The Kindred of Darkness

by Barbara Hambly

  And worse, she supposed, because she at least was intelligent. She knew Noel wasn’t, particularly – or even that good a painter.

  And after she was thirteen, she had known that Jamie, at least (or Mr Asher, as she’d called him then) would understand.

  She said, ‘I do know.’

  Another small sigh escaped him. ‘I suppose I should be glad. Before he became enamored of Miss Armistead, as he is now, he was going the pace fearfully hard. Now he seems … more content. And of course though they’d never say so, his parents are sobbing with joy that he’s marrying the Silver Eagle Mining Corporation.’ He looked down into his untouched and now tepid tea. ‘But he isn’t the man I knew.’

  In the pause that followed, the voices of the women at the next table drifted to Lydia’s ears: ‘… climbed on top of the wardrobe to get away from him on their wedding-night!’

  She hoped James was paying attention to that conversation as well as to her own.

  ‘And where does Bertolo – or Zahorec – come into it?’

  ‘That’s just it,’ said Seabury. ‘When I reached Paris in November, Noel introduced me to him as a new friend: scholar, artist, connoisseur, bon vivant. He’d just arrived in Paris the previous week, had met Noel at the Cabaret du Néant and they’d taken one another to their mutual bosoms as kindred souls. Noel does that.’ For a moment the smile returned to tug at the corner of his lips. ‘Develops enthusiasms about people. I thought nothing of it. And he is fascinating – Bertolo, or Zahorec, or, as it turned out, Bessenyei … Count Bessenyei, he called himself in Florence. I quite liked him … until I accidentally learned that he’d been one of Miss Armistead’s suitors in Florence. Cece’s father had purchased a partial copy of the Liber Gente there also, the English John Aubrey translation that is supposed to be based on the lost Paris text of 1510. I gather her father had “Count” Bessenyei’s finances investigated by his tame detectives and it was found he was only recently arrived in Italy from the Balkans, and both his bank account and his bona fides were fairly sketchy. Miss Armistead conspired to keep her father ignorant of “the Count’s” presence in Paris. I suspect it was he who told Miss Armistead to recommend Noel to her father.’

  ‘That it was he who brought them together, you mean.’

  ‘I don’t know!’ He raked his fingers angrily through his hair. ‘Sometimes it seems to me …’ He shook his head despairingly.

  Lydia was silent.

  ‘I say, of course all the landlords in Ireland don’t live there,’ proclaimed Lady Savenake at the next table, loudly enough to be heard all over the café. ‘Who would want to live surrounded by a lot of bog-trotting potato-eaters who sleep with their pigs?’

  ‘Noel changed.’ Seabury’s voice was suddenly small. ‘About a week after they were introduced. He started dreaming about her – reading books about the destinies of kindred souls, and writing to Dr Millward about reincarnation. He asked me, did I think one’s …’ His eyes shifted and he groped for a moment to phrase a thought that dared not speak its name, at least not in the presence of a lady. ‘Did I think one’s deepest habits and inclinations were only something one had learned in this lifetime, and that they might simply be a sort of garment one was given, like the color of one’s eyes? He started smoking opium again, heavily, and drinking absinthe with Miss Armistead in places like the Café l’Enfer and L’Heure Verte. I had already extended my leave twice, but in the end I had to return to London or lose my position.’

  His forehead creased with distress, at the thought that he had abandoned his friend for so mundane a cause.

  ‘But it was nothing I could put my finger on. Sometimes he seemed as troubled by these dreams of her as … Well, as I admit I was.’ He picked up his cup again, set it down. ‘Then shortly before I was to leave, it began to seem to me that Miss Armistead was … was wasting. I know it sounds melodramatic and for a week I tried to tell myself that it was only jealousy: an overheated imagination. For all I’ve studied with Dr Millward – for all he’s revealed to me about the Undead – it wasn’t anything I actually expected to see. But I realized that Miss Armistead always did wear scarves, or collars that covered up her throat. And when I thought about it, I never saw Bertolo during the daytime. He made a great fuss about the bourgeois being slaves to the clock and how the mere thought of rising before five in the evening gave him migraines, but those last few days I was in Paris, I studied him closely. That’s more difficult than you might think,’ he added ruefully, ‘in some ill-lit bistro when everyone has had a few drinks …’

  ‘And when you can’t be quite certain,’ finished Lydia, ‘that you’re seeing what is, or what you only wish were true: that someone you dislike is a demon rather than simply another man.’

