fanfic: the devil in the flask [7/12]
Disclaimers: I do not own.
Ratings/Warnings: M. Flat-out M for mature (as well as explicit) scenes, gothic themes, disturbing and occasionally gory imagery, and all-around delicious Kuroshitsuji darkness. Makes references to characters all across the map of manga, anime, etc.
Pairings: Sebastian/Ciel, Ciel/Lizzy if you squint later, Sebastian/everyone, and too many others on the side that don’t really make a difference
Summary: we can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy in life is when men are afraid of the light - a family of witches, they say, where the crosses are turned upside down by invisible hands and ravens are sacrificed to the devil, where incest and tragedy and murder prance hand in hand with noble responsibilities and otherworldly elegance, where the man is sighted most often in the company of the current heir of the Phantomhive legacy, the young Earl left a vast estate of enviable value: and that is the boy Ciel Phantomhive
Posted on FF.net here or below:
⌈ the devil in the flask ⌋
chapter seven
THE DEVIL IN THE FLASK
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Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…
†††
12. blessed virgin
They slept together once, just after he turned fourteen.
Lizzy was a curious creature. Wendy and Nina were always frightened so easily by the noises and activity of the house-that is to say, once the candles were blown out and the ghosts came to play-and Lizzy appeared to be frightened at times, too, but Ciel knew that it was all a ruse. These things fascinated her the same they terrified her, and when she wasn’t feigning the fragility of a proper Victorian lady, she was fencing with her cousins or going on walks through the cemetery, or standing in empty rooms smiling and laughing and conversing with invisible beings through her drawing and writing automaton dolls while her many music boxes tinkled idly away.
Phantomhive blood ran in Elizabeth Middleford’s veins. She had her mother’s resolve and her father’s good cheer. Her eyes were a deep green, like emeralds, and at first glance she seemed vulnerable and innocent, but if you were lucky enough to catch one of her pointed sideways glances, it became quite clear she was a very good actress.
Lizzy took pride in calling herself a witch. She was something of a clairvoyant, hypersensitive to changes in the aural fields. Madame Red, although not a direct heir but descendant of some eighteenth-century Phantomhive cousin, had been the same way. For these unexpected mediums, their intuition was incredibly sharp. Specters were drawn to them as if disciples to Christ. They could hear the strong thoughts of others and they could sense the presence of preternatural energy, be it attached to entity or object. They could tentatively guess future events by listening carefully to their intuition, although it took quite a lot of energy and normally wasn’t as intentional as it seemed.
A dainty knock sounded on one of Ciel’s bedroom doors and he tried to rub the sleep from his eyes, watching as the crystal knob turned and Lizzy peeked in from the hallway.
“Are you awake!” she whispered, less a question and more an excited giggle.
Ciel moved his blankets back for her to join him on the bed, door latched again and the warmth of her body comforting. He lay on his back, blinking groggily up at the ceiling, and Lizzy lay next to him with her arm comfortably across his chest as if they were already married. The wool of her nightgown was ticklish to him. The press of her tiny breasts against his side was alluring.
“The man’s not here,” Lizzy observed. There wasn’t a trace of spite or disgust in the little treble.
“No…” Ciel confirmed.
“I know where the man came from.”
Ciel bristled with a gentle chill. He met Lizzy’s eyes in the moonlight, wondering if he appeared as eager as she did for the story, like two conspirators or siblings fighting bedtime. “Nobody knows where the man came from,” Ciel insisted, mouth dry. Lizzy’s eyes danced with the excitement of a particularly titillating secret. She smelled like warm sweet skin and crushed roses when she tightened her arms around him and spoke low into his ear:
“Years, and years, and years ago-sometime between King Edward II and King Edward III-in the Grand Duchy of Moscow. There’s where the man came from. He was still a boy, though, and he painted holy pictures. He was stolen away by the Tatars, who sold him off. Somehow he made it to Paris, but he died of the plague.”
Ciel rolled his eyes. “That’s so imaginative. You read far too much for a girl.”
Lizzy was offended. “It’s true! Images of it flash through my mind when he’s around! I swear it on my life!”
She was so endearing, and so strangely sexless. They kissed in the dark of his bedroom, comforters rustling. Her hand was soft like silk on his face, her hair tickling his nose, and she laughed wildly after their tongues met briefly and hid under the blankets as if ashamed of her disgraceful actions.
Floorboards creaked overhead. The dying coke crumbled under the mantle. The bed squeaked once, when Lizzy crawled on top of him. Her soft face was engulfed in shadows. She tossed blonde hair over her shoulder and smiled, lashes lowered, such graceful dominance, and Ciel was endlessly thankful she made no comment about his distinct knowledge of lovemaking. It wasn’t like she was inexperienced, either, which was mildly distracting to Ciel as he wondered, blushing, just what she’d done and with whom-but then she kissed his neck and the shivers rattled through him, and he let his hands wander and his mind wander and the heat of her form was like fire, infecting and inflaming. Her little breasts were so full and silky-soft, and the way she tilted her head and laughed at him again, oh…
It wasn’t wrong. They were going to be married one day. And sometimes Lizzy made his heart flutter just so, and sometimes Ciel just wanted to hold her against his chest and protect her from everything-but that was the funny thing about Elizabeth Middleford. She didn’t need protecting at all.
Lizzy was tall and slender, in a girlish way. Her favorite dresses were cream-colored with lots of taffeta, muslin, and pearls, and pink sashes about the waist. Her hands were small, and so were her feet, and she had an oval face and a button nose. Her smile was flanked by matching dimples. She carried herself with all the importance of a Marquess’s daughter, elegance and little girl maturity. She could walk with books balanced atop her head as easily as she could dance in her favorite silk slippers. She tried to teach Ciel once. He stepped on her toe.
Lizzy could sing and sew and talk fashion for hours. She enjoyed English history (particularly tales of the Tudors). She read poetry aloud. She spoke three languages other than her native tongue and she fenced masterfully. She knocked on the dirty windows of the family sepulchers and went on walks in the family cemetery with the spirits she’d called upon, and she was never more beautiful to Ciel than she had been the day Sebastian had made her dolls dance and she’d cried, so vexed, but there was a dark light of insatiable curiosity in her green eyes that had never gone out since then.
It was a unique sort of love between Ciel and his fiancée Lizzy, singular only to her and her view of the world.
Making love to Lizzy was like playing house. It was childish, far from the rough and mature, almost animalistic lust between him and Sebastian. No, it was markedly almost maternal, Lizzy full of that sad smiling understanding as she ran her fingers through Ciel’s hair after they’d romped in the sheets and it was so good to close his eyes against her shoulder after the tentative coalescing of desire between them.
What went on inside that pretty little head of hers? What hid behind her dimpled smile? She was always, always smiling at him. Undeniably, she knew about his relationship with the man. She knew, definitively, that Ciel belonged to Sebastian and nobody else in some unholy intimate way she’d never inhibit-and she understood. That was what mattered. It was like the blessing of angels, releasing Ciel from some unspoken weight of rotten secrecy. The love they shared was simple and light, the love of friends and brothers and sisters, a commingling of souls that was not really romantic but existed in the most honest of laughs and sparkling eyes because Lizzy knew him. She accepted him for everything. She loved him for it all. How could he ask for a better girl to marry, a wife who would not make him feel obligated, who did not need him to be perfect on her own?
Tragic, thus, that Elizabeth Middleford died in quarantine just after the season in 1890.
A summer of receptions and parties and outings became per usual a drab London, cheerless and exhausted as the days turned to that strange lazy stretch between summer and autumn. Noble families fled the dreariness, and in 1890 the Phantomhives boarded to Italy. Sailor suits and pale boater hats galore, and alabaster-white gloves with gleaming pearl buttons, their first stop was at the old family villa, some kilometers south of Venice. By the water, the reeds grew tall over the sand dunes and distant rocks were covered in moss and algae. A week of recuperation there was all that was needed before heading north to the Venetian palazzo the Phantomhives owned and rented out, with its crooked faded floors and moldering marble majesty, and rooms of murals like some fairy tale world.
