Page 139 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

Julian looks at him.

“I do know.”

Arthur nods. Then the two of them go on looking up into the tree, and neither of them says one further word about it. Later, Julian tells me he doesn’t know when Arthur figured it out. “I suppose his father may have told him something.”

“Did his father know?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

“His grandfather? His great-grandfather? His great-great-grandfather?”

“I don’t know that either.”

I look at him. “And that’s bothering you.”

“Not in the way you think.” He glances back towards the south lawn. “I spent a very long time believing the structure worked because no one knew. Retire one name, raise up the next, keep the resemblance plausible, stay useful, and stay private.”

“But some of them knew.”

“Some of them saw enough.”

“And left it alone anyway.”

“Yes.”

He’s quiet for a long minute.

“You weren’t wrong to be careful,” I tell him. “There were times when you absolutely needed to be careful.”

“I know.”

“You were just careful longer than you had to be.”

Julian turns that over.

“Armor,” he says finally.

“What?”

“Something Victoria told me once. That armor is useful until you forget you are wearing it.” His mouth shifts. “I believe I told her she was being tiresome.”

“Was she?”

“Almost certainly.”

“Still right, though.”

“Frequently. It is her worst quality.”

I laugh and we let it drop, but it still leaves the other thing.

We don’t talk about it for eleven weeks. That’s not avoidance, or it is not only avoidance. February is Mabel’s questions and a hundred and ten covers for the wedding that was rescheduled due to the storm, and March is mud and Theo’s pump, and I have a business to run.

It’s still there, but I know exactly where it sits. It sits in the fact that I have stopped doing a piece of arithmetic I never knew I was doing. I caught myself in February, watching Julian carry a barrel and not counting. I’ve stopped calculating, but I haven’t decided anything. Both of those things are true at once, and they have to go on being true for a while.

It comes up in the middle of April, on the south lawn, on a rainy Saturday, because Julian plants a tree.

Not a beech. Arthur is extremely clear that you do not put a beech in the shadow of a beech. It’s an oak, about nine feet of it, delivered on a flatbed from a nursery in Union. I come up the hill at four to find Arthur Finch supervising from the covered porch while a four-hundred-year-old vampire digs a hole in the wet ground with a spade.