Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  Then he climbed the two shallow steps, and knocked at the door.

  She opened it at once. She’d been waiting for him.

  ‘La!’ She flung up one hand in a theatrical gesture. The other held aloft an immensely elaborate branch of candles. Their light flashed in her green eyes like mirrors. ‘Monsieur le Professeur! I had thought you were gone away to the East – perhaps killed. Please do come in.’

  At least, he reflected as she stepped back from the door, she can’t possibly be hungry. Not that satiation had ever kept any vampire from a promising kill, but Elysée de Montadour was too nosy to do away with a good source of gossip. The luminous glance flicked over his face, taking in what he’d seen on those few occasions that he’d had access to a mirror larger than the broken fragment he shaved in. Since the start of the War he’d lost forty pounds, weight his six-foot frame could ill afford. The silver that had threaded his brown hair and mustache in 1914 had widened to hand-breadth streaks.

  She herself still looked exactly like the twenty-year-old courtesan that François de Montadour, then Master of Paris, had killed in 1799. Killed, and absorbed her soul, re-releasing her consciousness back into the body that he’d infected with vampire blood.

  ‘Madame.’ He bent over her hand. It was warm. She’d been out already in the early-falling spring night, and had killed. With paint on them, her inch-long claws could pass easily for mere fingernails. ‘Is this a convenient time to talk? I would have sent a note,’ he added, ‘but I reached Paris only this afternoon, and the news awaiting me here was such that I could not wait.’

  ‘About Don Simon?’ A mocking smile lilted her voice, and she slipped his greatcoat from his shoulders, her fingernails brushing the nape of his neck. Upstairs, the drawing room, with its gilt-trimmed wall-panels of straw-colored silk, was warm from a large (and in these days, extremely expensive) fire in the marble grate, and from clusters of candles in wall sconces. On the far wall an oil portrait of her – a Corot, Asher thought – smiled the secret smile that flickered even now on the lips of the woman beside him.

  She was watching him from beneath those impossibly long lashes. Waiting for him to react to her words.

  ‘Tell me.’

  She pouted as if on a stage. Unlike most vampires, Elysée de Montadour was always in motion, always making little moues and smiles and theatrical gestures. Asher wondered if she was that way when she hunted.

  Probably. Sexuality hung about her like patchouli and almost certainly, he reflected, made concealment unnecessary. The most devoted husband in Paris would follow her down a dark alley without a second thought. It was, as Don Simon Ysidro had told him once, how vampires hunted: through the illusion of desire.

  That, too, was something that strengthened with the power they absorbed from their kills.

  ‘That he’s been hanging about the clearing stations where your pretty wife works, like a lovesick schoolboy? Oh, without a word of thanks, so far as one can tell. Which makes it all the more hilarious. He writes poems about her, I daresay. You didn’t know?’

  Her eyebrows quirked and she laughed as she tweaked his mustache. ‘Oh, my dear Professor! Don’t tell me you didn’t know!’

  He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t surprise me, though.’

  ‘And here I thought you were behind it!’

  ‘Behind what?’

  She’d settled herself on a loveseat to one side of the fire, and invitingly patted the cushion next to her. He took the chair across the hearth. She made a little face at him – one step short of blowing him a flirtatious kiss. ‘Tattling to his bank,’ she purred. ‘Serves him right, abominable aristo. He has about ten of them – different banks, I mean. And Heaven only knows how many apartments and hidey-holes here in Paris, and properties that he rents under a dozen different names. I saw him only Saturday, striding along Rue Notre-Dame des Victoires like an icebox ghost. He said one of his lawyers had wired him that there was some sort of trouble at Barclay’s, refusing to transfer funds to the Banque d’Algerie through which he holds his Paris house. Another man – any other man – would have been hopping up and down and spitting, he was so angry …’

  Her eyes twinkled maliciously and her French, in general almost completely modern, slipped for a time back into the slightly trilled r’s of that language’s eighteenth-century pronunciation. ‘“Given my understanding that America is not even involved in the War”,’ she mocked, with a good imitation not only of Ysidro’s whispering voice and antique Spanish inflection, but of his haughty stance and his way of looking down his nose as well, ‘“I fail to see why this stock-holder’s conviction that anyone doing business as a corporation must be a German spy warrants investigation” … You know his way! Like a schoolmaster with a frozen poker up his backside.’

