How Do I Love Thee? (32 page)

‘I have to go,’ I said. My voice wavered.

Dismay drew his face taut and he caught at my hands. I evaded him easily and took a step backwards.

‘No, Dan. I have to go.’ I couldn’t trust myself. Insidious thought: that once it was done it couldn’t be undone. Part of me didn’t believe he’d destroy himself if I turned him, for suicide was a sin against his god. But I couldn’t be sure.

‘Don’t leave.’

‘I have to go. I can’t tr—I can’t stay here right now.’

‘Please, Sylvie. Talk to me.’

‘Talk, talk, talk, it changes nothing. I can’t stand by and let you die.’

Dan’s eyes glittered. ‘But you expect me to let you kill.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘You really don’t know?’

I glared at him. ‘I wouldn’t ask if I did.’

‘You don’t need to kill to live.’

I didn’t understand what he was getting at. ‘So?’

‘You can choose not to.’

‘It’s not that simple.’

‘Yes, it is. Every choice matters.’

I laughed, and bitterness stung my throat. ‘Oh, I know that. More than you’ll ever understand.’

‘Then help me to understand. What is it you won’t tell me?’

For a moment, I was tempted. But it would be like tearing down a dam wall during a once-in-a-century flood. If I told anything, I’d tell all, and the guilt and the horror would drown us both. And in my fear, I’d damn both of us.

Ice crept over my skin. By staying, I was cursing Dan to a half-life, a miserable nocturnal existence, cut off from his friends, suffering from lack of sleep and lack of sunlight. No friends, no family, no children.

And before long, I’d give in to my fear, and I’d turn him. And then he’d walk into the sunlight, where I couldn’t follow.

No.

I looked at him, filling my eyes with the sight of his face, his eyes, his hair. His hands stretched out to me in an unspoken plea.

Did I love him enough to leave temptation behind? To leave him?

Always.

‘I love you, Dan. Be well.’

‘Sylvie!’ He lunged for me, but he was too slow.

They’re always too slow.

I loosed the preternatural strength and speed I usually kept tightly leashed, and spun away into the night, his voice calling my name a fading echo in my ears.

As I sped through the darkness, seeking to put miles between us, distress burned my throat. If I was human, no doubt the tears would fly in my wake like pattering rain. Sorrow is agonising when you can’t express it.

It shouldn’t have surprised me, I suppose, that he wasn’t going to let me go so easily.

One night as I made my way wearily through the cemetery, a familiar figure detached itself from an adjacent crypt.

‘Dan.’ Oh, but the syllable slipped so sweetly from my lips. I’d missed even saying his name.

‘Sylvie.’ And my name on his tongue cut through my resolutions like a knife. Bittersweet.

‘You found me.’

‘You wanted to be found.’

‘No.’

‘You could have moved her.’

My mother. Once the wicked flames had burned out, I’d recovered her ashes. I carried her with me for years, but once I settled, I saw her interred with due ceremony in hallowed ground, as I knew she’d have wished. I’d spun tales, forged documents, used my magic to influence the local authorities until they accepted that she belonged where she was. I couldn’t disturb her rest now. Nor could I answer truthfully whether a part of me had hoped he’d come. I had come here, after all. Night, after night, after night.

‘Is she the reason, Sylvie? Do you kill to avenge your mother’s death at the hands of evil men?’

‘How—?’ He knew? He couldn’t possibly.

‘The brutality of the witch slayings around Fife are well documented, my love.’

‘You never said.’

‘I was waiting for you to tell me.’

‘I couldn’t.’

‘I know. It’s all right.’

‘I started with my mother’s murderers,’ I said, my voice low and scratchy against my throat. I scented smoke, pungent and suffocating, as I always did whenever I thought of that time. ‘After I was turned, I killed the men who were responsible. And then I hunted down other evil creatures hiding their sick malice and their power-mongering behind God’s word. I thought it would fill the hole inside me, but it never did.’ I looked at Dan, afraid of the condemnation I’d see in his eyes, knowing I had to face it. Perhaps then I’d have the strength to truly walk away. Let him go. Forever. ‘That’s how I know, Dan. I can’t fill the emptiness, so I have to keep killing. I have no soul, and I can never walk into the sunlight. There’ll be no eternal rest for me.’

