Chapter Twelve
SHE WOKE ALONE, but the door was open.
She got herself out of bed, feeling a bit dizzy, and she staggered over to drain the ale that was sitting out. There was blood on her dress. She touched it, the brownish red stain. He’d never spilled her blood onto her clothes before. What did that mean?
She went to the doorway, but her husband’s valet was there and he urged her back to bed, saying he’d been given orders to keep her there while he went to speak to his master.
She tried to protest, but eventually she climbed back into bed.
The valet returned soon enough with her husband in tow and a man who was introduced to her as a surgeon, not a gentleman doctor, but this seemed to be because the surgeon wanted to examine her person, and doctors were very hands off.
He felt at her wrists and neck and he had her breathe and cough and asked her a number of questions about how she had been been feeling what with Mr. Darcy’s ministrations.
The surgeon and her husband spoke about her outside the door, in low voices, but she could hear.
“I never like it when I get called upon for your sort,” muttered the surgeon. “Medicine is not equipped to say what happens when a being like yourself is attached to a person.”
“I know,” said Mr. Darcy. “But you must be honest with me.”
“You keep taking that much blood from her and it will weaken her. If she is weakened, she will become ill more easily and she’ll have less ability to fight off illnesses.”
“So, even if I don’t drain her, I shall likely kill her anyway.”
“If you are so sure of that, I don’t know why you brought me here at all. What do you wish me to say to you, sir? That you can drink as much as you want from her and cause her no harm? You know that isn’t the case or I would not be here.”
A long silence.
And then Mr. Darcy spoke again. “You are right, of course. I thank you for giving it to me, the whole and unvarnished truth. It is what I needed to hear.”
“Good,” said the surgeon. “So, you will drink much less of her blood.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Darcy. “Of course.”
“She is not in any current danger, I don’t think. She needn’t stay abed or anything of that nature. She should get some food and exercise and…”
“And what?”
“Sunlight,” said the surgeon.
“Of course,” said Mr. Darcy.
She heard the surgeon leave.
Then Mr. Darcy came to the doorway.
She sat up in the bed.
He looked her over. “You do look well, I suppose.”
“What happened?” she said, getting up to go to him.
He backed away from her, out of the doorway. “I took too much. I could not wake you. I was frightened. It’s my own fault. You… your orgasm in the bond, it was… I lost control.” He would not look at her.
She felt oddly about this, as if it was her role to reassure him. But she was also alarmed that she had been so badly affected, that he could have killed her.
“It is night now, but the sun will be coming in but a few hours, I think. You should eat, my love, spend this day without me, and—”
“But you said that we must consummate our marriage,” she said, trying to adopt a teasing tone, to lighten the mood.
“That must wait, I think,” he said. “You’ll need to get your strength back before I am at you again, and I…” He swallowed. “I shall wish to be at you, I’m afraid.”
She twisted her hands together. “Yes, I suppose I should stop you, should I not? I cannot be so very idiotic as to welcome such danger into my arms, can I?”
“You should not have to fear your husband in this way,” he said in a rough voice. “I am sorry for all of it, Lizzy.”
“Ty,” she said, going to him, putting her hand on his chest.
He let out a breath, and then backed away from her, firm, insistent. “No touching, Lizzy.”
“I do not think you would truly hurt me,” she said.
“And it is that sort of thinking that is going to get you hurt.”
SHE WAS RATHER tired that day.
She had a lovely breakfast, quite a spread, all alone in the breakfast parlor as the sun streamed in. Then she napped, sleeping until luncheon, when she woke to eat again—she was quite ravenous—and she napped in the afternoon as well.
When the sun finally set, her husband woke, and he joined her in the dining room for dinner, though he ate nothing, only sipping at his wine glass.
He did not touch her, but he gazed at her with hunger in his eyes. “I shall go out to feed first and then come back to you,” he said.
She didn’t like this, she found, and she squirmed in her chair, gazing forlornly into her potatoes, telling herself that she must not be stupid, for she did not wish him to hurt her, and she certainly did not wish to die.
“I can feel your objections through the bond,” he muttered, sipping at a glass of wine.
“But I have told you before, there is no reason for jealousy, for it is not that way. I shall not tarry, but only get a bit to drink. You worried about it, but have you felt anything through the bond since we parted?”
