Those Who Hunt the Night(25)

Keyed and alert for the silent approach of some new peril, Asher saw the girl Chloé enter the cellar again, his own jacket and greatcoat and Ernchester’s seedy velvet coat over her arm. She was dressed, he saw now, in an expensive and beautiful gown of dark green velvet, beaded thickly with jet; her soft white hands and pale face seemed like flowers against the opulent fabric. Here was one, he thought, who would have no trouble winning kisses from strangers in alleyways. As he took the coat from her arm he said, “Thank you,” and the brown eyes flicked up to his, startled at being thanked. “Did you hunt with Lotta Harshaw?”

She smiled again, but this time the mockery did not quite hide the frightened flinch of her lips. “Still the nosy-parker, then? You saw what it’ll buy you.” She reached up to touch his throat, then drew back as the silver of his neck chain caught the lamplight. “You know what they said curiosity did to the cat.”

“Then it’s a good thing cats have nine lives,” he replied quietly. “Did you hunt with Lotta?”

She shrugged, an elaborately coquettish gesture with her bare white shoulders, and looked away.

“I know you went for dress fittings with her. Probably other shopping as well. I imagine the pair of you looked very fetching together. Personally I find it a bore to have dinner alone—do you?”

The conversational tone of his voice brought her eyes back to his, flirtatious and amused. “Sometimes. But y’see, we don’t ever have dinner quite alone.” She smiled, showing the glint of teeth against a lip like ruby silk.

“Did you like Lotta?”

The long lashes veiled her brown eyes once more. “She showed me the ropes, like,” she said, after a long moment, and he remembered Bully Joe Davies’ frantic cry: I dunno how the others do it … To achieve the vampire state, the vampire powers, was evidently far from enough. “And we—birds, I mean—hunt differently from gents. And that…” She stopped her next words on her lips and threw a quick, wary glance at Ernchester, silent beside the lamp. After a long pause for rewording, she continued, “Lotta and me, we got along. There’s some things a lady needs from another lady, see.”

And that … That what? How would this beautiful, overdressed porcelain doll of a girl see the quiet antique lady Anthea? As a stiff-necked and uncongenial bitch, Asher thought, beyond a doubt. Mlle. La Tour had known at a glance that Lotta and Chloé were two of a kind and that Anthea—for undoubtedly it was she who went by the name of Mrs. Wren—was far other than they.

“Did you know her rich young men?” he asked. “Albert Westmoreland? Tom Gobey? Paul Farrington?”

She smiled again, playing hard to get. “Oh, I met most of ’em,” she said, toying with one of her thick blondecurls. “Lambs, they were—even Bertie Westmoreland, so stiff and proper, like it killed him to admit he wanted her, but following her wherever she went with his eyes. We’d go to theatre parties together—Bertie’s brother, me and Lotta, and some girls Bertie’s friends might have along … It was all I could do sometimes not to drink one of ’em right there in the shadow of the back of the box. Like smelling sausages frying when you’re hungry… It would have been so easy…”

“It’s a trick you could only have done once,” Asher remarked, and got a sullen glance from under those long lashes.

“That’s what Lionel said. Not when others are around, no matter how bad I want it—not where anyone will know.” She moved closer to him, her head no higher than the top button of his waistcoat; he could smell the patchouli of her perfume, and the faint reek of blood on her words as she spoke. “But no others are around now—and no one will know.”

Her tongue slipped out, to touch the protruding tips of her teeth; her fingers slid around his hand, warm with the evening’s earlier kill. He could see her eyes on his throat and on the heavy silver links of the chain. Though he dared not look away from her to check, he had no impression of Ernchester being in the room. Perhaps it was only that the vampire Earl would not have cared whether she killed him or not.

“Ysidro will know,” he reminded her.

She dropped his hand and looked away. A shiver went through her. “Cold dago bugger.”

“Are you afraid of him?”

“Aren’t you?” Her glance slid back to his, brown eyes that should have been angelic, but had never been so, he thought, even in life. Her red mouth twisted. “You think he’ll protect you from Lionel? That’ll last just as long as heneeds you. You’d better not be so quick about findin’ the answers to your questions.”

