Blood Maidens (14 page)

So he watched from his window, and now and then Molchanov would turn his shaggy head and glance in his direction, as if he knew perfectly well that Ysidro couldn’t have gotten to St Petersburg, and then to Moscow, from London without a human escort . . .

And knew perfectly well that humans were nosy, even to the point of peeking through the doors of Hell.

The clock downstairs chimed the quarter hour. As if they heard it, the vampires swarmed the garden wall again, leaping down – cloaks, hair, dresses billowing – on the outside. The moon struggled like a drowning swimmer from the clouds, and Asher saw the garden was empty. The Master of Moscow, the pale beautiful woman, Ysidro . . . They were all gone. He waited, listening for footfalls he knew he wouldn’t hear, until outside the door of his room he heard Ysidro say, ‘James?’

Only then did he get to his feet and remove the protective swags of garlic and whitethorn, stow them in his suitcase again, and open the door.

Asher realized he was shaking. The fire in the stove had burned to ashes, unnoticed.

‘You are cold.’ The vampire crossed to the samovar, filled a silver-mounted glass with steaming tea.

Asher turned up the lamp. ‘Just glad you found someone else to talk to our friends.’

‘As am I.’ Ysidro knelt to open the stove’s shining grate, added a log and stirred the fire, its orange light painting the illusion of life on his thin features. ‘I was invited to go hunting, in what remained of the night – would I dine with them, they asked. I replied I would sup when I returned to Petersburg. This satisfied them, though Molchanov suggested that he could find me an escort back, should harm befall you here.’

Asher stood by the window for a time, the tea glass cradled in his hands. Guessing what would have happened, had Ysidro gone hunting with the fledglings, while Molchanov remained behind. Now that the vampires were gone, he found he could not stop shivering. ‘What did you tell him?’

‘That I had need of one who could speak both English and Russian. He cautioned me against employing a man with brains:
Get a good, stupid peasant
, he said – through the lovely Xenia, who is certainly stupid enough to suit him to the ground.
They’re loyal, and they don’t ask questions. You can’t trust a city man. Like weasels, they always think they know best
. I did not ask him how he came to know what weasels think. I never met a master who did not consider himself more intelligent than any man living.’ Ysidro brought up a chair to the stove and, after a glance at Asher, silently, brought from the window the chair in which Asher had watched and placed it by the open grate as well.

Then he sat and folded his long, white hands. ‘I have now learnt all that gossip can tell me of the Petersburg vampires,’ he said. ‘No inconsiderable matter, given the fewness of hours in the night that can actually be spent in the hunt and the length of years in which human minds – whom immortality renders no less human – have nothing to occupy themselves with except gossip.’

Asher hid a smile and took the chair opposite him, as if he had been a living friend. ‘You behold me agog.’

‘I fear you will be less so,’ responded the vampire politely, ‘when you learn that you and I will be obliged to continue our travels together through Europe for some weeks yet. It appears that the rivalry between Count Golenischev and his brother-fledgling Prince Dargomyzhsky – both fledglings of the same master who made the Lady Irene vampire – has been complicated still further by the presence of an interloper, a vampire who came to Petersburg about two years ago. For years the Count and the Prince each have attempted to gain Irene’s support, but she kept apart from them both – regarding both as imbeciles, an evaluation I find it difficult to contest. The interloper – whom Molchanov simply referred to as a German, meaning in Old Russian simply a foreigner – he called you one, too – sides now with one, now with the other—’

‘And now with the actual Germans?’

‘That, neither Molchanov nor any of his fledglings could say. They do not, you understand, travel abroad themselves. Like all Muscovites they regard Moscow as the heart and center of the physical and spiritual universe, and Petersburg as a sort of corrupt excrescence, necessary only to maintain a contact with the tradesmen of the West. And it is a long distance,’ he added. ‘A vampire alone might be able to travel from Moscow to Petersburg in two days in midwinter, could he find secure lodging in Bologoe. Myself, I would not care to try. Petersburg has always had a very small population of the Undead, and its masters have tended to be those who had not the strength to establish themselves elsewhere.’

‘And this vampire girl who perished in the autumn?’

‘He knew nothing of her. The Lady Xenia – our fair translator, who corresponds with Golenischev – assured me that Golenischev knew nothing of her either. Had he done so, he would have attempted to recruit her, not sought to do her harm; doubtless Dargomyzhsky would have as well.’

‘Either they’re all lying . . .’ Asher set his tea glass on the raised stone of the hearth on which the stove stood. ‘Or what? What
could
the Kaiser’s government offer a vampire? Power? I’d think that given the weakness of the local master, in St Petersburg that wouldn’t be much of a consideration. Food? God knows, the city has the biggest slums this side of India, and even the families of those who disappear don’t dare ask questions. What else is there?’

‘That,’ Ysidro replied, ‘is what we must travel to discover. To Prague – to Warsaw – to Köln – to Frankfurt – to Munich . . . and to Berlin.’

Mrs L.M. Asher

Holywell Street, Oxford

Uncle William’s stocks prospering no danger there stop yet your husband has fallen dangerously ill advise come at once stop contact Isaacson in Petersburg stop

Don Simon

TEN

Asher sent the telegram – signed with Ysidro’s name – to Lydia from Moscow’s Kursk Station, just before boarding the ten a.m. train. Further conversation in the small hours had only confirmed Asher’s conviction that it would be best to move their departure forward to daylight, an opinion in which Ysidro concurred. ‘Molchanov has many fledglings,’ the vampire remarked an hour or so before it grew light, as he packed clothing, toiletries, clean shirts – he was as fastidious as any dandy Asher had ever met. ‘His mistrust of Western “cleverness”, as he terms it, outdistances any consideration of what he would do were a foreign vampire to become stranded in Moscow because his servant had met an unfortunate end. Besides, he can think of no greater felicity than to be obliged to dwell in Russia for the rest of eternity. I think it were best, were neither you nor I in Moscow when darkness next falls.’

