The Kindred of Darkness (34 page)

And before he rushed around the counter to help him into a chair, he snatched the room key from the board behind him.

‘Is Mrs Berkhampstead not in?' The exhaustion and cold that had swamped him in the cab vanished.

‘No, sir. There's a doctor just over in New Broad Street …'

‘Did she leave a message?'

The man paused on his way into the back room where the hotel's boy was doubtless sleeping: ‘Why, yes, sir! It's right here …' He ducked through the door behind the counter. Had Asher been able to get to his feet and knock the man's head against the wall, he would have done so. As it was he could only sit in the worn green lobby chair until the clerk, and the young lad in his rumpled uniform, came back out. The boy darted away through the door, into the mists that had not yet begun to stain with the first daylight, and the clerk came around the counter again and handed Asher Lydia's note. ‘She came in about ten, sir – looked to be bound for the theater – and went up to her room, then came right back down and went out.'

Damn it
, thought Asher, his hands trembling.
Damn it
.

Tufton Farm, Herts. 5 mi on Hatfield Road outside St Albans. Z learned of Miranda there, has gone to take her. I'm going to find Simon. Follow us
.

He crushed the paper.

Damn it
.

D
on Simon switched off the headlamps beyond St Albans. Lydia reminded herself that the vampire could see perfectly well in the dark. Even with the moon waxing, the hedgerows rendered the road a perfect abyss, and when Simon halted the car she couldn't tell whether they were near a farmhouse or not. The whole night seemed thick with the smell of hay, without the more localized aromas of wood smoke or cows.

An owl cried, answered by the far-off barking of a dog.

‘He can hear your footfalls if he is listening,' the vampire whispered. ‘Yet I will not leave you here alone.'

Lydia wished she had the courage to say, ‘Leave me here if it will make the difference.' But the words wouldn't come out. She clung instead to the cold fingers that wrapped hers, and tried to walk as silently as she could on ground that was invisible, uneven, and thick with last year's leaves.

Branches tangled in her hair in passing. Wispy moonlight showed the roughcast walls of a house: half-timbered gables, dormers like death-sealed eyes. Simon halted beside her, listening.

‘None live in the house.'

He strode, soundless, across the graveled yard, Lydia stumbling at his heels.

No
…

Two doors opened into the house from the stone porch. Lantern light beneath one of them seemed unbearably bright in the blackness. Simon pushed it open and a cat whipped past their feet, and away into the night.

The room beyond smelled of coffee, coals, bacon, tobacco, ashes.

No blood.

‘What make you of this, Mistress?'

The lantern on the table in the stone-floored kitchen showed a plate with part of a bacon sandwich on it, a dish of butter well-licked by the guilty puss. Coffee half-filled a pottery cup. Simon wrapped his hand briefly around it, went to look at the collapsed coals burning themselves out on the old-fashioned hearth.

‘Two hours.'

A door beyond the stove opened into blackness. Lydia caught up the lantern, the light falling through to show her a stone stair going down. Iron bolts on the kitchen side of the cellar door … the familiar nursery smell of chamber pots and nappies penetrating even the earthen damp of the cellar.

No
…

The room below was deserted. Tidy, whitewashed, almost bare, with a little heating stove in one corner (Lydia shut her eyes in a prayer of thanks) and a commode in another. A single cot was drawn up close to the heater. There were three blankets on it, one of which had been on Miranda's cot at home.

No
…

She sank into one of the rickety chairs beside the little table. Cards scattered the tabletop – bezique, she noted automatically. Three hands. Three cups of tepid coffee. A fork lying by itself. A child's cup, a little saucer and bowl. A tin of biscuits and a stack of newspapers on a shelf, and a Bible:
Daphne Jean Robinson 1879
written on the flyleaf.
Nan must have asked for something to read
. That they'd obliged her filled Lydia with gratitude.
They hadn't been cruel
.

‘None are here in the house.' Simon descended the stair – an extraordinarily long stair; the cellar was very deep.
No wonder Simon couldn't hear them, sense them
… ‘A motor car was kept in the shed, with cans of petrol and oil.'