Dan looked back at me, and his face was haggard, his eyes lacking their usual light, but there was no trace of disgust or accusation there.

‘You can stop killing. That hole inside you needs to be filled, yes, you’re right, but it’s love you seek. Not death.’

‘How do you know?’ My legs started to tremble. I was shocked at how desperately I wanted to believe him. How much I envied his faith. In everything.

‘Look at you. So beautiful, so fragile. You were made for love. Even a fool can see it.’

‘You’re a fool, then.’

‘Of course I am. Please, Sylvie. Come with me. Come home.’

Oh, the word was like a lance, a temptation aiming for my cold and silent heart as surely as a stake in the legends of old. Stupid. How could a stake kill something already dead?

I shook with the desire to go to him, slip into the comforting circle of his arms, let the solid warmth of his body drive some of the chill from my own. But I knew it was transient. A false temptation.

I didn’t deserve the redemption he was offering me. I could never walk into the sunlight, for no salvation waited for me there, no light on the other side. Only a darkness I couldn’t face.

‘No, Dan. It’s not meant to be. I knew deep in my heart, when I still had one, I’d have to atone for my choices. I could have accepted God’s plan. But I didn’t. I didn’t care about anything but vengeance, and I thought I was prepared to pay the price. Any price. But then I met you.’

Dan moved a little towards me, and I watched him warily. I could easily avoid him, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was I didn’t want to.

‘I knew you were the one I’d been waiting for when you walked in to the shop and asked about the late-shift position.’ Dan said. ‘Five feet tall and female, all hair and eyes and
curves, I knew you’d be a security risk, an invitation for every thief in town, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t let you leave.’

‘And then you found out I was damned. Should have let me walk out that door, Dan.’

‘You’re not evil. I know it. God knows it, or He’d have struck you down.’

I wanted to believe him. But I’d learned the bitter lesson of complacency when I listened to my mother’s assurances that no harm would come to her. Wishing something was true didn’t make it so. A belief that everything would somehow work out didn’t make it come true. Prayers weren’t always answered.

‘God tolerates evil all the time.’

‘God has used you as His instrument against evil, Sylvie. That doesn’t make you evil.’

I gazed at him, aware that although I could see him clearly by the light of the distant stars, with the moon sulking behind clouds I’d be nothing more to him than a familiar silhouette. And yet he’d known it was me. He knew me. Could this good man really be so wrong about me? Or was I once again indulging in wishful thinking?

‘Maybe I was just sent to tempt you,’ I said.

‘Sylvie,’ Dan said again, and surely he was aware of how every time he uttered my name it further weakened my resolve? ‘Yes, you’re right, you were sent to tempt me. Who
wouldn’t be tempted by the promise of living forever? And how could God have made that promise any more enticing, when it offered me an eternity at your side? But I passed the test.’

I’d thought I was already a dead thing, but the pain spearing through me now made a mockery of that belief. He’d rejected what I was, what I could offer, everything about me. And he’d thwarted my desire. If I tried to force eternal life on him I’d be bringing about his premature death.

‘Sylvie, I believe. I believe God loves all his creatures. I believe in redemption. I believe it isn’t too late for you to choose the right path. All you have to do is turn away from death and choose life. Choose love. Choose me.’

‘I c-can’t. It’s too late.’ But I didn’t resist when he closed the distance between us and swept me into his arms, where I so longed to be.

‘It’s never too late. You can still choose, just as I did. I choose to live a mortal span, with you beside me, my wife, my love, my soul mate—yes, Sylvie, you do have a soul. I know it, I feel it. I see it in your eyes every time we make love. Every time you look at me with love.’

I shook my head, afraid to believe it. ‘Dan, please, let me turn you. I can’t bear to lose you.’

He cupped my jaw with his palm, peering into my face as if he could see my expression. As if he could see me.

‘You won’t lose me. Oh, I’ll die, eventually. Not for a long time, I hope, but that isn’t up to me. But that isn’t the end, Sylvie. It will be wondrous, once I go into the light. True eternal life. Eternal love. And I’ll be waiting for you.’

