He strolled over to the fireplace where Asher stood and prodded with one well-shod toe at the cold debris within, a millefeuille of white paper ash, like that which had decorated Neddy Hammersmith’s long-cold hearth. “That is, provided, of course,” he added ironically, “one survives 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. “He what?”
“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 stevedores, sluts, and tradesmen as my peers? The Farrens come 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 labyrinth 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 changeable 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 heliograph when she turned her head. In spite of them, she looked absurdly young, with a delicate prettiness which would have seemed touchingly vulnerable to anyone who had never seen her in the dissection rooms.
Asher, at her side, kept a weather eye out 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 their charges at double time through a rapid constitutional before the rain should commence again; that was all.
“Neither does Ysidro,” Asher said. “But he suspectedall along that the killer wasn’t human. It’s why he had to hire a human and, moreover, 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.”
They walked in silence for a time, the wind tugging now and then at the ends of Asher’s scarf and at Lydia’s skirts and coat.
Lydia nodded. “I’m wondering whether all vampires fall asleep at the same time—into the deep sleep. For, of course, just because the windows were opened to let in thesunlight doesn’t mean that it was done while the sun was in the sky.”
“I suppose, if the killer were a vampire, he might have—oh, a half-hour or so—to get to safety,” Asher said. “More than enough, in London. And it would certainly solve the question of why he believed in vampires in the first place, let alone knew where to look.”
“In all the books, the vampire hunter drives a stake through the vampire’s heart,” Lydia remarked thoughtfully. “If this one did, everything’s been too charred to tell, but Lotta’s head was certainly severed. If the sun weren’t yet in the sky, I wonder if that would wake a sleeping vampire?—for that matter, if the mere opening of the coffin would do so? Are you sure I can’t put my hand in your pocket?”
“Quite sure,” Asher said, fighting his own inclination to walk closer to her, to hold out his arm to hers, or to have some kind of physical contact with this woman. “In spite of the evidence that the killer is a vampire, I still don’t feel safe meeting you, even by daylight…”
She widened her brown eyes at him behind the schoolgirl specs. “Perhaps I could disguise myself as a pickpocket? Or if I tripped and stumbled, and you caught me? Or fainted?” She put a gloved hand dramatically to her brow. “I feel an attack of the vapors coming on now…”
“No,” Asher said firmly, grinning.
She frowned and tucked her hands primly into her muff. “Very well, but the next time Uncle Ambrose goes on about Plato and Platonic friendship, I’ll have a few words to say to him. No wonder Don Simon didn’t seem to worry too much about your allying yourself with the killer, as you’d originally thought you might. Do you still plan to do that, by the way?”
“I don’t know,” Asher said. “It isn’t out of court entirely, but I’d have to know a good deal more than I donow. The fact that he’s destroying them for reasons of his—or her—own doesn’t mean he wouldn’t destroy me with just as much alacrity.” Or you, he added to himself, looking at that slim figure beside him, like a heroine of legend lying beside the hero, separated by a drawn sword.
Lydia nodded, accepting the change in a situation upon which her life depended with her usual calm trust. They walked along for a time, Lydia apparently sunk in her own trains of thought; Asher was content—almost—only to be with her, the dun gravel of the damp path scrunching faintly under their feet. Off across the gray lawns, a dog barked, the sound carrying fantastically in the cold air.
“Have you any idea how much light it takes to destroy their flesh?”
Asher shook his head. “I asked Ysidro last night. I’ve been trying to work that out, too—that half-hour or so of leeway. That’s what’s puzzling me. Ysidro was caught at dawn on the second morning of the Great Fire of 1666. He says the thinnest gray light before sunrise burned his face and hands as if he’d stuck them into a
furnace—more than that, his arms, chest, and parts of his legs and back beneath his clothes were scarred and blistered as well. According to Lady Ernchester, it was nearly fifty years before the scars went away.”
“But they did go away,” Lydia murmured thoughtfully. “So vampire flesh does regenerate…” Her dark brows pulled even deeper, an edge of thought hardening her brown eyes, as if she looked past the piled whites and grays of the late-morning sky to some arcane laboratory of the mind beyond.
“Pseudoflesh, he called it,” Asher said.
