Chapter Eleven A Practical Guide to Staking One’s Neighbours #4
“We have not told him what we are,” Mr Bingley admitted. “But he has agreed to stay close to you, Miss Elizabeth, for your protection.”
Elizabeth straightened. “You recruited him to protect me without telling him that vampires exist?”
Mr Hurst spread both hands. “He had already reached most of the conclusion without assistance. We merely gave his fears employment.”
“His task is simple,” Mr Darcy intervened. “He will remain near you during the ball and alert us if Wickham attempts to separate you from the company.”
“Mr Collins has been attached to my side since he arrived at Longbourn. No instruction was required.”
“That made him an economical choice,” Mr Hurst observed.
Silence returned, heavier now because Elizabeth could fill it with answers.
Every peculiar incident at Netherfield shifted into place, yet the completed design was more frightening than the scattered pieces had been.
She rose so abruptly that the tea in her abandoned cup trembled.
She walked several steps to the windows, stopping before the band of sunlight crossing the carpet.
Mr Darcy rose at once but did not follow.
“You are monsters.”
Mr Bingley flinched. Miss Bingley’s face hardened, while Mrs Hurst lowered her eyes to her folded hands.
Mr Hurst did not stir from his seat. “Yes. We probably are.”
“Hurst,” Mr Bingley protested.
“She prefers honesty,” Mr Hurst said, shrugging. “Let us not withdraw it when it becomes disagreeable.”
Mr Darcy faced Elizabeth across the sunlit carpet. “What we are does not determine every action we take, but I shall not demand that you use a gentler word.”
Elizabeth was disturbed by the ready acceptance.
She surveyed them again under her new understanding.
Monsters should not appear ashamed, worry about Jane’s recovery, arrange balls, quarrel over doors, or refuse to feed without consent.
The books had prepared her for bloated corpses and village panic.
They had not prepared her for moral distinctions.
“What is Mr Wickham?” Her voice emerged lower than she intended. “Is he one of you?”
“He is one of us by creation, not by conduct.” Mr Darcy moved around his chair but kept the sunlight between them. “I converted him fifty-one years ago.”
Elizabeth’s mind returned to the officer, charming Lydia and Kitty while remaining carefully under the milliner’s awning. “You made him a vampire.”
“Yes. He was mortal, he knew the consequences, and he persisted until I consented. I believed affection and gratitude would govern him after the conversion. I was wrong.”
“What did he do?”
Mr Darcy glanced at the closed door, then back to Elizabeth. “A year later, he attempted to bind himself to my sister.”
“Bind?”
“The equivalent of marriage under our law. It creates obligations recognised by every vampire authority and would have given him permanent standing through Georgiana.”
Elizabeth remembered Mr Wickham speaking of Pemberley, his manner warm when he mentioned the estate and carefully wounded when discussing its master. “He loved her?”
“No.” Mr Darcy’s control thinned, revealing an injury carried for half a century.
“He wanted her fortune and her rank. Georgiana had lived under my family’s protection for nearly three hundred years, but she appears as she was when our mother converted her at fifteen.
Wickham persuaded her that he alone regarded her as a woman capable of choosing her own life.
He told her he loved her and encouraged her to resent my protection. ”
Charlotte’s face tightened. “Did she agree to the binding?”
“She did. I returned before the ritual and confronted him. He admitted that her wealth mattered more to him than she did. Georgiana heard enough to understand the deception.”
“And you allowed him to leave?” Elizabeth moved away from the window, anger overcoming fear.
“Our law did not permit me to extinguish him for seduction, greed, or injury to my family. No binding had taken place, and Georgiana had consented.”
“She consented because he lied.”
“Yes.” Mr Darcy’s voice became quiet. “Our law has never been as interested in the quality of a woman’s consent as it claims.”
The admission silenced even Mr Hurst.
“What happened to your sister?” Elizabeth had intended to challenge Mr Darcy, yet the image of a girl carrying three centuries of life in the body of fifteen altered the direction of her anger.
“She withdrew from society. She resides in a convent in Flanders, under the protection of women who know what she is.”
Elizabeth wanted to offer sympathy, but Mr Darcy had closed himself around the subject before she could frame it without pity. She returned to the sofa but remained standing beside Charlotte.
“What has Mr Wickham done since?”
“He feeds without consent, uses compulsion for access, and converts people carelessly when he fails to control his hunger. Some victims have died. Others awakened into a condition they never chose.” Mr Darcy placed both hands against the back of his chair.
