“You aren’t like that now,” she said, aware of something in his manner that convinced her he was telling her the truth.
“No, not now. I learned, in time. That is the one thing those of my blood usually have: time.” He bent to kiss the top of her head.
“Do you regret being what you are?” She had another sip of brandy.
“No. Once, a very long time ago, I did, so profoundly that it truly altered the course of my existence.” He thought back to his early years in the Temple of Imhotep, and Hesentaton, frightfully burned and dying in agony. “And I have done things since I regret, at least in hindsight. I certainly regret I wasn’t able to save Laisha; that failure still haunts me. There was so much promise in that child, and I miss her and all she might have become.” He felt more than saw her frown of uncertainty. “No, Rowena, she was not of my blood. I couldn’t have done that to her. She was my child, as much as if I had fathered her myself.”
“But if she had wanted—” Rowena blurted out.
He shook his head. “No. I would not do this to my child; it’s an unconscionable notion. It would appall me to attempt something so … contemptible.” He lifted her face so she could see him. “What you and I share isn’t for a father—or mother—and child. You have no reason to fear that there is an iota of incest in what is between you and me.” The image of Csimenae and Aulutis came to mind; he winced.
“What is it?” She was troubled by his sudden change of expression.
“Another thing I regret. I’ll tell you about it, someday. Not tonight.”
“Why not?” she asked. “You don’t suppose I’d be jealous, do you?”
He laughed shortly. “No. There is nothing of which to be jealous.” He put his hand on her shoulder again. “It’s not that; I am chagrined by what happened.”
“I find it hard to imagine you chagrined by much of anything,” said Rowena.
“Then you have an idealized impression of me.” He was at once complimented and vexed. “No one can live a decade—let alone millennia—without having at least a few moments of mortification. If you think vampires are immune from being disconcerted, you have been taken in by film and Stoker.”
“Oh, that’s right. You saw my drawing of the Borgo Pass for Dracula, didn’t you?” She put her hand over his. “Talk about chagrin.”
“I told you I liked how well you had caught the spirit of the book.” He could feel the tension in her shoulders. “How can that embarrass you?”
She pressed his fingers. “I thought at the time you were being kind.”
“Had I done that, the way you imply, I would have said it was accurate to the place as well as the book, which—”
“—it wasn’t,” she finished for him. “I do remember that. So I absolve you of trying to sweeten a bitter pill.”
“Thank you,” he said solemnly.
“You shouldn’t thank me,” she said, turning in her chair so that her back was against an arm and she was staring up into his face. “I should thank you.”
“For what reason?” he wanted to know.
“For taking me seriously when no one else did,” she said. “You and my grandfather were the only ones.”
“There was you,” said Saint-Germain, his voice deep and stirring, like the base note of a ’cello.
She shook her head. “Not always, especially at first Oh, I said I was certain, but in my heart I had many doubts, about the quality of what I had done, let alone what I could do. Occasionally I still do.” She gazed dreamily across the studio, seeing events of twenty years ago. “When I first arrived here, I was sure I was doing the right thing, leaving England and living as an independent woman on my own, but then I knew my grandfather would support me, and so I never had to put myself on the line as so many others did, which gave me an advantage of a sort.”
“Did that worry you?” Saint-Germain asked, perceiving it had.
“Not at first. It was hard enough just being a woman entering the world of artists. But over the ensuing years, my doubts reasserted themselves.” She pressed her lips together.
“How much did they trouble you?” He spoke steadily, no accusation in his question.
Rowena took a long moment to answer. “I began to feel ashamed of my good fortune. I wondered if I ought to throw everything to the winds, go off on my own, and try to survive on my art, to prove myself, to earn my place.” She ducked her head. “I might have done it if a woman I met here, another artist, who lived as much by her wits as her brush, wasn’t killed by a man who was supposed to be helping her arrange for a show at a small gallery. I knew it could have been me, in her place.”
Saint-Germain stroked her hand. “That must have been upsetting.”
“Terrifying is more like it; it brought back everything that happened with von Wolgast,” said Rowena with a self-deprecatory chuckle. “That’s the first time I went up the coast. I told myself it was to paint, but it was also to get away, to think. The first time I went with a guide, and we rode from the rail-stop outside of Ukiah. The road was hardly more than a goat-track, and it took two days to get to the coast. We both had a horse and a pack-mule, and we stopped at farmhouses along the way until we reached the old coach-road that follows the Noyo River; in many places it was little more than two wide ruts along the river-track. There was a train for the loggers, but it took no passengers. I think now we should have taken the coach-road all the way, but I wanted to see unspoiled territory.” She shrugged. “Most of it had been logged over, and there were what they call stump-farms all through the hills.” Picking up her snifter again, she swirled the brandy in it. “I don’t know—I think I was trying to prove something to myself.”
“And did you?”
