The Historian

The Historian Page 80

The hotel in Les Bains boasted a high-ceilinged parlor with a fireplace, and the ma?tre d' had lit a fire there and stubbornly closed the parlor doors against other guests. "Your trip to the monastery has tired you" was all he had said, setting a bottle of cognac near my father, and glasses - five glasses, I noted, as if our missing companion were still there to drink with us - but I saw from the look that my father exchanged with him that much more than that had passed between them.

The ma?tre d' had been on the phone all evening, and he had somehow made things right with the police, who had questioned us only in the hotel and released us under his benevolent eye. I suspected he'd also taken care of calling a morgue or a funeral parlor, whatever one used in a French village. Now that everyone official was gone, I sat on the uncomfortable damask sofa with Helen, who reached over to stroke my hair every few minutes, and tried not to imagine Master James's kind face and solid form inert under a sheet. My father sat in a deep chair by the fire and gazed at her, at us. Barley had put his long legs up on an ottoman and was trying, I thought, not to stare at the cognac, until my father recollected himself and poured us each a glass. Barley's eyes were red with silent weeping, but he seemed to want to be left alone. When I looked at him, my own eyes filled with tears for a moment, uncontrollably.

My father looked across at Barley, and I thought for a moment that he was going to cry, too. "He was very brave," my father said quietly. "You know that his attack made it possible for Helen to shoot as she did. She would not have been able to shoot through the heart like that if the monster had not been distracted. I think James must have known in the last moments what a difference he had made. And he avenged the person he had loved best - and many others." Barley nodded, still unable to speak, and there was a little silence among us.

"I promised I would tell you everything when we could sit quietly," Helen said at last, setting down her glass.

"You're sure you wouldn't like me to leave you alone?" Barley spoke reluctantly.

Helen laughed, and I was surprised by the melody of her laugh, so different from her speaking voice. Even in that room half full of grief, her laugh did not seem out of place. "No, no, my dear," she said to Barley. "We can't do without you." I loved her accent, that harsh yet sweet English of hers that I thought I already knew from so long ago I couldn't remember the time. She was a tall, spare woman in a black dress, an outdated sort of dress, with a coil of graying hair around her head. Her face was striking - lined, worn, her eyes youthful. The sight of her shocked me every time I turned my head - not only because she was there, real, but because I had always imagined only the young Helen. I had never included in my imagination all her years away from us.

"Telling will take a long, long time," she said softly, "but I can say a few things now, at least. First, that I am sorry. I have caused you such pain, Paul, I know." She looked at my father across the firelight. Barley stirred, embarrassed, but she stopped him with a firm gesture. "I caused myself an even greater pain. Second, I should have told you this already, but now our daughter" - her smile was sweet and tears gleamed in her eyes - "our daughter and our friends can be my witnesses. I am alive, not undead. He never reached me a third time."

I wanted to look at my father, but I couldn't bring myself even to turn my head. It was his private moment. I heard, though, that he did not sob aloud. She stopped and seemed to draw a breath. "Paul, when we visited Saint-Matthieu and I learned about their traditions - the abbot who had risen from the dead and Brother Kiril, who guarded him - I was filled with despair, and also with a terrible curiosity. I felt that it could not be coincidence that I had wanted to see the place, had longed for it. Before we went to France, I had been doing more research in New York - without telling you, Paul - hoping to find Dracula's second hiding place and to avenge my father's death. But I had never seen anything about Saint-Matthieu. My longing to go there began only when I read about it in your guidebook. It was just a longing, with no scholarly basis." She looked around at us, her beautiful profile drooping. "I had taken up my research again in New York because I felt that I had been the cause of my father's death - through my desire to outshine him, to reveal his betrayal of my mother - and I could not bear the thought. Then I began to feel that it was my evil blood - Dracula's blood - that had caused me to do this, and I realized that I had passed this blood to my baby, even if I seemed to have healed from the touch of the undead myself."

