Riot Most Uncouth (12 page)

“This contains treasures and truths from across the world, obtained at great effort and expense over a period of years,” I said.

“But you never have any money.” I wondered if I'd spoken too freely of my financial difficulties in front of this woman. Perhaps it was a mistake to reveal my treasures to her. I wondered if she ever betrayed my secrets to her husband, as she betrayed her vows to him with me.

“I find credit whenever it's available,” I said. “And I employ my borrowed funds toward the pursuit of this.” I opened the cabinet to reveal several rows of ancient heavy tomes.

“Why, it's a bookshelf,” Violet remarked. “But who locks a bookshelf?”

“There is some knowledge that is valuable and dangerous. Some knowledge must be shielded behind locked doors and guarded by bears,” I said. “You are looking at the most comprehensive library in all of Britain on the subject of immortal creatures, and on vampires in particular.”

“Vampires?”

“The undying dead,” I told her. “They rise from their graves to feed on the blood of the chaste. Stealing life allows them to stave away death. They do not age, they cannot be hurt, and they never die.”

“I've never heard of any such thing,” she said. “This sounds like a fairy story.”

“It's true that there have been no documented sightings of these creatures in England,” I said. “But they are quite common in the East.”

Violet was examining an ancient heavy tome and rubbing with a pink thumbnail at a small, dark spot on the cover.

“That won't come off,” I said. “It's a mole, I think, or a freckle.”

She looked at me with confusion.

“That book is bound with human skin,” I explained, to clarify.

Violet turned very pale, which I thought was attractive. But she looked like she might drop the precious volume, so I took it from her and opened it to show her a lithograph printed onto one of the parchment pages, depicting a fanged wraith sucking at the throat of a young woman.

“My father told me stories about these creatures when I was a child. He said they possessed the secret of eternal life, and that, with their knowledge, he would live forever. I was very young when he disappeared. There are two possibilities: either my father deserted my mother and me and he died someplace, destitute and alone, or he went to the East to take his place among the vampires. The second scenario seems unlikely, but I would submit that the first is impossible. My father loved me.”

“Men are imperfect, Byron,” she said. “They are weak and flawed. Your father was incapable of being what you needed him to be. You do yourself no service by mythologizing him.”

“In 1676, stoneworkers in Cornwall discovered a hunk of calcified bone in a quarry,” I said. “A professor of chemistry at Oxford deduced that this bone was the base of a femur, but no known animal has a leg-bone of comparable size. This creature, you must understand, would have easily exceeded the bulk of the African elephant by several orders of magnitude, and it dwelt in England at some point in the past. Fanciful creatures are realer than you think. The natural world exceeds and outpaces man's ability to document and catalog it.”

“I'm sure your father loved you as best he could.”

I ignored her. “Six years ago, a gentleman named Schneider discovered the estuarine crocodile, an eighteen-foot reptile with jaws that can tear a horse in half. If a thing like that can exist in the saltwater swamps of the Indochine, why can't vampires dwell in the sparsely populated mountains and caves of Rumania?”

“If such a thing existed, there would be documentation. There would be proof.”

“What do you think is collected in these volumes? Vampires are real enough for the mountain Gypsies to drape their doors and windows with strings of garlic in hopes of warding the things off, and to nail the dead into their coffins with wooden stakes.”

“You're talking about superstitions and folktales.”

“Like the tales of giant reptiles, with teeth like knives, which we have only recently verified?”

“I don't think we're talking about the same thing.”

“It would have seemed impossible that the American colonies would revolt and throw off the rule of the Crown, and yet they did. Nobody would have believed that the French would haul their royal family out of Versailles and execute them upon the guillotine, and yet it happened. Who would have imagined the mechanized textile-factory or the steam-powered mine were things that could exist, until they did? Who can say what is possible, when we live in an age in which the inconceivable happens with regularity?”

“The progress of the practical sciences does not justify your credulity regarding the existence of the fanciful and mythical. I see no relationship between the one thing and the other.”

I put the ancient book back on the shelf. “The estuarine crocodile is the relationship,” I said. “It's a verified, documented dragon.”

