He frowned. “You do not know me. You can’t mean that.”
There was so much pain in his voice that Clio knew she had to tell him everything. She swallowed hard. “I do know you. You were my first investigation. I began reading about you and following you the summer I was fifteen, simply out of curiosity, to see what Mariana’s betrothed was like, and once I started I could not stop. I followed you every night, when your father thought you were out drinking and your cousins assumed you were with one of a dozen mistresses. I know where you went and what you did. When you stood outside the glass-less windows of those small houses on the outskirts of the city through the night, watching as parents held their children and laughed with them and kissed them fondly even though they barely had enough to eat, I stood next to you. I saw you leave piles of gold for them on their dusty windowsills after they went to bed. I saw you wait to see that the food you sent them anonymously each day arrived, and I saw you leave every time before they began to eat it. I saw the children go out in new clothes, the fathers walk around with the confidence of men who have found better jobs, the mothers smile, really smile, for the first time in years. I saw you bring enormous joy to thirty families that summer. And none to yourself. Every night, before the sun came up, I followed you to the river and watched as you stood at the edge and I knew exactly how you felt. You were alone. Like me.” She paused. “You were the best man I had ever seen, Miles. You still are. That is why I wanted you to make love to me. Because I love you. Because I have loved you with my entire heart for ten years.”
He stood rigid, looking at her, his eyes, his face, his posture unyielding, unexpressive, and Clio feared the worst.
Then he said, “It was you.”
Clio gazed at him. “What?”
“I thought it was some sort of apparition, but I should have known. It was you all along.”
“You mean, you saw me? Ten years ago?”
“No. But I knew you were there. When you were close by I felt peaceful. Like everything inside me made sense. And then one day you just disappeared.” He moved his glance from hers. “Do you know how long I looked for you? I went back to the river every night that fall but you were never there. I finally gave up and decided that it had been a figment of my imagination.”
Clio could not believe what she was hearing. “Why didn’t you ever speak to me?”
“I was afraid to do anything in case I scared you away. That was why I went to the river. I hoped you would come out and talk to me.” He returned his eyes to hers. “Why did you leave?”
“We moved back to the country and there was no way that I could stay behind. But I read all about you, everything I could put my hands on.” Clio put her palm on his chest. “And in the end you did find me. You have me now.”
“Yes.” Miles looked down at her, no longer a grown man but instead the boy she had followed along the Thames years earlier, the boy who chose to spend his nights not in pleasure but in watching parents treat their children with love, the boy whose loneliness had resonated so powerfully with her own, the boy who had wanted her to talk to him. “Tell me again, Clio,” he whispered forcefully, almost pleading. “Please, Clio, say it again.”
Clio did not need to ask what he meant. “I love you Miles,” she told him, not whispering it. “I love you.”
He would have liked to make her promise she would never leave him again, that she would always be his, but it was a promise he could not ask and she could not give. Instead he bent down and pulled her to him and held her against him with a fierce, overwhelming possessiveness.
“Say it again,” he begged, over and over again, as he pulled her nightgown over her head, “again,” he implored as he admired her in the moonlight, as he kissed her breasts, her neck—his, all his, only his, had always been his. “Again,” he entreated, tumbling her onto his lap, her wetness leaving a glistening trail up the black velvet of his breeches- as he pulled her toward him. “Again,” he demanded as she ran her hands across his chest, pulling his doublet off, kissing him, short nails scratching down his smooth, hot skin. “Again” he ordered as she pushed him onto the bed, “again,” he pled as he slipped inside of her. “Again,” this time a ragged cry as she sat astride him, touching herself while he moved into and out of her body. She was incredible and gorgeous and everything he had not known how to name, and she was his and she loved him. “Again, again again,” he shouted as she collapsed on top of him, panting and moaning, her body pulling him into her, pulsing around him, squeezing him, teasing him, demanding him through one release, and then another. For a long moment Miles floated outside his body, somewhere between consciousness and death, hovered, soared, rose higher and higher on a steadily building surge of pressure and pleasure commingled, and then all of a sudden he heard her say “I love you Miles,” one final time, and his climax slammed through him with an intensity that left him gasping and pleading and shouting her name.
They held each other tightly, neither daring to move, to upset whatever fragile balance they had attained.
Then, suddenly, Clio rolled over and said, “E’en rises and die else young fatter is every moon hide can then and comely.”
Miles had begun to grow accustomed to her flashes of insight, but this was something else. Something more like insanity. “What?” he asked, suddenly worried that the exertion had not been good for her wound. Wounds, he corrected.
But Clio only beamed at him. “Of course,” she said with the air of someone who was not speaking nonsense. “Look in the mirror. It is not how you begin, it is how you end up. I need a piece of paper and some ink.”
Miles, still bewildered by her earlier disclosure, managed to decipher that at least the last sentiment was lucid and reached to the table next to his bed to get her some.
“E’en rises and die else young fatter is every moon hide can then and comely,” she repeated, then added, “E-R-A-D-E-Y-F-I-E-M-H-C-T-A-C,” pronouncing the first letter of each word as she wrote it.
“He are a dee if I’m ache sea tea?” Miles asked, misunderstanding what she had said. “Is that supposed to be a poem? Because,
amore,
I’m a bit rusty bu—”
“No. It’s E-R-A-D-E-Y-F-I-E-M-H-C-T-A-C. Which, read backward, as in a mirror, is C-A-T-C-H-M-E-I-F-Y-E-D-A-R-E. ‘Catch me if ye dare.’ ”
At least now she was speaking in sentences that resembled English. “Catch me if ye dare. Is
that
part of a poem?”
Clio held the paper out to him. “No. It is what is underlined in your copy of
A Compendium of Vampires.
