Many of the students in the practice rooms were boarders who would go to their dorms for the evening. But some lived nearby and would return to their homes and families once their day was done, as would colleagues who were not members of religious orders.
As Hance played the Bach, he remembered coming home from school when he was a boy and playing the same piece on the harpsichord. For the moment, his office and the practice hall did not exist. Fresh pies cooled on the sideboard, which had been moved into the parlor so the dining room could be freshly wallpapered. The warm, sugary fragrance challenged the scent of the glue. Any moment now his father would come home and hang his coat and hat near the door. His brother was outside kicking through piles of autumn leaves. … How easy to believe it all was happening now, yet how hard to believe he once had enjoyed a life that many people would consider boring and of no consequence.
Why did he never suspect that that life could end, or that his life would no longer be his to spend as he pleased? What had been wrong with him, to think his life in his future would be as good as or better than what he knew as a boy? What had been wrong with him, to believe he was guaranteed that segment of time called a future?
Hance knew the students in the practice rooms thought they had their own future. They waited, as he once had waited, for the time when they would be what they worked so hard to become.
How silly.
How ingenuous.
How utterly ignorant about the true properties of life. Life does not go from one fulfillment to the next, like promised stops on a well-crafted tour. Life is a succession of heartaches garnished by the attempt to relieve the agony.
He almost ended the Capriccio with a petulant smash of a chord. No. Some nosy individual was bound to see who was having the hissy fit. He went for a walk.
Walking was the only way he could try to escape himself. Two hundred years ago, he’d have hired a horse and gone for a ride. He couldn’t let his mind wander while riding. He had to be aware of his surroundings; to watch the road or path ahead for anything that could spook or lame the horse. Besides, the horse always knew when he became lost in thought. He no longer moved with the horse. He let the reins go slack when he should have tightened them or tightened the reins when they should have hung loose. The horse would become confused and either roam where it wished or stiffen and back up, preparing to rear.
He hadn’t enjoyed a good ride in ages. He could drive a car, instead, but the consequences of becoming lost in thought behind the wheel were much graver than the results of falling mentally asleep in the saddle. He could possibly kill someone. A horse at least had sense enough not to walk into something. A horse always stopped for a human, if there was time enough to stop.
Dusk had long matured into a night rich with the scent of wet earth and dead leaves, an aroma that swelled in the unseasonably warm air. A small footbridge crossed the stream between the arts building and the library. Students hurried to or from the parking lot hidden behind the dense stand of trees. Hance leaned on the railing of the bridge and listened to the water. It had the sound of purity: silvery, unsullied by silt, unhindered by rocks. Sometimes, when all was quiet, a deer or two would saunter to the edge and drink. They never walked into the water to drink. It was almost as if they understood the difference between clean and filthy water. One day he almost coaxed a doe to take a leaf from his hand. She stepped close enough for him to see the curtain of lashes over her great eyes, but a student late for class raced over the bridge, making a clatter that frightened the animal into bolting through the trees. Hance thought of her whenever he passed that way. He hoped to see her again, but began to sense he never would.
He had been at the college for nearly seven years already and would be assigned to a new school before the next fall term. He never stayed anywhere more than seven years. It was the most reasonable amount of time. A man didn’t change that much within seven years. After ten years, though, he’d be expected to show signs of aging. Hance, however, would never change. He couldn’t. So far as students and faculty ever knew, he could be thirty or forty, never more, never less.
The aging was inside. He was exhausted: from performing. From coaching the same inadequate singers day after day, ad infinitum and ad nauseam.
From an existence he never could have chosen for himself.
When students asked Hance what religious order he belonged to, his reply was quick and casual: “None.” He was a diocesan priest, not associated with any monastic rule or “order” like the Benedictines (Order of Benedict), the Franciscans (Order of Friars Minor) and the Dominicans (Order of Preachers). He lived in the world, not in a monastery, and though he didn’t take vows like those associated with monastic orders, like his monastic counterparts, he was bound to canon law.
