The Kindred of Darkness (11 page)

‘You would burn the skin off your hands,' retorted Lydia. They had crossed the jostling confusion of drays, cabs, passengers dashing to catch the last omnibus in Finsbury Circus, to the doors of the Christian Travelers' Hotel. He handed her up the single shallow step. In a smaller voice, she said, ‘I have to know.'

Without answering, he opened the door for her, the Christian Travelers' Hotel not running to a doorman. At the desk, she gave the clerk a shilling and asked if there were any letters for Elizabeth Röntgen.

There were two. One, from Henry McClennan, contained another list of properties: her eye picked out the name of Daphne Scrooby of Parish Street again, of Francis Houghton and Bartholomew Barrow. It was noted that while birth certificates existed for Mrs Scrooby (née Robinson) and her husband, a well-known pub-owner in the Limehouse, no such things existed for Houghton, Barrow, or Nicholas Barger of Rood Lane, to whom Barrow had also willed City property.

It was hard to keep her fingers from trembling as she opened the second envelope, a telegram from Ellen sent that morning.

WIRE FROM MR JAMES SENT VENICE LAST NIGHT STOP SAYS HE IS ON HIS WAY STOP

He is on his way
.

She woke in blackness, gasping.
NO
…

The dream swallowed back into itself.

The Temperance Hotel
…

Reassuringly, the darkness around her smelled of wallpaper mold and the desiccated ghosts of garlic and wolfsbane. Across the street, the clock on All Hallows struck three.
Was that what waked me?
Dimly the groan of the goods trains came from Liverpool Street Station, without cease through the small hours.

It had been cold in her dream.

Miranda?

No
. She'd dreamed of her daughter, a brief, far-off image of the toddler curled asleep in Nan Wellit's arms. She'd taken great comfort from the fact that – although in the dream too it was pitch dark – she could see that Miranda's clothes were clean and her hair combed. Nan was looking after her.

Good for you, Nan
…

It wasn't that which had frightened her.

Something about Simon
?

After she'd stuffed the telegram from Ellen, and that thin sheaf of information from Henry McClennan, into her handbag, she'd walked with Simon to a café on the other side of the oval park, had sat talking for a time, knowing if she went straight back to her room she would lie awake. She'd asked him about being a vampire, and about reading dreams; about the Old Earl who'd built Wycliffe House and laid out its gardens. About the harper called Rhys the White, who after his death had slept in the crypt of St Giles Cripplegate and had lured his victims with music that they could not tear from their dreams.
There were men in London, living men, who believed him to be a wizard or an angel or a saint, because of the dreams he could visit upon them
…

And as he spoke Ysidro had watched passers-by beneath the glare of the café's electric lights, servants making their way home from evening service, soldiers who stopped to buy ginger beer. Observed them the way Jamie observed them, picking individual faces, separate voices:
That man's from Sussex. One of that girl's parents is Liverpool Irish. See how he holds his left wrist? He's a coachman
…

Reading their bodies and voices, their mannerisms and their lives.

James and I understand one another
, he had said
. Many vampires make humankind our study: sit in cafés and theaters and on the benches of the Embankment, watching and listening. To us the Personals of every newspaper are like serialized novels, or like observing the tracks of beasts in the woods. Such awareness is life to us: hunting, or watching for who looks at us twice and thrice
.

When they'd walked back to the Temperance Hotel, she had observed that the beat constable had rousted the two sleepers beside the church wall, and moved them on.

It was Rhys the White who killed you
? she had asked, and Simon had answered,
Yes
, matter-of-factly, without so much as a pause.

Yet in a dream once she'd felt the paroxysm of light, that was the drinking of the soul of the living by the Undead, and knew there was more to it than
Yes
…

Was that what I dreamed?

Somewhere in her mind lingered the echo of moonlight through the iron lattices of a barred window, of a man's voice whispering desperately: ‘
De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine
…'

Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord
…

A man clinging to the edge of life as to a precipice.

