A dark-coated doorman stood at the curb, wearing a top hat in defiance of the wind off the river. He stepped forward and opened my door as the driver fetched my suitcase from the trunk.
“Welcome to the Howard, miss.”
I barely got out a “thank you,” before I and my bags were whisked into the lobby. As I turned from the car, something near the Underground station gave a fractured glitter through the Grey like light tripping off a broken mirror. I turned around to catch it but saw only a white streak of movement that vanished into the shade of the station’s doorway to roost among the steam-shapes of the Grey.
From my room I had a view of the Thames and the street below. The room was a bit too high for me to see the inside of the Underground station’s doorway, but I could see the sidewalk in front of it. The layers of glass between me and the exterior filtered the Grey to a dim soup of mist and Saint Elmo’s fire, but I could still detect something near the station’s entrance that was more like a faceted void of Grey than the usual lingering energy colors. I observed it for about twenty minutes before it drifted deeper into the Tube station and disappeared. Something that wasn’t quite there was watching my hotel.
CHAPTER 19
My hotel proved to have a rear courtyard and several service doors. As soon as I was sure there were no more watchers—at least none I could detect—I changed into more casual clothes and snuck off to the streets. I felt a little naked without my usual paraphernalia, but guns and my pocketknife were blatantly illegal in England for someone like me, and I’d left them in Seattle. I was at a distinct disadvantage against anything corporeal since I didn’t know the lay of the land or have anything but my brains and my fists if I got into a jam. The wiser course was to case the streets and find routes in and out of the area as well as places I could disappear to if the hotel became untenable.
I moved away from the open areas along the river where dallying crowds were not always enough to hide in. A couple of blocks up I crossed the Strand, pausing on a curious island in the stream of traffic where a small church of weathered white stone stood under a rippling canopy of leafy branches. There was a sign with something on it about the RAF, but I didn’t pause to read it so much as to catch my breath before I plunged back into the press of early summer tourists. An incredible range of voices and accents rang a complex peal on the air, and I was a little startled to notice how ethnically mixed the busy business folks and goggling tourists were. I had that American expectation that England was mainly peopled by white Anglo-Saxons, but London at least was more in the melting-pot mode. The city—its sounds, sights, smells—and the rippling effect of a thousand years’ worth of ghosts made me dizzy and I had to concentrate to stay on task.
It took a bit of looking to find a newsagent. The shops were narrow and varied wildly, from specialists in arcane materials and curious arts that had been in business since William and Mary, to bustling little food stands selling everything from spicy kebabs and curry to bacon sandwiches and cups of steaming tea. There were also lots of pubs with contingents of smokers relegated to the sidewalks with their cigarettes in one hand and their pints in the other, talking nonstop and blocking the pavement, unable to hear my “excuse me” over the roar of traffic and the babble of voices.
I finally found what I was looking for. The small shop sat next to a post office and advertised newspapers, magazines, books, and maps on its sign. Like many of the small, street-level businesses I’d already passed, it was more like a deep stall than anything else and empty of people except me and the cashier. Local maps and other aids for travelers were prominently racked near the front, so I went in and bought several as well as a small bottle of water and an energy bar. I asked the very young woman behind the counter about the address Edward had given me for his missing agent, John Purcell.
She squinted, her brow creasing crookedly where a piercing had been removed, and tilted her mouth to one side as she thought. Her hair was patchwork brown over a previous dye job that had left it a bit brittle. Green and blue glints shot through her aura like tiny shy fish. If someone had asked, I’d have guessed she was coming out of a broken relationship with a bad boy and a bad crowd. Her accent was decidedly less posh than those I’d heard at my hotel and her demeanor a little nervous.
“Jerusalem Passage? Not sure. Here, let’s look.” She flipped open the map book I’d just purchased and riffled through the street index until she found it. Then she flipped back to the appropriate page. “Oh, that’s Clerkenwell. Must be just north of the old priory gate. See,” she added, pointing to a convoluted quirk of streets near Clerkenwell Road and St. John Street, about half a mile northeast of where we stood.
I peered at the page and had difficulty picking out the narrow wiggling line of Jerusalem Passage. “It must be a very narrow street,” I thought aloud.
“It’s not a proper street,” the shopgirl said. “It’s a passage.”
I didn’t know the difference. “Is that like an alley?” I asked.
“Sort of, but not. It’s, umm. it’s a walkway. Not a promenade—not wide like that—and not like a regular pavement on the edge of a road. Just a footpath, not very wide, say. three people wide—or two fat German tourists.” She looked startled at what she’d said and lowered her head back to the map with a blush.
She studied the book for a moment and flipped it over to the Underground system map on the back before adding, “Not sure about the bus. The closest Tube station would be Farringdon, but you’d have to take the Circle line all the way round past Aldgate. Bloody pain that is.” She winced a little and glanced at me to see if I’d noticed before going on. “Much shorter to walk if you don’t mind it.”
“I don’t mind at all.”
“Good. Weather’s nice for it. Here, now. what’s the best way.?” she pondered.
Between us we worked out a route that was easy but not too ugly. “If you’ve a mind to, you could go up Hatton Garden to Clerkenwell Road instead of Charterhouse to St. John’s. It’s not so direct, but the jewelers are worth a glance.”
I looked at the map again. Purcell’s home was within a few minutes’ walk of a lot of “points of interest,” according to the map. Of course that was true for a lot of London addresses, but this one was old and close to a lot of economically important businesses that had been around since the city was young: the jewelers, the meat markets, the old business districts for cloth makers and brewers, and the hospital and medical school at St. Bartholomew’s among others. An ideal place for a vampire who managed the long-term investments of other vampires.
Of course, if Purcell was there, he wasn’t likely to be awake for hours, but he’d have to have some kind of daylight assistant I could track down. And if not, I’d look for records.
“Oh,” I started, “where would I find records of titles and deeds and things like that?”
“For Clerkenwell? Parish records to start, maybe at Clerkenwell Heritage Centre if it’s something old. They’d tell you where to go after that.”
I thanked her and headed out toward Fleet Street and Clerkenwell.
I’d read a lot of British mystery novels in my time, but I didn’t expect to see much that recalled the worlds of Christie or Sayers or Conan Doyle. But between the occasional high-rises, the roads were lined with buildings that hadn’t changed in hundreds of years, and the routes blazed with a millennium of coming and going worn deep into the ground but still shining upward. And the city sang.
The Grey makes a noise composed of the murmuring of ghosts and the vibration of power. Each city sounds different: Seattle mutters and rattles; Mexico City hums like feedback. London raised a mighty chorus over the bass drone of the river Thames. The power lines of the Grey were not laid in a neat grid, like Seattle’s wire-frame world, but in wild-hare directions and labyrinthine meanders that came together in knots of brilliant colored light. I couldn’t see them all, but I knew there were layers of history as thick and striated as sandstone beneath my feet, just as they were at the street level. The ghosts of buildings glistened over the surfaces of present structures, and phantom traffic choked the streets with oxcarts, horses, trams, and pedestrians. Most of the visions were from the eighteenth century onward, after the city had recovered from its own Great Fire, but promontories of older times and buildings long gone thrust up from below or floated slightly displaced by the actions of history and nature. Glimpses of fire caught my eye again and again. I shied the first time I heard the whistle of a falling bomb from the city’s memory of World War II.