“Who knows? I thought at the time I had, but now?” She sipped the brandy, taking her time, and at last she said, “I went back in ’26, and in ’28, and by then there were real roads, graded, some paved, and even a few hotels along the way. I could drive all the way without too much difficulty. For a while I considered buying a house up in Albion or Little River or Mendocino or Casper, but I realized I would be too much of an oddity in those towns, among those loggers and fishermen and berry-farmers, and I didn’t think I could stand to be that much of a peculiarity.” She set the snifter aside again, and looked up at him. “I’m glad we had an early dinner. Well, I had an early dinner, in any case.”
“Why is that?” He remained very still.
“Oh, because … because I didn’t want to have to cook tonight. You’ve spared me that.”
He could sense this was not the real reason, but kept his reservations to himself. “Have you been back to the north coast again recently?”
“Three years ago; I went as far as Eureka, to see their Victorian houses. They have some very fine ones, though it is hard times there as it is everywhere else.” She bit her lower lip. “There was trouble brewing—labor organizers trying to get the loggers and mill-workers to unionize. It’s strange: most of northern California has been heavily union since before the Great War, and southern California not; but logging and lumber have lagged behind, and the struggles in some areas are becoming entrenched. I found the conflict interesting, I’m ashamed to say, and I followed it with some diligence for over a week. I did some of my best sketches of the loggers working on the Eel River until one of the foremen told me to get out of the area, and to keep my pictures out of the press if I knew what was good for me. They didn’t want anyone making note of what was going on there. I left that day. I still have the sketches, but I haven’t done anything more with them.”
“Do you plan to?” Saint-Germain asked her, his compassion almost too much for her.
“I don’t know,” she said curtly. “It’s one of the many things I intend to do, but haven’t done yet; no specific plans yet.”
“Perhaps you’re getting ready to do those paintings,” he suggested. “Many perceptions take time to become clear.”
“That’s the attraction of your life, of course,” she said,
impatiently pinching burgeoning tears from her eyes. “Having the time to do more.”
“But this troubles you,” Saint-Germain said.
“Yes. An artist’s style is always distinctive, if he or she’s any kind of an artist, and I’m afraid if I came to your life, I would eventually have to stop painting, or risk being found out utterly.” Now that she had actually said it, she felt a burden lift from her.
Saint-Germain gave a single nod. “Of course. It is a problem.”
“Do you have any solution?” She sounded precariously near weeping.
“I can tell you what I have done, and what others of my blood have done,” he said. “I don’t know if that would be sufficient.”
“All right; other than travel, what do you do?” she queried.
“Yes, travel, that’s the heart of it, and change. There are other forms of art you might pursue, and other applications of your talents,” he said. “For myself, to make that less cumbersome, I have a number of identities established in various places.”
“That is becoming more difficult to do,” said Rowena.
“Yes, and it takes a bit more caution, but it can be done. It takes time and a little thought, and the opportunity to … slip through the cracks, as it were.” He offered her a single-sided smile. “One of my blood always creates the impression she has a niece interested in following in her footsteps. She’s an archeologist, and that is a very small world; those in the profession tend to know each other by reputation, and most of them have closer contact than that. So far she has been able to continue her work, supposedly from aunt to niece, but she has said it isn’t easy.” He could not convince himself that Madelaine de Montalia’s methods would work for Rowena. “Others have had their own ways to deal with their lives.”
“And none of them have ever been found out?” The angle of her chin suggested she would not believe a denial.
“All of us have, from time to time, and paid the price for the lapse,” said Saint-Germain, recalling many of his own mishaps.
Rowena sighed. “This is what makes me hesitate. I don’t know how I could manage to live as you and your kind must do. What I want to do is paint. I would love to have decades and decades more in which to do it, but I don’t know if I can … I wouldn’t be young again, would I? When I became a vampire.”
“Circling back to this, Rowena?” he inquired, ironic and saddened at once. “Very well. You would stay the age you were when you died, as it is for all of us. Vampires do age, but very, very slowly, and some of it is the changes that happen around us, more than within us. I was a tall man in my breathing days—today I am short, although my height is unchanged. I was thirty-two or -three when I was killed, and now I appear to be in my mid-forties, or so I’m told. Whether I have changed, or the look of age has been pushed back, I cannot say. I haven’t seen my face since I became a vampire, although I have seen portraits, such as yours.” He had a distant memory of his features reflected in a mirror of polished copper, as foreign now as if they belonged to an utter stranger.
“That does alarm me, being the age of one’s death for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years,” Rowena admitted. “But what can I hope for, a woman in my fifties, getting older every hour? How long will I be a woman whom men will seek? What if I don’t die until I’m seventy-five or more? How will I manage in the world once I become a vampire? I’m going to ask you about this again, you know, until I work it out.”
Saint-Germain contemplated her pensively. “I can only tell you what others have done. What you decide to do is up to you.” She sighed. “You are the most provoking man! I want you to lay out a strategy for me, and you won’t do it.”
“Because I can’t,” he said. “To tell you otherwise would debase you.”
“I know; I am glad of it, inconvenient as your scruples may be,” she conceded, her confidence increasing. “And that’s why I haven’t been able to make up my mind. I haven’t yet decided what I must do.” She looked into his eyes, happiness softening her expression. “But I am sure that I want you to stay with me this evening.”
