Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  And at her elbow, Mrs Cochran had regaled the princess with tales of how ‘freedom has absolutely ruined the darkies!’

  Mr Tilcott had pressed Lydia to accompany him to dancing in the First Class lounge after dinner – the City of Gold had its own orchestra – but she had excused herself. It had been a long day.

  I’ll do better tomorrow evening. Lydia turned over in her bed for the hundredth time. The cabin was stuffy, and seemed oddly silent after the noises of the clearing station and the constant thunder of the guns. Nevertheless, she found the movement of the ship soothing rather than otherwise. The princess’s suite is just next door …

  What else could be in a box that large?

  Is the room secured? the Princess had asked. Not the smallest shred of light can penetrate …

  Presumably, the box was stored in one of the ‘servant’s rooms’ on the inside of the Promenade Suite, the equivalent of those which housed Ellen, Louise’s maid Malkin, and the faithful butler Mortling. Did that mean that the princess’s maids – Palfrey’s list had noted two of them, in addition to her secretary Mademoiselle Ossolinska – had quarters down on C Deck like Aunt Louise’s companion Mrs Flasket? And how was she to get around the two footmen?

  She pushed aside an assortment of books and magazines to rearrange her pillows.

  What if I’m wrong? What if Don Simon isn’t on the ship after all? Have I – has Aunt Louise! – put Miranda in danger for an illusion?

  No, she thought, with a queer, utter certainty. He’s here. I know he’s here.

  Vampires were supposed to lose all their powers on running water – hadn’t Dracula had to ship himself like a box of potatoes to England in that silly book? But Don Simon, who ought to know, had confirmed this to her, though the business about having to sleep in one’s native earth, he had said, was nonsense. In his travels he’d always required a living helper.

  Could he even contact me – touch my dreams – once aboard?

  Then her mind slipped back to anger at Aunt Louise – whom she knew she couldn’t quarrel with, not if she was to continue sharing a suite with the formidable dowager – and the newspaper pictures from the Lusitania victims. All the way up here on B Deck, she had little sense of the sea, save a gentle rocking (apparently enough to incapacitate the Princess Gromyko’s maid Evgenia, to judge by the conversation at dinner).

  But she was aware of the Atlantic, scrimmed with spindrift and bone-breakingly cold, eighty feet below her.

  Waiting.

  She didn’t know if she slept or not. Her one thought, when the first thin lines of gray threaded the edges of the curtain over her room’s porthole, was that the thing she didn’t want that morning was to encounter Aunt Louise at breakfast. Rising silently, she slipped into the dressing room, gathered clothes by the soft glow of the night-light, and moved silently into the bathroom – Aunt Louise had sharp hearing, even sound asleep. Despite her aunt’s horrified insistence that no lady – even one taking x-ray photographs and assisting surgeons in the midst of German shelling on the Front – was properly dressed without a corset, Lydia had sneaked a number of brassieres into her luggage. Thus she was able to dress herself speedily and discreetly, and to make her way along the promenade in the gray cold of morning, salt spray stinging her cheeks.

  The First Class dining room was open, but, to judge by the empty tables, the gleaming ranks of silver warming-trays and chafing-dishes on the sideboards, only just. One of the few other passengers in the room was, a little to Lydia’s surprise, the Princess Gromyko, clothed in an elegant walking suit of claret-colored velvet (beautifully corseted beneath the exquisite lines of that Paquin jacket – no brassiere nonsense for her!) and another extremely Parisian hat. The two French bulldogs lay politely at her feet, diamonds glittering on their collars in the bright electric radiance of the dining-room lamps. Quickly pocketing her glasses, Lydia made her way among the tables. After all, it’s the Captain’s Table and I am entitled to sit there …

  Nevertheless she asked, in her fluent French, ‘Do you mind if I join you, your Illustrious Highness? I meant to tell you last night how much I love your dogs, but I’m afraid I was a little indisposed and not at my best.’

  ‘Darling!’ The princess beamed upon her warmly, and signed for one of the stewards – already on his way from the buffet – to pour Lydia coffee from the Crown Derby pot already upon the table. ‘Please forgive me for the way I broke into Mr Tilcott’s remarks to you, but you looked so wretched my heart positively bled for you. And then everyone was going on and on about the poor, and it would look so bad if one drowned one’s table companions in the soup, n’est-ce pas? Much as one might wish to do so. I trust you are recovered?’

