Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Vampire Menace

by Olga Wojtas

  “And may I ask your name, dear lady?” he asked.

  “Shona McMonagle.”

  “Shona McMonagle,” he repeated perfectly. “A fine Scottish name. Is your family of Scottish origin?”

  Scottish, not English. For a moment, I thought I must have misheard. But my hearing hadn’t let me down.

  “I am Scottish,” I said.

  “Forgive me, dear lady, I took you for a Parisienne. But I should have known – your charm, your elegance, so much greater than any Frenchwoman’s. You could be nothing other than Scottish.”

  “You’ve heard of Scotland? Did Mary Garden tell you about it?”

  “Dear lady, I heard of Scotland long before I met Mademoiselle Garden. A military gentleman introduced me to the music of your wonderful bagpipes. I felt the country that could produce such divine sounds was my spiritual home. It is my profound sorrow that I was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and not in Edinburgh or Glasgow.”

  He didn’t know as much about Scotland as he thought. Being born in Glasgow is definitely a reason for profound sorrow.

  “Of course,” he said, “our two countries have had an affinity since the thirteenth century through the Old Alliance. Scotland inspires me. You inspire me.”

  He was gazing at me with those lovely eyes. I felt a little overheated. I decided I had better change the direction of the conversation.

  “Mr Debussy–” I began.

  “Call me Achille.”

  “I thought your name was Claude,” I said, although I could understand that anyone called Claude would want to be called something else.

  “Achille-Claude. But my intimates call me Achille.” I wasn’t sure about “intimates”.

  “Mr Debussy,” I said sternly, “may I remind you that you’re married?”

  He gave a profound sigh. “Ah, it is well that you remind me. For in your presence, any man would forget every other woman, my flaxen-haired Caledonian enchantress.”

  I was quite startled. Nobody’s ever called me flaxen-haired before. But I knew where I’d heard that description.

  “Have you written any piano preludes inspired by Scotland?” I asked.

  He shook his head thoughtfully. “Not yet. Not yet. That’s an excellent suggestion. But I have written a Marche écossaise for piano four-hands.”

  “Now that would have been perfect for me and Madeleine,” I burst out. “I wanted to play a Debussy duet, but she insisted on Fauré.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Debussy. “Fauré and I are good friends.”

  I remembered that Debussy and Fauré were sufficiently good friends that Debussy would end up with Fauré’s bidie-in, and as a result, Debussy’s poor wife would shoot herself. I gave him a disapproving frown. He met my gaze with his lovely eyes, and I was startled to find myself prepared to forgive even his future misdemeanours. In confusion, I returned to our original conversation.

  “My friend Madeleine’s round the corner,” I said. “She was my accompanist this evening. She’s just got an old Gaveau at home. I think she really enjoyed playing on the Érard.”

  “She was magnificent,” he said. “Not as magnificent as you, of course, my divine songstress, but worthy to support you. Perhaps you could introduce me to her?”

  I wasn’t that keen, but I couldn’t see how to refuse. I went to the corner and called, “Madeleine! Someone wants to meet you.”

  I was used to the name “Madeleine” being followed by a sigh. This time it was Madeleine’s sigh at being disturbed when she was in a clinch with her Sylvain. The pair of them came towards me, Madeleine nestled in the crook of Sylvain’s arm, gazing up at him in adoration.

  “Madeleine,” I said, “this is my friend Achille. Achille-Claude Debussy. He wants to say hello.”

  Her eyes widened in surprised delight. She disengaged herself from Sylvain and bestowed a dazzling smile on the composer.

  “An honour to play your beautiful music,” she said. “I bought so much of it when I was in Paris that I could scarcely carry it home.”

  Behind her, Sylvain was glaring.

  “The honour is all mine, to have my music played by such a beautiful and talented lady,” said Debussy. “The next time you come to Paris, you must visit me. I would love to have you run your fingers over my Pleyel.”

  He had scarcely finished speaking when Sylvain grabbed him by the lapels and pinned him to the wall, drawing back his fist.

