There was a huge and very dribbly candle burning in a tall black candlestick.
'King Verence had all those oil lamps put in, a lovely modern light, and Igor's been going around replacing them with candles again! We don't even know where he gets them from. Lacci thinks he saves his earwax...'
They were in the long room beside the great hall now. Vlad lifted the candlestick up so that the flame's glow lit the wall.
'Ah, they've put the pictures up. You ought to get to know the family...'
The light fell on a portrait of a tall, thin, greyhaired man in evening dress and a red-lined cloak. He looked quite distinguished in a distant, aloof sort of way. There was the glimmer of a lengthened canine on his lower lip. 'My great-uncle,' said Vlad. 'The last... incumbent.'
'What's the sash and star he's wearing?' said Agnes. She could hear the sounds of the mob, far off but growing louder.
'The Order of Gvot. He built our family home. Don'tgonearthe Castle, we call it. I don't know whether you've heard of it?'
'It's a strange name.'
'Oh, he used to laugh about it. The local coachmen used to warn visitors, you see. "Don't go near the castle," they'd say. "Even if it means spending a night up a tree, never go up there to the castle," they'd tell people. "Whatever you do, don't set foot in that castle." He said it was marvellous publicity. Sometimes he had every bedroom full by 9 p.m. and people would be hammering on the door to get in. Travellers would go miles out of their way to see what all the fuss was about. We won't see his like again, with any luck. He did rather play to the crowd, I'm afraid. Rose from the grave so often that he had a coffin with a revolving lid. Ah... Aunt Carmilla...'
Agnes stared at a very severe woman in a figure-hugging black dress and deep-plum lipstick.
'She was said to bathe in the blood of up to two hundred virgins at a time,' Vlad said. 'I don't believe that. Use more than eighty virgins and even quite a large bath will overflow, Lacrimosa tells me.'
'These little details are important,' said Agnes, buoyed up by the excitement of terror. 'And, of course, it is so hard to find the soap.'
'Killed by a mob, I'm afraid.'
'People can be so ungrateful.'
'And this...' the light passed along the hall '... is my grandfather...'
A bald head. Dark-rimmed, staring eyes. Two teeth like needles, two ears like batwings, fingernails that hadn't been trimmed for years...
'But half the picture's just bare canvas,' said Agnes.
'The family story is that old Magyrato got hungry,' said Vlad. 'A very direct approach to things, my grandfather. See the reddish-brown stains just here? Very much in the old style. And here... well, some distant ancestor, that's all I know.'
This picture was mostly dark varnish. There was a suggestion of a beak on a hunched figure.
Vlad turned away, quickly. 'We've come a long way, of course,' he said. 'Evolution, Father says.'
'They look very... powerful,' said Agnes.
'Oh, yes. So very powerful, and yet so very, very dumb,' said Vlad. 'My father thinks stupidity is somehow built into vampirism, as if the desire for fresh blood is linked to being as thick as a plank: Father is a very unusual vampire. He and Mother raised us... differently.'
'Differently,' said Agnes.
'Vampires aren't very family orientated. Father says that's natural. Humans are raising their successors, you see, but we live for a very long time so a vampire is raising competitors. There's not a lot of family feeling, you could say.'
'Really.' In the depths of her pocket Agnes's fingers closed around the bottle of holy water.
'But Father said self-help was the only way out. Break the cycle of stupidity, he said. Little traces of garlic were put into our food to get us used to it. He tried early exposure to various religious symbols - oh dear, we must have had the oddest nursery wallpaper in the world, never mind the jolly frieze of Gertie the Dancing Garlic - and I have to say that their efficacy isn't that good in any case. He even made us go out and play during the day. That which does not kill us, he'd say, makes us strong-'
Agnes's arm whirled. The holy water spiralled out of the bottle and hit Vlad full in the chest.
He threw his arms wide and screamed as water cascaded down and poured into his shoes.
She'd never expected it to be this easy.
He raised his head and winked at her.