or that I was going to see Hazel, or whatever I needed to say that wouldn’t make them forbid me from going out alone. I knew it was wrong of me to spend time alone with the adult man, but I regarded that rule with the same spirit as I did “don’t speak unless spoken to”.

He brought me into his world, of many high society friends who called me his pet. They didn’t treat me as an equal, though I craved it and tried to earn their friendship. I was entertaining to them, a mere tag along of Kinsleon’s. 

I was overjoyed when he asked me to attend his new years party, the first party I had ever been to and it was at his lavish home. He paid my mother to make a beautiful white gown for “My niece with measurements that I would guess are near identical to your daughter’s”. The white cloth was the most expensive material my mother had ever gotten ahold of. I was giddy and could barely contain the secret from her as she made it for me. It was high waisted and girlish, with a skirt just a bit shorter than what the style and propriety preferred on a grown woman in that time, but would be acceptable for a child. Exactly how he specified.

He sent a carriage to collect me that night. Inside was a strange woman who hastily did my dull brown hair up in a graceful bun, clipped a lovely hat with fake sunflowers adorning it to my head, added rouge to my cheeks, and stained my lips red. She showed me my face in her hand mirror. I looked like a porcelain doll. My round cheeks and big blue eyes betraying my youth. I wanted to cry, I had so wished I would look like one of his elegant womanly friends that night. 

His eyes lit up at the sight of me, he looked almost hungry, I remember thinking. 

“Everyone is looking at you, you’re quite the show stopper” he said in a smug tone. In hindsight I believe the looks were due to how out of place I was there, a child dancing with the adult host. I distinctly remember a servant girl looking at me with barely disguised horror written on her face. It confused me, the attention. Why do I always stick out? The only place I seem to belong is in his arms… 

At the countdown, I had heard that you were meant to kiss someone at parties like this. I was afraid, I had never kissed before and wasn’t ready. Many of the attendees were drunk, and a bubbly bitter drink was shoved into my hand. Kinsleon didn’t drink anything that I saw. He told me I should try to drink it quickly to experience the feeling. I held onto it without drinking until he said “Are you scared? It’s an adult drink, I thought you might be ready but perhaps another time…” and at that I stupidly drank the whole thing and another two in quick succession. 

The world spun faster as we twirled around the ballroom floor. Around me there was laughter, I couldn’t tell if it was directed at my clumsy movement or something else. At midnight, it seemed everyone had paired off and were kissing, Kinsleon looked down at me expectantly, I was frozen anxiously in a moment of sobriety. A few of his friends noticed that I was hesitating and called out “Come on Caroline, you’re not leaving until we see some kissing!” then another called out “If you don’t kiss him, I will!” uproarious laughter from everyone as Kinsleon continued to look at me expectantly with a smirk on his face. Finally he lifted me up and kissed me. I was practically limp. He didn’t set me down after. Instead he kissed my neck, and then bit down. Hard. I screamed as others laughed maliciously. He took one deep drink from me and set me down. He beckoned a servant over, who quickly patched the puncture marks up with some kind of salve and a bow adorned silk ribbon. For a moment I was disoriented, shivering with embarrassment and anxiety. But the party went on, and I wanted so badly for that to not have happened, so I pretended that it didn’t. It was surprisingly easy to ignore, like many future boundary crossings. Usually denying reality is something people don’t allow you to get away with easily, but not in cases like this. It was the only “acceptable” reaction to his abuse, as I would eventually discover. 

“I’m moving to London in the spring” He told me suddenly near the end of the night.

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“No! You can’t!” I immediately cried, terrified of going back to the way things were before him. It seemed so cruel, to get a taste of a world more beautiful than I had ever dreamed only for it to be gone again like smoke blown away in the wind. To be all alone again.

“Come with me.” He said, staring intently into my eyes, holding my hands firmly in his. 

