The Kindred of Darkness (10 page)

The butler bowed, and extended a polished salver bearing a card. ‘Excuse me, Madame, but there's a gentleman here to see Mrs Asher.'

‘At this hour?'

‘He apologizes for the intrusion, Madame, but explains he has but newly come to London and knew he might find her here. He is a friend of Professor Asher.'

Lydia had already picked up the card. The lettering on it was just large enough for her to read – with a certain amount of difficulty – without holding it up to her nose.

Esteban Sierra

Piazza del Trinita del Monte

Rome

Feeling a little breathless, she said, ‘Oh … yes, of course.'

Isobel's lips tightened – her own father might have owned a pottery works, but not even she had approved of Lydia's match with a mere lecturer at New College, even if she had been disinherited at the time. But she only said, ‘Then of course, Ross, show him in.'

He came into the drawing room and bowed, with perfect correctness for the twentieth century. Aside from the length of his pale, spidery hair he had the appearance of any thin young gentleman, though if she looked at him closely, she could sometimes see the scars on his face. She found it persistently impossible to notice his fangs, or the fact that he did not breathe. He went first to Aunt Isobel, and begged her pardon for intruding upon her at such an hour – ‘Professor Asher suggested that your generous hospitality is such that Mrs Asher might well be found beneath your roof …' Then to Uncle Richard: ‘I'm certain you have no recollection of it, sir, but we met briefly at the Royal Academy Show in 1906. Was the decision to exhibit the Hogarths yours, sir?'

Uncle Richard – whose passion was his membership in the Royal Academy of Arts – beamed.

Only then did Ysidro cross to Lydia, and bend over – without kissing – her hand.

‘Mrs Asher.'

She hadn't seen him in the flesh in seven months, and had received only a single brief note from him, upon her and Jamie's return from China, telling her that – contrary to what the old vampire-hunter Karlebach believed – he was well. When he said, ‘I trust you've heard from your husband since he and I last met,' she knew it was for Aunt Isobel's benefit. ‘Nevertheless, he bade me seek you out and give you his kindest regards when I came through London, and so you behold me, Madame.'

She replied, ‘I have heard nothing of him for over a week,' and saw a tiny line, like a pen-scratch, flicker into being between his pale eyebrows. ‘But I understand the posts in Italy are frightful.'

‘They are indeed, Madame.' He turned then and included his hostess and host in the conversation, charming them with a wholly fictitious account of where and how he knew Professor Asher (‘My father insisted that I do a year at Oxford – Christ Church – and as my chief study was languages a meeting was inevitable') and drawing them out adroitly: Uncle Richard on art, Aunt Isobel on the slings and arrows encountered in presenting a daughter to Society. When precisely fifteen minutes had elapsed, he said, ‘But I must not further trespass on your evening, kind Madame. Having discharged my errand to my friend, I must be in Bayswater at nine—'

‘Might I prevail on your friendship,' said Lydia promptly, as Ysidro rose, ‘to beg a place in your carriage as far as Paddington? No, really, Uncle, there's no need to turn out poor Perkins—'

Perkins was the Halfdene coachman.

‘—at this hour.'

There followed a few minutes of polite argument, in which Ysidro made it tactfully clear that his coachman waited for them in George Street, and that he would take it as a privilege and an honor to see Mrs Asher on to her train.

‘You don't really have a carriage waiting for you, do you?' whispered Lydia, as Ysidro handed her down the shallow step to the pavement of Berkeley Square, and led her toward the dim shape of a brougham a few houses along.

The warm glow of the gaslight behind them vanished as Uncle Richard closed the door.

‘
Dios
, no. There is a cab-stand at the corner of Davies Street, if so be you have no objection to such a vehicle.'

‘Not in the least. Aunt would be horrified – and horrified at you, for even suggesting that a lady ride in one. Considering you came with no letter of introduction, even, I'm astonished she didn't give us both a lecture about what married women can and cannot be seen to do with even close and trusted friends of their husbands.'