  She laughed again and leaned back, voluptuous even in the unshaped garments that women considered (for reasons which utterly escaped Asher) the height of fashion these days.

  ‘And was he able to straighten out this contretemps?’

  ‘La, who knows?’ She shrugged, regarding him with lazy interest. ‘Who cares? I have not seen him since that night, you know.’

  ‘Has anyone?’ The dreams of agony had been Sunday night.

  ‘You know the Spaniard.’ She waved her hand. ‘If you were to offer to bring him ten virgin maids in their nightgowns to kill, he wouldn’t give you his address.’

  ‘Is that what you do?’ Asher kept only a level curiosity in his voice. ‘Bring each other kills?’

  Her smile widened. Long lashes veiled the copper hell-mirror of her eyes. ‘Would you like to stay and see?’

  He thought of the dark mansion above him. Of the black labyrinths of the old gypsum-mines that stretched for miles below Paris. Of the games he’d seen the vampires play when they chased – leisurely as drifting ghosts – some weeping and terrified prey. The recollection turned him sick.

  ‘It is not that I don’t trust you, Madame,’ he said, rising and again taking her hand. ‘I do so, absolutely.’ He made the lie obvious in his voice, like a kind of secret jest, and she gleamed a dark amusement back at him. ‘But I see that you’re expecting company—’

  There were two card tables set up in the long room, and he knew that after they hunted, vampires sought one another’s company. Music, gaming, and gossip continued to draw, evidently, beyond the frontier of life, and as Ysidro had said to him once, night was no shorter for the Undead than it was for the Living.

  ‘Oh, la, a few friends merely! Xaviero of Venice, and a couple of the St Petersburg boys. And of course my own dear precious Serge …’

  ‘—and I fear that in the excitement of the chase one or another of your fledglings might get carried away. But if I might beg of you a favor,’ he added, not liking the way she kept hold of his fingers, nor the way she studied him, now that her curiosity about his return to Paris had been satisfied. Vampires, he knew well, liked to toy with their prey: converse with them, flirt with them, go to the opera with them or on moonlight drives in the park. Sometimes they would court a chosen victim for months, satisfying their physical hunger with the blood of the poor while they ripened the piquancy of the eventual ‘harvest’, as they sometimes called it, with the spice of cat-and-mouse horror and betrayal.

  Like Scheherazade, he had learned the value of keeping the game going until he could get out the door.

  ‘And what is that?’ Interest brightened her eyes – interest in something other than killing him for the sport of it.

  ‘Could you – or your beaux garcons –’ he knew the Master of Paris chose her fledglings for their looks – ‘make further inquiries about this? About who this American is, and how he managed to light on Don Simon’s banking arrangements? There’s something very odd going on here,’ he went on, holding Elysée’s gaze and looking grave. ‘And this isn’t the first time that I’ve heard this rumor about German agents routing funds through Paris banks – God knows they’ve got more money in them than the German ones do right now. It was
why I returned to Paris,’ he continued, extemporizing freely. ‘I had hoped to locate Don Simon here – as Madame Asher returned to England nearly two weeks ago – since I knew he worked with a number of private banks. I should feel better,’ he added, ‘if I knew that he was all right.’

  If I knew that someone wasn’t holding him captive in torment – something no one would do, whose goal was not to use the vampire’s power for some scheme of their own.

  Barclay’s Bank. Banque d’Algerie. American stock-holder. Saturday night sometime …

  Most vampires, he knew, could be lured by two things: blood, or money. A threat to the funds that guarded them would act as infallible bait.

  Britten at the embassy would know. He works with the banks.

  Asher kept his eyes on hers and didn’t dare glance at the clock, but he guessed it was now close to ten at night. In fact, when he did reach the icy pavement of the Rue de Passy again a few minutes later he confirmed it.

  Eleven hours until the embassy opened its doors. The City of Gold had sailed at two – probably later, given the possibilities of coaling problems. It would take him roughly four hours to get from Paris to Brest. And who knew how long it would take him to actually locate Cyril Britten tomorrow morning and how long it would take Britten to dig out the information about who had set what sounded like a very neat trap for Don Simon Ysidro.

