Asher’s frown darkened. He had asked Lydia earlier in the evening if Ysidro had been entering into his dreams, as the older and more skillful vampires were able to do. He did not remember, he had said, much of his dreams, even as he had no recollection of anything that had happened to him after he had left Oxford in mid-July. But Ysidro had walked into his dreams before this.
Yet at the vampire’s words he rubbed his forehead, as if trying to reconstruct those vanished visions, or at least call to mind someone who’d fit that description. ‘Shorter than yourself?’ he said at last. ‘Black hair pomaded straight back, square jaw, snub nose, wide mouth, lobeless ears …?’
‘Even he.’
‘It sounds like Jürgen Schaumm.’
‘Your fellow student at Rebbe Karlebach’s?’ asked Lydia, surprised.
‘I can’t imagine why I’d be dreaming about him. I haven’t thought of him in years.’ The troubled look retreated further, before the challenge of a puzzle and the task at hand. ‘A brilliant polymath with some jaw-dropping holes in his make-up. He could run rings around me in botany and the natural sciences, and read about twelve languages, most of them dead. But he was one of those men for whom, when in pursuit of one of his obsessions, it was as if neither food nor drink, neither sleep nor other people existed. He was in Prague originally to study early Hebrew texts, but by the time I came to Rebbe Karlebach’s, he’d taken up the study of folklore as well.’
His brows pulled together again, as if the words had triggered some jagged line of connecting thoughts in his mind. For a time he was silent, trying to fit them together.
Evidently this didn’t work. He shook his head, letting them go.
‘Did he study vampires?’ asked Ysidro.
‘I – yes. Yes, I think he did. I know he read everything in Karlebach’s library, and Karlebach had a number of volumes on the Undead. He’d come with me sometimes when I’d go on my walking trips into the mountains to collect legends,’ he added. ‘Wrapped up like a beekeeper to protect himself from the sun – he had skin like a mushroom. Last I heard he was teaching at the University of Göttingen. God knows where he is now.’
Lydia dug in her reticule and produced the last invitation of ‘William Johnson’. ‘Is this his handwriting?’
‘Yes.’ Then he read it over and glanced back up at her, thunderously angry now in the dim reflection of the single electric bulb burning in the hall. Lydia took the note from him, aware that the rush of anger would be followed by a splitting headache.
One more thing to worry about …
After the incursion of the lady Elysée de Montadour the previous night, Lydia had been more conscious than ever of how deserted the wards were at night. Of how people came and went in the daytime without ever encountering an orderly – most of whom were leaving for the army – and of Dr Théodule’s growing exhaustion. He HAS to be sleeping half this shift, if he’s doing daytime duties as well!
Only the squeak of Fantine’s mop-head, far down the corridor, broke the stillness now.
With half the Paris police force reporting to their deployment stations as well, and nobody keeping track of random murders in the capital, does that mean vampires will be around the hospital in greater numbers, or lesser?
Her eyes returned to the note in Jürgen Schaumm’s Germanic writing …
‘That’s why Karlebach must have written to you last month,’ she said. ‘He must have learned of some deal that Schaumm was making with the Paris nest.’
‘With some of them, at any rate.’ Ysidro perched on the edge of the bed like a well-dressed bird of prey. ‘The man might be doing escort duty to German vampires, to take over Paris – it being preferable to rule in Paris than to serve in Augsburg, though personally I would have neither city, even presented to me on a golden plate. I observe in no correspondence does your William Johnson offer to meet you after sundown. Have you received further word of him?’
Lydia shook her head. ‘He must think I left with Aunt Louise.’
‘Be careful how you come and go.’ Asher leaned back against his pillows, chalk-white, a line of agony between his brows. ‘They will have killed Camille Batoux to silence her. God knows if Elysée will keep silent about you being here, or the fact that I’m conscious.’
‘’Tis to her advantage to do so,’ remarked Ysidro. ‘Yet no force on Heaven or Earth has ever served to stop that pretty mouth.’
