Blood Maidens Read online

Chapter Six

  SIX

  Because man does not exist in a vacuum – and because Asher guessed that the dvornik, or concierge, of the Imperatrice Catherine was probably being paid by someone on the staff of the German Ambassador, as well as by the local Secret Police, to note the arrivals and departures of foreign visitors at this unfashionable time of year – on the following morning he carefully re-shaved the top of his head, touched up the dye on his hair and mustache, reread the Editorials page of the copy of the Chicago Tribune that he had brought with him, and paid a visit to the Ministry of Police. Though the Ministry had been folded into that of the Interior some years previously, the Chief of Police still ruled St Petersburg from the ill-famed building on the Fontanka Embankment, and Asher had little trouble presenting himself as Mr Jules Plummer of Chicago, in outraged and affluent pursuit of an absconding wife.

  ‘I heard she’d come here, and I don’t want to make trouble,’ he announced, in a loud voice and grating Middle-Border accent that no one would have associated with the soft-spoken Lecturer in Philology of New College, Oxford. ‘But I won’t be made a fool of, either, damn it. The man she ran off with claimed he was a Russian Count, and I know he had letters from St Petersburg, so here I am. Damn all women, anyway. Bastard probably lied, but I’m here to make a start. ’

  Needless to say, no member of the extremely wealthy Orlov family (Asher spelled and pronounced it Orloff) had been anywhere near Chicago that the police knew about – and the movements of the near-royal Orlovs were well known. ‘Knew it,’ growled Asher, and he gave the rest of his report to the bored functionary with just enough impatience, condescension, and arrogance not to get himself arrested as well: a good defense, he had found, against recognition by those who might have last encountered him as the self-effacing Professor Leyden.

  In a major capital, in a time of increasingly murderous international affairs, the Auswärtiges Amt was likely to send in its most experienced men. One couldn’t be too careful.

  That done, he took a cab across the river to the Kirov Islands and inquired, of the footman in powdered wig and blue-and-burgundy livery who answered the door of a particularly splendid palace, if Prince Razumovsky was in town at this season. The footman replied in impeccable French that this was in fact the case, contracted (for two roubles) to take up M’sieu Plummer’s card and inquire if His Excellency was, in fact, at home, and left Asher in a drawing room that made the Lady Irene Eaton’s town house look like an East End tenement. Returning, the footman implied that it was a shame that his master would lower himself to speak to an American, particularly at this hour of the morning (it was one in the afternoon), but that he would. Please come this way, M’sieu.

  The Prince looked up from his desk as Asher was shown in, without the faintest trace of recognition. As soon as the door shut behind the footman, Asher removed his pince-nez, relaxed from his American strut into his usual posture, and said, ‘Your Excellency?’ in his normal voice.

  The golden giant’s face transformed. ‘Jamie?’

  Asher put a finger to his lips. Prince Razumovsky had a voice like an operatic basso.

  ‘Good God, man!’ The Prince came around the desk, grabbed Asher by the shoulders, and kissed him on both cheeks. ‘Where is it that you’ve sprung from, eh? I thought you had—’

  ‘I have,’ said Asher, holding up a warning finger. ‘I’m in Petersburg on a private matter, Your Highness. Not even my own Department knows I’m here. ’

  ‘And your beautiful lady—’

  ‘Is at home. ’

  ‘Just as well. ’ Razumovsky shook his head. ‘Lent in St Petersburg . . . ’ He shuddered theatrically. ‘I couldn’t interest you in coming to the Theosophical Society’s charity ball at the Winter Palace tonight, could I? The two Princesses of Montenegro are trying to catch the final contributions before everyone makes their escape for the Crimea . . . It will be a horrific crush – every charlatan in the city, and everyone in the city who wishes to be on the good side of their Highnesses. ’ The Prince stroked his splendid mustache. By everyone, Asher knew he meant the two or three thousand (out of a population of a million and a half) who were fashionable in their professions, or in the highest levels of the government bureaucracy.

  ‘I should be honored, Your Excellency. ’ Asher inclined his head, glad that he had thought to pack evening clothes. He had first encountered Razumovsky not in Petersburg, but in Berlin, when the Prince had been in charge of collecting the day-to-day information of the Foreign Bureau agents there: the clerks in the defense ministry who had blotted their copybooks; the officer on the Kaiser’s staff who was living beyond his means and wasn’t averse to having his gambling debts paid, no questions asked. The tiny details of which nine-tenths of good intelligence work consisted. While he would never have expected the aristocratic diplomat to assist him in anything against the interests of the Russian Empire, he knew he could trust the man as a friend.

