The Kindred of Darkness (14 page)

He'll be fired without a character if anyone ever finds out he's been giving details of a depositor's account to a stranger
.

Lydia shivered.
And Miranda may die, if I tell him the truth and send him away
.

She closed her eyes, not knowing whether it was Don Simon she hated, or herself.

‘I can't like it.' Seraphina Bellwether had sidled up to Lydia as the younger members of the party exclaimed over the breakfast, set out on an exquisite Regency table in the midst of the tarpaulin-draped dining room. ‘Colwich may be an Earl one day, but had I a daughter, I should certainly not wish to see her marry a young man of his
reputation
.' She tilted a significant glance at Ned Seabury, who had been trying all morning – unsuccessfully – to get his lordship alone.

Since Colwich had departed abruptly – ‘to have a chat with the family solicitor, you know …' – the dark young eromenos had relapsed into glowering at Cece from across the bright array of silver and Rockingham china.

‘Quite apart from … well … what one
hears
, I understand his lordship spent the whole of his time in Paris, when he was
supposed
to be studying art – and what business has a young man of his station studying art, anyway? Ogling undraped
grisettes
, more like, which he could certainly have done at home … Well, I understand that he kept
dreadful
company, smoking himself into an opium stupor and going about the town with Devil-worshippers. I fear he may lead Miss Armistead into evil habits.'

Lydia remembered the bottle of laudanum at the back of Cece Armistead's closet, and the bottle of absinthe.

And yet, she reflected, Lord Colwich displayed none of the symptoms of opium use with which she had become acquainted in her months at the charity clinic. Most of the morning he had chattered with his prospective father-in-law about the typography in various printings of the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
, and blown kisses at Cece.

Left as host, Armistead grunted replies to his daughter's chatter, mostly concerning the prices paid by Vanderbilts and Belmonts for Gutenberg Bibles and First Folios of Shakespeare, and on his other side Emily went into raptures about the house's ‘Gothic shadows'. ‘I know it must be haunted,' sighed Julia Thwaite. ‘I'm very sensitive to vibrations and I can feel it in the house's ancient bones.'

Does Cece realize that Zahorec intends to initiate her into the Undead? To put it at its baldest, to kill her?

Would she MIND?

What has he told her about the vampire state? Does she think it isn't really necessary to kill your victims? Just take a little blood, the way he does from her? And live forever … with him
.

Does she think they'll make love in reality as they do in her dreams?

And when she learns the truth, it will be too late
.

No wonder fledglings hate their masters
.

The acrid whiff of wool long uncleaned and linen unwashed stung her nostrils in the same moment the light from the café's long windows dimmed, and looking up, Lydia saw a man beside her table. Tallish, stooped, neither fair nor dark, his silk hat in his hands to reveal the greasy gleam of dirty hair, thinning away from his forehead. Though she couldn't see his face clearly she saw that his eyes were light within smudges left by poor sleep. He'd made an effort to drown the smell of his suit and flesh with bay rum and the result was nauseating.

She set down her coffee spoon. ‘Please have a seat, Mr Rolleston.'

Instead he fell to his knees and took – and kissed – her hand. At the next table, her Aunt Harriet's friends Lady Gillingham and Mrs Tyler-Strachley stopped their gossip and stared.

Timothy Rolleston whispered, ‘My lady,' and, thank goodness, took the other chair. Even without her spectacles Lydia could tell he was devouring her with his gaze, staring at the cloisonné mermaid on its green jeweled chain.

Simon, I am going to drive a stake through your heart for this
…

‘Command me.'

How about starting with a BATH?

‘What were you told?' At least a week's association with Cecelia Armistead had given her an idea of the tone to take.
Gothic vibrations. La Belle Dame Sans Merci
.

‘That you had need of me.'

She touched her forefinger to her lips. ‘You understand that it is not necessary that you understand why we ask these things of you?' She privately thought the
we
a nice touch.

