Jonathan Barrett Gentleman Vampire

by P. N. Elrod

  “Is there something wrong, Mother?” I asked, rising.

  Her mouth flapped several times. It might have been comical but for the blistering fury in her.

  “You two. . .” she finally gasped out, pointing at each of us.

  “What is it?” I stepped forward, thinking she was ill. She looked feverish with those blazing eyes.

  “You . . . filthy . . . filthy unnatural wretches!”

  “What’s the matter with her?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Mother?” I put my hand out. “Come and sit down, Mother.”

  She slapped me away. “You miserable, depraved creature. How could you even think—you’re sickening, the pair of you!”

  Elizabeth shook her head at me, a sign to keep my distance, and to communicate her own puzzlement.

  “Mother. . . .” I began, but she came at me and this time slapped me right across the mouth with all her strength. My head snapped to one side, my face afire from the stinging blow. I fell back, eyes smarting, gaping at her without comprehension, too startled to move.

  She struck me again with her other hand, fairly rattling my head. Tears started from my eyes from the pain. Another strike. I backed away, suddenly aware of the invective flowing from her. None of it was coherent, broken as it was by her hitting me and the intensity of emotion behind the blows. Her temper tantrum this morning was but a shower compared to this gale.

  Elizabeth was off the bed by now and shouting at her. I put my hands up to guard myself and tried to back around toward the door and escape. Elizabeth got between us and took solid hold of Mother’s arm. Now they were both shouting.

  Then Mother hit Elizabeth. Not with an open hand, but a closed fist.

  Elizabeth cried out and spun away, hair flying. She fell against the bed, then dropped to the floor. Her next breath was a bewildered, angry sob. Mother loomed over her, shifting her weight to one foot. Before she could deliver what would have been a vicious kick to my sister’s face I caught both her arms from behind and dragged her away. Mother screamed and squirmed and her heels flailed against my shins.

  “What is it? Oh, dear, what is it? Marie, what is happening?” Mrs. Hardinbrook dithered in the hall, adding her foolishness to the din.

  Mother paid her no mind, thrashing madly about. She’d used up her words and much of her breath. Only hideous little animal grunts escaped from her clenched teeth.

  I hoarsely shouted Elizabeth’s name, breathless myself. She shook herself and found her feet, moving slowly, and holding her face. She was dazed, but had sense to keep clear. Stumbling toward the door, she ran into Mrs. Hardinbrook, who didn’t quite know what to do.

  “Get some help, you fool!” my sister bellowed, pushing her away The woman squeaked with fear and fled.

  “Elizabeth?” I asked.

  “I’m all right,” she stated shakily.

  “Harlot!” Mother shouted at her. “Filthy, unnatural harlot!”

  Elizabeth gaped at her, then her gaze darted to my bed, where she had been giggling hardly a minute past. “Oh, my God. She can’t mean that.”

  Busy as I was, the realization of what she was talking about took longer to dawn upon me. When it did, Mother took advantage of my utter shock to twist from my grasp and round upon us. Her carefully made-up hair had shredded into a tangled mess, framing her beet red face like Medusa’s snakes. Her eyes fairly popped with rage. She looked absolutely and utterly demented.

  “You shameless creatures! It was a cursed day that either of you were born—that you should come to this! You dirty, disgusting. . . .”

  “Mother, you are wrong! You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  She could have scorched me with those eyes. “I know what I saw, you unnatural monster.”

  Elizabeth came in to stand next to me. “She’s incensed, Jonathan, don’t try to argue with her.”

  “That was ever and always the excuse,” Mother snarled. “I don’t know what I’m talking about! Is that it? Is that what you’ll say? This shame is upon you both. You’ll be the ones locked away. Dear God, I should have seen this coming and been here to prevent it.” She looked past us. “It’s your fault, Samuel. You raised them as you would and see what has become of them. I swear, if any vile bastard get comes of this unholy union I’ll drown it myself. Do you hear me? I said, do you hear me?”

