Traveling With The Dead(23)

“And you didn’t go to Grippen?”

Anthea shook her head. “Since last year—since the rift among us concerning you and your knowledge of us—there has been uneasiness among the Undead of London. Grippen has gotten other fledglings in place of those who were killed; has summoned to London older fledglings of his as well. Me, he never trusted. Indeed, I… until you spoke of the Austrian, I could not be sure that this was not of Grippen’s doing. But for that reason I dared not go to Ysidro, either.”

She handed him one of the new shirts he had bought, then took the whiskey flask and stepped quickly away, pouring the liquor on her fingers and meticulously, repeatedly, almost obsessively wiped from them all trace of his blood. While she did this, he put on his shirt, resumed his tie, his jacket, his coat, moving slowly for his vision sometimes would suddenly gray, but she did not offer her help. In the dark of the crypt, rat shadows flickered among the bones.

“At a certain distance I can feel my husband’s mind. Sense his presence. I did not… I dared not wait.” She raised her eyes to his. “Might he have gone to this Austrian because he was fleeing the Master of London?”

“He might,” said Asher. “But I suspect Grippen had nothing to do with it. Come.” He picked up his valise. “Will you go with me for coffee?”

They went to LaStanza’s on the Graben, luminous with gas-light and bright with the pastel frocks of the dancers. Anthea had donned, over her cold white fingers, a widow’s black lace house mitts, and produced from a corner of the crypt’s vestibule a plumed hat bedighted with veils that further hid—and heightened by contrast—the whiteness of her flesh. She must have left it there, thought Asher, when she went to rescue him from his attackers in the alley. The scent of her hair on the silk had evidently been enough to keep the rats from coming anywhere near.

“I have been afraid for Charles for years,” she said after the Herr Ober took their orders. “Part of it was Danny being killed—the man who had been our servant since the days of the last King George. Burned up in the light of the sun. Some would say, a fit end for such as we.” She glanced quickly at him, challenging, but Asher said nothing.

“Part of it was the death of the city that he knew. Not all at once, as when the fire took it, but little by little, a building demolished here, a street torn up there that the Underground might pass beneath. A word or expression would fall out of use, or a composer die, whose work he loved. He used to go every night to concerts, listening with joy to the new men, to those light airs like clockwork flowers, and then the strength, the passion that came after…”

A waiter brought them coffee: for her, “dark with skin”—one had to be specific when ordering coffee in Vienna—for him an einspanner, black coffee, whipped cream.

“Is it passe now, the waltz?” She put back her veils and raised the cup to her lips, not drinking, but breathing deep of the bittersweet riches of the steam. On the dance floor women floated weightlessly to “Tales of the Vienna Woods,” their gowns like lilies of saffron, rose, pale lettuce-green; the black clothing of the men a delineating bass note, the officers’ uniforms jeweled flame.

“I think so.” He remembered dancing with Francoise. She’d been gawky as a scarecrow to look at but never missed a step, as light as a bluebell on a stem. “Not with people my age,” he went on. “But the young and the smart are doing things like the foxtrot and the tango.”

“Tango.” She savored the unfamiliar word. “It sounds like a New World fruit. Something whose juice would run down your chin. I shall have to learn it one day.” Her eyes returned to the dancers, quickly, as if avoiding a thought. “The waltz was a scandal when first I learned it. And so I thought it, too.” She laughed a little at herself. “Ernchester still enjoyed dancing in those days. Grippen mocked at us. For him all things are only to serve the kill. But we’d go to Almack’s Assembly Rooms or to the great ton balls during the Season. He… was not always as you’ve seen him.”

“Did something change him?” His voice was low, under the music, but she heard, and past the wraiths of her veils her glance crossed his again. Then she looked away. “Time.” She traced the ear-shaped curve of the cup’s handle, a gesture that reminded him of Lydia when she had something worrying her. Her eyes did not meet his. “I wish you could have known him as he was. I wish you could have known us both.”

