NINE
Ysidro
was waiting on the platform of Warsaw Station when Asher arrived at
half-past eleven. Wordlessly, he slipped a luggage claim-ticket
into his hand in passing and vanished at once into the little knots
of students and workers, functionaries and their wives, who milled
about in the cold, talking, checking tickets, giving last-minute
assurances of love to Cousin Volodya in
Bologoe . . .
Outside the station,
murky fog-banks drifted in the streets, thick with the smells of
sewage, coal smoke, and the sea.
The vampire did not
enter their first-class compartment until the train had passed
beyond the ghastly ring of wooden tenements, unpaved streets, and
mephitic factories that encircled St Petersburg’s exquisite
eighteenth-century heart, and was on its way south through the
darkness. It crossed Asher’s mind that Ysidro – Count Golenischev’s
reassurances of support notwithstanding – might feel himself to be
Abroad as well.
As he set up the tiny
ivory pieces of his traveling chess-set, the Spaniard listened with
interest to Asher’s account of his visit to the Okhrana. ‘No wonder
Golenischev’s fledglings are uneasy,’ he murmured, when Asher had
finished. ‘We – the vampire kind – find profoundly unsettling these
rumors that fly among the poor. Such panic can stir up the police
and waken street mobs and riots. ’Tis no mischance that none of the
Paris nest survived the Revolution. Even without open violence,
tales of that kind cause the poor to watch one another more closely
and to take greater care of themselves. When this killer of whores
whom the newspapers called the Ripper walked London’s streets,
tavern keepers and dock hands took it into their heads that he must
have a “lair” somewhere, and groups of them developed an unhealthy
interest in the cellars of empty buildings, and town houses whose
inhabitants did not show themselves by day.’
Asher turned from the
pitch-black abyss of the window. ‘I wonder the lot of you didn’t do
something about Jolly Jack, then.’
‘We did.’ Ysidro
adjusted the frosted-glass shade of the lamp over the compartment’s
narrow table and moved his knight. He always, Asher was amused to
note, chose the black figures: Spanish, stained ivory, and
extremely old. ‘What these disappearing children – or for that
matter the burning of this vampire girl whom Golenischev did not
think to mention to me – have to do with our German scientist’s
friend, I know not. Yet it is clear to me that all is not –
stable – in Petersburg.’
‘Could vampires exist
in Petersburg that Golenischev doesn’t know about?’
‘Only if they did not
hunt. And if one is not going to hunt, why risk travel to a
different city?’
‘To see a doctor?’
Asher moved his knight out of the trap Ysidro was closing upon it
and perceived, in a single irritated glance, that in the next three
moves he would be checkmated and there wasn’t a single thing he
could do about it.
‘Golenischev informs
me that the Master of Moscow is one of the old nobility,’ Ysidro
went on. ‘Molchanov – an old long-beard, Golenischev calls him.
These days he lets his acres to bailiffs to farm and himself dwells
in Moscow, though he will return for a week, or perhaps two, to his
ancestral lands, sleeping in the old chapel there and never showing
himself to his tenants, nor laying hand upon them, Golenischev
says. Will you have tea?’ A bearded little man with a crooked back,
old enough to be Asher’s father, had tapped at the door, bearing a
tray of steaming glasses. Ysidro gave him two roubles extra and
received the man’s blessing with unmoved countenance.
‘They do not know
that their Baron is the same man for whom their fathers worked, and
their grandfathers,’ the vampire went on, when the man had gone.
‘Yet he has paid to bring a schoolteacher to the estate and gives
generous dowries for the young girls in his villages when they
wed.’
‘Kind of him.’ Asher
doggedly shifted a pawn. He was coming to know some of his
companion’s pet moves and, more, coming to learn how the vampire
played, with the whole of the game and all its myriad possibilities
existing in his mind before his thin fingers touched the first
piece.