  ‘I am, thank you. So silly.’ Lydia managed a trusting smile. She judged the diminutive princess to be just the right age to cast as a protective older sister to her own confiding youth. ‘I’ve crossed the Channel half a dozen times and sailed all the way to China five years ago, and I’ve never been seasick before.’

  ‘Alors.’ The princess made an airy gesture. ‘It is as I suspected: the company, and not mal de mer. The ghastly Lady Mountjoy is, I believe the captain said, your aunt? And you are Madame Asher?’

  ‘I am,’ said Lydia. ‘But I wish you would call me Lydia.’

  ‘And you must call me Natalia Nikolaievna. And this is Monsieur le Duc, and Madame la Duchesse – very much set up in their own conceit, as you see.’ She slipped the little dogs fragments of buttered toast. ‘And the beautiful little fairy I saw you with on the deck yesterday evening – your daughter, yes? In my country red hair is not fashionable – those peasants your aunt discoursed upon at such tiresome length even say that to be born with red hair is a sure sign that one is destined to become vurdalak … vampire. Myself, I find red hair enchanting.’

  Lydia made herself look disconcerted. ‘What a shocking superstition!’ she exclaimed, and self-consciously touched the thick knot of cinnabar braid at the nape of her neck. ‘What won’t people believe? All that silliness—’

  The princess raised her manicured brows, and Lydia halted, as if uncertain.

  ‘It is silliness, isn’t it?’ she faltered. ‘I mean, like Aunt Louise’s tenant-farmers and their stories about ravens and magpies …?’

  ‘Ravens and magpies …’ The princess shook her head. ‘Even of them, I have heard tales that maybe cannot be dismissed. But the vampir – the vurdalak –’ her lovely brows plunged into a frown – ‘I do not mean your beautiful daughter, please do not think I subscribe to that peasant stupidity. But as your Shakespeare says, There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, and it is best to be cautious.’

  ‘Cautious?’ Lydia made herself look puzzled – as indeed she was. Would a German spy with a vampire imprisoned in a secret cabinet, in a completely blacked-out cabin, go around bringing up the subject?

  ‘They scoff at it.’ The princess leaned closer to Lydia, her expression deadly earnest. A frost-rime of tiny diamonds glittered on the veil of her hat. ‘The captain, and that imbecile ship’s doctor, and the officers … Yet I believe what my maid Tania told me this morning to be true. There is a vampire on board this ship.’

  Lydia was so completely nonplussed that her face must have been expressionless. She only stared at the woman before her, and as if she took Lydia’s silence for disbelief, the princess went on, ‘It is true, Lydia my friend. Believe it. They try to hush it up – you will hear nothing of it, up here among the gratin.’ She laid her exquisite hands over Lydia’s, and sank her voice to a whisper. ‘It killed a young girl in Third Class last night.’

  SIX

  Too shocked to dissemble, Lydia whispered, ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know because it is true.’ The princess seemed not at all discomposed. ‘Tania, my maid – the one who is not seasick – heard it this morning, from the women in Third Class. She took the children candies, you understand, and bits of treats which she put into her pockets from the dinne
r they serve the maids and valets.’ She slipped another fragment of toast to Monsieur le Duc.

  ‘She is absolutely silly on the subject of children, Tania. There was diphtheria in her village, you understand, and her children died, three of them: Vanya, Tasha, and Marya. Every child, she says, could be one of them, re-born in its next life. She went down there this morning and everyone was speaking of it, of the vampir, and the girl who was killed.’

  Lydia shook her head, groping to fit this information into the dreams she had had, and the conversation she had overheard. ‘It’s … impossible …’

  Can Don Simon have escaped them?

  Simon wouldn’t do something so stupid as to kill in a closed area where every person is counted …

  Her hands trembled as she set down her coffee cup. The princess was regarding her, grave conviction in those luminous dark eyes.

  ‘Truly,’ she said. ‘Truly, Lydia – truly, it is not.’

  This woman can’t possibly be the one who kidnapped him.

