Barbara Hambly - James Asher 2 - Traveling With the Dead

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TRAVELING WITH THE DEADTRAVELING WITH THE DEAD
James Asher - Book Two
BARBARA HAMBLY
A Del Rey® Book Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright © 1995 by Barbara Hambly
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House,
Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,
Toronto.
For George
With a prayer in the shadow of the Aya Sofia
Prologue
The house was an old one, inconspicuous for its size. Curiously so, thought
Lydia Asher, when she stood at last on the front steps, craning her neck to look
up at five stories of shut-faced dark facade. More curious still, given the
obvious age of the place, was the plain half timbering discernible under
centuries of discoloration and soot, the bull’s eye glass of the unshuttered
windows, the depth to which the centers of the stone steps had been worn.
Lydia shivered and pulled closer about her the coat she’d borrowed from her
cook—even the plainest from her own collection would have been hopelessly
fashionable for these narrow, nameless courts and alleys that clustered behind
the waterfront between Blackfriars Bridge and Southwark. He can’t hurt me, she
thought, and brought up her hand to her throat. Under the high neck of her plain
wool waist she could feel the thick links of half a dozen silver chains against
her skin.
Can he?
It had taken her nearly an hour to find the court, which by some trick of chance
had been left off all four modern maps of this part of London. The whole yard
was adrift in fog the color of ashes, and at this hour—Lydia heard three o’clock
strike in the black steeple of the crumbling pre-Wren church that backed the old
house—even the little remaining light was bleeding away. She had passed the
house three times before truly seeing it, and sensed that had the air been
clear, it would somehow still have been difficult to look at the place. She had
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the absurd impression that by night, lanterns or no lanterns, streetlamps or no
street lamps, it would not be visible at all.
There was a smell about it, too, distinct and terrifying, but impossible to
place.
She stood for a long time at the foot of its steps.
He can’t hurt me, she told herself again, and wondered if that were true.
Her heart was beating hard, and she noted clinically the cold in her
extremities, in spite of fur lined leather gloves and two pairs of silk
stockings under her dainty, high heeled boots. Stouter shoes would have somewhat
alleviated the situation, always supposing stout shoes existed that did not make
their wearer look like a washerwoman—if they did, Lydia had never seen them—but
the panicky scald of adrenaline in her bloodstream informed her that the cold
she felt was probably shock.
It was one thing to speculate about the physiology of the house’s owner in the
safety of her own study at Oxford, or with James close by and armed.
It was evidently quite another to go up and knock on Don Simon Ysidro’s front
door.
Muffled by the fog, she heard the tock of hooves, the jingle of harness from
Upper Thames Street, and the groaning hoot of the motorbuses. Another hoot,
deeper, came from some ship on the river. The click of her heels on the dirty
steps was the strike of a hammer, and her petticoat’s rustle the rasp of a saw.
For all the house’s age, the lock on the door was relatively new, a heavy
American pin lock oddly masked behind what must have been the original lock
plate of Elizabeth’s time. It yielded readily enough to the skeleton keys she’d
found at the back of her husband’s handkerchief drawer. Her hands shook a little
as she then operated the picklocks in the fashion he’d taught her, partly from
the sheer fear of what she was doing, and partly because, law abiding and
essentially orderly, she expected a member of the Metropolitan Police to appear
behind her crying, ‘Ere, now, wotcher at?
Absurd on the face of it, she thought. It was patently obvious that no
representative of the law had set foot in this square in years.
She pushed her thick lensed spectacles more firmly up onto the bridge of her
nose—Not only breakin‘ the law, roared the imaginary policeman, but ugly and
four-eyed to boot!—slipped the picklocks and skeleton keys back into her
handbag, and stepped through the door.
It wouldn’t be full dark until five. She was perfectly safe.
The hall itself was much darker than she had expected, with the wide oak doors
on either side closed. Trimmed with a carved balustrade, generous steps ascended
carpetless to blindness above. The passage beside them to the rear of the house
was an open grave.
There was, of course, no lamp.
