Blood Maidens (17 page)

How could the words of your stepmother and your nannies have had such force that you’ve believed yourself ugly ever since?

In a smaller voice she asked, ‘Do you leave tonight?’

‘At a quarter to midnight. Ysidro says that it is vital that we arrive in daylight, and that we never meet once darkness falls.’

Lydia appeared for a time to concentrate all her attention on the score of tiny pearl buttons that closed the transparent lace of blouse and collar over the silver that ringed her throat. ‘And I’m to find who Theiss associates with – particularly anyone with the social peculiarity of never being seen by daylight?’

‘If you can. Though I can assure you now that half the young dandies and three-quarters of the ladies of Petersburg society never go to bed until dawn and aren’t out of doors until the sun is going down, so there’s a good chance they’ve never noticed if one of their number is strictly nocturnal or not. That’s where the bank records come in.’

She smiled. ‘I don’t need bank records for that, silly.’ And her smile faded. ‘You’ll be careful going through Germany?’

‘I won’t stir a foot out-of-doors once the sun is down. It’s not quite a day and a half to Warsaw,’ Asher went on, as lightly as if they both did not know why it was so vital that none of the vampires in the cities they would visit should learn where Ysidro’s human partner could be found. ‘We’ll reach Berlin at noon on Wednesday – I hope and trust – and with luck be gone from there just after dawn on Thursday. I have no desire to be in Berlin a moment longer than we have to, and even then, it’s too long. Right now my one prayer is that whoever this renegade fledgling is, he or she isn’t from Berlin. I don’t want to have to stay long enough to search for vampire nests, with or without the cooperation of the local master. Being picked up by the Berlin police for burglary would be all I need.’

‘Don Simon would get you out of trouble –’ she turned from the mirror, short-sighted brown eyes filled with the fear she ordinarily hid – ‘wouldn’t he?’

‘He would,’ said Asher grimly. ‘But if the hue and cry resulting from the murder of two or three stray
polizei
lasted until daylight,
I’d
then be hard put to protect
him
long enough to get us both to the Polish border. Right now I’ll settle for hoping that the situation doesn’t arise.’

Her voice deliberately off-hand, she went back to her scrutiny of her eyelashes. ‘I would think Don Simon would be more subtle than to leave official corpses lying about.’

‘As would I. But accidents happen – and the spy who doesn’t take that into account is the spy who doesn’t make it back to home base in one piece and with the goods in his pocket. I hear the silent whisper of invisible minions setting out luncheon, and something tells me His Excellency keeps a high standard in the way of cuisine.’

Ever tactful, Prince Razumovsky did not return to the
izba
until well into the afternoon, having kept Mrs Flasket entertained at a luncheon of their own at his palace. Lydia meanwhile met and completely charmed the servants – one of whom, Alyssa, the senior maid, spoke excellent French – while they unpacked the companion’s luggage in the smaller chamber that Mrs Flasket would occupy for one night before returning to England.

‘She really is an excellent companion,’ said Lydia, as through one of the wide windows they observed Razumovsky and the widow emerge from the woods that almost completely hid the little cottage from the palace. ‘She’s read everything from Plato to penny dreadfuls, can argue any political question backwards and forwards – once I’d assured her she didn’t have to keep up a flow of chat on the train, I don’t know
how
many newspapers she read . . . She can even keep track of what’s going on in the Balkans, and nobody I know but you can do that! And she knows about fashion and cricket and how to care for lapdogs, enough to at least keep up small talk about it for hours, if small talk is what you were paying her for. I’ve written her a recommendation for my Aunt Louise in Paris—’

‘I’ve met your Aunt Louise and that isn’t a kindness.’

‘Well, no, but she does pay very well for the boredom and abuse she serves out, and poor Mrs F. is very much in need of a job. And I think she’d enjoy living in Paris. And she’s the most tactful creature in the world. It’s the one thing Don Simon did teach me, you know,’ she added, with that slightly forced note her voice took on when she spoke the vampire’s name. ‘That whatever you need in any city in the world, there’s someone you can get to do it, if you have enough money.’

