gallantly, we both know—the game is on again. She is tangibly older of course—flesh thickening, her stiff layers of corsetry and clothes giving her the grandeur of a duchess. Still a desirable woman, though. She still has the gleam in her violet eyes, once so innocent, now full of shrewdness; knowing and sultry. I still desire her—how not? Her flesh is as plump with blood as ever and the blood as sweet in its promise.
Later, at Blackwater Hall once more, we face each other in her bedchamber, but something is different. The first thing she says to me is, “Make me a vampire.”
I only look at her. Somewhere deep inside me, dreary horror wells, a kind of tired revulsion.
“That’s what I want,” she insists. She clasps my arms, imploring me with luminous eyes. “Look at you, forever young and powerful, fearing nothing! I want that too!”
“Never.” I tear myself from her. Surely my contempt must pierce her to the heart. “I couldn’t do it, even if I wanted to. It’s not a simple process. It takes three vampires to create a new one.” And I explain a little about Rasmila, Fyodor, and Simon.
“Then find two others to help you,” she persists, addressing me as if I were some inept boot-boy.
“Don’t you understand?” I say patiently. “The gathering of three means that the change can’t happen by accident. It must be planned. Which means that it must be desirable.”
“But it is. I desire it.”
“Desirable to them. To me.”
She looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind. The look makes me angry.
“Who do you think you are, Elizabeth?” I say with cold spite. “You were never anything to me but blood-filled flesh. What, you think you’re worthy of immortality? No, you are not so special. You are no different from any other mortal. A lump of ageing flesh.”
Strangely, she doesn’t appear to react much. Her eyes narrow a little, but she keeps her burning, wounded anger contained inside her. She doesn’t scream or beg. I’m too dismayed at her tiresome request to care about the feelings she is hiding.
Eventually she says, in a surprisingly cutting tone, “What you’re telling me is that you, alone, lack the power to transform me. You can’t do it without help. Poor Sebastian.”
I should have killed her for that. Should have done so long before now. I hate it when I let them reach this stage.
I go away then, leaving her standing ghost-like in the centre of the large and shadowy bedroom that, so often, had witnessed our convulsions of ecstasy.
Unbelievable as it may seem, I almost entirely forget she ever made this request. It passed from my mind in the manner of a lover’s tiff. Some months later I arrive at the house again, as jaunty as a young suitor who’s gone off, got drunk, and returned later utterly oblivious to the fact that his lady friend has been seething with rage all this time.
I can’t altogether have forgotten, though, because I feel wary. I don’t approach her at once. Instead I haunt stairwells and alcoves for a time, watching the family from a distance. It amuses me to do this, but I’m sure Elizabeth knows I’m around. She’s uneasy and over-sensitive, just as she used to be in the old days when I would look at the pale peach column of her neck with such delicious longing.
Actually, I have some vague intention of starting on one of the daughters now. Or maybe a son, for a change. Or all of them. They must be of an age to make it fun.
Alas, it seems I’m too late. Where did the time go? All but one of the offspring appear to have left—farmed out to schools or to relatives in order to become ladies and gentlemen, ready to marry money and enter society—they’re out there in the world, but Elizabeth and her husband are still here. Their youngest is about eight, a plain bookish boy who doesn’t interest me.
Still, I’m a patient man. I can wait for the son to grow up and come home with a trembling, fresh young wife, or even wait for grandchildren… After all, the house is mine. Generations will come and go but I will always be here, like a curse.
Only something is wrong.
I start to notice changes in Elizabeth. She’s lost weight; she looks younger, more slender, her hair restored to its lustrous gold. She’s languorous, pleased with herself—as she used to be in the early days with me. The