The Kindred of Darkness Read online

  We will stay away from you and yours, the vampires had said to James, when he had accomplished the task they had needed a living man to do. It is simply prudence on our part. You could hunt us down eventually, were you willing to give your soul to it, to become obsessed … To hunt us would be to hunt smoke …

  But she had always known they were there.

  He took my daughter …

  Rage and panic made it hard to breathe.

  ‘Who is he, Miss Lydia?’ Ellen whispered. ‘How could this Grippen have just walked into the house like that? Bette was up to the nursery just an hour before—’

  ‘He’s no one.’ Lydia took a deep breath. ‘Put his name out of your mind. Never think of it again. Mick …’

  The gardener appeared, laboring under hatboxes and bags.

  ‘Please take Ellen and the others back to the house. I’m going to walk.’

  ‘You can’t, ma’am!’ Even at age twenty-one, Mick was scandalized. ‘It’s a good three-quarter mile, and it’s near to eleven—’

  ‘Not wearing those shoes, Miss Lydia!’ Ellen protested. ‘They’re not—’

  I really am going to scream.

  ‘Just go! Please.’ She softened her voice with an effort. ‘I’ll be quite all right, it’s right through the center of town and the worst I’ll encounter is undergraduates.’

  And a man who has systematically murdered thirty thousand people and drunk their blood in order to stay alive himself.

  If I’m lucky.

  ‘That isn’t the point, Miss Lydia. What your mother would have said, or your aunts, if I were to let you go walking about the town by yourself—’

  Her voice shaking – knowing what would happen to Ellen, or to any of the servants, if they accompanied her – Lydia said, ‘Just please do as I ask. I need the fresh air …’

  It took ten minutes of arguing before they obeyed. Any of her aunts, Lydia reflected, with a chilled detachment as she watched the little knot of servants finally walk away, would have fired them on the spot. Dear God, please don’t let them follow and watch me …

  Breathless with the pounding of her heart, when Lydia reached the end of the platform she slipped her silver spectacle case from her handbag, put on the thick, round-lensed glasses that she never let anyone (except James) see her wear. Better a blinky-blind skinnybones (as the other girls at Madame Chappedelaine’s Select Academy for Young Ladies had called her) than a goggle-eyed golliwog (her other appellation there). One could get over being a skinnybones if one had the money to hire a really good dressmaker.

  She scanned the night beyond the station’s gaslights. This was the end of the line for the 9:50 from Paddington, and it was the last train of the evening. As the cars huffed their slow way on to a siding, all cabs vanished as if by magic from the graveled space between the town’s two railway stations. The sweet shops and newsagents along Hythe Bridge Street were shuttered for the night. The darkness around her lay unbroken, like clear cobalt glass. Even the roving undergraduates seemed to be either asleep or keeping to their own jumble of little streets and courts further east. Lydia’s heels clicked softly on the stone verge as she crossed the bridge, the smell of the river an ache of nostalgia, the willows of the Worcester grounds a dark mass under the starlight.

  Ellen was right; these aren’t shoes for walking any great distance in …

  James – and others – had told her: this was how one found a vampire. She had no doubt that having left the note in Miranda’s crib, Grippen would be waiting for her to do exactly this. To ‘promenade herself’, as the vampires said.

  For six years now she’d worn, under the fashionable high collars of her exquisite dresses, half a dozen silver chains around her neck, a concentration of the metal sufficient to badly burn a vampire’s mouth, to buy herself an instant to run, to scream, to twist free. James wore them, too, over fading bite scars that tracked his throat and forearms. Terror filled her, but it went nearly unnoticed under a pure, burning anger so powerful that it seemed to lift the hairs on her head.

  He took Nan …

  Miranda’s little nursery maid – the changer of nappies, the emptier of bathwater, the server of Mrs Brock’s evening tea – was Cousin Emily’s age. Seventeen, sweet-faced, slow-speaking and good-natured no matter what was demanded of her. Performing the dirty, heavy chores of the nursery work and taking orders from the crusty Mrs Brock was, Lydia recalled, the girl’s first paid employment.

