Dmitry felt the urge to ask if he should do the same favour for Domnikiia Semyonovna, but he resisted. He could also guess that it was she who would be seeing Aleksei off tomorrow.

  He embraced his father, and felt his quick, tight squeeze returned. Then Aleksei left without another word.

  Dmitry walked back over to the piano. It was good news on all counts. That Aleksei was out of Moscow would mean that he was away from that woman. Perhaps absence would make him forget her. But what was more exciting was the suggestion that soon the national transformation they had all so long hoped for was close at hand. The moment Dmitry had discovered that his father was a member of the Northern Society, he had forgiven him much. There were still vast distances between them, concerning many subjects, but those could be bridged, with time. Whatever Aleksei had said, the fact that he was at that very moment embarking on a journey in pursuit of a vampire could not be unconnected to the future of Russia itself, though Dmitry could not begin to imagine how. It did not matter. What did was that now, at last, the game was afoot.

  The heads of many soldiers in the club looked up and over to the piano in surprise, as Dmitry struck up a jollier tune than he had in many days.

  Tamara grinned broadly. She looked from side to side. Two faces smiled back at her: on her right, her mother; to the left, her father.

  ‘And you promise to look after your mother while I’m away?’ said Aleksei.

  Tamara frowned and then nodded. Her father was usually away. It was only a few days ago that he’d come back. Had he forgotten?

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

  ‘To a place called Taganrog,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘On the Sea of Azov.’

  Tamara didn’t like to ask another question. Her father clearly thought she knew what he was talking about. Mama helped out.

  ‘You remember when we looked at the Black Sea in the Atlas?’ she asked. Tamara nodded. ‘It’s near there.’

  ‘Is that where the Golden Fleece was?’ asked Tamara.

  ‘Not far,’ said Papa with a smile. It was he who had told her the story of Jason, last time he visited. Mama had shown her some of the places on the map afterwards. But Taganrog and Azov were new to her.

  ‘Taganrog,’ she said, listening to the sound of her own voice. ‘Who are you going to see there?’

  ‘Papa’s going to talk to the tsar,’ said her mother. Tamara grinned again. She knew when Mama was making up stories.

  ‘He’s not,’ she said.

  ‘I’m going to see an Englishman called Mr Cain,’ said Papa. Tamara considered. This sounded a little more likely.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘Go to sleep now, Toma,’ said Mama. She leaned over and kissed Tamara on the forehead, then stood up and walked towards the door.

  Papa held her hand in his. His two funny fingers felt strange against her palm. He bent forward to kiss her and she felt something cold and a little heavy on her chest. She reached for it. There were two of them, both metal, hanging from chains around Papa’s neck. One was plain and silver, but the other had a face on it. It was a man with a beard – younger than Papa. He had kind eyes.

  ‘Who’s this?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s Jesus.’

  Tamara was amazed. She stared at her father in awe. ‘You met him?’ she asked.

  Papa laughed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Nor had whoever painted that.’

  ‘So how did they know what he looks like?’

  ‘They guessed.’

  Tamara hesitated. She knew she shouldn’t ask for things, but her desire overwhelmed her. ‘Can I have it?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said her mother quickly from over by the door. She was concerned, almost angry. ‘Papa will need that where he’s going.’

  Aleksei looked over at her as if to disagree, but chose not to.

  ‘I’ll bring you back something even better,’ he said.

  ‘Promise?’ asked Tamara.

  ‘I promise. Now go to sleep. I’ll be back again as soon as I can.’ He kissed her on the cheek. Before he stood up, he whispered something in her ear.

  Tamara watched as her parents walked away, hand in hand, through the open door. On the other side they kissed, and Tamara saw her mother’s hand rubbing against her father’s chest. Then her father pushed the door shut and they disappeared from view, as darkness filled the room.

  Tamara shut her eyes and tried to sleep, but she was puzzled; not by the way she had seen Mama touch Papa – she had seen that before – but by what her father had whispered to her. Why should she ever forget that he loved her?

