The Kindred of Darkness

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘All right,’ he said.

  Ysidro walked them as far as the back door of the house, listening – Asher thought – to the darkness of the summer night. Only when Lydia had gone inside did Asher say, ‘Thank you for looking after her. For all you have done.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  Their eyes met again. In his own, Asher suspected the vampire read his knowledge that if Miranda were killed, nothing between himself and Lydia would be the same again.

  Into the velvet silence of the night the sound of the Great Tom bell spoke the hour. One o’clock, and the black sky over the old town’s sleeping spires saturated with moonlight and stars. ‘’Twas my doing that Grippen came to know your names. And despite the neglect meted out to well over half the infants of this country,’ Ysidro went on, ‘who shiver under every bridge and railway embankment in London wholly unnoticed by most of its population, I understand your desperation at the thought of your daughter’s peril. But lest you think me sentimental, I will admit that I understand also that should harm befall Miss Miranda, no power on earth will turn aside your vengeance upon every vampire of your acquaintance, myself included. And I understand also that you are a singularly difficult man to kill.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I would not wish to be obliged to make the attempt. Nor to have any of my … fellows –’ he hesitated for a moment over the word – ‘feel so moved, particularly since this pre-emptive defense would perforce involve you both.’

  Asher said nothing. He had guessed this already.

  ‘Tell me – if you know, and you may not … Did the tedious Dr Millward lose one whom he loved to the Undead?’

  ‘I think he must have,’ replied Asher in time. ‘I hadn’t thought of it before. I know his brother died young and unexpectedly in the early nineties – I was out of the country at the time. I know they were extraordinarily close. Even before that death he believed in the existence of the Undead, which I did not. So he always seemed a little crazy to me. By the time I returned to Oxford permanently his wife had left him, and he’d ceased to lecture. So far as I know he lives on what was settled on him in the marriage, and spends the whole of his time obsessively hunting down legends of vampires.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Ysidro.

  As usual, though they stood together beside the door, Asher did not see him depart.

  Accompanied by Ellen and four portmanteaux of apparel appropriate for a morning at a garden show, tea with Aunt Isobel, a formal dinner, the Ballet Russe, and breakfast tomorrow morning – plus a spare green walking costume in case she had to meet a worshipper at the Metropole after all – and shoes – and hats – and rice powder, mascaro, rouge, rosewater and glycerin for her hands, Moondrops complexion restoratíf, pomade, a copy of Haeckel’s Die Lebenswünder, two issues of the Journal Physiologique, and seven pairs of earrings – Lydia took the nine-oh-five train to London the following morning, having missed the eight-twenty-seven. Resplendent in gray hair-dye, eyeglasses, a horrible combination of mustard-colored tweeds and a pair of enormous Dundreary whiskers, Jamie had ridden down to London earlier on his motorcycle to have another look at the Book of the Kindred of Darkness.

  ‘Do you think Simon was lying?’ she asked him, as he glued the Dundrearies in place at the bedroom mirror. ‘That the book really does contain the truth?’

  ‘I think the book contains some truth,’ Jamie had replied. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and stubble – grayed also with flour – incompletely masked the slight red burns on his jaw and chin, where he’d glued his former disguise last night for his visit to The Scythe. ‘He admitted as much. Be careful at Wycliffe House,’ he added. ‘Stay with the company, and declare yourself sick and get out of there as quickly as you can.’

  ‘You don’t really think Zahorec is really going to turn up at Cece’s wedding supper?’

  ‘I think if there’s any danger Armistead is going to put a spoke in his wheel by calling off the marriage to Colwich, he may be unable to resist the temptation to find out what’s going on.’ He feathered streaks of flour into his own mustache thence to the fake foliage on his cheeks: Jamie sometimes joked with Lydia about the time she spent making herself presentable, but when he wore a disguise he was meticulous about putting it on, even if it was just to come and go from a bookshop unnoticed by a parcel of American thugs. ‘He’d see to it that no one noticed him. He’ll almost certainly put in an appearance at the ballet.’

