Page 3 of Just for a Taste

W hen I entered the piano room, I found myself engulfed in darkness. The sound of orchestral music played on an old gramophone. A woody, spiced scent hung in the air, some long-faded cologne now lingering among the musty abandonment. It was neither warm nor cold but rather a strange lukewarm temperature that made me feel like I was swimming in myself. I had the sensation that this was what it was like to be dead.

But, I supposed if I were dead, I wouldn’t hear the blood surging through my ears. I couldn’t help but shiver. Was this really the room I was meant to be meeting a member of the illustrious Medici family in?

Just as I was about to retreat, a low, serious voice reverberated throughout the room. “Would you like some light?”

Before I got the chance to answer, a match was lit, and the warm glow of a beeswax candlestick sprang forth. Although the lighting was dim, I could discern a figure amongst the shadows.

Duca de’ Medici was sitting in a wingback chair, his head resting against the top rail, his arms spread wide along the wings. Despite the awkwardness of the pose, he looked utterly at peace, practically as though he were sleeping. Or maybe, given the formality and the archaic nature of his outfit—canvas trousers held high at his waist by suspenders atop a white button-down shirt—I was staring into a massive open coffin.

“Sit, please.” The man gestured with a wave of his hand to the chair opposite him.

As I sat, his white lashes fluttered open. The quick movement of his pale, ruby eyes struck me as strangely lupine. He stared at me with his head at a peculiar angle. Even from the corners of his eyes, I saw him watching my every movement.

In a sudden yet fluid motion, he uncrossed his legs and shifted toward me.

Seeing Duca de' Medici’s slender body, it was hard to believe the stories in my textbooks of vampires overtaking entire villages in their search for blood. And yet, with those elegant, calculated mannerisms, it was easy to understand how they had maintained power in the church and kingdoms for hundreds of years. Per my thorough research on this Medici before me, I would argue the link was rather direct—if you included bastards, that was.

Duca de’ Medici bore no small resemblance to the art commissioned by his illustrious forefathers. He had the same thin Roman nose of Michaelangelo’s David , the same prominent Cupid’s bow as Donatello’s counterpart, and the same heavy brow as the statues on the chapels of his relatives. Like those statues, he was depigmented compared to his Italian brethren. If memory served, oculocutaneous albinism type 1A was the exact mutation commonly associated with vampirism.

He ran a porcelain hand through pale blond hair.

“So,” I said, wringing my hands. “You must be Duca de' Medici.”

“Please,” he said, resting his head back onto the wing chair with a tone of disdain. “Zeno. Or, if you must use a title, just Duca.”

Where I was from, plenty of people shed their given names. I had done so myself. But here, in the realm of titles and nobility, it felt odd to do so. I scoured my brain to come up with an explanation, but was unsuccessful.

Another huff from the vampire prompted me to reply, “Which do you prefer?”

He closed his eyes again with a sigh and replied, in a thoroughly exasperated tone, “I don’t.”

This time, I allowed the silence to linger. Strangely, it was the act of doing nothing that changed everything in the vampire. He leaned forward with an acutely interested gaze and gingerly lifted the needle from the gramophone.

“Pardon my manners,” Duca de’ Medici said once the record stopped spinning. “Your name is?”

It took me a moment to reply, for the candlelight had glinted off of a pearly fang. I hadn’t ever seen one in person before now. “Um . . . Cora. Cora Bowling.”

“Signorina Cora Bowling.” He spoke my name slowly, enunciating every syllable. When his eyes flickered to me and he said nothing more, I realized he was commanding me to speak.

I nodded and gestured to the now-motionless record player. “Was that Tchaikovsky?”

“Not a terrible guess, actually,” he replied, popping a chocolate truffle into his mouth from a tray on the coffee table. “Rachmaninoff, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini , Opus 43, Variation 18. You can tell it’s him because of the wide chords and use of ‘Dies Irae.’”

Not a terrible guess, actually. I held back a sneer. What a pompous ass.

Duca de’ Medici nudged the tray of chocolates closer to me after carefully selecting another one for himself. “They’re raspberry flavored,” he noted.

