She set down her oyster-fork, her hands trembling too badly to wield the delicate little instrument. She wondered if Ysidro would be hunting tonight, and how she might reach him.
She closed her eyes briefly, and behind the lids seemed to see those crooked, staggering characters, spelling out all that she had asked to know about Lionel Grippen’s lairs.
Miranda …
She had consulted Uncle Richard’s Ordnance Survey of Great Britain at Halfdene House. Of Grippen’s properties, only one – a farm called Tufton, a few miles beyond St Albans – lay close enough to a railway line that Nan Wellit would have heard the trains go by.
The footman replaced her oysters Florentine with timbale du jambon farcie; Terence Winterson asked her, What did Lady Halfdene think of his suit? He thought if he could not marry Emily he would very likely die.
Lydia poked once or twice at her timbale, and tried to formulate a reply. She’d wired the information about Tufton Farm to James at Oxford, not knowing where else to send it. The thought of what she proposed to do tonight terrified her (but it’s almost perfectly safe this early, with everyone at the ballet), but her sense of urgency – of not knowing how much time she had left before something frightful happened to Miranda and Nan – pressed on her like a nightmare.
Poor Noel.
And poor Ned.
At eight-thirty, when the coaches came to the door to transport everyone to the ballet, Lydia found herself sharing – as she’d hoped – with Julia Thwaite, Terence Winterson, Lady Priscilla Sidford (sixteen, and in awe of Emily’s Worth gown), Lady Priss’s aunt Vorena, and Emily. The presence of Aunt Vorena relieved Lydia of any sense of guilt (though Aunt Isobel will still kill me if I don’t make it to the ballet by the end …) when, halfway to Leicester Square, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, curse! My bracelet – I left it in the downstairs washroom at Wycliffe! I know I did …’
Aunt Vorena’s placid retort – ‘Surely Lady May’s footmen will put it aside’ – was nearly drowned in the shrill cries of the three younger ladies of the party.
‘I won’t feel right if something should happen.’ Lydia turned on her seat, and rapped at the window of the coach. ‘Curtis, I’m devastated, but could you stop a moment and let me out? I must take a cab back to the house—’
‘Mrs Asher!’ cried Aunt Vorena. ‘You’ll never—’
‘Now, it’s perfectly respectable. Yes, Curtis, I mean it, please stop …’
‘It’s all right, Mrs Sidford,’ soothed Winterson, ‘I’ll be happy to escort Mrs Asher …’
After ten minutes of argument, Lydia was on the pavement in her gold-and-turquoise silk, while young Mr Winterson hailed a jarvey from the press now jamming Piccadilly. ‘I’m quite all right,’ she assured him. ‘Honestly—’
‘It would be no trouble at all—’
‘Emily would never forgive me if you missed the ballet.’ Lydia gathered the silken billows of her coat and climbed into the cab. ‘Go along now … I’ll be at the theater in just twenty minutes …’
As soon as the Sidford carriage worked its way back into the flow of traffic, Lydia turned to slide open the driver’s window behind her, and called out, ‘Excuse me, sir … could you make that Walton Street instead?’
Pain woke Asher. Seeping cold, lantern glare, the reek of gin and sewage almost drowning the chloroform still clinging to his mustache.
But mostly pain.
He tried to roll over and gave it up instantly. His legs were trapped; it felt like his right ankle was broken, under the crushing weight of …
He blinked at it, barely visible in the clammy darkness. Stone blocks, with traces of ancient carving – Roman?
What the …?
He twisted a little where he lay on the broken tiles of an old floor, saw pillars holding up a roof that was lost in blackness overhead, and a portion of what had been a fresco, nearly obliterated with time and damp. A dark lantern burned six feet from where he lay.
The skin of his face stung, where someone had ripped away the concealing plumage of false whiskers. The fake eyeglasses were gone, too. His shirt collar was open, as were the cuffs of his sleeves. The silver chains had been taken.
‘Millward!’ he shouted. ‘Millward, God damn you!’
