There came a long pause in which he could measure her displeasure, her disappointment. Then, like a mask slipping into place, she suddenly smiled. "You know what a vampire is, William."
Despite its false good humor, her tone sounded definite almost to the point of insistence. She sounded as though she were trying to convince him of it. William wished she could convince him of it, for he wanted to please her. More than anything in the world, he wanted to please her. It was only that...
"Forgive me. Truly, I don't."
The expression on her face when he said it made him wince. She looked so troubled, so anxious. Yet she struggled against it, fought it down, and when it was gone, it was almost as though it had never been there at all. She said again, "Oh, you know. Vampires. Like Count Dracula."
"Dracula," he echoed, trying out the word. It seemed no more familiar in his mouth than in hers. She was watching him carefully.
"Actually, scratch that. Forget about Dracula. Come to think of it, Bram Stoker won't be writing that for a few years yet. How about Carmilla?"
He shook his head.
"Varney the Vampire?"
"I'm afraid not."
"Huh." She settled back against the heels of her hands, frowning thoughtfully.
"Perhaps I am not so learned in these matters as you assume," William said quickly, trying his best to gratify her. "If you would be so kind as to describe what manner of creature you mean, I am sure it would be known to me. The name is merely an unfamiliar one."
She looked skeptical. "To be honest, they aren't that easy to describe. I'm afraid you might not be—"
"Please," he interrupted. Then, when she looked at him, "Please. I don't ask a lot of you."
"That's true. You don't." She sighed. "All right then, if you insist. Vampires are these things—monsters, I guess you would call them—that come out after the sun goes down. They survive by drinking blood and—"
"The blood of men do you mean?"
Buffy seemed unreasonably annoyed by this question. "Men and women," she answered. "They mostly go for whichever sex turns them on. Of course, a really hungry one will take what it can get, even down to animal blood."
"And are they animals?" She was being frightfully vague, and he was having trouble imagining such creatures. Every time he tried, all he could picture was stoats raiding a chicken coop.
"No, they aren't animals. They're more like...well, like people infected with parasites. Evil, bloodthirsty parasites that steal their hosts' souls." She saw his blank look and struggled to explain. "See, what happens is a corpse gets taken over by a demon—"
"Good God!"
"Actually, I'm getting ahead of myself. What happens first is a vampire attacks a human. For example's sake, let's say it's a male vampire and the human he attacks is a woman. Anyway, he bites the woman and drinks her blood. Then, just as she's about to die, he cuts or bites himself and forces her to drink some of his blood. After that she becomes a vampire."
"Immediately?"
"Well, no. Most of the time it takes a couple of days."
William took a moment to digest this information.
"I see," he said finally. But he didn't see, not at all, and that could not have been any more obvious to her if he said it outright. She looked at him soberly.
"So, is any of this ringing any bells for you? Do you know the kind of creatures I'm talking about and maybe just refer to them by a different handle?"
"Handle?"
"Name."
"Oh." He wanted to say yes. He wanted to remove that fretful look from her face and see her smile. He wanted it so badly it amounted to an actual, physical pain. But he couldn't. It would have been a lie.
When he told her, she looked away, focusing her attention on the horse grazing a few feet away. He knew she must not want him to see her expression.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Don't be. You didn't do anything wrong." Still, the words sounded hollow. He heard her whisper under her breath, "Trust me to land in the world without shrimp." Then she laughed so bitterly it frightened him.
"The—the world without shrimp?" he echoed. She turned back to him with a sigh.
"Oh, it's just a metaphor. Or an allegory. Whatever. I sucked at English literature and never learned the difference between them. But I'm not even going to pretend any of that will make sense to you."
Undoubtedly, she was right and he wouldn't understand, but it hurt somewhat to hear her say it. Men were supposed to be cleverer than women; they were supposed to know things women did not. Men were supposed to teach them. Yet here was Buffy Summers, explaining things to him as though he were a child, determining when she had reached his capability for understanding. It was not a little humiliating, and part of him longed to change the subject, to talk of matters with which he was familiar so that he might impress her. Yet another part, the part that had not yet been touched by laudanum, could not quite restrain its curiosity. Because if the things she told him were true, they were also extraordinary.
"These...vampires..." he began reluctantly, "You say they are corpses?"
She nodded.
"Do they look like men?"
"And women." She offered him a tiny smile. "Don't be a chauvinist and ignore the female bloodsuckers."