It was only days after they arrived in Venice that Lizzy’s illness rang chords of fear through the household. Was it consumption? Was it something worse, something foreign and more contagious? She was holding her hands out to someone when she sighed her last breath, smiling and asking them closer, but she was alone in the room save for her parents and the Venetian doctor.
The family returned immediately to England. The storm of emotion that brewed in the manor was comparable to that after Madame Red’s death. Clarence Middleford was devastated by the loss of his daughter. Clause came in from London. Frances Middleford was far lost to some violent black emotion, vicious and spiteful and sometimes making no sense at all while other times snapping out of her daze long enough to insult someone before lapsing back into tearful, grief-stricken fury.
Gossip over servants’ breakfast claimed she’d been heard in a nasty fit with her son Edward. Voices, stomping, the harsh slap of skin on skin that was most likely a smack across the face, all part of a tense and brutal argument. Frances is reported to have screamed at her son: “This is what happens when you defy God!” and “like the crybaby he was” Edward Middleford allegedly howled back amidst agonized sobs: “I wasn’t going to let Ciel have her, Mamma, I told you that!”
Is this indicative of incest in the Middleford family? Had Edward tried to involve himself with his sister romantically? If so, was Elizabeth raped by her brother or was it a consensual routine? And if that is indeed the case, why? The two were often described as “twins” or “pretty little angels”, both being blond and dainty and seen arm-in-arm at social gatherings, pink-faced with port or mulled wine. But the comment “too close to be siblings” had only been dropped a record four times over the last fifteen years, and all that can be taken from such a scene-if it is truth and not servant story-is that Frances Middleford blamed her son for some atrocity, and Edward Middleford, while always somewhat of a spineless, sycophantic young man (who as a matter of fact did not ever truly warm up to Ciel Phantomhive), was never the same after his sister’s death.
The funeral for Elizabeth Ethel Cordelia Middleford was dark and ascetic. Frances Middleford refused to have her daughter entombed in the Phantomhive sepulchers, but instead had the interment finished in Highgate Cemetery, where Clarence Middleford’s family was buried.
In her casket, Lizzy was pale as the orchids around her, and it was quite rainy that day in London. Another Anglican funeral Mass rang out into the barrel vault and galleries of St. James’s, and, “How fitting,” Sebastian whispered where he lingered near Ciel’s side, watching the tears roll off Ciel’s chin and burst on the orchid flesh of Lizzy’s dead face. Peaceful, so peaceful, but hard-looking at the same time as if a beautiful doll carved crudely of wax.
“Go away from me,” Ciel gritted out between his teeth, so as not to seem suspicious if Sebastian was revealing himself to him and only him amidst this mourning crowd. He could not bear to think that Sebastian might have struck Lizzy down with a fever in order to keep Ciel all his own. There was a veritable pain in his chest, a terrible rotten ache that left him winded, as if some cruel insidious hand of fate had clutched onto his heart and were slowly, slowly crushing it to pieces. He felt lost in an inevitable state of gray that threatened to cripple him. The world seemed a bleak and hostile place to him suddenly, and did Sebastian understand that as Ciel fixed him with cold, damning eyes? He didn’t have to utter a word to convey the recycled accusation, did he?
You’ve left me alone among my enemies, again!
Sebastian looked so sad in the light of the church, which was dim, and pale, and moving erratically with the rain as it fell against the painted-glass window in the nave, rendering his smooth skin as orchid-white as Lizzy’s. There was nothing malicious about those blood-clot eyes of his, just an exquisite look of apology and sorrow on his face like that of a dark, damned saint.
“I hate you,” Ciel whispered urgently, tears burning his eyes and doubling, trebling the world around him. He spun on his heel and left Sebastian standing over Lizzy, and he welcomed the deafening pound of his heart in his ears because it separated him from reality for a while.
He saw Lizzy once after the funeral, on a foggy bitter December morning. It was his birthday, ironically, and he awoke to the sound of a singing voice behind closed lips. Adrenaline surging through him, hot and then cold, Ciel sat up straight to see Lizzy staring wistfully out his frosted bedroom window, having removed the drapes herself and swaying side to side as she hummed her favorite hymn. She wasn’t miasmic. She was seemingly solid, and Ciel was actually painfully confused for a moment. But after he scrambled out of bed and ran across the room to her, she looked at him with a wide cold look of fear, and uttered a bone-chilling shriek. It was the sort of sound that spirits uttered when they knew not yet how to focus energy to properly communicate, or when they wanted to scare others away, that thin and hollow-sounding voice that seems to echo into one’s very marrow-and then Lizzy disappeared in the blink of an eye, and Ciel staggered back in surprise.
His heart crumbled when she vanished. Dismally it occurred to him, as if growing impatient with his blindness to the truth, that love of any kind was futile.
Breathing hard, bruised and deeply shaken by the apparition and its violent disappearance, Ciel’s restive gaze flickered up to meet Sebastian’s in the mirror over the mantle.
And he was as alone as he’d ever been.
---
13. like candles snuffed out in the night
In early 1892, anecdote and doctor’s reports shed light on a severe quarrel between Frances Middleford and the Earl Ciel Phantomhive that prompted Frances to somehow convince a London doctor that her nephew might be mad, just as his father had been, and their father, and their grandmother, and so on. This resulted in a few rounds of shock therapy prescribed to the young Earl, by cold water immersion and gyration. Which was, of course, talk of the town. A Phantomhive, mad? Impossible! (And these remarks in proper context may or may not have been sarcastic.)
The treatment of Ciel Phantomhive struck up great controversy, not only in parlor talk but in the offices of Bethlem itself. Some doctors openly condemned the treatment of a Phantomhive based on the Marchioness’s claims. “Nobody’s ever come from that family feeble-minded,” they reproached, disdaining the doctor who so ignorantly bent to Lady Middleford’s insistence. Rumors began to circulate that Lady Middleford was having an affair with the doctor in charge of her nephew, and gossip was quite distinctly divided between those who were appalled at Ciel being “falsely diagnosed” and those who were immensely relieved something was “being done” about “that family”.
The sexes at Bethlem Royal in Southwark were separated. Even in the chapel a thick curtain hung between them. Some cells-but Ciel never saw them-were lined, floor and walls, with cork and India-rubber, for the more “dangerous” patients. The women had pianos, and the men were allowed billiards in their dayroom.
Being of nobility, and a rather powerful peerage at that, Ciel was given one of the best rooms, closest to the doctor’s room. It was far from his standards of comfortable, dimly-lit and sparse and somewhat chilly; it was locked from the outside, and he blushed in dread when the nurses heard him yelling at Sebastian to just break him out already-but it wasn’t completely unendurable.
He was filled with hate for Frances. He was disgusted by the other patients, dirty and mentally disturbed. He was terrified of being small and handsome in a ward of men and his days and nights began to bleed together, so shaken was he by being ripped from the manor and stuck in this institution, and dunked in icy water and spun round and round strapped to the gyration chair. He felt feverish. He was exhausted. If he wasn’t being ushered to eat or take fresh air, he was curled up in the shoddy bed of his shoddy chamber passing the seconds whispering to Sebastian about how he would exact vengeance on his callous aunt. She just wanted control of the manor. She wanted to be head of the family. She was the mad one!
He saw his mother, actually. Perhaps it was a delusion from the fever he’d gotten after the cold water therapy. Perhaps it was just a simple dream. Or perhaps her spirit actually had attached itself to him and joined him here in his cell at the asylum, and wrapped in his blanket, Ciel stumbled over to her in the moonlight and burst into tears. It was something he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do since that fateful night when the blood had run from her eyes, but here he was, weeping so hard that he shook, and his mother gathered him to her chest seemingly so material and warm, and her fingers stroked through his hair as she whispered, “Shh, angel, don’t cry. I forgive you…”
It did not occur to Ciel that Sebastian had taken the form of his mother to give him long overdue closure in a time of fragile state of mind. But we must remember this is a possibility.
