His voice paused, hovering in a way that told Asher that the vampire was recalling something about Emeric Jambicque’s fate.
‘I can’t let you—’
‘Mistress,’ said Ysidro patiently, ‘’tis I who will not let you visit a vampire nest alone. James, you say an old Roman sewer lies beneath those catacombs.’
He managed to nod, his mind skating along the edge of sleep.
‘Thus ’twould be possible for me to come and go, and find refuge for the remainder of the day.’
‘I’ve seen what that sort of elixir does to you!’ protested Lydia.
An illness which, Asher knew, could only be alleviated by killing.
Lydia, he was aware, knew it too.
With the vampires, he reflected, it always comes back to that. A few extra victims. The price the German High Command was perfectly happy to pay …
Is that reason for me to wink at it? To thwart their plans, whatever they are?
‘Yet I assure you, Mistress, there is no Facinum, no magical glass of starlight nor vial of saint’s blood, involved in the making of a new vampire. Nor in the domination of the master’s mind over that of the fledgling. You know this.’
Asher whispered, ‘Hyacinthe knows it, too. It’s in the bone chapel.’
‘What is?’
Ysidro’s voice was sharp. Asher’s eyes drifted open for a moment as his mind groped for that last thought: the thing that he knew was there.
The thing Hyacinthe was looking for.
The thought slipped away and he slept.
EIGHTEEN
Ysidro is right, he thought.
A master vampire makes a fledgling by a natural process. There is no talisman, no magic about it.
Unless one called it magic, to absorb the soul of a dying man into one’s own brain. To breathe it back into the brain of that dead man, once the changes to the tissue began to spread.
In a dream-fragment tiny as a fingernail he saw the young Protestant Gallard talking with his wife, a young woman, dark and bespectacled and intense. Gallard paced back and forth across a stolid, bourgeois study as he talked, while the woman watched him with her dark eyes growing larger with shock as he talked. She shook her head, and shook her head, and reached out for him. He took her in his arms, said, ‘It’s for our daughter that I’m doing this, Dorcas! For all the daughters of the Congregation, for its sons and its descendants! The Catholic League will stop at nothing! They are strong, they have the wealth of a thousand years at their back, the Spanish gold of the Indies! They must be stopped!’
‘You will lose your soul, Gideon! Your soul!’
‘No,’ he insisted, ‘no. My feet are guided into this course. I know I am guided! God can use anyone to His purposes. I know this. I am called. I know I am called.’
And she wept in his arms.
Elsewhere, as if he were looking through several windows at once, Asher was aware of Simon patiently following Esdras de Colle through the night alleyways of Paris, observing where he went, risking his own immolation to follow him to the brink of dawn to learn where he slept. Stumbling, shuddering with terror, into his own lodgings, to fall into the coffin that his servant Tim guarded for him in the vaulted cellar.
‘You can’t keep doin’ this, my lord!’ the young man protested, as Ysidro sagged back on the rough cushions, closed his eyes. ‘One day sleep’s gonna take you before you can get back.’
Ysidro’s hand closed briefly around his servant’s. ‘I must …’
And Tim folded the vampire’s hands together on his breast and wound a rosary around them, its crucifix wrought of ivory and gold.
Stanislas Greuze took Ellen and Lydia to a house near the Gare Montparnasse that afternoon – Saturday – to introduce her to the family of his neighbor’s cousin, who were leaving for Bordeaux the following day. ‘They’re nice people,’ he assured her, ‘good people. They’ll look after your servant and, I promise you, the money you give them for doing so will make all the difference to them when their family down there takes them in. These are hard times, mesdames.’ He left the taxi half-blocking the narrow lane, helped Ellen from the back seat, and collected her valise from the boot.
Lydia had her doubts about these informal arrangements – the journey was to be accomplished in the wagon of M’sieu Dupont’s coal business and would take three days – but the Duponts were, as Greuze had said, clearly ‘good people’, a working-class family who seemed equally and amicably divided between Gran’père’s devout Catholicism and the red-dyed bred-in-the-bone socialism of Gran’mère, M’sieu Dupont, and two of his sons who unlike every other young man in the neighborhood showed no signs of dashing off to the nearest recruiting office.
