Chapter 364 - In Transit part 1

Though she might live a thousand years and perhaps even longer than that, she didn't believe she would ever forget the first time she saw the man who would make her an immortal.

His name was Gon, and he was the oldest living vampire in the world, but that was not the name she knew him by at first. It would be a very long time before he trusted her with the precious secret of his true name, the name he was given at birth some thirty thousand years ago. No, he was a pretender from the beginning, inveigling himself into London society under an assumed name: Lord Guy Venport, newly repatriated from colonial India and sole living heir (ahem) of the Sudbury Venports.

A ruse.

You might even say a fraud.

His deception was not directed at her specifically, nor were his motives malicious in nature. All vampires, she would come soon to understand, must adorn themselves in cloaks of anonymity to move safely about the world of men. Some took new identities as casually as mortal men and women changed clothes. Others chose to skulk along the edges of mortal society, keeping to the shadowed fringes, nameless doll-eyed predators. Nevertheless, it was a deception, and one that he would compound in the months that followed—not excluding his hollow promises of love and eternal life. But she held a deep and abiding affection for him anyway. She flew even now to save him from himself, and with a confederacy of his friends and former lovers, mustered from the four corners of the earth.

Her eternal lament: she would always love him.

Did that speak to the quality of his character or simply underscore how credulous she was, even at the age of one hundred and sixty?

She had pondered that question frequently over the last century and a half, and still she was not certain of an answer to it.

Her name was Eleonora Havercamp, Nora to family and friends. She had never thought it a particularly melodious pet name. More like the bleating of a goat. But that was her true name, the name she was given at birth, and that was a thing on which vampires hung great value. She was born on March 3, 1853 in the village of Abingdon, also known as Abingdon-on-Thames, a market town and civil parish in the Royal County of Berkshire, and she was a maiden of sixteen the year she was seduced by the vampyre.