The Kindred of Darkness by Barbara Hambly Page A

won’t do anything silly,’ she repeated doggedly.
    â€˜Had I a silver coin for every time a woman has said,
I will not do anything silly
—’
    â€˜You would burn the skin off your hands,’ retorted Lydia. They had crossed the jostling confusion of drays, cabs, passengers dashing to catch the last omnibus in Finsbury Circus, to the doors of the Christian Travelers’ Hotel. He handed her up the single shallow step. In a smaller voice, she said, ‘I have to know.’
    Without answering, he opened the door for her, the Christian Travelers’ Hotel not running to a doorman. At the desk, she gave the clerk a shilling and asked if there were any letters for Elizabeth Röntgen.
    There were two. One, from Henry McClennan, contained another list of properties: her eye picked out the name of Daphne Scrooby of Parish Street again, of Francis Houghton and Bartholomew Barrow. It was noted that while birth certificates existed for Mrs Scrooby (née Robinson) and her husband, a well-known pub-owner in the Limehouse, no such things existed for Houghton, Barrow, or Nicholas Barger of Rood Lane, to whom Barrow had also willed City property.
    It was hard to keep her fingers from trembling as she opened the second envelope, a telegram from Ellen sent that morning.
    WIRE FROM MR JAMES SENT VENICE LAST NIGHT STOP SAYS HE IS ON HIS WAY STOP
    He is on his way
.
    She woke in blackness, gasping.
NO
…
    The dream swallowed back into itself.
    The Temperance Hotel
…
    Reassuringly, the darkness around her smelled of wallpaper mold and the desiccated ghosts of garlic and wolfsbane. Across the street, the clock on All Hallows struck three.
Was that what waked me?
Dimly the groan of the goods trains came from Liverpool Street Station, without cease through the small hours.
    It had been cold in her dream.
    Miranda?
    No
. She’d dreamed of her daughter, a brief, far-off image of the toddler curled asleep in Nan Wellit’s arms. She’d taken great comfort from the fact that – although in the dream too it was pitch dark – she could see that Miranda’s clothes were clean and her hair combed. Nan was looking after her.
    Good for you, Nan
…
    It wasn’t that which had frightened her.
    Something about Simon
?
    After she’d stuffed the telegram from Ellen, and that thin sheaf of information from Henry McClennan, into her handbag, she’d walked with Simon to a café on the other side of the oval park, had sat talking for a time, knowing if she went straight back to her room she would lie awake. She’d asked him about being a vampire, and about reading dreams; about the Old Earl who’d built Wycliffe House and laid out its gardens. About the harper called Rhys the White, who after his death had slept in the crypt of St Giles Cripplegate and had lured his victims with music that they could not tear from their dreams.
There were men in London, living men, who believed him to be a wizard or an angel or a saint, because of the dreams he could visit upon them
…
    And as he spoke Ysidro had watched passers-by beneath the glare of the café’s electric lights, servants making their way home from evening service, soldiers who stopped to buy ginger beer. Observed them the way Jamie observed them, picking individual faces, separate voices:
That man’s from Sussex. One of that girl’s parents is Liverpool Irish. See how he holds his left wrist? He’s a coachman
…
    Reading their bodies and voices, their mannerisms and their lives.
    James and I understand one another
, he had said
. Many vampires make humankind our study: sit in cafés and theaters and on the benches of the Embankment, watching and listening. To us the Personals of every newspaper are like serialized novels, or like observing the tracks of beasts in the woods. Such awareness is life to us: hunting, or watching for who looks at us twice and thrice
.
    When they’d walked back to the