Magistrates of Hell

EIGHT

‘And what did you tell him?’ asked Lydia the next morning, when Asher related the events of the previous day in more detail than he’d had the energy for, in the small hours after half-carrying Karlebach up to the suite.

‘Nothing, at the time.’ Asher poured coffee rather gingerly from the bright polychrome pot that Ellen had set before them accompanied by scones (fresh), buttered eggs (excellent), extremely Scottish marmalade (tinned), and pungent commentary on heathen countries where the weather was enough to send a good Christian running for home. Asher got the impression that in the maid’s opinion the dust storm currently wailing over the tiled roofs of Peking had been visited by a disgusted God upon an unregenerate population of idolaters. ‘We had other things to worry about.’

The dust storm had overtaken them within sight of the lights of Men T’ou Kuo, after a stumbling race along the trail by moonlight, with no thought of anything but haste.

‘Ito – Mizukami’s bodyguard – was wounded, more seriously than he’d admit, I think. Mizukami had to help him most of the way back. And Karlebach was at the end of his strength.’ Asher flexed his wrists, which ached from holding off eleven stone of homicidal impaled killer who should have been dead. ‘Mizukami drove us back in his motor car – Karlebach, Ito, and myself – because there wouldn’t be a train until morning. Even after the worst of the dust passed it was all he could do to hold the car on the road. He didn’t explain his own presence, but I’m guessing that he and Ito had been following us most of the day. Mizukami must have recognized me and may still think I’m a German agent. I assume he will arrive shortly after we finish breakfast, to ask everything he had not the opportunity to query last night.’

Lydia glanced over her shoulder at the door of their bedroom, where the old professor had spent what had remained of the night. Though Karlebach had revived a little on the drive under the influence of the Count’s French brandy, he had still barely been able to get up the stairs, and even allowing for the ghastly things electric lighting did to peoples’ appearance, neither Asher nor Lydia had liked the chalky grayness of his face.

Since Lydia invariably traveled with both stethoscope and sphygmomanometer tucked into one of the dozen steamer-trunks of Worth and Poiret dresses, she’d made sure his blood pressure and heartbeat were normal, if weak, before mixing him a sedative. She’d spent the night in Miranda’s little cubicle with Mrs Pilley, while Asher had dossed down on the parlor sofa.

Now, even with the windows shuttered, the drawn curtains bellied restlessly in the cold, dust-laden wind and the air was blurred with a gauze of suspended gray-yellow silt. In the nursery, Asher could hear Miranda crying fretfully at the dust in her eyes, nose, and porridge.

‘You’ve heard nothing of Ysidro?’

Lydia shook her head.

Ellen appeared, starched and friendly, like a good-natured draft-horse in the spotless print cotton dress appropriate for maidservants before noon, to take away the tray, and through the open door into the ‘service’ half of the suite, Asher heard Mrs Pilley exclaim, ‘Now, there’s my good girl!’

‘Miranda doesn’t sound like she approves of her first dust storm,’ he remarked, and Ellen chuckled.

‘Oh, she’s kept trying to scrape the dust off the porridge with her little fingers, and the Pilley –’ Ellen had little use for the nurse, whose opinions on the rights of working men to picket (‘They should be arrested!’) and women to vote (‘They should be sent home to their husbands, who should have kept them there to begin with!’) she decried as barbaric – ‘has been half-mad wiping her hands every two seconds. And it itches her eyes, poor sweet. How we’re to bath her with this dust turning the water to mud I don’t know. And how is poor Professor Karlebach?’

‘I’m just going in to check.’ Lydia rose, unobtrusively collected her glasses – which she’d whipped off at the first creak of the door hinges heralding Ellen’s entry – and moved softly toward the bedroom: ‘No, you sit there and finish your coffee, Jamie. I heard you get up and check on him in the night when you should have been resting yourself.’

Asher sat back and gazed consideringly at the half-open door of the bedroom after Ellen left, his coffee cup still cradled in his hands. He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, Francis Bacon had written. They are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief . . .

When he glanced down at the cup he saw that a microscopic film lay on the surface of the coffee.