  There were few in his own Department in Petersburg that he knew to that extent.

  ‘Excellent! Wunderbar!’ The Prince waved him to a chair beside the stove – a monument of colored tiles and gold – and rang the bell. ‘One can only endure so many platitudes about the Serbian situation or communications with the dead – both of which topics seem to suffer severely from lack of hard information. You’ll have tea with me, Jamie—?’

  ‘Mr Plummer. And perhaps it’s best that I don’t. There isn’t anyone in town from Berlin, is there? Or who was, for instance, in South Africa—?’

  ‘Or China? Or Vienna? Or Bosnia? Or Mesopotamia—?’

  ‘Who told you about Mesopotamia?’ returned Asher with a grin, and Razumovsky shook a finger at him.

  ‘Nobody can remember all the faces, Jamie. Not you – and not them. So far as I know, all the good folk over at the German Embassy are the ones who’ve been there since Tsar Alexander was on the throne – or Catherine the Great, for that matter. Now tell me how I can help you in this “private matter” that’s brought you eighteen hundred miles from your beautiful Madame Asher at a time when Germany is boiling to conquer Morocco and revolution is threatening to sweep the world—’

  ‘Not my business,’ said Asher firmly, and he accepted the tea – in a silver-mounted glass, with a lump of sugar, and stronger than most coffee in England – that the liveried footman deigned to offer him on a tray.

  The Prince waited until the servant was gone before he asked, more quietly, ‘And what is your business, Jamie? It is a long way to come at this season, and that is the truth. ’

  ‘I don’t know what is the truth,’ replied Asher, just as softly. ‘And the information I’m looking for is going to sound insane to you. ’ He was silent for a moment, debating how much he might ask without triggering a Russian investigation – and how much would be in the report he’d asked Lydia to compile and send to him, which should arrive, he hoped, within days . . .

  The very word ‘German’ – especially coupled with ‘scientist’ – was likely to start the Third Section asking questions . . . and might lead to his own deportation. Instead, he asked, ‘Can you speak to the police – or perhaps to the Okhrana – and find out if there have been cases here in Petersburg of what has been called spontaneous human combustion?’

  Razumovsky’s eyebrows mounted halfway up to his hairline. ‘Like in Dickens?’

  Asher nodded. ‘As in Dickens. ’

  ‘Why—?’

  Asher lifted his hand, shook his head. ‘For the moment, it’s what I need to know,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t have to be proved, only reported. I’m looking for one within the past two months. ’ If you can’t start at one end, start at the other . . . at least until Lydia’s report arrives.

  The Russian was silent for a moment, blue eyes narrowing. Asher wondered if he – or anyone – had heard or read reports of what had been found in the old palace in the ancient section of Constantinople, from which he and Lydia had emerged on a winter morning in 19
09: four or five charred bodies, consumed almost totally with no evidence of pyre or combustibles. The Turkish government had hushed the matter up, and it had been lost in accounts of the larger rioting that had swept the ancient city that night.

  But as his friend – and as an agent of the Tsar – Razumovsky would certainly have looked up the reports.

  But the Prince said only, ‘Well, if it is spontaneous human combustion you seek, my friend, the Theosophical Society ball tonight is the place to hear all about it. And about poltergeists, levitation, falls of live fishes, and frogs found alive in impenetrable hollows of rock. The Montenegrin sisters cannot get enough of this sort of fare. Every scientist who makes his living attempting to develop teleportation or to explain mysterious monsters in Scottish lakes shall be there—’

  ‘And I will be urging them on to unfold themselves to their utmost. ’ And perhaps asking them whether they specialize in diseases of the blood as well.

  ‘Then you will doubtless be the most popular man at the event. Most of these “scientists” won’t even listen to one another. ’

  ‘But I would also like to hear,’ said Asher, ‘what the Okhrana has to say about it. ’

  ‘You can ask them tonight yourself. ’ Razumovsky grinned again. ‘They, too, will be there in force. ’

  With a further assurance from Prince Razumovsky that any unspecified ‘trouble’ Asher might happen to find himself in during his stay in St Petersburg could be referred to the Prince’s department in the Ministry of the Interior, Asher took a cab back along the Kamenno Ostrovsky Prospect to the city again. The day was freezing cold but clear, and in the fading light the Islands still retained the fairy-tale air of a place and time long separated from the nascent Twentieth Century; the woods and birch groves of aristocratic private estates, the little wooden izbas that mimicked peasant simplicity, all seemed like something glimpsed through a magic mirror. A glimmering quality of Once Upon a Time.

