Chapter Nine: Departures

If you don't breathe, you don't snore. After the bedsprings stopped creaking, signalling that Darla was settled in bed, the silence in the hollowed dark beneath the rail shed was woolly thick. It seemed to rustle itself and crackle against William's ears as he sat with Dru, listening, for as long as they could bear. Did Darla take long to fall asleep? She usually went out like a light when she finished with Angelus, which stood to reason, but tonight for Angelus had clearly ended with an ignominious drunken faint to the floor, so that was no clue. William's skin was crawling with impatience by the time he finally let himself believe Darla must have dropped off, and Dru leapt up like a coiled spring suddenly loosed to lead him up the ladder.

When no cry of surprise greeted their emergence from the trapdoor, Dru tugged William up into the shed, where she hopped soundlessly from foot to foot in childlike excitement. They tiptoed to the bed to examine the sleeping elders. Darla had hoisted an unconscious Angelus up onto the bed and they lay curled around each other. In sleep, they had the lush, contented look of the well-fed, and even looked almost affectionate: Darla was higher up in the bed and Angelus's head rested against her cream silk chest, a look of seraphic, blithe contentment on the Irishman's sleeping features. Darla's gold hair spilled loose around her, halo-like, and together they were quite the romantic tableau. William cracked into a broad grin. Never saw anything like that when either of them had the slimmest spark of consciousness. Satisfied that the matriarch and patriarch had to be sound asleep, he led Dru to the corner of the shed, where the girls' dresses were folded in a decadent pile beside the boxes where Darla stored her personal effects.

Dru dropped to her knees and began rearranging the boxes by height order, her giggles rising til William had to shush them with a kiss. Then she stilled and looked at him, saucer eyes brimming with excitement, making him smile back at her: he found it quite impossible to fathom what got Dru going. She could talk without concern about being forced to eat sewer rats, but give her a pile of boxes and she was happy as a child on Christmas Day. Around her, he often felt as though he was the one missing something – as though Dru saw more than him, and made sense according to details he simply couldn't grasp. He needed to know what she did. "When we were down in the tunnel – did you hear Darla talk about packing and leaving?" he asked.

Dru nodded vigorously, then tilted her head to one side. "Don't usually take time to pack. Not proper fleeing if you have to pack." She grinned, and held out her left hand, palm upwards. She walked the fingers of her right hand out across the palm, speeding up and twisting them down underneath when she reached the fingertips. "Better when we steal away in the night, across woods by moonlight, and hear all the men shouting behind, waving their pitchforks and brands. Makes a pretty chorus."

William frowned in the half-light. "What do we need to flee from? Isn't anyone who can do anything to us!"

"Doesn't do to pull down the curtain and let everyone see us." Dru waggled a finger at him sternly. "You've been swinging on the drape-pull."

William stared at Drusilla, and swallowed uncomfortably. "It's all in there," continued Dru, hazing a hand over the green silk hatbox in which Darla kept her especially precious belongings. William knelt, the creep of anticipation up his spine more delicious and less like guilt than he'd expected, and removed the lid. On top of the pile within sat a neat envelope postmarked from Deptford, addressed to Darla via the poste restante service of a nearby post office. William opened it and read extremely out-dated handwriting on fine, water-marked paper:

"MY DEAREST DARLA –

We were most surprised to receive your letter after so long a silence. Of course we remain eternally obliged to yourself and to Angelus, and cannot refuse you board at our home. I do not believe you have yet seen the mansion; the previous owners were sweet and accommodating and we have ample space. We shall expect the four of you on the night of the twenty-third.

Yours truly,

ELIZABETH."

William frowned. "What's the date?" he asked Dru.

"Nine days til Sailor-mass," she replied portentously, shushing him with a finger. Quietly, William fetched the paper detailing the railway workers' deaths. "Yesterday was the nineteenth," he noted.

"Deptford, then out over the sea," whispered Drusilla. "Grandmum wants to see Paris, see if it's all still in pieces. Eat frogs' legs, and bodies and heads."

"They're planning to go to France? From Deptford?"

"Nice and quiet. Dark little boats go out at night, Thames spits them right out of its mouth," murmured Dru, swaying as though she had sea-legs.

"What's the use of going to France when we have London at our feet?" William shuddered, then frowned as a thought struck him. "What about garlic? Do we need to worry about garlic?"

"It depends how many Frenchmen you eat in one go," allowed Dru.

William re-read the letter in consternation. Deptford. France. His limbs were chilling of their own accord and his stomach turning to water. Going to France, when London was a fairytale kingdom, and he'd just been reborn as the big bad wolf. Where was the justice in that? London had spent a quarter of a century scrupulously grinding him down; he deserved more than a fortnight to get back at it. London was his town, his birthplace, home to all the pleasures he knew how to savour and edifices he wanted to tear down. London was his, and he was going to bring it to his knees. Couldn't leave. Not yet.

