“This was one of his early articles,” she went on slowly. “Back in ‘eighty-six or ’eighty-seven, when he first went to Austria to study those Styrian peasants who live to be a hundred and ten. He mentions that the private sanitarium he was given charge of is owned by the Karolyi family, and that it was Ignace Karolyi who made the arrangements. He mentions Karolyi in the next article as a financial contributor who made research possible. And then Karolyi vanishes. In fact, all reference to Fairport’s funding vanishes. It’s never mentioned again. I checked.”
“It astounds me that I did not read that myself.” Ysidro sounded not the slightest astounded. “But I subscribe to a good many journals, as I daresay you saw.”
Lydia blushed. What had seemed, at the time, to be the necessary investigation of a vampire’s lair became trespass in a gentleman’s house. “I’m sorry,” she stammered, but he vouchsafed no reply.
Instead his finger moved in the direction of the sprayer. “And what is this?”
“Oh.” Lydia took the sticking plaster from her pocket and recapped the nozzle. “It’s full of silver nitrate solution. One can buy it in any chandlery. I—well, James once mentioned that vampires sometimes slept several to a house. I didn’t know what I might meet, you see.”
She was afraid he would mock her, since, upon consideration, the weapon would certainly have been difficult to deploy quickly enough to do her any good. She had learned to deal with mockery from an early age over her medical studies, but this was a matter from which she could not simply walk away.
But the vampire only said, “Ingenious,” and touched the side of the pump’s reservoir with the backs of his fingers, then took them quickly away. In the pale gaslight, Lydia could see that his ears had been long ago pierced for earrings, like a Gypsy’s. “Then this Fairport is in truth Karolyi’s pensioner.”
“I think so.” Lydia held out to him another telegram, the telegram which, reaching her that morning from Munich, had caused her to pack her trunks, manufacture a moderately plausible tale for her servants, and take the train down to London in search of the man in whose kitchen she now sat, with the smallest of his cats—a sinuous shadow-gray torn—winding itself around her ankles.
Ysidro took the second paper from her hand.
LEAVING PARIS STOP
STAYING EPPLER ADDRESS BOOK JAMES
“He’s waxed cautious since his first wire.” The vampire touched the paper to his lower lip again. “You conned this book of his?”
“After I decoded the message, yes.” She reached down half unconsciously to stroke the cat, looking up at Ysidro where he sat above her, hands folded over his knee. His nails projected some half inch beyond the tips of his fingers and had a strange glassy appearance, far thicker than human nails. Some kind of chitin? It would be rude to ask for a cutting.
“The words ‘address book’ were the tip, you see,” she explained. “It’s a simple code; last for first, counting inward, and A means B, B means C, et cetera. He keeps duplicate books. Eppler is two from the end of the E’s—Mrs. Eppler is the mother of an old pupil of his. She lives in Botley, about ten miles from Oxford, and it’s ridiculous that he’d be going there from Paris. Two from the beginning of the F’s was Fairport, in Vienna. As you see, the telegram was sent from Munich, at one-forty Tuesday afternoon.”
“And I was that easy to find?”
Lydia hesitated, wondering if she should lie. Although her initial fears had subsided, she realized she was still in a great deal of danger. She supposed that if Ysidro didn’t have the ability to make people stop fearing him, he would have starved to death centuries ago.
The greater fears still lay ahead of her, a vast uncharted territory of deeds she had no concept how to perform.
At last she said, “I knew about this house a year ago. In theory. I hadn’t sought it out. But I looked up all the possibilities of vampire lairs for James while he was… working for you.”
A small line printed itself briefly near the fanged mouth, and the smallest flare of annoyance moved Ysidro’s nostrils. But he only said, “Then this Fairport is thought by the Department in Vienna to be their man—they, too, having missed the articles which speak of Karolyi’s contributions to Fairport’s research. No matter of surprise, given the fewness of agents and the troubles in the Balkans in that year, and in France. Afterward, one presumes Fairport would have known not to publish his patron’s name.”
“What it means,” Lydia said quietly, “is that James is walking into a trap.”
