Writings

When I started writing Stregoni Benefici, I wanted desperately to have a ten-chapter buffer. I made it to three, if you count the prologue. With the help of June Camp NaNoWriMo (I won! By the skin of my teeth, and these last 7,000 words are crap, let me tell you), I’ve finally gotten ten chapters up on SB, which puts me in clear striking distance of the end. I’m finishing chapter 24, and then there will be 25, 26, 27, and 28, and a short epilogue.

I haven’t decided yet whether I will finish out to 28 before beginning to post again. Of course there’s a part of me that wants to get to showing people the rest of this RIGHT NOW but there’s also the part of me that loves cohesion and wants to make sure that every piece fits together perfectly at the end of this fic.

Of course, with 50,000 new words in SB, most of them laid down very fast, there’s a lot of work to be done on the editorial side. I hope to start posting in the next week or so, and then will maintain a regular posting schedule if it kills me.

In the meantime, for your amusement, here’s a compilation of editorial notes from SB. During a NaNo, forward momentum is of utmost importance, so often, when I need to look something up or take more time deciding something, I throw myself a note to go back in for it later.

Isn’t it the insane who are known for talking to themselves?

Here’s a peek into my head…

Stregoni Benefici: The Draft Notes

(brackets are the notes, outside the brackets are text that the note refers to.)

» Read the rest of this entry «

Chicago, Illinois
October, 1918

“Mother, go home.”

Junior snapped at Elizabeth when she stroked his hair for what must have been the thousandth time since she’d arrived to the hospital. The first few days that Edward had been here, she’d yearned for him to be awake, but she’d been learning lately that her son’s temper had a habit of flaring right along with his fever.

“They—don’t want—you—”

His voice halted between violent coughs, but he rolled away as she tried to wipe his chin. “You’ve—heard them.” Another cough. “Go home.”

“Edward—”

But he jerked away from her hand, rolling so that the cot’s springs creaked. Every bed here had its own small cubby, cut off from the one next to it by a draped sheet. “To slow the spread,” the doctors said, but she suspected it was more for appearance than anything. The hanging sheet her son faced was a strange, brilliant white, grossly out of place alongside the bedclothes stained with mucous and blood.

And Edward yelled and cursed, and refused her. Insisted she follow the orders of the doctors. Rolled away from her as he did now.

But the truth was her child was terrified.

And so she had no intention of leaving his side.

It was the same here as it had been at the infirmary. The nurses and the doctors told Elizabeth to go home, that they would put her contact information with Edward, and that she would be telegrammed at once if there was substantial change in his condition. She should stay home. Draw the blinds, and stay away from others.

Make sure that at least someone in her family survived.

She didn’t waste time telling them it wouldn’t be worth it; that she was barren, that her whole life was these two men with their identical names and identical looks. Or at least that it had been until that awful day—had it been only three weeks ago?—that the young, light-haired doctor had delivered that awful news.

He had been the one who transferred them here within only two days of their arrival at the armory. Junior clung to his health, and nearly seemed to be improving, wandering unsteadily from his bed when he grew bored of lying down. He’d constantly needed to be pulled back from the far reaches of the armory, where he went to play craps or read the news with other patients, ignoring his own inability to keep a steady stride.

The nurses, Elizabeth thought with a chuckle, must have been glad to see such a pest go.

Here at Cook County, however, the younger Edward Masen had become much more sedate. He grew weaker by the minute, it seemed. A body which had once been able to keep still now trembled with fever, and his lips and nail beds were beginning to turn that pale shade of blue she recognized from his father’s face and hands three weeks before. Even if he’d wanted to, he lacked the strength to wander across the ward by himself, and the boy who four days ago had driven the nurses crazy was gone.

Or to be more accurate, he was dying.

Elizabeth was terrified. And so was Junior. But the older Edward had taught his son bravado, not fear, and today, bravado was taking the form of anger.

Running a hand absently over his back, Elizabeth felt each vertebra of his spine. Her Edward had lost several pounds. His face appeared gaunt, and his limbs, already gangly as they waited for his body to grow into adulthood, were now spindly and fragile. He had never been exactly filled-out, but he now appeared starving—which was little wonder as he hadn’t managed to keep down even what little food he ate since arriving at the armory.

Edward coughed. Except for the timbre, the deep pitch that was the result of a chest that was many times over larger than it once had been, it could have been the same, wet, gurgle-cough that had greeted her the day he was born. His lips reddened a little—with blood, she realized in horror. She reached for the rag which some nurse had hung on the post of his cot and wiped, her hand trembling.

How stupid, she thought. She’d worried about that infernal war, and sending him off to be one of Wilson’s boys overseas. She’d obsessed over it. Argued with Senior over it. And it had all been for nothing. Her son would die here, in a cot in a hospital in the hometown he’d left only a handful of times. He would never see Europe—he would never so much as see Ohio. He would die without a soldier’s glory, or without knowing a woman’s love. He would die without a high school diploma, let alone the law degree Senior had always intended for his son to have.

The rag disappeared from her hand. Startled, she looked up into the eyes of a woman. A nurse, who carried in one hand a basket of fresh rags, white and warm, and in the other, a hamper for collection.

“Now you shouldn’t be here, ma’am,” she said as she dropped the bloodied rag into the hamper, but even though the voice was authoritative, it was kind. “We don’t want you sick right alongside your boy here.”

Elizabeth looked away from the nurse and back to Edward, running a hand through his coppery waves. “I have nothing left to lose,” she murmured, her breath hitching.

It was the first time she’d said this thought aloud. The nurse stopped what she was doing, and the two baskets settled onto the floor with a scratching noise as she knelt next to Elizabeth’s stool. For a long moment, neither of them said anything, both just staring at Edward’s chest as it rose and fell.

“Your husband?” the nurse asked finally.

“The influenza took him two weeks ago.”

“And your other children?”

“We were only able to have Edward.” Elizabeth shot the nurse a look. Her face was kind and sad, and for a moment Elizabeth nearly told her the story of Margaret, of how her son had almost had a sibling. Of how she still carried the terrible weight of a mother who’d already had one child die.