  Tamara felt terribly alone when she woke. She could not remember having had a nightmare, but she had that same feeling that something overwhelmingly dreadful had happened. She remembered that Papa had been about to leave. How long ago had that been? She leapt out of bed and scampered across the room, turning the big brass doorknob with both hands.

  Inside her parents’ bedroom, the bed was empty. Sheets and blankets lay on the floor in an untidy heap. It was dark outside, but a little starlight spilled through the open curtains, where Mama stood, wearing only her nightdress, her hand resting against the glass. Her plaited hair hung straight and neat down her back.

  Tamara went up to the window and looked out. Outside, through the light mist, she saw a man was mounting a horse. It was Papa. She raised her hand to wave, but he wasn’t looking. She felt her mother clasp her other hand tightly. Then her father turned and looked up at the window. She waved vigorously, while her mother simply raised one hand and wiggled her fingers very slightly. Papa raised a hand towards her in a similar gesture, but then saw that Tamara was there too. He waved enthusiastically at his daughter, imitating her action, then blew her a kiss. Finally, he blew another to Mama, then he turned his horse and headed away from them, up the street. He didn’t look back again, but Mama did not leave the window until he was gone from sight. Tamara stayed with her. She seemed very unhappy.

  Finally, Mama stepped away. ‘It’s a few hours before we need to get up, Toma,’ she said. ‘Do you want to come to bed and keep me company?’

  Tamara turned and nodded, then took one last glance out of the window before jumping on to the bed and snuggling herself inside Mama’s waiting arms.

  She wondered if her mother had also seen the darkly dressed man who had stepped out from a doorway after Papa had left and walked away in the opposite direction. She decided not to ask. It had been the same man they had both seen a few weeks before, and then, it had seemed to upset Mama. Today, she was sad enough already.

  Instead, Tamara gazed out of the window and tried to count the stars.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER XIV

  TAGANROG WASN’T MUCH TO LOOK AT. NEITHER HAD BEEN many of the other towns Aleksei passed on the way. In total, the journey had taken eight days, part on horseback, part by coach. The final phase had been by horse.

  He had never been in this part of the country before. He’d met up with the river Don soon after Tula, and had followed the valley all the way down. It still felt like autumn, but he’d noticed it getting warmer each day. He knew the cold would soon catch up with him again, even so far south. Paris was on about the same latitude as Taganrog, and yet Paris never got nearly so cold in winter. It was a very Russian thing.

  His journey down the Don had reminded him of the journey the Oprichniki had taken in the opposite direction in order to ‘save’ Moscow thirteen years before. Was there a link there? Had they put down roots in the region which somehow connected to the experiments Cain was performing? In the various hostelries he had stayed at along the way, he had asked if anyone remembered the autumn of 1812. Stories had reached Moscow of a plague travelling up the Don, which Aleksei had realized to be the echoes of the revolting feeding habits of voordalaki. But as with all such tales, details, even years, became merged. Locals disagreed as to what had happened and when it had happened. More recent outbreaks of pestilence were far more pressing on the memory than what had happened thirteen years before.

  And so Aleksei had spent most of his evenings continuing his translation of Cain’s writings. It was still difficult, but at least Valentin had not asked for the dictionary back. Much of what Aleksei uncovered was what he already knew, though with a precise, scientific gloss to it. He worried that his prior knowledge might be biasing his translation, forcing it to tell him what he expected it to tell him. But he had no way of avoiding such prejudice.

  Several sections discussed what happened when a vampire was injured. Measurements were made concerning the speed of regrowth and the degree to which an individual could resist that regrowth. A table of figures showed how a well-fed voordalak could regenerate its flesh far more quickly than one which had been starved. Cain also referred to reported evidence of a voordalak who had fended off the regrowth of his missing fingers for four hours in order not to be discovered by humans, and of another who had had an arm hacked off with a sword, and grown it back without the slightest sign of a scar. The first was clearly Kyesha’s story. It seemed that Kyesha had been at one time the subject of Cain’s experiments. Presumably he had escaped, stealing the notebook and taking it with him. But why had he brought it to Aleksei?

