The Kindred of Darkness (18 page)

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 myself. 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.'

Even sheathed in a very proper gray kid glove his hand had a warm strength to it, firm and adept.

‘Don Simon …'

He cupped her cheek with his other hand. ‘My only fear is that you'll be hurt, best beloved,' he said, and a ghost of a smile touched his eyes. ‘I know you're not going to run off with him.'

Her single quick laugh came out like a sob, at the thought … Absurd? Tragic?

Nothing so simple as that.

He'd been a man grown when first she'd met him, a college lecturer and – she had rapidly come to suspect – a spy on Her Majesty's service, and she herself a schoolgirl, living her own double life like a spy in enemy country. It was he who had shown her the path that led to her dream of education and training in a field of knowledge which had fascinated her for as long as she could remember. She recalled how scandalized she'd been with herself, when first she'd thought of him as
Jamie
instead of as
Professor Asher
. When first she'd wondered what his lips would taste like on her own.

Trust and love had come first, a woman's passion only later, with womanhood. With Simon it was different.

She whispered, ‘I'm glad you understand. Because I don't.'

He leaned across the wheel and kissed her, his lips and mustache tasting of spirit gum and Claridge's Hotel coffee. ‘The only thing that will pull us apart is death,' he said.

As the cab darted away into the maelstrom of Trafalgar Square she leaned out to look back, but Jamie had disappeared already in the crowd.

He was good at that.

It took Asher only moments to ascertain that Bowler Hat was in fact following himself rather than Lydia. The man pursued him when he took a cab to Porton's Hotel in Bayswater, where he registered under his old work name of John Grant. There was a tea shop across the street: just as well to know where to find his pursuer, instead of wondering. He was in morning costume, correct for tea at Claridge's but less so for slipping out the back way and walking over to Prince's Square to take a cab again (one couldn't very well ride a bus in a top-hat and swallowtail coat) back to the Temperance Hotel. He changed cabs twice without seeing any sign of pursuit, and in the last one removed the spectacles and false beard. Lydia had introduced him last night to the desk clerk as her husband and it wouldn't do to arouse the man's suspicions by a discrepancy of appearance.

Owing to these precautions, by the time he reached the place she had already been and gone. She had left for him the list of properties that Lionel Grippen had owned six years previously, when first their paths had crossed, which he'd studied that morning while Lydia dressed – at her usual fascinating length – to go to Claridge's. These lay mostly in the oldest portions of London, the City or the East End:
We feed on the poor
.

There was a note from her also:
Returning meet Rolleston 1. Tea at the Metropole 3?

He wired her confirmation at the Oxford house, then resumed his false whiskers and a different pair of spectacles, changed into the rough tweeds and soft cap of a working man, and took the Metropolitan Line to Stepney. The Scythe, on Oak Street, was easy enough to find. It was the largest pub in the district, and at this hour of the afternoon jostled with sailors, soldiers, and stevedores in a musty fug of low voices and cigar smoke. He retired with an Indian pale ale to a corner of the tap room and spent about an hour, speaking to no one but taking note of the faces as they came and went.

It was the time when the neighborhood regulars would begin coming in, to get pails or bottles of ale for dinner or to have a pint before going to whatever grimy rooms were occupied by their families. Asher sat close enough to the bar to hear one of the men greet the woman behind it as Miss Violet, and ask after her ball-and-chain: Miss Violet laughed and retorted, ‘Lord, I feel like as if I'd rented 'im out … and for a good price, too!'

When Henry Scrooby, Proprietor (as it said in chipped gilt letters on the front door's glass) arrived the resemblance was visible between himself and Miss Violet: crisp brown curls, sharp brown eyes, trim small stature though it was the brother that was the slighter of build. He was handsomer as well; Miss Violet had a nose and chin that could have been copied from the sculpted bust of one of the homelier Roman emperors. Asher moved deeper into the shadows, and took note of the fact that four men came in to give the publican money – with the matter-of-fact air of men repaying a loan – and two appeared to be borrowing it.

