Count Epaminondas Saint-Hilaire in Paris – said Sophister’s painfully neat block printing – had owned two copies of the Liber Gente, one the same 1637 Latin edition that lay before him on the bookseller’s cigarette-burned desk, the other the first known printed edition, also in Latin, from Burgos in 1490. Four, Wirt had said, and one of them evidently in French: there had been a French edition printed in Paris in 1510, Sophister had written, of which nothing was known and no copies had ever surfaced. Both French forgeries were supposed to be taken from it, and John Aubrey had published an English translation of this text in London in 1680 – Balliol and Christ Church Colleges in Oxford, and Caius College in Cambridge, possessed copies. There was record of a Spanish edition of 1494 printed in Toledo, and two different Latin printings done in Geneva.
This has to be what Grippen is seeking.
The hold of a master-vampire over his fledglings – said the problematical French edition – could be broken by master and fledglings partaking of a Black Mass together, at which a black child without a single drop of Caucasian blood was sacrificed, or by dosing the master (and how are you going to do that?) with henbane, ox-gall, and powdered black pearls. The Prague edition gave three additional methods, all involving potions drunk by both master and fledglings in the dark of the moon on a bridge above running water (presumably you have a living person get you on to the bridge … do you then kill him or her afterwards?).
He wondered what the other versions said on this subject, and if in fact Damien Zahorec was going to have the temerity to suggest these rituals to Lord Vauxhill, and sharp-eyed Mrs Raleigh.
And, in their desperation to be free of Grippen, would they comply? (Which still leaves the problem of how you’re going to trick Grippen into drinking a cup of black dog’s urine and garlic in the middle of Blackfriars Bridge …)
Is this what Zahorec is seeking, in the house of Titus Armistead?
If not these specific formulae, then one that WILL give him mastery over London?
There was also, he noted, a method by which a vampire might – by use of a distillation of silver, graveyard earth, and the blood of a virgin boy – come to hold in his thrall vampires not his own fledglings.
The angle of window-light shifted. Pubs in Stepney would be opening, though it was too early for their owners to be working the taprooms themselves. Miss Violet would recognize him as someone who’d been in before and not a stranger – easy enough to get up a chat on the subject of other property owned by the publican, and whether members of his family had taken a vacation out of town on or about the eighth. Amateurs always use their families.
He rose from his desk, and made his way – nearly breaking his neck over the piled volumes of the Patrologia Latina – to the window. Dean Street was quiet. A cab rattled past, two lady shoppers strolled along the opposite pavement and paused to look into the windows of Clement Carghill, Fine Stationery.
Sunlight shone bright on sooty bricks, glinted on windows.
Yet the feeling that he was being watched hadn’t left him: the sensation that had caused him to change cabs twice on his way here from Moscow Road and to leave his satchel at the toyshop on Regent Street where he’d bribed the counter-boy to let him change his jacket and hat and leave by the back door. Before parting from Lydia that morning, he’d arranged a fallback signal for the train station: Red scarf, don’t come near me, don’t speak to me. Just get on the train.
He hoped that precaution would suffice.
Lydia turned the page of the Café Metropole’s menu with languid grace, not that she could read a word of its copperplate catalogue of poppy-seed cakes and gateaux crèmes at a distance of eighteen inches. On the far side of the little lake of white-draped tables, her stepmother, Valentina, sat likewise alone, likewise studiously absorbed in perusal of the possibilities for tea. Lydia might be blind as a mole, but she could identify her father’s exquisite little widow anywhere, and had nearly shrunk under the table ten minutes ago when the older woman had entered the café.
Valentina had scrupulously taken a table as far from Lydia as she possibly could.
Meeting a lover …
She peeped up over the edge of the stiff white card: one glance at Valentina, one glance at the door. Aunt Lavinnia will kill me if she learns I didn’t put on my eyeglasses to see who joins her …
A glance down at the packet of notepaper, folded small, which Hellice Spills had handed her over coffee at Lady Sydenham’s Parlour Tea Shop and Sweets.
The list of properties whose purchase Noel Wredemere had arranged – and paid for – since the first of the year.
