‘Ma’am, all the other ladies have already gone! You know how people talk!’
It took Lydia another hour to convince Ellen that nobody in England was going to think that she, Lydia, was lingering in Paris to carry on a clandestine affaire while her husband was in the hospital and the city was in a theater-less, cab-less, nearly restaurant-less uproar because the Germans were getting ready to invade (‘But that isn’t the point, ma’am!’). After a day which had included kidnapping, attempted murder, no sleep, and neither lunch nor dinner, Lydia had the surreal sensation of carrying on the argument in a dream, and wondered at what point she had fallen asleep … Oh, and I forgot all about the church of Sainte-Clare this morning!
Crossing the long central courtyard toward the arched gateway again, where Greuze’s cab stood on the Rue Ambroise-Paré, Lydia marveled that the din of trains was still, at almost four in the morning, going strong. That people were still coming and going on the street, dark figures passing beneath the electric lights along the hospital colonnades … To take care of their loved ones, as I’m taking care of Jamie? To steal medical supplies while no one’s looking? In the hours she’d been in the Acute Ward with Ellen she’d seen one nurse, once, and no physicians at all. There had still been no one at the lobby desk when she had passed it going out.
Something in the shadows caught her eye with a cold sensation of shock, a memory of horror or fear.
But turning, she saw only a woman walking in the direction of the hospital’s door, long black curls hanging down her back.
She was wearing a black-and-beige striped satin jacket, like the skirt Lydia had seen crumpled over a chair in Camille Batoux’s violated flat.
‘Did you kill Esdras de Colle?’ Asher asked, and Ysidro turned his face aside.
‘No.’
But the vampire was lying, and the dream had changed. Asher remembered asking Ysidro about the chief of the Protestant vampires, back when he had been in Ysidro’s portion of the dream – back in Ysidro’s memories of Constantine Angelus’s house – but things were less clear now, and the scene kept repeating itself. He’d finished searching the house for anything that he recognized – only how would I recognize something in a dream that I only saw in another dream? – and the shadows of the young Simon, and of Raimund Cauchemar, had faded, leaving himself and Ysidro standing in the crypt among the lidless coffins in the darkness.
And he had asked him, ‘Did you kill Esdras de Colle?’
But with the changed dream he stood in the crypt again and saw that the coffins all bore their lids now, massive slabs of stone. Too heavy for a man to lift, unless he possessed a vampire’s strength. Yet they were not heavy enough to muffle completely a man’s screams of agony, repeated over and over. And then – when Asher found himself once again in his father’s church at Wychford – he saw standing to the right side of the Wychford altar Constantine Angelus, his fingers torn where he’d scratched and clawed at the inside of his stone coffin, his face ghastly with nightmare, exhaustion, and pain. ‘Help me,’ he repeated. ‘Help me.’
In quick succession, and as if from a great distance away, Asher saw a mob drag a woman off the street and into the courtyard of a Paris house – artisans and laborers, they looked like, men and women both. They stripped their victim naked and brought out kitchen implements they’d heated red-hot in a fire, pokers and spits and cooking-forks; for many minutes the woman prayed to Saint Agnes and Saint Lucy – women who had met torture with God-given strength – as they burned her, until at last she screamed out the location of a house on the Rue du Grand-Hurleur. Then one of the men said, ‘You better be telling the truth, witch,’ and they tied her and left her naked in the mud with five of the mob’s women to guard her while they all raged out into the street and the tortured woman sobbed with pain, over and over, ‘Forgive me, my lord. Forgive me.’
Later – his dream was fragments of darkness and daylight – he saw the vampires Zaffira and stout, fair Anselm Arouache chase through the dark countryside a man whom Asher vaguely recognized as one of those who’d been in the mob, letting him think he’d escaped before materializing again out of the shadows at his elbow, cutting him a little and letting him run before they caught him and cut him a little more. They drank his blood – absorbed his life – as he screamed, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’
‘Did you kill Esdras de Colle?’ Constantine Angelus asked, in the hacked and burned ruins of a desecrated parish church – two monks washing the face of a third who’d been beaten to death – and Simon turned his face aside.