  Cain also wrote of the methods by which a vampire could die. There was little new. Fire could kill them, freezing cold could not but would paralyse them, as would starvation and suffocation. Cain had conducted his own experiment with fire – his description of the death of the creature was brutally detached – but of the attempted freezing there was no detail. Aleksei wondered if the winters would be cold enough this far south to conduct such an experiment successfully. His own experience of a voordalak being frozen had been much further north.

  What seemed to interest Cain most was his investigation of the actual mechanism by which a man could be turned into a vampire. Aleksei was familiar enough with the process, having had it described to him by Iuda back in 1812. Iuda, of course, could not be trusted on any matter, and was not even a vampire, so might not know the truth. However, Cain’s studies concurred. The victim had first to have his blood drunk by the vampire and then, close to the moment of his death, had in turn to drink the vampire’s blood.

  Aleksei had shuddered as he finished translating that section. It was exactly what he had witnessed – believed he had witnessed – at the window of the brothel on Degtyarny Lane, except that, in truth, he had seen Iuda lower his lips on to the woman’s neck and pretend to suck the life-giving fluid from her using fangs he did not possess. He had seen the woman lick at the blood that seeped from a self-inflicted wound in Iuda’s breast, but it was not vampire’s blood. And still today, Aleksei did not know whether that woman had been Margarita or Domnikiia.

  Again, Cain’s concern was with precise measurement. He was convinced that consumption of the vampire’s blood had to occur within a certain time period leading up to the actual moment of death of the victim, but he had been unable to pin down the duration; in some cases it was hours, in others many weeks. Beyond that, the death of the victim did not have to be caused by the original bite of the vampire and subsequent loss of blood. Any cause of death would be effective, as long as blood had been exchanged both ways. In nature, as Cain had put it, the vampire’s bite was almost always the cause of death as well, but he had demonstrated that it was not uniquely effective. He went on, somewhat unnecessarily, to list mechanisms of death he had found to work: stabbing, shooting, drowning, poisoning.

  Aleksei stopped reading at that point. Evidently Cain was not only using voordalaki for his experiments. Humans were involved as well; human, at least, when the experiments began.

  That was about as much as Aleksei had discovered by the time he reached Taganrog. There was much he could make neither head nor tail of, and few translations in which he felt entirely confident.

  He quickly found a tavern that had rooms available. He had expected the town to be busy, as social climbers hoping to gain favour at court – and social decliners, desperate to hang on to what slight favour they had left – hovered round the tsar like flies. But Aleksandr’s presence had caused remarkably little stir. Aleksei had arrived in time for lunch. The last leg of his journey, from Rostov, had been short – only about seventy versts – and he had set out early. After eating, he wrote letters to Marfa, Dmitry, Domnikiia and Tamara – the last of those he wrote mostly in Russian, with occasional hints in French to help her understand.

  Then he set out on a simple quest – an audience with the tsar.

  The adopted royal palace was unassuming. It was a low building, with no upper floors. It must have helped in keeping the crowds at bay. Although there was no overt secrecy, few passing the house would have guessed the majesty of the personage dwelling therein. It had a garden and a view of the sea, neither of which Aleksei paid much attention to. There was one piece of comfort he took from seeing the house at last with his own eyes: everything was in order. Whatever Cain was planning against Aleksandr, he had not yet acted.

  Aleksei’s credentials got him past the guards at the gate and the household staff, but none felt audacious enough to allow him access to the tsar. Instead he was asked to sit in a small anteroom, overlooking the beach, and wait until he could be dealt with by the tsar’s personal secretary, Prince Volkonsky. He waited for a quarter of an hour before the door opened and three men entered the room.

  Volkonsky was easy to recognize. He was the only one of the three in uniform, but beyond that he had the bearing that only a man raised with the title of prince could carry. He was almost fifty now, and his square face had a benevolence to it which belied his history. Aleksei well knew – though it was not the sort of thing that was ever spoken of publicly – that Volkonsky was one of those who had organized the death of Aleksandr’s father, Tsar Pavel I. Just how closely Aleksandr himself had been involved was a matter of wide, if hushed, debate. Few who held him responsible thought less of him for it. The whole empire had benefited. Pavel had been a hopeless monarch. Aleksandr had been a hopeful one, but twenty-four years on, that promise remained to be fulfilled.

