And there was something else.
They were near Covent Garden, a tangle of little streets and alleys, the cramped, cheap lodgings of servants and seamstresses, costermongers hawking at half price from carts what they couldn't get rid of earlier in the day, and the smell of rotting vegetables piled with the dung in the gutters. A couple of loungers outside a pub whistled admir-ingly and called out to her. She ignored them and hoped the vampire did, too. Though she vastly preferred the quieter life of Oxford for her work, at her father's insistence she'd spent a certain amount of time in London, but the graceful houses of Mayfair, the green spaciousness of Hyde Park and St. James, and the quiet opulence of the Savoy and Simpson's might have been in another city. This tangle of wet cobble-stones, loud voices, and harsh lights was alien to her experience; though she wasn't particularly frightened-after all, she knew she had only to summon a cab and return to Bruton Place -she knew she would have to go carefully.
She saw the vampire turn into a little court whose broken cobbles leaked black water into the wider
street; she ducked her head and passed its entrance swiftly, not daring even to look. In this part of London, circling a block was always a chancy business, but she took the next turning and hurried her steps down the insalubrious and deserted court until she found a dirty alley that seemed to lead through.
She hesitated for a long time-nearly a minute, which, given her quarry and the danger she knew she would be in, was long. The alley, what she could see of it, was dark and crooked. Though the houses of the little court at her back gave evidence of life in the form of lights burning in the windows and shadows crossing back and forth over the cheap curtains or baldly uncurtained glass, all the ground-floor shops had been locked up, and the wet, narrow pavement lay deserted under the chill drift of evening mist. She shivered and huddled deeper into her coat, for the first time conscious of why so many people disliked being alone. The vampire was in the next court. She had a strong suspicion that he had gone there to seek his prey.
Her hand closed tighter on the sheath of the amputation knife in her pocket. A six-inch blade seemed like a broadsword in the dissecting room; she wondered if, put to it, she could bring herself to use it against living flesh.
Or even, she added with involuntary humor, Undead. One way of getting a blood sample, but risky. If the other vampires didn't know of her connection with James, they would have no reason for sparing her life.
And James would be furious.
Like the whisper of a breath, of a footfall, or of the half consciousness of the smell of blood, she knew there was someone behind her.
She swung around, her heart hammering, galvanized into terror such as she had never felt before, the knife whipping out of her pocket, naked in her slim hand. For a moment she stood, flattened to the brick of the corner of the alley wall, the scalpel held before her, facing... noth-ing. The court behind her was deserted.
But, she thought, only just.
Her glance dropped instantly to the wet pavement behind her. No footprint but her own little smudges marred its moist shine. Her hand was shaking-it, her mouth, and her feet all felt like ice as all the blood in her body retreated from her extremities in reaction to the shock. She noted the effect with a clinical detachment, at the same time conscious of the heat of her breath, and how it smoked as it mingled with the mists that had begun to drift through this dark and tangled part of the city. Had it been this misty before?
There had been something there. She knew it.
A smell, she thought, her mind taking refuge in analysis while her eyes swept here and there, to the shadows which suddenly clotted blacker, more twisted, beneath the doorways and shutters of the locked and empty shops-a smell of blood, of rot, of something she had never smelled before and never wanted to smell again... A smell of some-thing wrong.
And close to her. So terrifyingly close.
It was perhaps forty seconds before she gained the courage to move from the protection of the wall at her back.
She kept as close to the wall as she could, making her way back swiftly to the populated noises of Monmouth Street; she felt every door-way and every projection of the shop fronts concealing invisible threats. As she passed the entrance to the next court movement caught her eye. She turned her head to see a girl, fourteen or fifteen and dressed in secondhand finery from the slop shops of the East Side, an exuberantly trimmed orange and blue frock standing out in the darkness. She heard the nasal voice say, "Well, Mister, wot yer doin' 'ere, all by yourself?" It was young and coaxing and already with a professional's edge.
She stood for a long moment, sickened, the knife still in her lowered hand, wondering if she should call out. Beyond the girl's form, in the black darkness of the court, she could see nothing, but half felt the gleam of eyes.
She quickened her steps, cold and shaking, and hailed the first cab she saw to take her back to Bloomsbury.
What little sleep she achieved that night was with the lamp burning beside her bed.
The morning post brought Asher an envelope without return address, containing a blank sheet of paper in which was folded a cloakroom ticket from the British Museum. He packed up the precis of yesterday's findings, the list of relatives of Lotta Harshaw's victims, and the mea-surements of tracks and footprints taken at Half Moon Street and put them in a brown satchel, which he took with him to the Museum and checked in to the cloakroom. After half an hour's quiet perusal of court records of the brief reign of Queen Mary I in the vast hush of that immense rotunda, he slipped an envelope from his pocket, addressed it to Miss Priscilla Merridew, sealed his own cloakroom ticket in it, af-fixed a penny stamp, and left, presenting the ticket he'd received by post and receiving another brown satchel whose contents, opened in his own rooms after posting his missive to Lydia, proved to be several folded sheets covered with his wife's sprawling handwriting.
Even a preliminary list of houses in London which had not changed hands, either by sale or by testamentary deposition, in the last hundred years was dauntingly long. Given the vagaries of the Public Records Office, there were, of course, dozens of reasons why a piece of property would have no records attached to it-everything from bequests by persons living outside Britain to purchase by corporations-but Asher was gratified to note that 10 Half Moon Street was on the list. And it was a start, he thought, a preliminary list against which to check...
A name caught his eye.
Ernchester House.
For a moment he wondered why it was familiar, then he remembered. One of the names Lotta had used on old dressmaker's bills was Carlotta Ernchester.
Lydia was not at the Public Records Office in Chancery Lane when Asher got there, a circumstance which he thought just as well. Though by daylight he knew he had nothing to fear from the vampires of Lon-don, he was uneasily conscious that the man he was stalking was not of the Undead and, like himself, was able to operate both in the daytime and the nighttime worlds.
He established himself at a desk in the most inconspicuous corner of the reading room and sent in his requests with the clerk, aware that the killer could, in fact, be any of the nondescript men at the various desks and counters around the long room, turning over leaves of laborious copperplate in the old record
books, searching the files of corporation and parish records for houses which had never been sold, or bodies which had never been buried. The chap at the far side of the room with the graying side whiskers looked both tall enough and strong enough to have wrenched loose the shutters from Edward Hammersmith's win-dow. Asher leaned idly around the edge of his desk and studied the man's square-toed boots with their military gloss. Far too broad for the single clear track he'd been able to measure.