‘Were Baron Molchanov
kind, I doubt he would have remained Master of Moscow through the
French invasion and the burning of the city. Yet he knows that
which apparently eluded your Mr Stoker in his so-interesting novel:
that a vampire lord who preys upon his own peasants is doomed to
swift discovery and death. ’Tis difficult for our kind to hide in
the countryside. Even Golenischev, who has never set foot upon his
own acres, takes care to keep his peasants content and in his debt,
lest he should need the services of one to pick up a wagonload of
boxes from the station one day, while the sun is high, and leave
them in a dark room at the man’s town palace without asking too
many questions. Check.’
Asher thrust down the
urge to throw the nearest bishop at his companion’s
head.
Towards morning
Ysidro disappeared, leaving Asher to get a few hours of sleep as
the train rolled through the dreary blackness of an endless plain.
As they left the sea the clouds thinned, and waning moonlight
painted the bulbous domes of country churches, the snow thick upon
the fields. For a long while, it seemed, a single lamplit window
burned in the distance – what are they doing
awake at this hour? The train stopped at Tver and Klin, low
wooden buildings dimly descried through the gloom and an occasional
bearded peasant moving about the frozen streets as light struggled
unwillingly into the sky. Waking, Asher took another cup of tea and
turned in his mind all that Ysidro had ever told him of the Undead
and all he had learned of them in his studies of folklore and
legend. What could the Kaiser offer a vampire that would
counterbalance the terrible risks of setting off organized hunts
for their lairs by a population convinced of their
existence?
’Tis almost unheard of for a vampire to kill another
vampire, Ysidro had said . . . yet Asher felt
almost certain that even as the vampires of London had attempted to
kill him, Asher, rather than have him assist Ysidro in searching
for the creature that was killing them,
so they might very well kill a vampire who threatened to break the
secrecy that was their strongest protection.
Was that what had
happened last autumn? Had the girl, whoever she had been, come to
Petersburg with Theiss?
Yet would they not
have killed Theiss, rather than the girl, if they’d found
out?
He reached in his
pocket for Lydia’s letter, but brought out, instead, the one he had
found in Lady Irene’s house.
Lady, I received your
letter . . .
Why had she not gone
back to London after the Master of Petersburg had
died?
Had she been ashamed
to face Ysidro? Or had it only been that she could find none to
accompany her on the journey?
Had her memories of
England – wind and meadowlarks on the high downs, and the sound of
Oxford church-bells – rusted like the strings of her harp? Withered
like the bindings of the mathematics books in her library, until
there had been nothing left but the hunt?
Dearest Simon, forgive me my long
silence . . . a letter filled with the minutiae of
ballet and opera, scandal and politics, creeps towards its
conclusion on my
secretaire . . .
Would he miss them,
those letters filled with the minutiae of ballet and opera, scandal
and politics? Asher recalled how Ysidro had thrust thick packets of
his replies to those letters into the pockets of his coat and
cloak . . . To burn? To reread? Would one who had
lost all capacity for caring – one for whom all the world had
reduced itself to the passion of the hunt – care about what he had
written to one who now would no longer write?
Asher closed his
eyes . . . and woke sharply with the jostle of the
carriage wheels over the points, a woman’s voice in the corridor
complaining, ‘—and if that coachman of his is drunk again I
swear I shall tell him to send the man
packing!’ in bad provincial French.
Ysidro had given
Asher an address on the Ragojskaia Zastava, on the outskirts of
Moscow: a small town-house, built early in the century upon what
looked like the ruins of a convent and set in its own walled
grounds. Stone lions the size of sheepdogs guarded its little gate,
and Asher half-expected to see the hairy shadow of the Dvorovoi –
the Slavic spirit of the yard – lurking in the dusk. If Ysidro did,
in fact, find himself in need of a translator, Asher guessed that
the Moscow vampires would sooner come to an isolated structure than
to a terraced house or a rented flat. Still, when the Spanish
vampire emerged from his locked, double-lidded trunk with fall of
darkness, bathed and changed clothes and disappeared into the
night, Asher unpacked those dry net-wrapped swags of wild rose and
wild garlic with which he’d filled his luggage and made the bedroom
that overlooked the gate as secure as he could, given who he was
dealing with. He slipped his little silver sleeve-knife into its
holster and satisfied himself that it would drop with a twitch of
his wrist into his hand.