  ‘Colonel Danilov?’ said Volkonsky somewhat haughtily.

  ‘Yes, Your High Excellency,’ said Aleksei, standing.

  ‘You have a message for His Majesty?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Aleksei felt no sense of awe in the presence of the prince, but he knew his business would be achieved a lot more simply if he appeared to.

  Volkonsky held out his hand. ‘Give it to me, I’ll take it to him.’

  ‘I don’t have it written down.’

  ‘Then tell me,’ Volkonsky snapped.

  ‘I think the tsar would prefer it if I told him personally,’ said Aleksei.

  ‘He would, would he?’

  ‘Just tell him my name, Your High Excellency.’

  Volkonsky considered for a moment, but he was by no means a stupid man. It was unlikely that Aleksei would be bluffing about the issue, but if he was, it would only be a short delay before he received his retribution.

  ‘Very well,’ said Volkonsky. ‘But it may be a while. His Majesty has many matters to attend to.’ He strode out through a different door from that by which he had entered, leaving Aleksei alone with the other two men. The shorter of them, a greying man in his fifties or sixties, came over and extended his hand to Aleksei.

  ‘Colonel Danilov,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.’ He spoke in French with an undulating accent which Aleksei first took to be English, but then he became less sure. Aleksei took his hand and shook it. ‘The name’s Wylie,’ said the man. ‘James Wylie.’

  ‘Dr James Wylie?’ asked Aleksei.

  ‘Yes,’ said Wylie, with a brief nod.

  ‘It’s an honour, sir.’ His accent now made sense to Aleksei as Scots, but a Scots that had been smoothed over decades of living in Russia. ‘You were a hero to hundreds at Borodino.’

  ‘I did what any surgeon would do,’ said Wylie. ‘Are you a veteran yourself?’

  ‘I fought under General Uvarov.’ It was not a lie, but it did mislead.

  ‘This is Dr Tarasov,’ said Wylie, introducing the other man.

  ‘Colonel Danilov,’ said Tarasov. The accent to his French was pure Russian.

  ‘I understand you’re His Majesty’s personal physician these days,’ said Aleksei, addressing Wylie.

  ‘We both are,’ said Tarasov.

  ‘A man as healthy as His Majesty couldn’t be the result of just one pair of medical hands,’ added Wylie.

  ‘Tell me, Dr Wylie’ – Aleksei instinctively lowered his voice, but not so as to exclude Tarasov – ‘do you know of an Englishman about these parts by the name of Cain? Richard Cain?’

  Wylie thought for a moment, then shook his head. ‘I can’t say that I do.’ He looked at Tarasov, who shrugged. ‘Mind you,’ added Wylie, ‘people come and go here. There are plenty of ships passing.’

  At that moment, Volkonsky returned. ‘His Majesty will see you now,’ he said, without any hint of annoyance. Aleksei followed him back out through the door. As he passed the window, he glanced out over the sea, but Dr Wylie had been wrong. The water was not teeming with vessels. All Aleksei could see was the sail of one unremarkable yacht, anchored on the horizon.

  He went into the tsar’s rooms.

  CHAPTER XV

  THAT SAME FACE.

  It was thirteen years since Aleksandr had first seen that face – six weeks since he last had. In between he had grown to regard Colonel Danilov with increasing degrees of trust. But in all that time, the matters over which he and Danilov had confided had been – for want of a better word – temporal. It was only now that he had appeared, without summons, in Taganrog that Aleksandr sensed that the nature of his initial, unearthly vision of Danilov’s face would become clear; that the two separate strands of their lives would become entwined into a single cord. Whether that cord would provide mutual strength for them both, or whether one thread would constrict and then strangle the other, he did not know. But if it was the latter, he knew it would be he who tightened his grip first.