Those Who Hunt the Night(45)

Like Lydia’s desk at home, the little writing desk was a spilling chaos of notes, among which he found the letter he’d written in Ysidro’s cellar in Paris, forwarded from Oxford, its seals intact. Beside it, likewise intact, was the telegram he had sent earlier that day, and beneath them both the London Standard, spread out to the story of the second massacre in the Limehouse.

That, it appeared, was the last thing she had read before she left.

Fear clenched the pit of his stomach, the dreadful sinking sensation he’d had in Pretoria, when he knew he’d been blown, and after it, cold and deadly anger.

Grippen.

When she hadn’t heard from him, she’d gone vampire hunting on her own.

Lydia, no, he thought, aghast at the foolhardiness of it. It was hard to imagine Lydia being rash enough to undertake such an expedition alone, and yet…

She had promised him, yes—but that had been before he himself had disappeared. Before the “Limehouse Vampire” had begun its rampages. For all she knew, he could have been dead in Paris—and he was, in fact, extraordinarily lucky not to be. She had obviously realized that for once, unwittingly, Fleet Street hyperbole was telling nothing but the unvarnished facts; for all she knew, whatever she had learned or deduced might have been the only help the mortal population of London was going to get.

Like many researchers, Lydia was cold-blooded—as a rule the softer-hearted altruists went into general practice. But at heart, it took a streak of self-sacrifice to enter the medical field at all. He had never known Lydia to break a promise, but at that point she might very well have believed that a daylight investigation was “safe.”

What had Ysidro said? That vampires were generally aware of vampire hunters? All it would take would be for Grippen to become aware of her, to know whom to look for in the masses of London.

He made another swift survey of the room.

In the desk he found things he knew Lydia had not formerly possessed—a small silver knife, a revolver loaded—he broke it open to see—with silver-nosed bullets. In her bedroom she had set up a small chemical apparatus, a microscope, a Bunsen burner, and a quantity of garlic, as well as a bottle of something which, uncorked, was a pungently obvious garlic distillate.

For all his gentleman-adventurer tamperings with the Department, Asher was first and last a scholar and had arranged to track the vampires with scholarship. Lydia, the doctor, would use medical means for her defense.

Medical journals stacked every horizontal surface in the room and peeked from beneath the tumbled coverlets of the bed—he had long grown used to her habit of sleeping with books. Slips of note paper marked them, and the briefestperusal showed him they all contained articles dealing with either speculations on blood pathologies which could have been the source of vampire legends, case studies of pathologically related increases in psychic abilities, or obscure blood disorders. On the nightstand he found a hypodermic syringe, and a brown velvet case containing ten ampoules of silver nitrate.

It took him a few moments to realize what finding all this meant.

It meant that she had none of it with her when she left—or was taken.

Quietly, Asher returned to the sitting room, where the landlady was standing, gazing around her in bafflement at the storm of papers and notes and the warlike battle map of London. She was a little brown woman with a neat figure, a few years younger than Asher; she took one look at his face and said, “I’ll fetch you some sherry, sir.”

“Thank you.” Asher sat down quietly at Lydia’s desk. If there was any residual weakness in him, he wasn’t aware of it now.

He had put his life back together after Pretoria, knotted up the frayed strings of whatever seventeen years with the Department had left of his soul, and had gone on. Long ago, he had loved a girl in Vienna, during the dozen or more journeys there to collect information, and, leaving her, had betrayed her in such a way that she would be distracted from her growing suspicions of him. It had been one of the most difficult things he had ever done. But he had made his choice and had patiently put his life to rights afterward, though it had been years before he could sit through certain songs.

If Lydia was dead, he did not think he would be able to undertake that patient process again.

Then a bitter rictus of a smile pulled at his mouth, as he remembered Ysidro in Elysée’s salon, saying, “Fear nothing,mistress. I do not forget,” and the vampire’s grip like a manacle on his wrist. The vampires just might make the whole question academic. And if they’d harmed Lydia, he thought, with chilly calm, they would have to.

Unhurriedly, he examined Lydia’s lists again.

Many addresses had one star beside them; only two had two.