She half-opened her lips then to say something else – about Ysidro, Asher thought – and then closed them as the Prince and the companion crossed the covered veranda, stomping mud and gravel from their shoes. The only snow that remained was on the shady side of the trees. It would probably freeze again that night, Asher judged, seeing how Razumovsky’s breath smoked in the deepening slant of the light. But in a week the birch trees would begin to leaf.

‘I expect you had best be going,’ said Lydia softly.

‘I had, yes.’ He laid his hand over hers. He wanted to remain with her the way a drowning man wanted breath, with the whole of his flesh and being. Yet he remembered the cold grip of the vampire Ippo’s hands on his arms, the flickering pale ghosts of the Moscow vampires as they leaped weightlessly to the top of the wall . . .

And he would have thrown himself into the teeth of a threshing machine before he would have given any of those creatures – who knew him, who had seen his face – the slightest hint that there was someone in St Petersburg to whom he, Ysidro’s human servant, might tell secrets.

‘Be careful,’ she said softly, as he brought up her fingers and her palm to kiss, memorizing the touch of them, knowing he’d want that memory in the days ahead. ‘Tell Ysidro— Give him my best.’

‘I will.’ Seeing the trouble in her eyes, he added, ‘He understands, you know.’

‘I know.’ She nodded slightly. ‘I’m glad he does,’ she added. ‘I – we – owe him a great deal, and I don’t want him to think I’m ungrateful for his protection of you. And of me, for that matter. It’s just that – I don’t ever want to see him again.’ And she took off her glasses, lest Razumovsky and Mrs Flasket, opening the door with laughter and jokes, should behold her in them.

TWELVE

They left St Petersburg at just before midnight. First light showed Asher the trackless, boggy forests of the Baltic plain through the window of the first-class compartment. Ysidro had vanished some time before that, and Asher slept for a few hours in the very handsome wagon-lit provided by the Russian Imperial Rail Service, then woke to a view substantially the same. Gray-trunked pines with sodden snow still around their feet; the far-off glint of lakes; sometimes the blunt gray walls of ancient fortresses that spoke of terrible medieval wars that English schoolchildren never heard of. Then more trees.

‘I take it,’ Ysidro inquired on the following night, when at last the northern twilight had shimmered out of existence, ‘that the Polish tongue is not one of your accomplishments?’

‘You are correct. But, even more so than in Russia, the Polish aristocracy are more fluent in French and German than in the language their own peasants speak. At least in some circles in Russia, it’s fashionable to know a little Russian.’

Ysidro dismissed the entire Slavic race with a single movement of fine-cut nostrils. ‘It were best, then, that you do not see the Warsaw vampires at all. Molchanov and Golenischev spoke of them with contempt, but that may have been because they were Russians, speaking of a conquered people. Will you be in danger on your own account, in that city?’

‘I have a good book,’ replied Asher, ‘and a secure room to read it in. Much as it would interest me to view the city again, I have learned to take no chances whilst Abroad.’

As in Moscow and St Petersburg, Ysidro had arranged for his own lodging in an antique but well-kept town house in the Old City and for Asher’s in a
pension
not far away. Asher saw their considerable luggage, including Ysidro’s enormous coffin-trunk, brought to the town house, and he remained there through the long spring day, reading
Les Miserables
, napping, playing the piano in the parlor – old tunes from childhood, a practice he found soothing on the occasions that his motorcycle was unavailable to him – and watching the street below. At eight – the sun westering in the high northern sky – he departed, got himself a café dinner in the Ulica Senatorska, and was in his own
pension
room while twilight lingered yet over the red-and-gold steeples of the town.