  Debussy covered his face with his hands in a protective gesture.

  “Achille!” I bellowed in the prefect’s voice that demanded instant obedience. “Drop your hands right now!”

  He did, and Sylvain’s fist connected with his jaw. He crumpled.

  The Dupondts – the combined Duponds and Duponts – and the mayor, hearing the disturbance, rushed round to see what was going on. I knelt down beside Debussy. “That was really stupid,” I said. “You must always keep your hands out of harm’s way. How could you play if you were injured?”

  “I am injured,” he groaned, experimentally massaging his jaw.

  “You’ll be fine,” I said. “The officer isn’t a musician and just misunderstood what you said.”

  I turned to Sylvain. “When Mr Debussy mentioned his Pleyel, he was referring to his piano,” I explained.

  Sylvain shot me a contemptuous look. “No, he wasn’t.”

  A Dupondt sniggered.

  Madeleine stroked Sylvain’s arm appeasingly. “My love, this lady is our guest, and helped me to look for you.”

  Reluctantly, Sylvain offered me his hand, and I shook it. It was like an electric shock.

  “Oh my God,” I gasped. “You’re the one! I’m tingling all over!”

  The next thing, Madeleine sprang at me and started trying to scratch my eyes out.

  “Get your filthy hands off my husband!” she screamed.

  “Cat fight,” announced a Dupondt with some enthusiasm.

  I grabbed Madeleine’s wrist and got her arm behind her back in a martial arts restraint move, preparatory to immobilising her on the ground, but then Sylvain was on me, yelling, “Get your filthy hands off my wife!”

  They were tremendously possessive of one another. I was calculating how to immobilise him without injuring him – I could imagine Miss Blaine wouldn’t be happy if I damaged the subject of the mission – when the mayor shouted, “Officer! Stand down!”

  They might do some things differently in Sans-Soleil, but at least the mayor was still in charge of the police. Sylvain immediately complied.

  I let go of Madeleine, who rushed back to her husband and snuggled up to him.

  “If my hands are filthy,” I said quietly, “it’s because I was recently digging up Officer Sylvain’s grave to find out whether he was dead or not.”

  Madeleine gave Sylvain a quick abashed look, nodding to confirm the truth of what I was saying.

  “I was sent here on a mission,” I went on. “I wasn’t clear what it was until a moment ago. I don’t expect you to understand, but when I meet the person I’m supposed to help, I feel a tingling. I’m here to save Sylvain.”

  It was making sense now. I had tingled from Madeleine because she was Sylvain’s other half. I had tingled in the town hall, not because of the time-travelling or because of the louchely attractive mayor, but because Sylvain was close by. Now that it was clear Sylvain was the one I was here to help, all I had to do was complete my mission by getting him out of this prison and back home.

  But perhaps that was easier said than done.

  “Mr Mayor,” I said, “earlier you said nobody was dead yet. Did that have any significance beyond the fact that we’ll all die eventually?”

  “Oh yes,” said the mayor. “We were warned that tonight would be the end. All of the merchandise and equipment has been moved out, so my hunch is that they’ll set fire to the building with us inside it.”

  Thirteen

  “We have to get out of here,” I said.

  The mayor shrugged. “Impossible. We’ve tri
ed. There are too many locks and padlocks on the door, and I built these walls myself. It would take a sledgehammer to get through them.”

  “Do we have a sledgehammer?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “The front door is open,” I said. “Why can’t we break into the hall from here and get out that way?”

  “The same problem. I made the walls too well. And there’s the extra problem of all the mirrors.”

  Mary Garden looked enquiring.

  “Two sides of the hall are covered in mirrors, just like Versailles,” I explained. “It’s a beautiful venue when the chandeliers are lit. You would have loved playing it.”

  I started thinking out loud. “If only there was some way of breaking the mirrors, that might weaken the walls, and we could punch and kick our way through.”

  The mayor gave a wry laugh. “I admire your optimism, Madame Maque, but we can’t break the mirrors since they’re in there, and we’re in here. We must simply accept our fate.”

