flinched then fell against
him, silent, trembling. "There's nothing we can do. Let's go," he
whispered.
"We
can't. We have to tell someone."
"We will, but anonymously. Do
you want to have to explain how you knew the man?" He didn't wait for an
answer. Instead, he ordered the dog to the top of the bank, then, using the
leash for support, he helped Mina to climb over it. "Now, I want you to listen
to me this time, all right? I'm going to take you to the carriage. I want you
to wait there with the driver while I go inside the house and make certain that
there is nothing to connect you with this crime."
"I've
done nothing. I wasn't even in London until tonight."
"And Ujvari has been dead for
some time. But he is dead because of you." Mina stiffened, but Gance went
on. "My reputation can survive a link to this murder. Yours is, forgive
me, my dear, expendable. But your husband's . . ." He left the thought
unfinished, but Mina understood. Solicitors had to be above reproach.
She waited in the carriage, her eyes
fixed on the path until he returned from his search of the cottage, the
agreement and some letters clutched in his hand, along with the cover of the
leatherbound journal that he had found in the stove. It was over. She would never
know what had been written in the book now.
"Did
anyone come by?" Gance asked his driver. "Someone did while you and
the lady were at the house. A homeless old beggar
from the looks of him. I gave
him a few coins and he went on." He pointed in the direction the man had
gone.
"Go the
other way," Gance ordered. "And put Byron up front with you. He's far
too muddy for the back."
As soon as Gance sat beside her, Mina buried her face against the
thick sable collar of his coat. He held her tightly as they rode away, and
scanned the fog through the open window, noting with relief the glow rising
through the mists behind them. By the time they reached his house in St.
James, Mina's tears had stopped, but her face still showed grief, and the
terrible depth of her guilt.
Whatever
impression Gance's house might have made on Mina was lost by the evening's
shock. She scarcely noticed the
magnificent
brick mansion with its tall white marble pillars. She did not comment on the
drawing room with its Parisian upholstered settees in rococo shades of plum
and gray and teal, or the tasseled pillows scattered across the floor. She paid
no attention to the black walls with their patterned stripes in red and green,
the oriental lacquer desk with its carved dragon and peacock designs or the
huge water pipe from India already filled with opium that Gance had purchased
to help prompt her confession. Instead, she sat on the edge of one of the
padded divans, her back stiff, her hands clasped firmly together in her lap.
Gance rang
for his butler, who joined them quickly. Though the man wore a dressing gown
instead of a uniform, he listened
attentively to Gance's
whispered instructions and disappeared to get a carafe of brandy, a warming
stand and two glasses.
Gance
prepared the drinks himself. After handing one to Mina, he stood behind her,
kneading his fingers into her tense shoulders
while she drank it. He poured
her another. "You should get out of those damp clothes and into a hot
bath," he suggested.
"I'm
leaving in the morning. I am going home and telling Jonathan everything that's
happened. I've been keeping so many secrets.
Gance, I think it's time to
confess."
"Start
with me," he said softly. "Tell me why Arthur drinks so excessively
and raves in his sleep. Tell me why that man's body was
mutilated so gruesomely. Tell me about this." He touched his
collar above the place where she had bitten him. "After tonight I deserve
an answer, don't you think?"
"You
won't believe it," she said.
"After
what I saw tonight, I'm prepared to believe anything." He'd tried to be
witty, she knew, but his words only brought back
the memory of Ujvari's
bloated body. "Come on," he added after a moment. "Bathe while
we talk."
"Very well," she said wearily. She pulled the first
pages of the translation from her bag then followed him upstairs. He helped
her with the hooks down the back of her blouse then let her undress. She did
not ask him to leave the room, nor did he volunteer to do so. They had mated,
and the sight of each other's bodies was natural now. While she undressed, he
read the pages she gave him.
Then he followed her into the
bathroom.
As she soaked in the ornate
porcelain tub with its gently sloping back, she told him about Lucy and Van
Helsing and their desperate chase across the Continent. She told him too about
how she found the book Ujvari had been translating. Sometime during her
account, he left her, and returned stripped of his tie and vest and carrying
the water pipe. He set the pipe the edge of the bath, and took an occasional
pull as he listened to her. He offered it to her three times before she took
it.
As he
promised, the drug moved through her, relaxing her through the terrible
revelations of her dark passion for Dracula-of how
he had fed on her and forced
her to share his blood as well. "Now his life is within me like some caged
animal, demanding release.
