Time's Convert Read online

  ALSO BY DEBORAH HARKNESS

  A Discovery of Witches

  Shadow of Night

  The Book of Life

  The World of All Souls

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Deborah Harkness

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ISBN 9780399564512 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780399564529 (ebook)

  ISBN 9780525561347 (international edition)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_2

  A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

  —THOMAS PAINE

  CONTENTS

  Also by Deborah Harkness

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  1: Naught

  Part 1: Time Hath Found Us2: Less Than Naught

  3: The Prodigal Returns

  4: One

  5: The Sins of the Fathers

  6: Time

  7: Two

  8: The Burying Place

  9: Crown

  10: Three

  11: Liberty and Restraint

  12: Pain

  13: Nine

  14: A Life of Trouble

  15: Dead

  16: Lame

  17: Name

  Part 2: ’Tis Time to Part18: Fifteen

  19: Twenty-One

  20: As the Twig Is Bent

  21: Father

  22: Infant

  23: Thirty

  24: The Hidden Hand

  25: Depend

  26: Babel

  27: Incense

  28: Forty-Five

  29: Their Portion of Freedom

  30: Duty

  31: The True Father

  32: Future

  33: Sixty

  34: Life Is But a Breath

  35: Seventy-Five

  36: Ninety

  37: A Fence Against the World

  38: One Hundred

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  Naught

  12 MAY

  On her last night as a warmblood, Phoebe Taylor had been a good daughter.

  Freyja had insisted upon it.

  “Let’s not make a fuss,” Phoebe had protested, as though she was just going on holiday for a few days, hoping to get away with a casual farewell at the hotel where her family was staying.

  “Absolutely not,” Freyja said, looking down her long nose. “De Clermonts do not skulk around—unless they are Matthew, of course. We shall do this properly. Over dinner. It is your duty.”

  The evening party Freyja put on for the Taylors was simple, elegant, and perfect—right down to the weather (a flawless example of May), the music (could every vampire in Paris play the cello?), the flowers (enough Madame Hardy roses had been brought in from the garden to perfume the entire city), and the wine (Freyja was fond of Cristal).

  Phoebe’s father, mother, and sister showed up at half past eight as requested. Her father was in black tie; her mother wore a turquoise and gold lehenga choli; Stella was in head-to-toe Chanel. Phoebe wore unrelieved black with the emerald earrings Marcus had given her before he left Paris, along with a pair of sky-high heels of which she—and Marcus—was particularly fond.

  The assembled group of warmbloods and vampire first had drinks in the garden behind Freyja’s sumptuous house in the 8th arrondissement—a private Eden the likes of which had not been carved out of space-starved Paris for over a century. The Taylor family was accustomed to palatial surroundings—Phoebe’s father was a career diplomat, and her mother came from the kind of Indian family that had married into the British civil service since the days of the Raj—but de Clermont privilege was on an entirely different scale.

  They sat down to dinner at a table set with crystal and china, in a room with tall windows that let in the summer light and overlooked the garden. Charles, the laconic chef whom the de Clermonts employed in their Parisian homes when warmbloods were invited to dine, was fond of Phoebe and had spared no effort or expense.

  “Raw oysters are a sign that God loves vampires and wants them to be happy,” Freyja announced, raising her glass at the beginning of the meal. She was, Phoebe noticed, using the word “vampire” as liberally as possible, as though sheer repetition might normalize what Phoebe was about to do. “To Phoebe. Happiness and long life.”

  Following that toast, her family had little appetite. Aware that this was her last proper meal, Phoebe nevertheless found it difficult to swallow. She forced down the oysters, and the champagne that accompanied it, and picked at the rest of the feast. Freyja kept up a lively conversation throughout the hors d’oeuvres, the soup, the fish, the duck, and the sweets (“Your last chance, Phoebe, darling!”), switching from French to English to Hindi between sips of wine.

  “No, Edward, I don’t believe there is any place I haven’t been. Do you know, I think my father might have been the original diplomat?” Freyja used this startling announcement to draw out Phoebe’s circumspect father about his early days in the queen’s service.

  Whether or not Freyja’s historical judgment was accurate, Philippe de Clermont had clearly taught his daughter a thing or two about smoothing over conversational rough edges.

  “Richard Mayhew, you say? I believe I knew him. Françoise, didn’t I know a Richard Mayhew when we were in India?”

  The sharp-eyed servant had mysteriously appeared the moment her mistress required her, tuned in to some vampiric frequency inaudible to mere mortals.

  “Probably.” Françoise was a woman of few words, but each one conveyed layers of meaning.

  “Yes, I think I did know him. Tall? Sandy haired? Good-looking, in a sort of schoolboy way?” Freyja was undeterred by Françoise’s dour remark or by the fact that she was describing roughly half the British diplomatic corps.

