Traveling With The Dead(2)

The kitchen and scullery were on the ground floor, at the back of the house, down that caliginous throat of passageway. Stairs corkscrewed farther down. The scullery contained a modern icebox. Lydia opened it and found a cake of ice about two days old, a bottle of cream, and a small quantity of knacker’s meat done up in paper. Four or five dishes—including a Louis XV Sevres saucer—lay on the floor in a corner. For the first time, Lydia smiled.

Boothole, wine cellar, vegetable pantry belowstairs, and many smaller rooms, low-ceilinged and smelling of earth and great age. The lamp flung her shadow waveringly over cruck-work beams, discolored plaster, stonework that spoke of some older building on this site. As in searching for the house itself—which had fallen out of all mention in the Public Records Office after the Fire of 1666—Lydia passed three or four times through the room that contained the trap to the subcellar. It was only when, failing to see any such ingress as she knew must exist, she studied the composition of the walls themselves that she narrowed the possibilities to the little storeroom whose damp stone wall bore signs of having once supported a stairway.

Outside, the day must be slowly losing its grip on life. Trying to keep her hands from shaking, with cold now as well as fear, she pulled off her gloves and ran her fingers under the chair rail and around the heavy molding of the room’s two doors. Near the base of the door into the wine cellar she felt a lever click unwillingly under her fingers and saw, in the dirty brazen light, the wider gap between two panels.

There was a latch on the inside of the movable panel so it could be opened from below, and a worn ladder going down.

As Lydia had guessed, the low room beneath looked as if it had been the subcrypt of a church, either the one that backed the house—in a square named, oddly enough, Spaniard’s Court—or some forgotten predecessor. Barely visible in black paint on the ceiling groins were the words Salvum me fac, Deus, quoniam intraverunt aquae usque ad animam meam.

Lydia had not been raised a Catholic—her aunts considered even the inclusion of candles on the parish altar grounds for complaint to the bishop—but recognized, from her residency at St. Bartholomew’s, the words from the Mass for Deliverance from Death.

A granite sarcophagus filled the far end of the chamber like a somber altar, all but concealing a low, locked door. Lydia stood before it for some time, holding the lamp high and gauging the probable weight of the stone lid. Then she knelt and studied the floor.

Dustless.

A laborious investigation of the cracks in the gray stone floor showed her the trapdoor, an eye-straining business by the amber glow of the lamp; she gave up early trying to do the business tidily and without griming and wrinkling her skirt, and it was equally impossible to keep her corset bones from jabbing her ribs and the pump sprayer from knocking her repeatedly on the elbow. Another squinting, painful half hour revealed the trigger to the trapdoor’s catch behind the projecting stone frame of the chamber’s inner door.

As she had deduced, the sarcophagus had nothing to do with anything. It was simply too obvious.

The steps leading downward were shallow, so deeply worn in the centers that she had to press her shoulder to one wall and brace herself against the other to maintain her footing. She guessed it was well past dark outside, and beneath her growing fear—the panicky conviction that she was completely unqualified to deal with the encounter that lay ahead—she wondered precisely how dark was dark enough. She suppressed the urge to check her watch and make notes.

The lamplight could not penetrate the night below her, and from that darkness rose the smells of wet earth, cold stone, and rust. Interestingly, there was no smell of rats.

The light slithered wetly over a grille of metal bars. Lydia pressed herself to it, maneuvered the lamp through and held it up to illuminate what lay within. The bars were old, the lock on them new and expensive and beyond the capacity of either the skeleton key or the picklocks. The lamplight reached only partway into the catacomb beyond the bars, but far enough to show her wall niches, empty for the most part, or occupied with the suggestion of ghastly natures mortes: skulls, dust, and shreds of fallen hair.

On the right-hand wall the shadows all but hid a niche whose interior no amount of angling the lamp would reveal.

But hanging over the edge, like ivory against the dingy stone, was a man’s hand: long-fingered, thin, ringed with gold. Darkness hid the rest, and though the white hand itself looked as perfect as if painted by Rubens or Holbein, Lydia knew that its owner had been dead for a long time.

It’s true , she thought, her heartbeat fast and heavy with fright. Silly, she added, for she had known already that it was true… it was all true. She had met this man and seen others like him from a distance.