  ‘I don’t think Mr Armistead is really going to call things off,’ said Lydia after a moment. ‘Not if he’s hosting a dinner for forty people and taking twenty of us to first-tier boxes at the Ballet Russe. But he wants to tie all Cece’s money up in a trust, and Lord Crossford got offended because he wants to touch Noel for the money to repair the roof on Crossford Hall. Aunt Lavinnia heard from her dresser that Mr Armistead and Lord Crossford had a frightful row, so in addition to seeing if I can get another look at the contents of the library, my assignment tonight is to find out about the settlement from Lady May.’

  Asher shook his head. ‘I think Zahorec doesn’t know what he’s getting into, tangling with those families. He’d probably be better off hiding in a country churchyard in the Midlands.’ He selected from the corner a knobbed old shillelagh such as an elderly country-man might carry. ‘Will you have time to meet me at the Bag o’ Nails on Sloane Square at five? It’s a perfectly respectable pub into which a lady may step without compromising her reputation.’

  ‘Not if she has an aunt like Lavinnia, she can’t.’

  He kissed her, like being bussed by a holly bush. ‘Fallback an hour later at the Temperance Hotel. I don’t think even Aunt Lavinnia could object to that.’

  ‘I think you’re thinking of someone else’s Aunt Lavinnia. Mine would and could and will.’

  In truth, Lydia reflected some four hours later, as a blue-liveried footman helped her from the Halfdene family landaulet before the gates of the Chelsea Hospital grounds, it wasn’t Aunt Lavinnia she dreaded meeting here at the International Horticultural Society’s Flower Show so much as Josetta Beyerly. Other than their brief encounter at Claridge’s on Wednesday, she had seen nothing of her friend, but whenever chance had taken her to the parks, she had seen the massed green-purple-and-white colors of the suffragists demonstrating before the palace or the Horse Guards, and the newspapers were full of accounts of disruptions of Parliament and social events alike.

  ‘We will make them take notice of us!’ Josetta had said to her, on more than one occasion. ‘And we will make them admit to the nation – to all the nations of the world – what they are doing to women, what they would rather do to women before they’ll give a woman the power to speak out.’

  Lydia comforted herself with the reflection that at so early an hour as eleven, the full publicity value of a demonstration would be lost: why get yourself dragged away to prison if the newspapers weren’t going to be there taking pictures? In any case instead of Josetta, she and Emily encountered the Earl and Countess of Crossford, and with them, Lord Colwich and Cece Armistead.

  ‘It’s outrageous!’ Lady Crossford’s nasal voice pierced the dimness of the orchid pavilion. ‘Who does he think Noel is? An adventurer who’s marrying you for your money?’ Lydia spotted them easily in the sparse crowd: Lord Colwich had inherited both his height and his breadth of shoulder from his mother, and even to Lydia’s myopic eye the grouping of her formidable shell-pink form, his ‘artistic’ green-and-yellow waistcoat, and the bird-of-paradise brightness of Cece’s gold-and-tangerine frock were unmistakable.

  ‘Lady Crossford, of course it isn’t that—’

  ‘It isn’t as if we needed your father’s money …’

  In point of fact Lydia was well aware that they actually did. She crossed the pavilion to them, however, and, mindful of Hellice Spills’ evaluation of Colwich, maneuvered herself close to Cece and her fiancé. Though it went severely against the grain with her, she nerved herself to put on her spectacles – purportedly to read some ve
ry small print on the show catalog – and looked up into the young viscount’s face to ask, ‘Why on earth would anyone deliberately breed a flower that smelled like that?’

  And in spite of the diffuse light within the white cloth walls of the long tent, she saw that the Viscount’s pupils were shrunk to pinpricks.

  Lydia was so surprised she barely heard his response, which like most of Colwich’s theories involved Hindu gods and aeons-deep recesses of pre-human time. She fell back from the main party, watched that tall, stout form as he moved among the tables of fragile Phalaenopsis and gaudy Cattleya.

  Cocaine on top of opium? At eleven in the morning?

  Nothing in his manner suggested opiates. He was talking fast and gesturing more wildly than Lydia had seen him do on other occasions, which did look like cocaine. Still wearing her spectacles, she saw Cece’s worried expression as she glanced up at him.

