Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  He paused by the foot of the stair, looking around him – a narrow corridor crossed at that point leading to Third Class cabins on either side – and, diffidently, he approached Heller and Lydia. ‘I beg pardon, good sir, good madame …’ He bowed with the obsequiousness of one who all his life, thought Lydia, had been thrashed, and worse, for being disrespectful to his Christian betters. On either side of a monumental beak of nose, his dark eyes were wise and bright behind the gold pince-nez. ‘But did you see two children run past here? A little lad, a little girl …’

  Lydia glanced at the belt and said nothing. Heller replied, ‘They went up the stair.’

  ‘Ach,’ grumbled the old man, climbing laboriously. ‘Little monkeys.’

  To Lydia, after he had gone, Heller said, ‘Goldhirsch makes great threats, and it is true that he’s merciless to those who owe him money. Yet these two days I have never seen him strike his grandchildren. Nor are they afraid of him, as children are with those who beat them. The other children throw things at Yakov – and at his grandfather – because they are Jews.’ His mouth twisted, as at the sour taste of lemon. ‘Myself, I think it is well, that children are kept a little closer now, as this killer seems to have a taste for the young and the helpless.’

  Lydia thought of Miranda, safely watched over by the grim-faced Mrs Frush, by the cowed little nursery-maid Prebble, and by the faithful Ellen.

  She shivered, and said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Heller shook his head. Below-decks the air was close and frowsty, but chill draughts flowed down the gangway from above, where rain had fallen, on and off, all morning. Like the distant tinkle of windchimes, she heard the voices of the children from the deck above.

  ‘You are of a different world, Frau Doktor,’ Heller said. ‘Yes, you’ve been to the Front. You’ve seen men die. But you’ve not lived in these little villages, these little towns, where every pfennig and every mouthful of bread must be counted. Where you cannot even give the milk you take from your own cow, and the eggs from your own chickens, to your children, because such things must be sold that you may pay the rent on your cottage, while your children exist on water and bread. I can tell you that being shot at every day is not so bad as that.’

  Lydia recalled some of the letters she’d read to the men in the moribund ward, too weak to hold up the ill-spelled notes sent by mothers and wives, or blinded by gas or shrapnel. Matter-of-fact accounts of the endless, grinding shifts to afford a few scraps of bacon, or to come up with the interest on what they owed the local money-lender, or the weekly rent due the owner of the rooms they shared with another family. Even at her worst, sharing an attic with two other young women at Oxford, tucking newspapers inside her shirtwaist for extra warmth and having to make the nightly decision between supper and heating-fuel, Lydia had known she had hope. That she would eventually become a doctor one day, and be out of all that.

  Quietly, she asked, ‘That’s what you’re fighting to save them from, isn’t it? That world. That life.’

  ‘It is, gnä’ Frau. For that, too, is a form of death. Not only in Saxony or Germany, but everywhere there are rich people who own mines and factories, and poor people who accept a few pfennigs a day because they have no other choice. Cochran knows this,’ he finished with a sigh. ‘It is why he seeks to keep me out of the United States. Since the crimes, as they call them, which I have committed were in Germany, they may have trouble at that. And my Danish papers are quite good.’

  ‘Do you speak Danish?’ asked Lydia, amused.

  ‘Som en infødt.’ Heller bowed with a flourish. ‘Probably better than whoever the authorities will produce to question me in it. My captain – in my brief career in the Kaiserliche Marine – was a Schleswiger; half the crew of our U-boat spoke Danish better than they spoke German. I will probably “jump ship”, as they say, rather than present my papers to the authorities … if this Cochran doesn’t come up with some means of getting rid of me before we land.’

  As she climbed the stairway to First Class to meet Captain Palfrey for luncheon, Lydia shivered again, guessing what that means might be.

  After luncheon, rather to Lydia’s surprise, she found herself being recruited as a vampire hunter by Mr Cochran himself.

