Midnight Harvest (49 page)

“If you do not want to be a vampire, then you would do well to reject coming to my life,” he said, and when he saw her confusion, he added, “I have known four women who came to my life and discovered it wasn’t what they wished. Two of them died the True Death by their own hands, one by the hands of others, and one decided the Blood Bond wasn’t what she wanted and cut off all contact with me and my kind.” He smoothed the lapel of his suit with his free hand, using the motion to cover his need to think. “I have no desire to cause you anguish, nor the wish to compel you to act against your inclinations.”

For several seconds she remained still, and then she said, “I have no idea what your life is like, not really, though I’ve been thinking about it a lot I know it must be unlike anything I’ve known before, and that makes me uncertain. I realized I can’t have an audition for vampirism, and that means that I must continue to debate with myself; how can I know if I want it, that life?” She pulled her hand back. “I know about the native earth, and the problems with sunshine and running water, and the lack of reflection, and the other matters you described. But that’s not the same thing as knowing—really
knowing
—what it is to be nourished solely by intimacy and blood.”

“I wish I could describe it adequately, but I’ve never hit upon the words to depict the experience. I suspect it is one of those things that cannot be expressed in words.” He regarded her, his eyes filled with compassion.

“But how then am I to know if it is a life I want for myself? How can I decide without knowing?” Rowena shook her head. “You mustn’t be troubled by this; I am inclined to ruminate aloud—it comes from living alone.”

“Is Clara in the house? Should I expect her to announce dinner, or supper?” Saint-Germain asked. “If she’s going to—”

“No.” She laughed a bit unsteadily. “I’m not so heedless as that. She’s left for the day. I give her half-days for two weeks before Christmas, and the week between Christmas and New Year off. She has shopping to do and arrangements to make for her three children, who visit twice a year. She’s been planning for their arrival for more than a week. She’ll pick them up at the train station in two days, and I won’t see Clara until after the New Year, after she’s sent them back to their grandparents in Michigan.” She was soothed by speaking of these very ordinary things; her edginess faded, and she relaxed. “So you and I will have time together—as much as you like.”

“Thank you,” he said, watching her. “I’m looking forward to it.” He paid no attention to the expanse of windows in which the room was reflected; he had long since ceased to be disoriented by his missing reflection, although he was comforted by the realization that she could not see the windows behind her.

She got up and went to the cabinet to Saint-Germain’s right. Opening the carved doors, she took out a bottle of brandy and a bubble-snifter and set them down on the wide lip beneath the doors. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to have a drink.” The color of her velvet hostess-gown almost exactly matched the shine of the brandy. “I’ve been wondering about my life a lot of late.”

“As you like; drink what pleases you,” said Saint-Germain, watching her, his eyes contemplative. “You know, Rowena, you have much to be proud of.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked, stopped in the task of pouring the fine Mattei brandy.

“I think you often underestimate your accomplishments because you have not achieved all you have set out to do,” he said at his most gentle.

“Well, you’re right about that—I haven’t; nowhere near,” she said, judiciously gauging the amount of brandy in the snifter; she put the cap back on the bottle and returned it to the cabinet, closing the carved doors before lifting the snifter. “You don’t know how much I haven’t done.”

“No; only you know that,” said Saint-Germain. “All I have to go by is what you have done, and you have done a great deal.”

“No, I haven’t, not really; I should have done much more,” she said. “I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time.” She sat down again, and again tucked one leg under her, the snifter resting in her hand. “Every year that passes, I can’t help but compare what I’ve done to what I had intended to do. It seems to me the gap widens a little with every passing year. It troubles me that I haven’t accomplished all I have set out to do. I could have done so much more if I hadn’t spent so long at meaningless events that everyone said were important but turned out to be nothing more than a gathering of gossips. Thank God I was never in that group that takes tea at the Saint Francis, or it would be much worse.” She gave a slow sigh. “I don’t mean that it’s wrong to have a social life, but so often that means—”

“No one can work every hour of every day, or night; all creatures need rest, or exhaustion sets in and stops all work, and thought,” said Saint-Germain. He waited a long moment, giving her a chance to speak; when she said nothing, he went on, “If you had attempted to soldier on at all costs, you would probably have produced fewer works, not more, and you probably would have liked them less. Insight cannot be forced, Rowena, and it cannot thrive without stimulation, which includes reflection.” He rose and went to stand behind her, his small, beautiful hands resting on her shoulders.

