‘War or no war, republic or no republic,’ she said softly, ‘it is gone. The Russia I grew up in. The world that I knew. That my husband knew, and my children – that my mother knew. Things as they were – things as I knew them – loved them … they will never be the same. They will never come back. The only way for me to walk is forward.’
Stroll in the park with the princess? Accept invitations from Mrs Tilcott? Help poor Captain Palfrey search New York for Colonel Simon?
Wait to hear from Jamie.
If I ever hear.
She closed her eyes, remembering his voice, the touch of his hand. The first time their eyes had met, and he’d smiled at her. The last time they’d kissed. The man she had loved since her girlhood, the man whose love for her was steady as rock. Not a pale elusive chimera with one foot already in Hell.
At the conclusion of the long transcripts of notes had been a single final communication:
Leaving today. Will see you next year. Forever – J.
Destroy the laboratory upstairs, she thought. Burn the notes. Along with the antidote had been what was supposed to be the formula for the poison Barvell and Cochran had given Don Simon after trapping him – given its percentage of silver chloride and aconite, it probably would kill a vampire (or pretty much anyone else, she reflected) – and the temporary antivenin, the chemical leash that had made him Cochran’s slave.
But what, she thought, was the use of that? To keep him as my slave?
No. Just … No.
She closed the door, locked it – double locked it – and went back up the stair.
Halfway up it she turned around, unlocked the door, and entered the vault.
He should have been awake when she opened the trunk, but the wax-white, twisted body didn’t move. Only, when she touched his arm, she could feel his muscles rigid and shuddering, as if he were being eaten up from the inside, nerve-thread by nerve-thread, cell by cell. As he had been transformed, she thought, three and a half centuries ago, by the initial contamination which had altered him – nerve-thread by nerve-thread, cell by cell – into vampire flesh to begin with.
Had it hurt like this, then?
There was no real need to seek a vein, since his heart did not beat, but she nevertheless injected the fluid into the carotid artery in his throat.
She sat beside him for nearly an hour, during which even his eyelids did not move. Then, slowly, he went limp, his trembling stopped.
After another hour she got up from the damp stone of the floor, left the vault, and locked the door behind her.
She gave him another injection on the second night. By the hardness of the flesh around the first puncture mark, she could tell that the serum hadn’t even dispersed into the tissue. What that meant, she had no idea.
She barely knew how she’d spent the day. She had slept like a dead woman, eaten a little lunch (Mrs Quarterpace had found her an excellent cook – if the woman works for vampires, why do they care what food tastes like?), and went uptown to the Belcourt, to take Miranda to play in the park. ‘Darling, what are you doing to yourself?’ demanded the princess, when the little girl dashed away to explore the cast-iron bandstand at the end of the Mall. ‘You look ghastly – don’t tell me that handsome Captain Palfrey is that exigeant …’
And Lydia had shaken her head. ‘I’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘But if I can trust you to look after Miranda for another day or two …’
‘It will be my delight, my sweet! We have already been invited to the birthday party of Elenya Trubetskoy – cousins of mine, dearest, and they have taken an apartment at the Apthorp – and that tedious M’sieu Tilcott has telephoned I don’t know how many times, asking how he might reach you.’
He is dead, she thought now, looking down into the vampire’s still face. But she gave him the second injection in any case, and sat beside him.
Two hours later his hand stirred, and when she took it – cold as death – he whispered, ‘Mistress?’
‘I don’t know if this will work,’ she said.
Under the black-bruised lids, his eyes moved a little. ‘I only want it over,’ he murmured. ‘I am in Hell, and to Hell I will go for my sins. To be thus forever. But thank you.’ And then, after a time, ‘Leaving you will be hardest of all.’
She had dreamed of him during the morning just passed – dreamed of searching through a hedge maze, hearing him scream in the distance but unable to come to him. When finally she returned to her room and lay down, she did not sleep again until there was light in the sky. That morning she did not dream at all.
