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at this circumstance.
    ‘Some masters will feel it, when a fledgling is destroyed,’ he went on after a moment, and his voice, thought Asher, hesitated fractionally over the words. ‘Not all; certainly Grippen does not. And Golenischev is young in his domination of this city and was chosen by his own master for his money and connections rather than his brains. The Lady Irene, though the elder, never challenged him for supremacy. Nor has she had the temerity to make fledglings of her own.’
    ‘As you have never challenged Grippen for mastery of London?’
    The yellow eyes regarded him for a moment behind straight white lashes, then moved: a dismissal. ‘Grippen is a Protestant.’ The contempt in his voice implied that this explained everything – or anything , reflected Asher, exasperated. That question settled, Ysidro went on, ‘The Petersburg nest is in any case not a large one, owing to the awkwardness of there being two months of the year wherein it is impossible to hunt, and two more in which one hunts at one’s peril. Here we are.’
    They stepped from the cab in a handsome street of town houses and small town-palaces, not far, Asher judged, from Ysidro’s own temporary residence. A row of town houses graced one side of the street, as in a London court; on the other side, a couple of small free-standing villas stood in their own walled gardens. Lamps burned in a porter’s lodge at the far end of the way. The others stood dark.
    The vampire shouldered his satchel, crossed the pavement to the end house of the row, and drew from his coat pocket a modern brass Yale key. The house was set high above what seemed to be a shallow basement, owing – Asher guessed – to Petersburg’s marshy water-table. The steps ascending were marble, alternating black and pink. A woman passed on the pavement, huddled in the skimpy and faded clothing of the poor, and looked up as Asher happened to turn his head. He saw her make the horned sign for the aversion of evil, followed up quickly with the Sign of the Cross. She was still crossing herself as she hastened away.
    Ysidro closed the door behind them. Unshuttered vestibule windows let through a daub of reflection from the gas lamps on the pavement as the vampire produced two small bullseye lanterns and a box of matches. ‘Would the Lady Irene not have shuttered the windows if she were going to the Crimea?’ Asher inquired as he followed Don Simon into the hall.
    ‘Given the numbers of the poor in Petersburg – curse or no curse—’
    Asher hadn’t thought the vampire had noticed the woman on the street.
    ‘—I would assume she would have taken such a precaution. Irene was most assiduous in the protection of her property, particularly of her jewels.’ The vampire shut the slide on his lantern and held it low, careless of the beam of its light, but Asher raised his, so that the narrow shaft of brightness gleamed across a suggestion of porphyry inlay, colored marbles, gilded atlantes along the wall. Oriental carpets scattered the floor: Persian and Turkish and Aubusson stacked one on the other, so that the exquisite Chippendale furniture seemed to wade hock-deep in the colored pile. The drawn curtains were moss-colored velvet, tasseled and corded with plum and gold. A silver samovar the size of a steam-engine boiler caught the light, its surface thinly frosted.
    ‘And what are the chances that it was the Count himself that Lady Irene saw at the Obolenskys’?’
    ‘Slender.’ Ysidro crossed the hall, passed through the dining room that opened from it. A mahogany table that could have seated fifty. Flowers only a day or two old: she must have some arrangement with day servants that had not been cancelled. ‘He was at a masked ball at the opera that night, he says, with two of his fledglings – who might also have been lying, ’tis true. Yet something in the way he spoke of Germans – whom he holds in contempt, as many Russians so sapiently do – sounded