Then the illusion was back, elegant as a single white orchid.
‘In Fourth Street just now I passed a girl, with a basket of mouse traps that she had been selling. I smiled at her, and she returned the smile, seeing nothing amiss. Last night, when I walked about the city making my arrangements for a place to stay, none pointed at me or cried out. The hunger remains,’ he added. ‘But it is remote, and tinged with … distaste. I seem to have come through my illness … changed.’
Nerve-thread by nerve-thread, she thought. Cell by cell.
‘And the Army of the Dead?’
‘They are with me still. But they no longer torment me as they did – thus providing the definitive answer, as my confessor would have said, to the question of whether God is merciful or just.’ His voice was flippant, but there was a somber stillness in his eyes.
She had no answer to that, or to any thing that he had said.
‘What … are you, then?’ she asked in time.
‘I know not. Not what I was.’ He shook his head. ‘Our James and his colleagues speak of the Undead as blood-drinking ghosts. Without the hunt – without the kill – what am I then? Merely a ghost, like the voices that pipe in old houses, until time and the convenience of a changing world sweep those ruins away? I am still flesh.’
With a fingertip he prodded his arm experimentally. ‘I can trick the minds – the perceptions – of strangers, as ever I did. My flesh retains its weakness to silver –’ he took the glove from his left hand and held up the two smallest fingers, to show where the colorless flesh had been savagely burned – ‘as I ascertained just now in your dining room, ere coming out to the garden. I presume to daylight as well.
‘Last night I spoke to James in his dreams, but could not do so tonight. Yet I had no trouble entering the mind of our Captain Palfrey, and convincing him that he’d glimpsed me in a crowd on Fifth Avenue. I expect he will come to you tomorrow, effervescing with the news. Whether this is an effect of distance, or of the poison, or of the new moon for that matter, I know not, nor whether this will alter with time. Nor do I know how long this grace – if grace it be – will last, nor what state will follow it. Nearly every other Undead that I have ever encountered older than myself has been mad.’
He turned his hand over slowly, looking at the burned flesh, the demon claws, the unhealed gashes where he had torn at his own wrists in agony. ‘In truth I know not what I am now, Mistress, nor what is native to me.’
His voice was expressionless as ever, a whisper like the stirring of the new-leaved branches in the dark garden, like the far-off occasional conversations heard in the foggy dark of the unknown city around them. But Lydia heard in the bare words the note, not of fear, but of loneliness incalculable; the damned soul cut off not only from God, but from the other damned as well. As if, reaching Hell, he had found its endless bolgias empty and dark.
She answered him, ‘You are my friend.’
His cold fingers tightened on hers. ‘Friend indeed,’ he said softly, ‘to have led me to this place.’
‘Was it the poison that did this?’ she asked. ‘Or the combination of the poison and the antivenin? Or the length of time that it was in your system? If it can free the Undead of the need to hunt …’
‘I suspect, rather, ’twould kill them in the process. And few indeed would even desire to be other than what they are, not were it given them free and without pain or consequence.
‘We toughen as we age, Mistress. Had I been younger among the Undead, I doubt I would have survived these past five days. Be assured I would never have undertaken such a process, had I had any choice in the matter.’
‘Do you feel all right?’ She recalled what he had said to Miranda: I will be well.
He thought about it. ‘Oddly, yes. Disconcerted. But much the same.’ He drew on his gloves again. ‘Aware of the change, but not certain what it means. I tread untrodden ground, Lady. I think I shall miss the … the intensity of the kill, yet I am not sure that I would even be capable of feeling such a thing now. Certainly I have no desire to risk re-awakening the Army of the Dead. But as to what I am …’
‘What do you want to be?’
And he raised her hand, with its signet ring of gold, to his lips. ‘Your friend.’
‘Have you a house here in the city?’
‘I do. I shall show it to you presently, when I have purchased furbishings for it, and tea to offer you. When chance occurs I shall send for my books – ghost or vampire, I remain a child of darkness in this new world, neither living nor dead, and the nights promise long. Will you remain?’
‘I think so. At least until the war is over – and if the United States plans to join in, the way everyone was saying on the voyage that they will, it would be even less safe now to try to cross back. Jamie—’
She broke off.
‘’Tis a long way to Russia, Lady,’ said the vampire. ‘God only knows what is coming to that unhappy land ere the War is done. Yet I think, were true grief to come to James, I would know … as, I suspect, would you.’
‘I’d like to think so.’ Lydia heard the shakiness in her voice, sighed, and straightened her shoulders, as she had when she’d boarded the City of Gold. Like a woman readying herself to cross a narrow and railless bridge. From the old-fashioned cobblestones of Charles Street a motorcar honked its horn in the fog. A wisp of conversation passed by the rear wall of the garden, Yiddish or Russian, accompanied by the clatter of a pushcart’s wheels and the smell of oysters and steam. Down the street at a cellar club, music drifted forth, American jazz, clear and wailing and sad.
Lydia thought, for the first time, I’m in New York.
I’m in America.
For the past ten days she had been so preoccupied, so wretched, and so frightened for her child that she had moved from one action to the next almost automatically. Now all the things she had seen and done and said – the pale spring-green in Central Park, the variegated crowds around City Hall, the startling grandeur of that towering dull-green copper statue in the harbor (only in America! reflected Lydia, though Miranda had been enchanted at the sight) – all these seemed to fall into place in her mind.
I’m in America.
And this is my new home. With Miranda asleep upstairs. Safe.
She said, ‘We both tread untrodden ground, my friend. Jamie—’ She stopped herself again. I don’t know, nobody knows …
‘I think Natalia was right,’ she went on slowly, ‘in that the world we knew – the world we grew up in … Whatever happens, in the War, or after … It’s gone. It will be a new world there, too. Things the way we knew them will never be the same, and I’m … I’m no more sure than you are, about what I’ll be, or you’ll be, or anything will be, in the time that lies ahead.’
‘Who among us is?’ Again he raised her hand to his lips, pale-yellow eyes gleaming in the darkness. ‘Never is a long time, Mistress. And ever stretches ahead for us all. We need see no more before us than what each day – each night – shall bring. Perhaps the time has come, for me to write my memoirs.’
Then he melted into the fog, and was gone.
FOOTNOTES
CHAPTER NINE
1 See Darkness on his Bones
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
2 See The Kindred of Darkness
Prisoner of Midnight Page 29