The Kindred of Darkness (3 page)

He was tall, as tall as Jamie. His half-seen face was a horror, thick-fleshed and sensual, fangs protruding a little beyond his heavy lower lip and a nose flat, crooked, and sprouting with black hair. He'd been a physician in sixteenth-century London, James had told her.
So he probably started killing people long before he joined the Undead
. Like other vampires she had encountered, he had a quality of stillness to him, more than simply the fact that he didn't breathe. As if he'd been there forever, waiting for you to get near.

And she knew he could get the minds of the living to not quite notice him, unless they were looking for him. Lay sleepy inattention on the thoughts. Trick the mind into not seeing him as he was.

Into seeing him as handsome, or trustworthy, or someone you would be happy to walk up a dark alley with.

That was something vampires did.

She drew a shaky breath. ‘And what use is it, sir, that you have for me?'

May you rot, may you burn screaming for eternity in Hell
…

He folded his heavy arms. ‘They tell me you can track the Undead in their lairs.' His deep, hoarse voice sounded almost like an American's. James had mentioned this also, when he spoke of dealing with Grippen six years ago. In the sixteenth century, apparently everyone in the south of England used those flat vowels and nasal Rs.

Again Lydia took a deep breath. Either
Yes
or
No
would be a perilous answer. One did NOT go about telling vampires that one knew how to locate their home addresses.

He wants something. He'll keep her alive because he wants something
.

Oh, God, don't let me mess this up
…

‘Only sometimes,' she lied at last. ‘Who is it, that you want me to find?'

‘Damien Zahorec. Montenegrin, or Serbian: some kind of dago. He's in London now.'

‘Does he have a lair in London? Or have you merely seen him there?'

‘If I knew it I wouldn't be knockin' on your door, Missy. I've not even seen him – not even I, who knows the names of every beggar that rots on the wharves. He's hid; hid deep. I want to know where.'

He stepped closer. He was built like a bull and seemed larger in his old-fashioned evening dress: frock coat, low-crowned shaggy hat, high collar wound round with a dark cravat. His hands were bare and even as she could see his fangs and the unholy reflective glimmer of his eyes, she could see how his nails had thickened and grown into inch-long claws. She knew there was something wrong with herself because as she stood before this man, this creature, who had killed thousands of people and kidnapped her daughter and who could kill her as easily as plucking a daisy, she found herself wondering about the cellular composition of those claws, and about whether the vampire's eye, dissected (
one would have to do so under artificial light
), would resemble that of a cat.

Those hands had picked up Miranda.

Had held her child …

She was trembling again.

‘He's been killin' two and three a night sometimes,' the vampire went on. ‘The police are startin' to talk. And folk are talkin', down Whitechapel and among the docks. Next they'll be startin' to look about 'em. I can't have that.' One corner of that fleshy lip raised to show a long glint of fang. ‘I'll show him who's Master of London.'

‘How long since he came to London?'

‘Candlemas. I smelt him along the wharves below the City, and that's when the killings began. That's when first I heard whisper of his name.'

‘From whom?' asked Lydia, interested. ‘If no one's seen him—'

‘From those as have no business to know it!' He caught her arm in a grip that made her sob and shook her like a drunkard shaking a child. ‘I knew this city when 'twas the size of the Paddington railway sheds and I know every crack and sewer and cellar of her. Yet nary a hair of his arsehole have I seen. I want to know where he's hid, and who it is who's hidin' him.'

‘But if you can't find him …'

The heavy finger, the long, cold claw, pointed at her nose. ‘I want a list of every bolt hole he's got. Every lair, every cupboard where he hides his clothes and every cellar where he changes 'em, and that's
all
I want of you. You're not to put a foot in any of 'em, nor tell man nor woman, livin' nor Undead, where they lie. Just tell me. You put a note in the Personals for me, in
The
Times
, under the name of Graves – or you'll never see that brat of yours alive again.'

