‘Thank you.’ She took the sack, put her hand on Ysidro’s shoulder and kissed him, very gently, on the cheek. ‘Bless you.’
The vampire smiled. ‘’Tis long,’ he remarked softly, ‘since any person has said those words to me, Mistress. They are good to hear.’
Through the hospital doorway she could see Stanislas Greuze’s taxi, waiting for her across the empty street. It was after four in the morning and the city was utterly deserted, yet she removed her spectacles lest anyone see her with them on. When she looked back at her side, Ysidro had disappeared.
With Ysidro’s money Lydia bought a day of the cab-driver’s time, sent him off to stand guard in the hospital ward, and – after stopping to ransack the cupboards of Aunt Louise’s maids – walked to the district once called the Marais.
Nicolette Batoux had warned her that the hôtel was difficult to find. It had been a fashionable suburb in the days of Cardinal Richelieu and still contained a number of elegant mansions whose stable blocks and extensive gardens had for the most part been sold away and the land built over with the cheaper lodgings of the poor. Fashion had moved across the city, to the newer districts around the Place de l’Étoile. Following the Revolution, the artisans’ quartier of Saint-Antoine had spread to swallow this up.
Lydia had to walk along the Rue de Moussy three times before she saw the turning for the Rue des Trois Anges, which had been left off the three most recent maps of Paris. She’d had the same trouble the first time she’d tried to locate Don Simon Ysidro’s London house.
Just before turning down the tiny street she took off one shoe and inserted a pebble in it to change her gait (and make sure she didn’t forget which foot she was supposed to be limping on). The result was startlingly painful, and made her glad she’d also borrowed one of Aunt Louise’s canes.
With Mrs Flasket’s oldest dress flapping baggy around her thin frame and all her red hair skinned back carefully under a countrywoman’s cap, she approached the shut gates, the sealed door.
No one responded to her knock on the gates. But when she put her eye to the crack (reflecting on what a relief it was to wear spectacles and not worry about who was seeing her because she was in disguise), her view of the cobbled courtyard beyond was almost immediately blocked by a man who emerged from the concierge’s booth to the left. Lydia barely had time to step back before he opened the small wicket door. ‘Whom do you seek, madame?’
‘I’m seeking my niece.’ Lydia made her voice as unlike her own as she could, with a whispered thanks to her governess and the mistresses at Madame Chappedelaine’s Select Academy for Young Ladies for an almost flawless facility with French. She blinked nervously at the blue-uniformed guard through her second-best spare glasses, square-lensed and thick as bread sliced for sandwiches at tea; took in the unshaven jaw, the ill-buttoned uniform, the size and shape of the courtyard behind him, and the location of the house door, set beside the round, many-windowed tower. Guards in novels – and villains always seemed to employ scores of them – were generally tough, soldier-like, and formidable. This man looked like a retired butcher.
‘Madame Lotier – Danielle Lotier – she’s staying with the Peletiers. Rue de Moussy …’ She squinted at a piece of paper she’d written on, and named the nearby street.
‘Two streets up.’ The big man jerked a thumb in the general direction of Montmartre.
‘They don’t mark the streets around here,’ complained Lydia, turning at once to limp away. ‘How they expect anyone to find anyone in this city …’
She changed her shoes at a café on the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois for another pair that was too tight, to remind her to keep her walk small and shuffling, and took a shawl and a wide-brimmed straw hat from her satchel. These alterations effected, she abandoned Aunt Louise’s cane, returned to the neighborhood, and made a cautious circuit of the streets and alleyways around the old hôtel, to get some idea of its size and extent. It was hemmed in on all sides by later buildings, but past their corners and over their rooflines Lydia could occasionally glimpse the conical cap of the tower.
That done, she hobbled the short distance – and she calculated it was less than two hundred yards, though the layout of the intervening streets made it seem much longer – to the church of Sainte-Clare-Pieds-Nus.
