Magistrates of Hell

TWO

‘A known killer attends a festivity, at which a young girl is killed.’ Rebbe Solomon Karlebach’s deep voice ground the words with a heavy-handed sarcasm that was almost relish. ‘I am astonished! Do you suppose there is some connection?’

‘There might be.’ Asher refused to be baited. He glanced at the doorway which separated the parlor of his suite at the Hotel Wagons-Lits from the little hall which led to the servants’ rooms and the nursery, where the widowed Mrs Pilley – twenty-two, sweet-natured, and wholly convinced that China would be a better place if taken over by England and forcibly converted to Methodism – slumbered with tiny Miranda.

Then he crossed to the other chair, took his wife Lydia’s hands, and kissed her. ‘On the other hand, I am a known killer – known in certain circles, which I trust do not include anyone here in Peking – in that I’ve murdered total strangers when no war has been declared between our countries.’ And not always total strangers . . .

His mind flinched from that memory. ‘Colonel von Mehren has killed people, if he’s been in the German Army for thirty years. I know – of my own knowledge, as the lawyers say – that Count Mizukami killed at least one man in the Shantung Peninsula fourteen years ago, because I saw him do it. And I’m sure he had his bodyguard on the premises somewhere—’

‘You know what I mean.’ The old professor leaned back in the deep-green velvet chair beside the hearth, folded the more mobile of his arthritis-crippled hands over the gnarled and frozen knot of the other. His dark eyes, far from the mocking tone of his voice, studied Asher with troubled concern.

‘I know what you mean.’ Asher tightened his grip on his wife’s long, ink-stained fingers. After six weeks at sea together in the Royal Charlotte, she still wouldn’t wear her spectacles in Karlebach’s presence, and consequently – by the look of the cribbage board on the marble-topped table between them – was being annihilated at the game. Like a leggy, red-haired marsh-fairy in one of her astonishing collection of lace tea-gowns, and nearly blind as a mole, Lydia was unshakeably convinced of her homeliness and to Asher’s knowledge had only been seen wearing her glasses by himself, their tiny daughter Miranda, very occasionally by her maid Ellen . . .

And by Don Simon Ysidro.

He went on, ‘But I doubt Don Simon had anything to do with Miss Eddington’s death. She was strangled with Richard Hobart’s necktie, not bitten and exsanguinated.’

‘It is death that the vampire feeds upon,’ retorted Karlebach darkly, ‘not the blood alone. This you know, Jamie. The energies released by the human psyche in death are what feed his ability to manipulate the minds of men. He was being careful. He knew he had been seen.’

‘Yes, but in that case, why kill at all?’ Lydia moved over to make room for Asher on the arm of her chair. ‘Why murder the daughter of the Assistant Trade Secretary, of all people, in a public place, when there were probably Chinese beggars asleep in some alleyway twenty feet from the spot? No one would make a fuss if they died.’

Karlebach sighed deeply and regarded Lydia for a moment over the rims of his own spectacles, beneath a shelf of white eyebrows that seemed to curl with the strength of his vital personality. ‘You defend him too, little bird?’

Lydia looked away.

Someone – probably Ellen – had, in the few hours that Asher had been gone, rearranged the parlor of the Ashers’ suite with all the small comforts that Lydia had brought from home to adorn their stateroom on the Royal Charlotte: small red-and-blue silk pillows had been added to the green velvet chairs, favorite books placed in the shelves and on the room’s central table. Even the familiar gold-and-sky-blue Royal Doulton tea-set was laid out, the pot gently steaming.

Though Asher always felt bemused when he traveled with his wife and his wife’s staggering caravan of luggage, there was a good deal to be said, he reflected, for coming in from an icy foreign night to find all things exactly as they were at the house on Holywell Street in Oxford.

‘Who knows why the Undead do as they do?’ Karlebach held up one crooked hand, as if to stop an argument that neither his former student, nor Lydia, made any attempt to pursue. ‘The vampires cease to be human when they pass beyond the realm of the living. Their thoughts are not like ours. Neither are their motives anything which the living can fathom.’

He lapsed into brooding silence, and Asher – who knew that Lydia tended to become absorbed in conversation, to say nothing of not being able to see across the table – fetched the teapot and refilled the old professor’s empty cup.

