The horse was a magnificent specimen, perhaps not one of the fastest in the world but certainly one of the sturdiest. Its stamina did not flag as it covered the miles of the Dover road, passing through Greenwich and Eltham like a cannonball, swathed in the fog as if by a cloud. Beyond Eltham there were no more street-lights, and the three-quarter Moon was only visible at present as a pale glow lighting the mist, but the horse had been this way many times before; it knew the road, and was confident of its footing, even on the frost-ridged carriageway.
The mist began to crystallize out and sink to earth as frost while Temple made progress. The Moon became more distinct by the minute, and the stars began to peep through; the sky above the fog was almost free of high cloud. Temple knew that dawn would be a long time coming, given the season, but there was light enough to let him see, and the layer of sparkling white frost covering the highway and the objects to either side of it assisted him in that task.
By the time he reached the place where the mail coach had been attacked, there was no danger of him missing the residual evidence of the assault, which showed almost as clearly as it would have done on freshly-fallen snow. Temple was convinced that he could pick out Jean-Pierre Sévérin’s footprints, and those of Malo de Treguern, left when they leapt down from the vehicle, armed with a cane and a staff, to battle the marauders. He dismounted and tethered the post horse to a bush, then swiftly located the spot where the Hospitaller had been interrupted and wounded, but did not pause to examine the blood-stains flecking the thin layer of rime. He pressed on, following Sévérin’s footprints to the point where they too reached a confused terminus, beneath the overlapping boughs of two venerable trees.
He looked up then, to see where the net that Treguern had mentioned might have fallen from—and realized his mistake.
The trap had been re-set, and his detective skill had led him straight into it.
The net fell again, and caught him in its toils. He struggled hard to throw it off, and might have succeeded had he had a minute longer—but the bandits had not left their trap to do its work unaided. Shadowy forms emerged from the pools of darkness beneath the trees, and reached out to grapple with him. One, at least, was armed with a wad of German tinder steeped in some sweet-smelling substance.
Realizing what the substance must be intended to do, Temple held his breath and tried to continue the fight—but he was outnumbered by at least four to one, and would have succumbed within a matter of seconds had the contest not turned into a brawl, in which his immediate assailants seemed to be fending off an attack by another party.
The battle took place in silence; no one barked any orders or expressed surprise in curses. The whole affair had a supernatural feel to it, as if none of the combatants, save for Temple himself, was fully human—but that was probably an illusion, caused by the fact that his exertions had forced him to take a tainted breath.
He struggled to retain consciousness, but his mind became dizzy and it seemed that the world began to spin around him.
His one regret, as he fell into unconsciousness, was that he had not been able to obtain a single useful clue as to who had tried to capture him, or who had tried to stop them, or who was likely to triumph in the ensuing conflict.
Chapter Two
Beyond the Dover Road
Gregory Temple had fallen unconscious in the course of his investigations on several previous occasions, and had even been the victim of chemical narcotics more than once. When he began to come round, therefore, his first lucid thought was that he ought to conceal his condition, to feign unconsciousness in the hope of overhearing something that might be to his advantage.
He could hear someone moving about—more than one person, if the discrimination of his hearing could be trusted—but no words were spoken. After a little while, the evidence of one of the movers faded away; the individual had either left the scene or become very still.
As to what “the scene” might be, Temple was only able to make a few deductions. He was lying on a dusty wooden floor, too stable to be the deck of a boat—although the sound of water lapping could be heard not far away. If he was in a dwelling or storehouse of some kind, it had to be on a shore, probably that of the Thames. He was lying under a thick blanket, but his hands and feet were not bound, so there was a possibility of mounting a swift and effective action against his captors if he could work out where they were positioned. He began to tense and flex his muscles, but without stretching his limbs in a fashion that might disturb the blanket in a revealing fashion.
