The Kindred of Darkness (27 page)

By the time Lydia reached the sidewalk of Northumberland Street, he was gone.

W
earing a red cravat, and reading an octavo edition of Burton's
Kasidah
, Asher watched platform eleven of Paddington Station until the eight-oh-five for Oxford was safely on its way. He'd seen Lydia get on it, and watched the other passengers for any hint of a familiar outline, any sense of having seen a walk, a shape, a type of hat …

And saw nothing and no one that, in his spying days, would have sent him fleeing for the nearest border without bothering to pack.

Lydia didn't give him a glance.

When the express arrived from Birmingham, and Asher went as if to meet it, then left the station, returning only minutes before the nine-fifty departed, with the last milky twilight barely lingering in the sky. He waited until the train was actually in motion before stepping on to it. No one followed.

The fact that he saw no one meant only that he'd seen no one.

The shadow he'd glimpsed beside Blackie Wirt's car – and as he'd guessed, there was no mention in the newspapers of the discovery of a body in Woolwich or vicinity, mutilated or otherwise – lingered in his mind. The cloaked form in the Underground station. The note of fear in Mrs Raleigh's voice:
Who is that?

Not Zahorec, that was clear.

Would any of Armistead's other ‘boys' have the wits to trace him through Sophister?

The thought troubled him as the dark countryside streamed past the window, alternating with the recollections of the smoky dimness of The Scythe: sausages, beer, and enough neighborhood gossip to fill out a three-volume novel.

Asher watched the platform behind him when he stepped off the train at Oxford.

All the way along George Street he listened in the darkness.

A light burned behind the curtains of Lydia's room as he came down Holywell Street. He let himself in through the garden gate, heard her voice speaking softly beneath the arbor.

‘Do you think you can get him to come tomorrow?' Behind her usual matter-of-factness he heard exhaustion and dread.

The glow of the breakfast-room window haloed them: Lydia on the garden bench, looking up into Ysidro's face, a shawl wrapped over the traveling dress she'd had on at Paddington. Ysidro standing, thin arms folded, gray clothing indistinguishable from shadow.

‘What names do you seek, Mistress?'

She gave them: a catalog of how deeply she had penetrated the secrets of the vampire nest. The Spanish vampire had on several occasions risked incineration to help them, but Asher knew that his true loyalties were also wrapped in shadow. It was Ysidro –
with divers bribes … appearing in the guise of those they honor
– who had drawn himself and Lydia into being the heirs and successors of Johanot of Valladolid, servants of the Undead.

And is all of this – or part of this – some chess game he's playing against Grippen
? Everything he knew about vampire nests whispered to him that there was at least that possibility.

‘I feel such a wretch for not catching … Mr Ballard, did you say your clerk's name was?' said Lydia after a time. ‘I did try.' It was a measure of her desperation – and her trust in the vampire – that she had her spectacles on. In the reflected lamplight she looked very like the gawky schoolgirl Asher had first met in the home of Ambrose Willoughby, the Dean of All Souls. ‘I took a cab and drove round that whole area, from the Embankment up to Trafalgar Square. He fled the café as if he'd seen the Devil.'

‘He may have believed he had.'

‘Will you be able to bring him back?'

‘Or can someone else be recruited?' Asher stepped from the darkness. Though he was fairly certain Ysidro had both heard and seen him coming, the joy on Lydia's face at the sight of him would have been enough to banish from anyone but a maniac any thought of jealousy … notwithstanding he was well aware that Lydia loved Ysidro.

The fact that he would rather that she didn't had more to do with his fear for her safety than conventional resentment of a wife's
ciscebeo
. As her arms closed hard around his ribcage, he asked across her shoulder, ‘Am I being followed?'

The vampire's eyes for an instant lost their focus. ‘I hear no one.' Then he held out his hand. ‘I trust you are well?' The crystalline gaze lingered for a moment on Asher's face, as if he saw there everything that had passed since he'd come into the Palazzo Foscari to find Lydia's telegram. ‘Madame informs me there seems to be more than one alien vampire in London – the second of whom has remained invisible even to Lionel's watchful eye.'

