Silver did not care for it at all.
“I would like to see Mr Finch now,” he said.
“If you like,” said Maud, and she couldn’t even hide her disappointment properly.
* * *
Maud had indeed dragged Tobias into yet another subcellar of the sprawling hidden crypt. “There, you see?” she said, as the two of them looked down through the trapdoor. “He’s perfectly well. Just asleep.”
“Miss Lindhurst, you gave my companion a double dose of an untested soporific—”
“Of course it’s not untested,” she said sharply. “I tested it on myself. It’s entirely safe. How else do you think I knew a dosage?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I gave you enough to knock me out for an hour,” she said, “since you’re about my size: and I gave him twice as much, since he’s about twice my size.”
Silver stared at her, caught between admiring and appalled. “Young lady—”
She snorted. “Are you my father?”
“Miss Lindhurst—”
“Maud,” said Maud, firmly. “I told you. Well, there he is. I half doubted it would work. Is he even human?”
“Entirely,” said Silver, “I assure you.” This was a strange view, here in this dank crypt surrounded by golden candlesticks and looking down as it seemed into the bowels of the earth where Tobias lay motionless. He had seen Tobias asleep before, of course. He had crept in the early morning from under that massive arm, unable to stop smiling even as spring called him up and away to walk the Wood. Oddly, he felt a fresh stab at the memory: not the self-pity he was so used to, but grief, real grief, for something lost.
The light from the candle Maud held at an angle illuminated the top of Tobias’s head, the outline of his big shoulders in shirtsleeves. He was facedown and still, but he did not look smaller or more vulnerable; he looked fearsomely strong. Silver swallowed. Underground again. “Forgive me,” he said, “but I find I do feel rather light-headed. I must confess I dislike confined spaces. You heard my outburst earlier.”
“Quite natural,” said Maud, but her tone and expression spoke of amusement, and not a little pity. This girl had killed an ancient vampire to steal its crypt and then tested the effects of its powdered corpse on herself. She must have a stomach of steel. A little like Silver’s mother, in fact—except that Silver’s mother never allowed courage to get in the way of good sense.
Silver was counting on the fact that Maud, for all her obvious courage and intelligence, plainly had the common sense of a flea. Even Tobias had not wanted to hunt this vampire alone. The fact that she had succeeded was beside the point: what a lunatic risk to take! “I am sure you are right and he is perfectly well, but would you mind—forgive my nervousness—would you mind just checking his pulse for me? He is a very dear friend.” Silver put all the sincerity at his disposal into his voice. It helped that it was close to the truth. Friend hardly described their connection, now, but if Silver forced a smile—
“If you insist,” said Maud, and passed him the candlestick.
She swung herself down through the trapdoor as handily as any young sailor, plainly very comfortable in her corduroys and shirtsleeves. She crouched and pressed two fingers to Tobias’s pulse for a moment. The candlelight picked out the bright gold of her hair in the gloom. “He’s quite well, as I said,” she said.
“Mr Finch,” said Silver.
He needn’t have spoken. Tobias was already moving, erupting with surprising speed from the huddled pile where he had most certainly not been asleep—didn’t Silver know what he looked like asleep?—facedown, the better to hide the flicker of his eyes. He grabbed Maud by the wrists—she barely had time to shout in surprise—and turned them around, pinning her to the ground with one strong hand, and his other hand went for his belt—
“Tobias, for the love of God!” Silver called out, and Tobias stopped with one of those sharpened stakes held at a professional angle over Maud’s ribcage and looked up.
Silver said, “She’s not our vampire.”
“Was always a chance the beast would turn her,” said Tobias, but he narrowed his eyes, dropped the stake, and put his hand to Maud’s throat: that same careful check for a pulse, with a rather different intent this time. Then he nodded and let the girl go.
“Sorry, miss,” he said. “Better to be safe.”
Maud looked ever so slightly shaken as she scrambled to her feet. “Not as strong a dose as I thought, then.”
* * *
And then they all sat down together in the ancient vampiric crypt, at what by now had to be two in the morning, and drank hot sugary tea out of cheap tin mugs.
Silver had to work to keep from cracking into dreadful laughter at the absurdity of it all. Maud had pointedly picked up a revolver while she was making the tea over the paraffin stove; it was in a pocket of those corduroys now. It was perfectly clear that she did not intend to be returned home by main force. Silver had no idea if the girl was capable of shooting a man and did not relish the prospect of finding out. She was certainly capable of beheading a vampire. He’d spotted the cleaver among her things.
So the three of them were sitting and chatting—well, Silver and Maud were sitting and chatting, and Tobias was sitting and not chatting—as if there were not a nine-hundred-year-old corpse in the next arched chamber. Maud’s eyes kept flicking thoughtfully towards Tobias. He looked grim and troubled still. The prospect of killing a young girl turned vampire had distressed him; had been distressing him from the start, probably. Silver could see that now. He should have thought of it sooner. There had been a time when Tobias’s silence and calm had not deceived him; when he had been able to tell what the big man was thinking. No longer, it seemed.
Maud, it turned out, could be coaxed into explanations. This was not a surprise. It was Silver’s experience that most people could be persuaded to talk about themselves with very little effort. Tobias, with his natural reserve, had been a piquant exception from the first time they’d met. With only a little work on Silver’s part, she was explaining the circumstances in which she’d disappeared from her parents’ home. “I purchased the clothing secondhand, mostly, out of my own money. I said it was for charity.”
“Your own money?”
“A legacy from my great-aunt,” said Maud. “I knew any expedition would have to be well equipped.” There was a bulky canvas backpack propped in a corner, next to the cleaver. “I ordered some things from the capital, and purchased others locally. Then it was a question of a suitable starting point. Do you know, I think it was your article on the Hallow Wood that put me onto it? I forget how you put it exactly, but you argued that any place long inhabited by the supernatural will in due course become supernatural in itself—didn’t you?”
“Roughly,” Silver agreed.
“Which struck me as back to front, rather,” said Maud. “Would it not make just as much sense to say: any place supernatural in itself will in due course become inhabited by the supernatural?”
“The chicken-and-egg problem did occur to me, yes, but these things being so very hard to measure—”