Chapter 21 #2
“Bristol was exactly the same, and it was the worst of them, because you did it to people who had done nothing but be fond of you.” She picks the teacup up again, although she still doesn’t drink.
“Close the house. Salt the earth behind you. Go still until the world forgets your face, then wait fifty years and start again. It always works. That’s the trouble with it. ”
Julian turns around.
“What would you have me do?”
“I have no idea,” she says. “I’ve never had anything to lose that couldn’t be put in a car.”
Her eyes settle on me for a moment, and I understand that this is the part she drove three hours for.
“I am not here to stop you,” she tells him. “I have never stopped you and I would not know how. I came because I would rather you went on purpose than by habit.”
Something in Julian’s face changes, just a little. Victoria watches him, then looks at me and back.
“How long do you intend to leave it?” she asks.
“That’s not your concern.”
“She is thirty-two years old,” Victoria says. “You told me that inside the first minute. You told me eleven weeks, and you did not have to stop and work it out. I have watched your face for two hundred and fourteen years. How long do you intend to leave it before you tell her?”
“Tell me what?” I ask.
Julian goes very still, and suddenly I know. Not whatever Victoria thinks I haven’t been told, but the thing I’ve known without looking at it directly, the stove burning in the next room. Four hundred years. Thirty-two. Another calculation I chose not to do.
“You’re going to outlive me,” I say, and Julian’s eyes come to mine. “By a lot.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve thought about this.”
His silence is answer enough, but I ask anyway.
“How much have you thought about it?”
He looks at me for a long moment. “Enough.”
And here’s the thing that makes my face go hot and my eyes sting, and it isn’t grief.
It’s fury. Because I look at Julian and I see it on his face now that I know what I’m looking for.
The grief he’s been carrying for a funeral that’s decades off.
Mourning me while I’m standing in front of him with flour on my hands.
“Don’t do that.”
“Penny—”
“No. Don’t you dare do that.” My voice is shaking, but it’s still there. “You don’t get to mourn me while I’m standing in front of you.”
“I am not—”
“You are. You’re doing it right now. You’re looking at me like I’m already a photograph.
Like I’m an entry in one of your journals.
” My throat tightens. “I’m here. I’m standing in your terrible cold beautiful house with flour on my wrist and a hundred and forty covers on the twenty-eighth, and I’m alive.
If we get sixty years, I want sixty years.
I don’t want fifty-nine of them wasted because you’re already thinking about the end. ”
Julian’s face closes, but not fast enough.
“You don’t get to spend our time being sad about the time ending,” I tell him. “That’s stealing it.”
The room is very quiet. The amusement is gone from Victoria’s face, and she’s looking at me in a way she hasn’t before.
Julian says, “I had no intention of asking you to alter your life because I am afraid of losing you.”
I stare at him.
“Alter my life how?”
Victoria closes her eyes. Just for a second.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh. You appalling man. You haven’t told her.”
“There was nothing to tell her yet.”
“Tell me what?”
Julian looks at Victoria. Victoria looks at Julian. It is an entire two-hundred-year argument conducted in silence, and apparently she wins.
“Blood,” she says, and I blink.
“What?”
“Our blood.” Victoria continues before I can ask. “Vampire blood has a restorative effect on a living human body. Taken once, it can accelerate healing. Taken regularly and willingly, over a long period of time, from the same source, it slows aging considerably.”
I sit down. I didn’t decide to sit down. The chair was just there.
“Slows it.”
“Considerably. There’s a woman in Bruges who was born in 1804 and looks about sixty and is, I’m reliably informed, an extremely tedious conversationalist.”
My mouth has dropped open. I close it.
“It doesn’t make you a vampire,” she says. “You must be clear about that. You do not stop aging. You do not become what we are. Turning is something else entirely, and this cannot do it. It also won’t save you from a bus.”
“Good to know.”
“Some humans respond more than others. Some live another two hundred years. Some three. I have known a few who lived much longer. There is no way to know in advance, and anyone who promises you a number is selling something.”
“How much blood?”
“Very little, but regularly.” Victoria glances at Julian. “It’s not one dramatic evening. It is a decision made again and again, by both people, over a very long time.”
I look at Julian.
“Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“And you thought about it.”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“About the effect? Since approximately 1740.”
“About me.”
He is quiet for a moment.
“Since the ninth of November,” he says, “at approximately eleven at night, when you fell asleep on my shoulder in front of the fire and I sat there and did the arithmetic.”
I close my eyes. Of course he did the math.
“And then what?”
“I went into the kitchen.”
“For how long?”
“Approximately two hours.”
Of course he knows that too.
I open my eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Victoria starts to speak, but Julian looks at her.
“No,” he says. “I’ll answer.”
She sits back, and he crosses the room. He does it in a few steps and stops in front of me, then takes my flour-dusted hands in his cool ones.
“I didn’t tell you because I would never ask it of you,” he says.
His voice is low and rough at the edges, not the careful voice he uses when he has already decided exactly how much of himself he is going to give me.
“It’s not an easy thing, and it cannot be something I want for you.
You would hear what I wanted, and I would never be certain you had chosen it for yourself. ”
“Julian—”
“I take your blood. I take your table. I walk through your door as if I own it.”
“You are expected there.”
“I know.” Something unlocks in his face when he says it. “I know. That’s the miracle of you, Penny. I know I’m expected there. And because I know that, I will not use it to ask you for two hundred years. Or three hundred. Or whatever number your body might give us.”
My eyes sting, and he tightens his hands around mine.
“I would rather have sixty honest years with you than six hundred you gave me because you knew I wanted them.”
For several seconds I can’t think past the fact that he has apparently considered six hundred years with me and still thinks I’m the dangerous person in this relationship.
“I’m not deciding anything today,” I say.
“No.”
“I mean it. I’m not deciding about three hundred years on the twenty-second of December in a room with a fire in it because I’m thirty-two and in love.”
“Good,” says Victoria.
I look over at her. She’s picked up her bag and risen to her feet.
“That is the first entirely sensible thing anybody has said in this house today.”
Julian gives her an offended look. “I’ve said several sensible things.”
“No, Julian. You’ve said several careful things. You confuse them.”
He doesn’t say anything as she puts on her gloves. We accompany her to the door, and in the hall where the coats are, Victoria stops and looks at me.
“He was worse company in 1830,” she says. “I want you to know that I have noticed, and that I have not enjoyed noticing it, and that I would like it to continue.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“It’s the only kind I do.”
Then she looks at Julian.
“I meant what I said. If you leave, leave because you have decided to leave. Not because you have mistaken an old reflex for wisdom.”
Julian inclines his head.
Victoria goes out to a car with its wheels dead straight and drives down the hill.
The house is very quiet after that. I stand in the hall for a while, looking at the hooks by the door.
One of them has my work coat on it. Another has Julian’s.
There are four more, empty, and I wonder for the first time whether they have always been there.
When I go back into the library, Julian has returned to the window, with his hands behind his back, in front of black glass that holds his reflection and mine coming up behind him.
“I’m still angry with you.”
“I know.”
“Not about the blood. I understand about the blood. I don’t like that you didn’t tell me, but I understand why.” I stop beside him. “I’m angry about the ninth of November. You stood in a kitchen for two hours.”
“I did.”
“On your own.”
“Yes.”
“You have got to stop doing that.”
“I am aware of the size of the project,” he says, but his voice isn’t steady, and I take his hand.
We stand there and look at the water. The harbor lights move below us, little yellow pieces scattered along the shore, and somewhere down there Theo is probably pouring beer and Mabel is correcting somebody and Harriet is telling a person who did not ask about her hip.
My life is happening. Julian’s life is happening. Neither of us is dead.
“There’s no hurry,” I say eventually. “That’s the actual thing, isn’t it? That’s what Victoria gave us. Not forever. Just—not sixty. Not a number you’ve already been quietly counting down.”
“I have been counting it since November.”
“I know you have. You count most things.” I lean my head against his arm. “I’m not saying yes and I’m not saying no. I’m saying there’s time, and I would like to spend some of it not being at my own funeral.”
He turns towards me. He takes my face in both hands, cool and careful, and looks at me for long enough that I nearly say something to break it. I don’t. I’m learning.
“If you want more time,” Julian says, quietly and directly, because he’s learning too, “I can give you some of mine.”