The interview had been frustrating, because Evelyn was as much wrapped up in sports—and now in the stock market—as his brother Bertie had been in clothes and fashion and was grossly inobservant of anything else, but with patient questioning she’d been able to piece certain things together.
First, Lotta had been seen as early as an hour after sunset, when the sky was still fairly light—Evelyn had thought that was in spring, but wasn’t sure.
Second, sometimes she had been paler, and sometimes rosier—though it was difficult to tell by gaslight—indicating that sometimes she had fed before joining the Honorable Bertie and his friends. Evelyn did not remember whether she had ever been rosy on those occasions upon which she had met them early, which would indicate that she had risen just after sunset to hunt.
Third, she often wore heavy perfume. James had said nothing about vampires smelling different from humans, but presumably, with a different diet, they might have a different odor, though a very faint one—she tried not to think about the smell of blood and strangeness that had touched her nostrils in the dark of the Covent Garden court.
Other than that, he’d thought there was something odd about her fingernails, he couldn’t say what. And her eyes, but he couldn’t say what either, so had fallen back on “an expression of evil,” which was no help toward clinical analysis.
About the circumstances of his brother’s death he would not speak at all, but Lydia guessed, from things James had told her about the techniques of spying, that when Lotta finally killed her victim, she had arranged for the body to be found in circumstances that were either disgraceful orcompromising, such as dressed in women’s clothing, or in an alley behind an opium den, or something equally damning.
And lastly, Evelyn had told her that Bertie had once had a charm made, a lover’s knot, out of Lotta’s red-gold hair. It was still among Bertie’s things. He would send it to her by the morning post, to the accommodation address where she picked up her mail.
She sat back in the cab as it jolted along the crowded pavement of Gower Street, staring abstractedly out at the blurred yellow halos of the street lamps where they shone through the mists against the monochrome cutouts of the house fronts behind. The rising fog seemed to damp noises, making all things slightly unreal; omnibuses like moving towers loomed out of it, their knife-board advertisements for Pond’s Arthriticus or Clincher Tires—Still Unequaled for Quality and Durability—transformed into strange portents by the surrounding gloom.
When the cab reached Number 109 Bruton Place, Lydia paid the driver off quickly and hurried inside, displeased to find her heart racing with a swift, nervous fear. She found she was becoming uncomfortable at the thought of being outside, even for a few moments, after dark.
The room to which the vampires took Asher was a cellar, not of Ernchester House but of a deserted shop whose narrow door opened into the blackness of the lane. Ernchester produced the keys to its two padlocks from a waistcoat pocket and led the way into a tiny back room, piled high with dusty boxes and crates and boasting an old soapstone sink in one corner, whose rusty pump, silhouetted against the dim yellowish reflection of the window, had the appearance of some wry-necked monster brooding in the darkness. An oil lamp stood on the side of the sink; Ernchester lighted it and led the way to another door nearly hiddenbehind the crates, whose padlock and hasp had been ripped off with a crowbar—recently, by the look of the gouges in the wood. The smell of mildew and dampness rose chokingly to engulf them as they descended the hairpin spiral of stairs to a cellar, certainly much wider, Asher guessed, than the building above; probably deeper, he thought, glancing at its far end, nearly obscured in shadows, and beyond a doubt older. Rough-hewn arched beams supported a ceiling of smoke-stained stone; just below them, at the other end of the room, two pairs of locked shutters indicated windows either at street level or set into a light well just below it.
“They’re barred behind those shutters,” the Earl remarked, taking an old-fashioned, long-barreled key from a nail beside the door. “So even if you could get the padlocks on them open, it wouldn’t do you much good. Chloé, my dear, would you be so good as to fetch Dr. Asher’s coat? And mine as well?”
The fair-haired vampire girl shot him a look that was both sullen and annoyed, childish on that angelic face. “Don’t trust me to stay with ’im while you get ’em yourself, ducks?” she mocked in accents that put her origins within half a dozen streets of the Church of St. Mary-Le-Bow. She threw a glance back at Asher in the flickering light of the oil lamp they’d collected when they’d passed through the room above. “And don’t go givin’ yourself airs over that bit o’ tin you got hung round your gullet, Professor—we can drink from the veins in your wrists, you know.”
