Black Wallace

Black Wallace could not have asked for more from his life or death. The inheritor of an of earldom, Wallace took his seat in the House of Lords at the age of 28. Well known for his excesses, he frequented a London brothel that catered to “unusual and egregious needs.

” Rumor had it that his father spent an enormous sum to quiet a certain baronet whose daughter had suffered some great indignity during a dalliance with Wallace. In spite of his indiscretions, Wallace carried himself with aristocratic flair and learned the workings of Parliament quickly. He always argued vigorously for his concerns, and he made strong allies.

The House of Lords came to know him as a man of conviction and determination instead of as the bully and sadist he truly was. In the early 1640s, Wallace became enamored with Oliver Cromwell’s crusade against the Anglican Church. During the English Civil War, he led one of Cromwell’s most notorious terror mobs.

Normally, a man of his station would merely orchestrate such acts of violence — Wallace, however, relished leading his men. Cromwell once remarked that Wallace might be taking too much pleasure from these excursions, but it was also noted that the earl’s particular appetites did not dull his leadership ability.

When England entered the Thirty Years’ War against Spain, Wallace immediately involved himself. His leadership was superlative, and he was able to negotiate substantial holdings in Spain from the Peace of the Pyrenees. In 1659, during a tour of his Spanish concerns, he arranged a sitting with the master painter, Diego Velazquez.

Although aging, Velazquez created a forgiving and exquisitely crafted portrait of Wallace. While showing this portrait to Wallace’s associates from the Spanish court, the young servant handling the painting let its corner drop to the floor, thus cracking the frame. The CHAPTER ONE 19 hosts apologized profusely, but Wallace made light of it.

A week later, he arranged to have the boy moved to his own estate. That night, Wallace had the painting displayed in his chambers. He escorted the frightened boy in and smoothly slid a wooden shard from the frame into the child’s eye.

Wallace stood basking in the moment — simultaneously aware of his fabulous power and his license to explore the darkest urges of his soul — when a voice drifted to him from the shadows of the room. It spoke slowly as one does when reaching a long-considered decision. “Yes, yes — they are right, of course. But better I take you now than one night face you as one of Mithras’ Ventrue.

…” Then the darkest corners of the room closed on Wallace. Black tendrils held him fast and pinched off the air from his throat. Enraged, terrified and helpless, he watched as a swarthy man pulled himself free of the shadows. The man considered him for a moment, then slowly forced Wallace’s face into contact with the portrait.

“In the centuries to come, as you lose the memory of your face, you will cherish this painting above all else — if you survive.” Then the man dragged him out the window and into the night. If the Embrace of “Black Wallace” had been indecisive — if the clan had questioned his potential — all such concerns soon vanished.

He relished the power of his vampiric form, and he took immediately to the aristocratic structure of Clan Lasombra. More than anything else, he appreciated the illicit opportunities that Sabbat membership presented to him. Initially, his low standing in the clan was of great concern to him, but Wallace was nothing if not politically adroit.

He soon deduced that he could gain power more quickly by revealing treachery within the sect than by fighting the Camarilla. His chance to test this theory came sooner he could have hoped — in fact, it was because he was a neonate that the opportunity came to him at all. A stranger approached Wallace one night mere minutes before the break of dawn.

He commanded Wallace to bring his sire, Lord Vauxhall, to the stables the following evening. The man wove a hurried tale of intrigue and promised that Lord Vauxhall would reward Wallace richly for following these instructions and would surely kill him should he fail to do so. Most importantly, the stranger explained that Wallace should say nothing of this meeting, for there were spies everywhere.

Then the stranger vanished, leaving Wallace to flee from the approaching daylight and with no time to consider the conversation. The stranger played his part well, and almost any fledgling would have been cowed into doing exactly as directed. Wallace, however, had staged more than one coup in his mortal life and recognized a set-up when he saw one.

He burst into his chambers and had just enough time to bark out a command before he fell into his daytime slumber. When the sun left the sky the next evening, the stranger erupted from the soil beneath the stable. Immediately, a dozen Lasombra ghouls burst out of hiding and set upon him. They held him fast until Wallace arose, groomed and fed, then made his way into stable.

Both history and Wallace have forgotten why this Gangrel antitribu assassin sought Lord Vauxhall. It is remembered, however, that Wallace tore the secrets from him by slicing the plotter’s body lengthwise to the bone, laying knotted lengths of rope in the wounds, then letting them heal over. Hitching horses to the ends of the ropes, Wallace drove them away in opposite directions.

After his third evisceration, the man spoke freely. Soundly praised and rewarded for his acts, Wallace used the momentum of this event to begin a relentless crusade against “enemies from within.” Whether his true motivation was genuine concern, political gain or the opportunity to torture is unclear.

Each motive grew to feed the others and, within a century of his Embrace, Wallace had become a vampire possessed by his own passions. He sliced apart the traitorous, the impure and the suspect. Few dared to challenge him, and all grew to fear him. Black Wallace became an Inquisitor in 1780 — both to focus his energies and to keep him tempered by the company of other Inquisitors.

Now known as the most impassioned and feared of his kind, he sometimes lingers weeks behind his fellows to consummate a punishment that his companions “gave up on too early.