There was only one answer I could have given him. I know now that had I told him no, he would have drunk my blood until I was a husk. I wasn’t the first starry eyed little girl he brought home, I was just the first one desperate enough to tell him yes even though I knew in the back of my head he would hurt me again just as he had earlier that night. I reasoned it was a small price for passage to his world. He told me I shouldn’t tell my parents, they would try to stall or stop us from being together, make us wait “an arbitrary amount of time” before we could be together, and would certainly hate him after we take the leap. Besides, I longed for freedom, and explanations couldn’t convey the intensity of my need to make him happy.   

Spring came in a flash, he showered me with affection and attention, I was on cloud nine in those months leading up to the move to london. I had become increasingly distant from my family, and they hardly seemed to notice. When dad got an apprentice boy as mom had been trying to get him to do for ages, I didn’t protest, though I would have been devastated before. Good, I thought, dad has a replacement to distract him from mourning my departure. I felt mom would probably be relieved. I wrote a letter explaining that I had been swept off my feet by a wealthy suitor, that we were in love and moving overseas for his work. I told them not to look for me, that it was better for me to just start over where I wasn’t known as a community menace.  I left the letter on my bed. My last look at my old life was from outside my bedroom window on my way to the carriage waiting in the dark.

Soon we were finally alone in our own home, smaller than I imagined, in a country I’d never been to before. His demeanor was almost instantly different. He was more distant, “busy” as he would assure me. And when we were together instead of how we used to laugh and talk easily about beautiful things, he would tell me the ugly parts of his life, how repulsive he thought people were, how they were all scheming and conniving. That they were all just waiting for an opportunity to rip you off, or hurt you. At first I tried to persuade him that it wasn’t true, that there were good people in the world, but as I felt increasingly isolated I began to believe him, and found myself becoming timid around anyone he didn’t approve.

Each night he would drink from me. It hurt and terrified me but I didn’t protest. I dreaded it, hated it, but never said a thing. He would have me get drunk most times, so he in turn could get drunk off my blood. He finally told me what I had put together. 

“I’m of a rare breed, a vampire. I hate to hurt you, but I have to in order to survive. One day when you’re older, I will make you immortal and you’ll never hurt again. Besides, this way, you become one with me, your blood flowing through me. It’s beautiful.” 

His friends, other vampires, were the only people besides him I spoke to. I became particularly close with Sven. Unlike the others, he seemed to treat me as an equal. I could talk to him about the stresses of being alone most days, of Kinsleon’s dark perspective on people, how his drinking from me was scary and painful. He comforted me some, but mostly made excuses for Kinsleon. He’d encourage me to understand Kinsleon’s perspective, tell him how clear it was to him that he loved me dearly. I was naive enough to believe Sven wanted the best for me, cared about me as a friend, cared about me and Kinsleon equally. 

Later when I told Sven about the mean things Kinsleon said to me, how I felt belittled, condescended to, confused by his anger, and scared of his intensity, Sven suggested ways I could better respond, told me it was just a communication issue that all couples go through. When I felt Kinsleon was lying to me, telling me I’d done things I’d never done, that I’d misheard things I knew he said, Sven “helped” me see things from Kinsleon’s perspective, that I needed to accept I can be wrong, that it was part of growing up to learn how to compromise even when you’re in the heat of an argument. I told him of a time Kinsleon got so mad he shook me awake throughout the night to continue a constant string of furious insults, and that I went limp, felt as though I had left my own body to escape it. He told me yes, that was wrong, but to forgive Kinsleon because he had been through so much in his life he had mental scars that he needed my love to heal from. “Everyone has baggage, you can’t run away from it. You’ll grow together and you’ll both heal.” 

Then I told him Kinsleon wanted to change me, to make me immortal. Sven laughed and said “It’s not as scary as you think. It’s easy for the recipient anyway, all you have to do is lay there.” 

