Lydia set the lamp down and lifted the shawl aside. Thin and rather fragile looking, her reflection gazed back at her: flat-chested and schoolgirlish, she thought despairingly, despite her twenty-six years. And despite everything she could do with rice powder, kohl, and the tiny amount of rouge that were all a properly brought up lady could wear, her face was still all nose and spectacles. Four- eyes, they'd called her, all her childhood and adolescence-when it wasn't skinnybones or bookworm-and if her life didn't, quite literally, depend on how quickly she could see danger in this place, she'd never have worn her eyeglasses outside her rented Bloomsbury rooms.
Her life, and James' as well.
She let the lace fall, touched again the silver around her neck and the fat, doubled and trebled links of it that circled her wrists under cuffs and gloves. Why a mirror? Something one wouldn't expect to find here. Did that mean the stories were wrong?
She picked up the lamp again, hoping the information she'd learned on the subject was even partially correct. It was a disgrace, really, that over the years more scientific data had not been collected. She would definitely have to write an article for the Journal of Medical Pathology-or perhaps for one of James' folkloric publications.
If she lived, she thought, and panic heated in her veins again. If she lived.
What if she were doing this wrong?
She found another floor of high-ceilinged rooms, plus attics, all of them filled with either books or journals. Her own experience with the proliferative propensities of back issues of Lancet and its competitors-British, European, and American- gave her a lively sense of sympathy, and an envious appreciation for so much shelf space almost, for the moment, eased her fear. Lancet went back to 1823, and she had little doubt the first issue could be found here somewhere.
One small chamber upstairs contained clothing, expensive and relatively new. From the first, all her instincts told her she must look down, not up, for what she sought.
The kitchen and scullery were on the ground floor, at the back of the house, down that caliginous throat of passageway. Stairs corkscrewed farther down. The scullery contained a modern icebox. Lydia opened it and found a cake of ice about two days old, a bottle of cream, and a small quantity of knacker's meat done up in paper. Four or five dishes-including a Louis XV Sevres saucer-lay on the floor in a corner. For the first time, Lydia smiled.
Boothole, wine cellar, vegetable pantry belowstairs, and many smaller rooms, low- ceilinged and smelling of earth and great age. The lamp flung her shadow waveringly over cruck-work beams, discolored plaster, stonework that spoke of some older building on this site. As in searching for the house itself-which had fallen out of all mention in the Public Records Office after the Fire of 1666- Lydia passed three or four times through the room that contained the trap to the subcellar. It was only when, failing to see any such ingress as she knew must exist, she studied the composition of the walls themselves that she narrowed the possibilities to the little storeroom whose damp stone wall bore signs of having once supported a stairway.
Outside, the day must be slowly losing its grip on life. Trying to keep her hands from shaking, with cold now as well as fear, she pulled off her gloves and ran her fingers under the chair rail and around the heavy molding of the room's two doors. Near the base of the door into the wine cellar she felt a lever click unwillingly under her fingers and saw, in the dirty brazen light, the wider gap between two panels.
There was a latch on the inside of the movable panel so it could be opened from below, and a worn ladder going down.
As Lydia had guessed, the low room beneath looked as if it had been the subcrypt of a church, either the one that backed the house-in a square named, oddly enough, Spaniard's Court-or some forgotten predecessor. Barely visible in black paint on the ceiling groins were the words Salvum me fac, Deus, quoniam intraverunt aquae usque ad animam meam.
Lydia had not been raised a Catholic-her aunts considered even the inclusion of candles on the parish altar grounds for complaint to the bishop-but recognized, from her residency at St. Bartholomew's, the words from the Mass for Deliverance from Death.
A granite sarcophagus filled the far end of the chamber like a somber altar, all but concealing a low, locked door. Lydia stood before it for some time, holding the lamp high and gauging the probable weight of the stone lid. Then she knelt and studied the floor.
Dustless.
A laborious investigation of the cracks in the gray stone floor showed her the trapdoor, an eye-straining business by the amber glow of the lamp; she gave up early trying to do the business tidily and without griming and wrinkling her skirt, and it was equally impossible to keep her corset bones from jabbing her ribs and the pump sprayer from knocking her repeatedly on the elbow. Another squinting, painful half hour revealed the trigger to the trapdoor's catch behind the projecting stone frame of the chamber's inner door.
As she had deduced, the sarcophagus had nothing to do with anything. It was simply too obvious.
The steps leading downward were shallow, so deeply worn in the centers that she had to press her shoulder to one wall and brace herself against the other to maintain her footing. She guessed it was well past dark outside, and beneath her growing fear-the panicky conviction that she was completely unqualified to deal with the encounter that lay ahead-she wondered precisely how dark was dark enough. She suppressed the urge to check her watch and make notes.
The lamplight could not penetrate the night below her, and from that darkness rose the smells of wet earth, cold stone, and rust. Interestingly, there was no smell of rats.
The light slithered wetly over a grille of metal bars. Lydia pressed herself to it, maneuvered the lamp through and held it up to illuminate what lay within. The bars were old, the lock on them new and expensive and beyond the capacity of either the skeleton key or the picklocks. The lamplight reached only partway into the catacomb beyond the bars, but far enough to show her wall niches, empty for the most part, or occupied with the suggestion of ghastly natures mortes: skulls, dust, and shreds of fallen hair.
On the right-hand wall the shadows all but hid a niche whose interior no amount of angling the lamp would reveal.
But hanging over the edge, like ivory against the dingy stone, was a man's hand: long- fingered, thin, ringed with gold. Darkness hid the rest, and though the white hand itself looked as perfect as if painted by Rubens or Holbein, Lydia knew that its owner had been dead for a long time.
It's true, she thought, her heartbeat fast and heavy with fright. Silly, she added, for she had known already that it was true... it was all true. She had met this man and seen others like him from a distance.
But knowing, she had learned this afternoon, was different from seeing, and she felt very naked, uncertain, and alone in the dark.
I'm doing this wrong.
Her breath made a little apricot smoke in the lamplight as she sat down on the steps. Laying her weapon across her knees and pushing up her spectacles with one forefinger, she settled herself to wait.
One
All Souls and black rain, and cold that passed like needles through flesh and clothing to scrape the bones inside. Sunday night in Charing Cross Station, voices racketing in the vaults of glass and ironwork overhead like ball bearings in a steel drum. All James Asher wanted was to go home.
A day and a night spent burying his cousin-and dealing with the squabbling of his cousin's widow, mother, and two sons over the estate to which he'd been named executor-had reminded him vividly why, once he'd gone up to Oxford twenty- three years ago, he'd never had anything further to do with the aunt who raised him from the age of thirteen. It had just turned full dark, and Asher drew his greatcoat closer around him as he strode down the long brick walkway of the platform, jostling shoulders with his erstwhile fellow passengers in a vast frowst of wet wool and steam and reflecting upon the lethal adeptness of familial guilt. Outside, the streets would be slick and deadly with ice.