It had been disconcerting to recognize names on those cards of invita-tion which dated from a certain period seven or eight years ago. Poor Bertie Westmoreland had not been the only member of that gay circle of friends who had sent her invitations or bought her trinkets, though he was evidently the only one who had paid the ultimate price,
The others were lucky, he thought. Though Albert Westmoreland had died in 1900, the Honorable
Frank Ellis-another of Lydia 's suit-ors, though Asher had never met the boy-had bought the vampire a loden-green crepe tea gown as late as 1904. Who knew how many oth-ers had also kept up the connection?
He shivered, thinking how close Lydia had passed to that unseen plague then, and thanked all the strait-corseted deities of Society for the strict lines drawn between young girls of good family and the type of women with whom young men of good family amused themselves be-tween bouts of "doing the pretty,"
Lydia had been very young then. Eighteen, still living in her father's Oxford house and attending lectures with the tiny clump of Somerville undergraduates interested in medicine. The other girls had dealt as best they could with the comments, jokes, and sniggers of male undergradu-ates and deans alike-apologetic, frustrated, or defiant. For the most part Lydia had been blithely oblivious. She had been genuinely puzzled over her father's blustering rage when she'd chosen studying for Responsions over a season on the London matrimonial mart; had she had brothers or sisters, he might well have threatened to disinherit her from the considerable family estates. Even her uncle, the Dean of New Col-lege, though her supporter, had been scandalized by the direction of her studies. Education for women was all very well, but he had been think-ing in terms of literature and the Classics, not the slicing up of cadavers and learning how the human reproductive organs operated.
Asher smiled a little, remembering how even the most anti-woman of the dons, old Horace Blaydon, had come around to her support in the end, though he'd never have admitted it. "Even a damn freshman can follow what I'm doing!" he'd bellowed at a group of embarrassed male students during his lectures on blood pathology... he'd called Lydia a damned schoolgirl everywhere but in the classes. And the old man would have acted the same, Asher thought, even had his son not been head over heels in love with her. Staring at the obituaries spread out on the grimy and ink-stained table top before him, Asher glanced at his list of Lotta's admirers since the early '80s and thought about Dennis Blaydon.
Lydia was probably the last person anyone would have expected to capture Dennis Blaydon's fancy, let alone his passionate and possessive love. Bluff, golden, and perfect, Dennis had been used to the idea that any woman he chose to honor with his regard would automatically accept his proposal; the fact that Lydia did not had only added to her fascination. Since the first time he'd seen her without her spectacles and decided that she was possessed of a fragile prettiness as well as great wealth, he had wanted her and had put forth all his multitude of charm and grace into winning her, to Asher's silent despair. Everyone in Ox-ford, from the Deans of the Schools to the lowliest clerk at Blackweli's, had accepted his eventual triumph in the Willoughby matrimonial lists as a matter of course. Her father, who considered one intellectual more than enough in the family, had been all in favor of it. To Horace Blaydon's query as to what his son would want with a woman who spent half her time in the pathology laboratories, Dennis had replied, with his customary shining earnestness, "Oh, she isn't really like that, Father." Presumably he knew better than she did what Lydiawas like, Asher had thought bitterly at the time. Pushed into the background, a middle-aged, brown, nondescript colleague of her uncle, he could only watch them together and wonder how soon it would be that all hope of making her a part of his life would disappear forever.
Later he'd mentioned to Lydia how astonished he'd been that she hadn't married such a dazzling suitor. She'd been deeply insulted and demanded indignantly why he thought she'd have been taken in by a strutting oaf in a Life Guards uniform.
He grinned to himself and pushed the memories away. However it had transpired, Dennis and his other friends-Frank Ellis, the mourn-ful Nigel Taverstock, the Honorable Bertie's Equally Honorable brother Evelyn-had had a close escape. Lotta had known them all. They were all the type of young men she
liked- rich, good-looking, and susceptible. How long would it have been before she had chosen an-other of them as her next victim, when enough years had passed for them to forget poor Bertie's death?
