Lydia felt a chill, for M’sieu Potric had spoken to her when she’d come in that evening, and she’d thought he was getting better. Théodule went to confirm the death. The cleaning-lady went on stoically gathering soiled sheets.
Lydia stood where she was, beside her husband’s bed. M’sieu Potric had lain opposite the window where for a moment she had thought she’d seen something reflected in the inky glass.
She didn’t see Ysidro for the remainder of the night. When she emerged from the hospital gates in the morning, exhausted and dreading the hunt for a pharmacy that would, she knew, occupy most of the day, the first person she encountered was a newsboy in the street, shouting that Germany had declared war on France.
FIVE
There were Albanian mercenaries – bashi-bazouks, Muslims – all over Bosnia in 1885 in spite of the fact that Austria had taken the area from the Sultan several years previously. Asher’s Modern Languages tutor had shown up rather unexpectedly on Rebbe Karlebach’s doorstep in Prague and suggested that Asher come ‘walking’ with him in the area, to learn the ways of the countryside. ‘Invaluable if you’re going to be studying there,’ Belleytre had added, with that glinting twinkle in his gray eyes that Asher later came to know well. Asher had done rough hiking in the Carpathians and the prospect of physical exertion didn’t trouble him. Belleytre taught him how to blend in – not just in his speech but in his mannerisms and hygiene – with the local polyglot population of Bosnian Muslims, bearded Greek monks, swarthy gypsies, and staunchly Catholic Croats, and had introduced him to bandit chiefs, arms smugglers, the leaders of informal nationalist armies, and similar colorful types. The following year Belleytre had suggested that he go back – ‘just to have a look about’ – with Edward Brannert, one of the senior men on Asher’s stairway at Balliol. Up until that time Asher had never dreamed that Brannert was connected with what he suspected Belleytre was involved in.
‘You’re only there to get to know everyone,’ Belleytre had said when the two young men had come to tea in his chambers: evasive as always, just as if they were going to enter the disputed provinces legally and make Sunday calls on other well-bred academics. ‘Study the lie of the land, maybe keep your ear to the ground a bit in the public houses, pick up some nibbles of gossip. Maybe draw the odd map or two.’ It went without saying that these maps of the tangle of heavily forested gullies, gorges, and valleys between Sarajevo and the Montenegro border had better not be discovered in either of the travelers’ pockets, should they happen to encounter officials of the Austro-Hungarian or Turkish empires – both of whom were claiming the territory.
Or if they should encounter the bashi-bazouks.
When Asher first began to suspect that there were mercenaries in the neighborhood of the deserted hunting-camp where he and Brannert had planned to rendezvous that evening, the first thing he did was destroy his maps – four weeks’ worth of painstaking work – and abandon the camp. Thus, when he was caught by the mercenaries in the woods, he could convincingly protest that he was just a Czech student from Prague (thank you, Mama Karlebach!) on the tramp to Sarajevo where his cousin had offered him a chance of work. Brannert, who’d walked into the hunting-camp shortly after Asher had fled it, had still had his maps on him.
It was the first time Asher had seen a man tortured.
He’d gotten thoroughly sick but it never occurred to the mercenaries that he might be acquainted with this ‘English spy’. He doubted that even Brannert had recognized him. The bashi-bazouks had teased him unmercifully about his weak stomach for the remainder of the night, and let him go in the morning. Looking back, he didn’t know why he didn’t tell Belleytre and his mysterious ‘friends’ in the Department to go to hell as soon as he returned to Oxford, but the thought never crossed his mind. Later he wrote to Brannert’s family telling them their son had fallen down a gorge while hiking, and had been killed instantly.
