‘If you think vampires are the only ones who talk about nothing but hunting,’ observed Asher, gently unfolding a sheaf of notes written in Latin in a neat, fourteenth-century hand, ‘you’ve obviously never spent three days at a hunt meeting in the shires with Lydia’s family. I don’t wonder that Angelus – if he retained the capacity to appreciate educated conversation – took you to his bosom. By Saturday night I’d have played chess with Satan, for the sake of a change in topic.’
‘A perilous occupation.’ Ysidro opened the door at the end of the room, which led to a sharp-angled little enclosed staircase, leading down into blackness. ‘As my friend Father Jeffrey cautioned me many times.’ He glanced back to the glowing doorway far behind them, at his younger self absorbed in talk with the Master of Paris. ‘To Jeffrey’s mind, ’twere one thing to ingratiate myself with the Devil’s minion with an eye toward the salvation of my own soul through assistance to the Holy Church, and another matter entirely actually to love the man.’
‘Did you?’ They descended to what were clearly the living quarters of the house, simply furnished with the sturdy elegance of that era, carven furniture cushioned in yellow plush, bulb-legged tables and curtained beds, maintained to convince servants that the man whose possessions they guarded lived and breathed and went about his business like other men. ‘Love him?’
Before a fireplace – this one cold and swept – a chess set of limewood and ebony, a lute, and a set of virginals.
‘I did.’ The vampire followed him from room to room on this floor, as Asher looked into cabinets, drawers, behind the curtains of niches. ‘Many did. Gabrielle, with that portion of her mind which she could spare from planning where and how and whom she would next kill. She chose her victims months in advance, slipped into their houses to observe them in the evenings … sometimes sat beside their beds every night for weeks while they slept, drinking their dreams, before she even made herself known to them in those dreams. Gabrielle was deeply fond of him, as was Ivo Chopinel, a simple soul who had been his servant in life. Anselm Arouache …’
And as Ysidro opened a door into another chamber Asher saw them, startlingly, like ghosts in the firelight, as he had seen Simon and Angelus in conversation upstairs …
And yes, there were both Simon and Angelus, talking with the others of the Paris nest in a chamber set up to be an eating-room, with a long table and sideboards grinning with silver cups. Two women flanked the young Simon Ysidro, shockingly beautiful (is that only because this is a dream?), laughing and smiling with those long white fangs gleaming against pale lips. One had brown curls wired up and trembling with pearls, and something of the coldly seraphic look of Lydia’s aunt Lavinnia – Gabrielle Batoux? The dark one, with her tight-laced bodice cut to show the henna-stained areolae of her nipples, must be Zaffira Truandière the gypsy, though her gown was every inch as expensive and stylish as that of her companion, with its circular farthingale and collar of stiffened lawn.
‘Anselm Arouache was, as I have said, a Flemish scholar with whom Constantine long corresponded …’
The stout, fair gentleman in brown velvet who stood talking to Angelus near the fire gestured eagerly, and there was a greedy passion in his pale eyes that Asher could not associate with a discussion of spontaneous generation or phlogiston.
‘’Twas a deep disappointment to him – and a personal sadness as well, I think – when Anselm forsook the science that had been his life and became the most avid and greedy hunter of them all. Emeric Jambicque the alchemist – who had been a dear friend of Constantine’s in life – continued his studies after he became vampire. ’Twas the fervor with which he embraced the so-called Reformed Faith that estranged him from Constantine. I know that Constantine never gave up the hope of healing the breach.’
Asher looked around the room, but the young Simon, Anselm, and Constantine were the only men present.
