As she suspected, she passed the maid Giselle, a woman a few years younger than Camille Batoux, dead on the kitchen table amid boxes of half-packed dishes. Wrists and ankles had been tied with silk scarves and she, too, had been tortured. A cup of cold tea stood nearby, with a sewing-basket containing a beige-and-black striped Poiret skirt. Very little blood was to be seen.
It must have happened immediately after Jamie came to visit.
Immediately after Tante Camille told him whatever it was she told him about the interior arrangements of the Hôtel Batoux.
Was that what the vampires wanted to know? Whom she’d told, and why he’d asked?
She quickened her steps down the tradesmen’s stair, unlatched the door at the bottom, and stepped out into a narrow alleyway. The afternoon’s advance had already left it in deep shadow, but at its end the Boulevard de Versailles glowed in late sunlight.
If I hurry, she thought, hastening her steps toward the red-and-yellow cab that still waited for her across the street, I can make it to Jamie’s rooms before the sun goes down.
Shadows haunted the streets of Paris.
Against the starry sky – stars black and clear as Asher had seen them in the Dinarics – he could see the roofs of tall buildings, the occasional spires of churches; the stink of woodsmoke and the mud underfoot told him where he was. Asher was aware of the young man Simon flitting ahead of him like a shadow, invisible to the man he himself pursued. Of that man, Asher could see only the white of a small ruff at his throat, the occasional pale smudge of his face when they passed an ill-fastened shutter.
Of those who ringed them, like sharks trailing a lifeboat adrift in open water, he could see nothing at all. But he knew they were there.
Asher tried to catch up, tried to shout to that first man, Watch out!
Go indoors, go where there are people …
Run for the bridges and cross running water …
He fished through his mind for all the various things that folklore described as inimical to vampires: garlic, crucifixes, wolfsbane, Christmas rose. Knives with silver blades …
For a moment another memory tugged at him. Shouldn’t I be wearing a silver chain around my neck? That sounds like a good idea …
The recollection of having done so, of feeling the weight and chill of it under his shirt-collar, scratched at his thoughts like a forgotten appointment. Why would I have done such a thing?
Or was that in some other dream?
Someone had taken it off him. He remembered that. Iron hands had held his arms. Rough fingers fumbling at the back of his neck.
Why am I dreaming about vampires in the days of Shakespeare – and in Paris, of all places?
I was in Paris …
The memory sank away. But just in case, he took the silver chains from his wrists (Why am I wearing these?) and wrapped them around his hands.
A blow from the silver will burn …
Burn whom?
The intended victim turned, in a tiny court blue with starlight that had no other outlet. Asher saw the sober dark clothing of a merchant or tradesman. He held up a book, thick and dark-bound, cried out, ‘Keep your distance, spawn of Hell!’ and the young man Simon’s eyes flashed in the dim light. ‘God will defend me!’
‘Don’t name God to me, heretic,’ whispered Simon’s soft voice from the darkness. ‘You have led your last victim astray with your blasphemous sermons.’
With the shocking suddenness of a dream the pale-haired vampire was beside his quarry, clawed hand flicking toward the older man’s throat. But in the same instant, it seemed, the other vampires materialized from the darkness: for the first half second only a ring of reflective eyes, then they were there, as if they’d dropped from the roofs or risen from the reeking mud.
They caught Simon’s hands and arms, grabbed his hair in their unbreakable grip. The black-clothed man with the book stepped forward, grinning horribly: ‘Well, well, demon, so your Pope dares call us heretics, does he? So you’re going to try to silence the teaching of God’s true word in the name of your Anti-Christ in Rome?’
Simon looked in shock at the vampires who held him. Like terrible ghosts in the starlight, two men and two women, grinning with their long fangs. Their leader, a stocky man with the thick mustache and localized chin-beard seen in portraits of James I, took Simon’s jaw in his hand and looked for a moment into his eyes. His own eyes, gleaming in the starlight, were pale snow-water blue. ‘He is a stranger.’ His voice was like sandpaper on stones. ‘A Spaniard. I’ve not seen him before. I doubt those hell-spawned devils at the Cemetery of the Innocents even know he’s in Paris. He’ll not be missed. And I’ll not be trifled with.’
