Vampire or not, however, he was a most loathsome creature.
“I want you to leave town, Leif Sedgewyck.”
“I will, I promise, at first light.”
“There are plenty of stagecoaches available tonight. I see no reason you should wait.”
He rose to his feet, wincing and clutching his injured belly. I squared my shoulders and raised my hands, in case he wanted to swing at me, but he didn’t even seem to think about it. He was unmanned and pacified.
“What about Olivia?” he asked. “She deserves better than you.”
“Perhaps she does,” I said. “But you’re worse than I, by birth and by merit. Moreover, you’re useless in a fight. You’re no solution to her problems.”
He looked at the ring, and then he slipped it into the pocket of his waistcoat. “Very well,” he said with a bitter laugh. “It seems you have beaten me.” His eyes were turning dark where I had punched him, creating deep hollows against his pale skin, and there was blood in the spaces between his teeth. He looked exactly like a vampire ought to look.
He stalked back into the bar, and I heard him ask Richards to send for a driver. Thus, I had one fewer problem. I considered returning to Olivia, flush with victory over her suitor, to claim her as my own. But I doubted she’d approve of my disposition of Sedgewyck, and anyway, I was angry with her.
I went looking instead for sweet Noreen, Mr. Sedgewyck’s pretty housemaid. He would likely no longer be in need of her services, so she was thus available to service me. I didn’t love her, but she would do for the night.
Chapter 27
Now Hate rules a heart which in Love’s easy chains
Once Passion’s tumultuous blandishments knew;
Despair now inflames the dark tide of his veins;
He ponders in frenzy on Love’s last adieu!
I first learned about love when I was eight years old, from a governess named May Gray. Her job in the daytime was to look after me. At night, she was a whore. As someone experienced with numerous practitioners of both professions, I can safely say she excelled at neither. She smelled like whisky, and her breasts tasted like old sweat, and she was as quick to raise the strap as she was to lift her skirt. My feelings about her have always been conflicted; though I was never passionate about her, she aroused and awoke my nascent passions for proper and liberal application elsewhere. I suppose I appreciate the education she provided.
Real love, though, would wait another two years, until I met Mary Chaworth. In the interim, my great-uncle, the fifth Lord Byron, passed without surviving issue, and my mother and I moved into Newstead Abbey.
Mary was a distant cousin of some sort; the Chaworths lived near the Byron lands, on the edge of Sherwood Forest, and the convenience of proximity had been the seed of a number of love affairs and marriages between the two families. Mr. Hanson thought she was a fine girl, and he encouraged me to quickly betroth myself unto her. Together, he believed, we might build a productive and upright life. My mother agreed, and conspired to foment a match during the summer vacation after my first year at Harrow.
The day I met Mary, though, she was only really interested in one thing:
“Can I see the sword?”
“What sword?” I asked. We were eating a picnic lunch in a disused sheep-tract between Newstead and the Chaworth lands. We’d found a lovely little rise crowned with a diadem of trees, and we sat on the shaded grass to eat cold chicken and drink hock and soda-water. These pastoral environs, according to my mother’s theories, were conducive to burgeoning romance. I still had seven months, at that time, until my eleventh birthday.
“The sword your dad used to murder my grandfather.”
The aspersion against my father tensed my entire body and set my vision double. Blood roared to my ears. How dare this foolish child impugn the honor of one of Britain’s greatest heroes, even as he undertook necessary and dangerous adventures abroad on the State’s behalf, which kept him away from his devoted son?
“Take it back!” I yelped as I leapt to my feet. The audible creaking of the metal leg-brace beneath my trousers undercut the effect of my rage. “My dad never murdered anybody. He’s a soldier and an honorable man.”
“He ain’t a soldier anymore,” she said. “He’s just dead.”
“He’s not dead,” I said. “Only those without imagination ever die.”
“The real Lord Byron-the old Lord Byron-is still alive?”
“Oh. No, he’s dead. He wasn’t my father. He was my great-uncle.”
“Well, that still means your father is dead.”
I was incensed. “How would you know that?”
“If he were alive, he’d have become the Lord Byron, and not you.”
I tried to stammer something about vampires and the Gypsy legends of the East, but she just laughed at me.
“I can promise you that everyone dies,” she said. “Your father told you a fanciful story.”
I would say that was when I first loved Mary Chaworth. She represented, to me, the allure of adulthood; the stripping away of the pretty lies of childhood to perceive the world as it truly is, even if I had no intention of shedding my illusions.
Clergymen say the desire for knowledge is the Original Sin, and that was certainly the case for me. Like Adam’s, my pursuit of Knowledge came at the behest of a woman. Ever since Mary Chaworth, the scent of perfumed flesh and the warm touch of it beneath my fingertips has reminded me of the fact that I would not endure forever. Awareness of death, I think, mingles passion with urgency.
“So, what about the sword?” asked Mary on that sun-dappled afternoon in my distant, formative past, sitting in the grass with her legs tucked coyly beneath her ruffled skirts.
“What sword?”
“You don’t know much about Lord Byron, do you?”
“I am-”
“No, the real Lord Byron.”
The sword, as it turned out, was part of a rather comical bit of family lore. My great-uncle had a neighborly dispute with Lord Chaworth, Mary’s grandfather, on the subject of whose lands were more abundant with game. My uncle was determined to resolve this argument, and did so in a rather clever manner: He got roaring drunk and disemboweled Chaworth with a sword, in full view of a number of witnesses, at the Stars and Garters tavern in London.
As punishment for the murder, my uncle spent two years imprisoned in the Tower. Murder is a capital crime, of course. But in England, nobility is still respected. Only commoners get executed.
They say Lord Byron felt winning the argument was worth the two years. When he returned to Newstead, he hung the murder weapon above his bed as a trophy, and when my mother and I inherited the place, we left it up there to collect dust and cobwebs. Mary found some sort of macabre delight in looking at it.
“The Byron name has come to stand for cruelty and senseless, remorseless violence,” she told me. “You’ve got a grand legacy to live up to.”
How could I do anything but love her?
Three summers later, I was somewhat more mature, and I decided that Mary Chaworth was my muse and that I was destined to spend my life with her. I refused to return to Harrow, because I could not stand to be apart from my beloved. But, thanks to the peculiar acoustic qualities of some of the larger rooms at Newstead, I overheard her from some distance away, saying that she cared nothing for “that plump, lame, bashful boy lord.” She was soon after engaged to a gentleman named Musters, a man known for his dubious morals and questionable finances.
This destroyed me utterly. I had given this girl a piece of my heart, and she took it and locked it away in a dusty cupboard. And throughout all my affairs and adventures that followed, I could never again give that piece of my heart to anyone else, for she had it and it was hers forever, though she cared nothing for it.