‘He made a fledgling. A week ago, maybe more …’
‘You have seen him?’
‘I have seen him,’ Simon affirmed. ‘Yesternight. ’Twas what I came here to you tonight to say. A man named Gallard, near the Port au Blé. I saw them speak and part, not eight hours ere de Colle was killed. He was undoubtedly vampire.’
And when Angelus did not reply, Simon laid a hand on the large well-shaped hand of the Master of Paris and added quietly, ‘I think you did not know this … man—’ and Asher knew he was originally going to say this heretic – ‘so well as you thought.’
For a long time after that Asher wandered among dreams that made no sense. Sometimes he was a child, back in that ghastly school in Yorkshire, listening to rain or winds in the winter after his parents died. He’d taken up studying Arabic that winter, he recalled, to keep his mind busy during the holidays; saw himself on the station platform a year and a half later, when he’d finally gone south to visit his aunt. Mostly in his dreams he was ‘abroad’, as they said in the Department, amused and exhilarated at the people he met, the human foibles he encountered among the Germans and Czechs and Bosniaks and Arabs who thought he was one of themselves; occasionally scared out of his skin.
Once in his dreaming he encountered his Uncle Theobald, on the railway platform at Shantung of all places, a snuff-colored fussy man like a plump-faced version of his father. ‘What’d you mean, no?’ demanded Theobald, a fragment of a conversation which had taken place in another location at another time, because of course Uncle Theobald had never been in China in his life. ‘What possible living can you ever make mucking about with those dirty old books, boy? We’ve paid your school fees for five years, and looked after your sister, and the first time we ask you for something we get, “No, that isn’t what I want to do with my life.”’
He knew he was burning up with fever; knew he was drowning, an inch at a time.
Sometimes he was in Liège, with the distant siege guns still hammering the other forts around the Belgian city as lines of gray-clothed men scrambled over the rubble, coughing on the dust. Sometimes, through that dust, he saw Constantine Angelus, like a shadow among other shadows: the vampires of Liège.
He saw Simon when Simon returned to the priest Father Jeffrey, made his confession, and knelt before the old Jesuit and the tall Cardinal Montevierde. Heard him whisper to the candlelit darkness, ‘De Colle is dead, lord. It is done.’
Montevierde laid a hand on Simon’s pale head. The ruby in his ring glinted purple in the gloom. ‘It is not done, Simon. Not quite. Not while the Protestant demons still walk the streets of Paris.’
‘There is another of that evil tribe,’ Jeffrey Sampson said, ‘spreading poison to the ears of the young.’
Simon shook his head, aghast, as they put aside his description of the violence that had begun to spread between the followers of one faith and those of another – and their vampire captains.
‘You refuse a favor to God?’ The Cardinal’s fingers closed on Simon’s hair, when the vampire would have looked away from him. ‘You hesitate, even for a moment, to do as God himself asks?’
‘’Tis best not to ask too closely after these things, Simon,’ Father Jeffrey said. ‘We are but the servants of God.’
And Simon bowed his head. Asher could see that he trembled.
‘The alchemist, Emeric Jambicque,’ said Montevierde. ‘It is whispered in the confessional that he is one of them too. Is this true?’
‘It is, Father.’ His voice was an insect-scratch upon frozen stone.
Father Jeffrey knelt at Simon’s side, pressed the vampire’s clawed hands between his own. ‘Will you stay in Paris, and do this for us?’ he asked. ‘Will you do this for God?’ His gray eyes met the yellow, plumbing them deep.
‘Will you do this for your soul?’
A shiver ran through the whole of Simon’s flesh, and he put his hand over his eyes. He whispered, ‘I will stay.’
TWENTY-ONE
The following day, through the louvers of the salon’s shutters, Lydia thought she saw the sturdy figure of Stanislas Greuze pass the house on the Rue Lepic, climbing the steep street to the top of Montmartre hill. Saw him give the shuttered windows, the locked door, a quick sidelong look that missed nothing.