“Interesting.” She reached up to unsnag a long strand of hair from the braided trim of her collar—Asher had to keep his hands firmly in his pockets to avoid helping her. “Because I got that lover’s knot from Evelyn this morning. I’vehad a look at it and those vertebrae under my microscope, and they look—I’m not sure how to put it and I wish it were capable of greater magnification. The bone was pretty damaged, but the hair … I’d like to be able to examine it at a subcellular level—and their flesh and blood, for that matter.”
Of course, Asher thought. He himself saw the vampires linguistically and historically, when he wasn’t simply trying to think of ways to avoid having his throat cut by them; Lydia would see vampirism as a medical puzzle.
“Do you know how petrified wood comes about?” she asked, as they neared Marble Arch with its scattered trees and loafers and turned back the way they came, two solitary and anonymous figures in the wide, cleared spaces of the Park’s brown lawns. “Or how fish and ferns and dinosaur bones are fossilized in the Cambrian sandstones? It’s a process of replacement, cell by cell, of the organic by the inorganic. There’s been a lot of research done lately on viruses, germs that are smaller than bacteria, so small we can’t see them with a microscope—yet. Small enough to operate at a subcellular level. I’ve been reading Horace Blaydon’s articles on viruses in the blood; he did a lot of work on it while I was studying with him. I’m wondering whether a vampire’s immortality comes from some kind of cellular replacement or mutation—whether vampirism is in fact a virus or an interlocking syndrome of viruses that alter the very fabric of the cells. That would account for the extreme photosensitivity, the severe allergic reactions to things like silver and garlic and certain woods—why you’d have to fill the mouth with garlic to deaden the brain and stake the heart with one of those allergic woods to paralyze the cardiovascular system—why you’d have to separate the central nervous system…”
“And transmitted by blood contact.” Again he wondered tangentially why, in the face of such an overwhelmingbody of corresponding evidence, there was such paucity of belief. “All the legends speak of vampires’ victims becoming vampires. The vampires themselves speak of ‘getting’ fledglings, but that’s apparently a matter of choice. Ernchester said that Grippen would not have stood for anyone but himself making a new vampire, but Calvaire evidently had no trouble initiating Bully Joe Davies.”
“Initiating, but not training,” Lydia said thoughtfully. “Or—was it just a lack of training that made him clumsy enough for you to spot him? Do the psychic abilities that seem to be part of this viral syndrome only develop with time? How old were the vampires who were murdered?”
“Another interesting point,” Asher said. “Lotta had been a vampire since the mid-1700s; Hammersmith and King were younger, almost exactly one hundred years. Ysidro saw all of them made. I don’t know about Calvaire. One of the many things,” he added dryly, “that we don’t know about Calvaire.”
“Valentin Calvaire,” Ysidro murmured, settling back against the worn leather squabs of the hansom cab and tenting his long fingers like a stack of ivory spindles, reminding Asher somehow of a marmalade tomcat so old that its fur has gone nearly white. “Curious, how many trails seem to lead back to Valentin Calvaire.”
“He was the first victim—presumably,” Asher said. “At least the first victim killed in London; the only victim not from London; the only victim whose body we have never found. What do you know about him?”
“Less than I should like,” the vampire replied, his voice soft beneath the rattling clamor of the theater-going crowds in Drury Lane all about them. “He was, as I said, one of the Paris vampires—he came here to London eight months ago.”
“Why?”
“That was a topic which he never permitted to arise.”
The vampire’s tone was absolutely neutral, but Asher’s mustache twitched as he detected the distaste in that chilly statement. Ysidro, he surmised with a hidden grin, had probably had very little use for M. Calvaire.
“I take it he was not of the nobility.”
“What passes for nobility in France these days,” Ysidro stated, with soft viciousness, “would not have been permitted to clear away the tables of those whose birth and style of breeding they so pitifully attempt to emulate. Anything resembling decent blood in that country was flushed down the gutters of the Place Louis-Quinze—excuse me, the Place de la Concorde—a hundred and seventeen years ago. What is left is the seed of those who fled or those who made themselves useful to that condottiere Napoleon. Scarcely what one would call honorable antecedents.”
