Keyed and alert for the silent approach of some new peril, Asher saw the girl Chloe enter the cellar again, his own jacket and greatcoat and Ernchester's seedy velvet coat over her arm. She was dressed, he saw now, in an expensive and beautiful gown of dark green velvet, beaded thickly with jet; her soft white hands and pale face seemed like flowers against the opulent fabric. Here was one, he thought, who would have no trouble winning kisses from strangers in alleyways. As he took the coat from her arm he said, "Thank you," and the brown eyes flicked up to his, startled at being thanked. "Did you hunt with Lotta Harshaw?"
She smiled again, but this time the mockery did not quite hide the frightened flinch of her lips. "Still the nosy-parker, then? You saw what it'll buy you." She reached up to touch his throat, then drew back as the silver of his neck chain caught the lamplight. "You know what they said curiosity did to the cat."
"Then it's a good thing cats have nine lives," he replied quietly. "Did you hunt with Lotta?" She shrugged, an elaborately coquettish gesture with her bare white shoulders, and looked away.
"I know you went for dress fittings with her. Probably other shop-ping as well. I imagine the pair of you looked very fetching together. Personally I find it a bore to have dinner alone-do you?"
The conversational tone of his voice brought her eyes back to his, flirtatious and amused. "Sometimes. But y'see, we don't ever have din-ner quite alone." She smiled, showing the glint of teeth against a lip like ruby silk.
"Did you like Lotta?"
The long lashes veiled her brown eyes once more. "She showed me the ropes, like," she said, after a long moment, and he remembered Bully Joe Davies' frantic cry: I dunno how the others do it... To achieve the vampire state, the vampire powers, was evidently far from enough. "And we-birds, I
mean- hunt differently from gents. And that..." She stopped her next words on her lips and threw a quick, wary glance at Ernchester, silent beside the lamp. After a long pause for rewording, she continued, "Lotta and me, we got along. There's some things a lady needs from another lady, see."
And that... That what? How would this beautiful, over-dressed porcelain doll of a girl see the quiet antique lady Anthea? As a stiff-necked and uncongenial bitch, Asher thought, beyond a doubt. Mde. La Tour had known at a glance that Lotta and Chloe were two of a kind and that Anthea-for undoubtedly it was she who went by the name of Mrs. Wren-was far other than they.
"Did you know her rich young men?" he asked. "Albert Westmoreland? Tom Gobey? Paul Farrington?"
She smiled again, playing hard to get. "Oh, I met most of 'em," she said, toying with one of her thick blonde curls. "Lambs, they were-even Bertie Westmorland, so stiff and proper, like it killed him to admit he wanted her, but following her wherever she went with his eyes. We'd go to theatre panics together-Bertie's brother, me and Lotta, and some girls Bertie's friends might have along... It was all I could do sometimes not to drink one of 'em right there in the shadow of the back of the box. Like smelling sausages frying when you're hun-gry... It would have been so easy..."
"It's a trick you could only have done once," Asher remarked, and got a sullen glance from under those long lashes.
"That's what Lionel said. Not when others are around, no matter how bad I want it-not where anyone will know." She moved closer to him, her head no higher than the top button of his waistcoat; he could smell the patchouli of her perfume, and the faint reek of blood on her words as she spoke. "But no others are around now-and no one will know."
Her tongue slipped out, to touch the protruding tips of her teeth; her fingers slid around his hand, warm with the evening's earlier kill. He could see her eyes on his throat and on the heavy silver links of the chain. Though he dared not look away from her to check, he had no impression of Ernchester being in the room. Perhaps it was only that the vampire Earl would not have cared whether she killed him or not.
"Ysidro will know," he reminded her.
She dropped his hand and looked away. A shiver went through her, "Cold dago bugger."
"Are you afraid of him?"
"Aren't you?" Her glance slid back to his, brown eyes that should have been angelic, but had never been so, he thought, even in life. Her red mouth twisted. "You think he'll protect you from Lionel? That'll last just as long as he needs you. You'd better not be so quick about findin' the answers to your questions."