  He wouldn’t have taken Nan if he didn’t need to keep Miranda well and cared for.

  If he harms a hair of that poor girl’s head …

  Tears closed her throat. Tears of terror, less for herself than for her daughter. Tears of remorse, for the traveling companion, four years ago, who had been killed by a vampire.

  If he hurts her …

  If he hurts Miranda …

  Damn Jamie; damn him for being in Venice …

  Mist filmed the river, blurred the outlines of the willows.

  I’ll bet it isn’t even a philology conference. Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and a lot of other little countries in the Balkans had all been fighting each other since last spring, and James had received a steady stream of notes from the Foreign Office – for whom he had worked before quitting in disgust at the end of the African war – which he had just as steadily been putting on the fire. Then, quite suddenly, he had asked her, was it all right if he went to Venice? A meeting of experts in folklore and linguistics …

  A man stood at the end of the bridge, silhouetted against the star-soaked mists.

  A vampire …

  The vampire of London. He’d been murdering people since before Queen Elizabeth was on the throne.

  He stood massive and unmoving, but his eyes caught the distant lights of the station like an animal’s.

  It’s him.

  Rage flooded her and she lengthened her stride, straight up to him.

  His clothing smelled like old blood.

  Lydia didn’t care. She slapped at his face: ‘You give her back! You bastard devil, you give me my daughter back!’

  She knew vampires could tamper with the mind, put a cloud on human perceptions, but had been too angry to remember. When he grabbed her, caught her against his body in an iron embrace, it was as if she didn’t, for an instant, remember how to struggle or cry out. It was just that suddenly he was crushing her fingers in an agonizing grip; his arm was around her waist as he bent her backwards over the parapet of the bridge. His pock-marked face was inches from hers and when he spoke his mouth reeked with blood.

  ‘You want to bless your stars, Missy, that I’ve too urgent a use for you, for me to go off and let you think for a week or maybe two about layin’ hard names to one who’s got your brat in his hand.’

  His grip tightened on her fingers until she cried out, and he grinned. Distant gas lights showed her his fangs. Then he threw her from him on to the stone of the bridge, as a child will throw a doll in a fit of temper. The impact knocked the breath from her and she fought not to weep, as she’d fought when, long ago, her Nanna had taken a strap to her. I will NOT let him see he’s hurt me …

  The impact had knocked her spectacles off as well. She saw starlight gleam in the round lenses near the parapet, and groped over to pick them up. For a miracle, they hadn’t broken. In her smallest voice she said, ‘You are right, sir. I should not have spoken.’

  This was what she’d always said to Nanna, or her stepmother, and neither had ever seemed to notice that the phrase was simply the literal truth and contained no apology.

  The vampire made no move to help her to her feet. Painfully, she used the parapet to steady herself as she rose.

  He was tall, as tall as Jamie. His half-seen face was a horror, thick-fleshed and sensual, fangs protruding a little beyond his heavy lower lip and a nose flat, crooked, and sprouting with black hair. He’d been a physician in sixteenth-century London, James had told her. So he probably started killing people long before he joined the Undead. Like other va
mpires she had encountered, he had a quality of stillness to him, more than simply the fact that he didn’t breathe. As if he’d been there forever, waiting for you to get near.

  And she knew he could get the minds of the living to not quite notice him, unless they were looking for him. Lay sleepy inattention on the thoughts. Trick the mind into not seeing him as he was.

  Into seeing him as handsome, or trustworthy, or someone you would be happy to walk up a dark alley with.

  That was something vampires did.

  She drew a shaky breath. ‘And what use is it, sir, that you have for me?’

  May you rot, may you burn screaming for eternity in Hell …

  He folded his heavy arms. ‘They tell me you can track the Undead in their lairs.’ His deep, hoarse voice sounded almost like an American’s. James had mentioned this also, when he spoke of dealing with Grippen six years ago. In the sixteenth century, apparently everyone in the south of England used those flat vowels and nasal Rs.

  Again Lydia took a deep breath. Either Yes or No would be a perilous answer. One did NOT go about telling vampires that one knew how to locate their home addresses.