He wanted to “make love”, though I had been taught it was only possible in marriage. In those times there was no sex without marriage, but the group of immortals regarded culture as hardly relevant. They all knew I was still a virgin even after being with Kinsleon for nearly a year by then. They kept goading “When are you going to do it already?” Kinsleon would shrug and say “Up to her'' with a smile, I would hide my red face in humiliation. I would mumble something about waiting for marriage, or some other excuse, which everyone found hilarious.

He told me vampires had a different ritual for “marriage”. They called it bondage, and it was a special ritual I wasn’t to know all the details of in case I backed out and revealed their secrets to outsiders. All I knew was sex was involved and I would be a vampire when it was over. 

“It isn’t safe for you to be alone in this city without me while you are still mortal.” So I stayed inside, trapped in my circumstance, holding on to my mortality. Virginity, which had been such an odd concept to me before, suddenly had real importance. He would often talk about how he loved that about me, that I would be his and only his, that my virginity would belong to him. It made me uneasy that he valued something that he wanted to take from me. Will he value me less once it’s gone?  I would wonder. Not that he could value his possession any less. That’s all I was to him. He called me his little doll. “My perfect little doll” he would hold me up by my armpits, and I would go limp, widen my eyes and pucker my lips and put air in my cheeks because it made him laugh. “Perfection, I never want you to change.”

Then I told him one Christmas when I was 16 that I would do it. He was overjoyed and told me he’d make arrangements for the ritual to be on New Years, our 1 year anniversary. I tried on the dress my mom had made me last year but I found it no longer fit. I had since had my first blood and had suddenly sprouted hips. “Will my body continue to change after the ritual?”. He scoffed “Silly girl. No, you’ll never age, the only thing that will change is that your hair will turn white in half a century or so. We all assume it’s about the same time it would have gone white as if you were mortal.” He didn’t realize those words would horrify me. How old is Kinsleon, really? I’m practically marrying an old man… but I felt I had no choice but to go through with it. After all, what else did I have? I tried to focus on the fact he looked forever like a young man, so maybe he was mentally young, too. I think back in disgust at how blinded I was to the imbalance of it all, but the culture I was raised in did not teach girls to fight or disobey men. Although I had been so strong willed and independent before, I felt as though I’d burnt myself out on fighting the world, that I found where I wanted to belong and would do anything to stay. It felt impossible to go against him. The expectations heaped heavily onto my shoulders, I didn’t even think of leaving, though I knew in my heart it was all wrong. I was unhappy and felt lonelier than ever. I cried often, hardly ate, not that he brought me all that much food. I think he liked me to be that thin, it made me appear even more childlike and vulnerable. My stomach churns at the thought. I feel a visceral disgust too intense to explain any time I think of him, it goes deeper into my core than there should be room. A void which endlessly swirled with feelings of disgust, betrayal, mourning the loss of my mortality, the loss of my final years of childhood, deep self loathing, and an existential horror at the reality of all he had done to me. He had changed the course of my life forever, and I could never get that back. He was still here, in my head, hurting me to this day. A fact he would probably get sick pleasure from, if he were still alive. I try to find comfort in the fact he is dead, but it leaves me feeling icily hollow. 

Kinsleon took me to a high end London tailor, and they made me a long dress with the same high waist he preferred me in. White except for a thick red ribbon tied just below where my breasts would be if I had any. It was more extravagant than anything my mother could have made, with elegant lace over the long, belled dress. Truly doll-like, I was transfixed by the reflection of what I suddenly realized was a complete stranger. Who is she? That expensive doll in the mirror… I had so often rejected anything resembling femininity on me before Kinsleon. He never outright told me to do it, I would have rejected it if he had demanded I conform to specific standards. It was that he used my strong headedness and naivety against me to mold me the way he chose with subtle insinuations, strategic compliments, backhanded comments, reverse psychology, and something much more powerful than I could have imagined would affect me; peer pressure. At that tender age, peer pressure had an impact like little else, and having so little experience with it before I was utterly at the mercy of the people who wielded it. And Kinsleon didn’t stop with manipulating me, no, the friend group was bent to his will with none of them the wiser. 

