An Old Friend Of The Family (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 3) by Fred Saberhagen (interesting books to read for teens .TXT) 📗

midnight, with the drive again full of police cars, Clarissa found herself rising like a sleepwalker from her sleepless chair, moving away from the other members of her distraught family and letting herself be drawn back to the library.

   Inside, she closed the door behind her, at the same time switching on one light. The shelves at the far east end were still in dimness.

   In a pocket of her sweater her hand encountered a handkerchief, which, come to think of it was part of her last year’s Christmas gift from Johnny. Dear God, let him be still alive! But it was too long since she had genuinely tried to pray.

   At the touch of her foot, the library stool glided along the base of the shelves, then settled beneath her modest weight to grip the carpet and hold itself in place. Handkerchief in hand, she ascended to the second step.   The seldom-disturbed books on the top shelf must be dusty, given the succession of part-time maids who had lately been in charge of cleaning.

   Clarissa whisked with the handkerchief, and pocketed it again. Then her hand went out to the book she wanted, one she had not opened in more than thirty years.

* * * * * * *

   November 1946. Clarissa, widowed early in the war, had been two years remarried to a Yank, John Southerland, lately a brigadier in the US Eighth Air Force. She was preparing to leave her native England for her husband’s home in far off Illinois; one step in that preparation was to bid farewell, for what had seemed would quite possibly be the last time, to her grandmother Wilhelmina Harker.

   The old lady had been in her seventies then, though she looked no more than a well-preserved sixty, and another two decades were to pass before she breathed her last. Eight years widowed herself in 1946, Grandmother Harker was still living then in her turn-of-the-century home in Exeter. The house, like the rest of England, had been left almost servantless by World War II, and was in a gloomy, neglected state, with some of last year’s blackout curtains still in place.

   Grandmother Harker had begun the interview by looking keenly at little Andrew, who had accompanied his mother. “Will he be changing his name to Southerland?” she demanded of Clarissa.

   “I think he will.” Clarissa’s chin lifted, and her tone balanced between defiance and toleration. She had never spent much time with her grandmother and did not know her very well.

   “Just as well,” the old lady answered shortly, to Clarissa’s surprise. Then Grandmother Harker had given the child his farewell present, a book of adventure stories, had wished him well among all the Red Indians in America, and then had sent him off to play with some neighbor’s offspring. It turned out that the old woman had, or thought she had, some very private business with Clarissa.

   “When you come right down to it,” Grandmother Harker said, waving at the younger woman a fat, dark-bound book that Clarissa had not noticed until that moment, “jewels and money and such things are trivialities. At least they are once one has enough of them to get along in comfort. I understand your new husband is quite well off?”

   “Quite.”

   “Then I hope you won’t be disappointed that I’m not giving you anything of that sort.”

   Clarissa murmured a truthful denial, and at the same time wondered: A book? What in the world? She herself was not much of a reader, and certainly no collector; nor would she have guessed her grandmother, who in her youth had been rather adventuresome in a physical way, to have any particular leaning in that direction.

   The book was being extended steadily toward Clarissa, in a slender hand that evidently still retained surprising strength. The old lady said to her: “But this is something valuable, my dear, as such a parting gift ought to be. You know, you were always my favorite among your generation of the family. And now, why shouldn’t I say so, and do something to show I mean it? Truthfulness is one of the few luxuries whose enjoyment becomes more practical as we grow older.”

   “A book.” When the sound of her own voice registered in Clarissa’s ears she was afraid that she had said it much too flatly. The book hadn’t been dusty on that day, though certainly it was already very old. “How lovely!”

   “You don’t mean that, though you say it well. Listen to me now. On the pages where I’ve put the marker, you’ll find something much more useful than mere loveliness, should there ever come a day of extraordinary trouble for you and your new family.”

   Clarissa had accepted the book, and was making some remark appreciative of the old binding, when Grandmother Harker cut her off with a headshake and a sharp sigh.  “I do hope I can make you understand me, girl.  I’ve had this from the Continent at great—well, at great expense, though I don’t mean of money but of effort.  It wouldn’t do for it to be forgotten, or ignored, or used with frivolity.  No, that especially wouldn’t do at all.”

   As far back as Clarissa was able to remember, her grandmother had somehow, from time to time, obtained impressive things “from the Continent”. Lace, jewelry, at least once a fifteenth-century painting, later attested as a genuine Jan van Eyck by a surprised appraiser called in by the old lady herself, who must have had her own reasons to be suspicious of the acquisition. And Clarissa could recall, as a child, being introduced by grandmother to a dark, romantic-looking Continental gentleman of indeterminate age, come from that mysterious cross-Channel realm to visit grandmother, though grandmother even then, as even little Clarissa had been able to see, was rather ridiculously overage for such…

* * * * * * *

   “Are you attending me, girl? Now when I speak of a day