The Kindred of Darkness (15 page)

The anger returned, a rush of crimson heat that extended not only to the interloping vampire and the London nest, but to Simon Ysidro as well. He heard the steely hardness in his own voice as he said, ‘And has Zahorec asked anything of you yet?'

‘Not yet.' She broke her biscuit into tinier and tinier fragments without appearing to notice it at all. ‘But now that he knows me he might wonder if I suddenly went back to Oxford. And to tell you the truth, I'd rather be where I can do exactly as Grippen asked me: find all Zahorec's lairs. It may be the quickest way to … to bring an end to all this. Just give him what he's asking for.'

Asher closed his lips on the words,
Do you really think he's going to give her back?

‘I gave Mr Rolleston – the Barclays man – a list of all the names by which Grippen has done business over the years, and the addresses of his properties. Simon says he'll find me someone in the B of E.' Again the tremor in her voice, the movement of her eyes. Ysidro, Asher knew, could be ruthless. ‘That's where Grippen used to keep his money. I hope I've thought of everything …'

He took her hands and kissed them, then held them to his face, unshaven and grimy after two days' nonstop travel: Venice to Turin, Turin to Geneva, Geneva to Paris. Stations that echoed in the dead of night and the sourness of railway coffee. The rhythm of steel wheels seemed ground into his bones.
Come home at once. Grippen has done something terrible
.

Lydia's telegram had lain on the front desk of the Palazzo Foscari Hotel for nearly twenty-four hours before he'd returned to Venice from Sarajevo. He'd passed the time between Venice and Paris planning how to bomb the Foreign Office and kill every living soul within it, for asking him to run that courier drop into Serbia. And then kill himself for agreeing to do it.

After he killed Grippen.

‘You've acquitted yourself like a hero, best beloved.'

‘I tried.' She abandoned the component atoms of the biscuit and began to align the silverware. ‘Grippen's fledglings followed me one night. At least Simon guesses they were Grippen's. Two men and a woman. Simon says he doesn't think they'll harm me, that Grippen's hold on them is too strong.'

They had both seen Ysidro command his own fledgling to remain out of shelter in the first touch of the Arctic summer sun, until the new-made vampire flesh had ignited into unquenchable flame.

‘I've said before,' Asher reflected grimly, ‘that for people who stand in danger because they know too much about vampires, you and I know very little about vampires. Ysidro's probably right, but it's another reason I'd rather you stepped into the background. If Zahorec is strong enough to hide from Grippen, we don't know what else he's strong enough to do.'

Lydia was silent for a long time, making sure her fork was exactly perpendicular to the edge of the table, and that its central tines pointed precisely to the mathematical center of her coffee cup's diameter. ‘Should I not have borne a child?' she asked at length. ‘Knowing about them what I knew—'

‘Never think it.' He grasped her hands again, as if to force her to meet his eyes. ‘We will not transform ourselves into the dead for fear of them. Nor for hatred of them. You've seen where that leads.'

She looked aside. The electric light of the platform lamps outlined her features against the twilight that now filled the cavernous spaces around them. ‘It's one thing to say that of ourselves. We can choose. Miranda …'

‘No child can choose.' He rose from his chair and came around to her, drew her against him, delicate in his arms as a bundle of twigs. He remembered the Boer children in the concentration camps during the African wars, shock-haired, filthy skeletons with their bellies swollen from starvation: hostages to the demands of the diamond companies that called themselves by the name of Empire. Remembered, as he rode away from the camp into the warm African dusk, how the thin wailing of a baby had seemed to follow him for hours across the veldt. Their fathers in the commandos had not ceased fighting the invaders.

But he could not speak.

You could hunt us down eventually
, Ysidro had said to him once,
were you willing to give your soul to it … to become obsessed, as all vampire hunters must become obsessed with their prey … Are you willing to give it years?

He had not been.

And this
, he reflected,
is what came of that
…

He became aware of a man standing at the far corner of the café kiosk, a slender gentleman in evening dress, spidery pale hair trailing down his shoulders. For a moment Asher's eyes met his, pale as yellow champagne, across his wife's red head.