She paused to stroke my cheek and to take my hand in hers. I quivered under her touch, the closeness of this strange, familiar woman leaning against my shoulder on the divan. "I felt more and more unworthy, and when I heard Brother Kiril's explanation of the legend at Saint-Matthieu, I felt that I would never be able to rest until I knew more. I believed that if I could find Dracula and exterminate him I might be completely well again, a good mother, a person with a new life.

"After you fell asleep, Paul, I went out to the cloisters. I had considered going into the crypt again with my gun, trying to open the sarcophagus, but I thought I could not do it alone. While I was trying to decide whether or not to wake you, to beg you to help me, I sat on the cloister bench, looking over the cliff. I knew I should not be there alone, but I was drawn to the place. There was beautiful moonlight, and mist creeping along the walls of the mountains."

Helen's eyes had grown strangely wide. "As I sat there, I felt the crawling of the skin on my back, as if something stood just behind me. I turned quickly, and on the other side of the cloister, where the moonlight could not fall, I seemed to see a dark figure. His face was in shadow, but I could feel, rather than see, burning eyes upon me. It was only the work of a moment more before he would spread his wings and reach me, and I was completely alone on the parapet. Suddenly I seemed to hear voices, agonizing voices in my own head that told me I could never overcome Dracula, that this was his world, not mine. They told me to jump while I was still myself, and I stood up like a person in a dream and jumped."

She sat very straight now, looking into the fire, and my father drew his hand over his face. "I wanted to fall free, like Lucifer, like an angel, but I had not seen those rocks. I fell on them instead and cut my head and arms, but there was a large cushion of grass there, too, and the fall did not kill me or break my bones. After some hours, I think, I woke to the cold night, and felt blood seeping around my face and neck, and saw the moon setting and the drop below. My God, if I had rolled instead of fainting - " She paused. "I knew I could not explain to you what I had tried to do, and the shame of it came over me like a kind of madness. I felt I could never be worthy, after that, of you or our daughter. When I could stand, I got up, and I found that I had not bled so much. And although I was very sore, I had not broken anything and I could feel that he had not swooped down upon me - he must have given me up for lost, too, when I jumped. I was terribly weak and it was hard for me to walk, but I went around the monastery walls and down the road, in the dark."

I thought my father might weep again, but he was quiet, his eyes never leaving hers.

"I went out into the world. It was not so hard to do. I had brought my purse with me - out of habit, I suppose, and because I had my gun and my silver bullets in it. I remember almost laughing when I found the purse still on my arm, on the precipice. I had money in it, too, a lot of money in the lining, and I used it carefully. My mother always carried all her money, too. I suppose it was the way the peasants in her village did things. She never trusted banks. Much later, when I needed more, I drew from our account in New York and put some in a Swiss bank. Then I left Switzerland as quickly as I could, in case you should try to trace me, Paul. Ah, forgive me!" she cried out suddenly, tightening her grip on my fingers, and I knew she meant her absence, not the money.

My father clenched his hands together. "That withdrawal gave me hope for a few months, or at least put a question into my mind, but my bank could not trace it. I got the money back." But not you, he could have added, and didn't. His face shone, weary and glad.

Helen dropped her eyes. "In any case, I found a place to stay for a few days, away from Les Bains, until my cuts could heal. I hid myself until I could go out into the world."

Her fingers strayed to her throat and I saw the small white scar I had already noticed many times. "I knew in my bones that Dracula had not forgotten about me, and that he might search for me again. I filled my pockets with garlic and my mind with strength. I kept my gun with me, my dagger, my crucifix. Everywhere I went I stopped in the village churches and asked for a blessing, although sometimes even entering their doors made my old wound throb. I was careful to keep my neck covered. Eventually I cut my hair short and colored it, changed my clothes, wore dark glasses. For a long time I stayed away from cities, and then I began little by little to go to the archives where I had always wanted to do my research.