Even after a while, the doctor in contact with Frances Middleford began to agree with his colleagues over their coffee: “It’s an injustice that he’s here. There’s no reason he should be here.” But it seemed that damn Marchioness Middleford was going to have him “helped” if it was the last thing she did on this earth-until finally Dr. Diedrich showed up with Clause Phantomhive after their trip through the Continent, easily overruling the Marchioness and quickly stepping in as the Earl’s “personal doctor”, much to Ciel’s relief and Frances’s fury. The doctors were thankful to release Ciel Phantomhive into their hands again. They seemed relieved to be rid of Frances’s callous carping and ruthless “follow-up” of her nephew’s treatment. Ciel scared all the other patients, they said. Nobody wanted to be around him. A few patients claimed he was “possessed” or “carried the devil in his pocket”. The doctors laughed with Diedrich and Clause in the office and explained that they took such accusations as a sign of Ciel Phantomhive’s normalcy in comparison, which incurables can sense like animals sense danger. Diedrich proved he’d been the boy’s personal doctor since birth and promised to closely follow Ciel’s mental progress at the manor, should he in fact be suffering from dementia praecox as Frances Middleford insisted he was.
Diedrich was appalled by Frances’s power of manipulation and strong-arming of the family’s feelings (and the doctors’) for her own sick exaction of “punishment” of some sorts. He refused to speak to Frances for weeks afterwards.
In the months after her daughter’s death, Frances’s condition progressively worsened. Her normally well-composed and self-possessed mind seemed to decay, leaving her a rather ill-tempered and meticulous woman. Gradually she grew to despise social gatherings and retreated to her apartments and boudoir plagued by bouts of anxiety and panic, where she had guests call upon her as if a sick queen. She believed it was what she deserved, and when she wasn’t being icy and invidious, and rather serpentine, she simply acted curt and affected, as if somebody had grievously offended her and she was awaiting an apology. She cried for Lizzy at least once a week, locked into her daughter’s old room with the mechanical dolls and music boxes, and whenever Edward or Clarence tried to comfort her, they emerged closing the door again with slap marks on their faces and bruises on their arms.
It is not wrong to suggest that perhaps the man, “Sebastian” as Ciel knew him, was gradually driving this woman to madness as revenge for the emotional pain she had inflicted over the years on his “beloved”.
Rumor after rumor of hateful friction between Ciel and Frances Middleford surfaced, before and after Ciel Phantomhive’s brief admission to Bethlem Royal Hospital. There were tales of the two frightening everyone out of the long dining hall with their horrid high-pitched arguments, throwing dishes and silver tableware at each other. They argued about money, esteem, loyalty, social standards, who to blame for the deaths of innocent family members. Reportedly, the house was divided between them, and members of the family had one of three choices: side with Ciel, side with Frances, or remain dangerously arbitrary. The division was obvious at banquets and balls. Shouting matches between the two occurred almost daily. When hard-fisted Uncle Ivan cornered Ciel in the office and demanded, “Why must you two squabble like children?” Ciel replied gaily enough: “Because she is acting like a child, and I was never raised to deal with children.”
It was hypocritical, of course. Ciel was usually the first to start throwing things at Frances. Once or twice he stood on a chair to get directly into her face with his remarks, or he grabbed her by the collar of her gown and yanked her to his eye level. Clarence and Edward were useless. It’s never been quite clear what, exactly, planted these seeds of malice and revulsion between aunt and nephew, but one can only suppose it had something to do with family loyalty, personal morals, family history, a violent collision of very different minds, the way trauma and melancholy can deteriorate one’s soul, and a very compelling spirit in elegant broadcloth.
Frances hated Ciel. That much was clear. He didn’t exactly like her, either. But it was a rather cryptic sort of dispute that was a natural part of the house just like the faded marble tile and chill of the west hall. It might have had something to do with the fact that she hadn’t thought he was fit enough to marry her daughter (but then again, she’d promised herself nobody was fit enough to marry her daughter), or that he was the son of her brother and therefore the proper place to channel the ill will she’d previously been aiming at Vincent.
Her brother had always been the favorite child, even to the ghosts apparently, and this had rendered Frances rather cold and critical even as a child, quite easily unenthused by all around her and walking with her nose high in the air. She hadn’t changed much since girlhood, with a long narrow face and pale hair, and Miss Doll and Nina had always whispered as if Ciel were too young to understand, “She’s a real witch if there are any left at all!”
She was not the type of woman concerned with the art of passivity or subtlety; she was proud and self-possessed, and she brimmed with impending spite at times, overseeing all with an almost hateful appraisal. It was quite evident that she believed the estate should have gone to her, not a child, she being Vincent’s last living sibling apart from their delusional father and Ciel not even thirteen yet. Her narrowed eyes were like shards of ice and everyone in the house knew she disparaged Ciel, ultimately despising him the same way she’d despised her own baby brother. She wanted to run the house. In truth, she tried to, and some days she succeeded in unfairly controlling everyone by planting seeds of contention or asserting her presence by way of daunting attitude, but in the end her only esteemed influence was in that of financial matters with Clause and William Spears and Madame Red, who Ciel consulted before every business decision whether or not Sebastian had whispered to him the proper choice.
“Why don’t you just leave and live with Clarence’s cousins?” Ciel asked Frances Middleford in a brief moment of neutral disposition.
Frances was immediately injured. Her face pinched. The wrath was crystalline in her voice. “This is my house, too. I was born here. I grew up here. It’s been mine longer than it’s been yours, child.”
By mid-1892, Frances Middleford was a cold and narrow-faced ghost of the resilient, formidable woman she’d once been. She wandered around in her nightgown, ashen-faced, wan, her pale hair in tangles down her back. Formally such a prim and proper and austerely beautiful woman, she was now almost mindless, screaming at everyone when she couldn’t articulate her feelings, and spending her time alone in Elizabeth’s old room, talking to the automaton dolls as if they were her daughter. She even took tea with them. Eventually, Diedrich decided she was too manic and unpredictable, so he began to sedate her by means of slipping powders into her morning tea and coffee until finally she was manageable enough for Ivan and Diedrich to lock her into one of the attic rooms. Hannah was put in charge of her, sweet middle-aged Hannah. “Like ‘Jane Eyre’!” Ivan and Ciel laughed, and Diedrich put a hand on Ciel’s head as he said, “You won’t have to fret about her any longer.”
Ciel’s grudge against Frances was like fire and brimstone within him yet, even on that cloudless morning when his silver spoon rattled delicately against the side of his fine china as he peered out the window at the sullen empty sky, listening to the sounds of struggle and commotion down the hall as Diedrich and Ivan and Charles Phipps and Charles Grey dragged Frances to the attic. Frances was screaming. Feral, she was knocking things over, punching the wall, kicking at those who tried to restrain her. But even Clarence had said, brokenheartedly, “She’s gone. I know that she’s gone. She’s not the same Frances I fell in love with…”
“It’s your fault!” Edward cried shrilly, eyes narrowed at Ciel, a pathetic wallowing excuse for a twenty-year-old man with messy blond curls and a frail stature. There had always been something so strangely sickly about him.
And over his tea, after Edward had accused him and stormed off, Ciel’s eyes flashed as they met Sebastian’s, a vague shadow of perturbed suspicion pinching his brow.
“You did this,” he whispered, less a question or allegation than a dawning realization. Ciel felt breathless. He wanted to demand, How could you do such a thing, when I didn’t command it! But he knew what Sebastian was capable of. He’d seen it firsthand. And none of it mattered, really, brooding about it, because Sebastian could pick through his thoughts if he wanted to, anyway. It was too late to throw up a mental shield against it. Sebastian’s eyes had penetrated his skin, hovering right over his very soul.
Sebastian smiled, leaning near the window. It was a wistful smile, nothing malicious or Machiavellian about it. His eyes shone brightly with indignant tears as he insisted, “But, Ciel, if you could see that woman’s true ways like I do, if you had sensed the potential for evil in her very core-evil like you and I could never imagine, not this spirit play but true, inexpressible evil of the human soul… You would have commanded as much of me. You would have.”
Just as he’d thrown his father to madness, Sebastian had driven Frances out of her own mind.
