Those Who Hunt the Night(27)

They walked in silence for a time, the wind tugging now and then at the ends of Asher’s scarf and at Lydia’s skirts and coat.

Lydia nodded. “I’m wondering whether all vampires fall asleep at the same time—into the deep sleep. For, of course, just because the windows were opened to let in thesunlight doesn’t mean that it was done while the sun was in the sky.”

“I suppose, if the killer were a vampire, he might have—oh, a half-hour or so—to get to safety,” Asher said. “More than enough, in London. And it would certainly solve the question of why he believed in vampires in the first place, let alone knew where to look.”

“In all the books, the vampire hunter drives a stake through the vampire’s heart,” Lydia remarked thoughtfully. “If this one did, everything’s been too charred to tell, but Lotta’s head was certainly severed. If the sun weren’t yet in the sky, I wonder if that would wake a sleeping vampire?—for that matter, if the mere opening of the coffin would do so? Are you sure I can’t put my hand in your pocket?”

“Quite sure,” Asher said, fighting his own inclination to walk closer to her, to hold out his arm to hers, or to have some kind of physical contact with this woman. “In spite of the evidence that the killer is a vampire, I still don’t feel safe meeting you, even by daylight…”

She widened her brown eyes at him behind the schoolgirl specs. “Perhaps I could disguise myself as a pickpocket? Or if I tripped and stumbled, and you caught me? Or fainted?” She put a gloved hand dramatically to her brow. “I feel an attack of the vapors coming on now…”

“No,” Asher said firmly, grinning.

She frowned and tucked her hands primly into her muff. “Very well, but the next time Uncle Ambrose goes on about Plato and Platonic friendship, I’ll have a few words to say to him. No wonder Don Simon didn’t seem to worry too much about your allying yourself with the killer, as you’d originally thought you might. Do you still plan to do that, by the way?”

“I don’t know,” Asher said. “It isn’t out of court entirely, but I’d have to know a good deal more than I donow. The fact that he’s destroying them for reasons of his—or her—own doesn’t mean he wouldn’t destroy me with just as much alacrity.” Or you, he added to himself, looking at that slim figure beside him, like a heroine of legend lying beside the hero, separated by a drawn sword.

Lydia nodded, accepting the change in a situation upon which her life depended with her usual calm trust. They walked along for a time, Lydia apparently sunk in her own trains of thought; Asher was content—almost—only to be with her, the dun gravel of the damp path scrunching faintly under their feet. Off across the gray lawns, a dog barked, the sound carrying fantastically in the cold air.

“Have you any idea how much light it takes to destroy their flesh?”

Asher shook his head. “I asked Ysidro last night. I’ve been trying to work that out, too—that half-hour or so of leeway. That’s what’s puzzling me. Ysidro was caught at dawn on the second morning of the Great Fire of 1666. He says the thinnest gray light before sunrise burned his face and hands as if he’d stuck them into a furnace—more than that, his arms, chest, and parts of his legs and back beneath his clothes were scarred and blistered as well. According to Lady Ernchester, it was nearly fifty years before the scars went away.”

“But they did go away,” Lydia murmured thoughtfully. “So vampire flesh does regenerate…” Her dark brows pulled even deeper, an edge of thought hardening her brown eyes, as if she looked past the piled whites and grays of the late-morning sky to some arcane laboratory of the mind beyond.

“Pseudoflesh, he called it,” Asher said.

“Interesting.” She reached up to unsnag a long strand of hair from the braided trim of her collar—Asher had to keep his hands firmly in his pockets to avoid helping her. “Because I got that lover’s knot from Evelyn this morning. I’vehad a look at it and those vertebrae under my microscope, and they look—I’m not sure how to put it and I wish it were capable of greater magnification. The bone was pretty damaged, but the hair … I’d like to be able to examine it at a subcellular level—and their flesh and blood, for that matter.”

Of course, Asher thought. He himself saw the vampires linguistically and historically, when he wasn’t simply trying to think of ways to avoid having his throat cut by them; Lydia would see vampirism as a medical puzzle.

