Violenta's Vampire Journal

Violenta's Journal

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1 entry this month

Ghost Servant
02:32 Jul 14 2008
Times Read: 614

I have been called this before, "strega." Witch. I am no witch. I have a secret. A secret that shines without sunlight. I saw something I should never have seen, something no mortal was meant to see.

As a farmer's daughter, few options were available to me. Because my hair was fair and my face pleasant, I was chosen to work as a domestic for a wealthy family whose name you would recognize. Servant class, I was invisible, entering and leaving rooms like a whisper, walking through important men, dressed in silks and wools, brightly colored finery. Unseen, I felt like some kind of specter my Nonna would use to keep us children inside at night, warm in our loft that smelled of sweet hay.

As I walk through and around the gentlemen, I would imagine that I was dancing the Measures, Galliards, and Curantos I had seen in the masques my master often held for the wealthiest families of Tuscany. I was beaten once for imitating the cinque passe steps along a wall in the great hall where I was supposed to be gathering up trash and empty serving platters. I loved beauty and just couldn't help myself. Oddly, not one of those fine guests saw me there, a girl in shabby dress dancing like a princess along the wall. It was another servant who reported me to Cook and earned me my lashes.

It was in this way of mine, the invisible dance behind the curtain of their stage and their eyes, that I first beheld the secret that would become mine, a priceless treasure in the dirty apron pocket of a servant girl. Mined in Maremma L'amara, the bitter land of the Etruscans more than a thousand years before my feet touched the soil of my home, this secret, this shining thing of breathtaking beauty, this treasure of the Gods, was easier to steal than a crust of bread. Why? Because nobody thought to see me.

And so, the end of an era came to pass in Tuscany; a family of world renown ceased to be and a farm child danced with a pretty bauble in the moonlight while the best Italian mercenaries of the seventeenth century waged a quiet war, hunting for the powerful thief who dared to steal the secret of the Medici.

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