“Twenty-five. Someday I guess I’ll be two centuries old myself, but for now you and I must seem like infants. If I could make it on my own, I might steal you away. But I can’t. Rayner has kept his word to grant me power and immortality and I’ll never be poor again. So I won’t betray him either.”
What if I gave you no choice?
I knew by now that the vampires were always hungry, and it took force of will for them to resist me. I knew Jie’s youth made it harder for him.
And I wanted him. Back home, I might have tried to be obedient, with all the rules of society that pinned each one of us in place.
It just didn’t feel the same anymore.
I reached for the comb and pins that held my hair, which Rayner wished to remove before, and for Jie I let my hair fall loose. Certainly, the meaning of this gesture wasn’t lost on him. He was riveted by this small performance.
I don’t think either of us thought of Rayner then.
He pulled me into his arms and ran his fingers through my hair, then tugged at my clothes, while I ran the back of my hand against his short, rough beard. He looked so wild compared to any man I ever thought I’d be with, but he had a gentleman’s heart, I thought.
We were furtive. In the back of our minds, we both knew this was forbidden, but we couldn’t stop ourselves. I was only more excited for thinking I shouldn’t be with him. He tugged at my clothes, stumbling a little over every knot and fastener, until I was stripped down to my slippers. My old husband usually didn’t even bother to undress me or himself. He just wanted to fuck and be done with it. Jie stopped to admire me.
“You can’t afford me, can you?” I teased, because he had that look in his eyes. I’m sure he had looked at courtesans, at the very least.
“Luckily I don’t have to. You are mine now…”
I pulled his shirt off him. “I want to look at you too.”
I could see the lifetime of hard work in every lean muscle. I had never seen a man like that. And he was such a clever man, I thought he had been wasted in a life working on ships, but maybe not. “Do vampires ever change?” I murmured. “Or are they frozen in time forever? Will you always look just the same?”
“Always the same,” he said.
“Ohh…”
But then I will age, I thought.
I pressed myself into his strong arms and let him open my legs. I yearned to be so close to him that I could feel him inside me, his strength and yearning, the throbbing need that penetrated me.
And we won’t have children, either. I will never have my little girl now.
What a strange fate, I thought, and I sensed that despite this moment of happiness, I must seize it while I could.
We were very quick, fearing we might be caught, although we didn’t say so. He cleaned me up thoroughly and said he would get rid of the cloth, fearing that the other vampires might smell the scent of our love making. My heart fluttered with danger. I hadn’t thought of that.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” Jie said. “But I couldn’t help myself. Go gentle on Rayner, I…I understand him a little more now.”
“In what way?”
“As I smelled your perfume, it made me homesick. It hit me that someday, I might meet you again in another life. You won’t speak my language, and you won’t smell of home. But if I know that it’s your soul, I think I won’t be able to help but to love you. So I hope you’ll go gentle on me…”
By the time we got to England, I could speak a little better, and understand a little more. I was in a very large, dirty, bustling city, surrounded by this strange language. The poor seemed the same in every country, I thought. The adults looked tough and hardened and often crippled, and the hungry children still played. But the wealthier ladies didn’t stay in their homes as much either, and we passed a park full of strolling couples. I also saw ladies out shopping with their servants, but their clothes and hair looked so fussy and impractical, with huge puffed sleeves and curls dangling and bouncing over their ears topped with beribboned bonnets. Jie was staring just as I was as we both saw London for the first time. We reached a house that sat right on the street without any privacy.
Still, it was as large and grand as my husband’s house in China—or even more so, when I came inside.
Servants lined up inside to greet us and they were all looking at me almost agape.
“This is your new mistress,” Silvus said, calm and almost indifferent to their stares. “You must obey her. And this is your third master, Mr. Jie Yuan.”
They all curtseyed and bowed to me and gave me their names, layers of skirts swishing and their own curls bobbing.
My life in London had begun and it would not be an easy adjustment for any of us.
I think I would have hated London for a long time if Jie had not tried so hard to find things for me to like. He was determined to make me happy, even if he had to fight with the cook. Usually the cook only existed to feed the other servants who kept up the house, but now she had to feed me and I hated English food. Even the simplest of vegetables and meats seemed overcooked and bland. Jie started going to the market himself every few days and frequenting spice shops, figuring out ways to replicate the flavors of home. I could always seem to find him in the kitchen with his sleeves rolled up, making dumplings or soups and trying to figure out better ways and then show the cook, who didn’t seem to want anything to do with it. He would taste things and spit them out so they didn’t make him sick. Then he would ask me to taste them if they passed his own approval. I tried to help but many of the tools and ingredients were very different. Finally, the cook was fired and a younger one hired, and she was more curious about the odd recipes.
Servants in England seemed to have nothing to do but involve themselves in our own lives, and I felt as if they whispered about me all the time. They expected to wash my underclothes and even menstrual rags. In the house where I grew up servants didn’t touch your most private things and when they weren’t working they minded their own business. I rinsed all these things myself and lugged the soiled water out. Rayner and Silvus found this a strange habit and were always trying to stop me.
