Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  Good to know that it wasn’t. The thought brought no comfort. He listened to the grumble of military transports in the Rue St. Martin, far below his windows, and the curious silence of this gray wartime Paris. His eyes traced the cracks in the plaster ceiling, as if planning a route along them.

  A route that he knew he’d have to follow, once full darkness fell. Though no German bombs had dropped for a year and a half and blackout was no longer in force, electricity was in such short supply that the whole district (including the hotel) would be black as pitch. At least nobody’s going to stop me for walking around with a lantern …

  He stopped that thought, chilled. Knowing where his mind was going.

  His own fear surprised him, after what he’d been through in the past two years.

  The City of Gold sailed at two. By Lydia’s description it was grand enough to possess a fairly powerful wireless – strong enough to receive signals from a military base like the one at Brest, even when hundreds of miles out to sea. He wondered if the military credentials with which the Foreign Office had so obligingly supplied him would serve to get him on one of the overcrowded military trains.

  To hold a vampire prisoner on shipboard means a coffin lined with enough silver to keep him powerless. That means serious amounts of money. Either a government, or some extremely wealthy man. In either case, they’ll have hired help.

  In either case, they’d have the resources to outflank and overpower Lydia the moment they became aware that she was asking questions. Captain Palfrey, whom Asher had met at the Front two years previously, was a well-meaning head-breaker who would be lucky if he lasted twenty-four hours.

  Her only defense will be to not ask questions. The spy he had been knew this instinctively. She cannot afford to be perceived as a threat. She has to know beforehand where to look, and who to watch out for while she does it.

  Damn it. Asher felt almost physically sick with weariness at what he knew he had to do that night. It would be a long way to Rue de Passy in the bitter cold of the unlit streets, for the Metro had long ago ceased to run.

  To say nothing of those he would be seeking.

  The Undead. Those who hunted the night.

  Damn it, damn it, damn it.

  TWO

  I will never forgive myself.

  Dr Lydia Asher craned her head over the general level of the crowd in the ticketing salon, to view the gangplank, and the towering black wall of steel, in the chilly gray of the spring afternoon.

  She wouldn’t let herself finish the thought, but only whispered in her heart, ‘Oh, Jamie …’

  How could I do this to him?

  How could I do this to poor Miranda?

  And she told herself – in the voice of the long-departed Nanna who had ruled the nursery at Willoughby Close with a rod of ice and steel – Don’t cry.

  Crying wouldn’t do any good anyway.

  Jamie in the harsh lights and freezing cold of the Gare de l’Est, just after Christmas of 1915. Wrapped in his military greatcoat and a couple of scarves, shivering in spite of it. After nine months of Listening Post work – sitting in a German uniform in the holding areas with prisoners of war, piecing together information about the High Command’s plans and conditions in Germany itself – he was going behind enemy lines on the Eastern Front. They’d had three days together in Paris. He’d said, There won’t be a day that you won’t be in my thoughts.

  Miranda on the front steps of Peasehall Manor the day before yesterday, with Aunt Lavinnia’s ancient chauffeur waiting in the car to take Lydia to catch the train for London. A thin, little, red-haired, marsh-fairy, who looked as if the first wind would carry her away, her golden-haired doll in her arms. Will you be fighting the Germans again? she’d asked. Not blood-thirstiness in her eye, but craving for adventure and daring deeds. And Lydia, aware that knowledge of her mother’s heroism was what made these partings bearable to the little girl, had replied, I will …

  To Aunt Lavinnia’s affronted shock.

  I can’t let Don Simon be enslaved. Whoever has taken him must be stopped.

  The corollary to that – and Simon must be killed – was almost more than she could bear.

  She looked around her at the well-dressed, well-mannered, yammering crowd.

  Some of her fellow passengers she’d observed at three o’clock that morning – not of course the respectable ones – when she and Captain Palfrey had sneaked to the pier to watch the loading of the heavy luggage. She hadn’t had much hope that she’d glimpse a trunk being carried aboard that was large enough to contain the body of a small, slender man. (Lined with silver mesh? she’d thought. To weaken him and keep him helpless?) But she couldn’t not look.

