The stallion galloped hard, but Dimitri thrashed his steed until it cried out in anger. Nicholas clung tightly to the signalman’s immense back. ‘I can see it through the trees,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘You must be ready to climb aboard when I shout.’
They cut down into the forest, the branches whipping their faces, the horse’s hooves skipping on loose shale. Several times it threatened to unseat Nicholas as it vaulted fallen pine branches and ploughed on through narrow paths cut into the woods. Here, away from the hazy glow of the moon, all they had to guide them was the light of the passing train.
Nicholas could hear the familiar clackety-clack sound growing closer now, slowing down like the tick of an unwound clock. For a brief moment, moonlight shone a quicksilver outline around the carriages. ‘There is an open deck at the rear of the train where I can board,’ called Nicholas. ‘If you can get me close, I’ll try to jump on.’
‘If you make it, I want you to promise me something. You’ll kill the bastard who murdered my son,’ shouted Dimitri. ‘He’s they one they call the Conductor.’
‘If I make it, I’ll bring you his head,’ Nicholas shouted back.
Dimitri kicked his bootheels into the stallion until its sides bled. ‘Come on, then.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THE SEDUCTION
THOMAS RAN ON through the rocking train, witnessing the trail of sickness and death that lay in the wake of the Red Countess.
So many passengers were dying of the virulent plague, which aged their bones and rotted their skin. They lay collapsed in their own blood, their eyes vanished. The very air grew miasmic and foul, the nightmarish scene sweetly reeking of contagion. It seemed obvious to him now that everyone on the train was dead except for himself and Isabella. There was nothing that could be done to save the others, but he wasn’t meant to; perhaps he was seeing them as they really were—how they would be after the train’s arrival at its final destination. How they were for every night apart from this one.
Thomas pushed on along the corridors, searching for the woman he needed to confront. All those years in England, talking to families about facing up to evil and overcoming it, he thought, all those empty words when this—this is what I should have been doing, fighting real harm—pestilence, war, corruption, degradation, societies rotting from within, and in my safe little world I could not see the truth, for I was blinded from it. I am glad to be tested. If I fail, at least I can say that I faced my demons and found a form of redemption.
He was approaching the private section of the first class carriage. He knew he would find her here. There was a set of four suites, artfully arranged and bedecked with tasseled velvet curtains and banks of cushions, reserved for the most moneyed of travellers. And here, the Red Countess had sunk onto a grand filigreed chaise, distractedly turning her cards on the table set before her, in time with the rocking of the carriage. Joss-sticks burned in the corners, removing the bitter tang of death, filling the compartment with a nauseating sweetness. The light from the sconces flickered across her veiled face.
‘You are the cause of this,’ Thomas accused, standing in the doorway. ‘You cannot deny it.’
The Countess looked up, regarding him through her veil. ‘Did I address you? In my world, the Countess speaks first.’
‘But you are not in your world.’
‘Oh, come in,’ she beckoned. ‘I don’t usually talk to commoners, but I suppose as a man of the cloth you are at least partially exempt from human experience.’
‘You cannot frighten me,’ he said, ‘but you must be stopped.’
‘Please sit down and spare yourself any further embarrassment. I can see you quaking in your shoes. Look, your hands are all a-tremble. There’s no need to be afraid. I knew you would return. Men always return.’
‘There are terrible things happening, a great evil at work, and I know you are the cause.’
‘In this world sickness is terrible but unavoidable. Do you think me evil too, or just the disease?’
‘I... don’t know.’
‘You can’t help the sick. You’re a man of God and cannot forget the world, but you must also know that you cannot change it. Sit for a moment and take a glass of tokay with me.’
The Red Countess was casting a spell on him, confusing him. A card, the Queen of Spades, lay beside her glass. She took a sip of the amber wine from her crystal cup and poured a second glass, sliding it toward him. Was it tainted with contagion? Thomas stared at it.
‘Go ahead. Take a sip.’
