In his tidy back room on Grafton Place, James Asher sat on the end of the bed and looked down into the narrow yard, glistening under gray morning rain.
And thought about the Others.
Hideous memories, most of them. Shambling figures in the dark of ravines, in the hills west of Peking. Red eyes gleaming in the tunnels of abandoned mines.
Lydia sitting on the muddy shore of one of Peking’s artificial lakes, red hair glinting with the fires that consumed the last of the Peking hive, weeping …
Miraculously unhurt.
He’d known she was walking back into danger, just a little over two years later – back in November, four months ago, now. He’d said goodbye to her, his first full day on his feet after recovery from pneumonia. He’d gone to the train station with her, the sixth of November, the gray mists that drifted over the station platform still smelling ominously of leftover gun-powder from Bonfire Night. Lydia in her VAD uniform: the single small trunk beside her wouldn’t even have contained her cosmetics before the war. After the porter took it away she’d clung to him, gawky and thin and stork-like, her cheek pressed to his (she had carefully removed her spectacles, as she always did before they embraced). Wordless.
He knew she might never come back from the fighting. Seventeen years on Her Majesty’s Secret Service – and another decade and a half of following newspapers and reports – had made him sickeningly aware of what waited at the Front: machine guns, artillery that could kill at a distance of miles. And the White Horseman, Pestilence, more terrible than either.
Danger from the revenants, whom they had last seen in Peking, had been the farthest thing from his mind.
Looking back at their parting he couldn’t believe he’d been that naïve. Of course some government was going to hear about them sooner or later.
Of course they’ll try to make them into a weapon of war.
His studies had unearthed almost as many examples of similar beings in folklore as the study of vampires did: draugar, haugbui, the Celtic neamh mairbh. African and Caribbean zombies. Greek vrykolak, Chinese hungry ghosts, the barrow wights of ancient English legend. Things that came staggering out of their graves to feed – insatiably. The vampires of Prague, Don Simon Ysidro had told him, had been trying for centuries to get rid of them, to no avail.
And now one of them was in London.
Mrs Taylor – who rented out rooms in this tall, narrow house near Euston Station – had brought him up tea and bread and butter, rather to his surprise and unasked (‘I seen yesterday as you was poorly, sir …’). He had spent nearly eighteen hours, since he had returned from his abortive visit to the Foreign Office yesterday afternoon, lying on the bed looking at the ceiling wondering if this was any of his business or not. He ate without much appetite, though he no longer felt feverish. Only deeply fatigued.
What he most wanted to do was pack up his slender belongings, take a cab (if he could find such a thing) to Paddington Station and be in Oxford tonight, playing hide-and-seek with Miranda and deciphering Lydia’s latest letter from the Front.
What he would do instead, he already knew, was send another telegram to Mrs Grimes, and then go to the Wolf and Child on Chalton Street, to talk to publican Tim.
Think no more about it. Langham’s confidential, between-you-and-me smile. The matter is in hand.
Asher moved his hand toward the now-cold teapot to see if there was another cup left in it, but instead lay down again. Two years previously, he had sworn enmity to the vampires of London and had destroyed most of the London nest … only to discover that those he had killed were the unreliable members whom the Master of London wanted to be rid of anyway.
Twelve years prior to that, at the end of the African war, he had tendered his resignation to the Foreign Office, being unable to put from his mind the young Boer boy he had killed – a good friend, so far as a spy living under cover is able to make actual friends – in the line of what the Department considered duty. Even then he had known that swearing enmity to the Department would be futile and absurd, though he knew what they were. When he’d left Langham’s office on that occasion, his chief had shaken his hand and said – with that confidential little smile – ‘Au revoir.’ The words had been deliberately chosen. Nothing about Langham was accidental. Until we meet again.
Think no more about it …
Go back to Oxford and shout ‘A plague on both your houses!’ from the window of the departing train.
A revenant was hunting in London. It was only a matter of time before the infection began to spread uncontrollably.
A knock like a siege engine hammered the door. ‘Mr Asher, sir,’ trumpeted young Ginny Taylor’s adenoidal voice in the hall. ‘There’s a lady come t’ see you.’
