Now Comes the Mist

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

N ight has fallen, and I am standing in the shadow of the ruined abbey atop the cliffs of Whitby. The moonlight is so bright that I can see every stone in the crumbling walls, every bench beneath the graceful trees, and every flower beside the path. I stoop to pluck a luminous white blossom, and the scent of it is like ephemeral sugar, melting and pure. All is still, and aside from the rumble of the ocean hundreds of feet below, there is not a sound to be heard. I hold the flower to my nose and continue up the steps, feeling utterly at peace.

The month of July settled upon Whitby like a thick smothering blanket, but tonight, the ocean air is cool and refreshing, and my bare feet are kissed by a delicate mist that seems to shimmer in the dark. I enjoy the wind riffling through my hair and the folds of my long silk nightdress as I make my way toward my favorite seat overlooking the water.

Someone is already sitting there.

A man gazes out to sea, his long arms propped behind him on the bench. From his serene posture and the way he tips his head back to look at the stars, he seems as appreciative of the air and the view as I am. He does not turn, and yet I sense the exact moment in which he becomes aware of me. There is a slight straightening of his torso, the merest tilt of his head to the side, and an intake of breath that I can feel more than I hear. The sensation of his focus shifting from the ocean directly to me is like sitting with closed eyes in a pool of moonlight.

He does not speak, but I sense his patient expectation.

I find my voice. “Good evening.”

“Good evening,” he says, and my heart clenches. I know that voice, deep and rich and full of music, with the slight trace of a foreign accent. My head feels light and buoyant as I sift through the ashes of my dark dreams, searching for this man, but they elude me. Perhaps my mind is playing tricks on me; perhaps he is only a stranger after all.

“I am sorry to disturb you,” I say politely.

“You do not disturb me in the least.” The rhythmic cadence of his words is like a lullaby, filling me with calm and well-being. I am overwhelmed by a sudden powerful drowsiness and a longing to sink into the plush feathers of my bed. The scene around me grows hazy and dim, and the lines of the abbey dissolve against the night sky.

“Good night, then.” I turn to go home, for I can barely keep my eyes open.

“Lucy.”

My drowsiness subsides at once. In an instant, I feel more awake than I have ever been in the whole of my existence. That one word, my name, spoken in his soft voice, is enough to bring the cliffs and the sea and the sky back into sharp resolution. I can almost feel the cold heat of the stars from where I stand. All at once, I am certain that I have heard my name from his lips before, and he and I have stood together in the night.

“Yes?” I ask.

“Come and sit with me a moment.”

His cordial tone implies that it is a request, but my feet obey as if it had been a command. I take a seat beside him, looking out at the great black expanse of ocean. I have never seen this view at night, and in the darkness, sea and sky seem to be one but for the keening of the waves below like some great sleepless beast in the depths. Strands of mist weave through the grass at our feet, and the air smells of fresh turned earth, peculiar but not unpleasant.

I long to study this man I suspect I have met in my dreams, but something holds me back. A languid heaviness hangs upon me like the stupor of coming out of sleep, when you cannot yet slip from its grasp. I am forced to keep my eyes on the sea and take in only what I can feel: the cool stone beneath me, the stem of the flower in my fingers, the warmth of my hair and the fluttering ruffles of my nightdress upon my shoulders. The bench is not wide, and though I am small and perched on the edge with my knees together, the stranger is very close to me.

From the corner of my eye, I see that his legs are much longer than mine and end in polished black shoes. He wears dark trousers and a well-cut jacket, from the sleeves of which his long pale hands emerge, one of them resting on the bench between us. I glean the sensation of a big, powerfully built man, but it does not occur to me to be afraid. I am in my favorite peaceful spot in Whitby, after all, and my companion has a quiet, thoughtful presence.

Something glints on the smallest finger of his hand, and my breath stops in my throat when I recognize it. I know that ring of brass, that garnet of deep wine red. I have felt it on my skin as he stroked my face, as he ran his hand down my bare shoulder. Images flash through the darkness of my mind like lightning: A pale hand reaching for mine. A ballroom of dying roses. A moonlit kiss in a garden of watchful statues. A path of brambles calling to me from the dark.

“Hello, Lucy. I told you I would find you again.” He sounds amused. His attention on me feels like drifting into slumber on a languid morning, the muslin curtains diffusing sunlight into something soft and dreamy. I feel his gaze take me in, but it is a pleasant, rapturous scrutiny. I could happily sit here for all eternity with his eyes on me, warm and tranquil. “This is my first visit to these cliffs. I wanted my earliest glimpse of England to be a beautiful one.”

