Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel Page 8

  The address given by Celestine du Bois on those occasions when bills were sent to her and not to gentlemen admirers—one of whom, Asher had been interested to note, was also Valentin Calvaire—was an accommodation address, a tobacconist’s near Victoria Station and reachable from any corner of London by Underground. Calvaire’s address in the Bayswater Road was also an accommodation address, a pub—both vampires had picked up their letters personally.

  “Does Miss du Bois pick up letters here for anyone else?” Asher inquired, casually sliding a half-crown piece across the polished mahogany of the counter. The young clerk cast a nervous glance toward the back of the shop, where his master was mixing packets of Gentlemen’s Special Sort.

  “For a Miss Chloé Watermeade, and a Miss Chloé Winterdon,” the young man replied in a hushed voice and wiped his pointy nose. “She comes in—oh, once, twice a week sometimes, usually just before we puts the shutters up.”

  “Pretty?” Asher hazarded.

  “Right stunner. Short little thing—your pocket Venus. Blond as a Swede, brown eyes I think—always dressed to the nines. Not a loafer’ll speak to her, though, with the big toff what comes in with her half the time—Cor, there’s a hard boy for you, and never mind the boiled shirt!”

  “Name?” Asher slid another half crown across the counter.

  The boy threw another quick look at the back shop as the owner’s bulky form darkened the door; he whispered, “Never heard it,” and shoved the half crown back.

  “Keep it,” Asher whispered, picked up the packet of Russian cigarettes which had been his ostensible errand, and stepped back into the street to the accompaniment of the tinkling shop bell.

  Further investigation of Lotta’s grave in Highgate yielded little. It was a discouragingly easy matter to enter the cemetery by daylight—the narrow avenue of tombs behind the Egyptian gate and the dark groves and buildings around it were absolutely deserted, silent in the dripping gloom. Anyone could have entered and completely dismembered every corpse in the place uninterrupted, not just planted a stake through the heart and cut off the head.

  With the door left wide, a thin greenish light suffusedthe crypt, but Asher still had to have recourse to the uncertain light of a dry-cell electric torch, whose bulky length he’d smuggled in under his ulster, as he examined every inch of the coffin and its niche. He found what might have been remains of a stake among the charred bones, though it was difficult to distinguish it from the fragments of rib or tell whether it was wood or bone—he wrapped it in tissue and pocketed it for later investigation. It told him nothing he did not already know. In a far corner of the tomb, he found a nasty huddle of bones, hair, and corset stays rolled in a rotting purple dress: the former occupant, he guessed, of the coffin Lotta had commandeered.

  What remained of the afternoon he spent in a back office at the Daily Mail, studying obituaries, police reports, and the Society page, matching names with those on the list he’d assembled from the debris in Lotta’s rooms and from Mlle. La Tour’s daybooks. Poor Thomas Gobey, he saw, had in fact succumbed to a “wasting sickness” only months after the purchase of the russet silk dress. Asher noted the address—the Albany, which told him everything he needed to know about that unfortunate young man—and the names of surviving brothers, sister, parents, fiancée.

  It had been disconcerting to recognize names on those cards of invitation which dated from a certain period seven or eight years ago. Poor Bertie Westmoreland had not been the only member of that gay circle of friends who had sent her invitations or bought her trinkets, though he was evidently the only one who had paid the ultimate price.

  The others were lucky, he thought. Though Albert Westmoreland had died in 1900, the Honorable Frank Ellis—another of Lydia’s suitors, though Asher had never met the boy—had bought the vampire a loden-green crepe tea gown as late as 1904. Who knew how many others had also kept up the connection?

  He shivered, thinking how close Lydia had passed to that unseen plague then, and thanked all the strait-corseted deities of Society for the strict lines drawn between young girls of good family and the type of women with whom young men of good family amused themselves between bouts of “doing the pretty.”