Asher levered himself from the bed, astonished at how much energy this took, and slid into his jacket. ‘Thank you, Ginny,’ he said to the girl – fourteen, clean-scrubbed, with a face that reminded him of the roan cob that used to pull his father’s gig – as he stepped out into the corridor. ‘Please tell her I’ll be right down.’
‘Professor Asher!’ Josetta Beyerly sprang to her feet from the threadbare chair in the parlor window, strode across to grip both his hands. ‘I didn’t mean for them to drag you down here—’
‘This is a respectable house,’ replied Asher gravely. ‘As Mrs Taylor would no doubt have told you if you’d even thought about suggesting the possibility of coming up to a gentleman’s room. I take it Mrs Grimes telegraphed you with her conviction that I’d taken ill again?’
‘Why “good society” leaps to the automatic conclusion that every interaction between a woman and a man is of necessity immodest—’ began the young woman indignantly; then she caught herself, and shook her head. ‘It’s all of a piece,’ she sighed. ‘A way of making women their own jailers … And yes,’ she added, with her beautiful smile. ‘Mrs Grimes wired me last night. Please.’ She drew him back to the chairs by the window. ‘Sit down, Professor … Are you all right?’
Bright brown eyes looked across into his as he took the seat opposite. Even in the blue-and-white uniform of a volunteer at First London General Hospital, she wore a little rosette of purple, green and beige ribbons that marked her as a suffragette (And I’ll bet she fights every day with the ward sister about it …). He smiled a little, pleased by her stubborn adherence to a cause that many women had set aside at the start of the war because we must all stick together …
Strident though she was about her politics, Josetta had been Lydia’s close friend since 1898, the year his wife had spent at a select finishing school for girls in Switzerland, where Josetta, five years the elder, had been the English mistress. And Josetta had been the gawky, bookish young heiress’s only friend. Eighteen months later in England, it was Josetta who had secretly coached Lydia through the examination to get her accepted to Somerville College – an acceptance which had resulted in Lydia being disowned by her outraged father. A small legacy had enabled the one-time English mistress to remain in England, where she took day pupils in French and music to make ends meet, and now, at thirty-seven, she was active in a dozen causes, from votes for women, Irish independence and settlement houses to ‘rational dress’, the elimination of the House of Lords, and vegetarianism.
‘I’m quite well,’ Asher reassured her, though her dark brows plunged over her delicate nose at this. Evidently, he reflected, it was obvious he was lying. ‘I was kept later than I’d planned by meetings, and in fact I was on my way to the post office to let Mrs Grimes know that I won’t be home today either, nor probably tomorrow.’
‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ she asked. ‘Do you have board at this place, or are you eating at one of the frightful cafés hereabouts? Come to dinner with me at my club, if you’d care to – the menu isn’t much, but at least it would be an improvement on fried chips and sausage.’ She smiled, reached across to pat his hand, still slim as a girl. ‘Lydia did tell me to look after you.’
‘Thank you.’ Asher returned her smile, though he suspected that, to earn even the utilitarian Josetta’s disapprobation, the food on offer at the Grosvenor Crescent Club must be mediocre indeed. ‘I should like that.’
‘Have you heard from her?’
‘Not since before I left Oxford. But I know the fighting in Flanders has been heavy, so she may not have had time to write.’
While the former English mistress spoke of her own experiences with the casualties of the spring’s first great ‘push’, and of her outrage against the propagandist posters which plastered the hospital (and indeed, two virulent examples of the genre glared from the wall of the parlor: Women of Britain say ‘Go!’ and Lend your Five Shillings to your Country and Crush the Germans), his mind sifted her words automatically. ‘… And of course they don’t know any better. Most of those poor boys haven’t been outside their own neighborhoods in their lives. The women who’d come into the settlement houses could give you chapter and verse about each others’ grandfathers and great-aunts, but would regard Kensington as foreign soil …’
‘There is something you can do for me,’ said Asher, when Josetta finished her account of procuring books and magazines for the wounded men in London General. ‘If you would be so kind. Do you still have connections with the settlement house in Camden Town? I have heard—’ It was a bow drawn at a venture, but he guessed the query would at least bear some fruit – ‘that there’s been a … a mugger, or a slasher, working along the Regent’s Canal. A man who attacks at night, and who stinks of dirty clothes and fish. It would help me enormously if you could ask some of the people down at the settlement house, or people in that neighborhood, if they’ve heard of such a thug making the rounds.’