‘I was chosen to come to this country,' returned the vampire, as they climbed into the cab under the gas lamp at the head of Davies Street, ‘because I was a diplomat – and the principles of diplomacy have not changed so very much in three hundred years. Have you something of your daughter's, and of this nursery maid who was taken with her? 'Tis early yet in the night for the girl to be asleep, but children sleep at any hour, and the more so, if, as you say, she were to be drugged.'

‘Thank you,' she said, as the cab began to move, ‘for coming.' In the darkness he was nothing but the gleam of his eyes.

‘Did you not know that I would?'

Heat suffused her face. In her mind she heard again Damien Zahorec's voice:
Are you afraid you might follow
?

But follow to where
?

No good can come
, Simon had told her more than once,
of friendship between the living and the dead
…

So why the confusion, she wondered, at the thought that she had known, down into the marrow of her bones, that if she called him, he would come?

Why the intense consciousness of him sitting beside her, of his gray sleeve against the velvet of her cloak?

She took a deep breath. ‘I've seen Damien Zahorec. He came last night to Wycliffe House – that's where the American girl is staying, Cecelia Armistead. It's he who is seducing her.' As the cab wove its expert way through the porridge of busses, motor cars, carriages and cabs on Oxford Street, Lydia recounted the events of the evening, and her own deductions as to the interloper's motives and intent.

‘He's phenomenally attractive,' she said. ‘I mean that literally: he attracts like a magnet, or at least he did me, in the few minutes we were together. And obviously he has poor Cece completely under his thumb. She doesn't impress me as the kind of girl who'd … who'd ordinarily vamp a man into marrying her so that she could turn over his property to a lover, but it may be that she doesn't think of it in that light. I assume Zahorec plans to kill poor Colwich as soon as they're married.'

‘'Tis more likely he'll be his wife's early victim. That's the usual pattern.' Ysidro folded his hands as they passed into High Holborn, watched the hawkers of oranges and dolls on the sidewalks, and a blind man mending umbrellas in front of the Post Office. ‘I was often in Wycliffe House in the Old Earl's time,' he said at length. ‘The garden went clear to Cadogan Place – not that there was anything but a lane there, then – and I was sorry, when his grandson built the north wing and shut it in. I didn't know you knew the family.'

‘The seventh Earl's daughter was a friend of our family. My aunts wrote to me – that was the year I was in school in Paris – about how horrified they were when she married Alfred Binney, who wasn't a baronet then, just very wealthy. But that's exactly what my mother did, when she married Father. They said about him everything they said about Father behind my back – and about my mother, too. In spite of the fact that it was Father's money that paid for school for my cousins Ritchie and Charles, and kept Halfdene House from being sold.'

‘And kept you from growing up as your aunts did, and Lady Binney.'

Under the calm yellow gaze, Lydia felt disconcerted.
Can I accept his help finding Miranda
, the thought came to her,
without condoning that his ability to give it comes from murder? Just as my aunts accepted Father's money even as they were calling him a vulgar disgrace to his family for going into trade
?

‘Come,' said Ysidro, and took her hand. ‘Tell me what you have learned so far of this Zahorec, and of what you need yet to learn.'

Y
sidro shrank from touching the blanket Ellen had sent – it was one of those into whose binding Lydia had sewn thin silver chains – but ran his fingers over the tucked white lawn of Miranda's frock.

No mother in her senses should be able to watch this
, thought Lydia, as he stroked the lettuce-green silk sash.
Knowing what he is, I should be screaming at him to keep away from anything that has touched my child
.

What's wrong with me
?

Why do I trust him
?

And she tried not to hear her heart reply:
Vampires hunt by making the living trust
.

He touched the fabric to his lips. Champagne-colored eyes half-shut, he faced the window of her shabby room at the Temperance Hotel seeming almost in a trance.

‘Nothing.' He laid the little garment back on the cluttered bed. ‘The dreams of children whisper over London like the night sea. I said, did I not, that Lionel will guess that you will call me, and that I will come.' Beyond him the sooty rooftops were a jungle of chimney pots and ridge poles, touched here and there with the grimy echo of a skylight's glow.