Rebbe Solomon Karlebach had been old when Asher had first met him almost thirty years ago, an undergraduate already on his second tour of Mitteleuropa and eager to speak with one of the most respected scholars of the superstitions rife in the remoter corners of what had been the Old Holy Roman Empire. He had spent all that summer of 1884, and the following three, studying at Karlebach’s feet in that moldering stone house in the Prague ghetto, and had come to love the old man as a father. Only the previous year, however – some years after he himself had encountered, in Undead flesh, what he had long believed to exist only in legends – had it occurred to Asher to ask his teacher whether he, too, had had personal contact with vampires.

Karlebach now plucked a sugar cube from the saucer Asher offered him, tucked it into his cheek behind its jungle of snowy beard, and sipped his tea through it, lost for a time in his own thoughts. ‘And did he speak to you, this vampire of yours?’ he asked at length. ‘Did he tell you of the Others? Of whether the thing that this Bauer woman found is the same as the creatures that haunt the crypts beneath Prague?’

‘He did,’ replied Asher. ‘But he could tell me nothing beyond what you and I already know.’

‘Could tell you, or would tell you.’ The old man’s dark eyes glinted in the dim gleam of the shaded electric lamps. ‘You cannot trust the vampire, Jamie. Even in the tiniest of matters, they deceive. It is their nature.’

‘That’s as may be. But before the killing was discovered, Sir Grant Hobart told me that Dr Bauer has a clinic in a place called Mingliang Village in the Western Hills, about twenty miles from here. There are bandit gangs in the hills, to say nothing of the Kuo Min-tang – Republican fighters opposed to President Yuan and the Army. I expect we’ll need an escort. Hobart suggested his son,’ he added drily. ‘But it doesn’t look as if that’s going to happen.’

‘Beast!’ Lydia rapped his elbow with the backs of her knuckles as he returned to the chair arm at her side. ‘Her poor parents – what a horrible thing! And poor Sir Grant! One would think, though,’ she added reflectively, ‘that if Richard Hobart had proposed to Miss Eddington in his cups, and truly couldn’t stick going through with it, he could simply have fled the country.’

‘That depends on what he was drinking. If he was down in the Chinese city, it could have been anything.’

Lydia winced, but nodded sadly. Despite the elfin features and her air, in company, of having never done anything in her life but attend dress fittings and Royal Flower Shows, Lydia had trained as a physician at a charity clinic in Whitechapel and had had ample occasion to observe the effect on human behavior of alcohol. She started to ask something else, glanced at Karlebach, and closed her mouth again; Asher guessed her question echoed his own thought.

What, if anything, did Ysidro see?

Evidently Karlebach guessed this as well. For later, when Asher walked him down the hall to his own small room, the old man brought up the subject of the vampire again. ‘Trust not what he tells you, Jamie,’ he rumbled in his thick bass. ‘This vampire seeks to use you for the purposes of the Undead. Deception and seduction is how they hunt. You well know how they can manipulate the human mind to see things as they wish you to see them.’

It was late – the clock had struck midnight when Asher had first come into the parlor – and even Rue Meiji, one of the main streets of the Legation Quarter that lay below the windows of Asher’s suite, had gone quiet. In the bright glare of the electric lamps, the corridor had the queer, dead look of such places very late at night; doubly disturbing, Asher had found, since he had learned what walked the dark hours.

‘When first you spoke to me of this Spanish vampire of yours,’ Karlebach went on, ‘I feared for you, my son. I could see that he had placed you under the spell of the vampire mind: the spell whose first effect is to make the victim believe that he is not under a spell. Fear this. Fear him.’

‘I do,’ said Asher, quite truthfully.

‘It is unfortunate that your friend Hobart will now be taken up with this shocking business. Quite aside from his personal agony, of course – but the truth is that we could have done with one who could help us, here in the Legations.’ The old professor opened the door to his room, which was freezing cold. Asher pushed him into a chair, fetched every shawl he could find for him, and made up the fire, despite Karlebach’s somewhat mendacious protests that there was no need to bother about him . . .

No matter how tough the old scholar was, he was still ninety – not an age at which a man should be obliged to journey to China to hunt monsters. Yet Karlebach, when he had turned up – to Asher’s shock – in Oxford in September, had insisted, and would not be left behind.

As Asher set a pan of water on the hob to heat for the old-fashioned stone water-bottle, Karlebach continued, ‘I could speak to mine own ambassador about an escort, but they will want to know why. And I fear who they might tell, if indeed we find these creatures here.’

‘I’ll speak to Sir John Jordan tomorrow,’ promised Asher. ‘Now that I have the assurance that there’s someone in Peking who’ll vouch for it that, appearances to the contrary, the man who was here in ninety-eight wasn’t me.’