  Lydia had been very young then. Eighteen, still living in her father’s Oxford house and attending lectures with the tiny clump of Somerville undergraduates interested in medicine. The other girls had dealt as best they could with the comments, jokes, and sniggers of male undergraduates and deans alike—apologetic, frustrated, or defiant. For the most part Lydia had been blithely oblivious. She had been genuinely puzzled over her father’s blustering rage when she’d chosen studying for Responsions over a Season on the London matrimonial mart; had she had brothers or sisters, he might well have threatened to disinherit her from the considerable family estates. Even her uncle, the Dean of New College, though her supporter, had been scandalized by the direction of her studies. Education for women was all very well, but he had been thinking in terms of literature and the Classics, not the slicing up of cadavers and learning how the human reproductive organs operated.

  Asher smiled a little, remembering how even the most antiwoman of the dons, old Horace Blaydon, had come around to her support in the end, though he’d never have admitted it. “Even a damn freshman can follow what I’m doing!” he’d bellowed at a group of embarrassed male students during his lectures on blood pathology … he’d called Lydia a damned schoolgirl everywhere but in the classes. And the old man would have acted the same, Asher thought, even had his son not been head over heels in love with her.

  Staring at the obituaries spread out on the grimy and ink-stained table top before him, Asher glanced at his listof Lotta’s admirers since the early ’80s and thought about Dennis Blaydon.

  Lydia was probably the last person anyone would have expected to capture Dennis Blaydon’s fancy, let alone his passionate and possessive love. Bluff, golden, and perfect, Dennis had been used to the idea that any woman he chose to honor with his regard would automatically accept his proposal; the fact that Lydia did not had only added to her fascination. Since the first time he’d seen her without her spectacles and decided that she was possessed of a fragile prettiness as well as great wealth, he had wanted her and had put forth all his multitude of charm and grace into winning her, to Asher’s silent despair. Everyone in Oxford, from the Deans of the Schools to the lowliest clerk at Blackwell’s, had accepted his eventual triumph in the Willoughby matrimonial lists as a matter of course. Her father, who considered one intellectual more than enough in the family, had been all in favor of it. To Horace Blaydon’s query as to what his son would want with a woman who spent half her time in the pathology laboratories, Dennis had replied, with his customary shining earnestness, “Oh, she isn’t really like that, Father.” Presumably he knew better than she did what Lydia was like, Asher had thought bitterly at the time. Pushed into the background, a middle-aged, brown, nondescript colleague of her uncle, he could only watch them together and wonder how soon it would be that all hope of making her a part of his life would disappear forever.

  Later he’d mentioned to Lydia how astonished he’d been that she hadn’t married such a dazzling suitor. She’d been deeply insulted and demanded indignantly why he thought she’d have been taken in by a strutting oaf in a Life Guards uniform.

  He grinned to himself and pushed the memories away. However it had transpired, Dennis and his other friends—Frank Ellis, the mournful Nigel Taverstock, the Honorable Bertie’s Equally Honorable brother Evelyn—had had a close escape. Lotta had known them all. They were all the type of young men she liked—rich, good-looking, and susceptible. How long would it have been before she had chosen another of them as her next victim, when enough years had passed for them to forget poor Bertie’s death?

  What old score was Lotta paying off, he wondered, folding up his jotted lists, in the persons of those wealthy young men? He donned his scarf and bowler and slowly descended the narrow stairway past the purposeful riot
of the day rooms, stopping briefly to thank his reporter friend with a discreet reference to “King and Country.”

  Had it been some ancient rape or heartbreak, he wondered as he descended the long hill of Fleet Street, its crush of cabs and trams and horse-drawn buses dwarfed by the looming shadow of St. Paul’s dome against the chilly sky. Or merely the furious resentment of a cocky and strong-willed girl who hated the poverty in which she had grown up and hated still more the satin-coated young men whose servants had pushed her from the flagways and whose carriage wheels had thrown mud on her as they passed?

  Judging by Mlle. La Tour’s books, Celestine—or Chloé—seemed to be far more apt to pay for her own dresses than Lotta was, and the men who did buy her things were not the men of Lotta’s circle. Their names were always different; evidently few men lived long enough to supply her with two hats. She was either more businesslike about her kills than Lotta, or simply less patient.

  Was she, he wondered, also a “good vampire”? Like Lotta, did she savor those kisses flavored with blood and innocence? Did she make love to her victims?

  Were vampires capable of the physical act of love?

