The Kindred of Darkness

by Barbara Hambly

  The flame from the match he struck seemed to shine through his fingers as he touched it to the candle’s wick.

  ‘Such places exist in Prague, and in Roman cities on the Adriatic like Zara. A vampire out of Romania would surely know to look for them.’ As they ducked low through the ruinous doorway, Don Simon ran his free hand along the jamb, an inch or so from the stonework. Lydia had to press her own free hand against the clammy wall, to keep from slipping where feet had worn a groove down the center of the steps.

  ‘Why would the Romans have put a bath so deep underground?’

  ‘’Twas scarce the depth of a common cellar when first they delved it. London’s buildings slowly sink with time. Catacombs lie deep beneath the Camden Market, and the ancient Temple of Mithras under Holborn. Behold.’ He raised his candle. Lydia had a dark impression of a very long room, of brickwork arches from which the plaster had long since fallen. In a rectangular pit three or four feet deep, filth-crusted red and white tile could still be dimly discerned. The stone head of a lion at one end of the pit marked where water had once flowed in; a stone culvert showed where it had flowed out.

  Rats fled the light. Lydia hastily hiked her skirt up to her calves, and tucked it into her belt.

  ‘I can scarcely see Zahorec crawling out of the sewers through that culvert,’ she remarked. ‘Unless he has a change of clothes hidden somewhere here …’

  ‘I have them hidden all over London.’ Simon walked slowly around the perimeter of the room, studying the buckled floor. ‘But ’twere altogether a tidier matter to have his sweetheart admit him to the house through the garden door.’

  He dropped lightly from the edge of the pit – It must have been the bath itself, reasoned Lydia, observing the pit and chimney in the corner that led into the hypocaust beneath – and stood beside the low stone arch of the drain. Though the flicker of two solitary candles showed her barely the outline of the arch, and the vampire’s pale profile against the darkness, she knew he could see in that darkness as in daylight, whether there were any scrape-marks of elbows and knees coming up out of the realms beneath.

  ‘It would certainly be a help to be able to get about as mist,’ she commented, as Don Simon took two running strides and sprang up the four-foot wall of the pit as easily as she or James might hop up a curbstone. ‘Here’s the way down into the hypocaust, but it doesn’t look like it’s been marked. I mean, one couldn’t get a coffin down something that narrow, but this far under the earth he could surely just curl up in a corner.’

  ‘He could.’ He stretched himself full length beside the circular hole, and peered down it. Lydia’s candle showed her notches in the brick sides, which formed a sort of ladder. ‘Depending upon how he felt about being eaten by rats in his sleep.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Lydia. ‘Oh, that’s why you’re so careful about having a coffin or something to sleep in.’

  ‘Once we sleep –’ Simon rose and dusted his waistcoat fastidiously – ‘we do not wake. The coffin provides another layer of protection. During the Great Fire I slept unprotected for three nights, in hypocausts and crypts such as this … But by the third night every rat in London had either fled the city or had other matters to think on. As we age, we toughen, and an older vampire can remain awake for sometimes as much as half an hour when the sun’s light is in the sky, if he is protected against its rays. Likewise there are potions we can drink which will prolong wakefulness well into the day, but many of these are dangerous in themselves, and all of them leave one debilitated for days.

  ‘He has been here,’ he went on. ‘I feel his presence in the stones. But ’tis not how he comes and goes to the house above. Certain it is that he hunts along the underground rivers, coming up only to make his kill and then going below again. Thus it is that he has avoided Grippen’s eye. There are entrances to the underworld throughout London. Old churches, and the chapels of monasteries, often had vaults through which one could enter the drains, forgotten now by all save those who hunt the night.’

  ‘Jamie told me about them,’ said Lydia. ‘He made a study of them, when he was with the Department.’

  He led her back to the old ascending stair, switching off the electric lights in the treasure-crypt as they passed through it.

  ‘So if Zahorec is buying properties in London, he’ll choose those—’

  ‘Silence.’ Don Simon stopped on the long stairway back to the library, held up one finger. ‘Stay here.’ They were within sight of the door at the top; he reached it in what seemed, to Lydia, like two steps, and switched off the lights. In the blackness she felt his cold fingers around hers a moment later. ‘They’ve returned.’