  When she’d finally returned to her stateroom the night before – and she had not come up from Third Class until nearly two thirty in the morning – she had lain awake for nearly an hour, wondering what she was going to tell Palfrey: about Don Simon, about Spenser Cochran, about the killings deep in the hold of the ship. He would almost certainly not believe her if she told him the truth: that Don Simon Ysidro, his ‘Colonel Simon’, was in fact a vampire, one of the night-walking Undead who survived by drinking the life-energies of those he killed. Certainly not that Don Simon had deceived him, had skillfully planted scenes and pseudo-memories in his dreams, to convince him that he, John Palfrey, was in fact working for and with a member of a British Intelligence branch so secret that even the rest of the government wasn’t aware of its existence.

  That the vampire was simply using him as he’d have used any cab driver in London, as a means to get himself safely home.

  To begin with, Lydia wasn’t completely certain that this was true. She knew that even without recourse to illusion, Don Simon could be extremely charming. But she also knew that he could be loyal to his ‘servants’, as he called them, and had, upon one occasion, risked his life to retrieve Captain Palfrey from danger when there was little likelihood that the young man would ever be of any use to him again.

  And, reflected Lydia – not without exasperated misgivings – she found herself deeply unwilling to betray the vampire. Let alone kill him, she added. Which is what I should do.

  She pushed the thought away.

  I have five days yet, to make up my mind what to do.

  In any case, she found herself, over a veal and ham pie and an apple meringue in the Willow Grove (she didn’t feel up to dealing with either Aunt Louise or Mr Tilcott), explaining, to the worried young officer, that Colonel Simon had indeed been in touch with her. ‘He leaves notes, in the farthest book to the right on the top shelf of the right-hand bookcase, in the Second Class library,’ she said. ‘Last night it was The Pickwick Papers, which I can’t imagine anyone taking down on purpose to read. He’s in hiding, he said, somewhere on the ship – “hiding” is what he said, so I don’t know if that means disguise or actually concealing himself in a baggage-hold or a coal-bunker or somewhere.’

  ‘Did he say what danger he was in?’ Palfrey leaned forward, heaven-blue eyes dark with concern. ‘Is there anything we can do?’

  Lydia shook her head. ‘But the mark he made on the edge of the paper – a star in a circle – is the one that means, the danger is very great. All we can do is stand by and await instructions.’

  The young man nodded, accepting. Not even asking – and, Lydia suspected, not even asking himself – how Colonel Simon was able to come and go in the Second Class library, much less how he’d informed Lydia where the drop box was. Simon – or Simon’s long-dead valet – had been perfectly right when he’d compared the weight of Palfrey’s brains unfavorably to that of a pistol-ball. Lydia had devised an elaborate series of back-up explanations, in case it did occur to him to ask, but Palfrey never even blinked.

  But an hour later, as she was taking Miranda (and Mrs Marigold) for a tour of the Second Class promenade deck (‘Mrs Marigold wants to watch out for German submarines, Mummy.’), Lydia was accosted by the Princess Gromyko and, of all people, Mr Cochran, trailed at a respectful distance by the footman Zhenya, Ossolinska, and the burly detective Mr Kimball resplendent in the most American suit Lydia had ever seen.

  ‘My darling, I’ve been looking for you all over the ship!’ Her Highness thrust her leashes – Monsieur and Madame were also part of the entourage – into Ossolinska’s grip and seized Lydia by the hands. ‘Tania told me this creature, this thing, struck again last night, even as we sat in our circle of light around Madame Izora’s cabi
net. Even as dear Spenser here –’ she laid an impulsive hand on the millionaire’s shoulder (Lydia saw him flinch as if threatened with a rotting fish) – ‘had written already, upon his secret card, asking the spirits about the Undead.’

  ‘It was all about a – a dream I’d had.’ The hawk-faced millionaire brought the words out clumsily. Lydia was fairly certain by this time that he usually had his secretary, the sleek young Mr Oliver Cochran, tell his lies for him. ‘The first night on board ship, it was, and it isn’t like me to dream. Almost never do. Shook me up, I can tell you.’

