‘This man goes by the name of Zahorec sometimes, or Ludovico Bertolo, or possibly one of these others …’ She held out to him a notepaper on to which she had copied the other names Simon had found in Cece Armistead’s desk.
‘You are to speak those names to no one, but to seek him in the bank’s records. Tell me what property he has acquired, and the names of all to whom he has transferred money from his accounts. If he has accounts under other names I wish to know those. If he has traveled from London, I wish to know that. You will find everything about him, and everything about his money.’
‘Yes, my lady.’ She had the feeling he’d have slipped from his chair and knelt before her again, given the slightest encouragement to do so.
‘And you will find out all these same things about Bartholomew Barrow, if he has any dealings with your bank; about William Duggan, about Francis Houghton …’ She gave him every name under which Lionel Grippen had ever held property that she knew about. ‘If they have money, the names of the people they disbursed it to.’ From her handbag she took her list so far of Grippen’s names and properties, pushed it across the snowy linen to him. ‘If your bank has handled transactions involving any of these properties, I want to know the names of everyone involved and where the money went. Do you understand?’
‘I understand, lady,’ he whispered. ‘I shall do as you ask.’
If he’d had any doubts about violating the most sacred rules of his bank, he’d resolved them. Perhaps as he stood on the threshold and saw her, the red-haired woman in green wearing the necklace he’d been shown in his dream by some glowing elf king or elder god or angel … With his head humbly bowed, she could see the gray that streaked his hair. For her convenience Don Simon had, with the utmost casualness, put this poor deluded man in danger of ruin.
‘I shall be here Friday at this time.’ Her voice shook as she spoke the words. You’re a goddess, she reminded herself. Or the queen of the elves. Or the reincarnated spirit of this man’s sweetheart or wife. Such creatures don’t have pity for those who run under the juggernaut’s wheels for their sakes. ‘Will you have this information by then?’
‘I should. I’ll bring you what I have, lady.’ He looked down at his own grubby fingers, then quickly took her hand and kissed it again. Without meeting her eyes, he whispered, ‘And then I will be free?’
FREE OF WHAT???
Fury, pity, helplessness threatened for a moment to block all speech.
Miranda, she thought. Oh, Miranda …
She made herself say grandly, ‘Yes. You will be free.’
Tears flowed down his face and he quickly wiped them with a crumpled and yellowed handkerchief. Then he blundered to his feet and hurried from the café with a swift stooped shuffle. Lydia watched his gray form thread between the bright swatches of the ladies who’d stopped here for a cup of tea to recruit themselves for the evening’s ball or dinner or visit to the opera. Ladies who’d gone to Select Female Academies with her mother, who’d said t’sk-t’sk when Lady Mary Wycliffe – or Catherine Halfdene – had married ‘beneath them’ to rescue the family fortunes. Ladies who gave lavishly to charities and paid their poor maids barely ten pounds a year, ladies whose worlds began with the gossip of their friends and ended at the dressmaker’s.
Ladies among whom, all her life, Lydia had felt like a changeling, a visitor from some alien place or time.
At the next table she was aware of Lady Gillingham giving Mrs Tyler-Strachley a trenchant glance as she rose. Lydia laid the price of the coffee on the table beside her cup, got swiftly to her feet, and left the café. She was trembling.
Don’t any of you DARE speak to me …
She understood to the core of her soul why James had quit the Department.
There was a musicale at Lady Stafford’s that night, but the possibility that Lady Gillingham might be there – let alone a) her stepmother and b) Cece Armistead – overwhelmed Lydia as she climbed aboard the crowded omnibus to Liverpool Street Station. I can’t do it.
Aunt Isobel will kill me. I’ve abandoned Emily now two nights in a row.
And if Simon shows up at Lady Stafford’s thinking I’m going to thank him for seducing that poor clerk into jeopardizing his position, I think I’ll burst into tears.