  ‘Oh, bother! I do hope,’ she added, ‘Miss Armistead’s maid has – um – finished …’

  ‘They woke a little time after you and I went below ground. One presumes they went their separate ways. Come,’ he went on. ‘All have gone downstairs for tea, the servants to wait on them.’ The cold hand led her up through the darkness (And thank goodness those stairs were leveled and carpeted …) then across the plush of the library rugs. Lamps burned in several of the bedrooms and Lydia experienced a momentary rush of panic as they stepped into the hall.

  ‘Do not concern yourself,’ urged Don Simon as they walked toward the door of the backstairs. ‘We shall not be—’

  He was already stepping back as Lydia reached for the handle of the backstairs door. It opened virtually under her hand, and Lydia found herself face-to-face with Cece Armistead’s erring maid. The young woman halted, startled, eyebrows plunging together as she faced Lydia – who, at the vampire’s gentle tug, moved out of her way without speaking.

  ‘You better have those baths drawn,’ snapped the maid, and strode away down the corridor, not waiting for a reply.

  Simon guided Lydia ahead of him into the backstairs.

  ‘What …?’

  ‘She thought you another of the maids.’ He was smiling slightly, a far-off twinkle of brightness in his yellow eyes that she had never seen there before.

  He’s enjoying this.

  He was almost laughing as they slipped out into the garden.

  ‘Think you not, that if we can trick the eyes of the living so that they do not see us as we are, we can also – with a little practice – trick them into believing that we are someone else they know? Someone who has every right to be in the upstairs hall? Ere she reaches the parlor with her mistress’s shawl, she’ll forget that she even saw us.’

  ‘Wretch!’ Lydia poked him again. ‘No wonder Jamie’s worried about one of you hiring on with the Kaiser! And no wonder there are all those legends about vampires making respectable married ladies think they’re their husbands—’

  ‘So they said,’ retorted Simon. ‘I never had call for such a trick.’

  ‘You are dreadful!’

  The chimes of midnight were striking from St Michael’s as they emerged through the old garden gate into the mews. Lydia found herself trembling, from exhilaration and fright and the bone-deep relief of not fighting her battle by herself. Her heart still ached in terror for Miranda, her fear a shadow that colored the very air she breathed, and yet, for a time, she had been able to turn her mind from helpless dread.

  And the rest had brought unspeakable relief.

  As much relief, she wondered as Simon hailed a cab, as a young man would have, who was able to forget for a little time that he was a vampire?

  To forget that there was no road back to the country of the living which she saw now, suddenly, he had so profoundly loved.

  Wearing her green Patou frock, and Simon’s mermaid necklace, Lydia arrived at the Café Metropole the following afternoon at a quarter to six and ordered coffee.

  And thought, as she waited for Mr Timothy Rolleston of Barclays Bank, about illusion, and deception, and Simon de la Cadeña-Ysidro.

  She had dreamed again of the man praying in Latin in the barred moonlight of his cell, and this time had recognized Damien Zahorec’s dark curls and aristocratic features.
She had smelled in the cold darkness wet snow on pines, the stink of latrines and woodsmoke. Had seen, when he turned his head at the creak of the cell’s door, the puncture-wounds on his throat, some freshly scabbed and others weeks old. A woman stood in the doorway and Lydia thought, She’s keeping him here. Playing cat-and-mouse. The moonlight didn’t reach across the cell. Lydia saw only the silver light tipping the ends of furs about her neck, and the animal gleam of her eyes.

  Did that really happen? she wondered, waking in the darkness. Or is that only to make me see him as an unwilling victim, not responsible for what he is?

  Is that the dream he sent to Cece?

  Since her family duty that day had included chaperoning Emily to breakfast at Dallaby House – Titus Armistead’s ‘wedding present’ – she’d had plenty of opportunity to see precisely how deeply Cece was entangled in the intoxicating labyrinth of romantic dreams.