And why? Because she knew his true ways? Or because Sebastian, as he’d claimed, knew her true ways?
“It’s because of that man,” Frances had confessed to her husband one night long ago, shaking her head. “The man is evil! All I’ve ever tried to do is protect my brother from the man, but it only seemed to have the reverse effect, and-God, Clarence, you have to understand what I mean when I say my brother loved the man in ways he shouldn’t have, because I can’t speak the truth aloud and it’s been happening for generations, you see!”
The truth was that when she was seventeen, she’d walked in on her brother and the man in sinful relations, her brother already the handsome little gentleman with dark curls and that freckle below his eye, wearing a dashing coat and his tight white riding breeches as he crawled atop the man who’d sprawled, quite indecently and indecorously casual, on the leather seat in their father’s office. And where was their father, his absence permitting this depravity? And how was it possible, her brother and a ghost, the man’s hand on her brother’s narrow hip and her brother smiling such a tender smile, his eyes wide and full of love and his gestures those of the more dominant as he pressed a kiss to the man’s mouth? What else could she do but bury this rotten secret deep inside, like a pocket of poison within her? And what else was Frances supposed to do but bury it again when sixteen years later she heard none other than the man crying out in pleasure from the room of her brother’s eight-year-old son?
In her own cold hard way Frances was afraid, she was deathly afraid, and she wanted nothing more than to protect her family-but Ciel Phantomhive was so very different from any other child she’d known in her lifetime. He seemed to her of a totally different breed altogether. She’d always sensed it. He reminded her of her great-uncles Cain and Lionel Alistair. She’d told Rachel so many years ago, There’s some imminent danger about that child! He was a dark, dark boy, and if she believed that spirits could impregnate the living she wouldn’t hesitate to make the bold accusation that the man had slept with Rachel the same that he slept with Vincent, but then Vincent had always been so dark, too-
These are, although paraphrased and condensed, the sorts of things that filled Frances Middleford’s private journals, which Ciel read one night after commanding Sebastian pilfer the little diary from the woman’s apartments.
It quickened his blood in a terrible way to learn of his father’s involvement with Sebastian, a terrible sickly riveted way as this primal connection in the abyss of time was revealed to him.
His father had belonged to the devil’s devotion, as well.
It was chilling to him, this shiver of distinct awareness, a brief, ruthless acuity of the thread of things that faded as quickly as it had come. He was part of something. He was part of something that his father had been part of, and his father’s father, and his father’s father’s mother and uncles, and while other things in life could be tattered like a spider web torn by the wind indifferent to its delicate gossamer beauty, the infinite, unique, hallowed bond of Phantomhive blood could not be broken. Direct Phantomhive souls shivered on a kindred tonal plane.
This darkness was something they shared, macabre and ineffable and yet natural in a primal way, quite like Stonehenge and its eerie, inexplicable eminence, and the love surging in him for his deceased father was full of an ache like the most luscious of loves always are. Nothing could change Ciel’s image of his father. The late Earl Phantomhive was the same powerful, esteemed enigma in his mind yet, beautiful and indestructible, standing alone in the blackness of the unknown untouched and undefeated still.
If anything, Ciel felt slightly intimidated by Sebastian, and a little embarrassed that he’d actually believed the devil’s devotion was his and only his. It aggravated him to know just what his aunt thought of him, that wraith of a woman locked away upstairs-but that he could care less about. God bless all the dead’s souls, he was the man of the house now.
And, “What will happen if I don’t make a move this year in our game of chess?” Ciel asked, feigning honest curiosity but really just trying to annoy Sebastian.
“The collapse of the legacy,” Sebastian whispered against the corner of his mouth. Gently he pulled Ciel up off the upholstered chair near the fire and onto his lap, guiding him into a catlike arch of the back and resting his hands on his buttocks. “So taut, so tight,” he purred, hand slipping between his thighs, and Ciel smacked him without a second thought, wriggling off his knee and wandering away from the chair.
“Oh, what, will all our factories burn to the ground? Will all our banks be robbed?”
“You know I can make that happen,” Sebastian threatened, low and below his breath. He glared at Ciel from around the wing of the armchair, rather like an impatient pout. And it was true. He could make that happen, if he truly wanted to.
Ciel leaned against the window, peeking out at the manor grounds in the silvery moonlight. “One day you say you love me, and the next you act like this-a spoiled child.”
“I do love you, Ciel-”
“Ah-ah.” Ciel waved a finger of reprove. He shook his head. “What are you to call me?”
Sebastian heaved a grumpy sigh. He rolled his eyes, quite inelegantly. The firelight danced on all the planes of his smooth face, rendering him rather eerie-looking. “My apologies, young master.” He paused, but then changed the subject: “How old are you now?”
Ciel felt a little wounded. “I’m sixteen,” he whispered curtly, tracing a crack in the glass of the windowpane. “Don’t you pay attention to things like that?”
“No.”
And here he’d thought they had a special connection. They’d been through so very much together, after all…
Ciel sighed idly as Sebastian followed him like a dog to the four-poster bed. Sebastian didn’t even wait for him to get settled; he climbed on the bed after him and while Ciel was still on his hands and knees, Sebastian mounted him from behind. The press of his body as if it were real flesh and blood, emanating a heat and a powerful presence, was so disorienting at times. Ciel gave in at once as Sebastian’s arms wound about his chest. The touch was instantly seducing, molding them immediately together, and his knees twitched apart as Sebastian cradled him to his chest and rested his chin atop his head. His hands crawled like spiders down Ciel’s thighs, moving away the tails of his nightshirt. The keys to the red room with the never-ending chess game jingled, on a fine little chain around Ciel’s neck.
“You want to take away everyone until it’s just me you have, don’t you?” Ciel moaned, brow knotting and face flushing as his hips bucked forward into Sebastian’s groping fingers.
Sebastian was quiet, as if this brazen accusation offended him. Or perhaps he was musing over the proper answer-to be honest, to be manipulative, to lie? Was it actually a pensive moment for this being?
Fingers curled in Ciel’s dark hair, pulling his head back for a deep, passionate kiss. “Yes,” Sebastian whispered against his lower lip, and shivers rattled Ciel to the core. Yes, he said, and it was the truth. It was like a cold wind in off the bluffs, invisible but quite real, and there was nothing Ciel could do about it. There had never been anything he could have done about it. He was damned. His right eye was the badge of such. This was fate’s design from the very moment he’d first seen Sebastian, years and years before, but he couldn’t help but wonder: had he, somehow unknowingly, given Sebastian the freedom to wield power such as this?
Not so long ago, the manor had been full of life and light.
And then his mother had died, one candle snuffed out.
And then his father had slit his wrists, another candle gone.
And then Sebastian had sought vengeance on Madame Red for her unkind words to her nephew, another candle extinguished with the smoke unfurling in a long mourning period.
And from there, it was just one after the other-Lizzy, gone to a bed of worms from a fever. His cousins Peter and Wendy, Peter staying with Clause in London to think about University and Wendy off to Paris for the Académie Royale. His grandfather, breathing his last in his sleep. His aunt Frances, driven to madness and banished to a windowless attic room.
And now sometimes the days seemed too long, too quiet, too secretly lonely. The halls of the manor were always cool, the luxury splendid even under a layer or two of dust. Now and again servants tried to polish the windows, but invisible hands always pushed them away. The house was falling to shambles: peeling plasterwork, faded stone, grimy windows, crooked floors, the dilapidated swing on the old oak, the ivy, the ravens perched on the chimneystacks… Despite how many Phantomhives still called the manor their residence, the ambience of the estate was a rather grim quietude. The house felt dark and empty, although it actually was not. Activity became perfunctory. Around the middle of the day it peaked, and then everyone diffused to their own private corners of the house. Slowly but surely a sense of unshakable gloom began to descend on the family, and You’ve left me alone among my enemies!
It was quickly becoming clear that one day soon, like candles snuffed out in the night, they’d all be gone.
But for the time being, it was Ciel who was the man of the house.
And the man of the house belonged to the man named Sebastian.
