The Kindred of Darkness (2 page)

Even more startlingly – she noted with academic interest – she found herself looking forward to a game of pick-up sticks with her daughter upon her return home, almost as much as she looked forward to the intellectual challenge of her article. Which was very unlike herself.

Was
Dr Millward – who had recently called Jamie ‘a blind and sterile quibbler' in an article in the
Journal of British Folklore
– correct insofar as that the glandular changes triggered by pregnancy had an effect on the chemistry of a woman's brain?

He certainly has an extremely inaccurate perception of vampires
. Since her first glimpse of a vampire in a London alleyway in 1907 – the year James had been blackmailed into working for the London nest – she had associated with the Undead on four separate occasions and had the suspicion that for all his scholarship, Dr Millward had never actually spoken to a vampire in his life.

James Asher, though a folklorist and linguist, had no more believed in vampires six years ago than he'd believed the moon to be made of green cheese, and Millward had been absolutely scathing about his monograph on the origins of Balkan traditions concerning the walking dead. As the lights of Oxford glimmered through the trees, Lydia planned her evening letter to James. In his hotel in Venice, she knew he'd smile at both Millward's rodomontade and at his shocked fury at being put on the same level as a fashionable spiritualist charlatan …

And she was thus meditating on the subject of the Undead when she stepped from her compartment to the platform, and saw at once that something was terribly wrong.

Ellen – who had been a maid at Lydia's childhood home of Willoughby Close –
never
came to meet trains. On those occasions on which Lydia went down to London by herself (a perfectly respectable activity, she had more than once reminded the aunts and another extremely old-fashioned acquaintance), James would meet her homecoming train with a cab: the Ashers did not keep a carriage. When James was away from Oxford, Mick Bell – who worked in the Ashers' garden – would meet her.

But when Lydia peered short-sightedly around the platform for someone of Mick's stature and coloring – she had not the slightest intention of putting on her spectacles where anyone could see her – she made out not only Mick, but Ellen, Bette the parlor maid, Mrs Brock (Miranda's nurse) and, almost unbelievably, not only someone who looked like little Mrs Grimes the cook but also Tilly the scullery girl, all running toward her through the drifts of dispersing passengers.

Mrs Grimes?
Lydia's heart seemed to stand still in her chest. Years of navigating the world without the disfigurement of ‘gig-lamps', as the other girls at school had called them, hanging on her face had taught her to identify people almost unerringly by the way they moved. There could be no mistake – it
was
Mrs Grimes.
Why would SHE come …?

They'd never have left just Nan the nursery maid home with Miranda
…

Her hands and feet went cold.

No
.

She ran toward them, breathless with fear and shock as they nearly collided.

‘What happened?'

‘I swear it, ma'am, I don't know! I was in the garden, couldn't nobody have got to the house …'

Oh, God
…

Dizziness. Shock. Terror.

‘Miss Lydia, I took them up a tray at seven …'

‘We were in the kitchen together, ma'am, and how anyone could have got into the house …'

‘
What happened?
' She fought the urge to take the cook by the shoulders and slap her.

This can't really be taking place
…

Tears streaking her face, the big maid held out a sheet of folded paper. ‘This was on her pillow, ma'am.'

It had been sealed with red wax, the image on the seal – Lydia held it close enough to see its details clearly by the gas-jet on the station wall – a woman planting a tree. The seal had been cracked. The servants had read it already.

Jamie's work with old manuscripts – among other things – had taught Lydia what sixteenth-century handwriting looked like.

Madame,

Y'r daughter & ye girl are well & safe & will no be harmed. Yet you must needs speake with me and soone.

Grippen

C
old panic turned to rage so hot it was almost blinding.

Grippen.

The Master Vampire of London. Dead since 1555. Since 1666 the ruler – and the begetter – of the vampires of London.

