Wine and Oubliettes

Havermouth, Present Time

Samuel had always found the farmhouse and its surrounding buildings to be a peaceful, almost spiritual place, caught in a moment of time like an insect in amber as Sigrid had resisted changing her home, and water was still hand pumped into the bathroom, and the rooms were lit by candlelight and the fireplace.

There were ruins amongst the rambling gardens and fields – little cottages for those that served the farmhouse and worked the farm around it. Samuel knew of the tragic misunderstanding that had led to those ruins and the deaths of those who had lived within them and suspected that Sigrid’s refusal to move or upgrade her home was as a monument of grief for those that had died, but mostly for that break in her relationship with her vampire-father.

That refusal meant that there was an eternal need for wood, and, amongst the skeletons of vehicles that had made their way into the barn at some point and had never left, was an impressive woodpile. Sigrid and her