  He wants something. He’ll keep her alive because he wants something.

  Oh, God, don’t let me mess this up …

  ‘Only sometimes,’ she lied at last. ‘Who is it, that you want me to find?’

  ‘Damien Zahorec. Montenegrin, or Serbian: some kind of dago. He’s in London now.’

  ‘Does he have a lair in London? Or have you merely seen him there?’

  ‘If I knew it I wouldn’t be knockin’ on your door, Missy. I’ve not even seen him – not even I, who knows the names of every beggar that rots on the wharves. He’s hid; hid deep. I want to know where.’

  He stepped closer. He was built like a bull and seemed larger in his old-fashioned evening dress: frock coat, low-crowned shaggy hat, high collar wound round with a dark cravat. His hands were bare and even as she could see his fangs and the unholy reflective glimmer of his eyes, she could see how his nails had thickened and grown into inch-long claws. She knew there was something wrong with herself because as she stood before this man, this creature, who had killed thousands of people and kidnapped her daughter and who could kill her as easily as plucking a daisy, she found herself wondering about the cellular composition of those claws, and about whether the vampire’s eye, dissected (one would have to do so under artificial light), would resemble that of a cat.

  Those hands had picked up Miranda.

  Had held her child …

  She was trembling again.

  ‘He’s been killin’ two and three a night sometimes,’ the vampire went on. ‘The police are startin’ to talk. And folk are talkin’, down Whitechapel and among the docks. Next they’ll be startin’ to look about ’em. I can’t have that.’ One corner of that fleshy lip raised to show a long glint of fang. ‘I’ll show him who’s Master of London.’

  ‘How long since he came to London?’

  ‘Candlemas. I smelt him along the wharves below the City, and that’s when the killings began. That’s when first I heard whisper of his name.’

  ‘From whom?’ asked Lydia, interested. ‘If no one’s seen him—’

  ‘From those as have no business to know it!’ He caught her arm in a grip that made her sob and shook her like a drunkard shaking a child. ‘I knew this city when ’twas the size of the Paddington railway sheds and I know every crack and sewer and cellar of her. Yet nary a hair of his arsehole have I seen. I want to know where he’s hid, and who it is who’s hidin’ him.’

  ‘But if you can’t find him …’

  The heavy finger, the long, cold claw, pointed at her nose. ‘I want a list of every bolt hole he’s got. Every lair, every cupboard where he hides his clothes and every cellar where he changes ’em, and that’s all I want of you. You’re not to put a foot in any of ’em, nor tell man nor woman, livin’ nor Undead, where they lie. Just tell me. You put a note in the Personals for me, in The Times, under the name of Graves – or you’ll never see that brat of yours alive again.’

  ‘Please!’ Lydia caught at his wrist. ‘I swear I’ll do whatever you ask me but give her back. I’ll …’

  She broke off. He was gone. She was aware, with a sensation like waking up, that he’d been gone for some time. She was cold to the marrow of her bones and nearly ill with weariness.

  She passed through Oxford like a ghost through a city of the dead, unseeing through silence. The shut-up shop fronts and cobbled pavement of George Street, the dark gables and stumpy tower of Balliol cast not even a shadow on her mind.

  Miranda.

  The child she’d never thought she’d bear. The child she’d never even imagined she’d want, until after eight years of marriage to James she’d found herself pregnant – startled at first and simply curious to observe first-hand the physiological symptomatology on the female nervous system (Is there anything analogous in males?). And then suddenly it had come to her: that is ANOTHER PERSON. I am carrying ANOTHER PERSON inside me.

  Nothing in medical science had prepared her mind for this and when she had lost that child in her first trimester she had been devastated. As if a door had closed, a gate locked against her, sealing off a road filled with wonder. The second miscarriage, in September of 1910, had been worse, like a God she had never quite believed in telling her that she was too defective to bear a child. Four-eyes, skinnybones, goggle-eyed golliwog … No proper lady asks questions like that, no girl from any decent family even thinks about such things …

  Fifteen months after that, Miranda was born.