"And I have already told him he had best not be slow," the soft, drawling voice of Ysidro murmured. Turning, Asher saw the Spanish vampire at his elbow, as Grippen had appeared earlier that evening; his glance cut quickly back in tune to see Chloe start. She hadn't seen him either.
"So perhaps," Don Simon continued, "we had best stick simply to things as they are and not attempt to mold them to what we think they ought to be. You should not have come here, James."
"On the contrary," Asher said, "I've learned a great deal."
"That is what I meant. But as the horses are well and truly gone, permit me to open the barn door for
you. Calvaire's rooms are upstairs-or one set of Calvaire's rooms. I know of at least two others that he had. There may have been more."
"Hence all the secrecy," Asher said, as he preceded the vampire into the dark stair outside. "Any in Lambeth?"
"Lambeth? Not that I knew of," He was aware of those cold yellow eyes piercing his back.
They ascended the neck-breaking twist of steps to the stuffy back room again; though he listened closely, Asher could hear no footfall behind him from either Ysidro or Chloe and only the faintest of rustles from the girl's petticoats. He thought Ernchester must have left at the same time Ysidro had entered, for the Earl had been nowhere in the cellar as they departed. And, in fact, Charles and Anthea were both waiting for them in the parlor of a small flat which had been fitted up on the second floor, with its Tiffany-glass lamps all lighted, giving their strange, white faces the rosy illusion of humanity, save for their gleam-ing eyes.
"I trust you're not still sleeping in the building, Chloe?" Ysidro in-quired, as they entered and the girl set her lamp on the table.
"No," she said sullenly. She retreated to a corner of the room and perched there on one of the patterned chintz chairs; the place was furbished up in several styles, fat overstuffed chairs alternating with pieces of Sheraton and Hepplewhite, and here and there a lacquered cabinet of chinoiserie filled with knickknacks and books. The parlor was tidily kept, with none of the decades-deep clutter of other vampire rooms Asher had seen. Through an open door beyond Lady Anthea's chair, he could see a neat bedroom, its windows heavily shrouded and, no doubt, shuttered beneath those layers of curtain. There was no coffin in sight-Asher guessed it would be in the dressing room beyond.
"Lionel's gone," Lady Ernchester said softly. Her tea-brown eyes went to Asher. She had put up her hair again and bore no evidence of her struggle with Grippen beyond the fact that she had changed her dress for a dark gown of purple-black taffeta. Asher wondered if Minette had made it for her.
"You've made a dangerous enemy; his hand's welted up where he touched the silver of your chain."
Asher privately thought it served the master vampire right, but re-frained from saying so. His whole body was stiff and aching from the impact with the wall. He was still, he reminded himself, quite probably in desperate and immediate danger, but, nevertheless, Grippen's ab-sence comforted him. He prowled over to the small cabinet that stood under the gas jet and opened its drawers. They were empty.
"Lionel did that," Anthea's voice came from behind him. "He tells me he did the same at Neddy's house."
"He'sthe one who seems to be locking the barn door after the horse has escaped." Asher turned back, roving cautiously about the room, examining the French books in the bookshelves, the cushions on the camel-backed divan. He glanced across at Ysidro, who had gone to stand next to Anthea's chair. "If silver affects you that badly, how do you purchase what you need?"
"As any gentleman of fashion can tell you," Anthea said with a faint smile, "one can go for years-cen
turies, even-without actually touching cash. In earlier years we used gold. Flimsies-bank notes, and later treasury notes-were a godsend, but one must always tip. I've found that in general there is enough of a chill at night to warrant the wearing of gloves."
"But they've got to be leather," Chloe put in ungraciously. "And I mean good leather, none of your kid;
it'll bum right through silk."
Anthea frowned. "Does it? I never found it so."
Ysidro held up one long, white hand. "I suspect it toughens a little with time. I know if you had touched silver as Grippen did, Chloe, your arm would have been swollen to the shoulder for weeks, and you would have been ill into the bargain. So it was with me, up almost to the time of the Fire. It is curiously fragile stuff, this pseudoflesh of ours."