She scooped up a forkful of potatoes. “Obviously, I felt it when you fed,” she said. “But you are right, it was not the same as what is between us.”
“So?”
“So, nothing,” she said.
“I must drink, Elizabeth, and I think it would be better if I did not drink from you at all for several days, maybe a week, even. It will also be better if I am not thirsty when I am with you.”
“Yes, I see the sense in it,” she said. She was aware she sounded sulky.
“You don’t wish me to do it.”
“I have not said that.”
“I can feel in the bond—”
“I am going to be jealous, that is all,” she said with a sigh. “I can’t seem to help it.”
“But I have explained to you—”
“I shall never be equal to you, not truly. You like my blood ever so much, and you say it is some kind of power I have over you, except it is not, since you are capable of denying yourself the pleasure of drinking me. In the end, you control yourself. I have nothing over you.”
“You wish to control me?” he said, affronted.
“As if you do not control me,” she said, stuffing the potatoes into her mouth and chewing them.
He got up from the table. “The worst way that I control you is when I take too much of your blood and damage you, Lizzy. That is the very worst way.”
She ate more potatoes.
“I told you that marriages between vampires and humans are disasters,” he said. “I thought we might have at least a honeymoon before we were both miserable.”
She looked up at him, wounded. “You are miserable?”
“I feel your misery in the bond!” he snapped. “It affects me.”
“I am not miserable!” she said hotly. “I only wish to be married, really married.”
“We are really married,” he said.
And then he left.
When he returned some time later, he was less ruffled, and his presence in the bond was not as volatile. She had felt his drinking only as a good feeling, sated, full, less driven to give in to temptation.
Even so, he would not touch her.
He stayed on one side of the sitting room and she on the other. They talked.
At first the conversation went well, as they spoke of books they had read, and then Mr. Darcy told her a story about meeting William Shakespeare once.
“Only a moment of time. I shook his hand and told him I liked his plays, that is all,” he said, laughing, but she was intrigued and enchanted, and she asked him all sorts of questions about what London was like back then and he told her it was strange how things changed.
“You don’t notice it as it’s happening, often.
You are just moving through year after year.
Then you look back at some point, and it becomes very obvious how different things have become.
You realize everything is altered, and that it was so incremental, it was barely noticeable. ”
She thought that made a great deal of sense.
She said it was much like that in her own life, actually.
It was the way that she noticed her younger sisters had grown quite a bit, now that she thought about it, when something reminded her of the way things used to be, and she realized things had shifted a great deal.
Then, the conversation changed, because she said that he would be in London two hundred years hence, and she thought, with alarm, that it would be the year of our Lord 2012 in two hundred years, and she grew quite quiet.
“Lizzy, stop it,” he said.
“You must think of me as so very insignificant,” she said in a small voice. “You must barely register me as mattering. How many women have you loved in your long life, Ty?”
He sighed heavily. “Oh, Lizzy, my Lizzy, don’t compare this. It will not serve you, and it cannot be changed.”
“I have never loved anyone except you, did you know that? I have hardly found any other men attractive, truly.”
“Yes, this is why I thought to leave you be, of course. I feel a great deal of guilt for not having done it.”
“You probably don’t even know how many women you have loved.”
He sighed heavily. “Love is always unique, though. One never loves the same way twice. I have never felt about another woman the way I feel about you, I can swear that.”
“But I have never loved anyone but you. And I… I shall give you my whole life—”
“No, it is as I have told you, you will take a lover and have children. I shall claim them, and we shall make sure they are given a handsome inheritance of property and money, and—”
“But I have told you that I can’t see myself wanting a human man. Who could compare to you?”
“You will want someone who is alive and eager, someone who can tell you how many women he has loved before you, someone who—perhaps—has only loved you,” he said.
“You will notice a number of ways that I am lacking over the years we spend together. You will see that I am not what you want, not truly.” He was gentle as he said this, and he didn’t even sound as if he were sad about it, just as if he were imparting some truths to her, difficult truths, perhaps, but truths nonetheless.
She folded her arms over her chest. “I suppose there will come a time when I am too old for you to be interested in me.”
He swallowed. “Likely not, no. But I have…”