Verse of the Vampyre (17 page)

Grace freed herself, darting to the platform and up the stairs. The difficulty was that Peter was in the first-class section two cars up, while she was stuck in standard; it would be impossible to keep an eye on him.

She dropped into the first empty seat and picked up the newspaper someone had left on the seat next to her, opening it wide. At least it provided temporary concealment. She tried to think what to do next.

After all, Peter might simply be going to visit friends. Honest, law-abiding friends. He might be going shopping. He might just feel like a trip to London.

If he had been outraged at the idea of her spying on him in the graveyard, what would he make of this?

Someone plumped into the seat next to her.

“Why don’t you poke eyeholes in the front page,” Chaz muttered. “You couldn’t look sillier than you do now.”

Grace brought down the paper. “What are you doing here?”

“I can’t let you do this by yourself.”

“I
have
to do this by myself.” Especially since she had no idea what she was doing.

Chaz was shaking his head stubbornly. “I’ve bought my ticket. It’s too late now.”

The train was beginning to move.

“Chaz—”

He folded his arms and sat back in his seat, ignoring Grace’s exasperated gaze.

Outside the window, clouds, buildings and trees slid by as the train picked up speed. After a time Grace stopped fuming and started thinking. “Give me your cap.”

Chaz looked affronted. “Why?”

“I need a disguise.”

“This is ridiculous.” He seemed to be addressing the ceiling of the train.

“May I please borrow your cap?”

Chaz’s lips were set in disapproving lines, but he handed his golf cap over and smoothed his dark curls down.

Grace twisted her hair into a ponytail and tucked it under the spacious cap. She turned the collar up on her blazer, and muttered, “I’ll be right back.”

“You couldn’t look more conspicuous,” Chaz informed her departing back.

This, Grace ignored. Peter would not be looking for her, so all she needed to do was avoid catching his eye. It was a risk, but she needed to know where he was. A niggling doubt suggested that if he had spotted her, he might have left the train before it departed the station.

Tipping the golf cap low over her face, she started down the corridor. Briefly she scanned the faces of the passengers crowded into the rows of seats. He wasn’t in the first section.

She began to worry she’d lost him.

He wasn’t in the second section. Panic set in, but then she spotted him in a window seat, gazing out at the landscape flashing by.

Grace ducked back. A couple of passengers glanced at her curiously.

Her heart was racing as though she’d just completed an obstacle course. She had to wonder at herself. No surprise Chaz thought she shouldn’t be left on her own. And she considered herself a role model for girls? Yikes!

When she was composed again, she readjusted her collar and slipped back down the corridor, finding her place next to Chaz.

“Found him.”

Chaz shook his head. “May I have my cap back?”

Grace handed over the cap, took out her sunglasses, and put them on. “How much money do you have?”

“A few pounds. A hundred dollars in travelers’ checks.”

“I don’t know how far we’re going. Maybe all the way to London, although he could have purchased a ticket to London to throw off any possible pursuit. I didn’t notice if this train stops along the way or runs straight through. Even so, I suppose he’d find a way to get off if he needed to.”

“You should hear yourself,” Chaz commented. “It’s pretty sad.”

“We should move down to where we can keep an eye on him.”

“The train goes straight through. He’s not going anywhere for a while.”

There was no point arguing. Grace got up, and, sure enough, Chaz followed.

They found new seats closer to where they could observe Peter. He had ditched the mother and child but appeared to have been appropriated by a cuddly grandmother type who was showing him pictures of her cats. He really did have lovely manners, Grace reflected dispassionately.

The miles rolled by in a lulling clackety-clack of wheels on rails. Chaz read the news in sections while Grace watched the aisle from the shelter of the rest of the paper. She comforted herself that if Peter did spot them, they could pretend to be on a day-trip to London. It was reasonable that Chaz would want to sightsee. Peter shouldn’t automatically assume he was being followed. In her imagination she began to argue this point with him.

“I’m hungry,” Chaz said gloomily.

Grace considered for a moment. There was an onboard buffet, but that might just be for the first- or club-class passengers. In any case, they had to make sure they didn’t bump into Peter. Food would have to wait.

“I know. Me too. We can grab something in London.”

Chaz sighed in a way that seemed to imply that somehow his plight was all Grace’s fault.

They reached London well after three o’clock in the afternoon. In Grace’s mind, Euston Station was still graced with the Great Hall and massive Doric arch entrance of old films, but these had been destroyed in the early sixties when the station was rebuilt, and the new edifice was an uninspired slab.

“Now what?” the Voice of Doom inquired as they made their way through the crowd.

“I don’t know, but we have to be ready to move fast.”

They waited, watching Peter from around a corner.

“I feel like a fool,” Chaz groused. “What kind of relationship do you have that you feel like you need to spy on the guy?”

Stung, Grace retorted, “You’re spying on me!”

“That’s different.”

Grace sniffed.

They struggled through the other passengers, finding then losing the tall pale-haired figure working his way quickly through the crush of people milling around them. He left the station concourse, walking out on Eversholt Street. A few yards down he went into an Edwardian-looking building on the left. A green-and-white sign read
THE HEAD OF STEAM PUB
.

“What now?” wondered Grace aloud. “He must be planning to catch another train, or he would hail a cab, right?”

“Don’t ask me. Maybe he just likes to eat lunch here.”

