She was sixteen years old when she lost her name. She had been Marguerite, before - it was the name her mother called her, in pride or frustration, the name her younger sister whined out when she needed someone to bandage a scraped knee. It was the name she held onto when she was alone and within herself, when she prayed or read or wrote in her diary.

And then she married, and became the Countess de Gernande, and no one ever called her Marguerite again.

She was the fourth Countess de Gernande. The Count kept portraits of the others locked within his desk drawer; he showed them to her when she first arrived in his castle. Little frames, small enough to fit into her palm, showing rosy-cheeked girls with sharp collarbones and hair curling at their foreheads.

She thought, they are beautiful. She thought, they were so young. She thought, is that what I look like?

She was the fourth Countess de Gernande, and she would not be the last. He informed her of this cheerfully, his large, fleshly hands caressing the portraits with an insouciance that made her sick. "The fulfillment of my lusts leads to death, eventually," he said with a shrug. "It's an unfortunate fact, but there's no remedy. I will take every care to ensure that you may survive as long as possible, however, I promise you that. We can see how long you manage."

At the time, she was dizzy and weak, and the bandages on her arms itched enough drive her mad. She was not sure, still, that the whole thing was not simply a nightmare brought about by reading Charles Perrault too many times before bed.

"You'll be bled every ninety-six hours," he continued, setting the portraits aside. "and between sessions you will be provided as much rest and privacy and good, nourishing food as one could possibly wish. You will see, my dear Countess, that your life will not be so terrible. Many husbands demand far more of their wives than that - think, darling girl, of the fact that I shall never ask you to bear me an heir! Women have lost so very much blood in those endeavors."

Some of the servants, the strange young men dressed in loose-fitting gauze, tittered at that, but Marguerite could not understand the joke.

What she understand was this: that her husband would care for her like a piece of livestock, treating her body carefully like a valuable property, until eventually he had used her all up, her blood run out, brimming his deep bowls full, spilling out on the floor around her knees.

Marguerite had not feared the Count de Gernande when first she met him. She had thought him charmingly awkward, gentle in the delicate movements of his heavy body. She had been delighted with the rich accumulation of knowledge inside his head, with the outpouring of words, eloquent as a rhetorician's, which flowed from his mouth. She knew that she did not know him, but the fact barely troubled her. It was exciting, she thought. It was a risk. It was an adventure.

Marguerite was a proud young woman at the time, confident in her own intelligence and capability. She and her mother had discussed the matter together before arranging her meeting with the Count; her mother had worried that she might be too young for marriage, but Marguerite dismissed those fears. She was ready to be married, she told her. She was ready to start her own life. If the wealthiest and noblest man to show interest was a middle-aged widower, then what of it? It meant he was knowledgeable and experienced. He tossed quotations in Latin and Greek into his speech as casually as someone might pop a candy into their mouth, and Marguerite wanted to learn all she could from him.

The ceremony took place in the chapel by her home, with her family in attendance. There was no banquet afterwards, since the journey to his castle was long, and he wanted to leave as soon as possible, ahead, he told her, of the snowstorm which threatened to block off the mountain pass which would allow them access. Marguerite told herself that it did not matter. She packed up her dresses and books and cosmetics and embroidery silks and kissed her mother and sister goodbye.

The sun set quickly, and the carriage was slow. Worn out with the anxiety of the wedding, Marguerite spent the journey resting.

Later, she would regret every moment that she did not spend looking out the windows of the carriage, even in the twilight; she never left his castle alive again.

She screamed, the first time, for all that she knew of no one who might possibly hear and rescue her. It was clear immediately that the servants would not help, but she somehow could not believe, could not fully comprehend their apathy and resignation. She looked straight at her maid, a thin, worn woman whose hands were gentle as she helped Marguerite change for dinner, and screamed as loud as she could. But the woman's face never changed.

The first time. It horrified her, the moment when she realized that she had begun naming it as such in her mind, for the appellation seemed to her an acknowledgment that there would be a second time, and a third, and a fourth, so on as far as she could think. It was an acknowledgment that she was not going to escape, that no heroic relative would ride up on a horse and burst in through the door just as the straps were being fastened to her wrists.