  Phoebe had yet to discover anything that could put a dent in Freyja’s cheerful resolve.

  “Good-bye for now,” Freyja said breezily at the end of the evening, kissing each of the Taylors in farewell. A press of cool lips on one cheek, then the other. “Padma, you are always welcome. Let me know when you will be in Paris next. Stella, do stay here during the winter shows. It is so convenient to the fashion houses, and Françoise and Charles will take very good care of you. The George V is excellent, of course, but so popular with tourists. Edward, I will be in touch.
”

  Her mother had been characteristically dry-eyed and stoic, though she held Phoebe a bit more tightly than usual in farewell.

  “You are doing the right thing,” Padma Taylor whispered into her daughter’s ear before releasing her. She understood what it meant to love someone enough to give up your whole life in exchange for a promise of what it could become.

  “Make sure that prenup is as generous as they claim,” Stella murmured to Phoebe as she crossed the threshold. “Just in case. This house is worth a fucking fortune.” Stella could view Phoebe’s decision only through her own frame of reference, which was entirely concerned with glamour, style, and the distinctive cut of Freyja’s vintage red gown.

  “This?” Freyja had laughed when Stella admired it, posing for a moment and tilting her flaxen topknot to one side to show the gown and her figure to greater advantage. “Balenciaga. Had it for ages. Now, there was a man who understood how to construct a bodice!”

  It was her normally reserved father who had struggled with the farewell, eyes filled with tears, searching hers (so like his, Freyja had noticed earlier in the evening) for signs that her resolution might be wavering. Once her mother and Stella were outside the gates, her father pulled Phoebe away from the front steps where Freyja waited.

  “It won’t be long, Dad,” Phoebe said, trying to reassure him. But they both knew that months would pass before she would be allowed to see her family again—for their safety, as well as for her own.

  “Are you sure, Phoebe? Absolutely?” her father asked. “There’s still time to reconsider.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Be reasonable for a moment,” Edward Taylor said, a note of pleading in his voice. He was familiar with delicate negotiations, and was not above using guilt to tilt matters in his favor. “Why not wait a few more years? There’s no need to rush into such a big decision.”

  “I’m not going to change my mind,” Phoebe said, gentle but firm. “This isn’t a matter for the head, Dad, but the heart.”

  Now her birth family was gone. Phoebe was left with the de Clermonts’ loyal retainers Charles and Françoise, and Freyja—who was her fiancé’s maker’s stepsister, and therefore in vampiric terms a close relation.

  In the immediate aftermath of the Taylors’ departure, Phoebe had thanked Charles for the fine dinner, and Françoise for taking care of everyone during the party. Then she sat in the salon with Freyja, who was reading her e-mail before responding to it in longhand, writing on creamy cards edged in lavender that she slid into heavy envelopes.

  “There is no need to embrace this godforsaken new preference for instant communication,” Freyja explained when Phoebe asked why she didn’t simply hit reply like everyone else. “You will soon discover, Phoebe dearest, that speed is not something that a vampire requires. It’s very human and vulgar to rush about as though time were in short supply.”

  After putting in a courteous hour with Marcus’s aunt, Phoebe felt she had done her bit.

  “I think I’ll go upstairs,” Phoebe said, feigning a yawn. In truth, sleep was the furthest thing from her mind.

  “Give Marcus my love.” Freyja licked the adhesive on the envelope with delicate laps of her tongue before sealing it shut.

  “How do you—” Phoebe looked at Freyja, astonished. “I mean, what are you—”

  “This is my house. I know everything that happens in it.” Freyja stuck a stamp on the corner of the envelope, making sure it was properly aligned with the edges. “I know, for instance, that Stella brought three of those horrible little phones here tonight in her bag, and that you removed them when you went to the toilet. I presume you hid them in your room. Not among your underclothes—you are too original for that, aren’t you, Phoebe?—nor under the mattress. No. I think they are in the canister of bath salts on the window ledge. Or inside your shoes—those rubber-soled ones that you wear on walks. Or perhaps they are on top of the armoire in the blue-and-white plastic sack you saved from your trip to the grocer on Wednesday?”

  Freyja’s third guess was correct, right down to the plastic bag that still smelled vaguely of the garlic Charles had used in his triumphant bouillabaisse. Phoebe had known Marcus’s plan to flout the rules and stay in touch was not a good idea.

  “You are breaking your agreements,” Freyja said matter-of-factly. “But you are a grown woman, with free will, capable of making your own decisions.”