Mildly berating herself for not having foreseen that contingency—of course there
wouldn’t be a lamp!—Lydia pushed open one of the side doors to admit a rinsed
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and cindery light. It showed her a key on the hall table, and turning, she
closed the front door. For a time she stood undecided, debating whether to lock
herself in and observing the deleterious effects of massive amounts of
adrenaline on her ability to concentrate…
How would I go about charting degree of panic with inability to make a decision?
The workhouse wouldn’t really let me put my subjects into life threatening
situations.
In the end she turned the key but left it in the lock, and stepped cautiously
through the door she had opened, into what had probably been a dining room but
was as large as the ballroom of her aunt’s house in Mayfair. It was lined floor
to ceiling with books: goods boxes had been stacked on top of the original
ten-foot bookshelves, and planks stretched over windows and doors so that not
one square foot of the original paneling showed and the tops of the highest
ranks brushed the coffered ceiling. Yellow backed adventure novels by Conan
Doyle and Clifford Ashdown shouldered worn calf saints’ lives, antiquated
chemistry texts, Carlyle, Gibbon, de Sade, Balzac, cheap modern reprints of
Aeschylus and Plato, Galsworthy, Wilde, Shaw. In front of the bone clean
fireplace, a massive oak chest, strapped with leather and the only furniture in
the room, held a cheap American oil lamp of clear glass and steel, the trimmed
wick in about half a reservoir of oil. Lydia produced a match from her pocket,
lit the lamp, and by its uncertain light read the titles of the several new
volumes, half unwrapped from their parcel paper, which lay beside it.
A French mathematics text. A German physics book by a man named Einstein. The
Wind in the Willows.
How much time left?
With a certain amount of difficulty Lydia produced from beneath her coat a
curious device—a simple brass bug sprayer of the pump variety, its nozzle
carefully capped with a pinch of sticking plaster—and a shoulder sling
manufactured from a couple of scarves in last year’s colors. She removed the
cap, reslung the sprayer on the outside of her coat and, picking up the lamp,
moved off through the house.
The first-floor room contained more books. The rear chamber, book lined also,
held furniture as well. A heavy table, strewn with mathematics texts, abaci,
astrolabes, armillary spheres, a German Brunsviga tabulation machine, and what
Lydia recognized dimly as an old set of ivory calculating bones. At the far end
of the room loomed a machine the size of an upright piano, sinister with glass,
metal, and ranks of what looked like clock faces, whose use Lydia could not
begin to guess. Near it stood a blackwood cabinet desk, German and ruinously
old, carved thick with gods and trees, among which peeped the tarnished brass
locks to concealed recesses and drawers.
A wing chair of purple velvet, very worn and rubbed, stood before a fireplace
whose blue and yellow tiles were smoked almost to obscurity, its arms covered
with cat hair, an American newspaper lying on its seat. Movement caught her eye
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and made her gasp, but it was only her own reflection in a yellowed mirror, the
glass nearly covered by a great shawl of eighteenth-century black point lace
that hung over its divided pane.
Lydia set the lamp down and lifted the shawl aside. Thin and rather fragile
looking, her reflection gazed back at her: flat-chested and schoolgirlish, she
thought despairingly, despite her twenty-six years. And despite everything she
could do with rice powder, kohl, and the tiny amount of rouge that were all a
properly brought up lady could wear, her face was still all nose and spectacles.
Four-eyes, they’d called her, all her childhood and adolescence—when it wasn’t
skinnybones or bookworm—and if her life didn’t, quite literally, depend on how
quickly she could see danger in this place, she’d never have worn her eyeglasses
outside her rented Bloomsbury rooms.
Her life, and James’ as well.
She let the lace fall, touched again the silver around her neck and the fat,
doubled and trebled links of it that circled her wrists under cuffs and gloves.
Why a mirror? Something one wouldn’t expect to find here. Did that mean the
stories were wrong?
She picked up the lamp again, hoping the information she’d learned on the
subject was even partially correct. It was a disgrace, really, that over the
years more scientific data had not been collected. She would definitely have to
write an article for the Journal of Medical Pathology—or perhaps for one of
James’ folkloric publications.
If she lived, she thought, and panic heated in her veins again. If she lived.
What if she were doing this wrong?