You are a part of that,
Gance. I'm sorry. If what I did to you repulsed you . . ."
"Repulsed!" He unbuttoned
his collar to show her the purple bruise and the bite still red at its center.
"Mina, this mark I hide so diligently is hardly the worst wound a woman
has inflicted on me in a moment of passion. If you like I can show you the
place where a usually sensible woman . . ."
"Gance, don't make light of this. It's far more serious than
I've let on." The room seemed to move around her, in a languid spiral with
her and Gance at the center. She took his hand and rested it on her cheek.
"I think this will be our last night together and not a good one. And
yet, if I dared . . ." Her voice trailed off; she had said too much.
If she dared what? To stay with
Gance openly? To flaunt all tradition, all accepted social norms? She felt
perverse, unclean even at the thought of it. And yet? Her hand brushed her
forehead where the host had marked her. Realizing what she was doing, she pulled
her hand away and splashed it into the warm water.
"Mina,
don't fear that passion. Let it go. See how far it carries you," Gance
said. He helped her out of the tub, took a large towel
and dried her thoroughly.
When he'd finished, he lit the pipe and passed the stem to her.
"I
can't lose control, Gance. I could kill you the way Dracula killed poor Lucy
and so many others over his centuries of
existence."
"I
don't believe that." He rummaged in the washstand drawer and pulled out a
razor. He opened it and deliberately made a cut
over the mark already on his
neck before handing it to her. "I even trust you with this."
She looked at the blade. The few
drops of blood on its tip shone in the dim lamplight, more precious to her than
any gems he might have offered her. "You must not do this," she
whispered. The room was spinning faster. Her voice seemed too soft, too uncertain,
while inside her someone unseen laughed at her fear. She saw Ujvari's face as
it had been in the cafe, alive and intense, and as it had been in the river,
white with milky open eyes.
Life! The
creature inside her, aroused by the sight and scent of blood, was loose and
howling for it.
"Come with me," Gance whispered. "Come to bed.
Bring the razor, put it on the bed table. If you have the urge to kill, all
you have to do is reach for it. I know you, Mina, better perhaps than you know
yourself. You wouldn't harm me, or anyone. It isn't your nature." As he
spoke, he moved closer to her, a hand reaching out to brush the tip of her bare
breast.
"No!"
She backed away until she reached the wall. "Get away from me!" she
screamed, the blade held high. "Get away!"
He
disobeyed. His fingers moved lightly over her cheek, her neck, her shoulder. He
reached for her hand, saying softly as he did,
"Come, Mina. Come with
me."
"No! Not tonight. Not like
this!" She slashed down, cutting his palm. Instead of retreating, he
turned it toward her, the blood dripping from the cut onto the floor. She
stared at it, then forced her gaze upward toward his face. She stopped to focus
on the small trickle of blood from the cut on his neck. She fell on her knees
before him and pressed his wounded palm to her open mouth, moving her tongue
furiously over it.
Gance had
only expected her to want a taste. This terrible craving to devour was
something unimaginable. "Mina!" he exclaimed,
a hint of panic in his voice.
She raised her head. Her lips were
covered with his blood, her cheeks and chin smeared with it. One hand had a
white-knuckled grip on the razor. Her body shook with an emotion far more
potent than fear. He knew it well, for he was an expert at arousing desire.
"This
is what I've become," she moaned and flung the razor across the room.
"Do you still trust me, Gance?"
He stared at
her face a moment then decided to follow the instinct that had always served
him so well. He held his wounded hand
in front of her, and with the
other pulled Mina to her feet. "I do," he said. "Now, come with
me."
He led her into the bedroom. As her
eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, they focused on the bed, with its
mother-of-pearl inlaid tiles and carved dragon posts. He took her past it, to
the fireplace, where the first of the logs had already burned to embers.
He threw another onto them.
Its bark blazed, sending a soft yellow light through the room.
Without letting go of her arm, he pulled a chair from the shadows
to the front of the hearth. At first she thought it was nothing more than an
oddly designed settee. Then she noted that it had handles rather than arms
rising from its side, and a pair of stirrups mounted in its elaborately carved
paint-and-gilt frame. A flush spread over her face as he led her toward it.
"Gance, is this . . ."
