A Taste of Blood Wine

by Freda Warrington

  "I think," said Karl, "that we should go back upstairs." His expression brought her unease crawling back. Far from condescending to her, his eyes were intent upon her yet inwardly distracted, as if she had said something to disturb him. "I should like to talk about this, but it is very cold down here. You are shivering. Would you like my coat around your shoulders?"

  ***

  Karl was used to women—men, too—being drawn to him and becoming infatuated. He took it for granted, disregarded it. It was not him they were seeing but an outward shape, an arrangement of lines and planes and light that for some reason struck the eye as beauty. And more than that, they were touched by a vampire glamour, the subconscious recognition of something intangibly alien; the lure that brought his prey to him, even if he chose not to take advantage. The vivacity of Madeleine and Elizabeth was pleasant, mesmerising, yet at the same time he regarded the rapt attention they paid him with cynicism.

  But Charlotte was different. She rarely met his eyes, she was abrupt and so withdrawn that her presence had so far made hardly any impression on him at all. She was a colourless creature, hiding within a shell, camouflaged against the rocks.

  Yet when she said, "Have you thought what a ghost might be?" Karl began to notice her for the first time. She had the beguiling look of an actress on film; too great a contrast between the darkness that rimmed her large eyes and the pallor of her skin, as if she were permanently tired; an expression of solemn vulnerability. Her hair, a mixture of russet and gold, was not cut short but coiled at the nape of her neck, as if she were either unconscious of fashion or deliberately defiant of it.

  And she was a paradox. She shied away from people, even those who offered no harm; yet she walked boldly through a dark place that would make even the most sensible people hesitate. She spoke of ghosts not with a shiver but with analytical, open curiosity.

  Only once she smiled, there in the darkness, as if unaware of her surroundings. And the smile transformed her face into pearl and gold, as if she had walked into the sun.

  He was in no position to dismiss the supernatural, even if he had no explanation. He had felt the heavy, stinging chill of the cellar and had consciously desired to leave it.

  But Charlotte refused the offer of his coat around her shoulders. Like a delicate sea creature drawing in its tentacles she folded herself away, said nothing as they mounted the stairs. And in the kitchen she went straight to Anne and David, almost physically hiding behind them.

  They talked about the ghostly cat but it was a joke now. Karl liked the way the English made a joke of everything. Then David pulled his watch out of his waistcoat and said, "Good Lord, is that the time? I have to drive Edward back to London; his family are expecting him at two. Annie, you and Charlotte carry on with your ride while I take Karl back to Parkland. I'll telephone later."

  Anne pulled a face at him. "I hope I shall see more of you than this when we're married!"

  David embraced her and whispered in her ear, making her laugh. Charlotte stood apart, self-contained, uneasy. There were few people who could not be put at ease by friendly questions, but when Karl went to her, all he drew from her were monosyllables. She had withdrawn the fragile tendrils of communication that she had extended in the cellar. Her eyes, her voice, her self; she would give him nothing. She was wishing herself elsewhere. Sadly he let her be and a moment later she was gone from him physically as well.

  ***

  Edward was subdued but listless in the Bentley. His face was wax-grey with exhaustion and he chain-smoked nervously throughout the journey, compressing the cigarettes between shaking fingers.

  "Those damned sedatives leave you with a hell of a hangover," he said, trying to make light of it. "It's a swine, having the morning after without the night before."

  "I'm sorry you had such a rotten time," said David.

  "No, I should apologise. Didn't mean to embarrass you like that, but I couldn't—couldn't—" He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his fingers to his colourless forehead.

  "It's all right, old man. It's all forgotten now." David took one hand off the wheel and patted Edward's shoulder. "But I do think you should see your doctor as soon as you get home. In fact I'm going to make sure you do."

  "There's no need."

  "I insist, I'm afraid."

  "I don't need the bloody head-doctor, damn you!" Edward sighed and slumped back in his seat. "Sorry. Sorry."

