‘He’s phenomenally attractive,’ she said. ‘I mean that literally: he attracts like a magnet, or at least he did me, in the few minutes we were together. And obviously he has poor Cece completely under his thumb. She doesn’t impress me as the kind of girl who’d … who’d ordinarily vamp a man into marrying her so that she could turn over his property to a lover, but it may be that she doesn’t think of it in that light. I assume Zahorec plans to kill poor Colwich as soon as they’re married.’
‘’Tis more likely he’ll be his wife’s early victim. That’s the usual pattern.’ Ysidro folded his hands as they passed into High Holborn, watched the hawkers of oranges and dolls on the sidewalks, and a blind man mending umbrellas in front of the Post Office. ‘I was often in Wycliffe House in the Old Earl’s time,’ he said at length. ‘The garden went clear to Cadogan Place – not that there was anything but a lane there, then – and I was sorry, when his grandson built the north wing and shut it in. I didn’t know you knew the family.’
‘The seventh Earl’s daughter was a friend of our family. My aunts wrote to me – that was the year I was in school in Paris – about how horrified they were when she married Alfred Binney, who wasn’t a baronet then, just very wealthy. But that’s exactly what my mother did, when she married Father. They said about him everything they said about Father behind my back – and about my mother, too. In spite of the fact that it was Father’s money that paid for school for my cousins Ritchie and Charles, and kept Halfdene House from being sold.’
‘And kept you from growing up as your aunts did, and Lady Binney.’
Under the calm yellow gaze, Lydia felt disconcerted. Can I accept his help finding Miranda, the thought came to her, without condoning that his ability to give it comes from murder? Just as my aunts accepted Father’s money even as they were calling him a vulgar disgrace to his family for going into trade?
‘Come,’ said Ysidro, and took her hand. ‘Tell me what you have learned so far of this Zahorec, and of what you need yet to learn.’
EIGHT
Ysidro shrank from touching the blanket Ellen had sent – it was one of those into whose binding Lydia had sewn thin silver chains – but ran his fingers over the tucked white lawn of Miranda’s frock.
No mother in her senses should be able to watch this, thought Lydia, as he stroked the lettuce-green silk sash. Knowing what he is, I should be screaming at him to keep away from anything that has touched my child.
What’s wrong with me?
Why do I trust him?
And she tried not to hear her heart reply: Vampires hunt by making the living trust.
He touched the fabric to his lips. Champagne-colored eyes half-shut, he faced the window of her shabby room at the Temperance Hotel seeming almost in a trance.
‘Nothing.’ He laid the little garment back on the cluttered bed. ‘The dreams of children whisper over London like the night sea. I said, did I not, that Lionel will guess that you will call me, and that I will come.’ Beyond him the sooty rooftops were a jungle of chimney pots and ridge poles, touched here and there with the grimy echo of a skylight’s glow.
‘Myself, I believe he will hide the child outside of London altogether, to keep the matter from his fledglings.’
‘Do all masters distrust their fledglings?’ Lydia leaned her shoulder against the window frame, gathered the little dress in her arms.
‘Not all. Some fledglings learn in time the wisdom of their master’s prohibitions. Indeed, some masters take care to choose their fledglings for reasons other than for property, or from desire.’
‘Desire?’ Lydia’s eyebrows twitched together. ‘I thought the Undead were sexless. That the generative organs ceased to function.’
‘You yourself know, Mistress, how much desire resides in the mind, and vampires in this respect are no more wise than the rest of mankind. Many masters choose those whom they wish to possess, as well as those whom they simply wish to use.’ He brushed Nan’s gloves to his cheekbone, then tilted his head, eyes half-shut, listening.
‘Nothing.’ He set the gloves aside. ‘Thus it happens that many choose fledglings of lesser intelligence, seeking those who will not challenge their dominion. Then when the master does perish, it is often without teaching the fledglings all that they might know about the vampire state. This being so, they cannot pass the knowledge along in their turn.’
‘Like the reading of dreams?’
