by Huw Thomas
*
Isabel had barely completed her first task of the night when she sensed the catastrophe.
She felt each brother taken from her, one after the other. Before she could recover from these blows, she knew the passing of her mighty sire, and staggered and gasped as if the stake were being driven through her own heart instead of his.
Then came the slow beginning of sorrow.
She recalled a time, more than three hundred years before, when such grief would have been sudden and mortal: fang-sharp at first but growing dull soon enough.
Isabel’s nature was different now. Bereavement flowed in like a tide, as unfathomable as the void, as eternal as the moon. The only palliative for such a maiming was vengeance. She knew the surviving hunters’ names already: Darcy, Bingley, Fitzwilliam.
The sensation of being utterly alone was unfamiliar to her, since from the first she had been with her sire. He had brought her out of her grave, taken her under his tutelage, taught her the ways of kinship until she was as his daughter. She had been his first and eldest, but soon enough joined by brothers, too.
Tonight, she was to have gained her first true sister (her human siblings being long since dead) but the hunters of Pemberley had thwarted that hope. Now the chance was gone forever: as a female, Isabel was not empowered to extend her kinship to others, or to perform the sire-rites of her kind.
Still, there were certain compensations for that…
She had sensed the man’s presence, which meant he was already within her embrace. Everyday innocents were practically invisible to Isabel’s kind, and she found herself unable to sustain any interest in them, no matter how hard she tried. This was often a frustration, since it forced her to rely on others to deal with many aspects of the human world.
The handicap, however, was mutual: innocents did not perceive her, either. No mortal, no matter how brave or up-standing, could hunt a thing he knew not of. Nor could he protect his darker-souled or more curious fellows, whose dissolute nature or forbidden knowledge drew them into Isabel’s embrace.
The stranger who now rode along the lane had at least an inkling of her kind, but what truly drew her was the dissolution in him. This man’s recent life had been delightfully unwholesome; his soul reeked of it. His heart was steeped in it.
Isabel’s interest quickened further as he came into view, for he was a handsome-looking man who cut a striking figure astride his fine chestnut gelding.
Yes, a mortal’s quick life might well serve to distract from slow grief during the remaining hours of darkness. There was pleasure to be had from such a human, and also blood to restore some of the strength she had lost tonight. If the man pleased her, and survived until dawn, then later she might allow him to enter further into the dark embrace.
Isabel discarded her raiment, robing herself instead in flame and pale light and beauty, and stepped out of the night toward him.
*
What was that? Some slight sound made Wickham slow his horse and gaze around the woodland through which he was passing. The moon was bright enough to show the road, but on either side, below the trees, the land was shadowed and dark … but what light shone there, then? For nearby to his left he saw a glow as if from a wisp of luminous mist suspended in the still air.
As he watched, the apparition resolved itself into a slender human form that beckoned him, and he heard an alluring feminine voice, soft and urgently whispering.
Wickham swayed in his saddle, stunned as if by a blow to the head. He forgot Miss de Bourgh, Ada, the Darcys, Pemberley, and everything else as he dismounted, dropped his horse’s reins, and set out into the darkness.
Deep in the wood he caught up with her. She seemed to be dressed in a white gown woven from moonlight, so diaphanous and so scandalous that its wearer might as well have been naked. All seemed cool and pale apart from her hair, which was the colour of flame. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
“I have perhaps already sinned too much, these past weeks,” he said to himself, but the thought was extinguished by the cool touch of her hand on his.
“It displeases me that you are clothed,” she whispered, and Wickham found he had no choice but to make her happy by correcting that fault.
Dazed, he fumbled with his buttons and laces, but managed them eventually and discarded his garments and his boots onto the leaf-mould underfoot. She beckoned him into the darkness beneath a mighty oak tree, where she embraced him and kissed him on the mouth.
