James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (7 page)

But the vampire only said, “Ingenious,” and touched the side of the pump’s reservoir with the backs of his fingers, then took them quickly away. In the pale gaslight, Lydia could see that his ears had been long ago pierced for earrings, like a Gypsy’s. “Then this Fairport is in truth Karolyi’s pensioner.”

“I think so.” Lydia held out to him another telegram, the telegram which, reaching her that morning from Munich, had caused her to pack her trunks, manufacture a moderately plausible tale for her servants, and take the train down to London in search of the man in whose kitchen she now sat, with the smallest of his cats—a sinuous shadow-gray torn—winding itself around her ankles.

Ysidro took the second paper from her hand.

    LEAVING PARIS STOP

    STAYING EPPLER ADDRESS BOOK JAMES

“He’s waxed cautious since his first wire.” The vampire touched the paper to his lower lip again. “You conned this book of his?”

“After I decoded the message, yes.” She reached down half unconsciously to stroke the cat, looking up at Ysidro where he sat above her, hands folded over his knee. His nails projected some half inch beyond the tips of his fingers and had a strange glassy appearance, far thicker than human nails. Some kind of chitin? It would be rude to ask for a cutting.

“The words ‘address book’ were the tip, you see,” she explained. “It’s a simple code; last for first, counting inward, and A means B, B means C, et cetera. He keeps duplicate books. Eppler is two from the end of the E’s—Mrs. Eppler is the mother of an old pupil of his. She lives in Botley, about ten miles from Oxford, and it’s ridiculous that he’d be going there from Paris. Two from the beginning of the F’s was Fairport, in Vienna. As you see, the telegram was sent from Munich, at one-forty Tuesday afternoon.”

“And I was that easy to find?”

Lydia
hesitated, wondering if she should lie. Although her initial fears had subsided, she realized she was still in a great deal of danger. She supposed that if Ysidro didn’t have the ability to make people stop fearing him, he would have starved to death centuries ago.

The greater fears still lay ahead of her, a vast uncharted territory of deeds she had no concept how to perform.

At last she said, “I knew about this house a year ago. In theory. I hadn’t sought it out. But I looked up all the possibilities of vampire lairs for James while he was… working for you.”

A small line printed itself briefly near the fanged mouth, and the smallest flare of annoyance moved Ysidro’s nostrils. But he only said, “Then this Fairport is thought by the Department in Vienna to be their man—they, too, having missed the articles which speak of Karolyi’s contributions to Fairport’s research. No matter of surprise, given the fewness of agents and the troubles in the Balkans in that year, and in France. Afterward, one presumes Fairport would have known not to publish his patron’s name.”

“What it means,” Lydia said quietly, “is that James is walking into a trap.”

Ysidro remained still for some time, the telegram unmoving in his fingers, but Lydia could see thought and memory like swift-shuffled cards in the back of the jeweled yellow eyes. Remembering, she guessed, Fairport’s articles on Hungarian and Romanian centenarians, his preoccupation with extending life, his work in a part of the world that James had described as a hotbed of vampire lore. Then he raised his head and said, “Await me.”

And without seeing him leave, Lydia found herself alone.

She checked her watch, wondering how long “Await me” meant. If she herself were in a tremendous hurry, she could wash, dress, curl, frizz and put up her hair, and apply a judiciously minuscule quantity of rice powder, kohl, rouge, and cologne in just under two hours and a half, which her husband, manlike, seemed to consider an unreasonable length of time. At least, Lydia thought, she knew how long it took her to make herself presentable and allowed for it, unlike dandies of her acquaintance who lived in the fond delusion that they could assemble the component parts of their facade in “only a moment, my dearest Mrs. Asher.” She remembered the clothing in the dressing room upstairs, by the finest tailors in Saville Row. James had warned her, and now she knew from terrifying experience, how fast vampires could move, but she also knew that males as a species tended to potter, fidgeting endlessly with cravats and shifting coins, notebooks, and theater tickets from pocket to pocket as if fearing they would capsize if not properly trimmed. She wondered if death altered this.

Twenty-five minutes
, she made a mental wager with herself, and was within three of it when she turned her head to find Ysidro at her side again. In his cinder-gray suit, his flesh white as the linen of his shirt, he seemed more ghostlike than he had in the white robe, as if the clothing were a barrier, a shadow of distance.

