Karen Essex

by Karen Essex

  “I am a truthful girl,” I insist. I have seen the girls and held their hands in mine and listened as they sang my name with their beautiful, high voices. I do not lie, and I do not understand why the adults insist that I do.

  “Go kneel in the corner until your father comes home,” she says.

  She drags me in the house, and I kneel with my face to the wall, my stomach turning sick because I know that when my father comes home I will get a spanking. The light outside changes and it is dark and I am still kneeling and it is very painful. My mother finally tells me to get up and eat my supper. My father is still not home. My mother’s frown is a fixture now. Over a lumpy stew, she tells me that it is my fault; my witchery is keeping my father away. “This house will be without a man if you do not change your ways,” she says.

  The past faded away. I realized that I was curled up like a baby in the garden, my stomach still upset from the memory. I was cold and cramped, and I did not know what to do with myself. I stayed there for a while, waiting to see if the voices of the girls would come back, but all was silent except the distant sound of the river. I sat up, thinking that a walk to its banks might be what I needed to clear my mind. Perhaps the sight of the rushing water would sweep away my bad memories.

  Luckily, I had worn a thick woolen skirt and calf-length leather boots against the unforgiving coastal weather, and I set out through a half-cleared path that I had trodden as a child. My skirt caught on thistle, and as I bent down to free it, I saw that a small red fox—a female, I somehow knew beyond doubt—was staring at me as if asking whether I was lost. I found myself telling her that I knew my way, and she turned and skittered into the brush, waving good-bye with her bushy tail. Beech and oak trees, some with broken branches and misshapen trunks, covered the glen leading to the river. The sun’s glow had faded almost to dusk, and I hurried so that I would not be trying to find my way back in the dark.

  Tall grass lined the banks of the river. The current was even mightier up close than it had looked from the bridge. The water leapt over the black rocks chaotically, angrily, spilling its white froth as it raced to the mouth where it would be set free into the sea. I walked closer to the river’s edge until water splashed my skirt. I took off one of my gloves and reached out to put my hand in the water. Its bracing coldness shocked me, and I withdrew my hand, but I saw a strange reflection in the water, as if two people were standing behind me and I was watching their shadows on the current. I heard men’s angry voices and something like a howl. I turned around. The same strange feeling of falling came over me, and I shut my eyes, but did not like what I saw in my mind’s eye—two bodies intertwined beside the river, two men fully clothed, grappling with each other, hitting and punching. Shivering violently as if I were wet—as if I were in the midst of the water treatment again—I opened my eyes.

  The Count was sitting on the ground next to me. My teeth were chattering and my eyes wet. Tears came running down my face—but from what cause, I did not know. He put his arms around me, and I sank into him. His wool coat was thick and scratchy, and I burrowed into his chest.

  Do you remember?

  I do not want to remember.

  You must, Mina.

  Images that I did not want to see and sounds that I did not want to hear came back to me: the sickening thud of a punch; a preternaturally strong hand upon a neck, gasping, choking; a body gone limp and disappearing into the water. “No, no, no!” I screamed, beating my fists against his chest until the futility of it overtook me and I let my arms drop helplessly and looked up at him. “Why?” I asked. “Why did you do it?”

  “For seven long and painful years, I watched you and I did not interfere,” he said. “You were born with tremendous powers. You were unlike any mortal child I have ever seen, and you suffered for it. You were just a small thing, even for your age, and I used to take the form of animals and visit you so that I could watch over you and protect you. Sometimes we talked, sometimes at this very spot. But whenever you told your mother that you had had a conversation with a fox or a hare, she got very angry with you.

  “Your father was suspicious of you from birth, but he did not panic until he saw you change shape. I think you remember the night. Your mother tried to convince him that he had been drinking and was imagining things, but he knew better. He wanted a confession from you that you were in league with some sort of evil entity, so he tied you to your bed for two days and starved you. But, of course, you could not tell him what he wanted to hear.

  “He decided that you were a changeling—that the fairies had taken his real child away. He wanted to throw you on the fire to see if you would burn like a human child, for it is said that changelings do not burn. I did not have to interfere because your mother was able to stop him. She insisted that they consult a wise woman, which was against everything he believed in. The old woman told them that you were a fairy-struck child and that he must take you to the river every morning before dawn for seven days. If he dipped you twice in the water, calling upon the Blessed Trinity and all the saints to heal you, it would chase the magic out of you. After two days of this, you contracted pneumonia and almost died.”

  “Dear God, the water cure!” I said. “It had been done to me before.” The feeling of drowning, of being held down against my will in frigid water, had been all too familiar.

  The Count continued. “Despite that you were on the verge of death, he was determined to do it again. Though your skin and lips were blue and you could barely take a breath, he wrapped you in a blanket and carried you to the water. I could read your body and knew that it would mean certain death if he proceeded. I tried to speak to him, but he would not listen. He told me to stay out of his business. ‘I do not know you, stranger,’ he said. He thought that I was one of the Sidhe come to rescue his own. He strode right past me with you in his arms and put you down by the side of the river. He was going to bathe you in its waters again. I asked him to stop, but he did not.”

