James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (22 page)

“Maybe.” Lydia remembered one of James’ digressions on how easy it was to get out of a town that had become temporarily too hot.

Then she thought about the burned skeleton of the sanitarium and the stink of charred wood still hanging in the chilly air, and her heart sank, as if with sickness or shock.

“In the meantime, you can do me a favor, if you would, Mrs. Asher. Your husband said you were a medical doctor?”

She nodded. “I have a medical degree, yes, but I mostly do research on endocrine secretions at the Radcliffe Infirmary. The few women with practices all seem to go into what they call ‘women’s medicine’—and still have trouble making a living at it, I might add. And I’ve never been terribly interested in what my aunts referred to as ‘the plumbing.’ Did you need something looked at?”

He mopped up the last of his Sacher torte and gazed regretfully at the polished white porcelain plate. Then he propped his glasses, frowning. “None of the laboratories survived—they were all directly over the kerosene stores—but we do have Fairport’s notebooks from his study. The place was pretty badly charred, but those we managed to recover. He was a British citizen and be damned to who paid the rent on the sanitarium. I suspect the Kundschafts Stelle’s going to want to see them eventually, but if you’d be good enough to have a look through them and tell us anything that it might be worthwhile for us to know, I’d appreciate it. I have them here.”

He held up a battered leather satchel, overloaded and strapped together with rope where its buckles would not hold. “We’d like to know what he was working on. If you still have your list of his articles…”

Lydia
nodded. “Aging,” she said. “Blood. Immortality.” Halliwell grunted. “No wonder he fell for Farren.”

“Yes,” Lydia said quietly. “No wonder.”

In light of the articles she had read, Fairport’s experiments—with blood, with saliva, with mucus, with the chemistry of the brain and the glands—came into crystalline focus.

The man who seeks to live forever, Ysidro had said.

He was right, she thought, turning over the cryptic notes while Margaret dozed in a welter of crocheted snowflakes. He was right.

Bedford Fairport was quite clearly a man possessed with the fanatic determination to discover whence came the deterioration of age, and an even greater determination to learn how to reverse its effects.

In the article in which he had mentioned Ignace Karolyi’s donation of the sanitarium and funds, Fairport had spoken of his own “premature aging.” Lydia had encountered reports of such progeria dating from the sixteenth century, and was of the opinion that some unknown vitamin deficiency or breakdown was responsible. She pushed up her spectacles on her forehead, rubbed her eyes. Of course he would grasp at rumors of immortality.

A glance at the reagents and vitamin solutions told Lydia that his experiments had been appallingly costly. He’d used orangutans as subjects two dozen times in the past few years, and Lydia knew from her own experiments how expensive the animals were. Unnecessary, too, she thought. In most experiments with deficiency syndromes, pigs seemed to work just as well. A double check showed her that he used orangutans to repeat experiments done on pigs, refusing to take what were, to her eye, quite clear failures as anything more than individual variations in data. Toward the end he’d taken to rerunning additional tests on everything, insistently investigating smaller and smaller points, like a man clutching at straws. Even if Fairport had private funds, he’d have to be staggeringly wealthy to continue such work as long as he had.

And she knew that if he had family money—if he’d been connected to one of the wealthier families in England—her aunt Lavinia would have steered her toward him at some point in her own Oxford days as a potential reference, partner, or colleague.

He’d betrayed James. Taken him prisoner. They haven’t even finished digging out the building where the kerosene blew up… If Asher were a prisoner, it would have been down there…

James might have gotten out of town, she told herself defiantly. The police were looking for him. He could have taken a tram, as he always said was best, or a ferry.

Bled almost completely dry of blood…

Tears fought their way to her throat, and grimly she forced them back. We don’t know anything yet. We don’t know.

“An entire notebook of the historical and folkloric.”

The soft voice nearly startled her out of her chair. Looking up, she saw Ysidro sitting opposite, a green cloth-bound ledger open before him. Past the vampire’s shoulder the mantel clock was visible, and Lydia was mildly surprised to see that it was now close to three in the morning.