The day help had left
a meal of soup and pirozhki. Asher ate
it by lamplight – Moscow’s gas-company mains did not extend so far,
and of course there was nothing of electricity here – in the
breakfast room that overlooked the barren garden and wondered if
the first buds were on the willow branches in his own garden at
home and what Lydia was doing tonight. Despite the snow, and the
crushing cold, the days were lengthening, and he knew with what
swiftness the spring would come.
His body had settled
very quickly back into the strange rhythms of Abroad: sleep a few
hours here, a few hours there; quick wakefulness; eat when and how
he could, with little sense of hunger between-times. He carried up
the small samovar to his room and made tea by the dim amber gloom
of the lamp. Then he turned the flame down, so that only the little
burner of the samovar pierced the dark like a tiny unilluminating
star, and sat beside the bedroom window, gazing into the
night.
He was still wide
awake at two when he saw them. Nearly a dozen, they came at a sort
of drifting run from the direction of the tram stop, pale faces
like ghosts where the clouds cleared a little and the moonlight
broke through.
He hadn’t thought
there would be so many. None of them bothered with the gate. They
sprang to the top of the wall like cats: a couple of students, like
the ill-fated Ippo and Marya in Petersburg; a couple of
well-dressed gentlemen and youthful-looking ladies in dark gowns of
another year, silken skirts billowing when they sprang down into
the garden. Long hair floated loose like cloud rack. Even the
attenuated glimmer of the cloud-crossed stars made their eyes seem
to glow.
Ysidro must have come
through the gate, though Asher hadn’t seen him do
so . . . Can even the other
vampires follow, when he moves?
He stood on the
graveled walk, diminutive beside a heavy-shouldered man in
countrified tweeds, like a character out of Tolstoy, bearded and
bear-like without seeming in the slightest bit clumsy. A young
woman stood between them, ivory pale in a colorless satin gown, her
long hair loose upon her shoulders like a schoolgirl, speaking to
each in turn. Evidently Ysidro had found a translator, and that,
Asher thought, was just as well. Curious as he was about the Master
of Moscow’s patterns of speech and inflection – as a philologist
Asher would have given almost anything to hear how Russian had been
spoken in the seventeenth century – but he knew the knowledge would
have cost him his life.
So he watched from
his window, and now and then Molchanov would turn his shaggy head
and glance in his direction, as if he knew perfectly well that
Ysidro couldn’t have gotten to St Petersburg, and then to Moscow,
from London without a human
escort . . .
And knew perfectly
well that humans were nosy, even to the point of peeking through
the doors of Hell.
The clock downstairs
chimed the quarter hour. As if they heard it, the vampires swarmed
the garden wall again, leaping down – cloaks, hair, dresses
billowing – on the outside. The moon struggled like a drowning
swimmer from the clouds, and Asher saw the garden was empty. The
Master of Moscow, the pale beautiful woman,
Ysidro . . . They were all gone. He waited,
listening for footfalls he knew he wouldn’t hear, until outside the
door of his room he heard Ysidro say, ‘James?’
Only then did he get
to his feet and remove the protective swags of garlic and
whitethorn, stow them in his suitcase again, and open the
door.
Asher realized he was
shaking. The fire in the stove had burned to ashes,
unnoticed.
‘You are cold.’ The
vampire crossed to the samovar, filled a silver-mounted glass with
steaming tea.
Asher turned up the
lamp. ‘Just glad you found someone else to talk to our
friends.’