‘You’re very good to me, Jamie.’ Karlebach caught Asher’s hand, when he returned to the chair to help his old mentor to his feet. ‘I would say like my son, if it wasn’t that one of them is a good-hearted blockhead who can’t tell Maimonides from the funny papers, while the other is a slick momzer whose heart begins with the law courts and ends at Accounts Payable. Bless you.’

Wind moaned around the hotel’s Gothic eaves as Asher walked back down the corridor to his own suite. He wondered where Ysidro was staying and how the vampire had managed to procure the human assistance that the Undead needed in order to travel any great distance from their homes.

For that matter, he reflected, he had no idea where Ysidro called his home these days. Had he returned to London, after Asher had left him asleep in the crypt of St Job’s monastery in St Petersburg last year? Had he chosen some other city as his headquarters, since Lydia had acquired such a disturbing adeptness at tracking down vampire nests through bank records and property transactions?

And if that were the case – his mind returned uneasily to the fear that never quite left him – what about the other vampires of London? Did the Master Vampire of London know that Lydia had ways of finding them? He had long suspected that the London nest only kept their distance from Lydia, and from Asher himself, out of fear of Ysidro. Would that fear hold, if the Spanish vampire left London for good?

For people who’re in danger because we know too much about the vampires, we know damn little about them . . .

His hand was on the door handle when he heard Lydia say inside the parlor, ‘He should be back any minute . . .’

Ysidro. Who else would it be, at this hour of the night? Damn his impudence—

Anger flared in him, and he thrust open the door.

Grant Hobart turned from where he stood before Lydia by the fire.

‘You have to help me, Asher.’ The translator paced a few steps away from the hearth, as if incapable of sitting down. His face, heavily scored with lines though he was only a few years Asher’s senior, looked ten years older than it had five hours ago. ‘Ricky didn’t do this thing. He couldn’t have. He’s incapable of it.’

‘You said he drank.’

‘He gets stupid when he drinks, not violent.’ Hobart took a deep breath as if remembering where he was, inclined his dark, leonine head to Lydia. ‘I beg your pardon, Mrs Asher. We shouldn’t—’

‘It’s quite all right, sir.’ Lydia rose, a slim tallish figure in ivory point-lace, the firelight picking threads of brass and copper from the auburn masses of her hair. ‘I can retire if you gentlemen would like to be alone so you can speak more freely, though I assure you,’ she added, her brown eyes wide, ‘nothing much shocks me. Did your son habitually mix opium with liquor, Sir Grant? I only ask,’ she went on, into Hobart’s startled silence, ‘because generally if one isn’t accustomed to opiates, one just falls asleep . . .’

‘He had used them together before.’ The words came out stifled, shamed.

‘Tell me about your son and Miss Eddington.’ Asher pressed their new guest into the chair which Rebbe Karlebach had vacated and fetched a clean teacup from the sideboard while Lydia dug a notebook from beneath a pillow. ‘You said you thought he might have proposed to her while drunk?’

‘He could have.’ Hobart sighed. ‘It’s what that—’ He made himself swallow words descriptive but unwise. ‘It’s what that mother of hers hinted, when I went to her and Sir Allyn to try to see if there were a way of breaking it off, the more fool I. Myra Eddington had already put the announcement in the paper. Not just that little rag the Legations put out – she’d telegraphed it to The Times, da— curse her –’ he glanced apologetically at Lydia – ‘and sent word to the whole cursed family.’ His hand, huge and heavy, as if he were a navvy instead of the scion of a well-respected diplomatic family, bunched into a fist on the polished marble beside the cribbage board. His mouth twisted in an ugly sneer.

‘It’s all because of Julia’s money, of course,’ he continued after a brief struggle with his anger. ‘Julia and her damn money-grubbing father. I’ll have to write to Julia of this in the morning. God knows what I’ll say to her.’

He rubbed his face, as if trying to wake from nightmare. ‘It’s why I’m here, Asher. I have to be able to tell my wife something. She dotes on Ricky. I have to tell her that things are in hand, that someone’s looking into it. You speak Chinese. You aren’t a part of the Legation, a part of the whole Eddington set, which goes on tiptoe at the mere mention that something might disturb Yuan Shi-k’ai or upset their precious election – as if Yuan’s going to let there be an election . . .’

‘Chinese?’ Asher raised a finger, and Hobart waved impatiently, as if even the question were obtuse.

‘It was the Chinese that did it. Surely that’s obvious.’

‘Why would they do that?’ protested Lydia.

