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01 Those Who Hunt The Night ja-1

Page 12

by Barbara Hambly


  strong as steel, and fought it as he had fought Ysidro's in the train. The arm around his chest crushed tighter, and he twisted with both his hands at the fingers buried in his coat-he might just as well have tried to break the fingers of a statue.

  Anthea, too, was tearing at Grippen's wrists, trying to force them loose. He heard her cry, "Don't...!" as he felt the man's huge, square hand tear his shirt collar free, and thought, with bizarre abstrac-tion, And now for a little experiment in applied folklore...

  "God's death!" Grippen's hand jerked back from the silver chain, the reek of blood on his breath nauseating. Asher dropped his weight against the slackened hold, slipping free for an instant before the en-raged vampire struck him a blow on the side of the head that knocked him spinning into the opposite wall. He hit it like a rag doll-the strike had been blindingly fast, coming out of nowhere with an impact like that of a speeding motorcar. As he sank, stunned, to the floor the philologist in him picked out the sixteenth-century rounded vowels- far more pronounced than Ysidro's-as the vampire bellowed, "Poxy whoreson, I'll give you silver!"

  His vision graying out, he saw two shapes melt and whirl together, black and ivory in the lamplight. Anthea had hold of both of Grippen's wrists, trying to drag him back, her storm-colored hair falling loose from its pins around her shoulders. Though his mind was swimming, Asher staggered to his feet and stumbled the length of the room to the pillared archway. An inglorious enough exit, he thought dizzily. Prop-erly speaking, a gentleman should remain and not let a lady take the brunt of a fracas, but the fact was that she was far more qualified than he for the task. It was also very unlikely Grippen could or would kill her, and virtually certain that, if Asher remained, he was a dead man.

  Savoy Walk was silent, empty, wreathed thickly now in fog. If he could make it to the end of the street, up Salisbury Court to the lights of Fleet Street, he'd be safe...

  He stumbled down the tall stone steps, scarcely feeling the raw cold of the river mist that lanced through his shirt sleeves and froze his throat through his torn co lla r.Dangerous ground for a mortal to tread indeed, he thought, as his feet splashed in the shallow puddles of the uneven cobbles. Heedless of appearances, he began to run.

  He made it no farther than the black slot where the court narrowed into the crevice of the lane.

  In that shadowy opening a form materialized, seeming to take shape, as they were said to, out of the mist itself-a diminutive girl, a pocket Venus, primrose curls heaped high on her head and dark eyes gleaming feral in the diffuse glow from the lights of the house. He turned, seeking some other escape, and saw behind him in the fog the pale face of a world-weary ghost that belonged to the third Earl of Ernchester.

  Their hands were like ice as they closed around his arms.

  "I'm sorry," Ernchester said softly, "but you have to come with us."

  Eight

  Seven years is a long time," The Honorable Evelyn Westmoreland stirred at his coffee with a tiny spoon, looking down into its midnight depths. Across the table from him, Lydia hoped that seven years was long enough.

  "I know," she said softly and rested her hand on the table, close enough to his to let him know that, had she not been married, he could have covered it with his. The plumes on her hat, like pink-tinged sunset clouds, moved as she leaned forward; from the lace of her cuffs, her kid-gloved hands emerged like the slim stamens of a rose. Her brown eyes were wide and gentle-she could see him as a soft-edged pattern of dark and light, but had decided that in this case it was better to look well than to see well. Besides, she had learned how to interpret the most subtle of signs. "Believe me, I wish I could let the matter rest."

  "You should." There was an edge of bitter distaste in his voice. "It's not the sort of thing you should be asking about... Mrs. Asher." The soft lips, fleshy as those of some decadent Roman bust, pinched up. Past him, the red-and-black shape of one of Gatti's well-trained waiters glided by and, though it was well past the hour when teas ceased being served, fetched a little more hot water, which he soundlessly added to the teapot at Lydia's elbow, and removed the ruins of the little cake-and-sandwich plate. The restaurant was beginning to smell of dinner now rather than tea. The quality of the voices of the few diners coming in was different; the women's indistinct forms were colored differently than for daytime and flashed with jewels. Beyond the square leads of the windowpanes, a misty dusk had fallen on the Strand.