  No wonder poor Ned Seabury says he’s changed. A change dependent on how much of what he’d taken on any given day …

  And what kind of dreams is he having, that make him grope for the opium-pipe first thing out of bed?

  Her own dreams last night had left her shaken: passionate kisses in Zahorec’s arms, dizzying caresses that alternated with a curious succession of peril-and-rescue episodes involving the dark-haired woman whom he called Ippolyta. She is holding me prisoner, he had whispered, clutching her hands through the bars of his cell. I’ve been here nearly a year. She’ll drink of my blood, nearly unto death, then bring me back, slowly. She’ll make me become what she is, a monster, damned …

  And Lydia had forced herself to remember, This is a dream. A lure.

  Did any of this really happen?

  Does it matter whether it did or not?

  She wants me, he had told her at one point. She says she loves me … Maybe she does. We were lovers; her love was passionate, insane. He’d closed his eyes in the silvery moonlight – in that particular dream Lydia stood on a convenient snow-covered ledge beneath the window of his cell, clinging to the bars with a hundred feet of rock wall and another hundred feet of cliff-face below her, shivering in her jade-and-lavender silk. (Why that dress? It’s completely unsuited for climbing cliffs in.)

  She said she loved me from the moment we met …

  Through the window Lydia had seen the bite marks on his throat, the blue of his eyes like aquamarine.

  Had the woman Ippolyta – presumably, the Master of that particular area of Romania or Bulgaria or wherever it was all taking place – really lured him to her castle with threats to kill herself if he married the young lady to whom he’d been engaged? (Where were the servants during all this?) Or was that only something he’d told Cece?

  Later, in another dream (he’d managed to get out of his cell somehow and meet her in the woods) he held her in his arms, gently bit her throat, tasted her blood, whispered to her, ‘Don’t be afraid. They lie, who say that we drink our victims dry. We need the blood, but only a taste, a sip. There are those who love the kill, those who revel in death … among us as among the living. Oh my beautiful one, I would never harm you …’

  His hands – on her throat, on her face, on her breasts – were warm, his lips like honey and wine.

  Does he send me these dreams, and then turn his attention to Cece when I turn over or go on to dreaming about dress fittings? She removed her spectacles and frowned across the pavilion at Cece, exclaiming over Julie Thwaite’s new hat, secure in the knowledge that her own bridal ensemble was being made by Worth and boasted seven yards of point-lace train (‘So vulgar!’ Aunt Isobel had exclaimed over breakfast. ‘Nobody wears trains any more!’) and diamonds worth five thousand guineas … provided her father didn’t cancel the whole affair.

  Or is it like a hectograph, and he’s sending out identical dreams to the two of us at the same time, with just the names changed? DOES he use my name in the dreams? She tried to recall. What a gaffe, if in the midst of rescuing Cece from masked highwaymen in the moonlit snow he accidentally called her ‘Lydia’ …

  ‘And how is dearest Isobel?’ The Countess of Crossford appeared at Lydia’s side. ‘Better, I trust?’

  Lydia was frequently tempted, in her dealings with Lady Crossford, to answer such questions with I’m sorry, Aunt Isobel was hacked to death by cannibals yesterday in the drawing room, in the spirit of scientific inquiry. Would Her Ladyship REALLY respond with, ‘That’s nice … Tell her I was asking after her’?

  But the Countess had already turned from her and leveled her lorgnon in her son’s direction. ‘Tell her I was asking after her … Poor lamb, you can see how he feels the insult!’ Before a massed bank of Phalaenopsis Colwich turned suddenly upon Cece, snapped something at her with a gesture that threatened violence, then at once seized her hands when she drew back, stammering apologies: I don’t know what came over me …

  Cocaine and opium before breakfast?

  Passionate dreams that tell you you must do something you know you actually don’t want to, like make love to a woman, or buy houses for someone you barely know, or divulge information about your customers’ accounts?

  ‘And then will I be free?’ the clerk Rolleston had whispered, desperately, despairingly.

  And then will I be free?

