vampire lore. Then he raised his head and said, "Await me."
And without seeing him leave, Lydia found herself alone.
She checked her watch, wondering how long "Await me" meant. If she herself were in a tremendous hurry, she could wash, dress, curl, frizz and put up her hair, and apply a judiciously minuscule quantity of rice powder, kohl, rouge, and cologne in just under two hours and a half, which her husband, manlike, seemed to consider an unreasonable length of time. At least, Lydia thought, she knew how long it took her to make herself presentable and allowed for it, unlike dandies of her acquaintance who lived in the fond delusion that they could assemble the component parts of their facade in "only a moment, my dearest Mrs. Asher." She remembered the clothing in the dressing room upstairs, by the finest tailors in Saville Row. James had warned her, and now she knew from terrifying experience, how fast vampires could move, but she also knew that males as a species tended to potter, fidgeting endlessly with cravats and shifting coins, notebooks, and theater tickets from pocket to pocket as if fearing they would capsize if not properly trimmed. She wondered if death altered this. Twenty- five minutes, she made a mental wager with herself, and was within three of it when she turned her head to find Ysidro at her side again. In his cinder- gray suit, his flesh white as the linen of his shirt, he seemed more ghostlike than he had in the white robe, as if the clothing were a barrier, a shadow of distance.
"Come."
The alleys and back streets through which he led her were unlit and stinking, full of furtive movement. She guessed their route was not a direct one, but could not be sure, for as soon as they descended the front steps of his house, he took her spectacles from her. Moreover, she was aware that three or four times in the fifteen minutes of their walk, he touched her mind with the blankness, the empty reverie, that vampires apparently could extend. She had the sensation of waking repeatedly from dreams to find herself each time in a new street or court, blinking at ten shades of blurred darkness all spangled with the colored embers of reflected pub lights, with Yiddish or German or Russian yammering on all sides from the little knots of seedy, bearded men clustered in doorways or around chestnut vendors' braziers. The men would step aside unconsciously to let Ysidro pass, not looking at him, as if they, too, partook of his dream of invisibility; their clothes smelled of hard work and poor diet and not enough hot water for washing.
Every other week Lydia took the train down to London to work in the dissecting rooms of St. Luke's. Men like these, with their brown, broken teeth and their flea bites and their dirty, callused hands would be delivered by the workhouse vans, smelling of carbolic and formalin, dead of tumors that had burst untreated, of pneumonia, of consumption or the other ills of poverty, so that she and others like her could study the intricate beauty of muscle and nerve beneath the knife.
It was the first time in her scholarly life that Lydia had been among them living, and her mind swarmed with questions she wished to ask them about the food and working conditions that had contributed to their pathologies. On the other hand, she felt very glad of Ysidro's protection.
They crossed a plank bridge over water nearly invisible beneath low-lying fog, passed the wry, dark roofline of some very ancient church. In time they traversed a sordid alley behind a pub near the river and descended an areaway thick with garbage and the smell of cats. Though her eyes had grown used to darkness, Lydia saw only the moth flicker of pale hands before she heard the snick of a lock going over. Hinges creaked. Ysidro said "Come" again and stepped into absolute dark.
A match scratched. Ysidro's narrow face appeared, outlined in saffron. "You need not concern yourself over rats."
He touched the flame to a pair of guttered candles in a double branch. The plaster of the walls was black with mildew, falling away to reveal underlying brick. "Like cats, they are aware of what we are and know that though it is the human death we need to feed our minds, we can derive sustenance from the blood of any living thing."