"I was thorough. I found him everywhere I went - in Rome in the 1620s, in Florence under the Medici, in Madrid, in Paris during the Revolution. Sometimes it was the report of a strange plague, sometimes an outbreak of vampirism in a great cemetery - P¨¨re Lachaise, for example. He seemed always to have liked scribes, archivists, librarians, historians - anyone who handled the past through books. I tried to deduce from his movements where his new tomb was, where he had hidden himself after we opened his tomb at Sveti Georgi, but I couldn't discover any pattern. I thought that once I found him, once I killed him, I would come back and tell you how safe the world had become. I would earn you. I lived in fear that he would find me before I could find him. And everywhere I went I missed you - oh, I was so lonely."

She picked up my hand again and caressed it like a fortune-teller, and I felt, in spite of myself, a surge of anger - all those years without her. "Finally I thought that even if I was not worthy, I wanted to have just a glimpse of you. Both of you. I had read about your foundation in the papers, Paul, and I knew you were in Amsterdam. It was not hard to find you, or to sit in a caf¨¦ near your office, or to follow you on a trip or two - very carefully - very, very carefully. I never let myself see either of you face-to-face, for fear you would see me. I came and went. If my research was going well, I allowed myself a visit to Amsterdam and followed you from there. Then one day - in Italy, at Monteperduto - I saw him on the piazza. He was following you, too, watching you. That was when I realized he had become strong enough to go out in broad daylight sometimes. I knew that you were in danger, but I thought that if I went to you, to warn you, I might bring the danger closer. After all, he might be looking for me, not you, or he might be trying to make me lead him to you. It was an agony. I knew that you must be doing some kind of research again -  that you must be interested in him again, Paul - to attract his notice. I could not decide what to do."

"It was me - my fault," I murmured, squeezing her plain, lined hand. "I found the book."

She looked at me for a moment, her head to one side. "You are a historian," she said after a moment. It wasn't a question. Then she sighed. "For several years, I had been writing postcards to you, my daughter - without sending them, of course. One day, I thought that I could communicate with the two of you from a distance, to let you know I was alive without letting anyone else see me. I sent them to Amsterdam, to your house, in a package addressed to Paul."

This time I turned to my father in amazement and anger. "Yes," he told me sadly. "I felt I could not show them to you, could not upset you without being able to find your mother for you. You can imagine what that period was like for me." I could. I remembered suddenly his terrible fatigue in Athens, the evening I'd seen him looking half dead at the desk in his room. But he smiled at us, and I realized that he might now smile every day.

"Ah." She smiled too. There were deep lines around her mouth, I saw, and the corners of her eyes were creased.

"And I began looking for you - and for him." His smile grew grave. She was gazing at him. "And then I saw I must give up my research and simply follow him following you. I saw you sometimes, and saw you doing your own research again - watched you going into libraries, Paul, or coming out of them, and how I wished I could tell you all I had learned myself. Then you went to Oxford. I hadn't been to Oxford before in the course of my search, although I'd read that they had an outbreak of vampirism there in the late medieval period. And in Oxford you left a book open - "

"He shut it when he saw me," I put in.

"And me," said Barley with his lightning grin. It was the first time he'd spoken, and I was relieved to see that he could still look cheerful. "Well, the first time he looked at it, he forgot to close it." Helen almost winked at us.

"You're right," said my father. "Come to think of it, I did forget."

Helen turned to him with her lovely smile. "Do you know I had never seen that book before? Vampires du Moyen Age? ""A classic," my father said. "But a very rare one.""I think Master James must have seen it, too," Barley put in slowly. "You know, I saw him in there just after we surprised you at your research, sir." My father looked perplexed. "Yes," Barley said. "I'd left my mackintosh on the main floor of the library, and I went back for it less than an hour later. And I saw Master James coming out of the niche in the balcony, but he didn't see me. I thought he looked awfully worried, sort of cross and distracted. I thought about that when I decided to call him, too."

