She sometimes woke from these dreams fevered and disoriented, as if during the night some phantom had come into her room, filling her lungs with fiendish breath that poisoned her mind. In the first moments of consciousness she pulled against the sheets twined about her and called out for rescue. But in the empty house her voice went unheard.
A long hot shower helped remove Melodie’s smell from Jane’s body. Afterward she wrapped herself in a soft robe and went downstairs. Walking into the kitchen, she stepped on something soft and wet. When she turned the lights on she saw a small, dead bird lying on the floor in front of the refrigerator. Its light brown feathers were speckled with blood.
Tom, the black-and-white cat she’d adopted several years before, appeared and wound himself around her feet, purring as Jane bent to pick up the bird. She shuddered at the way the creature’s head lolled limply in her palm.
“Must you bring them inside?” she asked Tom as she deposited the bird in the trash can and washed her hands in the sink. She poured some dry food into Tom’s bowl and set it on the floor.
The cat trotted over and ate hungrily, crunching the bits between his teeth and watching Jane out of the corner of his eye.
“Horrid beast,” said Jane, scratching him behind the ear. She then turned her attention to the mail, which she’d brought in from the hall. Mostly it was junk, but at the bottom of the pile was a letter. Reading the return address, Jane felt her heart speed up. She ran her finger beneath the flap and pulled out the enclosed sheet of paper.
Dear Miss Fairfax:
Thank you for submitting your manuscript for our consideration. We regret to say that it is not right for our list. We wish you the best of luck in placing it elsewhere.
Sincerely,
Jessica Abernathy
Fourth Street Books
Jane crumpled the letter and tossed it to the floor. Tom eyed it, as if considering whether or not to bat it under the table, but did not stop eating. Jane opened a bottle of merlot, took a glass from the cabinet and a chocolate bar from one of the drawers, and left both the paper and the cat in the kitchen as she went back upstairs to her bedroom. She poured a glass of wine and set it on the bedside table. Then she pulled open a drawer in the nightstand and removed from it a small notebook. Turning to a page somewhere near the middle of the book, she added Jessica Abernathy’s name to the first unoccupied line, which in this case was almost exactly one-third of the way down, just below the name of Barlow McInerney of Accordion Press.
Beside Jessica’s name Jane wrote the number 116. “One hundred and sixteen rejection letters,” she muttered. “I’d say that makes the opinion unanimous.”
She flipped through the pages of the notebook until she came to the first one. She hadn’t been able to submit the manuscript to her usual publisher, John Murray, of course—that would have rather inconveniently given things away. So she’d been forced to seek elsewhere. At the top of the list of editors who had rejected her manuscript was one Geoffrey Martin Pomerantz of Pomerantz & Joygulb Publishers, London. Jane had no recollection of Mr. Pomerantz (or, for that matter, Mr. Joygulb). This lack of recognition, however, could be excused in light of the fact that her submission to them had taken place nearly two centuries before. Had the manuscript really been kicking around for that long? she wondered. She supposed it had, although that was difficult to imagine.
Tom, licking his chops, padded into the room and leapt onto the bed, where he settled himself on Jane’s lap and immediately went to sleep.
“Perhaps, Tom, it’s time to consider the possibility that I can no longer write,” said Jane.
Tom, opening one golden eye for only a second before closing it again, said nothing.
Jane closed the notebook and replaced it in the drawer. She told herself, as she had done many times before, that she should just throw the manuscript out. Having it around was depressing. But there was something masochistically satisfying about documenting her rejection. She didn’t save the actual letters—they would take up too much space, and anyway they would eventually fall apart from age—but the names she kept. Most of the people whose rejections she’d logged were dead now, which gave Jane some small amount of satisfaction. Yet the sting of remaining unpublished never fully faded.
“I’m a writer,” she announced to Tom. “That’s what I do. I ‘write.” She paused a moment, then sighed. “Well, I used to write,” she corrected herself.
The truth was she hadn’t written anything new since finishing the manuscript that had garnered 116 rejections. She had revised it slightly over the years, but for the most part it remained the novel she’d finished almost two centuries before. She’d had to abandon The Brothers—which her family had retitled Sanditon; she still wasn’t sure she was entirely happy about that—when she left Chawton cottage for the last time, but this manuscript she had kept a secret. She’d attempted to write new things since, of course, but the weight of the unpublished book on her thoughts had proved to be too great a block.
She suddenly felt very tired.