‘I did not.’
Then Asher saw himself – younger and bearded and inconspicuously attired as a laborer – pacing the crowded platform in the Müșir Ahmet Pașa Station, watching for Enver, his contact in Constantinople. There were two tickets to Belgrade in his pocket and the Sultan’s entire police force buzzed around the station looking for him. In Asher’s pocket was also a set of papers proving that Enver was in fact a French citizen and not liable for arrest by Ottoman forces – that he hadn’t had anything to do with an Englishman who asked questions about clandestine German loans to members of the Sultan’s court.
He felt again the panic and terror of knowing that the police were closing in and that if he were caught his own papers wouldn’t hold up to investigation. If only nobody stops me before the train leaves …
Like most trains in Turkey, it was late, and every minute that went by was one minute closer to capture and, he knew, the torture that Englishmen weren’t supposed to undergo.
And one minute more for Enver to make it to join him. To get himself out of the jaws of the trap.
When the train started moving Asher got on to it, the car jammed to capacity with countrywomen, goats, Greek priests, drunken soldiers, crates of chickens, so that Asher had to cling in the doorway as he stood on the bottom step and the train picked up speed. And as it did so, he saw Enver come into the vast modern cavern of the crowded station and break into a run for the platform, for the train.
Police closed around him. Asher saw that sturdy Armenian businessman, who had served for years as the Department contact in Constantinople, try for a moment to fight free, his dark glance going to the departing train, to the man who clung in the doorway of the last car, and though they were separated by nearly a hundred feet Asher had the sensation that their eyes met. That Enver saw him leaving as he was clubbed to the floor. He remembered hearing later in London that Enver had been killed in the prison – which was too bad, his superiors said; now the Department would have to recruit someone else …
Could I have saved him somehow, if I’d stayed? He didn’t know. It would have been against his orders.
Then the feverish images changed again and he saw Simon kneeling before the chair of the white-haired priest Jeffrey Sampson, while the tall Cardinal Montevierde stood in the shadows behind them, like the red-draped image of a martyr, smelling faintly of crusted blood. ‘You did well,’ Sampson was saying, ‘you did well. There is another of that evil tribe, spreading poison to the ears of the young …’
Simon shook his head. ‘I cannot. De Colle is dead. I gave men the direction to do the deed, and it was done. But I swore. I gave my oath—’
‘Gave your oath?’ said the Cardinal. ‘Upon what Testament? Gave your oath in whose name?’
‘You said if I did as you asked—’
‘Will God extend His mercy to any man,’ said the Cardinal, ‘who will refuse Him the small service He asks? A service that God asks?’
Simon looked up then, pale eyes filled with anguish. ‘The innocent suffer with the guilty,’ he said. ‘Men in the pay of de Colle killed a woman who worked for Arouache the philosopher, killed her horribly, trying to find out where Arouache and Angelus slept. When they went to that place and found none sleeping there – ’twas the vaults of an old church on the property of the Filles de la Providence – they wrecked the church and the convent nearby, saying the monks and the nuns were witches. Now those who
have used the nuns to guard them have killed some of them in the mob, and speak of seeking out others.’
‘You refuse a favor to God?’ repeated the Cardinal, stunned. ‘You hesitate, even for a moment, to do as God Himself asks?’
‘The monks, and the Daughters of Providence, are in God’s hands,’ added Father Jeffrey in his gentle voice. ‘And if ’tis true they gave shelter to such demons in the vaults of their church, their sin lay heavy on them in any case. ’Tis best not to ask too closely after these things, Simon. We are but the servants of God.’
SIXTEEN
Lydia returned to the church of Sainte-Clare late in the afternoon, after nine hours of sleep and a substantial breakfast, served up by a woman who, Lydia surmised, had been hired by Ysidro along with the hôtel particulier to which Greuze had taken her from the hospital.
Lydia had traveled with Ysidro before, and had wondered at the time whether there existed some vampire version of Cook’s Tours which specialized in hiring out inconspicuous residences in out-of-the-way corners of every city in Europe, furnished with lockable sub-crypts and servants who didn’t know who they were waiting on and didn’t care.
