The Kindred of Darkness (26 page)

In the French text the explanation of silver's power over vampire flesh was totally different, derived from magnetism, salt, and the tides.

The Latin text went on immediately into a discussion of the relationship of the Undead
anima
with water – that whole signature was missing in the French text – though a little searching yielded a dozen pages of formulae by which vampires could dose themselves to do everything from walking about in the daylight to taking on the forms of living men and women. Many of these potions involved silver, garlic or aconite – wolfsbane – presumably in order to break the resistance of vampire flesh to change of any sort, but Asher wondered if these were the enterprising invention of a vampire-hunter seeking to get his prey to swallow a phial of silver nitrate.

Almost none of them existed in the French text. It, however, contained a warning that
divers elixirs
, taken to increase the vampire's mental powers, had the eventual effect of exhaustion, madness, or insane thirst for blood, followed immediately by a dozen anecdotes concerning live burial, and the mysterious disappearances of eleven Parisian children during the reign of Henri III. Annoyed, Asher turned the thick pages and scanned for the words
elissir, potio, pocion
.

You'll see him sitting up all night in that strongroom of his
, Wirt had said,
with this book in front of him and a pile of dictionaries on the desk
…

Looking for what
?

A straight business proposition
, Wirt had said.
Mr Armistead's willing to pay five hundred dollars just for an introduction.

If he's going to feed him on socialist bastards from the WFM, more power to him
…

Asher sighed. He'd thought he'd uncovered the limits of danger, when he'd headed off attempts by the Austrian government – and the British – to employ vampires against their foes in what everyone knew was an oncoming war. Would the results be more, or less frightful, if private industrialists came to believe in them, and hired them as they hired men like Wirt and his cronies, to keep the unions in line?

Ysidro had said something of the kind to him once. Asher sought for the corresponding passage in the French text but found in its place a garbled passage concerning how Satan created quasi-souls and introduced them into the corpses of those whom the vampire killed, unless certain precautions were taken …

Yet the thought grew stronger in his mind, that whoever had written the original from which these two editions were taken – and neither bore more than a passing resemblance to the Geneva text he'd read all those years ago in Rebbe Karlebach's house – that man had genuinely known vampires.

He probably DID work for them
. Like a Shabbas goy, as Karlebach had said: the gentile sometimes employed in the household of a wealthy Jew, to stoke up the fires and open and close windows on the Sabbath, lest any member of the household dishonor the day by doing work.

If Lydia, or I, were to write what we knew of vampires – what we observed of them over six years of association with Don Simon Ysidro and the vampires of St Petersburg, London, Paris, Peking
…

Would it become the
Liber Gente Tenebrarum
?

Seldom do the dead employ a living servant for more than five years, before killing him and all members of his family, to protect their secret
.

This passage was the same in both books. Asher recalled it also from Karlebach's Swiss edition as well.

He rested his hands on those stained pages, and his sheaf of notes concerning hiding-places, running water, lineages of vampire masters in the old cities of the Danube and the Rhine. In his mind he saw again Don Simon Ysidro seated in the study in Holywell Street, with Lydia unconscious on the sofa:
My name is Don Simon Xavier Christian Morado de la Cadeña-Ysidro, and I am what you call a vampire
…

Count Epaminondas Saint-Hilaire in Paris – said Sophister's painfully neat block printing – had owned two copies of the
Liber Gente
, one the same 1637 Latin edition that lay before him on the bookseller's cigarette-burned desk, the other the first known printed edition, also in Latin, from Burgos in 1490. Four, Wirt had said, and one of them evidently in French: there had been a French edition printed in Paris in 1510, Sophister had written, of which nothing was known and no copies had ever surfaced. Both French forgeries were supposed to be taken from it, and John Aubrey had published an English translation of this text in London in 1680 – Balliol and Christ Church Colleges in Oxford, and Caius College in Cambridge, possessed copies. There was record of a Spanish edition of 1494 printed in Toledo, and two different Latin printings done in Geneva.

This has to be what Grippen is seeking.

The hold of a master-vampire over his fledglings – said the problematical French edition – could be broken by master and fledglings partaking of a Black Mass together, at which a black child without a single drop of Caucasian blood was sacrificed, or by dosing the master (
and how are you going to do that?
) with henbane, ox-gall, and powdered black pearls. The Prague edition gave three additional methods, all involving potions drunk by both master and fledglings in the dark of the moon on a bridge above running water (
presumably you have a living person get you on to the bridge … do you then kill him or her afterwards?
).

He wondered what the other versions said on this subject, and if in fact Damien Zahorec was going to have the temerity to suggest these rituals to Lord Vauxhill, and sharp-eyed Mrs Raleigh.

And, in their desperation to be free of Grippen, would they comply? (
Which still leaves the problem of how you're going to trick Grippen into drinking a cup of black dog's urine and garlic in the middle of Blackfriars Bridge
…)

Is this what Zahorec is seeking, in the house of Titus Armistead?

If not these specific formulae, then one that WILL give him mastery over London?

There was also, he noted, a method by which a vampire might – by use of a distillation of silver, graveyard earth, and the blood of a virgin boy – come to hold in his thrall vampires not his own fledglings.

The angle of window-light shifted. Pubs in Stepney would be opening, though it was too early for their owners to be working the taprooms themselves. Miss Violet would recognize him as someone who'd been in before and not a stranger – easy enough to get up a chat on the subject of other property owned by the publican, and whether members of his family had taken a vacation out of town on or about the eighth.
Amateurs always use their families
.