Lydia glanced at the newspapers, folded (that HAS to be Jamie) on the small nightstand between his bed and the next. The Germans were still besieging Liège, whose hilltop fortifications the paper proudly claimed they wouldn’t take in a hundred years. (‘They’re waiting to bring the heavy guns up by rail,’ Jamie had said to her. For a man who wasn’t supposed to be reading newspapers or anything else he was suspiciously well-informed. ‘Once they get those emplaced, I doubt the fortresses around the town will last twenty-four hours.’)
‘I’ll ask Streatham about Schaumm,’ she said after a hesitant moment. ‘He may know something, if I ever get to see him.’
Her latest attempt to do so had robbed her of most of her sleep that day without producing any useful result. The imposing eighteenth-century mansion on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré had been like a kicked beehive: tail-coated servants, morning-coated diplomats, and uniformed messenger boys strode through the patient hordes in the hall where Lydia had spent the hours between nine and six. Voices clattered and buzzed behind shut doors; telephones jangled without cease. Many of her fellow suppliants had been there for two days, living on what the servants would go out and buy for them at the cafés, and rationing their francs. Lydia had had to force herself not simply to hand them what she had in her pockets. Since her father’s death, she realized, she’d grown used to having money to spend. She didn’t know how long she’d be obliged to live on what she had left.
The confusion had still been going strong when Lydia had left at six, feeling as if she’d been slammed repeatedly against a wall.
On and off all day, when it had been possible to do so, she had read the pamphlets and treatises she’d taken from Jamie’s rented room on the Île Saint-Louis the day before, purportedly written by Constantine Angelus. The seventeenth-century French was thick and difficult, and she had feared she’d find the subject matter – theology – thicker and more difficult still, but a bit to her surprise that had not been the case. The former Master of Paris had made his arguments for religious tolerance with light and logical concision, critiquing the degree to which Catholics and Protestants claimed to know the intent of God vis-à-vis their opponents, without deriding either group. He used simple, very direct French, cutting down the number of words she had to look up.
‘Why Constantine Angelus?’ she asked now, and Jamie’s hand twitched involuntarily, as if the name meant something to him.
She almost thought he was going to answer her, as he had about Jürgen Schaumm’s notes, unthinkingly.
But it slipped away – she could see it in the vexed folds of his eyes – and he whispered, ‘Damn it.’ And she wanted to slap herself for pushing him with yet another matter that required mental effort and strain. ‘I don’t know.’
‘There were receipts from three different bookshops in your room.’ She touched her satchel which contained the pamphlets and dictionary, though she hesitated to read them, even if he slept. The danger of falling asleep over them was too great. ‘You paid almost two thousand francs for one of them … Don Simon says he was the Master of Paris. Who were the other vampires of Paris then?’ She turned to Ysidro. ‘And might one of them have survived, to be trying to … to reinstate himself, after making a deal with the Germans to leave him alone to hunt?’
‘In a conquered city,’ mused Ysidro after a moment, ‘I suppose one could hunt the vanquished with impunity, particularly if one had a mandate from the victors to listen for murmurs of discontent. Yet had one of the Paris nest, as first I knew it, survived the Revolution, he – or she – would have no need of a German army to
overpower Elysée de Montadour.’ He drew from the satchel one of the broadside sheets, in its careful wrappings of cardboard and tissue, his fingers like colorless insects walking.
He was dear to me, Ysidro had said of the former Master of Paris. Lydia wondered if there were copies of these, also, in the dark, book-crammed library of his London house.
‘’Twas a smaller city then,’ he went on in time. ‘Yet the people of Paris believed in our existence. Thus greater care was needed, and there was wisdom indeed in Constantine’s struggle to keep the Catholic and Protestant Undead from open war.’
Again Lydia saw Asher make the quick movement usual with him when he saw something out of the corner of his eye; one of the several things, she realized, that had made her wonder, even as a girl of fourteen, whether her uncle Ambrose’s inconspicuous lecturer friend was indeed as unassuming as he appeared. But the next instant he winced with pain and frustration, and whatever it was disappeared as if the darkness of the dim-lit ward had swallowed it up.