What old score was Lotta paying off, he wondered, folding up his jotted lists, in the persons of those wealthy young men? He donned his scarf and bowler and slowly descended the narrow stairway past the purposeful riot of the day rooms, stopping briefly to thank his reporter friend with a discreet reference to "King and Country."
Had it been some ancient rape or heartbreak, he wondered as he descended the long hill of Fleet Street, its crush of cabs and trams and horse-drawn buses dwarfed by the looming shadow of St. Paul 's dome against the chilly sky. Or merely the furious resentment of a cocky and strong-willed girl who hated the poverty in which she had grown up and hated still more the satin-coated young men whose servants had pushed her from the flagways and whose carriage wheels had thrown mud on her as they passed?
Judging by Mile. La Tour's books, Celestine-or Chloe-seemed to be far more apt to pay for her own dresses than Lotta was, and the men who did buy her things were not the men of Lotta's circle. Their names were always different; evidently few men lived long enough to supply her with two hats. She was either more businesslike about her kills than Lotta, or simply less patient,
Was she, he wondered, also a "good vampire"? Like Lotta, did she savor those kisses flavored with blood and innocence? Did she make love to her victims?
Were vampires capable of the physical act of love?
The women would be, of course, he guessed-capable of faking it, anyway. As he descended to the Underground at the Temple a woman spoke to him in the shadows where the stair gave onto the platform, her red dress like dry blood in the gloom and her glottal vowels scrawling Whitechapel almost visibly across her painted mouth. Asher tipped his hat, shook his head politely, and continued down the steps, thinking: They would have to feed somewhere else before undressing, to warm the death-chill from their flesh.
Back at Prince of Wales Colonnade he returned to the now-neat cata-logue of Lotta's finances. Seated tailor-fashion on the bed in his shirt sleeves, he sorted through the bills, letters, and cards, arranged by prob-able date. Mile. La Tour had only served her vampire clientele for a few years, of course-the earliest entry for Mrs. Anthea Wren was in 1899. Lotta's pile of yellowing bills dated back through the nineteenth cen-tury and into the eighteenth, paid by men long dead to modistes whose shops were closed, sold, or incorporated with others'-a woman cannot keep the same dressmaker for seventy-five years if she herself doesn't age.
There were only four names on the recent invitations not accounted for either in the obituaries or last week's Society pages.
There was a Ludwig von Essel who had bought Lotta things between April and December of 1905 and was then heard of no more. There was Valentin Calvaire, who had first bought Lotta a yoked waist ofpeau de soie, embroidered and finished with silk nailheads, whatever those were, in March of this year; and a Chretien Sanglot, who had sent her a card of invitation to meet him at the ballet and who not only picked up his mail at the same pub as Calvaire did but, to Asher's semitrained eye, at least, wrote in the same execrable French hand. And lastly, there was someone whose name appeared on bills dating from the Napoleonic Wars and on notes of Baton's finest creamy pressed paper, less than two years old: someone who signed himself Grippen in black, jagged writing of a style not seen since the reign of James
I.
He made an abstracted supper of bread and cold tongue while writing up a precis of his findings, lighting the gas somewhere in the midst of his work without really being aware of it. He doubted that the families of any of Lotta's victims were responsible for the killing
s, but if Lotta and Calvaire had hunted together, her victims' friends might be able to offer leads. Lydia would undoubtedly know where he could reach the Honorable Evelyn and Westmoreland's fiancee, whatever her name was, but again, he'd have to be careful-careful of the vampires, who must, he knew, be suspecting his every move, careful, too, of the killer, and careful of whatever it was that Ysidro wasn't telling him,
His Foreign Office habits prompted him to add a shorter list, just for the sake of off-chances: Anthea Wren; Chloe/Celestine Watermeade/ Winterdon/du Bois; Valentin Calvaire/Chretien Sanglot; Grippen. And looking up, he discovered to his utter surprise that it was quite dark outside,
He hadn't strolled for very long along the crowded flagways of Gower Street when he was suddenly aware of Ysidro beside him. The vampire's arrival was not sudden-indeed, once Asher glanced to his left and saw the slender form in its black opera cape at his elbow, he knew he had been there for some time. He had concentrated on watching for his appearance, but it seemed to him that something had distracted him- he could no longer remember what.
