“It has to be here,” Asher breathed. “His country place has been closed up for years and it’s a good thirty miles as the crow flies. He’s a research pathologist—he doesn’t have a consulting practice to worry about. His wife died some years ago and his son’s in the Life Guards. It wouldn’t be difficult to keep him away on some pretext. He’s not very bright.”
“He would have to be intensely stupid,” Ysidro murmured, “not to notice, if his father were forced into such an alliance as I forced you.”
Asher flattened to the corner of the house and scanned the empty street. “Set your mind at rest.”
It was difficult to tell whether the soft sound in the darkness was a comment or a laugh. “You know this Blaydon,” Ysidro then said softly. “Is it likely we could win him to our side—turn him, as is said in the parlance of your Foreign Office?”
“It depends on what his partner’s told him.” The street before them was still. The lamplight gleamed like fractured metal on the water of the gutters. If Ysidro, turning his head slightly for what even the cobweb nets of his far-flung awareness failed to bring him, could hear nothing, it stood to reason Asher wouldn’t, either. But still, Asher’s every nerve strained to hear. “I never knew Blaydon well—I went to fetch Lydia at some of his lectures and had been to the Peaks a few times. I think he was piqued that I’d married the Willoughby fortune instead of letting his son do it, but I don’t think he held it against me the way Dennis did. Horace is a stiff-backed and self-righteous old bigot, but he’s honest. He was one of the few dons who stood up to Lydia’s father when he wanted her taken out of University—though, of course, at the time Horace had a stake in wanting her to stay.
“In his place—the vampire’s, I mean—I’d make damn sure he thought the Limehouse rampages were the work of the vampires we were tracking.”
“You think he’d believe that?”
“I think if Dennis were in danger—if the vampire were threatening Dennis’ life as you’re threatening Lydia’s to win my compliance—he’d want to. We did it in the Department all the time. The old carrot-and-stick routine: on the one hand Dennis’ life is in danger; on the other, Blaydon can do viral research with what blood he can take, and congratulate himself on killing vampires at the same time. He may not even know Lydia’s a prisoner or he may know there is a prisoner, but not that it’s Lydia. It’s surprising how ignorant the right hand can be when it would really rather not know what the left hand is doing.”
They left the shelter of the corner and glided back like specters through the wet blackness of deep night in October London. “The mews is just past the next street,” Ysidro murmured, barely audible even in the utter silence of the empty street. “Do you plan to speak to this Blaydon, then?”
“If I can,” Asher replied, as they slipped into the cobbled, horse-smelling canyon of the mews. “After I get Lydia out of this, and see how the land lies, if possible. Like Lydia—like a lot of people in the medical profession—Horace has a little streak of saint manquéin him, in his case one of the stiffer-backed Scots variety. It could be the vampire is playing on that as well.”
“I would give a good deal to know who it is.” The vampire’s touch was light on his elbow, guiding him around half-seen obstacles. What little lamplight filtered in from the street glistened on the puddles in the center of the lane, but left the sides in velvet shadow; the air was sweet with the clean smell of hay and the pungency of well-tended horses, prosaic odors and comforting. “I suspectCalvaire came to London to seek in him a partner in power, but I still find it strange that he would have heard of him at all when I had not, much less been able to locate him.”
“Perhaps Brother Anthony told him whom to look for and where to look.”
“Maybe.” Ysidro’s voice was absolutely neutral, but Asher, who was growing used to the tiniest nuances of his speech, had the impression he was not satisfied. “There are many things here which I do not understand, and among them is why Calvaire’s appearance on the scene should have triggered these murders—if it did trigger them, and all these matters are not simply a chance juxtaposition in time. It may be that your Mistress Lydia can enlighten us, when we find her, or Blaydon. As I recall, Tulloch the Scot was big, though not so big as you describe. Your height, but bulkier…”
“No,” Asher said. “I looked up at him—he came over the top of me like a wave.”