  ‘It’s the oldest house in the street.’ The girl led her dozen guests up the two worn sandstone steps to its door. ‘Noel says it’s been here since Elizabeth’s time, but the chapel in the back of the house is ancient, part of the old priory of St Mary … the church of St Mary Westbourne over on Lyall Street was part of it, too, didn’t you say, Ned?’ She threw a sparkling glance at Colwich’s friend, who followed, doglike, in his lordship’s wake. ‘Only they’ve torn it all down and made it smart. Ugh!’

  She shuddered elaborately. ‘The builders tell me there used to be a secret crypt down below where they held Masses, and a passageway to the old priory, to escape from Cromwell’s men! Noel’s been looking for it, haven’t you, darling?’

  Pale as she was – and the vivid pink silk of her shirtwaist, worked high around her throat, seemed further to drain the color from her face – her dark eyes glowed with dreamy light. ‘Oh, how I wish that instead of making it all bright and new, Papa would take it back to the way it was when first it was built!’

  ‘You’d sing a different song first time you wanted to take a bath,’ growled the mining baron. ‘Or use some other plumbing I could mention …’

  Emily blushed, and Seraphina Bellwether – the other chaperone of the party – looked as if she would take the millionaire to task for speaking of such matters in mixed company, had she dared.

  ‘Oh, plumbing is much of a muchness.’ Lord Colwich dismissed the whole subject of convenience with a wave. ‘Such a bore, when one compares it with the incomparable vibrations of endless time!’ His smile went straight past Ned Seabury as if his friend weren’t present, and caressed his bride to be.

  They passed through the bare drawing room, suffused with light from curtainless windows. The walls had been stripped to the plaster and the equipment of the paperhangers littered the uncarpeted oak floor.

  ‘Glad you like it, your lordship,’ Armistead grunted. ‘But I’m telling you now, I wouldn’t have bought it if I’d known how much work there’d be – and at the prices you English charge for a simple job of paint and plaster! In Peru I could have brought in a dozen Indians from any of the villages …’

  ‘Now, Daddy!’ Cece took her father’s arm. ‘You know you said, doesn’t matter what it costs.’

  He growled, but when he looked down into her face it was like hearing one of the menhirs of Stonehenge suddenly whisper I love you to a child.

  ‘The moment I crossed the threshold,’ Cece gushed, turning back to her guests, ‘and felt the vibrations of ancient days, ancient memories, whispering to me like a half-heard song across the chasm of the centuries, I knew I could live nowhere else!’

  Snow and darkness and Latin prayers … A desperate man imprisoned at the mercy of a powerful and terrible woman … It’s like those books up in her room, thought Lydia, as she followed the party down the hall. Like Camilla, and Christabel, and the Belle Dame Sans Merci.

  Ahead of her, Colwich spread his arms in an expansive gesture as he chatted to the dour millionaire of psychic alignments and the ectoplasmic communications he’d received – under Dr Millward’s guidance, of course – at seances held at ‘our castle’ in Scotland. And he’s as bad as she is, Lydia reflected.

  ‘I’m going to have our bedroom done up in tapestries and medieval furniture, just as it was in olden times …’

  She’s practically begging to be hoodwinked, with Gothic shadows and ‘vibrations’ from the past.

  Sitting at her white-draped table at the Metropole, coffee cooling before her in its gilt-rimmed cup, Lydia turned the mermaid of her necklace in her fingers. And of course there’s no reason a clerk at Barclays Bank wouldn’t believe in faerie voices and elder gods and the spirits of the earth as well, or whatever other mishmash of omens Simon’s poured into this Mr Rolleston’s dreams. ‘Occult and aesthetic …’ A mysterious woman in green, wearing a necklace he’s seen already in his dreams …

  He’ll be fired without a character if anyone ever finds out he’s been giving details of a depositor’s account to a stranger.

  Lydia shivered. And Miranda may die, if I tell him the truth and send him away.

  She closed her eyes, not knowing whether it was Don Simon she hated, or herself.

  ‘I can’t like it.’ Seraphina Bellwether had sidled up to Lydia as the younger members of the party exclaimed over the breakfast, set out on an exquisite Regency table in the midst of the tarpaulin-draped dining room. ‘Colwich may be an Earl one day, but had I a daughter, I should certainly not wish to see her marry a young man of his reputation.’ She tilted a significant glance at Ned Seabury, who had been trying all morning – unsuccessfully – to get his lordship alone.