When he blinked, Ysidro was gone. Nor was Asher, who had been on trains continuously for nearly forty-eight hours and was half blind with exhaustion, entirely certain that he'd seen him at all. In either case he knew that even if he sprang to his feet and darted to the place he'd find nothing.

‘Come.' He stood. ‘Let's get something real to eat – Vidal's is just over on Broad Street and they make the best onion soup you're likely to find in London – and then go back to this Temperance Hotel of yours and get some sleep. In the morning I'll get myself up as a loafer and go down to Stepney and have a look at Henry Scrooby's pub. If Grippen trusts him enough to put property in his wife's name he may trust him enough to put him in charge of guarding a couple of captives. What's that?'

As he picked up the packet of McClennan's latest information a small envelope slipped from between the pages, addressed to Mrs Marie Curie care of the Ladies' Christian Hotel in a hand unlike any that he'd seen on any of the reports. Good-quality notepaper, he observed automatically as she tore the envelope open: linen rag, tuppence a sheet,
finest for all polite correspondence
…

Behind her thick spectacles he saw Lydia's eyes widen. Silently, she handed him the sheet.

Mrs Curie:

Please forgive my intrusion, but it has come to my attention that you are urgently seeking information about a man who came to this country at the end of January, with outsize luggage.

It happens that I am myself seeking such a man. Could you grant me the favour of a meeting, tomorrow afternoon, the fourteenth of May, at the café at Claridge's Hotel, at two? Please feel free to bring trusted friends with you. Would it be too great an imposition, to suggest that you wear a white hat, so that there will be no mistake in identity? I will likewise wear a white hat, and will bring proofs of my identity and bona fides.

Thank you, more than I can say,

Mr Edward Seabury

James went in first, attired in proper morning dress of gray and black (
and Heaven only knows
, reflected Lydia distractedly,
how he happened to have THAT in that little satchel of his!
) and festooned in one of his collection of fake beards (
I KNEW he was doing a job for the Foreign Office in Italy!
) to make sure Dr Millward wasn't lurking behind a potted palm in Claridge's lobby. He also carried a stick, purchased that morning at Selfridge's where they'd acquired a white hat for Lydia, since as a redhead she never wore such things. If it was necessary for Lydia – waiting outside the great hotel's bronze doors – to simply walk away without entering, James would emerge from his reconnaissance stick-less, and they would rendezvous back at the Temperance Hotel via separate cabs.

As a schoolgirl, Lydia had quizzed James (only she'd called him Mr Asher then) about being a spy. It hadn't taken her very long to figure out that her Uncle Ambrose's friend was leading some kind of a double life, probably because between her clandestine scientific studies and her hated lessons in deportment, dance and piano, she was leading one, too. She'd found the intricate play of logic, observation, and secrecy fascinating and exciting, certainly an improvement over deportment, dance, piano lessons and dress fittings.

Now she felt only fear.

Seabury CAN'T have told Millward
…

She felt sick at even the possibility.

He knows the man. He isn't stupid. He has to know that if he breathes a word about Cece Armistead being seduced by a vampire, Millward will go straight to Noel … Noel who was flirting besottedly with Cece on Saturday night and yesterday morning
…

Noel blurts all to Cece. Cece goes to Zahorec
.

Zahorec goes deeper underground – after guessing about me
.

If Zahorec kills me, Grippen will have no reason to keep Miranda alive
.

Or Nan
.

Lydia closed her eyes.
Ned Seabury CAN'T be that mesmerized by Millward … Can he? He HAS to understand the stakes …

She whispered a prayer to a God she didn't precisely believe in:
Don't let them come to harm
.

She had dreamed about Zahorec again last night. Dreamed of him by candlelight, charming and smiling, drinking wine among his friends and laughing, until across the room he'd seen a woman. Tall and queenly, full breasts braced tight by the flat front of a boned bodice, cold aquiline face framed by a collar of wired gauze. Her dark eyes had met Zahorec's smiling blue ones. Her face, stern when she had entered, had softened under his lilting glance.

