My first adventure into the world of the unlicensed attorney-at-law was filled with adventure, fleeting triumph, nimble rhetoric, sincere schadenfreude, and an almost-defeat that transmuted into mystery the the appearance of the allegedly late Joanna Mills.
If this is the norm, I might well find my home at the bar!
BC
I have died so many times that it was a shock to confront its actual consequences. As I did, a strange calm filled me. When I was liberated by Angelique, I knew why.
Throughout the centuries, I have seen the dearest of friendships fall into the ashes of acrimony with the slightest breeze of disappointment. You can imagine what I’ve seen become of love.
Angelique is love. I know that now. But what is Angelique? That is a far more difficult question.
But she did not come to me alone.
There are those who may be blessed with friends. And I honor them. Others may have lovers. That is their right. I congratulate their luck.
However, I have a Julia Hoffman.
She is not immortal because she needn’t be. She is a force of the universe. To think that here I am, a man of the 1790’s in the year 1840 by way of 1970, most recently shackled behind a brick wall, braving everything against Judah Zachary himself, and I have utter calm because I know that Julia Hoffman is with me. Always, before I even knew her, she was — somehow — there. Julia Hoffman. My second self? My better self. She is humanity when I have none. She is fury when I have only fear.
I will have love in my life, no doubt many times over. But I will know Julia Hoffman only once.
Today, I find Quentin sans attorney, so what will I do? Exactly what Julia would do for me. I will leap into the arena and become Quentin’s advocate. I will do so because it must be done. No one is going to sweep in to save us all. There are no heroes in life. Just us… faced with millions of minute-yet-mighty moments and choices:
I may choose convenience, or I may choose challenge.
I may choose self-indulgence, or I may choose some small act that changes a life.
I may choose to ignore those I claim to love, or I may choose to demonstrate my love before death removes the option.
Because it will.
These are things that Julia taught me.
She never cured me with an injection. She cured me with an example.
I would tell her that I loved her, but it is too small a concept for too great a woman.
BC
Gentlemen,
Here is the situation thus far:
Barnabas Collins has been missing for a week near Collinwood, whose master is now Gerard Stiles, but whose rightful master, Quentin Collins, is the subject of a witch trial where his cousin, Desmond Collins, served as advocate until being jailed for practicing the occult, himself, in a forced exposure probably engineered by Gerard, who suspects my friend Julia Hoffman rather than the witch, Angelique Bouchard, who has an obsession with Barnabas, a man once served by my ancestor Ben Stokes, who, when Julia first arrived, was one of the many live-on guests at Collinwood, along with the aforementioned Gerard Stiles who, at the time of Julia’s arrival, was not the evil monster he would become but someone merely fabricating the details of the drowning of Tad Collins and Tad’s father, Quentin, Gerard’s best friend and husband of Samantha, a woman Gerard attempted to marry in the wake (ha-ha) of Quentin’s alleged passing, and who would have done so, had it not been for the subsequent return of Tad and Quentin on their wedding day, causing interpersonal rifts which were furthered as Samantha chose the secretly gold-digging Gerard over Quentin, two men who later vied for the affections of Miss Daphne Harridge, a new governess to Collinwood, a house whose former master, Daniel, was dying at the time of the wedding, and who intended to bequeath all his wealth to Samantha, much to the consternation of Daniel’s son (and Quentin’s brother), Gabriel, an embittered malcontent in a wheelchair, who watched in glee as Quentin engineered strife between Gerard, his best friend, and Samantha, his estranged wife, by refusing to give up the son he had with her, Tad, a young man rendered helpless as Gerard moved to nearby Rose Cottage (with Flora Collins) but nonetheless maintained an odd friendship with Quentin, who still thought their friendship dear, while ignoring all of Gerard’s bad qualities, such as his practice witchcraft, a force insinuating itself into Collinwood by the evil power of Judah Zachary, a powerful warlock decapitated centuries ago in Bedford, Massachusetts and the architect of mass chaos in Collinsport via the mental seizure of Quentin’s cousin, Desmond (the man who brought the head to Collinsport as a gift for Quentin and who is now on trial for witchcraft), Letitia Faye (who has second sight and a keen singing voice), Dr. Julia Hoffman (a female physician who briefly attached the head to a body while under a hex), and now Gerard Stiles, supposed good friend to the one man man he did not possess, Quentin Collins, despite allegations from the state that Quentin is carrying out Judah’s grand design of revenge on the Collins family (whose patriarch, Amadeus, presided on the witchcraft trial), and whose the evil magic is powerful enough to overflow, causing strife with a neighbor whose cattle have died, a woman who perished with her forehead branded with the “mark of Satan” (hardly), which is a symbol also seen on the ring of Quentin Collins, a man later found kneeling over the body of his murdered brother-in-law, Randall Drew, a man who resided in a cell managed by a sheriff whose wife was found dead outside its bars from occult means, a fact emphasized by Lamar Trask, a crazed mortician and the chief accuser of witchcraft, a citation he uses to hector his sworn enemy, Barnabas Collins, the alleged (and, as it turns out, true) murderer of Trask’s father in 1795, the year when the elder Trask was walled up (for the public welfare) in the walls of the Old House on the Collins estate, the same house that Barnabas was leaving to testify on Quentin’s behalf when he vanished in a manner as mysterious as the way in which governess, Daphne Harridge, changed her affections from Gerard to Quentin, the latter of which caused her sister to go mad after their infidelity some time ago.
