NINE
Ysidro was waiting on the platform of Warsaw Station when Asher arrived at half-past eleven. Wordlessly, he slipped a luggage claim-ticket into his hand in passing and vanished at once into the little knots of students and workers, functionaries and their wives, who milled about in the cold, talking, checking tickets, giving last-minute assurances of love to Cousin Volodya in Bologoe . . .
Outside the station, murky fog-banks drifted in the streets, thick with the smells of sewage, coal smoke, and the sea.
The vampire did not enter their first-class compartment until the train had passed beyond the ghastly ring of wooden tenements, unpaved streets, and mephitic factories that encircled St Petersburg’s exquisite eighteenth-century heart, and was on its way south through the darkness. It crossed Asher’s mind that Ysidro – Count Golenischev’s reassurances of support notwithstanding – might feel himself to be Abroad as well.
As he set up the tiny ivory pieces of his traveling chess-set, the Spaniard listened with interest to Asher’s account of his visit to the Okhrana. ‘No wonder Golenischev’s fledglings are uneasy,’ he murmured, when Asher had finished. ‘We – the vampire kind – find profoundly unsettling these rumors that fly among the poor. Such panic can stir up the police and waken street mobs and riots. ’Tis no mischance that none of the Paris nest survived the Revolution. Even without open violence, tales of that kind cause the poor to watch one another more closely and to take greater care of themselves. When this killer of whores whom the newspapers called the Ripper walked London’s streets, tavern keepers and dock hands took it into their heads that he must have a “lair” somewhere, and groups of them developed an unhealthy interest in the cellars of empty buildings, and town houses whose inhabitants did not show themselves by day.’
Asher turned from the pitch-black abyss of the window. ‘I wonder the lot of you didn’t do something about Jolly Jack, then.’
‘We did.’ Ysidro adjusted the frosted-glass shade of the lamp over the compartment’s narrow table and moved his knight. He always, Asher was amused to note, chose the black figures: Spanish, stained ivory, and extremely old. ‘What these disappearing children – or for that matter the burning of this vampire girl whom Golenischev did not think to mention to me – have to do with our German scientist’s friend, I know not. Yet it is clear to me that all is not – stable – in Petersburg.’
‘Could vampires exist in Petersburg that Golenischev doesn’t know about?’
‘Only if they did not hunt. And if one is not going to hunt, why risk travel to a different city?’
‘To see a doctor?’ Asher moved his knight out of the trap Ysidro was closing upon it and perceived, in a single irritated glance, that in the next three moves he would be checkmated and there wasn’t a single thing he could do about it.
‘Golenischev informs me that the Master of Moscow is one of the old nobility,’ Ysidro went on. ‘Molchanov – an old long-beard, Golenischev calls him. These days he lets his acres to bailiffs to farm and himself dwells in Moscow, though he will return for a week, or perhaps two, to his ancestral lands, sleeping in the old chapel there and never showing himself to his tenants, nor laying hand upon them, Golenischev says. Will you have tea?’ A bearded little man with a crooked back, old enough to be Asher’s father, had tapped at the door, bearing a tray of steaming glasses. Ysidro gave him two roubles extra and received the man’s blessing with unmoved countenance.
‘They do not know that their Baron is the same man for whom their fathers worked, and their grandfathers,’ the vampire went on, when the man had gone. ‘Yet he has paid to bring a schoolteacher to the estate and gives generous dowries for the young girls in his villages when they wed.’
‘Kind of him.’ Asher doggedly shifted a pawn. He was coming to know some of his companion’s pet moves and, more, coming to learn how the vampire played, with the whole of the game and all its myriad possibilities existing in his mind before his thin fingers touched the first piece.