  Her magical red-haired child.

  Lamps burned in the tall old house on Holywell Street. Lydia had to steel herself to walk that last fifty feet to the front door – far more than she’d had to do in order to slap the Master Vampire of London in the face. The servants adored Miranda and Lydia felt that if any of them even spoke her daughter’s name to her, she was in danger of breaking down completely. But the rigorous training she’d received from Nanna and her aunts held good. When they swarmed around her (Don’t be silly, Lydia, five people isn’t a swarm …) in the hall, she was able to clasp Ellen’s hands, to comfort Mrs Grimes: ‘Please, I need to be alone right now … Yes, I talked to Mr Grippen … I’ll tell you about it later … No, we’re not going to the police … Yes, he assured me that Miranda and Nan are both safe—’

  Lying, murdering devil—

  ‘—Please, I need to be alone right now. Mrs Grimes, could I ask you to have some tea sent up? Yes, everything is going to be all right.’

  Mrs Brock, usually so grim-faced and reserved, was weeping, and the sight of her tears nearly broke Lydia’s heart.

  She lit one of the bedroom candles from the gas-jet in the hall, and carried it up to the study above. Through open windows the air was a soft miracle of springtime. Tea at Lady Brightwell’s, dinner with Aunt Isobel, drawing-room chatter about Emily’s Court gown … She wondered who that had happened to and why she remembered it.

  A little girl playing the violin for pennies on the platform at Paddington, who had smiled at her when she’d dropped a shilling in her cup. Did SHE have a mother?

  Did Lionel Grippen know HER name?

  Lydia kindled the gas-jet, lit the oil-lamps above her own exquisite eighteenth-century secretaire and sat for a moment, only breathing.

  The ormolu clock on the mantle gave the time as quarter to one. The Post Office was closed. Nothing could happen – nothing – until morning, and all the night yet to get through.

  Grippen was IN THIS HOUSE. Her mind repeated the thoughts, stupidly, as if like fingers numb with cold they could grasp only a few things. He must have made the servants fall asleep. Some vampires could do that, the older ones, more experienced or more deeply imbued with charge upon charge of psychic energy that they had absorbed from death upon death.

  Vampires. Walking corpses, drinkers of lives as well as of blood. Manipulators of illusion, readers of dreams.
/>   If I hadn’t married James …

  But she knew she was being silly. If I hadn’t married James … she couldn’t even imagine what her life would be. In any case she knew she would never have been happy, vampires or no vampires.

  Grippen was in this house. She still had braided chains of garlic, wolfsbane, and the desiccated blossoms of the Christmas rose, in a green painted tin box under her bed. I’d better get them out, festoon the windows like some demented heroine in a penny dreadful …

  Lock the bedroom door whose knob and hinges James had had replaced – at startling expense – with solid silver.

  All those rituals and precautions with which Dr Millward had bored everyone who came within twenty feet of him, letting them know that he never went to sleep without a wreath of garlic around his throat (his clothing reeked of it) and that he practiced three times a week, shooting moving targets with silver bullets by moonlight.

  What made us trust their word? What made us think this WOULDN’T happen in time?

  OF COURSE we trusted their word …

  She remembered another vampire saying to her: It’s how we hunt …

  She wanted to put her head down on the desk and cry.

  Instead she searched through five drawers crammed with dressmakers’ bills, silk samples, sketches of other peoples’ kidneys, three half-written articles on the effects of vitamins on the endocrine system (‘I hope you publish under a pseudonym!’ Aunt Harriet had protested over dinner), a Votes For Women handbill that her friend Josetta Beyerly had given her and invitations to a score of parties to which she was supposed to chaperone Emily. She finally unearthed a couple of Post Office telegraph forms.

  On one she wrote the address of the hotel where James was staying in Venice. And if he’s gone on to some secret location in the Balkans I will KILL HIM.

  Jamie, come home at once. Grippen has done something terrible.

  Even the bare facts would be torture to him, in the three days it would take him to reach Oxford. Grippen’s name alone – and the fact that she would wire him to return at once – would tell him that the matter was urgent.