“Come.”

The alleys and back streets through which he led her were unlit and stinking, full of furtive movement. She guessed their route was not a direct one, but could not be sure, for as soon as they descended the front steps of his house, he took her spectacles from her. Moreover, she was aware that three or four times in the fifteen minutes of their walk, he touched her mind with the blankness, the empty reverie, that vampires apparently could extend. She had the sensation of waking repeatedly from dreams to find herself each time in a new street or court, blinking at ten shades of blurred darkness all spangled with the colored embers of reflected pub lights, with Yiddish or German or Russian yammering on all sides from the little knots of seedy, bearded men clustered in doorways or around chestnut vendors’ braziers. The men would step aside unconsciously to let Ysidro pass, not looking at him, as if they, too, partook of his dream of invisibility; their clothes smelled of hard work and poor diet and not enough hot water for washing.

Every other week Lydia took the train down to London to work in the dissecting rooms of St. Luke’s. Men like these, with their brown, broken teeth and their flea bites and their dirty, callused hands would be delivered by the workhouse vans, smelling of carbolic and formalin, dead of tumors that had burst untreated, of pneumonia, of consumption or the other ills of poverty, so that she and others like her could study the intricate beauty of muscle and nerve beneath the knife.

It was the first time in her scholarly life that Lydia had been among them living, and her mind swarmed with questions she wished to ask them about the food and working conditions that had contributed to their pathologies. On the other hand, she felt very glad of Ysidro’s protection.

They crossed a plank bridge over water nearly invisible beneath low-lying fog, passed the wry, dark roofline of some very ancient church. In time they traversed a sordid alley behind a pub near the river and descended an areaway thick with garbage and the smell of cats. Though her eyes had grown used to darkness, Lydia saw only the moth flicker of pale hands before she heard the snick of a lock going over. Hinges creaked. Ysidro said “Come” again and stepped into absolute dark.

A match scratched. Ysidro’s narrow face appeared, outlined in saffron. “You need not concern yourself over rats.”

He touched the flame to a pair of guttered candles in a double branch. The plaster of the walls was black with mildew, falling away to reveal underlying brick. “Like cats, they are aware of what we are and know that though it is the human death we need to feed our minds, we can derive sustenance from the blood of any living thing.”

He lifted the branch. Twin lights called twin ghosts of shadow, merging and circling in a strange cotillion as he led her toward the back stair. “Anthea and Ernchester sleep seldom at the house on Savoy Walk these days. It is best to let memories lie. She scarce ever hunts this early in the night, but it may be that she has gone to her dressmaker.”

Lydia
checked her watch again as they passed through a downstairs hall: peeling silk wall covering, doors blackly ajar. “I suppose this close to Christmas there’d be one open…”

“If one has money, mistress, one always finds those willing to sell their sleep and their leisure. I have visited my bootmaker at midnight and never found him but that he was consumed with delight.”

“What do you tell him?” She couldn’t imagine her aunt Harriet’s modiste keeping open past seven for Queen Alexandra herself.

Ysidro regarded her with eyes turned amber by the ruddy light. “That I will have none of this foolishness of two-colored shoes, nor buttons up the side.” He turned to the room at the top of the stair. “So.”

Like Ysidro’s house, the chamber held little furniture, and that furniture old. A tester bed with a curving footboard stood against the rotted wall panels, the counterpane as faded as the silk paper downstairs; on the other wall, a blackwood armoire, stained, chipped, thick with dust-choked carving and mottled with water damage. Its doors stood open. Petticoats, corsets, stockings lay across the bed, and with them—separated by the length of space that would have accounted for a large portmanteau—two dresses Lydia immediately recognized as unsuitable for travel, one because of its now-unfashionable leg-o‘-mutton sleeves, the other because it was white, a color no sane woman, dead or Undead, would wear on a train.

“She’s gone after him,” Lydia said, opening the armoire doors. The only dresses there in the current fashion were the decollete silks and sumptuous velvets of evening wear. No waists, no skirts—Lydia peered shortsightedly into the lower drawer, and Ysidro handed her eyeglasses back—and no walking shoes. “She packed in a hurry…”

She halted, frowning, as her eyes adjusted to the sudden clarity and she realized that the tops of the dressers were in disorder: scarves, sleeves, kerchiefs caught in drawers that had been hastily closed.

