The Kindred of Darkness (9 page)

Ludovicus Bertolo, she knew, had come to London on the fifteenth of January from Cherbourg, with a valet and three pieces of luggage, one of which was a trunk six feet long and weighing nearly three hundred pounds.

She wondered what had become of the valet.

He'll have left the Cecil by this time
…

She replaced the paper in the book, the book in the drawer. Went to the window, blew out the candle, the scent of wax like a note of music in the sudden dark. Looped back the drapes as best she could. Started toward where the door would be—

And heard the faintest whisper as the handle turned.

There was no line of light beneath it. Whoever was outside stood in darkness.

Saw
in darkness.

Lydia remembered there was an armoire somewhere to her left but there was no time. She stepped back to the window, rolled herself in the curtain and crouched to the floor, her corset stabbing her mercilessly in the hip-bones as she curled herself flat.

He came into the room and very faintly she smelled the blood in his clothing.

Oh, God
…

He'll smell my perfume.

And the blood in my veins.

Softly he closed the door. ‘And who have we here?' Like Ysidro's, his voice was barely a murmur. But deeper: black velvet, with a slight inflection of Mitteleuropa. Drowsiness crushed her mind, like suffocating in rose petals. Sensual. Hungry for this man's kisses; for the touch of his lips … ‘I know you're hiding, beautiful one …'

‘You can't know I'm beautiful,' said Lydia matter-of-factly, and stood up. ‘You haven't seen me.'

The reflected light from the window showed her a dark god. A pale face above the blackness of a satin cloak that wrapped him from throat to feet, a darkness of tousled curls. ‘All ladies are beautiful,' he said softly, ‘met by moonlight.'

If he touches the silver on my neck or wrists he'll know I know about what he is
.

‘Nonsense,' said Lydia briskly. ‘And anyway that's electricity, not moonlight. You sound just like Bertie, and I'm perfectly fed up with him—'

‘Bertie?' He got between her and the door and made it look accidental.

Her heart was pounding so she could barely think. ‘Bertie Mousemire.' She manufactured a sigh. ‘Trust Bertie to arrange an assignation and then not be able to find his way up from the terrace. The man is hopeless. And by this time Richard will be looking for me, and—'

He was suddenly beside her – it was nearly impossible to see vampires move – and his hand closed around her arm above the elbow. Through the thick satin of her sleeve his touch was like warm electricity, a shocking sense of his presence. Of need.

‘And do you so hunger for love that you must needs seek it with the Berties of this world?'

His eyes were in shadow, but she knew they were blue. Languor flowed over her mind, honey now instead of sparks. A yearning to taste his kisses …

With THOSE teeth?

‘Don't be silly,' gasped Lydia, in her best imitation of her long-departed Nanna, and prayed her voice didn't shake.
He'll probably think it's with passion
…

And it was. Irrational, overwhelming hunger for what James never gave her (
but he DOES
), for what no man had ever given her …

She pulled free and he didn't hold her. This was seduction, she recognized; the game vampires played.

The game he was playing with Cece.

Or maybe it isn't
.

WOULD he kill here at a party?

There are nearly a thousand guests, he could hide my body and no one would know I was gone …

‘I have never understood,' said Lydia, ‘this passion people have for going around kissing total strangers …'

He put his hands on either side of her against the wall, pinning her without touching her. But she could feel the heat of his body, which meant, she knew, that he'd fed.

Someone in London had already died. Two and three kills a night sometimes, Grippen had said …

‘Since you do not understand, will you not open your mind?' He put his hand to her cheek. His face – barely seen in the darkness – seemed weary and a little sad, the face of a man who has survived horrors. ‘Why do you so much fear even the taste of a dream? Are you afraid you might follow it?'

Footfalls whispered in the carpet of the hall. Had the vampire been a cat he'd have put one ear back. Lydia took the moment to step away from him, and open the bedroom door. Cece's voice was no more than the scent of the candle wax in the darkness. ‘Damien?'

