TWO
‘Lydia?’
The shadows of the stairwell swallowed up the sound of her name, and in the silence of the house – death-still but not empty – Asher thought, This is a dream.
Anger flooded him, at the knowledge that he had stood here once before.
A foggy evening in the autumn of 1907. The house chill. The clip of hooves in Holywell Street loud in the silence. Standing in the front hall in his dark academic gown, Asher knew that if he went downstairs to the kitchen he’d find Mrs Grimes, Ellen the maid, and Sylvie the tweeny – who had married the butcher’s son last year and been replaced by the equally feckless Daisy – crumpled asleep at the table, like a tableau in a cheap melodrama . . .
And upstairs, Lydia would be lying unconscious on the divan in the upstairs parlor, fingers clasped around her spectacles where they rested upon her breast and hair hanging in a pottery-red coil to the floor. Don Simon Ysidro would be sitting at Asher’s desk, just out of the line of sight of the door, long hands folded, like a skeletal white mantis awaiting his prey. ‘My name is Don Simon Xavier Christian Morado de la Cadeña-Ysidro, and I am what you call a vampire.’
And despite half a lifetime of research into the folklore of a dozen cultures, Asher had not believed him until he had listened to his chest with Lydia’s stethoscope and satisfied himself that his uncanny guest had neither heartbeat nor breath.
He whispered, ‘Damn you—’ and strode up the stairs.
But when he threw open the door of the upstairs study, the divan – though it was back in the same position it had been in, that evening four years before, visible through the half-open connecting door – was empty. No whispered suggestion, as there had been on that occasion: I can kill your wife, your servants, and all those you care for, if I choose . . . if you do not do as I say. The lamp on his desk was lit, but no slender gentleman sat there, with his long white hair hanging to his shoulders and his eyes like crystallized sulfur, and the faint lilt of archaic Spanish still lingering in his soft voice.
The papers at the desk had been splattered with droplets of blood.
And in blood was written – on Lydia’s stationery, damn his effrontery! – in a sixteenth-century hand:
James,
We must speak.
It took Asher a day to find the court he had seen in dreams.
He knew it would be near the river, in the medieval tangle of streets that had been spared by the Great Fire. He knew it would be towards the east, between Whitechapel Street and the filthy, sprawling mazes of the docks. He knew to look for the half-ruinous spire of a pre-Wren church and a small, oddly-angled square surrounded by houses of blackened brick and ancient half-timbering: homes that must once have been the pride of wealthy Elizabethan merchants, but were now given over to sailors’ boarding houses and the tenements of the poor.
The March afternoon was arctic, and by three – when he finally identified the place – fog was rising from the river, mingling with the mephitic stinks of coal smoke and outdoor latrines. Shadowy figures stumbled on the worn cobblestones of the alleys, or clustered around the glowing stoves of the chestnut vendors, their coughing like that of the restless ghosts Odysseus had encountered on the banks of the Styx—
Bodiless, until you gave them blood.
Ysidro wouldn’t make his appearance until the sun was out of the sky.
Having located the square, Asher repaired to the nearest public house for a surprisingly good dinner of bangers and mash. The stevedores, thieves, whores and toughs who populated the Fish and Ring on Marigold Walk neither troubled Asher nor indeed seemed to notice him. Oddly for a man who was routinely shown off by his students to visiting Americans as the quintessential Oxford don, Asher had perfected the appearance of the equally quintessential out-of-work laborer. Had he not been a chameleon, he supposed, he would not have lived to the age of forty-six as a Secret Servant of the King.
When full dark came, he paid his two bob and made his way back to Felmonger Court.
In his dream that narrow, crooked space had been empty – to say nothing of awash with a lake of blood. In waking reality, at six o’clock on a raw spring evening the place swarmed with ragged children, rolling hoops and throwing rocks and calling to one another with piping ghostly voices in the fog. Slatternly women spoke to Asher from the darkness of alleyways as he passed. Men jostled past him, reeking of tobacco and gin and garments years unwashed, seeking only the relative shelter of overcrowded rooms and a few hours’ kip before returning to their work. Somewhere an old man’s quavery voice wailed, ‘Scissors, brollies, fix ’em all, fix ’em up—Scissors, brollies . . .’