And the other vampires shifted on their feet like children eager for a treat.
The chief vampire unhooked a horn from his belt, long and slightly twisted, the end cut off so that instead of forming a drinking vessel it made a funnel. The others dragged Simon’s head back, heedless of his frantic struggles, and forced the horn’s small end down his throat, holding him still as the bearded vampire took a phial from a purse at his belt and poured its contents into the horn.
‘Will it kill him, Brother Esdras?’ The Protestant preacher stepped close to take the empty phial and sniff it. With a grimace he handed it back. The vampire called Esdras drew the horn out of his victim’s mouth, returned it to his belt and the phial to its pouch. Simon tried to struggle again, but could not move in the grip of the other three. His yellow eyes were wide with fear.
‘Nothing kills us, Brother Thomas,’ returned the bearded vampire. ‘That is our curse. Only the sun’s cleansing fire. But this one—’ with a weird tenderness he stroked the disheveled pale hair back from Simon’s forehead – ‘will very shortly lose all control of his limbs and go limp as a puppet whose strings have been cut. But his mind will still be awake and alive, as we carry him up the Hill of Martyrs and leave him at the top. There he’ll lie watching the dawn lighten – little by little – in the sky, knowing that at any second his flesh will burst into unquenchable fire. A fit prelude,’ he added with a chilly smile, ‘to the eternal fire which will consume his soul in Hell. Would you care to come along and watch?’
‘I should like that very much.’ Brother Thomas the preacher nodded at the vampire’s belt-pouch. ‘What is it that you gave him?’
‘An elixir Brother Emeric makes.’ He smiled across at the other male vampire, lanky and freckled with a nose like the root of a tree. ‘Think you can run away, little Spaniard? Let’s see.’ He nodded, and the others released their victim’s arms. Simon ran two staggering steps and fell. They followed him as he crawled toward the entrance to the narrow court, until he could move no more. But his eyes were open, living, frantic, as they lifted him shoulder-high and bore him through the starlit streets toward the city gates and the hills that lay beyond them. The Protestant preacher, Bible under his arm, followed gleefully behind.
‘And let that be a lesson to you, my boy,’ said Asher’s father. ‘Mali principii malus finis.’
Asher found himself in his father’s church at Wychford as it had looked in 1874 when he’d gone away to Bracewell’s School in Yorkshire. The Reverend Arthur Asher looked as he had then, tall and thin – as Asher was himself – and, like his son, brown-haired and brown-eyed. Like his son also (Asher realized) capable of chameleon-like changes in voice and mien and manner, which only appeared when he preached: drama, passion, sound and fury, never seen at other times.
Now he was his non-preaching self, his shoulders stiff, his voice constricted, his eyes without expression.
‘You’d think Brother Thomas would at least go along to pray for Simon’s soul in those last minutes,’ remarked Asher, who was – he was interested to note – his adult self, though he sat in the corner of the family pew which had always been his in his childhood.
‘The boy was dead already, and damned.’ The Reverend Asher shrugged. ‘There was nothing that could be done for him. And he was taken at the moment of atte
mpting a murder – completely apart from having sold his soul to evil to become a vampire in the first place. Don’t talk nonsense, boy.’
‘No, sir.’ Asher knew that nobody had ever changed his father’s mind on the subject of what one had to do in order to win God’s approval or damnation. If this was 1874, calculated Asher, he was himself now older than the man who stood before him, the man who’d be dead in a railway accident in two years, without ever seeing his son again. The Reverend Arthur Asher had not been a believer in having children come home from school over the summer holidays, once they were dispatched to Yorkshire or (in his sister’s case) Brighton.
Through the door of the church he could see the little cluster of vampires climbing the steep, wooded hill that Montmartre had been in the seventeenth century, the stumpy tower of Saint-Pierre church silhouetted against the paling darkness at the top.
