"No," she said sullenly. She retreated to a corner of the room and perched there on one of the patterned chintz chairs; the place was furbished up in several styles, fat overstuffed chairs alternating with pieces of Sheraton and Hepplewhite, and here and there a lacquered cabinet of chinoiserie filled with knickknacks and books. The parlor was tidily kept, with none of the decades-deep clutter of other vampire rooms Asher had seen. Through an open door beyond Lady Anthea's chair, he could see a neat bedroom, its windows heavily shrouded and, no doubt, shuttered beneath those layers of curtain. There was no coffin in sight-Asher guessed it would be in the dressing room beyond.
"Lionel's gone," Lady Ernchester said softly. Her tea-brown eyes went to Asher. She had put up her hair again and bore no evidence of her struggle with Grippen beyond the fact that she had changed her dress for a dark gown of purple-black taffeta. Asher wondered if Minette had made it for her.
"You've made a dangerous enemy; his hand's welted up where he touched the silver of your chain."
Asher privately thought it served the master vampire right, but re-frained from saying so. His whole body was stiff and aching from the impact with the wall. He was still, he reminded himself, quite probably in desperate and immediate danger, but, nevertheless, Grippen's ab-sence comforted him. He prowled over to the small cabinet that stood under the gas jet and opened its drawers. They were empty.
"Lionel did that," Anthea's voice came from behind him. "He tells me he did the same at Neddy's house."
"He'sthe one who seems to be locking the barn door after the horse has escaped." Asher turned back, roving cautiously about the room, examining the French books in the bookshelves, the cushions on the camel-backed divan. He glanced across at Ysidro, who had gone to stand next to Anthea's chair. "If silver affects you that badly, how do you purchase what you need?"
"As any gentleman of fashion can tell you," Anthea said with a faint smile, "one can go for years-centuries, even-without actually touching cash. In earlier years we used gold. Flimsies-bank notes, and later treasury notes-were a godsend, but one must always tip. I've found that in general there is enough of a chill at night to warrant the wearing of gloves."
"But they've got to be leather," Chloe put in ungraciously. "And I mean good leather, none of your kid;
it'll bum right through silk."
Anthea frowned. "Does it? I never found it so."
Ysidro held up one long, white hand. "I suspect it toughens a little with time. I know if you had touched silver as Grippen did, Chloe, your arm would have been swollen to the shoulder for weeks, and you would have been ill into the bargain. So it was with me, up almost to the time of the Fire. It is curiously fragile stuff, this pseudoflesh of ours."
"I remember," Anthea said slowly. 'The first time I touched silver-it was bullion lace on the sleeve of one of my old gowns, I think-it not only hurt me at the time, but it made me very ill. I remember being desperately thirsty and unable to hunt. Charles had to hunt for me-bring me..." She broke off suddenly and looked away, her beautiful face impassive. Thinking about it, Asher realized that the logical prey to capture and bring back alive to Ernchester House had to be some-thing human-since it was the death of the human psyche as much as the physical blood that the vampires seemed to crave-but small enough to be easily transportable.
"Kiddies?" Chloe laughed, cold and tingling, like shaken silver bells. "God, you could have had the lot of my brothers and sisters-puking little vermin. Dear God, and the youngest of 'em has brats of her own now..." She paused and turned her face away suddenly, her mouth pressing tight; a delicate, beautiful face that would never grow old. She took a deep breath, a conscious gesture, to steady herself, then went on evenly. "Funny-I see girls who was in the Opera ballet with me back then, years too old to dance now-years too old to get anythin' on the streets but maybe a real nearsighted sailor. I could go into the Opera right now and get my old job back in the ballet, you know? Old Harry the stage man would even recognize me, from bein' the prop boy then."
She fell silent again, staring before her with her great dark eyes, as if seeing into that other time-like Anthea, Asher thought, standing on Harrow Hill and feeling the furnace heat of burning London washing over her mortal flesh. After a moment, Chloe said in a strange voice, "It's queer, that's all." Asher felt the pressure of her mind on his, as she made her swift, sudden exit from the room.
Anthea glanced quickly at her husband; Ernchester, much more qui-etly, almost invisibly, followed the girl out.
"It becomes easier," the Countess said softly, turning back to Asher, "once those we knew in life are all-gone. One is not-reminded. One can-pretend." Her dark brows drew down again, that small gesture making her calm face human again. "Even when one is for all practical purposes immortal, age is unsettling." And getting to her feet, she fol-lowed her husband in a whisper of dark taffeta from the room.
For a long time Asher stood where he had been by the fireplace, his arms folded, regarding Ysidro by the pink and amber glow of the shaded lights. The vampire remained standing by the vacated chair, his gaze still resting thoughtfully on the door, and Asher had the impres-sion he listened to the lady's retreating footfalls blending away into the other sounds of London, the rattle of traffic in Salisbury Place and the nocturnal roar of Fleet Street beyond, the deep vibration of the Under-ground, the sough of the river below the Embankment, and the voices of those who crowded its flagways in the night.
At length Ysidro said, "It is a dangerous time in Chloe's life." The enigmatic gaze returned to him, still remote, without giving anything away. "It happens to vampires. There are stages-I have seen them myself, passed through them myself, some of them... When a vam-pire has existed thirty, forty years, and sees all his friends dying, grow-ing senile, or changing unrecognizably from what they were in the sweetness of a shared youth. Or at a hundred or so, when the whole world mutates into something other
than what he grew up with; when all the small things that were so precious to him are no longer even remembered. When there is no one left who recalls the voices of the singers which so inextricably formed the warp and weft of his days, Then it is easy to grow careless, and the sun will always rise."
He glanced over at Asher, and that odd ghost of what had once been a half-rueful, bittersweet smile flicked back onto the thin lines of his face. "Sometimes I think Charles and Anthea are becoming-friable- that way. They change with the times, as we all must, but it becomes more and more difficult. I still become enraged when shopkeepers are impertinent to me, when these grubby hackney cabs dart out in front of me in the street, or when I see the filth of factory soot fouling the sky. We are, like Dr. Swift's Struldbruggs, old people, and we tend to the unreasonable conservatism of the old. Very little is left of the world as it was in King Charles' day, and nothing, I fear, remains of the world I knew. Except Grippen, of course." The smile turned sardonic. "What a companion for one's immortality."
He strolled over to the fireplace where Asher stood and prodded with one well-shod toe at the cold debris within, amillefeuille of white paper ash, like that which had decorated Neddy Hammersmith's long-cold hearth. "That is, provided, of course," he added ironically, "one sur-vives the first few years, the terrible dangers of simply learning how to be a vampire."
"Did Rhys the Minstrel teach you?"
"Yes." It was the first softening Asher had seen in those gleaming eyes. "He was a good master-a good teacher. It was, you understand, more dangerous in those days, for in those days folk believed in us."
It was on the tip of Asher's tongue to ask about that, but instead he asked, "Did you know Calvaire created a fledgling?"