“That may be true, but I know I could have done so much more.” She sounded mournful; her face grew more somber. “I keep thinking about it”

“You speak as if you are going to stop all work tomorrow, or run out of subjects to sketch and paint,” he told her.

She turned and lifted her head so she could look directly at him. “I don’t plan to, but it is possible. And what then?”

“The conundrum of all living things—and the undead. None of us know when it will end, or how.” He bent down and softly kissed the nape of her neck. “Any of my blood could die the True Death at any time, just as you breathing people might perish. But I must assume—and so must you—that it isn’t apt to be today.”

Rowena sipped her brandy. “But it is growing closer, the end of life.”

“For all living things,” said Saint-Germain. “And all of us as well.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?” She sipped again, then put her snifter down on the end-table. “The knowing you’ll die?”

“But I already have died, once. I was executed and left on a dung-heap.” It still bothered him slightly to recall that horrible afternoon four thousand years ago, and how he had behaved for five centuries thereafter.

She made a face. “How can you talk about it like that?”

“How do you mean?” he asked as he half-sat on the back of her chair.

“You know, so calmly,” she said.

“It happened a long time in the past,” he said. “I cannot cling to it as much as I once wished to because it has vanished. If I searched for it, I would hardly be able to find the ruins. My people are long-dead, and they left the Carpathians many centuries before they disappeared from the earth. Some went east and some went west, but they abandoned Transylvania about three thousand years ago.” They had not wholly gone from the West, for their name, in a reshaped form, still echoed in Tuscany. “It would be foolish of me to yearn for those times. They were harsh, as all men were in those times, and I was cut of the same cloth.” He touched her hair, smoothing the tailored waves carefully. “You would not have liked that age.”

“You aren’t like that now,” she said, aware of something in his manner that convinced her he was telling her the truth.

“No, not now. I learned, in time. That is the one thing those of my blood usually have: time.” He bent to kiss the top of her head.

“Do you regret being what you are?” She had another sip of brandy.

“No. Once, a very long time ago, I did, so profoundly that it truly altered the course of my existence.” He thought back to his early years in the Temple of Imhotep, and Hesentaton, frightfully burned and dying in agony. “And I have done things since I regret, at least in hindsight. I certainly regret I wasn’t able to save Laisha; that failure still haunts me. There was so much promise in that child, and I miss her and all she might have become.” He felt more than saw her frown of uncertainty. “No, Rowena, she was not of my blood. I couldn’t have done that to her. She was my child, as much as if I had fathered her myself.”

“But if she had wanted—” Rowena blurted out.

He shook his head. “No. I would not do this to my child; it’s an unconscionable notion. It would appall me to attempt something so … contemptible.” He lifted her face so she could see him. “What you and I share isn’t for a father—or mother—and child. You have no reason to fear that there is an iota of incest in what is between you and me.” The image of Csimenae and Aulutis came to mind; he winced.

“What is it?” She was troubled by his sudden change of expression.

“Another thing I regret. I’ll tell you about it, someday. Not tonight.”

“Why not?” she asked. “You don’t suppose I’d be jealous, do you?”

He laughed shortly. “No. There is nothing of which to be jealous.” He put his hand on her shoulder again. “It’s not that; I am chagrined by what happened.”

“I find it hard to imagine you chagrined by much of anything,” said Rowena.

“Then you have an idealized impression of me.” He was at once complimented and vexed. “No one can live a decade—let alone millennia—without having at least a few moments of mortification. If you think vampires are immune from being disconcerted, you have been taken in by film and Stoker.”

“Oh, that’s right. You saw my drawing of the Borgo Pass for
Dracula,
didn’t you?” She put her hand over his. “Talk about chagrin.”

“I told you I liked how well you had caught the spirit of the book.” He could feel the tension in her shoulders. “How can that embarrass you?”

She pressed his fingers. “I thought at the time you were being kind.”