On Friday, the damaged City of Gold had been towed into New York Harbor, with its cargo of emigrants – Third Class passengers had not rated transport on the Freedonia, though Lydia guessed they had at least had the benefit of the elegant rations of salmon, shrimp and lamb that their economic betters had left behind in the pantries. In the morning, Lydia had Captain Palfrey escort her to City Hall, where she gave her own testimony to the police commissioner and the immigration officials regarding the deaths of Pavlina Jancu, Luzia Pescariu, and Kemal Adamic. ‘I think,’ she explained, ‘that the young people involved must have seen something that could have been connected with the German saboteurs who were on board: Third Class passenger Vodusek, and possibly Mr Slavik as well.’
She gave further opinions concerning the connection of the Third Class murderers with Kimball and his men, being careful to exonerate Spenser Cochran from any suspicion of connection with either the murders or the subsequent planting of a pipe bomb in the ship’s engines: ‘Believe me, your Honor, I dined with Mr Cochran many times on the voyage and the idea that he would have had anything to do with sabotage is absurd!’
Oliver Cochran and his lawyer, also in the commissioner’s office with a file of injunctions and affidavits the size of an unabridged dictionary, looked mollified, and agreed, later in the day, to sell Lydia the entire contents of his uncle’s – and Louis Barvell’s – libraries.
But the whole of the day – for she was also called to give evidence at the Immigration Offices on Ellis Island in the afternoon – Lydia felt as if someone else were talking through her mouth. She was familiar with the feeling. She’d mastered the arts of appearing interested, intelligent, and businesslike while ready to scream or weep during her London season, and even the spectacle of the Princess Gromyko’s reunion with Madame Izora – who had refused to abandon her spirit cabinet and had thus remained on the City of Gold – did not lighten her mood. ‘Andreas Paulsen’ – a.k.a. Georg Heller – had simply vanished, the moment the ship had reached its berth.
When Captain Palfrey began to speak of Colonel Simon in the cab, speculating desperately about where his mysterious employer might be hiding, Lydia could only say in a small, calm voice, ‘Please. Can we talk about this tomorrow?’
He’d taken one look at her face, offered to take her for sweets to Delmonico’s, and then, at her carefully phrased request, told the motorcab driver to return to Charles Street. ‘We’ll find him,’ he promised, clasping her hand as he guided her to the green-painted door. ‘I promise you. You know what he is – he’s in hiding, up to something brilliant. He’ll get in touch with one or the other of us when he’s ready.’
Lydia managed to close the door between them before she wept.
Climbing quickly to her room, she lay down and cried, before falling almost instantly to sleep.
When she descended to the crypt that night, though the door was locked as she had left it, she found the trunk open, and empty.
Don Simon Ysidro was gone.
THIRTY
The troop-train from Lemberg to Brest-Litovsk averaged an hour’s travel before it was pulled over, to let trains of supplies or ammunition – or traveling generals – or nothing at all – pass by; sometimes it remained on the siding for three hours or more. Then it chugged on, sometimes for another hour, sometimes for half that time. The cars were unheated and what had been First Class had long ago been taken over by regiments of Ludendorff
’s Army and the Austrian signal corps, men sleeping in exhaustion on the seats, the floors, in the corridors. There was no coal for the heaters, which, Asher reflected, was just as well. The one in his own compartment was so seriously damaged that he doubted it could be lit without killing everyone in the crammed space from carbon monoxide gas.
But the fug of crowded bodies, of suffocating cigarette smoke and dirty uniforms, did little to pierce the bone-breaking cold and he wondered if this would be his fate: to escape being murdered by a vampire in Paris, only to freeze to death in a train on his way back to the Eastern Front.
He would laugh, he supposed, if he wasn’t so tired.
‘You are a useful man,’ the Graf Szgedny had said to him, on the steps of the Central Telegraph Office at four thirty Monday morning. Cold drizzle soaked through Asher’s greatcoat – formerly one of Augustin’s, since he’d disposed of the German one in the alley behind the golden vampire’s apartment block – and chilled him to the marrow. ‘One does not waste such servants.’