Ysidro remained still for some time, the telegram unmoving in his fingers, but Lydia could see thought and memory like swift-shuffled cards in the back of the jeweled yellow eyes. Remembering, she guessed, Fairport’s articles on Hungarian and Romanian centenarians, his preoccupation with extending life, his work in a part of the world that James had described as a hotbed of vampire lore. Then he raised his head and said, “Await me.”
And without seeing him leave, Lydia found herself alone.
She checked her watch, wondering how long “Await me” meant. If she herself were in a tremendous hurry, she could wash, dress, curl, frizz and put up her hair, and apply a judiciously minuscule quantity of rice powder, kohl, rouge, and cologne in just under two hours and a half, which her husband, manlike, seemed to consider an unreasonable length of time. At least, Lydia thought, she knew how long it took her to make herself presentable and allowed for it, unlike dandies of her acquaintance who lived in the fond delusion that they could assemble the component parts of their facade in “only a moment, my dearest Mrs. Asher.” She remembered the clothing in the dressing room upstairs, by the finest tailors in Saville Row. James had warned her, and now she knew from terrifying experience, how fast vampires could move, but she also knew that males as a species tended to potter, fidgeting endlessly with cravats and shifting coins, notebooks, and theater tickets from pocket to pocket as if fearing they would capsize if not properly trimmed. She wondered if death altered this.
Twenty-five minutes , she made a mental wager with herself, and was within three of it when she turned her head to find Ysidro at her side again. In his cinder-gray suit, his flesh white as the linen of his shirt, he seemed more ghostlike than he had in the white robe, as if the clothing were a barrier, a shadow of distance.
“Come.”
The alleys and back streets through which he led her were unlit and stinking, full of furtive movement. She guessed their route was not a direct one, but could not be sure, for as soon as they descended the front steps of his house, he took her spectacles from her. Moreover, she was aware that three or four times in the fifteen minutes of their walk, he touched her mind with the blankness, the empty reverie, that vampires apparently could extend. She had the sensation of waking repeatedly from dreams to find herself each time in a new street or court, blinking at ten shades of blurred darkness all spangled with the colored embers of reflected pub lights, with Yiddish or German or Russian yammering on all sides from the little knots of seedy, bearded men clustered in doorways or around chestnut vendors’ braziers. The men would step aside unconsciously to let Ysidro pass, not looking at him, as if they, too, partook of his dream of invisibility; their clothes smelled of hard work and poor diet and not enough hot water for washing.
Every other week Lydia took the train down to London to work in the dissecting rooms of St. Luke’s. Men like these, with their brown, broken teeth and their flea bites and their dirty, callused hands would be delivered by the workhouse vans, smelling of carbolic and formalin, dead of tumors that had burst untreated, of pneumonia, of consumption or the other ills of poverty, so that she and others like her could study the intricate beauty of muscle and nerve beneath the knife.
It was the first time in her scholarly life that Lydia had been among them living, and her mind swarmed with questions she wished to ask them about the food and working conditions that had contributed to their pathologies. On the other hand, she felt very glad of Ysidro’s protection.
They crossed a plank bridge over water nearly invisible beneath low-lying fog, passed the wry, dark roofline of some very ancient church. In time they traversed a sordid alley behind a pub near the river and descended an areaway thick with garbage and the smell of cats. Though her eyes had grown used to darkness, Lydia saw only the moth flicker of pale hands before she heard the snick of a lock going over. Hinges creaked. Ysidro said “Come” again and stepped into absolute dark.
A match scratched. Ysidro’s narrow face appeared, outlined in saffron. “You need not concern yourself over rats.”
He touched the flame to a pair of guttered candles in a double branch. The plaster of the walls was black with mildew, falling away to reveal underlying brick. “Like cats, they are aware of what we are and know that though it is the human death we need to feed our minds, we can derive sustenance from the blood of any living thing.”
He lifted the branch. Twin lights called twin ghosts of shadow, merging and circling in a strange cotillion as he led her toward the back stair. “Anthea and Ernchester sleep seldom at the house on Savoy Walk these days. It is best to let memories lie. She scarce ever hunts this early in the night, but it may be that she has gone to her dressmaker.”