TEN
Asher sent the telegram – signed with Ysidro’s name – to Lydia from Moscow’s Kursk Station, just before boarding the ten a.m. train. Further conversation in the small hours had only confirmed Asher’s conviction that it would be best to move their departure forward to daylight, an opinion in which Ysidro concurred. ‘Molchanov has many fledglings,’ the vampire remarked an hour or so before it grew light, as he packed clothing, toiletries, clean shirts – he was as fastidious as any dandy Asher had ever met. ‘His mistrust of Western “cleverness”, as he terms it, outdistances any consideration of what he would do were a foreign vampire to become stranded in Moscow because his servant had met an unfortunate end. Besides, he can think of no greater felicity than to be obliged to dwell in Russia for the rest of eternity. I think it were best, were neither you nor I in Moscow when darkness next falls.’
‘I’m not going to argue with you there.’
It would take Lydia, Asher calculated, three days to reach St Petersburg. Profoundly as he missed her, the thought of her coming here – crossing the paths of the vampires, as he had warned her not to do back in the smug safety of Oxford – filled him with dread. Yet if he and Ysidro were to trace the St Petersburg interloper – to find his name, possibly his former nest, and any account of his intentions, resources, and contacts – they would have to seek him in Germany: and Ysidro being what he was, there was no question of either he, or Asher, undertaking the search alone.
What an unaided human could do to locate the interloper in St Petersburg, Lydia knew well how to do. She had tracked down vampire lairs before and knew what to look for, not only in the numbers in bank records – in property transfer dates and the names on accounts – but in the more subtle realms of gossip, rumor, and newspaper reports. She might not know the Triple Entente from the Triple Alliance, or be able to recall the name of the Prime Minister or what party he was in, but a girlhood in upper-class London society had given her a talent for sorting usable information from the persiflage of gossip, for asking the right questions, for listening to what people said when they forgot that anyone was listening, and most of all for sniffing out where money was.
And a lifetime of using precisely those unobtrusive skills in the name of Queen and Country had taught Asher that gossip and listening, sorting chance remarks and poking into peoples’ financial records, generally yielded better results than hair’s-breadth escapes after stealing secret plans.
How long the interloper planned to remain in Petersburg, Asher did not know, nor where he would go from there; he was acutely conscious that this might be their only chance to scotch the alliance between vampire and Kaiser. Yet, every time Lydia tampered in the business end of the affairs of the Undead, it was like watching her dart across a den of sleeping lions.
‘Razumovsky can get her whatever bank records she needs,’ he had said, looking up from the telegram form at Ysidro, who was perched on the corner of the gilt-and-malachite desk in the town house’s tiny library. That was at six a.m., the first whispers of dawnlight not far off. Razumovsky – as Lydia would know from the duplicate address-book he had left with her – was the man he meant by Isaacson; any reference to Uncle William’s railway shares was the tag that meant, The following sentence is to be disregarded, it’s only for show. ‘If our interloper is German, he’ll deal with German banks. And I trust that neither of our St Petersburg rivals has the sophistication to realize that Lydia will be a threat.’
‘They are Russians.’ A world of conquistador scorn glinted like a single pale star in Ysidro’s colorless voice. Ysidro himself – upon learning how Lydia went about comparing wills and property records, payments from one bank account to another, and clandestine transfers of stocks and bearer bonds – had rearranged his own living arrangements to preclude such investigation. For a man who had died in 1555 he had become surprisingly conversant with such modern conveniences as telegraphs, foreign bank accounts, and consolidated private holding companies with headquarters in New York.
‘Moreover, they will themselves soon depart for the Crimea, for Odessa or Kiev. Within a month our interloper will have the city to himself, though how this could profit him I know not. For nigh on two months he will be a prisoner, and the cellars of the town are shallow and damp. ’Twere best, I think, did you not meet with your lady, save by daylight.’
‘That’s another statement I’m not going to give you an argument about.’
They departed Moscow by the ten o’clock train that same morning: an express, roaring through a flat world of fields where bare ground was only beginning to show. Asher closed himself into his first-class reserved compartment, and slept – the light, wary sleep of Abroad – and dreamed, uneasily, of an endlessly huge railway station with golden pillars between its platforms, like the Admiralty Hall in the Winter Palace. He and Lydia sought one another, leaping onto trains to avoid some frightful peril, riding them to terminus and then coming back in the hopes of finding one another before whatever it was – faceless, silent, smelling of rotten blood – found them.
When he climbed the steps of the Imperatrice Catherine at nine thirty that night, the dvornik handed him a note, the glue on its envelope surprisingly intact.
Jules Plummer
L’Imperatrice Catherine
26, Moyka Embankment
There has been another burning.