“I should make more ‘not terrible' guesses in the future, if this is what I get,” I said without thinking.

He didn’t laugh, or scowl, or make much of a response at all. I stuffed a truffle in my mouth, then another, trying to bury the lump in my throat. Positive thinking, Cora. Another truffle down the gullet. I guess if I fail this interview now, at least I’ve tried these damn good chocolates.

“Which composers do you listen to?”

I jumped when he spoke—not that having been mentally present would have made answering much easier. I chewed my cheek for a bit. His gaze remained steady on me.

“Not very many,” I finally replied. “Pretty much just Vivaldi.”

He frowned and said, “I like more recent composers than that—like Chopin—because you can hear recordings of them performing the works.”

“I think it’s nice to hear subjective interpretations.”

Duca de’ Medici scoffed again and folded his arms. “Why wouldn’t you want to hear the songs being played as they were truly meant to be heard? Does that not defeat the purpose?”

“But isn’t it fascinating that someone heard something in their head, transcribed it, and then someone lifetimes away tried to hear it again?”

“I want to listen to the work of a genius individual, not an unintended collaboration.”

“But that’s the entire point of music! It’s part of humanity that we can touch and change that transcends time!”

There was a pronounced silence. My shoulders were drawn up like a cat with raised hackles. I had been yelling. Heat spread over my cheeks.

To my surprise, Duca de’ Medici tossed his head back and let out a soft, short laugh. With an impish grin, he lifted the candle to his face. “Aren’t you a peculiar one? Interesting enough to keep around.”

The appraisal struck me as similar to the way Pa would talk about a strange cat that had wandered onto our farm. What a weird-lookin’ critter! That one’s interesting enough to keep around .

I had absolutely zero idea what a reasonable response to this would be, so I said, “Thank you?”

Another chuckle. “It’s a pleasure to have you as my guest tonight, Signorina Bowling.”

“Um, it’s a pleasure to be here, Duca d—” I paused. “Signore.”

There was a soft whoosh , and the candlelight vanished, immediately followed by the sweet ringing of a bell.

“I’ve summoned my butler. He’ll show you to your room. Doctor Ntumba will talk to you tomorrow about future steps.”

“Future steps? What—” I squinted my eyes into the darkness, but the vampire was already gone. “—future steps?”

Did this mean I had passed the interview? The reality of my situation struck me: I hadn’t expected to get this far. I hadn’t even thought they would let me in. And I’d been so desperate to find some sort of solution to my problems that I hadn’t considered what it would entail.

I had barely left the room when a towering man with a neatly groomed beard and combed hair greeted me. He gave a small bow and introduced himself, but my mind was swimming with too many thoughts to absorb any information. I’d have to get his name from Doctor Ntumba tomorrow, I reminded myself.

“How was the trip? Was the driver agreeable?” he asked, leading me down the hall.

With my head so full, even answering this was a challenge. “Um, good, I guess,” I managed. Then, with a bit of effort, I added, “I’ve researched this area a lot, but . . .”

The butler wasn’t listening and didn’t seem to notice when I trailed off. It was only when the silence became painful that he probed again. “Where are you from?”

“I lived in London before this, but originally, I moved around several small towns in Appalachia. Er, that’s a mountain range in the United States. What about you?”

“Florence.” Such a simple response, yet it sounded as though he had to wrench it out. Clearly, the man was not interested in disclosing much about himself.

That made two of us.

Neither of us made any further attempts at small talk. He led me through the abbey in silence and brought me to my room: an old monk’s cell with appropriately minimalistic furnishing. There was a single cot across from a window and a small altar beneath it. The stone walls were almost entirely undecorated, save for a cross on the wall and a simple shelf. A rosary dangled over its edge above a Bible. The sight gave me chills.

I imagined a monk clutching those beads a lifetime ago, whispering to himself in Latin. The vision was so unnervingly clear, his breath heavy in my ear. I wondered if his body was resting in the catacombs below, along with his brothers and dozens of locals.

