Page 79 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“You never changed your handwriting.”

“I tried once.”

I look up.

“In the seventeen hundreds. I thought if I was going to be different men on paper, I should write like different men.” He pauses. “It lasted a season.”

“Why?”

“It felt like lying to the only person who was ever going to read them.”

My throat closes. Julian looks at the journal rather than me.

“You’re the second person to hold one.”

“Who was the first?”

“No one living.”

I put the 1847 volume back exactly where I found it.

“Can I read one?”

He is quiet for a moment.

“Yes. But I would ask you not to read it in front of me.”

“Why?”

“Because I would watch your face, and I have no wish to know that much about my own prose.”

That gets me right under the ribs. “You’re shy about your diary.”

“It’s not a diary. I keep a record.”

“That’s a diary with emotional repression.”

“Which is why I regret permitting you access.”

But there’s no regret in his voice, and he brings me a chair. He genuinely carries an eighteenth-century armchair through the narrow doorway one-handed, sets it down without a sound, and waits while I choose a volume from the early eighteen hundreds.

I read 1809 for almost half an hour. It’s extraordinarily boring. Weather. Cargo. Prices. Repairs to something called the east quay. A man named Amos Kell owes Julian four pounds and goes on owing him four pounds for nine pages until an entry that reads, in its entirety: Amos Kell has offered me a goat.

“This is terrible.”

“Yes,” Julian says immediately.

I look up and, despite what he said about not watching me, I find him leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded.

“You knew.”

“I lived it.”

I laugh into a book written more than two hundred years ago. Then, halfway down a page about salt, there is one line. The child at the Rood house is dead of the croup. She was called Mercy. I have written the name so that it will be somewhere.

I stop. I read it again. Then a third time.

“Who was Mercy Rood?”