  As one, Elizabeth and I followed her gaze. Standing in my doorway, still wrapped in his traveling cloak, was our tardy father.

  CHAPTER THREE

  He regarded his wife in a calm manner and nodded soberly. “I hear you, Marie,” he said in a gentle, well-controlled voice.

  Elizabeth and I began to rush to him, but he swiftly brought up one hand to stay us. He did not look at us but at Mother.

  She glared back. “And where have you been while this wickedness has been going on? Or have you been a part of it? Have you?”

  He declined to answer that one, his glance shifting briefly to me and back to her again. “Library. Both of you.”

  We fled. In the hall we met Beldon hurrying along with a black case in hand and his sister in tow. He was dressed for bed, but had thrown on a coat and shoved his bare feet into shoes. Neither spared a word for us, though Mrs. Hardinbrook paused as though sorely tempted. But she went on to be with Beldon and thus watch whatever might come next. She was welcome to do so.

  Partway down the stairs we encountered the first of the servants roused by the row, a sleep-drugged maid. I ordered her to the kitchen to brew a pot of strong tea. She tottered out of our path, her face coming awake with questions. I ruthlessly confiscated her candle.

  The library was cold, but the fireplace had been swept and readied for tomorrow. I knelt and busied myself with the tinder, bringing it to fiery life with the candle flame while Elizabeth sank onto a settee.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked.

  Silence, and then an eloquent sniff. She rubbed her swelling and now wet cheek with an impatient hand. “Are you? Your face. . .”

  “It’s nothing.”

  But I began to tremble. A piece of kindling slipped from my suddenly fumbling fingers and hit the stone hearth. “My God, Elizabeth.”

  “I know.”

  “What she did . . . what she thinks . . . it’s monstrous.”

  “It’s impossible. She’s impossible. We can’t live like this.” Elizabeth hated crying and I hated watching her fight it. I left the fire and sat next to her, an arm around her slumped shoulders. It was as much for my solace as hers.

  With only the one candle and the embryonic fire, the library was overcrowded with shadows. I’d seen it like this many times, foraging down here for a book when the house was asleep, but never with such a heaviness in my heart.

  I was afraid. I was in my own house and afraid.

  It was not a child’s fear of the dark, or even of that time when I’d fallen into the kettle, or of a hundred other times and incidents. Those fears pass quickly and may eventually be laughed at; this was of an altogether different kind. It would not go away so easily, if at all.

  “Why did she ever have to come home?” I muttered.

  Elizabeth had recovered somewhat when the maid turned up with the tea. I let the girl pour; neither of us were steady enough to do it.

  “What’s going on up there?” I asked her. I’d heard a lot of rushing about and voices.

  “They’re taking care of Mrs. Barrett, sir. Mrs. Nooth is with her and so’s that Dr. Beldon. Mrs. Nooth said she’d had some kind of a fit.” The girl waited, perhaps hoping to glean information from me. I disappointed her with a nod of thanks and a clear dismissal.

  “ ‘Some kind of a fit’?” Elizabeth echoed sarcastically when we were alone.

  “That seems to describe it well enough.”

  She pulled herself straight and reached for a teacup. “I can see us describing it like that
from now on. What are we going to do with her? Lock her in the attic? Or will we build her a little block house and hire someone to feed her through a slot in the door?”

  “It won’t come to that,” I said.

  “Better that than to go through this again. I didn’t hate her before, Jonathan, but I do now. What she . . . what . . . oh, I can’t bear it. It’s unforgivable. It’s perverse and horrible. She has to go.”

  “But—”

  “This is more our house than hers. She had no right to come here and do this to us. We were happy until she came.”

  True. All true.

  Elizabeth put down the cup, her tea untouched. “Father will have to do something. After this, he must do something. He must.”