‘At least we could go along,’ piped up Jürgen Schaumm, who had somehow transplanted himself from Rebbe Karlebach’s parlor to this place and time. ‘We could ask him what he knows, before he burns up. We have time for that, don’t we?’ He set down his green notebook, checked his silver watch.
Asher’s own train for the school in Yorkshire would leave at seven in the morning, he knew. His father wouldn’t accompany him to the station, nor would he permit his wife to do so. Only make it harder on the boy, he’d heard his father say.
I should go to the house and say goodbye to her, Asher thought, since I won’t be seeing her again.
Yet he knew he had to follow the vampires up the hill, to speak to Simon before fire consumed him.
Simon knew something. He remembered that now. I came to Paris to find …
… to find …
Something that Simon would know, or might know …
But I’d better hurry. The sun will be up soon.
Schaumm got to his feet (like Asher, he was an adult in this dream, though they’d been of an age in the eighteen eighties so in 1874 he must have been a schoolboy too) and trotted to the door, notebook in hand. Asher rose and moved to follow, and his father snapped, ‘Sit down. Where do you think you’re going?’
‘I need to find out,’ he said.
‘Find out what?’ asked Lydia’s voice, and Asher opened his eyes.
His mouth was dry and his head ached as if he’d been smashed over the skull with a coach-and-four. He said, ‘Simon,’ and his throat hurt as if he, and not the pale-haired Elizabethan vampire in his dream, had had the narrow end of an ox-horn shoved halfway down it.
Lydia pulled off her glasses, bent her head down, and pressed her forehead to his shoulder. ‘Jamie,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, Jamie …’
He brought up his left hand – his forearm tightly bandaged (what the hell did I do to myself?) and stroked her shoulder, the bones delicate as a fawn’s under thin silk, and flesh not much more substantial. He felt weak, drained of strength, a puppet whose strings have been cut … who had said that? ‘Where am I?’
‘St Antoine’s Hospital.’ She sat up at that, put her glasses back on, and, seeing the frown that drew at his brows, added, ‘Paris.’
‘Paris?’
I dreamed about Paris.
I dreamed …
He groped for the fragments as they were sucked away down into darkness.
‘Jamie, the war’s started,’ she said softly. ‘Germany invaded Belgium, just like you said they were going to; they’re shelling Liège. We declared war on them yesterday. Everybody’s declared war on everybody else. All the armies are marching. Aunt Louise left for England … I thought you were never going to wake up …’
‘What am I doing in Paris?’
EIGHT
‘I got your things from your room.’
Lydia replaced the empty water-glass on the stand between Asher’s bed and that of the man next to him. The ward reeked like a workhouse in the hot night, and the only sound that broke the stillness was the rumble of trucks in the street, and someone coughing a few beds over. If they’ve declared war – dear God, what happened? – they’ll be pulling all the medical personnel they can into the Army …
Francis Ferdinand. His mind groped at half-remembered fragments, as unreal as the conversation with his father in the church at Wychford or the weird farrago of dreams about Shakespearean vampires in Paris (all of them speaking very proper Rabelaisian French).
Somebody shot the emperor’s nephew Francis Ferdinand …
And if Serbia was allied with Russia and Russia was allied with France and Austria was allied with Germany …
Like a horrible little song, the entangling alliances spun themselves into a chorus:
‘And the green grass grew all around, all around, and the green grass grew all around …’
Did the Department call me over?
And I WENT?
‘What happened to me?’
Her eyes widened, aghast. ‘Don’t you remember?’
He started to shake his head, but the slightest movement brought excruciating pain.
‘I got a letter,’ he said slowly. ‘In Oxford.’
His study, the windows open into the garden. The July somnolence of the long vacation. The smell of cut grass and the tiny ice-crackle of flimsy German notepaper in his fingers. An address in Prague …
Yes, he thought. Yes. Rebbe Karlebach wrote to me.
Trying to remember was like trying to thread a needle with one eye shut and his fingers frozen. His head ached and he wanted nothing more than to return to sleep, but he forced his mind to pursue those strange, fogged fragments.
