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, Papa, for our new house? Papa –’ 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 – Papa,’ 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 Papa. ‘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, th
e equally wealthy and recently knighted Sir Alfred Binney.
‘Meself … Myself,’ 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.
‘Oh, I hate the catch on that thing! One of these days I’m going to lose it and then Daddy will be furious …’
Well he might be, Lydia reflected as she gathered up the glittering weight in her hands. The thing was easily nine hundred guineas. ‘I’ll get it.’ She moved to put it around the girl’s throat.
And as she did so, even without her spectacles, she saw on the right side of Cece’s throat, just above the jugular vein, the small, fresh scab of two puncture wounds, as if the flesh had been bitten by an animal.
For a blank second Lydia wondered if this were her imagination.
But Emily, coming in at that moment saying, ‘Cece, have you got a cigarette? After listening to Ned Seabury for two solid hours I deserve—’ then stopped in her tracks and said, ‘Cece, what did you do to your neck?’
And Cecelia put her hand over the wound and said, ‘Just a stupid accident with a pin.’
And she smiled a smile of dreamy ecstasy.
FIVE
Is it Grippen?
Light rain, blowing in late, clattered on the window. Across the street, the chime on All Hallows church struck one.
Or one of his fledglings?
What can I do?
Lydia stared unseeing at the neat pages of handwritten notes before her. Jan. 12, Empress Josephine from Bordeaux, Matthias Barrière and Family, of Bordeaux – 2 trunks 2×2×5½ 275 lb. Same craft, Ottakar Dusik of Prague, trunk 2×17 – ×4 200 lb. Jan. 13 Doksa out of Athens, Christov Antokolski of Kiev, coffin of his father. Jan. 13, Sirena from Venice, Natalia Vatarescu of Sofia, and maid, 3 steamer trunks: 2×2×4 250 lb, 28’×17’×50 220 lb, 28’×22’×3.5’ 250 lbs …
What could I say, and to whom?
She knew the look in Miss Armistead’s eyes. The girl was being lured by a vampire.
Courted in her dreams – as Lydia’s companion Margaret Potton had been courted four years ago – with visions of a soulful Byronic wanderer through the ages, who lay the heart he did not think he still possessed at the feet of a living girl who could save him …
She wondered if the vampire seducer had grinned to himself all the while at the depth of her eager surrender, tickled at his own power to fool.
She shivered, and drew the room’s spare blanket closer around her bare shoulders.
Ludovico Bertolo of Sofia, and valet, Jan 15, from Cherbourg, on the Reine Margot, trunk 28’×18’×6’, 300 lbs. Fuad Al-Wahid of Cairo, Jan 17, on the Great George out of Bordeaux, with the coffin of his brother …
By and large, vampires fed on people no one would miss. Crossing-sweepers, mudlarks, paupers in workhouses or old men sleeping on alley pavements in the East End.
But neither man nor vampire lives on bread alone. The drunkards, the whores, the irredeemably abandoned were no fun to hunt.
And with all of eternity before them, vampires – she had been told by Jamie, who knew them better – were often and easily bored.
Her skull felt as if it would split.
Cece would deny it.
If Grippen – or one of Grippen’s fledglings – was Cece’s demon lover, Miranda and Nan would probably die if Lydia asked questions, poked into shadows.
They’ll probably kill me, too.
And Cece.
Would vampires dare kill the daughter of an American millionaire?
Grippen wouldn’t. That was a thousand times worse than two or three paupers a night.
But none of his fledglings is more than six years a vampire. Who knows who they are, or how much control he has over them.
By the end of the evening Aunt Lavinnia had been unobtrusively maneuvering to break up Lydia’s conversations with the American girl, lest – Lydia knew without a word being exchanged – her growing friendship with Cece encourage Armistead and his bumptious partner Binney to believe themselves ‘accepted’ into the Halfdene-Peasehall social circle.
God, forgive me for not pulling Cece aside this evening, demanding to know what’s going on. For not warning her, telling her …
Telling her what?
5–7 Shoe Lane, willed by William Boyle of Newham Street to Francis Houghton of Priest Row, Nov. ’07. 10 Bell Yard, willed June ’08 by Cosimo Graves of Rood Lane to Bartholomew Barrow of Rose Street. By
the same testament, 2 Rose Street willed to Daphne Scrooby of Parish Street, and 13–17 Horsleydown Street to Nicholas Barger of Rood Lane. 29 Rosemary Lane by deed of gift Dec ’09 by Viscount Vauxhill to Nicholas Barger of Rood Lane …
(Dear Heavens, not Geoffrey Vauxhill! Father wanted me to marry him!)
Vampires hunt slowly, when they hunt for sport. They’ll court a victim for weeks or months … Cece looked FAR too healthy for this to have been going on long …
I can’t let her meet him again! But even as she thought it, she knew she’d have to. Distantly the clang of the Liverpool Street train yards broke the dark of the sleeping city, and the coal-oil stink of the lamp smoke vied with the pungency of the dried garlic she’d hung in garlands around the window.
I should have hung them in Miranda’s nursery.
Osric Millward – she had heard from Valentina, accompanied by a tinkling, silvery laugh – had such protections on the windows of the small chambers he rented in Kensington, on the settlement that his wife’s family still paid to him. ‘Honestly, I’m astonished the poor woman stayed with him as long as she did! She’s a cousin of Honoria Savenake’s … still lives in Deauville … I hope your husband doesn’t keep horseshoes nailed to the doors or strews salt across the thresholds …?’
Dimly, she heard the clock strike again.
She opened her eyes. Sat up. The rain had ceased, and the lamp had gone out. Something moved outside the window.
Some flying thing that blundered into the glass.
Lydia put on her spectacles, got to her feet.
She crossed to the window, her long red hair hanging down her back in the ruins of her chignon, the fawn-and-pink silk of her niece’s gown whispering perfumed secrets. Whatever was out there, it was small and pale, bobbing erratically in the darkness. Sulfur eyes sparked in the light.
Is this a dream?
The Kindred of Darkness Page 4