I saw it two nights ago when I was waiting for you to yell at me. Remember, when I asked you why you had marked up your book?”
“I would like it to be noted that I didn’t yell at you,” Miles put in, studying the paper. “I did nothing like yell at you.”
“You have a remarkably forbearing nature,” Clio said. “Which is one of the things I love most about you, and which we will discuss at another time.” At the word “love” Miles smiled enormously and it was all Clio could do to stay focused on her explanation. “Those were the words underlined. At first I could not figure out what they meant, but then in the crypt it became clear.”
“How did you find the passages with the underlining in the first place?”
“I don’t know. I think—that is right. When I picked up the book there was a page marked with a yellow ribbon. As if someone had been reading it.”
“Or wanted to draw our attention to it,” Miles said, growing suddenly more serious. “Was that the first time you had noticed the bookmark?”
“Yes,” Clio began, then stopped. Braided yellow ribbon. Braided yellow ribbon. Something clicked in her memory.
A hundred eyes, a hundred mouths, leering at her, calling to her. An ear, an eye, a
braided yellow ribbon
lying on a worktable, waiting to be sewn on to the head of a doll. “A souvenir,” she breathed. Her fingers were trembling. “It was a souvenir. The vampire took it from the doll house, where I found the first body. And he left it for us to discover.”
Miles watched her. “Are you sure?”
She nodded. Then she looked at him. “He is taunting us. Daring us. ‘Catch me if you dare.’ ”
“He is doing more than that. He is laughing at us. Because the fact that he had access to my library means that he is part of my household. And unless I am mistaken, it is the same person who entered the library the night we, ah, discovered that the vampire was from Devonshire.”
Clio’s eyes got enormous. “Do you mean that he was the intruder? The person who walked in while we were—”
“—curing your hiccups. Yes. Because the
Compendium
was here in my chamber constantly from that time until you saw the bookmark. No one would have had access to it since that night.”
“What about your staff? Are there any members from Devonshire?”
“I am sure there are, but none of them are part of the contingent designated for my apartments. Each of them was handpicked.”
Clio wondered at that, but decided to ask why another time. “That seems to settle it. The vampire is here. Which means all we need to do is figure out who it was that entered the reading alcove the night we were in there.”
“Unfortunately, it will not be that easy. I already asked the men who were stationed at the top of the stairs to discourage guests from wandering into the private apartments who they had seen go by, just in case whomever entered the alcove spotted you and needed to be subdued with an explanation. Apparently, every member of Mariana’s party, and all my cousins, drifted upstairs at one point or another during the evening. The only person they did not recall seeing was your grandmother.”
“Too bad,” Clio mused. “Of everyone she is the one I should most like to imagine as a vampire.” They were both silent for a moment, thinking, and then she went on. “Eliminating your staff and your cousins and my grandmother—and I suppose,” she added reluctantly, “Mariana—leaves only those two men who are with her. Her tutor and my grandmother’s secretary.”
“And Sir Edwin,” Miles added gently.
“Sir Edwin? My uncle?” Clio was incredulous. “That makes no sense. He may be fairly vacant, but I am sure he is not evil.” She paused. “At least, I think I am.” But he had been around twenty-five years earlier when the first vampire attacks began. And he had acted strangely when they discussed the vampire. Still, it was hard to believe. “Besides,” she added, “he is not from Devonshire.”
“But his nurse may have been,” Miles pointed out. “Fifty years ago no noblewoman would have dreamed of nursing her own child. And, unless I am mistaken, he is the only one who actually managed to visit you at Newgate.”
“How nice of him,” Clio replied. “He has always been the only member of the family to care about me. It would be fitting if he were the vampire. Very well. We can include him as a suspect. Which means that we have three rather than two.”
“I’ll order my men to search their chambers tomorrow for evidence that one of those three might be from Devonshire. As well as for more souvenirs.”
“And disguises.”
“Disguises?”
“Whoever it is, must have a very good disguise or you would have recognized him from three years ago.”
“True. I’ll have them search for disguises as well.”
Clio scrunched up her nose. “Why wait until tomorrow? Why not do it tonight? Why not confront all three of them right now?”
“Because I like the thought of the vampire passing an uncomfortable night. I would be willing to wager there will not be a body tomorrow, simply because he is sitting in his room wondering what is taking us so long and waiting for us to act. As I see it, making him anxious is about the only leverage we have over him.” He paused while Clio thought about it.
“I think I believe that. But we lose the advantage as soon as we search. Wouldn’t it be better to do it clandestinely?”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps we can use his expectations to our advantage as well.” Miles warned to his theme. “I can have my men go through the motions of making a thorough search tomorrow during the day, and then, tomorrow night, when everyone is at the ball, we will go back and really search ourselves.”
“We? Together?”
“Do I have any choice? I would not trust this to anyone else, and if I go without you, you will just follow me.”
Clio blushed. “Am I that predictable?”
“Rarely,” Miles assured her. S’teeth she was beautiful.
She made a face at him. “Although I do not enjoy admitting it, I like your idea. But how will you justify the search?”
“I’ll just say I lost something,” Miles explained vaguely. There was something he had been planning to lose before his wedding anyway and this would be a perfect cover. “Do you think Toast would be willing to help us?”
“Does your cook make meat pies?”
“Good,” he answered definitively. “Then it is settled.”
“Yes,” Clio agreed. A thick silence settled in the air. “Isn’t it rather incredible? From out of hundreds of possible suspects, we have been able to narrow it to three in less than a quarter of an hour.”
“It is too easy,” Miles said.
Clio nodded slowly. “Maybe he is deliberately trying to deceive us. Maybe, somehow, he managed to sneak in here and leave the book, to deflect guilt from himself and make it seem like someone in the house.”