The Kindred of Darkness

by Barbara Hambly

  She slid an arm around Lydia’s waist. ‘And who was that outré creature I saw you with yesterday at the Metropole? What on earth did you say to him, for him to actually kneel and kiss your hand? My dear, don’t tell me you’re going to give that husband of yours something to worry about at last?’

  Lydia had the presence of mind to roll her eyes. ‘He’s a student of Professor Asher’s,’ she explained in her kindliest voice. ‘And yes, he does do things like that … But his uncle is a specialist in migraines, and I needed to ask him a few questions on the subject …’

  ‘Oh, you poor darling! And here I thought you just cooked one up the other night to escape from that frightful affair at Wycliffe House!’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ replied Lydia. ‘My doctor recommended regular rest in the afternoons, so as soon as I’ve met with Ned Seabury – who I understand knows a specialist in Brighton – I’m hoping to get back to Oxford … Oh!’ she added, as the Claridge’s doors opened. Among all the black-and-gray-clothed gentlemen of the world – even in fake spectacles and a fake beard and walking with the slouch that took three inches off his height – she knew Jamie by the way he moved. He was still carrying the cane he’d bought. ‘I think I see Mr Seabury now … Please excuse me.’

  She hurried up the steps, not exchanging so much as a glance with her husband as they passed one another.

  In a murmur no louder than the rustle of leaves he murmured, ‘He’s alone.’

  ‘Mrs Asher!’ Ned Seabury sprang to his feet, and even without her eyeglasses Lydia could see he was taken aback. Apparently it had never occurred to him that his fellow vampire seeker might be someone he already knew.

  He snatched off his bleached straw boater, but her own white straw hat seemed to leave him in no doubt that she was, in fact, the ‘Mrs Curie’ whom someone – it HAS to be one of Teazle’s operatives – had told him was seeking the same traveler that he himself sought. Belatedly he bowed over her hand.

  ‘Before we speak,’ said Lydia firmly, ‘have you told Millward anything? Anything of your suspicions, of this meeting, or anything you guess or know or think you know?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Seabury held her chair for her, then sat with his athlete’s grace.

  Lydia closed her eyes again. Thank you …

  ‘Please don’t misunderstand him,’ begged the young man. ‘No man walks this earth stronger or more steadfast in his opposition to the nameless and ancient evils that hunt the night. But he sees the duty that a man owes to the whole of humankind, and pursues it as he sees it—’

  ‘Without thinking who might be hurt.’

  ‘That’s not …’ He paused and shook his head in vigorous denial. ‘It is just that he thinks of the many before the few. As I should.’ Shame momentarily shadowed his face. ‘Were I stronger …’

  ‘Then I need to ask you –’ Lydia cut off his self-recriminations – ‘on your honor as a gentleman, I need to beg you – to swear to me by all that you hold sacred, that today’s meeting is to go no farther. Not to Dr Millward, not to Lord Colwich, not to Jamie – Professor Asher,’ she corrected herself self-consciously, ‘when he returns … to no one.’ She was fairly certain that Jamie was, in fact, sitting quietly within earshot of the entire conversation, having returned to the café in his usual unobtrusive fashion.

  But everything – her own survival, Miranda’s, Jamie’s as well – depended on remaining, in Damien Zahorec’s eyes, simply a friend of Cece’s, and not the wife of a folklorist familiar with vampire lore.

  And there was no guessing, in the small circle of London society, who would talk to whom.

  ‘Of course.’

  A waiter brought tea, biscuits, and cucumber sandwiches.

  ‘I gather …’ Seabury hesitated, as if unsure how to broach the topic of the Undead. ‘I gather your reason for seeking the man calling himself Ludovicus Bertolo is similar to my own?’

  ‘And I gather you encountered one of the detectives I hired in the course of your own researches?’

  Again he looked discomfited. ‘Please don’t complain of the man. I used every subterfuge to get the information out of him. I had to learn whatever there is to know of this … this creature. This thing masquerading as a man. It was clear to me that you – that someone – was able to pay for information that I’m forced to gather laboriously by myself, and time may be of the essence. Bertolo must be stopped.’