The nurse nodded. “I understand.”

“Do you have children?”

“Three,” she answered. “Billy is the oldest—he’s thirty-five. Got two of his own. Joyce is his sister, she’s thirty. She went to school to become a teacher, got married late. Her boy is just two right now and she’s getting ready for the next one. And Tommy is the baby. Twenty-two.” When Elizabeth gave her a curious look, she added with a chuckle, “Tommy was a mistake. But the best kind.”

“Is he in the war?”

The nurse shook her head. “No, thank Heaven. God gave him a club foot. Kept him out of the draft. Kept my heart from breaking.” She reached down as she said so, feeling Edward’s forehead for the fever, stroking his bangs a bit as she did so.

He grunted.

Elizabeth glanced at the bed. Aside from the six pounds or so gone from his body thanks to the influenza, her son’s body was perfect. No club feet. Strong muscles. Legs that could run a few miles. Nothing to keep him from rushing headlong to his death.

No matter which side of the Atlantic he died on.

A hand squeezed her shoulder, and Elizabeth realized that the nurse had been watching her watch Edward.

“He wanted to go,” Elizabeth said quietly. “And I keep wondering, if I’d let him—” The tears welling in her eyes cut her off before she could finish.

Another squeeze. “If you let him go over there, would he not be here?”

She nodded.

“You can’t think like that, Mother,” the nurse said quietly. “Wasn’t there nothing to be done about this.”

The wet cough came again; the large body contracted and released. He was asleep, it seemed. The nurse handed her a new rag, and she used this clean one to wipe away the fresh bit of blood and spit that gathered at the edges of her son’s lips.

“How much longer?” she whispered, when her son had gone still again.

The nurse shook her head. “We don’t know that. Some, they go right away. Some, they hang on for days. And some, well—they get all the way to looking like your boy, and they get up and go on their way home in a few days anyways.”

There was another scritch-scritch as the baskets went back onto wide hips, and the nurse squeezed Elizabeth’s shoulder once more. For a moment they both stared at Edward, at the way his chest now rose and fell evenly despite his rattling, wet breath. Elizabeth took his hand. Despite his fever, it was cool to the touch—as though he were becoming a corpse from the outside in. Tears welled in her eyes.

“You go on and stay here,” the nurse said quietly. “I’ll tell the doctor when he makes his rounds.”

“Thank you,” Elizabeth muttered.

The nurse turned to move to the bed across the narrow aisle.

“Wait…”

She turned.

“What is your name?”

The woman gave a small smile. “Dorothy,” she answered. “You can call me Dorothy.”

Elizabeth nodded. “Thank you, Dorothy.” She gestured to the bed. “I’m Elizabeth, and this is my Edward.”

A slow nod.

“Well, I’ll be praying for you and your Edward, Mrs. Elizabeth. God bless you both.”

Elizabeth listened to her footsteps as she made her way down the ward—a few steps, the baskets on the floor, a creak of bedsprings, more footsteps. Slowly they grew quieter and quieter, until the only sounds on the ward were the sounds she was used to—rattling breath, the occasional groan, the clang of a bedpan against the edge of a cot. But importantly she listened to the steady breathing of the child before her. Interrupted by coughs, and every bit as raspy as any other patient in the ward, but still, very importantly, there. Steady. Ongoing.

When he’d been little, and ill, she had sung to him. The old Irish lullabies, the ones her mother had sung to her, and of which Edward Senior made fun.

At first, it seemed her voice wouldn’t come. It rasped a bit at first, and she had to swallow several times. But then it did, in a whisper so quiet there was hardly a melody at all.

Sleep my child and peace attend thee,

All through the night

Guardian angels God will send thee,

All through the night

Her voice shook as she made her way through the stanza, but she did, and kept right on going. Edward’s breathing came evenly, almost in time to the song. In. Out. In. Out. Cough. In and out again.

And as the sounds of the ward washed over them both, Elizabeth Masen sang to her son and stroked his back.

~||x||~

Singing.

So faint it was almost impossible even for Carlisle to hear, and yet—no, it was unmistakable.

Singing.

It was unheard of. Quite literally, he thought, and chuckled to himself as he strode down the hall. The influenza wards were filled with many sounds. The squeak of bedsprings as patients rolled from side to side. The hacking retch of stomach bile and blood being vomited onto the floor. The murmur of nurses as they delivered prognoses in hushed tones. The clip of the doctors’ good shoes against the wooden floors.

But no one sang.

The singing was coming from the second-floor men’s ward, and Carlisle’s feet moved him toward it, even though he’d made rounds there only a few hours earlier. The closer he got, the more distinctly he could hear it—still too far away for human ears to manage to hear the whispered verse, he could make out a woman’s voice. And by the time he was within a few yards of the door to the ward, he recognized the voice itself.

His stomach wrenched, leaving him to question for a moment why it was that his body had such human responses to an emotion like guilt. Because guilt was exactly what this was.

The voice was the voice of the red-haired woman. No one had succeeded in getting her to leave her child. He had warned her, the other doctors had warned her, the nurses had warned her. The disease was highly contagious, they said. She would certainly contract it, staying around all these who were ill. And what if she became ill and died and her son recovered? What if she left him motherless?

But she’d stood firm. If it came to it, her son would be all right on his own, she said. He knew how to manage a home, and he would do just fine without his mother.

It was an overly optimistic thought, in Carlisle’s opinion.

The boy—Edward, the same as his late father—didn’t fare well in the late night, the only time the nurses and doctors could manage to wrench his mother from his side. The other doctors couldn’t explain it. They charted his temperature, and measured his breathing, and looked for the cyanosis setting in. They attributed the young Edward Masen’s circadian decline and rebound to some strange goings-on within his body that they couldn’t quite pin down.

It was all about the science, nowadays. The doctors rushed around looking for unsanitary procedures, people too close to each other, unwashed hands. Bathed in knowledge and books and research, they had long since embraced the euphoria of knowledge and forgotten the wisdom that came from ignorance—that intangible healing power that a mother had over her child.