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The chronicles of the Phantomhive family will be continued shortly…
back to chapter six
Ratings/Warnings: M. Flat-out M for mature (as well as explicit) scenes, gothic themes, disturbing and occasionally gory imagery, and all-around delicious Kuroshitsuji darkness. Makes references to characters all across the map of manga, anime, etc.
Pairings: Sebastian/Ciel, Ciel/Lizzy if you squint later, Sebastian/everyone, and too many others on the side that don’t really make a difference
Summary: we can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy in life is when men are afraid of the light - a family of witches, they say, where the crosses are turned upside down by invisible hands and ravens are sacrificed to the devil, where incest and tragedy and murder prance hand in hand with noble responsibilities and otherworldly elegance, where the man is sighted most often in the company of the current heir of the Phantomhive legacy, the young Earl left a vast estate of enviable value: and that is the boy Ciel Phantomhive
Posted on FF.net here or below:
⌈ the devil in the flask ⌋
chapter seven
THE DEVIL IN THE FLASK
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Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…
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12. blessed virgin
They slept together once, just after he turned fourteen.
Lizzy was a curious creature. Wendy and Nina were always frightened so easily by the noises and activity of the house-that is to say, once the candles were blown out and the ghosts came to play-and Lizzy appeared to be frightened at times, too, but Ciel knew that it was all a ruse. These things fascinated her the same they terrified her, and when she wasn’t feigning the fragility of a proper Victorian lady, she was fencing with her cousins or going on walks through the cemetery, or standing in empty rooms smiling and laughing and conversing with invisible beings through her drawing and writing automaton dolls while her many music boxes tinkled idly away.
Phantomhive blood ran in Elizabeth Middleford’s veins. She had her mother’s resolve and her father’s good cheer. Her eyes were a deep green, like emeralds, and at first glance she seemed vulnerable and innocent, but if you were lucky enough to catch one of her pointed sideways glances, it became quite clear she was a very good actress.
Lizzy took pride in calling herself a witch. She was something of a clairvoyant, hypersensitive to changes in the aural fields. Madame Red, although not a direct heir but descendant of some eighteenth-century Phantomhive cousin, had been the same way. For these unexpected mediums, their intuition was incredibly sharp. Specters were drawn to them as if disciples to Christ. They could hear the strong thoughts of others and they could sense the presence of preternatural energy, be it attached to entity or object. They could tentatively guess future events by listening carefully to their intuition, although it took quite a lot of energy and normally wasn’t as intentional as it seemed.
A dainty knock sounded on one of Ciel’s bedroom doors and he tried to rub the sleep from his eyes, watching as the crystal knob turned and Lizzy peeked in from the hallway.
“Are you awake!” she whispered, less a question and more an excited giggle.
Ciel moved his blankets back for her to join him on the bed, door latched again and the warmth of her body comforting. He lay on his back, blinking groggily up at the ceiling, and Lizzy lay next to him with her arm comfortably across his chest as if they were already married. The wool of her nightgown was ticklish to him. The press of her tiny breasts against his side was alluring.
“The man’s not here,” Lizzy observed. There wasn’t a trace of spite or disgust in the little treble.
“No…” Ciel confirmed.
“I know where the man came from.”
Ciel bristled with a gentle chill. He met Lizzy’s eyes in the moonlight, wondering if he appeared as eager as she did for the story, like two conspirators or siblings fighting bedtime. “Nobody knows where the man came from,” Ciel insisted, mouth dry. Lizzy’s eyes danced with the excitement of a particularly titillating secret. She smelled like warm sweet skin and crushed roses when she tightened her arms around him and spoke low into his ear:
“Years, and years, and years ago-sometime between King Edward II and King Edward III-in the Grand Duchy of Moscow. There’s where the man came from. He was still a boy, though, and he painted holy pictures. He was stolen away by the Tatars, who sold him off. Somehow he made it to Paris, but he died of the plague.”
Ciel rolled his eyes. “That’s so imaginative. You read far too much for a girl.”
Lizzy was offended. “It’s true! Images of it flash through my mind when he’s around! I swear it on my life!”
She was so endearing, and so strangely sexless. They kissed in the dark of his bedroom, comforters rustling. Her hand was soft like silk on his face, her hair tickling his nose, and she laughed wildly after their tongues met briefly and hid under the blankets as if ashamed of her disgraceful actions.
Floorboards creaked overhead. The dying coke crumbled under the mantle. The bed squeaked once, when Lizzy crawled on top of him. Her soft face was engulfed in shadows. She tossed blonde hair over her shoulder and smiled, lashes lowered, such graceful dominance, and Ciel was endlessly thankful she made no comment about his distinct knowledge of lovemaking. It wasn’t like she was inexperienced, either, which was mildly distracting to Ciel as he wondered, blushing, just what she’d done and with whom-but then she kissed his neck and the shivers rattled through him, and he let his hands wander and his mind wander and the heat of her form was like fire, infecting and inflaming. Her little breasts were so full and silky-soft, and the way she tilted her head and laughed at him again, oh…
It wasn’t wrong. They were going to be married one day. And sometimes Lizzy made his heart flutter just so, and sometimes Ciel just wanted to hold her against his chest and protect her from everything-but that was the funny thing about Elizabeth Middleford. She didn’t need protecting at all.
Lizzy was tall and slender, in a girlish way. Her favorite dresses were cream-colored with lots of taffeta, muslin, and pearls, and pink sashes about the waist. Her hands were small, and so were her feet, and she had an oval face and a button nose. Her smile was flanked by matching dimples. She carried herself with all the importance of a Marquess’s daughter, elegance and little girl maturity. She could walk with books balanced atop her head as easily as she could dance in her favorite silk slippers. She tried to teach Ciel once. He stepped on her toe.
Lizzy could sing and sew and talk fashion for hours. She enjoyed English history (particularly tales of the Tudors). She read poetry aloud. She spoke three languages other than her native tongue and she fenced masterfully. She knocked on the dirty windows of the family sepulchers and went on walks in the family cemetery with the spirits she’d called upon, and she was never more beautiful to Ciel than she had been the day Sebastian had made her dolls dance and she’d cried, so vexed, but there was a dark light of insatiable curiosity in her green eyes that had never gone out since then.
It was a unique sort of love between Ciel and his fiancée Lizzy, singular only to her and her view of the world.
Making love to Lizzy was like playing house. It was childish, far from the rough and mature, almost animalistic lust between him and Sebastian. No, it was markedly almost maternal, Lizzy full of that sad smiling understanding as she ran her fingers through Ciel’s hair after they’d romped in the sheets and it was so good to close his eyes against her shoulder after the tentative coalescing of desire between them.
What went on inside that pretty little head of hers? What hid behind her dimpled smile? She was always, always smiling at him. Undeniably, she knew about his relationship with the man. She knew, definitively, that Ciel belonged to Sebastian and nobody else in some unholy intimate way she’d never inhibit-and she understood. That was what mattered. It was like the blessing of angels, releasing Ciel from some unspoken weight of rotten secrecy. The love they shared was simple and light, the love of friends and brothers and sisters, a commingling of souls that was not really romantic but existed in the most honest of laughs and sparkling eyes because Lizzy knew him. She accepted him for everything. She loved him for it all. How could he ask for a better girl to marry, a wife who would not make him feel obligated, who did not need him to be perfect on her own?
Tragic, thus, that Elizabeth Middleford died in quarantine just after the season in 1890.
A summer of receptions and parties and outings became per usual a drab London, cheerless and exhausted as the days turned to that strange lazy stretch between summer and autumn. Noble families fled the dreariness, and in 1890 the Phantomhives boarded to Italy. Sailor suits and pale boater hats galore, and alabaster-white gloves with gleaming pearl buttons, their first stop was at the old family villa, some kilometers south of Venice. By the water, the reeds grew tall over the sand dunes and distant rocks were covered in moss and algae. A week of recuperation there was all that was needed before heading north to the Venetian palazzo the Phantomhives owned and rented out, with its crooked faded floors and moldering marble majesty, and rooms of murals like some fairy tale world.