‘I understand.' He bowed his head. ‘But thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my soul.' A tear glistened in his eye and she felt another pang of rage at Simon, for manipulating this man. His voice was not that of a youth just setting sail on his career, but of a man in middle age, beaten and tired. She could see no ring on his bare and ink-stained fingers.

‘It is we who thank you, Mr Rolleston.' She tried to make herself sound like someone in one of Cece Armistead's novels. ‘What we ask is simple. We seek a man, who entered this country late in January, from Montenegro or Serbia. He will have transferred money from a bank in that part of the world, Sofia or Bucharest.'

Rolleston nodded, his queer pale eyes not meeting hers but looking away to the side. ‘Many did, when the fighting started, my lady.'

‘This man goes by the name of Zahorec sometimes, or Ludovico Bertolo, or possibly one of these others …' She held out to him a notepaper on to which she had copied the other names Simon had found in Cece Armistead's desk.

‘You are to speak those names to no one, but to seek him in the bank's records. Tell me what property he has acquired, and the names of all to whom he has transferred money from his accounts. If he has accounts under other names I wish to know those. If he has traveled from London, I wish to know that. You will find everything about him, and everything about his money.'

‘Yes, my lady.' She had the feeling he'd have slipped from his chair and knelt before her again, given the slightest encouragement to do so.

‘And you will find out all these same things about Bartholomew Barrow, if he has any dealings with your bank; about William Duggan, about Francis Houghton …' She gave him every name under which Lionel Grippen had ever held property that she knew about. ‘If they have money, the names of the people they disbursed it to.' From her handbag she took her list so far of Grippen's names and properties, pushed it across the snowy linen to him. ‘If your bank has handled transactions involving any of these properties, I want to know the names of everyone involved and where the money went. Do you understand?'

‘I understand, lady,' he whispered. ‘I shall do as you ask.'

If he'd had any doubts about violating the most sacred rules of his bank, he'd resolved them. Perhaps as he stood on the threshold and saw her, the red-haired woman in green wearing the necklace he'd been shown in his dream by some glowing elf king or elder god or angel … With his head humbly bowed, she could see the gray that streaked his hair. For her convenience Don Simon had, with the utmost casualness, put this poor deluded man in danger of ruin.

‘I shall be here Friday at this time.' Her voice shook as she spoke the words.
You're a goddess
, she reminded herself.
Or the queen of the elves. Or the reincarnated spirit of this man's sweetheart or wife. Such creatures don't have pity for those who run under the juggernaut's wheels for their sakes
. ‘Will you have this information by then?'

‘I should. I'll bring you what I have, lady.' He looked down at his own grubby fingers, then quickly took her hand and kissed it again. Without meeting her eyes, he whispered, ‘And then I will be free?'

FREE OF WHAT???

Fury, pity, helplessness threatened for a moment to block all speech.

Miranda
, she thought.
Oh, Miranda
…

She made herself say grandly, ‘Yes. You will be free.'

Tears flowed down his face and he quickly wiped them with a crumpled and yellowed handkerchief. Then he blundered to his feet and hurried from the café with a swift stooped shuffle. Lydia watched his gray form thread between the bright swatches of the ladies who'd stopped here for a cup of tea to recruit themselves for the evening's ball or dinner or visit to the opera. Ladies who'd gone to Select Female Academies with her mother, who'd said
t'sk-t'sk
when Lady Mary Wycliffe – or Catherine Halfdene – had married ‘beneath them' to rescue the family fortunes. Ladies who gave lavishly to charities and paid their poor maids barely ten pounds a year, ladies whose worlds began with the gossip of their friends and ended at the dressmaker's.

Ladies among whom, all her life, Lydia had felt like a changeling, a visitor from some alien place or time.

At the next table she was aware of Lady Gillingham giving Mrs Tyler-Strachley a trenchant glance as she rose. Lydia laid the price of the coffee on the table beside her cup, got swiftly to her feet, and left the café. She was trembling.

Don't any of you DARE speak to me
…

She understood to the core of her soul why James had quit the Department.