‘That and other matters. Walk with me, Mistress.’ He took up her jacket from the bed, and held it for her to put on. ‘Walk and tell me what you will need, to find this interloper’s lairs.’
Obediently she donned the garment, removed her spectacles, locked the door behind them and followed him downstairs, where the lobby clerk sat gazing at his copy of The Illustrated London News without seeing it – or them – as they passed.
‘I take it your master didn’t believe in keeping his fledglings ignorant?’
For a moment, as they went beneath the gaslight in the lobby, she saw his face turn human as he smiled. ‘My master – Rhys the White – like myself was curious about the vampire state. He said that he thought the reading of dreams was originally a hunting skill, in the days before there were many cities, to draw prey from far off, or to find sleepers by their dreams. ’Tis a skill that grows slowly, and not many teach it now. And indeed why should they? We ourselves are safer in cities, where neighbor knows not his neighbor, and money can buy protection from those who do not inquire for whom they work. The poor die unheeded, so what need of stealth and skill?’
Beside the door of All Hallows church Lydia saw two men lying, bundles of rags ranged along the wall, asleep on the sidewalk with greasy caps over their faces, as oblivious to the clatter of the luggage-vans and cabs rattling within feet of them as the hurrying cabmen and drivers were to them. Tramps from the provinces, hoping things would be better in the city. London was full of them.
For a long while Lydia didn’t speak.
Then Don Simon asked again, ‘Tell me what you need,’ in a voice so gentle she wondered if he read her anger and her confusion. ‘Banking records, you said?’
She took a deep breath, let it out. ‘A vampire fleeing unrest in the Balkans would need a means to transfer his money here, if he wishes to acquire property.’
‘And the method described in romantic novels, of paying for everything in ancient gold coin, would cause more talk than the occasional corpse drained of blood with puncture-wounds in the throat.’ He steered her gently past a crowd of coster Don Juans clustered outside a sweet-shop, buying ices for their donahs. The glare of electric lights turned the girls’ gaudy dresses to jewels. ‘At least in London, it would.’
‘We’re probably looking for a single gentleman rather than a company,’ Lydia went on. ‘Though I expect you operate through a corporation of some sort … The name might be Zahorec or Bertolo, and he’ll have started withdrawing cash here around the seventeenth of January. He came here from Cherbourg, so there may have been withdrawals in Paris also.’
‘Duly noted, Mistress.’
‘Can you …’ She hesitated. ‘Can you do that?’
His slow smile in the electric glare was once again completely human. ‘Think you it lies beyond my measure, Lady?’
‘How—?’
‘How indeed. Do you not trust me?’
‘I do.’ She was aware that she should be ashamed of herself for meaning it. ‘And I’ll need access to records in the Bank of England.’
He tilted an eyebrow.
‘I promise I won’t do anything silly,’ she repeated doggedly.
‘Had I a silver coin for every time a woman has said, I will not do anything silly—’
‘You would burn the skin off your hands,’ retorted Lydia. They had crossed the jostling confusion of drays, cabs, passengers dashing to catch the last omnibus in Finsbury Circus, to the doors of the Christian Travelers’ Hotel. He handed her up the single shallow step. In a smaller voice, she said, ‘I have to know
.’
Without answering, he opened the door for her, the Christian Travelers’ Hotel not running to a doorman. At the desk, she gave the clerk a shilling and asked if there were any letters for Elizabeth Röntgen.
There were two. One, from Henry McClennan, contained another list of properties: her eye picked out the name of Daphne Scrooby of Parish Street again, of Francis Houghton and Bartholomew Barrow. It was noted that while birth certificates existed for Mrs Scrooby (née Robinson) and her husband, a well-known pub-owner in the Limehouse, no such things existed for Houghton, Barrow, or Nicholas Barger of Rood Lane, to whom Barrow had also willed City property.
It was hard to keep her fingers from trembling as she opened the second envelope, a telegram from Ellen sent that morning.