‘I’m not going to argue with you there.’

It would take Lydia, Asher calculated, three days to reach St Petersburg. Profoundly as he missed her, the thought of her coming here – crossing the paths of the vampires, as he had warned her not to do back in the smug safety of Oxford – filled him with dread. Yet if he and Ysidro were to trace the St Petersburg interloper – to find his name, possibly his former nest, and any account of his intentions, resources, and contacts – they would have to seek him in Germany: and Ysidro being what he was, there was no question of either he, or Asher, undertaking the search alone.

What an unaided human could do to locate the interloper in St Petersburg, Lydia knew well how to do. She had tracked down vampire lairs before and knew what to look for, not only in the numbers in bank records – in property transfer dates and the names on accounts – but in the more subtle realms of gossip, rumor, and newspaper reports. She might not know the Triple Entente from the Triple Alliance, or be able to recall the name of the Prime Minister or what party he was in, but a girlhood in upper-class London society had given her a talent for sorting usable information from the persiflage of gossip, for asking the right questions, for listening to what people said when they forgot that anyone was listening, and most of all for sniffing out where money was.

And a lifetime of using precisely those unobtrusive skills in the name of Queen and Country had taught Asher that gossip and listening, sorting chance remarks and poking into peoples’ financial records, generally yielded better results than hair’s-breadth escapes after stealing secret plans.

How long the interloper planned to remain in Petersburg, Asher did not know, nor where he would go from there; he was acutely conscious that this might be their only chance to scotch the alliance between vampire and Kaiser. Yet, every time Lydia tampered in the business end of the affairs of the Undead, it was like watching her dart across a den of sleeping lions.

‘Razumovsky can get her whatever bank records she needs,’ he had said, looking up from the telegram form at Ysidro, who was perched on the corner of the gilt-and-malachite desk in the town house’s tiny library. That was at six a.m., the first whispers of dawnlight not far off. Razumovsky – as Lydia would know from the duplicate address-book he had left with her – was the man he meant by
Isaacson
; any reference to Uncle William’s railway shares was the tag that meant,
The following sentence is to be disregarded, it’s only for show
. ‘If our interloper is German, he’ll deal with German banks. And I trust that neither of our St Petersburg rivals has the sophistication to realize that Lydia will be a threat.’

‘They are Russians.’ A world of conquistador scorn glinted like a single pale star in Ysidro’s colorless voice. Ysidro himself – upon learning how Lydia went about comparing wills and property records, payments from one bank account to another, and clandestine transfers of stocks and bearer bonds – had rearranged his own living arrangements to preclude such investigation. For a man who had died in 1555 he had become surprisingly conversant with such modern conveniences as telegraphs, foreign bank accounts, and consolidated private holding companies with headquarters in New York.

‘Moreover, they will themselves soon depart for the Crimea, for Odessa or Kiev. Within a month our interloper will have the city to himself, though how this could profit him I know not. For nigh on two months he will be a prisoner, and the cellars of the town are shallow and damp. ’Twere best, I think, did you not meet with your lady, save by daylight.’

‘That’s another statement I’m not going to give you an argument about.’

They departed Moscow by the ten o’clock train that same morning: an express, roaring through a flat world of fields where bare ground was only beginning to show. Asher closed himself into his first-class reserved compartment, and slept – the light, wary sleep of Abroad – and dreamed, uneasily, of an endlessly huge railway station with golden pillars between its platforms, like the Admiralty Hall in the Winter Palace. He and Lydia sought one another, leaping onto trains to avoid some frightful peril, riding them to terminus and then coming back in the hopes of finding one another before whatever it was – faceless, silent, smelling of rotten blood – found them.

When he climbed the steps of the Imperatrice Catherine at nine thirty that night, the dvornik handed him a note, the glue on its envelope surprisingly intact.

Jules Plummer

L’Imperatrice Catherine

26, Moyka Embankment

There has been another burning
.

Zudanievsky

‘I told you!’ Ellen’s voice cracked in real distress. ‘I said, didn’t I, ma’am, that if Mr James went off looking for that cousin of his, and in such terrible weather – and to Russia, of all the heathen places! – didn’t I say he’d come down ill, as he did before?’

‘Indeed you did.’ Lydia folded up the telegram, her heart beating fast.

Not because she believed for one instant that Jamie was ill, of course.

Don Simon
 . . .

Ysidro
.

She set the yellow paper down, aware that it gave away how badly her hands were shaking. Ellen peered at her, thick untidy brows drawing together: ‘Now, ma’am, don’t take on so,’ she said, her own anxiety shoved abruptly aside. ‘I’m sure it’s not so bad as this Mr Simon seems to think. He’ll be all right.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Lydia smiled up at the bigger woman, realizing – from the cold of her hands and feet, and the expression on Ellen’s face – that she must have gone pale.

‘It’s probably just a chill.’

‘I’m sure it is.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Would you have Mick bring down my luggage from the box room? I think there’s a train to London this evening.’

‘And then what?’ demanded her servant. ‘Us arriving at all hours of the night and having to find a hotel . . .’

Lydia opened her mouth, shut it, then managed to say, ‘Yes, of course.’
Us
. The inevitable taboo against young ladies traveling alone . . .

Margaret Potton’s face rose before her, huge blue eyes blinking behind thick spectacles beneath the eaves of her outdated hat.