The Kindred of Darkness (40 page)

Evidently Miranda had inherited Lydia's phlegmatic temperament. Asher's own sleep was not so restful.

Lydia sent word to her Aunt Isobel that Miranda had been taken ill and that she was no longer at liberty to chaperone Emily to regattas, ballets, and the races, thus missing the spectacle of one of Josetta Beyerly's suffragist compatriots who threw herself – fatally – beneath the hooves of the King's horse just before the home stretch at Ascot. She did go up to London to attend Emily's engagement party to Terence Winterson, and heard her aunt exclaim from her bath-chair throne, ‘I do not grudge one moment of the labor and trouble I went to this Season, to bring this about …'

For the first week of term Asher used a cane, and told sympathetic students he'd stepped off a curb in Padua.

Just before midsummer a back-page advertisement in the
Telegraph
mentioned that The Scythe pub in Stepney was up for sale, its owners – Mr and Mrs Henry Scrooby, and both of Mr Scrooby's brothers – having disappeared. A day or two later a small paragraph remarked on the suicide of bank clerk Timothy Rolleston, in whose rooms the hair ribbons of at least twelve little girls were found, tidily pasted into a scrapbook.

Shortly after that, when the days were longest and everyone who was anyone was flocking to Henley on the Thames, Asher quietly set about gathering syringes and ampoules of silver nitrate, stakes of hawthorn-wood, and a surgical saw. Since 1907, when first he had become acquainted with the reality of the kindred of darkness, he had been aware also that to become a vampire hunter – to follow in the literary footsteps of Abraham Van Helsing or the actual ones of Osric Millward – was to become obsessed. To enter into the world of the Undead himself, pursuing their shadows to the exclusion of the world of the light.

If the vampires, in their quest for eternal life, ended by shrinking that eternity to nothing but the search for prey and the efforts to control all things around them in order to remain safe, so, he had observed, did the vampire hunters of his acquaintance also live for nothing but the hunt.

Still, on the third of July, starting when first daylight flushed the sky at five and moving where he could through sewers, Underground tunnels, and London's submerged network of rivers and ancient crypts, he visited every one of Lionel Grippen's lairs. Asher had killed vampires before. Mostly it was a matter of dragging their decapitated bodies to where light would fall, if a shutter or a door or a manhole-cover were opened, and then opening it. Only a few seconds of direct sunlight would suffice to ignite the Undead flesh. Heads severed to separate the central nervous system, hearts staked and veins injected with silver nitrate, they would then go on burning in the darkness as he walked away.

He found in Grippen's lairs the lovely Penelope, the foxlike Jerry, and Sir Geoffrey Vauxhill.

In none of them did he find either Mrs Raleigh or Lionel Grippen.

In the house to which Lydia gave him directions in Spaniard's Lane, he found no trace of Don Simon Ysidro, nor even of the sub-cellar and crypt which she described. He wasn't entirely certain he had the right house.

He rode his motorcycle back over the hills to Oxford. And dreamed that night of Africa.

There was a camp he'd make on the veldt, on the land of a Boer farmer named Van Der Platz. The only son of the household, sixteen-year-old Jan, would ride out in the evenings, to talk with the man whom he knew as Professor Leyden of Heidelberg, about what life would be like beyond the confines of chores and church, about places where black men weren't assumed to be cattle and women weren't treated like brood-mares, about books to read that weren't the Bible. Then Jan would ride home, and Asher would sit sometimes for hours outside his tent, listening to the far-off lunatic yikking of hyenas, gazing at the gold African moon.

He often dreamed of the place, as he did tonight: the glow of his lantern catching in the long grass, the humming of insects in the twilight. On the camp table before the tent lay the
Book of the Kindred of Darkness
, and across the table from him, on the other camp chair where young Jan had sat (Asher knew) earlier in the evening, perched Don Simon Ysidro, elegant as always in Savile Row gray.

‘Do you think it an accident,' the vampire asked, ‘that Lionel's disloyal fledglings all happened to be sleeping in Lionel's lairs today?'

Disgust swept Asher, and anger that even his vengeance had been used for the Master of London's convenience. He pushed aside the scribbled notes of old Spanish morphology that littered the table, flung his pencil at Ysidro, who didn't even bother to dodge. ‘Is he watching me?'

‘I don't think so.' The vampire shrugged. ‘Are
you
watching
us
? Once
la niña
was safe I suggested to Lionel that you'd do something of this nature, as soon as you were on your feet again. He's been rearranging his holdings all month. It vexes him, but I pointed out to him that 'twas no more than what he had asked for, and all for the best. Even the dead must move with the times.'

‘Does he think he'll escape the reckoning for what he's done? That any of you will?'

‘Yes, in fact, we do. You sound like your friend Dr Millward – who has, by the way, disowned that poor
bonachón
Seabury when Seabury and his friend left together for the South of France. Do you really want to turn into him? To hunt us is to hunt smoke, James, as I have said to you before. Prior to the death of his young brother in 1882 Millward did quite good work in the translation of proto-Jewish inscriptions. Once he became a vampire hunter, he became as you see him. A fanatic, and a bore, incapable of having a relationship that does not turn upon the Undead in some fashion. Not a happy man and not a particularly effective vampire hunter either.'

‘That's no reason to let you go on killing.'