‘Ma’am, I can’t leave you!’ protested Ellen, as one of the boys carried her valise into the house, where she was to stay that night. ‘I know you’re staying with Professor Asher, but—’
‘I need you to look after Miranda for me.’ Lydia tucked into Ellen’s handbag a hundred francs – in addition to the three hundred she’d already given M’sieu Dupont – and the ticket she’d purchased that morning on the Bolingbroke, sailing from Bordeaux on the fifteenth, ‘Until Professor Asher and I get there. We shouldn’t be long.’ She suspected this was a lie, and wondered despairingly if she would ever see her daughter again.
‘And I won’t really feel safe,’ she admitted to Ysidro on Monday morning when she slipped through the door of the old crypt below St Clare’s, ‘until I get the telegram from her saying she’s arrived in London. The paper this morning says German submarines are patrolling both the North Sea and the Channel. But barring a miracle the situation is only going to get worse.’
As she and the vampire had arranged, Ysidro had entered the church in the night. He had left the side door open for her, and when Lydia entered at eight in the morning – as soon as the last celebrants of early Mass departed – the ancient vaulting still seemed redolent of the incense burned the day before. Ysidro was shivering slightly, and looked – Lydia reflected – every day of three hundred and eighty-four years old. He was usually able to keep her – and anyone else – from noticing the scars on his face and neck. Now they stood out in savage ridges.
‘I hate these elixirs,’ he said, when she asked him how he felt. ‘Vampire flesh resists change, so they must needs contain that which is poisonous to us, aconite or silver, in order to have effect. Even the mildest take a fearful toll. I can only hope and trust that for the next sennight neither your friend Schaumm nor that execrable hag Hyacinthe will make any assault on the hospital.’ He led the way from the crypt through the small door which Father Martin had shown Lydia on her previous visit, and down three steps into moist darkness that smelled of clay.
‘Like the meditations which open the way into others’ dreams,’ he continued, ‘the making of such potions is a dying art among the Undead, if you will forgive me the vulgarity of a pun. Emeric Jambicque studied the art, but few have done so since. Even he was looked upon as antiquated. Why trouble oneself with thought and experiment in how to alter the limits of the vampire state, when ’tis easier in these days simply to go forth and make a meal of the poor?’
Behind the expressionless whisper of his voice Lydia thought she heard a wry weariness. But when she slipped further open the slide on her dark-lantern, she saw no reflection of that – or of anything else – in his face. She was, moreover, aware of his fangs, something she usually wasn’t, and the reminder was a disquieting one.
And her unease – her horrified conviction that James was indeed justified in his enmity to the vampire kind – she saw reflected in Ysidro’s bitter eyes. The elixir that permitted him a few hours of wakefulness to keep her safe from the guards, she understood, drastically reduced his ability to mask himself with illusion.
He will risk himself to protect me, she understood, even to the extent of risking my revulsion and hate at seeing him as he is …
Is that the act of a monster?
She didn’t know.
The catacomb of the convent of the Daughters of St Clare had originally – Father Martin had told her – been some eighty feet in length, by ten in breadth. The curve of its vaults barely cleared Lydia’s head. As in the crypt above, three tiers of niches were let back into the stonework of the walls, swept clear at some point in the past and, Father Martin had said, formerly used for the storage of the old chairs and cartons of church records that now graced the little room in the tower. After the floods four years previously, they had not been returned.
A partition wall had been built when the convent land had been sold. ‘Do you think the builder of the hôtel – Monsieur Batoux, I think La Belle Nicolette said his name was … Do you think he had the door put in?’ Lydia was no expert in architecture, but the narrow demi-porte tucked into the darkest corner of the truncated vault looked at least three centuries old to her.
Three centuries of priests and sextons and volunteers lugging cartons of parish records had managed to miss it, not to mention the 1871 Commune’s Committee of Public Safety in search of popish torture-chambers. Reason enough to believe it had been intended as an escape route for the Undead. ‘I can’t imagine the Master of Paris letting a good back door go to waste.’
