The Winter of His Touch: Cold Hands Warm Coffee

The kitchen at Thornhollow Manor lay at the end of a servants' passage Elena had not known existed until this morning, when the predawn grey light through her window had made sleep impossible and restlessness had driven her to wander. The passage itself was narrow, floored with pale stone worn smooth by generations of footsteps, its walls lined with cupboards whose brass fittings had gone green with age. She had counted twenty-seven steps from the baize door to the first landing, thirty-four from there to the second, and another nineteen before the passage opened, at last, into a flagstoned kitchen twice the size of her father's entire workshop in Whitby.

A fire had been laid in the great range sometime during the night, though no servant had come to tend it. The coals still glowed beneath a fresh grating of ash, and the iron flap above them trembled faintly in some draught she could not locate. Hams hung from the ceiling beams, dark and cured, their skins wrinkled like old leather. Copper pots nested on hooks in descending sizes. A row of jelly jars stood on a stone shelf, their contents ruby-red and trembling in the warmth.

Elena set her candle down on the long oak table and turned slowly, taking in the room.

She had expected neglect. She had expected dust and cobwebs and the faint, sweetish decay of a house that had not known a living occupant in years. What she found instead was order, meticulous and recent. Sacks of flour stood against one wall, tied with twine and labelled in a spidery hand she did not recognise. A crock of butter sat beneath a glass dome, properly chilled. Bundles of dried herbs hung from a frame near the window: rosemary, thyme, sage, their scents mingling in the cold air.

The larder door stood ajar. Elena pushed it open with one finger and raised her candle.

Inside, shelves ran from floor to ceiling. On the lower shelves, she found potatoes in a bin, onions braided into ropes, carrots with their green tops still attached, a wicker basket of apples whose skins were wax-bright and unwrinkled. Above these, jars of preserved fruits, each one labelled in that same spidery script: Damson, 1894. Quince, 1893. Black Cherry, 1895. The dates were wrong, she realised. The manor had been sealed since before her birth. No one had set a foot inside in over twenty years. Yet the preserves looked perfect. The fruit held its colour. The syrup in the jars had not crystallised or darkened.

She pulled one jar down and held it to the light. The quinces inside were whole, their skins the colour of dark honey, suspended in a syrup so clear she could see the back of the glass through it. A small tag was tied with red thread to the neck of the jar, and on it, in even smaller script, was written: For Eleanor.

Her sister's name.

Elena set the jar down very carefully on the shelf, as though it might shatter.

Her hands were cold. She rubbed them together and turned her attention to the cooking range. If she was going to stay in this place, whatever strange hospitality it offered, she would need to eat. She could not live on the tea and dry toast that had appeared on a tray outside her door that morning, set there by no one she had seen.

She found the kindling box beside the range, filled with split pine. She found matches in a drawer beside the hearth, sulphur-headed and old-fashioned. She struck one, and the sulphur smell cut through the kitchen's cooler air, sharp and strangely comforting. The kindling caught. The larger logs followed. Within minutes, the range was humming with a steady heat, and Elena was standing in front of a hanging rail of utensils, trying to determine which implement would best suit the cooking of eggs.

She had never been a confident cook. Her father had done most of the work in their small Whitby kitchen, his large clockmaker's hands surprisingly deft with a whisk. Since his death, she had managed on kippers and boiled eggs and the occasional stew that turned out, more often than not, as intended. She could make a serviceable breakfast. She could make a strong cup of tea. Beyond that, her ambitions were modest.

She selected a small copper pan and a wooden spoon.

The eggs were in a wire basket on the counter, pale brown and still warm from some unseen hen. She cracked two into a bowl and whisked them with the spoon, then set the pan on the range and dropped a knob of butter into it. The butter hissed and spat. She waited for the foaming to subside, then poured in the eggs. They began to set at the edges, pale yellow against the dark copper.

She did not hear the door open.

"Good God."

The voice came from the doorway, low and slightly rough, with the particular timbre of someone who had not spoken aloud in some time. Elena startled. The wooden spoon clattered against the pan. A strand of egg slid over the edge and onto the hot iron of the range, where it sizzled sharply.

