‘Call the doctor, man, and make him give me what he gave the Boche to see women around here!’
Damn it! DAMN IT!
The corridor guard left. The door bolt slammed. ‘You pigs keep your mouths shut!’ snapped the door guard, subsiding again into his chair. ‘First man make a noise, I’m gonna come over there—’
At once a chorus of mock farts exploded, except from one bed whose sleeper had been unable to waken fully and kept crying faintly, deliriously, ‘Anna, don’t leave … don’t leave me …’
‘Don’t leave him, Anna!’ squealed one of the men in falsetto, which got another general laugh, and curses from the guard.
Asher could see Hyacinthe now, standing in a far corner of the room, nearly invisible in dark velvet. Arms folded. Patient, as the Undead are patient.
She met his eyes and licked her lips with a pointed, pale-pink tongue.
A hallucination? His head still swam with fever and he couldn’t seem to get any air into his lungs. Any minute, he felt, he’d slide back into seeing his parents, or a wall of grinning skulls, or the vampires who’d walked Paris’s mucky streets three hundred years before. But he was awake now, lucid, or almost lucid …
The ward around him was falling silent. The guard’s breathing deepened.
Shout to be taken to another room?
What would that get him but another whack with the guard’s club? Boche, they’d called him, sale Boche …
Schaumm, he thought. Schaumm accused me of spying, had me brought here where I’d be chained, waiting for her …
Exhaustion, fever, delirium, drowning him like a wave. He fought to remain alert but couldn’t.
Call for the chaplain? Demand last rites? As if any vampire in the world paid the slightest attention to a crucifix unless it was made of solid silver.
The light from the corridor, falling through the barred window, caught in the mahogany-dark curls of her hair as she walked – with that drifting movement that she alone, among the vampires, seemed to favor – to his bedside. He remembered her perfume: it had filled his nostrils as he’d fled up the church tower at St Clare’s, seeking a way out across the roofs. I see you … I see you, honey-man …
She took his hand, slowly unwound the bandage from the barely healed claw wounds in his arm, stroked the thin skin above the vein.
‘Can’t run no more,’ she whispered, ‘can you?’
The corridor light brightened on her hair. Heads shadowed the light.
Hyacinthe melted once more into the darkness, close enough that he could still smell her perfume.
Outside, the corridor guard complained, ‘This’s a hell of an hour to transfer him—’
‘Nobody wants trouble,’ retorted another voice. ‘And we heard there’d be some, if we wait till tomorrow. You got that stretcher? Come on, then, let’s get this over with.’
The door opened. The corridor guard came in, with another man – another guard? Why does he look familiar? – in the blue uniform of Parisian law enforcement.
And behind them, bearing a sheaf of official paperwork and likewise uniformed (and it was this that made Asher wonder if he had slipped back into hallucination), came the slender form of Don Simon Ysidro.
TWENTY-FOUR
Asher was delirious again by the time they carried him through the mine tunnels – entered this time through the cellar of a house on the Rue Ravignan – and up to Ysidro’s manoir. For three days Lydia sat beside him, barely aware of the newspapers that Greuze brought to her; the Germans had moved from the rubble of Liège to Brussels, dogged by Belgian francs-tireurs and systematically murdering civilians – either in retaliation or in fear – and burning villages all the way. From the street outside came only the occasional rumble of trucks and the voices of neighbors calling out now and then as one or another family loaded its goods into wagons or handcarts and moved creaking down the hill to begin the long road to the south. The Germans were coming. Greuze brought in what food he could, and stayed at Asher’s bedside in the mornings while Lydia slept.
For Lydia those mid-August days had a sense of profound unreality to them, as if she had been locked in a prison herself, or stranded on a deserted island somewhere. In the mornings she would leave the house, disguised, through one of the secret ways, and walk the weirdly silent streets. On Wednesday morning she climbed to the Sacré-Coeur basilica and stood before it looking out over Paris, wondering what she should do, or could do.
I have to get Jamie away.
And then I have to come back.
Every hospital in Paris was choked with the wounded. Lydia thought of Dr Théodule at Saint-Antoine, of the crowded wards of Lariboisiere. Of Fantine faithfully mopping floors and changing bedding.
Of her daughter Miranda, sitting in the window-seat of her nursery back in Oxford, waiting for her mother to come home.
Of the men in the trucks.
They need my help.
Wondering if she’d manage to get away before the Germans came for Jamie.
‘Fear not, Mistress,’ Ysidro said to her that night when he returned – very late – from the silent streets and found her curled up in the carved bergère chair beside Asher’s bed. ‘One way or the other, I shall see you home safe.’
She took his hand – the long fingers warm with someone’s stolen life – and found comfort in the clawed grip, though she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live without Jamie.
Ysidro had told her last night that Ellen had reached Oxford safely, and she believed him. She could imagine, easily, coming back to France and working in one of the hospitals, wherever they would be by the time she returned – Bordeaux, probably. And she cringed at the thought of all the dead and the wounded if the French and British fought the Germans all that distance …
Can they DO that? Can they endure that much slaughter and pain? Can anyone?
But she couldn’t imagine what it would be like – might be like – to go back to England and not have Jamie there.
For Jamie to be dead.
As a doctor she knew that people died, especially people who had pneumonia in both lungs after falling off church steeples.
But not Jamie.
Not this soon …
‘Will you leave Paris?’ she asked softly, and Ysidro glanced aside.
‘I will see to it …’
‘No.’ Her hand tightened on his. ‘Will you leave Paris?’