‘It does indeed sound as if Gabrielle sheltered with her brother’s descendants from the first.’ Ysidro ran a thoughtful finger over the decidedly modern lock, which clearly he had had no trouble in picking last night. ‘Myself, I’d not have put the price of a glass of wine into the hands of my sister, much less my life – particularly not if my sister thought she might gain some advantage out of my vampire state.’
Lydia’s heart beat faster as she raised the dark-lantern to illuminate the catacomb which continued beyond the old partition wall. Niter crusted the ceiling vaults and the edges of the burial niches. Along the walls lay dunes of clayey mud, and many niches still contained desiccated snaggles of bones, rags, hair. From others, these sorry shards of mortality had been pushed out on to the floor – long ago, to judge by the mud around them. In the middle of the room stood a coffin, the lid lying by its side.
Empty (it’s nine o’clock in the morning; vampires would be sound asleep anyway … ), and smeared inside with old mud. The floods again …
‘There.’ Ysidro touched her arm with a hand that shook. Her eyes followed his pointing finger to a corner near the farther door, where a round well was protected by an ancient grille of rusted iron. ‘The way into the Roman sewer, I dare say, of which James spoke.’ He went to it, knelt, and wrapped his strong white hands around it; Lydia saw the muscles of his jaw and neck cord up with the effort of wrenching the grille free. ‘A back door indeed. If no such entry lies in the room beyond …’
He pushed open the door to reveal a second catacomb, as Asher had said, the level of its floor some twelve inches below the first and its ceiling-vaults a good deal lower still. Three coffins formed a line, end to end, down the center of the room: all empty, as Lydia gingerly ascertained while Ysidro sought out a second well that communicated with the sewers. ‘All is well,’ she punned, straight-faced, and Ysidro gave her a pained look.
‘I have killed men for less, lady.’ He wiped the rust and slime from his hands with a spotless handkerchief. His fingers fumbled as he put it away, and his stride was unsteady as he walked the length of the narrow chamber to the door at its farther end, as if he were numb with cold.
‘With your permission, Mistress, I shall retreat like a rat into that hole ere you broach the door to the third catacomb, lest its farther door communicate with a stair open to daylight. By the sound of it—’ he pressed himself to the desiccated wood of the door – ‘the footfalls of men echo at some little distance, as if in a stairwell. The weight of the earth and stone around us make it difficult to be sure, but were I Master of Paris, or of any other city, and knew such a back door as this existed, I would lay some sort of trap against the Undead as well as the living.’
Vampire flesh toughened, he had told her, as it aged; she knew he could endure more light than the younger among the Undead. Still she shuddered at the thought of opening a door to an unexpected light-shaft, of seeing the man she knew, the friend she knew, auto-combust into unquenchable flame.
Even if he does deserve it …
He is risking that, for me. For Jamie.
For whatever it is that Jamie found out the Germans are looking for. Whatever Hyacinthe is looking for …
‘Particularly would I lay some trap,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘if I believed my power over my fledglings derived from some imbecilic bauble. ’Twere best we hasten, Mistress. This elixir I have taken lasts but a few hours, and I would fain be back in a safe place ere I sleep. And sleep I will soon, like the dead. If we can enter this place at all, we shall have little enough time to locate the chapel, and less to search it, ere we are discovered by the guards.’
‘You know what it is, don’t you?’ she asked suddenly. ‘What’s in the bone chapel?’
‘No.’ He looked aside.
They’re bringing up the siege guns to Liège.
Asher heard them, though the marketplace around him – Liège’s riverside Sunday market along the Meuse – was as it had been on an early visit to the Belgian city with Belleytre, whose sturdy gray-clothed form he could see moving ahead of him among the barrows of fruit, books, children’s toys.
The sky was clear and the river sparkled. Around him the babbled mix of French, Flemish, and Walloon was an intricate joy, like a mosaic.