The singing stopped as the door to the ward opened, and the green eyes searched for the door. He knew she could not make him out as easily as he could her, but he imagined she might, at least, see his hair. And she seemed to, because she showed no surprise when he skipped the half-dozen intervening beds and came straight to her and her boy.

His condition had worsened, Carlisle realized at once, as he laid a hand on the sweating forehead. The boy turned his face at once, seeking the coolness of Carlisle’s touch. He let his hand linger there a moment, as though he needed more than a split-second to ascertain that no, the fever was not breaking. The boy’s teeth chattered as he shook from chill. But as he turned, Carlisle saw the eyes—those strange green eyes that he shared with his mother—and they were still bright. That was the last part to go. You could watch for days, listen to the lungs rasping for breath, see the lips turn from red to purple to blue. But it wasn’t until the eyes went dull that the body was close to giving in.

And Edward Masen simply wasn’t there yet.

“You needn’t have stopped singing,” Carlisle said as he bent over the bed, but Elizabeth only leaned in anxiously.

“Doctor, please…” was all she managed, but Carlisle understood.

“Edward?” he asked.

The boy looked up at him with baleful eyes.

“How are you?”

He tried to shake his head, but he wound up coughing instead, his whole body convulsing and causing the bed to shake. A moment later, he coughed so violently that blood escaped his lips and dribbled down his chin.

“Oh, Edward,” his mother said, reaching for the rag she’d hung on the edge of his bed, but the boy pulled away, wiping his own mouth on the pillow.

“Make my mother go home,” he whined. “Please, Doctor.”

At once, Elizabeth Masen burst into tears, putting her head in her hands and crying with such force that the stool she sat on clattered against the floor.

Carlisle reached to her laying a hand on her shoulder.

But what could he say?

He was reading as much as he could on the virus, although no one truly had time to write anything down. Even the institutions—Harvard, Hopkins, Mayo—they couldn’t manage to keep up with the research. And so Carlisle had been reading everything he could find about any other form of influenza. Everything the doctors understood about what the virus was, how it spread, how it was attacked. He had carefully traced the progression of this virus—they called it Spanish Influenza, as though it came from overseas, but the nearest he could tell, it had its origins in the midwest. And it attacked the healthy every bit as virulently, if not more so, than it did the weak.

Carlisle knew all this. But none of that knowledge let him know what he was supposed to do in an instance like this. There were no papers on what to do with a mother who sat before a child, her only child, who would imminently lose his life.

“Please…” The boy coughed up blood again, and again refused his mother’s trembling hand. Carlisle took the rag from her, and when he reached to wipe the boy’s face, he grunted, but did not turn away.

This only had the effect of making Elizabeth look more defeated, however.

“I don’t believe it’s you,” Carlisle said quietly. How could it be, when her son fared so poorly without her? He might be drenched in the obstinacy of youth, but even the boy himself must have noticed that his health was better with his mother at his side.

“Then why—”

“Because I’m dying!” the boy snapped.

This was said with such tremendous force it surprised them both, and prompted a fresh round of tears from Mrs. Masen.

“Shhh.” Carlisle wasn’t sure where the hushing noise had even come from. It certainly wasn’t something he’d ever done to a patient or his mother before. He stopped himself short. What did he do now? Pat her shoulder? Offer her a hug? It was one thing to touch her son, whose fever raged so severely that he would never notice the oddity of Carlisle’s cool hands. It would be quite another to have physical contact with the boy’s mother.

“Mrs. Masen, would you be willing to step out of the ward? Not forever,” he added when he saw the stricken look cross her face, “but just for a moment, so that I might speak to your son?”

For a long moment, she didn’t move. But finally, she nodded, scooting her stool away from the cot and standing. She began to walk toward the aisle, but she’d reached only the end of the bed sheet which hung between Edward and the young man to his right when she turned back around. Saying nothing, she leaned over the bed and pressed her lips to the sweating forehead, holding them there. Edward’s eyes closed as his mother kissed him, and for once, he was still. Then his mother pulled away from him and disappeared, and Carlisle listened to her footsteps move further and further, becoming part of the strange symphony of sounds of sickness that echoed across the ward.

When he heard the door open and close, he turned to the boy.

“Edward—” he began, but the boy cut him off.

“When—will it—happen?” he asked between coughs.

“I’m sorry?”

“When will—I die?”

How many times had he been asked this question, Carlisle wondered. By men and women at the armory, by children far too young to lose their lives. And the problem was, it was a question without an answer. He’d admitted patients who looked as though they merely suffering a mild cold, and by the time he reached them on rounds some hours later, they had already expired. And then there were patients like Edward, who by all accounts should’ve been dead the day he came in, and yet who by some miracle clung to life with their fingernails.

What made the difference, he wondered? Tenacity? Stubborn will?

Love?

“We don’t know,” Carlisle answered, and immediately, he wondered at his use of we. Who else was involved?

“I don’t know,” he corrected himself.

The boy looked away for a moment, and when he spoke again, it was almost to his curtain.

“I don’t—want—my mother—” He didn’t finish this last, bursting into another coughing fit.

“I know.” Carlisle pulled up the stool next to Edward’s cot, and perched himself on it in the same way that Elizabeth had. “You’re her child, Edward. It’s extremely difficult for a parent to watch her child die.”

“But she’s my mother!” No break here. It was as though the sheer force of his statement managed to keep his coughing at bay. The voice was unsteady and high, as though the young man were slipping away into a petulant child.

This was the irony, Carlisle thought. Parents didn’t want to see their children die. But children thought their parents were invincible, or at least, that they should be. Elizabeth Masen was so hell-bent on seeing her son cured that she’d forgotten that he had every bit the same desire to see her live on without him.

He coughed again and went for his pillow. Before he’d even thought it, Carlisle’s hand reached out and stopped the boy’s chin. Had he moved at his full speed? He wasn’t sure. But Edward didn’t seem to notice it if he had, and in either event, he accepted Carlisle wiping his face before he pulled away again.

“Make her—stay away.”

“I can’t,” Carlisle said quietly. “Your health improves when she’s here.”

“Damn my health!”

Carlisle winced.

“You—take care—of her!”