On the floor, Drusilla was crumpling her dress in the dirt and sifting through the contents of Darla's hatbox with absorbed fascination. She pulled out oddments one by one: a hatpin with garnets; an extremely fine volume of Byron's verse; a bride's veil with tiny spatters of blood jewelling the hem in among the pearl beads; a long, curved glass object the function of which William, assiduously, didn't guess at. Dru admired each one for a moment, holding it up and moving her lips soundlessly as though enchanting it with a silent incantation. In her hands, the most ordinary trinket became black magic. What chance did he have?

"Dru, love?" It was probably about time to live out that old adventurous plan, the one whose moment he'd missed somewhere in the final five years of his life. Bid a fond farewell to the family and strike out alone with his girl. Well, perhaps the farewell could be avoided. He had a feeling it might not go so well. "Have you ever seen London?"

"See it all around, my sweet. Can't stop seeing it." Dru gave him an almost patronising smile, which made him prickle a little.

"I mean ... really seen the sights. Taken it all in."

Dru blinked up at him uncomprehendingly. "I see all the sights, even when nobody else does."

He sighed. "There's not much point in my giving you the great romantic speech, is there? Asking you to come away with me and be my love? Tried that business before we went to find my..." he let his voice trail off into a mumble, swallowed, then looked down at her with big eyes. "Just not ready to leave yet, is all."

"I am your love."

He had never heard Dru say anything so simply. His eyes widened. She held up a stately hand, which he took in his and used to draw her up to her feet. She cupped his cheek and moved close to kiss him, delicate and slow. When it ended, William had stopped thinking altogether.

"You'll... come with me then?" he asked. "Stay with me in London?"

There it was: that same feeling William got every time he pulled his heart from his chest and held it out to someone. It was odd, that. Every time he did it, it was exactly as total and immense and unbearable and delicious as the first time.

Dru looked at him in silence. It was all he could do not to screw his eyes shut. Had he done so, he'd have missed the sight of Drusilla's own eyes unfocusing, as though looking at something far beyond. She saw things, didn't she? Could probably see how all of this would fall out ahead of them. If she said yes, it would mean this was the right thing.

Dru's gazed flicked into focus on the bed. Angelus had stirred slightly, burying his face deeper in Darla's chest. A firework went off in William's guts at the thought of taking Dru from under Angelus's nose. He was momentarily transfixed by what was literally under Angelus's nose, that white curved flesh of Darla's that didn't look cold for a second; but this was love, and vengeance, and striking out alone, and goodbye to all that. And then, without a word, Drusilla slipped her hand into his, and he forgot it all instantly.

He led her to the trapdoor over the underground tunnel, hoisted her up into his arms like a groom carrying his bride over the threshold, and grinned when she twined her arms around his neck. "Madame," he declared, "Your carriage awaits." Then, on an impulse, he jumped down the short ladder, newfound grace and serendipity the only things keeping him from broken ankles and Dru from spilling onto the floor, and struck off into the dark.

Darla opened one blue eye and smiled.

Denial was the only way Arthur was going to go through with it. Really, denial had everything in its favour: it was the spirit of the age, the bright illumination of a neat empire built on massed ranks of slums and foreign blood and toil. For Arthur, it was a time-honoured self-preservation strategy, the only thing standing between himself and the various truths he couldn't possibly come to terms with. Like what, exactly, he thought he was doing now. And it went so nicely with the cloud of dejection and purposelessness that had settled over him when Cecily Addams's maid had shut the door in his face, and which he was diligently cultivating now. He was an outsider in this indifferent town, he reminded himself brutally. Nobody would let him in, and nobody would talk to him. He could very well have been able to help with this macabre mystery, but nobody would listen. He was utterly forlorn.

Too forlorn of course to even notice that he had taken two left turns in quick succession and was now forging ahead, hands thrust in his pockets, into the alleyway that ran directly behind Hardenhuish Square. Too wrapped up in miserable thoughts to recognise that his gloom was fostered by this grimy passageway, where greasy water trailed into a central conduit by way of piles of delivery-cart horse-dung. That the ripe, distinctive stench of the place must have been contributing to the churning in his guts. Even that, if one had been thinking about it, this here must have been the back of Underwood Villa, Cecily's house.

Arthur wasn't thinking about it, of course, or he might have been surprised by the rather grim appearance of the rear elevation. To think, that prim façade hid something so obscure. The wall was flat and sheer, punctuated with the small windows of the servants' quarters, set back from the alley by an ill-attended yard. It was strewn with pallets, a tin bath, and other miscellaneous objects that Arthur was far too absorbed in grim reflection to identify.