Lydia crushed the note and the hard wax dug into her hand like the edge of a coin. In a calm corner of her heart she knew quite well that it had been no choice of James' to make the acquaintance of the London nest and its sinister master. Nevertheless, for a moment she hated not only Grippen – the man, the thing, the animate corpse that had penned the words – but James as well.

Six years ago, the London vampires had sought James out, and before that bargain was concluded he and she had both come so close under the shadow of the wings of Death, they could feel the fan of the feathers.

Grippen
…

She shook as if the May night had turned to bitter winter. ‘Get my bags, please, Mick.'

James would laugh at her for taking, for an afternoon in London, a valise containing rice-powder, rouge, mascaro, distilled water of green pineapples, rosewater and glycerin, a silk shawl, a wool shawl, a change of shoes, three issues of
Lancet
and Curie's ‘On a New Radioactive Substance …', plus bottles of lemonade and mineral water, and two very large hatboxes – but this, she would point out to him, was only because he was sufficiently handsome that he did not require extensive embellishment to appear presentable. People didn't care what men looked like anyway.

She stood balling the paper tighter and tighter in her hand and shaking as if with fever.

He took Miranda. He took my daughter
.

She had never understood why women in plays and novels screamed. Now she knew.

We will stay away from you and yours
, the vampires had said to James, when he had accomplished the task they had needed a living man to do.
It is simply prudence on our part. You could hunt us down eventually, were you willing to give your soul to it, to become obsessed … To hunt us would be to hunt smoke
…

But she had always known they were there.

He took my daughter
…

Rage and panic made it hard to breathe.

‘Who is he, Miss Lydia?' Ellen whispered. ‘How could this Grippen have just walked into the house like that? Bette was up to the nursery just an hour before—'

‘He's no one.' Lydia took a deep breath. ‘Put his name out of your mind. Never think of it again. Mick …'

The gardener appeared, laboring under hatboxes and bags.

‘Please take Ellen and the others back to the house. I'm going to walk.'

‘You can't, ma'am!' Even at age twenty-one, Mick was scandalized. ‘It's a good three-quarter mile, and it's near to eleven—'

‘Not wearing those shoes, Miss Lydia!' Ellen protested. ‘They're not—'

I really am going to scream
.

‘Just go! Please.' She softened her voice with an effort. ‘I'll be quite all right, it's right through the center of town and the worst I'll encounter is undergraduates.'

And a man who has systematically murdered thirty thousand people and drunk their blood in order to stay alive himself.

If I'm lucky
.

‘That isn't the point, Miss Lydia. What your mother would have said, or your aunts, if I were to let you go walking about the town by yourself—'

Her voice shaking – knowing what would happen to Ellen, or to any of the servants, if they accompanied her – Lydia said, ‘Just please do as I ask. I need the fresh air …'

It took ten minutes of arguing before they obeyed. Any of her aunts, Lydia reflected, with a chilled detachment as she watched the little knot of servants finally walk away, would have fired them on the spot.
Dear God, please don't let them follow and watch me
…

Breathless with the pounding of her heart, when Lydia reached the end of the platform she slipped her silver spectacle case from her handbag, put on the thick, round-lensed glasses that she never let anyone (except James) see her wear. Better a blinky-blind skinnybones (as the other girls at Madame Chappedelaine's Select Academy for Young Ladies had called her) than a goggle-eyed golliwog (her other appellation there). One could get over being a skinnybones if one had the money to hire a really good dressmaker.

She scanned the night beyond the station's gaslights. This was the end of the line for the 9:50 from Paddington, and it was the last train of the evening. As the cars huffed their slow way on to a siding, all cabs vanished as if by magic from the graveled space between the town's two railway stations. The sweet shops and newsagents along Hythe Bridge Street were shuttered for the night. The darkness around her lay unbroken, like clear cobalt glass. Even the roving undergraduates seemed to be either asleep or keeping to their own jumble of little streets and courts further east. Lydia's heels clicked softly on the stone verge as she crossed the bridge, the smell of the river an ache of nostalgia, the willows of the Worcester grounds a dark mass under the starlight.

