The Kindred of Darkness

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Have you spoken to him since your return?’

  ‘Not yet. But I do not think he has forgotten my words to him, on the subject of yourself, at our last encounter.’

  That morning Lydia had dispatched a note to Aunt Isobel, crying off from the flower show and Lady Brightwell’s garden reception on the grounds of urgent business in Oxford, and promising to return in time to chaperone Emily to Lady Savenake’s ball that evening. It had crossed her mind that morning that if Nan Wellit had somehow managed to escape, and attempted to communicate with her at the Oxford house, she wasn’t entirely certain that Ellen or Mrs Grimes would be aware of a subtle message.

  But the sight of the empty nursery, the sound of Mrs Brock’s muffled sobs, had been more than she could stand. Ellen and the other servants asked her a dozen times that day what could be done, or suggested everything from calling in the police to canvassing London themselves for word of ‘this Grippen cove’, and went about their duties in a state of such morbid anxiety that Lydia was driven nearly frantic.

  It’s been FIVE DAYS!!!

  Would they be more, or less, anxious if they knew who had kidnapped her, and who I am dealing with?

  She had escaped the house with a sense of deep relief, with two trunks containing gowns, shoes, hats, gloves, and jewelry suitable for operas, teas, flower shows (‘You’re never going without me to help you dress, Miss Lydia!’) and a state dinner for forty to consecrate the bridal party for the upcoming Colwich-Armistead nuptials. Yet upon her arrival at the Temperance Hotel, the thought of seeing Cece Armistead hanging on Colwich’s arm all evening at Lady Savenake’s was more than she could bear. She had just finished and blotted a note to her aunt, begging yet again to be excused, and was about to carry it down to the lobby when the porter brought her up Don Simon’s card, with his familiar spiky, sixteenth-century handwriting: Would you do me the honor to walk out with me a little this evening?

  She had nearly wept with relief.

  ‘’Tis well that James will be here ere long,’ he said. ‘When you find record of Zahorec’s properties, ’twere better we had a man who can easily go into any neighborhood to see these places, than a woman going about alone. Spare me,’ he added, raising two fingers, ‘the tale of how a woman in these modern days might venture into any street in London without reducing herself to the level of a common trull: I will not stand by and see you harmed. Rather let me ask of you –’ he guided her toward the steps that ascended toward the Savoy Hotel – ‘if you have among the garments you brought with you to London a green day frock? I thought you might. ’Tis a color that suits you, if I may be permitted to say so. If you will wear it tomorrow afternoon at six, and sit in the Café at the Hotel Metropole, a man from Barclays will come to you. Wear this also.’

  From the pocket of his elegantly cut jacket he took a slim box, which contained – when Lydia opened it beneath the electrical lamps outside the Savoy’s great doors – a long sautoir necklace wrought of pearls, peridot, and a scattering of emeralds, and sporting as its central pendant an exquisite mermaid of enamel and bronze. She stared at it, shocked – it was Tiffany work, obviously expensive and not the sort of gift a married woman could possibly accept from a man not her husband, even if he had been dead for three hundred and fifty years.

  ‘At the sight of this necklace this man – Timothy Rolleston is his name – will, it is to be hoped, lay his soul and his access to the bank’s foreign depositors at your feet. ’Twill impress him greatly if you call him by his name ere he hands you his card.’

  ‘Simon …’

  ‘Show no surprise at anything he says. His dreams are a stew of occult and aesthetics, and worse things I dare say. At the sight of you wearing this jewel he will believe whatever you tell him. I suggest that what you tell him shall consist merely of, I am forbidden to speak.’

  ‘Forbidden by whom?’

  ‘He knows that no more than you do yourself. But it sounds well.’

  A carriage drew rein before the Savoy’s doors and Lydia – even without her spectacles – recognized the team of flaxen-maned chestnuts as Sir Alfred Binney’s. She gasped and drew back, but Don Simon put a hand on her arm, and moved one finger to signal silence. Sir Alfred, Lady May, Titus Armistead and Cece passed within a foot of them on the hotel steps, in full glow of the electric lamps, without the smallest sign of recognition.