"You called Master James?" I was surprised, but past feeling indignant.

"When? Why did you do that?"

"I called him from Paris because I remembered something," Barley said simply, stretching his legs. I wanted to go over and twine my arm around his neck, but not in front of my parents. He looked at me. "I told you I was trying to remember something, on the train, something about Master James, and when we got to Paris I remembered it. I'd seen a letter on his desk once when he was putting away some papers - an envelope, actually, and I liked the stamp on it, so I looked a little more closely.

"It was from Turkey, and it was old - that's what made me look at the stamp - well, it was postmarked twenty years ago, from a Professor Bora, and I thought to myself that I wanted to have a big desk someday, and get letters from all over the world. The name Bora stuck with me, even at the time - it sounded so exotic. I didn't open it or read the letter, of course," Barley added hastily. "I wouldn't have done that."

"Of course not." My father snorted softly, but I thought his eyes shone with affection.

"Well, as we were getting off the train in Paris, I saw an old man on the platform, a Muslim, I guess, in a dark red hat with a long tassel, and a long robe, like an Ottoman pasha, and I suddenly remembered that letter. Then your father's story hit me again - you know, the name of the Turkish professor" -  he gave me a somber look - "and I went to the phone. I realized Master James must still be in on this hunt, in some way."

"Where was I?" I asked jealously. "In the bathroom, I suppose. Girls are always in the bathroom." He might as well have blown me a kiss, but not in front of the others. "Master James was livid with me on the phone, but when I told him what was going on, he said I was in his good graces forever." Barley's red lips trembled a little. "I didn't dare ask him what he meant to do, but now we know." "Yes, we do," my father echoed sadly. "He must have done the calculation from that old book, too, and figured out that it was sixteen years to the week since Dracula's last visit to Saint-Matthieu. Then he'd certainly have realized where I was going. In fact, he was probably checking up on me when he went up to the rare-book niche - he was after me several times in Oxford to tell him what was wrong, worried about my health and spirits. I didn't want to drag him into it, knowing what a risk was involved."

Helen nodded. "Yes. I think I must have been there just before he was. I found the open book and did the calculation for myself, and then I heard someone on the stairs and slipped out in the other direction. Like our friend, I saw that you would go to Saint-Matthieu, Paul, to try to find me and to find that fiend, and I traveled as fast as I could. But I didn't know which train you would take, and I certainly didn't know our daughter would try to follow you, too."

"I saw you," I said in wonder. She gazed at me, and we let it drop for the moment. There would be so much time to talk. I could see she was tired, that we were all tired to the bone, that we could not even begin to say to one another tonight what a triumph this had been. Was the world safer because we were all together, or because he was finally gone from it? I looked into a future I had never known about before. Helen would live with us and blow out the candles in the dining room. She would come to my graduation from high school and my first day at university and help me dress for my wedding, if I ever married. She would read aloud to us in the front room after dinner, she would rejoin the world and teach again, she would take me to buy shoes and blouses, she would walk with her arm around my waist.

I could not know then that she would also drift from us at times, not speaking for hours, fingering her neck, or that a wasting illness would take her away for good nine years later - long before we had gotten used to having her back, although we might never have gotten used to that, might never have tired of the reprieve of her presence. I couldn't foresee that our last gift would be knowing that she rested in peace, when it could have been otherwise, and that this certainty would be both heartbreaking and curative for us. If I had been able to foresee these things at all, I might have known that my father would disappear for a day after her funeral, and that the little dagger in our parlor cabinet would go with him, and that I would never, never ask him about it.

But at that fireside in Les Bains, the years we would have with her stretched ahead of us in endless benediction. They began a few minutes later when my father rose and kissed me, shook Barley's hand with momentary fervor, and drew Helen from the divan. "Come," he said, and she leaned on him, her story spent for now, her face weary, joyful. He was gathering her hands in his. "Come up to bed."