Had he been paying any attention, though, he might have worried for the house's owner: a back door stood wide open to the yard, through which anyone could wander in. It was a liability. He entered the yard quite absently, thinking of something else altogether, approached the open door, and peered inside. He recognised the cool pantry where he had woken two nights previously. He was wincing somewhat at the inglorious memory when he realised he'd stepped right into the pantry corridor, at which point he sighed deeply and gave up the charade. He was in.

Arthur considered his options. The pantry, he remembered, gave onto a large kitchen, and thence into the main hallway. It should be easy. He tiptoed to the kitchen doorway, where he froze. From within, a coarse but passably tuneful female voice was singing:

"Go from my window my love, my dove
Go from my window my dear
The devil's in the man that he'll not understand
He can't have a harbouring here."

Holding his breath, Arthur leant in a little way through the door. The singer was a substantial, earthy-looking woman with an apron lashed around her waist. She stood peeling potatoes at the sink, beside a stove where two large pans of water were coming noisily to the boil. The cook was facing away from Arthur, gazing out of the window as she sang; he could probably make the door without passing into her line of vision. The floor, though, was cause for concern. It was tiled, and he had a horrible premonition of the sound his shoes would make clattering across it. Stepping back quietly into the pantry, Arthur unlaced and slipped off his black Oxfords.

Serendipity saved him. He hadn't much experience as a sneak, and it was a useless plan – creep behind the cook, who knew this kitchen and would hear the bound-to-creak hinges of the door opening – and just hope not to be noticed. He had taken three soundless, absurd steps into the kitchen, each one huge and accompanied with an involuntary repertoire of caricatured anxious expressions, when something sympathetic in the universe intervened. A heavy pot on the stove, hissing furiously and about to boil over, began to rattle on its fitting, the water inside rising up in an angry ferment like a storm at sea. The rattle grew louder as the cook turned and exclaimed, and Arthur exploited the furious sizzle as the water boiled over and extinguished the cooking flame to gain the door, open it as quickly as possible, the creak drowned out by the hiss of steam and the cook's exclamations, and to escape into the corridor.

Arthur exited the hall by the first doorway he reached, closing the door behind him and pressing his back against the wood. To his relief, the room he entered was darkened and deserted, and his thundering pulse began slowing toward normality. But only for a moment; when he stopped panting and became aware of his surroundings, unease once again chilled his blood. He stepped forward from the door, round-eyed, dropped his shoes, and turned in a slow circle.

He was in a library, prodigiously stocked, the furniture and fittings done out in elegant dark wood and burgundy. Heavily-laden bookcases lined the walls, gold lettering gleaming on their spines in the yellow light from a pair of electric table-lamps. Otherwise, the room was dark, heavy drapes at the windows choking out the daylight. The sight that set Arthur's skin crawling was the bookcases: it was not only books that stood on their shelves. He completed his slow turn to halt in front of a shelf, staring up into the gaping sockets of a human skull.

The skull sat plainly in the centre of a shelf at eye-height, its bare yellowed teeth grinning nastily. Next to it, a parody of its smooth, cold condition, stood a phrenological model of a head; beside that another unfamiliar skull which he took for that of a sheep; and arrayed along the shelf a further selection of objects that made Arthur's eyes open wider and wider. A mace. A pair of church candles decorated with odd symbols. An oddly shaped crystal with fractured rainbows trapped in its facets. A framed portrait of a demurely smiling woman, draped with an ostentatious necklace. Arthur set down his shoes and reached out to this last with trembling fingers, turning it toward him to get a better look. The woman was not Cecily.

The shelves that did contain books were almost as jarring as this bizarre collection. Many of the spines were lettered in languages – even alphabets – that Arthur did not recognise. Those in English included elegant volumes of fiction: The Mysteries of Udolpho. The Castle of Otranto. Le Fanu's Carmilla. Polidori's The Vampyre. There were also hefty, red-bound tomes, clearly reference works, but none Arthur had ever seen before: Phisto's Dictionary of Demons and Dimensional Spirits – English Version. The Twilight Compendium. Who's Who In The Dark Worlds. Nader's Taxonomia Demonicus. The Pergamum Codex. The Dictionary of National Necrography. Arthur stared, and reached up for the weightiest volume of all. Bound in handsome black leather, with huge gothic lettering picked out in gold down the spine, it sat heavy with foreboding in Arthur's hands. He ran his fingers over the front cover, and whispered the title. "Vampyr."

"Good day." Arthur's blood turned as cold as the speaker's voice, and he turned around.