  When Don Simon made to lead Lydia after them into the hotel café, however, Lydia shook her head: ‘I couldn’t! They’re going to Lady Savenake’s ball, and if they did see me they’ll tell Aunt Lavinnia – who has to chaperone Emily tonight as well as her own daughter …’

  ‘Are they, indeed?’ The vampire looked after them thoughtfully. ‘Then perhaps ’twere the moment – if you would be so good as to accompany me, Mistress – to visit Wycliffe House, and see there whatever might be seen.’

  They stopped on their way to Queen Street at Guerlain’s Bond Street emporium, where Don Simon purchased a small bottle of Jicky perfume. ‘An offensive air,’ he remarked as he handed it to her, ‘but favored by the young Mistress Armistead, I believe. ’Twere best the Bohemian did not scent it in places where a guest of the house would have no access.’

  At that hour the lights were on in the front of the house, and on its upper floors. After they dismissed their cab Don Simon stood for a time on the flagway opposite the doors, head bowed, arms folded. A carriage rattled past, and in the opposite direction a woman in a nanny’s dark cloak walked arm-in-arm with a soldier. Ysidro did not stir.

  Grippen did this.

  Lydia put on her spectacles and looked sidelong at that thin face like carved alabaster: aquiline nose, pointed chin. Lashes straight and colorless as the spider-silk of his long hair, and his scars – she could see them clearly now – like strokes razored into unbleached wax.

  Grippen stood in the Slipe between New College and our garden gate Thursday night, just like that. Reaching out to the minds of every man and woman in the house, whispering whatever it is they whisper that causes the mind to drift, then the eyes to close.

  He raised his head, met her eyes. Took her hand.

  The front door was unlocked. The liveried footman she’d paid Saturday night to fetch her a cab slumped sideways in a chair in the porter’s booth off the front hall, profoundly asleep. Don Simon paused to regard the young man, whose lolling head exposed several inches of throat above the snowy linen of his stock: Lydia could see the tiny beat of the vein under the flesh. Her stomach turned even as the vampire moved away.

  He could kill anyone in the house.

  My God, what am I doing with this man?

  He crossed the blue-and-pink flowers of that garish carpet, looked up at the electric chandelier, the refulgent runner on the stair, the bright splashes of gilt on the sky-blue boiserie panels, and though his expression did not change she saw the shadow that moved in his eyes.

  He sees it as it was.

  And himself, as he was?

  Then his eyes shifted from genuine grief at the passage of years, to disdain at Alf Binney’s taste. ‘Dios. I believe that sound I hear is the Old Earl rolling over in his grave. I have not crossed that threshold in forty years – an instructive lesson in letting the dead bury their own dead. Show me where it was, that you encountered this Zahorec.’

  In loyalty to Lady May, Lydia replied, ‘It was terrible to see it in the eighties. Everything that hadn’t been sold was covered in dust sheets, and cardboard over windows that had been broken … I take it vampires don’t actually need to be invited into a house in order to enter it?’

  ‘I was invited in 1682,’ replied Don Simon, as he followed her through a beautiful little vestibule into the dining room, the long table glinting softly in the diffused light from the windows. ‘But no. ’Tis another of those tales the living make up about the dead.’

  ‘Like that one about needing to sleep in consecrated ground – or your own native earth? I don’t think that bank vault you rented in Peking was particularly holy
—’

  ‘I assure you, Mistress, the world abounds in men who think so.’ A rare human smile touched his face.

  ‘But you do need human assistance in crossing running water?’

  ‘’Tis a different matter. Our ability to bend the minds of the living fractures with the movement of energy through living water, but that energy shifts with the moon and the tides. At midnight, or the tide’s turning, our minds can focus briefly—’

  ‘Is that why you need the help of the living, in order to travel?’

  ‘How not, when the first stain of light will ignite our flesh like a fat-soaked reed?’ He held up his hand, ungloved now, regarded the long fingers as if expecting to see them indeed consumed in the postponed flames of Hell. ‘A thousand strangers cross our paths, and a thousand things can go wrong, to keep us from shelter. ’Tis no surprise that the living believe that we cannot venture far from our graves. Few of us do.’

