“You have my blessing,” Matthew interrupted. “Just choose someone who will do it properly.”
“Thank you. I already have.” Marcus hesitated. “Jack has been asking to see Diana.”
“Send him over this evening.” Matthew flipped the eggs onto a plate. “Tell him to bring the cradles.
Around seven. We’ll be expecting him.”
“I’ll tell him,” Marcus said. “Anything else?”
“Yes,” Matthew said. “Someone must be feeding Benjamin information. Since you can’t find Benjamin, you can look for him—or her.”
“And then?” Fernando asked.
“Bring them to me,” Matthew replied as he left the room.
We remained locked alone in the house for three days, twined together, talking little, never separated for more than the few moments when Matthew went downstairs to make me something to eat or to accept a meal dropped off by the Connaught’s staff. The hotel had apparently worked out a food-for-wine scheme with Matthew. Several cases of 1961 Chateau Latour left the house in exchange for exquisite morsels of food, such as hard-boiled quail eggs in a nest of seaweed and delicate ravioli filled with tender cèpes that the chef assured Mathew had been flown in from France only that morning.
On the second day, Matthew and I trusted ourselves to talk, and similarly tiny mouthfuls of words were offered up and digested alongside the delicacies from a few streets away. He reported on Jack’s efforts at self-governance in the thick of Marcus’s sprawling brood. Matthew spoke with great admiration of Marcus’s deft handling of his children and grandchildren, all of whom had names worthy of characters in a nineteenth-century penny dreadful. And, reluctantly, Matthew told me of his struggles not only his with blood rage but with his desire to be at my side.
“I would have gone mad without the pictures,” he confessed, spooned up against my back with his long, cold nose buried in my neck. “The images of where we’d lived, or the flowers in the garden, or your toes on the edge of the bath kept my sanity from slipping entirely.”
I shared my own tale with a slowness worthy of a vampire, gauging Matthew’s reactions so that I could take a break when necessary and let him absorb what I’d experienced in London and Oxford.
There was finding Timothy and the missing page, as well as meeting up with Amira and being back at the Old Lodge. I showed Matthew my purple finger and shared the goddess’s proclamation that to possess the Book of Life I would have to give up something I cherished. And I spared no details from my account of meeting Benjamin—not my own failures as a witch, nor what he’d done to Phoebe, not even his final, parting threat.
“If I hadn’t hesitated, Benjamin would be dead.” I’d been over the event hundreds of times and still didn’t understand why my nerve had failed. “First Juliette and now—”
“You cannot blame yourself for choosing not to kill someone,” Matthew said, pressing a finger to my lips. “Death is a difficult business.”
“Do you think Benjamin is still here, in England?” I asked.
“Not here,” Matthew assured me, rolling me to face him. “Never again where you are.”
Never is a long time. Philippe’s admonishment came back to me clearly.
I pushed the worry away and pulled my husband closer.
“Benjamin has utterly vanished,” Andrew Hubbard told Matthew. “That’s what he does.”
“That’s not entirely true. Addie claims she saw him in Munich,” Marcus said. “She alerted her fellow knights.”
While Matthew was in the sixteenth century, Marcus had admitted women into the brotherhood. He began with Miriam, and she helped him name the rest. Matthew wasn’t sure if this was madness or genius at work, but if it helped him locate Benjamin, he was prepared to remain agnostic. Matthew blamed Marcus’s progressive ideas on his onetime neighbor Catherine Macaulay, who had occupied an important place in his son’s life when he was first made a vampire and filled his ears with her bluestocking ideas.