Those Who Hunt the Night(11)

Lydia dropped the card she had been looking at, her hand shaking a little with an odd sort of shock, as if she’d seen someone she knew … Which, she reflected, was in a way exactly what had happened. She didn’t know what to say, how to define that sense of helpless hurt, as if she’d just seen a very brainless cat walk straight into the savaging jaws of a dog.

He had already picked up the card and was reading the assignation on the back. Then he flipped it over to see the front, where the name of the Honorable Albert Westmoreland was printed in meticulous copperplate.

“I knew him,” Lydia explained, a little shakily. “Not well—he was one of Uncle Ambrose’s students when Iwas still in school. His father was a friend of Papa’s in the City.”

“One of your suitors?” The teasing note he sometimes had when speaking of her suitors was absent. She had had flocks of them, due in part to the Willoughby fortune, which had paid for this house and everything in it, and in part to her waiflike charm. After being told for years that she was ugly, she enjoyed their attentions and enjoyed flirting with them—though not as much as she enjoyed a good, solid analysis of nervous lesions—and charming people had become second nature to her. A just girl, she didn’t hold it against those earnest young men that they’d frequently bored her to death, but the distinction was something her father had never been able to grasp. With Baptista-like faith in man’s ability to change a woman’s personality, he had encouraged them all, never, until the last, losing his touching hope that he’d see his wayward daughter marry her way into the peerage.

She smiled a little, mostly at the recollection of her father’s face when she’d announced her intention to marry a middle-aged Lecturer in Philology without an “Honorable” to his name, and shook her head. “He was already engaged to Lord Carringford’s daughter. But he was in their set. So I saw him a good deal. I knew—well, nobody spoke of it before me, of course, and Nanna would have killed them if they had, but I guessed that when they went larking about in town it wasn’t with girls like me. I remember Dennis Blaydon coming round and telling me Bertie had died.”

She shivered, and he drew her close again, his hand warm and strong on her shoulder. Oddly enough, the news hadn’t upset her much at the time, though she’d felt shocked and sad, for Bertie had been the first contemporary, the first of her set, who had died. Even then, she had been familiar with death—old Horace Blaydon, chief Lecturer in Pathology at Radclyffe, had said it was positivelyindecent to watch her carve up cadavers—but it was different, it seemed, when it was someone you knew. Dennis, she recalled, had done his best to comfort her, with disappointing results.

“Did he say how?”

She shook her head. “But it was very sudden. I remember thinking I’d seen him only a few weeks before, when all their set went down to watch Dennis play in the rugger match against Kings. Poor Bertie.” The memory made her smile again wanly. “The Honorable Bertie—he made straight for the shadiest seat and spent the whole time being terrified the bench would leave spots on his trousers, lemonade would drip onto his sleeve, or his buttonhole would wilt. His brother, the Equally Honorable Evelyn, was on the Gloucester side and nearly died of embarrassment.”

What a thing to be remembered for, she thought. She wondered if he had cried out, if he had known what was happening to him, or if this vampire woman had taken him in his sleep, as Ysidro could so easily have done to them all. Her hand closed tighter around James’.

After a very long silence, she asked, “Can we meet in the daytime?”

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “Not safely, I don’t think. The killer can be about by day, even if the vampires can’t. Until I can contact him—talk to him—see how and why he’s doing this—I don’t want anyone knowing where to get at you.” His arm tightened a little around her, his fingers feeling hers, gently, as if treasuring even the bones within her thin flesh. She felt the tension in his body and turned to look up into his face.

“And it isn’t only that,” he said. “There’s something Ysidro isn’t telling me, Lydia, something critical. Whatever he says, he’d be a fool to hire a human; and whatever else he is, Don Simon Ysidro isn’t a fool. He had a reasonbeyond what he’s telling me. And whatever that reason is—whatever it is that he knows—it’s the first thing I’m going to have to find out if either of us is going to make it to Guy Fawkes’ Day alive.”

