Dawn Thompson (10 page)

“I could disable the bolt and lock you in myself, you know,” he said. “I would rather not, because I want you to feel safe in my care, but I will if needs must in order to ensure that safety.”

“Hand me that dressing gown, then,” she said, “and kindly avert your eyes.”

He did as she bade him, then crossed the threshold, and she didn’t hear the clacking of his boot heels receding along the corridor until she’d slid the bolt shut.

Obstinate little spitfire!
he thought, jogging down the stairs. Parker met him halfway.

“Sir . . . oh, sir, Vicar Emmerson’s come. I put him in the study. I know you told us not to admit anyone, but the vicar? How could we bar him from the house—especially now, with Bates lying dead in the parlor.”

Joss raked his hair back roughly. “I suppose it’s all right, Parker, but next time come and fetch me first.” There was nothing for it. He was going to have to take Parker into his confidence before the valet let the Devil himself into the house. “What brings him to the Abbey at such an hour?” he said. “He couldn’t know that Bates has left us.”

They had reached the bottom landing, and Parker slowed his pace. “He’s come to bring the young lady’s abigail, sir. ’Tis a miracle! She’s alive! And she’s sorely needed here now.”

Joss froze in his tracks, spine rigid. Gooseflesh drew his scalp back. “What?” he breathed. “What are you on about? Are you addled? Miss Applegate’s abigail is
dead
, Parker. She died in that carriage with the others. I saw her corpse myself!”

“You must have been mistaken, sir, begging your pardon,”
the valet said. “She’s very much alive. Come and see for yourself.”

“The study, you say?”

The valet nodded.

“See that a breakfast tray is brought up to Miss Applegate,” Joss said, moving past the valet. “Then make yourself available. Wait for me in the yellow suite. We need to talk directly.”

The valet sketched a bow and shuffled off, while Joss woodenly descended to the lower landing, trying to envision the abigail’s face. Whoever this was that the vicar had brought had to be an imposter, and Parker had let her in.

Joss thought a moment. He couldn’t have been mistaken, could he? Slowly the woman’s image took shape in his mind. She was a homely sort, slender and dark-haired. He’d seen the stray wisps peeking out from beneath her bonnet, and that unsightly mole sprouting dark hairs above her upper lip. Bursting into the study expecting to expose an imposter, he pulled up short before the very image in his mind. There was no mistake, and cold chills riveted him to the spot.

The vicar and the abigail surged to their feet from the lounge and the wing chair respectively. “Joss,” the vicar said, “this is Lyda Bartholomew. Lyda, your host, Joselyn Hyde-White.”

The woman curtsied to Joss’s bow.

“I’ve had her at the vicarage,” the vicar said. “I’m given to understand that you have her charge here . . . a Miss Cora Applegate. Had I known, I’d have brought her on sooner, before the storm worsened. It was all I could do to coax the sleigh horses up the tor. ’Tis like a sheet of glass out there.”

Joss nodded toward the woman, indicating that she sit, and she sank back down in the wing chair from which she’d sprung. “How could you know Miss Applegate was here?” he said, addressing neither directly.

“Your footman made mention of it,” said the vicar. “I was at the undertaker’s when he came about Bates—dreadfully sorry to hear that he’s gone. He will be sorely missed.”

Joss slapped his forehead, having forgotten his wound, and winced. Of course! He had totally forgotten sending Rodgers to the village. The whole event, for it was all related, had nearly addled his brain.

“Where have you got him?” the vicar went on seamlessly. “I’ve brought unction. I can give him a conditional anointing.”

“He’s laid out on the lounge in the salon until the undertaker brings the coffin and we can set up a proper bier,” said Joss absently. He was taking the abigail’s measure. Yes, it was she; there was no question. But how could that be? He could have sworn she was dead in that coach.

“Surely you can’t be thinking to bury him in
this?
” the vicar said. “The snow is four feet deep if it’s an inch, not counting the drifts! The sexton won’t put spade to ground in such as this, no matter what I pay him. That’s a blizzard out there!”

“No,” said Joss. “Once the staff has paid their respects, I shall bring him down and put him in the Hyde-White crypt until we can give him a proper burial.”

“Very well, then, while you two become acquainted, I shall see to Bates,” the vicar wheezed, shuffling toward the door. He wasn’t a young man. Past middle age, and rotund besides, he huffed and puffed when he walked, which was more of a waddle.

