The Kindred of Darkness (4 page)

He had an accomplice
.

From panic and fear, her mind became oddly cool. It was a problem to solve, like any medical puzzle.

The sun didn't set until almost nine. The sky held light for nearly an hour after that.

Her train had come in just before eleven and she'd heard the station clock strike half-past as she saw Grippen standing before her on the bridge.

Living accomplices
.

The desk lamps had burned out. She fetched a candle from Jamie's desk, lit it at the gas jet, carried it upstairs to the nursery. The glow of the blue-glass night light showed her the empty cot, the big black-and-white toy bear and the elegant doll called Mrs Marigold, her haughty china features wreathed in corn-golden hair braided into some fantastic coiffure of Miranda's own devising.

They would have to be living. He'd have to get Miranda out of Oxford, and be back to intercept me, AT MOST ninety minutes later
.

The Dead travel fast
, Leonore's demon-lover said to her in the ballad, but even they couldn't be in two places at once.

Living accomplices, to deal with Nan and Miranda after daybreak
.

She stepped back into the hallway's darkness, shielding the candle with her hand.

Trains would be leaving Oxford, either for London or for railway hubs like Nottingham, up until ten.
A horse and gig? Would a sixteenth-century vampire know how to drive a motor car? They could have gone to ground anywhere
… But as James had once pointed out during one of Cousin Ritchie's excited accounts of a cracking good book he'd read, it actually takes a good deal of time and expense to hold someone captive, particularly if one wants them to remain in relatively good condition for any length of time. ‘It isn't something one can easily do in one's attic.' (Cousin Ritchie's book had theorized that it was possible for German agents in London to do precisely that.) ‘The servants would talk.'

And if Grippen didn't want Miranda to remain in relatively good condition, he wouldn't have kidnapped Nan as well
.

Vampires may be able to fade into shadow and illusion
, reflected Lydia,
but their human allies are flesh and blood
.

Feeling calmed, she descended the stairs to her room, where she kindled a night light of her own, removed her spectacles, and lay awake, on top of the bedcovers, staring at the tiny pool of amber on the ceiling until the coming of first light.

Mr Polybius Teazle had offices in London's Old Street, near the railway line. Lydia found his address in James' address book. The building was a flat-fronted brick horror, and Teazle's office, two flights up, shared a hallway with a dentist, an accountant, and a manufacturer of false teeth. Teazle himself was about James' age, and had James' slightly downtrodden air of a man whom nobody would notice in a crowd.

But like James, she guessed, he saw more than he let on, and she was very glad she hadn't given him her right name, and had arranged to contact him through an accommodation address.

‘Mr Grant tells me that you have operatives to search public records.' John Grant was the name under which James had done work for the Department in England – when he was working for the Department – and Mr Teazle nodded.

‘That we do, Mrs Curie.' His voice was like his person, soft and unassuming.

‘I'm looking for shipping records,' she said, thankful that the six pounds she'd just paid absolved her from having to come up with a story about why she wanted this information. ‘An arrival in this country, probably from the Balkans, with a crate or an outsize travel trunk – anything above four and a half feet in length, weighing over a hundred and fifty pounds. This would be the end of January.'

He jotted something on his notepad. Even at a distance of four feet, Lydia hadn't the slightest idea what.

‘I need names and all addresses that you can find. And I'm afraid the matter is urgent. If more than one operative can be put on the task, I would greatly appreciate it.'

‘Very good, ma'am.' He might have been taking an order for tea and biscuits at a café. ‘You realize you may be dealing with several hundred addresses?'

‘Yes, I understand that. If any of these trunks came in through a receiving office, information about their ultimate destination would be appreciated. Do I need to pay you anything extra on account?' She reached for the battered leather handbag that she'd borrowed – along with a deplorable hat and an out-of-fashion chintz frock – from Mrs Grimes, and felt his glance size up … what? Her willingness to part with money over and above the retainer, in comparison with her out-at-elbows dress? Her too-new shoes?