It was only days after they arrived in Venice that Lizzy’s illness rang chords of fear through the household. Was it consumption? Was it something worse, something foreign and more contagious? She was holding her hands out to someone when she sighed her last breath, smiling and asking them closer, but she was alone in the room save for her parents and the Venetian doctor.
The family returned immediately to England. The storm of emotion that brewed in the manor was comparable to that after Madame Red’s death. Clarence Middleford was devastated by the loss of his daughter. Clause came in from London. Frances Middleford was far lost to some violent black emotion, vicious and spiteful and sometimes making no sense at all while other times snapping out of her daze long enough to insult someone before lapsing back into tearful, grief-stricken fury.
Gossip over servants’ breakfast claimed she’d been heard in a nasty fit with her son Edward. Voices, stomping, the harsh slap of skin on skin that was most likely a smack across the face, all part of a tense and brutal argument. Frances is reported to have screamed at her son: “This is what happens when you defy God!” and “like the crybaby he was” Edward Middleford allegedly howled back amidst agonized sobs: “I wasn’t going to let Ciel have her, Mamma, I told you that!”
Is this indicative of incest in the Middleford family? Had Edward tried to involve himself with his sister romantically? If so, was Elizabeth raped by her brother or was it a consensual routine? And if that is indeed the case, why? The two were often described as “twins” or “pretty little angels”, both being blond and dainty and seen arm-in-arm at social gatherings, pink-faced with port or mulled wine. But the comment “too close to be siblings” had only been dropped a record four times over the last fifteen years, and all that can be taken from such a scene-if it is truth and not servant story-is that Frances Middleford blamed her son for some atrocity, and Edward Middleford, while always somewhat of a spineless, sycophantic young man (who as a matter of fact did not ever truly warm up to Ciel Phantomhive), was never the same after his sister’s death.
The funeral for Elizabeth Ethel Cordelia Middleford was dark and ascetic. Frances Middleford refused to have her daughter entombed in the Phantomhive sepulchers, but instead had the interment finished in Highgate Cemetery, where Clarence Middleford’s family was buried.
In her casket, Lizzy was pale as the orchids around her, and it was quite rainy that day in London. Another Anglican funeral Mass rang out into the barrel vault and galleries of St. James’s, and, “How fitting,” Sebastian whispered where he lingered near Ciel’s side, watching the tears roll off Ciel’s chin and burst on the orchid flesh of Lizzy’s dead face. Peaceful, so peaceful, but hard-looking at the same time as if a beautiful doll carved crudely of wax.
“Go away from me,” Ciel gritted out between his teeth, so as not to seem suspicious if Sebastian was revealing himself to him and only him amidst this mourning crowd. He could not bear to think that Sebastian might have struck Lizzy down with a fever in order to keep Ciel all his own. There was a veritable pain in his chest, a terrible rotten ache that left him winded, as if some cruel insidious hand of fate had clutched onto his heart and were slowly, slowly crushing it to pieces. He felt lost in an inevitable state of gray that threatened to cripple him. The world seemed a bleak and hostile place to him suddenly, and did Sebastian understand that as Ciel fixed him with cold, damning eyes? He didn’t have to utter a word to convey the recycled accusation, did he?
You’ve left me alone among my enemies, again!
Sebastian looked so sad in the light of the church, which was dim, and pale, and moving erratically with the rain as it fell against the painted-glass window in the nave, rendering his smooth skin as orchid-white as Lizzy’s. There was nothing malicious about those blood-clot eyes of his, just an exquisite look of apology and sorrow on his face like that of a dark, damned saint.
“I hate you,” Ciel whispered urgently, tears burning his eyes and doubling, trebling the world around him. He spun on his heel and left Sebastian standing over Lizzy, and he welcomed the deafening pound of his heart in his ears because it separated him from reality for a while.
He saw Lizzy once after the funeral, on a foggy bitter December morning. It was his birthday, ironically, and he awoke to the sound of a singing voice behind closed lips. Adrenaline surging through him, hot and then cold, Ciel sat up straight to see Lizzy staring wistfully out his frosted bedroom window, having removed the drapes herself and swaying side to side as she hummed her favorite hymn. She wasn’t miasmic. She was seemingly solid, and Ciel was actually painfully confused for a moment. But after he scrambled out of bed and ran across the room to her, she looked at him with a wide cold look of fear, and uttered a bone-chilling shriek. It was the sort of sound that spirits uttered when they knew not yet how to focus energy to properly communicate, or when they wanted to scare others away, that thin and hollow-sounding voice that seems to echo into one’s very marrow-and then Lizzy disappeared in the blink of an eye, and Ciel staggered back in surprise.
His heart crumbled when she vanished. Dismally it occurred to him, as if growing impatient with his blindness to the truth, that love of any kind was futile.
Breathing hard, bruised and deeply shaken by the apparition and its violent disappearance, Ciel’s restive gaze flickered up to meet Sebastian’s in the mirror over the mantle.
And he was as alone as he’d ever been.
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13. like candles snuffed out in the night
In early 1892, anecdote and doctor’s reports shed light on a severe quarrel between Frances Middleford and the Earl Ciel Phantomhive that prompted Frances to somehow convince a London doctor that her nephew might be mad, just as his father had been, and their father, and their grandmother, and so on. This resulted in a few rounds of shock therapy prescribed to the young Earl, by cold water immersion and gyration. Which was, of course, talk of the town. A Phantomhive, mad? Impossible! (And these remarks in proper context may or may not have been sarcastic.)
The treatment of Ciel Phantomhive struck up great controversy, not only in parlor talk but in the offices of Bethlem itself. Some doctors openly condemned the treatment of a Phantomhive based on the Marchioness’s claims. “Nobody’s ever come from that family feeble-minded,” they reproached, disdaining the doctor who so ignorantly bent to Lady Middleford’s insistence. Rumors began to circulate that Lady Middleford was having an affair with the doctor in charge of her nephew, and gossip was quite distinctly divided between those who were appalled at Ciel being “falsely diagnosed” and those who were immensely relieved something was “being done” about “that family”.
The sexes at Bethlem Royal in Southwark were separated. Even in the chapel a thick curtain hung between them. Some cells-but Ciel never saw them-were lined, floor and walls, with cork and India-rubber, for the more “dangerous” patients. The women had pianos, and the men were allowed billiards in their dayroom.
Being of nobility, and a rather powerful peerage at that, Ciel was given one of the best rooms, closest to the doctor’s room. It was far from his standards of comfortable, dimly-lit and sparse and somewhat chilly; it was locked from the outside, and he blushed in dread when the nurses heard him yelling at Sebastian to just break him out already-but it wasn’t completely unendurable.
He was filled with hate for Frances. He was disgusted by the other patients, dirty and mentally disturbed. He was terrified of being small and handsome in a ward of men and his days and nights began to bleed together, so shaken was he by being ripped from the manor and stuck in this institution, and dunked in icy water and spun round and round strapped to the gyration chair. He felt feverish. He was exhausted. If he wasn’t being ushered to eat or take fresh air, he was curled up in the shoddy bed of his shoddy chamber passing the seconds whispering to Sebastian about how he would exact vengeance on his callous aunt. She just wanted control of the manor. She wanted to be head of the family. She was the mad one!
He saw his mother, actually. Perhaps it was a delusion from the fever he’d gotten after the cold water therapy. Perhaps it was just a simple dream. Or perhaps her spirit actually had attached itself to him and joined him here in his cell at the asylum, and wrapped in his blanket, Ciel stumbled over to her in the moonlight and burst into tears. It was something he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do since that fateful night when the blood had run from her eyes, but here he was, weeping so hard that he shook, and his mother gathered him to her chest seemingly so material and warm, and her fingers stroked through his hair as she whispered, “Shh, angel, don’t cry. I forgive you…”
It did not occur to Ciel that Sebastian had taken the form of his mother to give him long overdue closure in a time of fragile state of mind. But we must remember this is a possibility.
