Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘His father made a fortune selling boots to the Federals during their Civil War – cardboard, of course, and fell apart the first time they got wet – and ran things like gunpowder and medicines, of quality similar to the boots, to the Confederates. He invested the proceeds in railroads and mines, so Cochran Junior came into a fair packet when the old boy died and went to Hell. Junior re-invested in so many things – meat-packing, oil wells, banks – that there are few wealthier men in America now, and according to all I’ve heard, few stingier. He makes Ebenezer Scrooge look like Diamond Jim Brady: saves the buttons off his discarded shirts and charges his house guests for using the telephone. That’s to say nothing of demanding kickbacks from his suppliers and making deals with land companies in the Midwest to raise shipping prices on smaller farms and push them out of business … after which he buys up their land, of course.’

  The old man’s mouth set briefly with disapproval, but fifty years of secret service to Queen and Country had inured him to the vagaries of the powerful. He had been the chief clerk of the Paris section when Asher had first entered the service in the eighties, and had retired, Asher recalled, in 1905, at the age of seventy, and retreated to the Dorset coast to raise strawberries. Like many men, Asher included, he had been recalled to the colors with the outbreak of war.

  ‘Even among American industrialists, his reputation is smelly,’ Britten went on. ‘He was investigated in 1904 over the deaths of five strikers at one of his factories, and again two years later, but nothing was ever proved. The “private detectives” who supposedly did the actual killing – three men were beaten to death and two others simply disappeared – were released on the grounds of self-defense. Cochran still travels with a small guard of detectives, I understand.’

  He had frowned again, and sipped his tea. His sleeves, Asher had noted, were powdered with cat fur; at least four pairs of reflective eyes gleamed in the shadows of the stacked boxes of files with which the cubicle was choked.

  ‘After that, because of the newspaper stories, he appointed his nephew – whom he’d sent to Yale Law School – to act as press secretary. At Nephew Oliver’s advice he has begun making substantial – and very public – contributions to various charities, and has hired an English “consultant” – formerly the Duke of Avon’s butler, I understand – to instruct him in the social graces. Oliver Cochran has also worked with the press to suppress news of some of his uncle’s odder habits—’

  ‘Like superstitiousness?’ Asher had inquired, and Britten’s sparse brows had lifted.

  ‘Good Lord, yes. Like a savage in the jungle. You wouldn’t think a man that crafty in business could be that credulous, but Cochran has personally kept two New York mediums in business for years, as well as a shady “researcher” in Paris who’s supposedly able to extract information from the brains of the dead, and enable people to live forever, among other things. His wife’s just as bad, and a good deal more gullible.’

  ‘What was he doing in Paris?’

  ‘Supposedly, winding up the affairs of one Titus Armistead, an industrial rival of his who died in rather suspicious circumstances in—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Asher softly. ‘Yes, I know who Titus Armistead was.’

  And he wondered whether it was from Armistead that Cochran had conceived this scheme of trapping and using a vampire in the interests of ‘private industry’, or vice-versa? The plan had cost Armistead his life – and, if one believed the Church, and the old tales, and the Book of the Kindred of Darkness, his soul – and had ultimately failed. Probably Armistead’s daughter had been selling up her father’s antique books on the subject of the Undead.

  Interesting that Cochran would have crossed the Atlantic in the face of U-boat threats, to acquire them – if acquire them he had.

  What else had he sought to acquire?

  Whoever it is, Lydia had written, who has found a way of coercing the obedience of vampires …

  I will kill him, she had promised.

  I have packed all the appropriate impedimenta …

  He smiled a little now, as the brown fields of the French countryside fleeted by, dusted with the palest ghost of spring’s new grass in the long slant of the evening sun. But his smile was grieved, for he knew how much that beautiful, cool-hearted, scholarly girl loved the vampire.

  She would do it, he thought. But it would forever darken her heart … and his own.

  Cochran. He closed his eyes. There had been no train from Paris to Brest until late afternoon, but his military credentials had gotten him a car and a driver within an hour of his conversation with Britten. He had spent five hard, jolting hours on the roads of Brittany, passing lorries, convoys, and brown lines of exhausted men. The first thing he’d ascertained on his arrival at the British military headquarters had been, Was any liner sunk in the North Atlantic this morning?