‘No, Professor Asher.’ Osric Millward stepped through a low door in the wall to his right. ‘God damn you.’ He had a rifle in one hand, an American Winchester. His hawk-like face set like stone. Movement to his left caught Asher’s eye. Seabury and another man – scarcely a boy, in a plum-colored Eton jacket, grim but visibly scared – stepped from the ruins of what had been another doorway.
The boy must have been driving the cab.
He knew exactly where he was. The Roman merchants’ house that survived beneath the crypts of St Rood in the City.
‘I’ve suspected for a long time that vampires use the living as their agents,’ said Millward. ‘I know they threaten, coax, bribe … They can command the mad, as they command wild beasts. They can bribe the venal, who don’t know and don’t want to know why their employers want what they want. They can seduce women –’ he shrugged dismissively – ‘and cow the weak, the degenerate, the superstitious: Lascars and Italians and Negroes. But for a true man, a white man in command of his faculties, to serve them, knowing what they are – faugh!’
Shame scorched Asher despite his fury.
‘And for a long time I’ve known that this is the only way to catch them.’ Millward’s deep voice echoed among the broken columns, the wet darkness smelling of sewage and rats. ‘Underground, where they hide – but among the streams and hidden rivers which will blunt their perceptions, limit their movements.’ He slapped his rifle. ‘I can hit a moving target by lantern-light at a distance of a hundred feet. So can Ned, and Roddy there. But from the first I knew we needed living bait. I think a man who’d take money to lead Armistead to vampires is an appropriate choice – and I can’t say I was shocked to learn it was you.’
‘It would have been appropriate,’ said Asher slowly, ‘had my dealings with the London nest been prompted by greed, or love of power, rather than duress.’
‘What duress?’ demanded Seabury shrilly. ‘When Mrs Asher spoke of your “dealings” with the Undead, it sounded a great deal more like the understanding that comes from collaboration.’
‘That’s because you weren’t paying attention. All that concerned you was to rescue your friend Noel from the clutches of Cece Armistead and her vampire lover – not to find out how deep Noel’s involvement with that lover might be.’
‘That’s a—’
‘If Mrs Asher wasn’t frank with your assistant about the threat the Master of London is holding over our heads –’ Asher turned back to Millward – ‘it was because she suspected he’d do exactly what he did do: renege on his sworn word and tell you everything.’
‘And why not?’ retorted Millward haughtily. ‘I know what the fresh bite on your arm means. Had your dealings with the Undead been those of an honest man, you would have taken me into partnership from the beginning. Instead you go straight to that poisonous American thug, Armistead, and give him what he seeks: a means to introduce the curse of these vile things to a new continent – two new continents! – which have never known the fear of the dark hours …’
‘How do you know that?’ Asher tried to shift his left leg beneath the stones, but the pain in his right stopped him, gasping, from even the attempt. ‘How do you know there aren’t vampires in every American city already, who don’t need to go to work for Armistead any more than Cece’s vampire lover does? I told Armistead to have nothing to do with the Undead; that his plan was a stupid one – something he didn’t want to hear. I refrained from telling him that both his daughter and his prospective son-in-law were working for a vampire, possibly under duress, though it didn’t sound like it to me any more than ours did to Seabury—’
Seabury reached him in three strides. ‘You know nothing about it! Noel would never—’
‘Check his ba
nk account.’
The younger man lashed out with a vicious kick, which Asher dodged while he hooked Seabury’s other leg from under him. Seabury flipped backward and Asher caught his rifle as he fell, tried to twist to cover Millward and gasped in shock at the agony in his trapped leg. Young Roddy sprang forward, jerked the weapon from Asher’s weakened grip and kicked him. Millward fired – Asher heard the shrill crack as the bullet ricocheted off the tile of the floor yards away – and Roddy scrambled back, tripping over Seabury. The two of them retreated in haste, leaving Asher half-unconscious on the broken floor.
He heard Millward say, ‘It’s eight o’clock.’
‘If Noel gave money to the vampire it’s because that bitch made him …’
‘We’ll talk about it later, Ned. The Fleet’s just beyond that wall.’
Asher didn’t bother opening his eyes. He knew where the ancient river ran in its bricked-in bed.
‘So they’ll be coming from the opposite way. Be ready for them.’