Lydia felt the velvet cloak brush past her, smelled again the halitus of fresh blood. Gaslight from Queen Street filtered into the hallway from its windows, showed her the vampire like a shadow beside the pale shape of Cece Armistead in her lace-clotted gown of gold and bronze. Jewels still twinkled in her powdered hair, but she'd removed the collar of lace that had covered her neck. Zahorec bent his head to kiss her, gentle as a flower petal, on the lips, on the breast, on the delicate skin of her throat. Cece whispered, ‘I have …' But the vampire touched his lips to hers.

‘It can wait. All things can wait.'

Shaken, breathless, Lydia stood in the door of the bedroom as the two shadows merged; heard Cece's soft gasp.

It was two steps to the door of the backstairs and Lydia held down her heavy skirts with both hands, terrified that she'd feel his arms circling her from behind in the pitch black of the staircase. She was shaking uncontrollably by the time she reached the door at the bottom, stumbled out into the shadows of the pergola …

Can he follow me through the maze? Follow me back to the hotel?

She went straight up the graveled path and across the terrace to the front hall, where she tipped one footman to get her a cab and another to take a note up to Aunt Lavinnia, claiming a splitting headache and the urgent need to return to her hotel at once, and would Aunt Lavinnia see to it that Emily got home?
Aunt Lavinnia will never speak to me again
…

Once at the Temperance Hotel, Lydia double-locked the door, dragged the little desk in front of it, wound her garlands of garlic-flowers, aconite, and Christmas rose around the door handle and the window sashes.

And dreamed, for what remained of the night, of Damien Zahorec's eyes.

L
udovicus Bertolo
. Lydia studied the entry over tea at her little table in the gray of Sunday morning.

Not Grippen, not his fledglings.

He'd arrived from Cherbourg on the
Reine Margot
. He'd come through France.

Checking other entries for those who'd come from France, she found the record of Titus Armistead and Party, with crates enough to transport an army of vampires, also from Cherbourg, on 17 January. Presumably the
Imperatrice
was a higher-class vessel than the
Reine Margot
.

On the
Imperatrice
also had been Noel Wredemere, Lord Colwich, with two steamer-trunks and three crates over two hundred pounds and four feet in length – ‘and valet'. Someone last night (Valentina?) had told her that Colwich's beloved Ned Seabury had gone to Paris in the fall because of Colwich's ‘way of life'. Had he traveled back on the
Imperatrice
as well, gazing in hungry jealousy as his friend flirted with the American millionaire's daughter?

Or had he returned earlier, and learned of the engagement when he went to the dock to welcome his friend home, and saw him come down the gangplank with that bright-hued bird of paradise clinging to his arm?

As she removed the protective garlands from the windows and sought soap, towel, slippers, sponge bag and pennies for the bathroom geyser among the untidy chaos of the bed, Lydia recalled the look of weary pleading Colwich had thrown his friend along the dinner table Friday night, and the way the two young men had stood together in the drawing-room window Thursday, at Lady Brightwell's with Dr Millward. Were the tender looks and cheerful caresses with Cece last night window dressing only, to keep his wealthy father-in-law sweet?

She remembered Cece's golden shape as the vampire's cloak enfolded her in darkness. The girl's soft gasp.

Of course Cece would accept the proposal of a Viscount. One day she'd be Countess of Crossford.

The Crossfords had property all over England and Scotland.

He's going to make her a vampire
. Lydia shivered as she thrust coins into the bathroom geyser box and turned on the spigot for her modest fivepence-worth of nominally hot bathwater.
It isn't just seduction. He's biding his time, waiting till she marries.
The Crossford lands were mortgaged and in a poor state of upkeep, but this wouldn't matter to a vampire.

He doesn't want a victim
.

He wants a fledgling.

Who will leave him property in her will.

Lydia reached St George's church in Hanover Square just as the congregation issued from their pews to take communion, but after all one went to St George's to be seen by the
beau monde
, not because the sermons were any good. She waited at the back, from a sense of guilt and because, without her spectacles, she couldn't identify the Halfdene pew until the footman in blue and yellow livery wheeled the bath chair into the aisle. Then she hurried down and ducked into the enclosure. ‘I'm so sorry …'

Uncle Richard smiled as he took her hand. ‘
I will give unto this last, even as unto thee
,' he whispered, quoting Christ's parable about dilatory latecomers who scurried at that last minute through the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Following divine services, like three-quarters of the population of the West End – or that portion of the population that weren't polishing boots, preparing dinner, pressing Madame's skirt or taking Madame's children for their Sunday stroll – the family of Viscount Halfdene went driving in the Park, Uncle Richard's saddle horse having been brought along tied to the back of the landaulet which had carried them to church. Lydia made all the correct responses when they encountered friends or family among the slow tide of vehicles and horses that flowed along the southern avenue. By the gates she glimpsed, across the road, the massed green-purple-and-white banners of the suffragists gathered outside the Horse Guards, and she thought she saw one of them – undoubtedly her friend Josetta – wave to her, but couldn't be sure at that distance.

