James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (3 page)

At his feet a dog in a cage whined with fear.

The smell of the rainy night could neither cover nor disperse the stink of death.

Asher looked around him quickly, kneeling so as to be out of the line of the window. Dim light came through the little judas on the door, but not enough; he fumbled a lucifer match from the box in his greatcoat pocket, scratched it with his nail.

The man’s body had been folded small, knees mashed into chest, arms bent close to sides, the whole skinny tangle of him shoved tight into a corner behind a double bass in a case.

Asher blew out the match, lit another, and crouched to worm close. The dead man was young, dark, unshaven, with a laborer’s callused hands and a roughly knotted kerchief around his neck instead of a cravat. His clothing smelled of cheap gin and cheaper tobacco. One of his shoes was worn through. Only a little blood had soaked into the neckerchief, though when Asher moved it down with one finger, he saw that the jugular vein had been cut clear through, a rough, ripping tear, the edges white and puffy, mangled as if they had been chewed and sucked. Asher had a scar that size where his collar pressed the silver links of the necklace against his skin.

A third match showed the dead man’s face utterly white, blue-lipped, eyebrows and beard stubble glaring, though by the appearance of the eyelids he’d been dead for less than thirty minutes. Moving a frayed pants cuff, Asher saw the bare ankle had not yet begun to turn livid. Probably, Asher thought with a queer, angry coldness, it never would, much.

He blew out the match, stowed the stub—with the stubs of the first two—in his pocket, and slithered from between the bath chair and bass fiddle case. He’d passed the conductor in the second-class carriage, on his way down the train. The official’s nearness had probably interrupted the murderer before he could dump the body out into the night, or perhaps Ernchester was waiting till they were farther from London. Asher left the compartment quickly, dusting his hands on his coat skirts and muttering to himself like a man who has not found what he sought. Nobody in third class gave him a glance.

By the time the train reached Dover, he suspected, the body would be gone. To call attention now to what he had found would only, inevitably, call attention to himself. He wasn’t such a fool as to think he would then ever reach Paris alive.

In the dingy second-class compartment where he had left his satchel, a lively family of homebound Parisians had made themselves very much at home. They were passing bread and cheese among themselves; the bonne femme offered him some and a blood orange, while her mari laboriously scanned a battered copy of I’Aurore. Asher thanked her and fished out his own copy of the Times, most of which he had already read on the journey up from Tunbridge Wells, and wondered academically what he was going to tell whoever was in charge of the Paris section these days.

It was going to be a long night, he knew. He dared not sleep, lest Farren sense him through his dreams.

2/11/1908-0600     PARIS/GARE DU NORD

ERNCHESTER GONE TO PARIS WITH IGNACE KAROLYI

AUSTRIAN SIDE STOP FOLLOWED STOP WILL HAND OFF

COME BACK TONIGHT JAMES

Ernchester
. Lydia Asher laid the thin sheet of yellow paper down on the gilt-inlaid desk before her, heart beating quickly as she identified the name. Gone to Paris with someone from the “Austrian side.”

It took a moment for the meaning to sink in, mostly because Lydia, although she could have distinguished a parathyroid from a parathymus at sight, couldn’t immediately remember whether the Austrians were allied with the Germans or with England. But when it did, the implications made her shiver.

“Is it from the master, ma’am?”

She looked up. Ellen, who had brought the telegram to her with her tea, lingered in the study door, big red hands tucked under her apron. Last night’s inky downpour had dwindled this morning to a slow, steady drench from a sky like steel; beyond the tall windows, Holywell Street was a shining pebblework of cobble and wet, softened by Lydia’s myopia to a gentle sepia and silver Manet. The tall brown wall of New
College across the road was nearly black with damp. Now and then a student would pass, or a don, faceless ghosts nevertheless identifiable—even as Ellen was identifiable—by their bodies and the way they moved: there was no question, to Lydia, of mistaking the little banty-cock Dean of Brasenose, with his self-important strut, for the equally diminutive but self-effacing Dr. Vyrdon of Christ Church.

Lydia
drew a deep breath, blinking huge brown eyes in the direction of the dark square of the hall door, and realized for the first time that morning that she was starving. “Yes,” she said. “He was called away unexpectedly to Paris.”

“Tcha!” Ellen shook her head disapprovingly. “And in all that rain! What’s in Paris that’s more important than him coming home last night, and you so worried?”

Since Lydia couldn’t very well reply, Probably a partnership that will begin with Germany conquering England and end God knows where, she said nothing.

Ellen went on cheerily, “I told you not to worry about Mr. James, didn’t I, ma’am? With all that rain it’d stand to reason he’d be delayed, though I never did think of Paris, myself. Something to do with investments, like as not.” Ellen had worked for some years for Lydia’s father and was used to the fact that if the master of the house departed suddenly, it had to do with investments. “Though I didn’t know,” she added, with one of her occasional bursts of sapience, “as he had any.”

“A few small ones,” Lydia said truthfully, folding the telegram and unlocking a drawer of the gilt secretary at which she worked. Its contents exploded into a puffy mountain of household accounts and pathology notes. Lydia regarded the mess blankly, as if the entire desk were not awash with dissection diagrams, notes on the endocrine system, correspondence from other researchers on the subject of ductless glands, milliners’ bills, menus, silk samples, copies of Lancet, and the first draft of her article on pancreatic secretions for the January issue of British Medical Journal, on which she’d been working when Ellen had made her entrance. She shook back the cloud of lace from around her hand and determinedly stuffed the contents back into the drawer, which she then forced shut. She opened two more drawers with similar results, finally poking the telegram down into the side among a sheaf of notes concerning electrostimulation’s effect on the production of adrenaline.

Her friend Josetta Beyerly was forever joking her about not reading the newspapers even enough to know who the Prime Minister was, as if prime ministers—and in fact Balkan kings— didn’t come and go at the drop of a constituency. Reading newspapers only caused Lydia to wonder whether people like Lord Balfour and the Kaiser suffered from hyperthyroidism or vitamin deficiency and how she could find out, and she’d found that the speculation distracted her from her work.

“He says he’ll be back today.” It was unreasonable of her, she knew, to feel relief. Jamie was perfectly able to look after himself, as she had known last night, lying awake and fingering the heavy links of the silver chain around her neck. When she had dreamed, it had been of a corpse-white face upturned in the distant gaslights of a London alleyway, strangely reflective eyes, and a mouth snarling to show the glint of outsize fangs. She’d awakened then and lain listening to the ram on the ivy until morning.

There had been no reason for her to be afraid.

Handing off
the telegram said.

There was no reason to be afraid now.

What was it in the telegram, she wondered, that snagged at the back of her mind like a hangnail on silk?

“Though it would be a shame,” she went on thoughtfully, “if he didn’t spend at least a little time in Paris, long enough anyway to buy himself a clean shirt and a box of bonbons. He’d only his overnight things with him, you know, for his cousin’s funeral.”

Handing off.

Why did she think she’d heard the name Ignace Karolyi before?

And how on earth was he going to explain the Earl of Ernchester to the Foreign Office men in Paris?

“I wonder if you could get me some of the toast I didn’t eat at breakfast?” Lydia asked after a moment.

“Right away, ma’am.” She heard the beaming smile in the housemaid’s voice, saw it in the way her shoulders relaxed as she turned from the door. Ellen and Mrs. Grimes both considered her too thin, though she had confounded their earlier threats— when she was in school, a gawky and bespectacled fledgling bluestocking—that no girl who went around with her nose in a book and not eating enough to keep a canary alive was ever going to catch a husband. In spite of daily reminders of her undesirableness, Lydia had always been aware that as the sole heiress to the Willoughby fortune, she would be inundated with proposals of marriage the moment she put up her hair.

Jamie told her she was beautiful, the only man she had ever truly believed.

Had Jamie ever mentioned Ignace Karolyi to her?

She didn’t think so. She cast her mind back to the tall, self-effacing don who sat on the sidelines of her father’s garden parties with her, talking of cabbages and kings—telling her about medicine in China and how best to go about studying for responsions without letting her father know. The gentle, competent man who never made demands on her, who guessed that a completely different person hid beneath her careful facade and accepted her exactly as she was. He’d always been close-mouthed, though even as a schoolgirl she’d suspected there was more to him than that almost invisible “brown” mien of his. Reticence was still his habit; after seven years of marriage his stories, like Mark Twain’s, usually concerned men and women all named Fergusson.

