Few of the dons at Oxford were familiar with the kitchen quarters of their own homes-many of them had never penetrated past the swing-ing doors that separated the servants' portions of the house from those in which the owners lived. Asher had made it his business to know not only the precise layout of the place-he could have passed through it blindfolded without touching a single piece of furniture, as he could indeed have passed through any room in the house or in his College- but to know exactly where everything was kept. Knowing such things was hardly a conscious effort anymore, merely one of the things he had picked up over the years and had never quite dared to put down. He found the drawer in which Mrs. Grimes kept her carving knives-the hideout he kept in his boot was a small one, for emergencies-then moved on to the archway just past the stove which separated kitchen from pantry, all the while aware that someone, somewhere in the house, listened for his slightest footfall.
Mrs. Grimes, Ellen, and the girl Sylvie were all there. They sat around the table, a slumped tableau like something from the Chamber of Horrors at Mme. Tussaud's, somehow shocking in the even, vaguely flickering light from the steel fishtail burner by the stove. All they needed was a poison bottle on the table between them, Asher thought with wry grimness, and a placard:
THE MAD POISONER STRIKES.
Only there was no bottle, no used teacups, no evidence in fact of anything eaten or drunk. The only thing on the table at all was a bowl of half-shelled peas.
Studying the cook's thin form, the parlor maid's plump one, and the huddled shape of the tweeny, Asher felt again that chill sensation of being listened for and known. All three women were alive, but he didn't like the way they slept, like broken dolls, heedless of muscle cramp or balance.
He had been right, then.
The only other light on in the house was in his study, and that was where he kept his revolver, an American Navy Colt stowed in the drawer of his desk; if one were a lecturer in philology, of course, one couldn't keep a revolver in one's greatcoat pocket. The other dons would certainly talk.
He made his way up the back stairs from the kitchen. From its unob-trusive door at the far end of the hall he could see no one waiting for him at the top of the front stairs, but that meant nothing. The door of the upstairs parlor gaped like a dark mouth. From the study, a bar of dimmed gold light lay across the carpet like a dropped scarf.
Conscious of the weight of his body on the floor, he moved a few steps forward, close to the wall. By angling his head, he could see a wedge of the room beyond. The divan had been deliberately dragged around to a position in which it would be visible from the hall. Lydia lay on the worn green cushions, her hair unraveled in a great pottery-red coil to the floor. On her breast her long, capable hand was curled protectively around her spectacles, as if she'd taken them off to rest her eyes for a moment; without them, her face looked thin and unprotected in sleep. Only the faint movement of her small breasts beneath the smoky lace of a trailing tea gown showed him she lived at all.
The room was set up as a trap, he thought with the business portion of his mind. Someone waited inside for him to go rushing in at first sight of her, as indeed his every instinct cried out to him to do...
"Come in, Dr. Asher," a quiet voice said from within that glowing amber chamber of books. "I am alone-there is in fact no one else in the house. The young man who looks after your stables is asleep, as you have found your women servants to be. I am seated at your desk, which is in its usual place, and I have no intention of doing you harm to-night."
Spanish, the field agent in him noted-flawless and unaccented, but Spanish all the same-even as the philologist pricked his ears at some odd, almost backcountry inflection to the English, a trace of isolative a here and there, a barely aspirated e just flicking at the ends of some words...
He pushed open the door and stepped inside. The young man sitting at Asher's desk looked up from the dismantled pieces of the revolver and inclined his head in greeting,
"Good evening," he said politely. "For reasons which shall shortly become obvious, let us pass the formality of explanations and proceed to introductions."
It was only barely audible-the rounding of the ou in obvious and the stress shift in explanations- but it sent alarm bells of sheer scholarly curiosity clanging in some half-closed lumber room of his m in d.Can't you stop thinking like a philologist even at a time like this...?
The young man went on, "My name is Don Simon Xavier Christian Morado de la Cadena-Ysidro, and I am what you call a vampire."
Asher said nothing. An unformed thought aborted itself, leaving white stillness behind. "Do you believe me?"
Asher realized he was holding his intaken breath, and let it out. His glance sheered to Lydia 's throat; his folkloric studies of vampirism had included the cases of so-called "real" vampires, lunatics who had sought to prolong their own twisted lives by drinking or bathing in the blood of young girls. Through the tea gown's open collar he could see the white skin of her throat. No blood stained the fragile ecru of the lace around it. Then his eyes went back to Ysidro, in whose soft tones he had heard the absolute conviction of a madman. Yet, looking at that slender form behind his desk, he was conscious of a queer
creeping sensation of the skin on the back of his neck, an uneasy sense of having thought he was descending a stair and, instead, stepping from the edge of a cliff...
The name was Spanish-the young man's bleached fairness might well hail from the northern provinces where the Moors had never gone calling. Around the thin, high-nosed hidalgo face, his colorless hair hung like spider silk, fine as cobweb and longer than men wore it these days. The eyes were scarcely darker, a pale, yellowish amber, flecked here and there with pleats of faded brown or gray-eyes which should have seemed catlike, but didn't. There was an odd luminosity to them, an unplaceable glittering quality, even in the gaslight, that troubled Asher. Their very paleness, contrasting with the moleskin-soft black velvet of the man's coat collar, pointed up the absolute pallor of the delicate features far more like a corpse's than a living man's, save for their mobile softness.
From his own experiences in Germany and Russia, Asher knew how easy such a pallor was to fake, particularly by gaslight. And it might simply be madness or drugs that glittered at him from those grave yellow eyes. Yet there was an eerie quality to Don Simon Ysidro, an immobility so total it was as if he had been there behind the desk for hundreds of years, waiting...
As Asher knelt beside Lydia to feel her pulse, he kept his eyes on the Spaniard, sensing the danger in the man. And even as his mind at last identified the underlying inflections of speech, he realized, with an odd, sinking chill, whence that dreadful sense of stillness stemmed.
The tonal shift in a few of his word endings was characteristic of those areas which had been linguistically isolated since the end of the sixteenth century.
And except when he spoke, Don Simon Ysidro did not appear to be breathing.
The carving knife still in his left hand, Asher got to his feet and said, "Come here."
Ysidro did not move. His slender hands remained exactly as they had been, dead white against the blued steel of the dissected gun, but no more inert than the spider who awaits the slightest vibration of the blundering fly.
"You understand, it is not always easy to conceal what we are, partic-ularly if we have not fed," he explained in his low, light voice. Heavy lids gave his eyes an almost sleepy expression, not quite concealing cynicism and mockery, not quite concealing that odd gleam. "Up until ninety years ago, it was a simple matter, for no one looks quite normal by candlelight. Now that they are lighting houses by electricity, I know not what we shah" do."