Chapter Text
“Estelle,” Michael says, as he swirls the captivating, mysterious Englishwoman around the dancefloor. “Seems old-fashioned, for someone as young and as pretty as you are.”
Estelle, Lady Sharpe – is she due the title? If her father was a baronet? Michael’s not certain, but he’ll need to find out, if he intends to keep courting her – blushes a little at the compliment, turning her dark, liquid eyes from Michael’s face. But only for long enough to be appropriately modest before she catches his gaze again, looking up through dark lashes in a way that makes Michael catch his breath. “My brother calls me Star.”
The reminder makes Michael look up, scan the crowds around them for the baronet’s menacing presence, a smudge of dusty black against all the glitter and light of the McMichaels’ ball. There’s no doubt in Michael’s mind that Lord Sharpe is the only reason why his sister has not yet married.
“Star,” he says, deliberately, turning back to the woman in his arms. Focusing on the burning points where their bodies meet, the lit candle held precariously between their clasped hands. Testing the shape, the colour of the word on his tongue. Savouring its taste. “Yes, that suits you far better. Star.”
The way Star smiles up at him makes Michael feel a little dizzy, a little drunk. It’s a slow, languorous smile, her eyes catching the candlelight and sparkling with the light of a thousand of her namesake as they whirl through the dance so fast and smoothly that the flame they hold together barely even flickers.
So fast, so smoothly, that it almost feels like flying.
…
“Read it. You’ll thank us.”
Samuel looks down at the pamphlet the bookseller’s pushed into his chest, and then back up at the bookseller’s face. “You seem to have mistaken me for someone with an interest in penny dreadfuls.”
“Oh, you’ll find plenty to interest you in this one.”
Sam barely manages to suffocate a long-suffering sigh. He’s already regretting volunteering to run this errand for his grandfather. The trip into town, the temporary escape from the confines of the grounds, was certainly not worth this hassle. Nor, in his estimation, is the copy of the literary journal that his grandfather receives monthly. The old man never reads any of the books reviewed or discussed, anyway. Believes that reading the journal removes the necessity.
“You are the second Emerson son, aren’t you?” the bookseller continues, looking Sam up and down. It’s an insolent look, judgmental, especially coming from such a petty tradesman. Especially one who can’t be much older than Sam himself. Especially one with the dubious blessing of such a countenance. To say nothing of his attire.
It’s true that Sam’s family have had…difficulties, since the unexpected departure of his father for Italy without them. And that his mother’s faced some censure lately, been denied invitations, for entertaining Maxwell McMichael’s attentions while still legally a married woman. But still. Sam’s grandfather may never have been a true baron of industry, but he’s still well known and respected in Buffalo, if quickly gaining a reputation as something of…an eccentric. A reputation that Sam, unfortunately, can’t entirely deny he’s earned.
People will of course form their own thoughts, their own opinions, of his family. But they might at least make overtures toward refraining from so clearly revealing them to Sam’s face. Especially when asking for his custom in the same breath.
So, since the bookseller doesn’t bother trying to conceal his judgment, Sam doesn’t bother trying to conceal his irritation. “What is it to you if I am?”
“Your brother married that Englishwoman? The one who was here with her brother the Lord So-and-so for the last season?” The other man arranging stock on the bookshop’s cramped shelves answers Sam’s question with a question. He nods in the direction of the pamphlet his associate had pressed on Sam. “You want to read that.”
“I don’t think much of your sales tactics,” Sam says, looking down at the cover of the pamphlet. Varney the Vampire. Sensationalist, fantastical claptrap, just as he’d believed. He can’t imagine what possible bearing it might have on Michael, his new bride, and the Lord Sharpe. Or, if it did, what purpose it could possibly serve to have Sam, living an ocean and a continent away from his in-laws’ beloved Allerdale Hall, read the thing.
“For you,” the first bookseller says, “free of charge.”
Sam casts him a sharp look. “And the catch?”
“Your grandfather’s been a good and loyal customer of ours,” the second bookseller offers. “Take it for his sake.”