  The women would be, of course, he guessed—capableof faking it, anyway. As he descended to the Underground at the Temple a woman spoke to him in the shadows where the stair gave onto the platform, her red dress like dry blood in the gloom and her glottal vowels scrawling Whitechapel almost visibly across her painted mouth. Asher tipped his hat, shook his head politely, and continued down the steps, thinking: They would have to feed somewhere else before undressing, to warm the death-chill from their flesh.

  Back at Prince of Wales Colonnade he returned to the now-neat catalogue of Lotta’s finances. Seated tailor-fashion on the bed in his shirt sleeves, he sorted through the bills, letters, and cards, arranged by probable date. Mlle. La Tour had only served her vampire clientele for a few years, of course—the earliest entry for Mrs. Anthea Wren was in 1899. Lotta’s pile of yellowing bills dated back through the nineteenth century and into the eighteenth, paid by men long dead to modistes whose shops were closed, sold, or incorporated with others’—a woman cannot keep the same dressmaker for seventy-five years if she herself doesn’t age.

  There were only four names on the recent invitations not accounted for either in the obituaries or last week’s Society pages.

  There was a Ludwig von Essel who had bought Lotta things between April and December of 1905 and was then heard of no more. There was Valentin Calvaire, who had first bought Lotta a yoked waist of peau de soie, embroidered and finished with silk nailheads, whatever those were, in March of this year; and a Chrétien Sanglot, who had sent her a card of invitation to meet him at the ballet and who not only picked up his mail at the same pub as Calvaire did but, to Asher’s semitrained eye, at least, wrote in the same execrable French hand. And lastly, there was someone whose name appeared on bills dating from theNapoleonic Wars and on notes of Eaton’s finest creamy pressed paper, less than two years old: someone who signed himself Grippen in black, jagged writing of a style not seen since the reign of James I.

  He made an abstracted supper of bread and cold tongue while writing up a précis of his findings, lighting the gas somewhere in the midst of his work without really being aware of it. He doubted that the families of any of Lotta’s victims were responsible for the killings, but if Lotta and Calvaire had hunted together, her victims’ friends might be able to offer leads. Lydia would undoubtedly know where he could reach the Honorable Evelyn and Westmoreland’s fiancée, whatever her name was, but again, he’d have to be careful—careful of the vampires, who must, he knew, be suspecting his every move, careful, too, of the killer, and careful of whatever it was that Ysidro wasn’t telling him.

  His Foreign Office habits prompted him to add a shorter list, just for the sake of off-chances: Anthea Wren; Chloé/Celestine Watermeade/Winterdon/du Bois; Valentin Calvaire/Chrétien Sanglot; Grippen. And looking up, he discovered to his utter surprise that it was quite dark outside.

  He hadn’t strolled for very long along the crowded flagways of Gower Street when he was suddenly aware of Ysidro beside him. The vampire’s arrival was not sudden—indeed, once Asher glanced to his left and saw the slender form in its black opera cape at his elbow, he knew he had been there for some time. He had concentrated on watching for his appearance, but it seemed to him that something had distracted him—he could no longer remember what.

  Annoyed, he snapped, “Would you stop doing that and just come up to me like a human being?”

  Ysidro thought about it for a moment, then countered quietly, “Would you stop identifying all the exits from a house before you go into it? I have a cab waiting.”

  The houses in Half Moon Street were Georgian, red brick mellowed by time and somewhat blackened by the veiling soot of the city’s atmosphere, but retaining the graciousness of moderate wealth. Most of them showed lights in their windows; in the gaslight, Asher could make out the minuscule front gardens—little more than a few shrubs clustered around the high porches—groomed like carriage horses. An indefinable air of neglect clung to Number Ten, three-quarters of the way down the pavement. Asher identified it as the result of a jobbing gardener who had not been kept up to his work, and front steps that went weeks or months without being scrubbed—fatal, in London.

  “Housekeeping presents its own problems for the Undead, doesn’t it?” he remarked quietly as they ascended the tall steps to the front door. “Either you keep servants or scrub your doorstep yourself—the windows here haven’t been washed, either. Every doorstep on the street is brick-batted daily but this one.”

