Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Genevieve stumbled back to her bolt hole, a hand pressed to her face. Vampires did not blush—so why did it feel like her face was aflame? Chagrin and bafflement warred within her.
Vampire men did not like mouthy women who did not know their place.
They especially did not like sharp-tongued spinsters who grabbed them by the shirt placket and harangued them!
All her experience thus far in the Ossuary bore this out.
There was a hierarchy to be obeyed. Old vampires were at the top of the social ladder, then those men of noble birth, followed by women of noble birth.
Then everyone else trickled down in order of time in the dark and the rest of England’s class structure.
As men of noble birth and status before their deaths, Bacchus and Laurent most of all had been opposed to anything that smacked of opposition. Genevieve clenched her gloved fists.
Yet Kendrick, their new master, had watched her with an interest she could not begin to fathom.
And he hadn’t lashed out when she had taken him to task.
He had…asked her opinion? Held her hand gently?
And he had escorted her out of his room when she had asked to go.
He hadn’t demanded her given name, only asked.
He hadn’t punished her for impertinence.
And he had bowed over her hand before bidding her a good night.
Genevieve pressed her hand to her chest. Ducking her head to clear the low overhang of her shared bolt hole, she said, “Elspeth, you will call me every kind of fool—”
She broke off at the sight of Robbie MacPherson sitting beside Elspeth, the two of them hastily leaning away from each other. “Oh. Forgive me, Mr. MacPherson.”
Robbie MacPherson was a flame-haired Scotsman who had died at Culloden and had come south to London after the Highland clearances had shattered many of the communities he had depended on to stay hidden.
He had been kind to Genevieve and Elspeth when they had first been turned, offering what knowledge and assistance he could without their makers’ knowledge.
He was one of the few men in the Ossuary whom Genevieve would term a friend.
Elspeth might have called him something else.
“I beg your pardon, Miss Dryden—my visit has gone on for too long,” Robbie said, reaching for his crutch to lever himself up to his one leg.
He had lost the other below the knee. While vampirism would repair injuries sustained after death, it could not regrow limbs or mend wounds sustained before they were turned.
“No, no, please. Don’t mind me.” Genevieve collapsed across from them in an ungraceful puddle of skirts as her knees gave out. “I’ve just been a pea goose of the highest order, that’s all.”
“Pea goose? You?” Elspeth asked, taking Robbie’s crutch and leaning it back against the wall. “Do tell, Genevieve.”
Robbie cleared his throat, tugging at his collar. His red hair gave the impression of a blush, even if his skin stayed pale and gray. “I can—”
Genevieve squeezed her eyes shut. “I just gave the new master a tongue lashing of the highest order. Nothing to worry about.”
And I ogled him! He appeared again in her mind’s eye, the glow of his regard, his hair loose about his shoulders, burnished in the light of the candle flame, his corded neck visible through his opened shirt. The feel of his thumb on her cheekbone. She blinked rapidly to dispel the vision.
Elspeth gaped. “You? Scolded him? How did you even encounter him?”
Genevieve took a deep breath and explained about the overheard plots and the notes, and how she had been caught. Robbie knew of her talent and could be trusted. Loyalty was one of his best qualities—next to his silent constancy towards Elspeth.
She gulped and finished with, “And I was so—unsettled, and irritated with him, I told him what I thought of his management so far. So, you see. Pea goose.”
“Gracious,” Elspeth murmured.
Robbie leaned forward. “Kendrick’s a good man. His ego won’t be pricked by a lass’s honesty, Miss Dryden.”
Elspeth turned to him, alight with interest. “You know him?”
“Know of him, aye. He’s old—older than anyone else I can think of. Knows his Erse,” he added with a grin. “Been here and there, goes as he will. Never been involved with politicking before that I remember. He’s old friends with Etienne Flambeau and Salem.”
Etienne and Salem were the other two vampires who had contributed to Rupert’s death and downfall, Genevieve had heard.
Etienne, she knew of—a blond Frenchman, always very correct—but he didn’t come to the Ossuary often.
Salem, she had never seen. He was a bit of a legend among the underground.
He had toppled the power behind the previous master, Theron, which had allowed Rupert to swoop in and usurp Theron.
Which she was sure had always stuck in Rupert’s craw.
“He is older than Godfrey de Bayeux?” Elspeth asked. “Or Bohémond, who died during that impenetrable fog several years ago when he fell into the Thames just before daybreak?”