She stopped at her two letter-drops in Finsbury Circus, returned to her hotel room long enough to write a note to Aunt Isobel and change into a traveling costume of tobacco-colored faille, then took a cab to Paddington Station. Her heart wept for the peace of Oxford, for her own house – still and empty as it now felt, the nursery vacant, the servants whispering of this scheme or that to take matters into their own hands. The clock on All Hallows struck seven; there was a seven-thirty express to Oxford. She bought her ticket, crossed the teeming chaos of the station.
Clerks in their shabby black coats and the silk hats they treasured and nursed as their badges of respectability trudged toward the trains that would take them to red-brick suburbs: Basingstoke, Maidenhead, Westbourne Green. Students – fresh-faced, rowdy, slightly intoxicated, headed back ‘up’ to Oxford – as if London lay in a slough of sin at the bottom of an intellectual hill – sons of dukes and financiers and baronets, ‘down’ to be briefed by parents as to their duties in the Season. Costermongers shouting pies for sale, children crying as they hung on to their mothers …
And – she didn’t know what made her look around – a man in brown at the far end of the platform, standing suddenly still.
James.
Sixty feet separated them as the train began to move, and she wasn’t wearing her spectacles, but she knew him. Groped in her handbag for them even as he strode toward her, and yes, it was him, nobody else in the world moved like that.
She cried, ‘Jamie!’ as the seven-thirty to Oxford began to pick up speed, and stepped down off it, into his arms.
ELEVEN
He listened without comment, thumbed through the sheaf of yellow foolscap from Teazle and McClennan that she’d had in her satchel along with three issues of The Lancet and a monograph on blood groups. ‘Don Simon has arranged for a clerk at Barclays Bank to go through the bank’s records for me,’ she said, and he glanced up at the slight tremor in her matter-of-fact voice. ‘So I should have a list of Zahorec’s properties by Friday. I suspect that he’s going to lair up at Dallaby House – do you know it? Titus Armistead purchased it for his daughter and Lord Colwich to honeymoon in. Simon and I broke into Wycliffe House last night and found nothing … Well, nothing about vampires, anyway, but a great deal about what servants do when everybody’s out at the theater.’
‘Does Miss Armistead know that either of us knows about vampires?’ James Asher was a little surprised at how calm he sounded. Seventeen years of secret service to Queen and Country had, he understood, taken its toll on him, but somehow he hadn’t expected this. His rush of rage had almost suffocated him, when Lydia had told him what the Master of London had done. Yet with his heart screaming his daughter’s name, he found he could answer as if he were talking of someone else’s child.
‘I don’t think so.’ Lydia picked up her cup of railroad coffee, cold now, as Asher’s was – not that it had been particularly warm when the spotty youth at the café had brought it to them, along with a plate of moderately stale biscuits. Asher had devoured his share of them – the last time he’d eaten was, if he recalled rightly, at the Gare du Nord that morning – but noticed that Lydia left hers untouched. By the look of her he guessed she’d been eating almost nothing since the night of the kidnapping.
‘I suspect it’s time –’ Asher pushed a plate of biscuits across to her – ‘Isobel’s shrieks of outrage notwithstanding – for you to develop sciatica and retire to Oxford. It isn’t a very long trail that could connect you with the London nest. I’ll put myself in touch with Grippen—’
‘I don’t think I can do that.’ She obediently picked up a biscuit, broke off a corner of it, and left both fragment and biscuit on the plate.
Not that he blamed h
er, given the quality of biscuits served by the Great Western Railway Café.
‘I met Zahorec at a ball at Wycliffe House – spoke to him. I think he’s been trying to lure me in my dreams.’
The anger returned, a rush of crimson heat that extended not only to the interloping vampire and the London nest, but to Simon Ysidro as well. He heard the steely hardness in his own voice as he said, ‘And has Zahorec asked anything of you yet?’
‘Not yet.’ She broke her biscuit into tinier and tinier fragments without appearing to notice it at all. ‘But now that he knows me he might wonder if I suddenly went back to Oxford. And to tell you the truth, I’d rather be where I can do exactly as Grippen asked me: find all Zahorec’s lairs. It may be the quickest way to … to bring an end to all this. Just give him what he’s asking for.’
Asher closed his lips on the words, Do you really think he’s going to give her back?