WIRE FROM MR JAMES SENT VENICE LAST NIGHT STOP SAYS HE IS ON HIS WAY STOP
He is on his way.
She woke in blackness, gasping. NO …
The dream swallowed back into itself.
The Temperance Hotel …
Reassuringly, the darkness around her smelled of wallpaper mold and the desiccated ghosts of garlic and wolfsbane. Across the street, the clock on All Hallows struck three. Was that what waked me? Dimly the groan of the goods trains came from Liverpool Street Station, without cease through the small hours.
It had been cold in her dream.
Miranda?
No. She’d dreamed of her daughter, a brief, far-off image of the toddler curled asleep in Nan Wellit’s arms. She’d taken great comfort from the fact that – although in the dream too it was pitch dark – she could see that Miranda’s clothes were clean and her hair combed. Nan was looking after her.
Good for you, Nan …
It wasn’t that which had frightened her.
Something about Simon?
After she’d stuffed the telegram from Ellen, and that thin sheaf of information from Henry McClennan, into her handbag, she’d walked with Simon to a café on the other side of the oval park, had sat talking for a time, knowing if she went straight back to her room she would lie awake. She’d asked him about being a vampire, and about reading dreams; about the Old Earl who’d built Wycliffe House and laid out its gardens. About the harper called Rhys the White, who after his death had slept in the crypt of St Giles Cripplegate and had lured his victims with music that they could not tear from their dreams. There were men in London, living men, who believed him to be a wizard or an angel or a saint, because of the dreams he could visit upon them …
And as he spoke Ysidro had watched passers-by beneath the glare of the café’s electric lights, servants making their way home from evening service, soldiers who stopped to buy ginger beer. Observed them the way Jamie observed them, picking individual faces, separate voices: That man’s from Sussex. One of that girl’s parents is Liverpool Irish. See how he holds his left wrist? He’s a coachman …
Reading their bodies and voices, their mannerisms and their lives.
James and I understand one another, he had said. Many vampires make humankind our study: sit in cafés and theaters and on the benches of the Embankment, watching and listening. To us the Personals of every newspaper are like serialized novels, or like observing the tracks of beasts in the woods. Such awareness is life to us: hunting, or watching for who looks at us twice and thrice.
When they’d walked back to the Temperance Hotel, she had observed that the beat constable had rousted the two sleepers beside the church wall, and moved them on.
It was Rhys the White who killed you? she had asked, and Simon had answered, Yes, matter-of-factly, without so much as a pause.
Yet in a dream once she’d felt the paroxysm of light, that was the drinking of the soul of the living by the Undead, and knew there was more to it than Yes …
Was that what I dreamed?
Somewhere in her mind lingered the echo of moonlight through the iron lattices of a barred window, of a man’s voice whispering desperately: ‘De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine …’
Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord …
A man clinging to the edge of life as to a precipice.
The smell of pine trees …
The creak of a hinge as the door behind the prisoner opened and he flung himself to his feet, threw himself at the bars and clung to them with all his strength in the knowledge that his strength would not be enough. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me …?
Trembling, Lydia sat up. She fumbled her eyeglasses from beneath her pillow – rooms at the Temperance Hotel did not include such luxuries as night stands – and rose with care, recalling that she’d left her notes and pencils strewn on the floor around the bed. As she had in her dream two nights ago, she crossed to the window, the baize curtain rough under her fingers, the wreaths of garlic and wolfsbane like dry tissue paper against her cheek.
Through fog and darkness the tangle of rooftops and chimney stacks was barely to be seen. Mists caught the electric glow from the train yards, and by it, like a shadow, she thought she saw three figures, standing on the roof across the alleyway.
Two men and a woman. (How on EARTH did she get up there wearing a corset and a dress?) A dozen feet separated them from the window. She had seen vampires leap twice that distance. So great was the darkness, no gleam of light caught in their eyes, but she knew what they were.
Do they hear me breathe?
Detect the pounding of my heart?