“That can wait,” Joss said. “Take a seat, Vicar Emmerson. I would hear more of how Miss Bartholomew here came to be at the vicarage, of all places, in this blizzard, as you say.”

“Lyda, if ya please, sir,” said the abigail. “Bartholomew just takes too long ta say.”

Joss nodded. “As you wish,” he said. “When I came upon the carriage, there were five passengers. Miss Applegate was the only one still living—or so I thought. I chased off a . . . wild dog that was attacking the bodies. Were you . . . bitten, Lyda?”

“Oh, she was,” the vicar interrupted before she could answer. “The missus tended her.”

The abigail rubbed her shoulder through her torn cloak. “That she did,” she said, “ ’Tis healin’ right fine, too.”

“How did you reach the kirk in such a storm?” Joss said, a close eye upon the abigail’s expression. She seemed composed—too composed for his liking. He couldn’t credit that he’d been mistaken and left the poor woman to die in that carriage. She’d been dead! How could this be? And yet it was.

Since the strangeness began in him, he had gleaned what knowledge he could on the topic of vampirism. Mulling over that information in his mind now, he tried to remember everything he’d read, and what tidbits his parents had shared over time. It all came flooding back: those bitten by vampires became vampires themselves in varying degrees, depending upon the severity of the “infection.” Some were repelled by all things holy. Many could not stand the light of day, while others, though lethargic, like the coachman, could go about during daylight hours, but they could only exercise their greater powers at night. His own parents were such as these. He
didn’t know the whole of it, only that they had been spared the bloodlust that drives all vampires by a mysterious blood moon ritual they’d learned of through another like them, and fellow vampire hunter, the equally mysterious Gypsy, Milosh, whom they had met in Moldovia. At best, his information was contradictory. There had to be a way to tell for sure. Thus far this woman had passed two critical points. She was able to be abroad in daylight, and she had been staying on holy ground. But still . . .

It was a moment before he realized the woman was answering his question. “Then, when I came to,” she was saying, “I heard the dogs howlin’. I was all alone, sir, and I was scared o’ them dogs. One o’ them had bit me already. I couldn’t stay there, so I started to walk toward the lights I saw at the foot o’ this hill, and finally come upon the kirk. The good vicar and his wife took me in and tended me. Then they told me young miss was here. Is she safe, sir? Can I see her, please?”

“What happened to the others?” Joss said, avoiding the question. He wasn’t prepared to answer it yet. “There were three men in that carriage besides you and your charge when I found it.”

“ ’Tweren’t nobody in it but me when I woke, sir,” she said. “They musta wandered off lookin’ for help, too—and good riddance, if ya ask me, leavin’ me there like that, to say nothin’ o’ the rest o’ their mischief! Bad hats, the lot o’ ’em—the poor lass’s father, too, God forgive me, ’cause ’twas him what’s been payin’ my wages, but that don’t make him an upstandin’ gentleman. Please . . . can I see her, sir, the young miss? I ain’t goin’ ta rest until I do.”

Joss grunted, unconvinced. “In due course, Lyda,” he said, turning to the vicar. “Was she seen by the surgeon?” he asked.

The vicar took his arm and led him off toward the corner of the room, out of Lyda’s hearing, and spoke in a low whisper. “I had Dr. Everett in,” he said. “She ran a high fever. The missus couldn’t bring it down. We thought it could be due to exposure, her coming so far in such a storm ill clad for such a trek. We feared pneumonia. Dr. Everett was afraid it might be something . . . more. He fears the dog may have been rabid, but we have no way to be certain without the dog. Others have sighted dogs since the storm as well—big, shaggy, wildlooking animals—and the word has gone out to shoot on sight any four-legged creature that cannot be accounted for among the villagers.” Joss started to move away, but the vicar held him back. “As you well know,” he went on, “old Everett tends our livestock as well, and he says the animal’s bite more closely resembles the bite of a wolf, though there hasn’t been a wolf in England for centuries. He has books on such. Could be a crossbreed, something that came over on a vessel from the east. Who is to say? She will have to be watched.”