After a moment’s silence, he went on, “Yes, Calvaire claimed noble birth. It was precisely the sort of thing he would do.”
“How long had he been a vampire?”
Ysidro’s dark eyes narrowed with thought. “My guess would be less than forty years.”
Asher raised his eyebrows in surprise. He had, he realized, subconsciously equated age with power among the vampires—it was to the two oldest vampires, Ysidro and Grippen, that the others bowed in fear. The younger ones—Bully Joe Davies and the Opera dancer Chloé—seemed weak, almost pathetic.
“Consider it,” Ysidro urged levelly. “Paris has been in a state of intermittent chaos since the fall of the Bourbon kings. Thirty-five years ago it underwent siege by the Prussians, shelling, riots, and government—if such it can be termed—by a rabble of rioters who formed a Commune and gave short shrift to anyone whom they suspected of treason—for which read, disagreement with their ideals.Vampires as a group rely largely upon a tranquil society to protect them. Wolves do not hunt in a burning forest.”
Just as well, Asher thought dourly. During the riots in the Shantung Province, he’d had enough to worry about without a red-eyed kuei creeping up on him in the burned ruins of the Lutheran mission where he’d been hiding. After a moment, he asked, “And how did Grippen react to Calvaire’s coming here?”
Ysidro was silent for a time, while the cab jolted its way through the increasing crowds of traffic toward the Waterloo Bridge. Rain made a faint, brittle whispering sound on the hardened leather roof of the cab. It had begun again late in the afternoon, while Asher was in the Public Records Office in quest of property bought in the last eight months in Lambeth by either Valentin Calvaire, Chrétien Sanglot, or, just possibly, Joseph Davies. Now the whole city smelled of moisture, ozone, the exhaust of motorcars, the dung of horses, and the salt-and-sewage pungence of the river.
“Not well,” he said at length. “You understand, we—vampires—find travel unnerving in the extreme. We are conservatives at heart; hence the myth that a vampire must rest within his native soil. Rather, he must always have a secure resting place, and such things are difficult to come by on the road. Calvaire had naturally heard of both Grippen and myself. When he arrived he—promenaded himself, I suppose you would say—and did not drink of human blood until he had been contacted by the master vampire of the city.”
“Grippen,” Asher said. “Not yourself.”
For the first time, he saw the flash of irritation, of anger, in the Spaniard’s yellow eyes. But Ysidro only said mildly, “Even so.”
“Why?” he pressed.
Ysidro merely turned his head a little, haughtily contemplatingthe throngs on the crowded flagways from beneath the lowered lids of his eyes.
“I’ve heard of Grippen’s cadre, Grippen’s get,” Asher persisted. “Lord Ernchester, Anthea, Lotta, Ch
loé, Ned Hammersmith … Even though Danny King was the Farrens’ servant, even though it was to them that he owed loyalty, it was Grippen who made him, ‘at Charles’ request and his own.’ According to Anthea Farren, you were both made by the same master vampire at about the same time.Why is he the Master of London, and not yourself?”
The memory of Anthea’s face returned to him, framed in the dark hair with its red streaks like henna. She had warned him, had pulled him out of Grippen’s hold; she had held the enraged vampire back from killing him while he escaped. Yet she and her husband were also Grippen’s get—as Bully Joe Davies had said, Grippen’s slaves.
Why slaves?
For a moment he thought Ysidro would maintain that disdainful alabaster silence. But without turning his head back, the vampire replied, “Perhaps because I do not care to trouble myself.” The familiar supercilious note was absent from his voice as he said it; he sounded, if anything, a little weary. Asher had the momentary sense of dealing, not with a vampire, but with the man whose occasional, oddly sweet smile flickered across those narrow features.
But like the smile, that evanescent glimmer of resignation, of a vanished humanness, was gone—like the things one thinks one sees by starlight. Ysidro’s voice became again as neutral as his coloring, as if even the holding of opinions had become meaningless to him over the years. “And it would be a trouble, as well as a certain amount of peril, to challenge Grippen’s authority. I personally do not care to disrupt my existence by stooping to fight with a peon such as he. Calvaire was evidently not so fastidious. He swore allegiance to Grippen, but it is clear that he neverintended to submit himself to our medical friend’s authority…”
Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel Page 14