“Another argument,” Asher said, “for the fact that Calvaire knew him, it being less entertaining to watch the sufferings of those to whom we are unknown and indifferent.”
“Interesting.” Ysidro turned the ring he held this way and that, the candlelight shattering through its delicate facets to salt that alabaster face with a thousand points of colored fire. “The odd thing is that among vampires, there is a legend of an ancient vampire, so old and powerful that no one ever sees him anymore—so old that even other vampires cannot sense his passage. Even a hundred and fifty years ago, other vampires were avoiding his haunts. To them he was semifabulous, like a ghost. Traditions among them said that he had been a vampire since before the days of the Black Death.”
“And what were his haunts?” Asher asked, knowing already what the Spaniard would say.
The expressionless eyes raised from the glitter of the gem before them. “He slept—or was said to sleep—in the crypts below the charnels of the churchyard of the Holy Innocents, in Paris.”
ELEVEN
“IT IS NOT THE CITY THAT IT WAS.”
If there were nuances tothat soft, light voice of bitterness, anger, or regret, it would have taken a vampire’s hyperacute perceptions to read them—Asher himself heard none. Around him the closed cab jostled and swayed. When his elbow, raised where his hand, linked through the hanging strap, came in contact with the window, he felt through his coat sleeve the chill of the glass. The noises of the street came to him dimly: the clatter of wheels, on pavement of wood and asphalt, rebounding from the high brown walls of the immeubles; the occasional hoots of motorcars; the pungent cursing of the sidewalk vendors; and the gay, drifting frenzy of violin and accordion that spoke of some caf’ conc’ in progress.
Blindfolded, he could see nothing, but the sounds of Paris were distinctive and as bright a kaleidoscope as its sights. No one, he thought, who had ever been here ever questioned how it was in this place that Impressionism came to be.
Ysidro’s voice went on, “I have no sense of being at home here—this sterile, inorganic town where everything is thrice washed before and after anyone touches it. It is the same everywhere, of course, but in Paris it seems particularly ironic. They seem to have taken this man Pasteur very seriously.”
The noises changed; the crowd of vehicles around them seemed more dense, but the echoes of buildings were gone. Asher smelled the sewery stink of the river. A bridge, then—and judging by the length and the din of a small square and buildings halfway along, it could only be the Pont Neuf, a name which, like that of New College, Oxford, had not been accurate for a number of centuries. In a short time, they turned right, and continued in that direction. Asher calculated they were headed for the old Marais district, the one-time aristocratic neighborhoods that had not been badly damaged by either the Prussians, the Communards, or Baron Haussmann, but said nothing. If Ysidro chose to believe that blindfolding him would keep him in absolute ignorance of the whereabouts of the Paris vampires, he—and they—were welcome to do so.
He was uncomfortably aware that the Paris vampires had not even the threat of the day killer to reconcile them to the presence of a human in their midst.
“My most vivid memories of Paris are of its mud, of course,” the vampire went on quietly. “Everyone’s were, who knew it then. It was astounding stuff, la boue de Paris—black and vile, like a species of oil. You could never eradicate either its stain or its smell. It clung to everything, and you could nose Paris six miles away in open country. In the days when every gentleman wore white silk stockings, it was pure hell.” The faintest hint of self-mockery crept into his voice, and Asher pictured that still and haughty face framed in the white of a court wig.
“The beggars all smelled of it, too,” Ysidro added.“Hunting in the poor quarters was always a nightmare. Now…” He paused, and there was a curious flex in that supple voice.
“It would take me a long time to relearn Paris. Everything has changed. It is strange territory to me now. I do not know its boltholes or hiding places; I no longer even speak the language properly. Every time I say ci instead of ce, je ne l’aime point instead of je ne l’aime pas, every time I say je fit quelquechose instead of je l’ai fait, I mark myself as a stranger.”