  ‘You do.’ Lydia halted, her hand on the latch of the garden door. ‘I didn’t think, when I wired you … Did you get someone to come with you to England? A valet, a courier … Grippen wouldn’t harm him, would he? Or …’ A second, worse, fear smote her. ‘You wouldn’t …’

  ‘Mistress.’ He laid his hand on hers, cold as death and clawed like the Devil’s. ‘I assure you I murdered no one in order to reach your side.’ He opened the garden door. ‘Ah! Here at least is what I recall of this place …’ He stepped into the dappled moon glow of the pergola, and reached to brush the hedge with his fingertips. ‘Or will it be but a matter of time ere this man Binney mows down the yew maze and lays down a tennis court in its stead?’

  ‘Beast!’ She shoved him lightly – as she would have Jamie, or one of her chums in school – and like a dancer he turned out of her way, smiling again. ‘You sound just like Cece. I suppose you’d rather the place fell to ruin—’

  ‘Forgive one who has seen too much fall to ruin, Lady.’ He took her hand, and crossing the pergola, led her to the little southern door of the maze. ‘And too much suffer a sea change into something rich and passing strange indeed … and among the things which have so suffered since last I walked this ground in daylight was a church called St Adsullata’s Coldspring. ’Twas rebuilt as an inn – called Cold Spring also, or Cold Well – and the ground later sold to the Old Earl. For long the half-ruined shell of it served the house as stabling, with the hay stored in the crypt below.’

  They passed through the open ground at the heart of the little maze, thirty feet long and barely ten broad even when the dark walls of yew had been trimmed. Saplings and thrusting branches overgrew it, and in its center the little temple – a mere ring of pillars topped by a dome – had been robbed of its statue even in the days when Lydia had traced her way there as a child.

  In its shadow Don Simon paused, and stood as if listening. Then, satisfied, he renewed his grip on Lydia’s hand, and plunged into the northern side of the maze.

  ‘Do you think the crypt is still there?’

  ‘I know it to be so, Mistress. The Fourth Earl built the wing for his mother and sisters on the foundation of the stable, and used the crypt as a wine-cellar. They kept butter below it, in the sub-crypt which in its time had been part of a temple: inscriptions there preserve the names both of Jupiter and of the Magna Mater.’

  They crossed the northern pergola, lamp glow from the garden room dappling the grass before the French doors.

  ‘Lionel knows this as he knows all things within the city, though he comes seldom to its western end. His domain lies for the most part downriver of the Tower, among the streets he knew of old. Not hallowed soil, but his own.’

  A footman – wig off and cravat loosed – sprawled with his head on the little table in the center of the garden room, a burly detective snoring in the chair opposite and a decanter of V.S.O.P. Napoleon brandy and a game of rummy between them. Don Simon spared them a reproving glance; Lydia felt again the sensation of being in a fairy tale, passing like a ghost among enchanted sleepers.

  They climbed the back stair and found Cece Armistead’s maid – a light-complexioned black woman of perhaps Lydia’s own age – sprawled on her back on her mistress’ bed, her knickers about one ankle and her skirt hiked past her waist, and a footman in dark-green livery (‘Lord Mulcaster’s, I believe,’ remarked Ysidro) in a similar state of deshabille deeply asleep at her side.

  Lydia remarked, ‘Good Heavens,’ and assisted Ysidro to make a more thorough search of the secretaire, dressing table and closets than had been possible Saturday night by candlelight. She unearthed from the back of the closet a quantity of books – Keats, Radcliffe, Machen and LeFanau – and bottles of laudanum and absinthe. A slim gold case tucked under the mattress of the bed proved to contain brown Turkish cigarettes whose tobacco gave off the bitter smell of opium.

  ‘Here.’ Don Simon held out to her a slip of paper with the words Şcoala Neacşu, Ion de Majano, Claro Guinizelli, and addresses at hotels in Florence and Paris. Lydia copied them down. From there they moved, silent as a pair of shadows, down the hallway to the door of Titus Armistead’s library.

  ‘I have picklocks,’ said Lydia when Ysidro tried the handle, and fished James’ little kit from her handbag. ‘Have you ever picked a lock?’

  ‘The nights are long.’ He held out his hand for them. ‘If one does not particularly care for the company of other vampires, ’tis always a useful thing to acquire accomplishments.’