Owing to the cutting of the Rue de Rivoli through the old Quartier de la Porte-Saint-Martin the church had been left standing a good distance back from the street, tucked behind a block of shops. Both church and churchyard were much neglected; Lydia looked up at its stumpy tower and a sensation like a cold hand around her heart overwhelmed her. Jamie fell from there. He must have hit the roof of the porch and rolled before falling again. The first row of windows was about thirty feet from the ground. More than enough to fracture a skull.
Oh, Jamie …
Though her feet hurt in her too-small shoes, she shuffled up to the door.
The church was as dilapidated inside as out. Windows which presumably had been stained glass before the Revolution had been replaced with murky, yellowish panes. Statue niches still stood empty. Above the main altar a bronze Christ gazed sadly at the passing centuries from his cross; in a side-chapel, money had clearly been spent on a painting of a young woman running out of a garden gate to follow a gray-clothed friar who stood in the road outside. Presumably St Clare, reflected Lydia, though she seemed to be wearing her shoes on this occasion. Lydia wondered if they fitted her properly. From a circular baptistry to one side of the main door a stairway wound up into the tower.
They MUST be connected underground. Jamie wouldn’t have come here for refuge – he knows perfectly well that a church is no refuge from the Undead.
She stepped hesitantly into the dim gloom. And the thought that he might have been meeting someone here is just silly …
With his physical courage and half a lifetime of spying behind him, her husband could take very good care of his own skin.
He must have met Elysée at the Hôtel Batoux. He came in through here.
He could easily have picked the old-fashioned locks on the door.
There were nearly three hundred miles of sewers under Paris, according to Ysidro – and Mrs Flasket’s guidebooks – and close to four hundred miles of tunnels that anyone knew about in the old gypsum and limestone mines that lay beneath its higher districts like Montmartre and Montparnasse. Even London had old Roman drainage tunnels, and the bricked-in culverts of small, forgotten rivers. Sunken crypts, the cellars of Roman temples and houses, the vaults of lost churches …
Jamie had told her he could cross nearly any city in Europe without coming above ground.
Beside the archway leading to the tower, someone had tacked a thick silver chain to the parish bulletin-board.
‘FOUND …’
It was Jamie’s.
She’d bought it for him herself, at the same time that she’d bought the one that circled her own throat under the high, old-fashioned collar of her shirtwaist. It wouldn’t necessarily keep a vampire from killing you, but it was enough to burn one badly. Time enough to flee, if you were lucky. To scream, to grab a weapon if there were one available. She remembered the silver wrist-chains wound around his hands.
‘… ON THE MORNING OF MONDAY 27 JULY …’
‘My child?’
She pulled back from touching the chain. A tall, thin man in a priest’s soutane stood behind her, a little basket of rags and silver polish in his hand. Doesn’t this church even have an Altar Guild or a Ladies’ Auxiliary or whatever it is Catholic churches have? She’d noticed that despite the cheaply replaced windows and the not-replaced-at-all statues, the inside of the church was spotless.
‘Can I help you, madame?’
‘I …’ She struggled against the overwhelming urge to remove her glasses at once. He’s already SEEN you with them hanging on your face and besides, you’re supposed to be in disguise …
She took a deep breath. ‘My name is Lavinnia Prior.’ She held out her hand, and he shook it w
ith genuine warmth. Despite his gray hair and deeply lined face, his grip was firm and powerful. ‘My husband is the man who fell from your tower last week.’
She saw his quick glance ascertain that she was not in mourning. Mrs Flasket’s oldest dress, like all the companion’s clothing, was ‘second mourning’ for a husband long in his grave, dark (and much-faded) plum jollied up with cinder gray. This was close enough to actual mourning to cause the priest to say diffidently, ‘He was badly injured when they took him from here. I trust …’
He left the phrase hanging.
‘He has recovered consciousness,’ said Lydia. ‘But he recalls nothing of what happened. I came here to see …’ She paused, gathering her thoughts and sorting out a story like a hand of cards.