Answering questions about why he became a priest was equally straightforward: “I was called.”
Straightforward, but not as truthful as listeners presumed. “Bound and shackled” was more like it.
The nun in Rome had not lied when she said Hance wouldn’t be left alone. He was watched over day and night, sometimes in silence, sometimes to the drone of Latin prayers as a monk or a nun muttered Hours or a rosary. He never joined the devotions, nor was he invited to do so. Prayer had no place in his life. Though he had sung his own share of oratorios when opera houses shut down during Lent, he had been created to reject and refute, not to embrace and believe. To him, prayer was nothing. He dismissed the recitations as he ignored the sound of shutters rattling in the wind. The noise was there; it would go away.
But God would not be ignored. The lack of blood meals induced the headaches Hance would come to know and fear so well. In the beginning, he attributed the pain to the unpleasantness of his captivity; it would go away if he were patient and concentrated on escape. But the pain did not go away. It grew. He imagined not avenues of escape, but of his head exploding and a porridge of brains dripping down the wall. His body, not his mind, drove him out of his room and toward the chapel. “Ho bisogno … ho bisogno,” I need, was all he could say to the friar who escorted him, astute as a parent letting a toddler take its first rickety dash down a hallway.
The priest was giving Communion when Hance dropped to his knees at the railing and seized the chalice as he had seized it that first day among the clerics. He thought the priest would pull it away, but the friar behind him said something that made the priest back off. Or perhaps it was the way Hance gagged on the substance that made the man recoil. At the same time, the pain in Hance’s head broke and moisture flooded his face. He felt cloth patting the stuff away. When he opened his eyes, he saw a portrait drawn in blood on the sleeve of the celebrant priest’s white vestment. All that the image wanted was a crown of thorns and a beard, and the good friars could claim they had the long-lost Veronica’s veil in their possession. Hance almost laughed, but nobody else was laughing. Nobody else was making a sound. All the friars were looking at him and the picture his blood had rendered.
That night he was brought to a location near the Vatican. A Cardinal fluent in English carried an order from the Pope: become a priest and dedicate yourself to the Eucharist.
“Why?”
“You cannot die and go to Hell, so we must provide you with Hell here on earth. Your kind might live forever, but you are damned to eternal suffering, not to eternal life.”
Hance rebelled against his imprisonment by not rising in the morning when wakened and by not joining his keepers at mealtimes.
He was never ordered to be taken from his room. The Cardinal knew his agony would drive him to the blood that now kept him alive in order to suffer his punishment. If he couldn’t walk out of his room, he would crawl out, drawn by scent and any creature’s natural yearning for survival.
In time, Hance tired of the fighting. He found less agony by doing as he was told. He understood he had indeed succeeded in doing away with himself. Never again would he sing or play harpsichord or fortepiano as he pleased. Never again would he direct an opera. His voice and his music belonged to another John Hance in another life. But in the day when Gregorian chant was still a major part of the daily office and priests still sang parts of the Mass in Latin, it was impossible for him not to sing, and it was impossible for others not to notice his voice. In time, he was ordained Padre Gian Nicolo del Preziosissimo Sangue: Father John Nicholas of the Most Precious Blood. Instead of keeping their vampire in a monastery, beyond communion with ordinary humans, the Vatican made him suffer more by sentencing him to do what he no longer wished to do: make music. He would do so as a teacher within the confines of the Church, dealing with less talented students in schools not known as nests of musical geniuses.
He’d been working with dullards for nearly two centuries. Not a vast amount of time, considering the scope of eternity. But such was life in Hell. There would be no end. That was the point. All he could aspire to was to be among the beauty of nature every now and then. Never could nature be taken away. The sun rose and set; trees changed with the seasons; birds sang. Deer pranced and drank at pure, lovely springs.
Homeless men and woman pitched ramshackle camps in the woods behind churches.
A talentless girl wanted to teach their offspring.
Nature wasn’t beyond the fist of Hell, after all …
