starving. And poor besotted Margaret had told him more than once that she was his to use as he pleased, even unto death.
That was love.
Why do I care?
Why do I hurt?
Why do I hurt so BADLY?
The memories of all those nights of talk – over cards, over bank ledgers, over the investigation they had done together; in train carriages, in the latticed window-bay of a house in Constantinople, in the fog before the skeletal black-and-white stones of the Vienna cathedral – they should be nothing.
That sense she had had of dealing not with a vampire, but with a man – wry and clever, brilliant and maddening, a scholar and a sometime poet and an observer of three and a half mortal centuries of folly – would not leave her, and the intensity of it filled her with shame.
None of it is true. It’s only another illusion. He is no more than the cast chrysalis of his former shape . There was nothing inside him but darkness and the hunger for another’s death.
It is our lure to be attractive. It is how we hunt , he had said to James. It means nothing . . .
She wondered why the knowledge didn’t make her hurt less.
Ellen’s heavy tread in the hall. Lydia sat up quickly, realizing with a start that it was dark, her untouched tea was stone cold, and that she had done nothing for three days about the article for Lancet , which was due on Thursday . . .
‘Here we are, ma’am,’ said her handmaiden proudly and held out an envelope to her, smudged and dirty and dotted with Dutch stamps. ‘I told you he’d be well.’
Rotterdam
4 April, 1911
Best Beloved,
All well so far.
J.
Lydia put on her spectacles, checked the date, then went to the globe in the corner – she never could remember where all those little countries were, between France and Germany. He must have written this in the train station (the paper certainly looked like something one would find in a public waiting-room!), before boarding the train that would take him into Germany.
She made herself beam for Ellen, but when Ellen was gone she read the note again, then took off her spectacles and sat for some time in the amber gloom.
She did not believe in a God of miracles.
It was as unreasonable to pray for one as it would have been, for instance, to feel love for a man who to her certain knowledge had personally murdered – at the lowest possible computation – well over thirty thousand men, women, and children, one at a time, presuming the abstemious rate of two per week for three hundred and fifty-six years . . .
God, please bring him home safe . . .
SIX
Because man does not exist in a vacuum – and because Asher guessed that the dvornik , or concierge, of the Imperatrice Catherine was probably being paid by someone on the staff of the German Ambassador, as well as by the local Secret Police, to note the arrivals and departures of foreign visitors at this unfashionable time of year – on the following morning he carefully re-shaved the top of his head, touched up the dye on his hair and mustache, reread the Editorials page of the copy of the Chicago Tribune that he had brought with him, and paid a visit to the Ministry of Police. Though the Ministry had been folded into that of the Interior some years previously, the Chief of Police still ruled St Petersburg from the ill-famed building on the Fontanka Embankment, and Asher had little trouble presenting himself as Mr Jules Plummer of Chicago, in outraged and affluent pursuit of an absconding wife.
‘I heard she’d come here, and I don’t want to make trouble,’ he announced, in a loud voice and grating Middle-Border accent that no one would have associated with the soft-spoken Lecturer in Philology of New College, Oxford. ‘But I won’t be made a fool of, either, damn it. The man she ran off with claimed he was a Russian Count, and I know he had letters from St Petersburg, so here I am. Damn all women, anyway. Bastard probably lied, but I’m here to make a start.’
Needless to say,
That was love.
Why do I care?
Why do I hurt?
Why do I hurt so BADLY?
The memories of all those nights of talk – over cards, over bank ledgers, over the investigation they had done together; in train carriages, in the latticed window-bay of a house in Constantinople, in the fog before the skeletal black-and-white stones of the Vienna cathedral – they should be nothing.
That sense she had had of dealing not with a vampire, but with a man – wry and clever, brilliant and maddening, a scholar and a sometime poet and an observer of three and a half mortal centuries of folly – would not leave her, and the intensity of it filled her with shame.
None of it is true. It’s only another illusion. He is no more than the cast chrysalis of his former shape . There was nothing inside him but darkness and the hunger for another’s death.
It is our lure to be attractive. It is how we hunt , he had said to James. It means nothing . . .
She wondered why the knowledge didn’t make her hurt less.
Ellen’s heavy tread in the hall. Lydia sat up quickly, realizing with a start that it was dark, her untouched tea was stone cold, and that she had done nothing for three days about the article for Lancet , which was due on Thursday . . .
‘Here we are, ma’am,’ said her handmaiden proudly and held out an envelope to her, smudged and dirty and dotted with Dutch stamps. ‘I told you he’d be well.’
Rotterdam
4 April, 1911
Best Beloved,
All well so far.
J.
Lydia put on her spectacles, checked the date, then went to the globe in the corner – she never could remember where all those little countries were, between France and Germany. He must have written this in the train station (the paper certainly looked like something one would find in a public waiting-room!), before boarding the train that would take him into Germany.
She made herself beam for Ellen, but when Ellen was gone she read the note again, then took off her spectacles and sat for some time in the amber gloom.
She did not believe in a God of miracles.
It was as unreasonable to pray for one as it would have been, for instance, to feel love for a man who to her certain knowledge had personally murdered – at the lowest possible computation – well over thirty thousand men, women, and children, one at a time, presuming the abstemious rate of two per week for three hundred and fifty-six years . . .
God, please bring him home safe . . .
SIX
Because man does not exist in a vacuum – and because Asher guessed that the dvornik , or concierge, of the Imperatrice Catherine was probably being paid by someone on the staff of the German Ambassador, as well as by the local Secret Police, to note the arrivals and departures of foreign visitors at this unfashionable time of year – on the following morning he carefully re-shaved the top of his head, touched up the dye on his hair and mustache, reread the Editorials page of the copy of the Chicago Tribune that he had brought with him, and paid a visit to the Ministry of Police. Though the Ministry had been folded into that of the Interior some years previously, the Chief of Police still ruled St Petersburg from the ill-famed building on the Fontanka Embankment, and Asher had little trouble presenting himself as Mr Jules Plummer of Chicago, in outraged and affluent pursuit of an absconding wife.
‘I heard she’d come here, and I don’t want to make trouble,’ he announced, in a loud voice and grating Middle-Border accent that no one would have associated with the soft-spoken Lecturer in Philology of New College, Oxford. ‘But I won’t be made a fool of, either, damn it. The man she ran off with claimed he was a Russian Count, and I know he had letters from St Petersburg, so here I am. Damn all women, anyway. Bastard probably lied, but I’m here to make a start.’
Needless to say,
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