  Ysidro standing on the prosaic pavement of Queen Street, arms folded, head down. Whispering of sleep to a houseful of people …

  ‘Did you come to any conclusions?’

  He shook his head. ‘The day before I left, I bribed her maid. Hellice, her name is, Hellice Spills.’

  Lydia recalled the dusky satin of the girl’s thighs against the pinks and golds of Cece Armistead’s coverlet, and the general ridiculousness of a young man wearing Lord Mulcaster’s green velvet livery coat, a powdered wig, and no trousers.

  ‘She confirmed that Miss Armistead had known Bertolo – Bessenyei – in Florence. That Miss Armistead was still meeting him secretly. She demanded every penny I had above my bare passage money; I had to hide in the baggage compartment on the train up to London. She also said that her mistress has had “spells” of weakness and pallor, ever since they were in Florence. “It’s like the witches are riding her,” she said. And she confirmed that she’d seen wounds in Miss Armistead’s throat.’

  ‘Did you speak of it to Noel?’

  ‘I sent him a note that evening, saying I had to see him. Later he told me he’d gone with the Armisteads to St Cloud. I had to leave – I didn’t even have money for a room for the night by that time – and when he returned to England the first thing I heard was that he was engaged to Miss Armistead, and was moving into Dallaby House. While I was crossing the Channel I’d recalled Noel telling me about Armistead buying a partial copy of the Liber Gente Tenebrarum in Florence. Until then, it didn’t make any sense: why a vampire would choose a victim who’s being watched over by a doting father and five or six gun-toting detectives, rather than some poor flower girl whom no one will miss. When I got back to England I got a catalog of Saint-Hilaire’s collection from Dr Millward. And there it was: another copy of the book. It’s what he’s trying to find. What he’s trying to get his hands on.’

  ‘More than that,’ said Lydia quietly. ‘He’s trying to separate Cece from her father, and keep her in England. Vampires have an incredible power over the minds of the living. They can influence them, convince them to go against their own best interests—’

  ‘Dr Millward has told me that, yes.’

  ‘The old ones – the strong ones – can manipulate peoples’ dreams. Use them to make you think you’ve fallen in love, or that events – someone you meet, something you see – have some kind of mystic significance. It’s how they hunt.’

  As Simon does?

  DOES Simon do that?

  And if he’s doing it to ME, how would I tell?

  ‘You know this?’ Anguish burned in Seabury’s eyes.

  ‘I know it.’ She steadied her voice with an effort. ‘Heaven only knows what kinds of visions he’s sending Noel about Cece, or what Cece dreams about Noel at night. But you can see why speaking to either of them would be perilous.’

  ‘I realized that when I saw them come down the gangplank of the Imperatrice together. Bertolo came over only a few days after they did, with a “valet”, a Frenchman named Fournier. Fournier died very soon after that, committed suicide, the police say …’

  Lydia shivered again.

  ‘Bertolo only had one trunk with him,’ Seabury went on. ‘I’m guessing he has to have shipped several ahead of
him, of his native earth, to lie in …’

  ‘Oh, they don’t do that. That’s just an old wives’ tale.’

  The young occultist again looked shocked and a little miffed.

  ‘I would guess he’s purchased others since he’s been here. The problem is finding a safe place to put them, a place that’s absolutely secure, where there is no chance of daylight reaching him, or of anyone finding the trunk, opening it untimely.’

  ‘But how do we find such a place?’ he cried in despair. ‘What can we do?’

