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.
Chapter Two
“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.”
“Ernchester—or Farren, as he sometimes calls himself— Wanthope is another one of his names—is perfectly serious about it,” Asher said grimly, remembering the dead laborer on the train. Whether or not he’s correct in his claims that drinking human blood has enabled him to live two hundred years, I know from my own experience that the man has abilities for which a foreign power would pay well. He can get past guards unseen. I don’t know how he does this, but he can. He has an almost fakirlike ability to get in and out of places. And he can influence people’s minds to an almost unbelievable extent. I’ve seen him do it.“
In fact, Asher reflected, watching the thoughts pass almost visibly across the back of the Paris chief’s shallow blue eyes, he hadn’t seen Ernchester do any of the things he described. Of all the vampires who had ringed him like ghosts in last fall’s misty London darkness, Charles Farren, quondam Earl of Ernchester, was one of the few who had not, to one degree or another, used the eerie abilities of the vampire mind to trap or hunt or influence him.
And as he’d watched the yellow pinpricks of the Dover lights vanish into the blackness of fog beyond the Lord Warden’s stern rail, Asher had reflected that that was one of the strangest aspects of the entire matter: that Ernchester had been the Hungarian’s choice.
There were far more dangerous vampires in London. Why not one of them?
Streatham’s mouth grimaced into what was probably supposed to be a smile. “Really, Dr. Asher. The Department genuinely appreciates your concern, particularly in view of the circumstances of your leave-taking…”
It was a gratuitous jab, and Asher felt a sting of annoyance.
“What I said and felt about the Department when I left still holds.” He set down his teacup. At least they’d offered him tea, he thought, something he was unlikely to get elsewhere in Paris. “If the Department were about to be dynamited, I don’t think I’d cross the street to pinch out the fuse.
“But this isn’t the Department I’m talking about.” His voice was level, but cold with an old rage burned now to clinkers and ash. “This is the country. You cannot let the Hofburg hire the Earl of Ernchester.”
“Don’t you think you’re exaggerating a little? Just because the Austrians are courting some hypnotist—”
“It’s more than hypnosis,” said Asher, knowing that if he lost his patience with this man, he’d lose all hope of getting his help. “I don’t know what it is. I only know that it works.” He drew a deep breath, realizing how little of the actual vampire power could be described. Even to someone who was willing to believe, he wasn’t sure he could describe that curious blanking of the mind that vampires imposed on their victims, allowing them to move utterly unseen; the ability to stand outside a building or on the next street, or half a mile away, silently reading the dreams of whosoever they chose.
They were born spies.
Of course Karolyi, raised in the hotbed of Carpathian legends, would believe, or be ready to believe.
I am ready to do whatever my Emperor requires … He’d imitated the glowing-eyed gallantry of all those other young fools in the officers’ corps, but even then Asher had known that Karolyi had been speaking the absolute truth. It was just that some people had a different view of that word, whatever.
Nothing really changed, he thought. He didn’t know how many times he’d sat in this discreet town house within walking distance of the embassy during the years in which he’d ranged all over Europe, going out ostensibly in quest of moribund verb forms and variant traditions about fairies and heroes and coming back with German battleship plans or lists of firms selling rifles to the Greeks.
Those years seemed hideously distant to him, as if it had been someone else who risked his life and traded his soul for matters that had been obsolete in a year.
Streatham folded his hands, white as a woman’s and as soft. With a kind of perverse relish, he said, “Of course, having been out of the Department, you wouldn’t know about the reorganization since the end of the war and the old Queen’s death. After South Africa, the budget was drastically cut, you know. We have to share this house with Passports and the attache for Financial Affairs now. We certainly can’t ask the French authorities to order the arrest of an Austrian citizen just on your say-so— certainly not a member of one of that country’s noble houses, not to speak of the diplomatic corps. And we can’t spare a man to follow Karolyi around Paris, much less trail him to Vienna or Buda-Pesth or wherever else he’ll be going on to.”