Her work for Lionel Grippen was done.
There were six of them, all in the Greater London area. Four in far-flung suburbs, though minutes by train and Underground from the crowded docks and slums. Had Colwich used his engagement to Titus Armistead’s daughter as security for the purchases? The bridegroom would be in a sorry position, she reflected, if Armistead turned intransigent over the settlement and cancelled the marriage altogether. Cece – and Zahorec – would have to find a new means of getting her an independent establishment in London …
And they would almost certainly kill poor Noel.
She turned the list over in her gloved hands. The thought of Jamie going to have a look at these places – he would have to, to make sure there were no surprises in store anywhere – sickened her with dread.
And then what?
Lionel Grippen might possibly return Miranda to her unhurt – provided his human agents hadn’t panicked. But the chances of his – or their – letting Nan Wellit go free were microscopic. And though everything in her wailed to simply hand the vampire the list of properties tonight (Where? How? Even if I put an advertisement in The Times tonight it wouldn’t come out until the morning), she knew it would be a few days before Ysidro’s promised clerk at the Bank of England came up with the locations of Grippen’s holdings. Before she and Jamie had time to track down where Miranda actually was.
In those days anything could happen.
Tightly as she squeezed shut the door in her mind on the thought, a little whisper of it leaked through: Get Miranda NOW, and hope they’ll let Nan go as well …
She knew they wouldn’t.
Will Ysidro help us stage a rescue?
Dare we even ask him?
One thing at a time. She drew a deep breath, let it out.
Tomorrow night – provided Armistead didn’t halt the marriage altogether – was dinner at Wycliffe House. Forty people, Aunt Isobel had said, and the Ballet Russe afterwards. Enough of a crowd to allow her to slip away for a more thorough search of the library for copies of the Liber Gente Tenebrarum. (Drat it, that we didn’t know to look for it the first time we were there!) She was under orders from Isobel to seek out Lady May, who must (Isobel said) surely be so sick of the American and his daughter (and their detectives) by this time that she’d be delighted to tell all she knew about the settlement …
Movement on the edge of the café drew her attention. Though it grated on every sensibility she possessed, Lydia put on her spectacles. Across the café she’d already identified the unfashionable outline and colors of the man who stood on the shore of that lake of white tables: black and baggy and rather rusty-looking. Certainly not the garb of a gentleman coming to take a late and extremely expensive tea at the Metropole.
Maybe I am supposed to be Queen Mab or the Spirit of the Woods and shouldn’t be wearing spectacles … but the last thing she wanted was to be surprised by another Timothy Rolleston.
The man who stood looking at her across the intervening tables was younger than Rolleston, and had the unhealthy thinness that Lydia had seen among the opium-smokers of the Limehouse. His ancient blue-and-white school tie was faded, his respectable, clerkish black jacket and trousers hung like a scarecrow’s. Though he was clean-shaven and his hair was clean, he had the opium smoker’s air of shabby self-neglect.
His sunken eyes, fixed on her, flared with shock: the red-hai
red lady in green, with the mermaid necklace gleaming against the white of her shirtwaist. With her spectacles on, she could see that shock change to horror, and despair.
It’s really real. The dream you had is really real. Whatever that creature, that being of shining shadow promised you in your dream, you’re awake now and here she is, waiting for you exactly the way he said I’d be …
Asking you to violate everything you swore to your employers that you’d uphold.
Her heart ached with pity for him …
… until he turned, with sharp decision, and strode toward the lobby doors.
Lydia sprang to her feet. In panic she wove her way between the tables, cursing the dictates of good behavior (and the architecture of fashionable shoes) that made it impossible for her to run – the lifelong training that forbade her to shout.
‘Wait!’ she called out, in that polite half-cry that comes from the throat and not the chest. ‘Please, wait!’
He was out the door twenty feet ahead of her.
By the time Lydia reached the sidewalk of Northumberland Street, he was gone.
TWENTY
Wearing a red cravat, and reading an octavo edition of Burton’s Kasidah, Asher watched platform eleven of Paddington Station until the eight-oh-five for Oxford was safely on its way. He’d seen Lydia get on it, and watched the other passengers for any hint of a familiar outline, any sense of having seen a walk, a shape, a type of hat …
And saw nothing and no one that, in his spying days, would have sent him fleeing for the nearest border without bothering to pack.
