“Have you run across it before?”
The slim hands creased the paper again and put it by. “Not personally, no. But Rhys spoke of something of the sort happening during the Plague.”
He had been a vampire since before the Black Death…
“To those who drank the blood of the Plague’s victims?”
Ysidro folded his hands upon his knee, slim and colorless in his gray suit, and did not look at Asher. “Oh, we all did that,” he said evenly. “Rhys did during the Great Plague and took no ill; Grippen and I both did, during the last outbreak of the Plague in London in ’65. One could not tell, you understand, whom the Plague would choose before dawn. One night, I drank of a woman’s blood as she lay in her bed beside her husband; as I laid her back dead, I moved the sheets aside and saw him dead already, with the black boils just beginning in his armpits and groin. I fled into the streets and there Tulloch the Scot found me, vomiting my heart out, and asked me why I troubled with it. ‘We are dead already,’ he said. ‘Fallen souls on whom Death has already had his will. What are these virgin fears?’”
The vampire spoke without emotion, gazing into the distance with fathomless yellow eyes; but looking at the delicate, hook-nosed profile, Asher glimpsed for the first time the abysses of dark memory that lay beneath that disdainful calm.
“Even in his later years, Rhys was a traveler—an unusual circumstance for the Undead. He would vanish for years, sometimes decades, at a time—indeed it was only by chance that I saw him in London the week before the Great Fire. He once told me of vampires in Paris and Bavaria during the Plague who would go into fits of attacking humans, killing again and again in a night, though he did not know whether this was something in the Plague itself, or simply horror at that which was happening all around them. But there were some, he said, though by no means all, who, without warning, years and often centuries later, would be seized with the need to kill in that fashion again and again. I know Elizabeth the Fair used to go into the plague houses and kill the families who had not yet broken out—she was killed after what always sounded to me like a very stupid rampage, a series of careless killings that was not at all like her. She had never showed that tendency before and she had been a vampire for centuries.”
“But you have never done so?”
Still the vampire did not meet his eyes. “Not yet.”
They reached London in the black fog of an autumn predawn. Instead of fading away as had always been his wont before the train even pulled up to the platform, Ysidro rode with Asher in the cab back to his lodgings and saw him ensconced in bed before vanishing into the perilously waning dark. Though the vampire treated the matter as simply part of his obligation to an employee who mustbe kept serviceable, Asher was grateful and rather touched and heartily glad of the help. He had slept when he could on the journey; by the time they reached Prince of Wales Colonnade, he felt, as Mrs. Grimes frequently phrased it, as if he’d been pulled through a mangle.
The sun woke him hours later. His landlady, who had been horrified by his haggard appearance, brought him breakfast on a tray and asked if there was anything she could do to help. “Is there someone I can send for, sir?” she demanded worriedly. “If you’ve been ill, you’ll need someone to look after you, and dear knows, though we’re put here to help our fellow creatures, what with four lodgers and the keeping up of the place, I simply haven’t the time it would take.”
“No, of course not,” Asher said soothingly. “And I’m deeply obliged for what you have been able to do. I have a younger sister here in London; if you would be so good as to send your boy to the telegraph office, I’ll be able to go to meet her, and she’ll get me whatever I’ll need.”
It was an awkward and time-consuming arrangement, but he knew that, if he simply sent a note to Bruton Place, they’d wonder why she didn’t just walk back over with the bearer, and he was not going to risk having Lydia associated in any way with Prince of Wales Colonnade, if he could help it. He’d closed one window curtain to alert Lydia to the fact that a telegram would follow. Writing the message with a hand that still wobbled unsteadily around the pen, he decided, regretfully, that it would be safer if they did not meet at all—merely exchanged parcels of information at the letter drop in the Museum’s cloakroom. His soul ached to see her, to touch her, to hear her voice, and to know she was safe, but knowing what little he knew now about the killer, he did not dare even risk a meeting in broad daylight in the Park.
