The Kindred of Darkness (5 page)

‘The portion he doesn't spend on kif,' added Aunt Isobel, anxious to dissociate herself from her former plans to wed Emily to the Viscount. ‘And I'm sure neither of
your
daughters need fear being proposed to by the Earl of Crossford's son.'

Harriet lifted patrician brows. ‘Oh, not with a fortune like Titus Armistead's on offer.' She prodded the cold roast beef set before her, then ignored it as she would have an audible belch in Church. All of Lord Halfdene's daughters – Lydia's mother included, Lydia recalled – gave the impression of living solely on moonbeams and wild strawberries, and regarded their brother's stout wife and her pottery-manufacturing family as unmentionably gross. ‘One regrets seeing the spectacle matchmaking society mamas make, scrambling after a title, no matter what sort of man it's pasted to.'

Isobel turned bright pink.

Grippen is wealthy.
Jamie had told her that master vampires would create fledglings in part to gain control of their estates … of the hidey-holes and safety that money would bring. And even the most modest of investments, he had once remarked, would accrue a startling amount of interest if left to mature for three hundred and fifty years …

That kind of wealth could buy a guard for a woman and child, and no questions asked. Even as it would buy herself – with luck – the addresses of total strangers who'd brought large trunks into England last December.

Oh, Miranda, I'm sorry
.

She thought of her child …
Where? In an attic? In a cellar?
Nan would never abandon her tiny charge, but Lydia could easily imagine Nan trying to figure out a way to escape with the child, and the possibility turned her cold inside.

Down a drainpipe, across a roof, carrying Miranda in her arms
…

STOP IT THIS MINUTE! They're all right. They'll be all right
…

‘… won't you, Lydia dearest?'

Aunt Isobel was regarding her expectantly.

‘I'll certainly try.' Lydia wondered what she'd just let herself in for.

‘Excellent!' Isobel beamed. ‘I'll let your Aunt Lavinnia know. Now you'd best be going, if you're to be at Worth's by two.'

Somehow, Lydia made it through the day. When she returned to the hotel in Blomfield Street to change clothes (‘What your mother would say,' deplored Aunt Harriet in parting, ‘if she knew any daughter of hers was riding in a common hack …') she crossed to the nearby Commercial Hotel in Finsbury Circus that was one of her three accommodation addresses, thanking James for everything he'd taught her about what the Department politely called ‘tradecraft'. Two telegrams from Ellen awaited her, sent at noon, and at three.

No communication from James. Nothing from Rome.

She telegraphed back that she would be staying in London for the night, and would Ellen please send to this address a parcel with clean linen, her plum-colored walking-suit (
Is it too late in the season for plum?
), her black-and-apricot Paquin suit (
Let's be on the safe side
), the apricot velvet hat with the heron feathers, the black straw hat with the white flowers (
Does that really go with the plum?
), the black suede Gibson shoes, the Cuban-heeled pumps, the black-and-ivory pumps, another bottle of rosewater and glycerin, four pairs of white silk stockings and her white kid gloves. (
Oh, dear, that looks like rather a lot
…)

At the Christian Railway Hotel on the opposite side of the Circus, she picked up Mr Teazle's first installment of shipping notes, and Mr McClennan's information about which vampire nests had changed hands since 1907. Slender packets enough, but she guessed she wouldn't be sleeping tonight.

Dinner at Aunt Lavinnia's – known as Lady Peasehall to London society at large – and then the Opera, in ostentatious celebration of the engagement of Lord Colwich to his American heiress (Lady Crossford had been to school with Aunt Lavinnia and they were still bosom-bows). That meant having to borrow a dress from Emily, which entailed a long argument with Aunt Isobel (‘You can't borrow that one, it's for the Crossfords' ball next week … Oh, not the rose silk either; Lady Varvel is sure to be at the Opera – not that she knows Enrico Caruso from Robinson Crusoe – and she'll be sure to recognize it at her Venetian breakfast Monday night …')

Lydia wondered if she could invent a headache to get out of the inevitable supper afterwards at the Savoy. If nothing else, she reflected as she washed off powder, rouge, mascaro, kohl and then settled before the fly-specked hotel mirror to reapply them afresh, the information the detective agencies had sent her would give her names.

