Ernchester bent a little to touch his wife’s cheek, then leaned down to kiss her lips. To Asher he said, “She’ll wake soon. Tell her that I love her. Always.”
Yellow light flared higher as flames ran along the roof of the main house. Asher turned, startled, in time to see a spindly figure move on the balcony, work and thrust itself to its feet, wobbling and off balance. Disheveled white hair caught the light, and the lenses of his spectacles made great rounds of burning amber as he turned his head. Staggering, Fairport began to descend the stairs.
Asher shouldn’t have been able to hear it under the roaring of the fire, but he did. Thin, silvery laughter, like the breaking of wafer-frail glass, and beneath that, the obscene toad-croak of a bass chuckle. They seemed to hover on the balcony, and on the stair, not quite touched by the fire’s light, as if visibility were something to be put on or off at will, but at one point Asher thought that one of them wore a dress the color of web and moonlight.
Fairport cried under the gag and fell, rolling down the stairs. They floated after him, half-seen migraine visions of alabaster faces, shining hands, eyes that caught the light as had those of the rats among the bones of St. Roche. At the foot of the steps he tried to get to his feet, falling heavily and trying again, and they ringed him, like porpoises playing, flickering shadows of a force he had entirely underestimated, following him as he scrabbled and heaved along the ground.
They let him get quite some distance before they began to feed.
With a roar, the roof of the stables fell in, curtains of flame leaping higher, yellower, beating upon yet somehow failing to completely illuminate what was happening in the court. Then a deeper roar, like a battery of eight-inch guns, and the earth jarred underfoot as the kerosene went up. Beside Asher, Anthea cried out, “Charles!” and sat up suddenly, her brown eyes wide with terror.
Asher caught her hand. Her gaze met his, clouded with old dreams. “The stones. The stones exploded with the heat.” Then she flinched and turned her face away, and Asher realized that for a moment she had thought she was still in London, many years before, when the whole of that city burned.
She said again, “Charles,” and when she looked at him then, her eyes were clear.
“He’s gone.”
She started to rise, and he closed his hand hard on hers, draw-ing her back and knowing he had no way to hold her if she simply wrenched herself free. She could have broken his wrist, or his neck, with very little effort. She looked at him again, questioning and pleading, her black curls a cloud around her face and shoulders, the flame a soaked gold in her eyes.
“He told me to take you back to England,” Asher said. “To see that you reached there safely. He said that he would not see me— and, I presume, you—again. He said that he loves you, always and forever.”
In the courtyard the vampires had sunk down in a ring around Fairport, whose frantic noises had risen to a muffled crescendo, then ceased. Asher wondered what he’d do if Anthea vanished, as Ernchester had, flickering away like a ghost in the woods to seek him. He’d never make it back to Vienna.
For a moment he thought she would. Then she, too, glanced across at the dark shapes in the firelight. Just for a moment her pale tongue slipped out and brushed her lips.
But when she turned to him, her eyes were a woman’s eyes. “Do you know where he’s gone?”
Asher stroked a corner of his mustache. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I can guess. And my guess is: Constantinople.”
Chapter Ten
“Thursday.” Lydia stared blankly at the newspaper by the glare of the station lights. “Thursday night. We were still in Paris.”
Margaret whispered, “Oh, my God,” through hands pressed to her mouth.
“I thought… I thought I’d have a little more time to catch up with him. That things wouldn’t happen so quickly.”
Ysidro reappeared at their side, trailed by a laconic individual in a Slovak’s baggy white britches who, at his command, loaded Ysidro’s trunk and portmanteau, Margaret’s satchel, and Lydia’s voluminous possessions onto a trolley that he pushed away in the direction of the doors. The vampire tweaked the newspaper from Lydia’s hands, and read.
DOCTOR PERISHES IN SANITARIUM FIRE Early yesterday evening the well-known sanitarium “Fruhlingzeit” burned to the ground in a conflagration of epic proportions, claiming the life of the man who had made it his life-work and monument. The body of the most distinguished English specialist in rejuvenatory medicine, Dr. Bedford Fairport, whose work has contributed to the comfort and healing of hundreds of men and women in Vienna over the past eighteen years, was found in the smoking ruins by police constables and firefighters in the early hours of Friday morning. According to the Vienna police, foul play is suspected. The bodies of a coachman and a laborer were also found.