He decided, in the end, that the second individual that he had heard moving had indeed gone away, even though he had not heard any door opening or closing, and that the other was situated to his right, some three or four feet away, in a wooden-legged chair of some sort. There was no evidence, so far as his closed eyes could tell, that the place in which he was being held was brightly lit, but he assumed that there must be at least one candle burning close at hand, in order that he might be watched.
When the time seemed ripe, he tried to cast off the blanket and rise to his feet with a single fluid movement, and began reaching out toward his mysterious watcher even before he opened his eyes. The sound he emitted thereafter, however, was not a snarl as he launched himself forward aggressively, but a groan, as a reflex educated by long habit made him pause, forbidding his arms to act aggressively against the woman who was seated in an armchair beside an unpolished table—which did indeed bear a candle, positioned so that its light would fall upon a supine body in the location he had just escaped.
He groaned because he thought that the reflex had betrayed him: that what he saw was not really a woman at all. He recognized her, having seen her twice during his most recent excursion to Paris and its environs. It was the individual who called herself Countess Marcian Gregoryi, alias Addhema—the vampire’s minion.
Had she been carrying a weapon, she could easily have shot or stabbed him while he hesitated, but she was not, and obviously had no such intention. Her hands were holding an open book, which descended slowly to her lap as she looked up at him, mildly.
He tried not to meet her eyes, knowing what magic there was in them, and how completely he had been deceived by her master’s mesmeric art at Miremont, but it was not easy. In that matter too there was a reflex at work—a reflex guided by an innate capacity for lust that he had not entirely put away, in spite of his advanced age.
The pretended Countess—or Comtesse, or Grafina, according to her arena of operations—was very beautiful. “Do you intend to strike me, Mr. Temple?” she asked, in perfect English. “That seems a trifle ungrateful, given that my men saved you from…well, doubtless not a fate wore than death, but a fate that would surely have proved inconvenient to you.”
Temple’s reflexive pause became a frozen hesitation—and he realized that he was, indeed, very cold, although there was a stove next to the table, whose coals were still bright. The space was not easy to heat, for it was some kind of warehouse, capacious enough to defy the stove’s efforts even if its rear door not been standing open, letting in the pale light of dawn.
Countess Marcian Gregoryi did not appear to be feeling the cold, however; she was clad in a think woolen coat and a fur wrap, but even that might have been a disguise. Did vampires feel cold at all?
“Pick up your blanket, Mr. Temple,” said the Countess. “Keep warm—the daylight does not promise much relief to the frozen world.”
Recognizing the wisdom of the advice, Temple did as he as told. “You claim that you saved me from the trap that was set for me?” he said. “Who, then, disposed the net for a second time?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “The men who drugged you were mere hirelings, of course, and did not know themselves who issued the order, else I’d have got the information with very little effort. I do know that they took your friend Sévérin to Purfleet, with instructions to deliver him to a barge. I’ve sent Guido after them, with instructions to follow the barge to its destination, if
he can. They’re playing a dangerous game, whoever they are, because they’ll be heading into the heart of Tom Brown’s territory if they go upriver, and I can’t imagine that they’ll head for the marshes.”
Having swathed himself carefully in the blanket, Temple said: “And why did you save me—if indeed you did?”
“I can hardly blame you for your mistrust,” Addhema said, “after that fiasco in Miremont—but we have nothing against you on that score. If you were not a hunter in the pay of the state, we would have nothing against you at all, but you understand now, I think, what kinds of prejudice we have faced in the past, and still face, in our fight for survival.”
“You might not be a literal blood-drinker,” Temple retorted, “but if there is any truth at all in what Sévérin has told me, you are certainly a killer.”
“I don’t deny it,” she told him, equably, “but I plead self-defense. Do you imagine that men have not tried to murder me, in spite of my camouflage? But you have made alliances with murderers before, under the pressure of circumstances. Tom Brown has certainly contrived as many deaths as I have.”