‘Please!' Lydia caught at his wrist. ‘I swear I'll do whatever you ask me but give her back. I'll …'

She broke off. He was gone. She was aware, with a sensation like waking up, that he'd been gone for some time. She was cold to the marrow of her bones and nearly ill with weariness.

She passed through Oxford like a ghost through a city of the dead, unseeing through silence. The shut-up shop fronts and cobbled pavement of George Street, the dark gables and stumpy tower of Balliol cast not even a shadow on her mind.

Miranda
.

The child she'd never thought she'd bear. The child she'd never even imagined she'd want, until after eight years of marriage to James she'd found herself pregnant – startled at first and simply curious to observe first-hand the physiological symptomatology on the female nervous system (
Is there anything analogous in males
?). And then suddenly it had come to her:
that is ANOTHER PERSON. I am carrying ANOTHER PERSON inside me
.

Nothing in medical science had prepared her mind for this and when she had lost that child in her first trimester she had been devastated. As if a door had closed, a gate locked against her, sealing off a road filled with wonder. The second miscarriage, in September of 1910, had been worse, like a God she had never quite believed in telling her that she was too defective to bear a child.
Four-eyes, skinnybones, goggle-eyed golliwog … No proper lady asks questions like that, no girl from any decent family even thinks about such things
…

Fifteen months after that, Miranda was born.

Her magical red-haired child.

Lamps burned in the tall old house on Holywell Street. Lydia had to steel herself to walk that last fifty feet to the front door – far more than she'd had to do in order to slap the Master Vampire of London in the face. The servants adored Miranda and Lydia felt that if any of them even spoke her daughter's name to her, she was in danger of breaking down completely. But the rigorous training she'd received from Nanna and her aunts held good. When they swarmed around her (
Don't be silly, Lydia, five people isn't a swarm
…) in the hall, she was able to clasp Ellen's hands, to comfort Mrs Grimes: ‘Please, I need to be alone right now … Yes, I talked to Mr Grippen … I'll tell you about it later … No, we're not going to the police … Yes, he assured me that Miranda and Nan are both safe—'

Lying, murdering devil
—

‘—Please, I need to be alone right now. Mrs Grimes, could I ask you to have some tea sent up? Yes, everything is going to be all right.'

Mrs Brock, usually so grim-faced and reserved, was weeping, and the sight of her tears nearly broke Lydia's heart.

She lit one of the bedroom candles from the gas-jet in the hall, and carried it up to the study above. Through open windows the air was a soft miracle of springtime. Tea at Lady Brightwell's, dinner with Aunt Isobel, drawing-room chatter about Emily's Court gown … She wondered who that had happened to and why she remembered it.

A little girl playing the violin for pennies on the platform at Paddington, who had smiled at her when she'd dropped a shilling in her cup.
Did SHE have a mother?

Did Lionel Grippen know HER name?

Lydia kindled the gas-jet, lit the oil-lamps above her own exquisite eighteenth-century secretaire and sat for a moment, only breathing.

The ormolu clock on the mantle gave the time as quarter to one. The Post Office was closed. Nothing could happen –
nothing
– until morning, and all the night yet to get through.

Grippen was IN THIS HOUSE.
Her mind repeated the thoughts, stupidly, as if like fingers numb with cold they could grasp only a few things.
He must have made the servants fall asleep.
Some vampires could do that, the older ones, more experienced or more deeply imbued with charge upon charge of psychic energy that they had absorbed from death upon death.

Vampires. Walking corpses, drinkers of lives as well as of blood. Manipulators of illusion, readers of dreams.

If I hadn't married James
…

But she knew she was being silly.
If I hadn't married James
… she couldn't even imagine what her life would be. In any case she knew she would never have been happy, vampires or no vampires.

Grippen was in this house
. She still had braided chains of garlic, wolfsbane, and the desiccated blossoms of the Christmas rose, in a green painted tin box under her bed.
I'd better get them out, festoon the windows like some demented heroine in a penny dreadful
…

Lock the bedroom door whose knob and hinges James had had replaced – at startling expense – with solid silver.

