‘A one-eyed man is king in the country of the blind. If you remain long in Paris you’ll find many who are delighted to sell their services for whatever coin you choose to pay. Where do you stay? At your aunt’s, still? Very good. In the hours of darkness I shall remain here with you insofar as is possible. In the earlier hours of evening I shall commence arrangements to flee the city as soon as James is well enough to be moved. Discover if you can what took James to where he was found in the fourth arrondissement. To the best of my knowledge, Elysée de Montadour dwells still in the nest her husband had, out on the Rue de Passy, but she may well have another in the older part of the city. If any more of these communications reach you from this “Mr Johnson”, bring them to me.’
‘I doubt any will, now that Aunt Louise has gone. They’ll assume I left with her, which I suppose is what any sensible person would have done. You’re not turning German spy-hunter, are you?’ It was the last thing she’d have expected of the vampire.
‘What I hunt,’ Ysidro corrected gently, ‘is word of why James was seeking the writings of Constantine Angelus. And how it is that he comes to dream of matters that only Constantine would have known of me.’
SIX
‘I came to Paris in the winter of 1602,’ said Ysidro, ‘seeking the man who had been my confessor when first I arrived in England. His name was Jeffrey Sampson, a Jesuit and dear to me. A man of great intellectual attainment, yet of a kind and cheerful heart. Like many of the True Faith he was obliged to flee the country after the Pope issued a bull that called upon them to deprive the heretic usurper Elizabeth of her throne.’
‘One can scarcely blame her for being irked,’ pointed out Lydia.
A corner of the vampire’s lips flexed for a moment. Without admitting the justice of this position he went on, ‘When I came to Paris I had been vampire for nearly fifty years. I had done my best to take only the lives of those already damned – London crawled with heretics – yet my heart feared that this was not enough. I had heard all my life that ’twas Satan who created such creatures as myself, who walked the night and would be destroyed by God’s daylight. As I grew to know those others of the London nest – and those who haunted the countryside like wolves in the hours of darkness – I could not shake from my soul the terror of damnation, and the fear that I would in time grow like them. Then, too’ – he turned one hand over, where it lay on his knee, as if considering the length and sharpness of his claw-like nails and the worn gold of his signet-ring that gleamed in the dim light coming into the dark ward from the hall – ‘I had by then seen many of the living I knew in London age and die. Long already had I ceased to frequent old haunts, for fear that Moll Butcher at the Left Leg in Shoreditch, or Mistress Quimmer at the Black Dog, would see my face a boy’s face still and cry out that I had sold myself to the Devil for eternal youth.
‘A fit jest,’ he added, and looked down again at Asher’s face. ‘We who hunt the night are Dead Sea fruit. Colored dust. That those who behold us would call what they see “youth” is to me irrefutable proof that God exists and has a sense of humor.’
‘Were there that many heretics in London?’ Lydia had a momentary vision of acres of stakes, holocausts of flame.
‘’Twas illegal then in England to be anything else.’
By ‘heretics’, she realized, he meant Protestants. Church of England, like herself.
‘In France the Catholic League had striven and failed to keep the leader of the French Protestants from taking the throne. I doubt a single soul believed King Henri’s conversion to the True Faith was anything but a blasphemous ruse to silence opposition to his accession, and, I came to learn on my first night in Paris, even the Undead of Paris were divided between the faithful and the followers of Calvin and Luther. Thus I returned to the question that I asked Jeffrey, when at last I found him at his lodgings south of the river: can one be faithful, and yet damned?’
After a long silence Lydia asked, ‘What did he say?’
Lydia returned to the Avenue Kléber at eight the next morning, with the thin mists just burning off the river. In the cab she asked Stanislas Greuze the question – wondering what a good socialist would reply – and, rather to her surprise, he told her the tale of Tannehauser, the knight who sought out the goddess Venus in her secret realms below the earth. After three years of worshipping her there the knight was filled with remorse and left her, traveling to Rome to beg the Pope’s forgiveness of his sins. ‘With such sins as yours,’ the Pope cried, ‘it is far more likely that my walking stick will put forth flowers, than that you will ever be forgiven.’ So Tannehauser knew he was damned, and left.