Godfrey de Bayeux was reputed to be a former Norman lord, and Bohémond—
“Not the Bohémond de Terente, surely?” Genevieve put in. “The crusader?”
Elspeth frowned. “I don’t know. He was quite old, but—might it have been someone using the name?” Vampires freely changed their names as the fancy took them.
Genevieve pressed a hand to her forehead and giggled, the emotions of the night suddenly overwhelming her.
“Was he extraordinarily tall, slender of waist and flanks, with broad shoulders and chest, but perfectly proportioned, conformed to the ideal of Polykleitos, and the skin of his body very pale? Did he breathe freely through nostrils that were broad, worthy of his chest?”
Robbie said, “Every vampire is very pale.”
Elspeth tilted her head to the side, her brows furrowing. “I never saw him. Did you?”
“No. Anna Komnene describes him in her Alexiad, and—never mind,” Genevieve muttered. “If that’s who he was—you think Kendrick is older still?”
Robbie nodded. “He might be as old as the land’s henges or the White Horse.”
Elspeth murmured, “Surely not.”
“I’m not sure,” Genevieve whispered, thinking of his visage in the candlelight, the way he held his sword like a warrior of old. “I’m really not.”
“What are you going to do now?” Elspeth asked.
“Do?” Genevieve repeated, wrapping her arms around her knees. “Why must I do anything?”
“Well, he knows who you are now,” Elspeth said practically. “Will you speak to him again? Or will you just continue to slip clandestine notes into his bedroom?”
Genevieve made a face at her. “I regret telling you that. Why would I speak to him again?”
“To tell him what needs to be done with the Ossuary.”
Genevieve shook her head, her shoulders slumping. “You know as well as I do, Elspeth, that any suggestions from the Ossuary rabble on the proper governance of London’s vampires would be shot down immediately.”
“Yes, we know that,” Elspeth said cryptically, “but does he?”
“She did what?” Etienne laughed. “Incroyable! Called you onto the carpet like a governess dressing down a pupil. And resisted the famed Kendrick persuasion into the bargain.”
Kendrick frowned at him. “You don’t have to look so delighted about this.”
After Miss Dryden had left his rooms—she had clearly not wanted him following her, and he suspected she had used her talent once she’d been beyond his sight—he had decided to find Etienne instead of pacing the length of his room until dawn.
Etienne had sent him the direction of the terrace house down a small, quiet lane that he had purchased.
It was home to several families, Etienne had said, but the basement apartment would be for him and Addie.
It was a good place for a vampire, small windows up high that could be easily curtained, and quiet.
The basement was fairly empty at the moment, only a few chairs and a table in the main room that had belonged to a former occupant, but Etienne had told him Addie was choosing furnishings.
Some indefinable quality allowed women to transform a place from a building with a bed in it into a home.
The addition of curtains and embroidered cushions on chairs and patterned rugs on the floor, some men would say.
But it wasn’t just an accumulation of things.
It was a kind of…softness. A shelter from the cold.
Now Etienne chuckled as he cleaned the lenses of his spectacles and replaced them on his nose. “You cannot deny that your mystery woman had a point.”
“Stop that; you don’t even need those things,” Kendrick said in deep disgust. “And what point?”
“You’ve had discussions with Dominic and with Addie and me about what to do about the state of London’s vampires, but the general populace doesn’t know that.
All they have seen is one dramatic speech where you wiped Rupert’s crude ‘might makes right’ motto from the wall of the Ossuary, and then they heard of you offing assassins. ” He shrugged.
Kendrick glowered. “I thought I had time to contemplate ruling. It’s been nine hundred years since I had anything to do with vampire politics. And now this…this woman insists I upend the whole Ossuary right now.”
“We are very much prone to inertia,” Etienne acknowledged. “But all the more reason to listen to this—what is her name?”
“Miss Dryden.” Devil take it, what was her Christian name? He had never gotten it out of her.
In the span of only a few minutes, Miss Dryden had gone from wooden to deeply terrified to impassioned, and Kendrick would be lying if he said it didn’t fascinate him.
But after seizing him by the collar, as if he were a small boy caught filching an apple, she had retreated within herself, her eyes fixed on her toes.
Because of some man who was dead now. Etienne would say it was primitive of him to feel viciously satisfied about that. So be it. His very bones were primitive, and surviving this long had earned him the right to own it.