‘I wish I could believe it.’

‘Belief is just a choice, my love. It’s up to you what you make of it.’

I shivered, as the moon at that moment sailed free of the clouds and lit up his dear face. My hair stood on end, the superstitious peasant’s blood I’d been born from all those centuries ago reasserting itself. Such an unmistakeable omen. But an omen of what?

I stared into Dan’s eyes, searching, looking for something, I wasn’t sure what, and then for a moment I thought I saw it: a spark from my own eyes reflected back at me.

Could I hold onto that tiny glimmer of hope and his steadfast belief that something better still waited for me? Was it enough? Was love enough?

Always.

I touched his face lightly with my fingers.

‘Let’s go home,’ I said softly.

The joy in his face before he moved to bring his lips to mine was almost painful to see, but it was a pain that brought sweetness, rather than sorrow.

That single glimmer. Something still in me that shone out and could be reflected back to me. It was enough, for now.

Enough to give me hope that if I couldn’t yet reclaim my faith, I could trust in Dan’s and the hope that I might yet find my way back.

Enough to know I will take the chance. That I will gamble on faith, and hope, on this painfully won awareness that in the face of love, everything else falls away.

And after Dan takes his final breath—please, God, not for many years yet—I will close his eyes with a kiss. I will lay him to his eternal rest in the tender embrace of the earth. And then, I will take that walk I have feared for so long.

Into the sunlight.

And into his arms.

A
LAN
G
OLD

‘
I love thee with a passion put to use …
’

As Liz Brown stepped off the train and walked past the station manager, flashing her weekly ticket to prove her legitimacy as a traveller, she began to ponder the differences between her life and that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She often did that in the days before she introduced a new author to her class. She would steep herself in a writer’s life and times because the environment in which authors wrote often had a profound influence upon their art.

Environment, landscape, time and place; background elements so often glossed over by teachers under pressure
to fulfil the demands of the syllabus in order to edify their students in a range of literature. But Liz knew that it was important for her senior English classes to see writers not just as creators of great words and worlds, of towering thoughts and indelible images, but to judge them in the context of their time and place.

By re-examining her own world and contrasting it with that of the chosen author, Liz is able to provide her students with far greater authenticity, to burrow down beyond the words and into the emotional depths which had led Elizabeth Barrett to think the thoughts, to ponder the universality of the love she bore for Robert. So, for the past couple of days, Liz had been imagining herself as part of the world of the frail, wan, brilliant poet whose love affair had been the sensation of the Victorian age.

Just for a start, in Elizabeth’s day, these scruffy, down-at-heel people who looked after the railways would have been known by the non-pc and patronising name of ‘Station Masters’ and would have been puffed up and preening with self-grandiosity. They would have been vital participants in the new and exciting world of the railway, the invention which shrank the world and made distant lands accessible, just like the internet had shrunk Liz’s modern world. In the time of the great Victorian poets, the railway platform
would have been a Station Master’s realm, a place where he commanded respect and obedience.

But in today’s world of the equality of women, men who supervised stations had lost their mastery. They were now mere local supervisors, and the traveller had become the lord and master. There were, however, some remaining similarities: they were still uniformed, and railway overlords had done nothing in the past hundred or so years to brighten up the drab outfits they wore as an outward symbol of their once-mighty authority. And that wasn’t the only similarity. The trains were no more noticeably modern now than in Elizabeth’s day … overcrowded, dirty and smelly rattlers.

Liz and the greatest poet of the Victorian age were separated by 170 years, and the differences in their worlds were profound. But the more she researched Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the more Liz came to understand that the similarities between them were stirring and bordering on the uncanny. Sure, Elizabeth had been born into an age of male dominance, dreadful social inequity and colonialism, whereas Liz was a modern woman who communicated with people across the once-unknown world in nanoseconds. Elizabeth’s father had made a fortune out of human misery in the Indes, but had lost it almost overnight when the slave trade was banned; Liz’s father had risked the family fortune
on an ill-advised bit of property speculation and had lost everything.