‘Myself, I believe he will hide the child outside of London altogether, to keep the matter from his fledglings.'

‘Do all masters distrust their fledglings?' Lydia leaned her shoulder against the window frame, gathered the little dress in her arms.

‘Not all. Some fledglings learn in time the wisdom of their master's prohibitions. Indeed, some masters take care to choose their fledglings for reasons other than for property, or from desire.'

‘Desire?' Lydia's eyebrows twitched together. ‘I thought the Undead were sexless. That the generative organs ceased to function.'

‘You yourself know, Mistress, how much desire resides in the mind, and vampires in this respect are no more wise than the rest of mankind. Many masters choose those whom they wish to possess, as well as those whom they simply wish to use.' He brushed Nan's gloves to his cheekbone, then tilted his head, eyes half-shut, listening.

‘Nothing.' He set the gloves aside. ‘Thus it happens that many choose fledglings of lesser intelligence, seeking those who will not challenge their dominion. Then when the master
does
perish, it is often without teaching the fledglings all that they might know about the vampire state. This being so, they cannot pass the knowledge along in their turn.'

‘Like the reading of dreams?'

‘That and other matters. Walk with me, Mistress.' He took up her jacket from the bed, and held it for her to put on. ‘Walk and tell me what you will need, to find this interloper's lairs.'

Obediently she donned the garment, removed her spectacles, locked the door behind them and followed him downstairs, where the lobby clerk sat gazing at his copy of
The Illustrated London News
without seeing it – or them – as they passed.

‘I take it your master didn't believe in keeping his fledglings ignorant?'

For a moment, as they went beneath the gaslight in the lobby, she saw his face turn human as he smiled. ‘My master – Rhys the White – like myself was curious about the vampire state. He said that he thought the reading of dreams was originally a hunting skill, in the days before there were many cities, to draw prey from far off, or to find sleepers by their dreams. 'Tis a skill that grows slowly, and not many teach it now. And indeed why should they? We ourselves are safer in cities, where neighbor knows not his neighbor, and money can buy protection from those who do not inquire for whom they work. The poor die unheeded, so what need of stealth and skill?'

Beside the door of All Hallows church Lydia saw two men lying, bundles of rags ranged along the wall, asleep on the sidewalk with greasy caps over their faces, as oblivious to the clatter of the luggage-vans and cabs rattling within feet of them as the hurrying cabmen and drivers were to them. Tramps from the provinces, hoping things would be better in the city. London was full of them.

For a long while Lydia didn't speak.

Then Don Simon asked again, ‘Tell me what you need,' in a voice so gentle she wondered if he read her anger and her confusion. ‘Banking records, you said?'

She took a deep breath, let it out. ‘A vampire fleeing unrest in the Balkans would need a means to transfer his money here, if he wishes to acquire property.'

‘And the method described in romantic novels, of paying for everything in ancient gold coin, would cause more talk than the occasional corpse drained of blood with puncture-wounds in the throat.' He steered her gently past a crowd of coster Don Juans clustered outside a sweet-shop, buying ices for their
donahs.
The glare of electric lights turned the girls' gaudy dresses to jewels. ‘At least in London, it would.'

‘We're probably looking for a single gentleman rather than a company,' Lydia went on. ‘Though I expect
you
operate through a corporation of some sort … The name might be Zahorec or Bertolo, and he'll have started withdrawing cash here around the seventeenth of January. He came here from Cherbourg, so there may have been withdrawals in Paris also.'

‘Duly noted, Mistress.'

‘Can you …' She hesitated. ‘Can you do that?'

His slow smile in the electric glare was once again completely human. ‘Think you it lies beyond my measure, Lady?'

‘How—?'

‘How indeed. Do you not trust me?'

‘I do.' She was aware that she should be ashamed of herself for meaning it. ‘And I'll need access to records in the Bank of England.'

He tilted an eyebrow.

‘I promise I won't do anything silly,' she repeated doggedly.

‘Had I a silver coin for every time a woman has said,
I will not do anything silly
—'