Blood to Blood (19 page)

When Arthur woke the following morning, he immediately felt the side of his neck. It was not some instinct of Joanna's visit the night before, but a reflex he had possessed since he'd first heard that the vampire might be in London.

Ian Woods, his butler, had already laid out his clothes, and he could smell the faint scent of fresh biscuits rising from the kitchen. These had been made by Wendy Leyton, who had a master chef's touch. Besides the two, he also employed a maid and a gardener. Not the grand staff that had been here in his uncle's day, but more than adequate for his needs. The fact that their presence was more for security during his frequent absences than to actually serve him, also pleased him. He gave them a home they might not have had otherwise.

He considered sleeping in, but a glance at the windows made him decide against it. They had been nearly closed last night but were fully open now. It might have been a breeze, but it could have been she. If she had come, one of the four might have seen her. There would be no need to directly question anyone; all he had to do was open the topic.

He went downstairs and took his place at the table where a copy of the
Times
was waiting for him. Mrs. Woods brought him tea and wished him a good morning.

"And the same to you," he replied. "Did you sleep well? You look a bit tired this morning."

As he expected, this was all he needed to say. The woman was always ready to talk about some worry or another. "I suppose I am. Patch thought he saw a beggar walking in the garden. He and Ian searched the place, but she was gone."

"She?"

"Plenty of she-beggars out there. More than the other kind, since they aren't likely to turn to crime to eat."

"No use losing sleep over her, then," he said, unfolding the paper and pretending to scan he headlines.

"Beggars come in packs like wolves, sir. Some of them might be dangerous."

"Well, if this one comes back, give her something to eat and a few pennies. No use being stingy, no matter what the law."

When he was alone, Arthur poured himself another cup of tea and smiled to himself. So she liked his garden, did she? What else might she like?

He rang for Ian. "I should like your key to the storage room, since I seem to have lost mine," he said to the butler.

"If there is something you need from there, I would be happy to get it now."

"No, just some old papers of my uncle's that I need to sort through."

Now that he had both keys, he could set about redoing the room, making it more appealing to the woman, more what a princess would covet. And he considered what trinkets to leave to convince her that he meant no harm.

Over the next few nights, Joanna found gifts waiting for her, arranged on a table at the end of Arthur's bed. There was a scarf of supple black silk trimmed in jet beads, a ruby ring only a bit too large for her thin fingers, a hair clip holding a spray of peacock feathers that fell in long strands that brushed against the side of her neck light as kisses.

Each was accompanied by the same note, the one Colleen had to read to her the first time:
When you are ready, wake me
.

Joanna had no idea what he wanted of her, but the gifts were beautiful. She would return to the house in Chelsea and lay the new one next to the one that came before.

She expected Colleen to be as enchanted as she was becoming, but the girl grew more agitated with every new trinket. "If I see him on the street again, I'll scream for the police. I won't be able to help myself," Colleen said.

"You won't see him," Joanna replied. Since he'd finally lured her to his house, he hadn't been seen in the area day or night.

"If you don't make a move soon, he will," Colleen said, repeating what she'd been saying since Colleen's first visit.

Joanna didn't bother to answer. They'd had the discussion too many times before. "Come and lay beside me," she asked instead, knowing that a touch would sooth in a way her words never could.

Colleen did as she asked, trembling in her arms. "What will happen to me if you leave me now?" she whispered.

"I will always come back for you," Joanna said, brushing a hand over the girl's soft hair.

Colleen's concern made her cautious, so Joanna did not return to the estate the next night, nor the night after. Finally curiosity got the better of her, but instead of gifts at the end of the bed, she found a key and another note. Different words this time, and she could not decipher them.

The key was similar to the one in his bedroom door, so it likely belonged to some room in the house.

She moved down the hall, noting that the room keys were all in their locks, and unlike the man's, all on the hall side. She tried the first few doors and found they were not locked. She moved quickly to the opposite wing, finally discovering a locked door that had no key.

She did not need to open the door to go inside, but she wanted to make certain this was the room the man had intended her to find.

It unlocked easily. As the door swung open, she could see light coming from somewhere inside. Likely a candle, certainly dim for human eyes. For hers, huge in the darkness, it blinded, and she looked away until her eyes became accustomed to it.