The smell of pine trees …

The creak of a hinge as the door behind the prisoner opened and he flung himself to his feet, threw himself at the bars and clung to them with all his strength in the knowledge that his strength would not be enough.
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me
…
?

Trembling, Lydia sat up. She fumbled her eyeglasses from beneath her pillow – rooms at the Temperance Hotel did not include such luxuries as night stands – and rose with care, recalling that she'd left her notes and pencils strewn on the floor around the bed. As she had in her dream two nights ago, she crossed to the window, the baize curtain rough under her fingers, the wreaths of garlic and wolfsbane like dry tissue paper against her cheek.

Through fog and darkness the tangle of rooftops and chimney stacks was barely to be seen. Mists caught the electric glow from the train yards, and by it, like a shadow, she thought she saw three figures, standing on the roof across the alleyway.

Two men and a woman. (
How on EARTH did she get up there wearing a corset and a dress?
) A dozen feet separated them from the window. She had seen vampires leap twice that distance. So great was the darkness, no gleam of light caught in their eyes, but she knew what they were.

Do they hear me breathe
?

Detect the pounding of my heart
?

As silently as she could she moved back into the room, opened the suitcase beneath the bed and took from it the jointed rod she'd had made when she'd come back from China last winter, that screwed together into a sort of spear with a sharpened silver point. Whether it would work or not she didn't know, but all weapons used against vampires were more or less only to buy you time to flee, provided there was anywhere to flee to.

There was also a little box of coffee beans, to counteract the vampire's ability to make a victim drift momentarily into a dreamlike state of inattention. She'd once heard Dr Millward describing (at tedious length) a silver ring he'd had made, with a little spike on it to dig into his palm for the same purpose, though Lydia personally wouldn't have wanted to risk drawing one's blood anywhere near a vampire …

She screwed the spear together and sat on the bed, facing the window that was only just less inkily dark than the blackness of the room.

Grippen's fledglings?

Zahorec's, made in some fashion that Grippen couldn't detect?

Whoever they are
,
they know I'm here.

For six years she had lived with the knowledge that Grippen and his fledglings knew of her. Knew and kept their distance, out of fear of Simon.

Fear?
She wondered now.
Or was that part of a bargain? That he would leave London, and they would leave me alone?

And now he's returned
…

After a long time she realized that she could see the pale rectangle of curtained window a little more clearly, and heard the All Hallows clock strike four-thirty.

At five-thirty she unscrewed the sections of her spear and stowed them in her suitcase, took off her spectacles, and lay down once more. But it was long before she slept, and when she did, she saw them in her dreams. Two men and a woman, standing on the roof ridge of the building across the alleyway, watching her window with gleaming eyes.

‘H
ave you ever played Fox and Geese, Mistress?' Simon asked her the following evening, as they walked along the Embankment.

‘When I was in school, yes. The son of one of the headmistresses would insist on being the Fox, and my friend Josetta – she was the English mistress there – taught me that once one learns the strategy, the Geese can always win.'

‘Your friend is wise. The Fox can kill any Goose, but the Geese are many. By working together, and coordinating their attack, they can surround and trap Señor Fox. Multiply that a thousand fold –' his glance took in the sailors and flower vendors and fashionable ladies strolling around them, the rumble of traffic from the Strand above – ‘and you have the situation of the vampire.'

It was early enough – not quite ten – that twilight was barely out of the sky. The yellow twinkle from the military yards across the river answered the street lights in the park, and spangled the dark water between. From a barrow beside the curb a man cried hoarsely of nougats and caramels.

Despite Simon's assurance that no one Lydia knew would notice her as long as she was with him, she kept glancing at their fellow strollers, expecting any moment for Aunt Isobel to swoop out of the shadows of the trees in her bath chair, demanding to know what she was doing here and who was that she was with?

Did Jamie feel like this when he walked about somewhere like Vienna or Berlin, back in his days as a spy
?