  None so far.

  He still didn’t know whether the wireless message he’d flung out into the ether had reached the City of Gold or not.

  If it had, this man Cochran – this man whose reputation for ruthless violence was ‘smelly’ even by the standards of such men as John D. Rockefeller and Henry Frick – would at least not know that Lady Mountjoy’s young relative was asking questions about him. What Britten had told him about the man’s methods and employees made Asher shiver, even if he hadn’t already succeeded in breaking Don Simon’s will to his commands. And if he could command Don Simon Ysidro’s obedience, would that leverage – whatever it was – be sufficient to turn the vampire against Lydia?

  ‘Shove up, y’fookin bampot,’ snarled a voice across from him, and there was a general pushing on the opposite bench, like steers in a byre. A smell of wet wool and stale tobacco.

  ‘Bloody numpty …’

  ‘Awa’ an’ boil yer heid, ye stupid rocket …’

  They settled down. The train jostled around a long curve. Flashed past a village, women working in a field, harrowing the earth with rakes. All the horses had gone to the Front. To die beside the men.

  I need to know more.

  Like the men bound for the war once more, Asher cringed inside, knowing there was only one place to get the information he needed.

  EIGHT

  If Simon has managed to escape, he’ll be hiding.

  Back in her stateroom, Lydia studied the deck plans of the City of Gold. The American Line had thoughtfully provided these – printed on high-quality stock with lavish photogravures of the First Class amenities – for its First Class passengers. The engine rooms on G Deck, she reflected, though permanently sheltered from sunlight, would be subject to the constant comings and goings of the crew. The baggage and cargo holds, also on G Deck or down on the Orlop Deck (why Orlop? she wondered) would be largely unvisited through the six days of the voyage: luggage ‘Not Wanted on Voyage’. Safer even, she thought, than the coal bunkers, which would presumably be tapped for fuel at some point – is there a way to get at the schedule for their use? In any case, not anyplace a vampire would wish to fall asleep, to say nothing of the fact that she couldn’t imagine the fastidious Don Simon, sane or otherwise, sleeping in coal dust.

  She looked at her watch (three hours until I have to dress for dinner …) and transferred the picklocks she usually carried from the pouch buttoned onto the lower edge of her corset, into her skirt pocket.

  How long would it take for pain like that to turn his mind?

  Vampires toughened as they aged, and Simon was one of the oldest in Europe. Still …

  How many kills would he make before he either healed enough to come to his senses, or is caught?

  She opened the slick, black-enameled doors of the built-in wardrobe and brought forth her portmanteau. As she did so, Captain Palfrey’s list of passengers caught her eye and she wondered, what if Simon hasn’t escaped? Is this – whatever this hold is that Mr Cochran has on him – is it sufficient to let him out, then bring him back again, like a dog on a leash?

  The lined, foxy face of the American million
aire returned to her, the dark sharp eyes that were intelligent, but fanatical and cold. Whatever else was going on, she couldn’t imagine him being foolish enough to permit his prisoner to kill in a group of people whose comings and goings were all accounted for.

  And yet, she thought, what if Simon is so badly torn apart by the circumstances of his imprisonment – by being locked in a coffin, presumably lined with enough silver to keep him helpless – that he must have a kill, or die? In such a case they’d certainly pick on a Third Class passenger to bring to him for a victim.

  At various points during dinner last night, she’d heard both Cochran and Tilcott refer to the population of E Deck and below as ‘animals’, incapable of reasoned thought – or of any thought at all – and as ‘popish imbeciles’. Clearly, contempt for believers in faiths other than one’s own were not the exclusive province of Slavic Orthodox or Polish Catholics.

  Her hands shook a little as she unwrapped the things she’d brought – three stakes whittled of hawthorn, packets of dried garlic blossom and Christmas rose, a set of surgical knives and a bullseye paraffin lantern (matches! Don’t forget matches … Oh, and a hammer …).