As silently as she could she moved back into the room, opened the suitcase beneath the bed and took from it the jointed rod she’d had made when she’d come back from China last winter, that screwed together into a sort of spear with a sharpened silver point. Whether it would work or not she didn’t know, but all weapons used against vampires were more or less only to buy you time to flee, provided there was anywhere to flee to.
There was also a little box of coffee beans, to counteract the vampire’s ability to make a victim drift momentarily into a dreamlike state of inattention. She’d once heard Dr Millward describing (at tedious length) a silver ring he’d had made, with a little spike on it to dig into his palm for the same purpose, though Lydia personally wouldn’t have wanted to risk drawing one’s blood anywhere near a vampire …
She screwed the spear together and sat on the bed, facing the window that was only just less inkily dark than the blackness of the room.
Grippen’s fledglings?
Zahorec’s, made in some fashion that Grippen couldn’t detect?
Whoever they are, they know I’m here.
For six years she had lived with the knowledge that Grippen and his fledglings knew of her. Knew and kept their distance, out of fear of Simon.
Fear? She wondered now. Or was that part of a bargain? That he would leave London, and they would leave me alone?
And now he’s returned …
After a long time she realized that she could see the pale rectangle of curtained window a little more clearly, and heard the All Hallows clock strike four-thirty.
At five-thirty she unscrewed the sections of her spear and stowed them in her suitcase, took off her spectacles, and lay down once more. But it was long before she slept, and when she did, she saw them in her dreams. Two men and a woman, standing on the roof ridge of the building across the alleyway, watching her window with gleaming eyes.
NINE
‘Have you ever played Fox and Geese, Mistress?’ Simon asked her the following evening, as they walked along the Embankment.
‘When I was in school, yes. The son of one of the headmistresses would insist on being the Fox, and my friend Josetta – she was the English mistress there – taught me that once one learns the strategy, the Geese can always win.’
‘Your friend is wise. The Fox can kill any Goose, but the Geese are many. By working together, and coordinating their attack, they can surround and trap Señor Fox. Multiply that a thousand fold –’ his glance took in the sailors and flower vendors and fashionable ladies strolling around them, the rumble of traffic from the Strand above – ‘
and you have the situation of the vampire.’
It was early enough – not quite ten – that twilight was barely out of the sky. The yellow twinkle from the military yards across the river answered the street lights in the park, and spangled the dark water between. From a barrow beside the curb a man cried hoarsely of nougats and caramels.
Despite Simon’s assurance that no one Lydia knew would notice her as long as she was with him, she kept glancing at their fellow strollers, expecting any moment for Aunt Isobel to swoop out of the shadows of the trees in her bath chair, demanding to know what she was doing here and who was that she was with?
Did Jamie feel like this when he walked about somewhere like Vienna or Berlin, back in his days as a spy?
‘Were the Bohemian to get fledglings,’ Simon said at length, answering an earlier question, ‘I doubt he could conceal them. Indeed, ’tis more like they would lead Lionel to him. ’Twere more difficult for Lionel to know if this Zahorec has made living allies, and I think that is what he fears even more. The living have freedom of action denied the Undead, and a master cannot constrain his fledglings if they make such alliances behind is back.’
‘Would he kill them if he found out about them?’
‘Beyond doubt, Mistress. I would.’
Lydia remembered Constantinople, and glanced sidelong at her companion’s face, wondering what he recalled.
‘Would Lionel’s fledglings kill me behind his back? Rebbe Karlebach –’ she spoke the name of Jamie’s mentor hesitantly, but the vampire showed no reaction at the mention of the man who’d emptied a shotgun full of silver pellets into him the previous year – ‘warned us that the Undead usually kill their living helpers.’
‘This is because Rebbe Karlebach is an imbecile,’ returned Ysidro calmly, ‘like many self-nominated Van Helsings. They know only what they tell one another. I doubt he has had more than a dozen conversations with actual vampires in his life, and refused to believe what he heard from them. You are in no danger from Lionel’s get, nor yet from Lionel himself.’
The Kindred of Darkness Page 8