  Lydia nodded slowly. ‘I’ve tried to think of a way to separate Miss Armistead from him without rousing his suspicions,’ she said. ‘But she’s … she’s entranced. It’s enough to make one believe in magic spells. I don’t think she’d listen to reason – God knows what he’s told her about himself! And …’ She hesitated, raised worried eyes to the young man’s face. ‘And I’m afraid Lord Colwich is … is either entranced with Miss Armistead, or with her father’s money. At least he gives the appearance of being so. And if we spoke to him …’

  ‘It wouldn’t do any good.’ Anguish twisted his brow. ‘Bertolo – Bessenyei, he called himself in Italy – won’t give her up. He can’t! Not as long as he thinks he can lay hands on it.’

  ‘Lay hands on what?’ Lydia regarded him in some surprise.

  ‘On the book.’ And when she continued to look blankly at him, he lowered his voice almost to a whisper, as if he feared that at two-thirty in the afternoon vampires would be lurking behind the palm trees in the café of Claridge’s Hotel. ‘Have you ever heard –’ he leaned across the table, his face deadly earnest – ‘of The Book of the Kindred of Darkness?’

  TWELVE

  ‘Oh.’ Lydia blinked. ‘Oh, that. It’s a hoax, isn’t it?’

  It was Seabury’s turn to look blank. Then he snapped, ‘It’s nothing of the kind! The Liber Gente Tenebrarum—’

  ‘—was published someplace – Geneva? – sometime in the seventeenth century, Jamie said, to take advantage of this big craze they had then for witchcraft and the occult, as a sort of reaction against the growth of science. We talked about it one night, Jamie and I and his teacher from Prague, Professor Karlebach, on our way to Peking last year.’

  The dry breath of the Sinai wastelands came back to her at the mention of Karlebach’s name; for a moment she saw again the triangular sails of the dhows on the canal behind the Royal Charlotte, the endless lines of camels and donkeys on the footpath.

  Miranda was with us, sleeping in the cabin …

  ‘Jamie read it when he studied with Karlebach back in the eighties. He said it was a sort of hodgepodge of vampire tales, with a lot of formulae and spells thrown in, that vampires supposedly used to let them walk around in daylight, or take on the shape of women’s husbands in order to seduce them, that sort of thing.’

  ‘The book is not that sort of thing,’ Seabury retorted. ‘It’s no hoax. Vampires exist. They walk among us. Dr Millward has seen them, spoken to them—’

  ‘Oh, so have I,’ said Lydia. ‘Professor Asher and I have fought them for six years now.’

  Not the entire truth, perhaps, but it sounded better than We’re currently working for the Master of London. She folded her hands and tried to look like someone who was on a first-name basis with Professor Van Helsing.

  Seabury gasped. ‘Why have you never told Dr Millward this? Professor Asher has never given the slightest sign …’

  ‘Why haven’t you told Dr Millward that Bertolo – his real name seems to be Damien Zahorec, by the way – is trying to entrap Miss Armistead?’ Lydia tilted her head a little. ‘You’re afraid he’ll do something silly that will get Noel killed.’

  Seabury looked as if he were about to take exception to the word silly, but in the end only closed his mouth, and sighed. In time he said, very quietly, ‘I can’t risk it. But I see no reason why Professor Asher wouldn’t be able to share his knowledge with Dr Millward. Even the awareness that he isn’t fighting his battle alone would be, I think, of inestimable help. To know that someone else understands that these creatures exist, is aware of the danger … It is a lo
nely war that he fights, as you must know. His superhuman resolve has isolated him. Scorned and mocked for his beliefs …’

  Lydia was of the opinion that Osric Millward was probably scorned and mocked for his company manners, and his habit of vilifying academic rivals in public print, as much as for his beliefs about the Undead.

  ‘Professor Asher has a different approach to dealing with vampires,’ she said tactfully.

  ‘Has he killed many?’ He sounded like a wistful boy speaking of a soldier uncle.

  For a moment Lydia saw her husband in the lightless crypts of St Jude in Petersburg, injecting silver nitrate into the veins of those sleeping boys and girls, maiden vampires who had never tasted blood, never taken life. Saw their bodies burst into flame as he dragged them, one by one, up into the pale crystalline twilight of the summer dawn.