"I remember," Anthea said slowly. 'The first time I touched silver-it was bullion lace on the sleeve of one of my old gowns, I think-it not only hurt me at the time, but it made me very ill. I remember being desperately thirsty and unable to hunt. Charles had to hunt for me-bring me..." She broke off suddenly and looked away, her beautiful face impassive. Thinking about it, Asher realized that the logical prey to capture and bring back alive to Ernchester House had to be some-thing human-since it was the death of the human psyche as much as the physical blood that the vampires seemed to crave-but small enough to be easily transportable.
"Kiddies?" Chloe laughed, cold and tingling, like shaken silver bells. "God, you could have had the lot of my brothers and sisters-puking little vermin. Dear God, and the youngest of 'em has brats of her own now..." She paused and turned her face away suddenly, her mouth pressing tight; a delicate, beautiful face that would never grow old. She took a deep breath, a conscious gesture, to steady herself, then went on evenly. "Funny-I see girls who was in the Opera ballet with me back then, years too old to dance now-years too old to get anythin' on the streets but maybe a real nearsighted sailor. I could go into the Opera right now and get my old job back in the ballet, you know? Old Harry the stage man would even recognize me, from bein' the prop boy then."
She fell silent again, staring before her with her great dark eyes, as if seeing into that other time-like Anthea, Asher thought, standing on Harrow Hill and feeling the furnace heat of burning London washing over her mortal flesh. After a moment, Chloe said in a strange voice, "It's queer, that's all." Asher felt the pressure of her mind on his, as she made her swift, sudden exit from the room.
Anthea glanced quickly at her husband; Ernchester, much more qui-etly, almost invisibly, followed the girl out.
"It becomes easier," the Countess said softly, turning back to Asher, "once those we knew in life are all-gone. One is not-reminded. One can-pretend." Her dark brows drew down again, that small gesture making her calm face human again. "Even when one is for all practical purposes immortal, age is unsettling." And getting to her feet, she fol-lowed her husband in a whisper of dark taffeta from the room.
For a long time Asher stood where he had been by the fireplace, his arms folded, regarding Ysidro by the pink and amber glow of the shaded lights. The vampire remained standing by the vacated chair, his gaze still resting thoughtfully on the door, and Asher had the impres-sion he listened to the lady's retreating footfalls blending away into the other sounds of London, the rattle of traffic in Salisbury Place and the nocturnal roar of Fleet Street beyond, the deep vibration of the Under-ground, the sough of the river below the Embankment, and the voices of those who crowded its flagways in the night.
At length Ysidro said, "It is a dangerous time in Chloe's life." The enigmatic gaze returned to him, still remote, without giving anything away. "It happens to vampires. There are stages-I have seen them myself, passed through them myself, some of them... When a vam-pire has existed thirty, forty years, and sees all his friends dying, grow-ing senile, or changing unrecognizably from what they were in the sweetness of a shared youth. Or at a hundred or so, when the whole world mutates into something other
than what he grew up with; when all the small things that were so precious to him are no longer even remembered. When there is no one left who recalls the voices of the singers which so inextricably formed the warp and weft of his days, Then it is easy to grow careless, and the sun will always rise."
He glanced over at Asher, and that odd ghost of what had once been a half-rueful, bittersweet smile flicked back onto the thin lines of his face. "Sometimes I think Charles and Anthea are becoming-friable- that way. They change with the times, as we all must, but it becomes more and more difficult. I still become enraged when shopkeepers are impertinent to me, when these grubby hackney cabs dart out in front of me in the street, or when I see the filth of factory soot fouling the sky. We are, like Dr. Swift's Struldbruggs, old people, and we tend to the unreasonable conservatism of the old. Very little is left of the world as it was in King Charles' day, and nothing, I fear, remains of the world I knew. Except Grippen, of course." The smile turned sardonic. "What a companion for one's immortality."
He strolled over to the fireplace where Asher stood and prodded with one well-shod toe at the cold debris within, amillefeuille of white paper ash, like that which had decorated Neddy Hammersmith's long-cold hearth. "That is, provided, of course," he added ironically, "one sur-vives the first few years, the terrible dangers of simply learning how to be a vampire."