  ‘I shall ask.’ Elysée looked pleased at the prospect of a puzzle. ‘Of course, Serge will make a mess of it. He can stop your breath with his smile, but my God, I have bought clams in the market with more brain than he has! Louis-Claud …’ A dreamy expression came over her face at the name of another fledgling. ‘Well, he had at least the wits not to get himself drafted, for all he was healthy and young … Augustin is clever. A lazy beast, and tricky … He’s still at the Front, though.’

  Her green eyes narrowed, as if there were something about her fledgling Augustin that displeased her. Asher knew that at the best of times, the Paris nest was an undisciplined snake pit, filled with faction and intrigue. ‘Where do you stay, my sweet Professor?’

  ‘Hotel St-Seurin, in the Rue St-Martin.’ He knew she’d follow him if he refused to tell her anything.

  ‘Brr! What a ghastly part of town! Come here.’ With abrupt ebullience, she released Asher’s hand, caught his face between her palms, and kissed him – hard – on the mouth. He felt a rush of desire for her, the mad impulse to return the kiss, to bear her down on the Turkish rug before the fire. For over a year he had neither seen nor touched a woman and the need, for a dizzying moment, was unbearable.

  But completely aside from his love for Lydia – and his knowledge that this woman’s flesh was only warm because she had killed earlier in the evening – he knew where that would end.

  So he drew back, shivering a little – aware that she could hear the pounding of his heart, and was amused by it – and said, somewhat unsteadily, ‘Tomorrow night, then.’

  He started to ask her, And will this beautiful Serge, this handsome Louis-Claud, be here as well?

  But with a sensation like waking up, he saw that she was gone.

  He let himself out.

  FIVE

  In her bed on the City of Gold Wednesday night, Lydia got no sleep.

  If Don Simon cried out in his prison in dreams of agony, she lay awake, oblivious and impervious, shaking as if with fever whenever she closed her eyes.

  In her mind she saw the red head on the pillow of that pretty two-room suite that Aunt Louise had taken – in secret, gleeful at scoring over Aunt Lavinnia – as a nursery, where cold-faced, efficient Mrs Frush sat waiting for Lydia to depart (‘’Tis past time for a child to be abed, M’am …’).

  On her fingers she felt again the warm clasp of her daughter’s small hand, and saw the joyous sparkle in Miranda’s eyes. ‘I’m glad Aunt Louise came and got me, Mummy. I’m glad she told me I could come with you after all.’ She hugged Mrs Marigold to the stiff folds of her brand-new nightgown. By Miranda’s account, Aunt Louise had ‘taken her for a walk’ from Peasehall Manor Tuesday evening, leaving a letter for Lavinnia – who had been at a Soldiers’ Aid Society until late – explaining that Lydia had sanctioned this last-minute change of plan. (And I’ll lay any odds she looked up the times of the Aid Society meeting in advance.)

  On the way back to London, Aunt Louise had purchased everything the little girl had needed for her ‘adventure’ (including, apparently, Mrs Frush, whom Miranda had never met before in her life, and a downtrodden little nursery maid named Prebble). Mrs Marigold was the only thing Miranda had had with her, when they’d left the manor for their ‘walk’.

  Aunt Lavinnia would be spitting blood. Lydia was well aware that this had been the true object of Aunt Louise’s virtual kidnapping of their mutual grand-niece. To prove that she, not Lavinnia, was the better mother, or would have been, had Louise’s marriage to Lord Mountjoy not been childless. (For which the souls of her unborn children, Jamie had once said, offer up thanks every day.)

  Dining at the captain’s table, Lydia had barely been able to touch her sôle Colbert and suprême de volaille, or speak to her table-mates, aware though she was that she should have been making inroads of friendship to the sinister Princess Gromyko. All she had been able to think about had been the newspaper photographs she had seen of the bodies of the children recovered from the water after the Germans had sunk the passenger liner Lusitania; the lists of names of the dead from the torpedoed Sussex; the casualties from the California and the Britannic. She had learned as a girl – and as a young lady in her London ‘season’ – how to keep her countenance and appear to be listening, no matter what she felt inside. But anger had turned her nearly sick.