Sebastian Vane stood in the kitchen doorway.

He was dressed more formally than she had seen him the night before. His waistcoat was buttoned. His cravat was tied. His dark hair was pulled back from his face, though a few strands had escaped to fall across his brow. He looked, Elena thought, like a man who had dressed for company and then been surprised to have any.

"I did not mean to startle you," he said. His gaze moved from her face to the pan. "You are cooking."

"I am attempting to," Elena said. She turned back to the range, but her hands were trembling slightly, and she could not trust her voice. She stirred the eggs too quickly. They began to break apart into small, sad fragments.

"They will not thank you for that," Sebastian said. He had moved into the kitchen now, his footfalls almost silent on the flagstones. "Eggs must be coaxed, not bullied."

"I am not bullying them."

"You are punishing them for crimes they have not had time to commit." He came to stand beside her at the range. Up close, she could see that his eyes were a pale grey, almost silver, and that there were fine lines at their corners, though whether from age or from some other cause she could not tell. "May I?"

She stepped aside. He took the spoon from her hand and adjusted the pan's position over the heat. Then, with a few slow, deliberate strokes, he drew the eggs together into soft folds. Within a minute, they had set into a pale, glossy mass. He divided them between two plates that had been warming on the hearth.

"Sit," he said, gesturing to the long oak table. "You have been awake since before dawn. I heard you moving."

Elena sat. The chair was harder than she expected, and the table was scarred with the marks of countless previous meals. She pulled her plate toward her. The eggs steamed gently. They smelled of butter and of something else, something faintly herbal that she could not place.

Sebastian poured coffee from a pot that had been sitting on the side of the range. He set a cup before her without ceremony and took the seat opposite. His own plate remained untouched. He held the coffee cup in both hands but did not drink.

"The larder," Elena said, because the silence had grown heavy. "It is stocked."

"It is."

"But the house has been closed for years."

"It has."

She looked at him across the table. He did not flinch from her gaze, but she saw his jaw tighten, almost imperceptibly, the way a clock's mainspring tightens when wound past its expected tension.

"The preserves," she said. "There is a jar labelled with my sister's name."

Sebastian's thumb traced the rim of his coffee cup. He did not speak for several seconds. The fire crackled. A log shifted in the range, sending a small cascade of sparks against the iron backplate.

"Your sister was to have been mistress of this house," he said at last. "I had the preserves made in anticipation of her arrival. I had the larder stocked. I had the linens aired." His voice was very even, very controlled. "I had prepared everything for a wedding that never took place."

Elena set down her fork. The eggs, she noticed, were excellent. She could not taste them.

"You kept the preserves," she said.

"I kept everything." He met her eyes again. "I had no reason to dispose of them, and I had no guest to serve them to. They waited."

"For twenty years."

"For as long as it took."

The kitchen was very quiet. Elena became aware of the small sounds she had not noticed before: the ticking of a long-case clock somewhere in the servants' passage, the faint creak of the house settling, the soft hiss of the range fire.

"Where is the coffee from?" she asked, because she could not think of what else to say.

"Brazil," Sebastian said. "I have a supplier who has never failed me." A pause. "He believes I am an eccentric collector with a penchant for very old beans."

"You correspond with the outside world."

"I correspond with one person in the outside world. He believes me alive. Beyond that, the world may believe what it wishes."

Elena wrapped her hands around her coffee cup. The porcelain was warm. The coffee was strong and faintly bitter, with a depth of flavour she had not tasted in any coffee she could remember.

"It is very good," she said.

Sebastian inclined his head, a small acknowledgment. Then, very slowly, he reached across the table and took her hand in his.

His fingers were cold. Not chilled, as a man's fingers might be after a walk in winter, but genuinely, unnaturally cold, the way stone is cold, the way metal is cold. Elena did not pull away. She looked down at their joined hands on the scarred oak. His skin was very pale. Hers was pink with the fire's warmth. The contrast was almost absurd.