“I hadn’t got that far.” She reached back to twist her heavy braid into a less schoolgirlish knot. The cook—an excellent woman of broad smiles and a completely incomprehensible language—had left Sacher torte, bread and butter, and a succulent bunch of Italian grapes, should either dziewczyna suddenly find herself in peril of starvation before morning light, and the smell of the coffee warming on the little primus stove was heavy in the room. “And folklore would only be speculative. Even so-called ‘historical’ personalities—rumors about Ninon de l’Enclos and Cagliostro and Count What’s-his-name in Paris…”

“Scarcely speculative at the end.” Ysidro turned the ledger, slid it across the table to her, hands like old ivory in the lamplight.

Old man who lived to be a thousand, related the wandering script. Brzchek
Village. Woman who lived to be five hundred (wove moonlight). Okurka
Village. Woman who used moonlight to make herself beautiful forever. Salek
Village. Man who made a pact with devil, lived forever. Bily Hora
Village. Woman who bathed in blood, lived five hundred years. Brusa, Bily Hora, Salek.

She looked up, puzzled. “It sounds like the sort of thing James does—talking to storytellers and grannies and old duffers at country inns.”

“I expect Fairport observed the way James went about his questioning and turned it to his own usages.” He tilted his head, moved the pile of invoices so he could read the top sheet. His pale eyebrows flexed. “One can, in any case, see the trend of his mind. But orangutans? I have spoken to those who saw James leave this city.”

Her breath drew sharply; Ysidro watched her in stillness for a moment, his head a little to one side, like a white mantis, and again his eyebrows flexed, though it was impossible to read the expression in his eyes.

“Walk with me, lady.” He rose and held out to her his hand. “The Master of Vienna has given me leave to hunt in this city, if so be that I am circumspect. Should he see us in company, he will know you as a sojourner, and think us chance-met and you harmless prey.”

Lydia
glanced back at Margaret’s snoring form as Ysidro handed her her coat. Even through the gloves he drew on, and the kid that covered her own hands, his flesh was icy. Automatically, though no one would see her, she removed her spectacles, slipped them in her pocket. The card games had broken her of the habit of hiding her eyeglasses in Ysidro’s presence; he had seen her, she reflected, at her four-eyed ugliest and did not appear to mind. Perhaps it was only that he had seen many others worse than she.

He led her down the gilt and marble staircase and through the bossed bronze of the inconspicuous door to the pavement outside.

“You saw the Master of Vienna, then?”

“Count Batthyany Nikolai Alessandro August—and his wives. He has ruled Vienna, and indeed the greater part of the Danube
Valley, since the days when men still fought the Turks on the banks of the river. As well that he and I are both conversant in the old French of the courts, for German I know only from books. It was not, you understand, a language spoken by anyone of breeding in my day; one reason that I made a point of being elsewhere until the Kings of England learned a more civilized tongue.”

Lydia
hid her smile. She’d heard him speak German to the Slovak and to the cook. One thing she had learned about Ysidro in the past few days was the depth of his snobbery.

Around them, Vienna slept, a drowned Atlantis at the bottom of a lightless sea. Shutters of wood and glass accordioned over the bright cafes, and even the dormers of the servants, high at the tops of the canyon walls, were closed eyes sealed in dreaming.

“Your husband injured Batthyany’s youngest wife,” Ysidro went on as they walked. “He did well to leave Vienna. He was seen at the train station boarding the Orient Express for Constantinople…”

“Constantinople?” Lydia said, startled.

“Even so. A most curious choice.”

“But who… who saw him? If it was one of this Batthyany’s vampires…”

“Another wife,” Ysidro said smoothly. “Who perhaps had reasons of her own for wishing ill to the fair German beauty who had—until James evidently burned her face with a handful of silver—been the count’s fancy. The German beauty—Grete, her name is—slew at least two of the groundsmen at Fruhlingzeit in the hopes that their blood would speed the healing of her wound, but it will be some time before she is anything but hideous. Indeed, for some time to come Batthyany’s coterie must hunt with the greatest of care, for fear of attracting notice by the police—another reason it is as well that your husband left Vienna when he did. Count Batthyany spoke of revenge, but his eldest wife—Hungarian, as he is—seemed pleased.”