“Do you know how petrified wood comes about?” she asked, as they neared Marble Arch with its scattered trees and loafers and turned back the way they came, two solitary and anonymous figures in the wide, cleared spaces of the Park’s brown lawns. “Or how fish and ferns and dinosaur bones are fossilized in the Cambrian sandstones? It’s a process of replacement, cell by cell, of the organic by the inorganic. There’s been a lot of research done lately on viruses, germs that are smaller than bacteria, so small we can’t see them with a microscope—yet. Small enough to operate at a subcellular level. I’ve been reading Horace Blaydon’s articles on viruses in the blood; he did a lot of work on it while I was studying with him. I’m wondering whether a vampire’s immortality comes from some kind of cellular replacement or mutation—whether vampirism is in fact a virus or an interlocking syndrome of viruses that alter the very fabric of the cells. That would account for the extreme photosensitivity, the severe allergic reactions to things like silver and garlic and certain woods—why you’d have to fill the mouth with garlic to deaden the brain and stake the heart with one of those allergic woods to paralyze the cardiovascular system—why you’d have to separate the central nervous system…”

“And transmitted by blood contact.” Again he wondered tangentially why, in the face of such an overwhelmingbody of corresponding evidence, there was such paucity of belief. “All the legends speak of vampires’ victims becoming vampires. The vampires themselves speak of ‘getting’ fledglings, but that’s apparently a matter of choice. Ernchester said that Grippen would not have stood for anyone but himself making a new vampire, but Calvaire evidently had no trouble initiating Bully Joe Davies.”

“Initiating, but not training,” Lydia said thoughtfully. “Or—was it just a lack of training that made him clumsy enough for you to spot him? Do the psychic abilities that seem to be part of this viral syndrome only develop with time? How old were the vampires who were murdered?”

“Another interesting point,” Asher said. “Lotta had been a vampire since the mid-1700s; Hammersmith and King were younger, almost exactly one hundred years. Ysidro saw all of them made. I don’t know about Calvaire. One of the many things,” he added dryly, “that we don’t know about Calvaire.”

“Valentin Calvaire,” Ysidro murmured, settling back against the worn leather squabs of the hansom cab and tenting his long fingers like a stack of ivory spindles, reminding Asher somehow of a marmalade tomcat so old that its fur has gone nearly white. “Curious, how many trails seem to lead back to Valentin Calvaire.”

“He was the first victim—presumably,” Asher said. “At least the first victim killed in London; the only victim not from London; the only victim whose body we have never found. What do you know about him?”

“Less than I should like,” the vampire replied, his voice soft beneath the rattling clamor of the theater-going crowds in Drury Lane all about them. “He was, as I said, one of the Paris vampires—he came here to London eight months ago.”

“Why?”

“That was a topic which he never permitted to arise.”

The vampire’s tone was absolutely neutral, but Asher’s mustache twitched as he detected the distaste in that chilly statement. Ysidro, he surmised with a hidden grin, had probably had very little use for M. Calvaire.

“I take it he was not of the nobility.”

“What passes for nobility in France these days,” Ysidro stated, with soft viciousness, “would not have been permitted to clear away the tables of those whose birth and style of breeding they so pitifully attempt to emulate. Anything resembling decent blood in that country was flushed down the gutters of the Place Louis-Quinze—excuse me, the Place de la Concorde—a hundred and seventeen years ago. What is left is the seed of those who fled or those who made themselves useful to that condottiere Napoleon. Scarcely what one would call honorable antecedents.”

After a moment’s silence, he went on, “Yes, Calvaire claimed noble birth. It was precisely the sort of thing he would do.”

“How long had he been a vampire?”

Ysidro’s dark eyes narrowed with thought. “My guess would be less than forty years.”

Asher raised his eyebrows in surprise. He had, he realized, subconsciously equated age with power among the vampires—it was to the two oldest vampires, Ysidro and Grippen, that the others bowed in fear. The younger ones—Bully Joe Davies and the Opera dancer Chloé—seemed weak, almost pathetic.