‘’Twas Emeric who brewed the stuff they poured down my throat, that first night in Paris.’ Ysidro paused beside his younger self, like an odd image in a mirror, listening to the two women croon and sigh over a young laborer they were in the process of hunting, night by night, along the quays. ‘So far as I could tell, it contained enough aconite and silver to penetrate vampire flesh—’ his extended finger touched Zaffira Truandière’s dusky cheekbone, traced the sable stormcloud of her jeweled hair – ‘as well as a drug that numbed the central nervous system. ’Twould kill a man,’ he added. ‘’Twould still the lungs, paralyse the heart … But our hearts have already ceased to beat, our lungs to take air. At one time Emeric enjoyed a great reputation as a natural philosopher …’
For a moment, it seemed to Asher that – dream-like – he could look from the room in which he stood surrounded by the vampires of Paris through a door or window into a small lecture-hall, its benches occupied by a scattering of young men in the dark, sober clothing of the middle class. Some were taking notes – in the old fashion, on boards smeared with dark wax – but others looked frankly bored. Lectures, Asher reflected, did not seem to have altered much through the years. At the pulpit-like podium at one end of the room a tall man in the dark old-fashioned robe of a scholar lectured in Latin on the properties of salt and blood. Though his hair, and his flowing beard, were silver instead of sandy, the freckles on his cheekbones, the enormous crude shape of his nose, were recognizable instantly from that night in the Paris alleyways when he had held young Simon’s arms in an unbreakable grip while Esdras de Colle poured poison down his throat.
‘He dyed the beard,’ remarked Ysidro. ‘Our remade bodies return to a state of physical prime, and Emeric found that more people listened to his words if he wore the guise of age. Because his teaching was proscribed as heresy no one questioned that he would lecture at night, in secret, and in shuttered rooms where the light was dim. Many heretics sent their sons to learn from him: anatomy, alchemy, the properties of the natural world.’
‘And did he, like Raimund, believe in this Facinum?’
‘’Twould not surprise me to learn that he did. Raimund studied the arts of alchemy in his way, but he was lazy – and his mind was ever upon the hunt.’ Emeric Jambicque’s lecture-hall dissolved about them, as places do in dreams, leaving them once more in the house of Constantine Angelus. ‘And upon his “rights” to be Master of Paris, of course.’
Asher searched cupboards, opened drawers, ran his hands along the mantelpieces of stone and wood in every room of Angelus’s house, looking not so much for an obvious ‘talisman’ – he was aware that he saw only what Ysidro had seen before him – but for something familiar, something he had seen before … whatever that was.
And wherever it had been.
The Hôtel Batoux, almost certainly. The drawing-room with its sun-damaged boiseries, the candlelight in mirrors and in Elysée de Montadour’s eyes.
‘Where did this house stand?’ he asked, as they descended a stone stair into the earth, the cold of the damp air down there like walking down into the water of a well. ‘Angelus’s. Where are we now?’
‘Rue Poitevine. ’Tis gone now. ’Tis just as well. Even these days I would find the place difficult to pass.’
It was pitch dark, but Asher was aware of the stone walls around him, of low vaulting and cellars that had once contained wine. Ysidro’s perception again, he thought. I see what he knew. What he wills me to see.
‘Sybellia Torqueri had slept in the catacombs beneath a small convent on the Rue de l’Arbalêtre – ’twas a district of the city stiff with religious establishments. Even after she was killed the nuns kept that portion of the crypts locked for centuries. She had endowed them most handsomely. This house Constantine had built on one of the occasions on which he changed identities – it does not do, you understand, for those who know you to observe that you do not age. He had gone by other names before: Solomon d’Espiritu, Chrétien Montfort. When he died Raimund Cauchemar abandoned the house, and it was burned shortly thereafter.’
‘Did he loot it?’
‘I suppose so. I had left Paris by then.’
Eyes flashed in the darkness ahead of them, tiny spots of phosphor. Asher stopped, his heart cold in him, and though the vampire stood a few steps in front of him he heard Ysidro’s voice say behind him, ‘What do you here, Cauchemar?’
Ysidro – young Simon, clothed in different garments from those he had worn upstairs, gray-and-black striped silk rather than the dark velvet he’d sported earlier in the dream – passed both Asher and his older self, and around the gleaming eyes Asher saw Raimund Cauchemar’s face, then the whole of his form, black doublet glittering with lines of braid, pale features framed in a black jawline beard and a close-clipped black mustache.
‘Don’t tell me you haven’t been curious, little Spaniard.’ Cauchemar turned and walked away down the corridor, which descended a flight of a half-dozen steps, forcing young Simon to follow. ‘Don’t tell me you actually believe that so douce and milky a priest as our Angelus actually has the strength to hold the likes of the lovely Gabrielle – the spitfire Zaffira – with the gaze of his pretty gray eyes?’
