With luck, in the course of the evening she would be able to learn the identity of Cece’s vampire lover.
‘I don’t see what you see in the wretched girl,’ Aunt Isobel sniffed, when the tea things had been cleared away and Aunt Isobel’s dresser laid out half a dozen fancy-dress costumes in the dreamlike gorgeousness of the Yellow Drawing Room. ‘In spite of that “superior” governess, she has a terribly common accent … Charles, fetch some water for me, it’s time for my pills … And you see the way she wears her clothes! She made that Poiret she had on yesterday look like a bathrobe. And her hair—’
‘She’s an American.’ Valentina’s small gesture – merely the turning-over of her lace-gloved hand – held more venom than a pit of cobras. ‘I just LOVE that AY-ria …’ Her mastery of Cece’s flat vowels was devastating. ‘That part where it goes Da da dee da DAAAAA-da …’ She clasped her hands over her heart, mocking the girl’s habitual gesture.
‘At least she doesn’t pretend to swoon over the parts that she doesn’t care for,’ Lydia protested, ‘just because everyone else says how wonderful Mr Caruso is.’
Valentina – who had invited herself to luncheon – smiled indulgently. ‘Well, you never did care much for music, did you, dear? And those jewels in the middle of the afternoon … No wonder that frightful father of hers has private detectives all over Wycliffe House these days. You aren’t going to wear that tonight, are you, dear?’
Lydia drew back from the green velvet doublet of Maid Marian’s attire.
‘That collar will only emphasize your shoulders.’ Her stepmother shook her head, and turned her enormous blue eyes back to Isobel. ‘Urania Ottmoor tells me the Armistead girl’s costume cost two hundred guineas, not counting the jewels, and her father paid for Noel’s as well. Such a sweet boy he was as a child.’ She shook her head sadly, and added, with sugared malice, ‘Of course, you wouldn’t have known the family … I know he’s a thousand times more prepossessing now than he was when he left for the Continent, but who knows how long that will last? Did you see him last night at supper, Lydia, dearest? I understand opium is a frightfully difficult habit to break.’
But nothing, reflected Lydia, compared to an attraction to a vampire.
And she shivered at the quickness with which the thought rose up: Simon is different …
Beyond doubt, if challenged, Cece would say the same of the creature that visited her dreams.
‘Two hundred guineas!’ Emily kept her voice low as she and Lydia stepped down from the carriage (‘My dear, go to Wycliffe House in a motor car?’) in the forecourt of the baroque mansion on Queen Street. ‘That’s more than my Court presentation dress is costing, isn’t it? I mean …’ She blushed at having mentioned money, as they trod up the crimson carpet to the lighted door, followed by Uncle Richard’s second footman bearing Emily’s Medusa-headed shield and silver-tipped spear. ‘I mean, that sounds like quite a lot!’
Brilliant electric light streamed from the doors, lighting up the mizzly gloom of the spring night.
‘It sounds like her father wants her to have the best.’
The girl sighed very slightly. ‘Like Mama,’ she said, as if hesitant to express such unfilial heresy. ‘Not just to have the best, but for everybody to see that it’s the best.’
‘Like having her marry an earl’s son,’ agreed Lydia. A footman in full eighteenth-century fig relieved them of their wraps. ‘Is it true what Valentina said, about the opium?’
‘It’s what Julie says.’ With her hair concealed by a papier-mâché helmet, and her slim form robed in a blue-and-yellow peplos and himation, Emily looked surprisingly dignified. ‘I know he was a terrible mess when he left for Europe: sort of fat and pasty-looking, with his eyes all puffy. At least since he’s been back from Paris he has some energy, and talks about something other than his headaches, even if it is only about all those frightful old civilizations nobody’s ever heard about in places like Antarctica, and how vampires are going to take over England. Isn’t it awful what Sir Alfred’s done to this place?’
She looked around at the foyer in the blinding blaze of electric illumination. Through the open door of the porter’s room Lydia glimpsed two burly men in American-looking suits lounging in kitchen chairs smoking cigars: the ‘detectives’ Valentina had spoken of. Did Titus Armistead really think anarchists were going to storm a fancy-dress ball?