“Edward—”

This last outburst seemed to have taken it out of Edward, and he coughed uninterrupted for nearly a minute. Carlisle slung an arm under his shoulders, helping him to sit upright. Spit and blood and perhaps a bit of vomit, Carlisle wasn’t entirely sure, dribbled down the boy’s chin. He wiped this away as the thin body heaved with each cough. It seemed an eternity before Edward was able to take a deep breath. And as soon as he did, he used it to argue again.

“My father”—a gasp—”wouldn’t want”—another—”her to die.”

Ah, and here was the real fear, Carlisle thought, squeezing Edward’s shoulder in sympathy. You name a boy after his father, you give him expectations; shoes to fill. He had noticed the lighter which he’d removed from the boy’s trousers that first day at the armory, the same worn metal, the same initials carved into the lid. Carlisle remembered giving it to Elizabeth Masen, the day he told her that her husband had died. And now the son had inherited the lighter, and the temperament, and the obligation to protect his mother.

“It’s not your job to protect your mother,” he muttered, but he knew these words would fall on deaf ears. The boy was strong. Even in the face of death. Even only seventeen.

A human doctor wouldn’t have seen the brilliant way the green eyes shone in the dark, the way they caught the lamplight. The way, in that instant, it was as though the fever had gone. The eyes were clear, and Carlisle could make out each eyelash from beneath which the boy gave him a baleful expression.

“Please?”

Again, was Carlisle’s immediate thought. Again this family would catch him by surprise, tempting him to make promises he couldn’t keep. First a woman’s plea to save her husband, then her plea to save her son, and now the son’s plea to prevent his mother dying by the same way that he would.

And so he offered to the son the same answer he had offered to the mother, four days—had it only been that long?—ago.

“I’ll do my best,” he said.

The boy nodded, and rolled over to his other side. He coughed again, but this time, turned away.

Standing from the stool, Carlisle hung the little rag on the edge of the cot for the nurse, or for Elizabeth Masen, if she managed her way back in. But when he reached the end of the aisle, he stopped. There was an odd feeling burning in his stomach; one he hadn’t felt in centuries. A strange thickness; a feeling as if parts of him could break.

Crying, he realized. He was holding back crying.

Over the boy? Over his mother? Over the lost father?

Over his own sheer ineptitude?

He leaned against the wall next the door, letting the sounds of the ward wash over him—rasping breaths, wet coughs, fevered moans. He could make out the boy’s sighs among them—higher pitched, shallower, for he was so skinny.

There was, however, no more singing.

How many patients had he lost in his lifetime, Carlisle wondered. He could add them up, he was sure, if he took the time to comb back through the memories scattered through his mind like junk in a dank cellar. He had deliberately stopped counting the influenza patients, and although a portion of his brain was no doubt accumulating the tally, the number was growing too large for him to allow it to weigh on him.

There had been so many over the years. So why was it that he felt this odd pain? Perhaps it had been the singing, or the way that Elizabeth stroked her son’s back. Perhaps it was whatever it had been that drew him to them in the first place. Or his foolish promise to save the father, given in haste and stupidity, the one he hadn’t been able to keep and the guilt over which gnawed at him.

I don’t want him to die.

The thought startled him. But he never wanted a patient to die, Carlisle thought at once. He always wanted to save them, because wasn’t that who he was? His whole purpose for all of this, for living alone, for wandering, for denying everything about his own nature.

Of course he wanted to save them.

But it wasn’t only that, he realized, as he reached the last beds on the ward. This wasn’t just not wanting humans to die.

He didn’t want these humans to die.

It was an odd feeling. He was so careful not to get close. Not to care too much, because by definition, humans were mortal. They couldn’t grow close to him, and so he didn’t grow close to them. And so he cared about them en masse; he saved humans, but not people.

Had that been his problem? Sitting alone in his apartment, with his artwork, and books. No one could know what he was, but did that mean that he had to never allow another to know who he was?

And he liked them. The mother with her insistent care for her husband and son. The boy with his fiery temper and stubborn protectiveness of his mother. The fate that was this Great Influenza had thrown them together twice.

Carlisle wanted Edward Masen and his mother to live.

It was freeing, though terrifying, to admit. At once his step quickened. He would tell her that, he thought, as he put his hand on the doorknob. He would tell her that he was invested in Edward, as much as she was. He would try to keep her safe by keeping her away from the hospital, but he would keep his promise to them both.

He would do everything he could to keep them both alive.

The door opened easily in his hand, and he stepped into the brighter lighting of the corridor outside the ward. And at once, he stopped short.

Elizabeth Masen lay in the hall, unmoving.

Forward
Back

The Halfway Point. After too, too long.

This is a terrifying thing for me to do, posting this, but I’m going to do it anyway, because the guilt that I have a chapter in the bag and haven’t posted it is weighing on me. I hate, probably more than any of you do, that my posting speed with this story has dropped off as precipitously as it has. I had sort of an insane spring which marked several major hurdles in my professional life—I began writing fanfiction three and a half years ago as a happy-go-lucky student on her first winter break of her graduate career, but as of March, I now sit as a Ph.D. candidate with only a dissertation standing between me and the title of “Dr.” It blows my mind that so much time has passed…but I also find my world is different as term papers have given way to articles and taking courses have given way to teaching them.

I’ve been careful throughout the writing of Stregoni to keep at least one chapter ahead of where I was posting (back in the beginning, it was two). But I’m posting my buffer chapter. Most of the next one is finished, but I will resume posting when I have a more solid buffer, and perhaps when I’ve written out to close to the end. And given the size of my last break (I’m sorry!) it’s entirely possible that it actually won’t be any longer than it has been before I post next. If anything, I’ve tended to find that when I acknowledge that it’s taking me more time than I thought, I tend to start writing like a madwoman. This is the exact halfway point of this novel, but the more I write it the more I realize it’s meant to be read as a novel, not as a serial. I know where everything is going and of course I remember everywhere it’s been, without needing to re-read. But of course, you don’t, and I would rather give you something that allows you to experience it as a whole.

