And what the dickens could Elysée de Montadour want from Jamie that she doesn’t already know? Something about this Facinum? To the best of her knowledge, Jamie had never come across anything of the kind in his research. And anyway, Madame seemed to know all about it.
She did a swift reconnaissance to make sure the room next door – a music-room, stuffy and disused – was unlocked, then returned to the salon. Its long windows looked out over the central courtyard – DAMN it! I’ll have to wait for him. Otherwise when he comes in he’ll notice an open window.
Only a minute later the wicket door of the gate opened and Saint-Vrain’s elegant, broad-shouldered form stepped through. Lydia watched him until he disappeared into the building itself, then opened the window wide, dashed with soundless speed into the music-room and whipped off the stout silken cord that belted her kimono. The salon door opened inward, but the cord was long enough to reach across the gallery to the banisters. If I can just get the door closed behind him and the cord knotted around the handle quickly enough …
She heard his step on the marble semicircle of the stair as she was maneuvering the lockpicks to re-lock the door from the outside. She’d glanced around her, both in the salon and the music-room, for anything that could be used as a weapon, but her attempt to bash Schaumm over the head had led her to mistrust both her arm strength and her aim. Knocking someone out with a vase was evidently a great deal easier to do in music-hall melodramas. Intrepid heroines – depending on how intrepid they were – might conceal a paperknife from a convenient desk upon their persons and make sure of their captors with a single stab to the heart. But first, though Lydia knew where the heart was, she wasn’t at all certain she could stab a man in it without hitting a rib or the scapula (depending on the angle), particularly not in an emergency. Second, she knew she’d be right up next to him if her blow went awry.
And though she was fairly certain that Elysée de Montadour would kill her – while Saint-Vrain looked on in awe at her superhuman stature and resolve, no doubt – Saint-Vrain had in fact saved her life, and had done her no harm so far.
She wasn’t sure she could kill him. Not from behind, in cold blood.
So she retreated into the music-room and waited, and when he unlocked and opened the salon door and saw the window across the room open and Lydia gone, he dashed across immediately to look out (as Jamie said eight people out of ten would do), leaving the key in the lock.
Oh, good, I won’t need to do that sash business …
She pulled the door shut behind him, locked it, and removed the key.
The stairway, as she’d observed on the way up it, was a long one, so the drop from the window would be a good twenty feet.
Tying her kimono as she ran, Lydia darted down the stair. The key to the front gate was in a drawer of the table in the front hall. She’d heard him open and close it on their way in. Though perfectly willing to dash through the streets of Paris (I wonder what arrondissement I’m in?) in kimono and petticoats, she was deeply appreciative of the presence of the motor car – a Babcock electric brougham, it turned out to be – in the courtyard.
She abandoned it in an alley two streets from her aunt’s flat, and let herself in through the service stairs. That door was locked. Someone must have been here …
There was blood tracked everywhere – men’s boots – but Ellen was gone.
Lydia stayed only long enough to put on a frock and shoes and fill up a carpet bag with clean linen, make-up, and all the money she could find.
She found a taxi in front of the Peninsula Paris hotel. ‘L’Hôpital Saint-Antoine,’ she said.
THIRTEEN
Jamie was sitting up in bed when Lydia arrived. But though he smiled a greeting his cheeks were flushed with fever, and she could see by the crease between his brows that he was in the throes of another splitting headache. During her recital of the events of the afternoon he twice turned aside from her, racked with coughing, and when Lydia went out into the corridor in search of a surgeon she could only find Fantine, who told her that Dr Bloch – the only day surgeon who hadn’t joined the army – had already seen the men in Ward B and was in the Contagious Ward at the moment.
‘And is Ward B not contagious?’ retorted Lydia. ‘I need to speak to someone about whether my husband can be moved.’
The sweeper looked profoundly doubtful – as was Lydia herself. ‘I’ll let Dr Bloch know. Or Dr Théodule, should he arrive before Dr Bloch is done.’