  Saw him standing beside the bier where Don Simon Ysidro lay sleeping, a stake and a hammer in his hands.

  She found she could say nothing.

  ‘I’m sorry—’

  She shook her head quickly. ‘Tell me about the book,’ she said. ‘The Book of the Kindred of Darkness. Why does Zahorec – Bertolo – want it, and what does it have to do with Miss Armistead? I presume her father has a copy.’

  He would. It sounded like he’d bought every other example of early printed books in Europe.

  Ned’s brows knit. Other than lines of premature worry scratched deep into the outer corners of his eyes, he was remarkably like the boy of fourteen whom Lydia remembered, passing sandwiches at his parents’ country-house party, back in the spring of 1899. That had probably been the last ‘season’ before his father’s bankruptcy and suicide. Lord Colwich, she recalled – fourteen also and very conscious of his title – had always been at his elbow, producing with eager and laborious pride a full Latin quotation – they were studying Livy that term – to back up whatever scholarly tag Ned had tossed into the conversation.

  The bigger boy had been a total nuisance, but Ned had displayed a kindness and patience rare in boys that age. Was that why the friendship had lasted, when all Ned’s other contemporaries had ‘lost touch’ with him when he’d been obliged to leave Eton? Why Noel had used his own social eligibility to force ajar the door of the world Ned had lost?

  She saw them again, in the bow window of Lady Brightwell’s, heads together as if nothing and no one else were there …

  Yet only days later Noel had passed him unseeing, to flirt with a rich man’s daughter.

  So what was the truth? In the young man’s silence, she read the doubts that he wouldn’t frame even to himself.

  ‘Bertolo – Zahorec – wants power,’ said Ned slowly. ‘That’s what the book contains. The secrets that give one vampire power over the others.’

  I want a list of every bolt hole he’s got, Grippen had said to her. Every lair, every cupboard … every cellar … and that’s all I want of you. You’re not to put foot in any of ’em, nor tell man nor woman, livin’ nor Undead, where they lie …

  ‘Have you read it?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not the real one. There’s a late forgery of it, published in French, in Paris, in 1824, that’s supposedly a translation. I suspect the 1637 Geneva text that it sounds like Professor Karlebach has is inaccurate as well. But the great French occultist, the Comte de Saint-Hilaire, had the 1680 Antwerp printing in his collection, and it was that collection – Saint-Hilaire died last spring – that came on to the market in the summer, when Titus Armistead was in Europe.’

  ‘He spoke of that the other night,’ Lydia recalled. ‘At tedious length …’

  Seabury’s lips tightened. ‘He prides himself on the things he buys,’ he agreed grimly. ‘They all do – American millionaires, I mean. They ship paintings home by the boatload to prove to the newspapers they’re not swine. Rockefeller got such a terrible reputation, between buying Congressmen and hiring thugs to quell the unions, that he’s hired an advertising man to polish his “image” with the press. Given the number of strikers Armistead has had his own “detectives” beat up or shoot, he could do with a little of that himself. In any case,’ he sighed, ‘Armistead was in Paris when the collection came on to the market, and he asked Noel to go with him to take a look at it.’

  ‘He knew Noel, then?

  ‘He was recommended as a man who knew about paintings,’ replied Seabury in a flattened voice. ‘And Noel is a Viscount. For all that stony grimness Armistead is a fearful tuft-hunter, and he’s pleased as punch to see his daughter marry into the nobility. And Noel is very knowledgeable about incunabula. Saint-Hilaire’s collection included some very fine fourteenth-century manuscripts, and about a hundred early printed books. Armistead purchased the entire thing.’

  ‘And this was how Noel and Miss Armistead got to know one another?’

  Again that constricted silence, and the unspoken memory of Colwich and Cece, gorgeous in gold braid and powdered wigs, flirting outrageously in the electric glare of the Wycliffe House ballroom.

  Before Cece slipped away to meet her vampire lover and let him into her father’s library …

  ‘Sweetheart!’