I wrote in my first author’s note to this piece that this is my magnum opus of sorts-I began writing a draft of the story which would become Stregoni the day after I posted my first one-shot, “The Talk,” even though it took me over two years to actually solidify what its plot would look like. Carlisle’s story has been the story I’ve yearned to tell since I first read the words “He just celebrated his three hundred-and sixty-second birthday” the very first time I read Twilight. I can no more leave it unfinished than I could kill a member of my family. I have to tell this story, and I thank you, again and again, for coming along on the ride.

As always, I owe a great debt to Openhome and Julie for their feedback on the chapter (and advance thanks for the ones to come). Any remaining flub-ups are entirely of my own doing.

Thank you for your continued readership. It means the world to me.

Chapter warnings: this chapter contains brief description of bloodletting.

London, England
May, 1667

“It is a joy, Elizabeth, to see you here with your intended,” the woman said, smiling.

Elizabeth smiled back, squeezing Carlisle’s upper arm so firmly that it was almost painful. He beamed anyway. It was comforting, the way her hand squeezed around his. The warmth of her skin against his own even in the wet June air made the fine hairs on the back of his neck rise. Between them, Georgie looked up and giggled.

This was their third time to market together. The first time they’d come, they were met with surprise, a few confused nods, and requests that Carlisle introduce himself. But now there were smiles, friendly whispers, and greetings to them both.

“It is a joy to be here with a man like Mister Cullen,” Elizabeth answered, smiling up at him and causing his cheeks to warm. She paid for the bread, then gave a light tug on his arm as they moved toward the stall of a man selling vegetables. The baker smiled and waved as they left, and Carlisle had to twist around to return her gesture.

“It is his wife who tends the garden,” Elizabeth whispered as they approached the grocer. “Mrs. Jefferson. I buy from her directly most often.” She smiled at the man, greeted him cheerfully, and then began discussing with him the things she wanted to purchase.

The grocer had two chairs at his stand, which Carlisle recognized at once as coming from the Tyne shop. In fact, he was fairly sure he’d made them both, as he looked over the legs and the back ladders.

“Are these from Mr. Tyne?” he asked after a moment.

The grocer looked around, bewildered, and then, lighting on the chairs, smiled. “Ah yes, they are. And now I recognize whence I know you. You are Mr. Tyne’s apprentice.”

Carlisle nodded. “I believe I made these for you.”

“Well, they are quite finely crafted. I thank you. Will you open your own shop when you come of your apprenticeship?”

He shook his head. “I intend to study the law.”

“Study the law?” The grocer stopped his progress in loading Elizabeth’s satchel bag.

“And my father wishes me to become a minister.”

To say nothing of the edict issued by Christopher.

The man looked from Carlisle to Elizabeth and back again. “The world is full of solicitors and ministers, but has few excellent carpenters.” He ran a hand over the back of one of the chairs appreciatively. “I would hope you’d reconsider.”

Elizabeth beamed. “I’ve said the same. Carlisle is quite gifted in his craft.”

“No doubt,” the man answered. “It is always useful, I find, for a husband to be good around the house.”

Husband. It made his heart jump.

“I am not her husband,” he corrected.

“Thou art not yet my husband.” Elizabeth stood on her toes and brushed his cheek with her lips, bringing a fresh round of giggles from Georgie. “An important distinction, to be sure.”

The grocer continued to smile as he filled Elizabeth’s satchel with vegetables. He handed the bag back to her, and she fished in her purse for coins to pay him.

Carlisle heard her mutter something less than ladylike under her breath.

Looking up at the grocer, Elizabeth gave him a wide smile. “Sir, it seems my brother must have needed to collect some of my money for the household. Might we negotiate a credit, or perhaps we can take fewer things this week.”

Carlisle reached for his own purse at once. “Allow me,” he said, pulling out a small fist of coins.

Elizabeth made noises of protest, but he gently laid a hand on her arm. An odd feeling bubbled in his stomach as he paid the grocer. How many times in his lifetime would he do this, he wondered? Give Elizabeth money for something they would need? Thinking of this, he slipped a halfpenny to Georgie, whose face alighted.

“What shall I buy with it?” he asked cautiously.

Carlisle gestured to the rest of the market. “Something thou would like.”

Georgie looked to his sister for approval, and, when she nodded, a wide smile spread across his face, and he danced off toward a meat pie cart. Carlisle watched as the dark hair bobbed and weaved through the crowd. When would that be his child, he wondered? Running off into the marketplace with a tiny bit of money—not from the man courting his sister, but from his father.

Elizabeth tried to shoulder her bag, but Carlisle took it from her, slinging it over his own back instead. “I’ll need to repay thee later,” she said, sliding her arm into his.

Carlisle shook his head. “I suspect delicious things will come of these goods. Repay me with them.”

She laughed and poked him in the side. “Thou thinkest only with thy stomach.”

Better than with some other parts of his body, he thought, although he didn’t dare make this comment aloud.

Besides, he thought with that other part often enough, too.

They wove through the crowd awhile, keeping an eye on Georgie. Now he danced in and out of the market-goers, pausing occasionally to look longingly at boiled sugar plums, pies, and berries on display.

Was this what having a family was like? Strolling arm-in-armthrough the market, watching a child’s wonder?

“What thinkest thou?”

The voice startled him a little, and Elizabeth giggled when he jumped.

He didn’t answer right away.

“I think about what it feels like to walk with thee, and with Georgie,” he answered a moment later.

“I imagine walking feels much the same, whether alone or with us, does it not?”

“Thou knowest what I mean.”

This time it was Elizabeth’s turn to be silent. Eventually her head found his shoulder, sending the odd chill through him again.

“Thomas marries soon, does he not?” she asked at last.

Carlisle nodded. “A fortnight hence.”

Elizabeth went silent.

“What will you do?” she asked at last.

“What will I do?”

“About Christopher. And thy profession.”

If that wasn’t the important question. Carlisle threaded his fingers through Elizabeth’s, feeling the way they gently filled the spots of softer skin between his own, and the warmth of her palm over his.

He wanted this. He wanted Elizabeth. He wanted a boy like Georgie, and to go shopping at the market. The desire for all of it burned in his stomach, a hunger that had nothing to do with food.