“Or for your poor lady mother’s,” the first bookseller agrees.
“You have some gall, to speak of my mother. Be grateful I don’t speak of yours.” Sam glances over to the woman slouched insensate on the shoulder of the man who must be her husband, a hookah pipe forgotten between them. “Although I’m certain there’s no need for me to add my voice to the chorus.”
The first bookseller holds out a hand to stop the second from advancing on Sam. He ignores the insult as though Sam hadn’t spoken, lowering his voice instead like a sepulchral warning. The boyishness of that voice mostly ruins the effect. “She’ll thank us, in the end. When your brother and his bride return from their European tour. You all will.”
Sam looks down again at the cheap woodcut illustration gracing the cover of the pamphlet. The skeletal form of a man, face distorted in a grotesque snarl, crouches bestially over a slender swooning lady. It’s nearly comical in its exaggeration.
Sam can’t quite account for the little chill that shivers through him.
“Oh, I’m quite certain my family will thank you,” he agrees, slowly. “For my grandfather’s literary journal. It has come in, has it not?”
The second bookseller makes a face as though he’d love to tell Sam off. But he retreats behind the counter and emerges with the desired journal.
When Sam leafs through it, in the carriage headed for home, careful not to dog-ear the cover in the way his grandfather hates, he’s unsurprised to find the vampire pamphlet with its grotesque cover slipped between the pages.
…
Not for the first time, Michael dreams of David.
The dream – though in truth, it might be better called a nightmare – is much like the others. Michael wakes, in dread, in fevered anticipation, his sweat chilled and tacky against his back beneath his nightshirt, the room black as pitch and freezing cold around him, the chimneys of this thrice-accursed hulk of a collapsing manor-house all wailing out their lost-soul song. He reaches for Star, for where she should be warm in the bed beside him. But the sheets are empty and cold.
And as his eyes adjust, as though coalescing from the shadows, he sees the baronet watching him, from the foot of the bed.
No words are ever exchanged between them. This vision of David has never once answered any of Michael’s entreaties, or, indeed, his screams. The most he’s done to acknowledge a word Michael’s said in any of these dreams is that low, self-satisfied chuckle at the few times Michael’s been naïve enough to try to utter threats.
No matter what Michael says, no matter what he does, the dream always ends the same way. Gloved hands pinning him effortlessly back against the bed. A solid, cold weight on his chest, crushing the air from his lungs. Clammy breath close against the sensitive skin of his exposed neck, raising the fine hairs below his nape and all along his arms, sending delirious thrills of quivering terror through every inch of his body.
Sharp teeth slicing effortlessly through his flesh.
When Michael wakes, heart pounding, a shout dying on his lips unheard, the fire in the grate is low, its ruddy embers casting the vast room in a hellish light. Shadows cluster thickly and in strange configurations around the little island of precarious safety formed by the bed.
Perhaps it’s only Michael’s imagination, or the caprices of the embers, that makes those shadows writhe like living things wracked in agonies of torment.
Michael pushes the coverlet back, shaking his head to try to clear it. The fog of sleep still lies heavily upon him, his heart still rabbit-quick in his chest. It had seemed such a good idea, at the time, to humour his new wife’s desire to share her ancestral home with him before she would be forced to part from it for a new continent. Now, though, he regrets ever setting foot within these moldering walls. The sooner they continue on to Paris, the sooner they continue their honeymoon tour, the better.
Preferably without Michael’s new brother-in-law haunting their every step.
Star lies peacefully slumbering with her chestnut curls spilled out across the pillow beside Michael. He reaches out a hand to clasp the ivory skin of her bare shoulder, reassure himself of its warmth and solidity.
But stops himself.
There are spots of something dark flecking the back of his hand. And his palm. And the snow-white cover of his pillow.
Star stirs, as Michael stares. “Mm. Michael? Are you all right?”
Michael doesn’t know.
He coughs, once, into his hand, and tastes blood, bright and metallic at the back of his throat.