I tried to be gentle on Rayner. But it wasn’t easy.
They were embarrassed by me.
They had friends, other vampires who came to call and meet me. I could see the confusion with me—the foreign wife—on their faces, and as I learned their language it only became more clear. Rayner and Silvus had no idea what to do with me. They brought me here halfway across the world and now they urged me to dress and wear my hair like their own ladies. They wanted my feet hidden so their friends wouldn’t ask about them. I would not curl my hair in papers, and I hated their stiff clothes, tight sleeves and bone corsets and layers of petticoats, and every morning I woke before the servants and put on my own clothes and did my own hair without help. They wanted me to attend church with them like all the other ladies but I rebelled against going into the house of their god.
It became very obvious to me that the Englishmen thought I was a barbarian, and all I had to defend myself were halting words with a thick accent. I felt as if my entire world had not just been torn away, but was being stomped upon every single day.
I used to wish I could travel the country. Jie had seemed so excited about showing me another land. But I hated to leave now and felt even more confined than I had ever been. I didn’t have any sense of family duty or the hope of children to thread my life together.
After just a few months in London, I started staying in bed. There was nothing to make me wish to leave it. The weather was turning gloomy and cold. The city was choked with smoke. I started to hate Rayner. I had even started to miss my mother in law. She might have been strict and snappish but at least when we sewed together she did admire my embroidery in her quiet way, always asking to see my work when I was done and running her fingers over it while her eyes were pleased.
I started to hear Jie and Rayner fighting and Silvus trying to intervene only for both of th
em to yell at him. Rayner was still constantly trying to win my favor with presents and words of admiration, but we could hardly talk to each other in the way we needed to.
I bring them nothing but misery, I thought. And I am so miserable myself. Jie won’t tell me the truth, I’m sure, but some of these arguments must be about what to do with me. I’m sure they would rather send me home, but they destroyed my home. And Rayner can’t let me go. He always has that crazed look in his eyes. But he doesn’t love me. If he would be honest with himself, he would see that he doesn’t love me at all, and I’m not his wife. I’ll never be his wife. And I’ll never have a child.
I looked at the rafters of the room—low enough that I might reach them from a chair, I thought.
If I took my life, I would leave Jie alone here.
But he was adventurous and resilient. He saw all the good in England, and he had more freedom. He could go back to China if he really wished.
He had been learning to read so quickly. I picked up my brush and wrote for him:
At the end of spring
Plum blossoms fall to the ground
Their colors fade gently into the earth
I thought about how poetic my death would be.
And then I thought of Jie. You won’t speak my language…you won’t smell of home…
Go gentle on me.
I would have to find some way to bear it. I tore up the letter and threw it in the fire. Then I pulled the thick woolen shawl that had belonged to one of my former selves, bracing myself against the cold. I wanted to find Jie and distract myself with one of our talks.
I peered in the library, because Jie had been trying to learn to read English.
I saw Rayner’s fair head lowered in the chair, his long legs crossed in front of the crackling fire. He saw me before I could get away and then it looked like he was hastily putting something in a basket.
What was he doing with a basket? What was he hiding from me?
I walked close to him and I saw that inside the basket was a pair of my own shoes. No—that wasn’t right. They were new shoes. He was embroidering shoes.
“What is this?” I asked. “Woman’s work?”
“No,” he said, his eyes turning stormy. “I always make you shoes. I’m a shoemaker by trade.”
“And embroidery too?”
“When we were young,” he said, “I was poor…wanted to give…gift. I worked… making beautiful shoes…marry me.” I realized that he was speaking slowly now, so I could make my way through his words, and I understood well enough to make sense of half of it between blurs of confusing sounds.
“Shoes gift for marry in Amsterdam?” I asked, as my mind was spinning with all the words I had just learned.
He nodded. “From me to you.”
“In China, woman make her own shoes,” I said.
“Yes. You’re the shoemaker now,” he said wryly. “But…” Some murmured words I didn’t understand.
He took a shoe out of the basket and put it in my hand, and I saw that he had embroidered my little birds flying among plum blossoms onto the shoe. I had to give them to a kind woman we met on our travels. I didn’t want the voyage to stress them. Rayner must have examined one of my own shoes and measured it for a pattern.
“My pets,” I said. “They are very beautiful.” I couldn’t help but be a little suspicious of a man who could do such fine needlework. It seemed effeminate. But then I looked at Rayner and all such thoughts vanished from my head. There was certainly nothing else effeminate about him.
“Will you wear them?” he asked. “When I…making them? I want to…to see Ulf. He is…oldest vampires in London. He would like to see you. Ulf is…man…travel…he has been… Many countries.” My brain was spinning to pick out his words.
I realized that Rayner knew he was not giving me the respect he should, considering he had been the one to steal me away. This was an apology that didn’t require words. The shoes were a bridge between us.