"I should not have touched you," he said, and his voice was no longer even. There was a roughness in it now, a fracture. "Forgive me."

"What are you?" Elena asked.

He did not answer her with words. He lifted her hand, very gently, and pressed his lips to her knuckles. His mouth was colder than his fingers. Then he set her hand down, precisely, in the centre of her own plate, and rose from the table.

"Finish your breakfast," he said. "We have much to discuss, and you will need your strength."

He left the kitchen as silently as he had entered it. The door did not creak. The fire did not shift. The clock in the passage ticked on, patient and indifferent.

Elena sat for a long time after he had gone.

The coffee cooled in her hands. The fire popped and resettled, a log shifting on its bed of embers, and a thin curl of smoke rose from the grate and dispersed against the blackened lintel. She did not move. She looked at her hand where he had set it down, at the centre of her plate, as though it were an object that had been placed there for her inspection. Her own hand. Five fingers, the nails a little uneven from her habit of biting them when she worked late over a difficult passage of text. The skin of her knuckles was unmarked. His mouth had been cold, but it had not bitten, had not broken, had not done anything at all except press there, very gently, with a kind of formality that she did not understand.

She lifted her hand and pressed it against her cheek. Her own warmth answered.

What are you?

She had asked it plainly. She had not screamed. She had not recoiled. Some part of her, the part that had translated passages of medieval alchemical manuscript for a Cambridge don and understood them well enough to argue the finer points of translation, had already begun to assemble an answer from the evidence of her own senses. He did not eat. He did not drink. He did not cross the threshold. His fingers were the temperature of stone, and his mouth was colder. He lived alone in a house that had been his family's, and he had been betrothed to a woman who was now dead, and his mourning had lasted so long that he had ceased to be a part of the living world entirely.

The answer she was assembling was not a kind answer. It was not a comfortable answer. It was, however, a plain one.

She drank the rest of the coffee while it was still warm enough to taste. It was, she thought, the best coffee she had ever had. Bitter, deep, faintly resinous, as though the beans had been roasted with something more than heat. She set the cup down and looked at the kitchen for the first time with the eyes she ought to have brought to it from the beginning.

She had arrived in the dark, in a fever, with her boots ruined and her stockings wet through. She had noticed the warmth, and the smell of the coffee, and the tall man with the pale face, and that had been enough. Now, in the grey morning light that filtered through the small high window above the sink, she looked properly.

The kitchen was older than the rest of the house she had glimpsed. The flagstones were uneven, worn into shallow bowls by generations of feet. The dresser was not a single piece but two pushed together, and the join was hidden by a strip of oilcloth that had been nailed in place so long ago that the nail heads were flush with the wood. On the dresser stood a row of jars, and in the jars were dried things: lavender, certainly, and something darker that might have been a mushroom dried on a string, and a powder so fine and white that it could have been sugar and could equally well have been something else. A bunch of dried sage hung from a hook by the window, and beneath it, on the sill, lay a pair of gardening gloves, the leather so stiff with age that they stood upright on their own.

The range was cast iron and had been blacked many times. The kettle on it was copper, dented, with a wooden handle that had been replaced at some point, the new wood pale against the old. There was a rack beside the range that held a small collection of pots and pans, and beneath the rack hung a row of implements on hooks: a ladle, a skimmer, a long-handled spoon for stirring, and, lower down, a set of three knives in a wooden block, their handles dark with use.

The knives were very sharp. They were the sharpest things in the kitchen.

She looked at them for a long time.

Then she heard him.

He did not come through the door. She had been watching the door, because the door was where she had seen him enter and leave, and she was certain, now, that she would see him enter and leave through that door and through no other. But he did not come through the door. Instead, she heard him in the passage outside, the soft fall of his foot on the boards, and then a creak, and then a voice, very low, speaking to someone who was not there.

She could not make out the words. The voice was too low, and the door was too thick. But she heard the cadence of it, the rise and fall, and she knew that it was not the voice of a man giving orders or making plans. It was the voice of a man in conversation with the dead.

She did not move. She sat with her hands around her cold cup and listened to the silence that followed, and the silence was heavier than the voice.

