Carmilla: A Critical Edition

I

4 I An Early Fright In Styria,1 we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss.2 A small income, in that part of the world, goes a great way. Eight or nine hundred a year does wonders. Scantily enough ours would have answered among wealthy people at home. My father is English, and I bear an English name, although I never saw England. But here, in this lonely and primitive place, where everything is so marvellously cheap, I really don’t see how ever so much more money would at all materially add to our comforts, or even luxuries. My father was in the Austrian service, and retired upon a pension and his patrimony, and purchased this feudal residence, and the small estate on which it stands, a bargain. Nothing can be more picturesque or solitary. It stands on a slight eminence in a forest. The road, very old and narrow, passes in front of its drawbridge, never raised in my time, and its moat, stocked with perch, and sailed over by many swans, and floating on its surface white fleets of water-lilies. 1. This location invites reference to the portion of the former Duchy of Styria that is currently located in Slovenia and hearkens to the central placement of vampires in the eastern European tradition. However, the German-language references to Styria and to the more specific “Upper Styria” privilege the German-speaking area that today comprises part of Austria. For an interesting reading of the potential meanings of this location, see Gibson 2006 and 2007. 2. German word for “castle.” Carmilla 5 Over all this the schloss shows its many-windowed front; its towers , and its Gothic chapel.3 The forest opens in an irregular and very picturesque glade before its gate, and at the right a steep Gothic bridge carries the road over a stream that winds in deep shadow through the wood. I have said that this is a very lonely place. Judge whether I say truth. Looking from the hall door towards the road, the forest in which our castle stands extends fifteen miles to the right, and twelve to the left. The nearest inhabited village is about seven of your English miles to the left. The nearest inhabited schloss of any historic associations , is that of old General Spielsdorf, nearly twenty miles away to the right. I have said “the nearest inhabited village,” because there is, only three miles westward, that is to say in the direction of General Spielsdorf ’s schloss, a ruined village, with its quaint little church, now roofless , in the aisle of which are the mouldering tombs of the proud family of Karnstein, now extinct, who once owned the equally desolate chateau which, in the thick of the forest, overlooks the silent ruins of the town. Respecting the cause of the desertion of this striking and melancholy spot, there is a legend which I shall relate to you another time. I must tell you now, how very small is the party who constitute the inhabitants of our castle. I don’t include servants, or those dependents who occupy rooms in the buildings attached to the schloss. Listen, and wonder! My father, who is the kindest man on earth, but growing old; and I, at the date of my story, only nineteen. Eight years have passed since then. I and my father constituted the family at the schloss. My mother, a Styrian lady, died in my infancy, but I had a good-natured governess, who had been with me from, I might almost say, my infancy. I could not remember the time when her fat, benignant face was not a familiar picture in my memory. This was Madame 3. Adhering to a medieval architectural style known for its pointed arches and emphasis on height. 6 J O S E P H S H E R I D A N L E F A N U Perrodon, a native of Berne,4 whose care and good nature in part supplied to me the loss of my mother, whom I do not even remember, so early I lost her. She made a third at our little dinner party. There was a fourth, Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, a lady such as you term, I believe, a “finishing governess.” She spoke French and German, Madame Perrodon French and broken English, to which my father and I added English...