He was also staggered by the young lady’s appearance.
She was as distant from the lovely and doleful waif of Silver’s imagination as a hawk from a dove. Her hair was yellow—so far she matched the imaginary—but rather than a tastefully pastel blonde, it was a bold brassy guinea-gold colour, so bright one half suspected dye. Since Maud Lindhurst’s appearance in every other respect said that here was a woman who did not care for outward show—the bright hair was wound up at the back of her head in a coil so firm and severe it was worthy of Silver’s mother—Silver imagined it was natural. Otherwise, she was tall for a woman, with features too strong to be called pretty and too dull to be called striking: watery blue eyes, a long nose, a pinched little mouth. She was sloppily dressed in men’s clothing, tough corduroy trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to her elbows. Silver was largely immune to the charms of young ladies in any case, but he did not think he had ever seen one less interested in being charming.
“Well?” she said.
“Miss Lindhurst, I really must protest—”
“I asked for your name, not your protestations,” said Maud.
“Henry Silver,” he said. “Miss Lindhurst, your parents—”
“Silver,” said Maud. “Any relation to Alfred Silver?”
“My late father. I—”
“I liked his paper on the classifications of the supernatural. No one’s bettered it since.” She narrowed her eyes. “Didn’t you have an article in the last Folklore? No, the one before. On the Hallow Wood. Rather coy, I thought.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“You plainly knew more than you were saying,” said Maud, eyeing him with distaste. “Why pretend to be a scholar if you’re going to keep secrets? You didn’t mention the Wild Man once—anyone who knew anything about the Greenhollow matter would, unless there was something bloody odd going on.” As she was eyeing him, she went on in much the same tone, “What on earth are you wearing?”
“Miss Lindhurst,” said Silver, exasperated, “your parents—at some considerable expense—have employed a pair of master monster-hunters to track you down after believing you to be abducted by a vampire—”
She snorted with laughter.
“—and I am here because I have no ability to say no to my mother, and my coat is none of your business, and—what have you done with Tobias Finch?”
She raised her eyebrows. “That depends. Is Tobias Finch the Wild Man of Greenhollow?”
While Silver floundered over how to answer that question, she went on, “Because I have the Wild Man, or someone who looks extremely like him, sleeping off a double dose in the undercellar next to yours.”
“Miss Lindhurst,” Silver said in his firmest manner. “I do not know what has possessed you to run away from home and take up residence in—I suppose this crypt is a remnant of the old abbey?—and assault strange gentlemen, but—” Good God, maybe she was possessed, or hypnotised, or whatever it was that vampires were supposed to do to their victims. Silver found it hard to imagine a young lady behaving this way of her own free will. Although he also found it hard to imagine the vampire whose dark passions were inclined towards young women who dressed up in unflattering costumes and criticised Silver’s articles in Folklore.
“But?” said Maud, and then while Silver floundered her small mouth quirked up very slightly at the corner. If there was anything that was more charmless than a plain young lady who was shockingly direct with you, it was a plain young lady who was laughing at you. “Your Mr Finch is perfectly well. I probably should apologise.” She still didn’t. “I panicked. He’ll wake up when it wears off.”
“When what wears off?” Silver said. “What the hell did you do to us?” And that marked the first time he’d ever sworn in the presence of a lady, including his mother. Maud Lindhurst deserved it.
“Let me introduce you,” said Maud, “to the Demon of Rothling Abbey. It’s through here.”
* * *
In a square stone sarcophagus on a platform surrounded by golden candlesticks lay a shrunken white corpse swaddled in a black shroud. There was a wooden stake thrust squarely through its chest. It had also been beheaded, but the head had then been gently placed next to its neck. It tilted unfortunately to one side, but there, rheumed with death, were the dark and staring eyes, and there the hawk nose, of Rothport’s nine-hundred-year-old vampire.
“There he is,” said Maud. “Old Julius. He preferred Julius to Nigel, really, though he answered to both.”
“You knew him?”
“I used to play around the abbey ruins as a child,” Maud said. “He would come out to watch me, when the evenings were long enough. I spoke to him a few times. I think he was rather sad, really.” She said this without much feeling, as if she were discussing a distant great-uncle whom she had occasionally been forced to converse with at family gatherings. “I saw him with one of his handsome young men down in town once. They pulled the man out of the harbour the morning after. People said he fell in the water drunk and drowned.”
“What happened to his hand?” The corpse’s left wrist ended in a stump.
“Oh, I cut it off and powdered it,” Maud said. “Vampire dust is a natural soporific. I thought it might be useful. And so it was, of course.”
Silver took a deep breath and immediately wished he hadn’t. He’d breathed the stuff. His stomach squirmed.
“You’re not squeamish, are you?” said Maud, instantly dashing Silver’s hope that she wouldn’t notice. “I can’t stand squeamishness. But I’ve got smelling salts in my things somewhere if you need them.”
“No need,” Silver managed. He was rather embarrassed. His mother and Tobias would both have looked calmly down at the monster’s corpse without turning a hair, but Silver was not that sort. That had been a human being, once—long ago, perhaps, but—nine hundred years in the dark, creeping out at eventide to watch a child play—
Maud gave him a sceptical look but said, “Didn’t you say you hunted monsters? He ate people, if that makes you feel any better. Quite a lot of them over the years, I imagine.”
“My mother hunts monsters,” Silver said. “I study the marvellous. It’s not at all the same thing.”
He turned away from the sarcophagus, scraping the remnants of his dignity together. “Very well, you are not the victim of a vampire. I grant, Miss Lindhurst, that you seem quite capable of looking after yourself. Were you abducted?”
“I climbed out of the window,” Maud said.
“I see.”
“I really should apologise,” she said, and still didn’t. “I see now that it would have been better to hide down here and wait for the pair of you to leave. I doubt you would have discovered the crypt after dark—the entrance is very well disguised—and by the time you came back in the morning, I would already have been gone. Only, I was above ground, taking measurements, and then . . . it was seeing him again that startled me.”
Silver said nothing. He was good at drawing people into informative conversation; Maud, now she was attempting it, was plainly a rank amateur. She wanted to know about Tobias. Or rather, she did know about Tobias, know something; something about Greenhollow, something about the Wild Man, something about the Hallow Wood. And she wanted to know more.