Josetta regarded him curiously – like himself, he realized with a smile, sifting what he said, tallying in her mind what his purpose might be. ‘And does this have something to do with these “meetings” that are keeping you in town?’
Though Lydia – Asher was fairly sure – never spoke to anyone of his former life as one of Her Majesty’s Secret Servants, he guessed also that his wife’s concerns for him, particularly in the years since he’d become drawn into the affairs of the vampires, had communicated themselves to her friend. Josetta may well have developed suspicions that he wasn’t the retiring Oxford don that he appeared, though God knew what interpretation she’d put on his comings and goings. Exactly as he would have, had he been recruiting a political semi-radical for the Department for one of his networks abroad, he replied, ‘It’s just a matter of personal interest.’ With a raised eyebrow and a look that said, I know perfectly well you’re not fooled, Miss Beyerly.
She returned his secret smile. ‘I’ll see what I can find. Dinner tonight at seven?’
‘Seven it is.’
The Wolf and Child stood at the corner of Chalton Street and Matilda Court, three doors from Weekes and Sons, Importers of Fine Silk, where the unfortunate Harry had been employed. A woman passed Asher in the doorway of the long, wood-paneled taproom: her electric-blue jacket faded and four years out of style, with the telltale mark pressed into her left sleeve by the frame of a sewing machine. The taproom was as quiet today as it had been the previous morning, with only a couple of neighborhood men consuming a pint and a laborer’s lunch of bread and cheese. But the lunchers avoided one another’s eye, and there was worry in the face of the old man behind the bar as he watched the woman depart. ‘Y’ maun excuse us, sir,’ he said as he fetched the pint of mild that Asher ordered. ‘We’re a bit moithered just now. Our man didn’t show up to open—’
Asher made a gesture of casual acceptance, though cold stabbed him behind the breastbone, and the shock worse because it was unattended by much surprise. ‘I’m in no lather.’ He kept his accent rural, Shropshire, as he had yesterday morning when speaking with Tim … ‘Hard lines on you, gaffer, him droppin’ his work on you, though. Must be a chore findin’ help with all these lads joinin’ up.’
‘Nay, Tim’s not one to scarper, think on. That was his missus just now—’ The old man nodded toward the door. ‘Never come ’ome las’ night, he didn’t, and poor Masie at her wits’ end over it. ’Tis not the same,’ he added worriedly, ‘since the start o’ this war.’
No, thought Asher, laying his three-penny bit on the counter and looking thoughtfully toward the street, at least in part to conceal the anger that he knew was in his eyes. No, things are not the same.
He dreamed that night of Pritchard Crowell, a man he hadn’t even thought of in nearly a decade.
Crowell was something of a legend in the Department. Asher had worked with him only once. In Mesopotamia in the early nineties they’d scouted out opposition to Ottoman rule, and put together a network of sleeper agents in the Caucasus and in the desert country beyond Palmyra. The villagers often worked for German ‘archaeologists’ who coincidentally searched for their buried cities along proposed railway routes where troops might later be moved.
He recalled a wiry small man in his fifties, dark-eyed and dark-haired and absolutely unobtrusive. A wrinkle-threaded face, a hawk-bill nose and a touch with picklocks that half the professional burglars in London might have envied, and a chilly ruthlessness which, at that time, Asher had sought to make his own. The job, and the job only, existed, and everything else, including one’s own survival, merely facilitated whatever one had been ordered to do.
‘We are weapons …’ Asher heard again that low voice – a middle-range tenor and like everything else about him, expressionless and unremarkable – against the Mixolydian wail of voices outside the inn at El Deir where they sat. Even through his dream he smelled the burnt languor of coffee, the stink of dust, camel dung, harsh tobacco and ras el hanout. ‘If one is in a fight for one’s life, one wouldn’t thank a knife that turned round in your hand and asked questions. One does what one has to, my lad, and forgets about it afterwards … Clean as you go, and don’t look back.’
This applied, Asher recalled, to the members of one’s own network – one’s friends among the Bedu or on the Turkish Army supply staffs in Constantinople. They were warned (‘When feasible,’ Crowell had qualified, casually) that Higher Purposes might require them to be cut adrift. Asher remembered the occasion on which Crowell had let the population of an Armenian village which had sheltered them be massacred by the sultan’s tame bandits, rather than give them a warning which would have revealed that the Turkish Army codes had been broken.