  They’d stationed themselves between two warehouses, across the pier from what was politely referred to as the Third Class terminal – a long shed where the emigrants waited all night to go aboard.

  She’d had no luck with suspicious luggage, though there’d been some hefty impedimenta on the little electric trolleys which had passed them. Those wealthy enough to be traveling First Class on the City of Gold saw no reason not to take along different frocks for each dinner in the First Class dining salon, for each evening of dancing in the First Class lounge, and a wide variety of walking suits for leisurely strolls along the First Class Promenade. Not to mention shoes to match, and hats, and coats of fur or camel hair; their own pillows (though the literature provided by the American Shipping Line assured its passengers that everything was new, immaculate, and of the finest materials – ‘Of course that’s what they’d tell us,’ had sniffed Aunt Louise); their own tea- and coffee-sets for entertaining in their cabins; their own books, game-counters, musical instruments, ornaments. Aunt Louise certainly had – and, Lydia had to admit shame-facedly, she herself was guilty as well. (Not stationery, of course. ‘What’s the point of traveling on a first-class liner,’ said Aunt Louise, ‘if one can’t send out notes on its letterhead?’)

  Through the windows of the Third Class terminal she had seen them by the harsh glare of bare electric bulbs: those who had crossed half of Europe to achieve passage on an American ship, bound for America. When the door opened to admit more travelers (or, despite the cold of the night, fresh air) she had heard their voices: Italian and Belgian French, Russian and Yiddish and several of those incomprehensible Middle European languages that were Jamie’s specialty, Czech or Polish or Slovene. German, too – families in flight from areas where the borders of the Austrian Empire, Romania, and Russia ran together in a linguistic hodge-podge now soaked in blood. Families in flight from the devastation of the War.

  Their thin, frightened faces, their shabby odds and ends of luggage, were as different as possible from those around her now. Even without her glasses (‘Take those things off at once!’ had commanded Aunt Louise. ‘You know better than that!’), Lydia, from long practice and a London ‘season’ when she had come ‘out’, could price their clothing at three or four times the cost of the farms out of which those poor people had been shelled by the advancing armies. The sum paid for the hat worn by the woman in front of Aunt Louise – an astonishing confection of dark-green velvet, huge black silk roses, and a stiffened black silk bow easily the size of a Christmas turkey – had probably been more than any of the Third Class women had ever seen. Almost certainly, the woman’s two little black French bulldogs, held on leashes by a uniformed maid, had eaten better than any Third Class passenger for every meal of their pampered lives (and would continue to do so on the City of Gold).

  Lydia now winced inwardly, recollecting how, every time the door of the Third Class waiting shed had opened, she had heard the crying of children. Hunger, she’d thought. Thirst, exhaustion, and cold.

  The memory took her farther back. Miranda on the steps of Peasehall Manor (‘Mrs Marigold cries sometimes,’ had said Miranda, of her doll, ‘but I don’t’). Aunt Louise had raked her over the coals yesterday morning at breakfast, when she’d informed her that she wasn’t bringing her daughter to Am
erica with her. ‘Really, Lydia, you talk all the time of how much you care for the child but I do not consider your actions those of a responsible mother! Leaving her with Lavinnia, of all people, who hasn’t the strength of character herself to keep her nursery staff up to their work! You’ve seen how those daughters of hers turned out, slouching like a couple of unstrung bean-plants. I swear they don’t even wear corsets!’ She’d shaken her head, a tall, commanding woman whose dark-red hair had just begun to fade at the temples. ‘In America, the child can be given a decent upbringing, until it’s time for her to be sent away to school …’

  To Lydia’s mention of the danger from submarines, Louise had retorted, ‘There is no such danger. None at all. It’s all been invented by the newspapers. I daresay your poor little girl stands in more danger at Lavinnia’s – God knows what farmers are putting in their milk these days! I’m sorry to say that England is not the place I would wish to see any child grow up nowadays. Irish Republic indeed! Nothing short of treason. Why, I hear they’re even discussing universal suffrage! Slack! Undisciplined!’ The middle sister of Lydia’s tribe of aunts, and the widow of a diplomat, Louise, Lady Mountjoy had made her home in Paris up until the start of the War and had firm opinions concerning how children should be raised, despite (or because of, Lydia reflected) having none herself.