She guessed that this small house off the Rue Caulaincourt wasn’t where Ysidro himself was sleeping, but Madame Istabene (at least that was what Lydia thought the woman said when she’d asked her her name) spoke no English and very little French, so it was difficult to tell. She had, however, upon Lydia’s arrival at four in the morning, provided her with chocolate and croissants, for which she was weepingly grateful, and when she woke had drawn a hot bath for her, followed by the aforementioned breakfast.
Thus Lydia felt very much better when, some hours later, Father Martin led her down a little corkscrew stair to the vaults beneath the church of Sainte-Clare and helped her take down three of the banker’s boxes that stacked one wall. ‘As I said yesterday, the convent of Sainte-Clare covered nearly three acres back at the beginning of the sixteenth century,’ he explained. ‘Everything over to the Rue Bar du Bec was convent land. The records of the original sales were burned, but there’s a map here of what the buildings were like in the fifteen fifties.’
He switched on the jury-rigged light bulb that hung from the center of the low vaulting at that end of the room. Lydia saw that at one time the crypt had served for convent burials, the floor a patchwork of carved names – unreadable now with the passage of feet – and the walls ranked with niches, like a catacomb, all clustered around an ancient altar carved with the worn sculpture of a lamb.
‘As for what else might be here …’
‘That’s just the trouble,’ said Lydia, who had given a certain amount of thought to her story over breakfast. ‘I am virtually certain that Cousin Jürgen – if it is Cousin Jürgen who did this – lured my husband here in some fashion, and if I can find anything – any familiar name, or reference, or reason that he’d have come here – I may be able to trace him, to find out where he is and what name he’s using.’
She looked imploringly into the old man’s face as he guided her to a rickety chair and a card-table set beneath the light bulb. ‘From things the nurse told me at the hospital last night, it sounds as if Cousin Jürgen is still … still seeks to do my husband some harm. I’ve tried to go to the police with all this, but even if I had proof, with half their men joining the army …’
‘True indeed.’ In the harsh shadows his blue eyes were bitter, and sad. ‘They’re saying the fighting will be over soon. That now that our forces have seized Alsace they’ll be cutting the German supply lines into Belgium. Myself, I don’t see it.’
Even the women’s ward of the Lariboisière Hospital had been in an uproar when Lydia had gone there briefly that afternoon, with husbands and brothers all waving newspapers and shouting ‘SEDAN EST VENGÉ’! All the way along the unnaturally empty Rue de Rivoli, from the hospital to St Clare’s, in Stanislas Greuze’s taxicab, Lydia had seen men in the cafés gesticulating, hugging one another, buying one another drinks over the fact that French forces had seized back the ‘lost provinces’ of Alsace and Lorraine that Germany had taken from her forty-some years before. Or at least they now had troops on the ground there – which, from what Jamie had been telling her for years, was really the only reason France had wanted to get into a war with Germany anyway. She wondered if all this would make it easier or more difficult to get Ellen out of France – and eventually Jamie and herself.
‘Imbeciles,’ Greuze had muttered the fifth time an intoxicated reveler had darted into the street to plaster the newspaper’s headline against the window of the cab, as if the fact had somehow escaped Greuze’s attention. ‘Worse – dupes. Going out and dying because one group of wealthy men in politics wants to score points over another group of wealthy men in politics! Pfui! Jaurès – a great man, madame, a socialist and a man of peace – warned us of this! You know what the true definition of war is, madame? Eh?’
Lydia had shaken her head, disconcerted by the rage in the driver’s voice.
‘A gun with a working-man at each end of it. Only those who sell weapons – and those who are excused from slaughter because they are “too important” to go into combat – have cause to rejoice in these days.’
He’d glanced briefly over his shoulder at her, his ugly face dark with pity. ‘And we kiss the rods that scour our backs, and name as heroes those who march away with the army and leave their families to starve. Those men who teach peace and hope, like Jaurès – those men they shoot in the streets for being without love of their country. And when all is over, nothing in this world will be as it was.’