Lured by his warmth, or pretending to be. Predator masquerading as prey.

He had left his friends, reached out to her. He might even have been deceived by the softness of her fingers answering his grip.

‘Lydia, darling!'

Lydia opened her eyes with a snap in time to see Lady Gillingham toddling toward her in a golden-beige hobble-dress so narrow as to barely permit ascent of the hotel steps. ‘Darling, it's been simply
ages
… Is it true Isobel's having Emily's court dress made by Worth? I think the man's overrated, myself – you should see the
shocking
frock he turned out for Loië Varvel! It cost a hundred and fifty guineas and makes her look positively
pudgy
, darling – not that she'd be anything to brag about under any circumstances. Not everyone has your lovely figure.'

She slid an arm around Lydia's waist. ‘And who was that
outré
creature I saw you with yesterday at the Metropole? What on
earth
did you say to him, for him to actually kneel and kiss your hand? My dear, don't
tell
me you're going to give that husband of yours something to worry about at last?'

Lydia had the presence of mind to roll her eyes. ‘He's a student of Professor Asher's,' she explained in her kindliest voice. ‘And yes, he does do things like that … But his uncle is a specialist in migraines, and I needed to ask him a few questions on the subject …'

‘Oh, you poor
darling
! And here I thought you just cooked one up the other night to escape from that
frightful
affair at Wycliffe House!'

‘I'm afraid not,' replied Lydia. ‘My doctor recommended regular rest in the afternoons, so as soon as I've met with Ned Seabury – who I understand knows a specialist in Brighton – I'm hoping to get back to Oxford … Oh!' she added, as the Claridge's doors opened. Among all the black-and-gray-clothed gentlemen of the world – even in fake spectacles and a fake beard and walking with the slouch that took three inches off his height – she knew Jamie by the way he moved. He was still carrying the cane he'd bought. ‘I think I see Mr Seabury now … Please excuse me.'

She hurried up the steps, not exchanging so much as a glance with her husband as they passed one another.

In a murmur no louder than the rustle of leaves he murmured, ‘He's alone.'

‘Mrs Asher!' Ned Seabury sprang to his feet, and even without her eyeglasses Lydia could see he was taken aback. Apparently it had never occurred to him that his fellow vampire seeker might be someone he already knew.

He snatched off his bleached straw boater, but her own white straw hat seemed to leave him in no doubt that she was, in fact, the ‘Mrs Curie' whom someone –
it HAS to be one of Teazle's operatives
– had told him was seeking the same traveler that he himself sought. Belatedly he bowed over her hand.

‘Before we speak,' said Lydia firmly, ‘have you told Millward anything? Anything of your suspicions, of this meeting, or anything you guess or know or think you know?'

‘Nothing.' Seabury held her chair for her, then sat with his athlete's grace.

Lydia closed her eyes again.
Thank you
…

‘Please don't misunderstand him,' begged the young man. ‘No man walks this earth stronger or more steadfast in his opposition to the nameless and ancient evils that hunt the night. But he sees the duty that a man owes to the whole of humankind, and pursues it as he sees it—'

‘Without thinking who might be hurt.'

‘That's not …' He paused and shook his head in vigorous denial. ‘It is just that he thinks of the many before the few. As I should.' Shame momentarily shadowed his face. ‘Were I stronger …'

‘Then I need to ask you –' Lydia cut off his self-recriminations – ‘on your honor as a gentleman, I need to beg you – to swear to me by all that you hold sacred, that today's meeting is to go no farther. Not to Dr Millward, not to Lord Colwich, not to Jamie – Professor Asher,' she corrected herself self-consciously, ‘when he returns … to no one.' She was fairly certain that Jamie was, in fact, sitting quietly within earshot of the entire conversation, having returned to the café in his usual unobtrusive fashion.

But everything – her own survival, Miranda's, Jamie's as well – depended on remaining, in Damien Zahorec's eyes, simply a friend of Cece's, and not the wife of a folklorist familiar with vampire lore.

And there was no guessing, in the small circle of London society, who would talk to whom.