  Finding England, too, unsatisfactory under wartime conditions (‘The War overhangs everything so! Nothing else is talked of and I for one am quite sick of hearing about it …’) she had taken one of the four Promenade Suites on the City of Gold: Ultra-First Class, Lydia mentally termed them. Each suite consisted of two bedrooms, a parlor, a dressing-room, a private bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and two windowless, closet-like inner cells for servants: one’s other servants had accommodation suitable for their status down on C Deck immediately below. (This, Lydia gathered, in addition to a personal cabin steward at one’s beck and call.)

  Perusal of the American Shipping Line’s illustrated literature on the subject of these Promenade Suites had convinced Lydia that whoever had kidnapped Don Simon Ysidro – if her dreams, and Captain Palfrey’s dreams, had not been entirely hallucinatory – they were most likely to be traveling in another of these extremely expensive Promenade Suites.

  The reflection comforted her, as it reduced the scope of her search to manageable proportions.

  It would simply be that much more difficult to conceal the coffin – or trunk, probably – of an imprisoned vampire, even in one of the lesser, two-room First Class suites.

  For that reason she had tasked Captain Palfrey – who had military credentials – with getting her a list of the other Promenade Suite passengers, and he had come through handsomely. Surreptitiously consulting the paper he had slipped her last night outside the Third Class terminal, she could now, standing meekly among Aunt Louise’s immediate entourage, make an educated guess as to who had the other three Promenade Suites.

  The diminutive woman in the green velvet hat with the huge black roses, almost certainly. Lydia heard her speak in French to the woman who held the leashes of the little bulldogs, and guessed that this was the Russian Princess Gromyko. (A glance at the womenfolk attached to the other two Ultra-First Class groups convinced Lydia, even without her glasses, that these were Americans.) That being the case, the woman holding the dogs must, by the probable cost of her frock (dark-blue wool challis modestly accented with machine-made lace – two pounds six at most …) be her secretary-companion Mademoiselle Ossolinska, and the white-bearded, cadaverous gentleman hovering beside her would be her personal physician, Dr Boris Yakunin. Other members of the Gromyko entourage not present included two maids, two footmen, a Persian butler, and a chef.

  Those would – like Aunt Louise’s butler and maid, and Lydia’s own maid Ellen – already be aboard, laying out hairbrushes, nightgowns, negligees, personal tea-urns, dresses and shoes for dinner tonight, plus books and magazines and sheet music, and arranging personal knick-knacks on the sleek black tables.

  The two American parties in the other Promenade Suites, according to Palfrey’s list, were both millionaires. (At eight hundred and fifty pounds for the crossing, they would have to be!) Spenser Cochran, Lydia guessed, was the trim, elderly gentleman looking on with cold disinterest as a sleek-haired young secretary (his nephew, said the list) dealt with the red-blazered representative of the American Shipping Line in charge of paperwork. An angular woman in an expensive (but obviously not Parisian) silk gown of rather too emphatic a shade of petunia stood beside him, complaining in a grating drawl about the delay. Her audience was not Cochran, but a handsome, dark-haired man in the modest garb of a professional, streaks of silver at his temples and a medical bag in hand. That would be (another quick glance at Palfrey’s notes) Dr Louis Barvell, also a ‘personal physician’. They were hemmed about by a cluster of the men whom the list described as ‘private detectives’, large individuals in rough tweeds and bowler hats, smoking cigars.

  And well they should stand guard, reflected Lydia, considering the number of diamonds Mrs Cochran was wearing on her hat, brooch, ears, fingers, wrists, and shoe buckles.

  The other American party nearby also included a male secretary and what looked like a female ‘companion’, which would make the tall, stout, extremely well-tailored gentleman Mr Bradwell Tilcott, of Philadelphia, and the stately gray-haired grande dame in eggplant faille (Worth, Lydia estimated) his mother. Maids, a footman, a chef and a valet (names appended) had undoubtedly already gone aboard.