‘I gave Mr Rolleston – the Barclays man – a list of all the names by which Grippen has done business over the years, and the addresses of his properties. Simon says he’ll find me someone in the B of E.’ Again the tremor in her voice, the movement of her eyes. Ysidro, Asher knew, could be ruthless. ‘That’s where Grippen used to keep his money. I hope I’ve thought of everything …’
He took her hands and kissed them, then held them to his face, unshaven and grimy after two days’ nonstop travel: Venice to Turin, Turin to Geneva, Geneva to Paris. Stations that echoed in the dead of night and the sourness of railway coffee. The rhythm of steel wheels seemed ground into his bones. Come home at once. Grippen has done something terrible.
Lydia’s telegram had lain on the front desk of the Palazzo Foscari Hotel for nearly twenty-four hours before he’d returned to Venice from Sarajevo. He’d passed the time between Venice and Paris planning how to bomb the Foreign Office and kill every living soul within it, for asking him to run that courier drop into Serbia. And then kill himself for agreeing to do it.
After he killed Grippen.
‘You’ve acquitted yourself like a hero, best beloved.’
‘I tried.’ She abandoned the component atoms of the biscuit and began to align the silverware. ‘Grippen’s fledglings followed me one night. At least Simon guesses they were Grippen’s. Two men and a woman. Simon says he doesn’t think they’ll harm me, that Grippen’s hold on them is too strong.’
They had both seen Ysidro command his own fledgling to remain out of shelter in the first touch of the Arctic summer sun, until the new-made vampire flesh had ignited into unquenchable flame.
‘I’ve said before,’ Asher reflected grimly, ‘that for people who stand in danger because they know too much about vampires, you and I know very little about vampires. Ysidro’s probably right, but it’s another reason I’d rather you stepped into the background. If Zahorec is strong enough to hide from Grippen, we don’t know what else he’s strong enough to do.’
Lydia was silent for a long time, making sure her fork was exactly perpendicular to the edge of the table, and that its central tines pointed precisely to the mathematical center of her coffee cup’s diameter. ‘Should I not have borne a child?’ she asked at length. ‘Knowing about them what I knew—’
‘Never think it.’ He grasped her hands again, as if to force her to meet his eyes. ‘We will not transform ourselves into the dead for fear of them. Nor for hatred of them. You’ve seen where that leads.’
She looked aside. The electric light of the platform lamps outlined her features against the twilight that now filled the cavernous spaces around them. ‘It’s one thing to say that of ourselves. We can choose. Miranda …’
‘No child can choose.’ He rose from his chair and came around to her, drew her against him, delicate in his arms as a bundle of twigs. He remembered the Boer children in the concentration camps during the African wars, shock-haired, filthy skeletons with their bellies swollen from starvation: hostages to the demands of the diamond companies that called themselves by the name of Empire. Remembered, as he rode away from the camp into the warm African dusk, how the thin wailing of a baby had seemed to follow him for hours across the veldt. Their fathers in the commandos had not ceased fighting the invaders.
But he could not speak.
You could hunt us down eventually, Ysidro had said to him once, were you willing to give your soul to it … to become obsessed, as all vampire hunters must become obsessed with their prey … Are you willing to give it years?
He had not been.
And this, he reflected, is what came of that …
He became aware of a man standing at the far corner of the café kiosk, a slender gentleman in evening dress, spidery pale hair trailing down his shoulders. For a moment Asher’s eyes met his, pale as yellow champagne, across his wife’s red head.
When he blinked, Ysidro was gone. Nor was Asher, who had been on trains continuously for nearly forty-eight hours and was half blind with exhaustion, entirely certain that he’d seen him at all. In either case he knew that even if he sprang to his feet and darted to the place he’d find nothing.
‘Come.’ He stood. ‘Let’s get something real to eat – Vidal’s is just over on Broad Street and they make the best onion soup you’re likely to find in London – and then go back to this Temperance Hotel of yours and get some sleep. In the morning I’ll get myself up as a loafer and go down to Stepney and have a look at Henry Scrooby’s pub. If Grippen trusts him enough to put property in his wife’s name he may trust him enough to put him in charge of guarding a couple of captives. What’s that?’