  ‘Well,’ said Lydia, ‘I’m working on that. Until such time … Oh, bother!’ The slim, tall figures making their way towards the table could be no one but Aunts Lavinnia and Harriet: Lavinnia’s favorite dragonfly-brown silk was unmistakable. ‘I will not be quizzed about why I obliged Lavinnia to chaperone Emily to Lady Stafford’s reception last night …’

  She got to her feet, caught up her reticule. ‘Can you arrange for me to meet Miss Spills?’ she asked quickly. ‘Tell her I’ll make it worth her while.’ She slipped a half-sovereign from her bag, laid it on the table. ‘And if you value your life – if you value Noel’s life, or mine, or my husband’s – don’t tell Dr Millward anything: not of this meeting, not of anything we’ve said, nothing. Get yourself three silver chains.’ She pushed up her lace cuff, to show him the thick links where they crossed the veins of her wrist.

  ‘So long as the vampires of London thought Millward didn’t know what he was talking about, you were safe. That might not be the case any more. So mind your back, when the sun goes down.’

  THIRTEEN

  ‘Are you sure that this Book of the Kindred of Darkness is a hoax?’ inquired Lydia, when James fell into step beside her as she turned the corner into Moulton Lane. ‘Ned Seabury seems to be taking it very seriously.’

  ‘Ned Seabury takes Osric Millward very seriously,’ Jamie pointed out. He frowned, long, curling eyebrows incongruous behind the horn-rimmed spectacles. ‘Karlebach always spoke of it as a hoax … and just because Grippen is himself a vampire, doesn’t mean that he isn’t being hoaxed as well.’

  ‘It certainly sounds like he’s seeking something in Zahorec’s lairs. Something he doesn’t want me – or his own fledglings – to find.’

  Beside them, traffic streamed west toward Holborn and the City: blue, green, yellow buses of different lines, hackney cabs darting and clattering between luggage vans, motor cars, costers’ carts. Along the side of the street an Italian with a monkey cranked ‘Un di, felice, eterea’ out of a barrel organ.

  London at three in the afternoon.

  ‘As I remember,’ said Jamie thoughtfully, ‘the book contained most of the old folk myths about vampires that one finds all over Central Europe: the holes in their coffins, that eating soil from their graves will banish them, that wolfsbane or garlic or Christmas rose will keep them at bay.’

  ‘The wolfsbane and garlic part is true.’

  ‘Yes, but much of it simply isn’t. As far as I know they do cast reflections in mirrors, and they can’t turn themselves into bats or wolves or mist. They seem to vanish only because they trick your mind into not seeing them leave. It’s been years since I read it, but even at the time that I did, some of the formulae it contained – how some vampires will walk in daylight after coating themselves with a mixture of honey and gold dust, or how they’ll drink pearls pulverized in the blood of a priest to render themselves immune to the effects of silver – sounded ridiculous, or at least impossible to test without putting the vampire into mortal danger.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be exactly what someone would want to lure vampires into believing?’

  ‘You mean that it’s a hoax on vampires?’ He paused on the sidewalk in front of a stationery shop. ‘Surely they’d know it.’

  ‘I suppose.’ Lydia sighed. ‘Did Dr Karlebach correspond at all with Millward on the subject, do you know? He never mentioned him while we were traveling together.’

  ‘That’s probably because in his most recent article, Millward referred to Karlebach as “a racial degenerate”.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘On the other hand,’ Jamie went on, as they approached the jostle and clamor of Oxford Street, ‘people are still paying fortunes for relics of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel that were dug up in Michigan. And now that I think back on it, the author – who is given as Iohanot Vallisoletum – described fairly accurately the structure of vampire nests. He spoke of them existing in cities – Paris, London, Bruges, Toledo – which I found interesting because the Greek and Balkan tales of vampires all take place in villages or the countryside. And as I recall, John of Valladolid – whoever he was – attests that the vampire state is spread by corruption of the blood, not merely the fact of being bitten by a vampire. So it does sound as if he had some experience with vampires.’

  A little diffidently, Lydia asked, ‘Might Don Simon know about it, do you think?’

  ‘I would lay money that he does. He’s often said he’s made a study of the vampire state; he can’t not have heard of it. But whether he’ll tell you the truth about it is another matter.’

  He spoke matter-of-factly, but Lydia could feel in his careful glance his awareness that – much as she loved him – she loved Don Simon as well. She’d told Jamie about the Tiffany mermaid and understood that while the trinket in itself was nothing – Don Simon was an extremely wealthy man – a pale shadow fell between them at the mention of the vampire’s name.