Pardon me if I am late to brunch.
HELLFIRE!
T. Eliot Stoked!
Barnabas,
When you get back, know that as of this writing, I am making every effort to find you and to find Judah Zachary’s head. I promise.
Love,
Julia
No occult force is deadlier than the unthinking community that fears it.
DJC
Dearest Quentin,
Why do you still call me that? For you write in a way I do not understand. What have I done wrong for you to accuse me so? it is madness between us to start again.
– Joanna
As I hung there in a miasma of regret, perspiration, and the limitations of mid-1800’s hygiene, I was distracted by the many things that were going unattended.
1. I was supposed to give key testimony at Quentin’s trial.
2. Judah Zachary is still at large.
3. I trust almost no one.
4. I neglected to instruct the domestics to feed Quicksilver.
5. I have a slight nickel allergy, and these cuffs contain significant traces of it.
6. These galluses were not meant to be worn while hanging in this position for extended periods.
7. When Angelique met me, she was over a century old, and she still found me alluring. I am flattered.
If only she would have stayed. If only she could have. As immortals, we are like the audience members for a play. We see it and move on to another theatrical. But as a man, I am neither an audience member nor an actor. I am a character in a play that never ends. One role. One plot. One act of indeterminate length.
As a “character,” my full perception of life is unknowable to an audience member. And to be an audience member? Unfeeling? Godlike? Skipping about from saga to saga? It is now unthinkable to me.
Quite suddenly and quite definitely.
BC
The evening began poorly, when Flora informed me that everyone had thought I was a vampire. Thereafter, I arrived at Collins Hall and was forced into the Reverend Trask’s ancient manacles at gunpoint. (Upon reflection, I should have remained for the viola recital at Rose Cottage.) I was concerned, but it was not the first time I’d worn them. Nor would it be the last. Upon consideration, I have been forced into them under duress more often than has a Trask.
I shall always remember this lesson: never anger a Trask. Also, if possible, wait until a Trask is no longer near firearms before relinquishing immortality.
BC
Tonight, I will come back. This time, I will succeed.
– Joanna
I am free.
Free of the beast to a degree I never knew, and it has called into new perspective my entire adventure in 1897. I had thought that the Angelique of that time was the superior of the Angelique of 1840. After all, she cured me. But how much did it take? How many agonizing injections over weeks and weeks? And how easily would I be fused with the beast once more?
Of the two Angeliques, the one of 1840 is nearly sixty years the junior, but there is a wisdom within her that time and experience have not yet replaced with jadedness. This made itself known when she cured me. She simply willed it so. No ceremony. No needles and draughts. No pain. According to her, it is a curse lifted, and one that she can never again inflict.
This makes me understand that all of the past “inabilities” to lift the curse (with any ease) on her part carried with them an unspoken provision; they were being lifted in a manner merely temporary. That was the cause of the difficulty. She was merely masking the beast, not slaying it.
Now, she has slain it. I am in her debt.
I hate her for withholding my true cure. But it is not she. I cannot hold any other incarnation of Angelique responsible for this action, just as I cannot hold this Angelique responsible for the misdeeds of the others. We are all glorious individuals in the sea of time and events. The future has yet to come. The past is where it should be. In this strange either of cause and effect and identity, each is changing, growing, learning… swimming back and forth. Which Barnabas am I? Which Angelique is this? This never happened before. It shall never happen again. Whose future will it impact? Mine? Hers? Has my destiny been altered by those around me I’ve not even known?
And, in the end, does it matter?
Perhaps, but not now. Not while I can drink in the sun without fear. And in that light, I cannot help but see the sun paint the rarest vision: the woman made it possible. Her reasoning for doing so? The very same that I have felt and employed so very often; she would rather see me live for years as a moral than to die in hours at the hands of our enemies. Was it Miss Winters or MIss Evans or… after all of these years, I cannot recall. But I am alone now because of those exchanges. The want from my solitude does not outweigh their right to happiness.
Angelique has been alive far longer than I knew. She could not make me a warlock. Perhaps that would have stripped me of all humanity. But by bonding me to the beast, she gained the one thing she never had: a love who could accompany her through her immortality. Perhaps this was the best that she could do. Perhaps this explains her zealous and desperate attempts to protect that love at the expense of everything. Perhaps this is why she pursued me so ardently through the centuries. My encounters with the incarnations with Josette were all happenstance. Her discoveries of me were quite on purpose.
That is a love defiant of any measure I have known. I am humbled. And I am unable to return it. Love is no more a matter of will than is choosing not to.
The barrier? It is not hate nor fear nor furious memory. It is that she is quite simply not human. To what will she revert when doors are closed? To which dark masters is she kin? Her benevolence is godlike. She has powers to bless that transcend anything that I can imagine. Her wrath is just as mighty. Some time ago, I remarked that our immortality rendered us as casual observers to the human pace of the ephemeral and finite and entropic. My life is now ephemeral and finite and entropic. She will never understand what that means. For love to grow, there must be empathy. And there can be no empathy between a god and a man.
I worship you, Angelique. I think I always have. But I can only worship. Anything more would turn my heart from ice to fire and from fire to nothing.
BC
Collins Chronicles Reader 