Lydia didn’t give him a glance.
When the express arrived from Birmingham, and Asher went as if to meet it, then left the station, returning only minutes before the nine-fifty departed, with the last milky twilight barely lingering in the sky. He waited until the train was actually in motion before stepping on to it. No one followed.
The fact that he saw no one meant only that he’d seen no one.
The shadow he’d glimpsed beside Blackie Wirt’s car – and as he’d guessed, there was no mention in the newspapers of the discovery of a body in Woolwich or vicinity, mutilated or otherwise – lingered in his mind. The cloaked form in the Underground station. The note of fear in Mrs Raleigh’s voice: Who is that?
Not Zahorec, that was clear.
Would any of Armistead’s other ‘boys’ have the wits to trace him through Sophister?
The thought troubled him as the dark countryside streamed past the window, alternating with the recollections of the smoky dimness of The Scythe: sausages, beer, and enough neighborhood gossip to fill out a three-volume novel.
Asher watched the platform behind him when he stepped off the train at Oxford.
All the way along George Street he listened in the darkness.
A light burned behind the curtains of Lydia’s room as he came down Holywell Street. He let himself in through the garden gate, heard her voice speaking softly beneath the arbor.
‘Do you think you can get him to come tomorrow?’ Behind her usual matter-of-factness he heard exhaustion and dread.
The glow of the breakfast-room window haloed them: Lydia on the garden bench, looking up into Ysidro’s face, a shawl wrapped over the traveling dress she’d had on at Paddington. Ysidro standing, thin arms folded, gray clothing indistinguishable from shadow.
‘What names do you seek, Mistress?’
She gave them: a catalog of how deeply she had penetrated the secrets of the vampire nest. The Spanish vampire had on several occasions risked incineration to help them, but Asher knew that his true loyalties were also wrapped in shadow. It was Ysidro – with divers bribes … appearing in the guise of those they honor – who had drawn himself and Lydia into being the heirs and successors of Johanot of Valladolid, servants of the Undead.
And is all of this – or part of this – some chess game he’s playing against Grippen? Everything he knew about vampire nests whispered to him that there was at least that possibility.
‘I feel such a wretch for not catching … Mr Ballard, did you say your clerk’s name was?’ said Lydia after a time. ‘I did try.’ It was a measure of her desperation – and her trust in the vampire – that she had her spectacles on. In the reflected lamplight she looked very like the gawky schoolgirl Asher had first met in the home of Ambrose Willoughby, the Dean of All Souls. ‘I took a cab and drove round that whole area, from the Embankment up to Trafalgar Square. He fled the café as if he’d seen the Devil.’
‘He may have believed he had.’
‘Will you be able to bring him back?’
‘Or can someone else be recruited?’ Asher stepped from the darkness. Though he was fairly certain Ysidro had both heard and seen him coming, the joy on Lydia’s face at the sight of him would have been enough to banish from anyone but a maniac any thought of jealousy … notwithstanding he was well aware that Lydia loved Ysidro.
The fact that he would rather that she didn’t had more to do with his fear for her safety than conventional resentment of a wife’s ciscebeo. As her arms closed hard around his ribcage, he asked across her shoulder, ‘Am I being followed?’
The vampire’s eyes for an instant lost their focus. ‘I hear no one.’ Then he held out his hand. ‘I trust you are well?’ The crystalline gaze lingered for a moment on Asher’s face, as if he saw there everything that had passed since he’d come into the Palazzo Foscari to find Lydia’s telegram. ‘Madame informs me there seems to be more than one alien vampire in London – the second of whom has remained invisible even to Lionel’s watchful eye.’
‘I’m not even sure what I saw.’ Asher glanced back toward the garden gate, and wondered if a vampire capable of hiding from Grippen’s awareness would be any more apparent to Ysidro’s. ‘Has she informed you also that Titus Armistead is seeking to employ a vampire for purposes of smashing the miners’ unions that inconvenience him? Are there vampires in the United States?’