‘I remember how it used to be before Lady May–’ she used the family nickname for her aunts’ old friend – ‘married Mr Binney – Sir Alfred,’ Emily corrected herself. ‘Yes, it was falling to pieces, but it was … I don’t know. Real, somehow.’
Even without her spectacles – which would have accorded ill with the graceful folds of her ivory satin Restoration gown – Lydia had to agree. The oval entry hall at the bottom of the vast double hanging stairway looked like nothing so much as a hotel lobby, the worn marble of its floor masked in gold-and-burgundy Axminster and the walls ‘brightened up’ with hues that smacked of Liberty’s newest catalog. Lady Mary Wycliffe had gone to school with all five of the Viscount Halfdene’s daughters, of whom Lydia’s mother had been the second-born and most beautiful. Like a dream within a dream Lydia remembered being brought to the crumbling old townhouse, to dodge through dust-sheeted chambers while her mother and aunts had tea with their friend in one of the few rooms still habitable.
Like Emily, she found the sea change wrought by Lady May’s Mancusan mining-baron unsettling, and sad.
Cece Armistead was upstairs in the ballroom, ebullient in two hundred guineas worth of Ancien Regime court dress and flirting with Lord Colwich in a fashion that would have got Lydia sent to bed without supper, even from a ball for eight hundred people in her honor. In sharp contrast to his demeanor at supper Friday evening, the viscount seemed in high spirits, flirting back with every appearance of relish. Recalling the fat and profoundly unhappy young man she had seen at one or another of her aunts’ entertainments over the past twelve years, Lydia reflected that Emily seemed to be right. When she came close to greet them, Lydia observed – as far as she could without her spectacles – that the powdered wig and lace ruffles in no way rendered the tall, powerfully built young man effeminate, and his manners had improved.
‘People don’t understand Dr Millward,’ he said, when Lydia commented on his return from Paris. ‘Particularly my parents, poor souls.’ He glanced across the crowded ballroom toward the Earl and Countess, very correctly got up in modern evening dress. ‘They keep asking if it was Millward’s idea that I move into Dallaby House – the place Mr Armistead has bought for Cece and me –’ he smiled tenderly at his giggling bride-to-be – ‘during the restoration; as if they can’t imagine why a man would want to live in a place of his own.’
‘I’m going to try to talk Daddy into buying this place for us.’ Cece gestured around her at the mirrors that filled the walls where the Rococo boiseries had been, the high ceiling whose frescoed angels and goddesses had, like the hall downstairs, been ‘brightened up’ with fresh paint. ‘Sir Alfred has talked about tearing it down and putting up a block of flats. Daddy thinks that’d be swell – good – but I think it’d be a shame, don’t you? It’s why Sir Alfred hasn’t fixed up the gardens. Have you been in the maze down there?’
‘I used to play there.’ Lydia smiled a little at the recollection of her solemn five-year-old self, playing Explorer.
‘Honestly?’ The American girl clasped her hands before her bosom in a way that recalled Valentina’s exaggerated imitation of the gesture. ‘Do you know the little temple in the middle? It’s so romantic, like a magical door between this world and others … It’s all in ruins, but I wish they’d leave it that way …’
‘Nonsense, nonsense!’ Sir Alfred Binney, attired as a Chinese mandarin, thrust himself into the group. ‘If I do keep the place I’ll have it fixed up – get a smart new statue for it … trim those hedges and pave the paths and put in handrails … But with property values as they are hereabouts …’
‘Oh, but it’s magical, Sir Alfred!’ Cece insisted, and turned, to take Lydia’s hand. ‘You know, Mrs Asher—’
‘Please,’ said Lydia. ‘Call me Lydia.’ From beside the buffet table Aunt Lavinnia – in the persona of the Snow Queen – glared daggers.
