Page 106 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

It’s the twenty-second of December. I have a hundred and forty covers on the twenty-eighth, eleven days until the second of January, and a man on this hill who has spent a day being extremely reasonable about the arrangements for his own disappearance.

I did not need a strange car.

Julian opens the door before I’m out of the van, which is normal, and does not say anything, which is not.

“Whose car?”

“Victoria’s.”

“Who’s Victoria?”

Something happens in his face that I would describe, if pressed, as a man deciding how much of a sentence he has time for.

“Come in from the cold,” he says.

She is standing at the window in the front library with her back to the room. She turns around when I come in, and my first thought, before anything sensible arrives, is oh, she’s beautiful.

Not pretty. Not attractive. Beautiful the way a knife is, with everything unnecessary taken off it. She is somewhere between thirty-five and immortal, in a charcoal coat she has not taken off, with dark blonde hair pulled back so severely it must have been a decision made in a different century. Her eyes are pale blue, ice over a lake. They take in my work coat, my claw clip, the flour on one wrist, and the two plastic containers of soup in about one second and a half.

“Penelope,” says Julian. “This is Victoria Cavendish. Victoria, Penelope Harrington.”

“Penny,” I say.

“Victoria,” she says. “I would apologize for arriving unannounced, but he does not answer the telephone.”

“I answer the telephone.”

“You answered it in 2011,” says Victoria.

I am still standing in the doorway holding two quarts of parsnip soup, and I would like to state for the record that I know exactly what I look like and that on any other day of my life I would not care.

Today I care.

Because she has known him a long time. It’s in how she doesn’t look at him when she speaks to him and how he doesn’t answer some of it. It’s the way she walked into a house that nobody walks into. It’s the fact that she is standing in the middle of the loneliest room in Maine with her coat on and she is completely, absolutely at home.

I’ve been sleeping in this house for two weeks.

“Well,” I say. “I’ll put these in the kitchen.”

“Penny—” Julian starts.

“They’re for you,” I tell him, and hear myself start babbling, and cannot stop. “I mean obviously not for you. For the pans. It’s a soup you can put in a pan.”

I hang up my coat and I go to the kitchen. I put two quarts of parsnip soup into a refrigerator that contains nothing else except a jar of my mustard and a lemon I brought up in November for reasons I can no longer reconstruct. Then I stand there with the door open and the cold coming out.

I’m jealous of a woman who has been in the building for six minutes, I think, but I also think, four hundred years.

Because I haven’t done this calculation. I have deliberately not done it. I’ve had four hundred years handed to me across a kitchen table and I have been tender about it and grieved about it and made jokes about the posture. Not once have I sat down and thought about what four hundred years of other people looks like.

She is one of them. She is standing in his library and she doesn’t need to be invited.

I close the refrigerator. I fill the kettle, because my hands have to be doing something and because I am my grandmother’s granddaughter. I make a pot of tea for three people, two of whom cannot drink it.

When I come back in with the tray, Victoria Cavendish takes a cup from me and thanks me and holds it. She holds it cradled in both hands at the level of her chest, tilted at exactly the angle a person tilts a cup they intend to drink, and she hasn’t the slightest intention of drinking it and never will.

I’ve spent eleven weeks watching a man do that exact same thing in my kitchen.

Something in my chest comes down about four inches and lands somewhere much more comfortable, and I sit down in the chair by the fire.