Contrary to the assertions of Bram Stoker (Ysidro had informed him) and most other writers on the subject, vampires lived primarily on the poor, whom no one would seek to avenge or even locate if they should disappear. As he crossed the court, Asher scanned the darkness (the street lamp really was broken), wondering which whore, which child, which gin-fuddled drunkard would fail to come home that night, always supposing he or she had a home. Wondering if Grippen – the Master Vampire of London – or one of his fledglings was watching those huddled bundles of rags from the shadows right now, choosing a victim . . .
Though, of course, it was no more possible to see Grippen when he hunted, than it was to see smallpox or cholera or starvation, before they struck.
And it crossed Asher’s mind – not for the first time – to wonder if it was Ysidro at all who had put those images in his dreams, and not Grippen or one of the others, who considered that one mortal who knew how to find vampire lairs – one mortal who truly believed that such creatures existed – was one mortal too many.
Then beside him a gentle voice said, ‘James. ’Twere good of you to come.’
He felt the hair on his nape rise as he turned. ‘Had I a choice?’
‘My dear James.’ The vampire regarded him without change of expression, a stillness that had nothing in it of the immobility of a corpse. The death was inside and had happened long ago. ‘One always has choices.’ They passed from beneath the dim and greasy glow of a window; shadow veiled Ysidro’s thin face once more. The hand that closed on Asher’s elbow was light as a girl’s, though the fingers could have crushed the bone. In the mouth of an alleyway, rank with sewage and dead fish, a woman’s voice purred, ‘’Ere, gents, ever ’ad the two of you turned off at once?’
Ysidro responded politely, ‘There is nothing we have not had, Madame, my friend and I,’ and they kept moving, deeper into the darkness.
Asher felt icy water slop against the outside of his boots, and then the plank of a makeshift bridge vibrated underfoot. He caught a glimpse of water below them in the shadows. They turned twice right, then left, Asher counting strides. He felt Ysidro’s mind press on his own, a sort of sleepy uncaring, and he fought it . . . three, four, five, six . . . Another right, the creak of a hinge, and a cold up-rushing stench of mice and mold.
Stairs going down. An old kitchen at the bottom. A lamp on a wooden table, its dim glow barely outlining a dusty rummage of burst sacks and broken bins around the wall. A door on the facing wall; the smell of more water beyond.
‘Not my primary residence.’ Ysidro brought a slat-backed chair for Asher and perched himself, straight as if with the boning of a court doublet, on the table beside the lamp. ‘Mistress Lydia is entirely too clever in the study of deeds of conveyance. I trust she is well?’
‘She is well, yes.’
Ysidro’s silence lasted a few moments longer than it had to, the only indication that he had met – much less traveled with, or loved, or deliberately deceived – Asher’s young wife. It was only with careful attention – vampires relying as they did upon the misdirection of human perception – that Asher could see the frightful scars that Ysidro had taken on his face and throat in Lydia’s defense and his own. Undead flesh healed slowly, and differently from that of living men. After eighteen months, the marks still stood out like ridges of dried sticking-plaster on the colorless flesh. How long would it – did it – take vampire flesh to heal?
Lydia would have asked outright.
He remembered her silence and the words she would sometimes cry out in sleep.
Or maybe not.
‘Yourself?’
‘I’m well,’ said Asher. ‘You?’
‘Is this politeness?’ Ysidro’s head tilted a little to one side. ‘Or do you truly wish to know?’
Asher considered for a moment, then said, ‘I don’t know.’ And after another moment, ‘I truly wish to know, Don Simon.’
‘Another time, then.’ Ysidro drew a folded paper from the pocket of an immaculate gray coat – only a vampire could have worn such a garment in the East End and remained unnoticed – and passed it across.
It was in English: