Chapter Four

Chapter Four

It turned out to be a busy night at Regency, considering it started as a dead zone. The regulars were drinking hard, chatting into the early hours, and even Eliza was sneaking glances at her watch, clearly wishing everyone would fuck off so we could close up the bar.

Hans had already left with Frederick several hours before Max and the crew waved their goodbyes and stumbled out with boyish cheers.

“Thank God for that,” Eliza said once she’d locked the door behind them. “I thought we were going to be here until breakfast.”

We cleared up the empty glasses together, loaded up the washer and got to wiping the bar clean. She was on the opposite side to me, working hard when I cleared my throat and chanced a conversation. She knew the member accounts a lot better than I did.

“Hans seems an interesting guy. What does he do for a living?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“No,” she said. “His membership application had nothing on it beside the essentials.”

I stopped wiping the bar.

“Really? How did he get approved, then?”

The application process was normally rigorous, I knew that much. The criteria for acceptance here was high.

“He’s an associate of Frederick’s. Frederick went to management and they accepted Hans without question.”

“I guess maybe Hans is a client of Frederick’s?”

“Well done, Sherlock,” she laughed. One of the few times I’d seen humour from her.

Frederick was one of the top accountants in the country. He worked for the elite at levels that barely anyone knew about. Eliza had told me that right from my first shift. He was one of the most prestigious members, from a very prestigious group, and was to be treated with utmost respect and consideration.

The bar was archaic and all of the members were wealthy, but Frederick was a prize amongst the rich of the country, no doubt integral to them maintaining their already huge financial estates.

Eliza seemed to take pity on my curiosity as I carried on working.

“Hans moved back to London recently, I believe, from the countryside over by Wales. Quite a rural gentleman.”

“Really? Where from?”

“Herefordshire, actually. Like you. Who knows, maybe you ran into him in the corner shop, and didn’t notice him.” She huffed out a laugh. “Scrap that, you’d have definitely noticed him.”

I stopped moving, staring at her with the bar cloth in my hand.

“Herefordshire? Really?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where from exactly?”

My legs were trembling at the thought, because it seemed so weird. Hans from Herefordshire? Surely not.

She paused, with a hand on her hip.

“Let me think. Somewhere with weird churches.”

My turn to scoff. “That could be anywhere in Herefordshire.”

“No, there was one of them he was talking about with George… One with some weird things on it. Carvings of a serpent, and a green man, and an upside down hand.”

I stopped in my tracks. “Are you sure?”

She looked at me. “Um, yes. I’d say that’s pretty memorable.”

“Garway,” I said. “That’s the church at Garway.”

“Possibly. I don’t remember the name.”

“It is,” I told her. “That’s the Garway Templar Church.”

“I guess so, then,” she replied, unaware of the coincidence.

Or synchronicity.

“It’s only a few miles away from Orcop,” I went on. “Where I grew up.”

She laughed. “Maybe you did run into him at the local shop at some time. I don’t imagine they have all that many around there.”

She didn’t even say wow, that’s strange, don’t you think? Nothing. She got straight back to work, passing it off as nothing but two people living in the same county, but she didn’t know Herefordshire. The village communities were so small and interconnected that it was insane to think a man like Hans could have lived in Garway without me never so much as hearing about him. It gave me shivers.

If I’d have had anything like a decent relationship with Mum I’d have called her on the spot and asked if she knew him.

“When did Hans join the Regency?” I asked.

Eliza shot me a piercing stare this time.

“What’s the interest in Hans all of a sudden?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just a bit close to home. Literally.”

“Not all that long,” she said. “Just a few weeks before you started. Like I said, I don’t know all that much about him yet. None of us do really, bar Frederick.”

Those eyes. His smile as he reached for me…

I got a wave of something so deep in my stomach I thought I was going to be sick on the spot. I put my hand on my belly and held back a retch, but Eliza saw me.

“Are you alright? You look like you’re going to throw up.”

I nodded, but I was lying. I wasn’t alright at all.

She moved a little closer, but I held out a hand shaking my head.