  Those seven years, Lydia reflected privately, had not been particu-larly kind to the Equally Honorable Evelyn. He was still as big and burly as he'd been in those halcyon days of rugger matches against Kings; but, even without her specs, she could tell that under his immaculate tailoring he'd put on flesh. When he'd taken her arm to lead her to their little table, Lydia had been close enough to see that, though not yet thirty, he bore the crumpled pouchiness of dissipation beneath his blue-gray eyes, the bitter weariness of one who does not quite know what has gone wrong; his flesh smelled faintly of expensive pomade. He was not the young man who had so assiduously offered her his arm at croquet matches and concerts of Oriental music, no longer Dennis Blaydon's puppylike brother-in-arms against all comers on the field. Even back when she'd been most impressed with his considerable good looks, Lydia had found his conversation stilted and boring, and it was worse now. It had taken nearly an hour of patient chitchat over tea to relax him to the point of, she hoped, confidences.

  She looked down at her teacup, fingering the fragile curlicues of its handle, aware that, with her eyes downcast, he was studying her face. "Howdid he die, Evelyn?"

  "It was a carriage accident." The voice turned crisp, defensive.

  "Oh," she said softly. "I thought... I'd heard..."

  "Whatever you heard," Evelyn said, "and whomever you heard it from, it was a carriage accident. I'd rather not..."

  "Please..." She raised her eyes to his once more. "I need to talk to you, Evelyn. I didn't know who else I could ask. I sent you that note asking to meet me here because... I've heard there was a woman."

  Anger flicked at the edges of his tone. "She had nothing to do with it. He died in a..."

  "I think a friend of mine has gotten involved with her."

  "Who?" He moved his head, his eyes narrowing, the wary inflection reminding her of her father when he was getting ready to say things like "station in life" and "not done."

  "No one you know," Lydia stammered.

  He paused a moment, thinking about that, turning things over in his mind with the slow deliberation she had remembered. The Honorable Bertie, dimwitted though he had been, had always been the brighter brother. Then he said slowly, "Don't worry about it, Lydia... Mrs. Asher. Truly," he added more gently, seeing the pucker of worry be-tween her copper-dark brows. "I... You see, I heard recently that... that someone I know had been seeing her. Of course, you were barely out of school when Bertie was found... when Bertie died, and there was a lot we couldn't tell you. But she was a pernicious woman, Lydia, truly evil. And a week or so ago I... er... I met her and warned her off... paid her off... gave her money and told her to leave the country. She's gone." He didn't look at her as he spoke.

  Embarrassment?she wondered. Or something else?

  Truly?" She leaned forward a little, her eyes on his face, trying to detect shifts of expression without being obvious about it.

  She heard the weary distaste, the revulsion in his voice as he said, "Truly."

  She let another long pause rest on the scented air between them, then asked, "What was she like? I have a reason for asking," she added, as the Equally Honorable Evelyn puffed himself up preparatory to expos-tulation on the subject of curiosity unseemly for a woman of her class and position. "You know I've become a doctor."

  "I do," he said, with a trace of indignation, as if he'd had the right to forbid it, and she'd flouted his authority anyway. "Though I really can't see how Professor Asher, or any husband, could let his wife..."

  "Well," she continued, cutting off a too-familiar tirade with an artless
appearance of eagerness, "in my studies I've come across two or three cases of a kind of nervous disorder that reminded me of things I-my friend-told me about this-this woman Carlotta. I suspect that she may be insane."

  That got his interest, as she'd found it got nine people's out of ten, even those who considered her authority for the accusation an affront to their manhood. He leaned forward, his watery eyes intent, and she reached across the small table with its starched white cloth and took his chubby hand in both of hers, "But I haven't met her, or seen her, and you have... if you'd be willing to talk about it. Evelyn, please. I do need your help."

  In the cab on her way back to Bruton Place she jotted down the main points of the subsequent discussion-it would have looked bad, she had decided, to be taking notes while Evelyn was talking, and would have put him off his stride. The waiters at Gatti's, well-trained, had observed the intentness of the discussion between the wealthy-looking gentleman and the delicate, red-haired girl, and had tactfully let them alone- something they probably would not have done had she been scribbling notes.

