Chapter 13
The copper is in worse shape than he made it sound.
“You said an alarming quantity,” I tell him, on my knees in front of a low cabinet in the Blackthorn House kitchen with a jam pan in my lap the size of a baby’s bathtub.
“You did not say heirloom. You did not say museum. Julian, this is an antique French confiture pan and it has not been retinned since a French person owned it.”
“Then it has served admirably.”
“Did they?”
“You can tell. There’s a way people put things away.”
I set it down and reach past it for the next one, and the next. Saucepans. A fish kettle. A stockpot with two riveted handles and a repair on the base that somebody made by hand. There are nine pans in all, and the more I look at them, the more I can see the same hands in every one.
“Who cooked here?”
“A great many people, over the years.”
“Not the same ones, though.”
He’s quiet for a second too long. “No,” he says. “Not the same ones.”
I look over my shoulder at him.
I’ve been at Blackthorn House for two hours, and I have not said the word.
I promised myself in the van, driving up the hill with a roll of steel wool and a tin of my grandmother’s copper polish on the passenger seat like a chaperone, that I would give him the chance to say it first. He came to my kitchen four nights a week knowing I might eventually figure him out.
The least I owe him is the chance to tell me himself.
So I’ve been very good. I’ve polished. I’ve asked about the pans and not about him.
I’ve watched him lean against the kitchen wall with his arms folded, wearing a soft grey sweater and no shoes, which I did not expect and which is somehow worse than the suit, and I’ve said nothing every single time the far end of my brain lit up like a switchboard.
Because the far end of my brain has been having a wonderful time.
He has no shoes on. Do his feet get cold?
Everything about him is cold. Does he feel the cold, or is he the cold?
I have questions. I have roughly nine hundred questions, and I’ve been swallowing them one at a time for two hours until they’ve backed up into my chest.
I’ve given him openings.
“I’ve decided that painting of you at the museum is a great-great-something,” I said when I arrived.
“That would be the simplest explanation,” he agreed, taking the tin of polish out of my hands.
An hour later, I said, “You said forty years doesn’t seem long to you. What does?”
“Longer than that.”
And that was that.
He isn’t going to tell me. I understand it sometime during the second saucepan.
He has been alone with this secret for so long that keeping it has become less a choice than a principle.
I am so full of tenderness for him and so completely out of patience that I could put my head down on the kitchen table.
The door is in the corner past the cabinet. It’s paneled to match the cabinets, but it’s newer than everything else in the kitchen, with a rubber seal around it, and there’s a faint hum coming off it that I’ve been hearing under our conversation for two hours and filing, helpfully, under old house.
“What’s that?” I ask, standing up with the confiture pan.
“The pantry.”
“That’s a walk-in refrigerator.”
“It is a large pantry.”
“Julian, I have a walk-in. That’s a compressor.
I could pick that hum out of a marching band.
” I’m already walking towards it, because I am congenitally incapable of not opening a door in a kitchen, and because a professional walk-in in a house where no one cooks is exactly the kind of thing I cannot leave alone.
“Do you know what I would do with a walk-in this size? I could hold two events a week. I could—”
“Penny.”
Something in his voice should stop me. It’s the flat one, the enough one, and later I’ll wonder whether some part of me hears it perfectly well and opens the door anyway because I’m tired of being good.
I open the door.
Cold air rolls out over my bare ankles. The light comes on.
And there, on clean steel shelves, in neat labeled rows, are bags.
Medical bags, the kind with the little tube and the printed label, deep red, stacked with a tidiness that is so completely him that I would know whose refrigerator this was with my eyes shut.
Dates. Small handwritten dates in a fountain-pen hand I’ve seen before, on an acceptance note that came to the Salt & Sage in October.
I stand there in the cold with a two-hundred-year-old copper pan in my hands and look at a vampire’s dinner.
Behind me, the house has gone entirely silent. Even the version of silence Julian carries around with him, the one made of no breath and no heartbeat, has deepened into something I can feel between my shoulder blades.
He’s waiting. I can feel him waiting, braced, the way you brace for a slammed door. He’s been waiting for this since the museum. Maybe longer.
I turn around. He hasn’t moved from the wall, but every line of him has changed. He’s gone very still and very upright, and his hands hang open at his sides. He isn’t looking at the refrigerator. He’s looking at me.
I set the pan I’m still carrying down on the cabinet carefully, because it deserves that.