Before noon Asher was on his way back to London. Over breakfast he had informed Ellen and Mrs. Grimes that the night’s events had left Lydia in such a state of nervous prostration that he thought it better to arrange for her to see a specialist in London, a story which disgusted the phlegmatic Lydia and puzzled Ellen. “She was fine, Mr. Asher, sir, indeed she was, when she woke up me and Cook. And she’s never been one to take on.”

“Well, I’ve just spent the morning with her, and, believe me, she needs to see a specialist,” Asher said firmly. Twenty-four hours without sleep on top of the events and exertions of the night had left him in no mood for invention.

Ellen had regarded his pallor and his dark-circled eyes with deep disapproval. “It isn’t my place to say so, sir, but if anyone needs a nerve doctor…”

“No, it isn’t your place to say so,” Asher retorted, draining his coffee. “So just assist Mrs. Asher to pack her things, and I’ll be back to fetch her this evening.” It would probably take that long, he reflected bemusedly, for Lydia to assemble everything she considered essential for a few weeks in London.

The mere thought of another train trip before nightfall made his bones ache, but no husband as worried about the state of his wife’s health as he currently purported to be would entrust her on the journey with no other escort than her maid. Besides, once in London it would be difficult to get rid of Ellen, who, in addition to being more intelligent than she sometimes seemed, was incurably inquisitive.

Why was it, Asher wondered, crossing the MagdalenBridge on his way out of Oxford a short time later, that qualities deemed laudable in anyone else were nothing but a damned nuisance in servants? Past the bridge’s gray stone balustrade, he had a flying glimpse of the tops of the willows and a distant fragment of brown-green waters; he recalled Ysidro’s words about teak and cottonwood and smiled in spite of himself. Coming off the bridge, he veered onto St. Clement’s Street, which led through wooded byways toward the green rise of the downs.

In preference to another two hours on the Great Western, he had elected to take his motorcycle down to London, a five horsepower American V-twin Indian that had always been a bone of contention between himself and the other dons. There were Lecturers of All Souls and Fellows of Christ Church who might possess motorcars, but, it was implied, such things were thought to be far more typical of Cambridge men. To own a motorcycle, much less ride it through the countryside, was generally looked upon as scarcely above the level of an undergraduate. Out of deference for his colleagues’ sensibilities, as well as for his own reputation of mild harmlessness—to say nothing of what such behavior would do to his academic gown—Asher did not generally ride within the Town itself.

At the moment, however, time was of the essence. There were things which needed to be arranged while the sun was yet in the sky and Ysidro and the other vampires safely asleep in their coffins, and the quickest way to London was over the downs and through High Wycombe. The road was execrable, potholed and unpaved in places and awash in yellowish mud which liberally splattered his boots, leather jacket, goggles, and hair. But their silence enfolded him. For the first time he was alone, in that vast stillness of rolling chalk hills and hair-fine, dull-olive turf, to think and to plan, and the stillness seeped imperceptibly into thought and muscle and soul, like salve on a burn.

On the high backbone of the downs, he stopped and turned to look back on the green valley, the far-off glitter where half a dozen streams met amid a lingering suggestion of damp mists and dark clouds of trees. He could pick out the towers of the colleges, not as the crystal company of dreaming spires that dawn or sunset made them, but gray, lichen-stained, familiar—the ogee cupola of Tom, Magdalen seeming to float above its trees, Merton’s spires and the square proportions of his own New College Tower, like the faces of friends lined up on a railway platform to see him off—the place that had been his home, on and off, for the better part of twenty-seven years.

Abroad, he remembered, he had lived in constant danger, to the point where he could almost forget about it; there had been times when he could have been killed as easily as a candle being snuffed out. But through it he had always had this place, the memory of this gentle haven, at his back. He had always thought: If I can make it back to Oxford … And latterly had been the knowledge that Oxford had included Lydia.

Half the women he knew, he thought with an inward grin, would have swooned at the story he’d told her this morning or else gone into feverish speculation on how Asher had been hoaxed. Beneath her occasional and wholly illusory façade of scatter-witted loveliness, Lydia had a doctor’s cool practicality and a willingness to deal with facts—however bizarre—as they stood. He was reminded of himself, with his own life and hers at stake, concerning himself with the archaic pronunciation of the vampire’s speech.