Part VI: Sketching
He couldn’t get the line of the chin quite right. It kept coming out too hard, not the soft, baby curves of youth but, perhaps, how the boy would look in five year’s time, a young man grown – except of course, that would not happen.
Angelus tore the spoiled sheet off and began afresh. He tried to concentrate on how James would look walking beside him in the night. Soft fair hair almost silver in the moonlight, little round toed shoes tapping lightly beside his as he skipped from one moonbeam to another. If you froze blood could you make it crystalline, coated in sugar, something a child might accept to suck?
A clucking sound of disapproval came from where Darla sat on the far side of the parlour, which he ignored. They had already had the only conversation of the evening he intended to have with her – a narrow-eyed glare from her, a cheerful ‘Still here, darling? I thought you were going back to London,’ from him.
He tilted his sketch-book to catch the light better and swore as yet again the chin began to go wrong. He set his pencil down, looking inward, conjuring up the vision of James to fix it more firmly in his mind. Young, soft, perfect, a little angel. He wondered how the boy might react the first time he showed him his demon face. You could never tell with children. Sometimes there was confusion, often terror, once or twice awe. But if he was really lucky there would be curiosity, and the revelation of an innocence so pure it could not begin to conceive of the demon.
There was a stir of skirts swaying, a crunch of paper, and he snapped his head up with a snarl. ‘Darla!’
‘I’m not a mummy,’ Dru said very sadly. From across the room, Darla was giving him a withering look for his mistake. Dru stooped and scooped up one of the discarded drawings from the drift scattered at his feet, tilting her head as she studied it. Then she pressed it to her breast, rocking. ‘He misses his real daddy sometimes,’ she said.
Of course, Ashworth was only James’s stepfather. ‘What was his real father like, precious?’
She looked at him, a little surprised. ‘He was a priest. You pretended to be a priest once, but you aren’t a real father.’
A priest. Angelus felt himself begin to grin. It made enormously satisfying sense – the children of the choir school would be recruited from the sons of clergymen and those who worked for the cathedral. And then, when Mr Grayling had died, his widow had married the cathedral organist to provide security and a father for her boy. It would never have been a love match.
‘His father was a priest, and you weren’t a priest, and his father was a priest, and her father came as a priest, and she was born in a church, creeping out of her little nest of silk and rough, rough wool. So scratchy it was on her delicate new skins. But oh her wings!’ Dru turned on him a face of pure joy. ‘Black and blood red. Admirable, my mummy used to call them. Admirable Lord Nelson. Brown ones and blue ones and the ones like spotted snow. But you want the yellow ones, don’t you, Angelus.’
‘How did the priest die, Dru?’
She let the paper slip from her hands, so that it drifted to the ground in weary zig-zags and then settled. ‘An iron band at his throat.’ She touched her neck with both hands. ‘And at his heart.’ The hands dipped to press against her chest. ‘So tight that they couldn’t hear the screams.’
That might mean several things – perhaps an apoplexy, or heart failure. No point asking Dru when it had happened, she never had any concept of time. She was looking at him with a sparkle in her eyes now. ‘But I can hear him scream!’ She stretched her arms out, the dark drapery of her dress expanding like wings. ‘We all scream for you, don’t we, Angelus. We die silently, but in our hearts we scream.’
‘Oh you scream, my precious. And what of him? Can you see what will happen to him?’
She nodded solemnly. ‘Always. Can I help, Daddy?’
‘Yes, yes of course, precious. You’re always Daddy’s helpful little girl. Can you tell me how long he has, before… before his change?’ He hoped she would understand what he meant, but he didn’t actually want to say ‘until his voice breaks’ whilst Darla was in the room.
‘Someone wants to take him, make him stronger, make him… White wings on a throne of jet, seeking for him with eyes as red as… red. I can’t see… It’s dark where he is… He… he should emerge, break out of his cocoon, but he won’t. Something won’t let him. He…’ Her brow furrowed. ‘Should be spinning up, together in the sunbeams. Moths don’t do that – they flutter and beat at the window and ask to be let in, but if you lift the shade they only burn themselves in the flame.’
‘And what is his name? This boy Angelus has wasted half the night sketching,’ Darla said dryly from across the room. She was craning forward towards the nearest fallen papers and Angelus abruptly wished he had chosen to draw anywhere else except the parlour.