All those rituals and precautions with which Dr Millward had bored everyone who came within twenty feet of him, letting them know that he never went to sleep without a wreath of garlic around his throat (his clothing reeked of it) and that he practiced three times a week, shooting moving targets with silver bullets by moonlight.

What made us trust their word? What made us think this WOULDN'T happen in time?

OF COURSE we trusted their word
…

She remembered another vampire saying to her:
It's how we hunt
…

She wanted to put her head down on the desk and cry.

Instead she searched through five drawers crammed with dressmakers' bills, silk samples, sketches of other peoples' kidneys, three half-written articles on the effects of vitamins on the endocrine system (‘I hope you publish under a pseudonym!' Aunt Harriet had protested over dinner), a
Votes For Women
handbill that her friend Josetta Beyerly had given her and invitations to a score of parties to which she was supposed to chaperone Emily. She finally unearthed a couple of Post Office telegraph forms.

On one she wrote the address of the hotel where James was staying in Venice.
And if he's gone on to some secret location in the Balkans I will KILL HIM
.

Jamie, come home at once. Grippen has done something terrible
.

Even the bare facts would be torture to him, in the three days it would take him to reach Oxford. Grippen's name alone – and the fact that she would wire him to return at once – would tell him that the matter was urgent.

She looked at the other yellow form for a long time before writing anything on it. After she did, she found the teacup (and two of Mrs Grimes' biscuits) on the desk beside her, but couldn't remember Ellen either entering or leaving. So entangled her mind had been, with thoughts of the Undead.

Walking corpses that drank the blood of the living. That devoured the psychic energies released by death.

Beings who could use those energies to make people not see the fangs and the claws and the catlike, shining eyes. Who could make people trust them, or believe their promises, or lust after them with insane intensity …

Who could read the dreams of the living, and whisper illusions into those dreams.

Who stalked the streets of London in the dark hours when the forces of law and reason slept.

Grippen had been a vampire since 1555. At an abstemious rate of one victim a week that was eighteen thousand dead, the mortality rate of a flood or an earthquake. Nothing that produced such carnage could be trusted.

Should
be trusted.

Her reason told her this.

But after a long time, she wrote on the second sheet of paper:
Please come. I need you
.

She folded it up, wrote on the outside:

Don Simon Ysidro

2, Piazza della Trinità dei Monti

Rome

H
e was in this house.

In her dream she saw him – a massive, pockmarked shadow – pass through the kitchen. Mrs Grimes and Tilly slumped unconscious at the scrubbed table, the tray for the servants' evening tea between them. Bread and butter, yesterday's cinnamon cake toasted to revive its appeal.

Gaslight gleamed in the dark of his eyes as he passed up the stair.

The heavy hand with nails like dirty claws on the handle of the nursery door.

No
…

Mrs Brock asleep on the old striped Chesterfield that had belonged to Uncle Ambrose, a tiny dress half-embroidered in her lap. Nan – plump and fair, with a sad tenderness that spoke of a child loved deeply and lost, somewhere in the past that seventeen-year-old nursery maids weren't supposed to have … Nan in the chair beside the white-painted crib.

Miranda like a little red-haired marsh fairy against the clean white of the pillows, lashes like long black feathers on pink-stained ivory cheeks.

Grippen stood beside the crib …

NO
…

The child woke as he reached down with those long-nailed hands …

NO!!!

Gasping, Lydia jerked from sleep in time to hear the clock in the upstairs hall chime three.

The oil lamp had gone out. The gas-jets burned low.

He was in this house
…

And how did he get out of it?
Lydia got to her feet, put on her eyeglasses.
Did he carry poor Nan over one shoulder like a sack of grain and Miranda tucked under his arm? Did he make two trips?

She frowned.

He couldn't have carried Nan through the streets of Oxford in his arms
.