A man at the center of the neighborhood economy, then, like many pub-keepers.
Like the centurion in the Bible, he saith unto one Go, and he goeth; unto another Come, and he cometh
… Asher had seen the man's counterpart in shabby working-class neighborhoods from Peking to Lisbon. At least he didn't glimpse Mr Three-and-Ninepenny Bowler among the customers.

With the sun still well in the sky he departed, choosing a moment when Scrooby's back was turned. Pub-keepers on the whole were observant men and he wished to run no risk of being recognized at some inconvenient time. He took the roundabout route going back to Blomfield Street, on the District Line to the Embankment and then changed trains twice more, and walked the final quarter-mile, to make sure he didn't have company. At the hotel he changed clothes again – a corduroy jacket as rough as the one he'd just put off, trousers just as pilled and seedy, and boots as shabby – removed the beard and spectacles, and with darkness settling over London, set forth for the East End.

It was time to talk to Grippen.

In addition to his new raiment, he wound extra chains of silver around his throat and wrists, and wrapped three or four more around his left hand, so that a slap from it would burn a vampire's face like a blow from a blazing torch. Up his right coat sleeve he slipped a foot of iron rod with a knob at one end and a ring at the other, in case he met someone a little more mortal.

Grippen, he guessed, would be expecting a furious husband to storm to Lydia's defense. But what the Master of London's new set of fledglings would do if they guessed his involvement with those who understood vampires was another matter. As was what they thought they could get away with when his back was turned.

So he made his way to the ancient riverside parishes, to Priest Alley and Belly Court, to Fox and Goose Yard and Love Lane. What had been an old inn not far from the Tower, undestroyed by the Fire and built on foundations more ancient still, crammed these days with well over a hundred Romanian Jews …
Does he still collect the rent from this place, though he sleeps here no more
? In the narrow yard the women were still at work pasting together paper boxes for a penny the dozen by the light of burning grease as the men came home from searching for jobs in the sweatshops.

Were Francis Houghton and Nicholas Barger – both of Rood Lane – fledglings he'd made since the murder of half the nest in 1907? Or were they simply Lionel Grippen under another name?

He moved eastward, past the Tower, to brick mazes and old warehouses, cheap boarding houses packed with sailors, immigrants, whores. In a nameless court he passed what looked like a tumbledown church, transformed into a boarding house for Lascar sailors, chewing betel and watching the white man with speculative eyes. The philologist in him picked out accents and voices: the slithery glottal stops of Bow Bells Cockney and the dropped ‘r's and broad ‘a's of Bromley and Deptford …
What's a Yorkshireman doing selling oysters hereabouts?

Grippen would be watching for him.

Asher hoped he was right in his guess that the Master vampire would rather use than kill him. That he wouldn't shatter Lydia's usefulness by murdering her husband in the middle of the mission he'd commanded her to fulfill.

IS he searching for the Liber Gente Tenebrarum?

Is it, therefore, genuine?

A girl of fourteen, cocky in a new pink hat ablaze with silk roses, slipped her hand into his. ‘All at a loose end, guv? I can tell you a story that'll 'ave you weepin' wi' joy for a shillin'.'

‘Just spent me last on a woman that 'ad me weepin' wi' sorrow at the sad tale she told.' He very quickly withdrew his hand from the moist little grip: though he had nothing in any pocket that could be easily accessed, he'd learned a long time ago that one thing you didn't want to do in these streets was let either of your hands be trapped.

Her pert smile disappeared and she used a word sailors would have hesitated to pronounce, and disappeared like flotsam into the crowd around a pub door. Asher walked on.

Fog had risen, stinking of the river. Down lightless turnings he glimpsed the flaring illumination of the docks, where colliers, barges, merchantmen were unloading. The Fleet River flowed somewhere hereabouts, deep beneath the ground in its channel of brick. One could still get to Roman catacombs through the old sewer channels that had once served St George's Wapping.