Dangerous stuff. In 1602, France had just been torn to pieces by two generations of religious warfare. Catholic Paris had welcomed Henry of Navarre as its king, not because they believed his conversion to Catholicism was genuine, but because he promised peace. The Catholic League, driven out of power, would have gone on fighting. Another of Angelus’s pamphlets dealt – under a series of very thin pseudonyms – with the great House of Guise, the family whose fortunes and power underwrote the Catholic League, and whose founder’s son had attempted to seize the crown of France. Dangerous stuff for dangerous times.
Years ago, when it had first become clear that governments might angle for the services of the Undead, Asher had asked Ysidro, ‘What can the Kaiser offer a master vampire?’ What could any government – or, he had found out recently, American corporation; richer than many governments, some of these were just as irresponsible about what they considered important – offer the Undead that would be worth the danger of being recognized, of coming out of the shadows, of putting themselves in the position of being captured, imprisoned, threatened, used?
He closed his eyes, pressed his hand against the pain in his side (broken rib? It didn’t hurt this way the day before yesterday), saw again the troubling fragment of last night’s dream: Simon Ysidro on his knees before the priest he trusted, the Cardinal with his dark ring gleaming in the shadows. Father Jeffrey’s hand on the vampire’s colorless hair. ‘’Tis best not to ask too closely after these things, Simon. We are all but servants of God.’
Simon weeping.
Asher closed his eyes, and passed out like a snuffed candle.
‘The original church of the convent was smaller than this one.’ Father Martin’s calloused finger traced the irregular polyhedron on the map. ‘Its crypt held the relics that constituted the convent’s greatest treasures, most of which did not survive the Revolution. That may be for the best,’ he added with a sigh. ‘In our day and age, Christians are better able to focus on the faith and virtues of the saints through teaching and catechism, and I’m afraid that the whole custom of venerating relics led to far more abuses than acts of faith. During the Revolution the nuns did manage to save a reliquary containing a lock of St Clare’s hair, cut off, when she dedicated herself to God, by the hand of St Francis himself. In earlier days of course the convent had a whole collection of such things: a finger-bone of St Agnes, any amount of earth from the hill of Calvary, what was supposed to be starlight from the Christmas star preserved somehow in glass, as well as the obligatory fragment of the True Cross.’
He shook his head. ‘When the current church – this building – was built in 1583, the old church was incorporated into a new house for the prioress. But the bone chapel remained – you can see it here on this map, which is dated 1590 – and novices were still required to meditate there on the night before taking their permanent vows. The land was sold sometime in the early seventeenth century, and by the time Turgot’s 1739 map was made the old church and the prioress’s house were long gone. I assume the bones – whether they were moved here or remained in a private chapel in the basement of whatever house was built on the site – were cleared out in the seventeen eighties, when all the parish cemeteries of Paris were deconsecrated. But I understand the chapel itself was of the usual type. The altar wall consisted entirely of skulls, and contained niches in which complete skeletons stood in for statues, that sort of thing. An odd taste.’
His white brows twitched together as if he could see the macabre altar, the floating shapes of skeletons overhead. ‘I understand people from all over Paris came asking to be buried there, to share in the sanctity of the nuns.’
‘Was there a way from this church into the older crypt?’
‘I expect there was at one time. It would have been walled off when the property was sold, and heaven only knows how much of it survived the digging of the Métro. Would that be something that your husband was seeking?’
‘I think so. He has a theory that a sort of secret cult existed in Paris in the seventeenth century. You have no idea how seriously academics take these things.’ She widened her eyes and looked earnest. ‘It sounds silly to me, but it would be child’s play for someone to lure him here in the middle of the night just by sending him a note saying that such a tunnel or connecting crypt existed. I have a key, I’ll let you in … ’ Exactly like ‘William Johnson’, in fact, she reflected. ‘Poor silly man, he wouldn’t have stopped to think twice!’
