CHAPTER SIXTEEN
W e are merry that night, sipping wine and gossiping like a trio of naughty, dissipated sisters. Mamma fusses over Mina like a mother hen, and Mina is all sunshine in her presence, even responding to her inquiries about Jonathan with a calm “I haven’t had a letter recently, but I hope I shall soon.” I am cheered by their chatter and determined to enjoy our time together, knowing that soon, such evenings will only be things of the past. But I cannot help my growing impatience as the moon rises ever higher.
Mina lays a concerned hand on mine. “Are you tired? You seem out of sorts.”
“Lucy hasn’t been sleeping well,” Mamma explains as the servants clear away the dishes. “At least she hasn’t been sleepwalking as often lately, have you, my pet?”
My eyes meet those of Harriet, but my maid’s face remains expressionless as I say, “Of course not. But I am rather tired, and I think I will go rest.”
“You should too, Mina,” Mamma says. “Agatha has prepared the room next to Lucy’s.”
Upstairs, I slip on my nightgown, plait my hair, and blow out the candles, heart pounding with anticipation. But as soon as I get into bed, the door opens and Mina climbs in with me. And for the first time in all my years of confused love and longing for her, I feel a twinge of irritation. “What are you doing? I thought you would be exhausted and slumbering away by now.”
“It’s tradition. Have you forgotten?” Mina asks, hurt.
My annoyance fades at once. We always share a bed on our first night in Whitby and have done so ever since she first became my governess five years ago. It was a way to keep me from sleepwalking, since she would wake me up if I did … or so my fourteen-year-old self had explained to my approving mother. And every summer since then, on numerous occasions, I have watched Mina sleep, her pale lashes fluttering against her cheeks, thinking of how I wanted nothing more in life than the privilege of seeing her dream.
But now, with the stranger waiting for me on the cliffs, Mina’s face seems vague and intangible and imaginary, a palette of blues and greys in the shadows. She looks more like a painting from my dreams, meant to fade with the coming of day, than a woman.
“We can’t break tradition when this is our last summer holiday together.” She hands me a silver bracelet. It is simple and cheap, the kind of trinket I would never buy, and indeed, it would not even be sold at the shops Mamma and I patronize. But to a former governess of modest means, it must have been an extravagance indeed. The locket opens to reveal a photograph of Mina, her heart-shaped face solemn within waves of golden hair. “I hope you like it. You, Jonathan, and Aunt Rosamund are the only people to have my photograph.”
“Oh, Mina, thank you,” I say, touched.
She shows me an identical bracelet on her own wrist. Inside is a photograph of me, a rather bad one taken on my eighteenth birthday. I am looking off to the side, with a slight smile playing on my lips. “Now we will always have each other, even when we’re not together.”
She means when we are both married, of course, but I cannot help thinking of death, the ultimate door that will part us forever. I want to say something, anything, but I have no words.
“Lucy, what’s wrong?” Mina asks quietly.
What’s wrong is that something has changed in me, something I cannot easily confess in the light of day. If this were morning, I would give her my usual response: a flippant remark, a sparkling laugh, and then a change of subject. But night has fallen, and I have no desire to pretend in the shadows of the bed we share. I feel braver by moonlight. And I am so tired of pretending.
Mina rolls onto her side to face me. “You cannot hide anything from me, you know. I told you this afternoon that I feel connected to Jonathan, and I am to you, too.”
My heart gives a little leap. “You love me that much?”
“I always have.” Mina by daylight would have spoken the same words, but in a different manner: fond, sisterly, careful. But Mina by moonlight allows a tremor to enter her voice, and I remember again that day at the beach and the first tentative press of our lips. “You said earlier that you were jealous of Jonathan. Well, I am jealous of Arthur. I can feel how happy you are, happier than when you left London. But there is something else. Something like … a kind of thirst, as though you have tasted a wine you wish to drink forever.”
