Page 3 of Now Comes the Mist

Iam the moth, and Mina is the candle.

That has never been clearer to me than tonight in my room, dressing for her engagement party. She stands before the full-length mirror with her lips pursed in contemplation, examining every inch of her gown. The silk envelops her figure and trails behind her in a gleaming cascade of sky blue, a perfect match for her eyes. I knew it would be when I chose the material for her. She is studying the rippling sheen of the fabric, but I am distracted by the way the candlelight dances in her pale gold hair, gathered at her nape with one of my diamond pins.

“Lucy, I can’t accept this dress,” she says for the thousandth time.

“I told you, it’s notfromme, silly,” I reply, also for the thousandth time. “I arranged the dressmaker, but the gown is an engagement gift from Mamma.”

“Nevertheless …” Mina runs a hand down the bodice, from which her round shoulders and bare arms emerge like snowy marble. “You’ve done so much for me already, both of you. Throwing this party, ordering the flowers and champagne, sending out the invitations.”

I laugh and stretch luxuriously across my bed, the bones of my corset pressing into my torso with the movement. “We thrive on spoiling you. You know that,” I tell her and catch sight of my own reflection in the glass. I am the picture of ease and languor, lounging back on my elbows, my long, glossy midnight hair splattered across the pristine coverlet like spilled ink. My eyes, dark and tilting at the corners, sparkle in the light, and my pale olive throat glows above the expensive French lace that barely contains the plump, warm half-moons of my breasts. I shift my weight and the hem of my short chemise rides up a few inches.

If Mina is the angel in every man’s hopes, then I am the devil in every man’s dreams.

The sky-blue silk rustles as Mina turns to face me, her eyes darting to the expanse of naked thigh between my chemise and the lacy edges of my stockings. Her cheeks flush, and for a moment, I wonder if she, too, is remembering our kiss that sun-dappled day by the sea. “Lucy,” she says in a playful, scolding tone, picking up my abandoned cream-colored drawers from the floor, “aren’t you ever going to get dressed?”

I gesture at myself. “Whatever would be the point? I would catch a husband much more quickly as I am.”

“You wouldn’t have trouble with that even if you wore a potato sack,” she says, laughing.

“Men are so easy to manipulate.” I take the drawers and reluctantly step into them. “Wear a low neckline, flutter your lashes, stroke your finger over their hand, and they call you acharming girl. There’s no trick to it. No beauty or wit required.”

“Though it certainly helps that you have both.”

“I never said it didn’t.”

We laugh as Mina helps me into my gown of pale blush pink silk. “How wonderful you look in this color. I’m the one getting married, but you will be the one they all look at tonight,” she says without a trace of envy.

“Only because no one has entrapped me yet, as Jonathan has you.” The moment his name leaves my lips, I regret it. Her gaze turns inward at once, to thoughts and hopes and memories that have nothing to do with me. She twists the simple gold band on her finger, and it gives me a childish degree of satisfaction that the tiny sapphire Jonathan chose is nowhere as near the color of her eyes as the silk I picked for her.

“I don’t know what I’ll do with myself when he goes away this spring. He expects to be gone almost a month, and we’ve never been apart that long,” she says, her eyes downcast. In the soft light, she looks like a painting I would keep on my wall, if I could not keep any other part of her with me. “You must think I’m silly. I spent almost twenty years thinking of him as a friend and have loved him for only three. But he seems as irreplaceable to me now as my own heart.”

I feel her love and pain like splinters in my skin. They embed themselves in me until I can no longer tell whether I am moved by Mina’s passion or jealous that she will go into that blissful unknown before me, and with someone else. I imagine the soft, sibilant promise of the bedroom door closing, cotton and lace slipping down her body to pool at her feet,and her heavy sunlit hair tumbling down her smooth bare back. I see her walking to the bed where Jonathan sits, his eyes afire with want, and sliding a knee on either side of his lap.

Jonathan.

The first time I met Jonathan Harker, I had assessed him with one glance and found him wanting. Rather tall, but what man of our acquaintance wasn’t? The slight, quick build of a fencer. The unmarked hands of a man who shuffles paper for a living, a lawyer’s clerk with money of his own and rising in his employer’s estimation every day. Dark gold hair, a sloping nose, and a smile that appeared suddenly, when least expected. Even his conversation was too clever, too interesting for my liking. And the way he gazed at Mina, his grey eyes warm and soft on her, as though afraid she would vanish if he looked away.

No, I have never liked Jonathan Harker.

Mina looks up from the ring. “You will understand very soon, my Lucy,” she says lovingly, “what it is to care about someone in this way.”

I smile at her, my lips closed so that the words I can never say will not escape. Carelessly, I gather up my long black hair and affix it to my head with snowy pearl-tipped pins. My maid would have done a neater, more thorough job, but I prefer it recklessly windswept, as though I’ve been walking through the London gale. Or someone has just run his rough hands through it, his lips burning on my neck. “Well,” I say lightly, stepping back to look at my full reflection in the glass, “you’ll still have me when Jonathan is called away to business.”

“And I’m glad of it.” Mina rests her chin on my shoulder. We are the same height, both of us small and dainty, and she presses her cheek against mine as I adjust the simple jewelry I always wear: a gold locket embedded with jet, which holds Papa’s photograph, and a ring with a stone of green Vietnamese jade that had once belonged to my great-grandmother.

“Where on earth is he going again? The plains of Africa? The steppes of Asia?”

She laughs. “Not that far east, I’m afraid. His client lives in the wilds of Austria-Hungary, along the edge of the empire. He’s an elderly nobleman with a castle somewhere in the Eastern Carpathians, in a region translated roughly as the Mountains of Deep Winter. Isn’t that poetic?”

“You are the writer, not I. People speak of me as the useless one and of you as the talented one, with your daily diaries and gift for observation and knowledge of shorthand.”

“Nonsense. I write more than you do, that’s all. I keep it up so that I may be useful to Jonathan in his work. I hope he won’t always have to travel so far.” Mina sighs. “The mountains sound beautiful and full of history. I’m not certain why the client wants to move here to London when he lives, as Jonathan tells me, on a peak above a deep blue river.”

Her words bring to mind my dreams of plummeting into raging water, the visions dark and disturbing and endlessly seductive. I close my eyes as Death whispers to me. I envision emerald peaks dotted with villages and forests blooming in the shadow of old stone towers, and I feel an envy that is almost hatred. “I’d give anything to trade places with Jonathan.”

Mina wraps her arms around me, smiling. “Why? So you can leave me, too?”

“No. So I can marry you, of course,” I say, with just enough gaiety to make it a jest. “And travel the world and see all those glorious sights. Can you imagine sitting on a steam train, watching foreign castles pass outside your window?”

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