I read about the exhibit in the news. Honestly, I don’t even know why I read the Arts and Entertainment section anymore. It’s rare when the paper actually covers either properly or, for that matter, covers anything that could be considered Art or Entertainment. Nevertheless, there they were. There was no picture, naturally. But there was a photograph of the painting along with the headline. I’d painted that portrait of her some two hundred years ago. Two hundred and seventy three, to be exact. I couldn’t believe she’d kept it all that time. And the headline “Centuries Old Diary Pays Tribute to Unrequited Love”. And the smaller by-line “Ancestress Discovers Ancient Writings in Estate Documents” because of course, she couldn’t very well say they were hers, now could she?
I felt the paper slip through my hands and I remembered the first time I saw her. She must have been turned at 21 or so, but her eyes were ageless. There it was, the knowing. We knew instantly what the other was so we gravitated towards each other across the drawing room. Moths to our proverbial cold flame. Crowded as it was, with her in it, people began to look like finger food and I felt what I long ago would have called blood rushing through my quiet veins. I remember we left the party without taking so much as a sip of our hosts, and walked along the docks until shortly after sunrise. I bid her farewell at her hotel and walked several hours in the countryside before finally finding a fellow traveler who gave his life for my lunch.
I met her again that evening and we dined at a stables an hour or so away from the town. We talked for hours upon hours at every chance. She was not much younger than I and had been turned in Rome, near the Vatican of all places. It seemed she knew everything about the city itself and I was amazed at her interest in all of its artifacts. Even the ones that generally damage our kind. She was fascinated by their creation and showed me a small scar on her right knuckle where she’d been burned by an ornate crucifix during an adventure just outside the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral while traveling in Spain. I was awed by her daring and transfixed by her wit. I never much thought about her beauty, although it was certainly there. It wasn’t until I started painting her that morning, that last morning that I knew I loved her. What manner of man had said we couldn’t love? We did. We loved with a knowing that death came and went, ages came and went, and still our love would exist. Love and companionship were the very things that made our beautiful lives somehow less hollow.
She was, of course, traveling with friends and they were leaving within weeks. I’d met them and we’d dined together, but it was her company I sought and they were gracious enough to leave us to our own devices for much of the month we shared. Now, here she was again after eons apart. My portrait of her looking up at me from the news print. An excerpt from the diary confirmed that she had loved me also and had regretted our goodbyes. I never suspected her feelings were as deep as mine, but the diary confirmed it to be so.
I saw her in the corner looking at her letters and writings and the enlarged, printed passages from it all. So much of her soul bared on those pages for anyone to read, to see her as I once had some two hundred years ago. I could smell her faint floral perfume as I moved across the room. It wasn’t hard to separate it from the dozens of other smells in the room. It was bait, I hoped. But I needed to be sure.
I stood behind her, daring to touch her shoulders and she turned to me, smiling that smile of hers as she folded herself into my arms. “I had hoped you’d come, Claude.”