I can’t help shivering. But the thirst she senses in this moment is not for Arthur, and how can I tell her I desire another man, even if he is only in my dreams? Even with the courage the shadows give me? She might never look at me the same way again, my tender-hearted Mina who is devastated by the mere idea of Jonathan straying. “There’s nothing wrong, exactly,” I say. “I think I am nervous about giving up my freedom for marriage.”
“As am I. It will be wonderful, but it will be an immense change.”
“Arthur cut his visit short because of me, and I am still embarrassed about it,” I confess. “I’m afraid I threw myself at him as soon as Mamma left the room.”
Mina chuckles. “Kissing your husband-to-be is nothing to be ashamed of.”
“We didn’t … we didn’t just kiss.”
She lifts her head from the pillow. “Lucy!” she says loudly.
“No, no, not that ,” I say hastily. “We were alone in the parlor, on the sofa, and I climbed into his lap. He got a bit … excited, threw me to one side, and fairly ran back to London when I asked him to come to my room that night.”
Mina’s hands are pressed over her mouth, though whether from delight as well as horror, I cannot say. “Oh, poor Arthur. Is that why he stayed only an hour after coming all that way?”
“Yes,” I say miserably. “And I’m still angry with him.”
She laughs and puts an arm over me. “I don’t blame you in the least,” she says. “There have been times with Jonathan where I’ve felt a bit … impatient myself. Like something had taken hold of me. A kind of hunger and longing and curiosity.”
“It feels like electricity to me. Or free falling.” I think of the delicious scratch of Arthur’s chin against mine as we kissed in the parlor, my body pressed to his even though we could hear the servants’ voices a room or two away. And I shiver when I remember the stranger’s soft, cold lips closing around my fingers. “Have you and Jonathan ever … How far have you …”
Even in the darkness, I can sense her blushing. “Certainly not as far as you and Arthur, by the sound of it,” she says, giggling. “Though we, too, have been alone in the parlor. No, we’ve only kissed and held hands, and he touches my face sometimes. I think if I were brave enough to try with him what you did with Arthur, he would have reacted the same way.”
“How, by fleeing like a panicked rabbit?” I ask, and she laughs and gives me a squeeze. “Would you? I mean, would you ever be brave enough to climb into Jonathan’s lap?”
Mina by moonlight gives me a playful smile that sends a flutter through my stomach. “I don’t see why not,” she says, and I grin at her, delighted by the bravery the darkness lends us both. “They pursued us for marriage, did they not? Why shouldn’t we pursue them back?”
I hug the arm she keeps draped over me, almost clinging to it, because I know what comes next. This side of Mina, full of fun and mischief and daring, never lasts long, however much I want it to. And indeed, she sighs a moment later and removes her arm, rolling away onto her back. When she speaks again, it is in the prudent, cautious voice of governess Mina.
“Ah, but this is silly talk,” she says gently. The sober expression that has replaced her smile is like a cloud obscuring the moon. “We are fortunate girls to be marrying two kind and honorable men, who only wish to do what is proper and right.”
I feel it again, that knife of disappointment that cuts me each time she and I dance along the edge of such a conversation, only for her to pull away at the last moment. For some reason, it hurts more than ever tonight. “But what is more proper and right than pleasing one’s wife?” I argue. “Arthur and I will marry on September twenty-eighth, my birthday. I will be Mrs. Holmwood.”
“But you are speaking of the future. It has not happened yet, and so Arthur feels that he cannot come to you. Not in that way, not yet, for the sake of your virtue.”
“But what difference does a wedding make?” I ask, irritated. “It is only a party. I wear a white dress and we receive gifts. It is no one’s business what happens between us or when.”
“I see your point,” Mina says, trying to soothe me. “I do. But upholding tradition—”
“Is required only of women. Men have needs they satisfy elsewhere. Did you not allude to that earlier?” I ask, deftly aiming my sharp words, and she flinches. “Arthur and Jonathan, I am sure, will not come inexperienced to the marriage bed. These misgivings of theirs are only to preserve our virtue. Why should we not satisfy our needs as well?”