‘If there are, I have no desire to meet them. The thought of an American vampire’s feeding-manners renders me queasy. Presumably he conceived his belief in our existence by reading the Book of the Kindred of Darkness?’
‘You’ve heard of it?’
‘Who among us has not?’
‘Grippen’s fledglings, to name four.’
Ysidro’s long fingers moved, as if dismissing ungrateful hedge-pigs. ‘’Tis not a matter of which one speaks to fledglings.’
‘Because it contains formulae that would break a master’s hold on them?’
‘James.’ He tilted his head a little, like a mantis in the moonlight. ‘Don’t tell me you believe a word of that nonsense?’
‘Damien Zahorec is acting as if he does. As is Grippen.’
‘I never rated Lionel’s intelligence above average. One doesn’t speak of the book to fledglings because they would believe. Fledglings are so frightened at their own inexperience they’ll believe anything. One doesn’t wish to spend the next twelve decades trying to out-maneuver attempts to trick one into drinking rat-blood cocktails in the dark of the moon.’
‘It would get tiresome.’
‘Most of those mixtures contain silver or whitethorn, as you’ve probably observed. Not enough to kill a strong vampire, but some of those potions will drive him – or her – mad, and certainly weaken him. The book is a trap, James. Promulgated into the world – and spread down the centuries – as a means of killing vampires … or inducing them to kill each other or themselves.’
Asher grinned sidelong. ‘It’s deuced clever.’
Ysidro looked down his nose, like a fox not wishing to admit that foxes can be deceived, as well as surrounded, by geese.
‘Zahorec seems to have swallowed it whole – though not enough to risk travel across open ocean for five days at the mercy of an American millionaire and his “boys”. I wish I could reassure Grippen that sooner or later, his enemy is going to lay hands on the book and poison himself, but he seems to be taking great precautions to keep Lydia – a
nd myself – from knowing what he’s actually seeking in Zahorec’s lairs.’
‘Scant reassurance if Lionel’s fledglings lay hands on it.’ The twitch of Ysidro’s aristocratic nostrils was a condensed firestorm of derision. ‘Some of those recipes are genuine. The last thing he wants is to find himself another victim of Johanot of Valladolid’s extremely clever little scheme.’
‘I’m definitely starting to like Johanot. The problem is that like poison bait, the intended victim isn’t the only one who’s likely to die.’ Asher laid his hand on Lydia’s head as she seated herself again on the bench.
‘I visited The Scythe this afternoon …’
‘Not the first public house Grippen has used for his purposes,’ remarked Ysidro. ‘Though ’tis some sixty years since the last one. I hope you avoided the sausages.’
‘They were … memorable.’ Asher’s quick grin faded. ‘I had a long chat with Henry Scrooby’s sister Violet, and sundry of their neighbors. Scrooby’s wife, brother, and brother-in-law have all been away since the seventh of May. Everyone I spoke to attested to the terror and respect in which “Dr G” is held, but the general consensus is that neither Mick Scrooby nor Reggie Barns – the brother-in-law – can be relied on. Barns in particular is bad-tempered and impatient. Both are inclined to drink.’
Lydia’s hand went swiftly to her lips, and when she folded it, almost at once, upon her knee, her face was nearly as white as the vampire’s.
Ysidro only crossed his arms again, considering the words without expression. In life, Asher knew, the vampire had engaged in intelligence work himself, and would know what happened to hostages under the care of bad-tempered and impatient watchmen inclined to drink.
At length Ysidro looked down into Lydia’s face. ‘Tomorrow you will have the information you seek, Mistress.’
‘Thank you.’ She took his hand.
‘When you learn that which you seek to know –’ Ysidro’s glance returned to Asher – ‘speak to me, ere you make use of the information.’
Their eyes held for a long moment, and it seemed to Asher that behind the crying of the crickets in the summer darkness, he heard Millward’s voice, and that of his own master Rebbe Karlebach – and indeed, Johanot of Valladolid: They cannot be trusted. Their whole means of hunting and survival is deceit, and illusion, and the lies of the damned.
The Kindred of Darkness Page 20