‘He took them.' Lydia turned the tiny spoon in her fingers.
Miranda touched this
…

She thought about laying her head on the table, weeping – like Niobe in the Greek myth – until she turned into stone and couldn't feel the loss any more.

‘And their guardians – waking to find the cellar empty and their prisoners gone – fled, as anyone would who has seen Lionel in his anger. I smell no blood on the premises, and so take comfort in the fact that Zahorec at least did not murder your nursery maid. Yet having them prisoner, he will now use you – or try to use you …'

Lydia looked up at him sharply, in the lantern's dim glow. ‘And Grippen will kill me,' she said softly, ‘to keep that from happening, won't he?'

‘He may try, yes.' He raised her to her feet. ‘'Twere best we were gone, Mistress. Unless his minions be complete fools they shall have sent word to him at once of what befell. Daylight draws nigh. I have a house near Hertford, where you can remain hid from Lionel, but word will have to be got to James, ere Lionel's men find him …'

He stopped, a few steps short of the door at the top of the cellar stair. ‘
Putada
.' He handed Lydia the lantern. ‘He is here. Lionel. I can hold him I think until sunrise, but there is no lock on the inside of this door—'

‘Come out, you mewling Papist,' growled the harsh bass from the kitchen. ‘I should have thought I'd see you sooner or later. Bring the bitch with you. I need a word with her as well.'

The doctor – sun-burned and sallow from service in India – bound Asher's ankle and splinted it: the bone was cracked rather than broken, and shockingly bruised. ‘What'd you do to it, man?' he asked. ‘Looks like a carthorse trod on it.'

‘Motor car.' Asher took another sip of the brandy the desk clerk had fetched for him. Veronal would have been far better, but was out of the question. ‘The brake slipped off and my idiot nephew had left the thing in gear. Thing is, I must be in St Albans by eight—'

‘It's not going to happen.'

‘It must,' said Asher. ‘
I
must. If I don't …' He made himself look grave, noble, and not nearly as frantic as he felt. ‘There's a woman's honor in it.' He laid a hand on the physician's shoulder: a simpler explanation than the truth and one that didn't involve a twenty-minute effort to convince people of the existence of the Undead, much less explain how he came to be working for them. ‘I can't say more. I have a bike here; I can make the ride in good time if you'll strap me up.'

The doctor sniffed, and eyed Asher's loud tweeds – spattered with so much filth that Ippolyta's blood was lost in the general mess – and unshaven chin, but wrapped his ankle tightly, first in bandages and then in strips of sticking plaster. ‘That's going to be the devil when you start your bike,' he warned, as Asher got to his feet – a fact of which Asher was already cringingly aware. ‘The splint'll take part of the pressure, but if you make it as far as St Albans I'll be surprised.'

‘Not as surprised as me.' Doctor and desk clerk followed him as he limped down the rear stairs to the narrow yard. The moon stood just above the rooftops. He wondered if Lydia had found Ysidro, and if he wasn't doing her some terrible disservice – or indeed, condemning her to death – by haring off at this moment.

How the hell had Zahorec discovered where Miranda was hidden?

Damn Millward – and damn the lazy bastard who hasn't yet invented an electric starter for a motorcycle
…

The clerk strapped Asher's satchel on to the back of the bike, helped Asher to mount.

‘Good luck to you,' said the doctor.

Asher pointed the front wheel at the gate, thrust the bike forward, pedaled three times – each stroke like a bayonet rammed up his heel – and the Indian's engine caught with a muffled roar. As he swept out into the dark of Finsbury Circus he wondered who he could ask about the patron saint of motorcycles, to whom he owed at least a sheep.

He swung around and headed up City Road for Islington and points north.

‘So you've a house near Hertford, have you?' Grippen pulled a chair from the kitchen table, and pushed it roughly around for Lydia to sit in. ‘I thought you said you were leaving this land.'

‘And I thought you said you would leave Mrs Asher and her husband in peace,' returned Simon. Lydia set the lamp on the corner of the table and surreptitiously slid her feet from the gold-spangled slippers. She'd nearly broken her ankle twice between the motor car and the farmhouse. If it came to a dash for her life, she refused to be like a heroine in a novel and trip on her own shoes.