And if you think a silver bullet is going to stop Lionel Grippen – or Damien Zahorec – you’re in for a nasty surprise. Asher debated about warning them but couldn’t speak, almost nauseated from the pain in his leg and ribs and head.
Lydia, he thought. Lydia’s going to come in from her ballet outing with Armistead and the clerk will tell her I haven’t been in. Sophister isn’t on the ’phone … Will she go to the shop? Contact Ysidro? Not that anyone could find the vampire at will …
Underground, Ysidro wouldn’t be able to locate him.
The silence deepened, save for the hiss of the lamp fuel as it burned, and the occasional, far-off vibration of the Underground train.
Damn all vampire hunters.
TWENTY-THREE
The lock on the side door of St Mary’s Westbourne was so old – and so large – that Lydia almost felt she could have stuck her finger into it to move the levers, never mind the picklocks Jamie had taught her to use. She’d brought a candle and matches in her very small gold-beaded reticule, and the thread of light slipped eerily across the dark balusters of the altar rail, the chaste columns flanking the nave. Lydia found the door to the crypt easily, and descended, hand pressed to the glass-smooth stone of the central column.
As Ysidro had said, there was a second crypt beneath the first, accessed through a half-forgotten door behind the coal-hole: chillingly damp, circular and barely a dozen feet across. We must be right on top of the old river …
Even before she reached the bottom of the steps, she guessed it would contain a coffin.
And it did.
Her first thought was to wonder how the workmen had managed to get it down those stairs.
Her second, to wonder if it was empty.
It stood on a stone pedestal in the middle of the little room, lid off. (If he’s in it he’ll have seen my lantern light and it’s too late for me to run anyway … Oh, good. Empty.)
Surely if one is going to sleep in a coffin all day one would purchase a nice new one?
A second glance showed her – nearly hidden in the gloom – a ruinous niche leading off the crypt, containing a second dismantled tomb. Of course. He wants something that one would expect to find under an old church, in case someone came looking.
Turn around, she thought. Go back RIGHT NOW.
But she remembered the crooked handwriting of the note she’d received. Am I right?
Am I right about where he’s been hiding? HOW he’s been hiding?
There was, as she’d guessed there would be, a second door to the sub-crypt, which led to a short flight of (newly mended) steps, and thence to what had to be the sub-cellar of Dallaby House. A workbench glinted with small jars, a wooden pharmacist’s cabinet replete with tiny drawers. She unscrewed the cap of one big jar and made a face at the reek of ammonia. Others held only the faded pungency of crushed herbs. Another large jar was labeled silver chloride. Others were honey, gold dust, laudanum.
On a shelf above the workbench lay a yellowed, ragged bundle of pages, stripped of their cover and held together with ribbons like a Christmas present. Lydia held her candle close, but guessed what she’d see printed on the topmost soiled page, and she was right.
Libro Tenebrarum Gente
(Jamie had warned her about medieval Latin making free with word-order.)
de Iohann de Vallisoletos
Antwerp 1680
It looked thinner than Jamie’s description and, recalling some of the treasures of her scholarly friend Anne Gresholm’s library, Lydia lifted it gently and looked at the end. The stiff black-letter columns simply ran down to the bottom of the page.
The book was incomplete.
He’s trying to collate it. Like Jamie said about all those copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio, to compare information in this copy with others, to find the truth.
Gladder than ever that she’d taken the precaution of daubing herself with Jicky perfume in the cab, she opened a further door with infinite care. This one was new, and the stairway recently mended. The reek of opium reached her halfway up. Meditation chapel indeed! How much is he smoking, for it to smell so strong this many hours after he’s left?
Make this quick. If you stay in that room more than a few minutes you’ll be drunk as a wheelbarrow just from breathing the air.
The door at the top was elaborate, new masonry bright against the darkened stones of the old. The room beyond it had probably been a boot hole or a lamp room, now festooned with hangings of black and gold silk that must have cost Titus Armistead a pretty penny. A lamp wrought of a pierced ostrich egg sprinkled those glimmering tapestries with soft pink light. An ebony divan of fantastic shape, a carved ebony armoire, and a low ebony table crowded with empty absinthe bottles, laudanum bottles, open jars and boxes of gluey brown pastilles that smelled of opium and sugar. A pipe, an opium lamp, and an ivory dish of the brown opium pills lay among the mess.