The cab-driver spun the wheel deftly, dodged between two trucks of a convoy in the Place du Théâtre Français, and fleeted up the half-deserted Avenue de l’Opéra. ‘Three days later the Pope found his walking stick covered with spring flowers. He sent out men to fetch Tannehauser, to tell him that God’s mercy was indeed infinite, but Tannehauser was never seen again. My granny used to tell me,’ the driver went on, ‘that it just goes to show you not to judge. Myself, I think it just means, “Never trust the Pope.”’
Ellen let Lydia in with the information that after Lydia’s departure the previous afternoon Aunt Louise had had the locks changed ‘“in case that foolish girl is so careless as to leave her key lying about,” she said, the old witch!’ fumed the maid, handing her a new key. ‘The trouble I had getting these cut from the one Mrs Flasket slipped me at the train station! And what a horror that was, with soldiers all milling about and women crying and American tourists all fighting each other for a place standing up in the mail car. I’m to post it back to her,’ Ellen added, ‘at Halfdene, which is where she’s going, and God help your poor uncle! How is Professor Asher, ma’am?’
‘The same,’ Lydia whispered. Ellen had also gone shopping – predictably, Aunt Louise had stripped the apartment of everything edible, presumably to force Lydia to the conclusion that she must accompany her aunt back to London or starve in the street – and had purchased, as well as coffee and rolls, a cup, a plate, and a set of cheap tin utensils to lay out on the cherrywood table in the breakfast-room (Aunt Louise had sent the Limoges back to Halfdene Hall as well). ‘Oh, you dear!’ said Lydia when she saw this repast laid out for her. ‘You didn’t need to fix up the breakfast-room for me! I can eat in the kitchen.’
‘Never, as long as I’m in the house, ma’am! What your mother would say about that—’
‘What my mother would say to Louise,’ retorted Lydia, ‘if she heard she’d abandoned me in Paris with the Germans gathering on the border, and changed the lock on the door—’
‘What your mother would say—’ the maid’s brown eyes twinkled – ‘is exactly nothing, because she was as terrified of Lady Mountjoy as everybody else is. If you’ll give me a bit more money (and the cost of coffee is enough to make you faint!) I’ll go out later to get some real groceries – the markets are still open, thank heavens! – and a newspaper.’
She bustled through the baize-covered door that led into the pantry and the apartment’s kitchen quarters, leaving Lydia to contemplate the over-elaborate visiting card of La Belle Nicolette and wonder if Ellen had managed to salvage any of her – Lydia’s – clothing from the trunks that Louise had ordered packed. If not, where might she purchase at least a camisole and drawers … and another skirt … and a middy – a middy would go with nearly anything … and some stockings. What would people be wearing, now that war had started? Good heavens, I’ll need face powder, rouge, mascaro, lip-rouge if I’m to be presentable at all … I hope Aunt Louise hasn’t taken the laundry soap! Will two thousand francs be enough?
The jerk of her head made her realize she’d drifted almost into sleep. She had dozed, uncomfortably, in the chair at Jamie’s bedside for nearly three hours during the night, waking at intervals to see Ysidro motionless with his hand against Jamie’s temple, his yellow eyes half-shut as if listening to voices far off. ‘’Twere best you continue as you have b
een,’ he had said the first time she’d wakened, ‘and come here at eventide. Thus I may keep watch over you both. I mislike this “William Johnson” of yours. He does indeed write like a German’ (Lydia had brought to him the note that had come for her, repeating the previous invitation, before she had left the apartment) ‘and we have no surety who is working for whom. Sleep here if you can.’
Rising now, she slipped across the main salon and down the hall to her bedroom, which faced east into the small courtyard in the center of the block of flats. Ellen had made up the bed – Aunt Louise’s second housemaid had been stripping sheets and blankets when Lydia had sneaked away the previous evening – but there was no sign of a trunk, of Lydia’s small valise that she’d brought from Oxford, or of anything else. This included, she noticed, the cardboard box in which she’d brought long swags of dried garlic flowers, aconite, and Christmas rose, plants universally acknowledged to be inimical to vampire flesh. Did Aunt Louise pack them in my trunk with everything else? Or did she just have them thrown out?