Ellen was right; these aren't shoes for walking any great distance in
…

James – and others – had told her: this was how one found a vampire. She had no doubt that having left the note in Miranda's crib, Grippen would be waiting for her to do exactly this. To ‘promenade herself', as the vampires said.

For six years now she'd worn, under the fashionable high collars of her exquisite dresses, half a dozen silver chains around her neck, a concentration of the metal sufficient to badly burn a vampire's mouth, to buy herself an instant to run, to scream, to twist free. James wore them, too, over fading bite scars that tracked his throat and forearms. Terror filled her, but it went nearly unnoticed under a pure, burning anger so powerful that it seemed to lift the hairs on her head.

He took Nan
…

Miranda's little nursery maid – the changer of nappies, the emptier of bathwater, the server of Mrs Brock's evening tea – was Cousin Emily's age. Seventeen, sweet-faced, slow-speaking and good-natured no matter what was demanded of her. Performing the dirty, heavy chores of the nursery work and taking orders from the crusty Mrs Brock was, Lydia recalled, the girl's first paid employment.

He wouldn't have taken Nan if he didn't need to keep Miranda well and cared for
.

If he harms a hair of that poor girl's head
…

Tears closed her throat. Tears of terror, less for herself than for her daughter. Tears of remorse, for the traveling companion, four years ago, who had been killed by a vampire.

If he hurts her
…

If he hurts Miranda
…

Damn Jamie; damn him for being in Venice
…

Mist filmed the river, blurred the outlines of the willows.

I'll bet it isn't even a philology conference
. Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and a lot of other little countries in the Balkans had all been fighting each other since last spring, and James had received a steady stream of notes from the Foreign Office – for whom he had worked before quitting in disgust at the end of the African war – which he had just as steadily been putting on the fire. Then, quite suddenly, he had asked her, was it all right if he went to Venice? A meeting of experts in folklore and linguistics …

A man stood at the end of the bridge, silhouetted against the star-soaked mists.

A vampire …

The
vampire of London. He'd been murdering people since before Queen Elizabeth was on the throne.

He stood massive and unmoving, but his eyes caught the distant lights of the station like an animal's.

It's him
.

Rage flooded her and she lengthened her stride, straight up to him.

His clothing smelled like old blood.

Lydia didn't care. She slapped at his face: ‘You give her back! You bastard devil, you give me my daughter back!'

She knew vampires could tamper with the mind, put a cloud on human perceptions, but had been too angry to remember. When he grabbed her, caught her against his body in an iron embrace, it was as if she didn't, for an instant, remember how to struggle or cry out. It was just that suddenly he was crushing her fingers in an agonizing grip; his arm was around her waist as he bent her backwards over the parapet of the bridge. His pock-marked face was inches from hers and when he spoke his mouth reeked with blood.

‘You want to bless your stars, Missy, that I've too urgent a use for you, for me to go off and let you think for a week or maybe two about layin' hard names to one who's got your brat in his hand.'

His grip tightened on her fingers until she cried out, and he grinned. Distant gas lights showed her his fangs. Then he threw her from him on to the stone of the bridge, as a child will throw a doll in a fit of temper. The impact knocked the breath from her and she fought not to weep, as she'd fought when, long ago, her Nanna had taken a strap to her.
I will NOT let him see he's hurt me
…

The impact had knocked her spectacles off as well. She saw starlight gleam in the round lenses near the parapet, and groped over to pick them up. For a miracle, they hadn't broken. In her smallest voice she said, ‘You are right, sir. I should not have spoken.'

This was what she'd always said to Nanna, or her stepmother, and neither had ever seemed to notice that the phrase was simply the literal truth and contained no apology.

The vampire made no move to help her to her feet. Painfully, she used the parapet to steady herself as she rose.