  The interview had been frustrating, because Evelyn was as much wrapped up in sports-and now in the stock market-as his brother Bertie had been in clothes and fashion and was grossly inobservant of anything else, but with patient questioning she'd been able to piece certain things together.

  First, Lotta had been seen as early as an hour after sunset, when the sky was still fairly light-Evelyn had thought that was in spring, but wasn't sure.

  Second, sometimes she had been paler, and sometimes rosier- though it was difficult to tell by gaslight-indicating that sometimes she had fed before joining the Honorable Bertie and his friends. Evelyn did not remember whether she had ever been rosy on those occasions upon which she had met them early, which would indicate that she had ris enjust after sunset to hunt.

  Third, she often wore heavy perfume. James had said nothing about vampires smelling different from humans, but presumably, with a differ-ent diet, they might have a different odor, though a very faint one-she tried not to think about the smell of blood and strangeness that had touched her nostrils in the dark of the Covent Garden court.

  Other than that, he'd thought there was something odd about her fingernails, he couldn't say what. And her eyes, but he couldn't say what either, so had fallen back on "an expression of evil," which was no help toward clinical analysis.

  About the circumstances of his brother's death he would not speak at all, but Lydia guessed, from things James had told her about the tech-niques of spying, that when Lotta finally killed her victim, she had arranged for the body to be found in circumstances that were either disgraceful or compromising, such as dressed in women's clothing, or in an alley behind an opium den, or something equally damning.

  And lastly, Evelyn had told her that Bertie had once had a charm made, a lover's knot, out of Lotta's red-gold hair. It was still among Bertie's things. He would send it to her by the morning post, to the accommodation address where she picked up her mail.

  She sat back in the cab as it jolted along the crowded pavement of Gower Street, staring abstractedly out at the blurred yellow halos of the street lamps where they shone through the mists against the mono-chrome cutouts of the house fronts behind. The rising fog seemed to damp noises, making all things slightly unreal; omnibuses like moving towers loomed out of it, their knife-board advertisements for Pond's Arthriticus or Clincher Tires-Still Unequaled for Quality and Dura-bility-transformed into strange portents by the surrounding gloom.

  When the cab reached Number 109 Bruton Place, Lydia paid the driver off quickly and hurried inside, displeased to find her heart racing with a swift, nervous fear. She found she was becoming uncomfortable at the thought of being outside, even for a few moments, after dark.

  The room to which the vampires took Asher was a cellar, not of Ernchester House but of a deserted shop whose narrow door opened into the blackness of the lane. Ernchester produced the keys to its two padlocks from a waistcoat pocket and led the way into a tiny back room, piled high with dusty boxes and crates and boasting an old soap-stone sink in one corner, whose rusty pump, silhouetted against the dim yellowish reflection of the window, had the appearance of some wry-necked monster brooding in the darkness. An oil lamp stood on the side of the sink; Ernchester lighted it and led the way to another door nearly hidden behind the crates, whose padlock and hasp had been ripped off with a crowbar-recently, by the look of the gouges in the wood. The smell of mildew and dampness rose chokingly to engulf them as they descended the hairpin spiral of stairs to a cellar, certainly much wider, Asher guessed, than the building above; probably deeper, he thought, glancing at its far end, nearly obscured in shadows, and beyond a doubt older. Rough-hewn arched beams supported a ceiling of smoke-stained stone; just below them, at the other end of the room, two pairs of locked shutters indicated windows either at street level or set into a light well just below it.

  "They're barred behind those shutters," the Earl remarked, taking an old-fashioned, long-barreled key from a nail beside the door. "So even if you could get the padlocks on them open, it wouldn't do you much good. Chloe, my dear, would you be so good as to fetch Dr. Asher's coat? And mine as well?"

  The fair- haired vampire girl shot him a look that was both sullen and annoyed, childish on that angelic

  face. ''Don't trust me to stay with 'im while you get 'em yourself, ducks?" she mocked in accents that put her origins within half a dozen streets of the Church of St. Mary-Le-Bow. She threw a glance back at Asher in the flickering light of the oil lamp they'd collected when they'd passed through the room above. "And don't go givin' yourself airs over that bit o' tin you got hung round your gullet, Professor-we can drink from the veins in your wrists, you know."