He was deeply glad that Lydia and Miranda were with him – were where he could protect them, or at least know what kind of danger they were in. But his dreams last night had been troubled by the reflective eyes, the deformed faces seen in starlight. The stink of rotting filth. Exhausted as he had been, he had waked half a dozen times, less from concern for his old friend than from the nightmare that he’d heard clawed hands scratching at the windows, seen those slumped shadows following him again along the stagnant waters of the canal.

How much intelligence do they have? Enough to know me by sight? To follow me?

To learn that there are those here I love?

Fear twisted somewhere behind his breastbone. His one failing, in his days as a field agent, had been his imagination. An agent’s greatest gift, but a weapon that could turn in its wielder’s hand, as it had turned in his.

And what about the vampires of Peking? He remembered Ysidro’s nervousness – remembered his own sensation, walking along the canal’s high banks two nights ago, of something watching him, following him . . .

Months before Miranda’s birth, Lydia had sewed lengths of silver chain into the linings of the curtains of their daughter’s tiny bed, even into the bindings around Miranda’s blankets. The thought that she had to do this – the thought that the Master of London, only seventy miles from Oxford, knew where he and Lydia lived – still filled him with rage, terror, and guilt.

And though he had quit the Department before he’d asked Lydia – at that time a penniless student disinherited by her disgruntled father – to be his wife, he had done so with trepidation. Spying was a bachelor’s game, and even ex-spies spent the rest of their lives glancing over their shoulders. In Asher’s eyes, perhaps the greatest of Ysidro’s many sins was that, in dragging Asher into the affairs of the London vampires seven years previously, he had brought Lydia to the attention of those who hunted in the night.

Lydia, and now the child she had borne.

She came back in, coiling up her stethoscope in her hands. ‘He’s still sleeping,’ she said. ‘Poor old gentleman . . . And I must say, Jamie, that it was infamous of you to include poor old Karlebach on yesterday’s expedition and tell me I had to stay back and try to get gossip out of the Baroness. Not to speak of the fact that by the time I get out to Mingliang to have a look at those bones they’ll be crumbled to dust.’

‘Mea culpa!’ Asher raised his hands in surrender. ‘But as long as you did suffer an afternoon of the Baroness’s company—?’

‘Did you know in advance that she was like that?’

‘I am innocent, Lords of the Court, of the charges directed against me . . . though I had heard rumors.’ He swiped his coffee with a corner of his napkin, poured out the remainder of the coffee pot’s contents into Lydia’s cup, and set a saucer over it. ‘And speaking of rumors . . .’

‘Yes,’ Lydia said with a sigh. ‘Speaking of rumors . . .’

And she proceeded to give an account of her own afternoon’s expedition to Silk Lane.

‘I’m sorry to say,’ said Asher when she had finished, ‘that your friend Madame Giannini wasn’t wrong about Richard Hobart’s father. Grant Hobart had a smelly reputation even at Oxford. Of course, few of us were so green as to get ourselves entangled with the town girls, if all we wanted was a lark—’

‘And here I thought you spent your college years in monkish seclusion with a Slovak lexicon!’

‘Persian,’ corrected Asher with a grin. ‘And I’m afraid you’re mostly right.’ He removed the protective saucer from over his own cup, took a sip, and replaced it. ‘Even before the Department recruited me I never saw the point of getting castaway five nights out of seven, like the other men on my staircase. And you can thank my parsonical upbringing for keeping me out of the clutches of those girls the others pursued when they went down to London. It would be hard to imagine behavior too gross for drunken undergraduates to stomach, but Hobart managed it. He’d excuse himself – usually say the girls asked for it. There was a rumor back then – this was in eighty-two – that he’d killed a girl, at some place in London.’

‘Deliberately?’ Lydia’s voice was steady, but he could see she was genuinely appalled.

Asher thought about it. Remembered one spring afternoon in the Junior Common Room, and the silence that fell when Grant Hobart came through the door. Shortly after that, Hobart had come to him asking to be tutored in Chinese, a language Asher had been studying for two years. His father had given him three months, Hobart had said, meeting Asher’s eye with steely defiance in his own, to get a hand on the language and set forth to make his career in the Far East.

Unwillingly, he replied to her, ‘I think so, yes.’

She was silent, expressionlessly drawing tiny patterns with her coffee spoon in the dust that filmed the white tablecloth.

‘I attended a lecture last year,’ she said at length, ‘by a Dr Beaconsfield, who claimed that such behavior is traceable to atavistic malformations in the nervous system. To my mind he didn’t make a very good case for it. I’d be curious about Sir Grant’s father.’

‘Hobart spoke to me of his father exactly once, in all the time we were at Oxford together. I know Lady Hobart was a horror. And the fact remains that it doesn’t matter whether the need for violence to achieve satisfaction with a woman is hereditary or not. Richard was set up. We did that kind of thing in the Department all the time, to get a grip on someone we needed, though I never heard of a case where we used murder. The victim of this scheme isn’t Richard, or even the poor Eddington girl. It’s Hobart.’

Lydia thought about that for a moment. ‘Then he’s right. It really is the Chinese.’

‘I think so. But for reasons that aren’t inscrutable in the least.’

She added a neat series of boxes around her drawing.

He wondered if she were thinking about Ysidro, who had killed far more women than one or two.

‘While we’re in Peking I’ll take you to the opera, Lydia,’ he said after a time. ‘There aren’t any wings or flies, and when the scenery needs to be changed – or the hero needs to grab a sword – stagehands run out and do whatever is necessary in full view of the audience. But since they’re dressed all in black, the audience simply pretends they’re not there: agrees not to see them.’

‘Like the servants in the Legation.’ Her voice was sad. She understood who had had access to Richard Hobart’s tie drawer. Who would know all about Holly Eddington’s determination to wed him, and the fact that if someone – someone she must already have known – said, He’s asking for you at the garden gate, she would go. ‘Or the servants anywhere, for that matter.’

‘Except that we don’t know a thing about the servants in the Legations. Who they’re related to or where they go on their days off. Nothing. They come recommended – but when they step through the gates they disappear. But I do know that here, family is everything. Cousins owe favors to great-uncles; second-cousins carry messages for aunts they’ve never met. Whole clans of people who earn in a week what we pay for a rickshaw ride will club together every copper cash they make for years, so that grand-nephew Shen, who shows such promise, can get a tutor and go to school and take the government examinations – with the understanding that if Shen does make good and ends up Inspector of Customs, he’s going to let second-cousin Yao’s boxes go through unexamined, even though he’s never met Yao in his life.’

‘Not so terribly different,’ she observed softly, ‘from home.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Except that Shen will almost kill himself to pass those exams, not for the sake of his own future, but because of what he owes his family. And we don’t see them at all.’

She wiped her spoon clean of dust, used it to stir her coffee, replaced the protective saucer. ‘So you think this girl that Sir Grant is rumored to have killed at this . . . this house he goes to on Big Tiger Lane is related to some of the Legation servants?’

‘That makes the most sense of anything I’ve heard. A Chinese can’t bring a case against an English diplomat, Lydia. This is the only way they could make him suffer: by having the son he loves disgraced and hanged.’

She said nothing. Thoughts turning, like her fingers on the table furnishings. Asher’s thoughts, too, ranged back to those three strange months of spending four hours a day with that loud-voiced, hard-cursing young man who got himself violently drunk every night after the lessons were done. The fifty pounds Hobart had paid him then had been what had taken him to Central Europe that second time, to study with Karlebach.

And his familiarity with the less-known reaches of the Austrian Empire that he had thus acquired had been what had brought him to the attention of the Department in the first place.

He’d been the only one of the Balliol men who had been invited, five years later, to Grant Hobart’s wedding to the daughter of an American millionaire.

Behind the closed bedroom door his quick ears picked up the creak of the bed springs and a rumbly murmur in Yiddish.

‘I’ll see how he is.’

Lydia wiped the dust off her spoon again and set it in her saucer. ‘You know Sir Grant isn’t going to want to hear that.’