“No, it's not. It's just a crocodile,” she said. “When your father left, you were a small child, and it was no fault of your own. But you're a man now, and your father is gone. You only do yourself harm with these elaborate fantasies.”

I kept a green-glass bottle of absinthe on the shelf next to my vampire texts. I pulled the cork stopper out with my teeth and took a long pull of the burning-sweet liqueur.

“You are frantic and crazed some days, and sullen and brooding on others,” Violet said. “And you're always drunk lately. You have friends who care about you, but not so many as you used to. People will not stand by and watch you destroy yourself, Byron. I won't.”

“You're welcome, then, to go away,” I said, and I tipped the green bottle back a second time.

 

Chapter 17

Every day confirms my opinion on the superiority of a vicious life—and if Virtue is not its own reward I don't know any other stipend annexed to it.

—
Lord Byron,
from an 1813 letter to Henry Drury

As I figured it, the best way to establish Sedgewyck's guilt was to search his rooms and find some proof. The killer had taken Felicity Whippleby's blood with him, so if Sedgewyck had done the deed, the blood might be stashed away in his residence, or at least I'd find the dirty bucket, if he'd already drunk the contents of his gruesome haul. Perhaps he also had a vampire coffin. Regardless, my nemesis would be exposed, and I'd be a hero. It went without saying that I would claim Olivia as the spoils of my victory.

The Professor and I skulked past Sedgewyck's building. He lived on the second story, but I caught a glimpse of him through a window. He appeared to be dressing, and if he was dressing, he might soon be leaving. I retreated about fifty yards down the road and crouched behind a stout tree to wait for him.

It may seem ridiculous to the reader that I would employ a bear as my partner in stealth and skullduggery, but bears are, in fact, among the sneakiest of the predatory mammals. You may point out that you've never seen a bear sneaking up on anyone, but my response to that is: “Exactly!” Bears are masters of subterfuge.

I had to wait only a few minutes before I spotted Sedgewyck leaving his building by the front door. Evidently, traditional dark mourning garb was too plain for him; he was wearing a light gray greatcoat with brass buttons and a bright blue silk scarf. I didn't think he looked particularly vampiric, but perhaps monsters don't look monstrous when they're incognito.

According to some texts, vampires cannot bear daylight; and several mythological traditions hold that the creatures will burst into flame if the light of dawn catches them still prowling. Most experts, however, believe it patently ridiculous that an ostensibly immortal creature could be so fragile, although it is commonly held that vampires prefer to sleep by day.

However, if Sedgewyck was a vampire, the daylight must have dulled his preternatural senses, for he seemed to be preoccupied with something, and he did not spot me and the Professor lurking in the foliage. As soon as he'd rounded the corner, we bolted for the front door of his apartment house, vaulted the common stairwell, and I began frantically pounding with the knocker. When Sedgewyck's pretty housemaid opened the door a crack to see who was calling, I threw my shoulder against it, knocking her to the floor. Having thus secured my entry, I rushed past the girl, through the sitting room where Sedgewyck had received me the previous day, and into his quarters, where I began rifling cupboards and searching rooms.

All the suspicious cooking vessels in the kitchen were clean and empty, and looked as if they had not been used in days. Most undergraduates did not maintain full-time cooks on staff in the College residences even if they had the means to do so, as even the better residences had quarters for only one servant. Sedgewyck likely took his lunches at the College and had a town woman come in to cook for him sometimes in the evenings. I inspected his collection of cutlery. The knives were completely appropriate for kitchen use, but also suitable for throat-slashing. So nothing conclusively pointed to his guilt.

I checked the pantry and was disappointed when I found no buckets of blood. No ropes in evidence, either. The Professor discovered a ham that he believed might contain some promising clue, so I left him to investigate it while I checked Sedgewyck's private chambers.

Within, I found, to my disappointment, an ordinary feather mattress instead of a coffin. I spotted a large chamber pot next to the bed and my pulse hastened, but when I opened it up and looked inside, I found nothing but a fresh turd.