“The grocer is right, about thy craft,” she murmured. “It is a gift.”

Mr. Tyne said that also, every time Carlisle completed a project. He smiled, squeezing Elizabeth’s hand, even as her brother’s image swirled in his mind. “I should think, Mr. Cullen, that it not be proper for my sister to marry a carpenter. But she would be an excellent wife to a solicitor. Or a minister.”

Law would mean disownment by his father. But the ministry would be giving up everything he fought against. He was not William Cullen. He was William Carlisle Cullen, and that difference seemed as wide as the Thames…

Could he negotiate with Christopher? And even if he could, would he have his father’s blessing if he stayed in his trade?

Georgie materialized out of nowhere, his face smeared with juices and bits of pork from his hastily eaten pie. Elizabeth cleaned his face with her apron as he squirmed and whined, then suggested they turn themselves toward home.

They said nothing about the issue of which they had just spoken, losing themselves instead to Georgie’s chatter about the different things he’d found at the market—the berries, the lamb pie he couldn’t afford, the pork pie he’d eaten, the summer vegetables and the herbs, the way the fresh bread smelled from the baker’s and how it was different from his sister’s. They reached the small home before they knew it. Mrs. Bradshawe had also gone out for the afternoon, and Christopher was likewise nowhere to be found.

“Georgie, will thou go outside and feed the hens?” Elizabeth asked, earning a distinct pout from her brother.

“I am to stay with thee and Mister Cullen.”

Of late, Elizabeth’s mother had substituted one brother for the other in the way of chaperone; which was probably to her advantage, as Georgie was nosy and far likelier than Christopher to stay at his sisters’ side and report on Carlisle’s every gesture.

“It’s only in the yard. Do as I say.”

He looked from Carlisle to Elizabeth and then back again, his eyes narrowed. But ater a moment of scrutiny, his expression relaxed, and he skipped out into the yard. They both watched him go.

“He is a joy,” Carlisle said, and Elizabeth laughed.

“Thou sayest that only because he lives not with thee.” She took his hand again, leaning her head on his shoulder.

“I think I shall go speak to Thomas,” he muttered finally, letting out a little sigh.

“Speak to Thomas?”

“About my profession. And my father. And thy brother.”

“My brother? Georgie won’t oppose. I believe thou bought him quite thoroughly with that pie.”

They both chuckled. Out in the yard, they could see Georgie sprinkling grain for the hens, who followed him around like feathered babes.

“Georgie is not the brother I mean,” he whispered, and she threw her arms around him, pulling him to her and melding their lips.

When they pulled away, neither spoke for a minute or two. Finally, Elizabeth gave him a little shove. “Go,” she said firmly. “If thou intend to ask for my hand, thou ought go. Plan. Then come back.”

He still didn’t move.

“I love thee,” he mumbled.

Where the words came from, he didn’t know, and he would have clapped his hand over his mouth in surprise had Elizabeth’s lips not gotten there first. Her fingers entwined themselves in the thick hair at the base of his skull, and she pressed herself against him from shoulder to waist, causing his whole body to flush with heat. It was several moments later that she mercifully broke the embrace, and he found himself short of breath.

“I love thee also,” she said. Standing on her toes again, she kissed his cheek, then gave him another shove. “Go, inquire with Thomas, and come back and inquire with my brother.”

“I thought thou said I’d won Georgie?”

She smacked him playfully on the chin.

“Go, my husband. Go so that you may come back to me swiftly.”

My husband. His stomach jerked again as he leaned in for one last kiss.

“I’ll return as soon as I’m able,” he said.

~||x||~

“Could thou provide for thyself, were thou to study the law?”

Staring down at the cinder and iron filings which littered the floor of the smithy, Carlisle shook his head furiously.

“Myself, perhaps,” he answered dully, “but not a wife and child.”

Thomas’s chuckled. “A wife and child? Is that not a bit fast? I believe thou were the one who wished to maintain propriety until marriage?”

Of course he did. But once he was married, all those restrictions would be gone.

“I wish to be a father, and she a mother,” he answered.

They had talked about this much, when they walked with Georgie. Elizabeth would regale him with stories of what her brother had been like as a child, and Carlisle would laugh with her, all the while imagining those antics not to be coming from Elizabeth’s brother, but from their own son.

“It will be my desire to get her with child.”

His friend’s laugh was more robust this time. “Getting her with child will go from thy thoughts quickly enough, my friend. I promise thee that you both will forget the reason you couple the moment you do so.”

Carlisle looked away, which only caused Thomas to laugh even more.

That part was true, too. Elizabeth was bolder than he, and took risks he dared not. It had been the week before that her mother had left with Georgie for an hour, leaving them blessedly alone. It had taken no less than five minutes before he found himself with her in his lap as they kissed, her legs straddling his as she rocked their bodies together. He made feeble protests about what he’d promised her brother, and she reminded him that they were both still fully clothed—a fact for which he was grateful ten minutes later when her movements got the better of him and he spilled into his hose.

That was yet another reason marriage would be wonderful.

He stared down into his hands, which were rough and dry from the woodworking he’d been doing that week.

“Christ was a carpenter,” Elizabeth’s voice seemed to sing to him.

“Carlisle?”

He pulled himself back to the present.

“I don’t see…” He shook his head furiously. “How will I have this union blessed by my father and by her brother?”

There was an odd scratching noise as Thomas shifted uncomfortably on the trunk on which he sat. He said nothing.

He didn’t need to.

Carlisle gritted his teeth. “I know.”

“It would appease them both.”

But it would kill him, he thought. To join in everything he struggled so hard against…

As though he knew Carlisle’s thoughts, Thomas said, “Thou would not have to serve in Aldgate. Thou could serve outside London completely.”

“I know this!” The force of his own voice startled him. Carlisle stood and began to pace, his shoes scuffing a clear path through the filings on the smithy’s floor. His friend watched him for several minutes.

At last, Thomas stood and placed a hand on Carlisle’s shoulder, stopping him mid-step.

“You are not your father, Friend” he said quietly. “Serve from who you are. Serve God not as William’s son, but as Elizabeth’s husband.”