  "I'm doing it for purely selfish reasons," David said, pretending to be off-hand. "I need you fit to start work with me as soon as possible. There's a hell of a lot of work to do on that old house, never mind taking over the estate."

  "I know that. I won't let you down." Edward lit a new cigarette, wound down the window and let the dead stub tumble away on the wind. "I'm not mad, David."

  "I know that."

  "But you don't! You're just like all the others, 'Poor Edward, such a tragedy, be nice to him because he was such a hero but now he's quite barmy.' You don't understand."

  "What don't I understand?"

  "I am not mad. Last night isn't forgotten, and I can't take back what I said."

  David glanced at him, mildly alarmed. He had hoped that Edward's delusion had been momentary. "Steady on—"

  "No." Edward's voice was tight but calm. "You know I have these feelings about people sometimes. I don't want them, I can't explain them, but haven't they always proved right? I'm not hysterical. Look." He lifted a hand off his knee and held it level. "Trembling a bit but I'm as normal as I'll ever be, in the cold light of day. I will say it again. It's nothing to do with the War or my—my troubles. Karl von Wultendorf is—" He gave a shake of his head. "It does sound too crazy, doesn't it? But I'm deadly serious, old man. Whatever he is, he's dangerous. Please watch out for your family, David, before it's too late."

  * * *

  Chapter Five

  Touching the Light

  Karl could step into a dimension that lay aslant from the corporeal world and move through a whirling landscape in which light seemed solid and rock ran like liquid. Through the Crystal Ring he travelled to distant parts of the country—to a different place each time—to step out of nothingness and feed on some stranger whose face and life meant nothing to him. Then he would vanish again and return to Cambridge, to masquerade as a human being before the kindly, unsuspecting Nevilles. He had not anticipated the pleasure he found in working with them and talking with them, absorbing knowledge and ideas with a thirst almost as great as the need for blood. Another kind of vampirism. And they gave so much, so willingly.

  Soon after Karl arrived in Cambridge, Dr Neville showed him round the city, and Karl drank in its grandeur and beauty with a delight that felt like love. It was almost like being human again. Neville took him into Trinity College Chapel, and there Karl stood gazing at the great statues of Newton and Tennyson and Bacon, timeless in the sombre grey light.

  You are dead, but in your effigies you are preserved forever, larger than life, he thought. My flesh is as unyielding as your marble, but I still move and see and think… Different kinds of immortality. Yet acid would eat you, cold would crack your substance…

  "We come to chapel regularly," Dr Neville was saying. "You are welcome to come with us, naturally."

  "Thank you, but I would rather not," Karl replied. "I am not a church-goer."

  Dr Neville looked shocked, but recovered himself quickly. "Oh. Well, no obligation to come if you don't want to."

  "Do scientists still believe in God, in these days?"

  "I can't speak for the others, but I've no time for this intellectual fashion of questioning His existence. There is more in this universe than science can account for, believe me."

  "That is certainly true," said Karl.

  "The very fact that nature works according to the laws of pure mathematics, and that our brains are capable of understanding those laws, indicates that there must be a mind behind everything. As Einstein puts it, the only incomprehensible thing about the universe is th
at it is comprehensible."

  "But perhaps we comprehend the world as it is, because if it were any different we would not be here to see it."

  Dr Neville gave Karl a shrewd look, amused but sharp. "Not a blasted atheist, are you?"

  "I was brought up as a Catholic," said Karl, "but now I could only describe myself as an agnostic."

  "Can't make your mind up, eh?"

  "Let us say I prefer to keep an open mind." Karl smiled. "And do you also believe in the Devil, sir?"

  George Neville snorted. "Not the sort with horns and a tail. But yes, I definitely believe in the power of evil."

  Karl moved away from him, looking through the screens into the main body of the chapel. It was stately and hushed, seeming in its simple dignity more spiritual than any cathedral.