“Had I done that, the way you imply, I would have said it was accurate to the place as well as the book, which—”

“—it wasn’t,” she finished for him. “I do remember that. So I absolve you of trying to sweeten a bitter pill.”

“Thank you,” he said solemnly.

“You shouldn’t thank me,” she said, turning in her chair so that her back was against an arm and she was staring up into his face. “I should thank you.”

“For what reason?” he wanted to know.

“For taking me seriously when no one else did,” she said. “You and my grandfather were the only ones.”

“There was you,” said Saint-Germain, his voice deep and stirring, like the base note of a ’cello.

She shook her head. “Not always, especially at first Oh, I said I was certain, but in my heart I had many doubts, about the quality of what I had done, let alone what I could do. Occasionally I still do.” She gazed dreamily across the studio, seeing events of twenty years ago. “When I first arrived here, I was sure I was doing the right thing, leaving England and living as an independent woman on my own, but then I knew my grandfather would support me, and so I never had to put myself on the line as so many others did, which gave me an advantage of a sort.”

“Did that worry you?” Saint-Germain asked, perceiving it had.

“Not at first. It was hard enough just being a woman entering the world of artists. But over the ensuing years, my doubts reasserted themselves.” She pressed her lips together.

“How much did they trouble you?” He spoke steadily, no accusation in his question.

Rowena took a long moment to answer. “I began to feel ashamed of my good fortune. I wondered if I ought to throw everything to the winds, go off on my own, and try to survive on my art, to prove myself, to earn my place.” She ducked her head. “I might have done it if a woman I met here, another artist, who lived as much by her wits as her brush, wasn’t killed by a man who was supposed to be helping her arrange for a show at a small gallery. I knew it could have been me, in her place.”

Saint-Germain stroked her hand. “That must have been upsetting.”

“Terrifying is more like it; it brought back everything that happened with von Wolgast,” said Rowena with a self-deprecatory chuckle. “That’s the first time I went up the coast. I told myself it was to paint, but it was also to get away, to think. The first time I went with a guide, and we rode from the rail-stop outside of Ukiah. The road was hardly more than a goat-track, and it took two days to get to the coast. We both had a horse and a pack-mule, and we stopped at farmhouses along the way until we reached the old coach-road that follows the Noyo River; in many places it was little more than two wide ruts along the river-track. There was a train for the loggers, but it took no passengers. I think now we should have taken the coach-road all the way, but I wanted to see unspoiled territory.” She shrugged. “Most of it had been logged over, and there were what they call stump-farms all through the hills.” Picking up her snifter again, she swirled the brandy in it. “I don’t know—I think I was trying to prove something to myself.”

“And did you?”

“Who knows? I thought at the time I had, but now?” She sipped the brandy, taking her time, and at last she said, “I went back in ’26, and in ’28, and by then there were real roads, graded, some paved, and even a few hotels along the way. I could drive all the way without too much difficulty. For a while I considered buying a house up in Albion or Little River or Mendocino or Casper, but I realized I would be too much of an oddity in those towns, among those loggers and fishermen and berry-farmers, and I didn’t think I could stand to be that much of a peculiarity.” She set the snifter aside again, and looked up at him. “I’m glad we had an early dinner. Well,
I
had an early dinner, in any case.”

“Why is that?” He remained very still.

“Oh, because … because I didn’t want to have to cook tonight. You’ve spared me that.”

He could sense this was not the real reason, but kept his reservations to himself. “Have you been back to the north coast again recently?”

“Three years ago; I went as far as Eureka, to see their Victorian houses. They have some very fine ones, though it is hard times there as it is everywhere else.” She bit her lower lip. “There was trouble brewing—labor organizers trying to get the loggers and mill-workers to unionize. It’s strange: most of northern California has been heavily union since before the Great War, and southern California not; but logging and lumber have lagged behind, and the struggles in some areas are becoming entrenched. I found the conflict interesting, I’m ashamed to say, and I followed it with some diligence for over a week. I did some of my best sketches of the loggers working on the Eel River until one of the foremen told me to get out of the area, and to keep my pictures out of the press if I knew what was good for me. They didn’t want anyone making note of what was going on there. I left that day. I still have the sketches, but I haven’t done anything more with them.”