"Mrs. Farren?" he said, using the family name of the Earls of Ernchester, and it surprised her into replying.
"Yes." Then something changed in her eyes.
"Lady Ernchester?"
She didn't answer. He felt the touch of that sleepiness, that mental laziness of not paying attention, and forced it away; he saw in those glittering eyes that she felt that, too.
"My name is Dr. James Asher. I'd like to talk to you about Danny King." Seven
"Come in."
She stepped back from the door, gestured him to a salon whose pilastered archway opened to the right of the hall. Her voice was low and very sweet, without seductiveness or artifice of any kind. As he followed her, Asher was acutely conscious of the thud-ding of his own heart. He wondered if she was, too.
The salon was large, perfectly orderly, but had a chilled air of long neglect. One dim oil lamp on the corner of a curlicued Baroque mantel-piece picked out the edges of the furnishings nearest it-graceful Hepplewhite chairs, the curve of a bow-front cabinet, and the claret-red gleam of carved mahogany in a thick archaic style. Asher wondered who would dust the place and brickbat that dingy front step, now that Danny King was dead.
Mrs. Farren said, "I've heard of you, Dr. Asher." As in Ysidro's, there was neither commitment nor emotion in her voice. Standing be-fore her in the small pool of lamplight, he could see the gleam of her protruding fangs, and the fact that, except when she spoke, the creamy thickness of her breasts did not rise or fall.
"My apologies for intruding," he said, with a slight bow. "If you've heard of me you know I'm seeking information-and if you know Don Simon Ysidro, you probably know I'm not getting much. Was Daniel King your servant?"
"Yes." She nodded once. Unlike Ysidro, though her voice was abso-lutely neutral, there was a world of brightness, of watchfulness, of feel-ing in her large, golden-brown eyes. "He was my husband's," she added after a moment, and inwardly Asher sighed with relief-he'd been afraid for a moment that all vampires were as utterly uncommunicative as Don Simon. "His carriage-groom-a tiger, they used to call them. That was during our last..." She hunted for the word for a moment, dark brows flinching slightly together, and suddenly seemed infinitely more human. "Our last period of being of the world, I suppose you could say. We had a number of servants. In those days such extravagant eccentricities as barring a whole wing of the house and leading an ut-terly nocturnal existence were more accepted by servants than they are now. But Danny guessed."
She stood with her back to the mantelpiece, her hands clasped lightly before her slender waist, in an attitude regal and slightly archaic, like a stiffly painted Restoration portrait. In life, Asher guessed, she had been a little plump, but that was all smoothed away now, like any trace of archaism in her speech. Her gown with its flared tulip skirt was mod-ern, but the baroque pearls she wore in her ears could only have been so extravagantly set in the days of the last of the Stuart kings.
When she moved, it had the same unexpectedness Ysidro's move-ments did, that momentary inattention, and then finding her at his side. But she only said, "I suppose now that he's gone, it's I who must take your coat..."
"Did you make him a vampire?"
"No." She hesitated a moment in the act of laying ulster, hat, and scarf on a nearby sideboard, her eyes moving from his, then back. "Grippen did that, at our request-and Danny's. Danny was very de-voted to Charles-my husband."
"Could you have?"
"Is that question pertinent?" she inquired levelly. "Or just curiosity?"
"The answer is that we would not have," a voice spoke from the shadows, and Asher turned swiftly, having heard no creak from the floorboards that had murmured beneath his own weight. The man who stood there, face white as chalk in the gloom, seemed more like a ghost than a human being-thinnish, medium height, and with an indefinable air about him of shabbiness, of age, as if one would expect to see cob-webs caught in his short-cropped light-brown hair. "Not without Lio-nel's permission."
"Lionel?"
"Grippen." The vampire shook his head, as if the name tasted flat and old upon his tongue. There was a weariness to his movements, a slowness, like age that had not yet reached his face. Glancing swiftly back at Mrs. Farren, Asher saw her eyes on this newcomer filled with concern.
"He never would have stood for it," the vampire explained. "He would have driven poor Danny out of every hole and corner within a year. He's very jealous that way." He held out one thin hand, said, "I'm Ernchester," in a voice that echoed the resonance of that vanished title.
Asher, who had gained a certain amount of familiarity with the Earls of Ernchester from his afternoon's researches, guessed: "Lord Charles Farren, third Earl of Ernchester?"
A faint smile brushed that white, square-jawed face, and for a mo-ment there was a flicker of animation in the dead eyes. He inclined his head. "I fear I don't look much like the portrait," he said. Any number of portraits of ancient gentlemen lurked on the gloomy salon walls, too obscured with time and shadow to be even remotely recognizable. But Asher reasoned that, since the third Earl of Ernchester had died in 1682, and any portrait would have been two-thirds devoted to an elabo-rate periwig, it scarcely mattered. And, in fact, the third Earl of Ernchester had not died. Asher frowned, trying to recall the name of the Countess, and with the curious perspicacity of vampires Mrs. Farren said, "Anthea." She stepped over beside her husband and guided him to a chair near the cold hearth; in her brown eyes was still that wariness, that concern when she looked at him and that watchful enmity when she regarded Asher. Asher saw the way Ernchester moved when he took his seat- with the same economy of movement he had seen in Ysidro, and indeed in Lady Anthea, but without life.
"Did Danny sleep here?" he asked, and it was Anthea who replied, "Only very occasionally." She straightened up and walked back to the hearth; it was a relief to Asher not to have to fight to see them move, as he did with Ysidro.
"And I take it it wasn't here that you found his body?" From the comer of his eye Asher was conscious of Ernchester look-ing away, resting his brow on his hand in a gesture that hid his face. It came as a shock to him that the Earl felt grief, and he saw anger for that, too-a protective anger-in Anthea Barren's brown eyes.
"If it had been," she replied coolly, "you may be sure that the killer would have dispatched the both of us as well."
He bit his lip. Then, answering her anger and not her words, "I'm sorry."
Some of the tension seemed to slack in her strong frame, and the anger left her eyes. She, too, answered not his words. "It was foolish of you to come here," she said. "Ysidro can be maddening, but, believe me, if he has kept things from you, it is because there is ground that it is perilous for a living man to tread."
"That may be," Asher said. "But as long as he has a pistol to my head-as long as someone I love will suffer for it if I don't find this killer-he's not going to be able to have it both ways. I want to be shut of
this business quickly-before he finds where I've hidden away the woman whose life is in hostage to him, before the killer realizes he has a day hunter on his trail, learns who I am, and tracks down this woman also-before I get any deeper entangled into the side of this affair that isn't my business. But I can't do that unless I have more information than Ysidro's willing to give."
She considered him for a long moment, her head a little tilted, as if with the glossy weight of her dark hair. "He is-a very old vampire," she said after a time. "He is cautious, like an old snake in a hole; he errs on the side of caution, maybe. Maybe it's because he doesn't really care much about anything."