I changed tack. “May I see the desk?”
Jakob shrugged. “Can’t do more harm.”
I took that for sufficient invitation and stood up to cross into the far room. Jakob took a desultory swipe at me as I passed and I kicked at him with equal interest.
The room must have started as a dining room. The tall narrow windows peered out at the next building with only the thinnest view of the sky above, but light still managed to find its way down the gap between the buildings and lend a wan illumination to the place. It was a clever security system for a vampire in its way, the daylight being a natural barrier to others and ensuring that the owner would always be awake when the room was habitable. Purcell had clearly not been having any dinner parties; the room was strewn with detritus, ripped paper, upended boxes and furniture, torn curtains, and general upheaval—and not all of it was recent. The table that must have served as a desk had been toppled onto one side, upsetting an old-fashioned ink bottle so it had stained the thick old Oriental rug below. A small pile of recent correspondence was neatly stacked on the one remaining intact chair—Jakob’s concession to duty—but other than that, there wasn’t much chance of finding anything useful in the heap.
I picked up the letters and shuffled through them. One was from TPM in Seattle; several others appeared to be advertising, or regular bills. I tore open the TPM letter, but it was only Edward asking after Purcell and what was going on with some import duty. There was a related note from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs requesting payment of overdue duties on the import of half a dozen Greek amphorae, and another note about rents in someplace called Bishop’s Stortford. Useless. I put the envelopes back on the chair and returned to the main room, where Jakob glowered at me but did nothing as I wandered around and took a look at the rest of the tall, shallow house.
In the basement were seventeenth-century kitchens, long abandoned, and a storage room that had been made over into Purcell’s resting place far from the sun and difficult to storm. A wrecked safe stood ajar next to an ornate copper coffin and a massive double wardrobe filled with fashionable and expensive business clothes from several eras. The upper rooms were bedrooms and a tiny Victorian bathroom with an only slightly newer toilet and a massive claw-footed tub that appeared to be Jakob’s sleeping place. A delicate French commode cabinet, wedged between the utilities, was filled with waterlogged trinkets and bits of jewelry. The attic was a wonderland of antiques and trunks filled with ancient odd and ends. My collector’s sensibilities were overwhelmed, but judging by the dust, nothing had been disturbed in ages. I took nothing and put things back into their respective places, turning away to find Jakob silently watching me with his one good fog-lamp eye.
CHAPTER 21
I looked back at Jakob with a bland face but keeping very still, just in case he was poised to leap at me again. “Nothing to say what’s become of Purcell,” I said, feeling the need to explain my snooping.
“Course not.”
“Why do you think he was taken?”
Jakob made a face. “I don’t know an’ I don’t care.”
“I suppose you wouldn’t be upset if he were dead.”
He snorted. “I wouldn’t care were he gone forever, though would he were floating in the river where I might find him and eat his heart—if he has one.”
“Bloodthirsty little monster, aren’t you?”
He smiled and bowed his head. “Are y’done now? There’s naught else to see and naught to tell.”
“I have one question. What was the last thing you did for your master? What job? Where did it take you?”
He made a coughing noise and scrambled down the narrow staircase ahead of me. “I carried a letter to a place what smelled of old things and sanctified theft. A big white shop with pots in the window and there was a black stone creature over the door—half a woman with a lion’s head. She don’t like me.”
“I can’t imagine why.”
Jakob snorted again and led me down until we were back in the original sitting room I’d first entered. He scrambled to the door and held it open for me, stooped and inhuman now that I could better see him.
“Now go on your way. I’ve done with you.”
I took the hint and left. I held my shudders until I was out in Jerusalem Passage again where the sunlight had slipped to an obtuse angle and long shadows had moved into the corners and overhangs. I looked around—more in reaction to Jakob than anything else—and started back toward St. John’s Lane.
Traffic was much thicker and I realized I’d been in Purcell’s house long enough for rush hour to overtake me. The clerk in the newsagent’s had mentioned an Underground station nearby, and I paused near the priory gate to look at the system diagram on the back of my map book.
Farringdon. Right. I started off down St. John’s Lane, thinking I would cross at Albion Place. But somehow I didn’t find it.
The slanting light of afternoon played tricks on me in the Grey, and I turned onto a street much narrower than I’d expected. I seemed to be walking forever without finding any other large lane or roadway that crossed the street I was on. I turned south onto an even smaller lane, sure I’d become entirely turned around but would see a larger street soon if I kept going—I was still in the City of London and, as the driver had said, it was only one square mile. As I turned, the worlds quaked and the road jarred under my feet in a way I hadn’t felt in nearly two years. Thick silver fog pressed close and receded to take misty shapes.
It reminded me so much of my first encounters with the Grey after I’d died for those two fateful minutes that I was disoriented and a bolt of unaccustomed fear shot through me. I stopped and looked around, trying to get my bearings for where or when in the Grey I was, slowing the racing of my heart and telling myself this was not the first time. There wasn’t a monster waiting to snap me up in its grinding jaws or a vampire with an agenda waiting to plunge a knot of Grey into my chest and give me a “gift” I never wanted. Not this time.
The path ahead was very narrow—just about wide enough for two people to walk abreast, but no more—and the buildings loomed over the street in a drunken, tilted fashion. Some of them were brick and stone and others were faced with plaster over wood or something much rougher. The smell of horse droppings and garbage filled the air, and I could hear a chattering of distant voices coming from several directions.
I’d “slipped”—inadvertently stepped sideways through space and time to emerge someplace I had no control over because the Grey had wanted me so badly. I’d learned to control that slippage long ago, so I wondered why it was happening now. The narrow alley gave no clue.
I crept forward, noticing that my feet were just a little above the ground. I wasn’t entirely in the visible plane of time but physically in another with a higher street level while I could only see this one. I moved down the alley, which opened a little into a small courtyard for about half a block. The court was lined with narrow, ramshackle houses on one side and a stable yard on the other—which explained the odor. Twilight already held sway in this slice of the past, and I could see a candlelit window at the end of the alley with the preternatural clarity of something magical afoot. It was so blatant that I had to assume something or someone wanted me to see whatever unearthly thing had happened by its long-ago light. I sighed and shuffled across the road I couldn’t see to the tiny house on the south end of the darkened alley.
I looked in through the window and saw a young man and an older one sitting at a worktable in an old kitchen. Both the men were bearded and had dark hair that flowed from under close-fitting caps and hung over their collars. They wore robes of some kind that looked like daily clothes, not costumes or ceremonial vestments. An iron pot steamed on a hook over the fire in an open hearth. A third man slumped in a shadowy corner farther from the fire, looking either deeply asleep or dead drunk. A clutter of bottles sat on the table in front of him, so I was betting on the latter.