‘How the he— How the dickens would I know that?’ Hobart retorted. ‘You can’t tell what’s going on in their minds. I’ve served here nearly thirty years, and I’ve still never managed to figure out why the P’ei will only work for the Huang, and why a man who’s sworn allegiance to the Tian Di Hui for half his life will suddenly turn around and kill the leader of the local lodge. Trust me, I see the hand of the Chinese in this.’

Lydia started to speak again, and Asher caught her eye, slightly shook his head.

‘Any particular Chinese?’ he asked mildly. ‘Servants in your house—?’

‘Good God!’ cried Hobart. ‘How should I know? They’re all in it together – how would I know how they’re connected?’

‘May I speak to them? Your servants, I mean . . .’

Hobart hesitated, and his glance shifted at some afterthought. Then he said, ‘Of course. I’d ask ’em myself, but they’re too damn frightened for their own jobs to say boo to me.’

His hands shook a little as he lifted the delicate blue-and-gold china, and his powerful shoulders slumped, as if suddenly the only thing that was keeping him going was the comforting heat of the drink. ‘Thank you for going over to the stockade with us earlier tonight, Asher,’ he added quietly. ‘I won’t forget this, I swear.’

‘Was your son friends with the girl? Before he proposed,’ Asher amended, his voice wry.

‘Well, you know how it is in the diplomatic. There’s damn few single women out here, and even a shrill man-hunter like Miss Eddington starts to look good when all you’ve seen for a year is the local sing-song girls.’ Hobart’s face twitched again, as if at some memory. ‘Ricky was friendly enough, but he certainly had no intention of proposing. The girl’s four years older than he – was four years older,’ he corrected himself, with a slight flush of shame at his own callous tone. ‘Not an ill-looking piece, but at twenty-four she hadn’t had an offer in her life and wasn’t likely to get one. The Eddingtons have a fine family name, but they don’t have a pot to . . . they don’t have a penny to bless themselves with.’ Another apologetic glance at Lydia. ‘God knows why they brought the girl out here. A man’s got to have four hundred a year guaranteed private income to get promoted to attaché, and Sir Allyn’s estate won’t run to that. Not once he gets his son settled.’

‘You said your son went down to the Chinese city—’

‘Eight Lanes.’ He named a portion of the town notorious for its taverns and brothels.

‘Surely he didn’t go alone.’

‘Good God, no! I imagine he went with his usual gang of good-for-nothings: Cromwell Hall, Gil Dempsy from the American Legation, and Hans Erlich, von Mehren’s clerk . . . and yes,’ he added wearily, ‘I told the boy a thousand times not to go about with Erlich, because Ricky could not keep his mouth shut when he’d had a few shao-chiu . . . But since Erlich was generally three drinks ahead of Rick, and too stupid to tell horse artillery from a governess cart, I wasn’t worried, even if Rick had known anything of military importance, which he didn’t. For God’s sake, Asher, this is China, not France. There’s nothing to know out here.’

He set the cup down, sat with his elbows resting on his knees, his great head bowed. Like a soldier when the heat of fighting passes out of him, thought Asher, who knew the sensation well. When there’s nothing left but cold, weariness and pain . . .

At length Hobart said, ‘Thank you. Oh, I know you’ll never find the Chinese who did it, but at least establish that it was the Chinese. That it wasn’t Richard who did this – this frightful thing. Do that, and I’ll see to it that you get whatever you need for your own little expedition to look for shu-jen . . . and whatever else you need,’ he added, meeting Asher’s eyes significantly. ‘Just clear Richard of this charge. We don’t need to know anything beyond that.’

‘For a man who’s lived in China for nearly thirty years,’ objected Lydia as Asher returned from seeing Hobart out of the suite, ‘Mr Hobart doesn’t seem to have made the slightest attempt to learn about the Chinese.’ She dug behind the chair pillows and extracted her silver spectacle-case, unfolded the eyeglasses with her usual deliberation and blinked gratefully up at him, the final reflections of the dying hearth catching in the round lenses. ‘They’re all in it together, and you can’t tell what’s going on in their minds . . . I’d expect that kind of thing from Mrs Pilley, but not from a Senior Translator who’s been in China thirty years.’

‘True, o Best Beloved.’ Asher knelt with poker in hand and made sure that the fire was well and truly out, while Lydia got to her feet and made a circuit of the room switching off lamps. Their house in Oxford was an old-fashioned one, still lit by gas and, in some rooms, by paraffin lamps, though as a result of the journey Lydia had begun planning how electricity could be installed in her workroom. At least gas, Asher reflected, would have kept a parlor this size relatively warm. Away from the hearth it was cold as a tomb, and the bedroom would be ten times worse.