  There is no unseen barrier that bars me from entering a sacred place, he thought. I could walk up the aisle and lay my hands on the altar without harm. Crucifixes do not burn me. I can walk in daylight. What kind of God would have created a being such as me? If I came here and worshipped, would it be Kristian's God who heard my prayers? I think not. It would be a just God who would not tolerate such a demon in His house… and since I am tolerated, it follows that He does not exist. And that vengeful God of Kristian's who visits vampires on mankind as a plague? Should I worship Him, although He exists only in Kristian's mind?

  They went out into Trinity's Great Court, where sunlight gleamed on golden-beige stone and moisture glittered on the wide expanses of grass.

  "Even if science finds all the answers," Dr Neville went on as they walked, "it would not prove that God does not exist. On the contrary, if we ever achieve the ultimate object of our search, the grand unifying principle of nature, it might prove that He does. But we are very far from it. I hold that the chief achievement of physics in this century is not the theory of relativity or quantum theory, but the recognition that we are still not in touch with ultimate reality. Ah, to find one sweeping theory that encompasses everything… "

  Karl was thoughtful, reflecting on how vast Dr Neville's ambition was… and yet how blinkered. There is a whole dimension and layer of existence of which you know nothing! He said, "How could there ever be a grand unifying principle, when there exist creatures in this world that defy the laws of nature?"

  "What creatures?"

  Karl knew he should not have broached the subject, but the physicist's complacency goaded him. "I speak hypothetically, of course; but suppose there were beings that could see things that are meant to be invisible. The wind, and the magnetic fields of the earth."

  Dr Neville looked puzzled, but rose to the challenge. "First I would question what it is that they think they can actually see. We may think we can see the wind, but in fact we are only seeing certain indicators; clouds moving, trees leaning in a certain direction, debris flying through the air. An artists knows all the tricks to use to paint the invisible, so we can look at a landscape and say, 'Can't you just see the wind?' Likewise, if you scatter iron filings in the field of a magnet, the patterns you see are not the actual lines of force but only the indicator of where they are."

  "That is the viewpoint of human experience," said Karl. "Yet what if there were a being outside your experience, that could actually perceive the atmosphere as dense enough to touch? Suppose I could see shape and colour in it; that I could walk upon it, as a man walks across hills. And suppose the magnetism of the earth also became tangible to me so that I could navigate by it as I walked on the wind. How could the laws of physics explain such a change in nature?"

  "Ah. If such a creature could be proved to exist, by theory or experiment, I would question whether it was the world that had changed, or your perception of it. An observer on the ground might notice that it was what had changed—that your body had become thinner and lighter than air, so much so that air seemed solid to you. And perhaps this ratified form is deflected by magnetism, as atomic particles are."

  Karl was pleasantly surprised that Dr Neville had not dismissed his apparently bizarre question. "Yet I do not in turn see the observer as a proportionately dense and solid body, but rather as a gathering of light and heat. Of energy."

  Dr Neville was filling his pipe as they walked. "Well, that is akin to the paradox of relativity. A pilot flying his plane at close to the speed of light, lying flat in the line of flight, would appear to observers on the ground to have become a dwarf. Yet if he looks in a mirror in the cockpit, he sees no change in his own appearance; to him, it's the folk on the ground who look flattened out."

  Karl was amused. "So, perhaps this impossible situation could be explained by relativity after all."

  "My dear fellow, everything is a question of relativity. There is nothing in the universe that is not happening or moving in relation to everything else." Dr Neville paused to light the pipe, puffing out haloes of smoke. "We are hanging by our feet from a globe that is falling around the sun at twenty miles a second. Meanwhile the sun is moving away from its fellow stars—or are they moving away from us?—while the entire solar system is rushing all of a piece through empty space. It's enough to make one reach for the brandy… Why are you smiling?"

  "Because you answered my question without seeming to think it at all strange."

  "I'm not sure if that is a virtue or a weakness," said Dr Neville. "The more bizarre a problem is, the more it engages my imagination. But I haven't answered it, by the way; doubtless the more I thought about it, the further I would be from an answer."

