The Kindred of Darkness (31 page)

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
.

T
he 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.

When he wasn't convincing people, after the sun went down, that he simply
was
Noel …

‘That's where all those legends come from,' she went on chattily, ‘about this woman or that welcoming a vampire into her chamber under the impression that it's her husband. Or else it's just the vampire using that illusion that they do – that deception that keeps people from seeing their teeth and claws, or what their faces really look like … I don't suppose it was very difficult for Damien to get Noel to smoke himself silly in the hours before sunrise, then use drugs to keep himself awake into the daytime while he walked about in Noel's body, talked in Noel's voice. No wonder poor Ned thought Noel had changed.' She brushed gently at the dark lock of hair that fell over the young man's forehead. ‘Poor Noel …'

And that
, she thought,
is why Damien Zahorec chose him
. They were of a height, with the same coloring, almost the same build …

And of a social position that would make the substitution worthwhile.

Certainly it was by his build and outline and coloring that she'd identified him, at Wycliffe House and in company after dark when she hadn't been wearing her spectacles. She'd simply had the impression that this
was
Noel Wredemere, Viscount Colwich. People who had no experience with the illusory powers of a really skilful vampire wouldn't even be looking for the differences. They simply wouldn't notice that they weren't noticing what ‘Colwich' looked like.

Like me and Simon when we met Hellice Spills in the hallway. At night, Noel simply gets dispatched to his ‘meditation chamber' and his pipe, and Damien plays games with illusion
…

‘We're not going to hurt him,' Cece protested, her voice shrill. ‘He's perfectly happy. And Damien's situation is desperate. He had to escape, had to get away …'

‘From the war?'

The girl looked nonplussed.
Oh, come ON!
thought Lydia.
Even
I
know about the war in the Balkans!

‘No – I mean, yes … I mean, I suppose the war had something to do with it.' Cece stammered, like a schoolchild thrown off her stride in the midst of a recitation. Then her eyes flooded with tears, frantic that Lydia should understand. ‘But it's worse than that!
She's
after him. The woman – the devil – who enslaved him, who forced him into being what he is! She held him prisoner, kept him in the dungeon of her castle for a year, trying to break his spirit … After she forced him to become a vampire, she made him bring her victims, made him hunt with her … Forced him into the state from which he now seeks redemption—'

‘
Redemption?
' Lydia had been watching Cece's gun hand, gauging the distance between them, the size of the tiny room … and the time she had before Damien Zahorec himself appeared.
When I didn't turn up at the ballet he must have gone to see if I was investigating Wycliffe House, and sent her here
…

But at the word
redemption
she blinked, astonished at the degree of naivety. ‘Is
that
what you think he wants your father's books for?'

The dim light flashed in Cece's diamonds as she drew herself up. ‘It
is
what he seeks! It's in one of the books – he doesn't know which. How to return to being a living man. How to recover his soul. He has part of one book; he knows there are others. I'm the only one who can help him …'

‘Which is why he started appearing to you in your dreams, back in Florence,' said Lydia gently. ‘Because your father had the books. But what he wants isn't redemption. Just how to escape from Ippolyta, the master vampire who holds power over him. And how to obtain power of his own over the vampires of London.'

‘You know about Ippolyta?' Her surprise would have been comical, if the entire situation weren't soaked in blood, and drugs, and madness, and death.

If Miranda's life – and Nan's, and Noel's, and Cece's, and Lydia's own – didn't hang in precarious balance.

Here we go
…

In her kindest voice, Lydia asked, ‘Did you think you were the only one he sent those dreams to?'

And in the split-second of disillusioned shock – of immobilized grief at the fissuring of everything she'd assumed was going on, and before outrage and denial and murderous reaction could set in – Lydia, who had hooked her foot around the pedestal of Noel's laden bedside table, shot it at her with all of her strength and at the same instant ducked sideways, in case Cece fired at her after all.

Cece didn't. The revolver flew from her hand as she sprawled backwards; Lydia had no idea where it landed, because she launched herself on the younger woman, grabbed her by the hair and one wrist, twisted her arm behind her back. Cece clawed viciously at her but fortunately was still wearing kid opera gloves. The American girl flailed, kicked, screamed curses, but terror gave Lydia focus and strength. She shoved the younger woman headlong into the wardrobe, slammed the door, and turned the key.