Even the fact that he had done so once made his heartcontract with dread. The killer could have been watching, as Ysidro said, unseen and at a distance, listening to every word they uttered—a day stalker, mad and feverish with the hunger of the ancient Plague. Bully Joe Davies’ face returned to his mind, craggy and twisted behind his straggling, dirty hair—the glottal, desperate cockney voice whispering, “My brain’s burnin’ for it! … it keeps hurtin’ at me and hurtin’ at me…” and the frantic, naked hunger in his eyes.
Bitter self-loathing filled him—the godlike Dennis Blaydon, he thought viciously, would never have put her in danger like this.
He sent the telegram reply paid and put in a dogged two hours, writing up his adventures and findings in Paris. Even that exhausted him and depressed him, as well. He craved rest as he had craved water in the days down in Ysidro’s cellar, after his blood had been drained; he wanted to have Lydia out of this, himself out of this, and wanted the silence and green peace of Oxford, even for a little while. He yearned for rest, not to have to think about even the hypothetical vampires of folklore, much less the real ones who lurked beneath the pavements of London and Paris, listening to the passing of human feet on the flagways overhead, watching from the shadows of alleys with greedy, speculative, unhuman eyes.
But that was not an option any more. So he wiped the sweat of effort from his face with a corner of the pillow sham and continued driving his pen over the sheets of foolscap on his lap, straining his ears for the sound of the commissionnaire’s returning knock on the door.
But no reply came.
With some effort, he dressed again and sent for a cab, partly to give the impression that he meant to go some distance, partly because there was every chance he would have to track Lydia in Chancery Lane or Somerset House—and partly because even the thought of walking two blocks made his body ache.
“Miss Merridew, sir?” the landlady at Bruton Place said, with the Middle English i by which he’d earlier subconsciously identified her as an immigrant from eastern Lancashire. “God bless you, sir, you’re the one we’ve been hoping would call, for the good Lord knows the poor lass didn’t seem to know a soul in London…”
“What?” Asher felt himself turn cold to the lips. The landlady, seeing the color sink from his already white face, hastily guided him to an armchair in her cluttered parlor.
“We didn’t know what to do, my man and I. He says people stays here because they don’t want folks nosy-parkering into their affairs, and, if you’ll forgive me, sir, he says a pretty lass like that is just as like not to come home of an evenin’. But I know a wrong ’un when I sees her, sir, and your Miss Merridew weren’t that road…”
“What happened?” His voice was very quiet.
“Dear God, sir—Miss Merridew’s been gone for two nights now, and if she didn’t turn up by tomorrow morning, whatever my man says, I was going to call in the police.”
SIXTEEN
LYDIA’S TWO LODGING-HOUSE rooms were, like every place else where Lydia resided for more than a day or so, awash with papers, notebooks, and journals—the tedious minutiae of her search for the vampire’s tracks: gas company records, all noted in her neat hand; electrical usage; and newspaper stories, thousands of them. Asher felt an uneasy creeping at the back of his neck when he saw, in addition to transcribed details of old crimes, the two accounts of the Limehouse Murders. Names and addresses were noted also—Lydia had clearly gone through the parish rolls with a sieve, correlating property purchases and wills and coming up with the names of a small but indisputable number of persons over the years who had somehow neglected to die.
Traced out in those terms, he wondered why the Earls of Ernchester hadn’t come under suspicion before. Anomalies of property exchange and ownership splotched the family records like a blood trail. Houses were bought, leased, and sold to people who never surfaced in the records again—houses which were never willed to anyone nor subsequently sold. Other discrepancies were noted—fictitious persons who bought property, but never made wills, and interlocking wills spanning suspiciously long periods of time. Tacked to the greenish cabbage-rose paper of one wall was an Ordinance Survey map of London and its suburbs, sprinkled with red-, green-, and blue-headed drawing pins. Lists of addresses. Lists of names. He found Anthea Farren’s on two of them, Lotta Harshaw’s, Edward Hammersmith’s, and Lionel Grippen’s, along with many others. There were clipped photographs of Bertie Westmoreland, his brother the Honorable Evelyn, mammoth and smiling in football gear of Gloucester College colors, arm in arm with a beaming Dennis Blaydon, Thomas Gobey, Paul Farringdon, and dozens of others, and one blurred and yellow tabloid clip of a blonde-haired woman who might have been Lotta herself.