‘No. So, just in case of trouble, I’ve cached thirty pounds where I can get at it in a hurry, under a floorboard in the generator room of this hotel. He has a temper, and he may turn spiteful – in which case I may have to run for it. I wonder if old Wu is still willing to hide ch’ang pi kwei in his house . . .?’

‘Old Wu?’

‘A minor crook in the Chinese City. I think he works for the Sheng family, or he did fourteen years ago. He could procure anything from telephone wire to French champagne, and he’ll certainly hide a yang kwei tse from the authorities – or irate Germans – if the price is right. But I’m hoping we’ll be able to come up with a story of some kind that will exonerate Richard, cause minimal damage, and keep his father from killing again.’

He wondered, as opened the bedroom door and saw his old teacher propped up among the pillows, if he had learned to move so casually past the unavengeable murder of an unknown girl – barely more than a child, from what he knew of Grant Hobart’s tastes – from his days with the Department.

Or was that something that had come on him since he’d known vampires?

‘We have to go back.’ Karlebach’s left thumb – the only digit still mobile on that hand – curled down hard over Asher’s fingers, as if he feared his former pupil would pull away at the murmured words. ‘We have to go down into the mine, find where they lie. I saw shotguns for sale at Kierulf’s store, next to the hotel, and there’s a gunsmith attached to the British barracks—’

‘I’ll go.’

‘No! I must—’

‘Why?’

Karlebach turned his face fretfully aside. ‘I know these things . . .’

‘What more about them do I need to know,’ asked Asher softly, ‘other than that they must be destroyed? There must be maps of some kind of the mine. I’ll find out from one of Sir John’s clerks what the mining company was and how to get my hands on its records. If I tell them I suspect the Kuo Min-tang is using the mine for a hideout I should get access. It isn’t as if it’s a secret. Those medicines you made—’

He nodded toward Lydia’s dressing table, where the phials stood in a glittering line. A minuscule drift of dust had settled along their bases.

‘You don’t know if they’d work against these things or not?’

‘I was a fool to bring them.’ Karlebach sighed. ‘Had there been more remains at the German woman’s mission I would have tried a drop here, a drop there, to see what effect they would have . . . Jamie, did you count them? Did you see how many there were? Dozens—’ His lined face twisted with distress.

‘There always seem to be more attackers in the dark,’ said Asher firmly, though he himself had been appalled at their numbers.

‘And we did not hear them, did not smell them, until they were almost on us. Matthias—’ Again he hesitated on his betrayer’s name. ‘Matthias said they had something of the vampire power to shield themselves from the eyes and minds of the living.’

‘Matthias made a study of them, then?’ He wondered if that young rebel had had the opportunity to do so because the medieval crypts and tunnels beneath the Old City had been in use by the revolutionary groups of Hungarians, Czechs, and Slavs who plotted to free their various homelands from the age-long grip of Austria.

Karlebach lay motionless for a time, then nodded. In the dense gloom of the bedroom, tears gathered in the old man’s eyes. ‘Like me, he feared what would happen if some of these politicians, these generals, learn of them, seek to use them to control their enemies. Already there are too many evil weapons in the world, Jamie. And too many men who believe that some good can come from fighting what they perceive as evil with weapons of an evil stronger still. This is why I say, I have to go back to the mine. I have to see them for myself, with my own eyes that cannot be deceived.’

Asher was silent for a time. Then he said, ‘Deceived?’

‘Jamie—’ Karlebach’s voice sank to a whisper. ‘These things are the kindred of the vampire. How can we tell that it is not the vampire that controls them? That commands them? These things have no minds of their own, but if a vampire rules over them, what can they not do? You have been deceived by a vampire before,’ he added, deep sorrow in his voice. ‘Your heart is good, Jamie, but in this you cannot be trusted.’

The arthritic right hand, with its crooked fingers, closed around Asher’s, the grip still powerful as a young man’s. ‘The stakes are too high for me to risk the slightest error. So you see, it must be me.’

Maybe so, thought Asher, watching as the old man turned his face aside. But something tells me I’m not the only one who can’t be trusted.