Sunlight streamed in through the tall window, so it probably didn’t matter at the moment.
She pulled the pins out of her hair (twelve of them), sponged off her face powder and the artfully applied rouge without which she refused to be seen in public (using the hem of her petticoat for a towel – Aunt Louise had made off with those, too), and took off her shoes, skirt, and shirtwaist. With a certain amount of difficulty she loosened her corset, and finally – with profoundest relief – dropped on to the bed and slept.
And dreamed of a walking stick, bursting into flower.
‘What did he say?’ she had asked Ysidro last night, and for a long while the vampire had not replied. Had only sat with one hand on Jamie’s forehead, the other on his wrist, as if looking into those dreams – what was Jamie doing, having dreams that belonged to Ysidro? – that had so disconcerted him.
‘He heard my confession that night,’ the vampire said at length, and in her dream now Lydia glimpsed him as he must have been in those days, with his white ruff and his dark velvet clothing, kneeling before the cross, hands folded in supplication. So much for the legend that vampires can’t look at the cross …
‘He said he could not grant me absolution, but must speak to his superior, the Cardinal Montevierde. Even that gave me relief, to know that I had put in train the opening gambits of my salvation. When I returned the following night Montevierde was there, a tall man, lean with fasting and smelling of old blood from the wounds beneath his clothing: the cilice, the hair-shirt, the weals of self-flagellation. I found it extremely difficult to concentrate on anything that he said to me, so absorbed was I in a storm of hunger and need. He believed in the Undead and knew that this was what I was, yet in him I sensed no fear of me.’
‘Did he look on it as a test?’ asked Lydia. ‘Of his faith – or of yours?’
‘Mayhap.’ For a moment in her dream Lydia saw in his fleeting expression – as she sometimes did in waking – the young man he had been, emerging from behind the dignity of Spanish etiquette and the chill of Un-death. ‘At the time I had the sensation that fear had long since been burned out of him by some incandescent inner fire.’
‘Faith?’ After half a lifetime studying medicine and suffering, Lydia had always been amazed by faith, as if she heard people speaking in tongues.
Ysidro’s voice was quiet, and dry as paper. ‘Ambition.’
‘And did he absolve you?’
‘He told me to seek out Esdras de Colle, who had been a nobleman in the region of Bordeaux and was the chief of the Protestant vampires of Paris,’ said Ysidro. ‘To seek him out, and kill him.’
At that point, on the previous night, footfalls had sounded in the corridor and Sister Thérèse’s voice had echoed, indignant at the idea that any person had the right to express the opinion that the army was amiss in its strategy. ‘That time is past, doctor! The might of the army – the spirit of our men! – is what stands between us and the Germans! Not by one word – for God’s sake, Fantine, can’t you even carry a tray properly? – not by one word can we diminish that spirit …’
And Lydia’s dream folded itself away and she was in Oxford again, in the long garden of the house on Holywell Street, watching her daughter run races with butterflies. At two and a half Miranda would pick up, pursue, or examine anything, from bumblebees to chicken guts in the kitchen, and even after being told what these things were would make up alternative explanations for and uses of them (‘Bumblebees make houses for butterflies!’).
But even dreaming of her child, Lydia seemed to see shadows moving behind her, visible as a flicker in her peripheral vision – such peripheral vision as she had beyond the rim of her spectacles – and gone when she turned her head.
And she knew what she saw was a vampire.
Lydia had instructed Ellen to wake her at one, and she jerked from sleep with a gasp at five minutes before. Where can I buy clean clothing before tea with La Belle Nicolette at four? The lace-and-gauze shirtwaist she’d worn yesterday and last night was missing from the chair where she’d left it, and she guessed Ellen had stolen in and taken it to launder in the kitchen. But when she padded forth to the salon wrapped in the bedspread it was to find her handmaiden with a face like thunder, and an assortment of small parcels laid out on the salon’s holland-draped central table.
‘Invitations to visit gentlemen without telling anybody where you’re going are one thing,’ stated Ellen. ‘And what your mother would say about that I won’t go into, because you know as well as I do, with Professor Asher out of his senses and the German army tearing up the countryside … But any man who would have the brass-faced arrogance to send such things to a lady, and a married lady …’
She thrust an envelope at Lydia as if it bore the postmark of one of the upper circles of Hell.