He tasted blood upon his tongue and realised his lower lip was cut. For some reason he recalled the strange old German manuscript that had been all the rage at Pemberley before he left. He shivered as her hand slid down his flank and across his belly, and gripped the entirety of his privy parts so firmly that all thought fled and was replaced by something infinitely more urgent and primal.
With a start, he realised that her teeth were at his throat and wondered (without truly caring) if she would bite him, but instead she murmured, “Lie with me,” and guided him down onto the bed of moss and dried leaves amongst the roots of the great oak. “Your neck is sacrosanct, for I must not yet leave a mark on you that others would see.”
Wickham was too distracted by lust to question what mark she might leave or why others must not know; all he wanted was to hold her and be held by her, to receive the pleasure he knew she could offer, perhaps to be shown how to please her in turn.
Instead, she pleasured him — and in such perverse and intimate ways as Wickham, with all his experience of the women of London, would never have imagined. Ways that befuddled him to the point where he seemed to be elsewhere for a time, aware only of her mouth first on his flesh and then at his ear as she whispered to him, and then on his flesh again.
Wickham drifted in the aftermath of her savage embrace, and when he returned to himself, he found himself abandoned. He made to rise and find his clothes, but he was too weak to stand and sank back down among the tree roots. He tried once more to command his body to do his will, but…
Dragged down into a waking dream, he stood in a vestibule just off Pemberley’s grand entrance hall. The great house slept in the silence of deepest night, but the darkness revealed itself to Wickham as though it were broad daylight. At the centre of the vestibule, three polished caskets stood on sturdy oaken trestles, side by side. Two were large enough for grown men; the other was rather smaller. He approached this one first, fearing to open it, overcome by a horror of what he knew it must contain, yet unable to leave it unexamined. Steeling himself to the task, he lifted the lid and sagged with relief when he found the casket empty.
Surely there was nothing to fear, he told himself, for if one stood empty then so must the others. He found himself raising the second lid, to be confronted by the wax-like face of his godfather.
Stabbed by grief, he stifled a sob. His hand trembled as he stretched it toward the final coffin, more afraid now than he had ever been in his life.
The casket whirled away from him like a leaf on an autumn wind and he found himself in an unfamiliar bed, unable to sleep for fear of what awaited him downstairs. The silence that had blanketed the vestibule had gone now, and Wickham lay listening to the noises of the house and its grounds — the sighing of the wind in the trees, the slow creaking of timbers, the tapping of slates far above. The night had never sounded so loud.
His right thigh hurt abominably; when he pressed his fingers to the ache below the covers, the flesh seemed whole though feverishly hot, burning against cold sheets that gave neither comfort nor relief. He lay with his eyes closed, dreaming that he rested under an oak tree, re-living an encounter he had once imagined on the homeward journey to Pemberley after a time spent away.
Nausea forced him from the clammy bed and drove him from this chamber that closed in upon him like a tomb. He opened the door, wincing at the creaking hinges, then crept out into the corridor. All was darkness but Wickham needed no candle to find his way.
The next thing he knew, he was i
n Miss de Bourgh’s chamber, standing at the foot of her bed and drawing her scent into his lungs.
Even ill and unconscious she still had that fragrant bloom of youth that he found so fascinating. He knew, without remembering how it had happened, that she was grievously hurt. He knew that a doctor — what was the man’s name? — had left precise instructions for her care.
As he watched the rising, then falling curve of the girl’s bosom under the gauzy coverlet, and the steady beating pulse above the lace trim of her night-gown, what rose in his body was a mingling of hunger and lust that both excited and horrified him. He ran his tongue over his lips, then slid it from left to right along his front teeth as if searching for something he had never had and always missed. It was more than an absence; it seemed a gift long-denied.
It came to him that a maid would be along at daybreak to see to the unconscious girl’s needs. For the rest of the night, Wickham had Anne de Bourgh to himself.