“Have no fear of that,” said Joss. He wasn’t about to let the woman out of his sight until he was certain she wasn’t what he feared she might be. For if she were
vampir,
albeit through no fault of her own, she would have to be dealt with. He knew enough about his sorry predicament to be certain of that. Why hadn’t his parents prepared him for such as this? He knew the answer. When the years rolled by and the only manifestation of his level of infection was his ability to shapeshift into the dire wolf, they had evidently decided he knew all he needed to know.

Joss spewed a string of expletives in a low mutter. The vicar heard, and raised his eyebrow. Joss ignored him. The poor man had no knowledge of the situation—that
at least two of his parishioners were vampires, and that he very likely stood before a fledgling vampire at that very moment; two, if his suspicions in regard to the abigail were correct. It was just as well he’d brought the woman to the Abbey. Emmerson being a man of the cloth was at the greater risk, since the undead dearly loved to corrupt God’s anointed. This Joss knew firsthand, since his father had been ordained to the clergy just before his own nightmare began.

“Is there more?” he asked the vicar, leading him out of earshot. “I need to have it all if there is. We may be dealing with something far more dangerous than rabies here.”

The vicar’s nonplussed expression told him he had no inkling of what that might mean. Vampire scares had popped up in the village from time to time over the years; this due to the handiwork of a creature called Sebastian Valentin, who’d begun the corruption before Joss was born. It was Sebastian who had infected his parents, who had begun recruitment amongst the
unfortunates
plying their trade around Whitechapel and the docks. His minions and consorts had traveled to the four corners of the country, spreading their disease that came and went in spurts as time passed; all very hush, hush. None dared say the word
vampire
aloud for fear of being rushed off to Bedlam. It had been years since there was an epidemic, and even then it was called by other names: consumption, the bleeding sickness, anything that remotely involved blood. There hadn’t been an outbreak since Vicar Emmerson took over the parish. But still the sickness existed:
vampirism
.

As a child at his mother’s knee, Joss heard the tales of how she and his brave father had destroyed Sebastian. It was almost a desperate hope, their telling the
tale—that saying it would make it so, for after the final confrontation in the Carpathian Mountains, though Sebastian was not seen again, the vampire’s bones were never found.

“Nothing more that I can think of,” said the vicar, low-voiced. “Look here, you don’t seem overly enthusiastic to have the woman join you, after all my trouble carting her up the tor. I should think you would be glad to have her in this understaffed mausoleum. Who is tending Miss Applegate now? Your footman tells me poor old Grace has been taken with a fit of apoplexy since her husband passed, and she’s likely to be the next to go. Why, he said—”

“My footman is a blabbermouth,” Joss interrupted. So was the vicar, and the last thing he needed was wagging tongues in the village. “He gossips like a woman,” he went on. “We are managing splendidly, all things considered, at this difficult time.”

“Hmmm,” the vicar growled. “Very well then, I’ll have that moment with poor Bates and be on my way before this tempest grows worse. The winds died down a bit earlier, but they are worsening again.”

Joss watched him waddle off. He yanked the bellpull, his lips twisted in a sardonic grin.
Managing splendidly, indeed!
He almost laughed aloud. Who would come that wouldn’t make a liar of him? Amy was tending Grace, Cook had never answered the bells in her life, Parker was awaiting him in the yellow suite . . . which left Rodgers, the footman, whom in that moment Joss would love to strangle for carrying tales. He was glad the vicar had left the study. While he waited, he turned to Lyda.

“So!” he said, folding his arms across his chest. “We are to have you join our household until the roads are
passable. Tell me, where will you go when it’s fit to travel?”

“Why, to Applegate Manor, in Yorkshire, sir—young miss’s home. Our home,” she said. “And just so’s ya know, I ain’t sure what it was bit the others, but ’twas a
dog
what bit me, no wolf. There was more than one four-legged animal roamin’ around out there that night. All I want is ta take young miss home so’s I can care for her proper.”

“I see,” said Joss. “Well, that is days off, if not weeks, I’m afraid. Aside from the weather, we must first attempt to find your
dog
and be certain it isn’t rabid. In the meanwhile, I will see that your needs and comforts are met at Whitebriar Abbey. I have rung for . . . one of my staff to take you below to freshen up and take nourishment, while I prepare your charge for your arrival. She believes you dead. I would not shock her unnecessarily by having you suddenly appear without first breaking the news gently.”