An Old Friend Of The Family (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 3), Fred Saberhagen [best large ereader .txt] 📗

   “Question him? Question him? Why must you do that?”

   “Because I have been brought here to help him. To help all of you. It is all out of your hands now, my dear. Let me go about things in my own way.”

   Clarissa spent a little longer in sniffling recovery from her tears, thinking about this. “I never thought that old book…”

   “Ha. Why then did you use it?”

   “What is it that you want me to tell my son?”

   “That I would like to speak with him—there must be something in which his interest can innocently be caught. By which he may be distracted a little from his grief and worry. He has perhaps a hobby that fascinates him? Chess, photography…?”

   “Pottery,” said Clarissa in a very low voice. Almost completely recovered from her weeping now, she was looking at the visitor with such a guarded, watchful, poker-playing stare that he really had to smile.

   “Clar-iss-a! Was your grandmother such a terrible enemy of yours? Would she have delivered you and your own beautiful grandchild into the devil’s hand? No, no, no, you must know better than that.”

   “Then who are you? Really?”

   He emphasized the first words of his smiling answer with little hand-pats, delivered on alternate syllables. “I am Dr. Emile Corday, of London, an old friend of the family, and no one, no one, can prove anything to the contrary. Now, will you choose to help me? Or to help the creatures who have torn off your grandson’s finger?”

CHAPTER SIX

“Andrew? Dr. Corday is very interested in pottery. He was wondering if you might have time to show him a little of your collection before dinner?”

   Clarissa and the visitor had come upon Andrew standing in the hallway, gazing at a phone on a small table as if he knew or hoped that it was about to ring. Introductions had been brief.

   “He’s really interested. Go along, dear, it’ll do you good to think of something else.”

   “All right, Mother.” With a last pensive glance toward the phone, Andrew turned away from it. A minute later, Clarissa having effaced herself, he was guiding the visitor toward the rooms where, as he said, most of the things were currently being kept.

   This proved to be in an obviously older wing of the house, a one-story extension running north from what was now the main building. The original style of construction of this old wing had been partially obliterated by extensive remodeling carried on (as near as the visitor could guess) some decades back, and survived mainly in pseudo-Gothic archways separating rooms, gray stone walls still showing here and there, and some tall, narrow windows well suited to the needs of defending bowmen.

   “Most of the collection is in this room, Doctor.”

   And now they were standing in the midst of it. The large chamber held not only pottery of almost every conceivable age and province, but a jumble of other old things as well. There were two suits of what looked to the visitor like authentic medieval armor. On side walls were some large, second-rate old Flemish tapestries. But he looked most intently at the wall opposite the door, where there hung a portrait of Mina herself.

   “That is intriguing, isn’t it, Doctor? My wife’s grandmother, on the Harker side of the family. But of course you probably know…it was done by Gustav Klimt. Nineteen-oh-one, I think.”

   The old man could not now recall the date with any certainty either, though he well recalled the sunlit sitting room in Exeter where Mina had posed for this painting, and his own quick exit from that room into the noonday sun, with perilously aching eyes, on a day when Mina’s husband and the artist had come home sooner than expected. And sure enough there was gray stodgy Jonathan, still intruding in the only way that he could manage now, just down the wall from Mina in an inferior protract done sometime in the ‘twenties’.

   “You see, Doctor, we Southerlands are one of those American families who were involved around the turn of the century in what some people think of as the looting of poor old Europe by vulgar young America. That was when some of us here had a lot of money, and a lot of the old European families didn’t It was possible to buy up…but I keep forgetting, you probably know all that better than I do.”

   “That was not looting, dear sir. Not at all.”

   “This incense burner is Chinese porcelain, of course. Wan Li reign. But it came here through Europe.” Southerland went on, evidently seeking whatever distraction he might be able to find here, for there was a dry eagerness in his voice. “Of course we’ve added in more recent decades, recent years…this terra-cotta sarcophagus here was sent over during the war. There was a lot of space available in ships westbound from England in those days, I understand. I myself no longer work at collecting as I once did…and this little black bowl is Santa Clara Pueblo…Kate was starting to get interested in the Indian things…” Eagerness gone, slumping against a table, Andrew paused as if suddenly exhausted.

   “How easy it is,” the visitor observed, “particularly in the world of business, for an innocent man to acquire terrible enemies.”

   “Enemies?” Southerland did not seem greatly surprised at the suggestion; still he thought about it for a while, as if it had never occurred to him before. “Yes, we all make them, don’t we, and without even trying. The police have asked me several time: Who are your enemies? Any servants with a grudge? Hell, we haven’t had any really regular help in the house in years. Servants come and go. They don’t even remember who we are half the time, much less hate us.”

   “I know how difficult it can be to confide in the