‘Constantine Angelus—’ Ysidro folded the pamphlet again in its protective tissue – ‘was a scholar at the University of Paris in the last days of the Capets. He was made vampire by Sybellia Torqueri, who was venerated as a saint in certain parts of the Île de France up until the Revolution. Constantine became Master of Paris when the English held the city during the long wars between England and France. Another of Sybellia’s get, Raimund Cauchemar, claimed that Sybellia had a talisman of some sort – the Facinum, Cauchemar called it – that Constantine stole, which gave him power over the other vampires of the city. He, Raimund, he said, had the true right to be Master of Paris. The Master of any city always has trouble dealing with his own master’s leftover get.’
‘As Grippen has trouble dealing with you?’ Lydia smiled as she named the Master of London, and Ysidro looked down his nose at the idea.
‘Constantine could have folded Lionel Grippen up like a napkin and put him in his pocket. The truth was that Constantine was one of the most powerful vampires that ever I met. He was a man of extraordinary strength of character, with the wisdom to choose carefully whom he made vampire. So many masters yield to the temptation to make fledglings of those who can give them property – which all vampires covet – or wealth. Or they take those whom they think they can control utterly. Contradistinct to this, Constantine would court a man or a woman sometimes for years, growing to know them, learning to trust or learning that this was a person whom he could not trust … and if he could not trust them living, still less would he trust them with the power of the Undead.
‘He had made himself master of other cities, in France and in the Low Countries, and would periodically absent himself from Paris for years, before returning under another name. Thus he had a life in Paris, and living acquaintances who had no notion that the man they would meet in taverns, or in the churches after sundown, was vampire. Thus he took time and trouble, and carefully chose his friends. Many of these friendships were shattered when first Luther and then Calvin broke with the True Faith – as most things in the world were shattered. This was a great grief to him.’
‘And who were these friends?’
‘Ivo Chopinel.’ The vampire’s frown was barely a shadow. ‘A gypsy woman named Zaffira Truandière. Anselm Arouache – a great disappointment, Constantine told me, for the man had been a scholar of Greek texts, but with the vampire state lost all interest in everything besides the hunt. Gabrielle Batoux. Françoise Rabutin. Emeric Jambicque was also a scholar, an alchemist who went over to the so-called Reformed Religion along with Esdras de Colle, who was one of the Bordeaux vampires, whom Constantine also made. ’Twas Esdras de Colle who led the Protestant vampires of Paris. He was the man I was instructed to kill.’
‘Gabrielle Batoux,’ said Asher quietly, and Lydia looked over at him in surprise.
‘You remember?’
He coughed, and pressed a hand to his side – DAMN it, thought Lydia, if he comes down with M’sieu Lecoq’s pneumonia …
‘Not … not clearly. Not really. Her … her descendant, or her kinswoman …’
‘La Belle Nicolette,’ said Lydia. ‘Simon arranged an introduction. He said you’d met her—’
‘When a gentleman goes to Paris to make an assignation with the likes of La Belle Nicolette—’ Asher cast a glance of mock reproach at the vampire – ‘the least one can expect of another gentleman is that he will not inform his wife of it …’
And Ysidro returned a fleet, sudden, and completely human grin.
Lydia flicked Asher hard on the biceps with her fingertips. ‘Did you manage to enter the Hôtel Batoux? I take it that’s where you visited Madame de Montadour. I tried to see Tante Camille.’
She fell silent at the horror of what she had seen by the electric gleam of the bedroom lamps.
‘She … it looked like she’d been tortured. I think it happened the day you were found in the churchyard. It was horrible. I–I sent for the police, or at least I left the front door half-open, so someone would be sure to go in and find them …’
She fell silent, seeing the look of anguish in his face.
‘Do you remember her?’
He moved his head a little: No. ‘Does that matter?’ he added harshly. Stillness fell again.