  He did not have to finish his story, for I remembered it all—the two men fighting, one delivering the fatal blow and the other floating away down the river. “I carried you back to the house. Your mother never knew how you got home, which made her all the more afraid of you. I wiped your memory of the entire experience, which was easy to do because you were young and impressionable, and you had a fever at that time that made it difficult for you to distinguish between real and imagined events. His body was found that evening downriver.”

  I rocked back and forth, holding my arms around my chest as if I were trying to prevent my body from shattering into little pieces. “Why did he hate me so?”

  “Your father knew about your grandmother and the shame she had brought upon the family. He did not want that to happen to him.”

  “What do you know about my grandmother?” I asked. “My mother would never tell me anything about her, just that if I was not careful, I would end up just like her.”

  “You met your grandmother, though you did not know it at the time. But you were enchanted with her stories.”

  He waited for the truth to dawn on me.

  Vivienne?

  “No, that cannot be,” I said, growing more upset at the idea of a madwoman being my grandmother. “My grandmother’s name was Una. Why are you telling me this? Why do you continue to fill my head with things that will make me go mad?” I got up to run away, but I did not get ten paces before he was standing in front of me, and he caught me in his arms and held me tight. I wanted to take shelter in his strength, but at this moment, he was the bearer of information that I was sure was going to make me go insane. He read my thoughts, of course.

  “You cannot hide from the truth, Mina. Anytime you try to argue with truth, you will lose. Anytime you try to evade it or run away from it, it will find you down the road. Now sit down and just try to listen.”

  Though I had not run but a few steps, my heart raced, and blood swirled around in my head, tightening into a band of pressure. I wanted to escape, but I felt
too sick and too afraid to move. We sat down together on a big gray rock that I remembered standing on as a little girl to watch the flow of the river.

  “Growing up, Vivienne was called Una, which means ‘unity’ in the old language. ‘Winifred’ is the Anglicized version of the name. She was very rebellious against her rigid father, intrigued with the old religions, and also very lustful. The family was racked with shame over her pregnancy, which came after she had slept with many of the local men. No one was certain who the father was, not even Una herself. Una’s own father, your great-grandfather, decided that the best thing to do was to send her away for good, but publicly they declared her dead and buried her. Your mother’s grandfather was Anglo-Irish and had considerable holdings at one time. He took your mother away from Una and raised her. He also paid for Una’s care.”

  “His trust paid for my schooling and comes to me still,” I said, wondering how I would have reacted to Vivienne if I had known the truth.

  “No, it was I who did that. Your great-grandfather was furious that your mother ran away with a Catholic not of her class. When he died, she inherited nothing. I set up the trust as if it were from the old man. I kept the stipend small so that no one would be suspicious or try to lay their hands on the money.”

  “You paid for me to attend Miss Hadley’s School for all those years?”

  “It seemed the safest environment for you, considering the circumstances,” he said. “I could not take you from your mother. You were a child. You were terrified enough as it was.”

  I was trying to reconcile all that Vivienne had told me with what I had now experienced myself. “But Vivienne’s stories about the fairies? Was she mad?” Of course, the question I really wanted to ask was, am I mad?

  “Una had heard the stories of the Sidhe all her life and adopted them as her own. But she heard them from those who had actually experienced these things.”

  Whereas I?

  “Who do you think told Una those stories?” He waited for me to hazard a guess, but I could not venture one.

  “Her own grandmother, who was very powerful. The Gift often skips several generations until it manifests again. And though it skipped Una, as much as she desired it, it has manifested again in you.”

  “This is too much for me to apprehend,” I said. I slid off the rock and sat on my heels, trying to absorb all that I had learned and all that he told me. “My great-grandfather locked his daughter away, and my own father would have killed me? What sort of family is this?”

  “Your father feared you. And so you spent years fearing yourself.”

  I do not know if it was the shock of the truth, or the relief of finally knowing all, but I crumpled to the ground and began to cry again. He let me sob for a little while, and then he took me in his arms and raised my tear-streaked face. But I was not ready to be appeased. “What about Mrs. O’Dowd? Have you been watching over her since her childhood? Did you have to murder someone in her family too?”

  He smiled at me with the benevolence of a saint. “Are you jealous, Mina? You were not even born at the time of our brief liaison.”

  I felt foolish. Had I expected him to be faithful to me for seven centuries? When, apparently, for a good deal of that time, I was dead?

  “I have had other female companions, but you are the only one I have wanted to go through time with. I have endured your interminable cycles of birth and aging and death and rebirth; and every time, it has cost me a piece of my soul. I want you forever, but I wanted you to know the truth of what happened—the truth about your family history, and about my history—before you made a choice.”

  “It is difficult to contain all this in my mind,” I said.

  “You must give up the very act of analysis. You have a gift that is greater than the conscious, rational mind. It is the key to unlocking all mystery, and it is the very thing that you always try to deny.”