  “We have to sing,” said Mary Garden.

  “That’s a great idea,” I said. “There’s nothing like a wee sing-song to raise the spirits during difficult times. Like when they sang ‘Abide with Me’ on the Titanic. I’ll divide you into two groups. You lot to my left are group one, you lot to my right are group two. Group one to start, and group two, you come in on my signal. Everyone know the words of ‘Cher Fromage’?”

  “Dinna be daft,” said Mary Garden. “That’s nae the song I had in mind.”

  “You want me to teach them ‘The Boddamers Hanged the Monkey-O’?”

  “I want you to sing the “Queen of the Nicht” aria from The Magic Flute. Do you know it?”

  “Of course I know it,” I said.

  “And can you sing the top F?”

  Like Madeleine, she had never heard me perform as a soloist at the school concerts.

  “The top F will be no problem,” I said. “But I really don’t think it’s the right song under the circumstances. It’s not exactly cheery – ‘Death and despair flame about me’. It’s bad enough facing immolation without going on about it beforehand.”

  “And you think ‘Abide with Me’ is cheery? Just sing, quine,” she said tartly, and started up. There seemed to be no stopping her, so I sang along.

  We reached top F and, instead of carrying on, she waved her hand at me in a circular motion, indicating that I should stick with the note. It was very diva-like behaviour, but since she actually was a diva, I felt I must go along with it.

  We continued with the top F, Mary Garden’s voice becoming increasingly strong and piercing. I figured that any note she could sing, I could sing louder, so I upped the ante. I knew that high notes could shatter glass, but now we were singing to break the mirrors.

  There was a sudden movement above me. A bat circled over us, its huge wings outstretched. It was squeaking, higher and higher, until even my superb hearing couldn’t detect it, and I realised it had gone ultrasonic.

  There was another sound now, like the cracking and splintering of a mighty iceberg. It gradually dawned on me that this was the glass in the mini-Hall of Mirrors. Not a moment before time, since I sensed that Mary Garden was about to run out of breath. But she was a trouper – a quick inhalation, and she completed the aria while the din and clatter continued behind us.

  Debussy applauded politely when she finished, and she placed her hand on her chest and made a deep theatrical bow.

  “That was a great performance,” I said. “Such a shame your fans in the Opéra-Comique didn’t get to hear it. But now we have work to do.”

  I put my shoulder to the wall and began to push, signalling the others to join me. As we heaved and shoved, the wall slowly began to give way. But not enough. We were still trapped.

  Madeleine was watching me with a mixture of despair and hope. I was here to save Sylvain: I couldn’t let him down and I couldn’t let her down. But our little band was proving unequal to the task. I needed to enlist more help, but from whom?

  There was a low growl beside me, and Mary Garden let out a shriek. “How did that muckle hairy dog get in here?”

  “He’s not a dog, he’s a wolf,” I said. “And he happens to be a good friend of mine. Aren’t you, boy?”

  I scratched him behind the ears. He leaned into the scratching with a contented sigh, then rapidly backed off, his eyes glowing red. I guessed he had remembered that his mama wouldn’t approve.

  But he was backing up, tensing his hind paws, and I remembered him telling me there was a technique to jumping through windows. He was about to try jumping through a wall.

  “Are you sure about this?” I asked. It wasn’t exactly Platform 9¾.

  The great wolf gave a nod, then leaped at the wall, smashing through it. There was a dreadful howl, like the sound of a terribly injured animal.

  “Dracula!” I shouted, shoving my way through the rubble and masonry dust. “Are you OK?”

  I could see nothing – the candlelight in our corridor wasn’t strong enough to reach in here. I put my hand up to my brow and discovered the head torch had survived all of the rough handling. The elastic must be stretching, since it was no longer giving me a headache.

  I switched it on, and light flooded crazily on a ghastly scene, reflected in all the shards of mirror. The great grey wolf lay gasping in the middle of the debris, his flank torn open, and blood gushing out of it.

  “A vet!” I shouted. “We need a vet here, right away!”