‘I will never be a servant of yours.’ Asher was bone-tired, his head aching after hours of writing, concentration, and explanation – again and again – to a succession of telegraphers. Only the fact that it had been the early hours of the morning had prevented him, he was certain, from being lynched by a queue of irate customers, who would have been behind him at any other hour of the day.
At that moment he had scarcely cared whether the Graf killed him or not.
‘Anglus …’ The vampire grinned like a wolf. ‘I’m certain you swore you would never do Simon’s bidding either. Or that of that tedious monster Lionel, who rules London. And you have served both in your turn.’
The soul-stripped eyes held his, like a steel blade cutting into what was left of Asher’s own soul. ‘You swore no more to be a servant of your king.’
The Graf’s hawk-nosed face was shadowed from the electric lights above the telegraph office door by the peaked cap of a French colonel; the dispatch case at his side bulged with Barvell’s notes. Asher wondered, tiredly, what use he would or could make of these, in the days after the war ended, if the war ever ended …
In the telegraph office he’d glimpsed headlines about the new provisional government in Russia pledging to continue the fight against the Central Powers, and he guessed that both British and American funds were at the back of that decision. At times it seemed to him that all of civilization would be sucked down into the black mud of the Front, to die of typhus, poison gas, and despair.
Szgedny had walked with him to the Gare de l’Est, through the bitter damp of the pre-dawn hours. ‘I understand Madame Elysée is back in Paris, and if you’re going to be of use to me in the future it won’t do to have her find you.’ At the station canteen, over watery ersatz coffee and something that was supposed to be soup, Asher had wondered what the war’s end would bring to the Undead. Would Szgedny’s power extend from Prague over the pulped ruin of Eastern Europe? Would the other vampires – glutted like maggots from years of feeding at the Front – have the power to fight him? Would Augustin indeed take over Bordeaux or find some way to oust Elysée from her rule in Paris?
Would the provisional government of Russia manage to hold itself together in the face of what sounded like some of the most horrendous factional fighting Asher had ever encountered?
Would Germany in fact bring Britain to its knees with starvation? And what would she demand at the peace table?
Or would America come charging in and prolong the fighting, then rule over the blood-soaked shambles that remained?
At quarter past one on Monday afternoon he’d finally gotten on the military train for Venice, and had been traveling – or sitting on sidings – ever since.
At times he pretended to himself – in clouded dreams of exhaustion – that the days in Paris had in fact been spent with Lydia. That they’d eaten at cheap restaurants, drunk bad beer in the cafés of Montparnasse, lain together at the Hotel St-Seurin long into those icy mornings listening to the chimes of Notre Dame. Memories pieced up like a patched garment from other times: that he’d been with her, that he’d waked to see her face, relaxed with sleep, on the pillow beside him. That they’d walked along the Seine, and seen on the barren trees the first dusting of the green of spring.
It made, he reflected – now as he tried to find a more comfortable way to doze sitting up between two smelly, exhausted Austrian privates – absolutely no difference. He was headed back to the black pinewoods of Pripet Marshes, to the men who knew him as Major von Rabewasser. To the men he would betray to their deaths when he received orders to do so.
At least, as far as he could tell, she had arrived in America safe.
Or at least the City of Gold hadn’t been torpedoed.
That he knew about …
He closed his eyes. It would be a year or more before he learned whether she was dead. Whether she’d been able to save Ysidro. Whether the telegrams had reached her at all, and whether she’d outsmarted Spenser Cochran’s scheme.
‘James.’
He looked up. Don Simon Ysidro stood in the doorway of the compartment. He was clothed as a railway porter, the compartment was tidy and clean (and empty), and Asher knew this was a dream.
He asked, ‘Is Lydia all right?’
The vampire smiled. ‘She is well,’ he said. He looked as he always did: a young man in his late twenties, long wispy hair, pale as ivory, hanging to his shoulders. Cold yellow eyes like a weary demon’s.