“You only mark yourself as a foreigner who has learned French from a very old book,” Asher replied easily. “Have you ever talked to a Brahman in London for the first time? Or heard an American southerner speak of ‘redding up a room’?” The cab stopped; under the silk scarf bound over his eyes, Asher could detect very little light and knew that the street itself was quite dark, particularly for a city as brightly illuminated as Paris. The place was quiet, too, save for the far-off noises of traffic in some nearby square—the Place de la Bastille at a guess—but the smell was the smell of poverty, of too many families sharing too few privies, of cheap cooking, and of dirt. The Marais, Asher knew, had declined drastically from the days when Louis XV had courted Jeanne Poisson through its candlelit salons.
There was a slight jogging as the vampire got out of the cab and the muted exchange of voices and, presumably, francs. Then a light, firm hand touched his arm, guiding him, and he heard the cab rattle away down the cobbles. “Do you speak Spanish any more at all?”
There was level pavement, then a step down, and a sense of close walls and cold shade—the doorway vestibule whose gates would open into the central court of one of the big old hôtels particuliers. Beside him, very quiet,came Ysidro’s voice: “I doubt I could even make myself understood in Madrid.”
“Have you never gone back there, then?”
In the ensuing moment of silence, Asher could almost see Ysidro’s eyes resting on him with their calm, noncommittal gaze while the vampire sifted through all possible responses for the one which would give the least. “What would be the point?” he asked at last. “My people are, and have been since the Reconquista, suspicious and intolerant.” Asher realized with a small start that by my people he meant Spaniards, not vampires. “With the Inquisition probing every cellar for heretics and Jews, what chance would a vampire stand? It is possible in most circumstances to avoid the touch of silver, but such avoidance is, in civilized countries, not marked. Were it noticed in Spain in those days, it would have been fatal.”
Asher heard then a faint scratching, like the furtive scuffle of a mouse behind a wainscot, as the vampire scraped at the panels of the door with his nail, a sound which only other vampires would hear.
But other vampires, of course, would have detected their voices in the street.
He heard nothing within, but sensed feet floating weightlessly down the stair; his heart, it seemed, was thumping uncomfortably fast. “Do they know about me?” he asked.
They had taken the night mail by way of Calais. The porters had grumbled at the size and awkwardness of the huge leather-and-iron trunk that was ticketed as part of Asher’s luggage, but had been surprised at its comparative lightness. “Wot you got in there, mate, bleedin’ feathers?”
“I trust that all travel arrangements will go as we have made them,” Ysidro had commented, leaning on the Lord Warden’s aft rail and watching the few twinkling lights onthe Admiralty Pier fade into the thin soup of iron-colored mist. “But it never pays to take chances.”
He glanced beside him at Asher, whose mind had already recorded the slight flush of color in the white cheeks, the warmth in those cool fingers. Standing beside him, gloved hands on the rail and collar turned up against the raw cold of the night, Asher had been conscious of a vague disgust and alarm, not at the vampire, but at himself, for noting these signs as a mere deductive detail and not the certain evidence of some poor wretch’s murder in a London slum. He had felt angry at himself and frustrated, as he had often been in his latter dealings with the Foreign Office, burdened with a sense of performing what was only marginally the lesser of two colossal wrongs.
The vampire’s gaze had turned, as if he could still descry the dark shape of Dover’s cliffs, invisible now in the west. “At the risk of sounding crude,” he had gone on carefully, “I would like to point out to you that at present I am the only one protecting you from Grippen and his cadre. Were you to destroy me, you might perhaps ensure your lady’s safety for a season, for I am the only one who knows the terms of our agreement…”
Asher had started, relief loosening a knot of apprehension in his chest that had been with him, it seemed, so long that he had almost forgotten its origin.
With the possibility of a daylight-hunting vampire looming uneasily in his mind, he had not dared another meeting with Lydia, but it had been one of the hardest things he had ever done simply to take his leave of her by anonymous telegram. Ysidro, he presumed, would be able to protect him in Paris—if protecting him was in fact his intention—but he turned cold with dread at the thought of Lydia staying in London alone. Only the knowledge that she was enormously sensible and would wait, as ordered, to hear from him before undertaking anything remotelydangerous—the knowledge that she understood the situation—made it bearable and, then, bearable only in relative terms.