I've chased him for over twenty years, and across countless miles, and though often I was running, there have been many times when I could do nothing but sit and wait. Now I am only desperate for it to be finished.
In 1944, just days after the liberation of Paris, Charles Jackson sees something horrific: a man, apparently drinking the blood of a murdered woman. Terrified, he does nothing, telling himself afterwards that worse things happen in wars.
Seven years later he returns to the city—and sees the same man dining in the company of a fascinating young woman. When they leave the restaurant, Charles decides to follow...
***
I've often heard it said that the littlest things in life can have the biggest impact—an assertion evidenced by Charles Jackson, a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps whose subsequent career in the field of haemophilia springs from something seemingly insignificant. Celebrating the liberation of Paris from the hands of the Nazis, he hunkers down in a bunker, only to half-see something weird: someone gulping blood from the warm body of a woman.
A vampire? Perhaps. But more likely a mere madman. "It was ludicrous; it was, as I’ve said, something I should not have seen, something wrong. Not just violence, not just murder, but something even more depraved than those acts." (p.28) Absent any evidence that a crime has been committed, Charles does his level best to dismiss this wicked thing he's witnessed. But the damage is done, and the unsettling story told in A Love Like Blood begun.
A period of years later Charles' work brings him back to France, where he is surprised to find the focus of his all but forgotten fascination at lunch with a lovely lass hailing from the Hamptons. In the first, he follows her hoping she might tell him more about her benefactor—an Estonian Margrave, apparently, looking to learn the language—but before long Charles realises he has feelings for Marian... feelings she seems ready to return.
Alas, their chance at romance falls apart practically before it's started. When she suddenly stops replying to his regular letters, he asks after her at her former haunts, where he's made aware that Marian has a heart condition, and has had to head home to seek treatment. He never sees or hears from her again.