He must have survived.
‘And yourself?’
‘I, also.’
It was Saturday, he recalled. ‘Did Lydia get my telegrams?’
‘She did. I am more deeply in debt to both of you, than I can ever say.’
‘I take it you’re free?’
Ysidro inclined his head. ‘As you say. Mr Cochran suffered an accident aboardship. Not of my doing,’ he added, lifting a white-gloved hand. ‘Nor yet of Mistress Asher’s. We are safe – all three of us, for her execrable aunt brought Miss Miranda on the voyage as well—’
Asher started up from his seat with such violence that he almost woke himself from his dream.
‘All is well.’ Ysidro signed him to sit again, and Asher felt his real self, his waking-world self, slide back down into exhausted slumber again. ‘We are safe in New York. I know not if I will be able to speak to you like this again.’ A slight frown tugged at his brows, and he shook away some thought. ‘But since I can still do so tonight, I wished to tell you this.’
He moved as if to step back into the corridor – as if to step back out of the dream – and Asher saw around him a secondary image, of the sleeping soldiers, the filthy compartment, the broken heater, the cold. The future …
Asher said, ‘Watch over her.’
The vampire inclined his head. ‘To the end of my days.’
Lydia went with the Princess Gromyko to the promised children’s party at the Belcourt on Saturday night, and – to Miranda’s grateful delight – afterwards brought her daughter home with her to Charles Street. Home was how she had already begun to think of the tall, rambling mansion among Greenwich Village’s narrow streets. Through the evening, as had also been the case on the day before, the terrible feeling of separateness had persisted, the sense of operating her body, her words, and even her thoughts at a distance, like a puppeteer.
Don Simon is in New York. The thought came back to her, again and again.
He has killed. Probably several times, as ill as he was. As needful of the healing that only another’s death can bring a vampire.
I have killed. The blood of those victims is on my hands.
She felt sick with contempt at her own weakness.
I’ll need to tell Jamie that. And, one day, Miranda.
When she tucked the little girl into bed – in the night nursery which would, tomorrow, be graced with a young nursemaid from New Orleans whom Mrs Tilcott had recommended in the highest terms – Miranda took her hand and said softly, ‘I dre
amed about Simon, Mummy.’
Lydia’s throat closed. ‘Did you?’
‘I asked him if he was still sick, and he said, I will be well.’
There was a garden behind the house overlooked by a sort of balcony outside the window of Lydia’s bedroom. Stepping out onto that balcony, looking down into the well of black fog from which the wet scents of its tangled and overgrown foliage rose like a great, primeval sigh, she heard on that sigh the ghost murmur: Mistress …
And thought she saw something pale move down below, in the blackness and the fog.
She almost didn’t go down. The thought that she had loosed him in New York sickened her. She didn’t want to know. But she did, and he was waiting for her at the end of the garden.
He’d acquired evening dress from someplace – which fit him as if it had been tailored for him. His face was as it had been when first she’d seen him, before its flesh had been gashed by the talons of the Master of Constantinople in protecting her life. Before he had been shredded with pain. Before he had whispered to her, I only want it over …
Remote, and beautiful, and young.
He removed his glove, and held out his hand. Lydia shook her head, closed her fist, knowing that his touch would be warm, as vampires’ are, when they have fed. Knowing the warmth had been taken from some other person’s life.
Some person of little worth – like Pavlina Jancu, or Kemal Adamic, or all those Protestants he’d killed in his early days. Somebody that no one would trace or avenge. Knowing their souls to be damned in any case …
Is that part of the illusion that vampires cast, that keeps me from hating him outright for what he is? For what he does?
But when her hand drew away he reached deliberately and clasped her fingers, and his – long and thin and clawed like the Devil’s – were cold as ice, as the Devil’s are said to be.
Startled, she looked across into his eyes, and his yellow gaze reflected the lights of the house next door. ‘I have not fed,’ he said quietly, and for a moment he let her see him as he was, scarred and skeletal within the long frame of mist-pale hair.
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