Zudanievsky
‘I told you!’ Ellen’s voice cracked in real distress. ‘I said, didn’t I, ma’am, that if Mr James went off looking for that cousin of his, and in such terrible weather – and to Russia, of all the heathen places! – didn’t I say he’d come down ill, as he did before?’
‘Indeed you did.’ Lydia folded up the telegram, her heart beating fast.
Not because she believed for one instant that Jamie was ill, of course.
Don Simon . . .
Ysidro.
She set the yellow paper down, aware that it gave away how badly her hands were shaking. Ellen peered at her, thick untidy brows drawing together: ‘Now, ma’am, don’t take on so,’ she said, her own anxiety shoved abruptly aside. ‘I’m sure it’s not so bad as this Mr Simon seems to think. He’ll be all right.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Lydia smiled up at the bigger woman, realizing – from the cold of her hands and feet, and the expression on Ellen’s face – that she must have gone pale.
‘It’s probably just a chill.’
‘I’m sure it is.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Would you have Mick bring down my luggage from the box room? I think there’s a train to London this evening.’
‘And then what?’ demanded her servant. ‘Us arriving at all hours of the night and having to find a hotel . . .’
Lydia opened her mouth, shut it, then managed to say, ‘Yes, of course.’ Us. The inevitable taboo against young ladies traveling alone . . .
Margaret Potton’s face rose before her, huge blue eyes blinking behind thick spectacles beneath the eaves of her outdated hat.
Don Simon told me I’d find you here . . .
Ysidro had announced, I will not have you traveling alone abroad like a jauntering slut, and, disregarding Lydia’s protests, had coolly gone about recruiting a respectable female companion for her.
A companion he had killed, because by journey’s end Margaret Potton had known too much about vampires – and about him.
And because she’d bored him. Guilt seared her, at the knowledge that this was true. She blinked quickly . . . though not quickly enough to keep Ellen, misinterpreting, from laying a hand on her shoulder and saying, ‘There, there, ma’am, he’ll be all right.’
She took another breath and patted the big, rough hand where it lay among the lace of her tea gown. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. Ysidro liked her – loves you, her mind whispered, though she pushed the thought violently away (such creatures don’t love . . .) – among other reasons, because of her intelligence that matched his own. He had chosen Margaret because she was stupid. Had made her fall in love with him because she was lonely . . . and had disposed of her like an ink-stained glove because she was clingy, uninteresting to him, and awkward in her jealous love. Because she was everything that Lydia wasn’t.
And Margaret had known it. Their journey together had been punctuated by a dozen jealous scenes that had left the wretched little governess in tears.
And, after all that, Ysidro had killed her.
In what she hoped was a normal voice, Lydia went on, ‘You’re quite right. We’ll pack tonight, and you’ll come with me as far as London tomorrow morning. There are bureaux in London where one can hire a gentlewoman companion – I would never dream of taking you so far from your family, and into danger of sickness—’
‘I’d be all right, ma’am.’ Ellen sounded deeply dubious, however, about the whole idea of travel beyond the English-speaking world. ‘If you’d rather I went . . .?’
‘Dearest, I wouldn’t.’ Lydia pressed her hand again and manufactured a dewy smile. ‘Besides, Mr Hurley would never forgive me if I were to take you away.’ She named the keeper of the local pub on the corner, a widower with a handsome mustache.
Ellen bridled like a coy percheron. ‘Go along with you!’
Lydia finally got her out of the study, so that she could look up who the blazes Isaacson really was, whom she was supposed to find in St Petersburg. When she saw that it was Prince Razumovsky she felt profoundly cheered, as if she’d seen the Russian diplomat’s handsome, gold-bearded face in a crowd. Thus she ascended to her packing with a lighter heart: tea gowns, day gowns, evening dresses, walking dresses . . . The white-and-green shoes would go with the lavender carriage-suit, but not the blue-and-white, so she’d better take the blue half-boots also . . . Would the camel-hair coat be warm enough or should she take the gray fur? Both, to be on the safe side . . . How cold did it get in St Petersburg in April? Oh, and hats . . . and Fischer’s book on the chemistry of proteins . . . and that remarkable treatise on radiography by Curie, and the last four issues of the British Journal of Medicine, and the little set of picklocks James had gotten her and made her learn to use . . . What color gloves would go with the cinnamon-red walking-suit? Dear me, I seem to need another trunk . . .
But whenever she paused in her laying-out of petticoats and blouses, stockings and corsets among the froth of lace on the bed, silence seemed to flow into her room like deadly black water. And though the evening was barely come, she closed the curtains, as if she feared to look out into the darkness and see a pale shape in the gathering mists, watching from across the road with eyes that reflected the light of her bedroom lamps.