"Did Rhys the Minstrel teach you?"
"Yes." It was the first softening Asher had seen in those gleaming eyes. "He was a good master-a good teacher. It was, you understand, more dangerous in those days, for in those days folk believed in us."
It was on the tip of Asher's tongue to ask about that, but instead he asked, "Did you know Calvaire created a fledgling?"
The cold eyes seemed to widen and harden, the long, thin nostrils flared. "Hewhat? "
"He created a fledgling," Asher said.
"How do you know this?"
"I've spoken to him," Asher said, "A man named Bully Joe Davies, from Lambeth or thereabouts-he said he'd break my neck if I told anyone of it, particularly yourself. You seem," he added dryly, "to enjoy a certain reputation among your peers."
"Do you refer," the vampire asked coldly, "to that rabble of steve-dores, sluts, and tradesmen as my peers? The Farrenscome close, but, when all's said, his grandfather was no more than a jumped-up baron..."
"Your fellows, then," Asher amended. "And in any case, I trust you'll protect me. He says he's being followed-stalked. I'm supposed to meet him later tonight, to go to another of Calvaire's safe houses."
Ysidro nodded; Asher could see the thought moving in the pale laby-rinth of his eyes.
He walked over to the cabinet again, ran a finger, idly questing, through its emptied pigeonholes, every scrap of evidence of contacts burned by the cautious Grippen lest any should do what Asher had done-trace a name, a shop, an address, that would lead him to another cellar where a vampire might sleep. He glanced back at the vampire, standing quietly in the molten halo of the lamplight.
"I hadn't intended on telling you that," he went on after a moment. "But I've been finding out some things tonight about Calvaire, a little, and about vampires. I understand now why you've been lying to me all along. In a way, Grippen is right. You'd be an absolute fool to hire a human to track down your killer, much less tell him who and what you are-if your killer is human. But you don't think he is,
"In fact, you think the killer is another vampire."
Nine
I don't see how that could be." As she walked, Lydia folded her arms across her chest against the chill that dampened even the change-able sunlight of the autumn forenoon. Beside the dull purple-brown of her coat, her red hair, pinned under the only unobtrusive hat in her vast collection, seemed blazingly bright; her spectacles winked like a he-liograph when she turned her head. In spite of them, she looked ab-surdly young, with a delicate prettiness which would have seemed touchingly vulnerable to anyone who had never seen her in the dissec-tion rooms.
Asher, at her side, kept a weather eye o
ut across the sepia vistas of lawn and copse to both sides of the walk, but saw few other strollers. It had rained late in the night, and Hyde Park bore a slightly dispirited air; scudding clouds were collecting again overhead. A few black-clothed nannies hustled then- charges at double time through a rapid constitutional before the rain should commence again; that was all.
"Neither does Ysidro," Asher said. "But he suspected all along that the killer wasn't human. It's why he had to hire a human and, more-over, find one who could or would believe in vampires, who could operate to some degree independently-why he had to tell me what he was, in spite of the opposition from the other vampires. I think the others might have suspected they were dealing with a vampire, too. No human could stalk a vampire unseen-a human would be lucky to see one in the first place, let alone either recognize it for what it is or keep it in sight."
"You did," she pointed out.
Asher shook his head. "A fledgling, and an untrained one, at that," His glance skimmed the borders of the trees that half hid the steely gleam of the Serpentine, off to their left. Like Bully Joe Davies, he found himself wondering all the time now about shadows, noises, bent blades of grass...
"Did Bully Joe Davies ever turn up?"
"No. Ysidro and I waited until almost dawn. He just might have seen Ysidro and sheered off, but I doubt it. However, I think we'll be able to locate Calvaire's rooms in Lambeth-if he has them, and I'm virtually certain he does-by tracking property purchases since February, which was when Calvaire came here from Paris. If Calvaire was attempting to establish a power base in London-which he seems to have been doing, since he made a fledgling-he'd have bought property. Since Grippen didn't know about it, either, we may find something there."
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