  And she knew quite well that despite the fact that were it not for Don Simon, neither she nor Jamie nor Miranda would be alive, the Spanish vampire’s word could not be trusted. Not on all matters. Almost certainly not on matters concerning himself or other vampires.

  ‘It does seem,’ she went on after a moment, ‘that Zahorec might be on the trail of the book. If he’s has been living like Count Dracula in some crumbling castle in the mountains killing peasants, he probably doesn’t have a stockbroker and couldn’t come up with the cash to simply buy the thing when Saint-Hilaire’s collection went on sale. He seems to have latched on to Cece in Florence, which is where Mr Armistead bought another copy of it, as well as a First Folio of Shakespeare … of which he already had three, from what he told me Saturday night. Surely one would do.’

  ‘Not if you’re an American millionaire,’ returned Jamie, amused. ‘For one thing, most extant copies of the First Folio are incomplete, so if you want to know everything that’s in it, you need to see more than one. At ten or twelve thousand pounds apiece that can get to be an expensive hobby.’

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Even if one paid a tithe of that for a good copy of the Liber Gente …’

  ‘One can still see why Zahorec would go after Cece.’ They stepped around a pair of men washing the windows of Allenby’s Fine Soaps. ‘Though most of the older vampires seem to be phenomenally wealthy, he doesn’t seem to be. If he fled from the fighting, he may have had to leave most of his assets behind. I wonder if he told that poor “valet” he hired who and what he was?’

  ‘He’d have needed some kind of contact with the daylight world when first he left the Balkans,’ said Jamie. ‘I wonder where he did come from. Useless to try to find out now, with Bulgarian troops all over the mountains …’

  They emerged on to the crowd and hustle of Oxford Street, and he raised his stick to signal a cab.

  ‘I’m going to send you to Regent Street,’ he went on, ‘to purchase a new hat in the arcade. When you’ve done that, can you convince the shopkeeper to let you leave her premises by the back door? Take another cab back to your hotel. We’re being followed and I want to see which one of us he goes after when we split up.’

  Lydia said, ‘Bother,’ and didn’t look around. Completely aside from the fact that she didn’t have her spectacles on, she was fairly sure she wouldn’t be able to glimpse a reasonably competent professional even if she could see. ‘Why would anyone be following you? You’ve only just got back to England.’

  ‘I’m wondering that m
yself. Too much to hope he hasn’t got a good look at you …’

  A cab detached itself from the rank across from the Post Office, its driver seemingly oblivious to the safety of pedestrians and the ire of motor cars alike.

  ‘Will you be meeting Ysidro this evening?’ His voice was suddenly neutral again. ‘Or this tame clerk of his from Barclays? Then I’d feel a great deal safer if from the hotel you’d go straight back up to Oxford for the night.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ She caught his hand as he helped her into the unsteady vehicle, resentfully aware that for Jamie’s follower to remain unsuspecting, she couldn’t argue or linger … and that Jamie knew this.

  ‘Exactly what Grippen expects me to do. Act like an outraged husband. We’re certainly never going to be able to convince him I’m not in town.’ He pressed his lips to her hand, and turned to give the driver the address. ‘Our friend seems to be about medium height, dark hair, heavy build, brown tweed jacket, three-and-ninepenny bowler hat – a description which fits about a quarter of the population of London. He may in fact be working for Grippen. I’ll come up to you in the morning if it’s safe. Watch out for yourself.’

  He stepped back. Lydia was aware they were being observed, aware that she should simply sit back in the cab and let it bear her away …

  But she was aware also that if Jamie was going to look for Grippen, there was at least a chance that he wouldn’t come back. She leaned out – causing the driver to jerk his horse to a stop again with an oath – and caught her husband’s hand. ‘Jamie—’

  He turned back, that careful calmness already in his face and demeanor: armor that had protected him long before he’d put it to use as a spy. No wonder he and Simon get on so well …

  For a moment they regarded one another in silence, as if that pale shadow were not in both of their minds.

  ‘Jamie, don’t let’s let this – the vampires, and dreams, and mistrust – come between us. Don’t let it pull us apart.’