"I had to speak to you. I came in the daylight so the others wouldn't know." He released her arm, but standing in the confines of the narrow stair, it was as if they embraced. She noted that no heat came from his body, and save for the very faint reek of old blood in the folds of his shroud, no smell. Except when he spoke, his body made no sound whatsoever, neither of breath nor of movement. All these data she observed, while aware that no analysis of them came anywhere near describing what he was like.
She pushed up her spectacles. "Lord Ysidro-Don Simon-I think my husband is in trouble. I need your advice."
"Your husband, mistress, has had all the boon and gift I could make him, and more, in the breath of life that still passes his lips." The sulfur eyes regarded her, remote and chill. Not catlike, nor snakelike, nor like any beast's, but neither were they a man's eyes. Even his lashes were white, like his hair. "And a second time will I fill his hands with undeserved treasure, when I let you walk from this house."
"The Earl of Ernchester is selling his services to a foreign government." Don Simon Ysidro's expression did not alter. Indeed, his face, still as the peeled ivory statue of some forgotten god, had shown neither anger nor scorn, as if over the years the flesh had settled to a final resting place on the delicate substructure of skull. Nor had his voice risen over the soft level that was almost, but not quite, a monotone, and all the more terrifying for that. Don Simon Xavier Christian Morado de la Cadena-Ysidro was the only vampire Lydia had met. She wondered if others were like him.
"Come upstairs."
He handed her back her weapon and led the way, lamp upraised to shed light on the damp stone stairs. His feet beneath the hem of his shroudlike woolen robe were bare. Though Lydia 's breath clouded gold in the lamplight, the owner of the nameless house seemed to feel nothing of the cold.
Four cats somehow materialized in the scullery, miawing to be fed, though Lydia observed that none came within arm's reach of the vampire. Ysidro set the lamp on the table and touched a spill to the flame. Though he was extremely difficult to see when he moved, Lydia had impressions, like frozen images from a dream, of white hands cupping light above the curved glass chimney and carrying it to the fishtail burners above the stove; of dense gold outlining the slight hook of the nose, the long chin and trace of shadow at the corner of his mouth. He opened the icebox, addressed the cats in Spanish and put meat and milk down for them. Then he stepped away from their dishes. Only then did they come close to eat. "Where did you hear this?" He held a chair while she sat, then perched a flank on the corner of the table. His English was flawless, save for the faintest touch of a Castilian lisp, and the occasional oddly bent inflection that Lydia knew would have conveyed volumes to James. In the set of Ysidro's shoulders, the way he held his head, she saw the echo of a long-vanished doublet and stiffened ruff.
She held out to him the telegram she had received Monday morning from the Gare du Nord. "Ignace Karolyi is-"
"I know who Ignace Karolyi is." His voice still held no very great interest, as if all emotion had long been worn away by the sheer abrasion of passing time. Indeed, in stillness, Lydia had the odd impression that he had been sitting so on the corner of the table for years, perhaps centuries.
The vampire turned the paper in ivory fingers, raised it to his nostrils, then touched it, very gently, first to his cheekbone, then to his lower lip. "A Hungarian boyar and, like your husband at one time, a man who cherishes the honor of service to his empire above personal honor, though perhaps Hungarians as a rule do not consider truth and loyalty as the English do. A diplomat, and a spy."
"I didn't know then about Karolyi," Lydia said. Some of her panic was passing-at least he appeared willing to listen to what she said. "I mean, only what James says in his wire. But I recognized his name. I found it in one of the lists I made a year ago, when I was trying to track down medical doctors I suspected of contacts with vampires. I was making notes of every name I found in any article. This one was in an article about Dr. Bedford Fairport."
He tilted his head a little, like an albinistic bird. "The man who seeks to have men live forever."
"You've heard of him, then." Reading over the long series of articles last night, she hadn't thought of Fairport's work on the changes wrought in brain and blood and glandular chemistry over time in exactly that light-she doubted that Fairport himself would see it that way. But suddenly she knew that Ysidro was right.
"This was one of his early articles," she went on slowly. "Back in 'eighty-six or 'eighty-seven, when he first went to Austria to study those Styrian peasants who live to be a hundred and ten. He mentions that the private sanitarium he was given charge of is owned by the Karolyi family, and that it was Ignace Karolyi who made the arrangements. He mentions Karolyi in the next article as a financial contributor who made research possible. And then Karolyi vanishes. In fact, all reference to Fairport's funding vanishes. It's never mentioned again. I checked."
"It astounds me that I did not read that myself." Ysidro sounded not the slightest astounded. "But I subscribe to a good many journals, as I daresay you saw."
Lydia blushed. What had seemed, at the time, to be the necessary investigation of a vampire's lair became trespass in a gentleman's house. "I'm sorry," she stammered, but he vouchsafed no reply.
Instead his finger moved in the direction of the sprayer. "And what is this?"
"Oh." Lydia took the sticking plaster from her pocket and recapped the nozzle.
"It's full of silver nitrate solution. One can buy it in any chandlery. I-well, James once mentioned that vampires sometimes slept several to a house. I didn't know what I might meet, you see."
She was afraid he would mock her, since, upon consideration, the weapon would certainly have been difficult to deploy quickly enough to do her any good. She had learned to deal with mockery from an early age over her medical studies, but this was a matter from which she could not simply walk away.
But the vampire only said, "Ingenious," and touched the side of the pump's reservoir with the backs of his fingers, then took them quickly away. In the pale gaslight, Lydia could see that his ears had been long ago pierced for earrings, like a Gypsy's. "Then this Fairport is in truth Karolyi's pensioner." "I think so." Lydia held out to him another telegram, the telegram which, reaching her that morning from Munich, had caused her to pack her trunks, manufacture a moderately plausible tale for her servants, and take the train down to London in search of the man in whose kitchen she now sat, with the smallest of his cats-a sinuous shadow-gray torn-winding itself around her ankles.
Ysidro took the second paper from her hand.
LEAVING PARIS STOP
STAYING EPPLER ADDRESS BOOK JAMES "He's waxed cautious since his first wire." The vampire touched the paper to his lower lip again. "You conned this book of his?"
"After I decoded the message, yes." She reached down half unconsciously to stroke the cat, looking up at Ysidro where he sat above her, hands folded over his knee. His nails projected some half inch beyond the tips of his fingers and had a strange glassy appearance, far thicker than human nails. Some kind of chitin? It would be rude to ask for a cutting.
"The words 'address book' were the tip, you see," she explained. "It's a simple code; last for first, counting inward, and A means B, B means C, et cetera. He keeps duplicate books. Eppler is two from the end of the E's-Mrs. Eppler is the mother of an old pupil of his. She lives in Botley, about ten miles from Oxford, and it's ridiculous that he'd be going there from Paris. Two from the beginning of the F's was Fairport, in Vienna. As you see, the telegram was sent from Munich, at one-forty Tuesday afternoon." "And I was that easy to find?"