Abroad, he had learned long ago to see cities in terms of danger and safety – zones marked clearly on a mental map – and in terms of the likelihood of encountering an enemy, or the occasional necessity of a quick escape. There wasn’t a city from Petersburg to Lisbon that he could not traverse unseen by the local police, if need be. As a young man he had loved the cities of Europe for their beauty and their age, for palaces and parks, for the astonishing variety of passers-by and peddlers’ cries and the many-colored torrents of languages that flowed like streams along the cobbled ways. He had been sorry – more profoundly sorry than he had realized at the time – when he’d become aware that this love for these places was fading into the instinctive wariness of the Job.

Perhaps that loss had let him fully comprehend the regret in Ysidro’s voice, when the vampire had spoken of those for whom all things had become matters of indifference, except for the Hunt and the Kill.

He had not known, he realized now, when he was well off, with only that loss to mourn.

Since knowing the vampires – knowing that they were real – the cities of Europe had changed for him once again. They had become places where the danger was not only real, but unfathomable. He found he could not pass an ancient church without wondering what might be sleeping in its crypts – what would wake with fall of dark; could not cross the old stone pavements without seeing them as only a brittle crust above an abyss of demons.

Demons who now threatened to emerge and become part of the politics of blood and iron.

How could I have left Lydia alone in such a place?

Yet he knew that she was no safer in Oxford, if one of the London vampires should decide to run the risk of Ysidro’s formidable wrath and put her out of the way. The journey up from London was a short one.

Don’t think of it.
He closed his eyes, rested his forehead on the window’s dark glass.
The sword was offered you one more time, and you grasped it, of your own free will. You accepted the Job, yet again
 . . .

Because he knew in his heart that he could not have done otherwise.

Somewhere, there is a German scientist working with a vampire. And you need a vampire to help you destroy the threat of what that scientist will unleash on the world
.

But he had to sit for some time, hearing the clacking of traffic in the darkness below, before the red-hot knot of fear loosened a little in his chest and he could go back to the long-ago sorrows of Jean Valjean.

When full daylight was back to the sky, he returned to the town house and found on the piano seat two tickets for the 11:52 express that night to Berlin.

‘Nothing.’ The vampire slid shut the door of the first-class compartment as the lights of Warsaw were swallowed behind them in darkness and mist. ‘No fledgling has left this nest. Nor, they say, have they heard of any such in Gdansk, a city whose master spawned the Master of Warsaw. They are blockheads,’ he added, in the tone of an entomologist identifying a common species of bug. ‘Arrogant and intolerant.’ Considering Ysidro’s heritage of Reconquista and Inquisition, Asher did not think the Spanish vampire had a great deal of room to talk.

As he had when they had passed through Berlin on the way to St Petersburg, Asher found himself prey to the conviction that all the men who’d associated with him as the Herr Professor Leyden in the various cities of Germany during the early nineties had foregathered in the Empire’s capital and were all looking for him – a conviction upon which he was hard put to close his mental door so that he could behave normally. From long experience – his own, and the observed behavior of others – he knew how difficult it was to act ‘naturally,’ whatever ‘naturally’ might be; how fine a line separates an ordinary American accent from an assumed drawl that practically shouts to the observant ear,
Ah-all am a fake!

He had seen more than one Department novice stopped by the police, essentially, for overdoing a disguise to the point where it was obvious that it was a disguise.

It was difficult not to keep checking the shaven skin of his head, to make sure that he’d gotten every last millimeter of stubble. Even after decades of the Job, he felt the impulse to reassure himself of his appearance at every reflective surface he passed, though this behavior was among the first things he looked for in men he suspected of playing for the Opposition. It was like not scratching an itch.

He remained indoors at Ysidro’s elegant rented apartment through the daylight hours, and at his own hotel from sunset on, jotting notes in a personal code as to the addresses of these temporary nests. One never knew when the smallest trifles of information would become critical to one’s survival: like Lydia’s artless queries over tea and shopping, about who might be a ‘special friend’ of whom. It was from addresses and street names that recurred, names or even initials that repeated, as much as from property that changed hands suspiciously or not at all, that Lydia was able to put together the location of possible nests.