Lydia was rather proud of her story, and was much gratified when Father Martin nodded, and sighed at the machinations of the wicked. ‘I’ve served in this church for forty-five years,’ he said, ‘and I’ve never seen anything like the doorway or tunnel you describe. But I’ll show you all that’s left of the original catacomb – it’s used for storage these days – and the sub-crypt below this one. I expect,’ he added, offering Lydia his hand as she rose from her chair, ‘one could figure out where the bone chapel would lie by measuring the distance from this spot to the site of the old church, always supposing that map I showed you is to scale. It should be somewhere near the Rue de Moussy.’
Lydia had already mentally estimated the current location of the old bone chapel of the Filles de Sainte-Clare, and knew exactly where it lay.
It lay on the land now occupied by the Hôtel Batoux.
SEVENTEEN
Dreams without light.
Fragments, like a broken window of stained glass, of the crowding houses of Paris, half-timbered and grime-dark with centuries of chimney soot, darker now with foggy nights through which only chinks and slivers of dim firelight struggled around bolted shutters. The smell of the river, of woodsmoke, of a hundred thousand overflowing privies and of black muck underfoot. Bells chimed, near and far, the churches of Paris praising God for another day survived, driving away the Devil for another abyssal night.
Asher made out, as at a very great distance, the white edge of a man’s plain linen collar, and the dead-white blur of a vampire’s face. A stiff brown beard, and the smell of blood on his clothing. He’d killed that night.
Ysidro drifted behind like a ghost.
Esdras de Colle. Asher saw his face when he stopped, turned, once, twice, as if he heard or felt or sensed the Spanish vampire’s presence. Watching and wary. He stepped into a shadow and disappeared. Simon, invisible also in the dark between two houses, moved not. Asher heard the scurrying slither of rats.
He wasn’t sure when Simon departed in another direction.
The dream repeated. Esdras de Colle crossed a triangular churchyard before a church with a stumpy tower, impossible to identify in the darkness. So many churches had been pulled down and rebuilt in the eighteenth century. He stopped as before, listening.
Simon in the darkness – Asher was aware of them both – motionless as the fog.
De Colle moved on. Simon passed like the shift of moonlight against the sooty beige-brown clay of the walls.
Under peaked blackness, thirty feet from the stumpy church, a door whispered on oiled hinges.
Another night, the wind sharp as frozen wire moaning through the black streets. Church bells ringing again, stars burning holes in the sky. De Colle looking about him as he blew through the twisting streets, suspicion in his ice-pale eyes, his harsh mouth. Simon above him on the steep roofs slippery with moss and soot. Through dirty window shutters Simon saw – Asher saw – a man and woman sleeping on a crude bedstead in a litter of grimy blankets, filthy old coats and skirts, with two or three children huddled for warmth. Though the chamber shouted poverty – a table and a bench, a small woodbox containing scant fuel – still a little altar had been fitted up with a cheap plaster image of the Virgin, swags of holy medals and pilgrim-shells, a crucifix and rosaries. The door opened and Esdras de Colle came in, a shadow in his dark clothing. With him was a young man in the plain dark garments favored by the Protestants, his face like a locked steel box.
‘You know what you’re asking of me, Gallard.’ De Colle’s voice would have b
een covered over completely by the whine of the wind across the roof, to any ears but those of another vampire and of that young man at his side. ‘I’ve told you what we are, and what we do.’
‘I have prayed over this, brother,’ replied the young man Gallard. ‘I do not think that I am being led astray. God needs warriors. Is it not proof, when the leader of our armies himself is willing to sell God’s honor for the hollow title of King? The forces of the Anti-Christ in Rome are mighty, and are being drawn from the legions of the Devil. You have shown me what a Christian heart can do, armed with a demon’s powers. We can do great good.’
‘Watch, then.’ De Colle walked to the bedside; it was barely a step from the door. The young man hung back, and the vampire’s mustaches lifted a little in a half-smile. ‘Have no fear, brother. They will not wake. I’ll teach you to lay a glamor like this on their minds, so they’ll slumber up till the moment you take them … so they’ll fall asleep on their feet, if you want them to. Come close.’