“Because this world was neither made by us nor for us. Believe me, I see the unfairness of it, too,” Mina pleads. “I only meant that doing everything you can to start your marriage off properly can only be a good thing. Arthur believes this, too, don’t you see?”
I sit up in frustration. “You always do this,” I say. “Deep down, you agree with me, but then you pretend not to. You are never truly on my side.”
She sits up, too, flustered. “But, Lucy, I am on your side! You know that I see your point, and that I love you too much to blame or judge you.”
I press my face to my knees. I am not certain why I expected anything different. Even with her determination, her intellect, and her belief in the importance of female independence, Mina will always sit quietly in the boat life gives her, trying not to disturb the water, while I swim frantically against the current. She and Arthur love me, but they will never understand me.
She moves to sit close to me, leaning her cheek on my back. “Do you remember what your father used to tell you? That you must be above reproach at all times?” she asks, stroking my hair when she feels me go still at the mention of Papa. “I think about that advice often because it is how I live my life, too. I know you think I am a coward—”
“I think nothing of the sort,” I say, shocked.
“Overly careful, then. For hiding in the safety of rules.” Mina presses a kiss to my back, her lips warm through my nightdress. “My family never had money or status. I was never going to make a grand match like yours. I would never have even seen high society if not for you.”
I close my eyes. My heart is still beating a rhythm of displeasure, but I am listening.
“I want to be a credit to Jonathan. I want us to be respected and admired, to belong . To be above reproach … even if my true thoughts, deep inside and known only to you, are not.” I feel her smile against my back. “Things are changing. A new century is almost upon us, my Lucy, and we will see the world alter, bit by bit, until the next generation of women is freer than we are, and the next, and the next. But change doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time, just as you and Arthur must. And won’t it be sweeter to wait for something so special?”
“Let’s just go to sleep,” I say shortly, lying back down. “I’m exhausted.”
Mina wraps her arms around me, cuddling close. When her breathing is as steady as the tide, I slip away to her room and into her cold, abandoned bed. In my agitated state, it takes much longer to fall asleep, and I begin to fear that I will toss and turn uselessly until dawn.
But between one breath and the next, I am on the cliffs beneath the night sky once more. A massive bank of clouds shrouds the moon, revealing jagged pale veins of light that bleed over the ocean. The wind is restless, turbulent, and cold, and I hug myself as I hurry up the path.
The stranger is on the bench as usual, but he does not greet me with a smile or open arms tonight. His rigid posture cuts through the curtain of mist, and he keeps his eyes fixed on the raging waters below as I take a seat beside him. “It is very late. I was beginning to think you would not answer my call tonight,” he says, his voice clipped and as chilly as the wind.
I shiver in my thin nightdress. “I was delayed.”
“Were you?”
I glance at him, never having heard him speak so coldly to me. The wind blows a fold of my nightdress over his knee, and he gets up abruptly, as though he cannot bear to be touched by any part of me. He goes to stand near the fence with his back to me.
“Delayed by what or whom?” he asks. It is clear he expects some sort of apology or justification from me for being tardy to my own dream.
“What can it possibly matter? I am here with you now,” I say, irritated, to which he remains silent. The air hangs heavy with his expectation.
My annoyance rises as I watch the waves churn, beaten by the powerful wind. The roiling clouds move to reveal a corner of the moon. In the dim light, I see a sea bird struggling against the gale, and I feel angrier than ever that a mindless wild creature might understand me better than the people who profess to love me. I am in no mood tonight to be treated like a willful child.
The man turns and starts walking away from me, his broad shoulders stiff with anger.
“Where are you going?” I demand, rising from the bench. He ignores me. “If you refuse to give me even your name, then I can’t be expected to tell you every detail of my day.”
As soon as the words leave my mouth, I know that I have made a terrible mistake.