“I am his creator, which makes me responsible for presenting evidence against him. I have spent fifty years gathering it, but witnesses disappear, memories are altered, and victims are often unable to testify before our elders.”
“Why not kill him without permission?” Charlotte’s practical tone stripped the question of drama.
“If Darcy kills a vampire without legal cause, the elders may order his own extinction,” Mr Hurst explained. “Wickham understands the law well enough to remain immediately outside the offence one can prove.”
“He is coming to the ball,” Elizabeth realised.
“Your sisters secured his invitation for him.” Mr Darcy’s mouth tightened. “He arranged that very carefully.”
“And now you expect him to commit an offence where you can witness it.”
“Yes.”
Elizabeth glanced at Charlotte before returning to Mr Darcy. “What does any of this have to do with me? Why did his eyes change when he touched my hand?”
No one rushed to fill the silence. Mr Bingley rose and walked to the fire, then halted in front of Jane’s former chair as though proximity to the place she had occupied could assist him. Miss Bingley’s fingers tightened against her skirt. Mrs Hurst watched Mr Darcy, leaving the explanation to him.
“Perhaps once in a century, a human is born whose blood carries a power our kind cannot reproduce.” Mr Darcy left the chair and approached the edge of the sunlight. “Our oldest texts call that person the True Blood.”
Elizabeth felt the room contract around her. “You believe that person is me.”
“I know it.”
“How?”
“You resist compulsion. The scent of your blood is unlike any other, and the ancient relics recognised you before I understood what was happening.”
“The punch bowl.”
“Yes.”
“What power does my blood have?”
Mr Darcy paused, and Elizabeth realised that every earlier answer had merely cleared the path to this one.
“If the True Blood willingly gives her blood to a master vampire, and he drinks it as part of the prescribed rite, he becomes human.”
The possibility entered his face while he spoke. For the first time, Elizabeth saw not the ancient authority he carried or the hunger he restrained, but the mortal life he had lost and never ceased wanting.
“And what happens to the woman?”
“She becomes a master vampire.”
Elizabeth’s hand closed around her throat. “He takes her humanity.”
“Only through free consent. Compulsion cannot produce the transformation, nor can blood taken by force.”
“So, that is why you cannot compel me.”
“The True Blood is immune to a vampire’s command.”
“Half the county has taken Mr Bingley’s hand in a dance,” Charlotte intervened. “Why has no one else remarked on the cold?”
Mr Hurst settled back against the sofa. “The coldness is there. Humans feel it and name it mere coldness—a chilled room, thin gloves, poor circulation. People are generous with explanations that permit them to keep dancing. Miss Elizabeth and Darcy, however, are another matter. The True Blood answers a master’s touch differently. ”
Elizabeth’s fingers curled against her palm, remembering the crypt-cold that had passed through two layers of fabric.
Charlotte rose as well. “Mr Wickham recognised her when he touched her.”
“Yes,” Mr Darcy replied to her. “He now believes I intend to use her blood to become human.”
Elizabeth held Mr Darcy’s gaze. “Do you?”
He did not offer a comfortable denial. “I want to become human. I have wanted it for longer than Longbourn has belonged to your family.”
The honesty struck deeper than reassurance. “Then he believes correctly.”
“No.” Mr Darcy crossed the narrow band of sunlight. The weak autumn light touched his shoes, and the skin over his cheekbone tightened as he passed through it, before he stopped several feet from her. “He believes I value my humanity more than yours. I do not.”
“You scarcely know me.”
“I know enough to refuse a bargain which would restore my life by condemning you to mine.”
The room seemed to recede from Elizabeth. Mr Darcy wanted what her blood could give him, and he had chosen not to ask. The knowledge should have increased her fear. Instead, it exposed a restraint more dangerous to her composure than hunger.
“Then what do you want from me?” she asked.
“Your help trapping Wickham at the ball.”
Elizabeth pivoted to face him fully, her eyes searching his. “You want me to serve as bait.”
“Yes.”
Mr Bingley turned from the fire. “Darcy.”
“She requires the truth.” He did not soften the word. “Wickham will come because he believes Miss Elizabeth offers him power over me. He will approach her, attempt to gain her trust, and eventually try to remove her from the ballroom. We can apprehend him when he acts.”
“You cannot condemn him for approaching me.”
“No. We require evidence of compulsion, unlawful feeding, attempted abduction, or an attack. He must commit an offence recognised under our law.”
“So I am to wait until he commits it against me.”