She found another floor of high-ceilinged rooms, plus attics, all of them filled
with either books or journals. Her own experience with the proliferative
propensities of back issues of Lancet and its competitors—British, European, and
American—gave her a lively sense of sympathy, and an envious appreciation for so
much shelf space almost, for the moment, eased her fear. Lancet went back to
1823, and she had little doubt the first issue could be found here somewhere.
One small chamber upstairs contained clothing, expensive and relatively new.
From the first, all her instincts told her she must look down, not up, for what
she sought.
The kitchen and scullery were on the ground floor, at the back of the house,
down that caliginous throat of passageway. Stairs corkscrewed farther down. The
scullery contained a modern icebox. Lydia opened it and found a cake of ice
about two days old, a bottle of cream, and a small quantity of knacker’s meat
done up in paper. Four or five dishes—including a Louis XV Sevres saucer—lay on
the floor in a corner. For the first time, Lydia smiled.
Boothole, wine cellar, vegetable pantry belowstairs, and many smaller rooms,
low-ceilinged and smelling of earth and great age. The lamp flung her shadow
waveringly over cruck-work beams, discolored plaster, stonework that spoke of
some older building on this site. As in searching for the house itself—which had
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fallen out of all mention in the Public Records Office after the Fire of
1666—Lydia passed three or four times through the room that contained the trap
to the subcellar. It was only when, failing to see any such ingress as she knew
must exist, she studied the composition of the walls themselves that she
narrowed the possibilities to the little storeroom whose damp stone wall bore
signs of having once supported a stairway.
Outside, the day must be slowly losing its grip on life. Trying to keep her
hands from shaking, with cold now as well as fear, she pulled off her gloves and
ran her fingers under the chair rail and around the heavy molding of the room’s
two doors. Near the base of the door into the wine cellar she felt a lever click
unwillingly under her fingers and saw, in the dirty brazen light, the wider gap
between two panels.
There was a latch on the inside of the movable panel so it could be opened from
below, and a worn ladder going down.
As Lydia had guessed, the low room beneath looked as if it had been the subcrypt
of a church, either the one that backed the house—in a square named, oddly
enough, Spaniard’s Court—or some forgotten predecessor. Barely visible in black
paint on the ceiling groins were the words Salvum me fac, Deus, quoniam
intraverunt aquae usque ad animam meam.
Lydia had not been raised a Catholic—her aunts considered even the inclusion of
candles on the parish altar grounds for complaint to the bishop—but recognized,
from her residency at St. Bartholomew’s, the words from the Mass for Deliverance
from Death.
A granite sarcophagus filled the far end of the chamber like a somber altar, all
but concealing a low, locked door. Lydia stood before it for some time, holding
the lamp high and gauging the probable weight of the stone lid. Then she knelt
and studied the floor.
Dustless.
A laborious investigation of the cracks in the gray stone floor showed her the
trapdoor, an eye-straining business by the amber glow of the lamp; she gave up
early trying to do the business tidily and without griming and wrinkling her
skirt, and it was equally impossible to keep her corset bones from jabbing her
ribs and the pump sprayer from knocking her repeatedly on the elbow. Another
squinting, painful half hour revealed the trigger to the trapdoor’s catch behind
the projecting stone frame of the chamber’s inner door.
As she had deduced, the sarcophagus had nothing to do with anything. It was
simply too obvious.
The steps leading downward were shallow, so deeply worn in the centers that she
had to press her shoulder to one wall and brace herself against the other to
maintain her footing. She guessed it was well past dark outside, and beneath her
growing fear—the panicky conviction that she was completely unqualified to deal
with the encounter that lay ahead—she wondered precisely how dark was dark
enough. She suppressed the urge to check her watch and make notes.
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The lamplight could not penetrate the night below her, and from that darkness
rose the smells of wet earth, cold stone, and rust. Interestingly, there was no
smell of rats.
The light slithered wetly over a grille of metal bars. Lydia pressed herself to
it, maneuvered the lamp through and held it up to illuminate what lay within.
