Those Who Hunt the Night(21)

The fashionable shops were still open in Bond Street. At Lambert’s he purchased a silver chain, thick links of the purest metal available; he stopped in a doorway in Vigo Street to put it on. The metal was cold against his throat as it slid down under his collar. As he wrapped his scarf backover it, he was torn between a vague sensation of embarrassment and wondering whether he shouldn’t have invested in a crucifix as well.

But silver was spoken of again and again as a guard against the Undead, who far transcended the geographical and chronological limits of Christianity. Perhaps the crucifix was merely a way of placing a greater concentration of the metal near the big vessels of the throat. He only hoped the folklore was right.

If it wasn’t, he thought, he might very well be dead before morning.

Or, at least according to some folklore, worse.

Now that was curious, he mused, jostling his way back through the thickening press of young swells and gaily dressed Cyprians around the Empire’s wide, carved doors. The folklore all agreed that the victims of vampires often became vampires themselves, but at no time had Ysidro spoken of his own victims, or those of the other mysterious hunters of the dark streets, as joining the ranks of their killers. Bully Joe Davies had spoken of a vampire “getting” fledglings, as Calvaire had “gotten” him—evidently against the commands of the master vampire Grippen.

So it wasn’t automatic—not that Asher had ever believed that it was, of course. Even without Lydia’s projection of the number of victims a single vampire might kill in the course of a century and a half, logic forbade that simple geometrical principle; the vampires kept on killing, but the world was not inundated with fledgling vampires.

There was something else involved, some deliberate process … a process jealously guarded by the Master of London.

Grippen.

A big toff, the tobacconist’s clerk had said. A hard boy, and never mind the boiled shirt.

Grippen’s get, Bully Joe Davies had said. Grippen’s slaves.

Was Ysidro? It was hard to picture that poised, pale head bending to anyone.

Yet there was so much that was being hidden: an iceberg beneath dark waters; wheels within invisible wheels; and the power struggles among the Undead.

He left the streaming traffic of Drury Lane, the jumbled brightness of Covent Garden behind him. Crossing the Strand again, he got a glimpse of the vast brooding dome of St. Paul’s against the darkening bruise of the sky. The lanes were narrow here, lacing off in all directions, canyons of high brown buildings with pubs flaring like spilled jewel boxes at their corners. Somewhere he heard the insouciant clatter of buskers, and a woman’s throaty laugh.

He passed Savoy Walk twice before identifying it—a cobbled passage, like so many in the Temple district, between two rows of buildings, not quite the width of his outstretched arms. It curved a dozen feet along, cutting out the lights from Salisbury Place. His own footsteps pierced the gloom in a moist whisper, for fog was rising from the nearby river.

The tiny passage widened to a little court, where the signs of small shops jutted out over the wet, bumpy stones—a pawnbroker’s, a second-hand bookshop, a manufacturer of glass eyes. All were empty and dark, crouching beneath the tall gambreled silhouette of the house at the rear of the court, a jewel of interlaced brickwork and leaded glass, nearly black with soot. The lights of the populous districts to the north and east caught in the drifting fog to form a mephitic, dimly luminous backdrop behind a baroque jungle of slanting roofs and chimneys. The house, too, was dark; but as Asher walked toward it, a light went up in its long windows.

The steps were tall, soot-stained, and decorated withdecaying lions in ochre stone. There was long stillness after the echoes of the door knocker died. Even listening closely, Asher heard no tread upon the floor.

But one leaf of the carved double door opened suddenly, framing against the dark honey of oil light the shape of a tall woman in ivory faille, her reddish-dark hair coiled thick above a face dry, smooth, and cold as white silk. By the glow of the many-paned lamps behind her, he could see the Undead glitter of her brown eyes.

“Mrs. Farren?” he said, using the family name of the Earls of Ernchester, and it surprised her into replying.

“Yes.” Then something changed in her eyes.

“Lady Ernchester?”

She didn’t answer. He felt the touch of that sleepiness, that mental laziness of not paying attention, and forced it away; he saw in those glittering eyes that she felt that, too.

“My name is Dr. James Asher. I’d like to talk to you about Danny King.”





SEVEN




“COME IN.” She stepped back from the door, gestured him to a salon whose pilastered archway opened to the right of the hall. Her voice was low and very sweet, without seductiveness or artifice of any kind. As he followed her, Asher was acutely conscious of the thudding of his own heart. He wondered if she was, too.