‘As am I.’ Ysidro
knelt to open the stove’s shining grate, added a log and stirred
the fire, its orange light painting the illusion of life on his
thin features. ‘I was invited to go hunting, in what remained of
the night – would I dine with them, they asked. I replied I would
sup when I returned to Petersburg. This satisfied them, though
Molchanov suggested that he could find me an escort back, should
harm befall you here.’
Asher stood by the
window for a time, the tea glass cradled in his hands. Guessing
what would have happened, had Ysidro gone hunting with the
fledglings, while Molchanov remained behind. Now that the vampires
were gone, he found he could not stop shivering. ‘What did you tell
him?’
‘That I had need of
one who could speak both English and Russian. He cautioned me
against employing a man with brains: Get a
good, stupid peasant, he said – through the lovely Xenia,
who is certainly stupid enough to suit him to the ground.
They’re loyal, and they don’t ask questions.
You can’t trust a city man. Like weasels, they always think they
know best. I did not ask him how he came to know what
weasels think. I never met a master who did not consider himself
more intelligent than any man living.’ Ysidro brought up a chair to
the stove and, after a glance at Asher, silently, brought from the
window the chair in which Asher had watched and placed it by the
open grate as well.
Then he sat and
folded his long, white hands. ‘I have now learnt all that gossip
can tell me of the Petersburg vampires,’ he said. ‘No
inconsiderable matter, given the fewness of hours in the night that
can actually be spent in the hunt and the length of years in which
human minds – whom immortality renders no less human – have nothing
to occupy themselves with except gossip.’
Asher hid a smile and
took the chair opposite him, as if he had been a living friend.
‘You behold me agog.’
‘I fear you will be
less so,’ responded the vampire politely, ‘when you learn that you
and I will be obliged to continue our travels together through
Europe for some weeks yet. It appears that the rivalry between
Count Golenischev and his brother-fledgling Prince Dargomyzhsky –
both fledglings of the same master who made the Lady Irene vampire
– has been complicated still further by the presence of an
interloper, a vampire who came to Petersburg about two years ago.
For years the Count and the Prince each have attempted to gain
Irene’s support, but she kept apart from them both – regarding both
as imbeciles, an evaluation I find it difficult to contest. The
interloper – whom Molchanov simply referred to as a German, meaning
in Old Russian simply a foreigner – he called you one, too – sides
now with one, now with the other—’
‘And now with the
actual Germans?’
‘That, neither
Molchanov nor any of his fledglings could say. They do not, you
understand, travel abroad themselves. Like all Muscovites they
regard Moscow as the heart and center of the physical and spiritual
universe, and Petersburg as a sort of corrupt excrescence,
necessary only to maintain a contact with the tradesmen of the
West. And it is a long distance,’ he added. ‘A vampire alone might
be able to travel from Moscow to Petersburg in two days in
midwinter, could he find secure lodging in Bologoe. Myself, I would
not care to try. Petersburg has always had a very small population
of the Undead, and its masters have tended to be those who had not
the strength to establish themselves elsewhere.’
‘And this vampire
girl who perished in the autumn?’
‘He knew nothing of
her. The Lady Xenia – our fair translator, who corresponds with
Golenischev – assured me that Golenischev knew nothing of her
either. Had he done so, he would have attempted to recruit her, not
sought to do her harm; doubtless Dargomyzhsky would have as
well.’
‘Either they’re all
lying . . .’ Asher set his tea glass on the raised
stone of the hearth on which the stove stood. ‘Or what? What
could the Kaiser’s government offer a
vampire? Power? I’d think that given the weakness of the local
master, in St Petersburg that wouldn’t be much of a consideration.
Food? God knows, the city has the biggest slums this side of India,
and even the families of those who disappear don’t dare ask
questions. What else is there?’
‘That,’ Ysidro
replied, ‘is what we must travel to discover. To Prague – to Warsaw
– to Köln – to Frankfurt – to Munich . . . and to
Berlin.’
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