I don’t know that it was enough for me to love this troubled man, but I had chosen to live. I would not be going home. So I would have to find happiness where I could. “Yes,” I said. “I will wear.”
“You…start…understand me, Tulip.”
“I try hard. I am trying hard?”
He nodded. “I try…gentle…patient. I see more…girl… Love,” he added, trying to clarify new words with simpler ones.
“Lisbeth? Do I…?” I gestured for the word.
“You remind me of Lisbeth,” he said.
“Remind,” I repeated, trying to hold onto the word along with all the others. I had never spoken to him this much when it was so much easier to talk to Jie, and I don’t think either of us had realized just how well we could communicate without him as the weeks went by.
“She love…work…garden. Words. People.”
“In spring… can I have new flowers for garden?”
“Easy,” he agreed. “All the flowers you want. I take…flower market.”
This was not the immediate understanding and passion I felt with Jie, not with this man whose violence toward my family felt like a violence toward my entire world. I would never love him without thinking of what he had done. But day by day, I began to see the humanity that still lingered among the violent passion.
Chapter Eighteen
Alissa
I woke from my trance crying out without knowing it, and I realized that Rayner had a grip on my shoulder and was trying to wake me up, but for a moment I was confused about who I was and who he was to me.
“Alissa! Shh, shh, it’s all right. Did you have a nightmare?”
“Li Mei…” I started sobbing like I was letting out tears that I held back, in that other life. I had felt every moment of her loneliness and anguish. And I knew she was angry. I knew she was angry and also that she knew how to hide her anger where she could hardly get to it herself, and it was so close to how I had felt all my life.
We really are one and the same. I am Li Mei and Li Mei is me.
“Ah…” He smoothed my sweaty forehead with a cool hand.
“I—I…tried…to do a past life regression.” I swallowed.
“What did you see, dearest?”
I hardly knew how to answer. “Rayner…do you really want me to remember these things?”
“Yes,” he said. “I do. It was our history. I had over a decade with you, then. So tell me what you saw.”
“I didn’t love you. I was writing a…suicide note. I ended up tearing it up, but…”
He nodded. “I told you, quite rightly, that I made terrible mistakes with Li Mei…” He settled beside me on the bed, propped up on his arm so he was looking down at me. “There is no excuse for them now. At the time I felt justified. But…I was not very controlled either. You might tell me I’ve never been controlled, but compared to then…well. As I said, there is no excuse. I won’t make one. I went into a country without understanding anything about it, stole you away, and tried to make you into the woman I loved. I completely failed, at first, to see that you were the woman I loved. And it’s true. I was the one who put you in that impossible position.” He took my hand. “I hope you remember more of it.”
“I’m so confused,” I said. “I want to be myself, and all of you keep remembering me as someone else. But then…I felt Li Mei’s memories so strongly that now I wish I had more of them. All of them. I feel like they belong to me. So maybe I know how you feel. And yet…”
Be gentle…
That was always the confusion we faced, I realized. Rayner was pained to see me come from a foreign country where he couldn’t understand my language or customs, and then Jie went through the same pain when he saw Bertie. Each life I had lived, I wanted to be myself. They would never escape my ghosts.
“I love your soul,” he said. “I would be dishonest to say it isn’t hard to see you change, however. My Dutch girl to my French girl, it was not such a change. The miles between them are not so long… With Li Mei and Bertie
, it became much more difficult. I was furious at fate for tearing you away and changing you.”
“You still are, aren’t you?”
“God, yes.” He took a slow breath. “I think I earned her love. I hope I did. I suppose only you will know for sure what was in your mind at that time, but when I saw your grief, I understood that to lose one’s country is a kind of death. I thought back to when I had to flee Amsterdam. I had to meet you where your heart lived. And I had to let you love Jie more than you loved me.”
“Silvus told me I still loved you most, in the end…” I could hardly imagine that was true.
“Well.” He smiled, a little cynically. “I hope so.”
“How long before you made love to her?” I asked.
“Months,” he said. “Many months. I had seen what your husband was like. You were submissive in the bedroom, not so scared as you were this time because you knew what would come. But it wasn’t genuine. It was all too much like this situation now. I will wait until you ask for me and mean it.”
“But not to take my blood.”
“I’m no angel.” He smiled. “And now you’re mine again.” He met my lips, and I met them right back, and I was glad to feel him close to me and let the painful memory melt away. But I was also glad to remember.
Jie had changed so much himself, I thought.
I went with him to have the hotel’s complimentary breakfast. He was shy around me and seemed so young in my memories back then. He had been nervous around Silvus and Rayner, but he did stand up to them for Li Mei’s sake. Now he had an ease and confidence. None of that had troubled him in a long time.
“What?” he asked. I must have been gazing at him strangely across the table as I remembered.
“You’re two hundred years old now,” I said.
“Yeah.” He arched a brow.
“But you’ve always been a good cook. You told me the food in England killed me, but I don’t think so. You went to so much trouble to figure out good dumplings.”
Love Me Madly Page 14