The salon was large, perfectly orderly, but had a chilled air of long neglect. One dim oil lamp on the corner of a curlicued Baroque mantelpiece picked out the edges of the furnishings nearest it—graceful Hepplewhite chairs, the curve of a bow-front cabinet, and the claret-red gleam of carved mahogany in a thick archaic style. Asher wondered who would dust the place and brickbat that dingy front step, now that Danny King was dead.

Mrs. Farren said, “I’ve heard of you, Dr. Asher.” As in Ysidro’s, there was neither commitment nor emotion in her voice. Standing before her in the small pool of lamplight, he could see the gleam of her protruding fangs, and the factthat, except when she spoke, the creamy thickness of her breasts did not rise or fall.

“My apologies for intruding,” he said, with a slight bow. “If you’ve heard of me you know I’m seeking information—and if you know Don Simon Ysidro, you probably know I’m not getting much. Was Daniel King your servant?”

“Yes.” She nodded once. Unlike Ysidro, though her voice was absolutely neutral, there was a world of brightness, of watchfulness, of feeling in her large, golden-brown eyes. “He was my husband’s,” she added after a moment, and inwardly Asher sighed with relief—he’d been afraid for a moment that all vampires were as utterly uncommunicative as Don Simon. “His carriage-groom—a tiger, they used to call them. That was during our last…”She hunted for the word for a moment, dark brows flinching slightly together, and suddenly seemed infinitely more human. “Our last period of being of the world, I suppose you could say. We had a number of servants. In those days such extravagant eccentricities as barring a whole wing of the house and leading an utterly nocturnal existence were more accepted by servants than they are now. But Danny guessed.”

She stood with her back to the mantelpiece, her hands clasped lightly before her slender waist, in an attitude regal and slightly archaic, like a stiffly painted Restoration portrait. In life, Asher guessed, she had been a little plump, but that was all smoothed away now, like any trace of archaism in her speech. Her gown with its flared tulip skirt was modern, but the baroque pearls she wore in her ears could only have been so extravagantly set in the days of the last of the Stuart kings.

When she moved, it had the same unexpectedness Ysidro’s movements did, that momentary inattention, and thenfinding her at his side. But she only said, “I suppose now that he’s gone, it’s I who must take your coat…”

“Did you make him a vampire?”

“No.” She hesitated a moment in the act of laying ulster, hat, and scarf on a nearby sideboard, her eyes moving from his, then back. “Grippen did that, at our request—and Danny’s. Danny was very devoted to Charles—my husband.”

“Could you have?”

“Is that question pertinent?” she inquired levelly. “Or just curiosity?”

“The answer is that we would not have,” a voice spoke from the shadows, and Asher turned swiftly, having heard no creak from the floorboards that had murmured beneath his own weight. The man who stood there, face white as chalk in the gloom, seemed more like a ghost than a human being—thinnish, medium height, and with an indefinable air about him of shabbiness, of age, as if one would expect to see cobwebs caught in his short-cropped light-brown hair. “Not without Lionel’s permission.”

“Lionel?”

“Grippen.” The vampire shook his head, as if the name tasted flat and old upon his tongue. There was a weariness to his movements, a slowness, like age that had not yet reached his face. Glancing swiftly back at Mrs. Farren, Asher saw her eyes on this newcomer filled with concern.

“He never would have stood for it,” the vampire explained. “He would have driven poor Danny out of every hole and corner within a year. He’s very jealous that way.” He held out one thin hand, said, “I’m Ernchester,” in a voice that echoed the resonance of that vanished title.

Asher, who had gained a certain amount of familiarity with the Earls of Ernchester from his afternoon’s researches, guessed: “Lord Charles Farren, third Earl of Ernchester?”

A faint smile brushed that white, square-jawed face, and for a moment there was a flicker of animation in the dead eyes. He inclined his head. “I fear I don’t look much like the portrait,” he said. Any number of portraits of ancient gentlemen lurked on the gloomy salon walls, too obscured with time and shadow to be even remotely recognizable. But Asher reasoned that, since the third Earl of Ernchester had died in 1682, and any portrait would have been two-thirds devoted to an elaborate periwig, it scarcely mattered.