Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night

"Now, that I don't, for she'll pay up in cash. In any case, I doubt they're really friends. Goodness knows how they met in the first place, for a blind man could see Mrs. Wren wasn't her sort of woman at all- not that it's Mrs. Wren's real name, I'll wager, either. She has a drunk-ard of a husband, who won't let her out of the house-she has to slip out when he's gone to his club to buy herself so much as a new petti-coat. I suggest you look up her other friend, Miss Celestine du Bois, though if you was to ask me..." She gave him a saucy wink. "... Miss du Bois is about as French as I am."

Though thoroughly tickled and amused, Asher managed to look frostily disapproving of the whole sordid business as he stalked out of Mile. La Tour's.

The address given by Celestine du Bois on those occasions when bills were sent to her and not to gentlemen admirers-one of whom, Asher had been interested to note, was also Valentin Calvaire-was an accom-modation address, a tobacconist's near Victoria Station and reachable from any corner of London by Underground. Calvaire's address in the Bayswater Road was also an accommodation

address, a pub-both vampires had picked up their letters personally.

"Does Miss du Bois pick up letters here for anyone else?" Asher inquired, casually sliding a half-crown piece across the polished mahog-any of the counter. The young clerk cast a nervous glance toward the back of the shop, where his master was mixing packets of Gentlemen's Special Sort.

"For a Miss Chloe Watermeade, and a Miss Chloe Winterdon," the young man replied in a hushed voice and wiped his pointy nose. "She comes in-oh, once, twice a week sometimes, usually just before we puts the shutters up."

"Pretty?" Asher hazarded.

"Right stunner. Short little thing-your pocket Venus. Blond as a Swede, brown eyes I think-always dressed to the nines. Not a loafer'll speak to her, though, with the big toff what comes in with her half the time- Cor, there's a hard boy for you, and never mind the boiled shirt!"

"Name?" Asher slid another half crown across the counter.

The boy threw another quick look at the back shop as the owner's bulky form darkened the door; he whispered, "Never heard it," and shoved the half crown back.

"Keep it," Asher whispered, picked up the packet of Russian ciga-rettes which had been his ostensible errand, and stepped back into the street to the accompaniment of the tinkling shop bell.

Further investigation of Lotta's grave in Highgate yielded little. It was a discouragingly easy matter to enter the cemetery by daylight- the narrow avenue of tombs behind the Egyptian gate and the dark groves and buildings around it were absolutely deserted, silent in the dripping gloom. Anyone could have entered and completely dismem-bered every corpse in the place uninterrupted, not just planted a stake through the heart and cut off the head.

With the door left wide, a thin greenish light suffused the crypt, but Asher still had to have recourse to the uncertain light of a dry-cell electric torch, whose bulky length he'd smuggled in under his ulster, as he examined every inch of the coffin and its niche. He found what might have been remains of a stake among the charred bones, though it was difficult to distinguish it from the fragments of rib or tell whether it was wood or bone-he wrapped it in tissue and pocketed it for later investi-gation. It told him nothing he did not already know. In a far corner of the tomb, he found a nasty huddle of bones, hair, and corset stays rolled in a rotting purple dress: the former occupant, he guessed, of the coffin Lotta had commandeered.

What remained of the afternoon he spent in a back office at theDaily Mail, studying obituaries, police reports, and the Society page, match-ing names with those on the list he'd assembled from the debris in Lotta's rooms and from Mile. La Tour's daybooks. Poor Thomas Gobey, he saw, had in fact succumbed to a "wasting sickness" only months after the purchase of the russet silk dress. Asher noted the address-the Albany, which told him everything he needed to know about that unfortunate young man-and the names of surviving broth-ers, sister, parents, fiancee.

It had been disconcerting to recognize names on those cards of invita-tion which dated from a certain period seven or eight years ago. Poor Bertie Westmoreland had not been the only member of that gay circle of friends who had sent her invitations or bought her trinkets, though he was evidently the only one who had paid the ultimate price,

The others were lucky, he thought. Though Albert Westmoreland had died in 1900, the Honorable

Frank Ellis-another of Lydia 's suit-ors, though Asher had never met the boy-had bought the vampire a loden-green crepe tea gown as late as 1904. Who knew how many oth-ers had also kept up the connection?

He shivered, thinking how close Lydia had passed to that unseen plague then, and thanked all the strait-corseted deities of Society for the strict lines drawn between young girls of good family and the type of women with whom young men of good family amused themselves be-tween bouts of "doing the pretty,"

Lydia had been very young then. Eighteen, still living in her father's Oxford house and attending lectures with the tiny clump of Somerville undergraduates interested in medicine. The other girls had dealt as best they could with the comments, jokes, and sniggers of male undergradu-ates and deans alike-apologetic, frustrated, or defiant. For the most part Lydia had been blithely oblivious. She had been genuinely puzzled over her father's blustering rage when she'd chosen studying for Responsions over a season on the London matrimonial mart; had she had brothers or sisters, he might well have threatened to disinherit her from the considerable family estates. Even her uncle, the Dean of New Col-lege, though her supporter, had been scandalized by the direction of her studies. Education for women was all very well, but he had been think-ing in terms of literature and the Classics, not the slicing up of cadavers and learning how the human reproductive organs operated.

Asher smiled a little, remembering how even the most anti-woman of the dons, old Horace Blaydon, had come around to her support in the end, though he'd never have admitted it. "Even a damn freshman can follow what I'm doing!" he'd bellowed at a group of embarrassed male students during his lectures on blood pathology... he'd called Lydia a damned schoolgirl everywhere but in the classes. And the old man would have acted the same, Asher thought, even had his son not been head over heels in love with her. Staring at the obituaries spread out on the grimy and ink-stained table top before him, Asher glanced at his list of Lotta's admirers since the early '80s and thought about Dennis Blaydon.

Lydia was probably the last person anyone would have expected to capture Dennis Blaydon's fancy, let alone his passionate and possessive love. Bluff, golden, and perfect, Dennis had been used to the idea that any woman he chose to honor with his regard would automatically accept his proposal; the fact that Lydia did not had only added to her fascination. Since the first time he'd seen her without her spectacles and decided that she was possessed of a fragile prettiness as well as great wealth, he had wanted her and had put forth all his multitude of charm and grace into winning her, to Asher's silent despair. Everyone in Ox-ford, from the Deans of the Schools to the lowliest clerk at Blackweli's, had accepted his eventual triumph in the Willoughby matrimonial lists as a matter of course. Her father, who considered one intellectual more than enough in the family, had been all in favor of it. To Horace Blaydon's query as to what his son would want with a woman who spent half her time in the pathology laboratories, Dennis had replied, with his customary shining earnestness, "Oh, she isn't really like that, Father." Presumably he knew better than she did what Lydiawas like, Asher had thought bitterly at the time. Pushed into the background, a middle-aged, brown, nondescript colleague of her uncle, he could only watch them together and wonder how soon it would be that all hope of making her a part of his life would disappear forever.