“I’ll be fine, don’t worry.”

“Hardly. You’re as white as a ghost.”

I’m sure I was. A ghost from the past.

The room started spinning, so I closed my eyes. I heard a ringing in my ears as pictures of Garway church flashed through my mind one after the other. The carvings. The altar. The way I’d been lighting candles there on visits since I was a little girl. My mother and grandmother were religious women. Garway was the church they would pray in, every Sunday for years. I used to play around the gravestones, making up stories.

Had Hans been there?

Of course he had. The memories were flashbacks, streams of the forgotten like lightning bolts right through my head.

The evening choir singing around Christmastime. The man under the yew tree, watching as I left the service early, bored of Mum and Grandma chatting bullshit with the locals.

The man looking up at the Hand of God carving on the outside of the chapel, standing in the darkness and looking over at me with a smile.

It was him.

I couldn’t remember his face, only his presence, but it was him. I knew it for certain.

My God. Hans had been there. In Garway. All those years ago.

“You need to go home, Katherine,” Eliza said, breaking through my thoughts. “I’ll finish the bar. Go call yourself a taxi and get to bed.”

I nodded with a thank you and stumbled out to grab my phone from my bag, my fingers shaking so badly I could barely use the screen.

I dialled the taxi firm I normally used, but its lines were all busy. I tried the reserve taxi cab firm, but the operator told me they had no cabs available for at least the next hour. I called up some more from the listings. Three, four, five, all ringing out to nothing.

Fuck.

I tried the original one again, but the lines were still busy, over and over again.

The waves were still rushing through me, the spirals of memories still coming. Me in the darkness at Garway church as a little girl, the man on the sidelines always standing there.

No. It couldn’t be. This was fantasy.

Stupid girl, Katherine.

I gave up on cabs. I had to leave. Now.

I grabbed my coat and put it on, took my keys from my bag and set off on shaky legs. My phone was still in my hand, I kept dialling the cab number as I walked down the street, becoming oblivious to the line busy tone that was beeping in my ear.

It was gone 3.a.m. as I walked up the street, that much I knew. Far too late for every taxi cab in London to be busy. That was reinforced by the fact that there wasn’t anyone in sight as I made my way home.

Home.

It wasn’t home though, was it? I was living in a room in a house I hardly knew, with people I’d barely spoken to. My home was in Orcop. My family had been living there for generations. I’d traced my family tree back as far as it would go, hoping for signs of more relatives to ease the constant burden of just me, my mother and grandmother, wanting my life to be more than just the three of us, when both of them clearly dismissed me as nothing.

My search had shown up generations, all tied back to that one part of the country. Georgina, wife of Thomas, agricultural worker, Orcop. Josephine, wife of Phillip, agricultural worker, Orcop. Elaine, wife of David, agricultural worker, Orcop. Lillian, wife of Matthew, agricultural worker, Orcop. Ruby, Georgina, Margaret. Jane, Deborah, Kerry-May, Mary… so many women in the chain, all of them from Orcop.

So many women in my family line I’d thought of, and wondered who they resembled most. Were they more like my mother and grandmother or more like me? I’d been needing something, anything, to believe I wasn’t the black, lonely sheep in a very scathing family.

I kept on walking, so caught up in the memories and my pounding heart and the constant taxi firm unavailable tone in my ear, that I was at the cobbled lane of Hyde Street before I realised it. I stopped in my tracks the moment I felt the first bump of stone under my feet, staring at the dull street lights lying ahead of me. Barely more than an orange glow.

There was not a soul to be seen. Just like in my dream.

The air was misty, and my breaths were raspy, and I could have taken the longer route around Brooke Avenue, but it would have added at least ten minutes to my journey. I didn’t think my shaky legs could handle it.

The final scrap of stop being ridiculous, Katherine rose up and took hold of me, and I stepped forward onto the cobbles. As soon as I’d done so, I felt another lurch deep in the pit of me, knowing that the stop being ridiculous, Katherine, stupid girl rantings had always been nothing more than a lie. Mum and Grandma had known I wasn’t a stupid, ridiculous girl living in a fantasy world. I should never have believed them in the first place. I felt it right down in my soul.