Even after a while, the doctor in contact with Frances Middleford began to agree with his colleagues over their coffee: “It’s an injustice that he’s here. There’s no reason he should be here.” But it seemed that damn Marchioness Middleford was going to have him “helped” if it was the last thing she did on this earth-until finally Dr. Diedrich showed up with Clause Phantomhive after their trip through the Continent, easily overruling the Marchioness and quickly stepping in as the Earl’s “personal doctor”, much to Ciel’s relief and Frances’s fury. The doctors were thankful to release Ciel Phantomhive into their hands again. They seemed relieved to be rid of Frances’s callous carping and ruthless “follow-up” of her nephew’s treatment. Ciel scared all the other patients, they said. Nobody wanted to be around him. A few patients claimed he was “possessed” or “carried the devil in his pocket”. The doctors laughed with Diedrich and Clause in the office and explained that they took such accusations as a sign of Ciel Phantomhive’s normalcy in comparison, which incurables can sense like animals sense danger. Diedrich proved he’d been the boy’s personal doctor since birth and promised to closely follow Ciel’s mental progress at the manor, should he in fact be suffering from dementia praecox as Frances Middleford insisted he was.
Diedrich was appalled by Frances’s power of manipulation and strong-arming of the family’s feelings (and the doctors’) for her own sick exaction of “punishment” of some sorts. He refused to speak to Frances for weeks afterwards.
In the months after her daughter’s death, Frances’s condition progressively worsened. Her normally well-composed and self-possessed mind seemed to decay, leaving her a rather ill-tempered and meticulous woman. Gradually she grew to despise social gatherings and retreated to her apartments and boudoir plagued by bouts of anxiety and panic, where she had guests call upon her as if a sick queen. She believed it was what she deserved, and when she wasn’t being icy and invidious, and rather serpentine, she simply acted curt and affected, as if somebody had grievously offended her and she was awaiting an apology. She cried for Lizzy at least once a week, locked into her daughter’s old room with the mechanical dolls and music boxes, and whenever Edward or Clarence tried to comfort her, they emerged closing the door again with slap marks on their faces and bruises on their arms.
It is not wrong to suggest that perhaps the man, “Sebastian” as Ciel knew him, was gradually driving this woman to madness as revenge for the emotional pain she had inflicted over the years on his “beloved”.
Rumor after rumor of hateful friction between Ciel and Frances Middleford surfaced, before and after Ciel Phantomhive’s brief admission to Bethlem Royal Hospital. There were tales of the two frightening everyone out of the long dining hall with their horrid high-pitched arguments, throwing dishes and silver tableware at each other. They argued about money, esteem, loyalty, social standards, who to blame for the deaths of innocent family members. Reportedly, the house was divided between them, and members of the family had one of three choices: side with Ciel, side with Frances, or remain dangerously arbitrary. The division was obvious at banquets and balls. Shouting matches between the two occurred almost daily. When hard-fisted Uncle Ivan cornered Ciel in the office and demanded, “Why must you two squabble like children?” Ciel replied gaily enough: “Because she is acting like a child, and I was never raised to deal with children.”
It was hypocritical, of course. Ciel was usually the first to start throwing things at Frances. Once or twice he stood on a chair to get directly into her face with his remarks, or he grabbed her by the collar of her gown and yanked her to his eye level. Clarence and Edward were useless. It’s never been quite clear what, exactly, planted these seeds of malice and revulsion between aunt and nephew, but one can only suppose it had something to do with family loyalty, personal morals, family history, a violent collision of very different minds, the way trauma and melancholy can deteriorate one’s soul, and a very compelling spirit in elegant broadcloth.
Frances hated Ciel. That much was clear. He didn’t exactly like her, either. But it was a rather cryptic sort of dispute that was a natural part of the house just like the faded marble tile and chill of the west hall. It might have had something to do with the fact that she hadn’t thought he was fit enough to marry her daughter (but then again, she’d promised herself nobody was fit enough to marry her daughter), or that he was the son of her brother and therefore the proper place to channel the ill will she’d previously been aiming at Vincent.
Her brother had always been the favorite child, even to the ghosts apparently, and this had rendered Frances rather cold and critical even as a child, quite easily unenthused by all around her and walking with her nose high in the air. She hadn’t changed much since girlhood, with a long narrow face and pale hair, and Miss Doll and Nina had always whispered as if Ciel were too young to understand, “She’s a real witch if there are any left at all!”
She was not the type of woman concerned with the art of passivity or subtlety; she was proud and self-possessed, and she brimmed with impending spite at times, overseeing all with an almost hateful appraisal. It was quite evident that she believed the estate should have gone to her, not a child, she being Vincent’s last living sibling apart from their delusional father and Ciel not even thirteen yet. Her narrowed eyes were like shards of ice and everyone in the house knew she disparaged Ciel, ultimately despising him the same way she’d despised her own baby brother. She wanted to run the house. In truth, she tried to, and some days she succeeded in unfairly controlling everyone by planting seeds of contention or asserting her presence by way of daunting attitude, but in the end her only esteemed influence was in that of financial matters with Clause and William Spears and Madame Red, who Ciel consulted before every business decision whether or not Sebastian had whispered to him the proper choice.
“Why don’t you just leave and live with Clarence’s cousins?” Ciel asked Frances Middleford in a brief moment of neutral disposition.
Frances was immediately injured. Her face pinched. The wrath was crystalline in her voice. “This is my house, too. I was born here. I grew up here. It’s been mine longer than it’s been yours, child.”
By mid-1892, Frances Middleford was a cold and narrow-faced ghost of the resilient, formidable woman she’d once been. She wandered around in her nightgown, ashen-faced, wan, her pale hair in tangles down her back. Formally such a prim and proper and austerely beautiful woman, she was now almost mindless, screaming at everyone when she couldn’t articulate her feelings, and spending her time alone in Elizabeth’s old room, talking to the automaton dolls as if they were her daughter. She even took tea with them. Eventually, Diedrich decided she was too manic and unpredictable, so he began to sedate her by means of slipping powders into her morning tea and coffee until finally she was manageable enough for Ivan and Diedrich to lock her into one of the attic rooms. Hannah was put in charge of her, sweet middle-aged Hannah. “Like ‘Jane Eyre’!” Ivan and Ciel laughed, and Diedrich put a hand on Ciel’s head as he said, “You won’t have to fret about her any longer.”
Ciel’s grudge against Frances was like fire and brimstone within him yet, even on that cloudless morning when his silver spoon rattled delicately against the side of his fine china as he peered out the window at the sullen empty sky, listening to the sounds of struggle and commotion down the hall as Diedrich and Ivan and Charles Phipps and Charles Grey dragged Frances to the attic. Frances was screaming. Feral, she was knocking things over, punching the wall, kicking at those who tried to restrain her. But even Clarence had said, brokenheartedly, “She’s gone. I know that she’s gone. She’s not the same Frances I fell in love with…”
“It’s your fault!” Edward cried shrilly, eyes narrowed at Ciel, a pathetic wallowing excuse for a twenty-year-old man with messy blond curls and a frail stature. There had always been something so strangely sickly about him.
And over his tea, after Edward had accused him and stormed off, Ciel’s eyes flashed as they met Sebastian’s, a vague shadow of perturbed suspicion pinching his brow.
“You did this,” he whispered, less a question or allegation than a dawning realization. Ciel felt breathless. He wanted to demand, How could you do such a thing, when I didn’t command it! But he knew what Sebastian was capable of. He’d seen it firsthand. And none of it mattered, really, brooding about it, because Sebastian could pick through his thoughts if he wanted to, anyway. It was too late to throw up a mental shield against it. Sebastian’s eyes had penetrated his skin, hovering right over his very soul.
Sebastian smiled, leaning near the window. It was a wistful smile, nothing malicious or Machiavellian about it. His eyes shone brightly with indignant tears as he insisted, “But, Ciel, if you could see that woman’s true ways like I do, if you had sensed the potential for evil in her very core-evil like you and I could never imagine, not this spirit play but true, inexpressible evil of the human soul… You would have commanded as much of me. You would have.”
Just as he’d thrown his father to madness, Sebastian had driven Frances out of her own mind.