Dru tilted her head again. ‘He’s called “Will”, grandmother. I thought you knew that by now.’
And Angelus silently blessed the tangled skeins of Dru’s mind as Darla sat back with pursed lips.
‘Yes, well perhaps instead of drawing him all night you would consider spending an hour with the original training him. Where is he? Do you even know?’
‘He’s in his room,’ Angelus said, quickly leaning forward to grab the drawings before Darla took it into her head to examine one more closely. He briefly wondered where Will actually was. It hardly mattered. ‘He’s learning the fourth incantation, if he knows what’s good for him.’
Darla flicked a suspicious glance at him, but said nothing.
‘I’m going out.’
‘Where?’ Darla demanded.
‘Hunting.’ He tucked the sketches into his portfolio and snapped the little lock shut. ‘We vampires sometimes do.’
‘Drusilla, darling, come and give me your opinion on these hats,’ Darla trilled at once, holding open the pages of the ladies’ paper she had ostensibly been flicking through all night. He eyed her suspiciously as Dru tripped over and their heads bent together, but he couldn’t think of any real reason to interfere.
‘Don’t stay up too late, Drusilla,’ he said firmly. ‘You’re to be in bed by four.’
‘Yes Daddy.’
‘And make sure Will is as well.’
‘Yes Daddy. May I tuck him in and read him a bedtime story?’
‘Of course,’ Darla said, flipping over a page and pointing something out to Dru, ‘we wouldn’t want William staying up too late studying – very bad for his health.’
Angelus shut the door on them. It was cold in the hall, away from the island of warmth around the fire, and a keen little draft tugged at his ankles as he walked down the passage.
In the kitchen, Will was lounging in one of the spoke-backed wooden chairs, feet propped up on the table, a book resting on his lap. He tilted his head back and acknowledged Angelus without actually getting up. Angelus eyed him coldly in the hope it would elicit a response, and when it didn’t he tapped Will’s boots sharply until he took them down.
‘Fetch my outdoor things.’
‘What, the coat and hat you walked right past to get here?’ Will skipped out of range of Angelus’s cuff, took a route on the far side of the table and vanished through the door. Angelus examined his nails moodily. The room wasn’t as pleasant as the parlour but it was warm, and Will had set a tea-kettle on the little range. A plate covered in crumbs lay forgotten on the rag-hearthrug, next to the dark stain left from when they had moved in.
Will clattered back in, loaded with overcoat, hat, gloves and scarf. ‘Want me to come with you?’
‘No.’ He shrugged his overcoat on, then picked up Will’s book and read the title – The Antiquities, Mythology and Entomology of Western England by the Rev. V. S. Cockaigne. ‘Is this really the most useful way you can find to pass your time?’
‘It was in the parlour. All my books are back ho— in town.’
‘Well then you can…’ Angelus ran his eye over the kitchen, seeking inspiration.
‘Can what? I’ve cleaned the whole house. There’s enough coal in to last a month. I’ve polished all your footwear, and that includes your carpet-slippers. If your clothes are brushed any more they’ll go into holes. You don’t want me doing anything for Darla. If I spend the night with Dru you accuse me of playing. And you won’t let me go out with you.’
Angelus shook his head in irritation, tugging on his gloves. ‘Well find something more useful to do. You have got to learn how to fill your nights – we live for eternity, William, we have to fill it with purpose.’ It sounded pompous, as so much of what he said to Will seemed to do, and Will was staring at him blankly, perhaps with a little sneer. He wasn’t even four years old – he did not understand. Or worse, he thought that he did. But Angelus could not think of how to explain. ‘Well what do you normally do?’
‘Whatever you tell me to, sir. And when you can’t think of anything you ask Harold, or Lucius, or Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all – only none of them are here, are they. Can I take Dru out? Not that there’s anywhere to go in this dump but we could at least go for a walk.’
‘No.’ The last thing he wanted was Will and Dru turning up in the cathedral close. Will sighed but nodded, and he would obey – he’d had the consequences of going out without permission too firmly flogged into him for Angelus to have any fears on that score.
‘So do something useful, yes,’ Angelus said again.
Will just stared at him.
‘Can you play the piano?’
‘What? No.’
‘Yes you can, I’ve heard you playing for Dru.’
‘Wasn’t me.’
‘Who was it then? Dru’s dollies?’
‘I can’t play the piano.’
Angelus turned his back on him and left.