  But if Cochran sent his detectives to abduct some poor girl from Third Class for Don Simon to kill, why dump her body where it would be found? If they had to carry her down from B Deck in the dead of night anyway, why not drop her overboard, as Dr Liggatt said?

  It doesn’t make sense.

  She tucked her implements into a satchel – the hammer made it dreadfully heavy – and added a small box containing a hypodermic syringe and four ampoules of silver nitrate. Though the blood in a vampire’s veins did not circulate, Lydia knew that an injection of pure silver nitrate would spread rapidly through vampire tissue, from cell to cell of the flesh which had been altered, cell by cell, by the ‘corruption’ (possibly a virus?) that was the physical component of the vampire condition.

  Oh, Simon, I’m sorry.

  As she fastened extra chains of silver around her throat and wrists, she wondered if he’d be glad to finally die.

  Half-past four. She’d promised Miranda a walk along the First Class Promenade before dinner, which would be served at eight (Mrs Frush had frowned at this departure from her schedule). If the ship is moving west, what time will darkness actually fall?

  If Don Simon had escaped, and was lying concealed in some corner of the cargo hold – and if he had gone mad – she would much rather encounter him while he was still unwakeably asleep.

  At least, she reflected, Princess Natalia was too busy arranging a séance for that evening to insist upon accompanying her on a vampire hunt.

  ‘Going to bring in that Madame Izora of hers,’ muttered Ellen, when Lydia emerged from her room. The maid had kept watch against an incursion from Aunt Louise (‘She’s been looking for you all day, Miss – M’am …’), and had spent an hour earlier, reading to Miranda in the suite booked as the little girl’s nursery. ‘Getting in touch with the spirits, that heathen girl of hers calls it. What kind of spirits would be all the way out here in the middle of the ocean, I ask you, Miss? Naught but a lot of drowned sailors, and who’d want to talk to them? That’s if this Madame Izora isn’t a complete fake, which I’ll go bail she is.’ She preceded her mistress across the parlor to the door that opened onto the suite’s private promenade, opened it and looked out.

  But the private promenade on this side of the ship served Suites A and C, and at a guess, Aunt Louise was on the other side of the vessel, ‘kissing up’ (as Lydia’s erstwhile medical colleagues at the clearing station would have said), to either Mrs Cochran or Mrs Tilcott (who held one another in active contempt). A tall, strongly-built woman, still pretty in her late forties with masses of springy black curls pinned tight under her starched cap, Ellen had been a nursery-maid at Willoughby Close when Lydia was a child, and guarded her unquestioningly.

  ‘That hair of hers is fake, anyway,’ the maid went on. ‘The half of it bought in Waterloo Road and the other half dyed like a Leicester Square hussy. I daresay that’s Her Highness’ note to you there on the desk, asking you to be part of it. Looks like it’s all clear, Miss. Before you go, what should I lay out for you for dinner?’

  ‘I think the plum Doucet Soeurs.’ For all her willingness to work elbow-deep in trench mud or traipse through coal bunkers in search of vampires, Lydia had made sure she’d brought an adequate wardrobe aboard. ‘The mint-green shoes and headband – will you much mind switching out the aigrette on the headband? And the amethysts. You’re a darling …’

  ‘You watch out now, Miss.’

  She’d said that, Lydia recalled, smiling, when Lydia had gone downstairs to get into the carriage for her Court presentation – and in precisely the same tone of voice. You watch out now, Miss …

  Decks E and F were a maze of crew quarters and Third Class ‘cabins’ – actually dormitories of six to ten bunks – smelling of oil, cigarette smoke, and clothing too seldom washed. Discreet ‘lockers’ were tucked under stairways and in corners, for cleaning supplies and tools. Floor and walls vibrated with the beat of the City of Gold’s engines, mingled with the constant low echoes of talk, hard to localize in that anonymous labyrinth of steel: men arguing in five different languages, the shriller tones of women. Sometimes someone shouting, or children shrieking with laughter in play.