“The place has been searched.” Ysidro, who had passed swiftly into the other room, returned, moving his head as if scenting the air. “Living men, days ago, before she packed, I think. The air still whispers of their tobacco and their blood.” He crossed to the bed, studied the garments lying there. All the colors, as far as Lydia could tell in the low amber radiance of candlelight, that a dark woman would wear; everything of the highest quality— Swiss cotton, Melton wool, Italian silk. They were cut for a woman of Lydia’s height, with a waist like a stem and breasts like blown roses.

“Her clothing.” Ysidro turned a chemise over in one gray-gloved hand. “None of his. I like this not, Mistress Asher.” He let the silk slither away. “For many years now it has only been love of her that has kept him on this earth. She is the strong one. He hunts in her shadow, brittle, like antique glass.”

“Might that be reason in itself?” Lydia turned from the dresser, where an ivory hair receiver and ivory-handled scissors spoke of other pieces of a matched toilet set now vanished: brush, comb, mirror. A glove box lay open, gloves of all colors lying like dried and flaccid spiders where they had been spilled.

Ysidro lifted a brow.

Lydia
went on hesitantly, “Might he be fleeing her?”

“To such sanctuary as the Austrian Empire would afford?” He moved around the corner of the bed, touched the imprint on the dusty counterpane where the portmanteau had rested, and his nostrils flared again, seeking clues from the alien scents of the air. “I would not have said so. She loves him, guards him; she is all in all to him.”

He paused for a long time, his face half turned from her, inexpressive as the level softness of his voice. “But it is true that one may hate one’s all in all at the same time that one loves. This was something…” Another pause, debating; then he went on, “This was something I never understood as a living man.”

He met her eyes, expressionless, and she could not reply.

After a time he said, “The Calais Mail departs Charing Cross at nine. I doubt we can prepare swiftly enough to make tonight’s. Meet me tomorrow night at eight on the platform, you and your maid. I shall wire my own arrangements to Paris beforehand; I can—”

“I’m not taking a maid!” Lydia said, shocked.

Ysidro’s brows lifted again, colorless against his colorless face. “Naturally, she shall know nothing of me, save as a chance-met companion on the train.”

“No.”

“Mistress Asher—”

“This is not a matter for discussion, Don Simon.” Frightened as she was at the thought of traveling to Vienna—of dealing with one or possibly several vampires—the thought of journeying in company with one unnerved her still more. And as for putting Ellen or anyone else in similar danger…

“I came to you for advice in dealing with vampires, specifically with Lord Ernchester. There isn’t a great deal of reliable information on the subject, you know.” She saw the flare of genuine exasperation in his eyes behind the vampire stillness, and rather to her own surprise it didn’t frighten her as it had.

“But I would not take anyone—certainly not a woman who’s been my friend and servant for nearly fifteen years—into that situation without telling her what kind of danger she may be facing, which, on the face of it, is impossible.”

“A woman of your station does not travel alone.”

“Nonsense. My friend Josetta Beyerly travels by herself all the time. So does—”

“You will not.” Ysidro’s voice did not grow louder, nor his expression change, but she felt his irritation like a wave of cold off a block of ice. “In my day no woman traveled alone, save peasants and women of the streets.”

“Well, when I encounter a roving band of paid-off mercenary soldiers between here and Calais, I’ll certainly wish I’d taken your advice.”

“Don’t talk foolishness. You might trace Karolyi but you would never get near Ernchester, and it is Ernchester to whom I must speak on this matter.”

“You’re the one who’s talking foolishness,” retorted Lydia, though she knew he was right. “This is the twentieth century, not the sixteenth. I will certainly appreciate whatever advice you can give me…”

“Advice will gain you little against either Karolyi or Ernchester. If you wish to warn your husband of his danger, you must travel with me—and travel I will, to prevent Charles from doing this thing, whatever his motives.”

Lydia
was silent for a moment, unnerved beyond words at the thought of such a journey but remembering how utterly unprepared she had been to encounter him in the crypt. “If you must,” she said slowly, her dream of fanged white faces returning to her. “Thank you… but I am not taking my maid into the situation she’d face if we meet Ernchester, and I’m not exposing her to the chance of finding out inconvenient things about you. Which she’d do,” added Lydia. “Ellen’s got an inquisitive streak, and she’s smarter than she appears. I won’t do that to her.”