‘And like this “William Johnson” he’s got foreign handwriting, too! Who are these people, miss? Ma’am,’ she corrected herself – she’d have taken the trouble to correct herself, Lydia reflected, even if she’d had to shout The building’s being bombed, miss! ‘Do they have anything to do with poor Professor Asher?’
The handwriting wasn’t the Teutonic style of the alleged William Johnson. It was the vertical, looped, rather spiky script of a sixteenth-century Spaniard:
Mistress,
Whilst you slept last night I took the liberty of communicating with various tradespeople with whom the Paris nest habitually deals, who are well used to such instructions. I trust the parcels which will arrive today will serve to replace some at least of what your execrable aunt bore away.
Ever thy servant,
Simon
Lydia tore up the note at once (Ellen was trying to read it over her shoulder). The packages – from Houbigant on the Rue de Rivoli, Madeleine Chéruit (CHÉRUIT works for the vampires???), Marcelle Demay, Hellstern and Sons, and an assortment of clothing merchants – were a shining tribute to the ready-made garment industry. Shirtwaists, camisoles, underclothing, stockings, gloves, a pair of jade-and-lilac pumps (how does he know my size?), and two extremely pretty afternoon dresses in the colors Lydia favored. Another parcel contained towels. A smaller one held cosmetics and a hairbrush; one smaller still, a pair of earrings, in emerald and pearl.
‘Don’t you dare put those on, ma’am! The very idea! Your Aunt Louise would have a stroke if she heard of it!’
‘My Aunt Louise is the one who’s responsible for me being obliged to accept these gifts,’ Lydia retorted. ‘They’re … from a very old friend.’ About three hundred and eighty years old, in fact …
Stanislas Greuze, waiting faithfully at the taxi-stand on the Étoile, kissed his hand and cried, ‘Magnifique!’ as Lydia got into the cab and despite the total impropriety of accepting gifts of clothing and jewelry from a man not her husband – even if he had been dead for centuries – Lydia felt a good deal better about visiting an eight-spring luxury model courtesan knowing that she herself was just as expensively attired.
La Belle Nicolette’s flat was smaller than Aunt Louise’s – the same could have been said of Buckingham Palace – but was, as far as Lydia could tell without her glasses, far more stylishly appointed. Its drawing-room windows overlooked the Boulevard Haussmann, now surging with a steady traffic of military supply vehicles. Its furniture, upholstered in dusty yellow and amber, made one think of orchids and serpents. La Belle Nicolette, a dainty brunette, rose to hold out her hand to Lydia as the maid led her in. ‘M’sieu Ysidro said that he might send a deputy, rather than come to tea himself. Please do be seated, madame.’
Since she was wearing L’Heure Bleue by Guerlain, Lydia could guess the approximate cost of the rest of her raiment and be glad she’d disregarded Ellen’s admonitions about propriety. ‘My name is Mrs Asher,’ she introduced herself. ‘I’m the wife of the gentleman – he may have called himself Asher, or he may not – who sought you out last week to ask you about old hôtels particuliers.’
Every trade, Lydia was well aware, has its ethic, and La Belle Nicolette merely raised polite eyebrows. When the maid brought in tea and madeleines, Lydia caught the subdued bustle and scrape of activity elsewhere in the flat. Packing for hasty departure? Ysidro was right …
Whatever the French government had decreed about the French railroads, five hundred francs would go a long way with a woman who planned to go a long way.
‘Shortly after he spoke with you,’ Lydia went on, ‘my husband met with violence, and I have reason to fear that those who hurt him – he’s in hospital now, unconscious—’ the younger woman’s eyes flared with sympathy and shock – ‘might still seek to do him – or me – harm. We’re trying to find them – trying at least to learn who they might have been, and why they attacked him. It doesn’t appear to be … random. Not robbers or thugs, I mean. And so far, the only clue we have in this whole business is his investigation of these old hôtels.’
‘Tiens!’ Even at the width of the tea-table, La Belle’s features were little more than a delicate impression of rose and ivory, but she sounded impressed. ‘So this histoire of writing a book?’
Darkness on His Bones Page 5