And on the divan, snoring in a profound stupor, lay Noel Wredemere, Lord Colwich.
But he’s at the ballet …
The stylish pumps he’d worn at the Flower Show that morning lay beside a chair. The dark mud that Lydia recalled from her own shoes still adhered to the soles. He was still in evening dress from dinner, and the clothes he’d worn that morning were draped over the chair: striped trousers, gray coat, that refulgent yellow-and-green vest. Lamplight caught something in the half-open door of the wardrobe. An identical vest, tailored for a slimmer man. On the wardrobe’s floor, identical shoes, made for a narrower foot.
Lydia opened the door wider, held the candle high.
The wardrobe was full of sets of clothing, one half made for Noel Wredemere’s chubby teddy-bear stature … and the other, not.
For a moment she was back at Ysidro’s side in the upstairs hallway of Wycliffe House, facing Hellie Spills in the backstairs doorway …
‘Get your hands up,’ said Cece’s voice behind her. ‘Or I’ll shoot.’
Lydia turned, and raised her hands.
Sure enough, Cece had a gun, a big American revolver. Lydia wondered if it was her father’s, or if it belonged to one of his ‘boys’.
Lydia straightened her spectacles. ‘Do you honestly think you can get away with it?’
‘There’s nobody in the house—’
‘I don’t mean me; I mean Damien drugging himself awake and stepping in and controlling poor Noel like a hand-puppet during the daytimes.’
The girl looked down at her fiancé’s snoring form with undisguised contempt. ‘Are you kidding? It’s exactly what Noel’s always wanted out of life: someone to make all his decisions for him while he drowns his brain in a vat of dope. He’s happier than he’s ever been in his life.’
‘You’ve only known him five months,’ Lydia pointed out. ‘But it’s going to kill him …’
‘He won’t care.’ She shrugged.
‘And probably long before that happens, the elixir Damien is using to stay awake during the daytimes to control him will drive Damien mad.’
The girl’s eyes flared with alarm, then quickly narrowed. ‘No, it won’t.’
‘Did he tell you that?’ Lydia went to sit on the edge of the divan, putting the snoring Noel in the line of Cece’s fire. What a horrible thing to do, she thought – Cece looked so wrought up by her role as Tough Jane that she might shoot anyway – but settlement or no settlement, with the wedding only a month away, she – and Damien – won’t have any substitute plan for a dead suitor. ‘How many versions of the Book of the Kindred have you read? Most of them warn against that particular formula.’
James had actually only found one that did so, but Cece’s eyes shifted as she struggled to hold her ground. ‘How did you guess?’ she countered at last, and Lydia raised her eyebrows and looked surprised.
‘I didn’t guess,’ she lied blandly. ‘Every printing of the book gives the technique by which a vampire can control the actions of a sleepwalker, though the stuff they have to drink to stay awake and do it is sometimes different.’
It was a safe assertion. At a guess this girl knew no more French than the pen of the gardener’s aunt and no Latin at all. ‘All of them say the sleepwalker has to be pretty much drugged senseless, though that 1637 Prague edition says that vampires can enter into the minds of the mad as well. I suppose drugged – or falling-down drunk – is easier to come by than schizophrenia.’
The haggard thinness of that pitiful Bank of England clerk returned to her, staring at her across the white-draped tables of the Café Metropole. The wandering, jagged letters on the Bank of England stationery. Opium had beyond a doubt opened that poor man’s dreams to Don Simon’s whispering, and when he’d fought against them – successfully – it had probably taken very little for Simon to get him to waken from his dreams towards morning and light up another pipe – or two, or three …
Enough to let Simon step into his mind, like a sober party-goer taking over the reins when the coachman proved too drunk to find his way home. And drive it all the way to the Bank of England. Even as, more and more frequently, Damien Zahorec had been tooling Noel around London like a rented gig.
The Kindred of Darkness Page 23
