A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness [59]
“I don’t want her power!” Matthew exploded, making a bad decision with his rook, which Hamish quickly captured. He bowed his head, looking more than ever like a Renaissance angel focused on some celestial mystery. “Christ, I don’t know what I want.”
Hamish sat as still as possible. “I think you do, Matt.”
Matthew moved a pawn and made no reply.
“The other creatures in Oxford,” Hamish continued, “they’ll know soon, if they don’t know already, that you’re interested in more than this old book. What’s your endgame?”
“I don’t know,” the vampire whispered.
“Love? Tasting her? Making her like you?”
Matthew snarled.
“Very impressive,” Hamish said in a bored tone.
“There’s a lot I don’t understand about all this, Hamish, but there are three things I do know,” Matthew said emphatically, picking up his wineglass from the floor by his feet. “I will not give in to this craving for her blood. I do not want to control her power. And I certainly have no wish to make her a vampire.” He shuddered at the thought.
“That leaves love. You have your answer, then. You do know what you want.”
Matthew swallowed a gulp of wine. “I want what I shouldn’t want, and I crave someone I can never have.”
“You’re not afraid you’d hurt her?” Hamish asked gently. “You’ve had relationships with warm-blooded women before, and you’ve never harmed any of them.”
Matthew’s heavy crystal wine goblet snapped in two. The bowl toppled to the floor, red wine spreading on the carpet. Hamish saw the glint of powdered glass between the vampire’s index finger and thumb.
“Oh, Matt. Why didn’t you tell me?” Hamish governed his features, making sure that not a particle of his shock was evident.
“How could I?” Matthew stared at his hands and ground the shards between his fingertips until they sparkled reddish black from the mixture of glass and blood. “You always had too much faith in me, you know.”
“Who was she?”
“Her name was Eleanor.” Matthew stumbled over the name. He dashed the back of his hand across his eyes, a fruitless attempt to wipe the image of her face from his mind. “My brother and I were fighting. Now I can’t even remember what the argument was about. Back then I wanted to destroy him with my bare hands. Eleanor tried to make me see reason. She got between us and—” The vampire’s voice broke. He cradled his head without bothering to clean the bloody residue from his already healed fingers. “I loved her so much, and I killed her.”
“When was this?” Hamish whispered.
Matthew lowered his hands, turning them over to study his long, strong fingers. “Ages ago. Yesterday. What does it matter?” he asked with a vampire’s disregard for time.
“It matters enormously if you made this mistake when you were a newly minted vampire and not in control of your instincts and your hunger.”
“Ah. Then it will also matter that I killed another woman, Cecilia Martin, just over a century ago. I wasn’t ‘a newly minted vampire’ then.” Matthew got up from his chair and walked to the windows. He wanted to run into the night’s blackness and disappear so he wouldn’t have to see the horror in Hamish’s eyes.
“Are there more?” Hamish asked sharply.
Matthew shook his head. “Two is enough. There can’t be a third. Not ever.”
“Tell me about Cecilia,” Hamish commanded, leaning forward in his chair.
“She was a banker’s wife,” Matthew said reluctantly. “I saw her at the opera and became infatuated. Everyone in Paris was infatuated with someone else’s wife at the time.” His finger traced the outline of a woman’s face on the pane of glass before him. “It didn’t strike me as a challenge. I only wanted a taste of her, that night I went to her house. But once I started, I couldn’t stop. And yet I couldn’t let her die either—she was mine, and I wouldn’t give her up. I barely stopped feeding in time. Dieu, she hated being a vampire. Cecilia walked into a burning house before I could stop her.”
Hamish frowned. “Then you didn’t kill her, Matt.