Thomas felt himself falling under her compelling influence. Despite the sickly horrors aboard the train, the atmosphere in the salon was mysterious and intoxicating, unlike anything in his life, and like everything dark from his dreams.
His hand moved toward the glass. She raised her own to her lips once more.
‘Let’s drink to passion, and leave the terrors of disease outside, safe within our own boundaries. Be honest. Isn’t that why you joined the church?’
‘I joined to do good, but somehow I got lost.’ He watched as her ruby lips touched the rim of the glass, branding it.
‘No more faith, then? Drink with me. It is so much easier just to drink.’
He knew that this was a part of his wager, and was determined to be unafraid. Raising the glass to his lips, he took a sip. The liquor was no ordinary tokay. It was stronger than wine, with the sweet scent of Manzanilla but the bite of Eau De Vie. It filled his throat with fire.
‘That’s better. Now come closer, sit beside me.’ She patted the seat as if encouraging a dog. Drawn to her, Thomas came to her side. She was more intoxicating than the drink, and knew it.
‘Closer.’ She leaned toward him. He glimpsed her kohl-rimmed eyes glinting behind the veil and reached out to her. It was suddenly very important to discover who she really was. To get to the heart of her secret. Everyone on board had one.
His fingers touched the hem of the veil, slowly lifting it. He tried to prepare himself for what he might discover underneath.
‘Closer still,’ she whispered. He could feel the coolness of her body next to his. She actually seemed to be lowering the temperature in the cabin, annealing the lividity of illness, spreading a deathly calm.
His fingers raised the veil. He tried not to flinch. Age, plague, a soul in torment—he was prepared for all—but not for what he found.
A stunningly beautiful woman in her early twenties. Long dark lashes, pale high cheeks, seashell lips, perfection in stasis.
‘But... you’re beautiful.’
Her eyes were downcast now, and sad. ‘Once I fled my country aboard this very train...’
He closed his eyes and allowed her words to enter his head.
We are all being told stories tonight, he thought, a veritable cascade of them, but which of the tales are real, and which are intended to lead us into betrayals?
He closed his eyes and listened to her sugared words. As she spoke, the images appeared in his head. He saw a sumptuous Russian fin de siècle ballroom swathed in French red velvet, a scuffed parquet floor, an orchestra in evening dress, couples dancing, sputtering candelabras, falling snow outside. An onion-domed building finished in white wood and topped with gilt, a graceful dacha far removed from the peasant rabble in the city streets.
He saw the Countess surrounded by handsome young men in starched white shirts and tail-coats. One, waiting at the back behind her suitors, was a plain country priest, not unlike himself, sunburned, wrongly dressed, out of place. Two of the other men were secretly mocking him.
‘A man of God. So young, so desperately in love with me. Why, he might have once been you.’ The Red Countess sighed. ‘So many suitors. I thought it sport to make them want me. My compatriots were dying in the revolution and I cared only for my pleasures. The arrogance of wealth and youth and beauty. I still ask myself why I chose the little priest.’
Thomas watched as the eager young man rushed forward to kiss her hand. He failed to see that his fellow
suitors were making mock of him.
‘I suppose I made love to him for the novelty. The others were all of my social class, all so readily available, all so filled with a sense of entitlement. To the priest, my mere presence was a privilege. I liked that. So would any woman. But of course, I was no ordinary woman.’
He saw her bedroom in the dacha, the Red Countess stretched out, pale and naked and languorous in her boudoir as the priest made fervent, clumsy love to her. He heard the apologies, saw the fluttering hands, the awkward thrusting, the fading novelty, the familiar returning ennui.
He heard the Countess sigh as she drew her robes about her voluptuous breasts and rose from her bed, drifting from the bedchamber without a single glance back.
He saw the priest’s carefully crafted missives returned, ignored, left unanswered, the pages torn, the ink rainwashed in the gutters of St Petersburg.
‘To those who are spurned,’ said the Red Countess, ‘love is as serious as death.’