The wind stops gusting, the waves freeze their frenetic stirring, and the clouds halt their uneasy movement across the sky. A strange, thick, heavy silence settles over us, and I am suddenly seized by the absolute certainty that I will be struck dead by lightning where I stand.
The man stops walking but keeps his back to me. “I see that my company has become distasteful to you,” he says, his soft deep voice carrying an undercurrent of wrath. “Perhaps it is time we stopped meeting if you feel you do not wish to continue the friendship.”
“Why are you saying this?” I ask, my anger shifting at once into the panic of never seeing him again. “I have come to you gladly, willingly, every night you have called to me. Whenever I am not with you, I long to be. Of course I wish to continue the friendship.”
He turns around, his face impassive and his eyes fixed on a point above my head, as though I am invisible. “I want this to be clear, Lucy. You cannot hide anything from me.”
I stare at him. Mina had said those exact words to me as we lay in bed together earlier—though how different her meaning had been from his. As her face appears in my mind, I feel an odd sensation akin to needles prickling at my consciousness. Somehow, I can sense my thoughts being violently sifted through, and every thread of everything I have ever thought being ripped from the seams of my brain. I gasp at the sudden pain, my hands flying to my head.
Colors flash before my eyes, buried memories and scenes that have long passed. Mina’s golden hair flying as she runs on the beach, laughing; her cheek pressed against mine as we stand before the mirror, dressed for a party; her sky-blue eyes sparkling at me from across a crowded ballroom; our hands clasped, our lips meeting, as wild and reckless as the summer wind.
Every word, every look, and every touch I have ever shared with Mina has been laid bare, plucked from my mind like a bleeding tendril of a vein from my skin.
“You could have saved us all of this trouble had you only told me why you were late,” the man says quietly. “All I wanted was an answer.”
The pain in my head subsides as though it had never been there, but I keep my trembling hands on my temples, afraid it will return. Tears leak from my eyes as I take in gasps of air. “I thought you were my friend,” I whisper. “I trusted you. Why would you hurt me like this?”
“Because you hurt me first,” he says, and his voice is as gentle as it has always been. He looks at me for the first time tonight, his gaze full of sorrow and regret, and pulls me against him, stroking my hair just the way Mina had. “You made me feel that I am not important to you.”
I am crying in earnest now from the pain, confusion, and relief of being once more what I had been to him. “I thought of you all day,” I murmur into his chest. “I missed you all day.”
He hugs me tighter to him, bending his head protectively over mine. “I thought of you, too. I was waiting for nightfall just so I could see you again, my little Lucy, my kindred soul,” he says longingly, and with his words, the wind gusts, the sea crashes against the rocks, the clouds resume their swirling, and I feel that I can breathe deeply again.
“I am not myself tonight,” I whisper.
“No, you are not. Or you would not have so rudely demanded my name.” He leads me back to the bench, where we sit with our arms still around each other.
“Everyone disapproves of me this evening. First Mina, then you.”
“Dear me, how self-pitying we are,” he says, not unkindly, resting his chin on top of my head. “You did shock her with your confession regarding Arthur’s visit, but I don’t believe she thinks less of you for it. She loves you too well, that much is clear.”
A trickle of disquiet poisons my relief at having won him back to me. How easily he had combed my mind for secrets, scraping my thoughts from the inside of my brain like butter from a sharp knife. He himself is a creation of my mind, I know … but still, for the first time since I have known him, I feel the urge to pull away. I do not know why my dreams, so pleasurable until now, have soured to this degree—perhaps it is a result of the agitation I felt tonight. All I know is that I want to break free of the man’s arms, wake up, run down these cliffs, and curl up in bed next to Mina, safe and warm behind a locked door.
But I stay where I am, wrapped in his embrace with my head tucked into his chest. I am so inexplicably afraid of what will happen if I dare move. Think of something else , I tell myself, my heart in my throat. For God’s sake, think of anything else, for he can hear you.