The bars were old, the lock on them new and expensive and beyond the capacity of
either the skeleton key or the picklocks. The lamplight reached only partway
into the catacomb beyond the bars, but far enough to show her wall niches, empty
for the most part, or occupied with the suggestion of ghastly natures mortes:
skulls, dust, and shreds of fallen hair.
On the right-hand wall the shadows all but hid a niche whose interior no amount
of angling the lamp would reveal.
But hanging over the edge, like ivory against the dingy stone, was a man’s hand:
long-fingered, thin, ringed with gold. Darkness hid the rest, and though the
white hand itself looked as perfect as if painted by Rubens or Holbein, Lydia
knew that its owner had been dead for a long time.
It’s true, she thought, her heartbeat fast and heavy with fright. Silly, she
added, for she had known already that it was true… it was all true. She had met
this man and seen others like him from a distance.
But knowing, she had learned this afternoon, was different from seeing, and she
felt very naked, uncertain, and alone in the dark.
I’m doing this wrong.
Her breath made a little apricot smoke in the lamplight as she sat down on the
steps. Laying her weapon across her knees and pushing up her spectacles with one
forefinger, she settled herself to wait.
One
All Souls and black rain, and cold that passed like needles through flesh and
clothing to scrape the bones inside. Sunday night in Charing Cross Station,
voices racketing in the vaults of glass and ironwork overhead like ball bearings
in a steel drum. All James Asher wanted was to go home.
A day and a night spent burying his cousin—and dealing with the squabbling of
his cousin’s widow, mother, and two sons over the estate to which he’d been
named executor—had reminded him vividly why, once he’d gone up to Oxford
twenty-three years ago, he’d never had anything further to do with the aunt who
raised him from the age of thirteen. It had just turned full dark, and Asher
drew his greatcoat closer around him as he strode down the long brick walkway of
the platform, jostling shoulders with his erstwhile fellow passengers in a vast
frowst of wet wool and steam and reflecting upon the lethal adeptness of
familial guilt. Outside, the streets would be slick and deadly with ice.
Asher’s mind was on that—and on the hour and a half between the arrival of the
express from Tunbridge Wells at Charing Cross and the departure of the Oxford
local from Paddington when he saw the men whom he would later have given
anything he possessed not to have seen.
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They stood under the central clock in the echoing cavern of the station. Asher
happened to be looking in their direction as the taller of the two removed his
hat and shook the drops from it, gestured with a gloved hand toward the iron
frame into which boards bearing departure times had been slotted. Asher’s eye,
still accustomed to cataloging details after half a lifetime in secret service
to his country, had already been caught by the man’s greatcoat: the flaring
skirts, the collar and cuffs of karakul lamb, the soft camel color and the
braiding on the sleeves all shouting at him, Vienna. More specifically, one of
the Magyar nobility of that city rather than a German Viennese, who tended to
less flamboyance in their dress. A Parisian would have worn that smooth,
well-fitted line, but probably not that color and certainly without braiding;
the average Berliner’s coat generally bore a striking resemblance to a horse
blanket no matter how rich the man might be.
Vienna, Asher thought, with the tiniest pinch of nostalgia. Then he saw the
man’s face.
Dear God.
He stopped at the head of the steps down from the platform, and the blood seemed
to halt in his veins. But even before his mind could form the words Ignace
Karolyi in England, he saw the face of the other man.
Dear God! No.
It was all he could think.
Not that.
Later he thought he would not have seen the smaller man at all had his eye not
been arrested, first by Karolyi’s greatcoat, then by the Hungarian’s face. That
was one of the most frightening things about what he now saw. In the few seconds
that the two men spoke—and it was not more than a few seconds, though they
exchanged newspapers, an old trick Asher had used hundreds of times himself
during his years with Intelligence—Asher’s mind registered details that he
should have seen before: the fiddleback cut of the small man’s shabby black
greatcoat, and the way the creaseless buff-colored trousers tapered to straps
under the insteps. Under a shallow-crowned beaver hat his hair was
short-cropped, and he did not gesture at all as they spoke: no movement, no
change of stance, not even the shift of the gloved fingers wrapped about one
another on the head of his stick.
That would have told him, if nothing else did.