There was a
musicale
at Lady Stafford's that night, but the possibility that Lady Gillingham might be there – let alone a) her stepmother and b) Cece Armistead – overwhelmed Lydia as she climbed aboard the crowded omnibus to Liverpool Street Station.
I can't do it
.

Aunt Isobel will kill me. I've abandoned Emily now two nights in a row
.

And if Simon shows up at Lady Stafford's thinking I'm going to thank him for seducing that poor clerk into jeopardizing his position, I think I'll burst into tears
.

She stopped at her two letter-drops in Finsbury Circus, returned to her hotel room long enough to write a note to Aunt Isobel and change into a traveling costume of tobacco-colored faille, then took a cab to Paddington Station. Her heart wept for the peace of Oxford, for her own house – still and empty as it now felt, the nursery vacant, the servants whispering of this scheme or that to take matters into their own hands. The clock on All Hallows struck seven; there was a seven-thirty express to Oxford. She bought her ticket, crossed the teeming chaos of the station.

Clerks in their shabby black coats and the silk hats they treasured and nursed as their badges of respectability trudged toward the trains that would take them to red-brick suburbs: Basingstoke, Maidenhead, Westbourne Green. Students – fresh-faced, rowdy, slightly intoxicated, headed back ‘up' to Oxford – as if London lay in a slough of sin at the bottom of an intellectual hill – sons of dukes and financiers and baronets, ‘down' to be briefed by parents as to their duties in the Season. Costermongers shouting pies for sale, children crying as they hung on to their mothers …

And – she didn't know what made her look around – a man in brown at the far end of the platform, standing suddenly still.

James
.

Sixty feet separated them as the train began to move, and she wasn't wearing her spectacles, but she knew him. Groped in her handbag for them even as he strode toward her, and yes, it was him, nobody else in the world moved like that.

She cried, ‘
Jamie!
' as the seven-thirty to Oxford began to pick up speed, and stepped down off it, into his arms.

H
e listened without comment, thumbed through the sheaf of yellow foolscap from Teazle and McClennan that she'd had in her satchel along with three issues of
The
Lancet
and a monograph on blood groups. ‘Don Simon has arranged for a clerk at Barclays Bank to go through the bank's records for me,' she said, and he glanced up at the slight tremor in her matter-of-fact voice. ‘So I should have a list of Zahorec's properties by Friday. I suspect that he's going to lair up at Dallaby House – do you know it? Titus Armistead purchased it for his daughter and Lord Colwich to honeymoon in. Simon and I broke into Wycliffe House last night and found nothing … Well, nothing about vampires, anyway, but a great deal about what servants do when everybody's out at the theater.'

‘Does Miss Armistead know that either of us knows about vampires?' James Asher was a little surprised at how calm he sounded. Seventeen years of secret service to Queen and Country had, he understood, taken its toll on him, but somehow he hadn't expected this. His rush of rage had almost suffocated him, when Lydia had told him what the Master of London had done. Yet with his heart screaming his daughter's name, he found he could answer as if he were talking of someone else's child.

‘I don't think so.' Lydia picked up her cup of railroad coffee, cold now, as Asher's was – not that it had been particularly warm when the spotty youth at the café had brought it to them, along with a plate of moderately stale biscuits. Asher had devoured his share of them – the last time he'd eaten was, if he recalled rightly, at the Gare du Nord that morning – but noticed that Lydia left hers untouched. By the look of her he guessed she'd been eating almost nothing since the night of the kidnapping.

‘I suspect it's time –' Asher pushed a plate of biscuits across to her – ‘Isobel's shrieks of outrage notwithstanding – for
you
to develop sciatica and retire to Oxford. It isn't a very long trail that could connect you with the London nest. I'll put myself in touch with Grippen—'

‘I don't think I can do that.' She obediently picked up a biscuit, broke off a corner of it, and left both fragment and biscuit on the plate.

Not that he blamed her, given the quality of biscuits served by the Great Western Railway Café.

‘I met Zahorec at a ball at Wycliffe House – spoke to him. I think he's been trying to lure me in my dreams.'