He rose from his desk, and made his way – nearly breaking his neck over the piled volumes of the
Patrologia Latina
– to the window. Dean Street was quiet. A cab rattled past, two lady shoppers strolled along the opposite pavement and paused to look into the windows of Clement Carghill, Fine Stationery.

Sunlight shone bright on sooty bricks, glinted on windows.

Yet the feeling that he was being watched hadn't left him: the sensation that had caused him to change cabs twice on his way here from Moscow Road and to leave his satchel at the toyshop on Regent Street where he'd bribed the counter-boy to let him change his jacket and hat and leave by the back door. Before parting from Lydia that morning, he'd arranged a fallback signal for the train station:
Red scarf, don't come near me, don't speak to me. Just get on the train
.

He hoped that precaution would suffice.

Lydia turned the page of the Café Metropole's menu with languid grace, not that she could read a word of its copperplate catalogue of poppy-seed cakes and
gateaux crèmes
at a distance of eighteen inches. On the far side of the little lake of white-draped tables, her stepmother, Valentina, sat likewise alone, likewise studiously absorbed in perusal of the possibilities for tea. Lydia might be blind as a mole, but she could identify her father's exquisite little widow anywhere, and had nearly shrunk under the table ten minutes ago when the older woman had entered the café.

Valentina had scrupulously taken a table as far from Lydia as she possibly could.

Meeting a lover
…

She peeped up over the edge of the stiff white card: one glance at Valentina, one glance at the door.
Aunt Lavinnia will kill me if she learns I didn't put on my eyeglasses to see who joins her
…

A glance down at the packet of notepaper, folded small, which Hellice Spills had handed her over coffee at Lady Sydenham's Parlour Tea Shop and Sweets.

The list of properties whose purchase Noel Wredemere had arranged – and paid for – since the first of the year.

Her work for Lionel Grippen was done.

There were six of them, all in the Greater London area. Four in far-flung suburbs, though minutes by train and Underground from the crowded docks and slums. Had Colwich used his engagement to Titus Armistead's daughter as security for the purchases? The bridegroom would be in a sorry position, she reflected, if Armistead turned intransigent over the settlement and cancelled the marriage altogether. Cece – and Zahorec – would have to find a new means of getting her an independent establishment in London …

And they would almost certainly kill poor Noel.

She turned the list over in her gloved hands. The thought of Jamie going to have a look at these places – he would have to, to make sure there were no surprises in store anywhere – sickened her with dread.

And then what?

Lionel Grippen might possibly return Miranda to her unhurt – provided his human agents hadn't panicked. But the chances of his – or their – letting Nan Wellit go free were microscopic. And though everything in her wailed to simply hand the vampire the list of properties tonight (
Where? How? Even if I put an advertisement in
The Times
tonight it wouldn't come out until the morning
), she knew it would be a few days before Ysidro's promised clerk at the Bank of England came up with the locations of Grippen's holdings. Before she and Jamie had time to track down where Miranda actually was.

In those days anything could happen.

Tightly as she squeezed shut the door in her mind on the thought, a little whisper of it leaked through:
Get Miranda NOW, and hope they'll let Nan go as well
…

She knew they wouldn't.

Will Ysidro help us stage a rescue?

Dare we even ask him?

One thing at a time
. She drew a deep breath, let it out.

Tomorrow night – provided Armistead didn't halt the marriage altogether – was dinner at Wycliffe House. Forty people, Aunt Isobel had said, and the Ballet Russe afterwards. Enough of a crowd to allow her to slip away for a more thorough search of the library for copies of the
Liber Gente Tenebrarum
. (
Drat it, that we didn't know to look for it the first time we were there!
) She was under orders from Isobel to seek out Lady May, who must (Isobel said) surely be so sick of the American and his daughter (and their detectives) by this time that she'd be delighted to tell all she knew about the settlement …

Movement on the edge of the café drew her attention. Though it grated on every sensibility she possessed, Lydia put on her spectacles. Across the café she'd already identified the unfashionable outline and colors of the man who stood on the shore of that lake of white tables: black and baggy and rather rusty-looking. Certainly not the garb of a gentleman coming to take a late and extremely expensive tea at the Metropole.

Maybe I am supposed to be Queen Mab or the Spirit of the Woods and shouldn't be wearing spectacles
… but the last thing she wanted was to be surprised by another Timothy Rolleston.

The man who stood looking at her across the intervening tables was younger than Rolleston, and had the unhealthy thinness that Lydia had seen among the opium-smokers of the Limehouse. His ancient blue-and-white school tie was faded, his respectable, clerkish black jacket and trousers hung like a scarecrow's. Though he was clean-shaven and his hair was clean, he had the opium smoker's air of shabby self-neglect.

His sunken eyes, fixed on her, flared with shock: the red-haired lady in green, with the mermaid necklace gleaming against the white of her shirtwaist. With her spectacles on, she could see that shock change to horror, and despair.

It's really real. The dream you had is really real. Whatever that creature, that being of shining shadow promised you in your dream, you're awake now and here she is, waiting for you exactly the way he said I'd be
…

Asking you to violate everything you swore to your employers that you'd uphold
.

Her heart ached with pity for him …

… until he turned, with sharp decision, and strode toward the lobby doors.

Lydia sprang to her feet. In panic she wove her way between the tables, cursing the dictates of good behavior (and the architecture of fashionable shoes) that made it impossible for her to run – the lifelong training that forbade her to shout.

‘Wait!' she called out, in that polite half-cry that comes from the throat and not the chest. ‘Please, wait!'

He was out the door twenty feet ahead of her.