They moved down the darkness of the mews, scanning the tall, regular cliff of houses visible beyond the stables and cottages. All were dark; it was the ebb-tide hour of the soul. He went on softly, “But conceivably this virus, this mutation, could trigger abnormal growth. It could…”
The vampire beside him checked, and the slim hand tightened on his arm; turning his head swiftly, Asher caught the glint of the luminous eyes.
“What is it?”
The vampire moved a finger, cautioning. For a time, he listened like a hunted man for sounds which he thought he might have heard. Then he shook his head, though his eyes did not relax.
“Nothing.” The word was more within Asher’s head than without. In a stable, a horse wickered and stamped sleepily. “I—all of us—have grown used to the idea that as vampires we are, barring acts of violence, immortal, andto the idea that acts of violence are all we need fear. Like Lemuel Gulliver, we were stupidly willing to believe ‘immortal’ means ‘safe from change.’ It is disconcerting to learn that there may be terms to that bargain after all.”
Asher felt awkwardly in the pockets of his ulster for the reassuring weight of Lydia’s revolver, which, like the one the police had confiscated from him, was loaded with silver bullets—it was astounding what one could purchase at hyperfashionable West End gunsmiths. He’d also brought both silver knives and even the little hypodermic kit with its ampoules of silver nitrate. He’d found bills from Lambert’s, for silver chains and at least one silver letter opener, stuffed into the medical journals as bookmarks, so she hadn’t gone out completely unarmed. His own silver chains lay slim and cold over the half-healed bites on his throat and left wrist—the right was muffled in sling and splints and puffed up to twice its normal size—but even so, he felt hopelessly outgunned.
The briefest of investigations revealed a brougham and a trim bay hack with one white foot in Blaydon’s stables. After a moment’s silent listening, Ysidro murmured, “No one in the quarters upstairs, though someone has lived here recently—not more than a few months ago.”
“He’d have turned off the servants,” Asher breathed in return.
From the stable’s rear door, they could see the tall back of the house, past the few bare trees and the naked shrubs of a narrow town garden. “You can’t hear whether someone’s in the cellar?”
Simon’s eyes never moved from the house, but Asher could tell he was listening all around him and behind him, just the same. The night seemed to breathe with unseen presence. Asher’s hair prickled with the certainty that somewhere nearby they were being watched; that something listened, as Ysidro was listening, for his single breathand the beat of his solitary heart. By mutual consent, they both backed out of the small stable and into the lane again, where a sound, a commotion, was likely to bring every coachman and dog on the mews.
“I’m going in.” Asher shrugged his arm clear of his ulster; Ysidro caught it and lowered it to the baled hay piled just outside the stable door. With his left hand, Asher fumbled the revolver and a silver knife from the pocket, transferred the revolver to his corduroy jacket; the knife—since he was wearing shoes rather than boots—slid conveniently into his sling. “Can you watch my back?”
“Don’t be a fool.” Simon slipped his black Inverness from his shoulders, laid it in a soft whisper of velvet-handed wool on the hay, and reached into Asher’s jacket pocket for the revolver. He patted the cylinder gingerly a few times with his other hand, like a man testing for heat inside. Satisfied, he concealed it in his own jacket. “If you had four hours’ sleep on the boat from Calais last night, I should be surprised. No, stay here—you should be fairly safe. A cry from you—a sound from you—will wake every groom and dog in the mews, and this vampire must remain unsuspected now for his very life.”
And he was gone, in a momentary blink of distracted consciousness that made Asher curse his own lapse of guard.
He was aware that the vampire was right, however. The strain of the night was telling on him. It would have done so, even had his body not been struggling with the aftereffects of his attack by the Paris vampires or with the shock of the struggle at Grippen’s and the pain of his broken hand. The novocaine was beginning to wear off, and his arm in its sling throbbed damnably at every step he took. That alone would be enough to disrupt the concentration that was still his only possible defense against the ancient vampire’s soundless approach.