  He had it open in half the time even Jamie would require. Well, he DOES have hypersensitive touch and hearing …

  ‘What happened to seeping through keyholes in the form of a mist?’

  ‘You have read a great deal too many novels, Madame.’

  ‘They were seeking something in here,’ said Lydia as Don Simon pushed open the door. ‘Cece said, “I have—” and Zahorec said, “It can wait.” But they came in here, so I think what she must have “had” was the key.’

  She looked around her at the glass-fronted shelves, the marquetry work cabinets below them. Ysidro switched on the lights, the electric glare showing up more variegated carpeting and expensively upholstered chairs. The books themselves were bound sets, stamped in gold, bought with the house: Lydia recalled them from her childhood. Lady May had told her how in the old days, when a rich man bought a book he’d just buy the pages, and have it bound to match the other books in his library. The few dozen acquired since that time – Dickens, Thackeray, Gibbon, Austen, a thick Latin grammar, five French and three Spanish dictionaries – stood out among them, like civilians in the ranks of the Guards.

  Don Simon opened the drawers of the black-and-gold Louis XV table, but his search was cursory. He took the picklocks to the smaller door tucked among the bookshelves on the library’s inner wall and, opening it, revealed a stairway going down.

  New carpeting, fresh paint, and electric lights amply attested to its recent use to the new lord of the household. In structure it was obviously old, winding in four deep turns. Lydia guessed that under that blue-and-yellow broadloom the fifty-four original stone steps had been filled in with concrete to even out signs of wear.

  At the bottom she switched on the lights and said again, ‘Good Heavens!’

  The long room was clearly, as Don Simon had said, the vault of the old chapel of St Adsullata. Squat Romanesque pillars and stone ceiling groins had been plastered over and whitewashed, but the proportions whispered of great age even to Lydia’s uninstructed eye. The wine racks had been shoved higgledy-piggledy to the back of the crypt, and the room was crammed with crates. Boxed-up paintings: huge, flat, and square. A few were uncrated: portraits, landscapes, academy works that pointed up morals or sentimental scenes of faithful dogs guarding sleeping children. Josetta often accused her of having a hollow in her head where others had what the phrenologists called a ‘bump of aesthetics’: Lydia was always fascinated by the faces of portraits, wondering who these people had been and whether they’d been happy (Did their wigs itch?), but couldn’t have told a Ver
meer from a Monet.

  There were books there, too, stacked up on the crates: bindings of ancient leather, dark with age, or crates whose shape proclaimed them as more books, layers of brown paper visible through the tight-nailed wood. Evidently Armistead went in for collecting holy relics as well – a huge gold monstrance which displayed behind crystal a few scraps of cloth and hair, and three large chests of solid silver that made Don Simon back quickly away. Smaller reliquaries of silver, crystal and gold lay among the books, and Lydia picked one up. It contained what looked like a child’s tooth.

  Hastily, she set it down again.

  ‘No ill investment,’ remarked the vampire, ‘if this chamber were their goal. The quantity of treasure here is such that a golden crucifix, or that copy of Aretino’s Di Novi, would not be missed until your American returned to his home country, and then none could say when and where it had vanished. The price of any one of them would easily cover freehold on any property in London. Ah …’

  With deceptive ease he moved the wine racks aside from the wall.

  ‘I thought this would still be here.’

  TEN

  The door was wooden, ruinously old under its coating of white paint. It was barely five feet tall and set two steps down into the floor. Lydia could see its weight in the way even the vampire had to strain to open it a crack.

  The smell that rose through it was indescribable: muck, sewage, wet stone. The bright lights of the wine crypt showed her steps, narrow and deeply worn.

  Nobody had fixed these up with concrete filler or a Chicago Kidderminster.

  ‘What’s down there?’ she whispered.

  ‘The ancient baths. Did he lair in this house t’would be here, yet I behold no mark upon the floor, where the door would scrape on opening.’

  ‘Keyhole infiltration?’

  ‘At a guess the keyhole rusted solid sometime in the reign of Queen Anne.’ He fished in his pockets for the candles he had collected in the pantry. ‘Will you come? St Adsullata Coldspring lay close to the old Tyburn River, and anciently a sewer connected the Roman baths with the stream. ’Tis long since I passed this way.’