And why? Because she knew his true ways? Or because Sebastian, as he’d claimed, knew her true ways?
“It’s because of that man,” Frances had confessed to her husband one night long ago, shaking her head. “The man is evil! All I’ve ever tried to do is protect my brother from the man, but it only seemed to have the reverse effect, and-God, Clarence, you have to understand what I mean when I say my brother loved the man in ways he shouldn’t have, because I can’t speak the truth aloud and it’s been happening for generations, you see!”
The truth was that when she was seventeen, she’d walked in on her brother and the man in sinful relations, her brother already the handsome little gentleman with dark curls and that freckle below his eye, wearing a dashing coat and his tight white riding breeches as he crawled atop the man who’d sprawled, quite indecently and indecorously casual, on the leather seat in their father’s office. And where was their father, his absence permitting this depravity? And how was it possible, her brother and a ghost, the man’s hand on her brother’s narrow hip and her brother smiling such a tender smile, his eyes wide and full of love and his gestures those of the more dominant as he pressed a kiss to the man’s mouth? What else could she do but bury this rotten secret deep inside, like a pocket of poison within her? And what else was Frances supposed to do but bury it again when sixteen years later she heard none other than the man crying out in pleasure from the room of her brother’s eight-year-old son?
In her own cold hard way Frances was afraid, she was deathly afraid, and she wanted nothing more than to protect her family-but Ciel Phantomhive was so very different from any other child she’d known in her lifetime. He seemed to her of a totally different breed altogether. She’d always sensed it. He reminded her of her great-uncles Cain and Lionel Alistair. She’d told Rachel so many years ago, There’s some imminent danger about that child! He was a dark, dark boy, and if she believed that spirits could impregnate the living she wouldn’t hesitate to make the bold accusation that the man had slept with Rachel the same that he slept with Vincent, but then Vincent had always been so dark, too-
These are, although paraphrased and condensed, the sorts of things that filled Frances Middleford’s private journals, which Ciel read one night after commanding Sebastian pilfer the little diary from the woman’s apartments.
It quickened his blood in a terrible way to learn of his father’s involvement with Sebastian, a terrible sickly riveted way as this primal connection in the abyss of time was revealed to him.
His father had belonged to the devil’s devotion, as well.
It was chilling to him, this shiver of distinct awareness, a brief, ruthless acuity of the thread of things that faded as quickly as it had come. He was part of something. He was part of something that his father had been part of, and his father’s father, and his father’s father’s mother and uncles, and while other things in life could be tattered like a spider web torn by the wind indifferent to its delicate gossamer beauty, the infinite, unique, hallowed bond of Phantomhive blood could not be broken. Direct Phantomhive souls shivered on a kindred tonal plane.
This darkness was something they shared, macabre and ineffable and yet natural in a primal way, quite like Stonehenge and its eerie, inexplicable eminence, and the love surging in him for his deceased father was full of an ache like the most luscious of loves always are. Nothing could change Ciel’s image of his father. The late Earl Phantomhive was the same powerful, esteemed enigma in his mind yet, beautiful and indestructible, standing alone in the blackness of the unknown untouched and undefeated still.
If anything, Ciel felt slightly intimidated by Sebastian, and a little embarrassed that he’d actually believed the devil’s devotion was his and only his. It aggravated him to know just what his aunt thought of him, that wraith of a woman locked away upstairs-but that he could care less about. God bless all the dead’s souls, he was the man of the house now.
And, “What will happen if I don’t make a move this year in our game of chess?” Ciel asked, feigning honest curiosity but really just trying to annoy Sebastian.
“The collapse of the legacy,” Sebastian whispered against the corner of his mouth. Gently he pulled Ciel up off the upholstered chair near the fire and onto his lap, guiding him into a catlike arch of the back and resting his hands on his buttocks. “So taut, so tight,” he purred, hand slipping between his thighs, and Ciel smacked him without a second thought, wriggling off his knee and wandering away from the chair.
“Oh, what, will all our factories burn to the ground? Will all our banks be robbed?”
“You know I can make that happen,” Sebastian threatened, low and below his breath. He glared at Ciel from around the wing of the armchair, rather like an impatient pout. And it was true. He could make that happen, if he truly wanted to.
Ciel leaned against the window, peeking out at the manor grounds in the silvery moonlight. “One day you say you love me, and the next you act like this-a spoiled child.”
“I do love you, Ciel-”
“Ah-ah.” Ciel waved a finger of reprove. He shook his head. “What are you to call me?”
Sebastian heaved a grumpy sigh. He rolled his eyes, quite inelegantly. The firelight danced on all the planes of his smooth face, rendering him rather eerie-looking. “My apologies, young master.” He paused, but then changed the subject: “How old are you now?”
Ciel felt a little wounded. “I’m sixteen,” he whispered curtly, tracing a crack in the glass of the windowpane. “Don’t you pay attention to things like that?”
“No.”
And here he’d thought they had a special connection. They’d been through so very much together, after all…
Ciel sighed idly as Sebastian followed him like a dog to the four-poster bed. Sebastian didn’t even wait for him to get settled; he climbed on the bed after him and while Ciel was still on his hands and knees, Sebastian mounted him from behind. The press of his body as if it were real flesh and blood, emanating a heat and a powerful presence, was so disorienting at times. Ciel gave in at once as Sebastian’s arms wound about his chest. The touch was instantly seducing, molding them immediately together, and his knees twitched apart as Sebastian cradled him to his chest and rested his chin atop his head. His hands crawled like spiders down Ciel’s thighs, moving away the tails of his nightshirt. The keys to the red room with the never-ending chess game jingled, on a fine little chain around Ciel’s neck.
“You want to take away everyone until it’s just me you have, don’t you?” Ciel moaned, brow knotting and face flushing as his hips bucked forward into Sebastian’s groping fingers.
Sebastian was quiet, as if this brazen accusation offended him. Or perhaps he was musing over the proper answer-to be honest, to be manipulative, to lie? Was it actually a pensive moment for this being?
Fingers curled in Ciel’s dark hair, pulling his head back for a deep, passionate kiss. “Yes,” Sebastian whispered against his lower lip, and shivers rattled Ciel to the core. Yes, he said, and it was the truth. It was like a cold wind in off the bluffs, invisible but quite real, and there was nothing Ciel could do about it. There had never been anything he could have done about it. He was damned. His right eye was the badge of such. This was fate’s design from the very moment he’d first seen Sebastian, years and years before, but he couldn’t help but wonder: had he, somehow unknowingly, given Sebastian the freedom to wield power such as this?
Not so long ago, the manor had been full of life and light.
And then his mother had died, one candle snuffed out.
And then his father had slit his wrists, another candle gone.
And then Sebastian had sought vengeance on Madame Red for her unkind words to her nephew, another candle extinguished with the smoke unfurling in a long mourning period.
And from there, it was just one after the other-Lizzy, gone to a bed of worms from a fever. His cousins Peter and Wendy, Peter staying with Clause in London to think about University and Wendy off to Paris for the Académie Royale. His grandfather, breathing his last in his sleep. His aunt Frances, driven to madness and banished to a windowless attic room.
And now sometimes the days seemed too long, too quiet, too secretly lonely. The halls of the manor were always cool, the luxury splendid even under a layer or two of dust. Now and again servants tried to polish the windows, but invisible hands always pushed them away. The house was falling to shambles: peeling plasterwork, faded stone, grimy windows, crooked floors, the dilapidated swing on the old oak, the ivy, the ravens perched on the chimneystacks… Despite how many Phantomhives still called the manor their residence, the ambience of the estate was a rather grim quietude. The house felt dark and empty, although it actually was not. Activity became perfunctory. Around the middle of the day it peaked, and then everyone diffused to their own private corners of the house. Slowly but surely a sense of unshakable gloom began to descend on the family, and You’ve left me alone among my enemies!
It was quickly becoming clear that one day soon, like candles snuffed out in the night, they’d all be gone.
But for the time being, it was Ciel who was the man of the house.
And the man of the house belonged to the man named Sebastian.
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The chronicles of the Phantomhive family will be continued shortly…
back to chapter six