Cece beamed. ‘You know, Lydia, I think the room they’ve given me there, across the way –’ She pointed with her fan to the tall windows, and the wing visible on the other side of the narrow garden – ‘is haunted? Not in a bad way,’ she added quickly. ‘By lovers who were kept apart, I think. Sometimes I dream about them. The little boudoir off my bedroom has a portrait in it, of a dark-haired girl with a lily. Nobody knows who she is, but she looks at me with the saddest eyes …’
‘Piece of trash.’ Titus Armistead loomed behind his partner. He at least, Lydia observed, had the good sense to stick with plain evening dress. ‘Supposed to be a Quesnel, but my accountant tells me it’s nothing of the kind. And anyway, Noel tells me nobody buys Quesnels. Sharp boy, Noel,’ he added, with a stiff bow to Lydia. ‘Up on all that art stuff …’
Lydia wondered if this stiff, grim American had ever seen his prospective son-in-law in his less energetic days, when he’d spent weeks at a time without getting either dressed or shaved, while he pottered with his paints or compared typefaces in decaying manuscripts of the Malleus Maleficarum.
Emily came over then with Julia Thwaite, and Lydia effected introductions, moments before her own attention was claimed by Valentina (resplendent, Lydia observed with indignation, in the pretty Maid Marian tunic and tights that she herself had wanted to wear). Dancing had started, and a buffet of chilled caviar, asparagus, cucumber sandwiches, quail eggs, oysters and lobster patties had been laid out on ice at the far end of the room. Lydia glanced again through the windows, across the darkness of the garden, to the opposite wing, and remembered – exactly – which small chamber of that long file of bedrooms had contained the shadowy portrait of the girl with the lily and the sad eyes.
And how easily one could enter that wing from the garden, unnoticed by anyone in the house.
She’ll have his name somewhere.
And an address to get in touch with him.
I would …
The ballroom was on the piano nobile of Wycliffe House’s southern wing: the ‘noble floor’ where all the best public rooms were situated, above the ground floor’s business offices and dining room. A fertile source of confusion to Sir Alfred’s American guests, reflected Lydia, as she slipped through one of the ballroom’s several doors and made her way to the backstairs: Americans would refer to the ‘noble floor’ as the ‘second floor’, when Sir Alfred and every other person in England and Europe would call it the first. She gathered her heavy skirts around her, hastened swiftly down. The footmen she passed on their way up politely ignored her, assuming her to be in quest of the ladies’ toilet.
She had no doubt that the first thing Sir Alfred had done upon taking possession of this grand house of his wife’s impoverished father had been to install a dozen bathrooms. There had been none in the days when Lydia had roved the dusty rooms as a child. Even the family had used a House of Office at the end of the garden – separate facilities, of course, for the family and the few servants that had remained to them, after the Seventh Earl of Pencalder had gambled away nearly everything the family had owned in 1848.
Once outside, the first thing Lydia did was fish her silver spectacle case from her pocket. Up at the front of the long U that comprised the house, the terrace that overlooked the gardens had been transformed into a sort of outdoor bistro, with yet another band playing ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’, and a dozen small tables set up under strings of electric lights around yet another buffet. The glare from that, coupled with the brightness streaming down from the ballroom windows, made the narrow strip of overgrown pergola between house-wall and maze nearly as bright as day. As Cece had observed, the garden didn’t appear to have been touched in fifty years: the pergola thickly overgrown with roses, the gravel underfoot buried beneath a carpet of shed leaves. It took Lydia several minutes to locate the southern gateway in the twelve-foot wall of hedge and, once inside it – the wayward masses of foliage absorbing nearly all of the light – she had to press and fumble her way until the crunch of the pebble paths, rather than any appreciable gap in the leaves, indicated the corners.
The key to the maze was simple, though – even as a five-year-old she’d deduced it quite quickly – and the maze itself barely a dozen yards wide. She slipped through the northern gate only feet from the door that led into a sort of garden room in the north wing. The wing had been added by the Fourth Earl of Pencalder – Lady May had told her later – for the accommodation of his mother and sisters, who objected to his way of life: the sad-eyed girl with the lily had been one of his several mistresses. From the ballroom windows Lydia had seen that the wing was entirely dark. Presumably all the servants – even the detectives – had been pressed into readying the midnight supper for the guests.
