Even sheathed in a very proper gray kid glove his hand had a warm strength to it, firm and adept.
‘Don Simon …’
He cupped her cheek with his other hand. ‘My only fear is that you’ll be hurt, best beloved,’ he said, and a ghost of a smile touched his eyes. ‘I know you’re not going to run off with him.’
Her single quick laugh came out like a sob, at the thought … Absurd? Tragic?
Nothing so simple as that.
He’d been a man grown when first she’d met him, a college lecturer and – she had rapidly come to suspect – a spy on Her Majesty’s service, and she herself a schoolgirl, living her own double life like a spy in enemy country. It was he who had shown her the path that led to her dream of education and training in a field of knowledge which had fascinated her for as long as she could remember. She recalled how scandalized she’d been with herself, when first she’d thought of him as Jamie instead of as Professor Asher. When first she’d wondered what his lips would taste like on her own.
Trust and love had come first, a woman’s passion only later, with womanhood. With Simon it was different.
She whispered, ‘I’m glad you understand. Because I don’t.’
He leaned across the wheel and kissed her, his lips and mustache tasting of spirit gum and Claridge’s Hotel coffee. ‘The only thing that will pull us apart is death,’ he said.
As the cab darted away into the maelstrom of Trafalgar Square she leaned out to look back, but Jamie had disappeared already in the crowd.
He was good at that.
It took Asher only moments to ascertain that Bowler Hat was in fact following himself rather than Lydia. The man pursued him when he took a cab to Porton’s Hotel in Bayswater, where he registered under his old work name of John Grant. There was a tea shop across the street: just as well to know where to find his pursuer, instead of wondering. He was in morning costume, correct for tea at Claridge’s but less so for slipping out the back way and walking over to Prince’s Square to take a cab again (one couldn’t very well ride a bus in a top-hat and swallowtail coat) back to the Temperance Hotel. He changed cabs twice without seeing any sign of pursuit, and in the last one removed the spectacles and false beard. Lydia had introduced him last night to the desk clerk as her husband and it wouldn’t do to arouse the man’s suspicions by a discrepancy of appearance.
Owing to these precautions, by the time he reached the place she had already been and gone. She had left for him the list of properties that Lionel Grippen had owned six years previously, when first their paths had crossed, which he’d studied that morning while Lydia dressed – at her usual fascinating length – to go to Claridge’s. These lay mostly in the oldest portions of London, the City or the East End: We feed on the poor.
There was a note from her also: Returning meet Rolleston 1. Tea at the Metropole 3?
He wired her confirmation at the Oxford house, then resumed his false whiskers and a different pair of spectacles, changed into the rough tweeds and soft cap of a working man, and took the Metropolitan Line to Stepney. The Scythe, on Oak Street, was easy enough to find. It was the largest pub in the district, and at this hour of the afternoon jostled with sailors, soldiers, and stevedores in a musty fug of low voices and cigar smoke. He retired with an Indian pale ale to a corner of the tap room and spent about an hour, speaking to no one but taking note of the faces as they came and went.
It was the time when the neighborhood regulars would begin coming in, to get pails or bottles of ale for dinner or to have a pint before going to whatever grimy rooms were occupied by their families. Asher sat close enough to the bar to hear one of the men greet the woman behind it as Miss Violet, and ask after her ball-and-chain: Miss Violet laughed and retorted, ‘Lord, I feel like as if I’d rented ’im out … and for a good price, too!’
When Henry Scrooby, Proprietor (as it said in chipped gilt letters on the front door’s glass) arrived the resemblance was visible between himself and Miss Violet: crisp brown curls, sharp brown eyes, trim small stature though it was the brother that was the slighter of build. He was handsomer as well; Miss Violet had a nose and chin that could have been copied from the sculpted bust of one of the homelier Roman emperors. Asher moved deeper into the shadows, and took note of the fact that four men came in to give the publican money – with the matter-of-fact air of men repaying a loan – and two appeared to be borrowing it.
