Re: log: vanessa i, dracula, mina m
"Mr. Teplov," she repeated, with a small smile. "I am Vanessa Ives." She offered him her hand, if he would like to take it, and her eyes shone a little round the edges. They had just left the scene of a terrible murder, but she did not seem a white perturbed. Had not murder been the subject of visions before now, and would it not be again? Slave ships drowned in the cold sea, women crying to their mothers as they were set upon by shoulders, the dead shambling alongside the dead?
"Do they have another title for you, in the country you come from?" she asked, meaning something more than 'Mr'. She still did not know who he was to this society. Was he the wealthy businessman, outfitted as royalty once would be, or was he a private duke of a country she had only read about in newspapers? Was he the distant relation of some foreign prelate, or was he the subtle and immediate heir to a nearer fortune?
Her question played as pure curioisty, but she was trying to pin him, trying to hold him down, like one of the specimens she had handled in her youth. To know him, to have him and dissect his mysteries, she required a name.