Annoyed, he snapped, "Would you stop doing that and just come up to me like a human being?"
Ysidro thought about it for a moment, then countered quietly, "Would you stop identifying all the exits from a house before you go into it? I have a cab waiting."
The houses in Half Moon Street were Georgian, red brick mellowed by time and somewhat blackened by the veiling soot of the city's atmo-sphere, but retaining the graciousness of moderate wealth. Most of them showed lights in their windows; in the gaslight, Asher could make out the minuscule front gardens-little more than a few shrubs clus-tered around the high porches-groomed like carriage horses. An inde-finable air of neglect clung to Number Ten, three-quarters of the way down the pavement. Asher identified it as the result of a jobbing gar-dener who had not been kept up to his work, and front steps that went weeks or months without being scrubbed-fatal, in London.
"Housekeeping presents its own problems for the Undead, doesn't it?" he remarked quietly as they ascended the tall steps to the front door. "Either you keep servants or scrub your doorstep yourself-the windows here haven't been washed, either. Every doorstep on the street is brickbatted daily but this one."
"There are ways of getting around that." Ysidro's face, in profile against the reflection of the street lamps as he turned the key, retained its calmly neutral expression.
"I'm sure there are. But even the stupidest servant is going to notice something amiss when nobody orders any food or uses the chamber pots."
The vampire paused, the tarnished brass door handle in his gloved hand. He regarded Asher enigmatically, but in the back of his brim-stone-colored eyes, for an instant, Asher half thought he glimpsed the flicker of amused appreciation. Then the black cloak whispered against the doorframe, and Ysidro led the way into the house.
"Edward Hammersmith was the youngest son of a nabob of the India trade, almost exactly one hundred years ago," he said, his light, uninflected voice echoing softly in the darkness. "The house was one of
three owned by the family; Hammersmith asked for and got it from his father after he became vampire, thereafter gaining a reputation as the family's reclusive eccentric. He was in his way a reclusive eccentric even as a vampire-he seldom went out, save to hunt."
There was a faint scratch, the whiff of sulphur overriding for a mo-ment the general foetor of must and dampness that filled what, by the sound of the echoes, must be a large and lofty front hall. The sharp sliver of matchlight confirmed this an instant later, racing in threads along tarnished gilt panel moldings and the graceful medallions of a high Adam ceiling, almost invisible overhead in the gloom. For that first moment, Ysidro's face, etched in those hard-cut shadows, seemed, too, something wrought of unbelievably delicate plaster. Then he touched the flame to the wick of an oil lamp that stood with several others on a Sheraton sideboard. The light leaped and slithered over the square mirror set in the sideboard, the web-shrouded lusters of the chandelier, the rounded glass of the smutted chimney which gray-gloved fingers, seeming so disembodied in the warm glow, fitted over the flame,
"Did he hunt with Lotta?"
"Upon occasion." Sprawling shadows followed them up the stairs, flowing over carved wall panels warped with damp. "They were both..." Again that pause, that sense of veering, like a small boat before gusty wind, into potentially less dangerous seas. "Edward liked a change now and then. Usually he hunted alone."
"Was he a 'good vampire'?"
"Not very-" At the top of the first flight of stairs, Ysidro turned right and pushed open the double doors to what had once been the large drawing room. He held his lamp aloft as he did so, and the light scat-tered across books-literally thousands of books, crammed into make-shift shelves which not only lined every inch of wall nearly to the curve of the ceiling, but stacked the floor hip-deep in places. Little paths threaded between the stacks, like the beaten hoof lines or dassie tunnels that stitched unseen through the deep grass of the veldt. Towers of books ascended drunkenly from the two sideboards that loomed up out of the gloomy maze, and more were visible through the sideboards' half-opened caned doors; they piled the seats of every chair but one in untidy heaps. Bundles of papers were scattered over them or lay loose like leaves blown in an autumn wind. Bending down, Asher picked up one that lay nearest the door-brown and brittle as Lotta's oldest pet-ticoats, it was sheet music of some obscure aria by Salieri.