A man at the center of the neighborhood economy, then, like many pub-keepers. Like the centurion in the Bible, he saith unto one Go, and he goeth; unto another Come, and he cometh … Asher had seen the man’s counterpart in shabby working-class neighborhoods from Peking to Lisbon. At least he didn’t glimpse Mr Three-and-Ninepenny Bowler among the customers.
With the sun still well in the sky he departed, choosing a moment when Scrooby’s back was turned. Pub-keepers on the whole were observant men and he wished to run no risk of being recognized at some inconvenient time. He took the roundabout route going back to Blomfield Street, on the District Line to the Embankment and then changed trains twice more, and walked the final quarter-mile, to make sure he didn’t have company. At the hotel he changed clothes again – a corduroy jacket as rough as the one he’d just put off, trousers just as pilled and seedy, and boots as shabby – removed the beard and spectacles, and with darkness settling over London, set forth for the East End.
It was time to talk to Grippen.
In addition to his new raiment, he wound extra chains of silver around his throat and wrists, and wrapped three or four more around his left hand, so that a slap from it would burn a vampire’s face like a blow from a blazing torch. Up his right coat sleeve he slipped a foot of iron rod with a knob at one end and a ring at the other, in case he met someone a little more mortal.
Grippen, he guessed, would be expecting a furious husband to storm to Lydia’s defense. But what the Master of London’s new set of fledglings would do if they guessed his involvement with those who understood vampires was another matter. As was what they thought they could get away with when his back was turned.
So he made his way to the ancient riverside parishes, to Priest Alley and Belly Court, to Fox and Goose Yard and Love Lane. What had been an old inn not far from the Tower, undestroyed by the Fire and built on foundations more ancient still, crammed these days with well over a hundred Romanian Jews … Does he still collect the rent from this place, though he sleeps here no more? In the narrow yard the women were still at work pasting together paper boxes for a penny the dozen by the light of burning grease as the men came home from searching for jobs in the sweatshops.
Were Francis Houghton and Nicholas Barger – both of Rood Lane – fledglings he’d made since the murder of half the nest in 1907? Or were they simply Lionel Grippen under another name?
He moved eastward, past the Tower, to brick mazes and old warehouses, cheap boarding houses packed with sailors, immigrants, whores. In a nameless court he passed what looked like a tumbledown church, transformed into a boarding house for Lascar sailors, chewing betel and watching the white man with speculative eyes. The philologist in him picked out accents and voices: the slithery glottal stops of Bow Bells Cockney and the dropped ‘r’s and broad ‘a’s of Bromley and Deptford … What’s a Yorkshireman doing selling oysters hereabouts?
Grippen would be watching for him.
Asher hoped he was right in his guess that the Master vampire would rather use than kill him. That he wouldn’t shatter Lydia’s usefulness by murdering her husband in the middle of the mission he’d commanded her to fulfill.
IS he searching for the Liber Gente Tenebrarum?
Is it, therefore, genuine?
A girl of fourteen, cocky in a new pink hat ablaze with silk roses, slipped her hand into his. ‘All at a loose end, guv? I can tell you a story that’ll ’ave you weepin’ wi’ joy for a shillin’.’
‘Just spent me last on a woman that ’ad me weepin’ wi’ sorrow at the sad tale she told.’ He very quickly withdrew
his hand from the moist little grip: though he had nothing in any pocket that could be easily accessed, he’d learned a long time ago that one thing you didn’t want to do in these streets was let either of your hands be trapped.
Her pert smile disappeared and she used a word sailors would have hesitated to pronounce, and disappeared like flotsam into the crowd around a pub door. Asher walked on.
Fog had risen, stinking of the river. Down lightless turnings he glimpsed the flaring illumination of the docks, where colliers, barges, merchantmen were unloading. The Fleet River flowed somewhere hereabouts, deep beneath the ground in its channel of brick. One could still get to Roman catacombs through the old sewer channels that had once served St George’s Wapping.
Were they keeping Miranda in such a place?
Terror of such a thing ground through him, distracting his thought. I will kill them …
Present and clear as if she were cradled in his arms he felt the extraordinary silkiness of her baby hair – orange-red as poppies – against his lips, smelled the sweetness of her skin, when he’d kissed her before leaving for Venice. He’d loved Lydia almost from the moment he met her, his deep affection for the child merging into love as he’d seen her grow from girl to womanhood, but the love he bore his daughter had been instant and total, a sort of soul-deep daffiness that defied description or challenge.