Carlisle didn’t move. Was it possible it could be that straightforward? Go to seminary. Have his father’s blessing, and Christopher’s. And then leave this place with Elizabeth. He would forgive the wicked, bring them back in repentance instead of hanging them at Tyburn. Perhaps they would serve a parish in the countryside, and his children would run in the fresh air…

“Ah, see?” A smile slid across Thomas’s face as he watched Carlisle. “Not here. Not as thy father. As thyself.”

When Carlisle still didn’t answer, Thomas shoved him. “Don’t be a fool, Carlisle. Elizabeth is worth more than thy pride.”

And Carlisle found himself abruptly on the stoop, the door closed at his back.

~||x||~

It was shortly after dusk when Young William returned. The younger Cullen had been acting strange lately, disappearing from the house for long stretches of time with no explanation, but coming back looking sanguine and deliriously happy. Yet it seemed this happiness did not extend to his home; if anything, Young William seemed even more agitated every time the two of them spoke. They argued often; first over food, then over the cleaning, then over their housekeeper, and his chores in the sanctuary and grounds. Little, niggling arguments that seemed to amount to nothing, but which taken together seemed to indicate that something was bothering his son.

Today, however, his son was whistling, a strange minstrel song coming from his lips and a broad smile on his face. The smile disappeared, however, the moment he laid eyes on his father.

The boy nodded curtly. “Father.”

“William.”

His son’s body went rigid.

“Where hast thou been?”

“With Thomas,” his son answered, not looking at him. He laid down his shoulder satchel and began unloading some vegetables. It was early in the growing season, but there would be enough for them to have a few dinners.

“I needed to seek his advice,” the younger one went on.

“Regarding what?”

“Nothing of particular consequence.” The vegetables made a pith pith pith noise as they landed in the baskets on the floor.

William stared. His son reached into his bag one more time and removed a loaf of bread, from which he tore a chunk before handing the remainder to William. The stool on the opposite side of the table creaked a little bit as he sat.

Tearing a chunk of the loaf himself, William set the bread between them on the table. They both nibbled in silence. It was several minutes later, when William was on his second tear from the bread, that he noticed that his son was no longer chewing, but instead was simply watching William eat.

He set down his own bread.

“Speak thou to Thomas about his marriage?”

His son’s posture stiffened, and for a long moment, he didn’t answer, choosing instead to stare at the half-eaten loaf on the table. It wasn’t unusual. The boy had never been forthcoming; he and William rarely spoke about such things as his friends.

“William?”

“If I go to the seminary, will you cease referring to me as William?”

It was as though time stopped. No chewing. No creaking of the stool. No tiny scratch of cloth against cloth as his son straightened his legs. William suspected it was possible that even his heart had stopped its function. His jaw worked frantically a moment, trying to reposition words in his mouth. But all he managed was, “The seminary?”

“I do not wish to serve in Aldgate,” his son added at once. “The church here should not be passed from you to me. I would raise my family outside of London.”

My family.

He was thinking of a family?

William’s mind raced forward. The church at Aldgate had been his thoughts as long as he had brought up his son. That he would grow to manhood and attend the seminary, and do the Lord’s work right here.

But then his son had grown to manhood and wanted nothing to do with the seminary at all. If he led some church, did it truly matter if it was this one?

He swore he felt his heart jerk. He’d waited for the sign that his son was one of the Chosen; that he would work as the Lord directed him to. How long had William watched, hoping that his child would show some indication of wanting to follow the path laid for him? Some glimpse that the Lord had smiled on him and would accept him into His heaven? His health might be failing, but his that his son would join him in the afterlife now seemed surer than it ever had.

William wanted to say that he was excited. He wanted to share the utter relief that flooded through him. But instead, he moved to what he felt was the next logical step.

“I will be going out this evening.”

The blue eyes—Sarah’s eyes—narrowed.

“And you expect I shall accompany you.”

“I expect you will behave as one of the Chosen.” Which he now assuredly was.

For a long minute, his son did not answer. Instead, he picked up the loaf of bread, turning it over in his hands as he thought.

“We are called to do this work, my son,” William prodded.

For a long moment, there was no answer. And when it came, it was spoken not to him, but to the loaf in his son’s hands.

“I do not desire to kill people,” he mumbled.

William felt himself stiffen. “I do not kill people, William.”

“You as much do.”

“I behave as one who is Chosen ought. As you will. As you choose to. Or is the talk of seminary a ploy?”

From across the table he watched the shadow on his son’s jaw change subtly as the boy gritted his teeth.

“No ploy, Father,” he said darkly. “But do you not think that perhaps the Chosen might be best shown by our good works than by routing out the bad?”

“God calls us to rout Satan and his demons where they lay,” William began, but his son cut him off as he abruptly stood from the table.

“And Christ calls us to be fishers of men.”

He didn’t have a good answer for that. “William—” he began, and the boy whirled, his eyes suddenly dark. The boy looked unbearably angry, but also…sad?

“Father, my name is Carlisle,” was all he said.

~||x||~

“Oy! I could use a blessing, minister,” came the slurred words as a hulking body stumbled toward William. He wore the clothes of a sailor, his breeches and shirt untidy and slopped with ale.

William snarled, and the young man chuckled.

“Or did you come down ‘ere to join us?” The mouth opened wide with the drunken laughter. “I could bet you did. Seen the bad side of piety, have thee? C’mon, then, it’s warm inside.” He gestured toward the tavern across the street, from which issued lamplight and loud, drunken singing.

“No, then? Well, suit thyself, minister!” Laughing uproariously, he lurched back toward the tavern. William watched him go, thankful that they had not come into physical contact but still feeling strangely as though he’d been drenched in mud.

Except for the taverns, of which there were far too many for such a short stretch of road, Ratcliffe Street was entirely empty. It was just on dusk, and anyone who lived in the nearby homes had long since settled in for the night.

His son’s words still hung with him as he walked. Christ calls us to be fishers of men. He was right, of course. After years of schooling, the younger Cullen was as well-versed in the scriptures as was his father—perhaps even more so, as William suspected his child paid attention to passages he did not.