‘I'm not even sure what I saw.' Asher glanced back toward the garden gate, and wondered if a vampire capable of hiding from Grippen's awareness would be any more apparent to Ysidro's. ‘Has she informed you also that Titus Armistead is seeking to employ a vampire for purposes of smashing the miners' unions that inconvenience him?
Are
there vampires in the United States?'

‘If there are, I have no desire to meet them. The thought of an American vampire's feeding-manners renders me queasy. Presumably he conceived his belief in our existence by reading the
Book of the Kindred of Darkness
?'

‘You've heard of it?'

‘Who among us has not?'

‘Grippen's fledglings, to name four.'

Ysidro's long fingers moved, as if dismissing ungrateful hedge-pigs. ‘'Tis not a matter of which one speaks to fledglings.'

‘Because it contains formulae that would break a master's hold on them?'

‘James.' He tilted his head a little, like a mantis in the moonlight. ‘Don't tell me you believe a word of that nonsense?'

‘Damien Zahorec is acting as if he does. As is Grippen.'

‘I never rated Lionel's intelligence above average. One doesn't speak of the book to fledglings because
they
would believe. Fledglings are so frightened at their own inexperience they'll believe anything. One doesn't wish to spend the next twelve decades trying to out-maneuver attempts to trick one into drinking rat-blood cocktails in the dark of the moon.'

‘It would get tiresome.'

‘Most of those mixtures contain silver or whitethorn, as you've probably observed. Not enough to kill a strong vampire, but some of those potions will drive him – or her – mad, and certainly weaken him. The book is a trap, James. Promulgated into the world – and spread down the centuries – as a means of killing vampires … or inducing them to kill each other or themselves.'

Asher grinned sidelong. ‘It's deuced clever.'

Ysidro looked down his nose, like a fox not wishing to admit that foxes can be deceived, as well as surrounded, by geese.

‘Zahorec seems to have swallowed it whole – though not enough to risk travel across open ocean for five days at the mercy of an American millionaire and his “boys”. I wish I could reassure Grippen that sooner or later, his enemy is going to lay hands on the book and poison himself, but he seems to be taking great precautions to keep Lydia – and myself – from knowing what he's actually seeking in Zahorec's lairs.'

‘Scant reassurance if Lionel's fledglings lay hands on it.' The twitch of Ysidro's aristocratic nostrils was a condensed firestorm of derision. ‘Some of those recipes are genuine. The last thing he wants is to find himself another victim of Johanot of Valladolid's extremely clever little scheme.'

‘I'm definitely starting to like Johanot. The problem is that like poison bait, the intended victim isn't the only one who's likely to die.' Asher laid his hand on Lydia's head as she seated herself again on the bench.

‘I visited The Scythe this afternoon …'

‘Not the first public house Grippen has used for his purposes,' remarked Ysidro. ‘Though 'tis some sixty years since the last one. I hope you avoided the sausages.'

‘They were … memorable.' Asher's quick grin faded. ‘I had a long chat with Henry Scrooby's sister Violet, and sundry of their neighbors. Scrooby's wife, brother, and brother-in-law have all been away since the seventh of May. Everyone I spoke to attested to the terror and respect in which “Dr G” is held, but the general consensus is that neither Mick Scrooby nor Reggie Barns – the brother-in-law – can be relied on. Barns in particular is bad-tempered and impatient. Both are inclined to drink.'

Lydia's hand went swiftly to her lips, and when she folded it, almost at once, upon her knee, her face was nearly as white as the vampire's.

Ysidro only crossed his arms again, considering the words without expression. In life, Asher knew, the vampire had engaged in intelligence work himself, and would know what happened to hostages under the care of bad-tempered and impatient watchmen inclined to drink.

At length Ysidro looked down into Lydia's face. ‘Tomorrow you will have the information you seek, Mistress.'

‘Thank you.' She took his hand.

‘When you learn that which you seek to know –' Ysidro's glance returned to Asher – ‘speak to me, ere you make use of the information.'

Their eyes held for a long moment, and it seemed to Asher that behind the crying of the crickets in the summer darkness, he heard Millward's voice, and that of his own master Rebbe Karlebach – and indeed, Johanot of Valladolid:
They cannot be trusted. Their whole means of hunting and survival is deceit, and illusion, and the lies of the damned
.

‘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.'