“My grandson and his son were threatened by the same malefactors,” Temple said, dully. “It was a rare circumstance, in which the enemy of my enemy became my principal hope of attaining my goal—but we are not and never will be friends, and I consider you in the same light, even if some of your present enemies are also ill-disposed toward me. I do not make alliances with vampires.”
“You were willing to make an alliance with Frankenstein’s first Grey Man,” Addhema pointed out, “and your employee Ned Knob seemed actually to like him, if Guido is to be believed. Now that you know that Szandor and I are merely Grey Men created by the hazards of nature, why should you be unduly troubled by the reputation that legend and superstition have foisted upon us? Szandor took advantage of you in Miremont, it’s true—but can you really blame him? He took care not to hurt you. Indeed, when your friends attacked us, we were content to slip away without hurting anyone, rather than make a fight of it. The vehmgerichte have been after us ever since, and Colonel Bozzo-Corona has begun inquiries of his own that might prove equally inconvenient. Our hopes of making common cause with Lord Byron have been dashed, for the moment. We were tempted to take ship for Haiti to seek out Marie Laveau, but Faraday and his self-styled Necromancers of London are closer at hand. Faraday is the real prize in the game as it presently stands—there’s a man who can easily put the likes of Germain Patou and Balsamo’s antique alchemists in the shade! What a triple alliance might be forged between him, Frankenstein and Szandor!”
“If a triple alliance is formed,” Temple opined, “Andrew Crosse will be the third member. He, after all, is brokering the potential friendship between Faraday and Frankenstein. Darwin is dead, alas, and the Lunar Society little more than a memory, but England has enough great men of science not to need your master—or you, his second self.”
“Second self? We’re not quite as closely allied as that, Mr. Temple—although you’d doubtless find the terms of our relationship interesting, if you were to open your mind to the Inquiry.”
“Is that why you’ve taken me captive?” Temple demanded.
“Captive?” she echoed, mockingly. “Why, Mr. Temple, we haven’t taken you captive, but merely freed you from potential captivity in someone else’s hands. You’re as free as a bird. You’re not bound, and the door stands open not 15 meters away. No one will attempt to inhibit your movements—unless you surrender to the violent impulse that overtook you while you were still lying down, feigning unconsciousness. For the time being, you and I are on the same side, whether we make any formal alliance or not. We both want the parliamentary commission to reach Fyne Court safely, and to be dazzled by a successful demonstration of Frankenstein’s technique. You might not be as fully committed, as yet, to the cause of the dead-alive as your associate Mr. Knob and your mercurial adversary John Devil, but you’re a man of reason, a champion of deductive logic who does not stoop to using rhetoric as a means of sustaining belief when the evidence becomes challenging.”
“What are you looking for in London, Addhema?” Temple demanded.
“What we have long been looking for everywhere else,” the beautiful countess replied. “The secret of immortality…or, if you prefer, of eternal undeath. We are presently working on the assumption that the secret we need is not the same secret for which Civitas Solis and the Bavarian Illuminati have long been searching. Although there would be a certain esthetic symmetry in the discovery that an effective method of maintaining God-given life were also effective in maintaining the second life that some individuals achieve, naturally or artificially, after death, we have no reason to expect that to be the case.”
“God-given life?” Temple echoed. “Do you believe in God, then?”
“Not in the kind of God that would declare us an abomination, a blasphemy against His dictates—but who knows what plans the divine mind might have for the future progress of humankind, if there is indeed a God?”
“Malo de Treguern believes that information to be contained in the revelation of the scriptures,” Temple said.
“But you doubt it, Mr. Temple,” Addhema countered. “Scriptures tend to rush to judgment, which is why they are always being augmented, reinterpreted and replaced. Even so, Treguern’s scriptures are not averse to the idea that the dead might rise from their graves, in the flesh, in order to build a Millennial Kingdom on the Earth.”