  We fell silent. I went back to building up the fire. The chill of the room—and of other things—seeped past my skin and into my bones. It was devastating enough that Mother had violently struck us, but for her to have hurled such a revolting accusation was agonizing. Until now I’d not suspected the depth of her lunacy. She’d just shown it to be nigh to bottomless.

  Father came in just as the logs began to properly blaze. As one, Elizabeth and I rushed to him for the embrace we’d been denied earlier. It was something we’d done as children and now we instinctively returned to that simple and much-needed comfort. He smiled and opened his arms wide, folding us in close. I felt better for that solid weight around my shoulders. No matter how bad the situation, I knew that he would be able to make it better.

  “Is that tea I spy?” he asked after a moment.

  We loosened our grip and Elizabeth glided over to pour. He made a side trip to a cabinet and brought out a bottle of brandy, adding some to each cup.

  “I think we need this,” he observed.

  He’d shed his cloak at some point, but still carried some of the outdoors with him in his manner. His riding boots were smeared with old mud. He’d been wearing them, I remembered, when he’d taken his morning walk with Mrs. Montagu. Such earlier pleasures had clearly been driven away by tonight’s pains, for he looked tired. Older, I realized with another chill, but instead of being burdened by age, he was a man aged by a burden. His wife.

  “Well?” he asked. “Which of you wants to talk first?”

  Elizabeth stepped in. “Where’s Mother?”

  “In her room. That fellow with the popping eyes gave her a dose of laudanum to calm her down. He and that silly woman are sitting in with her. Said he was a doctor. Would he be Beldon, then?”

  “Yes. The woman is his sister, Deborah Hardinbrook.”

  Father had heard enough about them from Mother to need no further introduction. “Proper little pair of toadies, but they seem to be making themselves useful for the moment. Now, please, tell me what happened.”

  Between us we managed to garble the narrative enough for him to raise his hand in protest.

  “Jonathan, your turn,” he said firmly. “Pretend you’re in court.”

  It was his way of reminding me to present all the facts, but as simply as possible and in good order. I did my best. Elizabeth added nothing, but nodded agreement as I spoke. When I’d finished, our brandy-laced tea was gone.

  Father sighed and ran a hand through his graying hair. It was his own, tied back with a now-wilted ribbon. “A pretty mess,” he concluded. “Are you badly hurt? Elizabeth?”

  She shook her head. I did the same, though my cheeks were tender to touch and likely as red as hers.

  “But it might have been worse,” I said. “If Mother had kicked her as she’d intended . . . if I’d not been there to pull Mother away. . .”

  Elizabeth dropped her gaze. “We must do something, Father.”

  “Indeed,” he said, neither agreeing nor disputing. He stood and paced the room a few times. On the last round he checked the hallway for any listeners and closed the door before coming to stand in front of the fireplace. It was unlike him to behave so. I saw it as more evidence of how Mother’s presence had changed life for the worse.

  “There are more bad tidings, too,” I said.

  “Out with it.”

  “She wants me to go to England to study law.”

  Father only nodded, which was a bit disappointing. I thought he’d show some kind of dismay or denial. “What else?”

  “She wants to sell Jericho and hire an English servant to take his place.”

  This was news to Elizabeth. “That’s—no! No, she mustn’t!”

  “I told Jericho I’d sooner run away to sea and take him with me.”

  Father gave out with a chuckle just then, but quickly smothered it. I’d sounded foolish, but just then we needed some foolishness. Some of the shadows looming over us seemed to drop back.

  “But Jericho said that I’d be arrested for stealing him,” I added.

  “Jericho is a most level-headed young fellow,” he said. “You need not worry about him being sold. Since I bought Archimedes with my own money, both he and his son are my property. Your mother can’t sell either of them without my permission, and that is something I shall happily withhold. If she wants an English servant for you, she may hire one, but he will have to take his orders from Jericho.”

  I blinked with surprise, but Father was serious. We knew enough about the household hierarchies to know that no man of the type Mother would be looking for would accept work under that condition. Elizabeth smiled, new hope and cheer blooming on her face.