A lazy, drowsy calm suddenly settles over me. I feel my heartbeat slow and my breathing grow even, and my desire to run dissipates as the mist rises around us, cooling my heated face. I snuggle closer to him. There is nowhere I can be safer than here, with him.
“You are not angry with me, but with everyone you love. They don’t accept you as I do.” He smooths my hair off my neck and bends to kiss the burning skin there. I close my eyes as the soothing touch cascades down my spine. He parts his lips and I feel his teeth, icy and sharp, graze over my fluttering pulse. “I will teach you what you long to know and give you all that you have imagined in your darkest reveries. I will not push you away as they do.”
I am so sleepy, so calm, so happy to be with him. I clutch him tightly, wanting to be even closer to him, wanting his teeth to stop their teasing and push deep inside me. With a whimper of impatience, I pull myself onto his lap and tilt my head back, offering him everything. The contrast of his soft mouth and tongue with his rough chin and sharp teeth sends my pulse racing and my need rising. I put my hands on either side of his head, holding him to me.
And then I am saved, in that moment, by three things.
The first is the memory of how minutes before, I had put my hands on my own head in just such a way, not in passion, but in excruciating pain.
The second is the cold flutter of Mina’s silver bracelet against my wrist.
The third is his whisper against my throat: “You will give me what belongs to me?”
Belongs.
My trance breaks like the crack of fingers snapping. I pull back and put my hand over my neck, panting as the deep blue-green of his eyes washes over me. Once more, I feel the prickling pain in my head, and this time it is Arthur’s face in my mind and Arthur’s arms around me just like this, when I had sat on his lap in the parlor. No , I think fiercely. No, not again . I squeeze my eyes shut and imagine something, anything, shielding my vulnerable mind. Mina’s silver bracelet gives me an idea. Let it be silver , I think, drops of perspiration sliding down my back. A plate of silver protecting my mind that is so strong, so solid that the needles can’t get through.
I open my eyes to see a furrow between his brows. If I did not know better, I would have thought he was straining, fighting the barrier I have put into place against his invasion of my thoughts. “I do not belong to you,” I hear myself say, weak but distinct. “I am not yours to take.”
His eyes glitter, sharp as diamonds. “You think that is your decision to make?”
My heart pummels my rib cage, but the prickling pain lessens to a dull throb in my temples. “I do not belong to you,” I repeat, my voice stronger this time.
“You would rather,” the man says slowly, as the corners of his sly mouth turn upward, “that when I come to you, it will be as a husband to his wife?”
They are Arthur’s words. From the man’s widening smile, I see that in the quick moment before I had fought him off, he had glimpsed enough of what had happened between Arthur and me. Everything we had said, everything we had done, everything I had been thinking. Arthur kissing me with frantic passion, flying across the room, and leaving in haste to avoid temptation. Arthur, who loves me so much that he will not stain my virtue until I am his—so unlike this man, who would greedily take everything I had without another thought.
“You will not be my husband,” I say. I am frightened, but I am angry, too, as I slide off his lap and back onto the bench. “You do not exist. It is for Arthur to come to me, and not you.”
I half expect him to threaten or punish me again, but instead, his gaze holds amusement and renewed interest. He is intrigued , I think, by my refusal, my belonging to someone else. He likes a challenge . “There, now. You may very well be a perfect woman of the age after all.”
I blink in disbelief. “What does that mean?”
“In every age, every country, and every culture, there is a class of woman admired above all others,” he says, returning to the pleasant, conversational tone of our weeks together. “She is the model, the ideal, and represents every aspiration of her society in that period of history. As a scholar of the world, with all the time I could wish, I have made it a game to seek out such women and make their acquaintance. I find myself easily bored, you see.”
I hug myself, shivering on the cold bench in the icy wind. The air hangs heavy with the smell of rain, and an ominous light touches the storm-racked sky.