Gallard did. Knelt beside the bed when the vampire knelt. ‘It’s Mestallier,’ he said, surprised. ‘He works for Clopard, who owns the Magpie.’
‘Clopard at the Magpie takes his orders from the Catholic League. ’Tis Mestallier who carries them out: to beat a Reformed minister, to wreck the shop of a man who speaks out too loud against popish tyranny. ’Twas Mestallier and his men who kidnapped Séverine Ratoire last week and took her away to a convent, saying she had expressed the desire to become Catholic. Now they are refusing to send her back to her parents. For that poor girl’s sake alone, this man’s life will be no loss. Hold him down.’
Gallard put his hands – gingerly, at first – on the sleeping man’s shoulders; then when he made no stir, leaned down harder. De Colle pulled the blanket down to show the victim’s heavy-muscled arms and, taking up the right one, used his claw-like nails to rip open the arteries from wrist to elbow and pressed his mouth to the gushing wound. Mestallier jerked in his sleep, and his eyes flew open; before he could cry out, Gallard hooked one arm around his throat, choking off his scream. De Colle didn’t even raise his head, only drank and drank, his whole body shuddering like a woman in orgasm, while Mestallier thrashed and croaked, and the other sleepers in the bed stirred and muttered uneasily, as if in dreams.
Asher watched; young Simon watched. This happened three hundred years ago, Asher told himself in fury, as Mestallier’s body began to buck and twitch in convulsions. I can no more save this man than I could have saved Enver in Constantinople. The left hand that had pounded and torn at De Colle’s head and shoulder lost its strength and direction, flopping and flailing. It struck the woman who slept at his side, waking her finally. She stared in confusion, as if trying to decide whether this was a nightmare or not.
De Colle thrust Mestallier’s body out of his way, down to the floor with a thump, and with bloodied beard, bloodied mouth, bloodied hands seized the woman by the hair and one wrist and sank his fangs into her throat.
Gallard stepped back, flushed with sexual arousal and trembling from head to foot. On the floor, Mestallier tried to crawl to his wife’s aid and Gallard put his boot down on the man’s groping wrist. It was scarcely necessary. He was clearly too weak to defend her, too weak to live. When De Colle was done with the wife he turned back to the husband, dragged the bleeding arm to his lips once more and finished him, with a moan of pleasure that could have been heard all over the house, had the occupants not lain asleep under the vampire’s silent influence.
For a moment De Colle stared at his helper and his reflective eyes blazed with sheer hunger and sheer lust. Wanting only one more ecstasy, to take his life as well.
He turned away, his arm before his eyes. Still turned away, he took a handkerchief from his breeches pocket, wiped the blood from his beard. Sniffed the handkerchief, deeply, before he put it away and turned back.
‘This is the road that gives us our power,’ he said.
Gallard’s voice was thick with ecstasy and devotion. ‘Then I will follow it, that I may render over my power unto God.’
Lydia’s voice made Asher open his eyes. The Spanish Inquisition had invented a device – a sort of springy iron band to encircle the victim’s head, with spikes that pressed upon the temples. The band was open at the back and could be ratcheted tighter and tighter until the spikes were driven through the bone into the brain. It felt to Asher as if one of these devices were being tightened around his head. Though he was almost nauseated with the pain it certainly wasn’t the first time. He forced his eyes open a slit against what felt like blinding light, and saw Lydia and Ysidro sitting beside his bed.
‘I passed by that door about three times before I finally saw it,’ Lydia was saying. ‘And I was really looking hard, too. I mean, I knew vampires – skillful vampires – could make people not see things like doors or houses; whole streets, even. When the convent sold the western half of its property that included the old chapel, they bricked across the middle of the old catacomb, but there is a door there. When I mentioned it to Father Martin he stared at it and said, “Bless my soul! All these years, and I’ve never seen it!” Of course it was locked …’
‘There are three catacombs,’ said Asher, his own voice sounding like someone else’s to his ears.