Like a little island, there was an open place in the middle of the room, where grimy gray patches of lichenous carpet could be seen; it contained a chair, a small table supporting an oil lamp, a mahogany piano, and a harpsichord whose faded paint had nearly all flaked away. Sheet music heaped the floor under both instruments.
Beside him, Ysidro's calm voice continued, "There is a regrettable tendency among vampires to become like the little desert mice, which hoard shining things in holes."
"If passion for life is the core of your nature," Asher remarked, "that isn't surprising, but it must make for awkward domestic arrangements. Do all vampires do it?"
He looked away from the gloomy cavern, with its smells of mildew and damp, and found the vampire's strange eyes on him, a flicker of inscrutable interest in their depths. Ysidro looked away. "No." He turned from the door and moved toward the stairs at the far end of the hall, Asher following in his wake. "But I find the ones who do not rather boring."
It was on the tip of Asher's tongue to ask Ysidro what his hobby was, what passion filled the dark hours of his wakefulness when he was not actively hunting his prey, but he decided to take advantage of the Span-iard's relatively communicative mood with matters less frivolous. "Did Calvaire hunt with Lotta?"
"Yes. They became quite good friends."
"Were they lovers?"
Ysidro paused at the top of the second flight of stairs, the lamp held low in his hand, its light streaming up onto the narrow, fragile-boned face and haloing the webby stringiness of his hair, casting a blot of shadow on the low ceiling above. Carefully, he replied, "As suchvam-pires understand the concept, yes. But it has nothing to do with either love or sexual union. Vampires have no sex-the organs are present, but nonfunctional. And neither Lotta nor Calvaire would even have consid-ered the happiness of the other, which is what I understand to be one of the tenets of mortal love."
"Then what was between them?"
"A shared ecstasy in the kill." He turned to open the small door to the left of the stairs, then paused and turned back. "There is, you under-stand, an ecstasy, a surge of-I don't know what. A 'kick,' I think they call such things now-in the drinking of the life as it pours from the veins of another. It is not only in the taste of the blood, which I am told not all of us find pleasant, though I do. We are as much creatures of the psychic as the physical. We perceive things differently from human per-ceptions. We can taste-feel-the texture of the minds of others, and at no time more intensely than when the human mind is crying out in death. That is what we drink, as well as the
blood-the psychic force, which answers to and feeds our own psychic abilities to control the minds of others."
He leaned in the doorway, cocking his head a little, so that the strands of his pale hair fell in attenuated crescents on his shoulders. The lamp in his hands touched face and hair, wanning them, alike colorless, into the illusion of goldenness, like honey-stained ivory. Asher was con-scious, suddenly, of the empty darkness of the house all around.
His voice continued, light and disinterested and absolutely without inflection, committing nothing of the enigma of his eyes. "As a vampire, I am conscious at all times of the aura, the scent, of the human psyches near me, as much as I am conscious of the smell of live blood. Some vampires find this almost unbearably exciting, which is why they play with their victims. There is never a time-I am told-when they are not thinking, Shall it be now or later? It is that which feeds us, more than the physical blood-it is that which we hunt. And that psychic hunger, that lust for the draining of the soul, is as far beyond the knife-edge instant before the cresting of sexual orgasm as that instant is beyond-oh-after you have had two pieces of marzipan, and you are wondering whether you might like a third one, or a bit of honey cake instead."
After a long while Asher said quietly, "I see."
"You don't," Ysidro replied, his voice whispering away in soft echoes against the darkness of the empty house, "and you can't. But you would do well to remember it, if ever you find yourself in the company of other vampires than I."
There were candles in all the wall sconces of the room where Edward Hammersmith had kept his coffin. Ysidro thrust one of them down into the lamp chimney to touch the flame, then went around the room, lighting the others, until the whole place blazed with a quivering roseate glow unlike the soft steadiness of gaslight. Asher noted boxes of candles stacked carelessly in every corner and puddles of wax, raised to
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