“Yes, don’t you?” I gestured back to the market. “Wasn’t Catherine yours?”
“No, she’s a friend, more like a sister.” Her steps slowed a bit as we talked. “My maker was a stranger that my father paid to turn me, and then he promptly abandoned me.”
“Your father paid him?” I asked, not hiding my shock.
“We were dying,” Elise explained. “Both my younger sisters and my mother had already died. It was only my father and I left. The famine hit our family hard.”
“So to save you, he hired someone to turn you?” I asked, and she nodded.
“But he left me, alone with my father.” Her face darkened. “I had to learn how to be a vampyre on my own.”
I remembered how I’d been when I’d first turned, and I could only imagine what a starving girl like Elise had done, alone with a human.
“I’m sure my maker will have answers,” I said, hurrying to erase the thoughts on her mind. “Would you like to go talk with him?”
“Not now.” She shook her head, and her hair looked even more like fire as it shimmered across her back. “I should be heading back to help Catherine.”
“How did you meet Catherine?” I asked, desperate to keep the conversation going. I didn’t want to lose her.
“Luck, really,” Elise smiled at the thought. “I wandered around for a bit and came across her. She lived outside of the city with a garden. She lived like a human, not that animal I’d believed I was, and she taught me how to do the same.”
“That doesn’t sound bad,” I said.
“It’s not, really.” She stopped, looking back towards the market. “I really do need to get back and help her.”
“But we’ve only just met,” I said, and I’d already begun to panic at the thought of her departing. I didn’t know how I would possibly survive when she went out of my vision.
“I’m sorry.” She shook her head again, and I knew she meant it.
“When will I see you again?” I asked, and when she didn’t answer right away, I said, “I have to see you again.”
“Tonight,” Elise said. “Where are you staying?”
“We’ve rented a room above the pub,” I said.
“Tonight then,” she nodded once to convince me. She smiled and turned away, running back the way we had come.
This time, I didn’t follow her, despite how badly I wanted to. The thread around my heart tightened, squeezing it painfully, when she disappeared. My very being wanted to go with her, and I could barely breathe at the thought of being without her, even for a few hours.
When I found Ezra, I immediately told him about Elise and the way I felt around her. It was more than emotion. It was something physical. My body craved hers, my blood yearned for her. I had to fight to keep my feet from chasing after her.
Over a pint of whiskey we both pretended to drink, Ezra told me everything he knew about it, which wasn’t that much. He’d heard of stories of vampyres being bonded to each other. Something in their blood made them meant for each other. It was a physical reaction, something that pulled them together.
He’d never experienced it before, so he believed it to be a myth. He didn’t understand the purpose for it, but he understood very little of why vampyres acted the way they did.
Listening to me talk of Elise, he was convinced that this was the case with the two of us. We were bonded together, meant for each other, and nothing had ever sounded sweeter. I’d like nothing more for the rest of my life to start with Elise as soon as possible.
Ezra tired of listening to me speak endlessly of Elise, her smooth skin, her fiery hair, her hypnotic eyes… so he sent me out with a pad of paper to write down my story of Elise.
So here I sit on the stone by the pub entrance, scribbling all the things I can’t keep inside as I wait for Elise to arrive. Elise, my love, my true…
August 17, 1852
Dearest Elise,
I hope this letter finds you well. My heart aches without you, but otherwise, this journey is setting alright with me. I’ll never learn to enjoy being at sea, but the boat ride from Dublin wasn’t that long, and I am grateful for that.
As I write this, we’re not yet to London, but I expect we will be soon. The carriage is jostling us about a lot, so forgive the mistakes and the ink on the paper. Ezra is sound asleep next to me, and I wish that I could travel like him.
Maybe I would, but I can’t keep my thoughts from my last conversation with you. It’s that you said this time apart would be good for us both that has me so terrified.
I know this only because you feel as though I’m rushing things, but I’m not. We have only been courting for three months, that is true, but I am certain that I want to be with you for the rest of my existence. My proposal isn’t that strange.
Eternity is a very long time, but I know what I am agreeing to with you. I lie awake thinking of you when I should be sleeping. Ezra complains because I say your name in my sleep, and it keeps him awake.
We are bonded together, just as he says we are, and we both feel it. Why can’t you trust that I love you? I’ve done nothing to dissuade you of that, have I?
Ezra and I bought the house down the road from you, so we can be near without being too near. I’ve enjoyed the few kisses you let me steal, and I never ask you for more. I respect your decision to wait until marriage, but that’s not what I am encouraging marriage.
I love you, Elise. I love you, I love you, I love you.
Nothing can part me from you, my love, not even this distance between us. My heart still belongs to you, the way it always has, and always will.
I still feel your lips pressed to mine, taste the salt on them from the tears in your eyes as you kissed me goodbye. I assured you it was only a month to do business, to make our lives better, and you told me the time apart would do us both good.
The night before I left, when we stood in the moonlight in the garden behind your house, my proposal felt hasty. I know. But it wasn’t. I’ve thought of it since I met you, but when I’m with you, the words come out all wrong. My tongue fumbles that which my heart is certain of.
Elise, you are my love, my world, my true. You are the compass that keeps me due north. You are the moon that tells me when to wake and the sun that tells me when to sleep. You are everything, and so much more than that.
What I wanted to say to you, when your soft hand was cold in mine, and I saw you looking up at me with worry in your eye. You think I’ll go to London and won’t return – as if I could exist without you, as if I even have a choice not to come back.
I want to pour my heart out to this paper, but I fear the paper cannot contain it all. My love is spilling down the edges, seeping to the ground, and out the carriage door. The wind will carry it back to you, carry my heart to you, to where it belongs with you.
Do you not see that, Elise? You possess me, the way the Devil possessed Judas. Not that you are evil – but that you have taken over my soul, that you occupy my body, that my very being belongs to you.
I am going to London for you, for us. I know you love the farm, that you love managing the land your father once churned. But the earth can dry up, it can turn on you, and you know this better than anyone.