They turned a corner, coming clear of the tall walls to a cobbled expanse where the cathedral rose suddenly before them, like a black and white fish skeleton in the wintry moonlight. Mist lay thin about its feet, stirring with their stride; the air stung the inside of her nose when she breathed.

“Was it the vampires who killed Professor Fairport, then?”

“Of course.” Ysidro’s head turned at some small sound across the pavement. A young girl emerged from the cathedral’s porch and hastened across the square to the concealing dark of the lanes beyond, drawing her shawl over her head as she went. The Spaniard watched her, speculatively, out of sight.

“Batthyany was enraged, you understand, at any other’s fledgling entering his domain,” he said, turning back to Lydia. “And doubly, that any would ally himself with mortal governments, and so bring such governments into knowledge of the vampires. He considered the burning of Fruhlingzeit—and the death of the men involved—sufficient warning. His intent was that Ernchester die too in the conflagration, but says that the earl has departed also from Vienna. According to his eldest wife, your husband was accompanied on the train by a female vampire whom they found upon the premises, who claimed that she had been kidnapped and held prisoner by Fairport. Indeed, Batthyany and his countess helped this woman take horses from the stable and load into the wagon her traveling coffin, by the light of the burning house. With horse and wagon she would have easily returned to Vienna in time to be on the train.”

“Anthea?”

“It would seem. And my guess is that your husband lay alive in that coffin. He could not have escaped, else.”

Lydia
kept her face from showing the inner shudder she felt at the thought, but even as it went through her, another part of her mind was busy piecing together implications. Around her in the blanched moonlight the whole city seemed to lie in a drugged dream of mist and shadow, still with a stillness like death.

Ysidro’s world, she thought. The fag end of nighttime. The sense of being the only one left alive.

“That means—it must mean—Ernchester has gone to Constantinople.”

“Even so,” Ysidro agreed. “According to Batthyany’s countess, Anthea claimed that she had been used as hostage to force Ernchester to the will of Karolyi and Fairport. It implies, of course, that Ernchester did not come to Vienna of his own accord, and so they hunted him no further.”

“But James saw him get on the train with Karolyi of his own accord,” Lydia said, puzzled. “After Karolyi was dead and Ernchester freed, why would he flee?”

“The fact that Charles got on the train of his own accord,” Ysidro said softly, “does not mean that he did so of free will. And it would explain what has troubled me from the start. Ernchester is not a politician’s choice—that slut Grippen has lately got in St. John’s Wood is stronger to the hunt and the kill than Charles. But someone knew enough about him to know that he could be ruled. That a threat against Anthea would bring him. That to hold her would be to guarantee his conduct.”

“Would Karolyi know that?”

“Evidently.”

They had reached the house in the Bakkersgasse again. Unwilling, perhaps, to give up possession of those dark streets that were their sole dominion, Lydia and Ysidro sat as if by unspoken agreement side by side on the marble rim of the small fountain before the house. The gaslight wavered on the surface, made watching pits of the eyes of the bronze emperor above the water and touched the lower half of Ysidro’s face, giving the effect of a carnival mask through which fulvous eyes gleamed like marsh fire as he spoke.

“Will you return to London, mistress? The trap here is sprung.”

Lydia
hesitated, feeling for one minute the overwhelming desire for the comfort of the things she knew, the world of research circumscribed by the university’s walls. But she knew perfectly well, as the thought of it formed in her mind, that only a trap had been sprung.

“It isn’t… it isn’t over yet, is it? Whatever started this. Not anywhere near it.”

“No.”

Frightening as it had appeared in the beginning, Vienna hadn’t been so bad.

“Would it be of help to you for me to go on to Constantinople? Because that’s what I would prefer to do,” she added, seeing the swift thought behind the Spaniard’s eyes.

“It would be of help in finding Ernchester, yes.” He frowned, as at some unexpected thought. “I would not have you undertake unnecessary risk—yet you know your husband’s thought, and the legitimacy of your inquiries will help in the search for the heart of this matter.”

He paused again, considering, and there was, Lydia thought, just the smallest trace of surprise in the enigmatic eyes.

“Curiously enough,” he went on, “Charles has been in Constantinople. This was many years ago, but there might be some there who knew him when he—and possibly they—were living men.”