  ‘Spenser dreamed of the vampire.’ The princess lowered her voice, drew Lydia closer, dark eyes burning. ‘He dreamed of that poor girl Pavlina, following a whispering voice down into a corridor in dead of night. Dreamed of a dark figure enfolding her in a dark cloak …’

  Cochran nodded vigorously. Lydia had seen more convincing performances in her young nieces’ Christmas pantomimes. ‘That kind of nonsense isn’t like me, M’am. Don’t even read novels. But this dream – this thing I saw in my dream – looked to me like something out of one. And all yesterday I had this … this feeling that what I’d seen was true. I’ve been to séances, M’am – hundreds of ’em – and I never felt about ’em what I felt waking from that dream. I knew that banana-oil Winstanley was spreading around about a crime of passion, and “we’ve got the guy and it’s all safe now”, was bunkum.’

  He fixed Lydia with those sharp black eyes, as if gauging how much of his story she believed. ‘Don’t know how I knew it. But there’s something down there. And Her Majesty tells me you’ve gone down and talked to the people involved.’

  This was a man, Lydia thought, whose business was to judge character; to read when someone was bluffing, to sense evasions or lies. Millions of dollars worth of accumulated factories, mines, railroads and banks couldn’t be controlled, much less added to, by someone who didn’t have a ruthless instinct about people and – she suspected – a fairly good information system of his own.

  Who has he talked to? How much does he guess about why I’m on this ship?

  Is this a trap?

  Jamie had told her of the times when he’d allowed himself to be recruited by German or Ottoman Intelligence, turning their own game against them. There’s nothing in the world more terrifying, he had said, than working as a double. You never quite get over it.

  Her glance flickered momentarily to Mr Kimball, six feet three inches of solid muscle wrapped in that appalling mustard-brown check, his neck bigger around than his head and eyes like two pale-blue china beads. Remembered what Heller had said, about it being easy to account for a passenger’s disappearance.

  Did I leave some sign – a dropped handkerchief or a footprint – in his suite last night? Good Heavens, can they take fingerprints?

  If he’d kidnap a vampire – pay and support Dr Barvell in his quest for whatever awful poison they’ve come up with – in order to kill off strikers and troublemakers, what else would he do to protect his tame assassin?

  But Lydia had worked her own years of meticulously schooling herself to show not one needle-weight of guilt or dread when her father or stepmother (or her formidable Nanna) got close to the subject of the books she had hidden in the attic; not one flicker of an eyelid when plans were discussed that might interfere with her exams to get into Somerville College. She’d long ago learned how to brace herself for a good, big lie without the smallest twitch of hand or lip.

  She turned her face a little aside, in a way that had always worked for sneaky, stuck-up Arabella Howard at Madame Chappedelaine’s Select Academy for Young Ladies, and said in a low voice, ‘It sounds mad to me, too, sir. When Tania, and Princess Gromyko, told me about it, I …’ She looked back at him, her eyes wide. ‘There was a girl at my school, you see. A girl – Mollie, her name was – who … died …’

  She shook her head with a sort of quick violence, as if the recollection were too much to face, even now. ‘It’s true. And when I went down with Tania, and heard the girls’ mothers – Pavlina’s, and poor little Luzia’s – and the men from the villages all talking about … about other things they’d seen, and heard …’

  ‘Here.’ The American looked for a moment as if he would have grasped her elbow peremptorily, then seemed to remember his lessons in deportment and offered his arm instead. ‘Please join me and Her Majesty for a cup of coffee. Would you like to come with us and have a chocolate ice, little girl?’ He bared his big yellow teeth at Miranda in what he obviously thought was an encouraging smile.

  Miranda cast a hasty glance at her mother – clearly aghast at the prospect – and Lydia put a hand on the child’s thin shoulder and stooped down to her. ‘Would Mrs Marigold mind if Mademoiselle Ossolinska continued our tour of the deck with you? I’m certain Her Highness would let Monsieur and Madame continue with you …’

  She glanced back at the princess, who nodded at once.

  ‘I have secrets to talk with Mr Cochran. Deep, dark secrets.’

  Miranda tiptoed, and when Lydia drew closer yet, whispered, ‘Will you tell me later?’