“I haven't emptied that yet,” said the maid, who had recovered and followed me into the bedroom.

“I noticed,” I said, replacing the lid. I peered under the bed, but there was nothing hidden underneath, so I checked the closets.

“Have you come to kill me, like Felicity Whippleby?” the maid asked. She seemed more curious than frightened.

“Don't be ridiculous.” The closet seemed innocuous at first, so I started pulling Sedgwyck's clothes off the shelves and racks and tossing them on the floor to see if he'd concealed anything behind or beneath.

“Well, if you've come to lie in wait to kill Mr. Sedgewyck, I shall have to warn him. He did give me a job, after all.”

“What the hell?” I yanked open all the drawers in his armoire and emptied the contents into a large pile.

“Mr. Sedgewyck says he thinks you might have killed her, though his spirits seem to have recovered quickly from the shock of her death. I had a kitten once that died, and I was inconsolable for weeks. I guess refined sorts of people are quick to regain their composure.”

“There's nothing refined about Mr. Sedgewyck,” I said. His shoes and garments were thoroughly unremarkable. However, I found a scarf like the one I'd seen him wearing when he left, but in red. I liked it, so I stuffed it into my coat pocket.

“Are you going to ravish me?” the maid asked.

“I hadn't planned on it.”

“I won't resist. I mean, if you want to.”

I was barely listening to her, because I was busy rapping on the walls, looking for a hidden doorway or a hollow section. “I'm very busy this morning,” I said.

“I only asked because I've just put clean sheets on the bed. But I suppose, if I have to, I could change them again.”

I paused again and took a look at the girl. She wasn't pale like Olivia. She didn't have yellow hair or crimson lips. But she was shapely and graceful in a sort of uncultured way. She would certainly be good for an evening's entertainment. Or a morning's.

But I was also thinking that, if the evidence wasn't here, then Sedgewyck must have taken it with him. I needed to find out where he'd gone.

“What's your name?” I asked the maid.

“Noreen,” she said.

“Be a darling, Noreen, and entertain the Professor for a bit while I dash out.”

“What?”

“Don't worry. He's quite docile. Unless he's hungry!” I shouted this over my shoulder, for I was already out the door. I vaulted back down the common stairwell and raced back out the front door and dashed down the row of houses, turning left onto Sidney Street. Foot traffic was light; people were staying indoors after the second murder. My weak foot ached as it pounded against the cobbles, but it was a pain I'd learned to ignore. My legs would do what I told them to, and I could run until my lungs gave out.

I glanced down Green Street as I flew past, but I didn't think he'd have turned there; it would have taken him back to the College. Classes were canceled on account of Fat Cheeks' death, and nobody who mattered ever went to class anyway. Instead I headed toward Market Street and the Holy Trinity Church. But Sedgewyck didn't seem like the pious sort, and I knew where I would be heading in this neighborhood. I turned down an alley and caught sight of the blue scarf just as Sedgewyck slipped in the front door of my second-favorite local brothel.

I waited outside for ten minutes. My plan was to burst into the room and catch him in the act, and then draw my pistol on him while he was naked, and search his belongings for proof of his guilt.

I caught my breath, composed myself, and knocked the secret knock that indicated I was a customer in good standing. I heard the madam inside working the bar-locks, and then the door swung open.

“Lord Byron,” she said. “It's a pleasure to see you, as always. Which of the girls would you like?”

“Which of them are available?” I asked, tempted. I almost never forgo an opportunity for a roll with a whore. Life is harsh, volatile, and of indeterminate length. It thus seems irrational not to spend every moment mired in depravity.

“We don't entertain many visitors in the mornings. You can have whichever girl you like.”

This particular brothel employed: a dishwater blonde, two brunettes, a redhead who wasn't so saucy and spirited as I might have hoped, and the only black African prostitute in Cambridge, a girl I sometimes visited when I was in the mood for something exotic. Also, a boy whom I'd tried once but found uninteresting. Still, someone must have patronized him regularly; the lad had to earn his keep. I made a quick calculation about Leif Sedgewyck.