Three women in enormous hats, feathers drooping with wet, intervened, and when
Asher looked again, Karolyi was striding briskly in the direction of the Paris
boat train.
There was no sign of the other man.
Karolyi’s going to Paris.
They’re both going to Paris.
How Asher knew, he couldn’t have said. Only his instinct, honed in years with
the Department, had not waned in the eight peaceful years of Oxford lecturing
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that had passed since he quit. Heart pounding hard enough to almost sicken him,
he made his way without appearance of hurry to the ticket windows, the small bag
of a weekend’s worth of clean linen and shaving tackle swinging almost unnoticed
in his hand. By the station clock it was half past five. The departures board
announced the Dover boat train at quarter of six. The fare to Paris was one
pound, fourteen and eight, second class—Asher had just over five pounds in his
pocket and paid unhesitatingly. Third class would have saved him twelve
shillings—the cost of several nights’ lodging in Paris, if one knew where to
look—but his respectable brown ulster and stiff crowned hat would have stood out
among the rough clothed workmen and shabby women in the third-class carriages.
He told himself, as he bought the ticket, that the urgency of not calling
attention to himself was the only reason to stay out of third class tonight. But
he knew it was a lie.
He walked along the platform among women in cheap poplin skirts loading tired
children onto the cars, screaming at one another in the clipped, sloppy French
of Paris or the trilled r’s of the Midi; among men huddled, coatless, in jackets
and scarves against the cold, and tried not to listen to his heart telling him
that someone in third class was going to die tonight.
He touched a passing porter on the arm. “Would you be so kind as to check the
baggage car and tell me if there’s a box or trunk, five feet long or over? Could
be a coffin, but it’s probably trunk.”
The man squinted at the half-crown in Asher’s hand, then sharp brown eyes went
to Asher’s face. “C’n tell you that right low, sir.” Asher automatically
identified the cropped ou and glottal stop i of the Liverpool Irish, and
wondered at his own capacity for pursuing philological points when his life was
in danger. The man touched his cap. “Near killed old Joe ‘eavin’ the thing in,
awkward an‘ all.”
“Heavy?” If it was heavy, it was the wrong trunk.
“ ‘Eavy enough, I say, but not loaded like some. No more’n seventy pound all
told.”
“Could you get me the address from the label? A matter of information,” he added
as the brown eyes narrowed suspiciously, “to the man’s wife.”
“Runnin‘ out on ’er, is ‘e? Bleedin’ sod.”
Asher made a business of checking his watch against the station clock at the end
of the platform, conscious all the while of the men and women getting on the
train, of the thinning of the crowd that made him every second more visible,
every second closer to a knife-blade death. Steam chuffed from the engine and a
fat man in countrified tweeds, coat flapping like a cloak in his wake, hared
along the platform and scrambled into first class, pursued by a thin and harried
valet heavily laden with hatboxes and train cases.
He’d have to telegraph Lydia from Paris, thought Asher. It brought a stab of
regret—she’d sit up tonight waiting for him until she fell asleep surrounded by
tea things, lace and medical journals, in front of the bedroom fire, beautiful
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as a scholarly sylph. For two nights he had looked forward to lying again at her
side. Foul as the weather had been, she’d probably simply assume that the train
had been held up. Not a worrier, Lydia.
Still the porter hadn’t come back.
He tried to remember who the head of the Pans section was these days.
And, dear God, what was he going to tell them about Charles Farren, onetime Earl
of Ernchester?
His hand moved, almost unconsciously, to his collar, to feel the reassuring
thickness of the silver chain he wore beneath. It was not a usual ornament, for
a man and a Protestant. He hadn’t thought about it much, except that for a year
now he had not dared remove it. It had slipped into place like those other
habits he’d acquired “abroad,” as they said in the Department; habits like
memorizing the layout of any place he stayed so that he could move through it in
the dark, or noting faces in case he saw them again in another context, or
carrying a knife in his right boot. The other dons at New College, immersed in
their specialties and their academic bunfights, never noticed that the
self-effacing Lecturer in Etymology, Philology, and Folklore could identify even
their servants and knew every back way out of every college in that green and
misty town.
These were matters upon which his life had depended at one time—and might now
still depend.