  Karl said quietly, "My experience, exactly."

  ***

  Within a few weeks of returning to Cambridge, Charlotte began to fear that she was going mad.

  Whatever she believed about ghosts, she was not fey or gullible; she knew the presences she had sometimes sensed could be as much a product of her mind as of reality. There was no explanation for the apparition she saw in the middle of a bright October morning, except that the strain of her life was eroding her sanity.

  She had delivered a message from her father to the Cavendish Laboratory, glad of a chance to escape the house. As she came out of the dark archway into Free School Lane—the laboratory standing sternly behind her and the grimy monasterial walls of Corpus Christi College in front—she saw a man standing in the side gateway to the college. Something about him caught her attention, a quality of stillness that reminded her of Karl. But his eyes seemed too large, set too wide apart, and he was staring at her with a look of malevolent amusement that chilled her to the bone. She only looked back for a second or two and then he vanished. Literally vanished, flicked out of existence as if he had never been there.

  Charlotte stared at the empty gateway then reeled away, half-running along the lane to King's Parade. There she slowed down and walked in a daze, surrounded by the hiss of bicycles and the flapping of black gowns, letting the bustle ease her back into reality. Opposite were the spires and arched windows of King's College, solid and enduring yet seeming light as honeycomb, only lightly tethered to the ground. Risking injury between the weaving bicycles she hurried across the road and into King's Chapel. There was no one inside. She sat down, folded her hands, and prayed.

  She knew Corpus Christi was meant to be haunted, but by a ghost of the seventeenth century, not the twentieth. The modern, cruel-eyed young man was so vivid in her mind that she could recall the folds of his scarf and the tilt of his hat… yet he had disappeared. Why am I seeing things? Lord, please help me…

  The chapel calmed her. The slender lines of stone soaring up to the intricately fanned ceiling, the windows crackled with jewel-bright colours, pierced her with their beauty. Was it God she felt here, or was it only the way the light and air gathered dawn-golden under the branching vault; the echo of all the thousands of souls who had filed in and out through the ages, the power of the kings who had built it? She didn't know. To sit in the silence and the light while she gathered her thoughts was enough.

  She had envisioned her father's laboratory, her refuge no longer, becomin
g a cage of lions. In reality it had all been quite ordinary, externally at least, and she had fallen back into the pattern of work as if nothing had happened. Inside, though, the changes and the effort of suppressing her anxiety were wearing her thin.

  Outwardly, Henry was still the same unthreatening figure; bulky, untidy, forever pushing his spectacles along the bridge of his nose as he worked. Yet the knowledge that he was to be her husband imbued his every movement with an intangible significance. It seemed so unreal. Previously she had been at ease with him, but now she felt as if she had wronged him, or owed him some enormous debt. Whatever this feeling was, it was not love.

  It wasn't as though he'd made things difficult for her, or embarrassed her by being emotional. In fact he had been quite sweet, which made it worse. When she had arrived home from Parkland Hall he had been waiting, breathless and pink-faced with nerves, clutching a diamond ring in a box.

  "You must think I'm such a fool," he'd said, "but I simply didn't know how to ask you. I'm so glad, Charlotte. Um—I'm not awfully good at this romantic stuff, so we'll just, er, take it as read and carry on as normal, shall we?"

  He kissed her on the cheek, as if kissing a maiden aunt. Charlotte was taken too much by surprise to say, "No, it's a mistake, I can't marry you!"—and now it was too late. The trap had closed. Henry being what he was, they had carried on as if nothing had changed; except that the awful knowledge that they were to be married loomed over her. She couldn't back out… and even her father was pleased about it now.

  "Never quite imagined my little girl getting married, somehow," he had said, patting her shoulder. "But of course, now I think about it, it's perfect. Henry and you… "

  Henry, and me, and Father… of course. Henry was ten years older than Charlotte, had been with her father as student and postgraduate. Her father was closer to him than to David; he was almost a surrogate son. For Charlotte to marry him was like the bonding of a magic circle.