Lydia had brought in her pocket a tin of matches, and the picklocks that James – ever the cautious ex-spy – had warned her never to leave the house without, but the door into the garden room was unlocked. She found the backstairs with little trouble, and the light was better upstairs, leaking faintly from the avalanche of wattage being pumped into the garden. Gently she opened door after door, identifying smells.
Tobacco and leather would be Mr Armistead’s bedroom, the fusty comfort of book dust and ink the library. Toward the front end of the wing where it joined the main house were the public rooms: a cavernous drawing room enfiladed with a smaller parlor and an office. Guest chambers soft with the scents of potpourri and black-leaded grates. Presumably the detectives had a lair of their own downstairs. She couldn’t imagine any butler in London – not even Sir Alfred’s – putting up with them.
Dusting powder, stale cigarettes, and the distinctive scent of Jicky perfume by Guerlain marked Cece’s bedroom. The boudoir lay beyond, the Fourth Earl’s pretty mistress a pale blur in the shadows. Lydia let down the heavy drapes before she struck a match.
A desk stood beside one window, and by the other a dressing table the size of a kitchen stove. Like the rest of the house the room was wired for electricity, but Cece’s desk boasted an immense girandole, its candles showing use. Lydia touched the flame of her match to one, settled with a whisper of heavy skirts in the little chair, and opened the drawers, praying she wouldn’t find there the maelstrom that crammed her own secretaire at home.
However, one drawer held some virginal stationery – Cece’s letterhead included the address for Wycliffe House as well as addresses in Newport, Rhode Island, and Denver, Colorado – and a pen which obviously had never been used, and the others, nothing. The mess was in the dressing table – old powder puffs, combs, hair rats and switches, face creams, perfumes, papiers poudrées.
A man’s handkerchief.
And at the back, carefully buried under a stack of old issues of Harper’s Bazaar, a Morocco-leather notebook. Cece had plainly intended to copy all the addresses that she really wanted to keep and just as plainly had abandoned this endeavor long before she and her father had left Italy for Paris in November. Cards, fragments of notepaper, old dance cards with jotted bits of information on them interleaved the little volume’s pristine pages. Lydia thumbed through them quickly, wondering if she should simply steal the whole book …
Would Cece blame the maid?
Then her fingers turned over a torn scrap of what looked like the slip sheet from an old book. Ludovicus Bertolo, Hotel Cecil, the Strand, London.
Ludovicus Bertolo, she knew, had come to London on the fifteenth of January from Cherbourg, with a valet and three pieces of luggage, one of which was a trunk six feet long and weighing nearly three hundred pounds.
She wondered what had become of the valet.
He’ll have left the Cecil by this time …
She replaced the paper in the book, the book in the drawer. Went
to the window, blew out the candle, the scent of wax like a note of music in the sudden dark. Looped back the drapes as best she could. Started toward where the door would be—
And heard the faintest whisper as the handle turned.
There was no line of light beneath it. Whoever was outside stood in darkness.
Saw in darkness.
Lydia remembered there was an armoire somewhere to her left but there was no time. She stepped back to the window, rolled herself in the curtain and crouched to the floor, her corset stabbing her mercilessly in the hip-bones as she curled herself flat.
He came into the room and very faintly she smelled the blood in his clothing.
Oh, God …
He’ll smell my perfume.
And the blood in my veins.
Softly he closed the door. ‘And who have we here?’ Like Ysidro’s, his voice was barely a murmur. But deeper: black velvet, with a slight inflection of Mitteleuropa. Drowsiness crushed her mind, like suffocating in rose petals. Sensual. Hungry for this man’s kisses; for the touch of his lips … ‘I know you’re hiding, beautiful one …’
‘You can’t know I’m beautiful,’ said Lydia matter-of-factly, and stood up. ‘You haven’t seen me.’
The reflected light from the window showed her a dark god. A pale face above the blackness of a satin cloak that wrapped him from throat to feet, a darkness of tousled curls. ‘All ladies are beautiful,’ he said softly, ‘met by moonlight.’
The Kindred of Darkness Page 6