Free Blood Maidens by Barbara Hambly

well.
    ‘Then you will doubtless be the most popular man at the event. Most of these “scientists” won’t even listen to one another.’
    ‘But I would also like to hear,’ said Asher, ‘what the Okhrana has to say about it.’
    ‘You can ask them tonight yourself.’ Razumovsky grinned again. ‘They, too, will be there in force.’
    With a further assurance from Prince Razumovsky that any unspecified ‘trouble’ Asher might happen to find himself in during his stay in St Petersburg could be referred to the Prince’s department in the Ministry of the Interior, Asher took a cab back along the Kamenno Ostrovsky Prospect to the city again. The day was freezing cold but clear, and in the fading light the Islands still retained the fairy-tale air of a place and time long separated from the nascent Twentieth Century; the woods and birch groves of aristocratic private estates, the little wooden izbas that mimicked peasant simplicity, all seemed like something glimpsed through a magic mirror. A glimmering quality of Once Upon a Time.
    The world that children grew up in? Asher leaned his head back against the dirty squabs of the cab, remembering the cottage his aunts had had in the Kentish countryside, the sweetness of the woods beyond their garden. The world where something new and beautiful is waiting beyond the next turn of the path, under the next mushroom? Is that why it fascinates us so? Do we chase folk tales and fairy gold, when what we really want is our childhoods back, when we were safe and loved?
    When the world was a safe place to live in, because we knew no better?
    Back when we hadn’t learned about things like poison gas and bombs?
    Through the leafless trees the Gulf seemed to glitter, a hard green-black flecked with white. Behind the mossed-over gargoyles and granite lions of porters’ lodges, Italianate palaces of yellow, pink, and green showed up as bright as the flowers. They would be glorious inside, Asher knew, with polished stone of a hundred colors, with ebony and gilt, and with French marquetry and Chinese silks: every rouble of it contributed against their will by peasants in a thousand dreary hinterlands villages, and by workers who were shivering themselves to death in those dreary miles of tenements and factories within walking distance of this magical place.
    The cab dropped him off at the gardens of the Tauride Palace. He walked to the house where the Lady Irene Eaton had lived. Though the days were lengthening, the light was fading fast. Over breakfast, and during his various cab-rides, Asher had read steadily through all the more recent missives in the packets Ysidro had given him: so far, Golenischev seemed to have been accurate in his statement that she had no living acquaintance whose communication went beyond the superficial. Yet Ysidro had been searching for something. He walked around to the mews behind the row of town houses, scaled the back gate and passed through the bare garden – simple hedges that a jobbing day-gardener could tend, and a good deal of pavement – and found that the lock of the kitchen door, like that of the front, was a modern Yale model, a good fifty years newer than the house.
    The dimness inside was disquieting. He had not had the impression that Golenischev and his fledglings had taken over the lair – not if there was a suspicion that Lady Irene had met with some ugly fate – nor had they seemed to think the rival master, Dargomyzhsky, would be in residence. Nevertheless, the place made his scalp prickle, and he guessed that the St Petersburg vampires kept an eye on it after dark. Who had she brought here, he wondered as he climbed the wide swoop of the stairs from the front hall, that she wanted to impress with her Greek statuary, her brocaded curtains? Was it she who had played on the great golden concert harp that stood in the music room? Or did one of those cat-eyed forms he’d glimpsed in the darkness behind Count Golenischev last night have