As he picked up the packet of McClennan’s latest information a small envelope slipped from between the pages, addressed to Mrs Marie Curie care of the Ladies’ Christian Hotel in a hand unlike any that he’d seen on any of the reports. Good-quality notepaper, he observed automatically as she tore the envelope open: linen rag, tuppence a sheet, finest for all polite correspondence …
Behind her thick spectacles he saw Lydia’s eyes widen. Silently, she handed him the sheet.
Mrs Curie:
Please forgive my intrusion, but it has come to my attention that you are urgently seeking information about a man who came to this country at the end of January, with outsize luggage.
It happens that I am myself seeking such a man. Could you grant me the favour of a meeting, tomorrow afternoon, the fourteenth of May, at the café at Claridge’s Hotel, at two? Please feel free to bring trusted friends with you. Would it be too great an imposition, to suggest that you wear a white hat, so that there will be no mistake in identity? I will likewise wear a white hat, and will bring proofs of my identity and bona fides.
Thank you, more than I can say,
Mr Edward Seabury
James went in first, attired in proper morning dress of gray and black (and Heaven only knows, reflected Lydia distractedly, how he happened to have THAT in that little satchel of his!) and festooned in one of his collection of fake beards (I KNEW he was doing a job for the Foreign Office in Italy!) to make sure Dr Millward wasn’t lurking behind a potted palm in Claridge’s lobby. He also carried a stick, purchased that morning at Selfridge’s where they’d acquired a white hat for Lydia, since as a redhead she never wore such things. If it was necessary for Lydia – waiting outside the great hotel’s bronze doors – to simply walk away without entering, James would emerge from his reconnaissance stick-less, and they would rendezvous back at the Temperance Hotel via separate cabs.
As a schoolgirl, Lydia had quizzed James (only she’d called him Mr Asher then) about being a spy. It hadn’t taken her very long to figure out that her Uncle Ambrose’s friend was leading some kind of a double life, probably because between her clandestine scientific studies and her hated lessons in deportment, dance and piano, she was leading one, too. She’d found the intricate play of logic, observation, and secrecy fascinating and exciting, certainly an improvement over deportment, dance, piano lessons and dress fittings.
Now she felt only fear.
Seabury CAN’T have to
ld Millward …
She felt sick at even the possibility.
He knows the man. He isn’t stupid. He has to know that if he breathes a word about Cece Armistead being seduced by a vampire, Millward will go straight to Noel … Noel who was flirting besottedly with Cece on Saturday night and yesterday morning …
Noel blurts all to Cece. Cece goes to Zahorec.
Zahorec goes deeper underground – after guessing about me.
If Zahorec kills me, Grippen will have no reason to keep Miranda alive.
Or Nan.
Lydia closed her eyes. Ned Seabury CAN’T be that mesmerized by Millward … Can he? He HAS to understand the stakes …
She whispered a prayer to a God she didn’t precisely believe in: Don’t let them come to harm.
She had dreamed about Zahorec again last night. Dreamed of him by candlelight, charming and smiling, drinking wine among his friends and laughing, until across the room he’d seen a woman. Tall and queenly, full breasts braced tight by the flat front of a boned bodice, cold aquiline face framed by a collar of wired gauze. Her dark eyes had met Zahorec’s smiling blue ones. Her face, stern when she had entered, had softened under his lilting glance.
Lured by his warmth, or pretending to be. Predator masquerading as prey.
He had left his friends, reached out to her. He might even have been deceived by the softness of her fingers answering his grip.
‘Lydia, darling!’
Lydia opened her eyes with a snap in time to see Lady Gillingham toddling toward her in a golden-beige hobble-dress so narrow as to barely permit ascent of the hotel steps. ‘Darling, it’s been simply ages … Is it true Isobel’s having Emily’s court dress made by Worth? I think the man’s overrated, myself – you should see the shocking frock he turned out for Loië Varvel! It cost a hundred and fifty guineas and makes her look positively pudgy, darling – not that she’d be anything to brag about under any circumstances. Not everyone has your lovely figure.’
The Kindred of Darkness Page 11