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genuine.’
    Evidently, the day help’s ministrations didn’t extend to the kitchen quarters. These had been disused for decades, every shelf and cupboard bare. The front of the house was for show, Asher thought, or perhaps to satisfy the desire of its inhabitant for an echo of what it had been to be human. There was a boiler, and coal enough that My Lady could bathe. ‘There is little, as I said, that the Kaiser can offer a master vampire, particularly of a city like Petersburg, where the slums are vast and neither the government nor the owners of the factories themselves inquire what becomes of the poor.’ Asher’s footfalls echoed like the drip of far-off water. Like Virgil’s in the Inferno , Ysidro’s weightless tread left no mark upon the silence. ‘The Russians of the countryside believe in the vampire. Here in town, they are told that there is no such thing, and indeed they have learned that to complain is to bring oneself to the attention of the Third Section, which is never a good idea.’
    He led the way down the stairs from the kitchen. Lantern held high, Asher followed, though he did not expect to see anything but a hidden chamber and an empty coffin – the first things the Master of Petersburg would have checked, notwithstanding his certainty of an early departure for the Crimea.
    Estimating the dimensions of the basement by those of the house above – something one did a lot of, working for the Department – Asher guessed where a chamber had been walled off it even before Ysidro went to the entrance, which was concealed behind stacked boxes that it took a vampire’s preternatural strength to shift. When Ysidro pushed them aside – they had frozen to the floor, owing to the swampy dampness of the semi-subterranean room – and unlocked the narrow door they covered, the coffin was seen to be open and empty when the lantern beams pierced the utter darkness of the bricked-shut room.
    No sign of burning or of blood on the extravagant white satin of the lining. Nothing in the room, save the ice that sheeted the floor bricks. No surprises and no information, though Ysidro stood for a time, running his hand along the satin, as if he would have asked a question of the darkness, or looked for some message written upon it.
    Then he turned and soundlessly left the room.
    Asher followed. ‘Was Lady Eaton the wife of a diplomat? Or simply an unfortunate traveler, such as yourself?’ Ysidro’s sidelong glance reflected the lantern light like a cat’s. ‘I don’t imagine,’ Asher went on, ‘that when you left Madrid in 1555 to attend your King’s wedding to the Queen of England, you counted on meeting a vampire in London and finding yourself obliged to remain there for the next several centuries.’
    ‘No.’ The tiniest ghost of an expression – wry? half-amused? – pressed itself like a needle scratch into one corner of the vampire’s lips, and the shadow that had settled on him as he stood beside the coffin seemed to retreat. ‘No, I did not.’
    In the drawing room, Ysidro opened the drawers of the baroque desk – a stupendous confection of ebony and mother-of-pearl – and turned one thin shoulder, very slightly, to block Asher’s view as he drew forth packets of letters. He went on, ‘I have since learned that there were vampires aplenty in Madrid, and in Toledo also, which was my home. I could as easily have been taken there, given my carelessness at walking abroad nights. Perhaps in Madrid and Toledo it was guessed that I should be missed.’
    Past his shoulder Asher glimpsed the handwriting, a fine sixteenth-century court-hand. Packet after packet of letters, carefully bound in ribbons. Now and then Don Simon would glance at a date: April of 1835. November of 1860. Asher himself had not yet been born. He glimpsed his birthday, of the first year he’d been sent to that horrible school in York, the year his parents had died: like the scent of old patchouli unexpectedly encountered. Ysidro