“It will be magnificent,” I said, seeing it in my mind’s eye, beautiful and fertile and full of the promise of living things.

“I will make all of it better,” he said, his voice firm with conviction.

“I know you will. You will be the saviour of this place.”

He gave a short, bitter laugh. “I am no saviour, least of all of myself. And I very nearly destroyed you. I cannot ask you to stay. Not now. My mother is-” He broke off, then cleared his throat, continuing on in a voice rough with emotion. “She is dying. Consumptive, the doctor tells me, although she will not own it. She clings to her legends and her superstitions because they give her comfort, but she is dying, and it will not be quick and it will not be easy. I must do what I can for her. Alone.”

I stared at him. Had I been wrong then? Was she simply a malicious old woman with a cruel sense of humour to play upon my fears? Or was she something darker and more evil still, a strigoi, feeding and then calling up blood to extricate herself from a situation she found intrusive?

“I did not realise,” I said slowly.

“There is often consumption in the village,” he explained. “She used to nurse the valley folk before she fell ill. I ought to have seen it when I came home,” he said, his complexion darkening. “She was so pale and fragile. Her eyes were so bright. How did I not see?”

I thought of the symptoms she had manifested; the symptoms of a consumptive were very like those of a vampire. Even now who was to say which she was?

“How did I not see what she was?” he continued, and for an instant, something fierce and almost angry flashed in his eyes. Did he know then? Did he sense the monstrous evil within her? Whatever his feelings, he did not share them, but he recollected himself and gave me a joyless smile. “I must attend to her,” he said smoothly. “I am the only one who can see to it she is taken care of as she must be.”

Again that slight, shivering touch of something not quite right. Grief at his mother’s ill health, or something darker? “I know,” I said, summoning a courage I did not feel. I had not thought it would be so hard to leave him. “I must go. I have a novel to finish, and a life to begin.”

He fixed me with those startling grey eyes. “So we understand each other, then.”

“Not entirely,” I said, breaking off a withered leaf so I did not have to look at him. “You see, I realise now it was all trickery. Everything you made me think about you, it was all just the sophisticated japes of an experienced seducer. You came to my room by way of the tapestried stair, you made me believe you were something more than human. I see it now.”

“If you want apologies, I will make you none,” he said fiercely. “I wanted you and I knew what to give you to make you surrender. Yes, it was calculated and deliberate, but it was not malicious. I had my conjurer’s tricks and I used them well. Even now you do not know what to make of me, and I will not own what I am. I want you to think of me when you leave this place and wonder whether I am merely a mortal or something beyond. A better man would release you and want you to love another. I am no better man. I am selfish and flawed and I have nothing to offer you that is not broken or imperfect, including myself. And so I offer you nothing. But I will love you until the day I die, and no man will love you more.”

He kissed me then, and I clung to him and we stood as long as we could in the shadows of his grandfather’s garden, watching the first stars shimmer into life in the pale violet sky.

“When this is over,” he said, his lips against my hair, “come to me in Paris. I will give you everything you could desire.”

I opened my mouth, but he put a finger to it. “No, do not answer. Just think on it. You will live in luxury, I promise. You will dress like a countess, be the envy of everyone who sees you. I will keep you as you ought to be kept, with every wish and whim fulfilled.”

I pushed his finger aside gently. “As your mistress,” I said.

He regarded me a long moment in the dying light. “I can offer you nothing more. Not now.”

“Then I will take nothing from you save your heart,” I told him lightly, although mine seemed to fracture within my chest even as I spoke.

“But-”

It was my turn to speak and force him to silence. “You offer me all that you think you can give, and I thank you for that. But it is not enough. It never will be. I may not be worthy to be your wife, but I am far too worthy to be your mistress. To accept your invitation would mean to give up my work, for no kept woman can be a respectable authoress, and I mean to earn my keep by my pen. I know you will say it is not necessary, that you will keep me, and that would suffice for most women. But I am unlike most women, as you yourself have observed,” I told him, lifting myself just a little. “And I will make my own way.”

He put a hand to the nape of my neck and bent to rest his brow upon mine. “Go back to Scotland with Charles then, and write your book and know that I will be there. When the wind comes unexpectedly through the casement, you will hear your name and it will be my voice calling. When you blow out a candle, it will be my breath that rises with the smoke, curling once to touch your cheek. And when you weep-” he paused to rub his thumb over my cheek to catch my tears “-when you weep, you will taste the salt of my tears upon your lips.”

He kissed me again and again until I thought I would die from breathlessness and longing. When we broke apart I looked to the night sky. Above us, a single star shimmered into life.

“Venus,” I said, pointing with a trembling hand. “You see, you have taught me well. I shall not forget.”

I did not forget, and it was the memory of that enigmatic and fascinating man that warmed me through the months that followed. I left Transylvania an older and marginally wiser woman, with a book of poetry in my pocket and the pieces of my heart resting beside. There was a new coolness to me, a reserve that none could penetrate, and my hauteur served me well in the new life I fashioned for myself.

I did not go to Scotland; there was nothing within its grey streets to lure me back. I went instead to London, where I wrote and walked and waited to be made whole again. To his credit, Charles was a prop to me, advancing funds against the sale of my book to permit me to take furnished rooms in a pleasant quarter of the city and visiting often in the capacity of friend as well as publisher. We had endured much together, and sometimes, when the hour grew late and the moon hung low, we spoke of Transylvania and the extraordinary time we shared there. It had finally occurred to me that the greatest mystery-whether the strigoi actually existed or whether Cosmina had been a murderess-could have been solved by the expedient of searching the garderobe for traces of blood. A human villain would have rinsed the blood down the sluice to create the fiction of a vampire; an actual vampire would have fed upon it. But it was far too late to make such conclusions now, and I knew the question would never be settled within my mind. Was the countess a strigoi who had committed her own murder and seen her niece carried away for the crime? Or was she a consumptive old woman who had formulated a murderous plot? I should never know, and after a time, I realised I did not wish to. There were times I did not wish to think upon my time in Transylvania at all, and others in which I wished to relive every moment. Charles was a great comfort to me in both moods.

“Do you ever hear from him?” he asked me once. I did not ask whom he meant.

“No. And I am glad of it,” I told him truthfully. It was difficult enough to lay the ghost of his memory without the thorn-prick of letters to disturb my peace. But each night before I slept, I read Baudelaire, until the pages grew thin and worn with handling.