“Sorry we don’t have something better to give you,” the butler said behind me, jolting me from my thoughts. “You see, we’ve seen many people come through these halls over the past few weeks. A few have gone past Doctor Ntumba, but none any further. Who was I to guess Duca de’ Medici would permit a guest to stay the night?”

My brow quirked. I hadn’t registered that other interviewees had walked through these very doors. Were there others, like me, who wanted to comb through family trees and catch fleeting sights of the heir of a famous vampiric family? I had a hard time imagining any other reason someone would willingly sign up for such an unusual job square in the middle of nowhere. Unless, of course, you were me.

Unfortunately, he perceived my expression in the worst way possible. “It seems I have already spoken out of turn. My apologies, signorina.” He sighed softly, forcing his manner to return to the stuffy tone of servitude from before. “We will have the abbess’s suite prepared for you to move into by tomorrow evening.”

I couldn’t help but grimace. Every ounce of this interaction had been awkward, if not downright painful, and there was little point in trying to salvage it. Maybe tomorrow we could start again, and I could pretend I was comfortable talking with strangers.

“Thank you, sir,” I replied, my lips tightening. “Good night.”

With a small bow, he was gone, leaving me alone.

I took off my shoes and placed them by the door, which was a cloth curtain. I shuffled through my bag in search of a change of clothes, shoving aside a rabbit’s foot and my trusty binder. Most of my bag’s contents were old work, snippets of information I had scrounged together from old textbooks and university archives. The final section, however, was stuffed with all my research on the building I was in.

There wasn’t much information on the abbey to be found online, only that it was built shortly after the 1693 Sicily earthquake by a Spanish noble whose name I couldn’t place. Only a short walk away from his equally magnificent palazzi , the abbey stood proudly on the summit of a cliff, distantly overlooking the then-bustling city of Poggioreale. For a time, the Abbazia di Santa Dymphna was adored by the town and lovingly maintained by the locals. When the earthquake of 1968 struck, the town itself and even the noble’s palazzi fell into ruins, yet the Abbazia di Santa Dymphna stood entirely untouched. With no priest, no monks, and no congregation to attend, locals and the church alike abandoned it.

How Duca de’ Medici had funded such a venture wasn’t hard to fathom. The Medici were a rich family of bankers who had practically patronized the entire Renaissance, funding the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, and even the invention of the piano. If the family had even a fraction of their historical wealth—they would have been a dynasty full of billionaires in contemporary times—then the cost of this abbey was mere pennies to them.

My true curiosity was why Duca de’ Medici was here. Plenty of Medici lived outside of Florence, but to go somewhere with no company, no internet, and no interaction with the outside world was entirely contrary to the Medici goal of subtly influencing the church and state. The implication that one of the most important heirs of such a family had cast aside the political life he and all his forefathers had been groomed for since infancy was one of many puzzles that had drawn me to the Abbazia di Santa Dymphna. I theorized insidious documents might linger among the imported inventory, from wherever the heirs had been living before. It seemed silly now, but I had pinned my entire future on the vague suspicion that this haunted place held the secrets I had been searching for. After all, how could you research the underbelly of a family by keeping your head above-board?

But after such a long day, with my head a mess of unfinished thoughts, replayed scenes, and imagined futures, I just wanted to enjoy what remained of the night. The window creaked open in a greeting I found welcoming. I knelt on the bench, folded my arms, and rested my chin on my hands, breathing in the fresh Sicilian air.

Time passed at a bizarre rate. My thoughts gradually morphed into the sorts of daydreams that had kept me company since childhood. I imagined what it would have been like to be in this place back in its prime, that I was some abbess who had overcome her gender limitations to reign over the hills stretching endlessly beyond my window. Conversely, I imagined I was a lost damsel in distress, tucked away in the corner of a strange, haunted land.

Just as I shifted to another daydream, an icy, nearly imperceptible drizzle struck my fingertips like pins and needles and shook me from my reverie. By now, the moon had now reached its epoch in the sky, my forearms were covered in goose bumps, and my knees were aching. I didn’t need to glance at my watch to know I needed to get to sleep now.

It was surprisingly easy for me to go to sleep that night—despite the cold, despite the stiff bed, and above all, despite all the millions of questions swirling around my head.