They passed into a small chamber, round and low-roofed, which contained half a dozen stone coffins. All had their lids pushed aside. In two, Asher could see skeletons, and the ragged scraps of rotted winding-sheets.
‘Does it never occur to you to ask how it is that such a master holds sway over fledglings stronger than himself?’
‘The only one of them who thinks him weaker,’ pointed out Simon, ‘is you.’
‘Pah!’ The older vampire made a gesture of closing his fist. ‘Think him weak? I know him to be so! I am the elder!’ He swung around, hand upraised as if to take a vow. ‘And I am the stronger! Stronger than Angelus. Aye, and stronger than that bitch Sybellia before him. Does it never cross your mind to wonder what the Devil gave that skinny trollop – what the Devil gave her master – to hold our minds in thrall? Are you truly that stupid? That blind?’
‘As blind as those women who come to your shop?’ Simon raised a pale brow. ‘Who pay you for “inheritance powder”, when in fact what they get for their money is the slow wasting of their father or their husband, without trace of poison because there is none involved? Who purchase talismans of Venus from you, only to have you send an erotic dream or two to the one they desire … so long as they keep on paying you?’
Cauchemar laughed, a hearty mirth that struck the damp walls like a hammer. ‘Blind enough not to do the same, I dare say. But just because I trick you into paying me for an imaginary horse doesn’t mean that horses don’t exist, my purblind friend. And Sybellia made me vampire years before she drank the blood of that cold silver flounder who presumes to tell me when to hunt and who I can and cannot kill – decades! Without the help of the Devil he would have no power – no power over me, anyway!
‘Has he spoken of it to you?’ He stepped close to Simon, put a hand on the Spanish vampire’s nape and leaned close, to look into the champagne-colored eyes. ‘You who spend all those evenings being cozy with him by his fireside, playing chess and twiddling on the lute – faugh! He has walked a long way into your mind – has he ever permitted you to walk into his?’
And when Simon drew back Cauchemar’s face darkened. ‘Or are you the one who’s doing the whispering? Trying to sweet-talk the Facinum out of him, the same way he sweet-talked it out of Sybellia? The way he got power enough to lord it over me, who by all right should have been able to crush his flabby face into the mud. Power enough to free you, maybe, from that deranged little elf that lords it over the London nest. Is that why you came to Paris? Is that what you seek? The Devil’s Facinum? Else why are you still in Paris?’
Simon had moved to pull free of Cauchemar’s hand, but now stilled. The older vampire’s grip tightened on his striped sleeve and his dark eyes almost glowed with intensity in the blackness.
‘You’ve been in Paris three months now, little Spaniard. Winter melts to spring, and the man they told you to kill is ashes. And still you linger. What are you seeking?’
He drew him close. ‘And can you and I come to an understanding about finding it?’
FIFTEEN
The Hôpital Lariboisière stood in the tenth arrondissement, hard by the Gare du Nord. Even at this hour of the evening – and it was nearly midnight when Lydia, escorted by the stolid taxi-driver, passed beneath its arched gateway and crossed the long courtyard within – the streets surrounding the train station seemed jammed with all the trucks and motor cars that had vanished from the rest of Paris during the daylight hours. Men in the blue uniform coats and bright scarlet trousers of the infantry (they’re actually going to WAR in those trousers?) filed into the station with knapsacks on their shoulders. Others, in the rough corduroys and wools of artisans, laborers, shopkeepers, stood under the electric glare of the station lights in quiet conversation with women, heads bowed to listen below the constant clamor, hands furtively entwined.
Bidding mothers, wives, sisters, sweethearts their long goodbye.
It’s a wide highway that leads to war …
Lydia tried to remember where she’d heard that proverb.
… and only a narrow trail that comes back again.
Even in the wide courtyard of the hospital the noise of the station could be heard, though like the hospital of Saint-Antoine, once Lydia went inside (there was no one at the desk in the lobby) there was an eerie sense of deadness.
As at Saint-Antoine the wards were crowded, beds crammed in fewer rooms to accommodate the absence of staff. And as at Saint-Antoine, everywhere she smelled dirt and neglect, and heard the hacking cough of pneumonia.
