‘As far as I know, there is no book. My husband – did he call himself Asher, by the way?’
The courtesan shook her head. ‘He gave his name as Alexander Prior, but you understand—’ her silvery laugh implied that any gentleman might do the same – ‘so often men conduct business under names not their own. So silly, when the business is completely innocent – as indeed his was, madame, I assure you.’ She handed her a teacup. ‘He gave me a little present to thank me for my trouble, but truly, all he asked of me was to show him my uncle’s old hôtel in the fourth arrondissement, and to introduce him to my Tante Camille, who lived there as a child.’
‘Were you there when he spoke to your aunt?’
‘Briefly.’ La Belle considered the matter for a moment. ‘I had another matter which needed attention that day – it was the twenty-sixth of July, and I was preparing to depart for Deauville, you understand. All this—’ she gestured toward the long windows, the grating rumble of trucks passing on the Boulevard – ‘seemed … inconceivable! And of course now all the arrangements have had to be changed!
‘But your husband asked us both about how long the house had been in the Batoux family, and who had first built it. Our family is a very old one, you understand, though we were never of the nobility. Our … I don’t know how many greats, but my aunts on the respectable side of the family could doubtless tell you! Our ancestor Jacques Batoux was a moneylender, and his son it was, or maybe his grandson, who built the hôtel and was appointed to be an intendant by Cardinal Richelieu, and so founded the family fortunes. Of course the Marais was the most fashionable part of town then. Later the family acquired a much nicer place in Passy when we became fermiers généraux, but there were always some members of the family living in the old hôtel. It was usually some impoverished spinster or scholar or someone that the family was supporting. That’s what Uncle Evrard is – my mama’s uncle, and Tante Camille’s.’
She held out the madeleines to Lydia, who dipped one into her tea and then set it down untasted.
‘What your husband wanted to know was what the place was like inside. For his book, you understand – but now you tell me there was no book. But the idea that Uncle Evrard, of all people, might have … what? Hired thugs to assault your husband?’
‘No, of course not,’ Lydia hastened to reply, though La Belle had chuckled in genuine amusement at the idea. ‘Who lives there now?’
‘No one, as I told M’sieu Prior – M’sieu Asher, that is to say. Only guards. Uncle Evrard has a farm outside Perpignan – which Mama tells me he has not the faintest idea how to run!’
‘Then he didn’t own the house?’
‘Officially he does – on paper, as the Americans say. In reality, no, I think not. His side of the family never has had a bean.’
In Peking Lydia had encountered a powerful underworld family who had kept a vampire as a permanent prisoner, under horrible circumstances … In the same city there had been a temple where the Master vampire of Peking had living priests to act, apparently willingly, as his protectors. She couldn’t imagine Ysidro – or Grippen, the Master of London – putting themselves into such a situation, but keeping the living on hand to guard the Undead was clearly not an unheard-of strategy.
Unless Uncle Evrard himself …?
‘As I told your husband, Uncle Evrard and his family were cast out of the house by solicitors after the German war in 1871. I presume these were the same people who put money into his bank account every month.’ She made a graceful little shrug with hands and eyebrows as well as her silken shoulders. ‘It was all supposed to come from “family investments” that nobody ever discussed, and Uncle Evrard and all his sisters and their husbands occupied this giant spooky old mansion on the Rue des Trois Anges, trying to live like gentlefolk on cabbage soup. They were killingly respectable, and they had all these rules that Uncle Evrard demanded that everyone follow.’
‘What sort of rules?’
‘Crazy ones.’ The girl grimaced. ‘Whole areas of the house were locked up, and God forbid anyone should go into them. One could be beaten even for being found near the doors, Tante said. One couldn’t have company in the evenings, because everyone had to be in bed by dark. My other aunts – Tante Camille’s sisters and cousins – and their husbands didn’t dare disobey, because they didn’t have the money to live anywhere else, really. Tante Camille finally had enough of it and got Gran’mère – Uncle Evrard’s youngest sister, who had been seduced by one of Uncle Evrard’s friends and thrown out of the house and went on to the stage – to introduce her to a protector at Maxim’s.’