A dozen questions form behind my lips. I want to ask who he is, where he comes from, why he is here, and whether we have met before. But try as I might, I cannot—nor can I look at him. It is as though my words and actions are barred by some invisible gate. I clear my throat to ask another question, which comes out easily. “And is it beautiful, your earliest glimpse?”

“Yes, it is beautiful,” he says with a smile in his voice.

I have known much admiration in my nineteen years. I have received gifts and flowers, love letters and compliments, and three proposals of marriage. But from this man I still have not properly seen, the praise somehow means more than any silly flirtation. I am flooded by the knowledge that everything up to this point in my life has been meaningless. I have been waiting for this exact moment in time.

I have been waiting for him.

He runs his thumb over my cheek, and I close my eyes at his cool, soothing touch. The questions I long to ask fade like shadows. I am content not to know anything but what he chooses to tell me. “I come here every day,” I say. “The cliffs bring me a peace I cannot find elsewhere. I sit on this bench and look out to sea, and it seems I am suspended between two worlds. The waking and the dreaming. The living and …”

The dreamy sunlight of his focus sharpens into a blinding ray of heat. “And?”

“And the dead.”

He is surprised , I think, and the notion that I can astonish him with anything I say is heady and overpowering. I am oddly proud that I can affect this man.

“I often imagine what it would be like to slip over that fence,” I say, my voice rising and falling with the music of a reverie. It is so easy to share my deepest self with him, as inevitable as rain pouring from the sky. “I picture climbing to the other side, my shoes sliding on the crumbling earth, and then nothing but air beneath me as I plummet toward the sea.”

He smooths my hair behind my shoulder, as gentle as my own mother. “And what if you fall toward the rocks instead?” he asks as calmly as though we are conversing about the weather.

“Then I would accept that fate, too.”

“Are you that tired of life that you would so readily embrace death?”

“It calls to me, though I have many people for whom I wish to stay. My mother … Mina, my dearest friend … and Arthur.”

The man’s attention is now so sharp I can almost feel its razor edge brushing against my throat. He places his large, cold hand on top of both of mine, resting in my lap, and I turn my palms upward to meet his. “Arthur is someone who loves you?”

“He has given me his heart and he will give me his name.”

“But your heart? Where is that?”

“My heart is like the sea,” I say sadly as the man’s fingers close softly around my own. “It is deep and dark and belongs to no man, however many try to tame it.”

“I disagree,” he says in a quiet voice. “You are not the sea, but a sailor. A wanderer like me. You want to steer a ship to foreign lands, tread ground you have never walked, encounter wonders you have never seen.” His thumb traces the lines of my palm as though he knows them by heart. “You want to taste all of life, but you are shackled here. And you’re wrong, you know.”

I am shaking as I listen, moved almost to tears. “Wrong about what?”

“About my not seeing your chains. I see them, Lucy.” He runs his thumb down the inside of my wrist, so tenderly that my sorrow overflows. Tears scald my cheeks and splash onto our joined fingers. He lifts my wet hand but does not kiss it as I expect him to. Instead, he presses my tears against his own eyes, as though he would willingly take my pain and make it his own, to spare me. “I know why you are drawn to the places of the dead, to graveyards such as this one. There is freedom here. No one to watch or listen or try to change us into something we are not.”

I choke back a sob. This man sees me. He sees me as no one in my life ever has or ever will. “Tell me this is not just a dream. Tell me I will not wake up and be so alone again.”

“You will wake up,” he says kindly. “But I promise you, Lucy: you will never be alone again. Not now that I have found you, here in a place only we two know. Suspended between the waking and the dreaming.”

“Between the living and the dead,” I whisper, and like an incantation, the words lift the dreamy, hypnotic stupor from me. I feel it all come back: the ability to ask any question I wish, to move my body as I like, and to look where I want to look. I sense that this return of my free will is a gift he has bestowed upon me and that I have proven myself to him in some way. And I am able, at last, to turn and see him for the first time.

The man beside me has the appearance of stone, as though every angle has been cut into unforgiving rock, hewn by no human hand but by the passing of years and the relentless wearing down by wind and water. He is like the cliffs, and it is every bit as tempting to imagine myself plunging against him to my doom. His skin is as white as the flower still clutched in my hand, contrasting with wavy dark hair slightly curling at his temples and neck. He has thick eyebrows over a long straight nose and a thin, pale-lipped mouth.