Silence lay between them, save for the music and the swirl of silk and slipper leather. “Do you read the Personals?” asked Asher, and the question startled her out of the reverie into which she had slipped. He started to reach down for the valise on the floor between their chairs, but the bite of his wound stopped him; he gestured to the newspaper visible in the bag’s open mouth.

“Or more to the point, does your husband?”

“We all do.” She leaned to withdraw the folded sheets. “We follow families, names, neighborhoods for years, sometimes decades. To us, chains of events are like the lives of Balzac’s characters, or Dickens‘. The nights are long.”

Asher unfolded the section and touched the advertisement he had seen.

“Saturday’s paper,” he said. “His departure was arranged in advance. Umitsiz is Turkish for hopeless—a variant, I think, for Want-hope. Does Ernchester know Turkish?”

“He was part of the legation King Charles sent to Constantinople, before we were married. He was away three years. To me it seemed eternity.”

A wry smile brushed her lips as she considered the irony of that, and she added, a little shyly, “It still does, you know, when I look back.”

Then she frowned and held the railway timetable beside the few short lines of type, as if comparing them. “But why?” she asked at last. “What could they have said to him—this Olumsiz Bey—to make him come here without a word to me? Even without Grippen’s support, we have wealth and a place where we are safe. Men searched the house, yes, but it was night when they did so—they could not have overpowered him, even had he returned to find them. At night men are easy to elude. Charles knows London’s every cellar and bolt-hole. Even if he knew Vienna once, cities change with time, and those changes are perilous to those whose flesh the sun will destroy. What could he have been offered?”

“I suspect the men were only agents of someone else.” Asher folded both paper and timetable again. “Ysidro told me once that the Undead usually know when someone is seeking them. You know nothing, guessed nothing, of the men who searched the house?”

She shook her head. “There had been no… no unknown faces seen too many times, no footfalls passing where none should be.”

“Which means that someone told them about the house.”

The waltz had finished. On the platform the orchestra was putting up its instruments. A woman, small and gray-haired and dumpy, laughed as her white-bearded gentleman friend swept her up into an extravagant cloak of golden fur. Anthea turned her head to watch them, and in her eyes Asher saw an expression of almost sensual delight, a softening, as if she had drunk wine.

Karolyi ? Asher wondered. An attempt to make sure the earl’s wife didn’t stop him from coming? But would Karolyi have known of the power struggle between Anthea and Grippen that would rob them of the master vampire’s support?

Karolyi had certainly hired the toughs who attacked him tonight. They had probably followed him all day, waiting their chance. That meant he’d better pick the toughest-looking fiacre he could find and warn him of trouble once they got into the isolated lanes and vineyards of the Vienna Woods.

The Ober appeared, Lady Ernchester’s black cloak on his arm. putting it around her shoulders brought Asher a stab of momentary agony, and she turned quickly.

“You’re in pain.” Her fingers were cold still, though she’d warmed them on the cup. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think.”

“It just took me by surprise,” he said. “I’ll take you to your lodging.”

A tulle of fog suffused the gaslight on the Graben to dim haloes, blurred the swags and statues of the facades. Here and there a window still glowed, where maids, having unlaced their mistresses, brushed their hair and handed them nightdresses and prayer books, now locked up jewels or brushed dirt from slippers, or laid final fires for the morrow before creeping to cold beds themselves. The air was ice, the leafless trees friezes of unreadable runes passed by only a few final, home-hurrying shadows.

“Dr. Asher.”

He paused in his stride and saw, again, her face turned half away from him in confusion.

“I know no honest woman asks a man to come back to her rooms with her, to stay with her the night.” Her fingers stirred at the buttons on his sleeve. “And I understand that it’s the stuff of farce for me even to care about such conventions. Old habits die harder than you think. But… will you do this?”

She raised her eyes to his as she spoke. Oddly, Asher felt no sense of danger. He remembered how carefully she had wiped the blood from her fingers and the stammer of her nervousness that hurried to fill the silences of the dark crypt. It crossed his mind to wonder if she had inhaled so deeply of the coffee to cover from herself the smell of his blood.