Temple’s gaze went to the book resting on her lap, but it was not a Bible. Nor was it a copy of the anonymous Frankenstein. It was printed in Gothic script, apparently in German, but it seemed to be a recent text, more likely a philosophical treatise by some follower of Leibniz or Kant than some romance by Ludwig Tieck or the Baron de la Motte Fouqué.
“Show me your true form,” Temple whispered, forcing his voice so that she would be able to hear him. “Show me what lies behind your camouflage.”
Countess Marcian Gregoryi laughed lightly. “Do you still believe that I am a skeletal monster, like the one that Sévérin thought he saw, on the night that his daughter killed herself, or the one that René de Kervoz thought he saw when he believed that he had shot me in the head? Do you think that I am a mere husk, more dust than flesh, and that what you see before your eyes is but glamour? You have no idea, Mr. Temple, what Grey Men and Grey Women might be capable of making of themselves, given time and education…just as you have no idea what living men and women might make of themselves, given the same resources. You are on the brink of discovering something of your own inner resources, just as Colonel Bozzo-Corona appears to be…but you are still blinded, as he is, by your preconceptions, by ideas that you have long taken for granted, although the only basis they have is the strength of your conviction. We are more alike than you imagine, Mr. Temple—but I am older than you are, although appearances are deceptive. Szandor is older still….and there may be Grey Men even older, who have greater skill in concealing themselves, just as there are may be living men even older than Saint-Germain and the Jew, unhampered by the superstitions that have shackled those two. Szandor does not like that idea overmuch, but he has always had a tendency to vainglory. I find it intriguing, don’t you?”
Temple had heard of the Comte de Saint-Germain and the Wandering Jew, just as he had heard of Giuseppe Balsamo before the man currently using that name had introduced himself, but he had never believed in either and suspected that Addhema was teasing him. All he said aloud, however, was: “I am not a supernatural being. I am merely a living man who happens to have grown old.”
“I am not a supernatural being either,” the vampire countess retorted, “but merely a woman returned to life after death, who appears not to have grown old. I wish you well, Mr. Temple—for the moment, at least, we have the same enemies. Be careful, I beg you. Keep Frankenstein and Faraday safe, if you can.” She stood up as she was speaking, and gathered her fur wrap more tightly around her shoulders and neck, as if she were indeed f
earful of catching a chill. “The Sun is up, as you can see,” she continued, “and vampires prefer the dark. I must bid you farewell.”
For a moment or two, Temple wondered whether he ought to arrest her, or at least make the attempt—but he had no charge to bring against her that could possibly be proven in a court of law and he was, in any case, more than half-inclined to believe her when she said that it had been her men who had saved him from the predators who had sought to trap him in the same net that had trapped his friend. For that reason, he simply let her walk out of the door and move off into the gathering but still-gloomy light of day.
After a short pause, he followed her, eager to know where she might be headed—but when he arrived in the doorway and peered out, she was nowhere to be seen. He had to wonder whether he had been the victim of mesmerism, at least to the extent that he had allowed her to make her escape, but there was no use crying over spilled milk.
He set off to walk along the shore of the river, heading westwards. At the first possible opportunity, he hailed a boatman who was steering his skiff toward the port. He still had money in his pouch—at least Addhema was no cutpurse—and he paid for passage to Tower Bridge.
“Has there been any unusual traffic on the river of late?” he asked the boatman.
“Not that I’ve noticed, sir,” the boatman replied, “but this is the Thames, after all, where the usual is a broad church. Were you thinking in terms of conspirators or ghosts?”
“Conspirators,” Temple said, firmly. “Germans, in particular, or other Eastern Europeans.”
“No, sir,” said the boatman. “I’ve seen nothing of that sort.”
“And what of John Devil the Quaker?” Temple asked. “Is he up to his old tricks again?”
“The rallying cry is said to have been broadcast in Jenny Paddock’s,” the boatman admitted, “but I never go to such places myself—I’m an honest man, sir.”
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