It was an absurd sight—the little Bolshevik priest, returning to the court, waiting in cold anterooms before supercilious servants, lurking outside her summerhouse. Those whom the Red Countess rejected were never able to forgive her, but those she had taken and then discarded were never able to forgive themselves.
At first it was sport to make him wait, but she grew tired of his persistence. Displays of emotion were vulgar and commonplace. He sent bunches of garish flowers and bottles of mediocre wine he could ill afford. When he burst into a dancehall where her admirers were toasting her with pyramids of champagne glasses, the young men fought him and the glasses smashed, and he was thrown out into the snow.
Anxious to ensure that the priest would make no further scenes, she had a letter hand-delivered. Her words were carefully chosen to be cruel, and were not kindly received. In despair, the priest threw her farewell note onto the floor and stamped it black. Thomas caught words as they fluttered past his vision.
Caprice—foolishness—embarrass—forbid.
The priest returned to his tiny town apartment and climbed onto a chair with a length of rope in his hand. He painstakingly looped it around a large iron pipe set in the ceiling.
He said a prayer, one of the shortest he had committed to memory, and kicked the chair away.
But the pipe could not hold him. As the rope tore into his throat and his body began to thrash in death, it bent and broke beneath his shifting weight.
Thomas followed the pipe down in his mind’s eye. It was connected from the toilets above to the drains below, but now it was fractured. Filthy sewage flooded out over the priest’s convulsing body.
In his mind’s eye, Thomas followed the spill of effluent. He watched as it poured down through the floor to the drains and the tanks and the fountains below, into the city’s drinking supply. He saw the Countess’s fine suitors in their town apartments, watched as they drank deep and sickened, the disease spreading out across St Petersburg like a water-stain.
The bloody sewage overflowed from the fountains, flooding off into the run-offs and the canals, flooding down toward the station, to the platform, dripping into the gutters.
He saw the train filling its water supply from the polluted tank. The murky poison burst into clean water like a storm-devil, tainting with its touch. The water dripped from the tank to the pipe to the open window of the carriage, where a single germ-filled drop, carried by a sudden gust, fell into the Countess’s luncheon glass.
Flirtatiously smiling at her new beau, an army corporal with cold eyes and luxuriant moustaches, the Red Countess raised her glass and drank from it. As she collapsed, her crimson silks swirled about her like mist.
‘But you lived,’ said Thomas. Perhaps, he thought, something of the doomed priest’s spirit entered you. Perhaps that alone was enough to save you.
‘Would I look like this if I had died? See how I am.’ The Red Countess lay back, her crimson robes unfolding to reveal her flawless bare body. Thomas had never seen flesh so alabaster. His glass slid from his hand and cracked on the floor.
She reached forward and pressed her lips on his, unfurled her hot tongue into his mouth. His hands cupped her breasts. She loosened his shirt. Her crimson nails cut his chest, his back. His breeches came open, her thighs parted. The Red Countess released a tiny sigh of pleasure as her robes rode up about them both.
The train roared and rocked. The candles guttered. The joss-sticks wreathed them in dusky scent. Thomas was in the throes of an exquisite passion. It went without saying that this was quite unlike anything he had ever experienced with his wife in Henley-upon-Thames. As he climaxed, he saw that the Red Countess had shut her eyes in ecstatic satisfaction. It thrilled him to know that he had pleased her.
Spent, he pushed back and looked down at her body.
He had been penetrating an ancient, skeletal woman with rancid skin, straggly grey hair, veined grey dugs and claw-like liver-spotted hands. Her grip was not borne of amour but rigor. Opening her snaggle-toothed mouth, she sucked at his tongue and bit.
Thomas screamed in horror and tried to pull away.
Her nails tore bloody strips from his back. Disgusted, he broke free and tumbled into a corner, trying to cover his shrivelled manhood, to wipe the reek of rot from his mouth. Shaking violently, one thought reverberated in his brain. I’ve lost, I’ve lost, I’ve lost.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE SIREN
BUT WE MUST look elsewhere aboard the Arkangel, for at this moment another drama was unfolding.