  “There are ways of getting around that.” Ysidro’s face, in profile against the reflection of the street lamps as he turned the key, retained its calmly neutral expression.

  “I’m sure there are. But even the stupidest servant is going to notice something amiss when nobody orders any food or uses the chamber pots.”

  The vampire paused, the tarnished brass door handle in his gloved hand. He regarded Asher enigmatically, but in the back of his brimstone-colored eyes, for an instant, Asher half thought he glimpsed the flicker of amused appreciation. Then the black cloak whispered against the doorframe, and Ysidro led the way into the house.

  “Edward Hammersmith was the youngest son of a nabob of the India trade, almost exactly one hundred yearsago,” he said, his light, uninflected voice echoing softly in the darkness. “The house was one of three owned by the family; Hammersmith asked for and got it from his father after he became vampire, thereafter gaining a reputation as the family’s reclusive eccentric. He was in his way a reclusive eccentric even as a vampire—he seldom went out, save to hunt.”

  There was a faint scratch, the whiff of sulphur overriding for a moment the general foetor of must and dampness that filled what, by the sound of the echoes, must be a large and lofty front hall. The sharp sliver of matchlight confirmed this an instant later, racing in threads along tarnished gilt panel moldings and the graceful medallions of a high Adam ceiling, almost invisible overhead in the gloom. For that first moment, Ysidro’s face, etched in those hard-cut shadows, seemed, too, something wrought of unbelievably delicate plaster. Then he touched the flame to the wick of an oil lamp that stood with several others on a Sheraton sideboard. The light leaped and slithered over the square mirror set in the sideboard, the web-shrouded lusters of the chandelier, the rounded glass of the smutted chimney which gray-gloved fingers, seeming so disembodied in the warm glow, fitted over the flame.

  “Did he hunt with Lotta?”

  “Upon occasion.” Sprawling shadows followed them up the stairs, flowing over carved wall panels warped with damp. “They were both…” Again that pause, that sense of veering, like a small boat before gusty wind, into potentially less dangerous seas. “Edward liked a change now and then. Usually he hunted alone.”

  “Was he a ‘good vampire’?”

  “Not very.” At the top of the first flight of stairs, Ysidro turned
right and pushed open the double doors to what had once been the large drawing room. He held his lamp aloft as he did so, and the light scattered across books—literallythousands of books, crammed into makeshift shelves which not only lined every inch of wall nearly to the curve of the ceiling, but stacked the floor hip-deep in places. Little paths threaded between the stacks, like the beaten hoof lines or dassie tunnels that stitched unseen through the deep grass of the veldt. Towers of books ascended drunkenly from the two sideboards that loomed up out of the gloomy maze, and more were visible through the sideboards’ half-opened caned doors; they piled the seats of every chair but one in untidy heaps. Bundles of papers were scattered over them or lay loose like leaves blown in an autumn wind. Bending down, Asher picked up one that lay nearest the door—brown and brittle as Lotta’s oldest petticoats, it was sheet music of some obscure aria by Salieri.

  Like a little island, there was an open place in the middle of the room, where grimy gray patches of lichenous carpet could be seen; it contained a chair, a small table supporting an oil lamp, a mahogany piano, and a harpsichord whose faded paint had nearly all flaked away. Sheet music heaped the floor under both instruments.

  Beside him, Ysidro’s calm voice continued, “There is a regrettable tendency among vampires to become like the little desert mice, which hoard shining things in holes.”

  “If passion for life is the core of your nature,” Asher remarked, “that isn’t surprising, but it must make for awkward domestic arrangements. Do all vampires do it?”

  He looked away from the gloomy cavern, with its smells of mildew and damp, and found the vampire’s strange eyes on him, a flicker of inscrutable interest in their depths. Ysidro looked away. “No.” He turned from the door and moved toward the stairs at the far end of the hall, Asher following in his wake. “But I find the ones who do not rather boring.”

  It was on the tip of Asher’s tongue to ask Ysidro what his hobby was, what passion filled the dark hours of hiswakefulness when he was not actively hunting his prey, but he decided to take advantage of the Spaniard’s relatively communicative mood with matters less frivolous. “Did Calvaire hunt with Lotta?”