Nobody could tell her how to find someone to direct her.
After asking in three or four wards (and do the vampires of Paris lurk in the shadows here?), Lydia simply returned to the main lobby, searched the desk there (in the continued absence of clerk, nurse, or anyone else), and finally found Ellen’s name – spelled phonetically – jotted in the middle of a long list, with that day’s date – 6 August (only by that time it was an hour and a half into 7 August) – scribbled at the top. In a different hand, someone had noted ‘Aig-12’. Presumably aiguë – acute.
There was a map in the drawer of the desk.
As at Saint-Antoine, even at one thirty in the morning, both men and women clustered, muttering, around the beds of the women in the Acute Ward. A child was crying as he clung to his mother’s hand, the thin, faded woman trying to comfort him; there didn’t seem to be anyone else of the family there. By another bed, a harassed old man was trying to keep three obviously exhausted, squirming, fretful little girls calm and cheerful by periodically hitting them, in between blows exhorting the woman in the bed, ‘But you must come home, Marie! With Jean going now to join his company and Louis gone, Annette has left – hush, Colette! – and these brats drive me distracted!’
‘I’ll try, Papa,’ she whispered, and as she passed the bed Lydia could tell that this woman wasn’t going to rise from her bed soon, if ever.
Ellen sobbed, ‘Miss Lydia!’ and stretched out her hand; Lydia dropped into the chair beside the bed, put her arms around the maid’s big shoulders, and for a time they clung together like sisters. ‘You’re all right,’ the maid whispered – as if Lydia had been stabbed, not herself. ‘You’re all right. Ma’am, we’ve got to get out of here …’
‘We will. You will, as soon as I can arrange for your passage – M’sieu Greuze, if you’d be so kind as to bring up a screen …’
The dressings on Ellen’s arms and side had been changed recently (so at least SOMEBODY is doing their job around here!), but Lydia removed them carefully, knowing from Saint-Antoine that the army was already making off with most bandages and basilicum powder. The worst cuts were on the maid’s arms, but there didn’t seem to be any tendon damage. Lydia guessed she had passed out from nervous shock and loss of blood, rather than any critical injury. Thanks to a good stout corset the wound in Ellen’s side, though bloody, hadn’t been deep. While conducting her examinati
on, Lydia gave her handmaiden a carefully edited version of events, attributing the entire attack to German spies (‘I KNEW Professor Asher had to be mixed up with spies somehow, ma’am! The way he’s come and gone – and it was German spies who kidnapped Miss Miranda last year, wasn’t it?’).
‘Not a word,’ cautioned Lydia, a little alarmed at Ellen’s acuity. ‘Not – one – word, not to anyone. Not even to me.’
‘Oh, no, ma’am!’ Ellen’s brows deepened into a frown. ‘Somebody might overhear. You know how the newspapers say, those Germans have agents everywhere. And you know I’m not one to gossip, not even with Mrs Grimes.’ She named the Asher cook, who, like herself, had formerly been employed by Lydia’s father at Willoughby Close and had taken up service with the Ashers upon his death rather than stay and work for the second Mrs Willoughby.
She sank her voice conspiratorially. ‘Was it German spies that threw Professor Asher off the church tower?’
‘I think it has to have been.’
‘And him?’ She nodded toward the sturdy form of Stanislas Greuze, standing guard at the edge of the screen. ‘Can you trust him? He’s a Frenchman, when all’s said.’
‘He’s all right.’ Lydia whispered a mental prayer that the cab-driver didn’t in fact turn out to be in the employ of either Jürgen Schaumm or the Paris nest, and wondered if there were any way of making sure. ‘He’s making arrangements for you to go south to Bordeaux, to get on a ship for home.’
‘Oh, ma’am, I couldn’t!’ Ellen was aghast. ‘I’m perfectly all right, and it wouldn’t be fitting for you to stay here in Paris by yourself!’
‘I’ll be under the protection of the Department—’ she could see that Ellen was impressed by the term – ‘until Jamie’s well enough to travel. I hope that’s going to be soon, but I’ll feel safer – and I’ll be safer – once you’re safely on your way back to England.’
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