Page 23 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

And it’s wrong.

I know kitchens the way Wendell knows a hull. A working kitchen has a smell in the walls—old oil, onion, coffee, the ghost of every stock anyone ever reduced in it. There’s a film on top of the cupboards you can only take off with a knife. The spoons go dark at the handle.

This kitchen smells like nothing at all.

“How long since anyone cooked in here?”

“Some time.”

“That’s not a number.”

“No. It is not.”

The copper on the wall is perfect. The board by the range has never had a knife on it. And the range is spotless in the particular way that only ever means unused, because a clean range is a range someone polished recently, and a polished range has faint rings on the enamel where the pans go. There are no rings.

I have spent my whole working life in kitchens that hold the memory of every meal anyone ever cooked in them. This one is holding nothing at all. It’s the loneliest room I have ever stood in, and it’s beautiful, and I want to fill it so badly my hands hurt.

He sets my basket on a scrubbed wooden table that looks like it’s been scrubbed for longer than the United States has existed.

“Thank you,” he says, and he means it. He looks at the pastries, and then he does the thing I’ve been waiting weeks to see him do, and it breaks my heart a little, because he does it so carefully. He reaches into the basket and picks up a piece of the rosewater shortbread. He turns it in his fingers and looks at it like it’s a small precious artifact from a dig.

He doesn’t eat it. He sets it back down, gently, on the linen.

“They’re beautiful,” he says. “You made these.”

“I made these.”

“I can tell.” He doesn’t explain how he can tell. He looks at me instead, and there’s something almost apologetic in it. I get the sudden, dizzy sense that we are both standing very carefully around the same unspoken thing, the way you’d stand around a hole in the floor.

“Would you like to see the house?” he asks, and I understand it’s a change of subject. I let it be one, because I would like to see the house more than I’ve wanted almost anything.

“Yes,” I say. “God, yes.”

He shows me the house.

There’s a long gallery on the seaward side. The whole wall is windows, and past them the Atlantic goes on forever, iron-grey and endless, and the light coming in is that specific silver you only get over water.

On the second floor the light comes softly through drawn curtains, and every surface in the hallway has that undisturbed, held-breath stillness, like a room in a photograph. Not dusty. Just untouched. Like time got to the threshold and was politely turned away.

The painting is in the front room, over the fireplace, and I stop dead in front of it. An oil, four feet across, in a frame gone almost black with age. Black Harbor from the water at dusk with a dozen vessels at anchor, and behind them a working shoreline with sheds, drying racks, and a church tower exactly where the church tower still is.

There’s a small brass plate on the frame. Black Harbor, 1831.

“Oh,” I say.

I know this view. The shape of the headland is precisely right, and everything else in the picture has been gone for two hundred years.

“That is a Fitzhugh,” Julian says behind me. “He was not very good.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“It is accurate, which is better.” He comes and stands close enough beside me that I can feel exactly how much of the room he’s taking up, close enough that a warm and entirely unhelpful part of my brain starts calculating the distance between his sleeve and my shoulder. I make myself keep looking at the boats. I’d love to report that my attention is entirely on the boats. “He painted the light wrong. He worked it up in a room in Boston from a sketch and made it a September light, and the ice on the north shed is January. But the ships are right. That is the Ellen Rood, second from the left. She burned in 1844 off Portsmouth with no one aboard, which was the only lucky thing that ever happened to her.”

“Rood. Like⁠—”

“Her family, yes.”

“That building.” He nods at a squat structure near the water. “That’s where the Salt & Sage stands now. It was a chandlery then—rope, tar, sailcloth. It also burned in the forties.” A pause. “The eighteen forties. There was ice on the water that winter, all the way out past the point. You could walk to the Sisters. Some fool did, and made it back, and never let anyone forget it.”