Why do I remember this? he wondered, walking over the Charles Bridge into Prague, dirty and exhausted and still sick – nearly a week later – from the rakia the mercenaries had made him drink with them. The dark waters of the Vltava slid by under the arches like an oiled black sword blade; he knew he needed to turn right on to Bilkova Ulice to reach Rebbe Karlebach’s house. To shelter under the old man’s steep-slanted roof for a night or two before getting on the train for Calais, and so on to Oxford to report to Belleytre, which was what he knew he’d actually done …
Only the street wasn’t as he remembered it. Instead of the graceful frontages of eighteenth-century stone he saw around him tall, slightly crooked shapes, a weird lacework of dark timbers and pale plaster glimmering through the mist. He knew he should be on the Parizska but there was a four-storied gable black against the sky where he knew the Spanish synagogue should be, the narrow throat of a court where, in his waking recollection, the glatt kosher shop of Mama Karlebach’s nephews stood.
A young man walked ahead of him, long pale hair hanging on to slender shoulders of black velvet, and his face was familiar …
Where do I know him from?
Why am I dreaming of him?
Asher quickened his step to catch him up, trying to recall his name.
Stephen? Sylvester? Simon …
Simon …
The young man wore the archaic black robe of a scholar, billowing loose around a close-fitting doublet and paned breeches. Embroidered gloves covered his hands. He turned down a narrow passageway to a court, and Asher followed. This isn’t Prague …
Water glistened in the center of the dirt street, blobbed with excrement, animal and human; its stink overrode even the bitter chill of the night. Candle flame dimly illumined the windows of the upper floors, but the lower were all shuttered fast. Where AM I? It smelled like Constantinople at its most revolting, or the canals of Venice on a hot day, but the houses were all wrong. When the young man knocked at a door in the court beyond the passageway a servant opened it, and didn’t seem to see Asher when Asher stepped quickly through almost upon the young man’s heels.
The downstairs room was an abyss of shadow, sparse furnishings half-glimpsed in the serving-man’s candle flame. Judging by the servant’s clothing, and the young man’s, Asher put the date at late in the sixteenth century or within the first decade of the seventeenth. Why am I dreaming about the reign of Queen Elizabeth? Something to do with Shakespeare? The stair was narrow as a coffin and turned twice around itself as it ascended.
In an upper room an old man sat at a desk writing, his dark soutane buttoned close, with a shawl worn on top for additional warmth. Asher half expected one of them to greet the other with familiar opening words: ‘I know not why I am so sad’ or ‘Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York’.
The candles showed the mist of the old man’s breath as he turned his head and the younger crossed to him, holding out his hand.
The old man’s quill dropped from fingers gone nerveless with shock. He’d been handsome as a young man, and had kept most of his teeth. His bones were beautiful still. His lips formed the word ‘Simon?’, soundless with incredulity.
The young man – Simon – fell to his knees, caught the old man’s soft, wrinkled hands and pressed them to his cheek for a moment, then kissed them desperately, like a man begging for his life.
‘Simon?’ the old man whispered again, and put his palm to his visitor’s cheek. ‘Dear God, you—’ He broke off, staring and staring. ‘Fifty years,’ he said at last, hoarse with disbelief. ‘You died in—’
‘Help me.’ The young man’s voice was barely a breath of sound. ‘Jeffrey, help me. I beg you.’
‘How is this possible? Is it really you, and not a – a spirit, a phantom …’
For answer Simon pulled off his gloves and held up his hands. His long, slim fingers were almost skeletal, but instead of nails they were tipped with claws. Tilting back his head he drew up his lips to show the gleam of fangs. He caught the man Jeffrey’s hands when the old man would have pull
ed away from him in horror, and the candles on the desk reflected in his eyes as in a cat’s.
‘It is truly me,’ he said. ‘For almost fifty years I have been as you see me, dear friend. I have been the thing that you tell yourself cannot really exist. They say that God forgives, Jeffrey. Forgives anything, if it is asked with a contrite and willing heart. What must I do, to be forgiven?’
The man Jeffrey only touched Simon’s cheek, like white silk colored gold by the firelight, a young man’s cheek. ‘It is true, then? There are such things as the vampire?’
‘There are. I am.’ He bowed his head again, pressed his face to his old friend’s hands. ‘Tell me what I must do, to ransom my soul back from Hell.’
‘This isn’t right.’
Like the scratch of a razor in bleached wax, a frown marked Ysidro’s brow.