That was what troubled her now. She’d heard, or read, Karolyi’s name in some other context. Read, she thought… She couldn’t put a pronunciation to the closing yi. Which meant she’d never heard Jamie say it.

She slipped her eyeglasses out from behind a pile of papers— concealing them when anyone entered the room was a lifelong habit—and rose in a rustle of lace, crossing to her side of the bookshelves, where she settled on the floor, her long red hair hanging down her back, her plans to work at the Radcliffe Infirmary’s dissection rooms that afternoon laid aside. By the time Ellen reappeared with a tray of sandwiches and onion soup—for it was well past noon—Lydia had remembered when and in what context she’d come across Karolyi’s name, and the recollection made her more uneasy still. She left the tray untouched and ascended to the bedroom two hours later to continue her researches in the back issues of Lancet and Medical Findings stored under the bed.

She might not remember whether Germany had a Parliament these days or be able to tell a Bolshevik from a Menshevik, but she could remember to within a few months when secretin had been discovered or the address of Marie Curie’s laboratory in Paris.

She was still reading at teatime when Ellen came up with another tray and bullied her into eating half an egg and part of a scone while Ellen built up the bedroom fire and turned up the gas. Lydia had tracked down the reference, which had given her, in turn, another name; she was dimly aware that she had begun to count the hours between now and midnight, when, at her best guess, James was due home.

If he didn’t elect to remain in Paris overnight.

If something didn’t go wrong.

If Ernchester hadn’t seen him…

If he’s staying in Paris
, she thought, dabbing jam and Devonshire cream on a scone and then setting it on the plate to gaze at the darkening windows, he’ll wire me. He’ll let me know.

And if he didn’t?

She wondered if she could reach him by wiring the consulate or the Foreign Office—or was it the War Office that operated the Secret Service? Where was the Foreign Office in Paris, anyway? Like most girls of wealthy family, her experience of the City of Lights had been stringently limited by her preceptors to the Champs Elysees and the Rue de la Paix. If she telephoned the Foreign Office in London—would that be in Whitehall? Parliament? Scotland Yard?—they would only tell her lies.

She felt helpless, frightened, uncertain of what to do, because, unlike medical research, this was something for which she had never prepared.

And in any case, she realized, only now seeing the darkness beyond the curtain, they’d all have gone home by this time. As if to echo an affirmative, the Louis XV clock on the parlor mantel downstairs sang its five clear notes.

So all she could do was wait.

She fell asleep sometime after midnight across the foot of the bed, still wearing her fluffy rose-point tea gown, the eye of a maelstrom of medical journals that spread to the bedroom’s door, and dreamed of crumbling houses in ancient cities, their stones mortared with dark blood and cobweb; of half-seen forms whispering in shadows centuries deep.

By morning James had not returned. But it wasn’t until his second telegram that she decided to go up to London and seek out such a house herself.

“The Earl of Ernchester is a vampire.”

Streatham—a fussy, chinless man whom Asher had never liked—regarded him for a moment with narrow surprise in his light blue eyes, as if asking himself why Asher would perpetrate such a tale and if it constituted a threat to his position as head of the Paris branch of the Department. Asher had spent a good part of the previous night, sleepless aboard the Dover ferry and the train from Boulogne, trying to phrase an argument that would convince those in charge to either have Karolyi arrested in Pans—scarcely likely, since Karolyi never went anywhere without diplomatic credentials—or to assign a man to follow him, to at least see what his next step would be.

Lack of sleep, hunger, and sheer exasperation when the green-painted door of the town house on the Rue de la Ville de l’Eveque hadn’t opened to his knock at five minutes after nine had had their effect. Sitting on a bench under the bare trees before the Madeleine, watching the town house for signs of life, with the chilling threat of rain blowing over him for twenty freezing minutes, he had finally thought, To hell with it. I’ll tell them the truth.

Streatham ventured a small chuckle, like an agent offering a read newspaper on the Underground to the minor clerk of some foreign legation: a feeler to see how the land lies. “You aren’t serious.”