  Lydia met her daughter’s eyes – coffee-brown, like Jamie’s – and nodded.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘What are they saying below decks?’ Cochran leaned across the delicate wicker table in the Willow Grove Café and grasped Lydia’s hand. ‘Does anyone down there have any ideas of where this thing might be hiding? We cannot risk such a monster coming ashore,’ he added sententiously. ‘This may be our only chance to destroy this thing before we reach New York. If it gets ashore the consequences to America will be unthinkable! There are no such evil beings in the United States.’

  Lydia put on a terrified expression, and raised a hand to her lips as though to stifle a gasp.

  Princess Natalia Nikolaievna asked, with great interest, ‘Truly? No vampires in America?’

  ‘None I’ve been able to hear of.’ Cochran shook his head and started to say something (Lydia guessed) in proof of this statistic, then seemed to remember that his belief in the Undead was supposed only to date from the beginning of this voyage. ‘I make it my business to – um – inform myself about peoples’ beliefs.’ Personally, Lydia suspected that he’d searched very carefully for vampires in his own country before taking steps to import the commodity from Europe.

  ‘And of course, Mrs Cochran, growing up as she did in the country outside of Charleston, has heard every Negro superstition and folk tale in the countryside.’

  The waiter appeared with tea and coffee, petits fours, biscuits, and a small dish of poached pears for Cochran. He remembered all their names – his, Lydia recalled, was William – and even asked after the health of Monsieur le Duc and Madame la Duchesse. Cochran wiped the spoon with his handkerchief, tasted a mouthful of the pears, and snapped, ‘You call these poached?’ William took them back to the kitchen, with apologies.

  Lydia recalled her own investigations of property, interlocking bank accounts, curiously linked wills, which had led her to vampires and vampire nests. The Undead obsession with owning multiple refuges – with the power that money can supply – made them relatively easy to trace, if one knew what one was looking for.

  If one believed they existed in the first place.

  You took that much trouble and expense, all so that you could kill the people who dare to question your treatment of your workers.

  ‘So far,’ she answered slowly, ‘I think the Italians and the Slovenes and the Russians – the ones who already believe in … in vampires –’ (Remember you’re only just coming to this belief yourself.) – ‘are still so shocked that all they’re thinking of is protecting themselves. When I was down there this morning, they were all wearing rosaries around their necks – except the Belgians and some of the Sudeten Germans – and I saw most of the cabin doors had crosses marked on them.’

  Cochran grimaced a little at that – Lydia recalled his remarks about peasant superstitions from their first dinner on the City of Gold, and the cross-shaped silver
burn on Don Simon’s wrist.

  ‘Some people,’ she went on, ‘—there’s a Sudeten Slovene named Vodusek, and a man named Marek, the grandfather of the young man who’s accused of the first murder – are pretty vocal about there being a vampire, and more people are starting to listen to them. Old Father Kirn – and … and I, too – fear that people are going to panic, and start turning on each other. Though aren’t vampires only supposed to come out at night? So it couldn’t be anyone down there—’

  ‘No!’ protested Natalia, setting down her coffee cup. ‘The upír walk about in the daylight, of course they do—’

  The American half-opened his mouth to tell her they did nothing of the kind, then shut it again. He prodded the pears that William brought back for him from the kitchen, and sent them away again. ‘What the hell is wrong with those nigs they got working in the kitchen? They never seen a pear before? And that dish was filthy.’

  ‘Daylight robs the Undead of their powers,’ continued the princess, delicately squeezing a netting-wrapped lemon slice into her teacup. ‘As does the sea. Only at the hour of noon, or of midnight, or at the turning of the tide, does their strength return for a little time. In the daylight hours they are as mortal men, save for the coldness of their flesh, and the stench of decay that lingers in their flesh and on their breath. That is the great fear.’

  She lowered her voice, and leaned close. ‘That is the great danger. That any one of those people – or any one in Second Class, or in First – might be vampir, nosferatu.’

  Lydia made herself glance around in affright and forced herself not to say, Nonsense!

  She supposed it was a more rational belief than the truth: that when the disease of vampirism (which Lydia suspected was what the Dutch microbiologist Beijerinck called a virus in plants) took hold, it transmuted the very nature of human flesh. As Don Simon had said, cell by cell, it became something other than it had been. Really, to those unfamiliar with the chemical processes of decay it would make more sense, that the Undead are simply walking corpses.