“But that has to be right. He wouldn’t hang around here—unless he plans to meet someone who’s also arriving by train.”

“I can’t keep up this pace on an empty stomach,” Chaz informed her.

“Okay, let me think. I’ll keep an eye on the pub, and you go buy something and bring it back here,” Grace said. “I’m guessing he’s waiting around for another train.”

Chaz looked long-suffering, but went off to do her bidding. Grace checked her watch.

Chaz returned shortly with roast beef sandwiches and bottles of lemon squash. They ate hovering in the doorway, keeping an eye on the pub.

“I don’t see what the point of this is,” Chaz groused.

Mouth too full to answer, Grace glanced up; Peter was headed straight their way. She swallowed in one gulp, and practically fell over Chaz in her haste to avoid being seen. She dragged him, still clutching the remains of their impromptu lunch, behind the nearest magazine rack. Swimsuited models smirked at Grace from rows of glossy covers.

Peter strode past without a glance in their direction.

“Now comes the hard part.” Grace fixed Chaz with the compelling look that used to work so well on her freshman class. “We’ve got to find out where he’s headed without being seen ourselves.”

Chaz looked blank; then his eyes widened. “Look,” he said, “you may have noticed that I am not James Bond.”

“You’re doing very well,” Grace assured him. “Frankly, I’m impressed.”

Chaz made a harrumphing sound but looked a little flushed as he set out on his next mission. He was back after several nerve-racking minutes..

“I saw his ticket. He’s going to Scotland!” he gasped.

“Scotland?”

He nodded, and, still out of breath, added, “Edinburgh. We’ve got to decide now. It takes twenty minutes by tube to get to King’s Cross, and the train leaves at five.”

Scotland. Yes, of course. Transylvania was just so much thumbing of nose.
The Daily Record
was a Scottish paper. The man who had been driving the moving van had a Scottish accent. Catriona was Scottish.

Grace said firmly, “My mind is already made up.”

Chaz’s shoulders slumped. “This is crazy. We don’t have any luggage!”

Men. Grace had her purse, which contained all the essentials: lipstick, credit card and book. She started walking. “You don’t have to come. I don’t want you to come.”

“Of course I’m coming,” he said.

The light was gone when they crossed the border into Scotland. It had been raining for hours.

Och hush ye then, och hush ye. The night is dark and wet.

Grace put aside her book for a moment, listening to the lullaby of the rails; the wheels seemed to roll a soothing song as the miles melted away.

She glanced at Chaz. He was sleeping. No one looks his best sleeping, despite what the romance novelists write.

She reopened Paul West’s brilliant
Lord Byron’s Doctor,
but found that despite the seductive prose she couldn’t concentrate. Poor Polidori. Nothing had gone right for him. He had loved the wrong people and pursued the dreams that would destroy him. In the end he had taken his life. Grace reflected on this final act. Suicide could be motivated by many things, including the desire for revenge.

Polidori had believed his work would secure his place in Romantic literature, but his fiction was largely forgotten and the journals of his adventures with Byron and the Shelleys had been “edited” upon his death by his sister, who had believed them scandalous. (Probably correctly!)

So in the end Polidori did not even have his final say.

He had seemed locked in a love-hate relationship with Byron, but if his suicide had been intended as a kind of payback, it seemed to have earned little more than passing comment from his famous
fratelli.

Grace bookmarked her place and set the novel aside. She remembered discussing with Roy Blade how the lives of the Romantic poets seemed to mirror their dramatic works.

Life seemed to be imitating art in Innisdale as well.

Chaz spoke, startling her out of her reflections, and she realized he had been silently watching her for a few minutes.

“It doesn’t make sense. You’re not the kind of woman to sacrifice all her plans and ambitions for a man with an unsavory past. It’s like something out of a B movie.”

He sounded almost as though he were thinking aloud. And although he had only now truly brought it up, she felt like they had been arguing the subject since he arrived.

She tried to answer without sounding defensive. “Peter had some trouble with the law, but that’s history. He’s not the same person.”

“You don’t believe that, or you wouldn’t be on this train.”

“It’s just the opposite. I believe it, or I wouldn’t be on this train.”
Did
she really believe that? Even Grace wasn’t sure. She had to know what was going on, whether it meant the end to her dreams or not.

“But you’re so squeaky clean!”

“Gee, you flatter me.”

“I don’t mean—I mean that as a compliment.” Chaz straightened up in the cramped seat, his expression earnest. “You have morals and principles and goals. I just can’t picture you in love with someone like that.”

In love? Was it love? She didn’t know. Certainly it was not the love she had dreamed of, reading by the light of a flashlight beneath an adolescent’s bed-clothes. The love that dare not stay up past ten o’clock. Just as certainly it was unlike any emotion she had felt for any other man in her life.

Could you love someone without trusting him?

Trust, Grace would have lectured her young ladies, is essential in any healthy relationship. Possibly, spying on one’s gentleman friend was not the best illustration of trust, and yes, there was something about Peter Fox that roused instincts honed by years of supervising devious adolescents. But, the truth was, Grace did trust him. Not just with the small things, like her pocketbook. She would trust Peter with her life. In effect she had done so by moving to Innisdale.

And yet…she had kicked over the traces of her hitherto conventional and admirably well organized life, but she had done it on condition.

She had not truly given her heart; she had waited for proof, for guarantees.

There were no guarantees with love.