He thought about that for a bit.
"But if they look no different than the general populace, how on earth would one know who they are?"
"There are ways, trust me. When they get ready to bite somebody, they look different for a while. Also, they're a lot stronger than a regular person is. They're, like, The Incredible Hulk type of strong."
William had no notion what The Incredible Hulk might be, but he was willing to take her word for it that vampires were powerful. Nevertheless, there was one thing he could not quite understand.
"You say you kill these creatures," he said. "As you put it, you purge the world of them and make it a safer place. How do you manage that?"
"You mean what do I have to do in order to kill them?"
"No!" He wasn't at all sure he wanted to know that. "Rather, how are you capable of doing so? If they are as strong as you claim..."
"They are."
"Well, it is only that...what I mean to say is...you seem quite delicate." He found himself stumbling over his words, feeling suddenly confused. If only she weren't looking at him so oddly, with that mixture of amusement, irritation, and regret. If only he knew the right words to say to please her, which clearly he did not. William started to apologize—he felt as though he ought—then he remembered she did not like it.
He lapsed into a humiliated silence instead, and waited for her to make the next move.
"Delicate really isn't the word for what I am," she said finally.
William looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to elaborate. It seemed as though she might. He could see her hovering on the brink of her indecision, but at the last moment, she appeared to change her mind. She exhaled slowly, a sound so heavy with discontent it made his heart falter.
"If I knew..." he tried clumsily.
"Knew what?"
"What to say to please you. If I knew that, I should say it now. I do want—"
He couldn't go on, the words choked him, but somehow it did not seem to matter. He had a feeling she knew what he meant.
"Oh, William," she said. Then, with a little edge to her voice, "Oh, God."
"I've upset you."
"This whole damn situation upsets me. It has nothing to do with you."
What an absurd thing for her to say, William thought, when it very obviously had everything to do with him. Something he had done, or left undone, had let her down. She looked every bit as miserable and frustrated as he felt.
She did not, however, withdraw from the situation, as he would have done. As he tried to do. Instead, she reached out and touched his chest, tracing her fingertips along the line of his cravat and smoothing it down where it had come loose from his waistcoat. There was sadness in the gesture. There was sadness in her voice, too, when she said, "Tell me about your mother, William."
"My mother?"
"Yes. Tell me how she died."
His back tensed, although he did not quite pull away.
"I don't normally like to talk about that."
"No, I know. I wouldn't either. It's just that..." She hesitated.
"Just what?" he asked. She shook her head.
"Never mind. I know how you feel. I don't like talking about my mom either, about how she died. I shouldn't interrogate you."
No, she should not. His mother was a subject he refused to discuss with anyone. In the year since her death, he had not spoken her name aloud, and he certainly had not volunteered any information about her illness, not even to his doctor. He knew what would happen if he did. He knew what people would think of him.
It would have been the same with Buffy had it not been for the look in her eye, the gentleness of her touch, and the fact that he had taken more than his full measure of laudanum earlier in the evening. Heretofore he had always managed a certain amount of decorum in her presence—at least, he thought he had—but now his defenses were down and his natural inclination toward restraint utterly gone. He dropped his head down into his hands and told her the truth in a single, agonized gasp.
"I'm the reason my mother died, Buffy. I killed her."
The fingers of her right hand lay splayed across his shoulder, her palm resting just on top of his faintly beating heart. She did not pull it away at his confession, although her fingertips did press into his flesh a little more firmly as she asked him, "You did what now?"
William recognized his error almost immediately. Through no fault of her own, she had taken his words literally and now thought him guilty of something terrible. Her surprise was palpable, but oddly enough, she did not seem overly concerned. Confused and obviously quite taken aback, but not distressed. Not afraid of him.
Shouldn't she have been afraid of him?
William looked down at her hand on his chest. She thought him a murderer and still she desired to comfort him. Why?
He could not bring himself to ask her. It was all he could do to explain.
"I don't mean to say I did so intentionally. I was responsible, but I never meant to hurt her—"
"I know you didn't," she murmured. Then, even more gently, "Tell me what happened."
"It was because of Italy. I made her go there. She wanted to remain in England, but I forced her."
When he closed his eyes, he could see himself doing it. Forcing her. Hiding behind the pretense of following her doctor's orders when what he was really doing was pursuing his own selfish impulse, his desire to escape.