  Then what in Heaven’s name has she got in that giant box?

  When Lydia didn’t reply – she still felt as if she were trying to sort a hand of cards with hypothermia of the extremities and recent head-trauma – the princess went on softly, ‘They exist.’ Her grip tightened on Lydia’s hands. ‘The vampir. The vurdalak. The upyr.’

  She paused, glancing at the waiter who refreshed their cups, then shot a quick look around them at the near-empty salon.

  ‘The dead that do not lie still in their graves. Walking corpses that prolong their own existence with the blood of the living. The ship’s first officer, the stewards, they asked a few questions, they took the girl’s lover and locked him up in the brig. The ship’s surgeon signed the papers saying the girl’s throat was cut, but it wasn’t. It was pierced. Two punctures, above the great vein. No blood was found at the scene, nor anywhere else.’

  She leaned closer. ‘You say, impossible, dearest Lydia. But your heart believes. Your heart knows. I see it in your eyes.’

  My heart knows that a vampire who has been injured – surely one who has been in torment for four days, as Simon has been! – can heal himself with a kill. Even the thought of it turned her sick.

  And the pain whose echo she had felt in her dreams may have driven him mad enough to do it.

  She drew a shaky breath. ‘Might one … Do you think it would be possible … to … to see her? This girl?’

  The noblewoman’s eyes seemed to darken as her brows knit, and Lydia went on, ‘I … I’m a physician, you know. And I ask …’

  What sort of reason is she likely to believe? Lydia felt a wave of vexation that she hadn’t read more novels. Would she recognize bits of Dracula?

  ‘The thing is, years ago, when … when I was still at school in Switzerland, my friend – a very dear friend – was … found dead, in just such circumstances.’ She can’t possibly check a story like that and she’s certainly not going to tell me I’m making things up. ‘Of course we girls weren’t told anything, but I … I sneaked into the room where her body lay. And I saw …’

  She flinched in a fashion which she hoped was realistic, and pressed her hand for a moment to her mouth.

  ‘I didn’t know what to think …’ She threw an uncertain stammer into her voice. ‘Later, when the school doctor and the headmistresses and everybody kept saying Mollie had fallen and hit her head and wasn’t it a terrible shame, I almost convinced myself that they were right. That I’d only dreamed what I saw.’

  Sympathy and vindication blazed in her companion’s eyes. Lydia thought, And if you believe that, I bet that cabinet of yours has something to do with holding séances.

  Either that, or it’s full of the Russian crown jewels.

  She lowered her voice like the heroine of a penny dreadful. ‘But I know it wasn’t.’ (And I have to remember that my deceased schoolmate’s name was Mollie the next time I tell this story.)

  ‘No.’ The princess’s hand crushed tightly on Lydia’s fingers. ‘No. They tried to tell me the same thing – my parents, and the priest on our estate. And later, all the mistresses at my school. The world of shadows is not invisible, dearest Lydia. It is the eyes of its deniers that are sealed shut.’

  ‘As I said, I’m a physician,’ Lydia continued. ‘Do you think that would suffice, for me to get a look at this poor girl’s body? I don’t suppose they’d let me speak to this young man – what’s his name?’

  ‘Valentyn. Valentyn Marek.’

  ‘Did the girl have parents on board?’

  ‘We’ll ask Tania.’ The princess stood up briskly. ‘She can go down there with us, to Third Class. She cannot fix hair like my dear Evgenia can, but at least she isn’t laid up with mal de mer! And the friends she has made in Third Class will show us, also, where the body was found. Monsieur, Madame …’ She snapped her fingers imperatively for the dogs. ‘Allonz-y!’

  Natalia Nikolaievna Gromyko saw no reason why she should change out of her exquisite walking suit and velvet chapeau to visit Third Class, but conceded to Lydia’s argument – if you look too fine they’ll shut their mouths and not say a thing – when she was backed up by both the maidservant Tania and the stout blonde secretary, Mademoiselle Ossolinska. During the protracted changing process in Her Illustrious Highness’s suite (again Lydia thanked her earlier trip to Russia for the knowledge that a garden-variety Russian princess like Madame Gromyko was Your Illustrious Highness, as opposed to an Imperial-bloodline princess, who would have been Your Serene Highness), Lydia gathered that the princess’s entourage included a spiritual advisor as well, housed separately in the portion of Deck C reserved for the lower tier of First Class. The cabinet, it transpired, was hers.

