To fly between worlds, between Sanguinaria and here, to deposit on my doorstep a deep red rose, still slightly tacky where the blood hasn't yet dried - for me to send back a white rose in return - Fairtrade from Waitrose - is quite an undertaking. I'm not quite sure how I have managed it. Only a few days ago, a moon-month exactly since I came back here, I was wandering in the garden in the moonlight and a bat descended, the rose was there. The next night the bat came and picked up the rose I had bought from Waitrose. When the flittering creature took hold of it, the bloom flushed pink, then deeper and deeper red, and then vanished altogether.
I have a cold now, but it's worth it.

Oh, Rudolf! I loved you so much, yet I had my Duty. I was married to Bloodlouse, after all, and had to spend every day in his arms, in an eight-foot wide coffin, to embrace him, passionately, on the scarlet sheets - but every time my thoughts turned to the stalwart Rudolf, captain of my guard. Then one day, Bloodlouse looked at me and withdrew his fangs in the very act of sinking them into my throat. 'You little cheat, Chernya!' he snarled.

I knew then that the moment had come. It took a lot of planning, a secret visit to the Blood Bank, bribes - but one evening he didn't appear to the pre-breakfast gathering. He was nowhere to be found. (He was, in fact, being held by vampires I had suborned, in a tower twenty miles away from our castle).

Now of course his throne could not remain empty, that would have been against the Law. And though Rudolf was far better-looking than my royal spouse Bloodlouse, it's amazing what a lot of makeup can do. So he played the part of King. I stood beside him, I held his hand, he raised mine to his lips and gently bit my wrist-vein -and one morning he picked up the double-edged sword that lay between us in the wide coffin and tossed it out. The next minute we were in each others's arms. He fanged me. The exstasy of that moment is beyond description. I felt myself sailing away on bat-wings of rapture and then -

damn, there's the door. My John Lewis delivery. I shall post again, later.