  Dark Greeks pushed past her, and fair Slovenes. A sandy-haired Belgian mother pulled her children away from ‘dirty Mahometan’ Bosnians. In her shabby coat, nondescript skirt, and spectacles, nobody gave Lydia a glance. Crew members jostled her without an apology, except for a nod sometimes, her surest gauge that she was, in fact, being mistaken for somebody who belonged down there. (And if anybody catches me with picklocks in my pockets I’ll almost certainly end up in the brig with poor Valentyn Marek.)

  The door into First Class Baggage was just down the corridor from the ship’s post office. Lydia had to wait for a moment when no one was in the corridor before trying it. It was locked (a Chubb pin-tumbler) but of the sort (thank goodness!) whose latch could simply be forced with a slip of thin, stiff metal – a much quicker method which meant, Lydia knew, that the lock would catch again if the door were closed. With another quick glance up and down the corridor, Lydia slipped through into the hold, checked briefly that the inside handle would open the door without the necessity of picking the lock, then shut herself in.

  And just as she was telling herself, you idiot, you should have gotten your lantern out of the satchel before you shut the door … she thought she saw the flicker of light, somewhere deep in the hold before her.

  With the vibration of the engines, she wouldn’t have heard the soft scrape of a lantern-slide closing. But she smelled – or thought she smelled – the faint whiff of hot metal and paraffin.

  Someone else is here.

  Cochran. Her breath caught in her throat.

  Or some of his men. Looking for Simon?

  She stood without making a sound. Recalled the casual way he’d spoken at dinner of ‘getting rid of’ the men who’d tried to organize the mine workers to strike for higher wages or safety equipment in the mines. ‘They’re like cockroaches,’ he’d fumed. ‘For every one of ‘em you squash, there’s fifty hiding …’

  And when Dr Yakunin had responded that in many cases it was poverty which had made such men as they are, Cochran had lashed back, ‘Nonsense! Your honest poor don’t go around telling a man how to spend his own money! Not in America, they don’t!’

  The hatred in his voice was up to anything she’d heard at the Front in reference to the Germans. If anything, it was more personal, more venomous. ‘Who do they think they are? A real American – not one of these Bohunk dagos – if he don’t like working in a mine, let him go elsewhere – if anybody’ll have him.’ In his loudly professed view, Eyeties, Krauts, and Kikes deserved what they got.

  And presumably – thought Lydia, standing in the darkness convinced the unseen enemy could hear the pounding of her heart – a snooping wo
man might ‘deserve it’ as well.

  She opened the door, stepped very briefly into the aperture so that her shadow would block the dim light of the corridor, then ducked back inside and closed the door again.

  After a long moment of silence, a single light appeared again, deep within the hold.

  And if Simon hasn’t escaped, are those ‘detectives’ – ‘thugs’ would be a better word – out hunting some other dispensable prey to keep him in good health? Does Cochran really think nobody’s going to notice? Or does he simply think no one will care?

  Grateful that the engine noise covered any chance sound she might have made, Lydia began to move – with infinite caution – in the direction of the light. The hold was filled with what felt like grilled racks or cages to the touch of her slow-groping hand. Numbered, undoubtedly, so that any piece of any First Class passenger’s luggage could be located instantly, once they reached New York. One didn’t pay eight hundred pounds to wait in a shed for one’s possessions.

  Though the air was still and stuffy, she had a sense around her of enormous space. According to the deck plans, here was another hold below this one, for mail sacks, Second Class baggage (the lowly Third Class passengers presumably didn’t have anything besides carpet bags and satchels), and large cargo.

  And I’ll feel a terrible idiot if all I uncover is some poor burglar trying to pick the locks on Mr Tilcott’s steamer trunk …

  The light in front of her was clearer now. Moving among the racks of baggage, held close to the floor. Stepping slowly, Lydia lost sight of it, groped her way around another rack, saw it again, clear and quite near to her. A man bending over it, studying the floor … moving on …

  Looking for what?

  He swiveled on his heels, snatched the lamp-slide off and swung the beam on her. She saw him move for one instant as if he’d have darted into the maze of racks, then stopped as he got a better look at her.

  As he identified her, she could see him thinking, Not a crew member. Not a threat.