Vampires changed identities, if they lived long enough. They willed their property to themselves, when the authorities might have grown suspicious about Mr Brown being a hundred and fifty years old. Or they willed their property to the Master who made them, who held over them a sway which could barely be comprehended by the living.

My darling, I'll find you
…

Rattling to Aunt Lavinnia's in a cab, Lydia recalled her own first (and only) ‘season' in 1899, before her father had melodramatically cast her out of his house upon the discovery that she had applied – and been accepted – to Somerville College, Oxford, to train in medicine. Dressed in the height of Mr Worth's elegance and rigid with anxiety, she had been borne through the still-bright daylight of the streets of London toward Berkeley Square.

Only on the present occasion at least she had the quiet and privacy of the cab – odiferous as it was – instead of the chaperonage of her stepmother and her Aunt Faith, neither of whom ever shut up for so much as a moment.

You have dealt with vampires before this, and you survived
.

Jamie, where are you?

Dakers – Aunt Lavinnia's butler – bowed as he took her (borrowed) coat and said, with the liberty of one who had known her from earliest childhood, ‘You never came in that vehicle, Mrs Asher? Her Ladyship will be most shocked.'

‘Only if someone tattles,' Lydia replied, and slipped him a half-crown.

Without change of expression he led the way up the curving oval of stairs, and opened the drawing-room doors at the top. ‘Mrs Asher,' he announced.

‘Well, here you are at last, dear.' With brittle graciousness, her tiny, perfect stepmother turned from speaking to a man in evening dress whose looming outline – a Stonehenge menhir wrapped in black and white – Lydia did not recognize. Hands outstretched in welcome, exquisite in midnight-blue crêpe de chine which set off her delicate blonde prettiness, Valentina Willoughby rustled over to her late husband's only child. As usual in her presence, Lydia felt six feet tall and all elbows and knees as she leaned down to kiss the powdered cheek. The broad diamond ‘dog-collar' necklace that plastered her stepmother's white throat had belonged to Lydia's mother: her father's second wife had undoubtedly worn it to annoy the stepdaughter whom she had – erroneously – thought still disinherited upon her late husband's death … and also to enrage that stepdaughter's aunts.

But, as Isobel had pointed out over luncheon,
Valentina knows everybody
, and had to be kept sweet for the sake of Emily's chances of meeting the right gentlemen.

‘Mrs Asher –' Valentina's voice handled the name exactly as her fingers would have dealt with a dead mouse – ‘allow me to introduce Mr Armistead, of Denver, Colorado. Mr Armistead, my
dearest
daughter. And I'm
sure
I have no need to tell you, Lydia, darling, of his lovely daughter's engagement to Lord Colwich. Their love story is the talk of the town!'

‘Long as Cece's happy,' grunted the big man, in a voice like gravel being stirred at the bottom of a well. ‘Beats me why every gal in the country's on fire to marry some Englishman or other just 'cause he's got Sir this or Lord that on his name.' Up close, Lydia had an impression of grizzled hair, a broken nose, and a mouth like an iron door.

‘Like them paintings you buy over here. Why, they'll ask six thousand dollars for a picture of some woman with a bird that you could have painted up for two hundred in New York, and the New York one's brighter, and livens up a room.'

At that point Cecelia Armistead rustled over – she of the three-million-dollar marriage portion – exclaiming in ecstasies at the beauties of Lord Peasehall's London house. ‘That beautiful fireplace in the long drawing room … Can you have one made like it, Pa
pa
, for our new house? Pa
pa
–' she carefully emphasized the second syllable, as if her governess had taught her that this pronunciation was more elegant, exactly as Lydia's had – ‘has bought the most wonderful house for Noel and me! So ancient! It's practically a ruin!' She clasped her hands before her breast in delight at the prospect.

‘I love ruins – don't you?' She smiled at Lydia, Spanish-dark eyes in the creamy oval of her face. ‘And there are just
none
in America! When we visited the old priory near Leeds, I begged Daddy – Pa
pa
,' she corrected herself, ‘to take me back there after dark, so I could see the place by moonlight—'

‘I didn't bring you three thousand miles to have you catch cold,' growled Pa
pa
. ‘There wasn't a moon that night anyway. But –' he jabbed at her with a finger like a policeman's truncheon – ‘you say the word, honey, and I'll send a man to photograph every square inch of that ruin and I'll build you one just as good at Newport. We've got a summer place at Newport,' he confided to Lydia, as Cece went into further raptures over Emily's ice-blue satin dress. ‘Cost me a million-eight, but it's every bit as fine as the Astor place or the Berwinds'.'