The next moment he’d leaned out the window to yell insults at the driver of a military camion who’d pulled out of the Place de la Concorde into his path, and had driven on in silence.
Nothing in this world will be as it was …
Now she went on, ‘We are obliged to stay in Paris until my husband is well enough to travel. I’m so sorry to trouble you about our family matters, Father Martin, but I believe the danger he’s in is real.’
‘Evil in this world is real,’ returned the priest. ‘As I have cause to know. And at the moment, the forces of civil order all have their faces turned away from the concerns of common folk. Let me know how I can help you.’
Lydia studied the yellowed paper that he’d withdrawn from one of the boxes and spread on the table, cracked and brittle and traced all over with notations in the hand of some long-dead city clerk. She’d dressed, as she had yesterday, in Mrs Flasket’s borrowed clothing, and felt awkward and uglier than usual in her spectacles – really I look no worse, she tried to comfort herself, than Jamie does when he’s in one of his disguises.
‘My husband is an antiquarian,’ she said slowly. ‘Particularly of religious architecture. His cousin could have lured him here. Tell me … did the convent at one time include a bone chapel?’
For the fifth time in his laborious walk from one end of the ward to the other, Asher was stopped by the brother (or father, or in-law) of one of his fellow patients, had his hand shaken and his shoulder slapped. ‘Splendid, splendid, monsieur! I never harbored a doubt that we would see the English come to strike their blows against the Hun! But you must be as glad as we, eh, that the contest is all but finished now. War is a terrible thing, but now that we have the Germans on the run …’
Asher politely disclaimed any personal involvement in bringing the British Army to France, and kept to himself the reflection that in fact the French, in invading Alsace instead of sending the larger part of their army actually to meet the largest part of the German forces, had probably guaranteed their own defeat, whether the British showed up or not. His head ached less than it had when he’d first risen from his bed two days ago, but by the time he’d dragged himself back there he was, as before, nauseated and so dizzy he was obliged to cling to the iron bed-frames along the way. When he sank down again he was trembling, and cold with sweat.
Not good.
How soon can I plausibly convince Lydia
that I’m fit to make the journey to Le Havre, let alone across the Channel to England?
At the moment, even the thought of trying to get out of the building seemed to lie in the realm of those blood-and-thunder heroes who could brain villains with tins of condensed milk after they’d managed to recover from being beaten senseless and subjected to poison gas, just in time to wriggle out of handcuffs and swim clear of flooded cellars. (What would it cost to have one’s cellar piped to flood with that much water, anyway? I’m sure the London Water Board would have something to say about it.)
Whatever Elysée thought he knew, and whether the Facinum existed or not, it was only a matter of time before someone was killed.
It was some minutes before he was even strong enough to lean down and reach the cardboard box beneath the bed. Lydia had left the four pamphlets he’d bought, faded italic type tenderly wrapped in bookstore tissue.
The French was old-fashioned, even for the last years of the sixteenth century – traces of the old oblique case in the nouns, the occasional use of li for le, and copious sprinklings of the letter ‘s’ in unlikely words. But the writing itself was concise and well-reasoned:
Without the support of the King’s law, you may ask, how would the Holy Church command the respect of the people of Christendom? Would not men turn from the way of God and become as the beasts of the fields? Yet is not law a quality of God, and does not law proceed from reason, from those things which mankind has found to serve it, whether the men of Rome or the citizens of Cathay and India, who are not troubled by such things as anathemas, fish-days, and what God actually thinks about works of art?
And:
Is it not enough to follow Christ’s teachings and live humbly and with forgiveness in our hearts, without killing other men over His nature, His mother’s nature, and the small facts about His life on earth?
Another pamphlet spoke of Kings, and whether a King would indeed be favored by God for embroiling the country in a war for no better reason than his own desire for power, ‘or to show off to Europe how great his army was’. Asher leaned back against the pillows, struggling to get his breath back even ten minutes after he had lain down.
Darkness on His Bones Page 15