But it is his eyes that arrest me. If a painter could capture the ocean in a single gaze, it would be this one. I look into the deep blue-green of his eyes, and I can remember every summer I have spent on these cliffs, my lonely heart aching for the horizon. It is the color of solitude, of empty longing, of the pain of having to hide everything I am and everything I need. It is breathtaking, unsettling, like staring into a mirror and seeing my true self reflected for the first time. His eyes would be frightening, I think, if their expression was not so soft. I find that I am struggling for breath as I look at him. I seem to have forgotten how to take in air, an action I have done since the very first moment I came into this world.

“I have been waiting for you,” I hear myself say as tears continue to spill down my face.

“And I have come,” he says.

I am trembling as though I sit in the depths of winter, and I know it is from hunger and relief, from joy and sorrow all at once and not from being cold. But still, the man removes his jacket, which is of a beautiful dark wool too heavy for the weather, his movements slow and deliberate as though he does not wish to startle me. He wraps me within its folds and meets my eyes with that fathomless ocean gaze, a question on his starkly handsome, fine-boned features. Something in my face must answer it, for he gently lifts me—jacket and all—until I am in his lap, sitting sideways, and he hugs me tight to him. We do not speak for a long time, and I wonder with every beat of my yearning heart how he knew that I needed to be held like this: with infinite tenderness and no hesitation, no expectation of anything in return but for me to accept his care.

Not even Arthur would dare give me this intimacy outside of marriage, and to find it from an almost perfect stranger is dizzying, shocking, gratifying.

My face is pressed to the man’s white linen shirt, which exposes a strong throat corded with veins. “Who are you?” I whisper in the shelter of his arms. “How did you find me?”

“For now, think of me as a friend from far away who will listen without judgment.”

“Far away? Are you not with me right now?” I ask fearfully, burrowing deeper against him as though I am drowning in the sea and he is my only salvation. There is a stark reality to his existence, his voice, and his embrace that makes me forget that I am only dreaming.

His laugh is a low, pleasant sound. “You are extraordinary, Lucy Westenra. I did not think I would meet such a one as you when I have not even set foot upon this land.” He presses a light kiss to my temple. “You see, England has held my interest for decades. How could a tiny country floating helplessly in the grip of oceans come to such godlike power? Always am I drawn to those who grasp for domination, and it is England that commands my imagination this century.”

Century? I think. I long to ask about this curious, hyperbolic turn of phrase. But the soothing rise and fall of his voice is a stream of consciousness in which I am lost. I drift along its current as though he might dictate to me all the secrets of the universe if I listen intently enough.

“But it is not just her ships, commerce, and monarchy that interest me. It is also her society. Her people. The men … and the women.” His hand strokes my back, as meandering as his thoughts. “Death links us all, no matter who we are. Man is born, man breathes, man lives, and man dies. Man is but an animal, and yet English society prefers to forget that. Is this true?”

“I am not certain.” I lift my head to look at him, and his sea-glass gaze is the most intense scrutiny I have ever faced. I am a window he is looking through, and I sense that he can see absolutely everything inside my mind, my heart, and my soul.

“Babies emerge, screaming and bloody, from the pits of their mothers’ wombs, yet this is not spoken of,” he says, his hand moving yet lower on my back. “People rut in the privacy of their bedchambers, and sometimes carriages and darkened halls, yet this is not spoken of. All is prim and proper, buttoned to within an inch of its life, all to maintain a veneer of politeness .”

My breath comes in short, shallow gasps. I have never heard such notions put into words, and I am faint with how easily I can imagine myself closed up in a carriage with him, with all the curtains drawn, or in a dark and empty hall, our limbs tangled in the moonlight.

He runs a hand softly through my hair, and I shiver as electricity dances through my veins. “I have learned that strict rules govern the manners of England’s highest society, and the most rigid of these are laid upon the women.”

Even in the haze of my rising desire, I pull away in surprise.

The man’s mouth curves, sly and seductive, as his hand finds the curve of my bottom, exactly where I had placed Arthur’s the day before. It squeezes deliciously and I gasp with stunned pleasure. “Women do not speak of unpleasant topics such as death,” he murmurs. “They do not long to see the world or give in to their secret dreams, their private hopes, or their deepest longings. But you would if you could, wouldn’t you, Lucy? And why not? Why shouldn’t you be free for the first time in your existence?”

The coat slips from my shoulders as he pulls me to him, chest against chest, mouth against mouth. Slowly, tantalizingly, his tongue swipes across my bottom lip. “Because,” I manage to say, “I would lose everyone dear to me, especially—” I stop myself from saying Arthur’s name just in time, conscious of the sense of betraying him even in a dream.