Lydia was given ample opportunity to hear more about the summer place in Newport – and about the London house which Armistead had purchased for his daughter and her affianced husband – throughout dinner, as she had been seated between the American millionaire and his business partner, the equally wealthy and recently knighted Sir Alfred Binney.

‘Meself …
My
self,' Sir Alfred amended, ‘I'd kiss the doorknocker of a place that only costs twice what you'd pay new to fix it up, like you're payin' for Dallaby 'ouse … House. You shoulda seen Wycliffe House 'fore I bought it! Had to be half pulled apart 'fore it could be livable – oil lamps, one bog and not a bathroom in the place – tcha! 'Ere, you, let me have a bit more of that wine, 'fore you takes it away. Bottoms up to the 'appy couple!'

Across the table, Lydia saw her mother's old friend Lady Mary – formerly Wycliffe, now Binney – wince.

‘And I've 'eard that place in Scotland old Crossford gave Colwich for the weddin's worse still. Grouse moor or no, the roof's fallin' in, the tower's crumblin' to bits …'

Lydia closed her eyes briefly against a pounding headache and an almost uncontrollable desire to brain Sir Alfred with the epergne.

Across the table, Viscount Colwich, whose
boutonnière
of lily of the valley accorded ill with his massive six-foot frame, listened in glum silence to Cece Armistead's gushing account of two English ladies who had seen the ghost of Marie Antoinette in the gardens of Versailles. ‘Not simply the ghost, but they were actually
transported
back into the past! When they returned to the place a year later, the paths they recalled were not the same, and both of them identified the woman they had seen – sketching in front of the Petit Trianon – from a drawing of the Queen …'

Colwich glanced pleadingly down the table at Ned Seabury, who had clearly been invited to ‘make up the numbers' disarrayed by the unexpected inclusion of Julia Thwaite's hired companion Mrs Bellwether. Lydia could almost feel the meeting of their eyes.

Carriages for the Opera had been ordered for eight, and Sir Alfred Binney made sure everyone knew he'd been to the opera in both Milan and Paris.

At the first opportunity, Lydia retreated to the little cloakroom adjacent to the ladies' toilet, intending to lie down there – she knew the room was furnished with a daybed – and be ‘discovered' in a debilitated condition by the next person into the room, hopefully not Valentina. But she found Cece Armistead there already, stuffing tissue-paper into the toe of one of her too-long slippers.

‘You must excuse Daddy.' The girl looked up as Lydia entered. ‘He's such a diamond in the rough. But he has such
feeling
for paintings, and for manuscripts …'

Lydia had formed the impression that the American's ‘feeling' for paintings, incunabula, and medieval manuscripts was largely that of his accountant, but she said, ‘Indeed.' Though she had a hint of her father's sturdiness, Miss Armistead was a pretty girl, with her Peruvian mother's dark coloring and a voice – despite a tendency to drop back into her American accent – both pleasant and sweet. She was glaringly overdressed for her years – nineteen, her father had said – and her debutante status: in addition to a gown of claret-colored silk cut deep in the bosom, she wore sparkling girandole earrings, diamond bracelets on both wrists over her gloves, a diamond tiara (Lydia had already seen her stepmother and Aunt Lavinnia eyeing this with scorn), three strands of very large pearls that hung almost to her waist, and a ‘dog-collar' necklace of diamonds and pearls that put Valentina Willoughby's to shame.

A single strand of pearls – Lydia could almost hear Aunt Lavinnia say it to Lady Savenake – was the only thing appropriate for a girl in her first season …

‘I'm so grateful to Sir Alfred and Lady Mary for sponsoring me this way,' added Cece, a little shyly. ‘He and Lady Mary met us in Paris before coming on here. Lady Mary – dang it!' she added, as her necklaces caught on the profusion of her curls. ‘Ow!' The attempt to pull her hair clear sent the dog-collar slithering to the floor.