‘The thing is, Father,’ she went on after a moment, hoping she remembered to cover everything, ‘I have reason to fear that my husband was … was lured here. He stands to inherit a substantial sum of money, from an aunt who years ago disinherited her own son for … for conduct as shocking as it was violent. When they told me he appeared to have fallen from a church tower, I was baffled – why would anyone climb a church tower in the middle of the night? It isn’t even a place robbers would choose.’
‘I understand.’ The priest glanced toward the baptistry, the door to the tower stair. ‘I am Father Martin, by the way … And yes, that aspect of the accident puzzled me as well. I locked the doors myself when I left after Vespers.’
She widened her eyes and tried to look as if she’d never seen a picklock in her life. ‘I’m afraid – from what Aunt Louise has told me of her son – that he might have … might have had something to do with all this. Because it’s he who will inherit, if Jamie – Mr Prior …’ (is his workname James or John Prior? or something else Prior? – she couldn’t recall) ‘… should … should not recover. And of course with this frightful business happening in Belgium, the police don’t have a moment to speak to me, and I can’t even get in to see anyone at the embassy. It isn’t as desperate as what’s going on in Belgium, of course,’ she added, and let her eyes fill with the tears that she’d been putting off as an unnecessary luxury for the past ten days. ‘But it’s desperately important to me. Knowing Jürgen – Jamie’s cousin’ (I’ll feel SUCH a ninny if this man turns out to be working for the vampires and I’ve just given the game away!) ‘—is still out there somewhere … I thought I would at least come here and see where it happened …’
‘Of course.’ Father Martin set his basket on the nearest bench-pew and offered her his arm. ‘Do you wish to go up into the tower? After I looked around the chamber from which it is clear that he fell, the circumstances struck me as very queer. Watch your step here, madame, the stairs are very worn … But I could find no explanation that would suit the facts. The police said that your husband had lost a tremendous amount of blood, but there was none in the chamber – it lies between the ringing-chamber and the actual belfry, and is used for storage – and only a very little splashed just there.’ He pointed to one of the worn, crooked steps just beneath a narrow door. ‘I had meant to ask the police if there was further information.’
He opened the door, and with a shiver Lydia stepped into the room, illuminated from windows on all four walls (we must be above the level of the church roof). As Father Martin had warned her, the place was half-filled with boxes of what appeared to be parish records, neatly labeled, and an assortment of ecclesiastical bric-a-brac: old chairs, a rack of much-faded vestments, a narrow table piled with carefully sorted old clothes, and an enormous copper-bronze samovar enameled with flowers and birds.
‘But with the onset of the current crisis, I must confess – and apologize – that the matter slipped my mind. The other priest attached to Sainte-Clare has gone into the army, just at a time when more of our parish have need of help and advice—’
‘Please don’t apologize!’
‘This window was unlatched.’ Father Martin walked to the narrow south-facing casement. ‘The roof-slates just beneath it – that’s the roof of the side-aisle – are much marked.’
Lydia found herself breathless, trembling, as she came to his side and looked out.
Not thrown. She gazed from the sill to the steep-slanted roof, eight feet beneath. If he was caught by a vampire – or vampires – and managed to get loose … if he knew they followed him up the tower … he would have climbed out the window, hoping to drop to the roof and so scramble down to the ground. Hanging by his hands from the sill, his toes could just reach the roof …
But it was too steep. And he was weak from the blood he’d lost. He couldn’t hang on …
Stop it, she told herself as her stomach and knees both turned to water. If it was somebody you didn’t know you wouldn’t feel like this. She remembered Tante Camille’s body, in the tangle of that gargantuan bed.
Father Martin, keeping close to her in case she should lose her balance, maintained a gentle flow of information about the church itself, to give her a chance to recover. Built as the chapel of a small convent in 1583 (that’s why the churchyard is so big; it must be the original cloister), it had nearly been burned in the Revolution when the rest of the establishment had been torn down. Later it had been closed by the Commune revolt that followed the German war of 1871. ‘They pulled up most of the headstones in the churchyard for the barricade they built on the Rue de Rivoli,’ the priest explained, as he led Lydia down the stairs again. ‘They also took the doors, and most of the church furnishings. And the Committee of Public Safety had the crypt searched for evidence either of taking commands from the Pope, or of a torture-chamber. It is – shocking—’ he shook his head, troubled even after forty-some years – ‘the sorts of ideas the ignorant have, who believe whatever their leaders tell them.’