“So that’s why you never eat my garlic bread,” I say.
For a moment nothing happens.
Then Julian closes his eyes. Not the reaction I expected. When he opens them the red is still there, but underneath it is a man who has just set down something he has been carrying up a very long flight of stairs.
“Yes,” he says. “That is why.”
“I made you sit through the black garlic ribs.”
“You did.”
“And the garlic bread. My grandmother’s garlic bread. I brought it out specially. I stood over you like a—oh my God, Julian, I was so proud of that bread.”
“It was a very fine loaf,” he says. “From a distance.”
I make a noise that isn’t quite a laugh and isn’t quite anything, and I put my hand over my mouth, and I sit down on one of the tall stools by the table because my legs have decided independently that this would be a good moment to sit.
He watches me sit. He’s still braced. He’s waiting for the second part, the part where the realization turns into the door and the car and never again.
“Say it,” I tell him.
His expression changes.
“Penny.”
“Out loud. I need you to say it. Because if I say it, I’m going to turn it into a joke, and I’ve been trying not to do that since Sunday.”
He watches me for a long moment. Then he says, very quietly, “I am a vampire.”
Nobody in the room is breathing, including me.
“You knew,” he says finally, and it isn’t a question. “At the museum. The portrait.”
“The portrait, and the bell, and your chin, which is a very specific chin, whatever you say about 1816.” I take my hand away from my mouth.
“And the fact that you have never had a heartbeat, which I noticed the very first time I put my hand on your chest and then decided not to have noticed, because I’m a coward and I liked you. ”
“You are not a coward.”
“I diagnosed you with vampirism in October and then talked myself out of it because I didn’t want the dinner parties to stop.” I look at him. “Which one of us is the coward, exactly?”
He doesn’t answer that. He’s looking at me the way Dr. Cardoso looked at that bell, like something has appeared in front of him that he can’t quite make match the record.
I point at the table. “Sit down.”
“Penny—”
“If we’re doing this, I need you not to loom.”
He sits. He pulls out the stool across from me and sits, and the sheer ordinariness of a vampire settling onto a kitchen stool because a caterer told him to stop looming nearly undoes me.
“Ask,” he says. “I can see you are going to. Better it happens all at once.”
“Are you sure? Because there’s a lot.”
“I have a great deal of time.”
“How much?”
He gives me a look, and I give it right back.
“I don’t know precisely.”
“How can you not know precisely?”
“Birth records in seventeenth-century Eastern Europe were not maintained with your future curiosity in mind.”
I stare at him. “Seventeenth century.”
“Yes.”
“You’re almost four hundred years old.”
“Approximately.”
“Approximately four hundred.” I sit up. “You said forty years isn’t very long, and I thought you were being weird about your midlife crisis. Four hundred.”
I shake my head, and then I ask questions. God help him, I ask.
“Do you sleep in a coffin?”
“No.”
“A bed?”
“A bed. A very good one.”
“During the day?”
“I prefer the night. The day is not fatal. It’s uncomfortable and inconvenient, like most things that are supposed to be good for you.”
“So sunlight doesn’t kill you?”
“Cloudy days are tolerable. Direct sunlight makes me feel as though I have a low fever and a great deal of regret, so I avoid it as much as possible. I have always preferred being indoors.” A faint dryness. “It’s tidy that my nature and my preference agree.”
“The garlic.” I lean forward. “The actual garlic. Is that real, or is that a book thing?”
He pauses, and I can see him deciding how honest to be, and then deciding all the way. “It’s real. Not fatal. It’s—unpleasant. The smell is very strong to me. Overwhelming, at a certain concentration.”
“So when I put forty heads of garlic on my counter—”
“I stood at the far end of the kitchen and I thought about you a great deal to distract myself.”
I feel that one land somewhere useful.
“Right,” I say. “Noted. Moving on. Crosses?”
“No.”
“Running water?”
“I bathe, Penny.”
“Mirrors! Do you show up in—” I twist around to look at the dark window over the sink, where the two of us sit reflected, him and me, plain as day. “Never mind. You’re right there. You’re very reflective, actually. You have terrible posture in reflection, did you know that?”
“I have perfect posture.”
“You have four-hundred-year-old posture, which is a different thing.”
I grin at him and his mouth curves.
“You’re not afraid,” he says.
It comes so quietly that I almost miss it.
“No.”
“You should be.”