Colleen might accuse her of being a fool, but though Joanna was cautious, she was also curious. She paused at the threshold for a moment, all senses acute. Certain it was devoid of life, she stepped inside.

The fragrances of beeswax and oil were similar to those in her cottage when Colleen had been cleaning, but beneath them was a mustiness that told her the room had no window to let in fresh air—a stale, earthy scent, reminding her of her long years in the bowels of her brother's keep.

She moved deeper into the room. Stepping around a pile of crates and boxes and a folding oriental screen, she found the source of the scent, the box her brother had brought to England.

It had been placed in the center of a cleared space, the rough-hewn top polished until it shone in the light of the single red-cased votive candle placed on a table beside it.

There were three other tables around the box, and each of them held a dozen or more small candles—tapers, votives, poured pieces in shapes of griffins and cats and multicolored flowers. There were real flowers as well—cream-colored lilies in crystal vases. Most marvelous of all, from the ceiling hung clear glass prisms so delicately made that they caught even the dim light and sent it scattering as colors through the room.

Enchanted, and fearing that enchantment, she lit another pair of candles. As the flames flickered to life, she walked to the box and opened it.

Inside, she saw the thin piece of ancient fabric, brittle to her quick, cautious touch. Nothing burned her, nothing warned her that the earth below had been tainted. She pulled back the cloth and fingered the soil—cold to her touch. The earth that would have made her grave.

But the man had added two things to the box: a sheet of soft brushed silk and a silk pillow filled with mint, chamomile and lavender—a mélange of pleasant dreams.

Had he known the herbs' significance? She guessed that he had, just as he knew so much else about her kind.

What did he want of her? The question had been uppermost in her mind for days. Now, knowing the answer had become irresistible.

Probably the same thing the other one had wanted. He had a fortune to dispose of; all he needed was time.

Arthur, Arthur Holmwood, Lord Godalming. She thought the name, then whispered it, letting out the rest of the air she'd taken in with a thin, nervous giggle that seemed to hang in the air long after she had vanished.

He had raised too many questions. Too many! Before her courage failed her, she would wake him.

She wondered if he would find the experience pleasant.

From the journal of Mina Harker, August 17, 1891:

Everything is happening so quickly now, as if God or Fate or merely luck is on my side.

It took only two weeks for me to obtain a long-term lease on the property I intend to use for the shelter. I owe Jonathan for that. He has persevered with tremendous determination through the maze of owners and lessees and managers and tenants who allowed the structure to fall into such terrible disrepair.

Each of our meetings to discuss the matter quickly turned from business to personal ones. I spent two nights at our home. Then, one morning when Essie was away visiting her sister, he came to mine.

He approved of the changes I'd made in the house, saying that the guest rooms and larger kitchen had feminized the space. I made other changes too
—
subtle ones. I changed the dark downstairs walls to a pale shade of green that reflects rather than absorbs the natural light. As we sat and ate a quick meal, I watched him studying the surroundings, wondering, no doubt, which possessions were mine and which had belonged to him
.

He often became silent at odd moments in our conversation, and I guessed the questions he longed to ask. I found myself thinking of the truthful answers
—
how Gance had taken me here and here. How he had filled the solarium with roses to brighten a gloomy day. How he…

And so my mind went round and round, but always back to Jonathan, who had never eyed me with such intensity before, save when he thought I was about to turn into some monster before his eyes.

I was about to ask what was wrong when he stood and walked behind me. "I like what you've done here," he said. "You've made the place your own, somehow. It reminds me of you," he said and began, with no warning, to unhook my blouse, his kisses following his hands as they moved down my back. I wanted to ask what he was doing with so many hours of work ahead of him, but of course I knew, and knew as well that any question, any words at all, would ruin the time to follow.

So I let him continue with the skirt, the chemise, the loose corset I wore out of convention rather than because it served any need. I reached for him, then, and as I began to open the buttons of his shirt, I heard him moan. His eyes were closed. He might have been thinking of Gance or of the woman. I would have none of it, just as he would have none of my fantasies at a moment like this.