We’d – quarreled? Years ago. Why? He remembered most clearly his sense of relief and pleasure at seeing his old friend’s jagged handwriting on the envelope, the motley assortment of Central European stamps …
‘Was that why I came to Paris?’
‘I think so.’ She propped her spectacles more firmly on to her nose. She was thin, and looked harried, as if she’d not eaten or slept. How long was I unconscious, leaving her alone? ‘The letter wasn’t in your room – the room you rented here, I mean, on the Île Saint-Louis. At least I couldn’t find it.’
Île Saint-Louis? That must have been the one near the Quai d’Anjou – the landlady had known him for years under the name of Prior. Why that one? With the river running on both sides it was easy to be trapped, easy to be followed. He made a noise in his throat like hrmn. ‘That’ll teach me to carry everything in my head.’
‘Good lord, don’t write anything down, boy!’ Belleytre stared at him in shocked disapproval.
‘It isn’t as if members of the Auswärtiges Amt are going to be able to read Homeric Greek …’
‘You’d be surprised.’ Back at Oxford, Belleytre was always neat, with his graying ginger hair trimmed and his gray eyes sparkling with hidden humor. At the moment he was shaggy and bearded and clothed like an itinerant Greek monk, which was how Asher had encountered him in the summer of 1885 in the dusty streets of Belgrade – a town in which neither of them, as Englishmen, had any business.
Asher, journeying through the valley of the Drina, had thought it advisable – given the very real possibility at that time that Serbia was going to war with the Turks yet again – to let everyone think he was a Czech student from Prague, as he sought for tales of werewolves and witches, vampires and the goddesses who danced on Durdevdan night. So when he’d encountered the Modern Languages tutor who had, for the past year, been discreetly advising him to take courses in history and cartography as well as languages and folklore – and even at the age of twenty-one Asher had suspected him of not being the douce and retiring don that most people thought him – he had merely put a coin into his hand and had murmured in impeccable, idiomatic Austrian German, ‘Bless me, Father, for I am far from home.’
For a moment their eyes had met, and Asher had known that he was right.
And in that moment – in the streets of the former Turkish garrison town that seethed now with rebellion, violence, smuggled weapons, and parlous information –
Asher, dreaming, knew his fate had been sealed.
He’d followed the ‘priest’ back to his rooms at the local monastery, for what amounted to his first lessons in spycraft.
‘Any man who knows his business can crack any code you can think up, before tea,’ Belleytre had said, and had poured out for him coffee-black tea from the pot they’d begged from the brother in charge of the kitchens. ‘You don’t forget words, do you? You remember that on the Greek islands they call a visitor episkeptis and on the mainland misafir. God only knows how you tell your little witches and werewolves apart. No, my boy. You need to train your memory, like the old bards did in the Middle Ages – and still do, in these parts of the world. You write nothing down. No sense pretending to be a student from Prague if the Turkish authorities decide to strip you naked and find you’ve got some English importer’s address tucked away in your sock. I promise you,’ he added grimly, ‘you won’t like what happens next.’
So Asher had memorized a dozen names, to be delivered to a man at the embassy in Prague (‘They’ll know why those men are important’), and – he’d learned much later – in the few moments when he was out of the room Belleytre had concealed in his luggage two maps of the proposed Turkish railway route from Constantinople to the Danube. And though it had been another two years before Asher had made the decision to work for the Department, from then on he’d been careful what he wrote down and what he didn’t.
And Lydia – the thought passed through his mind as he found himself again descending the tower stair in that shadowy hôtel to the pitch-dark twisting passageway below which he knew led down to the bone chapel – Lydia had not yet been born.
‘Your husband paid a call on me,’ said the green-eyed lady vampire of his dream.
Montadour? Lady Montadour, he had called her …
In another dream? The memory ran away like water.
His mind fumbled at legends, trying to separate French medieval tales of vengeful revenants from Byronic fables and literary poems. For some reason it seemed terribly important that he identify this particular legend. It must have been important if I dreamed about her …
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