But it was cold, freezing cold, as if he stood in the dead of winter, and his chest tightened at the roar that was a thousand times louder than thunder. The big guns, the 42-centimeter monsters that they had to bring up in sections on railway cars, that could pulverize a building like a sledgehammer hitting an American soda-cracker. He’d seen the prototypes at the Krupp proving-ground at Meppen, seen what they could do. He shouted to Belleytre, ‘It’s started!’ but his tutor – to the end of his days with the Department Asher had never thought of the little man as anything else – was thumbing through a yellowed seventeenth-century pamphlet at a bookstall. Asher tried to thrust his way to him through the crowd, but around him the city seemed to change and shift, those tidy buildings of red and buff brick fading to narrow gothic frontages of half-timbering and steep roofs. The Meuse flung wide without embankments, bordered with mud and reeds, bobbing with hay-barges and cargoes of salt.
Ysidro’s memories? The Spanish had held the city for years …
The guns turned to thunder. Rain pounded on shuttered windows, hissed in a wood fire; for a moment, in one of those dark glass dream-fragments, Asher saw Simon Ysidro and his servant Tim in the midst of a gathering at what had to be a tavern. Paris again, not Liège. They were speaking French – early seventeenth-century French, before Richelieu and Louis XIV got to it, full of chewed-up bits of Latin and Italian – and the men around them on the benches leaned close to listen. It was cold here, too. Asher moved closer to the fire, but it gave no heat.
‘’Twas he who killed Mestallier and his wife,’ Simon was saying. ‘He who killed poor Jeanette Roux last week.’ He was dressed as a priest and looked absurdly young. Try as he would Asher couldn’t see the long glassy claws into which the vampire state transformed human nails, or the cat-gleam of reflected firelight in his eyes.
I gave men the direction to do the deed, he had said.
And the men on the benches round the fire exclaimed – in almost incomprehensible Parisian argot – and traded glares of anger and enlightenment. Asher made out fragments: ‘raped until she died of shame’ and ‘slew the babe in the cradle in the very chamber’. One man cried, ‘Heretic monster!’ and Simon leaned forward, fingers stretched as if he would take that rough artisan’s horny hands in his own, yellow eyes somber with outrage.
‘You speak more truly than you know, brother. The man is indeed a monster. Tomorrow he will lie, like a great leech swollen with his gorgings, in the crypt beneath his house on the Rue des Puits de la Ville, dre
aming of the Devil who made him … of the Devil who delivered Jacques Mestallier and Jeanette Roux and all those others into his hand …’
And what more did he whisper, Asher wondered, seeing him look into each man’s eyes in turn, in each man’s dreams at night?
After the darkness of the first two chambers of the catacomb, the faint daylight that permeated the third made Lydia squint and blink. Drat it, she thought, Ysidro was right. How is there daylight so far underground? There must be a shaft of some kind ahead. Is there a way to close it off? To get past it?
The strong, pale gleam flooding through the doorway before her outlined the same dilapidation and mess that had characterized the chambers through which she’d already passed, though the coffins that formed a line along the center of this one were closed, and caked with old mud. As her eyes adjusted, Lydia saw through the open door at the far end of the crypt what looked like a vestibule walled and floored with stone and flooded with morning light.
Whatever happened now, Ysidro couldn’t follow her. Couldn’t help if the guards found her.
I should go back …
She closed the door behind her, gathered up Mrs Flasket’s borrowed skirts, and, hurrying the length of the narrow chamber, put her head through the open door.
The foundation floor of a tower. She’d seen the same thing in a dozen old fortresses to which she’d been taken as a schoolgirl, at Carcassonne and Frankfurt and Foix. Heavy stone groinings, stone floor worn into runnels that marked the traffic patterns of centuries, low doors. A stairway wound upward to floors above. But the floors of the upper chambers had all been torn away and replaced by a metal grillework, gleaming in the sunlight that fell from above. The tower, she thought. That stumpy cone-roofed Renaissance tower in the courtyard, where someone had installed all those dozens of incongruous windows.
The grille was silver – probably silver plate; she gasped to think of the expense – and nearly black with tarnish. The trapdoor that blocked the stairway up was fastened with a silver lock.
Darkness on His Bones Page 17