James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night by Barbara Hambly

years ago. Poor Bertie Westmoreland had not been the only member of that gay circle of friends who had sent her invitations or bought her trinkets, though he was evidently the only one who had paid the ultimate price,
    The others were lucky, he thought. Though Albert Westmoreland had died in 1900, the Honorable Frank Ellis—another of Lydia's suitors, though Asher had never met the boy—had bought the vampire a loden-green crepe tea gown as late as 1904. Who knew how many others had also kept up the connection?
    He shivered, thinking how close Lydia had passed to that unseen plague then, and thanked all the strait-corseted deities of Society for the strict lines drawn between young girls of good family and the type of women with whom young men of good family amused themselves between bouts of “doing the pretty,”
    Lydia had been very young then. Eighteen, still living in her father's Oxford house and attending lectures with the tiny clump of Somerville undergraduates interested in medicine. The other girls had dealt as best they could with the comments, jokes, and sniggers of male undergraduates and deans alike—apologetic, frustrated, or defiant. For the most part Lydia had been blithely oblivious. She had been genuinely puzzled over her father's blustering rage when she'd chosen studying for Responsions over a season on the London matrimonial mart; had she had brothers or sisters, he might well have threatened to disinherit her from the considerable family estates. Even her uncle, the Dean of New College, though her supporter, had been scandalized by the direction of her studies. Education for women was all very well, but he had been thinking in terms of literature and the Classics, not the slicing up of cadavers and learning how the human reproductive organs operated.
    Asher smiled a little, remembering how even the most anti-woman of the dons, old Horace Blaydon, had come around to her support in the end, though he'd never have admitted it. “Even a damn freshman can follow what I'm doing!” he'd bellowed at a group of embarrassed male students during his lectures on blood pathology . . . he'd called Lydia a damned schoolgirl everywhere but in the classes. And the old man would have acted the same, Asher thought, even had his son not been head over heels in love with her. Staring at the obituaries spread out on the grimy and ink-stained table top before him, Asher glanced at his list of Lotta's admirers since the early '80s and thought about Dennis Blaydon.
    Lydia was probably the last person anyone would have expected to capture Dennis Blaydon's fancy, let alone his passionate and possessive love. Bluff, golden, and perfect, Dennis had been used to the idea that any woman he chose to honor with his regard would automatically accept his proposal; the fact that Lydia did not had only added to her fascination. Since the first time he'd seen her without her spectacles and decided that she was possessed of a fragile prettiness as well as great wealth, he had wanted her and had put forth all his multitude of charm and grace into winning her, to Asher's silent despair. Everyone in Oxford, from the Deans of the Schools to the lowliest clerk at Blackweli's, had accepted his eventual triumph in the Willoughby matrimonial lists as a matter of course. Her father, who considered one intellectual more than enough in the family, had been all in favor of it. To Horace Blaydon's query as to what his son would want with a woman who spent half her time in the pathology laboratories, Dennis had replied, with his customary shining earnestness, “Oh, she isn't really like that, Father.” Presumably he knew better than she did what Lydia was like, Asher had thought bitterly at the time. Pushed into the background, a middle-aged, brown, nondescript colleague of her uncle, he could only watch them together and wonder how soon it would be that all hope of making her a part of his life would disappear forever.
    Later he'd mentioned to