"Silence!"
he ordered, holding up the hand that she had wounded. She glimpsed the blood on
his palm. Without a word, he
pointed to the base, padded
like the seat and back, then to a second pair of brass fittings that would keep
the partner's feet from
slipping backward. He placed her on the seat, arranged her feet in
the stirrups and wrapped her fingers around on the handles. The one he had
grabbed to pull the chair forward had blood on it from his cut. Mina's eyes
focused on it. She thought of ritual defloweration, of blood-coated ritual
phalluses.
"Gance," she whispered
again, and his hand pressed against her lips-feeding her, silencing her. The
cut seeped blood into her mouth as he fell on his knees in front of her, his
free hand and his lips seeking her. With a moan, she relaxed. He had given
himself to her completely. He could do whatever he wished.
Later, as he pounded against her from below, with a rhythm so
strong and deep that it brought both pleasure and pain, she began to suck on
the wound, blood mingling with passion as it had so many times before, with her
doomed immortal lover. When they had finished, they moved to the bed. She
looked at his body against the brown satin sheets, pale as the vampire's had
been against the darkness of his clothing and the night, pale as Ujvari's had
been against the muddy water of the Thames.
As she rolled on her side for still another embrace, she saw that
somehow during the night he'd retrieved the razor she'd thrown away and set it
on the bedside table. "Gance, you mustn't," she said, but made no
move to stop him as he lifted the blade, made a cut on her chest and pressed
his lips against it to drink.
"I take
what I give," he said and raised his head to kiss her, not surprised to
feel a renewed passion in her response.
As Gance
slept beside her, Mina licked her lips and tasted his blood. She inhaled and
smelled his blood. Sleep would bring no
rest tonight, at least not
yet.
She put on her chemise, lit a candle
and went downstairs to the drawing room. She recalled a small electric lamp,
but with the darkness dispelled only by the flickering candlelight, she could
not find it. She pulled the chain for the chandelier instead, and the room was
bathed in more light than would leak in through such heavy curtains by day. She
blinked from the sudden glare. As she did, something moved in the corner. She
gave a small, stifled cry then saw that it was her own reflection in a
gilt-edged cheval screen. Moving closer, she saw the smear of blood across her
cheek, another on her chest. Her eyes were bright, her body flushed with
lingering excitement.
She searched the corners until she found her bag. From it, she
removed the little journal and a pen. The chandelier, with its blaze of
electric lit crystal, was too revealing for her work, so she switched on a
small desk light, turned out the others and, embraced by the shadows around
her, wrote a detailed account of every act she had committed with Gance that
night. She used his name in this account. She would hide no longer.
I wondered often how it
was that Gance and I came to be naked in one another's arms while someone had
died because
of me.
All the horror of the
day seemed to vanish when he came toward me,
she wrote.
Yet through every act of
passion, I
thought of the young man who had spoken so touchingly of the
Countess Aliczni, and I hoped that at some time before he died, he felt such
wondrous ecstasy. I thought that if he had died in grace and God was just, He
would let him feel through my body the magnificence of a skilled touch, an
unrestrained response. I offered the night as a prayer for his soul, as a memorial
to him.
And through it all, there was the blood. The
amount I drank was hardly life threatening, and the desire for it, though as strong
as ever, no longer repulses me. This sudden change of heart would trouble Van
Helsing, and, I suppose, it should trouble me. Instead, though I know that I
have been used, and will certainly be discarded when I no longer please Gance,
I am thankful to him. He has freed the woman that Dracula woke inside me, the
passionate woman that I always feared.
And created a new fear in its place. How can I
return to Jonathan and tell him what I did without promising that I will never
be unfaithful again? I see only one way. I will go to him as Gance went to me.
I will offer myself with the same frank need that Gance displayed. I will make
Jonathan understand that death waits for us all, and the only real regret when
life is over is never having possessed the courage to live.
She put down the pen and closed the
book. All that was left to write about was Ujvari's death, and she would not
delve too deeply into her thoughts on that, at least not now with the darkness
all around her. To do so would be to encourage a return of the old hysteria,
just when she needed to be as sane and cool as possible.
Besides, she
couldn't remain awake any longer. Now that she'd recorded her thoughts,
wakefulness seemed less important.
Fantasies could be feared as the ancient mystics had feared them,
punishing their errant bodies with whips and hair shirts, or they could be
cultivated as a private, harmless pleasure. With that idea firmly in her mind,
Mina returned her journal to her bag and went upstairs to sleep.