One does what one has to …
The pragmatist in Asher’s soul had admired Crowell’s uncanny expertise in the sheer craft of spying – of getting into places, of winkling shards of information from men and women wholly committed to Britain’s enemies. He always had an astonishing plethora of information at his fingertips, and was eerily expert at slipping through shadows to escape and bring the ‘goods’, whatever they were upon any given occasion, back to Langham and the others at the Department. He was an uncannily brilliant guesser. The patriot in Asher had striven to emulate what he saw, both the cold virtuosity and the single-minded loyalty to his Queen. In his dream now, Asher saw him as he’d seen him in those days: clever, cold, unobtrusive and ruthless.
Forget about it afterwards. Clean as you go.
Someone paused for a moment in the doorway of the little meyhane where they sat: Asher caught the shadow out of the corner of his eye, and his glance went to the silver coffee pot on the low table between them to see who it was, so he would not be seen to turn. The man was gone before Asher made out the image in the round belly of the polished metal.
But he thought it was Langham.
And just as he woke he thought he smelled the fishy, greasy reek of the Others, that the visitor had left behind.
Over supper, earlier in the evening, at Miss Beyerly’s club – mutton every bit as bad as Asher had suspected it would be – Josetta had told him that yes, she had heard rumor among the laborers who worked nights along Regent’s Canal, that there was a bludger afoot, mostly in the hours between midnight and three. So far he’d killed a whore and a seven-year-old pickpocket who’d been sleeping in a doorway and had, so the story went, eaten some of their flesh. Hungry Tom, he was called in the neighborhoods, or Tom the Ogre, though nobody had seen him nor knew whether his name was actually Tom or something else. The police were claiming that no such person existed.
‘The matter is in hand,’ Langham had said, with his sly little secret smile.
Langham wants the thing ‘for King and country’. Asher knew it as he knew his own name. He may not know precisely what it is. Only that it can be used.
And that its use will redound to his credit.
Looking across the coffee table at Crowell in his dream – though Asher knew that in fact, after a lifetime of hair-breadth escapes and false rumors of demise Pritchard Crowell had succumbed to a lucky shot by a Bosnian merchant’s blunderbuss in 1899 – he thought, Crowell would have put Tim the publican out of the way.
‘Of course the police would rather that such a person doesn’t exist,’ had sniffed Josetta after dinner, stirring coffee like diesel oil in the old-fashioned gaslight of one of the club’s small parlors. ‘Both the victims are the sort of people the government has been pretending for years are criminals who deserve what they get, or who no longer live in the up-to-date London of the twentieth century … Certainly not worth avenging, with the cost of slaughtering Germans to be thought of. And there are no reliable witnesses …’
Except Tim, thought Asher, in his dream of Mesopotamia. Tim, who saw the body of the creature’s most recent victim, in the fog of the alleyway behind the Wolf and Child.
‘It pays to be tidy,’ Crowell was saying to him, emphasizing the point with one tiny forefinger: he had hands like an eleven-year-old boy. His wrinkled eyelids puckered. ‘You never know who’s going to talk to whom; what blithering postman is going to remark to his friend who works in Army Intelligence some day, “Ach, that man who’s calling himself Martin and drawing pictures of ships in the harbor, I knew him in Strasbourg three years ago when he was named Schmidt …” And then it will be you for the high jump, my lad, and the whole show we’ve set up here blown to kingdom come. And nobody would ever associate the disappearance of the local postman with some traveling artist who’d scarcely even met the man …’
Clean as you go.
Crowell might be gone, reflected Asher, waking in the darkness of his rented lodging. But Langham remained.
He turned the dream over in his mind.
And there were a dozen or a hundred fledgling Crowells in the wings, waiting to take his shape, and continue his business.
After killing his young friend Jan van der Platz, Asher had quit the Department, when he’d realized that he was one of them.
Then he smelled blood, quite close to him, and knew suddenly he was in mortal danger.
His eyes flew open to darkness and a cold hand crushed down over his mouth, almost smothering him, while another had him by the wrist even as he snatched for the knife under his pillow.
The hand released its grip an instant later and Asher heard a curse of pain, and knew that his assailant had been burned by the chains of silver he wore.
Vampire …