She wrote a note to him at the Café of the Ax and Bow in Montparnasse, and, a little awkwardly, dressed herself in some of Simon’s clothes to carry it down the street to the yellow post-box, with her long red hair jammed up under a cap. If the house, the street, or the neighborhood were being watched (surely Hyacinthe doesn’t have THAT many people working for her?) this was a danger, but it wouldn’t help to have Greuze prowling around the district looking for her. Schaumm, or Saint-Vrain, might very well know – and be following – him.
She searched the house again after that, and this time she found the door into the tunnels – stoutly locked – and another small doorway that led (once she’d picked the lock) into the cellar of the house next door (and have THEY ever noticed there’s a door there?). Still she could discover no sign of Ysidro or his coffin.
It only means that I’m missing something.
There’s a door somewhere that he’s able to keep me from noticing, the way he’s kept city authorities from noticing the street that he lived on in London all those years.
No wonder the Germans want to get control of a vampire nest.
The summer day was long.
Lydia read the newspaper she’d bought on the way back from the post-box, and flinched at the news from Belgium and from the Rhine. She examined – half a dozen times – the notes Ysidro had left on the kitchen table last night, as well as she could given that the few handwritten jottings on them were in Spanish (probably sixteenth-century Spanish at that). Maps of La Santé prison, close to where the Duponts lived (they had probably reached Bordeaux with Ellen by this time … ), drawn with a neatness that reminded Lydia that Ysidro himself had worked as a spy. A few ‘X’s marked junctions of corridors and doorways – guard posts?
The fact that the vampire had managed to make any investigation at all last night in that debilitated state spoke volumes for his determination to get Jamie out of there as soon as possible. Lydia had to fight not to leap to her feet, to pace the kitchen – the whole of the house – like a caged animal. Not to send another message to Greuze and go out herself, to see the prison at least, to do something instead of simply sitting here, waiting for nightfall.
She’d done practicum in charity clinics. She could imagine what a prison infirmary would be by comparison. Even the hospital had been bad, with poor M’sieu Lecoq coughing his lungs out two beds over …
Stop it. Ysidro knows what he’s doing. You can do nothing until he’s well enough …
She closed her eyes, rested her forehead on her fist. I should walk out of this house, have nothing to do with him ever again.
She knew she’d be killed within a day. And Jamie within another, leaving their tiny daughter alone.
I was the one who called him to Paris, she reminded herself. Knowing what he is.
Darkness fell.
Lydia made a third tour of the house, but she assumed that Ysidro had left in secret so as not to remind her that he would hunt again. He was always very careful, she had observed, not to let either her or Jamie ever see him kill. Was that something he’d learned? That if one’s human employees were ever brought face to face with that starkest fact of vampire existence – that they must kill in order to retain the mental powers they held over human perceptions – one could never speak to them again?
She whispered a prayer for Ellen’s safe arrival in Bordeaux – and safe departure, in three days’ time, on the Bolingbroke – and realized she hadn’t eaten all day. Returning to the kitchen she wondered if she’d have any success with scrambling an egg, a skill which had eluded her in her student days at Oxford. She managed to make tea at the gas-ring, although the result was dire – how did Mrs Grimes manage to get it to taste so good? She
settled at the table again, looking over the maps: one section of the wheel-spoke blocks of cells was marked in kitchen pencil. But even on the most cursory sketch there seemed to be a frightful number of walls and corridors to get through, and if Jamie were badly ill how on earth were they to get him out?
We need to …
She came to, suddenly aware that she’d been asleep.
‘Mistress.’
Had she actually heard Ysidro’s voice? Was that what had wakened her?
‘Mistress!’
He called in a hoarse whisper and she stumbled to her feet, wondering how she had even heard him. Somewhere in the blackness outside …
He’d never have called to me unless he were in trouble …
She ran to the kitchen door, shot back the bolts—
Don’t be an idiot!
Her hand froze on the handle as he called out to her again – a distance away, somewhere in the little alley that ran behind the house and around to rejoin the Avenue Junot further down the hill.
The hair prickled on her head.
He has other ways to get into the house. Why call out for me?
