And James would be furious.
Like the whisper of a breath, of a footfall, or of the half consciousness of the smell of blood, she knew there was someone behind her.
She swung around, her heart hammering, galvanized into terror such as she had never felt before, the knife whipping out of her pocket, naked in her slim hand. For a moment she stood, flattened to the brick of the corner of the alley wall, the scalpel held before her, facing … nothing.
The court behind her was deserted.
But, she thought, only just.
Her glance dropped instantly to the wet pavement behind her. No footprint but her own little smudges marred its moist shine. Her hand was shaking—it, her mouth, and her feet all felt like ice as all the blood in her body retreated from her extremities in reaction to the shock. She noted the effect with a clinical detachment, at the same time conscious of the heat of her breath, and how itsmoked as it mingled with the mists that had begun to drift through this dark and tangled part of the city. Had it been this misty before?
There had been something there. She knew it.
A smell, she thought, her mind taking refuge in analysis while her eyes swept here and there, to the shadows which suddenly clotted blacker, more twisted, beneath the doorways and shutters of the locked and empty shops—a smell of blood, of rot, of something she had never smelled before and never wanted to smell again … A smell of something wrong.
And close to her. So terrifyingly close.
It was perhaps forty seconds before she gained the courage to move from the protection of the wall at her back.
She kept as close to the wall as she could, making her way back swiftly to the populated noises of Monmouth Street; she felt every doorway and every projection of the shop fronts concealing invisible threats. As she passed the entrance to the next court, movement caught her eye. She turned her head to see a girl, fourteen or fifteen and dressed in secondhand finery from the slop shops of the East Side, an exuberantly trimmed orange and blue frock standing out in the darkness. She heard the nasal voice say, “Well, Mister, wot yer doin’ ’ere, all by yourself?” It was young and coaxing and already with a professional’s edge.
She stood for a long moment, sickened, the knife still in her lowered hand, wondering if she should call out. Beyond the girl’s form, in the black darkness of the court, she could see nothing, but half felt the gleam of eyes.
She quickened her steps, cold and shaking, and hailed the first cab she saw to take her back to Bloomsbury.
What little sleep she achieved that night was with the lamp burning beside her bed.
The morning post brought Asher an envelope without return address, containing a blank sheet of paper in which was folded a cloakroom ticket from the British Museum. He packed up the précis of yesterday’s findings, the list of relatives of Lotta Harshaw’s victims, and the measurements of tracks and footprints taken at Half Moon Street and put them in a brown satchel, which he took with him to the Museum and checked in to the cloakroom. After half an hour’s quiet perusal of court records of the brief reign of Queen Mary I in the vast hush of that immense rotunda, he slipped an envelope from his pocket, addressed it to Miss Priscilla Merridew, sealed his own cloakroom ticket in it, affixed a penny stamp, and left, presenting the ticket he’d received by post and receiving another brown satchel whose contents, opened in his own rooms after posting his missive to Lydia, proved to be several folded sheets covered with his wife’s sprawling handwriting.
Even a preliminary list of houses in London which had not changed hands, either by sale or by testamentary deposition, in the last hundred years was dauntingly long. Given the vagaries of the Public Records Office, there were, of course, dozens of reasons why a piece of property would have no records attached to it—everything from bequests by persons living outside Britain to purchase by corporations—but Asher was gratified to note that 10 Half Moon Street was on the list. And it was a start, he thought, a preliminary list against which to check …
A name caught his eye.
Ernchester House.
For a moment he wondered why it was familiar, then he remembered. One of the names Lotta had used on old dressmaker’s bills was Carlotta Ernchester.
Lydia was not at the Public Records Office in Chancery Lane when Asher got there, a circumstance which he thought just as well. Though by daylight he knew he hadnothing to fear from the vampires of London, he was uneasily conscious that the man he was stalking was not of the Undead and, like himself, was able to operate both in the daytime and the nighttime worlds.
