Estelle du'Coeur

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Estelle du'Morte

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Lineage

The Old Man
- Oncle Augustan
  - Sire & The Boy
    - Estelle du'Coeur
      - Childe

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Background

DEAR PERSONS;

How good it was to step into a cool, draughty hallway. I’d quite forgotten the blasted heat and humidity of Atlanta, made more intolerable that every bone is in ache from that abominable hunger. Nevertheless I must see to jotting down what few things I remember of my life before now, as the trip here was so very harrowing.

I should like to add, as I write this the moon has risen, bloated, full, the color of blood, staining the much changed horizon with a noxious shade. I sit at my desk, a lovely little cherry-wood piece I found at an antique store. It is admittedly the only piece of furniture I have purchased so far, and the room is sparse and dusty around me.

What I remember:

My name is Estelle, I do not remember my original surname or the one I used prior to now. A dreadful affair as they are so beastly important, which means I shall have to concoct one as my tale progresses. Assuredly I had one.

I fancy I was brought into this world as all mortal children are, but I remember very little of my childhood. I do know I was privileged despite or because of my ethnicity and lived apart from my mothers people, in a great sprawling plantation house. Additionally I remember the other children being resentful of me, and this had caused many a tearful lamentation at prayer.

I have amorphous images of my mother, a dark skinned woman in a rather shapeless cap. Her tired face brings to mind another, a white woman of pinched lips and sharp features who would whip me, or order me about to do countless things. This recollection also consists of a white man and slapped fingers accompanied by piano music? Perhaps the man is my father? Nevertheless it’s unimportant now.

I remember most another house; this is the one I grew up in. A place in which music was played all the time, and the women who lived there were all beautiful and scantily clad. I was one a girl amongst others, our days spent sleeping or primping for the evenings when gentlemen come to drink, and to amuse themselves. At first I believe it was quite hard and I’m led to think I was perhaps quite young still, but I did learn to pleasure and to time each movement so as to please the eye.

However, many of my strongest memories of a mortal life are of the civil war. I was a young woman then, established in the skin trade. I could have settled down with one or another of my suitors but I preferred to have my sugar daddies and be committed to none, a luxury that I doubt a proper woman could have had then.

I’m not sure if I had always been drawn to the dead an dieing, however my first glimpses of a dead soldier in the street and the ghostly apparition beside the corpse stands out quite plainly in my minds eye. I foolishly told anyone who’d listen, as I often woke up screaming as the battles came closer to the city and I saw more and more unnatural things in the night.

I remember this quite disturbed the other women I lived with, and the mistress cast me to the street as I was unable to pleasure a man with a dead man leering at me, or drifting in an out of the walls of my rooms.

Destitute I wandered the city I believe for many a night, finally dirty and disheveled I attracted the eye of something more sinister then a passing soldier, (in which I had encountered many, and pleasured to have somewhere warm to sleep).

I call him Sire now and nothing more, for it wasn’t permitted. In his lust he was too violent for my poor battered frame and it was much later that he confessed that he would have killed me but for my face. He was a davea, and he took me in that night.

I’m unsure how long I kept his interest, a few months, a few years? Eventually he tired of me, and I of him and I was sent to his sire in Louisiana, my dearest Oncle Augustan. I think it was perhaps from this elder vampire I learned reading, and arithmetic but I’m not sure. I do know he cultivated my talents, and enjoyed what he called the pretty little Creole beauty on his arm, and it was he who saw in me more then a play thing.

I continued to have a fascination for the dead, heightened now by the embrace and my new environment and it was he who schooled me in medicine, the occult and when I was ready brought me over into the Disciplines of Nerkomonicon, and introduced me to his mentor known only as ‘The Old Man’ a shriveled husk of a man, a nosferatu who would only tell me he was from Haiti and part of a great lineage.

As the years progressed I lived a relatively quiet existence, preferring the company of books to that of other vampires. I did nevertheless attend important city functions, and I do remember lavish balls and grand vistas of gardens and gowns. I graced the arm of many a handsome Invictus for a fee, or disposed of a corpse of an accidental frenzy. Things must have continued quietly and smoothly as the years, possibly the centuries past as very little else sticks out in my mind.

Now a summons from the ‘Old Man’ has sent me back to Atlanta where I write this. I am to see to his descendant, a Mister Vashan Bokhari, as he feels that my skills would benefit him, and I shall do his bidding as always.

I will close now it feels I have spent the whole evening scribbling away like a mad woman. My fingers are cramped and smeared with ink and have left prints on the papers before me. And as yet, there are so many things as yet to be seen, rooms to air out, and hopefully dozens piece of execrable furniture to be purchased.

~ Estelle du’Coeur

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