Lydia leaned forward, her heart in her throat. ‘Is he …’ The words dried in her mouth. ‘He isn’t …’
The yellow eyes met hers, momentarily impatient. ‘He is as he was last night,’ he said, as if Asher’s future ability to think and reason, his intelligence, and the thousand things that made up the man Lydia loved were of only secondary importance, and she wanted to slap him, for all the good that was likely to do. ‘’Tis not his mind that I touch, but his dreams. His memories. The images of where he has been, and what he has seen. Yet he dreams of matters which are impossible for him to know. Recalls events at which he was not and could not have been present.’
‘Are you sure of that?’ She realized how foolish the words sounded even as they emerged from her mouth.
‘To the best of my knowledge,’ returned the vampire astringently, ‘your husband was not in Paris in 1602, so yes, I am fairly certain of my ground here.’ He considered the wasted face on the pillow, and for the first time Lydia saw not only puzzlement but also disconcerted alarm in his eyes. ‘To the best of my knowledge,’ he added, ‘those are my memories in which he treads, in his dreams.’
Lydia only stared at him, as if he had spoken some foreign language. For a moment she wondered if she were dreaming herself. She was so exhausted, she was aware, that the shadowy hospital ward had a slightly phantasmical cast to it. She’d spent the afternoon being driven by Stanislas Greuze to every pharmacy in Paris, and in those which were not closed she had met – and argued with – elderly men, or the wives of the younger pharmacists, who had only spread their hands in resignation. ‘It is of no use, madame. The army has sent for all supplies of drugs. If it should happen that a compromise is reached, perhaps next week …’
She’d returned to the Avenue Kléber and found her aunt’s salon hip-deep in steamer trunks. In her own room, Imèlde was packing the small case that Lydia had brought from Oxford the previous week. ‘I told ’em you were staying, miss,’ her own maid Ellen had protested. ‘But they wouldn’t listen …’
‘Nonsense, of course you’re returning to England,’ Aunt Louise had informed her – granite and steel swathed in patchouli and lace – and had slapped boat-train tickets into Lydia’s hand. ‘We need to be at the Gare du Nord at ten. It’s the last train – what I went through, to get these!’ Meaning, Lydia was well aware, what Honoria Flasket had gone through.
‘Heaven only knows what the Gare will be like. Military personnel only, they’re saying now. I guarantee you, Dieppe will be a madhouse.’
The ensuing argument had cost Lydia most of the sleep she’d been desperately looking forward to through the whole of the aching day, and she’d fled the apartment the moment her aunt went to her room to dress for dinner.
After examining seven or eight possible responses to the vampire’s words – picking each sentence up and mentally turning it over, like her Uncle Ambrose when he’d had too much cognac and was trying to select a music-box cylinder – she finally settled on, ‘How is that possible?’
‘It isn’t.’ Ysidro touched Asher’s temple with the backs of his knuckles, the small straight line still etched between his brows. ‘The only way he could have these things in his mind – in his dreams – is if he were in contact with Constantine Angelus.’
‘The Master of Paris? The one who wrote religious tracts?’
‘Even he.’
He was dear to me, Ysidro had said. Lydia was aware of how few – human or vampire – this man would speak of in those terms, in the three-plus centuries of his shadowy existence.
‘He is the only one whose mind I would permit to enter into mine, in dreaming, as if he were my master who made me vampire …’
‘Is it possible,’ she asked, ‘that he wasn’t killed after all when the others were … in 1871, did you say?’
‘No.’ The sharpness of his voice was like the shutting of a gate. ‘And he perished long ere that.’
In the silence that followed the grumble of truck engines rose from the Rue Saint-Antoine, the squeak of wagon-wheels, the tock of hooves. Reservists’ voices, coming into town with their satchels of food and clean socks, at the deployment centers and train stations.
Two beds over, M’sieu Lecoq coughed, wet and labored. The only person Lydia had seen so far tonight had been Fantine, stoically mopping the corridor. Judging by the stale smells of soiled linen and vomit she hadn’t made it to this ward yet tonight, and it was nearly midnight.