  ‘Madame Izora is marvelous,’ the princess assured Lydia, as Tania buttoned her into one of Marie Ossolinska’s frocks and deftly pinned back the considerable slack out of sight. ‘Literally so, a marvel upon the earth! One of the ancient souls. I insisted she accompany me to Paris last year, when things became so impossible in Petrograd. Tonight we shall surely form a circle, and perhaps one of those who dwell Beyond can tell us of this thing, this evil that stalks the ship …’

  ‘It was generous of you to bring her,’ said Lydia, and Her Highness looked startled that the matter needed comment.

  ‘But of course! How not? Even Paris has become gray and grim, since the start of the fighting. How can one attune oneself with the ineffable, in an atmosphere of prying and politics and shocking prices? Now that these dreary republicans are destroying the last of what was spiritual and good in Russia, I daresay many of us – the Obolenskys, the Dologorukys, the Golitsyns, everyone of decent birth – will be going to Switzerland or England or to the United States. Or to Paris when things look better and it is possible to buy decent wine there again. None of those stupid democrats in Moscow can possibly understand or believe the spirits that come to Izora when she sits in her spirit cabinet—’

  I knew it!

  ‘—and hears the voices from Beyond. I would ask her to come with us now—’

  Lydia hastily summoned every argument she could think of to discourage this addition to the investigation …

  ‘—only she will be sleeping at this hour.’

  Oh, good …

  Lydia’s own garb of shirtwaist and skirt, thick nondescript coat and shapeless hat that she’d worn the night before last (was it only the night before last?) to watch the luggage being loaded, was sufficiently anonymous so as not to intimidate (or arouse resentment in) anyone below-decks. Thus when the four women – Princess Natalia, Lydia, Tania, and Mademoiselle Ossolinska, who tightened her mouth at the mention of vampires but spoke fluent Slovene – descended the steps to the ‘well’ of the ship, they were received without hesitation by the troubled and angry crowd in the Third Class dining salon.

  This big, stuffy, low-ceilinged hall was situated on F deck, close enough to the engines to be shaken with their constant thrumming, and to smell of coal smoke and oil. It seemed, as we
ll, to double as a ‘day room’ for the Third Class passengers outside of dinner hours: newspapers in various Central European languages littered the tables nearest the door, clearly brought by the passengers. Urns stood on a buffet, but the coffee and hot water provided by the American Line to its low-paying clients had long ago run out and nobody had collected the soiled cups. In the open spaces among the tables the passengers were clumped in six or seven groups according – as far as Lydia could tell – to nationalities, but people shouted translations from one group to another, German and Slovene seeming to predominate (if that is Slovene they’re speaking …).

  When they entered the room Tania looked over the heads of the crowd – the maid was taller than many of the men – and thrust her way swiftly through to a thin, sunburned woman in the worn white linen that seemed almost a uniform among the Central European farmers, calling out, ‘Pani Marek!’ The woman cried out, and clasped the Russian maid in an embrace, pouring out a flood of words that Lydia didn’t understand and quite possibly Tania didn’t, either.

  A heavy-shouldered old man with a white mustache the size of a small sheep came up beside them, put his hand on ‘Pani Marek’s’ shoulder and spoke angrily, first to Tania and then to Ossolinska, who translated.

  ‘M’sieu Marek says that they have put the fiancée of his grandson into one of the ship’s refrigerators, as if she were but a piece of meat, and will permit no one to view her. Pavlina was her name, Madame, Pavlina Jancu—’

  ‘They are Poles,’ explained Tania to Lydia, in halting French. ‘East of Bohemia. Village torn to pieces by fighting, and all lands around. Pavlina from next village, betrothed—’

  She paused, as Pani Marek poured forth a sobbing torrent of expostulation.

  Ossolinska said, ‘Madame Marek says of course Valentyn was jealous, for what real man is not? And of course Pavlina attracted the attention of men here on the ship, for she was beautiful, and what beautiful girl does not like to flirt a little? And everyone loved her. But Valentyn would never have raised his hand against her.’