In the summer his students had commented, when they’d gone punting up the
Cherwell, on the double chain of heavy silver links he wore on either wrist;
he’d said they were a present from a superstitious aunt. No one had commented on
or seemed to connect the chains with the trail of ragged red scars that tracked
his throat from ear to collarbone and followed the veins up his arms.
The porter returned and casually slipped a piece of paper into his hand. Asher
gave him another half-crown, which he could ill spare with his fare back from
Paris to be thought of, but there were proprieties. He didn’t glance at the
paper, only pocketed it as he strolled along the platform to the final shouts of
“All aboard!”
Nor did he look for the smaller man, though he knew that Ernchester, like
himself, would be getting on at the last moment.
He knew it would not be possible to see him.
Eight years ago, toward the end of the South African war, James Asher had stayed
with a Boer family on the outskirts of Pretoria. Though they were, like many
Boers, sending information to the Germans, they were good people at heart,
believing that what they did helped their country’s cause—they had welcomed him
into their home under the impression he was a harmless professor of linguistics
at Heidelberg, in Africa to study Bantu pidgins.“We are not savages,” Mrs. van
der Platz had said. “Just because a man cannot produce documents for this thing
and that thing does not mean he is a spy.”
Of course, Asher had been a spy. And when Jan van der Platz—sixteen and Asher’s
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loyal shadow for weeks—had learned that Asher was not German but English and had
confronted him in tears, Asher had shot him to protect his contacts in the town,
the Kaffirs who slipped him information and would be horribly killed in
retaliation, and the British troops in the field who would have been massacred
by the commandos had he been forced to talk. Asher had returned to London,
resigned his position with the Foreign Office, and married, to her family’s
utter horror, the eighteen-year-old girl whose heart he never thought he had the
smallest hope of winning.
At the time, he thought he would never exert himself for King and Country again.
And here he was, bound for Paris with the rain pounding hollowly on the roof of
the second-class carriage and only a few pounds in his pocket, because he had
seen Ignace Karolyi, of the Austrian Kundschafts Stelle, talking to a man who
could not be permitted to take Austrian pay.
It was a possibility Asher had lived with, and feared, for a year, since first
he had learned who and what Charles Farren and those like him were.
Making his way down the corridor from car to car, Asher glimpsed Karolyi through
a window in first class, reading a newspaper in an otherwise empty compartment.
The Dorian Gray beauty of his features hadn’t changed in the thirteen years
since Asher had last seen him. Though Karolyi must be nearly forty now, not a
trace of silver showed in the smooth black hair or the pen trace of mustache on
the short upper lip; not a line marred the corners of those childishly wide-set
dark eyes.
“My blood leaps at the thought of obeying whatever command the Emperor may give
me.” Asher remembered him springing to his feet in the soft bright haze of the
gaslit Cafe Versailles on the Graben, the bullion glittering on the scarlet of
his Guards uniform; remembered the shine of idealistic idiocy in his upturned
face. “I will fight upon whatever battlefield He may direct.” One could hear the
capital letter in he—the Emperor— and around him, his fellow beau sabreurs of
the Imperial Life Guards had roared and applauded, though they’d roared louder
when another of their number had joked, “Yes, of course, Igni… but who’s going
to point you in the direction of the enemy?”
Even when Karolyi had hunted Asher with dogs through the Dinaric Alps after
torturing to death his local contact and guide—when it was blindingly obvious
that his pose as a brainless young nobleman who spent most of his time waltzing
at society balls rather than drilling with his regiment was a sham—that was
still the Karolyi Asher remembered.
They’d never met face-to-face in that hellish week of hide-and-seek among the
streams and gorges, and Asher didn’t know if Karolyi was aware who his quarry
had been. But passing along the corridor now with barely a glance through the
window, he remembered the body of the guide, and was disinclined to take
chances.
In any case, it was not Karolyi whom he feared most.
The third-class carriage was noisier than second, crowded and smelling of
file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/Barbara%20Hambly%20-%20J...0Asher%202%20-%20Traveling%20With%20the%20Dead.txt (10 of 228)13-8-2005 23:13:52
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