‘Were the Bohemian to get fledglings,' Simon said at length, answering an earlier question, ‘I doubt he could conceal them. Indeed, 'tis more like they would lead Lionel to him. 'Twere more difficult for Lionel to know if this Zahorec has made living allies, and I think that is what he fears even more. The living have freedom of action denied the Undead, and a master cannot constrain his fledglings if they make such alliances behind is back.'

‘Would he kill them if he found out about them?'

‘Beyond doubt, Mistress. I would.'

Lydia remembered Constantinople, and glanced sidelong at her companion's face, wondering what he recalled.

‘Would Lionel's fledglings kill me behind his back? Rebbe Karlebach –' she spoke the name of Jamie's mentor hesitantly, but the vampire showed no reaction at the mention of the man who'd emptied a shotgun full of silver pellets into him the previous year – ‘warned us that the Undead usually kill their living helpers.'

‘This is because Rebbe Karlebach is an imbecile,' returned Ysidro calmly, ‘like many self-nominated Van Helsings. They know only what they tell one another. I doubt he has had more than a dozen conversations with actual vampires in his life, and refused to believe what he heard from them. You are in no danger from Lionel's get, nor yet from Lionel himself.'

‘Have you spoken to him since your return?'

‘Not yet. But I do not think he has forgotten my words to him, on the subject of yourself, at our last encounter.'

That morning Lydia had dispatched a note to Aunt Isobel, crying off from the flower show and Lady Brightwell's garden reception on the grounds of urgent business in Oxford, and promising to return in time to chaperone Emily to Lady Savenake's ball that evening. It had crossed her mind that morning that if Nan Wellit had somehow managed to escape, and attempted to communicate with her at the Oxford house, she wasn't entirely certain that Ellen or Mrs Grimes would be aware of a subtle message.

But the sight of the empty nursery, the sound of Mrs Brock's muffled sobs, had been more than she could stand. Ellen and the other servants asked her a dozen times that day what could be done, or suggested everything from calling in the police to canvassing London themselves for word of ‘this Grippen cove', and went about their duties in a state of such morbid anxiety that Lydia was driven nearly frantic.

It's been FIVE DAYS!!!

Would they be more, or less, anxious if they knew who had kidnapped her, and who I am dealing with
?

She had escaped the house with a sense of deep relief, with two trunks containing gowns, shoes, hats, gloves, and jewelry suitable for operas, teas, flower shows (‘You're never going without me to help you dress, Miss Lydia!') and a state dinner for forty to consecrate the bridal party for the upcoming Colwich-Armistead nuptials. Yet upon her arrival at the Temperance Hotel, the thought of seeing Cece Armistead hanging on Colwich's arm all evening at Lady Savenake's was more than she could bear. She had just finished and blotted a note to her aunt, begging yet again to be excused, and was about to carry it down to the lobby when the porter brought her up Don Simon's card, with his familiar spiky, sixteenth-century handwriting:
Would you do me the honor to walk out with me a little this evening
?

She had nearly wept with relief.

‘'Tis well that James will be here ere long,' he said. ‘When you find record of Zahorec's properties, 'twere better we had a man who can easily go into any neighborhood to see these places, than a woman going about alone. Spare me,' he added, raising two fingers, ‘the tale of how a woman in these modern days might venture into any street in London without reducing herself to the level of a common trull: I will not stand by and see you harmed. Rather let me ask of you –' he guided her toward the steps that ascended toward the Savoy Hotel – ‘if you have among the garments you brought with you to London a green day frock? I thought you might. 'Tis a color that suits you, if I may be permitted to say so. If you will wear it tomorrow afternoon at six, and sit in the Café at the Hotel Metropole, a man from Barclays will come to you. Wear this also.'

From the pocket of his elegantly cut jacket he took a slim box, which contained – when Lydia opened it beneath the electrical lamps outside the Savoy's great doors – a long sautoir necklace wrought of pearls, peridot, and a scattering of emeralds, and sporting as its central pendant an exquisite mermaid of enamel and bronze. She stared at it, shocked – it was Tiffany work, obviously expensive and not the sort of gift a married woman could possibly accept from a man not her husband, even if he
had
been dead for three hundred and fifty years.