  The world that children grew up in? Asher leaned his head back against the dirty squabs of the cab, remembering the cottage his aunts had had in the Kentish countryside, the sweetness of the woods beyond their garden. The world where something new and beautiful is waiting beyond the next turn of the path, under the next mushroom? Is that why it fascinates us so? Do we chase folk tales and fairy gold, when what we really want is our childhoods back, when we were safe and loved?

  When the world was a safe place to live in, because we knew no better?

  Back when we hadn’t learned about things like poison gas and bombs?

  Through the leafless trees the Gulf seemed to glitter, a hard green-black flecked with white. Behind the mossed-over gargoyles and granite lions of porters’ lodges, Italianate palaces of yellow, pink, and green showed up as bright as the flowers. They would be glorious inside, Asher knew, with polished stone of a hundred colors, with ebony and gilt, and with French marquetry and Chinese silks: every rouble of it contributed against their will by peasants in a thousand dreary hinterlands villages, and by workers who were shivering themselves to death in those dreary miles of tenements and factories within walking distance of this magical place.

  The cab dropped him off at the gardens of the Tauride Palace. He walked to the house where the Lady Irene Eaton had lived. Though the days were lengthening, the light was fading fast. Over breakfast, and during his various cab-rides, Asher had read steadily through all the more recent missives in the packets Ysidro had given him: so far, Golenischev seemed to have been accurate in his statement that she had no living acquaintance whose communication went beyond the superficial. Yet Ysidro had been searching for something. He walked around to the mews behind the row of town houses, scaled the back gate and passed through the bare garden – simple hedges that a jobbing day-gardener could tend, and a good deal of pavement – and found that the lock of the kitchen door, like that of the front, was a modern Yale model, a good fifty years newer than the house.

  The dimness inside was disquieting. He had not had the impression that Golenischev and his fledglings had taken over the lair – not if there was a suspicion that Lady Irene had met with some ugly fate – nor had they seemed to think the rival master, Dargomyzhsky, would be in residence. Nevertheless, the place made his scalp prickle, and he guessed that the St Petersburg vampires kept an eye on it after dark. Who had she brought here, he wondered as he climbed the wide swoop of the stairs from the front hall, that she wanted to impress with her Greek statuary, her brocaded curtains? Was it she who had played on the great golden concert harp that stood in the music room? Or did one of those cat-eyed forms he’d glimpsed in the darkness behind Count Golenischev last night have conversation with her, beyond the hunt?

  ‘For many of us, everything becomes the hunt,’ Ysidro had said to him, one of those nights on the Nord Express, with the flat chessboard of Holland flickering past the windows like the Looking-Glass Country in the dark. ‘Some take pleasure in hunting in teams – picking victims to share, two and three in a hunt . . . planning the where and the when. ’ Long white fingers shuffled cards; the vampire would play solitaire for hours, of an insane complexity that Asher was often unable to follow. ‘You understand, there is not much challenge in killing the poor. And most vampires come to understand very quickly that the rich – even those sleek arrogant merchants of whom this world produces so many in these degenerate times – even if they are hated, they are missed. Those who live forever find that forever includes many, many hours of waking that must be filled. ’

  He had laid out the cards, two and three decks of them, his movements so quick as to baffle the eye; less a game of solitaire than what appeared to be meditations on mathematical permutation and principle. Asher had wondered how many of those endless hours of waking Ysidro had filled with the handling of these pasteboard generators of random numbers.

  ‘So we hunt. And when we meet, we speak of the hunt. Those of us who once read books, or wrote poems, or made music, or played chess, or studied languages, mostly find that these things pale to insignificance beside the immediacy, the urgency, and the intimacy of the hunt. It is what they spend their nights looking forward to, or back upon. The world becomes blood and fear and power. ’ He scooped the cards together again, long pale hair half hiding the face that was itself a concealment, then dealt them out again. Lydia had told him that Ysidro had taught her to play the old-fashioned game of piquet, but she would never teach it him. Ysidro had done so, the first night of their travels together. ‘For many, there is nothing else. ’

  From Lydia, who had traveled in Ysidro’s company from Paris to Constantinople, Asher had also learned enough to guess that Ysidro was not one of those who had forgotten the challenges of chess, the joys of reading, the challenge of learning new languages. There were books, she had said, in at least twelve tongues in his house somewhere in the mazes of the East End by the river, and three chessboards.