‘The odd thing is –’ he stowed the poker in its rack – ‘Hobart does know about the Chinese. At least, when I was here fourteen years ago, he read the Peking Gazette regularly and had dozens of contacts in the city. And if you’ll notice, he seems to be up on who the local bosses are and who they deal with. Living through the Uprising might have changed him.’ He took a bedroom candle from the little stand beside the door, scratched a match from the box that he always carried in his pocket as Lydia pressed the final switch to plunge the room into darkness. ‘But if it brought about that much of a revulsion against the Chinese, he could have gone home.’

‘Perhaps he doesn’t get on with Mrs Hobart?’ Lydia gathered an enormous cashmere shawl from the back of the chesterfield and draped it around her shoulders, something she would have frozen to death rather than do in the presence of anyone but her husband, for fear of appearing less than perfect in her lacy gown. ‘Though I suppose in that case he could have transferred to India. I wonder how much of the Foreign Service is actually based on marital incompatibility? Though it would be very pleasant, I suppose, to have a nice house in England and be able to do as one pleased without having a husband cluttering things up—’

Asher put a hand over his heart. ‘I shall take up rooms at the College again the moment we get home—’

Lydia looked startled, then flipped the fringes of the shawl like a whip against his arm. ‘I don’t mean you, silly. Sir Grant doesn’t look like he can make tea nearly as well as you do. But if Richard Hobart didn’t want to have Holly Eddington as his wife, all he had to do was send her home once they were married and stay out here in Peking. If he’s going to inherit that much money, he could afford not to live with her.’

‘True also,’ agreed Asher. ‘Which makes the whole thing doubly odd.’

Together by the light of the single candle they tiptoed down the glacial servants’ hall to the door of the nursery. Mrs Pilley, a nameless mound of blankets, was a great believer in ‘cold room, warm bed’, but Miranda at least was tucked up under a number of eiderdowns with a warm cap tied over her soft fluff of red hair.

After ten years of marriage to Lydia – and two miscarriages which had devastated that matter-of-fact, curiously fragile woman who had been everything to him from the moment he first laid eyes on her – the birth of their daughter seemed to Asher a miracle. When Professor Karlebach had telegraphed him in August, asking him to accompany him to China, Asher had refused. Even when the old man had crossed to England, arriving on Asher’s doorstep with the Journal of Oriental Medicine in his fist, Asher had had misgivings.

Asher had read the article himself when it had appeared, and had recognized the description of the creatures he’d glimpsed in Prague.

But it was Lydia who had said, Of course we have to go.

He slipped his arm around her waist now, gently closed the door.

Miranda. Tiny, red-haired, beautiful beyond belief . . .

And as safe here, he reflected, as she – or Lydia – would be back in Oxford.

Possibly safer. Since the Boxer Uprising in ’01, the King’s representatives kept a sharp eye on everyone who came and went in the high-walled Legation Quarter.

And curiously, he found his meeting with Ysidro that evening at Eddington’s reassuring.

Deny it though Ysidro would, Asher knew that the vampire, in his curious way, loved Lydia. And he, James Asher, could ask no better protector for her than that yellow-eyed Spanish nobleman who had died before Queen Elizabeth came to the throne.

Died and become Undead.

The bedroom was arctic. Ellen had warmed the bed with a stone water-bottle, and it, too, had gone icy. By candlelight Lydia pulled off her tea gown and corset in record time and, night-gowned to the chin, scrambled beneath the feather bed, then immediately proceeded to use Asher’s legs as a foot-warmer.

Later, as they were drifting off to sleep, she asked, ‘Are you really going to look into things and question Sir Grant’s servants?’

‘It isn’t my business,’ said Asher sleepily. ‘And, I have doubts about what I’m going to find. But yes. It’s only his word that will shield me from suspicion, and there are several people who might very well recognize me from my previous visit. I can’t really refuse.’

Silence, and the scent of sandalwood and vanilla, as she rested her head on his shoulder and stroked his mustache into tidiness with her forefinger.

‘Did Ysidro say how long he’d been in Peking?’ A trace of hesitation tinged her voice as she spoke the vampire’s name. There had been a time when she had refused to do so – a time when she had turned her face from Ysidro completely. You defend him, too? Karlebach had asked, and she had had no answer.

‘We were interrupted.’ Asher spoke with deliberate matter-of-factness.

‘Or whether there were vampires in Peking?’

‘No,’ said Asher softly. ‘I wondered about that myself.’