He reached down and moved the coverlet to expose her bare foot and dainty ankle. What would it be like to bite her there, he thought? Would there be much blood, enough blood? Probably not. The artery of her neck would be better, or perhaps the blue vein that offered itself so invitingly at the wrist resting on the coverlet. But another, more secret part of her body would offer arteries and veins that were just as great as those, he knew, and flesh that would be incomparably more tender.
He pulled the coverlet further up, revealing slender legs wantonly arranged in repose. The night-gown’s lacings were loosened — left so by the maid for her own convenience, and now for the convenience of Wickham. Anne de Bourgh’s smooth calves gleamed nakedly in the moonlight and it seemed as nothing — nothing at all — to slowly draw the silken fabric aside to reveal more, inch by inch, up to the downy-soft skin at the top of the thigh where the pulse beat so hotly and so sweetly.
With a final twitch he exposed the dark tufted curls which now held little interest to him beyond the pleasure a predator takes in exposing the helplessness of its prey.
He leaned forward as if to strike when—
“What in God’s name do you think you are doing?”
Wickham whirled to face his accuser.
Mr Darcy stood at the chamber’s threshold. “Have you no regard for decency or propriety? For your own honour? For the honour of Miss de Bourgh who is a guest under my roof?”
The force of Mr Darcy’s anger propelled Wickham from that place, and he found himself back under the oak tree, naked and chilled. The baying and yells of some urgent hullabaloo sounded in the distance; perhaps he would be found and rescued.
He lay there shocked and shivering. In the growing light of dawn, he perceived dark trickles of blood that stained his right thigh near the groin, oozing from twin puncture wounds.
IV
The disappearance of Miss Ada Wickham led to a full-blooded hue and cry throughout the parish of Lambton. Every cottage, every cellar and every barn was searched to ensure that the young lady was neither being held against her will, nor sheltering of her own accord.
It being thus proved that Miss Wickham was not residing anywhere indoors, two nights of unseasonable frost then dashed every hope of finding the young lady alive. The eagerness with which the search had first been conducted, turned instead into a melancholy resignation.
Still, men and dogs combed the countryside, ranging assiduously through thicket and field, spinney and stream. Haystacks were prodded and millponds were dragged, but no sign of the missing girl was found.
Charles Bingley assisted as far as he could until his efforts were curtailed by departure. He wished he might have stayed longer, not least so that he and Louisa could pay their respects at Pemberley’s coming funerals, but their return to London was now overdue. The date of their own father’s interment approached, and Caroline had been left without family comfort for too long. The two elder Bingleys could no longer postpone what would surely be a melancholy journey.
The failed search for Miss Wickham had at least led to the rescue of her brother. Mr Wickham was now back at Pemberley, having been taken seriously ill while journeying back from London. A search party had discovered him in the state nature had made him, covered him in a blanket, and carried him comatose back to the Lodge, where his condition continued so grave that Bingley had not been afforded the opportunity to make his acquaintance.
Even Darcy was not allowed into the sick room, for Doctor Harrison had returned from his son’s house to take charge of this new patient, and insisted on complete seclusion. He explained that Mr Wickham was often delirious, and inclined during these episodes to become violently agitated at the slightest disturbance.
Doctor Adler protested most volubly against his own exclusion, but it was hardly proper for a visiting physician to gainsay the local doctor who (as Harrison reminded all who would listen) had brought both of the young Wickhams into this world, as well as easing their mother’s passage out of it.
Miss Anne de Bourgh, at least, was managing a sort of recovery. The young lady left her sick bed on Charles Bingley’s final morning at Pemberley, and made her first appearance while he was in the midst of a very good breakfast.
It was shocking to see her grown so lacklustre; she took but little food and her conversation matched her appetite. The only subject that concerned her at all was the fate of her dear friend Miss Wickham, and she could address this topic but weakly before sinking back into lethargy.
Bingley found himself deeply concerned that one formerly so bright and lively, was left so entirely altered by what had befallen her. Still, he kept such thoughts to himself and instead joined with his sister, and with Captain Fitzwilliam, in expressing how glad he was to see the invalid so much recovered.