As they stared at him in surprise, his memory yielded up – small and clear as dark glass, like those fragmentary visions of his dreams – a close-printed page – where did I obtain it? – in a yellowed old book: Traité sur les maisons religieuses disparues de la ville de Paris …
‘The convent of the Filles de Sainte-Clare had three catacombs, connecting the new church with the old,’ he said. ‘They were dug in a line. The great Roman sewer that ran from the old Monastery of the Capucins on the Rue des Quatre-Fils to the river lay directly under them.’
‘Did you go through them?’ Lydia leaned close to take his hand. She drew back at once, then felt his face, her brown eyes widening with concern.
‘I don’t …’ He struggled to recall. A smell of wet bricks, of sewage and the river … of hastening, stumbling, through clammy darkness. Shallow steps, an uneven floor, slipping as he ran …
Pain closed around his skull like a vise.
He shut his eyes. The light was unbearable. ‘I think I must have.’
Ysidro’s insectile fingers pressed against his face, like one of the glass spindles lacemakers used, left out on a freezing night. ‘I’ll find the doctor.’ There was a little silence, in which one of the other patients could be heard arguing with someone: what the hell did we need les Anglais for, anyway? Asher realized he was shivering with cold.
Fleeing through the catacomb. Looking behind him once, twice … The feeble glint of his lantern showed almost nothing, and didn’t catch in the glow of vampire eyes. I must have eluded them in the cellars …
They’d been waiting for him in the church. Statues that came to life among the pillars, eyes gleaming …
‘He says he will come shortly,’ said Ysidro’s voice.
‘The thing is,’ said Lydia, and her hand – fingers almost as cold as Ysidro’s – stroked Asher’s forehead, ‘Father Martin told me about the relics that used to be in the bone chapel, and it really sounds as if one of them might have been … been something else. He spoke of a glass that had been imbued somehow with the light of the Christmas star, which doesn’t sound like any relic I’ve ever heard of. I mean, they’re usually things like somebody’s fingerbones, or the skull of John the Baptist—’
‘Of which there are two,’ remarked Ysidro. ‘One in Amiens, the other in Munich.’
‘By the sound of it,’ added Asher, ‘there are skulls enough in the bone chapel without that of John the Baptist.’
‘Whatever’s in there,’ said Lydia, ‘has to be what Hyacinthe wants. What she’s willing to deal with the living – to put herself into the power of the living – to get at. Listen, Simon. The place is guarded during the day, but there’s a chance that the vampires are out hunting at night. I think da
y may be safer – to go in there, I mean, and see the place. But if Schaumm has other living men working for him – and he probably does – we can’t leave Jamie unguarded. I can get M’sieu Greuze to come with me.’
‘Don’t be absurd. Your good Jehu will be of no use—’
‘I won’t have Jamie unguarded while you come with me at night.’
Ysidro was silent for a time, in which Asher tried to guess from the sounds of the traffic on the Rue Saint-Antoine what time it was. It had a different note to it, a different rhythm: trucks rather than motor cars, streaming by on their way to the Front. He knew by experience that it would go on so all night. This early in August the last, deadly sunlight would not have gone from the sky much before ten …
The argument at the other end of the room had shifted to who in the neighborhood were German spies. ‘They’re all over the city, I tell you, hiding in the empty houses, the empty shops …’
‘Elysée de Montadour is among the most brainless women I’ve met,’ said the vampire at length. ‘Yet she has a kind of cunning about things she considers hers. You know she is waiting for you. Even if her guards must be out of the place by sundown, beyond doubt they have orders to leave you tied up in some chamber, should they find you there. And we cannot guarantee,’ he added grimly, ‘that she will be the first of the nest to enter that room, come darkness.’
‘I have to risk it,’ said Lydia stubbornly. ‘Someone has to see the place. At least to see what we’re talking about …’
‘There is a solution.’ The vampire steepled his long fingers. ‘Literally a solution, and one which I have used before, Mistress. There are elixirs, mostly containing silver nitrate and various plant alkaloids, which enable the Undead to prolong their wakefulness for a few hours into the morning. Emeric Jambicque used to make them – he was forever fixing up one thing or another; I am astonished he did not kill himself before he met his fate …’
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