"Jonathan, " I whispered. "Jonathan, look at me. "

And so I called him back to me. There he stayed while I stripped off all those stifling layers of cloth that civilized people are forced to wear even in the heat of summer, and I took him to the settee.

Odd how I, who had relished setting down every small detail of my meetings with Gance, cannot do the same with my husband. It might be considered some sort of prudery, but I have found in the past that I have so little of that dreadful virtue. Instead, it is because I sense a permanence in our relationship and see no need to note details.

I need only say that we wound up in the tub, relishing the cool water against our skin. It was almost noon when he left, only after getting a promise from me that we would meet again tomorrow evening.

How many times will we meet this way before we decide what our futures will hold?

Mina put away the journal, pinned up her hair and changed into a different, simpler dress, one better suited to a day in the garden. She was in the front, cutting the spent blooms off the flowers, when a hansom drove up. Winnie waved and paid the driver.

She'd been expected, but Mina had forgotten all about the meeting. Hardly an unwelcome surprise, Mina thought, thankful her friend had not arrived early.

As she made them tea, she considered how everything was falling into place so quickly—due in no small part to Winnie and the doctor. Even before she had legal possession of the property, Winnie was taking the carpenters and plumbers who had helped construct her children's hospital on a tour of the building, negotiating the best price for the work that needed to be done.

Meanwhile, Mina found a mill that would donate fabric for sheets and table linens and a firm that would give the house a pair of sewing machines so the women could make their own clothing, draperies and linens, and perhaps take in mending and sewing work later. Dr. Rhys contacted a patient of his, a cabinetmaker who was willing to do some of the finishing work at half his normal fee.

The less skilled labor came from the neighborhood around the building. Mina had suggested this as a way of making the funds help more than her clients. Winnie was in favor of it, Rhys was not. "People so shoddy about themselves will not do the work well," he explained, his voice stiff with disdain for all of them.

"But it gives them a sense that this is theirs, not charity," Winnie added.

And so the women won, as did a half dozen men from that sorry neighborhood. Some drank in the mornings before they came to work, but those were soon let go. The others worked as the women had hoped. Soon the walls were going up, dividing the space into small rooms for single women, adjoining ones for those with children. The first rooms finished were already occupied with three single women and a male caretaker—a bear of a man and a bit simpleminded, but honest. He'd been doing the same sort of work for the hospital, and Mina had hired him at Winnie's suggestion to keep vandals and thieves away from the site and to protect the women after the house was finished.

Mina had intended to start the house with ten women, but soon found she'd underestimated the amount of space she'd acquired. The place could easily hold sixteen.

Mina showed Winnie her own nearly finished addition before they set to the afternoon's work, going through the long list of applicants she'd had to turn away.

They had planned to do their work in the garden, but a gusty afternoon storm make that impossible. So they worked at the dining table in the solarium with the outside doors cracked to let in the soothing sounds of wind and rain.

They paged through applications, many of which had been filled out in Essie's precise script on behalf of those who could not write. Mina stopped at an application for a woman with five children whose husband had drowned the year before. "If it were just her and a single child, or even two, I would have room. But five? Winnie, where can she go?"

"There's the church, or she could place them all in a charity home until she has the means to care for them. The option is hardly pleasant, but at least they'll have a warm place to sleep and three meals a day. If they stay together they may live on the street, but there's the Temperance League Soup Kitchen, not the tastiest fare, but nourishing."

Horrible options, all of them. "Perhaps I should have started my work on a less grand scale," Mina suggested.

"Settled, you mean?"

"Settled?"

"You're creating a model for the future, just as Mr. Beason and I did with the hospital. Yes, I could have done some work on sanitation, or arranged to open a clinic as Dr. Rhys has, but I wanted more. Recently two charity groups from the North visited my hospital. They plan to start hospitals much like mine. If I had settled for less in order to help more, I would have set no example for anyone to follow. Dr. Rhys did the same in London, and now we've inspired you."

She raised a subject Mina had longed to discuss, and with Essie gone, it seemed an ideal time. "Dr. Rhys approaches this work so strangely," she said.

Winnie grinned. "Of course he does. He's a man."

"Be serious. He doesn't have the same feeling about his work as you and I do. Sometimes I can't imagine why he does it, and at others it seems so… natural."

"He intrigues you?"