  I had spent my life denying my gifts because they were frightening to me and to others, and trying to find a place in the orderly, rational world. But the rational world—the world of my father, of the asylum doctors, of all those from whom the Count had kept me safe—was where my nemeses existed. Despite how difficult it was to hear the things he was telling me, he was not the one to fear.

  The sun had gone down, leaving us in the steel gray November dusk. “There is one more thing that I do not know, my love,” I said. “I do not know why I would ever have chosen a life without you.”

  “At the time, you had your reasons. I did not agree with them, and I tried everything to change your mind.”

  “You are my refuge, my sanctuary from everything that would harm me. We won’t part again, will we?”

  He stood and offered me his hand. “I want to show you something,” he said. “There is a place near here for which you once had great fondness.”

  I started to walk toward the carriage, but he stopped me. “If we take the carriage, we will miss twilight time.”

  He picked me up in his arms and started walking back toward the house. But soon, his feet were off the ground and we were moving at great speed, so fast that the landscape whizzed by me in a blur of browns and greens. I was exhilarated and afraid. I had experienced this once before with him, but not at this speed and not for this lengthy a distance. We seemed to be following the river, the wind whooshing past my ears. Beyond was the great glassy dark of the sea, and behind us, the outlines of a mountain range. It looked as if we were going to collide into the side of one of the tall cliffs, when we suddenly were standing inside one of its alcoves that overlooked the bay.

  My heart was pounding from the elation of flying, but I was thankful to have my feet on something solid. The alcove was dark and not very deep. I turned around to look at the sea, but panicked when I saw that my feet were on the precipice. I cried out, losing my balance and falling forward, when his arm caught me from behind and pulled me to safety. I fell back against him, looking over the bay. On one side, the gilded moon, brilliant though days past its fullness, hung over the water, while on the west side, the sun’s orb had almost sunken into the sea, and the last violet mist of daylight was fading into darkness.

  He wrapped his arms tight around my waist and put his lips to my ear. “Have you forgotten this place?”

  I closed my eyes, and in my mind’s eye, I saw us lying on a blanket of fur in the little cave, a cube of peat burning in the corner, lighting up the craggy dome. “Of course I remember it. This was our secret place, our eagle’s perch. This is where we came to be alone and to stay dry when the rains poured outside.”

  “Yes. Do you remember what we used to do?” He put his hands on my temples. It is still happening, right here in this very place. We are still here making love. We never left.

  I let myself rest against him, willing my mind to go blank. Then I saw myself on top of him, looking down at his face while I rode him, his blue eyes watery with pleasure and made translucent by the light of the fire burning in the deep end of the alcove. My hair was long enough to cover the length of my torso, and he moved it aside so that he could see my body. In my memory, I saw his younger face—eager and innocent—as he tossed his neck aside, baring it to me.

  Do it now.

  I ran my finger along his tender nape, making an incision in the skin, which burst with crimson color, drawing my lips to it.

  He interrupted my memory now with his lips on my neck, kissing it gently, taking my flesh between his teeth, not breaking the skin but igniting every nerve in my body. I turned around to face him, knowing that he had read my mind and revisited the memory too. Wordlessly, he opened the collar of his shirt and exposed his neck and throat to me. His tendons and muscles were prominent, like sculpted ivory, and inviting. Together, with our thoughts, we opened the skin, and the cut filled with a peculiar pool of red—brighter than ordinary human blood, and glimmering. He was perfectly still, and I knew that he could not encourage, nor could he force. I had to do this entirely of my own volition.

  I covered
the wound with my lips, taking in his essence, and it assaulted my senses. The blood flowed into my mouth, and, like the rest of his being, it hummed with a life of its own that was palpable to my lips and tongue as I took in more of it. At first it was a challenge to get enough of it, but I sucked harder, letting the stream fill my mouth and slowly slither down my throat. I kept my lips tight on his skin; and he pressed my head into his neck, encouraging me. At one moment, I began to feel weak from the hard work of getting the blood from his vein, but I continued, sucking like a baby at its mother’s breast. Something inside me drove me on—desperation to have him in me, to make him part of me, to have his blood mingling with mine, and this time, forever. I imagined it coming into my body and integrating with all that I was. I drank furiously, oblivious to him and to all things outside of what my lips were doing. I was in the thrall of taking him this way, feeling unleashed, as if I could go on forever, when he pulled my hair, detaching me and snapping my head back so that he could look at my face.

  I tried to free myself so that I could go back for more, but he held my hair firmly in his grip. His shirt was torn and the skin on his neck broken. A trickle of blood leaked out of the corner of the wound. He passed the two fingers he always used to take my pulse over the wound, closing it and sealing my source.

  At sea, 15 November 1890

  From the moment that I took his blood, until days later when we left Ireland, he did not let me out of his sight. He treated me like a baby, bathing and dressing me himself, bringing me my food, feeling my pulses, listening to my heartbeat, and giving me potions to drink. I did not welcome this pampering. My energy was so high that my ears buzzed. Something had ignited inside me, something that I did not know how to quell, and I tried to get him to let me drink from him again.