He took her hands in his. “As long as you want me, I am greatly favored, and I thank you.”
“You have nothing to thank me for,” she said.
“But I do,” he said mellifluously. “You have given me the gift of your self, and there is nothing more estimable in all the world. If only I could show you how highly I value you.” His dark, enigmatic eyes rested on her.
“Another notion peculiar to vampires, all this valuing?” she proposed, enticing and defensive at once.
“Not peculiar to us, no, but necessary to us.” He lifted her hand to his lips, kissing the back and then the palm; her mercurial state of mind did not trouble him, for he was aware of her growing passion, and her increasing yearning for coalescence.
“You are perplexing,” she said, attempting to sort out her many emotions; she moved in the chair with unconscious sensuality, graceful and voluptuous. “But I don’t want to give up what you provide me; you’re too sensitive to me for me to reject you—it would be like shutting off a part of myself.”
“That is the nature of the Blood Bond,” he said.
“You’ve tried to explain that to me before, and I still don’t entirely understand it. Perhaps I can’t so long as I’m one of the living.” She pulled closer to him, as if willing herself to absorb his understanding by touch alone. “I may not decide to come to your life, but I don’t want to turn you away from my life, or my bed. For now, I want you to continue to be my lover.” The bluntness of her statement surprised her, and she blinked in confusion. “There should be a better way to say all this, but I—”
He bent to kiss her mouth, saying as she ended their contact, “It was a wonderful way to tell me. I don’t mind if fondness isn’t wrapped in respectable phrases.”
She touched his leg that rested on the rolled back of her chair. “I am so happy to have this time with you. I was beginning to think that there was nothing left but work and the long, darkening path toward death. You restore my aspiration as the psychiatrist could only struggle to do, on his terms, not mine.”
Saint-Germain laughed softly. “Hope is as necessary to life as blood: believe this.”
She moved in her chair, rising onto her knees so she could press herself against him. “Then I hope we have a wonderful night tonight”
He took her face in his hands and kissed her tenderly, taking all the time they needed to feel the kiss to its full extent, to let it work its magic on them both. Slowly he slid his hands down her neck and over her body, his touch light and stirring. “You are sweet as honey and wine, nourishing as bread,” he murmured.
“My blood?” she asked, intrigued.
“No, you, Rowena; you.” He bent to kiss her a second time, and felt her arousal as he moved back from her.
She took a deep, unsteady breath. “Then let me be both to you.” As she rose to her feet, she put her hands on his chest. “My room is ready, the sheets freshly changed. We have until seven-thirty tomorrow morning to ourselves.”
His eyes were lambent, his voice was stirring. “You are the riches of my living, Rowena; never think otherwise.” He ran his fingers down her face, his touch light and evocative. “How much you offer in your self.”
“Come with me,” she said, catching his hand in hers and drawing him after her toward the stairs leading to the second floor. “I’ve wanted to lie with you since we left Lincoln Park. And so I will.”
Saint-Germain followed her up the stairs and, as they reached the top, stopped as she swung around to embrace him. “Nothing is urgent, Rowena. We have all night” Their kiss went on for some time, growing increasingly complex. When she finally took a step back, he brushed her lip with the end of his finger. “Why rush?”
“Because I’m afraid it will all be gone too soon, not just you, but everything—my work, my life, all of it; I’ll be an old woman with nothing to show for my life but a nice house and a generous bank account to le
ave my nephews, and no one will know or care that I lived and painted,” she said, starting toward her bedroom. “That policeman being here reminded me that you, because of what you are, cannot stay anywhere for very long.”
“No more than twenty years at most,” he said, following her through the door. “And often far fewer years than that.”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it,” she said somberly, stopping at the side of her bed and confronting him. “If matters become too difficult or too perilous, you will depart, possibly with nothing more than a telephone call, if that. Then I’ll have a letter from Venezuela, or Hong Kong, or Timbuktu, and that will be the end of it.” Her expression dared him to contract her. “Well? Can you tell me it wouldn’t happen?”
“No,” he said calmly. “But it is unlikely.” He paused. “And I doubt I would go to Timbuktu. I have spent very little time in Africa.”
Momentarily distracted, she asked, “Why?” her curiosity outstripping her need.
“I have found it useful to be able to fit into the population around me: in Africa that is impossible.”
“But you have traveled to the Orient” she pointed out.
“So have many from the Occident I am an oddity but not an obvious one.” He watched her consider this.
“There have been white men in Africa,” she reminded them.
“Most of them exploiters, slavers and the like,” he added with an air of contempt. “I want nothing to do with that pernicious market.”
“But you have had slaves,” she said, sensing that this was crucial to understanding him. “Haven’t you?”
“Not since Heliogabalus was Caesar, and I always provided manumission for any slaves I owned. The Romans approved of that, at least for a time. Slaves were allowed under law to buy their freedom unless their slavery was a punishment under the law.” He loosened his tie. “I have been a slave, more than once. I cannot put another human being into that despicable state.”
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