Tamara was amazed. She stared at her father in awe. ‘You met him?’ she asked.
Papa laughed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Nor had whoever painted that.’
‘So how did they know what he looks like?’
‘They guessed.’
Tamara hesitated. She knew she shouldn’t ask for things, but her desire overwhelmed her. ‘Can I have it?’ she said.
‘No,’ said her mother quickly from over by the door. She was concerned, almost angry. ‘Papa will need that where he’s going.’
Aleksei looked over at her as if to disagree, but chose not to.
‘I’ll bring you back something even better,’ he said.
‘Promise?’ asked Tamara.
‘I promise. Now go to sleep. I’ll be back again as soon as I can.’ He kissed her on the cheek. Before he stood up, he whispered something in her ear.
Tamara watched as her parents walked away, hand in hand, through the open door. On the other side they kissed, and Tamara saw her mother’s hand rubbing against her father’s chest. Then her father pushed the door shut and they disappeared from view, as darkness filled the room.
Tamara shut her eyes and tried to sleep, but she was puzzled; not by the way she had seen Mama touch Papa – she had seen that before – but by what her father had whispered to her. Why should she ever forget that he loved her?
Tamara felt terribly alone when she woke. She could not remember having had a nightmare, but she had that same feeling that something overwhelmingly dreadful had happened. She remembered that Papa had been about to leave. How long ago had that been? She leapt out of bed and scampered across the room, turning the big brass doorknob with both hands.
Inside her parents’ bedroom, the bed was empty. Sheets and blankets lay on the floor in an untidy heap. It was dark outside, but a little starlight spilled through the open curtains, where Mama stood, wearing only her nightdress, her hand resting against the glass. Her plaited hair hung straight and neat down her back.
Tamara went up to the window and looked out. Outside, through the light mist, she saw a man was mounting a horse. It was Papa. She raised her hand to wave, but he wasn’t looking. She felt her mother clasp her other hand tightly. Then her father turned and looked up at the window. She waved vigorously, while her mother simply raised one hand and wiggled her fingers very slightly. Papa raised a hand towards her in a similar gesture, but then saw that Tamara was there too. He waved enthusiastically at his daughter, imitating her action, then blew her a kiss. Finally, he blew another to Mama, then he turned his horse and headed away from them, up the street. He didn’t look back again, but Mama did not leave the window until he was gone from sight. Tamara stayed with her. She seemed very unhappy.
Finally, Mama stepped away. ‘It’s a few hours before we need to get up, Toma,’ she said. ‘Do you want to come to bed and keep me company?’
Tamara turned and nodded, then took one last glance out of the window before jumping on to the bed and snuggling herself inside Mama’s waiting arms.
She wondered if her mother had also seen the darkly dressed man who had stepped out from a doorway after Papa had left and walked away in the opposite direction. She decided not to ask. It had been the same man they had both seen a few weeks before, and then, it had seemed to upset Mama. Today, she was sad enough already.
Instead, Tamara gazed out of the window and tried to count the stars.
PART TWO
CHAPTER XIV
TAGANROG WASN’T MUCH TO LOOK AT. NEITHER HAD BEEN many of the other towns Aleksei passed on the way. In total, the journey had taken eight days, part on horseback, part by coach. The final phase had been by horse.
He had never been in this part of the country before. He’d met up with the river Don soon after Tula, and had followed the valley all the way down. It still felt like autumn, but he’d noticed it getting warmer each day. He knew the cold would soon catch up with him again, even so far south. Paris was on about the same latitude as Taganrog, and yet Paris never got nearly so cold in winter. It was a very Russian thing.
His journey down the Don had reminded him of the journey the Oprichniki had taken in the opposite direction in order to ‘save’ Moscow thirteen years before. Was there a link there? Had they put down roots in the region which somehow connected to the experiments Cain was performing? In the various hostelries he had stayed at along the way, he had asked if anyone remembered the autumn of 1812. Stories had reached Moscow of a plague travelling up the Don, which Aleksei had realized to be the echoes of the revolting feeding habits of voordalaki. But as with all such tales, details, even years, became merged. Locals disagreed as to what had happened and when it had happened. More recent outbreaks of pestilence were far more pressing on the memory than what had happened thirteen years before.
And so Aleksei had spent most of his evenings continuing his translation of Cain’s writings. It was still difficult, but at least Valentin had not asked for the dictionary back. Much of what Aleksei uncovered was what he already knew, though with a precise, scientific gloss to it. He worried that his prior knowledge might be biasing his translation, forcing it to tell him what he expected it to tell him. But he had no way of avoiding such prejudice.
Several sections discussed what happened when a vampire was injured. Measurements were made concerning the speed of regrowth and the degree to which an individual could resist that regrowth. A table of figures showed how a well-fed voordalak could regenerate its flesh far more quickly than one which had been starved. Cain also referred to reported evidence of a voordalak who had fended off the regrowth of his missing fingers for four hours in order not to be discovered by humans, and of another who had had an arm hacked off with a sword, and grown it back without the slightest sign of a scar. The first was clearly Kyesha’s story. It seemed that Kyesha had been at one time the subject of Cain’s experiments. Presumably he had escaped, stealing the notebook and taking it with him. But why had he brought it to Aleksei?
Cain also wrote of the methods by which a vampire could die. There was little new. Fire could kill them, freezing cold could not but would paralyse them, as would starvation and suffocation. Cain had conducted his own experiment with fire – his description of the death of the creature was brutally detached – but of the attempted freezing there was no detail. Aleksei wondered if the winters would be cold enough this far south to conduct such an experiment successfully. His own experience of a voordalak being frozen had been much further north.
What seemed to interest Cain most was his investigation of the actual mechanism by which a man could be turned into a vampire. Aleksei was familiar enough with the process, having had it described to him by Iuda back in 1812. Iuda, of course, could not be trusted on any matter, and was not even a vampire, so might not know the truth. However, Cain’s studies concurred. The victim had first to have his blood drunk by the vampire and then, close to the moment of his death, had in turn to drink the vampire’s blood.
Aleksei had shuddered as he finished translating that section. It was exactly what he had witnessed – believed he had witnessed – at the window of the brothel on Degtyarny Lane, except that, in truth, he had seen Iuda lower his lips on to the woman’s neck and pretend to suck the life-giving fluid from her using fangs he did not possess. He had seen the woman lick at the blood that seeped from a self-inflicted wound in Iuda’s breast, but it was not vampire’s blood. And still today, Aleksei did not know whether that woman had been Margarita or Domnikiia.
Again, Cain’s concern was with precise measurement. He was convinced that consumption of the vampire’s blood had to occur within a certain time period leading up to the actual moment of death of the victim, but he had been unable to pin down the duration; in some cases it was hours, in others many weeks. Beyond that, the death of the victim did not have to be caused by the original bite of the vampire and subsequent loss of blood. Any cause of death would be effective, as long as blood had been exchanged both ways. In nature, as Cain had put it, the vampire’s bite was almost always the cause of death as well, but he had demonstrated that it was not uniquely effective. He went on, somewhat unnecessarily, to list mechanisms of death he had found to work: stabbing, shooting, drowning, poisoning.