Page 112 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“I have been counting it since November.”

“I know you have. You count most things.” I lean my head against his arm. “I’m not saying yes and I’m not saying no. I’m saying there’s time, and I would like to spend some of it not being at my own funeral.”

He turns towards me. He takes my face in both hands, cool and careful, and looks at me for long enough that I nearly say something to break it. I don’t. I’m learning.

“If you want more time,” Julian says, quietly and directly, because he’s learning too, “I can give you some of mine.”

CHAPTER 22

The crate comes on the twenty-ninth. I’m at Blackthorn House at nine in the morning because I left my good tongs in his kitchen after prepping the Trask reception, and there’s a truck in the drive with New Hampshire plates and two men in a hurry. In the hall there is a wooden crate the size of a chest freezer with a shipping label on it and BOSTON in the third line of the address.

Julian doesn’t explain it and I don’t ask.

That’s the deal I made with myself on the twenty-second, standing in his library with a fire going and my whole life rearranged, and it is a much harder deal to keep than it sounded. I said I’d give him time. So he gets time, and he takes it in the form of a crate in the hall, and a man from a firm in Boston who telephones twice on the thirtieth. The little papered door beside the bookcase in the library is standing open on the thirty-first and there are eleven journals stacked on the floor beside it in date order.

I look at them for about four seconds, then go and put the kettle on.

Christmas happens somewhere in there. It’s very good, actually, which I did not expect. Julian comes with me to the Christmas Eve bonfire down by the harbor and stands beside me through carols, hot cider he doesn’t drink, and thirty minutes of Harriet Coyne explaining why the town used to do the whole thing better before the Parks Committee got involved. Then he comes back to the cottage.

Lucy comes for the afternoon of the day itself and eats an alarming amount of the ham. Julian is given a present by Lucy Carver, wrapped by Lucy Carver, which turns out to be a mug that says WORLD’S OKAYEST SAILOR, and I wish I could frame the look on his face.

I give him a charcoal cashmere scarf, which feels embarrassingly ordinary until he puts it on immediately and wears it for the rest of the day despite the fact that we are indoors and he is a vampire. He gives me a book. A small one, brown, with the leather gone soft.

“That is 1809,” he says. “It has salt in it, and a great deal of weather, and Amos Kell.”

“Julian, this is⁠—”

“It’s not a loan,” he says.

I sit on my hearthrug on Christmas afternoon with my best friend asleep in the good chair and a four-hundred-year-old man on the sofa wearing the scarf I gave him and reading a book about knots. I hold the first thing anyone has ever written about Mercy Rood, and I decide that I am not going to think about the crate until January.

January arrives on a Friday.

The Veil comes into Black Harbor at about two in the afternoon on the second, in two vehicles and a van, and by three minutes past two Deirdre Fanning has telephoned four people about it.

The welcome reception is at the Maritime Museum at six, because Mabel arranged it inside four hours flat, and I am catering it, because Mabel booked me in the same phone call and had already decided the number of covers.

“Sixty,” she said.

“Mabel, there are three of them.”

“There are three of them, Penelope,” said Mabel Libby, in the voice she uses for people who have not thought something through, and she was right. There are seventy-one people in that granite hall by half past six.

I do it properly. I want that on the record too. I could have done a tray of supermarket cheese and a bowl of pretzels for people I have every reason to be frightened of. Instead I do a hundred and fifty crab things that are not from Portland, and Fern Tibbetts’ parsnips as a soup in little cups, and the smoked bluefish pâté that Gil Amory has been trying to get the recipe out of me for six years, because if a stranger is going to write about this town I would prefer him to write about it having eaten well.

Also because I do not know what else to do with my hands.

The first member of The Veil I meet saves me from a crime against historic hardwood. The chafing dish handle is too hot even through the towel, and I nearly drop fifty dollars’ worth of smoked mussel chowder onto the two-hundred-year-old floor when a big hand catches the edge of the tray.

“Whoa. Careful.”

He has a serious camera and an enormous coat and a general air of eagerness. His lanyard says BEN CARTER.

“Thank you.” I get the dish safely onto the burner and shake out my fingers. “You have good reflexes.”

“Occupational hazard.” He grins at me, wide and doggish. “That smells incredible. What is it?”

“Chowder. Local mussels, leek, a little cured pork.”