She raised Asher’s wrist to her mouth, pressed her cold lips to the thin skin there in a smiling kiss. Then she turned and with barely a rustle of her silk petticoats was gone in the darkness.
Asher became aware that he was shivering. Though the cellar was dry, it was intensely cold. Beside him Ernchester,lamp still in hand, was frowning at the narrow black slot of the door through which Asher knew the girl must have gone, though he had not seen her do so. She, like Ysidro, moved largely unseen.
“An impertinent child.” Ernchester frowned, his sparse brows bristling queerly in the shaky light. “It isn’t just a question of breeding—though of course I understand that things do change. It just seems that no one knows how to behave anymore.” He set the lamp down on the floor beside him and held thin hands in the column of heat that rose from its chimney.
“Anthea has gone to look for Ysidro,” he went on after a moment. “Neither of us approved of Don Simon’s plan for hunting the killer—for reasons which are obvious by your mere presence here. But now that he has hired you, I agree with her that it would be most unfair simply to kill you out of hand, leaving aside the fact that you are, in a sense, a guest beneath my roof.” Those dulled, weary blue eyes rested on him for a moment, as if seeking reasons other than an old habit of noblesse oblige for sparing his life.
Dryly, Asher said, “I take it Grippen voted against it, also?”
“Oh, there was never a question of a vote.” By his tone the elderly vampire had entirely missed the sarcasm. “Don Simon is and always has been a law unto himself. He was the only one of us to think it necessary to hire a human. But he has always been most high in the instep and will carry his humors against all opposition.”
Asher rubbed his shoulder, which ached where Grippen had flung him into the wall. “He might have mentioned that.”
Beneath their feet, the stone floor vibrated; the glass of the lamp chimney sang faintly in its metal socket. “The Underground Railroad runs very close to this cellar,” Ernchester explained, as the rumble died away. “Indeed, when they were cutting for it, we feared they might break through, as in fact they did in another house we own a few streets away. That cellar was deeper than this one, without windows—it had been the wine room of an old tavern, paved over and forgotten after the Fire. There are a great number of such places in the old City, some of them dating back to Roman times. It was desperately damp and uncomfortable, which was why no one was sleeping there when the workmen broke in.”
Asher stroked his mustache thoughtfully and wandered across the uneven slab floor to the coffin against the wall. Opening it, he saw the lining burned entirely away at the bottom, only clinging in charred shreds around the upper rim. Nothing but a faint film of scraped-at ash lay over the charred wood of the coffin’s floor.
He wondered in what church’s crypt they had buried the remains. St. Bride’s, beyond a doubt. Odd, that after so many years that should still be a concern to them … or perhaps not so odd.
He replaced the lid and turned back. “Were the padlocks on the windows open, then, when you found Danny’s body?”
Ernchester glanced quickly at the barred shutters of the windows, then back at the empty coffin. For a moment he seemed to be trying to figure out how much he should tell a human; then, with a tired gesture, he gave it up. “Yes. The key was on the sill.”
Asher walked over to the window, stretched his long arm up to touch the tips of his fingers to the lock. He looked back at the vampire. “But the bars were undisturbed?”
“Yes. Had someone—a tramp, or a vagabond—entered this cellar and been looking about, it would be natural for him to open the shutters to obtain light, you see.”
“Was there any sign of a tramp elsewhere in the building? Cupboards open, drawers ajar? Or in the rest of the house? Any sign that the place had been searched?”
“No,” Ernchester admitted. “That is—I don’t think so. I really don’t know. Anthea would.” Another man—a living man—might have sighed and shaken his head, but, as with Anthea and Ysidro, such gestures seemed to have been drained from him by the passing weariness of centuries. There was only a slight relaxing of that straight, stocky body, a loosening of the tired lines of the face. “Anthea—does such things these days. I know it’s the portion of the man to manage affairs, but … it seems as if all the world is changing. I used to keep up better than I do now. I dare say it’s only the effect of the factory soot in the air or the noise in the streets … it usen’t to be like this, you know. I sometimes think the living suffer from it as much as we. Folk are different now from what they were.”