But within moments her thoughts returned to Cece Armistead. To that voice like sable velvet:
Do you so hunger for love …?

No matter how many times Lydia told herself,
Actually, no, I don't
, its echo returned.
Why do you so much fear even the taste of a dream? Are you afraid you might follow it?

No wonder poor Cece wore that goopy smile. Lydia shivered again.

God knows what Zahorec has told her about what he is. About what being a vampire means
…

Beneath the trees of Rotten Row she caught a glimpse of Cece, riding in company with Lady May. No sign of Colwich's bright waistcoat: two-thirty in the afternoon was evidently too early an hour for his lordship to be astir. A stolid detective followed them on what was clearly a rented hack, his brown suit like a baked potato in a plate of petits-fours. Even had Lydia been wearing spectacles the little group was too far off for her to tell if the American girl looked pale or ill, but she seemed to have no trouble controlling her frisky steed.

He's seen me, in her bedroom. Hiding from ‘Bertie', he thinks. And no one he needs to worry about. Unless I speak to Cece and tell her, ‘I know you're being courted by a vampire.'

Then she'll tell him
.

As I told Don Simon, when old Professor Karlebach warned me about HIM
.

She wanted to leap out of the carriage and run …
where? Back to the Temperance Hotel
? To put up her garlic-blossom garlands again like a madwoman; to sit staring at the peeling greenish trellises of the wallpaper until it grew too dark to see? She didn't know which grated most across her nerves, having to lie when Aunts Harriet and Lavinnia – out driving themselves in Lavinnia's blood-crimson park phaeton – asked her how Miranda was, or encountering Valentina (driven by an admirer and full of backhanded compliments on Emily's dress) and having her not ask about the child at all.

Three nights she's been … somewhere. Crying for me? Hungry? Drugged
?

STOP IT THIS MINUTE … She's all right. She'll be all right.

‘I'm sorry, Aunt.' She pulled her mind back to the present. ‘I felt dreadfully about leaving Emily, but I had the most fearful headache last night …'

‘It could have been the champagne,' purred Valentina, whose admirer happened to pull his natty Tilbury up next to the Halfdene landaulet at that moment. ‘It takes some people that way, if they're not used to it. Though heaven knows had
I
been left by
my
husband I'd have done just the same …'

‘You're sure you won't stay in town and go to the concert this evening?' asked Isobel, when dinner was over. ‘Emily could certainly lend you a dress – though not the white tarlatan,' she added, with a worried frown. ‘She's wearing that to the Ottmoors' and they're sure to be there tonight … Not the ice-blue either …'

Lydia refrained from saying that firstly, nothing would induce her to wear ice-blue, and secondly, she had a perfect right to both frocks, having paid for them. ‘Thank you, Aunt, but I should be getting back home.'

‘Have it your own way, dear.' Isobel poured her out a second cup of tea. ‘Though I must say, whatever Valentina said – and did you get a look at those emeralds she was wearing? In the middle of the afternoon, too! – I expect it was all the running up and down from Oxford that brought on your headache last night. Heaven knows the
worst
migraine I ever had in my
life
was when I traveled up to Scotland last August to go shooting at the Wintersons'– I was in bed for
days
! Dr Purfleet had to prescribe veronal for me. When you come back up tomorrow – You
are
coming for the opening of the flower show? We're quite counting on you – you are most welcome to bring your things and stay here. I'm sure Miranda will be just fine without her mama for a few days … I remember during the Season, for years, Emily would go
weeks
without seeing me and it never seemed to do her any harm, did it, darling? You could—Yes, what is it, Ross?'