"Thought you toffs was never comin' back," their cabby began indig-nantly, struggling up out of the tangle of his lap robes in the cab, and Ysidro inclined his head graciously and held out a ten-shilling note.
"My apologies, I hope it caused you no inconvenience?" The man looked at the money, touched his hat brim quickly, and said, "Not at all, guv'-not at all," His breath was redolent of gin, as was the inside of the cab. It was, Asher reflected philosophically as he climbed in, a cold night.
" Albemarle Crescent, Kensington," Ysidro said through the trap, and the cab jolted away, "Insolent villain," he added softly. "Yet I have found it seldom pays to engage in quarrels with menials. Regrettably, the days are past when I could have ordered him thrashed." And he turned his cool profile to gaze-not quite tranquilly, Asher thought- into the night.
Albemarle Crescent was a line of houses that had seen better days, though a kind of faded elegance clung to them still, like a duchess' gown bought third-hand at a rag fair. At that hour, the neighborhood was deathly silent. Standing on the flagway, wrapped in a fog that was thicker now, here closer to the river, Asher could hear no sound of passers-by. In Oxford at this hour, the dons would still be up, wrangling metaphysics or textual criticism, undergraduates carousing or scurrying through the streets, gowns billowing behind them, in the course of some rag or other; in other parts of London, the very rich, like the very poor, would be drinking by lamplight. Here the stockbrokers' clerks, the ju-nior partners of shopkeepers, the "improved" working class, kept them-selves to themselves, worked hard, retired early, and did not question overmuch the comings and goings of those around them.
Ysidro, who had stood for some moments gazing into the fog at the barely visible bulk of the terraced row, murmured, "Now we can enter. I have deepened their sleep against the sound of my own footfalls, but I have never before had call so to mask a living man's. Tread soft."
Lotta's rooms were on the second floor; the ground floor smelted of greasy cooking, the first of stale smoke and beer. They left the lantern unobtrusively cached in the entryway. No lights were on anywhere, save over the entry, but Ysidro guided him unerringly as he had before. The old-fashioned, long-barreled key Asher had found with the latchkey proved, as he'd suspected, to open Lotta's door, and it was only when they had closed it again and locked it behind them that he took a lucifer from his pocket and lit the gas.
Color smote his eyes, magnified and made luminous by the soft shim-mer of the gaslight; the room was an incredible jumble of clothes, shoes, peignoirs, trinkets, shawls, laces, opera programs, invitations, and cards, all heaped at random over the cheap boarding house furniture, like an actress' dressing room between scenes. There were evening gowns, scarlet, olive, and a shade of gold which only a certain shade of blonde could wear with effect, kid opera gloves spotted with old blood, and fans of painted silk or swan's-down. A set of sapphires-necklace, earrings, double bracelets, and combs-had been carelessly dumped on a tangle of black satin on the mahogany of the table, glinting with a feral sparkle as Asher's shadow passed across them.
The clutter in the bedroom was worse. Three giant armoires loomed over a bed that had obviously never been used for sleep; their doors sagged open under the press of gowns. Other dresses were heaped on the bed, a shining tangle of ruffles in which pearls gleamed like maggots in meat-yards of flounced organdy three generations out of date and narrow, high-waisted silks, older still and falling apart under the weight of their own beading as he gently lifted them from the shadowy disar-ray. Cosmetics and wigs, mostly of a particular shade of blonde, clut-tered the dressing table, whose mirror frame bulged with cards, notes, bibelots, and bills; jewels trailed among the mess in prodigal clusters, like swollen and glittering fruit. Near the foot of the bed, Asher saw an old shoe, broad-toed, square-heeled, with paste gems gleaming on its huge buckle and ribbons faded to grayish ghosts of some former indigo beauty. Gold sovereigns strewed a corner of the dressing table under a layer of dust and powder. Picking one up, Asher saw that they bore the head of the unfortunate Farmer George.
"Did her beaux give her money?" he asked quietly. "Or was she in the habit of robbing them after they were dead?"
"Both, I expect," Ysidro replied. "She never saved much. Hence her need to live in rooms-or in any case to rent them to store her things. But, of course, she could not risk sleeping here, with the possibility of her landlady entering to ask questions. And more questions would be asked, of course, if she shuttered the windows tightly enough to cut out all sunlight."
"Hence Highgate," Asher murmured, removing a dressmaker's bill from the table and turning it over in his
hands.
"The propensity of the vampires for sleeping among the dead," Ysidro said, standing, arms folded, just within the connecting door, "stems not so much from our fondness for corpses-though I have been told many vampires in the so-called Gothic ages considered it no more than proper-but from the fact that the tombs would be undisturbed by day. And by night, of course, interference would not matter."
"On the contrary, in fact," Asher remarked. "Must have played hob with the Resurrection trade." He was systematically removing all the cards, all the notes, and all the invitations that he could find from the mirror frame and dressing table, shoving them into an old-fashioned beaded reticule for examination later at leisure. "And I presume your money comes from investments?"
"That is not something which concerns you."
He flipped open a drawer. The reek of old powder and decaying paper rose to his nostrils like the choke of dust. The drawer was crammed with a chowchow of bills, most of them yellow and cracking with age, letters still shoved into embossed envelopes which bore illegi-ble handwritten franks instead of postage marks or stamps, and little wads of notes issued by banks long collapsed. "It concerns me how I'll get money to pursue my investigations."
Ysidro regarded him for a moment from beneath lowered eyelids, as if guessing that reimbursement was, in fact, the least of Asher's con-cerns. Then he turned away and began picking up and discarding the dozens of reticules of various ages, styles, and states of decomposition that lay among the anarchy of the bed or drooped from drawers of kerchiefs and underclothes. He opened them, plucking forth small wads of bank notes or emptying glittering streams of gold or silver onto the dressing table carelessly, as if the very touch of the money disgusted him.
A true hidalgo of the Reconquista, Asher thought, amused again and interested to see that three and a half centuries among a nation of shopkeepers hadn't changed him.
"Will that suffice?"
Asher sorted through the money, discarding anything more than twenty years old, except for one George III gold piece he pocketed as a souvenir. "For now," he said. "Since Lotta was the fourth victim, it isn't tremendously likely the killer started his investigations with her, but there might be something in all this paper-the name of a recent victim, an address, something. I'll want to see the rooms of the others- Calvaire, King, and Hammersmith-and I'll want to talk to these 'friends' of King's you spoke of..."
"No."
"As you wish," Asher said tartly, straightening up and flipping shut the drawer. "Then don't expect me to find your killer."
"You will find the killer." Ysidro retorted, his voice now deadly soft, "and you will find him quickly, ere he kills again. Else it will be the worse for you and for your lady. What you seek to know has nothing to do with your investigation."
"Neither you nor I has any idea what has to do with my investigation until we see it," Anger stirred in Asher again, not, as before, anger with the vampires, but the frustration he had known when dealing with those bland and faceless superiors in the Foreign Office who could not and would not understand field conditions, but demanded results neverthe-less. For a moment he wanted to take Ysidro by his skinny