Isabella had located the Conductor at the entrance to the last carriage, staring in the direction of the open deck. Following his gaze, she was amazed to see Nicholas climbing from the back of a galloping black horse to the platform. A huge bearded man was pushing him from behind, making sure that he could grip the guard-rail before taking off.
She ran forward and grabbed him, pulling until he had safely fallen to the deck. ‘You came back,’ she cried, embracing him so tightly that he could not breathe.
The Conductor watched in amazement. No-one had ever tried to come back on board the Arkangel before. For a moment all sense of protocol left him.
‘Are you all right?’ Nicholas asked Isabella.
‘I am alive. And you?’
‘I still have my soul. Where is Thomas?’
‘He is with the Red Countess, and I fear he may have succumbed.’
‘Then let’s find him. Perhaps it is not too late to save him.’
‘Wait.’ The Conductor stood in their way. ‘This time, I cannot let you come to the vicar’s aid as you did before, freeing him from the coffin.’
‘Why not?’
‘I let you help because it was not his time, but his wife’s. Now he must face his demons alone, as you must eventually.’
‘Please,’ she pleaded, ‘he’s done nothing wrong. I was the one who fled the town. Thomas and his wife were innocents.’
‘He boarded the Arkangel of his own volition,’ the Conductor reminded her. ‘He could have stood his grounds and faced the soldiers at the station.’
‘But he is a man of God, he would not have fought—’
‘That is no concern of mine. We must see if he has the mettle to survive. Wait and watch. And remember, I’m saving you for last. As for you, deserter.’ He turned to Nicholas with a sour face. ‘You are either very brave or even more stupid than I had imagined. You had your chance to escape, and here you are, returned.’
‘Whatever befalls Isabella must be my fate, also,’ he said, taking her hand. Seeing her again had cemented his feelings. They would not be parted so easily next time.
‘I see you do not understand,’ said the Conductor. ‘You have boarded the train. You know the rules. You must undergo a trial. Every living soul who boards the train must take the test.’
‘But I passed—’
‘That was not the train’s doing. It was caused by your own circumstances. The challenges are set by the Arkangel, not by its passengers. Your platoon died in the tren
ches after you left them, but some of them boarded the Arkangel by chance.’
‘Then you are not infallible. There are forces at work here which are beyond your control.’
‘The Arkangel was designed to remove human imperfections from the war between good and evil,’ said the Conductor indignantly. ‘Any errors that occur are always caused by outside forces. The behaviour of the passengers is not so easily predicted.’
‘You think evil will triumph by removing humanity’s interference?’
‘I am no fool. Perhaps this war will never be decisively won, for each side is required to act in fairness to the other. But we can make sure that the pious and the doubtful are never able to destroy our empire.’
Reaching out his tapered pale hands, he pushed the lovers apart. ‘Enough now. You,’ he pointed to Isabella, ‘go forward. And you.’ He pushed Nicholas down into a seat. ‘You must stay here and prepare yourself. Your time is close.’
IN THE RED Countess’s suite Thomas pushed himself back against the wall as his seducer’s raddled face loomed closer.
‘So you see,’ said the Red Countess, ‘I died aboard the train, and so I was reborn in living death. Doomed to travel on the Arkangel for all time, carrying disease in my touch.’
She had edged very close to Thomas. The Red Countess was like a scorpion, unable to prevent herself from striking. ‘When beauty is tainted with cruelty it becomes a curse,’ she explained. ‘I was very beautiful, and very cruel.’
They were almost touching now. Thomas was mesmerized and horrified. He looked down at the backs of his hands, expecting to see the skin break out in pustules.
‘I don’t understand. I am untouched.’
‘But you lost.’ The Red Countess smiled sadly.
‘What does that mean?’
‘You know the cost already. You are dead and damned. You will join us on the train. I will keep you young and make love to you each night. Until I tire of you. My demon lover.’
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