"Why did you force her?" Buffy's voice broke into his thoughts and he gave his head a slight shake. Yet he could not banish the echo of their laughter and mockery, of Cecily's dismissive words. Oh, that last was the worst of all. A gracious refusal he might have endured with equanimity, but to be so needlessly cruel about it...!
"I hate England." His voice was as harsh as his words, and trembling with poorly concealed rage. He added, "That is why I forced her to leave. I despise it here."
"I don't like it either," Buffy said. "It rains too much."
William looked up in surprise. Her tone was deadpan—she wasn't teasing him—yet her expression was one of extreme tranquility, as though she heard such confessions so frequently they had become commonplace.
He had expected disgust, or at the very least righteous indignation. Instead, he found only compassion. Her eyes were very soft, her voice very tender, when she asked about his mother's illness.
"She suffered from consumption. Do you know what that is?" She nodded and he continued, "Her doctor advised a move to a warmer climate for two or three years. I leapt at the chance to go. I gave no thought to what she wanted, and it killed her in the end."
"But if she was already sick, why would you think—?"
"Because she wanted to be here! She would have died regardless—I know that—but she wanted to die in London, in her own home. In Italy, she knew no one and she was miserable. She wished to die. A dozen times, she begged me to take her back to London; a dozen times, I might have obliged her. But I never would."
He waited for her to ask him why, but she did not. He was almost sorry she did not. It would have been a relief to tell. When she pointed out that everyone did things they later regretted, he shook his head wretchedly.
"Not to the people they love they do not."
"Don't be ridiculous," she said. "Of course they do. Probably to the people they love more than to anyone else. I've done it."
That gave him pause. He swallowed and took a moment to pull himself together. Then he asked, "But to your own mother?"
"To my friends, who are practically family to me. I've hurt them, they've hurt me, and we all felt really sorry about it in the end. It's pretty much just human nature."
"Isn't that a rather awful prospect? That people must hurt each other even when they would not?"
"Maybe." Then, seeing his expression, "Probably. All right, yes. But that doesn't make it not true. No one is perfect, William, and what you did with your mother isn't any worse than what a lot of people do to their loved ones. I've known people who have done a lot worse—and were forgiven for it."
"Such as what?" he asked, but she shook her head. He drew a breath. "Well, it does not matter. I'm not likely to be forgiven anyway."
"If she weren't dead you would. I think you know that." She sounded so confident William felt his spirits begin to rally. After all, if she was able to know the worst of him...if it did not send her away...
He clumsily reached for her hand and, somewhat to his surprise, she suffered him to hold on to it. Yet her thoughts seemed very far away when she asked him, "After she died, what did you do?"
"Then I buried her, and I came home."
"Why did you come back? If you hate England..."
"I had to sell the house in London and settle some business matters. When I finally felt free to go, I found I hadn't the energy. I bought this property instead. I moved in and I waited."
"Waited for what?"
Waited to die.
That was the answer she was seeking, but William could not tell her so. If she knew he was ill, she might not visit him any longer. Anyway, the depression of spirit had come long before his prognosis, and that suddenly seemed a distasteful thing. Unmanly. He had divulged enough ugly secrets for one evening. His ill health, the ugliest one of all, could wait until another time.
He looked down at their clasped hands.
"You don't think less of me, I hope. You don't see me as a—a—"
"No, I don't," she interjected kindly. "I think you're a good man. I just think it's been too long since someone told you that, and you've started to forget."
A lump came into his throat at that. He swallowed hard, but couldn't say anything.
After a moment or two, she released his fingers with a little squeeze. The expression on her face when she glanced at the sky was one he knew well, one he had quickly come to dread.
"You're not leaving?"
She looked apologetic. "It's getting awfully late."
It was, too. The sky was beginning to fade from black to navy, and William knew his servants would be rising soon. Still...
"I wish you wouldn't go just yet. If you would like, we could have breakfast together."
Buffy smiled at him as she climbed to her feet. A wistful sort of smile, not at all like her usual.
"I would love that," she said, "but I really have to get back." She moved off in the direction of her horse, which was happily dismantling some of the rose trees within its reach. William watched her untie the animal and run down her irons. The same preparations to leave as every night, only now they left him feeling strangely gutted.
"You'll come tomorrow?" he asked her.
She paused, one hand on the pommel of her saddle, the other on her reins. She did not look at him when she gave her answer.
"Of course I will."
She was lying. He knew it even then.