Mina knew exactly what her friend meant, and laughed. "Yes, but not like that. It's his beliefs that intrigue me. He says he runs the clinic not out of any concern for the poor but because of a promise he made to his mother long after she was dead."

"I know a little about that. Actually, I was going to give you some good bits about the doctor but then you and Jonathan seem to have reconciled or—"

"We are reconciled when we see each other, which isn't often enough. But at least we both have things to talk about when we do."

"That isn't what I mean, and you know it."

"There's been a bit of that, too." Mina looked away and laughed, silencing her. "That doesn't mean I wouldn't like to hear some bits about our Dr. Rhys."

"First you must promise never to repeat it, or Mr. Beason will be furious, since I learned most of it from him."

"Maybe it would be better if you didn't—"

"No, it wouldn't. I may not be playing matchmaker, but you work with him, after all, and in a few minutes you'll understand a great deal about his behavior. His mother was Indian—from Delhi, I believe. His father was a member of the House of Lords, though hardly noble, given his conduct. His mother was the man's mistress. When his business in India ended, he brought her to London, where she lived in nearly total isolation. She gave birth to Dr. Rhys there."

"Though the man supported the woman and her son, he did not much care about either of them. They never lived together, and he never acknowledged the boy as his. She apparently was a simple creature who thought of them as married and was subservient to his every demand. Eventually he contracted some disease from the other women he frequented and passed it on to her. I understand that he died when Dr. Rhys was a small child, the mother soon after."

"How terrible! How did Rhys survive without them?' Mina asked.

"The father was no cad, at least not completely. But he waited until he was on his deathbed to spring his bastard son and dying mistress on his family. He'd also made provisions for the boy and arrangements to send him to a private school. During the holidays, his father's sister took him in, just as she cared for his mother during her last days. She was a rigidly religious woman with a low opinion of her brother's vice, and apparently sex in general, since she never married. She is responsible for the doctor's rigid view on vice and virtue, I think."

"Yet the doctor is no Christian."

"Nor was his aunt, and I think Christ would be the First to agree with me."

"Winnie!" Mina exclaimed. "You may be right, but the words seem blasphemous."

"You're right. I shouldn't speak the obvious so openly. It has a nasty way of leaking out in more inopportune moments."

"Is the aunt still alive?"

"No. And though, out of deference to her church, Dr. Rhys was never publicly acknowledged as her nephew, she gave him her name and a healthy allowance then left her estate to him."

"So he's a wealthy man?"

"Not as wealthy as Gance was, or Arthur, but since he has rental income from a number of properties, he has no need of a paying medical practice. He does the paying work to keep busy, I think, and the charity clinic he's already explained."

"And he never married?"

"I suspect he's never been attracted to a woman before. But lately I've noticed that he seems to be flirting with you."

Those long, questioning looks, the occasional times when his hand had held hers longer than necessary to help her out of a cab. The solicitous way he saw to her needs when they were together. Until now, Mina had dismissed his close attention as some sort of Eastern custom. "He makes me un-easy," Mina confided. "I prefer direct men. In his case, I have no idea what he wants from me."

"You could ask him."

"I'd rather not acknowledge the behavior. It's better if I just ignore it and keep my distance. Perhaps he'll lose interest."

So they went on with their work, picking out four more women who had children, two younger ones who did not.

Afterward they walked to the main road and hailed a cab to take them to the bank, then the shelter site. There they stopped in the yard, got the invoice from the roofer and paid the man for his work. "One more thing finished," Mina said as they went through the wide doors into the shared rooms of the lower level.

The building had three floors. The first floor had a large kitchen and dining room on one side; there was a second, larger room on the other, where Mina hoped the youngest children could take lessons by day and the women could socialize at night. The last time she had visited, the rooms had been empty. Now there were cupboards in both of them, a huge wood stove in the kitchen and a large potbellied stove in the living room. Hardly complete, but close enough that a number of the more desperate residents would be moving in within the week.

The second stove had been placed near the stairs so that the stove's heat could rise to the upper floors and take away the damp on winter nights. It was hardly the sort of arrangement that would lead to a comfortable warmth in the sleeping rooms, but extra stoves on the upper floors would increase the risk of fire.