Miss Georgiana Darcy joined them next, and then her brother who set about his breakfast with a good appetite. There was some talk of the arrangements for the coming funerals, but no mention of the vampyres that had been their cause.
Later that morning, the Bingleys’ carriage waited outside Pemberley with luggage stowed and all made ready for departure. They bade Darcy and Miss Darcy a fond farewell, and also Captain Fitzwilliam. At the last moment Doctor Adler rode up, come to see his solitary patient, he said, and also to pay his respects to the Bingleys until such time as he might see them in London.
When all was done and they were driving along the lane that led out from Pemberley, Bingley realised for the first time that this carriage now belonged to him. He recalled all the occasions when he had travelled in it with his father; and the pleasure the three of them had taken in journeying up from London into Derbyshire only weeks earlier; and how that family delight was now gone and would never be again.
*
Lady Catherine de Bourgh swept into Pemberley with all the grandeur of a visiting duchess.
Captain Fitzwilliam had been expecting her, having informed her by letter of certain recent events, a duty he undertook on behalf of Darcy whom he judged to be too grief-stricken to pay sufficient attention to such necessities.
This letter had, of course, omitted any of the details that would have enlightened her Ladyship as to the cause of her daughter’s malady or prompted her to ask awkward questions. All his aunt knew was that a sudden illness had taken her brother-in-law and his steward, and that the same malady had laid Miss de Bourgh low for a while.
And so Lady Catherine had come to Pemberley to pay her respects to old Mr Darcy as he was laid to rest and then to take her daughter home to Rosings in far-off Kent, where she would be able to recuperate in comfort.
“It is most vexing that Doctor Harrison was not available while you were unwell, Anne” she said to her daughter once they had gathered in the drawing room. “I suppose this man Adler might be alright, but a proper, old-fashioned English country doctor cannot be bettered, and I said as much to Doctor Thompson the other day when he attended me at Rosings. Though his visit was hardly necessary, truth be told, for I have an exceptionally strong constitution — but one cannot be too
careful of one’s health.”
“Indeed one cannot,” Fitzwilliam said helpfully.
“It is a pity that you took after your father in that regard, my dear Anne, for Lewis became quite frail even in his younger years, while I used to shake off any indisposition in a day or two — if I even fell ill at all, for there can have been few people healthier than myself. But it is a comfort to me to see your improvement since my arrival; my own robust constitution has evidently had a beneficial effect on yours. If only I had accompanied you to Pemberley and remained here to watch over you, I feel certain you would never have fallen ill at all.”
Fitzwilliam thought that Miss de Bourgh was far from improved, for she was even more listless now than when she had first risen from her sick bed. As for the change since before her ordeal, it was as if he were looking at a different person entirely. Lately he had not seen Miss de Bourgh go outside even once; nor had he noticed a pen, paintbrush or book in her hand.
Fitzwilliam found himself increasingly concerned that his fair cousin had suffered a wound to her spirit that might cost her very life unless some palliative could be found. If only that goblet of blood that Dr Adler had been so keen to acquire had not been lost! Lacking any such remedy, the vital flame that had once burned so brightly within Miss de Bourgh now flickered more feebly with every passing day.
Lady Catherine turned to her younger nephew. “You shall accompany us to Rosings, Darcy. Anne would take comfort as well as strength from your presence, I am sure, and now that you are master of Pemberley, it is fitting that you should consider how soon you will be able to fulfil your mother’s wishes and my own.”
“I regret, madam, that I shall be unable to join you. There are several matters of business that I must attend to here at Pemberley.”
“That is most vexing,” Lady Catherine said. “Then you shall follow us as soon as you are able — and in the meantime Fitzwilliam shall accompany us and stay for the coming month at least.” She turned to Fitzwilliam. “I know how much you miss Rosings when you are away, and I dare say your regiment may spare you for a few weeks longer.”