The Spaniard raised colorless brows. ‘You do not “let” us, James. We do as we must. We do as we do. 'Twas Lionel who returned to London that night and made Armistead vampire, you know. Guessed – or recalled under the goad of Mistress Asher's words – the man's true purpose in seeking for a vampire. It takes a devil to deal with a devil, Armistead said, and we all of us underestimated him. From reading the books he understood what was happening to his daughter, weeks before. It was, as he said, the only thing that he could think to do, to save her. Would you do as much, to save Miss Miranda?'

Asher recalled the man's screams, and how even as his flesh was consumed he had not released his grip on his daughter's predator.

‘Yes. Yes, I would. And to save the children of other men, from Grippen … and from you.'

‘
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies / Despair, law, chance hath slain
,' quoted Ysidro. ‘Can you save them?
Earth's face is but thy table, there are set/ Plants, cattle, men, dishes for Death to eat.
If saving the world from death were truly your heart's calling, James, you would have remained in the Department. The Kaiser will kill more than ever we did – he, and your Prime Minister, and Messires Poincaré and Clemenceau in France and all the rest of them.'

‘That's the answer of a thief who wants to go on helping himself to other men's goods.'

‘'Tis the only answer I have. Will you publish this?' The long nails brushed the brittle brown paper of the book between them.

Asher shook his head. ‘I know as well as you do that to prove to the authorities that vampires exist would only set them hunting them to hire them, like Armistead told his men he was doing. Do you think these Americans – these Vanderbilts, these Rockefellers, these Fords – wouldn't try it, if they knew?'

For a time there was only the hiss of the lantern's hot metal, and the sough of wind through the veldt. Then he asked, ‘That one is the original, isn't it?'

‘How did you guess?'

‘Because the language is right. The date of publication is 1494 – one of the oldest editions, though the earlier Latin one is substantially different. But that's fourteenth-century Spanish: when Johanot of Valladolid supposedly lived. It has to be a direct copy of what he wrote.'

Ysidro smiled. With lantern light giving color to the pallor of his flesh, he looked, Asher guessed, as he had in life: a young Spanish gentleman who traveled to London for a little diplomatic spying, and who never found his way home again.

Asher thought,
He has a copy, too. Somewhere in that dusty library that Lydia described …

‘What will you do with it, then?'

‘I'll keep it,' said Asher. ‘In a silver reliquary, like Armistead did. Possibly the same one he had. I'm told Cece is selling up his collection before going back to the States. And I'll study it. And use its knowledge, to destroy whichever of your kind crosses my path. Including yourself.'

‘James …' The vampire held out his hand to him. ‘I have known this of you for many years now … and I will endeavor, as I have for many years now, not to cross your path. Might I bid Mistress Lydia, and
la niña
, farewell ere I go?'

Asher recalled Ysidro's thin form locked in the grip of lady Ippolyta, as he'd pulled the other vampire away from Lydia on the parapet against the growing light of dawn. Knew in his heart that it was only luck that the Spaniard had been able to either catch some window-ledge or projection of the tower, or that he had not broken his neck or his legs in the fall and had been able to crawl to safety before the sky grew bright.

Had he been, he reflected, a true vampire-hunter, a true champion of what was right instead of a man used to compromising with shadows in order to win achievable goals, he would have said,
I'll kill you before I'll let you touch my daughter.
Get you back into darkness where you belong
.

And he knew Ysidro would have gone.

‘Of course.'

Ysidro turned toward the tent and lifted the mosquito-bar, and sure enough, as Asher had guessed would be the case, Lydia lay asleep on his cot, dressed in one of her lace tea-gowns, her spectacles laid down on a copy of Weismann's
Germ-Theory of Heredity
, Miranda curled up asleep in her arms.

The vampire knelt beside them, gently kissed Lydia on the brow, and laid his clawed hand on Miranda's cheek.

‘Don't abandon your treasures, James, to chase shadows you never will catch,' he said quietly. ‘I did so once, and have for three hundred and fifty-eight years regretted it. They need you, as your heart needs them in order to go on beating.'

Bending, he kissed Miranda's cheek, eyes shut, like a man breathing the scent of a rose.

Then he straightened, and stepped out into the darkness, holding the mosquito-netting aside for Asher to follow.

‘Light and warmth are very brief, James. Darkness is long.'

And he melted away into the warm African night.

Asher stood for a time, looking out over the veldt; the place, perhaps of all places on earth, that he had loved the most. It was a part of his heart and his bones that he could never share with Lydia, for he had known it before they were wed: the smell of the grasslands, the dry softness of the nights. Across the sandy wash, in its stand of willows, he could see the Van Der Platz farm, and knew that behind the barn among the trees Jan's body lay in a pool of blood, killed not by a vampire, but by Asher himself, in the name of King and Country.

He went to the table, where the
Book of the Kindred of Darkness
lay, and remembered what Sophister had told him about Johanot of Valladolid: that he'd died caring for others in a season of plague. He had been a servant of vampires. Had this been his penance, to record all that he knew of their secrets, for whoever needed in future to chase shadows?

He closed the book, carried it back into the tent, laid it beside the cot. Then he stretched out at Lydia's side – in waking life of course the cot would never have accommodated two, but in his dream it did so easily. His wife and daughter wrapped in his arms, he lay long, listening to the darkness, and waiting for sleep, and daylight.