But knowing, she had learned this afternoon, was different from seeing, and she felt very naked, uncertain, and alone in the dark.

I’m doing this wrong.

Her breath made a little apricot smoke in the lamplight as she sat down on the steps. Laying her weapon across her knees and pushing up her spectacles with one forefinger, she settled herself to wait.





Chapter One


All Souls and black rain, and cold that passed like needles through flesh and clothing to scrape the bones inside. Sunday night in Charing Cross Station, voices racketing in the vaults of glass and ironwork overhead like ball bearings in a steel drum. All James Asher wanted was to go home.

A day and a night spent burying his cousin—and dealing with the squabbling of his cousin’s widow, mother, and two sons over the estate to which he’d been named executor—had reminded him vividly why, once he’d gone up to Oxford twenty-three years ago, he’d never had anything further to do with the aunt who raised him from the age of thirteen. It had just turned full dark, and Asher drew his greatcoat closer around him as he strode down the long brick walkway of the platform, jostling shoulders with his erstwhile fellow passengers in a vast frowst of wet wool and steam and reflecting upon the lethal adeptness of familial guilt. Outside, the streets would be slick and deadly with ice.

Asher’s mind was on that—and on the hour and a half between the arrival of the express from Tunbridge Wells at Charing Cross and the departure of the Oxford local from Paddington when he saw the men whom he would later have given anything he possessed not to have seen.

They stood under the central clock in the echoing cavern of the station. Asher happened to be looking in their direction as the taller of the two removed his hat and shook the drops from it, gestured with a gloved hand toward the iron frame into which boards bearing departure times had been slotted. Asher’s eye, still accustomed to cataloging details after half a lifetime in secret service to his country, had already been caught by the man’s greatcoat: the flaring skirts, the collar and cuffs of karakul lamb, the soft camel color and the braiding on the sleeves all shouting at him, Vienna. More specifically, one of the Magyar nobility of that city rather than a German Viennese, who tended to less flamboyance in their dress. A Parisian would have worn that smooth, well-fitted line, but probably not that color and certainly without braiding; the average Berliner’s coat generally bore a striking resemblance to a horse blanket no matter how rich the man might be.

Vienna , Asher thought, with the tiniest pinch of nostalgia. Then he saw the man’s face.

Dear God.

He stopped at the head of the steps down from the platform, and the blood seemed to halt in his veins. But even before his mind could form the words Ignace Karolyi in England, he saw the face of the other man.

Dear God! No.

It was all he could think.

Not that.

Later he thought he would not have seen the smaller man at all had his eye not been arrested, first by Karolyi’s greatcoat, then by the Hungarian’s face. That was one of the most frightening things about what he now saw. In the few seconds that the two men spoke—and it was not more than a few seconds, though they exchanged newspapers, an old trick Asher had used hundreds of times himself during his years with Intelligence—Asher’s mind registered details that he should have seen before: the fiddleback cut of the small man’s shabby black greatcoat, and the way the creaseless buff-colored trousers tapered to straps under the insteps. Under a shallow-crowned beaver hat his hair was short-cropped, and he did not gesture at all as they spoke: no movement, no change of stance, not even the shift of the gloved fingers wrapped about one another on the head of his stick.

That would have told him, if nothing else did.

Three women in enormous hats, feathers drooping with wet, intervened, and when Asher looked again, Karolyi was striding briskly in the direction of the Paris boat train.

There was no sign of the other man.

Karolyi’s going to Paris.

They’re both going to Paris.

How Asher knew, he couldn’t have said. Only his instinct, honed in years with the Department, had not waned in the eight peaceful years of Oxford lecturing that had passed since he quit. Heart pounding hard enough to almost sicken him, he made his way without appearance of hurry to the ticket windows, the small bag of a weekend’s worth of clean linen and shaving tackle swinging almost unnoticed in his hand. By the station clock it was half past five. The departures board announced the Dover boat train at quarter of six. The fare to Paris was one pound, fourteen and eight, second class—Asher had just over five pounds in his pocket and paid unhesitatingly. Third class would have saved him twelve shillings—the cost of several nights’ lodging in Paris, if one knew where to look—but his respectable brown ulster and stiff crowned hat would have stood out among the rough clothed workmen and shabby women in the third-class carriages.