‘Gabrielle Batoux—’ Ysidro’s colorless gaze rested on Asher’s face; it was Asher who looked aside – ‘was the wife of a moneylender. An educated woman in the Renaissance fashion, though she, too, lost much of her interest in mathematics and Greek manuscripts from the first moment she drank of a human soul’s dying paroxysm. She retained at least the good sense to limit her kills and draw no attention to herself, and ’twas she – a little to my surprise, I admit – who became Master of Paris when Raimund Cauchemar succumbed to a gang of witch-hunting beggars who developed a grudge against him during the upheavals of La Fronde. Her grand-nephew, I believe, built the hôtel, and I recall some rather curious rumors—’
‘Raimund Cauchemar?’ said Lydia. ‘I thought the Master of Paris was Constantine Angelus.’
‘Cauchemar became Master when Constantine perished.’ Ysidro’s voice turned cold and remote as starlight. ‘Not a particularly good one. I am pleased to say he did not retain the position long – less than fifty years.’
‘What happened to Constantine Angelus?’
‘I have not the smallest idea.’
‘Then could it be he—?’
‘No,’ said Ysidro, like the shutting of a door. ‘No.’
TEN
‘One of us should have a look at the Hôtel Batoux.’ Lydia returned to the subject when a few hours later Ysidro, with Elizabethan courtliness, bowed over her hand in the deserted vestibule of the hospital to take his leave. ‘I’ll take an oath Madame de Montadour wasn’t telling the truth last night.’
‘I doubt she could identify Truth,’ returned the vampire, ‘if it came up to her and offered her a rose to put in her hair.’
Deathly stillness once again quenched the City of Light. All those tail-coated servants and uniformed messenger boys at the Ministry must be asleep by now; all those beaten, frustrated, frightened young couples and their children, all those exhausted grandmothers and uncles who’d innocently trotted off to take their usual two-weeks-on-the-Continent at the end of July …
Only the ambassador, the diplomats, and Streatham the spymaster must lie open-eyed on clammy pillows, Lydia reflected, calculating the days before Britain’s Expeditionary Force could be ready to take ship for France. Ready to march away to war. They’d be wondering how many submarines Germany had in the North Sea, and counting the hours it would take for General von Kluck to bring up the siege guns Jamie had described to her, so big they took two railway cars to carry and so powerful they could lob a shell nine miles. And oh, yes, I suppose we’ve got to do something about all those people in the hallways …
How can they AIM nine miles?
Jamie slept, like a corpse save for the wet, slow rasp of his breathing. Fever-spots stood
out on his cheekbones.
Don’t you dare, don’t you DARE develop pneumonia!
When she’d come in at sunset – days ago, it felt like now – after spending the whole day in the Ministry vestibule, she’d found that M’sieu Lecoq was gone. Dead, Thérèse Sabatier had informed her briskly. In her absence that day all the other wards had been consolidated, and what had been space between the beds was now occupied by more beds and more men. Coughing spattered the room like gunfire, and the place stank of bodies unwashed, dressings unchanged, of piss and gangrene.
I MUST talk to Dr Théodule when I come back, about having Jamie moved to Aunt Louise’s …
‘And I think it should be me,’ Lydia went on after a moment. ‘Because I’d really rather you were here to keep an eye on Jamie at night. I can go in the daytime, and at least see what it’s like now. I’ll go in disguise – change my voice, I mean, and the way I walk. According to Mrs Flasket’s guidebook, St Clare’s churchyard is only a few streets away. It was a convent church, and I’ll just bet you there’s a sewer or a crypt or something left over from the convent, connecting the two. He has to have been on his way out, after seeing Elysée. Why not use the front door, I wonder?’
‘Fear of her fledglings, I dare say. I like this not, Mistress,’ the vampire went on quietly. ‘Yet I agree that one of us must see this place, and the guards by day will be less of a threat than whatever we might encounter there by night. And with the crowds that come and go here unwatched and unchecked, my heart misgives me to leave James unguarded even by day. Could I walk about in the light, I doubt not that I could come in here in the middle of the day, kill half the patients in the ward and walk out again unremarked. Watch behind you – even in daylight, this Schaumm may not be the only living man employed by the Undead. You shall need this.’ From his pocket he drew a wash-leather sack, which jingled when Lydia took it.
It was heavy.
Aunt Louise would lock me in my room for the rest of my life.
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