“Most people bore me quickly, which is why you, with your hidden depths,” he says, gesturing to me with gallant charm, “entertain me so. But always, I find myself turning back to perfection … or what is considered perfection in a certain place and time. Do you remember when I told you of how England’s tightly buttoned, polite society fascinates me?”
“I remember.”
“We know that proper women do not speak of death, nor are they entranced by it, and so you would be considered odd by those standards. But tonight, you refused me to keep yourself pure for your husband. Purity is prized in women of your society, I think?” He looks at me with a smile that I cannot be sure is not mocking. “Hence, a perfect woman of the age.”
I touch my bracelet, thinking of how Mina had said that this world was neither made by us nor for us. She may accept that fact, but I do not. “You’re wrong. I have never wanted to be perfect. I refused you because I belong to another, but it isn’t Arthur. It is me. I belong only to myself, no matter what the world has to say about it.”
He follows my eyes to the silver bracelet. “I have seen that photograph you carry before. A woman with sunlit hair and an angelic face, her eyes shining out at the viewer.”
I go still. “I have not yet shown it to you.”
“And yet I tell you, I have seen it before,” he says calmly. “Perhaps your Mina is the perfect woman of this age, and it is she I have been seeking and not you at all.”
Fear knifes through me at the thought of Mina helpless on this bench, drowsy and unable to ask questions, crying from the prickling pain in her head. It is impossible, utterly impossible for a man I have only imagined to hurt her, and yet my chest is tight with dread. I stand up. “Leave her be,” I say. “I don’t want you involved with her or Arthur or anyone else in my life.”
The man is smiling. “You don’t wish to share me.” And then he is standing, too, with his arms locked around me. It happens between heartbeats, similar to the way I move from my bed to being on these night-smothered cliffs with him. Where his previous embraces had been tender, I now feel as though I have been swallowed up by some cold dark star or a column of granite, for there is no affection in the way he holds me. Only possession. I am a butterfly caught in an iron net, and with one movement, he could extinguish the whole of my existence. “Do you truly think you can turn me away, Lucy? After all that we have been to each other? After I told you my secrets and shared with you what scraps of my soul remain?”
I cannot respond. My answer is trapped in my throat by his strange, intangible power, and I can only look up into his face, as brutal and wild and beautiful as the arctic.
“You say you belong to yourself.” He pushes my head back with one hand, exposing the length of my neck to him. His teeth graze me, harder this time. “But I can make you mine if I want to. I can make it so that no one on this earth could fight my claim upon you.”
This is no longer a dream. It is a nightmare.
Wake up, Lucy , I tell myself fiercely as the points of his teeth threaten to penetrate me.
But then drowsy, aching, uncontrollable desire returns, so suddenly that it is almost like a spell. I tilt my head back even more, my blood galloping, even as some rational part of me presses my hands hard against his chest, trying to push him away. He looks down at them and gives a low, pleased laugh. He likes when I fight him. When I fit his definition of a virtuous and perfect woman, it makes him want me even more. I am a helpless creature in his thrall, but lord help me, this dangling thread of power that I hold, weak as it may be, is utterly intoxicating.
“I do not belong to you,” I say again. “You are a stranger. And you are not really here.”
He presses his smile to my ear and whispers, “My name is Vlad. And I am here at last.”
I wake up.
An enormous clap of thunder has shattered the air and torn me violently from my dream.
A heavy, relentless rain that must have begun some time ago pummels me. I am soaked to the skin and freezing cold, my thin nightgown plastered against my body, and I shiver uncontrollably in the maelstrom that came upon me unawares. The wind howls through the willow tree, ripping leaves down with wild abandon, and several hard branches slap at my back and shoulders like desperate hands pushing me to go, go, go.
But before I can run back down the path toward home, a ship’s horn screams in the night, drawing my attention to the vicious, roaring sea below. In between brutal, disorienting flashes of lightning, I see a gargantuan vessel approach Whitby harbor with inexorable speed, careening madly in the white-capped waves: a battered foreign ship with black sails, jagged as bats’ wings.