Blood Maidens (9 page)

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 level 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

SEVEN

The Theosophical Society’s charity ball was held – in the absence of the Imperial Family, who hadn’t lived in the Winter Palace in years – in one of the Palace’s larger halls: a jaw-dropping barn of crimson curtains and golden columns that looked as if it could have swallowed Westminster Abbey whole. Even Ysidro – who gave the impression that the destruction of the planet would not discompose him – paused for a moment on the threshold and said, in his soft expressionless voice, ‘
Dios
.’

Asher hid a grin. ‘Travel is broadening,’ he observed, and the vampire’s pale-yellow glance flicked sidelong at him, then back to the gilt-trimmed ceiling, to the ocean of humanity swirling around the refreshment tables at the far end of the room.

‘As is longevity,’ returned Ysidro. ‘Each time, I delude myself that I have beheld the limit of money wasted by rulers in praise of their own glory, yet I am humbled anew. ’Tis enough to make one believe there is a God.’ And he moved, like a slim impeccable specter in black and white, ahead of Asher into the enormous hall.

‘At least I won’t be called upon tonight to confirm some would-be adept’s visions of fairies at the bottom of her garden,’ murmured Asher as he followed in the vampire’s wake. ‘Which seems to be part of the job, if one lectures in Folklore . . . Not to speak of being dragged to seances by that imbecile cousin of Lydia’s, who regards me as the local expert on things that go bump in the night. I didn’t think there were this many True Believers to be found in any European city . . .’

‘As I say, ’tis only that you lack three centuries’ experience in the matter.’

‘Nor do I want it,’ replied Asher firmly, and received – to his surprise – one of Ysidro’s fleeting, unexpectedly human smiles.

‘It has its compensations.’

Asher checked his steps, halfway across the acres of crowded parquet that separated the doors from the buffet: ‘
Are
they real?’

Ysidro turned back. Around them, ladies in satin gowns cut to the nipples – in the fashion of St Petersburg – and wan-looking gentlemen in evening dress or, in some cases, extravagant silk versions of ‘the raiment of the people’, chatted at the top of their lungs in French or Russian about apports, apparitions, ectoplasmic manifestations, or railway shares . . .

‘Are what real?’

‘The fairies at the bottom of the garden. I’ve studied accounts of them going back to classical times without ever for a single instant believing that any had actually been seen – precisely as I studied accounts of vampires.’

‘The difference being,’ said Ysidro, ‘that vampires are not supernatural. We are merely rare, and intelligent enough – for the most part – to keep hidden from the eyes of our far-more-numerous prey. Regarding the fairies at the bottom of the garden, I have on the subject no more than any man or woman in this extremely noisy room: an opinion. Which is, that while I can not deny that some persons may actually have seen elemental spirits, even as some persons may have held converse with ghosts, I deeply doubt that
all
those who claim such experiences have actually had more than delusions.’

Asher grinned again at the phrasing of the statement. ‘
Have
you ever seen fairies?’

‘Would they make themselves visible to a vampire?’

Ysidro turned away, and Asher reflected,
Touché
. And touched, in the pocket of his extremely American tuxedo-style jacket, the letter from Lydia that had been waiting for him earlier that evening on his return from Lady Irene’s. Then he squared up his shoulders and reminded himself that everyone in the room was an effete superstition-ridden non-Protestant and he was an American, by God, and the match of any bunch of sniveling Russkis.