There was more to this. So much more.

My thoughts were interrupted by a jolt.

“Lovely to see you, Katherine.”

Hans’ voice came out of nowhere, his footsteps appearing behind me. I spun to face him, dropping my keys and phone without a thought, and he kept on pacing towards me, even though I had both hands held up in panic.

“Stop it, Hans! Leave me alone!”

“Oh, please.” He laughed. “I’ve been leaving you alone for eighteen long years. It’s high time we became properly acquainted.”

“It was you, wasn’t it?” I squeaked at him. “You were the one at Garway!”

He had his hands clasped behind his back so naturally, circling me with footsteps, his bright green eyes fixed on mine as I turned around to keep him in view.

His voice was so low and powerful.

“Strange, don’t you think? How you didn’t remember those encounters at Garway until a short while ago. Recollections can come back in a flash. Just like that!” He clicked his fingers.

I was playing around the gravestones, ran straight into a man’s legs, fell back with a yelp. His smile. His slender fingers reaching to help me up.

Be more careful amongst the dead, Katherine. Those were his words. Then he’d vanished.

I’d forgotten all about…

“What the hell is going on?” I asked him. “Really, Hans. What’s going on?!”

I was terrified, and my heart was thumping so hard I could feel it in my ribs, my legs shaking harder than ever, but underneath all of that there was something different. A recognition, as though I’d known this man my whole life.

“You know what’s going on,” Hans said. “Trust your instincts and not your brain, like you should have done since the day you were born.”

Rational Katherine was losing all hold of me, but I still felt like a fantasist fool when I spoke the words out loud.

“You really are a vampire, aren’t you?”

He smiled his perfect smile.

“Indeed, I am.”

“And last night… that wasn’t just a nightmare, was it? That was real?”

“Ouch. I see you’re using the term nightmare now. It was a dream earlier, if I recall?”

“A dream, then. It wasn’t a dream at all, was it? It was real.”

He tipped his head, as though he was curious, still circling me. “Call it a trial run.”

I backed up against a door, ignoring my discarded phone and keys. I wasn’t surprised to find it was the same large wooden door I’d backed into in my dream.

“A trial run for what?”

His hand between my legs.

He moved a step closer, his eyes so fierce yet so beautiful.

“You have a choice to make, Katherine.”

“What kind of choice?”

Fingers sliding over my nipple.

“A simple one, really. Tell me you want me to leave you alone and I’ll walk away. You’ll have no memory of this, just as you’ve had no memory of our encounters before. All of it will be forgotten, and you’ll be free to continue your new life in the city, trying to run away from the shadows of the past.”

“And if I don’t?”

“You’re asking me questions you already know the answers to, you just don’t have enough faith in yourself to accept them.” He paused. “I blame your mother and grandmother for that. They’ve been feeding your self-doubt since you were old enough to start believing in fairytales.”

“You know my mum and grandma?”

“Well enough to stay on the sidelines of their sad little world. I’m glad you opted to up and leave before they could crush your spirit even further.”

My thoughts were spinning so fast my mind couldn’t keep up. I closed my eyes and tried to focus, begging my head to take control.

“Stop fighting it,” Hans said. “Instincts over brain, remember?”

“I don’t… I don’t know what to say…”

My voice sounded like a whisper, my whole world spinning and crashing in tidal waves, until there was silence.

Just like that, there was silence.

There was only me and Hans, the beautiful man standing in front of me, all London noise faded and gone.

“Tell me to leave you alone, Katherine,” Hans whispered. “Or tell me you want me to stay. Your choice, but make it now.”

My voice sounded more assured this time, without the chaos of thoughts there to lead me astray.

“And if I tell you to stay? What happens next? You suck the life out of me here on the cobblestones and I get the grand exit of my dreams?”

The thought seemed surprisingly enticing.

He smiled his stunning white smile, long pointed canines shining bright.

“I think you might be quite surprised by the outcome, Miss Blakely. Why don’t you make your choice and find out?”