‘That was your mama’s mama?’ Lydia recalled with a wince what her father’s butler had said to her when – at her father’s orders – he had refused to admit her to the house again on the day her father had discovered that she’d enrolled at Somerville College to study medicine.
‘It was. By the sound of it, Gran’mère danced in the Opéra ballet for all of about forty-five minutes before a protector set her up in a flat, and after that she has only been in contact with the family through reading of them in the social columns of Le Figaro. Mama herself has never set foot inside the house nor spoken to Uncle Evrard or any of his side of the family. Certainly not the rich side of the family out in Passy.’
‘Might it have been the Passy side of the family who gave him the house, and the money?’ Odd rules about the operation of grace-and-favor dwellings were certainly nothing unusual among Lydia’s Halfdene relatives, none of whom – to her knowledge – was numbered among the Undead. Though now she thought of it, nobody had seen Uncle Nugent for decades …
‘I don’t think so.’ La Belle’s delicate eyebrows puckered. ‘Tante later got a friend of hers, a banker, to try to track down where the money came from, and it was so tied up in trusts and foreign accounts that he couldn’t. But Uncle Evrard was always fighting with the Passy crowd, who wanted him to sell the house and divide the money with them. Tante Camille says also that Uncle Evrard seemed to get madder as he got older – he must be nearly ninety now – and that he never would tell anyone why he had all these little rules. Gran’mère said she thought he’d gotten them from his Uncle Raoul, who lived in the house before him, but he seemed terrified that if anybody disobeyed they’d all be thrown out on to the street.’
A vampire nest.
It has to have been what Jamie was looking for.
‘As indeed they all were, in the end …’
Eighteen seventy-one, Lydia recalled, was the year Elysée de Montadour became Master of Paris and started creating her own fledglings. She also remembered the nebulous rings of men and women all through the poverty-stricken alleys of the East End upon whose services Lionel Grippen, the Master of the London nest, could call: publicans who lent money to men who needed it, men who thereafter could be called on for ‘favors’ without any need to explain why.
The same way, she supposed, that Ysidro could simply send out notes to tradespeople last night, secure in the knowledge that they’d arrange for two lovely frocks and assorted stockings, rice-powder, towels, and underwear to be delivered to Aunt Louise’s …
Or ask a waiter at Maxim’s to hand the woman before her a note containing five hundred francs in order to purchase an hour of her time and all the information she had to give about an old hôtel particulier.
And Jamie went there …
‘And he wanted to know what the place was like inside?’
‘It’s what he said.’ Again La Belle spread her hands with a dancer’s gesture, an actress’s wry little moue. ‘The only person who would want to know that – aside from a man writing a book – would have been a burglar, but as far as I know there’s nothing of value there to steal. Tante Camille said that she and her brothers sneaked into the forbidden area looking for treasure, about three years before the war with the Germans – this would have been in 1867 or ’68, then – and she told me the place was nearly bare. Just old furniture, crumbling to pieces, and chests and chests full o
f old clothes. I went with M’sieu Prior to Tante Camille’s flat that day and introduced them, and left him there with her. I don’t know if he returned the next day or not.’
And the following night he was thrown off a church tower, after being bled nearly to death …
How close is the church of Sainte-Clare to the Rue des Trois Anges?
‘Is your aunt still in Paris?’
‘Now you speak of it—’ the young woman frowned, thinking back – ‘I don’t think I have heard from her this week. Of course things have been so upside down … she might very well have left town – she has a place in Normandy. But that’s very close to the Channel, after all. It isn’t like her not to send me a note.’ She glanced again toward the window, toward the trucks grumbling their way in the direction of Belgium.
‘Might I beg of you,’ said Lydia, ‘a note of introduction to your aunt? I really think … there’s something very odd going on here,’ she added, with a hesitation which she hoped sounded genuine. ‘And I’d feel much better if I could learn from her just exactly what she told my husband about that house.’