Constantine Angelus, Lydia reflected, had written almost the same thing in 1597.
He nodded toward the small door at the side of the baptistry, when they emerged from the stair on to the ground floor again. ‘We had most of the convent records still, there in the crypt. When the church was being used as an arsenal during the German siege a great many of those were simply burned. It was spring, and very cold. When I returned here after the army retook the city I gathered up what I could, but it was an irreparable loss.’
‘Did you flee the city when the Commune took over?’ Lydia thought of Uncle Evrard and his family, returning home to find themselves without one. Of Elysée de Montadour, Master of Paris, and the other vampires of the Paris nest, lingering in the beleaguered city to hunt in the chaos.
Lingering and dying, when the people of Paris had finally guessed who and what and most particularly where they were … Why didn’t they hide in the gypsum mines?
‘I was jailed,’ said Father Martin simply. ‘And came within two hours of being shot in retaliation for the execution of Communard hostages. And I saw what happened when the Germans marched in. I read in the newspapers what is happening now, and am filled with the gravest foreboding.’
ELEVEN
There has to be a way into the Hôtel Batoux from the church.
Wrapped in her Japanese kimono, Lydia lay on her back, stared across at the muzzy suggestion of striped light on the wall of her bedroom.
They had been waiting for him in that dim shabby sanctuary, under the sad eyes of the bronze Christ. It must have been the fledglings; Elysée de Montadour would have killed him in the Hôtel itself. The fledglings – with Jürgen Schaumm’s help, if they got the silver chain off him. It had been found, Father Martin had told her, in a dark corner near the confessionals. Lydia’s fingers crept to her throat, where the chain – returned to her by Father Martin – now lay with four others of her own, warmed by the heat of her skin.
And afterwards they went and killed Tante Camille and her poor maid, for talking about crazy Uncle Evrard’s house.
Or maybe to keep her from talking to anyone else about it.
Anyone else like me.
Most of the inhabitants of her aunt’s building h
ad departed. The constant soft vibration of footfalls, of activity, of water in pipes and windows opening and closing that had characterized the block of flats in the first days of her stay had all stilled. The Avenue Kléber, the Place de l’Étoile, the fashionable shops and usually bustling streets of this wealthy district, lay silent.
On the bed beside her that day’s discarded newspaper, purchased on the way back from the Hôtel Batoux and the church of Sainte-Clare, blared the headlines ‘GERMAN ZEPPELINS BOMB LIÈGE’.
I have to sleep. I’ll have to remain awake all night, in case Ysidro decides to have a look at the Hôtel Batoux – or the church – for himself.
I have to talk to Dr Théodule about getting Jamie out of there.
She closed her eyes, and saw again the courtyard through the crack of the carriage gate, long and very deep between the wings of the house with its round Renaissance tower. Morning sunlight had glistened on the tower’s many windows, modern additions even to Lydia’s unpracticed eye – like modern handbills for soap pasted on eighteenth-century boiseries.
More than one guard, La Belle Nicolette had said. They’re probably under orders to get out of there come dark. Elysée can’t afford gossip about the place and it certainly sounds like she can’t control her fledglings.
Lydia frowned, trying to remember all that Jamie and Don Simon had said about those fledglings.
Elysée took over as Master of Paris when her husband was killed … she had had to make all new fledglings, Ysidro said.
Murderers. Killing how many thousands over the years, how many tens of thousands?
Reflective eyes gleaming in the darkness. The silent whisper of movement, the chill laughter of the Undead.
The look she had seen in Jamie’s eyes when he’d met Ysidro’s gaze returned to her. His defeated silence in the face of the fact that they needed the vampire’s help. Jamie, I’m sorry …
Ysidro’s strong fingers around hers, and the brush of his lips on her hand. The quick flicker of the smile that echoed, like one mirror’s reflection in another, the man he’d been in life …
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