After a while, she heard his footstep again, further away, and then the distant sound of a door, and then nothing at all.

She rose, then, and carried her cup to the sink. She washed it carefully, in the water from the stoneware jug that stood on the windowsill, and dried it on the cloth that hung from a hook beside the range. She set it upside down on the dresser beside the other cups, all of them the same pattern, all of them with the same pale chip on the rim. She stood there for a moment, looking at the row of them.

Seven cups. For one man.

She dried her hands on the cloth and folded it neatly and hung it back on its hook.

Then she went to the door and opened it and stepped out into the passage.

The passage was dim. The morning light did not reach it well, and the single window at the far end, above the front door, was small and high and set with old glass that distorted the view. She could see, through it, a strip of grey sky and, below it, the tops of trees, bare of leaf, their branches black against the pale.

The clock was on her left. She knew it was there without turning to look, the way one knows the position of a familiar piece of furniture in a dark room. She could feel it in the air, in the slight pressure against her ears that a large mechanism makes, and she could hear it, very faintly, the tick beneath the tick beneath the tick, the patient counting of something that did not care whether anyone listened.

She did not look at it. Not yet. She had a feeling, which she did not examine too closely, that to look at it now would be to commit to something she was not yet ready to commit to. Instead, she turned the other way, toward the back of the house, and began to walk.

The house was larger than she had understood. The passage went on for some way, past closed doors on either side, and then turned at a right angle and went on again. The boards creaked under her boots, which she had left unlaced because her feet were still swollen from the walking. She made a mental note of the doors as she passed them. Five in all. The first was shut and the handle was loose in its socket. The second was shut and the handle was firm. The third was shut and had a keyhole without a key. The fourth was ajar, and through the gap she saw a room with the shutters closed and the bed still made, a square of white pillow in the dim. The fifth, at the end of the passage, was the door to the kitchen she had just left.

She turned the corner and found herself in a different sort of passage. This one was narrower, and the boards were bare, and the air smelled of dust and cold stone and something else beneath those, something that was not unpleasant but that she could not place. It was the smell of a house that had been closed for a long time, she thought, and then she thought again and revised. It was the smell of a house whose owner had not aired it for a long time. The two were not the same.

A staircase went up from this passage, narrow and steep, with a banister of dark wood that had been worn smooth by hands over many years. She did not go up. She did not go down, either, although there was a door at the far end of the passage that she suspected led down to the cellars. Instead, she stood and listened.

The house was very quiet. The clock ticked in the distance. Somewhere above her, very faint, she heard the sound of a board creaking once, and then nothing, as though someone had walked across a floor and stopped.

She went back to the kitchen. She did not hurry, and she did not dawdle. She went back to the kitchen because that was where the fire was, and the fire was the warmest thing in the house, and she was not yet warm.

He was there.

He was standing at the range with his back to her, and he was holding the copper kettle in both hands, and he was pouring hot water into a fresh cup. The steam rose in a thin column and dispersed in the cold air of the kitchen. He did not turn when she came in, but she knew he had heard her, because the line of his shoulders changed, very slightly, the way a man's shoulders change when he becomes aware that he is no longer alone.

"Sit down," he said, without turning. "It is not good for you to be cold."

"I am not cold."

"You are." He set the kettle down and turned, and he was holding the cup in both hands, and he held it out to her the way one holds out something precious, with great care. "Sit down, Miss Ashford. You have been standing on a stone floor in wet boots, and you are colder than you know. The coffee will help."

She sat. She took the cup. It was, as before, very hot, and she wrapped her hands around it and held it against her breastbone for a moment before she drank.

He sat down across from her.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The fire settled. The clock in the passage ticked on. Outside, somewhere distant, a bird called once, and was answered, and then was quiet.

"You asked me what I am," he said.

"Yes."

"You have not asked me again."

"I did not think you would answer me."

He looked at her. In the grey light of the kitchen, his eyes were the colour of new pennies, with a darker ring around the iris that she had not noticed before. They were not cruel eyes. They were not kind eyes, either. They were patient, and they were very old.

