“You’re him, aren’t you? You’re Sebastian Pierse, who murdered his wife and her lover, and then disappeared.”
“And been in torment over it ever since,” I concur. “She betrayed me most sorely, but I wronged her the more. Now I seek atonement.”
“My parents and grandparents have always feared you,” she whispers. “They are always looking over their shoulders in the dark. They brought in priests to cleanse the place—but it didn’t work, did it?”
I try not to laugh at this, since she’s so sincere. I speak with quiet, desperate need. “Elizabeth, it is the dearest wish of my heart to trouble the household no longer. But I’ll never be at peace unless you help me.”
“Help you, how?” She is trembling. We’re half in love already. The warm weight of her body so close is driving me mad.
“Should I pray for you?”
“Yes. Let me come to you at night like this, and we’ll pray together. A link with the living …”
“I can’t have a man in my room!” she says in a panic. “I’m to be married.”
“But I’m not a man, I’m a soul in torment. Connection with a living being, that’s all I need.”
“All?”
“And a sip of your life-blood.”
She blinks. It doesn’t sound much, put like that. She touches my hand, doesn’t flinch when I sit beside her. “You’re very solid, for a ghost,” she says.
We talk like this for a long time, a game of thrust and parry that grows ever more intense. There are soft touches between us; my fingertips on her hand, hers on my sleeve. Confidences are shared. She holds nothing back.
I gather she is dreading this marriage to a man older than herself. It is no love match, clearly. As our dialogue strays into more intimate areas, she confesses that she fears the wedding night. “George will expect me like this—all pure, untried and nervous. But I … I don’t see why I should be lying here ignorant and frightened!”
“You deserve pleasure,” I tell her. “He will not give you pleasure; you are just a possession to him.”
“How do you know?”
“I can tell, from your words, exactly the sort of man he is. Domineering, certain of his rights. He will have despoiled a hundred women in his time and yet expect his wife to be a perfect innocent. He will use you brutishly.” My outrage is genuine. “I can’t bear to think of him hurting you.”
She chafes her lip with her teeth. I want to bite that rose-pink pillow. I see in her eyes a violet fire of rebellion. At last she asks, “Will you show me, then? So that when the time comes, I’ll know what to expect and I won’t be afraid. Will you, Sebastian?”
“Nothing would please me more.” I speak with complete sincerity.
“But he must never know!”
“He won’t,” I reassure her. “It will be our secret. After all, with a ghost, it doesn’t count.”
At last I lean in and feel the sweet, fresh warmth of her neck against my mouth. She sighs. I am lost.
When I became a vampire I walked away from Blackwater Hall. I left others to find my wife and her lover in the old stone tower, where I had left them marinating in pools of their own blood. I took ship to America, like the long wave of Irish emigrants after me, thinking never to return. I put an ocean between myself and the old country; I wanted no more of its shadowy magic, its religions and superstitions, its wars and the endless struggle I’d had just to hold onto what was mine.
In those early years of my new existence, I was savage and bitter. Yet as time passed, as bitterness faded and I brought the bloodthirst under control, I began to think of the house again.
Some sixty years after I left, I came back. Just curiosity, you understand. I discovered that the scandal of Sebastian Pierse—who’d murdered his wife, her lover, and her unborn infant before vanishing—was local legend; a folk-tale told by old men in their cups. My estate had been claimed by the British and awarded to a family of English Protestant settlers. They were decent enough folk, I concede, who looked after the estate well and were fair to the tenants. I’d no argument with the way they ran my affairs.
And yet, they had no right to be there. I owed it to the house and to myself to haunt them a little, to frighten the old men, to feed on the young and strong.