The Van Helsing Legacy: Dark and Hungry Graves

Chapter 3

5 March, 1920

I submitted my paperwork and strolled out to Tulip Cottage about two in the afternoon, where Mrs Ralston told me that Geordie was out. I'd expected he would be—he must be up at Oxford for some particular reason other than loitering at Mrs Ralston's house—and I'd really only meant to ask when I might come back to visit.

But she told me she expected him very soon, so I waited and chatted over a cup of cocoa. The conversation and the chocolate were both pleasant, but I had the feeling she was trying to get a sense of me. We had met only a handful of times, and we had never had a chance to sit and talk alone. She was certainly entitled to a bit of caution, a bit of protectiveness. Geordie might as well have been her grandson, and my sudden appearance in his life had brought nothing but trouble for him and for her son, Sir Hannibal, Geordie's father in every way that mattered. And then I'd curled in on myself and disappeared, which, in retrospect, could not have inspired much confidence.

So I tried to chat as amiably as possible. She asked after my studies, and I answered as honestly as I could without being depressing. She approved of my upcoming sabbatical. We talked about her garden, some about her family and then about mine, and while I knew she sensed the empty space where I talked around my mother, she did not ask. I sensed a certain lacuna, too, some very old pain she never named. We talked about Harold Lloyd and stargazing, and she showed me the telescope she sometimes took out into the country if the night was exceptionally clear. Hannibal had been an avid astronomer, as a child. She laughed and told me about the trials of raising boys.

It had been about half an hour when I heard the door, and Mrs Ralston got up and went to the hall.

I followed, hanging back in the door.

The moment I saw Geordie, I realised that some part of my restless anxiety had simply been missing him. There's something about fighting alongside a person that causes bonds to form very quickly, and between the nineteenth of December and the tenth of January, when I finally left London, I'd become accustomed to seeing him almost daily. Part of the knot inside me unravelled. Not a large part, but a small relief is still a relief. He was there. He was all right.

He'd joked that I never seemed to have a chance to see him at his best, which was irritatingly true, and that made it pleasant to see him well and whole, not injured or sick or exhausted. Gheorghe Apostol on an ordinary day, not pursued by dark sorcerers or the un-dead, was a treat. He looked as though he'd been cobbled together from the best bits of every moving picture star: smooth, planar features, high cheekbones, dark, mobile eyebrows, a straight, narrow nose, and full, pigmented lips. He was about average height in England, which I understood would have made him tall in Roumania. There was a bit of a wave to his black hair and an open, unpretentious warmth in his golden-brown eyes. He was so utterly perfect that, if one thought too hard about it, it became a trifle unnerving. Inhuman. As though a Renaissance sculpture had come to life, which, while a lovely, romantic descriptor, is not something that ought to happen literally.

Most people would never have the chance to think too hard about it, though. The overpowering, unnatural attraction he radiated had a tendency to cloud people's perceptions of him, as well as their good sense. We still had not figured out why it didn't affect me, though I had to admit that I had not recently been searching for that answer as diligently as I had promised.

He hung his coat and hat beside mine, and then he was waylaid.

Mrs Ralston appeared by his side and turned him to face her, her hands firm upon his shoulders.

'You've got a visitor,' she told him. She reached up to straighten his tie and adjusted his lapels and pocket square, then licked two fingertips and smoothed an errant strand of his hair. He stilled reflexively, careful that her skin should not touch his, but she was careful, too.