"I am a clockmaker," he said. "That is the truest answer I can give you, and it is also the least true. I am the last of the Vane family of this estate, and the estate has been in my family for seven generations. I do not eat, and I do not drink, except for the coffee, which is a particular preparation of my own, and which you must not ask me to share with you, because it would not agree with you. I do not cross the threshold of the front door in daylight. I do not sleep in the way that you understand sleep. I have not slept in that way for a very long time."

He paused. He folded his hands on the table, one over the other, and his long fingers were very still.

"My elder brother, Lucien, is the same as I am. He is the elder by some years. He is not often at the house. He has his own concerns, in his own places, and we see each other seldom, and we correspond rarely, and this arrangement suits us both. We are not close. We were never close. There was a third brother, once, who was different from us, and he is gone, and we do not speak of him."

"And the servants?"

"There are no servants. There have been no servants for a long time. The house is too large for one man, and too large for two, and yet we remain in it, because it is ours, and because leaving it would be a worse thing than remaining."

She drank a little of the coffee. It was, as before, very good. The bitterness was a clean bitterness, like the bitterness of a herb taken for a purpose, and there was a warmth beneath the bitterness that was not only the warmth of the liquid.

"And the girl?" she said. "The one in the kitchen garden, last night. The one who ran."

He did not answer for a long moment. The clock ticked. The fire settled. Outside, the bird called again, further away now.

"Tomas," he said, at last. "He is not a girl. He is a boy of fourteen, who has been in my service since he was nine, and who has the misfortune to be alive in a house where the living are not common. He was frightened of you. He is frightened of most things. He has had a difficult life. You must be gentle with him."

"Where is he now?"

"I have sent him to his room. He will not come out until I tell him it is safe, and that will not be until you and I have spoken."

"Spoken about what?"

He looked at her, and for the first time, she saw something in his face that she had not seen before. It was not warmth, and it was not coldness. It was the look of a man who is about to say something he has been turning over in his mind for a long time, and who has at last decided to say it.

"About what you are doing in this house, Miss Ashford," he said. "And about why you are not afraid."

She looked at him. The cup was warm in her hands. The coffee was strong and faintly bitter, and the fire was bright, and the kitchen was quiet, and the clock in the passage ticked on, patient and indifferent, and she did not know what to say.

The question hung between them like the steam rising from the cup in Mara's hands, curling upward into the cold air of the kitchen. Outside, the wind had picked up, and she could hear it now, pressing against the windows with a low, persistent moan, like something large and patient trying to get in. The fire crackled and spat. The clock in the passage measured out the silence.

Sebastian Vane had not moved from the doorway. He stood with his shoulder against the frame, his arms crossed over his chest, his long fingers tucked into the crooks of his elbows, and his dark eyes fixed on a point somewhere past her left shoulder, as though he were looking at something she could not see. The light from the candles caught the sharp line of his jaw, the hollow of his cheek, the pale column of his throat above the high collar of his coat. He looked, she thought, like a man being measured for his own coffin.

"I am not afraid," she said, "because I have spent the last seven years translating the letters of a woman who lived through the French Revolution, and who wrote very explicitly about what she was afraid of, and I have learned from her that the things we fear are rarely the things that hurt us."

"That," he said, after a pause, "is a very clever answer, Miss Ashford, but it is not the one I asked for."

"Then ask again."

He looked at her then, directly, and she saw that his eyes were not dark at all. They were the color of old amber, or of tea held up to the light, and they held the same quality of stillness. He did not blink.

"Why," he said, "are you not afraid of me?"

She considered the question. The coffee was cooling in her hands. The fire had burned down to a low, red glow, and the shadows in the corners of the kitchen had grown longer, deeper. The bread on the table was pale and thick, and the butter in the dish beside it had a crust of cold on its surface. The smell of it was honest, and it helped her to think.

"Because," she said, at last, "you have not given me a reason to be."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only one I have."