‘Today’s paper,’ said Asher when Lydia returned to his side, and winced as someone a few beds away yelled, ‘And then will Sedan be avenged!’ at the top of his lungs. It was late afternoon, and visitors crammed the crowded ward. ‘If Ellen was no longer at the flat someone must have come and taken her away, and it doesn’t sound like Schaumm would have had either the strength or any reason to do so. Somewhere in all this jingoistic hoo-rah—’ his fingers flicked the three-inch headline ‘LES DARDANELLES FERMÉES!’ – ‘you should find what hospital she was taken to.’
Denunciations of Austria for declaring war on France’s ally Russia jangled the air around them, every visitor waving a newspaper at bedridden fathers, husbands, sons. Speculations about how long it would take General Bonneau’s Seventh Army Corps to sweep the Germans out of Alsace and cut off Germany’s supplies to its army before they reached Liège almost – but not quite – distracted Lydia’s mind from her concerns for her husband and Ellen, and where she might take Jamie now that Aunt Louise’s was clearly unsafe.
‘Karlebach said something to me once that makes me think he’s on at least speaking terms with the Master of Prague,’ Asher went on, after Lydia had finished her tale. ‘The Master may very well have told him about Schaumm soliciting the help of a rebel fledgling in the Paris nest – and yes, that certainly sounds like what I remember of Hyacinthe. Looking back, I’m guessing that at some point Schaumm established contact with some vampire in Prague … I wonder if Karlebach knew about it then?’
The line of pain between his brows deepened as he tried to delve into further memories. Lydia put her hand over his.
‘And then will Sedan be avenged!’ bellowed a man near the door, and the cry was taken up by seven or eight of Asher’s fellow sufferers.
‘I’ll swear Schaumm never read anything about this Facinum or anything like it in any of Karlebach’s books.’
‘Saint-Vrain said that the Master of Paris had to create her fledglings in a certain specific place,’ recalled Lydia. ‘Because the Facinum was there, I presume. Don Simon’s certainly never mentioned such a thing, though I’m not sure that he would, to me. The Book of the Kindred of Darkness …’
‘Says nothing of them.’ The decisive note in his voice indicated that whatever else had been obliterated by the blow to his head, at least he remembered reading that strange old text. A good thing, too, Lydia reflected. What a bore, to have to go back and reread the whole book – in medieval Spanish, too! – because you’d forgotten every word of it. In the course of the past year, since the volume had come into his hands, Asher had been working on a translation for her: slow going, because they were both annotating, with their own findings and recollections, the original account of what Johanot of Valladolid had learned during his years of service to the Prague vampires in the fourteenth century.
‘This bone chapel he spoke of …’
He frowned at that, and pressed his fingers to his forehead. ‘I’ve never heard of any vampire having to create its fledglings in a specific place,’ he said in time. ‘But there was something …’
‘About a bone chapel?’ Lydia recalled the bone chapels that she’d seen in Rome, beneath the Monastery of the Capuchins on the Via Veneto: the walls of one tiny chamber wrought of grinning skulls, those of another of banked tibias and radii. Pelvises decorated a third. Ceilings refulgent with twining foliations of ribs, with flowers fashioned out of coccyges and fingerbones. In the last of the suite – there were, she recalled from her visit as a fascinated fourteen-year-o
ld, six separate chambers – the image of Death himself had hovered on the ceiling, a single skeleton in an aureole of vertebrae, wielding his scythe. She recalled her delight, in the face of her schoolmates’ horrified shrieks.
‘I think – I don’t know.’