How long had she had the bookstore? She counted back. It was, what, eight years? No, nine. She’d moved to Brakeston after two decades spent in Phoenix, a city she’d chosen precisely because it was blessed with the polar opposite of the weather of her English childhood. But twenty years of unrelenting heat and sunlight had finally gotten to her, not for the reasons one might expect (the sun was not nearly as devastating to vampires as popular mythology would have the public believe) but because she was naturally fair. She turned pink after less than an hour in the sun, and never had been able to obtain even the semblance of a tan. The best she could manage was a kind of boiled puffiness, like a lobster or a cabbage. It was not a particularly attractive look.
For years she had tried to mimic the effects of time, dyeing her hair and simulating lines and liver spots. But there was only so much she could do, and besides, it was tiresome, so somewhere along the line (she vaguely remembered the year 1881, although it may have been 1900, which, being the start of the new century—and the year in which she had abandoned Europe for America—would have been a logical time to decide such a thing) she had given up trying and instead simply moved whenever her lack of aging began to be remarked upon. And so after many moves she had come to this town in upstate New York, choosing it more or less at random because she liked the sound of it.
Nine years, she thought. That gives me about ten or so more before I have to think about it. It was possible she could get even more time out of Brakeston. After all, wasn’t forty the new thirty? She’d heard that somewhere recently. Clearly, whoever had said it hadn’t been forty-one for the past two centuries. “It’s more like forty is the new one hundred and ninety-two,” she informed the cat, who was curled up on her stomach asleep.
She drank the rest of the wine and polished off the chocolate while flipping through the channels on the television, watching bits and pieces of different shows until finally the only things on were infomercials for vegetable peelers and fat-burning pills. Then, her head dulled by the wine, she felt her eyes close.
Not asleep yet not quite awake, she traveled back to a night long ago. She was standing on a veranda, looking out at a lake. It was twilight, and it was raining. A thunderstorm shook the world around her, and the waves on the lake were violent and angry. Thunder rent the air and lightning split the sky. She was afraid but also exhilarated.
Nobody knew where she was. She had told them she was visiting a friend, but in truth she had never met the man in whose house she now stood. Not in person, anyway. But they had exchanged many long letters, and through those she had come to know him. When he’d suggested she visit his house on Lake Geneva she had hesitated only a moment before agreeing.
She felt free. Away from her home and her family she could do as she liked. That she had come to the house of one of the most scandalous figures of her time only added to her excitement. And he was just as beautiful and stimulating as she had imagined him to be.
“What are you doing out here?”
She turned to see him watching her. His dark hair was swept back, and his eyes seemed to stare directly into her soul. When he smiled her heart skipped a beat.
“Watching the storm,” she answered.
He walked toward her, his limp only barely noticeable. From what she’d heard of him, she’d expected it to be more pronounced. But nothing about him was exactly as he was described. It was as if he appeared in different forms to everyone he met.
“It suits you,” he said when he was standing beside her. “The storm, I mean.” He put an arm around her waist. “They all think of you as a quiet afternoon,” he said. “But inside you rage with passion, don’t you?”
She said nothing. How was it he could know her so well? Already she felt as if she’d known him for years, but it had been only a day since her arrival.
“The night shows stars and women in a better light,” he said as thunder rumbled overhead. “Come inside. You’ll catch your death of cold out here.”
She allowed him to lead her back into the drawing room. But he didn’t stop there. Instead he led her down the hallway lined with portraits and landscapes and into a bedroom. His bedroom. She paused, looking at the enormous bed of carved mahogany, its sides hung with ruby red velvet draperies. The sheets were a tangled nest, as if he’d just risen from them. Throughout the room candles burned, warming the air and filling it with the faint scent of flowers.
“I can’t,” Jane told him, suddenly afraid.
“Of course you can,” he said. “There’s nothing to fear.”
She trembled as he turned and began undressing her. She closed her eyes for fear that looking at him would make her flee from the room. His fingers moved deftly over her body, slipping her dress from her shoulders. It pooled at her feet. Then he was undoing the laces of her stays. She barely breathed as he took them from her. Finally, he removed her chemise and she stood before him naked.
When his hands cupped her breasts she gasped, and when his mouth touched her skin she felt her knees buckle. He caught her, sweeping her up in his arms and carrying her to the bed. He placed her atop the sheets and stepped back. She watched through half-closed eyes as he removed his clothes. His chest was lean, his skin pale as milk. When he stepped from his trousers she glanced briefly at his manhood before looking away.
Then he was beside her, his hand stroking her as he told her how beautiful she was. His kisses covered her face, her neck, her breasts and stomach. His hands drew from her such pleasure that her breath caught in her throat.
In seconds he was on top of her, looking down into her face.
His eyes bore into her, and she could not look away. Outside the storm raged, the wind blowing one of the windows open and letting in the rain. At that moment he leaned down and kissed her. His mouth moved to her neck.
As his teeth pierced her flesh her eyes flew open.