  Father’s own smile came and went more quickly. “England.” He sighed.

  “I don’t want to go, but she said that it’s all been arranged.”

  “Then I’ve no doubt that it has. Cambridge, I suppose. Yes, she’s mentioned it before and no, I did not know that she’d pursued it this far.”

  “Why?” I asked. “What is it she wants? Is Harvard not good enough for her?”

  “That and many other reasons, laddie. Tell me everything you know.”

  I summarized this morning’s conversation, leaving in Mother’s tantrum, then went on to her lecture in the afternoon. The latter was little more than a sketch because of my muzzy condition at the time.

  “She seems to have everything well in hand,” was his comment when I’d finished. “It looks like she’s been cooking this up with that bloody sister of hers for some goodly time.”

  “Aunt Theresa?” The name was not unknown to me, but unfamiliar on the tongue. She lived in London and wrote often to Mother. Hardly a week passed without a thick packet of letters arriving by way of whatever ship had made the crossing. It took months for her correspondence to get here and she filled reams of paper with her spiky, precise hand. Mother had several boxes of those letters in her baggage when she’d moved in.

  Father went to his desk and shuffled the papers on top, plucking one from the pile and bringing it back to the better light. It was the same one Mother had been studying this morning. “This is it. You’ve been accepted at Cambridge; according to this, your studies are to begin at the Michaelmas term. How like her to leave it there for me to just ‘find.’ ”

  “She also waited until you were away before telling me. She did it on purpose, I think—”

  “She does most everything with a purpose,” he growled, putting the paper aside.

  “But I don’t have to go . . . do I?”

  Father did not answer right away. Elizabeth’s hand, resting on mine, tightened.

  “Father?”

  Always decisive and in control, he hesitated, frowning at the floor. “I’ll talk to her,” he said.

  “Talk to . . . ? What does that mean?”

  His chin snapped up at my tone, and I shrank inside. Father had no patience for whining; I’d forgotten that he’d taught me better than to indulge in it. But his face softened. “It means that both of you need to know what’s really beneath all this so you can understand and make the best of things.”
<
br />   That didn’t sound too terribly hopeful.

  He poured out another swallow of brandy and drained it away, then looked up at his wife’s portrait. “Firstly, I married your mother because I loved her. If her father had realized that, then our lives might have been quite different. Whether for good or for ill, I could not say, but different, perhaps.

  “All this took place in England. You know that I went to Cambridge myself. I was out and working with old Roylston when I met judge Fonteyn and his family. He was wealthy but always looking to either increase it or raise his status in society. I did not fit his idea of an ideal son-in-law, and he saw me not as I was, but as he perceived me to be. He put himself in my place and assumed that I was paying court to his daughter for her inheritance.

  “Admittedly, the money made your mother that much more attractive to me, but it was never my real goal. We might have eloped, but Marie persuaded him to consent to our marriage. He did so with ill grace but provided her with a generous allowance. He also drew up a paper for me to sign, stipulating that this allowance was hers and hers alone and I was not to touch it.”

  “But doesn’t a wife’s property become her husband’s?”

  “That’s the law, but old Fonteyn’s paper was a neat bit of work to get around it. The only way I could marry was to agree with his conditions. I signed it readily enough. He was surprised that I did, and at the same time contemptuous. There was no pleasing the old devil.”

  That sounded familiar, I thought.

  “The marriage took place and we were happy for a time, at least we were when there was sufficient distance between your mother and her family. Her father was a terrible tyrant, couldn’t and wouldn’t abide me, and it was because of him that I decided to leave England altogether. Marie went along with it, because in those days she still loved me. You both know how we came to settle here, but it was your mother’s money that bought this place and it still pays for the servants and the taxes.”

  “The paper you signed . . .” said Elizabeth, beginning to see. It was like crystal to me.