When Ysidro arrived with the coming of full darkness he shook his head at once. ‘This is absurd. ’Tis the master who creates the fledgling, not the spot upon which the transaction takes place.’ His yellow eyes narrowed. ‘Raimund Cauchemar used to claim that the Facinum was the only reason Constantine was able to hold power over him, Raimund … for naturally Raimund would never admit of another’s mind being stronger than his. Yet ’twas not so. I know this. As to why Elysée would seek to trap Mistress Asher as hostage …’
‘Does it sound to you,’ said Lydia slowly, ‘as if Elysée doesn’t know where the Facinum is? Only that it’s somewhere in the house. Then kidnapping me would make sense, if she thinks Jamie does know. And if Schaumm knows, and has made a bargain to set up Hyacinthe as the Master of Paris, using its power …’
Asher leaned back against the pillow, eyes sliding closed. Lydia looked around her again, at the shabby women, wives or mothers, some of them also coughing or spitting. This place is a plague ward! It was long past the hour when Dr Théodule should have appeared. From the hall came Thérèse Sabatier’s voice, railing at poor Fantine, and almost in Lydia’s lap a woman was explaining at great length to her son in the next bed how she’d walked ten miles through the wealthier neighborhoods and had found nothing – not one thing – which could be scavenged and taken home to remake into another garment or another blanket, and what were they going to do for food tomorrow? A few yards along the ward, another went on and on about how Germany must be punished for starting all this trouble, in a voice so shrill it could have cut glass.
Across the room someone roared, ‘And then will Sedan be avenged!’ to a cacophony of cheers.
The heat was insufferable, the smell of dirty clothes stifling. All Lydia wanted to do was put her head down on the pillow beside Asher’s and fall asleep, but she knew this was impossible. The newspaper on her lap was folded open to the small article – barely two lines amid acres of war news – that spoke of a burgled flat in the Avenue Kléber, and an English maidservant found wounded. She’d been taken to the Hôpital Lariboisière, it said.
I have to go to her. And tomorrow I’ll have to make arrangements to send her back to England, the moment she’s well enough to travel. M’sieu Greuze may know some way to get her to Bordeaux.
Even as her whole exhausted soul sobbed with thanks that Ellen had survived, Lydia cringed at the thought of going anywhere or doing anything further tonight.
Can’t I just PLEASE go to bed somewhere and get some sleep?
Not in Aunt Louise’s flat, I can’t.
Just rest a few minutes, she told herself firmly, as she had all those nights of doing clinic duty at that awful charity hospital in the East End. A few minutes’ rest and I’ll be fine.
Lydia raised her eyes to Ysidro’s cool alabaster profile, saw him studying one bed after another – the women, the men – with enigmatic absorption.
Monster …
‘You’ve said—’
At the sound of her voice he turned his glance to her. Human again, or nearly so.
‘You’ve said Elysée de Montadour doesn’t have the strength to be Master of a city like Paris.’ She folded the newspaper, tucked it aside. ‘So how did she come to it? And is that why this woman Hyacinthe hates her so much?’
‘All fledglings hate their masters.’ His voice was remote, as if none of this had anything to do with him. ‘Some masters force their fledglings to love them – which of course only makes the hatred worse. Others solve the problem by choosing only those too dull-witted to cause them trouble. Elysée wanted a servant from whom she would not have to conceal her vampire state; the deception rapidly becomes fatiguing. Like most white women of her class she had not the slightest notion that a woman of color would have more brains than she did.’
‘And this was …’ Lydia fished in her memory. ‘Right after the last war? When Germany defeated France? Didn’t you say Elysée’s husband was the only one of the Paris vampires to survive the Revolution?’
‘One of the few. During the Revolution one could hunt in the city with absolute impunity, so long as one wore trousers rather than breeches, or cheesecloth rags in preference to corsets and petticoats. They would go into the prisons every night to kill, retail murder which barely raised an eyebrow beside the wholesale slaughter taking place in the Place de la Révolution.’
‘Were you in Paris then?’
Ysidro managed to sneer without altering his expression. ‘Please. Those of the London nest – and of other places – who made the Channel crossing on purpose to join them got, I am gratified to say, precisely what they deserved for such stupidity. As I said, the poor of Paris believed in vampires. Once the revolutionary women of the quartiers became suspicious, the chaos in the city made it possible for them to hunt the predators unopposed – indeed unremarked – and to raise a mob of any size on short order and no provocation.’
‘Why didn’t they hide in the sewers?’ asked Lydia. ‘Or the gypsum mines, or the catacombs?’