  The library in Lady Irene’s house was wide-ranging, and Asher noticed nearly two shelves of books on mathematics, on computation and calculation, and on the theories of music and numbers. But when Asher touched the red calfskin bindings, the gold-stamped spines, he found the leather dry, the tops of the pages dusty. No books lay on the tables of purple bloodwood and pale yellow tulipwood. In the study he opened the desk drawers, empty now save for dust and old pen-nibs. The ink in the old-fashioned standish was fresh; the pens had been much used. When he passed through the music room again he touched the strings of the harp and found them red with rust.

  The gorgeous carpet in the bedroom was splotched with the drying blood of the two vampires, Marya and Ippo, where the Count Golenischev had made them maul one another. Was that why he had never made a fledgling? . . . The giving over of their soul, their consciousness, to the master vampire, to be held in his mind . . .

  Asher could not even imagine the kind of intimacy that would engender, the naked soul held in the embrace of the naked soul. It reduced the consummations of the wedding bed to the lev
el of a gloved handshake.

  Knowing Lydia would never forgive him if he didn’t, he went back down to the study to find a clean piece of notepaper and an envelope, and returning, used his penknife to crop a few inches of blood-soaked carpet-pile for her to examine . . .

  If I survive to hand it to her.

  Those two lost revolutionaries – for whom the Revolution had faded before the lure of the hunt as surely as had the Lady Irene’s love for the harp – were not the only thing Asher recalled of last night. His knowledge of human nature told him – if Marya’s animal glare had not – that it was he, who had only been fighting for his life, against whom their hatred would turn. They had been brought down before a human.

  If they thought they could kill him without Golenischev finding out, he was a dead man.

  His blood sample collected, he turned to the corner where he had been thrown. Pressed his hand to the lower panel of the wall, and felt it give.

  The moveable panel was a simple one. It didn’t take much probing along the ornate scrollwork on its edges to find the catch. The compartment behind, barely five inches deep, contained stacks of banknotes, a thick glass bottle containing an aqueous solution of silver nitrate – evidently the Lady Irene had no more trust in her vampire colleagues than Asher did – a revolver loaded with silver bullets, three different sets of identity papers, and, in an envelope at the back, another envelope, yellow with age, addressed in Ysidro’s spidery hand.

  Asher collected everything, tucked it into his satchel, closed up the panel, and got out of the house as quickly as he could. At no point had he seen, or heard, or sensed in any fashion that anyone else was in the house or that the house was being observed . . .

  Yet he got into the cab that he hailed, and left the Smolny District behind him in the cold spring twilight, with a sense of having escaped just in time.

  In his chambers at the Imperatrice Catherine, he sat in the bow window overlooking the river and read Ysidro’s letter to the Lady Irene Eaton.

  London

  May 10, 1820

  My Lady,

  I received your letter.

  And I read in it that which fills me with horror.

  DO NOT DO THIS THING. I beg of you, in the name of the love that I bear you. In the name of the love that you bear for me, do not do it.

  When we parted, you asked of me that which I would not do – and despite my pleadings, despite my most desperate efforts to explain my refusal, though you said that you understood, I think that you did not and do not.

  You said that I would live forever, while you as a living woman were doomed to die. Yet I do not live forever. I do not live now (as I told you then, you shaking your head, eyes shut), and death changes things. Death changes all things. And Un-Death the more so than Death, for in Death memory survives untainted by future change.

  You do not think that you will change, but you will. I have seen hundreds pass this gate of blood into the world I now inhabit, and I have not seen more than four or five who did not turn into the Grippens of the world, who did not turn into the Lottas and the Francescas at whom you stared with such fearful interest when at my side you heard the chimes at midnight: who did not become, in truth, demons who live only for the kill. I have seen scholars turn from their books and artists from their easels; I have seen mothers who sought this state the better to aid their children turn from those children in boredom, once they had passed the gate that you knocked upon, with such desperation, the night of our parting.

  I love you because you are who you are, Lady. To see you lose the self – the Lady – that I love, to see you turn from your music and your love of learning and the joy you take in your pets, and become as I am, would be infinitely worse than to lose you, whole and yourself, to death, even to death of withered age.

  I write this as I read how you have met the vampires of St Petersburg – how you followed on from what I had told you of the London vampires, and those of Paris . . . and I am filled with horror and with dread.

  I know you, Lady. And I very much fear – knowing your courage, and your determination, and your love – that you write to me not waiting for my reply.

  The world does not need another vampire, Irene. The world – and I – needs you as a living woman.

  If you have not gone unto these vampires of the North to ask to be changed by them, do not.

  If you have done so already, I write to you with the gravest foreboding that I will never look upon your face again.

  Ysidro