contracted pneumonia and almost died.”
“Dear God, the water cure!” I said. “It
The Count continued. “Despite that you were on the verge of death, he was determined to do it again. Though your skin and lips were blue and you could barely take a breath, he wrapped you in a blanket and carried you to the water. I could read your body and knew that it would mean certain death if he proceeded. I tried to speak to him, but he would not listen. He told me to stay out of his business. ‘I do not know you, stranger,’ he said. He thought that I was one of the Sidhe come to rescue his own. He strode right past me with you in his arms and put you down by the side of the river. He was going to bathe you in its waters again. I asked him to stop, but he did not.”
He did not have to finish his story, for I remembered it all-the two men fighting, one delivering the fatal blow and the other floating away down the river. “I carried you back to the house. Your mother never knew how you got home, which made her all the more afraid of you. I wiped your memory of the entire experience, which was easy to do because you were young and impressionable, and you had a fever at that time that made it difficult for you to distinguish between real and imagined events. His body was found that evening downriver.”
I rocked back and forth, holding my arms around my chest as if I were trying to prevent my body from shattering into little pieces. “Why did he hate me so?”
“Your father knew about your grandmother and the shame she had brought upon the family. He did not want that to happen to him.”
“What do you know about my grandmother?” I asked. “My mother would never tell me anything about her, just that if I was not careful, I would end up just like her.”
“You met your grandmother, though you did not know it at the time. But you were enchanted with her stories.”
He waited for the truth to dawn on me.
“No, that cannot be,” I said, growing more upset at the idea of a madwoman being my grandmother. “My grandmother’s name was Una. Why are you telling me this? Why do you continue to fill my head with things that will make me go mad?” I got up to run away, but I did not get ten paces before he was standing in front of me, and he caught me in his arms and held me tight. I wanted to take shelter in his strength, but at this moment, he was the bearer of information that I was sure was going to make me go insane. He read my thoughts, of course.
“You cannot hide from the truth, Mina. Anytime you try to argue with truth, you will lose. Anytime you try to evade it or run away from it, it will find you down the road. Now sit down and just try to listen.”
Though I had not run but a few steps, my heart raced, and blood swirled around in my head, tightening into a band of pressure. I wanted to escape, but I felt too sick and too afraid to move. We sat down together on a big gray rock that I remembered standing on as a little girl to watch the flow of the river.
“Growing up, Vivienne was called Una, which means ‘unity’ in the old language. ‘Winifred’ is the Anglicized version of the name. She was very rebellious against her rigid father, intrigued with the old religions, and also very lustful. The family was racked with shame over her pregnancy, which came after she had slept with many of the local men. No one was certain who the father was, not even Una herself. Una’s own father, your great-grandfather, decided that the best thing to do was to send her away for good, but publicly they declared her dead and buried her. Your mother’s grandfather was Anglo-Irish and had considerable holdings at one time. He took your mother away from Una and raised her. He also paid for Una’s care.”
“His trust paid for my schooling and comes to me still,” I said, wondering how I would have reacted to Vivienne if I had known the truth.
“No, it was I who did that. Your great-grandfather was furious that your mother ran away with a Catholic not of her class. When he died, she inherited nothing. I set up the trust as if it were from the old man. I kept the stipend small so that no one would be suspicious or try to lay their hands on the money.”
“You paid for me to attend Miss Hadley’s School for all those years?”
“It seemed the safest environment for you, considering the circumstances,” he said. “I could not take you from your mother. You were a child. You were terrified enough as it was.”
I was trying to reconcile all that Vivienne had told me with what I had now experienced myself. “But Vivienne’s stories about the fairies? Was she mad?” Of course, the question I really wanted to ask was, am I mad?
“Una had heard the stories of the Sidhe all her life and adopted them as her own. But she heard them from those who had actually experienced these things.”
“Who do you think told Una those stories?” He waited for me to hazard a guess, but I could not venture one.
“Her own grandmother, who was very powerful. The Gift often skips several generations until it manifests again. And though it skipped Una, as much as she desired it, it has manifested again in you.”
“This is too much for me to apprehend,” I said. I slid off the rock and sat on my heels, trying to absorb all that I had learned and all that he told me. “My great-grandfather locked his daughter away, and my own father would have killed me? What sort of family is this?”
“Your father feared you. And so you spent years fearing yourself.”
I do not know if it was the shock of the truth, or the relief of finally knowing all, but I crumpled to the ground and began to cry again. He let me sob for a little while, and then he took me in his arms and raised my tear- streaked face. But I was not ready to be appeased. “What about Mrs. O’Dowd? Have you been watching over her since her childhood? Did you have to murder someone in her family too?”
He smiled at me with the benevolence of a saint. “Are you jealous, Mina? You were not even born at the time of our brief liaison.”
I felt foolish. Had I expected him to be faithful to me for seven centuries? When, apparently, for a good deal of that time, I was dead?
“I have had other female companions, but you are the only one I have wanted to go through time with. I have endured your interminable cycles of birth and aging and death and rebirth; and every time, it has cost me a piece of my soul. I want you forever, but I wanted you to know the truth of what happened-the truth about your family history, and about my history-before you made a choice.”
“It is difficult to contain all this in my mind,” I said.
“You must give up the very act of analysis. You have a gift that is greater than the conscious, rational mind. It is the key to unlocking all mystery, and it is the very thing that you always try to deny.”
I had spent my life denying my gifts because they were frightening to me and to others, and trying to find a place in the orderly, rational world. But the rational world-the world of my father, of the asylum doctors, of all those from whom the Count had kept me safe-was where my nemeses existed. Despite how difficult it was to hear the things he was telling me, he was not the one to fear.
The sun had gone down, leaving us in the steel gray November dusk. “There is one more thing that I do not know, my love,” I said. “I do not know why I would ever have chosen a life without you.”
“At the time, you had your reasons. I did not agree with them, and I tried everything to change your mind.”
“You are my refuge, my sanctuary from everything that would harm me. We won’t part again, will we?”
He stood and offered me his hand. “I want to show you something,” he said. “There is a place near here for which you once had great fondness.”
I started to walk toward the carriage, but he stopped me. “If we take the carriage, we will miss twilight time.”
He picked me up in his arms and started walking back toward the house. But soon, his feet were off the ground and we were moving at great speed, so fast that the landscape whizzed by me in a blur of browns and greens. I was exhilarated and afraid. I had experienced this once before with him, but not at this speed and not for this lengthy a distance. We seemed to be following the river, the wind whooshing past my ears. Beyond was the great glassy dark of the sea, and behind us, the outlines of a mountain range. It looked as if we were going to collide into the side of one of the tall cliffs, when we suddenly were standing inside one of its alcoves that overlooked the bay.
My heart was pounding from the elation of flying, but I was thankful to have my feet on something solid. The alcove was dark and not very deep. I turned around to look at the sea, but panicked when I saw that my feet were