Or was he used to people coming into his office, asking for information about shipping records or people's movements and giving accommodation addresses and false names?

‘Quite all right, ma'am. I'll send an account at the end of the week.' He rose, and escorted her to the door. ‘Do coffins count?'

She hoped her startle wasn't visible.

‘A man can transport a deal of effects in a coffin, ma'am, and no customs official will think to open it. Particularly if the owner's thought to put a dead chicken in it, before leaving home. Begging your pardon, ma'am.'

‘Definitely coffins.' The thought that any Balkan vampire would do something that obvious hadn't occurred to her, but of course, who would be looking for one?

Except vampire hunters.

‘Very good, ma'am.' Mr Teazle opened the door.

As she descended to the smoky heat of the London morning, she hoped wretchedly that she wasn't going to get the poor man killed.

A short cab-ride took her to Broad Street, where another ‘Private Enquiry Agent' from James' address book had his offices. Henry McClennan was Scots, fat, brisk and bustling, and assured her in his high, surprisingly light voice that for £6 7s he could have two of his operatives at Somerset House by noon, ascertaining whether any of the properties listed had been willed to anyone since 1907.

If Grippen knew she could track vampires through their property, he'd have changed the ostensible ownership of his own since then.

She turned the matter over in her mind as she walked the hot pavements toward the Women's Temperance Hotel on Blomfield Street.

Vampires didn't rent. How could one risk it, if the smallest ray of the sun's light would ignite unquenchable fire in that pale and fragile flesh?

They needed – demanded – absolute control over their surroundings. No wonder the thought of angry and suspicious dock-workers made Lionel Grippen nervous.

So who
was
hiding this Mr Zahorec?

That morning, as soon as it grew light, she had checked the ground in the open strip of earth behind her house for wheel tracks. The Slipe, as it was called – too wide to be a lane but not quite wide enough to be considered a yard – gave access to the stables, kitchens, and domestic offices of New College, and saw considerable traffic during the day, but Lydia thought she'd discerned the prints of a four-wheeled brougham that had waited there during the night. It didn't tell her much, and Grippen would almost certainly learn of it if she went rushing around Oxford asking if anyone had rented such a vehicle the previous day. But her conviction grew that he had used the living for accomplices, not the Undead. In the six years since Horace Blaydon had wreaked slaughter upon the London nest, the Master of London must have made new fledglings …

I suppose I'd better learn who those are
, she thought as she took her key from the hotel desk, where she had rented a room under another name. Names and initials were the tracks she followed, in tracing vampire property.
He may hold property in their names rather than his own.
With a certain amount of difficulty, owing to the absence of a chambermaid, she changed out of Mrs Grimes' borrowed frock into a stylish celery-green Patou ensemble, rearranged her hair, applied rice powder, the tiniest whisper of rouge, the faintest traces of mascaro and kohl (not enough to elicit comment from Aunt Isobel) and tried to imagine how she was going to get through the next twenty-four hours.

It would be that long before she could reasonably expect to receive any information from her operatives. Two or three times that long before James would be home, if he'd been in Venice when her telegraph reached his hotel. To return to Oxford now would only result in being driven frantic by the anxieties and unsolicited suggestions of her servants. But a claim to be ill would at best spread the saga of her indisposition throughout the family (with speculation that the illness was faked to avoid social responsibilities), and at worst bring Aunt Isobel hot-foot to Oxford – sciatica or no sciatica – to bully her into wellness. Isobel's conviction that Lydia was ‘soft' on her servants might easily lead to inquiries that could end with the police being called in.

It would also be useful
, Lydia reflected as she adjusted her hat,
to know if Grippen's fledglings even know that he's enlisted me to find this Zahorec, and if they approve, or disapprove, of the participation of the living in their affairs
.

And if
– she locked the door behind her, started down the dingy stairway –
Grippen has sufficient command over them to keep them from killing me before I locate Miranda and get her to safety.

