Page 36 of Now Comes the Mist

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

He calls for me every night, and soon all of July bleeds into heady, dazed half memories, languorous and incoherent. I begin to feel that the daytime is the dream, that walks into town and dinner parties with Mamma are the confused visions of a sleeper, while my evenings, sharp and clear and bright, are the true reality. My conversations with the stranger are all-encompassing, and at times the breadth and intricacy are enough to render me to tears.

Starved for knowledge, I beg him to discuss history and law and philosophy, all the subjects that have been kept from me until now, and he obliges, taking pleasure, I suppose, in the shaping of my sheltered mind. I am certain he is teasing, yet when his musical baritone lingers on a particular note—whether a rapturous description of Florence during the Renaissance or the burning seventeenth-century shores of a Dutch-occupied South Africa—I canalmostbelieve that this man had been there, that he had actually lived and breathed and loved in those lost centuries.

My rational mind understands that everything he knows is whatIknow. Perhaps I have gleaned more from the books I have read and the years I have spent under Mina’s tutelage than I thought. But I wonder how I could have possibly forgotten so much, only to recall it vividly in my sleep. Perhaps it is another disquieting quality of my dreams, this suspension of logic.

“Let us say, for the sake of argument, that youdidsee the forests of the Amazon in 1502,” I say one night after he mentions the beauty of the South American continent.

A smile plays at the corners of his mouth. “1582.”

“I still don’t believe you,” I say in the playful tone I would use with a suitor. “But if I did, and youhavelived for five hundred years, I imagine such a long life would be a burden.”

“Burden?”

“Yes. It would grow tedious. The world is only so big, is it not?”

He laughs. “In some ways, you are right. Humans are tiresome. The same mistakes and the same wars, only with different people. Civilizations rise and fall and rise again. But there is always some novelty, some new path to trace … such as this one that takes me to England and to you.” As always, one of my hands is cradled in his. His skin is so cold that it feels more like clay than flesh and blood, but I find it more soothing than unpleasant.

“If a person could live five hundred years, and assuming no one else can,” I venture, “I think it would be lonely, observing the world in solitude.”

The man looks at me, and the light that was briefly in his eyes when he laughed is gone. “Do I seem lonely to you?” he asks quietly.

“You have spent night after night talking to a strange girl,” I point out.

“Then by that definition,youalso are lonely.”

“I am. I have no one I can talk to the way I talk to you.”

The stranger sighs. “Tell me. If you had five hundred years, what would you do first?”

My answer comes at once, without hesitation. “I would go to Vietnam to learn more about my great-grandmother. I should like to see the place where she first met my great-grandfather. His uncle was a French minister in the emperor’s court.”

The man touches the green jade stone upon my finger. “As was I and many men in my family. I know the court well. I am familiar with a lady of that country.” I sense a dark and bitter melancholy settle over him and surmise that the lady meant—means?—something to him. But he does not elaborate, and I tactfully change the subject.

“And with the remainder of my five hundred years, I would spend half a century living on each continent,” I say. “I would learn every language, read every book, study every culture.”

“You would be a scholar like me. A kindred soul, as I have said.” He strokes my palm with an icy fingertip. My hand looks like a leaf in his, easily crumbled between his powerful wrists. I close my eyes as he touches the pulse fluttering in my wrist. “You were right. Iamlonely. And I am glad to have met you and to see, on your lovely hand, a long life … if you wished it. I wonder if this hand would take mine if I offered it.”

My eyes fly open. I know by now what a proposal of marriage sounds like. But then the stranger brings my palm to his mouth and traces its lines with his tongue, dissolving any rational thought. Electricity ripples through me, making my bones feel formless and liquid as his lips close around my thumb. He licks circles around the tip, and then a long, slow stroke down the base, as though drinking honey from it. All the while, his eyes are on me, blazing and intent.

I am burning where I sit. Somehow, I can also feel his freezing tongue on my lips, breasts, and between my legs and gasp at the delicious impropriety of my own mind. I tense as his mouth moves rapturously down to my wrist. Never before have I dreamed of kisses like these. My desperate longing to be touched has grown feverish indeed.

“Would Arthur kiss you like this?” the man murmurs.

“No,” I gasp, only half recognizing the name.

He presses his knowing smile against the tender inside of my arm, but then stops. When he lowers my hand, I actually whimper in desperation. It is not a sound I have ever made in the whole of my life, but I am not ashamed. I want more. I want him.

“In time,” he says with a quiet laugh. “I have much to teach you, my beautiful and willing Lucy. The waves are carrying me to you now on the ship calledDemeter.”

I choke in air, trying to calm my racing heart.

“A strange name for a ship. Demeter,” he says matter-of-factly, as though I am a dinner guest and not a woman who had practically just begged him to ravish her. “The Greek goddess of the harvest and all things that grow. It is not quite fitting forme… but then Demeter was the mother of Persephone. You know the story, of course?”

I nod, still taking air into my straining lungs.

He tightens his hold on my hand possessively. “In a way, because she gave birth to her, you could say that Demeter brought Persephone to Hades. But in our case … in yours and mine, theDemeterwill bring Hades instead.” He chuckles and strokes my cheek. “I will see you soon, my Persephone. Very soon.”

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