One was Ernchester House.

The other was an old townhouse near Great Portland Street, an area he dimly associated with dingy Georgian terraces which had seen better days. The house in question had been bought freehold in 1754 by some relation of the sixth Earl of Ernchester, and deeded in gift to Dr. Lionel Grippen.

The sun hung above Harrow Hill, a blurred orange disk in the pall of factory soot, as his cab rattled west. It was several degrees yet above the roofline—plenty of time, Asher thought. He wondered if Lydia had other silver weapons, if she’d gone out completely unarmed—or if, for that matter, she’d gone out at all. Grippen could just as easily have broken into the place some night and taken her.

How had he known who she was and where to find her?

Stop this, he told himself, as the walks through Hyde Park returned to his mind like an accusatory bloodstain on a carpet. There’ll be time for this later. And, just as firmly, he refused to contemplate what that later would constitute.

The house at 17 Monck Circle, like its neighbors, wore the air of having come down in the world. They were tall houses of brown stone, rising flush out of the pavement—servants’ entrances in the back, Asher noted mentally as he paid off his cabby.

Good, he thought. Nothing like a little privacy when breaking and entering.

He observed the tightly shuttered windows as he strolledpast it, looking for the inevitable entrance to the mews. It had once been gated, but the gates had long since been taken down and only their rusted posts remained, bolted to the dingy bricks. Just within the narrow lane, a closed carriage stood, a brougham such as doctors drove. He made a mental note of caution against a possible witness or bar to a quick escape and edged past it, jingling his picklocks in his pocket. He wondered whether Grippen would be able to sense him in his sleep.

If, for that matter, Grippen were here at all. Charles Farren had mentioned owning the building to which he’d been taken after the fiasco at Ernchester House, plus another, a few streets away; Lydia’s more intensive research had turned up several others owned by aliases for the same pair. From things Ysidro had said, he gathered the Spaniard changed his sleeping place frequently—a somewhat uncomfortable mode of living, even for a year, Asher knew from his own experiences abroad. He wondered whether vampires did not simply perish of carelessness when the pressure of pretending to be human grew unbearable.

Except for a few, he thought. Brother Anthony the Minorite had gone quietly mad instead.

And—who? Tulloch the Scot, haunting the churchyards of St. Germain? Elizabeth the Fair, who had drunk the tainted blood of Plague victims? The incalculable Rhys, who had not been seen since 1666? Or some other, more ancient vampire still, hiding in London until his very legend was eradicated …

Until, perhaps, Calvaire had turned him up?

Asher soft-footed his way down the nearly deserted mews, counting cottages and coach houses. Many of these were long empty of the horses and carriages they’d originally housed, transformed into storage or let out for a few shillings. The one attached to Number Seventeen was crumbling and dirty, the doors sagging on rotted hinges,the windows broken. The door into the yard stood ajar.

Asher’s hair prickled on his head as he stepped closer. He could see the two stout padlocks on the inside of the gate, and beyond it, across a tiny yard cluttered with old boxes and decaying furniture, to the house. Moss grew on the paving blocks, on the steps of the sunken areaway, and around the outhouse. No servants had used that kitchen for decades, at least. Above the kitchen, two sets of long French windows gaped mournful and black—the rest of the windows were shuttered.

The rational man, the twentieth-century Englishman, stirred in a faint reflex of protest at the obvious conclusion, but in his heart Asher felt no doubt. The place was the obvious haunt of vampires.

And the gate was open. He glanced back at the brougham, standing unobtrusively in the lane, waiting …

For whom?

As if to reassure him, the bay hack between the brougham’s shafts shook its mane and chewed thoughtfully on its bit. The last broken fragments of the setting sunlight glinted on the bridle brasses.

Did vampires go driving in the afternoons?

He could think of one that might.

Something seemed to tighten inside of him as he slipped into the rained and weedy yard. If he and Lydia could find this place, someone else certainly could—unless, of course, Ysidro was somehow right after all, and Grippen himself was able to get about by day.

Either way, he was on the verge of this riddle’s dark heart, and, he reflected, probably in a great deal of danger.