At length Ysidro set his thoughts, whatever they were, aside. ‘But as Constantine could enter into my thoughts,’ he said, ‘I am well able to walk into James’s dreams, as I can walk into the dreams of any one of the living into whose eyes I have looked. Last night James dreamed of a woman who from her manner and the over-emphatic style of her attire I assume to be one of the demi-monde – “eight-spring luxury model”, as the fashionable say. Thus when I departed last night I repaired to such haunts of fashion as are still in operation in this city; contrary to the assertions of Sister Sabatier, many in Paris still think more of seeing and being seen than of aiding La Patrie, and most of them were at Maxim’s until a surprisingly advanced hour of the morning. By the time I located the woman with whom James had gone riding in a carriage through the old Marais district, ’twas near daylight and I was forced to return to my own lodgings by way of the sewers. But ere I left the restaurant I managed to send the woman a note by way of one of the waiters – a note containing five hundred francs – and she will be expecting you to call in the afternoon. Is this agreeable to you, Mistress?’
‘It is.’
He drew from his pocket a visiting card, elaborate with copperplate lettering and embossed flowers, which bore the name ‘La Belle Nicolette’.
An address on the Boulevard Haussmann had been penciled on the back. Lydia could only offer up a silent prayer of thanks that at this moment Aunt Louise was on her way to England, home, and glory.
‘I would have called on her myself, tomorrow night,’ the vampire went on, as Lydia took the card, ‘rather than suggest that you go near such a woman. Yet my heart misgives me. I think we need to learn what this woman may know as soon as may be. Despite assurances from the government that France’s armies will cut those of Germany to pieces, I suspect a great many people will be leaving Paris ere this morning’s sun goes down. ’Twere better not to delay.’
‘I agree.’ Lydia slipped the card into her reticule and propped her spectacles more firmly on to her nose. Eight-spring luxury model or not, it never crossed her mind that Asher would have sought out or dreamed about a woman who wasn’t somehow involved in the puzzle he had come to Paris to solve, whatever it was. ‘Last night, did you – were there …’ She regarded her friend hesitantly. It might have been he who killed poor M’sieu Potric, she reminded herself, whose empty bed stood like an accusation opposite the open window … Yet he had saved her life, and that of her daughter. And beyond that debt, she recalled all the nights she’d walked with him in the spring mists along the Embankment, or played cards with him on the train to Constantinople. Remembered moments when he’d smile the smile of the man he’d once been.
And she hated herself for feeling wha
t she felt.
For knowing herself a traitor to Jamie in her heart.
‘Am I safe here, do you think? Is Jamie safe?’
‘While the sun is down? No.’ Lydia had not seen him move, but he stood now beside the window, looking down into the street. The chilly glare of the street lights outlined the aquiline nose, touched with frost his thin white eyelashes, his spider-web hair. ‘Though I sensed their presence near the hospital last night I encountered none of the Paris nest. It may be that Elysée de Montadour is waiting to get at James again to finish what she began – if ’twas she. Or it could be one of her fledglings. As I said, Paris has long been a rebellious and troublesome nest. I would not leave either of you here alone.’
Fantine came in then with her bucket and mop, thin and stooped, though Lydia guessed she and this woman were nearly of an age. She left a great bundle of stinking linen outside the door and carried, awkwardly, another clean bundle jammed beneath her arm; not nearly enough, Lydia judged, to change all the sheets in the ward. Still, she went to her, helped her set the linen down and gave her a friendly ‘Bonsoir, madame’, and listened to her complaint of the army’s depredations on the hospital stores.
‘My brother’s joined up,’ the cleaning-woman said. ‘I tried to tell him not to, for it won’t be good for him. He’s not so smart, my brother.’ She frowned worriedly, and tapped her temple. ‘He’ll get hurt. And now they’ve took away most of the clean sheets as well.’
When Fantine moved off to the far end of the ward Ysidro seemed to re-materialize from the embrasure of the window; the hand he laid on Lydia’s shoulder when she sat down was cold as death.
He hasn’t fed.
Yet.
‘Did you get money ere the banks closed?’ he asked.
‘Two thousand francs. That’s all they’d give me.’
Darkness on His Bones Page 4