(If only, she thought with bitter laughter, she had ended up with older brothers rather than a younger sister.)

The first time happened so fast that she could hardly understand it. Clothes stripped from her, with swift, practiced movements. The Count sitting at the other end of the room, smiling faintly, his eyes upon the body which she had never before shown to a man. He examined her, as she blushed and panicked and tried to escape the hands of the servants who held her still.

He talked. He explained what was about to happen. He smiled as he described it.

"There is no point in resisting," he said.

"I have ways of breaking your will," he said.

"I need to test you now," he said.

What would horrify her most later, in the remembering of it, was not the pain but the blood, so bright and so much, hearing the slow liquid drip and knowing that it was the substance of her own body which echoed in her ears.

The first time, they forced her to her knees and held her arms still for the lancets. Later, she would have to learn to kneel of her own accord, and hold her body still in the positions that best pleased him.

She fainted, that first time, because he was unfamiliar with her body and misjudged how much blood she could safely lose. He would not make that mistake again.

These are the ways she tried to escape -

- by picking the lock on her bedroom door

- by climbing out the small, unbarred window in her dressing room

- by bribing her maid with jewelry and dresses and the little money she had brought with her

- by feigning compliance and docility long enough for him to let his guard down

- by offering her body to his male attendants

- by offering her body to her maid

- by building up a romance with her maid over many months, being kind and gentle and appreciative and listening to her sorrows, the two of them weeping on one another's shoulders until her maid was willing to do anything to help her

- by writing letters to her mother and throwing them out the window when the wind was strong, so that perhaps they would be blown into the hands of someone who would deliver them

- by pretending that she did not exist

These are the ways that succeeded -

When he was angry with her, he chose some part of her body other than her arms from which to draw blood. He laughed when he saw what parts made her tremble most to see the sharp point of the lancet approach.

"I'm sorry," she told him.

"I will never do it again," she told him.

"I am ready for anything," she told him, "you know full well that I am your victim and you have only to command me."

She never knew, afterwards, whether or not she had been lying.

He told her mother that Marguerite had gone mad, was wound up in paranoia and delusion, that it was tragic but he would devote the rest of his life (the rest of her life) to caring for her. Marguerite's mother offered to take responsibility for her care, or at least to come visit and take some of the burden off of him, but he declined each offer. Marguerite needed rest and quiet, he said, and, in her delusions, he was the only person she now trusted.

She had dreams, sometimes, of the previous Countesses.

In some of the dreams they all sat together around a table, wrists and necks swathed in bandages. The table was heaped high with all the food the Count required her to eat to restore her strength after the bleedings. In the dream, Marguerite knew that they had to finish all the food on the table or else some dreadful punishment would befall them. She ate and ate, until she felt weighed down with nausea, but somehow the amount of food never seemed to lessen. Around her, the other three women were behaving exactly as she did.

In other dreams, she found herself kissing and embracing them, their bodies recognizable under her touch for all that Marguerite had never met them, for all that Marguerite could not possibly have met them, as it was their death which had made her entrance in the Count's castle possible. Their kisses matched her own, as if she embraced a mirror, yet every time she could taste blood upon their teeth.

The final type of dream was one in which she was dead, and lay beside them in the grave. This was the most peaceful dream, and the one which left her least panicked upon waking, but the chill and stillness of the death was in the dream identical to the feeling of blood loss.

He finally killed her when she was not quite twenty-one years old.

That final punishment was in many ways no different from any other time he had bled in her in rage; likely he did not even intend her death. But it was only a day since her bleeding, and her body was weakening month by month. He was angry, driven into a fury by the revelation of her latest plan of escape, and opening vein after vein in her body. She lived only a few hours afterwards.

She asked for him, when her pulse sped up in her throat and she knew herself to be near death. She did not expect him to come, but she asked for him and he came.

In the years before, when she had tried to imagine her death, she had seen herself cursing him finally, spitting in his face, or, proud with the certainty of her own righteousness, informing him that she hoped he would repent of his crimes.

But she could not do any of that, when the time actually came. She was cold and lonely and frightened and had not left his house for nearly five years.

She asked him to hold her hand. He did.