‘Were Baron Molchanov kind, I doubt he would have remained Master of Moscow through the French invasion and the burning of the city. Yet he knows that which apparently eluded your Mr Stoker in his so-interesting novel: that a vampire lord who preys upon his own peasants is doomed to swift discovery and death. ’Tis difficult for our kind to hide in the countryside. Even Golenischev, who has never set foot upon his own acres, takes care to keep his peasants content and in his debt, lest he should need the services of one to pick up a wagonload of boxes from the station one day, while the sun is high, and leave them in a dark room at the man’s town palace without asking too many questions. Check.’
Asher thrust down the urge to throw the nearest bishop at his companion’s head.
Towards morning Ysidro disappeared, leaving Asher to get a few hours of sleep as the train rolled through the dreary blackness of an endless plain. As they left the sea the clouds thinned, and waning moonlight painted the bulbous domes of country churches, the snow thick upon the fields. For a long while, it seemed, a single lamplit window burned in the distance – what are they doing awake at this hour? The train stopped at Tver and Klin, low wooden buildings dimly descried through the gloom and an occasional bearded peasant moving about the frozen streets as light struggled unwillingly into the sky. Waking, Asher took another cup of tea and turned in his mind all that Ysidro had ever told him of the Undead and all he had learned of them in his studies of folklore and legend. What could the Kaiser offer a vampire that would counterbalance the terrible risks of setting off organized hunts for their lairs by a population convinced of their existence?
’Tis almost unheard of for a vampire to kill another vampire, Ysidro had said . . . yet Asher felt almost certain that even as the vampires of London had attempted to kill him, Asher, rather than have him assist Ysidro in searching for the creature that was killing them, so they might very well kill a vampire who threatened to break the secrecy that was their strongest protection.
Was that what had happened last autumn? Had the girl, whoever she had been, come to Petersburg with Theiss?
Yet would they not have killed Theiss, rather than the girl, if they’d found out?
He reached in his pocket for Lydia’s letter, but brought out, instead, the one he had found in Lady Irene’s house.
Lady, I received your letter . . .
Why had she not gone back to London after the Master of Petersburg had died?
Had she been ashamed to face Ysidro? Or had it only been that she could find none to accompany her on the journey?
Had her memories of England – wind and meadowlarks on the high downs, and the sound of Oxford church-bells – rusted like the strings of her harp? Withered like the bindings of the mathematics books in her library, until there had been nothing left but the hunt?
Dearest Simon, forgive me my long silence . . . a letter filled with the minutiae of ballet and opera, scandal and politics, creeps towards its conclusion on my secretaire . . .
Would he miss them, those letters filled with the minutiae of ballet and opera, scandal and politics? Asher recalled how Ysidro had thrust thick packets of his replies to those letters into the pockets of his coat and cloak . . . To burn? To reread? Would one who had lost all capacity for caring – one for whom all the world had reduced itself to the passion of the hunt – care about what he had written to one who now would no longer write?
Asher closed his eyes . . . and woke sharply with the jostle of the carriage wheels over the points, a woman’s voice in the corridor complaining, ‘—and if that coachman of his is drunk again I swear I shall tell him to send the man packing!’ in bad provincial French.
Ysidro had given Asher an address on the Ragojskaia Zastava, on the outskirts of Moscow: a small town-house, built early in the century upon what looked like the ruins of a convent and set in its own walled grounds. Stone lions the size of sheepdogs guarded its little gate, and Asher half-expected to see the hairy shadow of the Dvorovoi – the Slavic spirit of the yard – lurking in the dusk. If Ysidro did, in fact, find himself in need of a translator, Asher guessed that the Moscow vampires would sooner come to an isolated structure than to a terraced house or a rented flat. Still, when the Spanish vampire emerged from his locked, double-lidded trunk with fall of darkness, bathed and changed clothes and disappeared into the night, Asher unpacked those dry net-wrapped swags of wild rose and wild garlic with which he’d filled his luggage and made the bedroom that overlooked the gate as secure as he could, given who he was dealing with. He slipped his little silver sleeve-knife into its holster and satisfied himself that it would drop with a twitch of his wrist into his hand.