He could not put her image from his mind. Sleeping … gravely searching his study for her alphabet-blocks … snatching at milkweed pods with tiny hands in the garden …
If I don’t get her back … if I can’t get her back …
Years of work for the Department had taught him precisely how many things could go wrong with the most foolproof of arrangements. …
At the last minute he realized he was surrounded – Jesus, I didn’t even hear them! – as shadows materialized from between the buildings of the narrow court into which he’d somehow wandered in his abstraction, as hands grabbed him from both sides by the arms. He tried to wrench free but was slammed like a rag-doll into the brick of the wall behind him, and in the near-pitch darkness, discerned the shape of a man who stepped in front of him, and the steely glitter of a drawn knife.
‘Help me …’
Damien Zahorec’s voice, barely more than a whisper among the murmur of the leaves around her.
‘Lydia, help me …’
Yew leaves. Lydia identified them, with the clarity of eyesight that she invariably enjoyed in dreams.
The garden maze at Wycliffe House. High over her head, she could see the ragged line of the bushes against a sky black and clear and bannered with stars, a sky such as she had never seen in London in her life. No glare of street-lights reflected on river fog and smoke. It was like the sky at sea, jeweled infinity down to the horizon.
‘I need you …’ There was desperate weariness in his voice, the weariness of the prisoner she’d seen in his cell.
She followed the maze’s turnings, the way she remembered from childhood. He’ll be in the belvedere at the center. Smelled recent rain on the leaves, and from the damp gravel underfoot. In the weeds of the lawn at the maze’s center her stiff satin skirts whispered on curled brown leaves. Damien Zahorec rose from the broken plinth of the miniature temple, and the linen of his shirt hung open to show his jailer’s bite-marks on his throat. Infinite loneliness seemed to surround him and yet in a small corner at the bottom of her heart, Lydia was aware that this was artificial, like the radiant blondness of her stepmother’s hair.
A very good job … but a job, nonetheless.
‘Why did you run from me?’
‘You sounded like you had other fish to fry.’ She threw a wistful note into her voice. ‘This is a dream, isn’t it?’
His face gentle and a little sad, he held out his hand to her. She put hers behind her back, remained where she stood.
‘Don’t be like the others,’ he pleaded. ‘They look at me and see one who is beyond salvation, beyond hope. Or they want to use me. To use these gifts that I have, these abilities that I swear every waking moment that I will not use …’ He spread his hands, begging.
‘I don’t understand.’
There was a thing that vampires did. Lydia had experienced it before: a crushing sleepiness, a period of blank unawareness that wasn’t exactly sleep, as if the mind uncoupled itself from her awareness …
And then she was in the circle of pillars, and in his arms. His grip was gentle, careful, yet crushingly strong, his lips on hers soft and cool as rose petals. (How does he keep his fangs out of the way during a kiss? Or do I just not notice?) Her whole body responded, with a cresting frantic awareness of the shape and strength of his back under her hands, a thousand times more powerful than the passion she felt in Jamie’s arms. She let him tilt her head back, kiss her throat and her breast. The nip of his teeth was feather-light on the skin, not drawing blood – a testing, to see how she’d take it.
Her desperate body ached for more. (He’s influencing glandular reactions on the nerves in some fashion …) His body pressed hers against the wall. (What wall? We’re in a circle of pillars …) His breath hot against her neck. (Vampires don’t breathe …) His hands doing things to her, calling responses from her that she’d never dreamed possible. She was aware of her heart racing. (A hundred and twelve beats per minute? She wondered if she had a watch in this dream to time it.) Her knees trembling and growing weak. (At a hundred and twelve beats per minute that’s no surprise …) Aware of the tangy salt smell of his flesh, and the scent of the pines beyond the window. (Window?)
She opened her eyes and saw they were in his prison cell.