  ‘At least that frightful father of hers will be going back to the Wild West or wherever he’s from once the wedding is over. But you know he’s going to do everything he can to interfere with their lives! All expenses over a hundred pounds must be submitted to the trustees indeed! And as for buying them that miserable little house on Eaton Place, I’m sure Noel would be far happier living in Crossford House with his lordship and myself. He has no concept of how to hire servants or run a house, and …’

  Lydia wondered if, after her meeting with Jamie, she dared make herself late getting back to Halfdene House in order to be at the Metropole again at six, in case the errant Mr Ballard had been lured, pressed, twisted into keeping his rendezvous with the Goddess in Green. Isobel will murder me …

  Good Heavens, in sixteen years I may need her goodwill when it’s time for Miranda’s come-out …

  Pain closed her throat like a crystal hand.

  Dear God. Dear God, let Miranda be in need of a come-out at seventeen …

  ‘Look!’ Emily seized her elbow, pointing through the crowd in ecstasy. ‘Oh, look, Lydia, there’s the King!’

  Jamie wasn’t at the Sloane Square pub at five, with or without false whiskers. Nor had the clerk at the Temperance Hotel seen him, when she went there at half-past. She waited as long as she dared at the Metropole, stroking the jointed tail of her little bronze mermaid and wishing that, like Jamie, she could don false whiskers and ghastly mustard-colored tweeds and not have to worry about being descended upon by someone she knew.

  ‘I have ordered the carriage for seven,’ Aunt Isobel greeted her when at last she slipped into Halfdene House by a side-door and attempted to get up the stairs unobtrusively. ‘Honestly, Lydia, considering the honor Lady May is doing Emily by asking her to be one of Cece’s bridesmaids, I would have thought you would have made more of an effort—’

  ‘Letter for you, ma’am.’ Ross handed it to her as she started up the stairs.

  The envelope was the stationery of the Bank of England. It had been posted at ten that morning.

  It was addressed in a hand that was shaky and crooked as a drunkard’s, or of a man laboring under illness or pain so great that he could barely form the letters.

  But the letters were shaped in the fashion of the sixteenth century.

  On Bank stationery within, those same staggering characters spelled out a list of names – Barger, Scrooby, Graves, Barrow – and of money transferred, properties bought, accounts under new names arranged.

  With the same sense of sudden clarity she got when putting on her spectacles, Lydia suddenly understood.

  Understood how Noel Wredemere had been induced to propose to Cece Armistead. Understood why Noel had turned from the friend he loved to a gir
l he scarcely knew with such blithe disregard. Understood why Damien Zahorec had no need of so wealthy a patron as Titus Armistead, and what he planned for Cece.

  Understood everything.

  And her heart turned to ice in her breast.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Nests of the Undead haunted the unbroken forests of Germany and Gaul ere the coming of the Romans to the North. Among the Nervi and Atrebates they were worshipped as gods; among the Arverni and Ubii, spe-cial priests existed to protect against them, and in no case would travelers venture into the woods alone after dark. The first Master to dwell in Paris was Chramnesid, who preyed principally on travelers. He created Rigunth and Margareta to dwell with him in Paris and Godomar and Grimald who re-mained in the forests. Grimald later became a bandit-chief on the road between Paris and Bruges. Margareta became Master of Paris after Chramnesid’s destruction and was in the days of the great siege of Paris by the Northmen succeeded by Egles …

  True or not true?

  Asher turned the page.

  Did it matter?

  The blood of cats, mixed with the distilled essence of the garlic root and the crushed fruits of the wood laurel will free the ancelot (a late Latin word meaning ‘little servant’, presumably fledgling) from his master’s will. Yet to continue such potion over time brings madness.

  Why insert that caution, if the book – or even that particular formula – was a trap?

  And how did it accord with the statement, elsewhere in the book, that the hold of the Master over the fledgling was absolute?

  Or the accounts in both the Prague and the Paris printings, of fledglings who had indeed (in some fashion unspecified) defied their masters and set up rival nests?

  There weren’t many cities of any size in Europe in 1360. Asher scratched gingerly where the spirit-gum stung beneath his false whiskers. Paris might have held fifty thousand people, London perhaps half so many. Far easier for a predator – or a small circle of predators – to hide in, than in a countryside whose few inhabitants knew one another’s faces from birth.