  The ticket agent made his way respectfully toward Aunt Louise, and Aunt Louise’s secretary-cum-companion – a sweet-faced, gray-haired and murderously efficient widow named Mrs Honoria Flasket – intercepted him with their travel papers. One could easily, Lydia guessed as they moved off toward the First Class gangway, transport an unconscious and encoffined vampire aboard unnoticed. All the stewards seemed to be concerned about was whether the papers were in order. Nobody searched or even glanced at their trunks.

  With her aunt’s attention diverted she sneaked her glasses on again, and scanned the ‘cabin luggage’ as it crossed the gangway lower down. On another gangway, she recognized faces she’d glimpsed last night outside the Third Class terminal. A golden-haired girl of fifteen taking competent charge not only of three younger siblings but of their heavy-muscled, ox-like mother as well. A tall old hook-nosed Jew, exactly like Shylock in a bad production of Merchant of Venice in his rusty black coat and pince-nez, clutching a heavy satchel to his breast with both long arms (must contain his money) while two little children clung to his coat-tails. A blonde man whose face bore what were clearly shrapnel-scars, helping an elderly Italian woman and her gaggle of black-clothed daughters. A brown-faced woman shepherding six or eight children of various ages. (‘Honestly,’ sniffed Aunt Louise behind her, ‘I don’t see how a woman can keep track of that many children! I’ll wager she can’t remember all their names.’)

  Pilgrims setting forth on the last leg of their journey to the Promised Land.

  In front of them, Lydia heard the gray-haired dowager bray to her son, ‘I do trust Alvina will have my bath ready when we get to the suite.’ Jamie would have identified the origin of her twangy inflection in moments. ‘Heaven only knows who they’ll have put at the Captain’s table with us, or what kind of wines they have on board …’

  And at the Front, Lydia found herself remembering, the surgeons she’d worked with for two and a half years would be making tea for themselves with boiling-hot water tapped from the cooling coils of the machine-guns, if they weren’t elbow-deep in dying men because there was an enemy ‘push’ going on. That’s where I should be. Guilt closed strangling around her throat. Doing what I can …

  Then she stopped, halfway up the gangway, at the sight of a huge box – nearly eight feet in length and close to a yard wide – being maneuvered with care and profanity up the luggage bridge by four struggling porters. She was too far to see details, except for its size, and groped quickly for her glasses.


  If I can’t slip away from Aunt Louise and follow it to its destination surely the whole cabin staff will know where it went. There can’t be another like it …

  I’ll have to ask Ellen. Servants always know everything.

  ‘Come along, Lydia,’ said her aunt briskly. Lydia hastily removed her glasses. ‘Richard and Isobel –’ She named her brother and his wife, Lord and Lady Halfdene – ‘are probably already in the suite, to see us off … if they haven’t perished with boredom, waiting for those tedious ticket officers to finish their paperwork with us out here! I saw them on the boat-train coming down this morning …’

  Lydia cast a last glance at the enormous chest as she was escorted, firmly, off the gangplank and onto the First Class Promenade.

  The Promenade Suites had, of course, their own private promenade, facing out over the deck well into which the luggage ‘Not For Use On Voyage’ had been craned last night. As her aunt led her up the stairs to this exclusive precinct, Lydia could look down and see the stevedores still moving the last of it through the open doors and into the First Class baggage hold. Too few stevedores for the task, she reflected. She could see where some of them moved clumsily, working around maimed or missing hands, crippled or artificial legs. A year ago, or two, in the hammering, rat-ridden, maggot-whispering hell of some clearing station on the Front, she might easily have been the one who’d held the ether-cone over that barrel-chested man’s face while one of the surgeons took his leg off. Maybe she’d visited that skinny dark man’s bedside when he woke up blind on one side where his eye (and a substantial section of his cheek) used to be.

  Entering the parlor of Aunt Louise’s suite it felt like it had been someone else who had been there, who had done those things. Gauze curtains veiled the portholes, and the electrical fixtures were wrought like lilies of frosted glass. Is this the same world? The same era in time?