  Lydia turned her head with a start, to see her friend Josetta Beyerly threading her way toward her among the tea tables. An ivory-fair brunette whose figure would have been called voluptuous by anyone with the temerity to treat her as an object of beauty instead of intellect, Josetta had spent a good portion of her thirty-five years teaching French and English to the daughters of wealthy provincials, until a small legacy had permitted her to return to London. At the moment she looked ruffled and rather pink, her straw hat askew and smudges on her sleeves and gloves: the purple-green-and-white ribbon around her shoulder amply attested that she and her fellow suffragists had been demonstrating at Parliament again. But her voice – and her face, when she came near – held only concern.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ She caught Lydia’s hands, then glanced past her with a warm smile, ‘Hullo, Ned! I won’t keep my girl but a moment …’ She lowered her voice, looked down into Lydia’s eyes. ‘I haven’t heard from you, which isn’t like you—’

  ‘I’m well.’ My daughter has been kidnapped by vampires and Jamie and I might get ourselves killed trying to find her …

  Smile.

  Josetta’s brows tugged together, as if she read the lie. ‘There are times,’ she said at length, ‘that I want to slap your aunts. Jenny Boyer tells me you’ve been blackmailed into putting that poor little niece of yours through her paces this Season …’

  ‘It’s not so bad – except for Isobel expecting me to foot the bill for things like new gloves and ballet tickets.’

  The older woman stood for another moment, studying her face. Remembering, maybe, everything Lydia had told her over the years about the workings of her family, since the nights they’d huddled together in the dark of that frightful dormitory at Madame Chappedelaine’s …

  ‘Don’t listen to a word they say to you, honey.’ Josetta put a gloved hand to Lydia’s cheek. ‘Whatever you do, you’re not going to ruin Emily’s life … or theirs. We’ll be over at the corner table,’ she added more briskly, nodding toward the blobs and blots of purple-green-and-white, like bedded-out flowers in the sunlight by the long windows. ‘Plotting – we will ask a question in Parliament and we’ll make them answer … And you …’ She turned to Seabury, and whipped a leaflet from the satchel at her side. ‘You come to our demonstration this evening! Steps of Whitehall, seven o’clock, and tell that horrid old professor of yours if he’d ever actually talk to a woman instead of just about them, maybe he’d learn a few things.’

  Seabury grinned, and took the leaflet. ‘That horse has been standing in front of that fountain for years, not drinking,’ he said.

  ‘Him and every other man in his profession.’ Josetta patted him on the shoulder, and strode away in the direction of her friends.

  For a moment the young man sat, folding the leaflet, first in one direction, then in another. Lydia was silent, watc
hing his face.

  ‘The odd thing is,’ he said, after a little time, ‘Noel hadn’t a good word to say of either Miss Armistead or her father, when he went with them to view Saint-Hilaire’s collection. He found Armistead père vulgar and Miss Armistead’s romanticism tedious – for all his quest for independence – and those frightful waistcoats he wears – Noel can be a terrible snob.’ A smile, reminiscent and forgiving, brushed Seabury’s Cupid lips. ‘He was simply murderous on the subject of Armistead’s pretentions to gentility, and about how Miss Armistead would go on and on regarding spectral lights and ghosts and old tales of teleportation and travel through time in a trance state … We’d walk down the Boul’ Mich and he’d do imitations of them …’

  ‘You were in Paris, then?’

  ‘I’d gone to see Noel. I was worried about him – about what friends had written to me. It’s true he went through a phase, as I think they call it these days, of living on absinthe and opium before he left England … trying to live the artist’s life. You must – or at least I think you must – know what it’s like to be the only child, to be expected to do and be something that you can’t possibly do or be without surrendering your soul and your sanity.’

  His dark glance questioned, and Lydia looked aside from it, sick with the recollection of her Nanna’s discovery of Lydia’s old copy of Anatomie Generale that she’d hidden under her mattress, with its colored plates and precise descriptions of things eleven-year-old girls weren’t supposed to know about or think about or want to know or think about.

  Her father had been away and Valentina had had her locked in one of the attics for twenty-four hours without food, drink, lights, or a chamber pot, to teach her refinement of thought. For years after that Lydia had dreamed about being the only person in the world who had fingers, and trying to hide them because the people in her dreams kept wanting to cut them off.

  It had never occurred to her that boys went through that, too.

  That the heir of an earl who wanted to do something besides be an earl would have to fight, as she had fought.