“And I have already told him he had best not be slow,” the soft, drawling voice of Ysidro murmured. Turning, Asher saw the Spanish vampire at his elbow, as Grippen had appeared earlier that evening; his glance cut quickly back in time to see Chloé start. She hadn’t seen him either.

“So perhaps,” Don Simon continued, “we had best stick simply to things as they are and not attempt to mold them to what we think they ought to be. You should not have come here, James.”

“On the contrary,” Asher said, “I’ve learned a great deal.”

“That is what I meant. But as the horses are well and truly gone, permit me to open the barn door for you. Calvaire’s rooms are upstairs—or one set of Calvaire’s rooms. I know of at least two others that he had. There may have been more.”

“Hence all the secrecy,” Asher said, as he preceded the vampire into the dark stair outside. “Any in Lambeth?”

“Lambeth? Not that I knew of.” He was aware of those cold yellow eyes piercing his back.

They ascended the neck-breaking twist of steps to the stuffy back room again; though he listened closely, Asher could hear no footfall behind him from either Ysidro or Chloé and only the faintest of rustles from the girl’s petticoats. He thought Ernchester must have left at the same time Ysidro had entered, for the Earl had been nowhere in the cellar as they departed. And, in fact, Charles and Anthea were both waiting for them in the parlor of a small flat which had been fitted up on the second floor, with its Tiffany-glass lamps all lighted, giving their strange, white faces the rosy illusion of humanity, save for their gleaming eyes.

“I trust you’re not still sleeping in the building, Chloé?”Ysidro inquired, as they entered and the girl set her lamp on the table.

“No,” she said sullenly. She retreated to a corner of the room and perched there on one of the patterned chintz chairs; the place was furbished up in several styles, fat overstuffed chairs alternating with pieces of Sheraton and Hepplewhite, and here and there a lacquered cabinet of chinoiserie filled with knickknacks and books. The parlor was tidily kept, with none of the decades-deep clutter of other vampire rooms Asher had seen. Through an open door beyond Lady Anthea’s chair, he could see a neat bedroom, its windows heavily shrouded and, no doubt, shuttered beneath those layers of curtain. There was no coffin in sight—Asher guessed it would be in the dressing room beyond.

“Lionel’s gone,” Lady Ernchester said softly. Her tea-brown eyes went to Asher. She had put up her hair again and bore no evidence of her struggle with Grippen beyond the fact that she had changed her dress for a dark gown of purple-black taffeta. Asher wondered if Minette had made it for her.

“You’ve made a dangerous enemy; his hand’s welted up where he touched the silver of your chain.”

Asher privately thought it served the master vampire right, but refrained from saying so. His whole body was stiff and aching from the impact with the wall. He was still, he reminded himself, quite probably in desperate and immediate danger, but, nevertheless, Grippen’s absence comforted him. He prowled over to the small cabinet that stood under the gas jet and opened its drawers. They were empty.

“Lionel did that,” Anthea’s voice came from behind him. “He tells me he did the same at Neddy’s house.”

“He’s the one who seems to be locking the barn door after the horse has escaped.” Asher turned back, rovingcautiously about the room, examining the French books in the bookshelves, the cushions on the camel-backed divan. He glanced across at Ysidro, who had gone to stand next to Anthea’s chair. “If silver affects you that badly, how do you purchase what you need?”

“As any gentleman of fashion can tell you,” Anthea said with a faint smile, “one can go for years—centuries, even—without actually touching cash. In earlier years we used gold. Flimsies—bank notes, and later treasury notes—were a godsend, but one must always tip. I’ve found that in general there is enough of a chill at night to warrant the wearing of gloves.”

“But they’ve got to be leather,” Chloé put in ungraciously. “And I mean good leather, none of your kid; it’ll burn right through silk.”

Anthea frowned. “Does it? I never found it so.”

Ysidro held up one long, white hand. “I suspect it toughens a little with time. I know if you had touched silver as Grippen did, Chloé, your arm would have been swollen to the shoulder for weeks, and you would have been ill into the bargain. So it was with me, up almost to the time of the Fire. It is curiously fragile stuff, this pseudofleshof ours.”