He established himself at a desk in the most inconspicuous corner of the reading room and sent in his requests with the clerk, aware that the killer could, in fact, be any of the nondescript men at the various desks and counters around the long room, turning over leaves of laborious copperplate in the old record books, searching the files of corporation and parish records for houses which had never been sold, or bodies which had never been buried. The chap at the far side of the room with the graying side whiskers looked both tall enough and strong enough to have wrenched loose the shutters from Edward Hammersmith’s window. Asher leaned idly around the edge of his desk and studied the man’s square-toed boots with their military gloss. Far too broad for the single clear track he’d been able to measure.
A tall man and a strong one, he thought, staring abstractedly through the long windows down at the courtyard and at the frilly Gothic fantasies of the roof line beyond. A man capable of tracking a vampire? Even an inexperienced fledgling like Bully Joe Davies? Or was Bully Joe, disoriented and maddened by the flood of new sensations and now further confused by his master Calvaire’s death, merely prey to a chronic case of what Asher himself had occasionally experienced abroad—the conviction of perpetual pursuit. God knows, Asher thought, if even Ysidro had picked up the trick of glancing continually over his shoulder, what shape would Davies be in after—a month, had he said, since Calvaire’s death?
And he made a mental note of the fact that Bully Joe seemed in no doubt that Calvaire had, in fact, been “donefor,” and had not merely disappeared, as Ysidro had once hypothesized.
It was likelier that the killer, like himself, was a man of education, able to track by paper what he could not track in the flesh.
Arguably, he was a man of patience, Asher thought, running his fingers along the dusty leaves of the St. Bride’s parish roll book; a man willing to go through the maddening process of sifting records, names, deeds, and wills, checking them against whatever clues he might have found in the vampires’ rooms before he—or someone else—burned it all.
Certainly a man of resolution and strength, to slice off the head of the blonde woman in Highgate Cemetery with a single blow.
And—perhaps most odd—a man who had sufficiently believed in vampires in the first place to make his initial stalking, his initial kill, which would conclusively prove to him that his prey, in fact, existed at all.
That in itself Asher found quite curious.
For that matter, he thought uneasily, turning back to his work, it might be Ysidro or the mysterious Grippen whom Bully Joe sensed on his heels. If that were the case, Asher knew he stood in double danger, for if Bully Joe realized it was Ysidro on his trail, he would never believe Asher had not betrayed him.
After a tedious examination of ward records and parish rolls, he ascertained that Ernchester House had been sold in the early 1700s by the Earls of Ernchester, whose town house it had once been, to a Robert Wanthope. The house itself stood in Savoy Walk, a name only vaguely familiar to Asher as one of the innumerable tiny courts and passageways that laced the oldest part of London in the vicinity of the Temple. Oddly enough, there was no record of any Robert Wanthope having ever purchased any other propertyin London, in St. Bride’s parish or any other.
Ten minutes’ walk to Somerset House and a certain amount of search in the Wills Office sufficed to tell Asher that Mr. Wanthope had never made a will—an unusual circumstance in a man who had sufficient funds to buy a town house. A brief visit to the Registry in another wing of the vast building informed him, not much to his surprise, that no record existed of Wanthope’s death or, for that matter, his birth.
In the words of Professor Dodgson, Asher thought, curiouser and curiouser. Almost certainly an alias. Ernchester House had not surfaced in any record whatsoever since.
It was nearly five when he left Somerset House. The raw wind was blowing tatters of cloud in over the Thames as he crossed the wide, cobbled court, emerging on the Strand opposite the new Gaiety Theatre. For a few minutes he considered seeking out Savoy Walk, but reasoned that there would be no one stirring in Ernchester House until dark—and in any case there was something he very much wanted to buy first.
So he turned his steps westward, dodging across the tangles of traffic in Piccadilly and Leicester Square. Lights were beginning to go up, soft and primrose around the wrought-iron palisade of the public lavatories in Piccadilly Circus, brighter and more garish from the doors of the Empire and Alhambra. He quickened his pace, huddling in the voluminous folds of his ulster and scarf as the day faded. He had no idea how soon after sunset the vampires began to move, and above all, he did not want Ysidro to spot him now.