  Since Colwich had departed abruptly – ‘to have a chat with the family solicitor, you know …’ – the dark young eromenos had relapsed into glowering at Cece from across the bright array of silver and Rockingham china.

  ‘Quite apart from … well … what one hears, I understand his lordship spent the whole of his time in Paris, when he was supposed to be studying art – and what business has a young man of his station studying art, anyway? Ogling undraped grisettes, more like, which he could certainly have done at home … Well, I understand that he kept dreadful company, smoking himself into an opium stupor and going about the town with Devil-worshippers. I fear he may lead Miss Armistead into evil habits.’

  Lydia remembered the bottle of laudanum at the back of Cece Armistead’s closet, and the bottle of absinthe.

  And yet, she reflected, Lord Colwich displayed none of the symptoms of opium use with which she had become acquainted in her months at the charity clinic. Most of the morning he had chattered with his prospective father-in-law about the typography in various printings of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and blown kisses at Cece.

  Left as host, Armistead grunted replies to his daughter’s chatter, mostly concerning the prices paid by Vanderbilts and Belmonts for Gutenberg Bibles and First Folios of Shakespeare, and on his other side Emily went into raptures about the house’s ‘Gothic shadows’. ‘I know it must be haunted,’ sighed Julia Thwaite. ‘I’m very sensitive to vibrations and I can feel it in the house’s ancient bones.’

  Does Cece realize that Zahorec intends to initiate her into the Undead? To put it at its baldest, to kill her?

  Would she MIND?

  What has he told her about the vampire state? Does she think it isn’t really necessary to kill your victims? Just take a little blood, the way he does from her? And live forever … with him.

  Does she think they’ll make love in reality as they do in her dreams?

  And when she learns the truth, it will be too late.

  No wonder fledglings hate their masters.

  The acrid whiff of wool long uncleaned and linen unwashed stung her nostrils in the same moment the light from the café’s long windows dimmed, and looking up, Lydia saw a man beside her table. Tallish, stooped, neither fair nor dark, his silk hat in his hands to reveal the greasy gleam of dirty hair, thinning away from his forehead. Though she couldn’t see his face clearly she saw that his eyes were light within smud
ges left by poor sleep. He’d made an effort to drown the smell of his suit and flesh with bay rum and the result was nauseating.

  She set down her coffee spoon. ‘Please have a seat, Mr Rolleston.’

  Instead he fell to his knees and took – and kissed – her hand. At the next table, her Aunt Harriet’s friends Lady Gillingham and Mrs Tyler-Strachley stopped their gossip and stared.

  Timothy Rolleston whispered, ‘My lady,’ and, thank goodness, took the other chair. Even without her spectacles Lydia could tell he was devouring her with his gaze, staring at the cloisonné mermaid on its green jeweled chain.

  Simon, I am going to drive a stake through your heart for this …

  ‘Command me.’

  How about starting with a BATH?

  ‘What were you told?’ At least a week’s association with Cecelia Armistead had given her an idea of the tone to take. Gothic vibrations. La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

  ‘That you had need of me.’

  She touched her forefinger to her lips. ‘You understand that it is not necessary that you understand why we ask these things of you?’ She privately thought the we a nice touch.

  ‘I understand.’ He bowed his head. ‘But thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my soul.’ A tear glistened in his eye and she felt another pang of rage at Simon, for manipulating this man. His voice was not that of a youth just setting sail on his career, but of a man in middle age, beaten and tired. She could see no ring on his bare and ink-stained fingers.

  ‘It is we who thank you, Mr Rolleston.’ She tried to make herself sound like someone in one of Cece Armistead’s novels. ‘What we ask is simple. We seek a man, who entered this country late in January, from Montenegro or Serbia. He will have transferred money from a bank in that part of the world, Sofia or Bucharest.’

  Rolleston nodded, his queer pale eyes not meeting hers but looking away to the side. ‘Many did, when the fighting started, my lady.’