  Dupont the undertaker peered through the hole I had clambered through. “We don’t have a vet. The animals either get better, or…” He made a throat-cutting gesture.

  I knelt down beside the wolf and gently stroked his head. “You’re going to be fine,” I said. “You’ll be leaping out of here in no time.”

  He gave a feeble wag of his tail, and tried to lick my hand, but the effort was too great. As I watched, the red light in his eyes flickered and dimmed.

  “No!” I cried. “You can’t die!”

  And then I thought, of course he can’t die, he’s a vampire – unless that was something else Bram Stoker had got totally wrong. I had thought vampires were self-healing, but the great grey wolf was growing weaker by the second.

  As I tried to see how best to help, the animal shape disappeared, and there in front of me was Dracula in human form, or at least apparently human form. Even if he couldn’t die, he definitely didn’t look well. I didn’t know it was possible for anyone to be that pale. Blood continued to pour out of a massive wound in his side. I grabbed his muffler to try to staunch the flow, pressing on it firmly. Dracula gave a faint moan.

  The others were beginning to emerge from the corridor, cautiously navigating the wreckage and helping one another avoid the mirrored spikes.

  “The English milord!” one of the Dupondts said.

  Tending to a seriously injured patient, I couldn’t shout.

  “This man is not English,” I whispered, as reprovingly as I could. “And we need to get him to hospital as quickly as possible. Where’s the nearest one?”

  The Dupondts exchanged glances and looked to the mayor to answer. He turned to Sylvain.

  “We don’t have one,” said Sylvain awkwardly. “It’s basically the same situation as with the animals.”

  Dracula’s breathing was laboured and his eyes were gradually closing.

  “Wake up!” I said urgently. “Stay with me! Come on, you mustn’t go to sleep.”

  With an obvious effort, he kept his eyes open. “Leave me,” he whispered. “You must escape.”

  “He makes a good point,” said the mayor.

  I turned my gaze and my head torch on the group and saw them shrink back.

  “We would still be stuck in that corridor if it weren’t for Dracula here,” I reminded them. “It was his squeak added to the top Fs that shattered the mirrors in the first place, and he was the one who broke through the wall. We’re not leaving without him. Is that clear?”

  There was
a bit of shuffling, but nobody argued.

  I turned back to Dracula. “You’re still losing blood,” I said. “You need a transfusion.” And then I said something I had said many times before, but never in this tone. “Bite me.”

  “No … I can’t … vegetarian…”

  “Don’t give me that,” I said. “You told me yourself, you eat wild boar.”

  “Yes, wild boar,” he murmured. “Like hellebore.” He was becoming delirious.

  “Don’t go to sleep,” I warned him. “Here.” I started to unfasten my high-necked blouse.

  “Please … no … mustn’t…”

  “Stop arguing. I’m not talking about your tea, I’m talking about a medical procedure.”

  “No … you…” He stretched a shaky hand out towards me.

  “It’s all right,” I said briskly. “I’ve undertaken a risk assessment.” And I had. I foresaw two suboptimal outcomes. The first was that Dracula would inadvertently sever my carotid artery, and I would bleed to death. But at present, that was a possibility, not a certainty. The certainty was that Dracula would bleed to death without a transfusion.

  And then there was the possibility that I would turn into one of the undead. Dracula was so adamant that Bram Stoker had got it all wrong that I felt this was unlikely. But what if Stoker was correct? Then Miss Blaine would be happy. She had recruited me for time-travelling missions so that I could help to make the world a better place. If I became one of the undead, I could continue going on missions indefinitely. Although I would probably need some sort of therapy not to bite people the whole time.

  I patted Dracula gently on the shoulder. “If it helps you, that’s all that matters.”

  “No … mustn’t bite … mustn’t take your blood…”

  “It’s no problem. I’m a regular blood donor. It helps my cardiovascular system and reduces my risk of heart attack and stroke.”

  “No…” His voice was getting fainter. “… my mama … shocked…”

  “Don’t you worry about your mum, she won’t know anything about it. What happens in Sans-Soleil stays in Sans-Soleil.”