‘Some did, I believe. As I said, I was not here. But for many vampires, the kill is not only a necessity, it is an addiction: they will come forth to hunt even under conditions of danger. François de Montadour survived by passing himself off as a living man, which took a great deal of cunning, and even after the accession of Napoleon made people believe this of him for a surprising number of years. He took over the town mansion of the Master of Paris – Gabrielle Batoux, it had been – on the Rue de Passy, and her other hideouts as well, presumably the old Hôtel Batoux among them. He had a great deal of money, which was by then the only criterion upon which one was judged in Paris. In counterfeit of a living man he wed Elisabette Cloue, otherwise known as Elysée L’Alouette, a demi-mondaine of rather specialized clientele: the years just before Napoleon’s seizure of the French government were a notoriously vicious time.’
‘According to La Belle Nicolette, the Hôtel Batoux was the original home of the family. Members of it lived there up until the last war with Germany.’
‘A risky arrangement.’ Ysidro frowned. ‘Gabrielle Batoux had hideouts all over Paris. Her Passy hôtel – the present Hôtel de Montadour, probably the place to which you were taken – is a honeycomb of secret rooms and concealed staircases. So far as I know, ’twas François’s chief nest and remains so for his wife.
‘François, though not a particularly intelligent man, was ruthless, and cunning as a rat. Like Gabrielle before him he chose his fledglings – and his wife – for what they could give him or do for him, men and women as greedy and self-centered as himself. He taught them few of the finer skills of the Undead, preferring to keep the arts and glamors of deception which he had learned from Gabrielle – the songs one weaves with dreams – as his own secrets, his means of controlling them. Why it never occurred to him that conditions of civil chaos would be as dangerous in 1871 as they were in 1793 – despite the excellent hunting to be had in a city virtually without law – I cannot say—’
‘I think I can, though,’ said Lydia. ‘I think Gabrielle Batoux, and François de Montadour after her, didn’t take refuge in the sewers or the mines – or didn’t do so for very long – because they were unwilling to leave the Hôtel Batoux unguarded.’
Impatience flickered in his eyes. ‘There is no Facinum.’
‘But they didn’t know that. And there must be something about the house that caused François, at least, to think it gave him power.’
‘François de Montadour thought the house gave him power because he was a fool,’ snapped Ysidro.
‘No, listen. Schaumm heard about the Facinum somehow, and about Hyacinthe’s hatred of Elysée – do vampires gossip amongst themselves? I’m sure they must. They have to talk about something besid
es hunting.’
‘You demonstrate your ignorance, lady.’
‘Whatever the case, Schaumm promises Hyacinthe he’ll put her in power if she works for the Germans – not a bargain I’d feel safe making. Schaumm learns that Jamie is in Paris trying to trace the places where the Facinum might have been hidden – places where Constantine Angelus might have been – and learns that Jamie has been asking questions about the Hôtel Batoux. Jamie gets away by the skin of his teeth …’
‘And Schaumm guesses that you will come, when you hear of his injury,’ concluded the vampire softly. ‘Hence the disposal of poor Tante Camille – and that silly “William Johnson” charade.’
‘And when he saw me at the embassy,’ said Lydia, ‘he knew I hadn’t left Paris with Aunt Louise, and came to finish the job. And so I need to get Ellen, at least, away from Paris.’
She got to her feet, shook out her creased and rumpled skirts. ‘If you would be so good as to remain here and watch over Jamie tonight—’
‘I can look after myself for one night.’ Asher’s eyes half-opened. Lydia wondered if he had been asleep at all. ‘Don Simon, if you would go with her—’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Lydia, in chorus with Ysidro’s rather stronger admonition.
‘And you,’ added the vampire, turning to Lydia, ‘do not you be a fool either.’
Lydia opened her mouth to snap a reply, and Asher put in, ‘Can you hire this man Greuze, this cab-driver you had watching over me yesterday, to go with you tonight?’
After a moment’s silence, in which Lydia could see the struggle in his face, he turned his head a little to meet the vampire’s gaze. ‘Would Mrs Asher be safe in whatever dwelling you’ve hired for yourself, Don Simon? Does your reputation extend to putting the fear of the Lord into the Lady Hyacinthe?’
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