He uncrossed his arms. He took a step into the kitchen. Then another. He moved the way a man moves when he is very tired, or very old, or very careful, placing each foot as though testing the ground before he committed his weight to it. He stopped at the table, on the opposite side from her, and put his hands flat on the wood, and looked down at them, and she saw that his hands were shaking.

"I should tell you," he said, "that the last person who sat where you are sitting did not leave this house alive."

"I know," she said. "She was my sister."

He looked up. The amber eyes widened, just slightly, and then narrowed again, and she saw something move behind them, something swift and bright and terrible, like a fish turning in deep water.

"Yes," he said, softly. "She was."

The wind outside pressed harder against the windows. A loose shutter banged somewhere above them, a hollow, wooden sound, and one of the candles on the table guttered and spat and threw a wild shadow across the ceiling. The clock in the passage did not miss a beat.

"Her name was Clara," Mara said. "Clara Ashford. She was twenty-three years old when she disappeared. She had been engaged to a man named Sebastian Vane, of Vane House, in the village of Thornwood, in the north of England. The engagement had been announced in the spring. By autumn she was gone. No body was ever found. My father spent the rest of his life trying to understand what had happened to her. He died without understanding. I have come here to try."

"To try what?"

"To understand. To find out. To know."

He was silent for a long time. The fire settled. The wind dropped, and the loose shutter stopped its banging, and the silence that followed was the silence of a house that is listening. Mara could hear the clock in the passage, and beneath it, faintly, the sound of her own breathing, and beneath that, nothing at all.

"You are not what I expected," he said, at last.

"What did you expect?"

"Something like your sister. Something soft. Something that would break."

"I am not soft," she said. "And I have not broken yet."

"No," he said, looking at her across the table, the amber eyes unreadable. "You have not."

He pushed off from the table. He went to the fire, and stood with his back to her, and held his hands out to the heat, though she noticed he did not get close enough to feel it. His shoulders were very straight under the dark coat. His hair, where it fell against the collar, was the color of iron.

"Your sister," he said, to the fire, "was the kindest person I have ever known. She was also the most stubborn. She would not leave, even when I told her what I was. Even when she saw. She said she did not care. She said it did not change anything. She said she would stay, and she did stay, and in the end that was what killed her. Not me. Not what I am. Her own refusal to go."

Mara said nothing. The coffee had gone cold in her hands. She set it down on the table, and the sound of the cup against the saucer was very small and very loud.

"Why did she not leave?" she asked.

"Because," he said, and his voice was so quiet now that she had to lean forward to hear it, "she was trying to save me."

"From what?"

"From myself."

He turned from the fire. The light caught his face, and she saw that he had aged in the space of a minute, that the lines around his mouth had deepened, and that the shadows under his eyes were darker than before. He looked, she thought, like a man who has just set down a weight he has been carrying for a long time, and who does not yet know whether the relief will kill him or cure him.

"You have questions," he said.

"Yes."

"You will have your answers. Not tonight. Tonight I am tired, and you are tired, and this house is tired, and it has been a long day for all of us. Tomorrow I will show you the room she kept. I will show you her letters. I will show you the clocks. And you will see for yourself what she saw, and you will understand, as I understand now, that there are some things in this world which cannot be helped, and some which can, and the difference between them is the only wisdom worth having."

He crossed to the doorway. He paused there, one hand on the frame, and looked back at her over his shoulder.

"You should sleep tonight, Miss Ashford. The room at the end of the west corridor has been prepared. It was her room. The bed is made. There is a fire laid. You will be safe there. No one in this house will harm you. I give you my word on it, and I have never broken my word, not once, in all the years I have lived in this place, and I have lived here a very long time."

"How long?"

He smiled. It was a small smile, and a sad one, and it did not reach his eyes.

"Long enough," he said, "to have learned that some questions are better asked in daylight. Good night, Miss Ashford."

"Good night, Mr. Vane."

He inclined his head. Then he turned and went out into the passage, and she heard his footsteps on the stone floor, slow and even, growing fainter, until they were gone, and the only sound in the kitchen was the tick of the clock and the settling of the fire and the slow, patient whisper of the wind against the windows of a house that had been waiting, for a very long time, for someone to come home.