‘'Tis no concern of yours, Spaniard.'

‘'Tis no concern of mine if your fledglings find themselves another master – deeply as 'twould grieve me to see you driven from London. I can recommend a number of minor cities in Italy whose masters might conceivably permit you coffin space.'

‘I'd sooner lie in Hell than within smellin' distance of Rome – an' I'll drag that snivelin' Bohemian with me to the Devil's door sooner than stand by while he sets up for himself in my city! Yes, and them puking traitors—'

‘Stop it!' cried Lydia. ‘Both of you! Listen to me. Titus Armistead owns four copies of the
Book of the Kindred of Darkness
. Among the four of them, there's sure to be one formula that will break the hold of a master on his fledglings—'

‘There's no such thing!' Grippen must have raised his hand to strike her, though Lydia didn't see it. Only that suddenly, Simon was standing next to her with his hand locked around the master vampire's upraised wrist.

Grippen yanked his arm clear. ‘Nothing can break the hold of a master on his get. Not if the master's got any hair on his …' He glanced at Lydia, then at Simon, and finished: ‘Chest.'

‘And what will you do,' retorted Lydia, ‘if one of those volumes also contains a recipe for the growing of that hair? For making himself stronger, if he isn't so already? He's been hiding from you all this time, Dr Grippen, by possessing the man who's going to marry Armistead's daughter. Controlling him when he's in an opium sleep. Taking his place outright when the sun goes down. Moving underground, only coming to the surface to kill. Through the girl, with Armistead's money, he's going to build a power-base in London. After the marriage I think he plans to step into Lord Colwich's identity completely, with the girl to cover for him.'

‘Where's he gone, then?' growled Grippen. ‘Him and this American slut? Looks to me like the answer to this puzzle is to kill her …'

He glanced at Lydia again, calculatingly, and then at Simon.

‘And any other that'll give him aid. And you can't tell me, Spaniard, that this girl of yours won't betray you, if Zahorec but sends her a lock of her babe's red hair.' The dark eyes turned to Lydia. ‘Would you, Missy?'

‘I would,' replied Lydia steadily.
He'll know anything else is a lie, and so will Simon
…

‘Any parent would,' she went on, looking up into his face. ‘Surely you remember that at least, from your days as a living man. Had you not a daughter? Would you not have killed any man who harmed a hair of her head?'

The vampire looked aside. ‘Greedy little bitch.'

There was pride, and deep affection in his voice.

‘Which is why it would make more sense for you to help me catch him,' said Lydia. ‘To help me get my daughter away from him would make more sense than it would for you to kill me. I mean, if you kill me, and kill Jamie, you might have to kill Simon also … at least I hope Simon would try to stop you from doing it …'

‘I would.'

‘You're a fool!'

‘I'm not the one who made fledglings of a weaselly dandy and a scheming tradeswoman.'

‘No, you're the one who—'

‘
Stop it!
' Lydia said again. ‘Don't pay any attention to him, Dr Grippen; he's just trying to annoy you. Listen. Before anything else Zahorec will try to get in touch with me, to secure my aid by threatening my daughter. Like the coward he is.' She spared a hard glare for the Master of London. ‘But he doesn't know I've followed him here. He'll try to write to me, or contact me through some kind of middleman. While he's waiting for my reply he'll need to hide somewhere with Miranda. He knows I know where all his properties are, and he knows there's a good chance that I've told you. The one place he
doesn't
know I know about – because I didn't learn about it from banking records or bribing the servants, but just from knowing the family – is in Scotland.'

‘Scotland!'

‘And in Scotland,' Lydia continued, ‘Miss Armistead can marry Lord Colwich immediately, without her father's consent. Right now he's trying to tie up her money so Lord Colwich can't touch it – probably somebody snitched to him about Colwich's use of opium. He may even suspect she has a lover. Zahorec has to be able to get at that money. If they present Armistead with a
fait accompli
, he'll capitulate. By what I've seen there's nothing he won't do for his daughter.'

‘Armistead,' said Grippen. ‘The cuffin that's got four copies of the book, so you say—'