The last night I was mortal I spent with my consciousness bobbing along like a balloon on a long string tied around my neck. I couldn’t confront the terror I felt, couldn’t come to terms with what was happening. My body easily played my bubbly part as I knew he wanted me to, as he always wanted me to. I watched him kiss me goodbye outside the room I was to be dolled up in by a team of servants.

I was led around numbly, obedient and docile, just as Mom always wanted. The thought of my parents hit me for the first time in a long while, temporarily dragged me back into my body. I cried in the arms of the woman who was doing my makeup. She held me close, sincerely cooing “Oh darling girl, it’s okay, you’re okay.” she hushed me and pet my hair until my tears turned into stuttered breaths. I wanted her to take me home with her, but then Sven knocked on the door and I nodded to another servant to let him in as I wiped away evidence of my crying. 

Seeing his smiling excitement offset my outburst, and soon I drifted back outside my body. He was to guide me to the room where the ritual would begin. I held his hand tightly down the long spiraling steps, I can still hear the echoes of our steps. He opened the door to a near pitch black room. Tealight candles lined the way to an intricately carved wooden altar alight with candles which Kinsleon stood behind. I was led to the altar which had a space in the middle with a silver embroidered cloth which reflected the flickering candlelight. Sven swept me up and laid me down across it without warning, and just as abruptly receded into the dark. I made no sound, even as Kinsleon pulled out a knife and pointed it over my heart. My chest heaved with frantic breathing. I thought for a moment that he was about to plunge it into me, but instead he dragged it all the way down my dress, careful not to cut the red ribbon as he tore through the beautiful thick layers. He drove stakes into my dress at all points around my exposed body, using the dress with intact sleeves and ribbon to pin me to the altar. He lifted my arms over my head and drove the knife through both sleeves and deep into the wood. My hands clasped at the handle and I instinctively tested it. It felt immovable. Kinsleon looked at me with an expression I had never seen before. Unhinged hunger. Animalistic desire. Then I realized with a shock that there were many others in the room, all of his friends and more. Whispering chants in tongues and a hundred held candles lit with a hundred matches striking at once. 

He leaned in with his teeth over my heart, his brow raised to look up at me, the candles casting long shadows on the wrinkles of his forehead making him appear so much older, and much less human. His teeth pierced more than just my skin, the pressure he exerted on my torso with just his jaw caused pain I’d never known, nor have words to describe. I heard my rib snap, as he dug his face deep into my chest and pierced my heart. I screamed bloodcurdlingly, inhumanly, an alien sound I can hear in my mind as clearly now as if I was there again, as though the sound cut through all of time and still echoes within me. Blood cascaded out of my chest into his greedy, unhinged jaw and lapping tongue, the pain so severe I hardly registered that he slathered my blood onto himself below and forced himself inside me as the chanting swelled. It could have lasted hours, it could have lasted moments, I have no way of knowing. The undulating fountain of blood continued to pour out of my chest, he hunched his long body in order to reach it and continue drinking. I saw faces pass me by and hold chalices to my sides to catch the blood. They all drank from me, I was bewildered at how much blood I held within me, prayed for the bleeding to stop and for death to make it end. I was drifting in and out of consciousness, I saw Sven’s face, he momentarily looked me in the eyes. I thought I saw pity there, briefly, until he held a chalice of my blood to his lips and drank with a look of sheer indulgence. He didn’t look into my eyes again, instead I saw his eyes hungrily take in my exposed body.   

On that table, I felt a searing hatred for them all. Outrage and betrayal, a clarity of what horrors were being done to me, even as I could hardly wrap my mind around the mere fact that it was all really happening. But then my bleeding stopped, and the chanting changed, just before I lost consciousness in my last human moments, I heard them say.

Welcome sister Caroline.

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