  Aunt Louise, of course, hadn’t even noticed. ‘It’s an absolute disgrace!’ she had proclaimed to the table at large. ‘You wouldn’t see the British Army go over to the side of the rioters – not that there has ever been a major riot in London. And as for this talk about calls for abdication—!’

  ‘Only what you could expect from Russkies,’ had responded Spenser Cochran, his dark eyes sharp in a seamed, wolfish face. A slim-built, medium-sized man, he had a voice like chains being dragged over broken flint and as far as Lydia was able to tell, ethics to match. He had demanded more speed from the ship (‘With what I’m paying I deserve to get to my business in New York on time!’) despite warnings of submarines (‘All cowardly nonsense!’) and warned Captain Winstanley about anarchists, strikers, and socialists sneaking aboard the ship and corrupting the crew. (‘Hipray – that’s my lawyer – will be glad to check the credentials of your stewards and engineers, and if there’s any trouble my boys can give a hand rounding up the ringers. We’ll turn ’em over to the authorities the minute we reach the States … No, no trouble, glad to do it …’)

  Now he started, as if (Lydia suspected) his diamond-embellished wife had perhaps kicked him under the table, and he made a jerky little bow in the direction of the Princess Gromyko. ‘Present company excepted, M’am.’

  ‘I have heard tell,’ put in Mrs Cochran, in the treacle drawl of the American South, ‘that the peasants in your country, Princess, are as bad as the niggers in mine. Though –’ she uttered a tinkling laugh – ‘it’s actually hard to picture anybody that stupid …’

  One of the black waiters removed her soup-plate impassively and set in its place a dish of oysters. Seeing the glance the man traded with another waiter – also of African descent – Lydia recalled things she had learned from the men she’d cared for at the Front, and earnestly hoped that for the remainder of the voyage the staff would be careful to spit only in the appropriate person’s food.

  ‘I can only assume,’ returned the princess in her sweet contralto, ‘that Madame has not travelled in rural Russia.’ Her English bore a trace of a French accent – in Russia, the upper classes used Russian only to address servants.

  ‘Or in rural Yorkshire, for that matter.’ Aunt Louise polished off her salmon mousseline in two bites. ‘I�
�ve encountered tenants on my late husband’s lands who will walk half a mile through the fields rather than pass a raven on a stump. You’d think such things would be corrected in schools! What we pay rates for I don’t know – and half of them don’t attend even if there are schools!’

  ‘Exactly, M’am!’ Cochran jabbed his asparagus fork in her direction – he, like his physician Dr Barvell on the opposite side of the table, was a vegetarian. Then he hastily corrected the gesture, as if table manners were a branch of learning only lately mastered.

  ‘And what the – what the dickens do miners and mill-girls need book-learning for anyway? Or farmers either? Only stirs ’em up. Every strike at my mills, every walk-out or lock-out at any of my refineries, you trace it back and you find some know-it-all ditch-digger that somebody taught to read, just enough to make him think he’s got all the answers—’

  The regal Mrs Tilcott had waded into the conversation at that point with corroborative tales from her late husband’s experience with his mills, railroads, mines and refineries, while her son – large, meek, and exquisitely dressed at her side – downed a dozen oysters and asked the waiters to bring him another serving of sole. He also made several somewhat fulsome attempts to engage Lydia’s attention, until the princess, with a sapient glance at Lydia’s pallor and distraction, had stepped in with tactful answers to his chat.

  Lydia was grateful. On closer view, (though hazy with myopia), Her Illustrious Highness did not appear in the least sinister, being a tiny, dainty woman in her mid-forties wearing almost as many diamonds (though in far better taste) as Mrs Cochran.

  The only conversation that might have interested Lydia at all had been the snatches that had drifted across the white-and-crystal fairyland of the table from the two medical men. ‘But can one transform the personality with such injections?’ and, ‘Nevertheless, six months of a rest cure – without access to the written word, to writing implements, to any form of over-stimulating conversation – will transform even the most stubborn cases of female hysteria …’