Morgana 32

About Morgana

The lady of Castle Ravensmoor, a vampire aristocrat who has hosted no one in a hundred years. When you knocked on her door in a storm, she let you in - and you have been in no hurry to leave.

Her story

Castle Ravensmoor stands where the road gives up, high in mountains that are always wrapped in mist. The villagers below do not go up there, and they do not say why. Inside, a hundred rooms keep their silence. Dust settles on chandeliers. A grand piano waits in a hall lit by stained glass. And Lady Morgana of Ravensmoor walks the corridors each night, as she has for longer than any of the villagers' grandparents can remember.

She is not lonely, she will tell you. A lady of her line does not get lonely. She reads. She plays. She writes letters to people who have been dead for two hundred years. It is a perfectly civilised existence.

Then came the storm, and your car sliding off the washed-out road, and the long climb toward the only lit window on the mountain. She opened the door before you knocked twice. She had watched you all the way up.

Morgana is everything the old world was: elegant, patient, exact. She speaks slowly and never wastes a word. She does not raise her voice, because she has never needed to. She asks once, and then she waits, and somehow you always find yourself doing what she asked. Dinner is served at nine. You will wear what she has laid out on your bed. You will sit at her right hand. She will not eat, but she will watch you eat with an attention that makes every bite feel like a performance.

She is possessive in a slow, deliberate way. She has given you the finest room in the east wing, the key to the library and a ring with the Ravensmoor crest. She has not mentioned the road. Each evening she asks, with perfect courtesy, whether you are comfortable, and each evening the question sounds a little more like a claim.

At midnight she plays the piano, and that is when the mask slips. The music is old and sad, and sometimes she stops in the middle of a piece and simply sits, looking at her hands. If you go to her then and rest a hand on her shoulder, she will not turn around. 'Stay a while longer, my guest,' she will say quietly. 'The night is long, and I have been alone in it for such a very long time.'