L
uckily, Aunt Isobel was far too self-involved to notice her niece's pallor or the smudges of sleeplessness under her eyes. When Lydia came through the door of Halfdene House at noon, the stout, dark-haired little woman whom her uncle had married – enthroned now in a wickerwork bath chair of marvelous design and attended by a footman, her maid, and a harassed-looking Irish nurse – swept down upon her with a list of accessories Emily's wardrobe would need for her presentation and regaled her, over a luncheon that she didn't seem to notice Lydia did not touch, with a catalogue of the eligible gentlemen expected to be present at Lady Binney's masquerade on Saturday night and the net worth of their parents.

‘I'm told Freddy Farnsworth – Lord Varvel's heir – has two thousand a year settled on him but the family's worth a good ten thousand … Lawrence Rockland's a trifle old but the Rocklands have at least a quarter million in the Funds. Your Aunt Lavinnia tells me not to be deceived by the Clifford boy; he's obliged to hang out for an heiress … What a pity young Colwich got snapped up by that American girl! She has the most frightful accent – if you ask me, nothing can take the place of a good Swiss finishing school …'

Lydia recalled her own days in a good Swiss finishing school and shuddered. Cousin Emily said nothing, well aware that this commotion had far more to do with her mother's determination to prove her offspring ‘acceptable' than with any desires of Emily's own. Tall and slender, like most of the Halfdenes, Emily took after her mother's sallow coloring: Lydia wondered if she could order her gown in ivory hues rather than the ‘snow-princess' satins her mother rhapsodized over.

After all
, she reflected,
I AM paying for it
… Another ‘duty to the family', attendant upon her mother's having ‘betrayed her lineage' by marrying extremely well.

‘… entire interior of the house in different colors of marble!' exclaimed Aunt Harriet, setting down her fish fork. ‘I never heard of anything so vulgar in my life!' Barrister's wife or not, she remained every inch a Viscount's daughter and knew to a carat's-weight what was vulgar and what wasn't. ‘Though how the Crossfords got Colwich to propose to the girl I can't imagine. Noel has always been a little
fond
of that friend of his …'

‘With a settlement of three million dollars,' retorted Aunt Isobel, whose marriage to Richard, Lord Halfdene, had much more to do with her dowry than her family's non-existent background, ‘I don't suppose there was much shilly-shallying. Charles, this water is
cold
! You know what Dr Fielding said about chilled water being bad for the liver!
Honestly
… And I don't suppose there was any trouble getting Lady Mary Wycliffe to present the girl at Court … Lady Mary Binney, I
should
say!'

‘Poor Lady May,' sighed Aunt Harriet. ‘Married to that
dreadful
man, but they say her father was all to pieces, with Wycliffe House about to be sold out from under them …'

Grippen can't be keeping them in London
, thought Lydia.
I'm not sure you COULD keep a kidnapped baby hidden – unless he drugged her …

Dear God, don't let him have drugged her.

Eight months of internship at a London charity hospital had given Lydia deadly experience in how small children could most easily be kept silent.

Don't let him have harmed Nan
…

She tried to push from her mind the sight of her companion Margaret Potton's body lying, drained of blood, on that high carved bed in Constantinople. Did Miranda's
jailer
even know that he – or she – was in the pay of a vampire? And that vampires had an expeditious habit of cleaning up after themselves in order to keep the secret of their existence?

‘Not that it will make any difference to this what's-her-name American – Miss Armistead – millionaire's daughter or not, with that frightful father of hers tagging along to “make sure the job gets done properly”.'

‘Job indeed!' Isobel sniffed. ‘I'm told she's gone to Worth for her gown, so we'd probably better do the same for Emily, Lydia …'

If Grippen was with his human accomplice for the first hour or so, they could have taken the train and no one would notice
…

‘Crossford's heir or not, Colwich isn't anyone I'd care to see wed to one of
my
daughters,' opined Aunt Harriet smugly. ‘Running off to Paris to paint things … turning himself into a veritable disciple of that
ghoul
Millward … Urania Ottmoor tells me he was at Andromache Brightwell's tea yesterday and prosed
dreadfully
! Spending every penny of his allowance on nasty old books …'