She glanced at the windows. The shutters in the kitchen were stout and solid, not louvered like those that looked down on to the street in the front. An oil-lamp burned on the table and she had happened to cross behind it, not between it and the window, when she’d risen.
She bolted the door, returned to her chair the same way.
Urgent, desperate, the harsh hushed voice called, ‘Mistress, help me!’
If he’s killed Jamie will die, and I will die.
Or is this just another version of ‘William Johnson’?
She folded her hands hard together, sat like a statue in the wavering light.
He did not call again.
He came into the kitchen shortly before three in the morning, still looking, as the anatomy lecturer at the Radcliffe had been fond of saying, like death on a soda-cracker. ‘’Twas not I,’ he said, when she told him of the voice. ‘Hyacinthe, for a guess, or Elysée if she still seeks you as hostage. Either can call out to your thoughts from a great distance, and both are adept at such tricks. I had hoped to go to the Hôtel Batoux again, to see if I can get more from Elysée than lies. Yet at the moment I think my nights better spent treading the halls of La Santé and whispering to the dreams of the guards there. James is not well, the inflammation of his lungs devouring him with fever.’
‘I knew it!’
‘Hyacinthe has been there, though she took care not to cross my path. Doing the same as I, I think,’ he added, as Lydia looked across the table at him in alarm. She recalled the form glimpsed in the darkness outside Lariboisière wearing Camille Batoux’s striped jacket, which had clearly taken her fancy. ‘Finding out where James is situated, and informing herself of where the guards are stationed, and of how many doors she must needs get through. Her task is easier than ours, I fear. For we will need to bring him away with us, whereas her goal is but to kill him where he lies. Fear not, Mistress,’ he added, looking down into her eyes. ‘We shall take the trick. But I think the hour has come to instruct your servant Greuze in the role he is to play.’
‘He isn’t my servant,’ said Lydia quickly.
‘Indeed? Nine days now you have paid him a wage that outstrips his earnings with his taxicab, with the understanding that he kick his heels at a café in Montparnasse awaiting your pleasure. Tell me how this differs from the occupation of your Aunt Isobel’s footmen, save that M’sieu Greuze is required neither to wait tables nor yet wear a powdered wig. Wilt have tea, lady?’ He reached for the pot.
She shook her head. ‘It’s cold – and it wasn’t so very drinkable warm.’
For just a moment, when he smiled, his ravaged face turned human.
‘I – I don’t want M’sieu Greuze hurt.’
‘And I don’t want you hurt, lady. Nor our James. Had I a sennight to recover my full faculties ere attempting a jail deliverance I might accomplish such a feat with but the two of us. Had I a sennight, or half a month, to court and charm and secure the services of some worthless stranger over whose possible death neither you nor I would shed a tear, I would do so. But I do not.’ He held up a finger against her hot protest that she would shed more than a tear, stranger or no.
‘I think we must make our move the night after tomorrow and for that we will need this man Greuze’s help. You must needs follow my instructions to the smallest detail, and so must he, and e’en so I cannot guarantee your safety, nor indeed my own.’
‘You would do that for Jamie?’
‘I would do it for you, Mistress.’ He took up her hand and brushed the fingers with cold lips. ‘And yes, I would undertake such an endeavor for James’s sake. I have a constitutional dislike of having my servants killed.’
Lydia remembered Margaret Potton; Ysidro had – as he had described it – courted and charmed her and secured her services five years ago, when he had decided Lydia needed an escort on her journey to Constantinople.
‘Do you really?’
His eyes grew remote, like crystals of sulfur. ‘I do.’
There were six other men in the infirmary. Between bouts of fever that left him feeling as if flesh and bone had been put through a mangle, Asher was aware that word had gone around among them that he was a German spy. One of them had tried to kill him by holding a pillow over his face, and when he had been dragged away had yelled that it was any good Frenchman’s duty to do the same. At some later point – day and night had long since ceased to have any meaning – Asher heard a man in the corridor say that Liège had fallen. That the Germans were on their way to Brussels and, after that, to Paris.
