The Kindred of Darkness Read Online Free

mind.
    Miranda
.
    The child she’d never thought she’d bear. The child she’d never even imagined she’d want, until after eight years of marriage to James she’d found herself pregnant – startled at first and simply curious to observe first-hand the physiological symptomatology on the female nervous system (
Is there anything analogous in males
?). And then suddenly it had come to her:
that is ANOTHER PERSON. I am carrying ANOTHER PERSON inside me
.
    Nothing in medical science had prepared her mind for this and when she had lost that child in her first trimester she had been devastated. As if a door had closed, a gate locked against her, sealing off a road filled with wonder. The second miscarriage, in September of 1910, had been worse, like a God she had never quite believed in telling her that she was too defective to bear a child.
Four-eyes, skinnybones, goggle-eyed golliwog … No proper lady asks questions like that, no girl from any decent family even thinks about such things
…
    Fifteen months after that, Miranda was born.
    Her magical red-haired child.
    Lamps burned in the tall old house on Holywell Street. Lydia had to steel herself to walk that last fifty feet to the front door – far more than she’d had to do in order to slap the Master Vampire of London in the face. The servants adored Miranda and Lydia felt that if any of them even spoke her daughter’s name to her, she was in danger of breaking down completely. But the rigorous training she’d received from Nanna and her aunts held good. When they swarmed around her (
Don’t be silly, Lydia, five people isn’t a swarm
…) in the hall, she was able to clasp Ellen’s hands, to comfort Mrs Grimes: ‘Please, I need to be alone right now … Yes, I talked to Mr Grippen … I’ll tell you about it later … No, we’re not going to the police … Yes, he assured me that Miranda and Nan are both safe—’
    Lying, murdering devil
—
    â€˜â€”Please, I need to be alone right now. Mrs Grimes, could I ask you to have some tea sent up? Yes, everything is going to be all right.’
    Mrs Brock, usually so grim-faced and reserved, was weeping, and the sight of her tears nearly broke Lydia’s heart.
    She lit one of the bedroom candles from the gas-jet in the hall, and carried it up to the study above. Through open windows the air was a soft miracle of springtime. Tea at Lady Brightwell’s, dinner with Aunt Isobel, drawing-room chatter about Emily’s Court gown … She wondered who that had happened to and why she remembered it.
    A little girl playing the violin for pennies on the platform at Paddington, who had smiled at her when she’d dropped a shilling in her cup.
Did SHE have a mother?
    Did Lionel Grippen know HER name?
    Lydia kindled the gas-jet, lit the oil-lamps above her own exquisite eighteenth-century secretaire and sat for a moment, only breathing.
    The ormolu clock on the mantle gave the time as quarter to one. The Post Office was closed. Nothing could happen –
nothing
– until morning, and all the night yet to get through.
    Grippen was IN THIS HOUSE.
Her mind repeated the thoughts, stupidly, as if like fingers numb with cold they could grasp only a few things.
He must have made the servants fall asleep.
Some vampires could do that, the older ones, more experienced or more deeply imbued with charge upon charge of psychic energy that they had absorbed from death upon death.
    Vampires. Walking corpses, drinkers of lives as well as of blood. Manipulators of illusion, readers of dreams.
    If I hadn’t married James
…
    But she knew she was being silly.
If I hadn’t married James
… she couldn’t even imagine what her life would be. In any case she knew she would never have been happy, vampires or no vampires.
    Grippen was in this house
. She still had braided chains of garlic, wolfsbane, and the desiccated blossoms of