SEVEN
‘Already one finds it difficult to obtain petrol,’ observed Stanislas Greuze as he gunned the cab across the Champs-Élysées. ‘It is not only medicines that the army is buying up all over the town. When I was very small I remember it was like this, in the days of the last war. The streets silent, as the world waited for news.’ All along the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, placards above the news-stands screamed with black letters.
The German army was shelling Liège. Britain had declared war. Clinging to the hand-strap in the back seat, Lydia felt a queer sensation of sinking, as if she’d somehow stumbled into somebody else’s life.
This isn’t supposed to be happening. Somebody was supposed to stop it at the last minute, like they’ve always done before. Something was supposed to get us out of it.
Her heart pounded hard at the recollection of things Jamie had told her about the new weapons of war: airships, poison gas, cannons that could launch shells four miles.
Or at the very least I was supposed to be reading about this while sitting with Jamie and Miranda in the parlor in Oxford, exclaiming, ‘Oh, I do hope those poor people in Paris don’t get shelled!’
She stared without seeing at the silvery gleam of the river, the black lace arrowhead of the Tour Eiffel against the slow-fading light of late afternoon.
Jamie, wake up!
What am I going to do?
Tante Camille’s flat on the Boulevard de Versailles was within a half-mile of Aunt Louise’s. The front entrance of the building was molded with the asymmetrical curves of a ‘modern’ door-frame, giving Lydia the impression of walking down the throat of an immense lily, like Alice in Wonderland. No one occupied the concierge’s little booth in the lobby, but through its brass-grilled window she saw an inner door standing open, and heard voices within: ‘Ça va bien, ça! Tu me déserts pour cette précieuse Patrie, et alors? Que se passe-t-il à tes enfants, si tu es sauté?’
Three b, La Belle Nicolette had said. The elevator, around which the bronze-decked marble staircase ascended in graceful ovals, was likewise deserted.
Lydia climbed the marble stairs.
The silence above-stairs seemed absolute. She wondered if the inhabitants of these expensive flats had already packed and left, just as La Belle was packing (or rather having the servants pack), and if she’d find the apartment of Camille Batoux as empty as Aunt Louise’s.
And then what? Go to the Rue des Trois Anges and try to get into the Hôtel Batoux myself? Return to the hospital and wait until some afternoon when there are so few on duty – or they are so exhausted – that they don’t notice one of the vampires’ human servants walking in, the way I just walked in, and killing Jamie in his sleep? Wait for the Germans to arrive? Should I take day guard, and leave Ysidro to watch through the nights?
Prior to meeting La Belle Nicolette, Lydia had made another attempt to see W.W. Streatham at the embassy. She had left after one look at the long line of stranded holidaymakers – penniless, and as weary as herself – that jammed the halls. Even had she succeeded, she reflected as she rounded the last landing and ascended through a little archway formed of two bronze caryatids to the stair-lobby at the top, they’d only lie to ME. She glanced around – though the place was as empty (probably considerably emptier, come to think of it) as an Egyptian tomb – and sneaked her spectacles on to identify the bronze emblem on the door as ‘a’. A short hall stretched on the other side of the lobby, terminating in door ‘b’.
Before her hand reached the bell, Lydia smelled it.
There was something dead in the room beyond.
She’d worked too long in the clinic at the East End charity hospital, in her days as a struggling resident, not to recognize the stink of rotting flesh. It would be stupid to knock – what human being would stay in a place with a corpse? – and she glimpsed beneath the door the corner of a piece of paper. Bending, she pulled it out.
Madame,
I beg a thousand pardons, but Giselle was not here to let me in today, and Madame Rotier would not oblige. Please send a note to let me know, should I come Tuesday?