  She raised Asher's wrist to her mouth, pressed her cold lips to the thin skin there in a smiling kiss. Then she turned and with barely a rustle of her silk petticoats was gone in the darkness.

  Asher became aware that he was shivering. Though the cellar was dry, it was intensely cold. Beside him Ernchester, lamp still in hand, was frowning at the narrow black slot of the door through which Asher knew the girl must have gone, though he had not seen her do so. She, like Ysidro, moved largely unseen.

  "An impertinent child." Ernchester frowned, his sparse brows bris-tling queerly in the shaky light. "It isn't just a question of breeding- though of course I understand that things do change. It just seems that no one knows how to behave anymore." He set the lamp down on the floor beside him and held thin hands in the column of heat that rose from its chimney.

  "Anthea has gone to look for Ysidro," he went on after a moment. "Neither of us approved of Don Simon's plan for hunting the killer- for reasons which are obvious by your mere presence here. But now that he has hired you, I agree with her that it would be most unfair simply to kill you out of hand, leaving aside the fact that you are, in a sense, a guest beneath my roof." Those dulled, weary blue eyes rested on him for a moment, as if seeking reasons other than an old habit of noblesse oblige for sparing his life.

  Dryly, Asher said, "I take it Grippen voted against it, also?"

  "Oh, there was never a question of avote." By his tone the elderly vampire had entirely missed the sarcasm. "Don Simon is and always has been a law unto himself. He was the only one of us to think it necessary to hire a human. But he has always been most high in the instep and will carry his humors against all opposition,"

  Asher rubbed his shoulder, which ached where Grippen had flung him into the wall. "He might have mentioned that."

  Beneath their feet, the stone floor vibrated; the glass of the lamp chimney sang faintly in its metal socket, "The Underground Railroad runs very close to this cellar," Ernchester explained, as the nimble died away. "Indeed, when they were cutting for it, we feared they might break through, as in fact they did in another house we own a few streets away. That cellar was deeper than this one, without windows-it had been the wine room of an old tavern, paved over and forgotten after the Fire. T
here are a great number of such places in the old City, some of them dating back to Roman times. It was desperately damp and uncom-fortable, which was why no one was sleeping there when the workmen broke in."

  Asher stroked his mustache thoughtfully and wandered across the uneven slab floor to the coffin against the wall Opening it, he saw the lining burned entirely away at the bottom, only clinging in charred shreds around the upper rim. Nothing but a faint film of scraped-at ash lay over the charred wood of the coffin's floor.

  He wondered in what church's crypt they had buried the remains. St. Bride's, beyond a doubt. Odd, that after so many years that should still be a concern to them... or perhaps not so odd.

  He replaced the lid and turned back. "Were the padlocks on the windows open, then, when you found

  Danny's body?"

  Ernchester glanced quickly at the barred shutters of the windows, then back at the empty coffin. For a moment he seemed to be trying to figure out how much he should tell a human; then, with a tired gesture, he gave it up. "Yes. The key was on the sill."

  Asher walked over to the window, stretched his long arm up to touch the tips of his fingers to the lock. He looked back at the vampire. "But the bars were undisturbed?"

  "Yes. Had someone-a tramp, or a vagabond-entered this cellar and been looking about, it would be natural for him to open the shutters to obtain light, you see."

  "Was there any sign of a tramp elsewhere in the building? Cupboards open, drawers ajar? Or in the rest of the house? Any sign that the place had been searched?"

  "No," Ernchester admitted. "That is-I don't think so. I really don't know. Anthea would." Another man-a living man-might have sighed and shaken his head, but, as with Anthea and Ysidro, such gestures seemed to have been drained from him by the passing weari-ness of centuries. There was only a slight relaxing of that straight, stocky body, a loosening of the tired lines of the face. "Anthea-does such things these days. I know it's the portion of the man to manage affairs, but... it seems as if all the world is changing. I used to keep up better than I do now. I dare say it's only the effect of the factory soot in the air or the noise in the streets... it usen't to be like this, you know. I sometimes think the living suffer from it as much as we. Folk are different now from what they were."

 

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