Love, compassion, service. Those were the things Young William found in the Word. Somehow, even without a mother’s care, William’s son had grown up assured of his love, focusing on the passages which redeemed men instead of condemned them.

He wished to attend seminary. To lead a church, even if it was to be outside of London. This was wonderful, even if not quite what William wanted for him. But if his son didn’t wish to rid the world of evil, did that mean the boy was not one of the Chosen?

The thought sent a chill down William’s spine and caused him to walk faster. He wanted that. No, he needed that. If he was to lose his life, he needed the assurance that his son would be received into Heaven.

He was so deeply lost in thought that he nearly ran sidelong into a young woman, walking sanguinely up Ratcliffe street the other direction. Her satchel was full of something—herbs it seemed, as he caught a whiff of them.

“I am terribly sorry, sir,” she said at once. “Please.” She gestured to the street beyond her, and beckoned him to go on.

William frowned. A woman, out here, unchaperoned? He looked her over. He looked her up and down again. She was young, perhaps in her twenties, of marriageable age. Her dark hair fell over one shoulder in a long braid. Underneath her arm was a basket of something. She did not appear to be one of the whores who so freely roamed Ratcliffe looking for beer-emboldened sailors. If anything, she looked like a young wife.

“What brings you out at this late hour?”

She looked downward. “Nothing of consequence, sir.”

A quick glance over her shoulder toward a house with darkened windows.

“Surely you are escorted?”

Shaking her head, she answered, “My father passed away in the sickness, and my brother…well, I provide what he is unable to.”

“Your husband?”

“I am merely promised.”

“And your intended? Does he know you are here?”

“He—” She gave William an uncertain glance. “He is at his home.”

He frowned. “You should not be here. It is an area unsafe for women.”

Cocking her head slightly to the side, she narrowed her eyes. “I was merely running an errand. I was on my way returning, but” —she gestured to him— “I have encountered a delay.”

He had just barely opened his mouth to upbraid the woman for her cheek when he saw the barber-surgeon lean from his doorway and look up the street. The other man beckoned him, causing William’s face to flush. The woman’s back was to the barber, and she would not see him, nor know the reason William himself came to Ratcliffe, as long as he sent her on her way.

Waving a hand, he said, “Go then. Before it is too dark. But in the future, bring thy intended. He should accompany thee to a place like this.”

“I go with him wherever it is possible to,” she said, eyeing him warily once more. “Goodnight, sir.”

It wasn’t his imagination, he thought, that the woman moved more swiftly up the street as she walked away from him. When she was far enough away, he turned, striding quickly himself toward the barber. The two men acknowledged each other with a nod, and it was only seconds before William sat in the chair, his shirtsleeve rolled to his upper arm.

The barber approached with the lancet and bowl, taking his usual perch on the stool. “And your health, Reverend?” he inquired.

But that was not William’s concern this evening.

“Do you know the woman?”

The barber shrugged his shoulders as he tugged the tourniquet tightly around William’s arm. “She is here more often of late, I see. She goes to the widow’s across the street. Arrives with a basket and leaves with another. As you noticed, she is never escorted.”

“Do you know her business?”

“Only suspicions, sir.” He began to rub his thumb in circles over William’s forearm, so as to expose the vein.

“Suspicions?”

The barber’s fingernail stung as he snapped it against the skin. Nodding at his own handiwork, he reached behind him to take his instruments. He said nothing as he readied them.

“What are your suspicions?” William pressed.

“The widow meets with a number of women,” the barber answered carefully. “They come and go. At dusk. Like that one did. Sometimes in groups. Sometimes alone.”

William’s intake of breath was sharp. So it was as he’d thought. It made sense; the woman as forward as she was. Brazen with him, really.

Of course.

“And that one I met?” he asked. “Know you her name?”

Holding the lancet up to the candlelight to be sure it was positioned correctly in his fingers, the barber then laid it against William’s skin, the cold metal causing the minister to jump.

“Her name is Bradshawe, I believe,” he muttered.

There came a little shove and a searing sting, and then William began to bleed.

Not so long ago a friend of mine, kittandchips, commented, “I generally consider a fic on hiatus if it hasn’t updated in a month.”

She then added, “Unless it’s yours.”

I think there’s a fine line between writing extraordinarily slowly and hiatusing a fic, and I know it’s a line I tend to walk. Thank you for continuing to read.

On to the chapter.

So, Stregoni is, in addition to being my baby, the fic I started writing the day after I posted my first Twilight fic (it was then entitled Absolution and I planned to just mow through Carlisle’s history from birth through Breaking Dawn), a bit of an exercise for me.  I’ve tended, as a writer, to be more of a “pantser” than an outliner, one who writes as things show up. Over the decades, it lead to a lot of fragments of novels (sometimes even longer than  novels themselves–one of my abandoned works is well over 100,000 words), and it wasn’t until the last six years or so that I started learning to stick a plot from beginning to end.

SB is plotted in a relatively tight three-act structure, which is a bit of a new challenge for me. Although all my fics and novels adhere to that structure in some form, this is the first where the acts are nearly mathematical. SB will, at its finish, be approximately 27 chapters, with three chapters in each timeline in each act. Chapters  13, 14, and 15 are, therefore, the middle of Act II for all three plotlines, the point where the conflict for all the characters in all the arcs is intensified, where they get extra stuff thrown at them. I confess, it is taking me a little time to wrangle them.

My beta readers aren’t great testers of this, because they both know exactly where the plot of SB is headed (I refuse to have people beta blind, because continuity and foreshadowing is one thing I like feedback on). But I will say that the one person who pre-read chapter 13 didn’t quite see where the story is headed just yet, which is kind of exactly what I’d like at this point. So I’ll be curious who has guesses as to where the 1667 plot is headed after this chapter.

As always, I am deeply indebted to my beta readers, Openhome and Julie, whose feedback on everything from style to language to reactions of individual characters makes this story so much stronger than it is when it first comes out of my fingers.

And if you find yourself in a void and would like some more vampire writing, check out the New Moon round of The Canon Tour. As it happens, I was struck by inspiration and wrote a short piece for it…keep an eye out, and enjoy all that you read.

Happy reading!