No patients were present at the sanitarium when it burned, Dr. Fairport having temporarily closed the premises last week. The distinguished Herr Hofrat Theobald Beidenstunde, of the Imperial-and-Royal Austrian Coal Board, undergoing treatment for a nervous condition at Fruhlmgzeit last week, states that Herr Professor Doktor Fairport requested that all patients return to their homes due to repairs on the foundations of the main building. Complete financial recompense was made to all patients so affected.
It is believed that the fire started in the laboratory where a generator was positioned too dose to stores of kerosene, and later spread to the main villa. However, since all three bodies bore marks of violence, arson is being considered as a possibility. Further investigation by the Vienna police is under way.
“Behold an Englishman,” murmured Ysidro. “The good Hofrat Beidenstunde should thank his stars he was reimbursed. The old Queen would never have approved such request for funds.” He folded the newspaper and bestowed it in the pocket of his cloak.
“Victoria?” Margaret Potton asked in surprise.
“Elizabeth. There is nothing there which proves your husband’s fate, mistress. This way.”
The Slovak was waiting for them in the square outside, on the seat of a gaily painted wagon. Ysidro helped the two women in—lifting Lydia with unnerving ease from the pavement—and without wasted words they proceeded into the winding network of high-walled ways that made up the most ancient part of the Altstadt.
“Who—besides Fairport—would Jamie seek out in Vienna?”
“Three years ago it was a man named Halliwell.” Ysidro turned his head, as if listening for some sound below or between the myriad voices and threads of stray music that clamored all around them on the bustling streets. “I have no more recent knowledge than that, nor am I sure where the Department has its headquarters these days. The embassy would be the place to inquire. Say that you seek your husband, that you wish to speak with Halliwell.”
“They won’t be there on a Sunday,” Margaret pointed out worriedly.
“At least we can rent a carriage and go out to the rums of the sanitarium.” Lydia brought the newspaper up close enough to her nose to make out something other than vague blocks of gray. “It may not say anything about Jamie, but considering it was Fairport I came to warn him against, the coincidence is a little marked. I expect we could find the address in a city directory.”
“I expect every jehu in the town will know its location,” Ysidro remarked. “From what I know of human nature, the place will have been trampled by curiosity seekers ere the ashes cooled.”
Palaces crowded them on all sides, the darkness patched and painted by a thousand glowing windows whose reflections gilded the scrollwork of doorways with careless brush strokes of light, the faces of the marble angels rendered curiously kin to Ysidro’s still, thin features as the vampire turned his head again, seeking whatever it was that he sought.
The wagon drew up before a tall yellow house in the Bakkersgasse, like an excessively garlanded wedding cake in butter-colored stucco. Ysidro accompanied the two women inside, watching as the Slovak unloaded Lydia’s trunks, portmanteau, satchel, and hatboxes, but when that was finished, he returned to his own luggage, still on the cart, and drove away with it into the darkness. An hour later he returned, afoot and uncommunicative as ever, for picquet in a salon that was a miniature Versailles above a shop selling silk.
“I made arrangements ere departing London,” he said, shuffling the cards. “It is necessary to know the existence of such places, which can be had in any city for a price. You will find a cook and chambermaid at your disposal in the morning, though they speak no English and little German. Still, I am assured that the cook is up to the most exacting of standards. Certainly, for English, she will suffice.”
Margaret said, “It’s too good of you…”
“Assured by whom?” Lydia wanted to know. Ysidro picked up his cards. “One whose business it is to know. You are the elder hand, mistress.”
Ysidro’s estimate of human nature proved a distressingly accurate one. When Lydia and Miss Potton arrived by rented fiacre at the smoke-stained wall around what was left of Fruhlingzeit Sanitarium the following afternoon, they found at least five other carnages there, the drivers seated comfortably on the low stone wall across the road chatting among themselves, and a large number of fashionably dressed men and women prowling around the trampled weeds or engaged in argument with a couple of sturdy gentlemen who seemed to be guarding the gates.