possibly quell this odd starvation. My body yearned for something, and I could only imagine that it was for him.
He did not respond but observed me as a doctor would, as John Seward had done. He took my pulse again. “Mrs. O’Dowd will have food prepared when we arrive.”
In the dining room, jumpy flames from the iron candelabra on the table made flickering shadows on the walls. I sat down to a lavish meal of Irish stew, boiled salad with beets, celery, potatoes doused in cream sauce, haddock and rice, and a long cheeseboard piled with pungent varieties and tasty rolls. I ate with fiendish voraciousness, and slowly, my hunger subsided and my nerves calmed.
We said little. The Count watched me eat, refilling my wineglass as I emptied it. “Much better,” he said, pronouncing on my condition.
“It is not a decision to be made lightly,” he said. “There are consequences along the path to eternal existence.”
“You said that I have the blood of the immortals, and that you have been trying to convince me for hundreds of years to accept eternal life with you. But when I agreed to begin it-thirsted for it, in fact-you would not allow it.” The food had calmed me, but I was still angry that he was able to control me. He had evoked something wild inside me, some feral part of me that eschewed danger and lived to perform feats of magic, and yet he stifled me.
“There is more that you need to know.”
“I know all that I need to know about you, if that is what you mean. And I know all that I need to know about myself. I do not care what happened seven hundred years ago after we sealed our love. I no longer care what happened seven days ago, for that matter. The past is dead, my love. I only care about the present and the future.”
The Count looked at me as if I wearied him. “Let us see if you still feel the same way tomorrow.”
“I feel more alive now than I have ever felt in this lifetime,” I said. I pushed away from the table and went to him and sat in his lap. He hugged me to him, letting me rest my head on his shoulder. “If we can visit the past, my love, can we not change it? I want to return to the past and change whatever I did that separated us for all this time.”
I heard him laugh to himself.
“Like actors on the stage who must obey the lines that are already written,” I said, for that is what it felt like to me. “I inhabited my former body, but I did not control it.”
“And yet our powers are ever evolving,” he said. “We may discover in the future that we are able to do things that now seem impossible.”
“Slowly, my love, slowly. Impatience will not serve you in this process.”
I woke the next day in the afternoon and tried to get out of bed, but my fatigue was great, and I was unable to combat it. Every time I rose, exhaustion came over me, and I retreated to the bed, where I took a light meal and some tea. The Count watched me with concern. I could tell that he had not expected me to respond this way to the loss of blood and the rekindling of my powers. He had been so sure that I would be able to make the gradual transition out of mortal life, but my overwhelming need for rest troubled him. He had the kitchen prepare strong, meat-and bone-based broths for me, which he watched me drink to the last drops. In the evening, he made me take a mulled wine spiced with something that he said would relax me.
“I do not need a sedative,” I said. “I can barely keep myself awake.”
“There is a difference between a fatigued body and a relaxed body,” he said. And so I drank it and slept for fourteen hours.
With one more lengthy sleep, I was able to rise in the afternoon, though a queasy feeling invaded my stomach and would not go away despite three cups of ginger tea and some toast. But a tepid yellow sun shone through the clouds for the first time since we had arrived, and it inspired me to dress.
I could not find the Count anywhere. I sought Mrs. O’Dowd, finding her in the kitchen. I asked her if she knew his whereabouts, but she shrugged. “I do not, madam,” she said. I waited for her to speculate as to where he might be, but she was as silent as a stone. I sensed that she knew many things about him, perhaps more than I knew at this point, but I also saw that she was not about to reveal them to me. She was solicitous toward me, but by the way that she curtly answered my questions, she seemed either amused by me or suspicious of me, and I wondered if I was not the first female guest the Count had taken to this castle.
“Mrs. O’Dowd, I would like to try to find out if I have any living relatives in the county,” I said, trying to establish a connection with her so that she might give me some information about my family. I explained that my mother had been an only child, and I did not know anything about my father’s family. I ran the only family names I remembered past her, but she claimed not to be familiar with any of them. She was very formal with me despite my attempts to approach her in a friendly manner. I asked her to arrange for me to have a carriage and coachman. I wanted to pass by my old home and I also wanted to find my mother’s grave. “You may try the old cemetery at Drumcliffe,” she said. “That is where many are buried.”
She looked at me coldly, and I stared back into her eyes, when, in my own mind’s eye, I had a vision of her as a much younger woman in this very room bent over the long, pine worktable hatcheted with knife marks, with the Count’s mouth on her lips and neck. He looked exactly as he looked today, whereas she looked perhaps forty years younger. I almost swooned with the sight of it, after which she looked at me with even greater suspicion. “I am fine, Mrs. O’Dowd,” I said quickly, even before she asked me. “I took a sedative that has had a lasting effect on me, that is all.”
“I understand the effect very well,” she said in a very knowing tone. “You needn’t explain anything to me. Do excuse me while I arrange for your carriage.”
By the time the coachman brought me to the cemetery and helped me out of the carriage, the sun had dropped and the light had grown dimmer. An ancient stone watchtower flanked the cemetery, casting a long shadow over some of the gravestones, and an Irish High Cross that must have sat there for one thousand years, marked by its great circle at the center and decorated with biblical scenes, lorded over the entrance. A Gothic-style church with an inviting wooden door recessed in a massive arch was attached to the cemetery. I wanted to have a look inside, but knew that I must take advantage of the ever-diminishing daylight.
I asked the coachman to wait by the carriage and I began to walk the rows between the headstones, searching for familiar names, especially those of my parents, Maeve and James Murray. I had nothing else to go on but that my grandmother’s name was Una. Moss, fungus, and wear from the passage of time obscured many of the stones’ inscriptions. I did not find any tombs bearing the name Murray, though it was common enough in the area. I was about to leave the cemetery when I saw a name and date that seemed strikingly familiar: Winifred Collins, 1818- 1847. Where had I seen it before?
I closed my eyes, resting my hand on the headstone. The wind picked up, sending a languid chill across my face, as if it had intentionally stopped to caress me. I remembered the name written on John Seward’s patient file.
What were the chances that two female children with the same name had been born in the same year in Sligo County? On the other hand, Vivienne had not said that she was from Sligo. Perhaps this was just a coincidence after all. Though Winifred was not a common name, Ireland was rife with families named Collins.
Poor Vivienne. I tried to banish my last image of her from my mind, dead by the hands of the doctors and their unnecessary, fatal experiments. If the doctors had had their way, I would be lying in the cellar next to her on another cot, covered by a sheet and waiting for burial. I did not like to think about her, either dead or alive, with her mad eyes that were the same color as mine. I remembered how her outlandish stories had captivated me. Now I had relived them the other night in my vision, or whatever that was, with myself as the central character. Had I been correct when I told John Seward that when I looked at Vivienne, I saw my future? Was I, in fact, as mad as