And some time after that – though it may have been a dream, it was difficult to tell – he thought he saw a woman’s face appear at the barred window of the door. The vampire Hyacinthe, beautiful as twilight and stars. His bed was nearest the door and he could see her quite clearly. For an instant he thought that there was a livid burn on one side of her face, and remembered striking her – when? In one of those dreams of darkness inside a church?
Striking her with a silver chain wrapped around his hand?
Someone spoke in the corridor, and she was gone.
Why is the window barred?
He drifted back into dreams.
Dreams of Simon, sitting by the window in a corner of his lodgings. Gray rain pittered on the thick tiny panes and leaked around the frame. Candles burned on the mantelpiece and on the table amid his books. His servant Tim paced the room, long-legged and long-nosed like a stork, gesturing with his long arms. ‘I can’t let you do this, my lord!’
‘I won’t go against him.’ Simon would not meet his eyes. ‘He saved my life—’
‘God’s teeth, my lord, we’re not talkin’ of your life! We’re talkin’ of your soul!’
Simon said nothing.
Tim lunged to his side, dropped to his knees, took his hand, long and thin and white, in his own big red ones. ‘My lord,’ he said. ‘My lord. I swore I’d serve you – more, I swore I’d care for you. Without what you did for us when my brother was taken for plotting against the bastard Elizabeth I’d have been killed with him, and my Ann also. I’ll never forget that you went and found our Maggie where we’d hid her. If you hadn’t got her out of that cellar she would have starved, or been eaten by the rats. How could I forget? How could I owe you anything less than the whole of my heart? I can’t let you do this.’ And he shook him, as if by doing so he could make him understand.
‘You’re not letting me do anything, my dear Timothy.’ And Asher heard, in Simon’s voice, the echo of the frozen calm that characterized the vampire he himself knew. ‘I have made my choice. I will not kill Emeric Jambicque. I encouraged men to kill de Colle – I told them where he lay. But Constantine is right. He—’
‘He’s bewitched you,’ retorted Tim. ‘Him and his cozening words, and his pretty metaphysical arguments – faugh! Like them pamphlets he writes, twisting up what
a man believes and bringing up all them pagans and Greeks. It suited his purposes to get you away from the heretics and it suits his purposes to make you obey him! To keep you under his hand, though it puts your soul back into Hell!’
And when Simon looked away the servant tugged on his hand, like an importunate child.
‘It’s like that tale you told me, about what’s-his-name the musician that went to Hell to fetch back his wife. And the Devil told him he could take her, so long as he didn’t look back behind him … This Angelus, this master – who isn’t even really your master! – he’s calling to you to look back behind you, sir! To turn your eyes away from the light. And if you look back, it’s you who’ll fall back into the pit! And yet he’ll do it … for his own ends. My lord, that’s not the act of a friend!’
‘Stop it.’
‘I can’t stop it!’ Tears stood out in the taller man’s eyes. ‘And I can’t not speak, sir. I love you, sir. I don’t care what you’ve done nor what you are nor what they say. And I hope when I die I’ll win through to Heaven … and ’twould break my heart, my lord – yes, and Ann’s, and Maggie’s too, after all the good you’ve done for us – if we should be in the bosom of God, and look down and see you trapped in flames, trapped for eternity, not for what you done but for what you wouldn’t do because you let this Angelus command you. This man Emeric’s a heretic, my lord! He deserves to die for that, and for whatever other reason Father Jeffrey and the Holy Father know of … You don’t know what that might be! It’s a trial of your faith, my lord …’
Simon turned his wrist, breaking effortlessly from his henchman’s hold. ‘Leave me.’
‘Not to go and run back into Hell, like a spooked horse into a burnin’ barn, sir! I won’t—’
‘Leave me.’
Tim shook his head, reached for his master’s hand again. But Simon was gone.
Why do you show me this?
Asher turned, searching the shadows – of the room where it seemed to him that he stood? Of the ward where he lay – where he thought now that he was standing beside the bed in which his own body twitched and whispered in fever, and vampire eyes gleamed reflectively through the barred window in the door? Of his house back in Oxford, the nursery where his tiny daughter had climbed, with infinite care, from her own cot to sit on the window-seat, looking out into the deeps of the night?
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