‘She’s coming,’ he whispered. ‘She’ll take me, change me. Force me under the shadow of damnation … Make me her slave. Lydia, I’m begging you. Help me.’
Though she knew transition to the vampire state to be voluntary – although the alternative was death – she gasped, as she was fairly certain Cecelia Armistead had gasped before her, ‘What can I do?’
With a convulsive sob he thrust her from him, and she saw that they were definitely in his cell. He pushed her behind him, away from the door as it opened, and the dark woman stood framed there, the dark woman who’d smiled to him when as a living man she’d encountered him at that candlelit gathering. She saw Lydia (how much of this is a dream?) and her face twisted. ‘Who is this?’ She reached toward Lydia with a hand tipped by long vampire claws, and Damien caught her wrists.
‘She is no one …’
She flung him aside with the terrible strength of the vampire, and as Lydia backed away (oh, God, what if this isn’t a dream?) Damien sprang up, seized the woman’s arms. ‘Ippolyta, don’t …’
The woman Ippolyta turned upon him, seized his arm with a grip that drove her nails into his flesh. She dragged him to her by the hair at the back of his head and thrust him to his knees, kneeling over him while she released her grip for the second it took to rip his throat with her claws.
His eyes met Lydia’s in that last mortal second and he gasped, ‘Run!’ and Lydia fell back another step as the vampire woman fastened her lips on the spouting wound. Her black hair fell from its twisted braids, half covering his face; the black silk of her garments billowed around them like a cloud, the jewels in it flashing like half-concealed lightning. Lydia saw his hand grip the woman’s arm, frantically trying to thrust her away, then clinging as if he felt himself swing suspended over the blackness of a deeper abyss.
‘Lydia, run … and wait for me. I will come …’
She woke trembling, her whole body reverberant with the memory of his lips, his hands, his strength … his blood black-red in moonlight …
What a farrago of nonsense!
The dry pungency of garlic filled the darkness. Beyond the windows of her bedroom she heard the dim chiming of the Great Tom bell in Christ Church College’s gatehouse. Heard birds begin to sing.
If he thought I’d fall for that I think I’ve just been insulted.
But the taste of his lips
lingered in her memory as the first stains of day infused the sky.
FOURTEEN
‘You Asher?’
The hands that crushed the silver links under his shirt-cuffs into his flesh were warm. The bodies pressed against his on both sides stank of the living, not the dead. Someone dug at his throat with fingers like tanned leather and pulled his collar away, grabbed the handful of silver chains.
‘Looks like,’ grunted a voice accompanied by a wash of beer and dental caries.
Other hands tore open his cuffs, stripped the silver from his wrists and his left hand.
‘Oi’ll take them,’ said the man in front of him, a deadly quiet voice with a south Irish dh to his speech. ‘Grippen said he’d be wantin’ ’em.’ He held out his hand and Asher heard the protective metal jingle as it went into the man’s palm and pocket. ‘And that one you kept out, Jem,’ added the Irishman, and the man holding Asher’s arm cursed unimaginatively and handed it over.
‘It’s real silver.’
‘And Grippen’s real easy to fool, ain’t he, then?’
The would-be thief didn’t even attempt a rebuttal.
‘Let’s be havin’ no monkey tricks then, Professor.’ The Irishman yanked Asher’s neckerchief free of his collar, used it to bind his eyes.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’
In the clammy darkness somewhere nearby, he smelled the whiff of blood.
The stink of sewage and coal smoke and the river; the occasional brush of wet bricks against his shoulder or sleeve. Voices yammering. A woman screamed Spendthrift! and Godless drunkard! in Romanian and a man yelled that he owed nothing to a shrewish whore. Neighbors shouted at them both to shut up. Someone played a barrel organ, a shrill rickety approximation of ‘Il balen del suo sorriso …’
Ships hooted on the river, not more than a few streets away. The old inn near the Tower …
Steps underfoot, deeply worn in the centers, slick with moisture and stinking of vomit and piss. A door creaked and he smelled the musty reek of filthy bedding on top of the other myriad stinks of poverty, overcrowding, degradation. An uneven floor beneath the crunchy sponginess of soiled straw.
The Kindred of Darkness Page 14