  Technically, Marcus and Phoebe were forbidden to speak to each other until she had been a vampire for ninety days. They had wondered how they might bend this rule. Sadly, Freyja’s only phone was located in the entrance hall, where everyone could hear your conversations. It seldom worked properly, in any case. Every now and again it gave a tinny ring, the force of the bells inside the ancient device so strong that they rocked the handset in its brass cradle. As soon as you picked up the receiver, the line usually went dead. Freyja wrote it off to a bad wiring job courtesy of a member of Hitler’s inner circle during the last war; she was not interested in fixing it.

  After considering the challenges of the situation, Marcus had, with the help of Stella and his friend Nathaniel, come up with a more secretive means of communication: cheap, disposable cell phones. They were the kind used by international thieves and terrorists—or so Nathaniel had assured them—and would be untraceable should Baldwin or any other vampire want to spy on them. Phoebe and Marcus purchased them in a shady electronics shop located on one of the 10th arrondissement’s more entrepreneurial streets.

  “I am sure, given the situation, that you will keep your conversation brief,” Freyja continued. She glanced at her computer screen and addressed another envelope. “You don’t want Miriam to catch you.”

  Miriam was hunting around the Sacré Coeur and was expected to return in the small hours of the morning. Phoebe glanced at the clock on the mantel—an extravagant affair of gilt and marble with reclining male nudes holding up a round timepiece as though it were a beach ball. It was one minute before midnight.

  “Good night, then,” Phoebe said, grateful that Freyja was not only three steps ahead of her and Marcus, but at least one ahead of Miriam, as well.

  “Hmm.” Freyja’s attention was devoted to the page in front of her.

  Phoebe escaped upstairs. Her bedroom was down a long corridor lined with early French landscapes. A thick carpet muffled her footsteps. After closing the bedroom door, Phoebe reached up onto the top of the armoire (Empire style, circa 1815) and snagged the plastic bag. She pulled out one of the phones and switched it on. It was fully charged and ready for use.

  Clutching the phone to her heart, Phoebe slipped into the attached bathroom and closed that door, also. Two closed doors and a broad expanse of thick porcelain tile was all the privacy this vampire household afforded. She toed off her shoes and lowered herself, fully clothed, into the cold, empty tub before dialing Marcus’s number.

  “Hello, sweetheart.” Marcus’s voice, usually lighthearted and warm, was rough edged with concern—though he was doing his best to disguise it. “How was dinner?”

  “Delicious,” Phoebe lied. She lay back in the tub, which was Edwardian and had a magnificent high back with a curve to cradle her neck.

  Marcus’s quiet laughter told her that he didn’t entirely believe her.

  “Two bites of dessert and a nibble here and there around the edges?” Marcus teased.

  “One bite of dessert. And Charles went to so much trouble.” Phoebe’s brow creased. She would have to make it up to him. Like most culinary geniuses, Charles was quick to take offense when plates were returned to the kitchen with food still on them.

  “Nobody expected you to eat much,” Marcus said. “The dinner was for your family, not you.”

  “There were plenty of leftovers. Freyja sent them home with Mum.”

  “How was Edward?” Marcus knew about her father’s reservations.

 
“Dad tried to talk me out of our plan. Again,” Phoebe replied.

  There was a long silence.

  “It didn’t work,” Phoebe added, in case Marcus was worried.

  “Your father just wants you to be absolutely sure,” Marcus said quietly.

  “I am. Why do people keep questioning me?” There was no keeping the impatience from her tone.

  “They love you,” Marcus said simply.

  “Then they should listen to me. Being with you—that’s what I want.” It wasn’t all that she wanted, of course. Ever since Phoebe met Ysabeau at Sept-Tours, she had craved the inexhaustible supply of time that vampires possessed.

  Phoebe had studied how Ysabeau seemed to fully extend herself into every task. Nothing was done quickly or for the sake of getting through and checking it off one’s endless to-do list. Instead there was a reverence to Ysabeau’s every move—how she sniffed the blossoms in her garden, the feline stealth of her steps, the slow pause when she reached the end of a chapter in her book before she went on to the next. Ysabeau did not feel that time would run out before she had sucked the essence from whatever experience she was having. For Phoebe, there never seemed to be enough time to breathe, dashing from the market to work to the chemist’s for cold medicine to the cobbler to have her heels fixed, and back to work.

  But Phoebe hadn’t shared these observations with Marcus. He would learn her thoughts on the matter soon, when they were reunited. Then Marcus would drink from her heart vein—the thin river of blue that crossed the left breast—and learn her deepest secrets, her darkest fears, and her most cherished desires. The blood from the heart vein contained all that a lover might conceal, and drinking from it embodied the sincerity and trust that their relationship would need in order to succeed.

  “We’re going to take this one step at a time, remember?” Marcus’s question reclaimed her attention. “First, you become a vampire. Then, if you still want me—”

  “I will.” Of this, Phoebe was absolutely certain.

  “If you still want me,” Marcus repeated, “we will marry and you will be stuck with me. For richer and poorer.”