With sincerity,
Anne Foucault
Charwoman. Lydia threw another glance back at the lobby behind her, silent as a stage-set in the slightly bleak north light, then pulled up her skirts and removed, from the slender packet buttoned to the bottom edge of her corset, the roll of picklocks that Jamie had given her. The proper thing to do, of course, would be to run downstairs, interrupt the domestic dispute between the concierge and her husband (the elevator operator?), and call the police …
How many police remain in Paris? wondered Lydia, maneuvering the smallest of the delicate hooks into the keyhole and probing around for the wards. Have they all gone down with the hospital orderlies to volunteer? And if Monsieur and Madame Rotier didn’t detect the smell of decay – the concierge’s booth had reeked of cheap tobacco, so there was a good chance they wouldn’t – would they refuse to ‘oblige’ her as they had refused the charwoman?
She added another probe to the lock, listening all the while for the echo of a footfall in the stairwell, the rattle of the elevator mechanism. This close to the door the smell of death was distinct – not just rotting flesh but feces as well (they must both have been killed in the flat) – but not strong. If the flat was anything like the size of Aunt Louise’s, the bodies – Tante Camille’s and that of Giselle, who was presumably her maid (did she keep a cook?) – might be several rooms away from the door …
She felt the wards give, gently pushed the door open.
Tante Camille had been killed in the bedroom. The chamber was a sort of shrine to the wages of sin, which in her case had clearly been substantial. Naked bronze atlantes upheld the canopy over her bed; the ceiling was the sort of Moorish plasterwork that reminded Lydia of photographs she’d seen of the Alhambra palace in Spain. The chests, wardrobes, dressing-tables, and bureaux that jammed the room were themselves jammed with precious things: statuettes of bronze and marble and alabaster, Sèvres porcelain make-up pots, Tiffany lamps and boxes. Whether the room had been searched, or whether the old woman who lay on her back on the bed in twenty thousand francs’ worth of Jeanne Paquin had been packing to leave Paris, Lydia couldn’t tell. Certainly every drawer of the shoulder-high jewelry safe next to the bed was open and empty.
Given the heat of the week, and the oven-like stuffiness of the room, Lydia guessed the woman had been dead four or five days. It was hard to tell, for she had been tortured, in a fashion that brought the taste of bile into Lydia’s throat. It was clear, however, that most of her blood had been drained.
Moving quickly, touching nothing – though the first thing she’d done on entering the flat had been to put her gloves back on again – Lydia checked the frame of the bedroom mirror, that universal filing place of visiting cards, invitations, and addresses. Nothing. She tried not to see in the gla
ss the reflection of the twisted body on the bed.
The dressing-table and the mantelpiece – more bronze nudes, upholding rose-red marble from Spain – were tidy, a tribute to ‘Giselle’, but if the killing had taken place four days ago Lydia guessed that any information Jamie had left had not yet had time to migrate into a drawer. Though Camille’s hairpins and false switches of hair had been put away in their alabaster bowls, the old woman had still been dressed, which meant that the vampires had come for her as she’d been preparing for bed. Sponge and wash-cloth lay ready beside the cold water in the basin and ewer. The electric lamps burned not only in the bedroom but in the salon, and tears of agony had left tracks in the rice-powder, mascaro, and rouge that still plastered the wrinkled, pain-twisted face.
Trying to learn something? Lydia wondered, catching the frame of the bedroom door to steady herself. Or just for sport? With vampires, it could be either.
She knew James was right, in his vow to destroy them all.
Beyond the door, in a sort of drawing-room, trunks stood half-filled with dresses. They’d clearly been gone through, garments of satin, lace, and silk tumbled on the floor, but the notes tucked into the mirror-frame above the mantel here were undisturbed. Lydia recognized her husband’s handwriting at once.
Alexander Prior. 10 Rue Saint-Louis en l’Île.
I should search the rest of the flat …
Through the heavy golden curtains bars of sunlight lay at a strong angle, which didn’t mean – Lydia was well aware – that she was anything resembling safe. She tucked the note into her glove, crammed all the rest of the cards and invitations into her handbag to be sorted through later (and all of them thrown out, I should imagine, but one never knows … ), made sure that the front door was slightly ajar, and then hastened through to the kitchen quarters, to where she knew she’d find the back stairs.
Darkness on His Bones Page 6