But the man hears it anyway. “Ah, yes, the saintly Arthur,” he says with wry amusement, “who would keep you safe in his lordly house like a trophy. But you would soon lose your shine. He does not know how to bring out the best of you.” His mouth finds my neck, and the edges of his teeth graze my skin. “What if you gave him up and let yourself go? I wonder if you would be brave enough to make that choice. You who seem bolder than the women who follow your society’s constraints. What if another path were laid before you?”

I think of the red-tipped brambles from my past dreams as his teeth slide over my throat, the promise of them as sharp as thorns.

“Are you yourself not worth choosing?” he murmurs against my skin.

“Women do not choose themselves.” I have unconsciously crushed the flower in my hand, scattering fragile petals all over his coat. I close my eyes and tilt my head back, inviting his lips with abandon. “The perfect woman lives only for others.”

“But you are not the perfect woman?” he asks, his mouth meeting mine again in a lingering kiss. His eyes are almost black with desire.

When he pulls back, I lean forward to kiss him again, but he holds me just an inch apart, smiling. “No. Not like Mamma or Mina, who snuff their own spirits like fingers choking a flame. They are like dolls, happy to be loved and touched and told what to do.”

The man takes the remains of the destroyed flower from me and lifts its broken petals to his nose. “You will be the same if you marry Arthur, no? He, too, is bound by these rules and expects you to be as well.” He chuckles at my consternation. “I can see every encounter you have ever had with him. I can taste your wanting like wine.”

A small thread of fear comes loose in my chest. “How can you see all of this?”

He does not answer. He only runs the crushed flower over my lips, and my unease fades into that languid stupor once more. “I would not deny you anything, Lucy. Unlike Arthur, I will satisfy your thirst. Also unlike him, I understand your craving for death … your instinct that dying could be the one choice you will ever make of your own free will.”

“Yes,” I breathe as he tucks the flower in my hair, just above my ear.

“But have you ever considered that death might not be the escape you wish for?” he asks, studying my face in the pale light. “That it might merely be a different sort of chain?”

I think of my dreams of sinking beneath waves and lying in the mausoleum. Always, I see myself walking into the arms of death, but never what happens next, like a morbid fairy tale with no unveiling of what happens after the happy ending.

The man laughs gently, hearing my thoughts. “Tell me this,” he says, wrapping one of my waves of hair around his fingers. “If someone were to push you over that fence and give you that dark dream you long for, would death not be yet another method of being controlled?”

I push through my hazy confusion and look fiercely into his eyes. “Not if I asked for it. Not if I embraced it willingly and stood on the edge of the cliff waiting for the push.”

Something flickers on his face, half admiration, half recognition. “Do you know how else I am unlike Arthur?” he asks. One of his hands is still on my bottom, and the other finds my bare leg. It slides from my knee up to my thigh, dragging the hem of my nightgown with it, and my mouth goes dry with need. “This is what you wanted him to do to you on the sofa, with your mother and the servants only steps away. You wanted his hand where mine is, his lips where mine are.” He presses his mouth to the pulse galloping in the hollow of my throat.

“Yes,” I gasp, wrapping my arms around his neck. “Oh, yes.”

“I will give you what he cannot,” the man whispers as his hand drifts ever higher.

A shadow falls over our bench, blocking out the moonlight.

“Miss Lucy, wake up!”

I jerk awake, half falling off the bench. A pounding pain knifes through my temples as I look into the face of my maid. “Harriet? How long have you been here?” I ask, looking around in a panic. I cannot imagine what she must think of the scene she has just taken in: me sprawled in a stranger’s lap with his hand on my thigh, my hair mussed and nightgown almost to my waist. But the space beside me is empty, and when I put my hand on the seat, it is chill.

It was only a dream. I have been sleepwalking again. The realization is both a relief … and a disappointment.

I press a hand to my heart, allowing myself to slowly regain full consciousness. My pulse is racing as though I have run all the way up the cliffs.

“A noise woke me,” Harriet says. “I found the door open and saw you wandering up the cliffs. I was terrified you would fall into the sea! But you only came up here and sat down.”

“You saw no one else?” I ask, though I know the answer. I gasp in air, still breathless from the dream and the feeling—so very real —of the stranger’s hands and lips on my body.

“No one, miss,” Harriet says, her face strained. She wraps a light shawl around me, unconsciously echoing the man’s actions. “Let’s go back. You shouldn’t be out here alone.”

But I wasn’t alone , I think as she steers me home. I reach up and find the half-torn white flower in my hair, where I had dreamed that the man tucked it. I wasn’t alone at all.