His face was without expression. ‘There is something here I must see to. Something I must see done.’
‘What?’
‘I can’t—’ He stopped the words – whatever they’d been – on his lips. Then: ‘I don’t precisely know.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I don’t – know.’ He shook his head, looked away from her again. The room where Asher lay was still shuttered tight in the heat, velvet curtains keeping the slightest flicker of her candlelight from being seen outside. On her walks it seemed to her that men who remained in the neighborhood clumped together in muttering suspicion and followed her with their eyes.
‘What are you afraid is in the bone chapel?’ she asked softly. ‘This – this thing that you keep saying doesn’t exist, the Facinum that will – supposedly – give Hyacinthe power over the Paris nest, including Elysée? Will it give her power over you? Is that what you fear is going to happen if Hyacinthe gets to it before you do?’ She looked up into his face, worn and thin like a saint in alabaster but for the scars and the fangs. ‘That she’ll make you her slave?’
‘Worse, I think.’
‘Worse?’
He knelt beside the bed and brushed Asher’s temple, very lightly, with the backs of his long claws, his eyes half-shut, listening.
Seeking whatever it was that he sought in Asher’s dreams. ‘I have walked the Marais for some hours tonight,’ Ysidro said softly, ‘endeavoring to get close to the Hôtel Batoux. Though I saw naught of Elysée or any of the Paris nest I sensed their presence everywhere, and had no wish to risk dra
wing any of them here. Indeed, Hyacinthe may e’en yet be recovering from the effects of the day-walking elixir she took. Many such things are considerably stronger than the one I made, and she is younger than I am, and frailer.’
The following afternoon, when she knew perfectly well she should have been sleeping, Lydia took a taxicab to the Quai des Célestins – expensive, but the thought of going underground frightened her even in the daytime and the Métro had taken to running erratically, if at all. There were still taxis, like red-and-yellow candy-boxes, zooming through the half-deserted streets. From there she walked past the Hôtel Batoux. The gates to its court were locked, but peering through the crack between them she saw one of Elysée’s guards crossing the court, past Saint-Vrain’s rather worse-for-wear electric brougham.
Even dressed in boys’ things Lydia felt exposed and in danger out of doors, well aware that any of the men she saw in the cafés of the Boulevard de Sébastopol, any of the women hurrying silently along the sidewalks of the Rue du Renard with their shopping-bags of cabbages and peas, could be in Hyacinthe’s pay or under her influence.
Having satisfied herself that the Hôtel Batoux was still under guard she hastened back to the Quai de Gesvres to find a cab back to Montmartre.
That night when Ysidro returned she asked him about Constantine Angelus and, a little to her surprise, he answered. He must be more tired than I thought.
‘He asked me,’ said Ysidro, ‘early in my days in Paris, what I meant to do with my life, if indeed I succeeded in receiving absolution for all I had done. This was before Esdras de Colle’s killing. Indeed, I was careful to keep my intent from him, first from fear he would stop me – for he could have killed me easily enough – and then because I could not bear to lose his regard.’
‘What did you answer?’ asked Lydia. ‘What did you plan to do?’
Ysidro brought his hand away from the sleeping Asher’s forehead, trimmed the candle that burned beside the bed, the sole illumination of the room.
‘I told him I didn’t know. ’Twas the truth. I knew I would have to give up hunting altogether, and suspected ’twould be my death. For as you know, ’tis the kill that feeds these glamors of the mind that we cast upon the perceptions of the living. Without the kill, we cannot cause men to think our faces resemble theirs. We cannot blind mortal eyes against those features that mark us out as Undead.’
He spread his hands, with their inch-long claws. (Tissue alteration in the keratin of the nail, reflected Lydia automatically. The structure of the eye changes as well, not to speak of photo-reactivity of the flesh … ) Still weary from their attempt to enter the Hôtel Batoux, he could not keep her from seeing him as he was.
‘I had excused myself theretofore by killing only heretics, damned in any event. Constantine pointed out to me that no man was worthier of damnation than Saul of Tarsus ere the Christ appeared to him and transfigured his heart. Did I consider myself worthy to judge the moment of another man’s salvation? To forestall the eventual intent of God? But when I spoke of the matter to Jeffrey, he said that Cardinal Montevierde was of the opinion that I must do whatever would strengthen me to be of service to the Faith. That God would guide me to a victim who deserved such an end. In a word, that heretics were lawful prey.’
‘That’s—’ began Lydia indignantly.
‘—precisely what James’s superiors in his Department told him of his country’s foes,’ the vampire finished for her. ‘And to speak truth, at this distance, I wonder if the Holy Father even knew of what Montevierde did. As I have said, the Cardinal was a man of ambition as well as piety, even ambition to the throne of St Peter itself. I doubt not that the notion pleased him, of having a baptized demon at his beck and call.’
Lydia said nothing for a time. Only regarded her friend with helpless anger mixed with a confused compassion, which – like so many other emotions she felt towards this bleached and mutated soul – she knew she should not feel.
‘What did Angelus think you should do?’
‘He knew no more than I did. But he begged me to keep accurate notes of whatever befell me, for I was treading, he said, where none of our own kind that he knew of had gone before.
‘For my soul, I would not have disobeyed him. And so perhaps I deserved my damnation, for loving one whom the Church would have called murderer and unworthy of my love or any man’s. Quite literally, I would have gone to Hell for him, which was indeed exactly what I proposed to do. And my servant Tim Quodling, who had loved me and watched over me e’er since I delivered his wife and his baby daughter from death.’
He shook his head at the memory of that man, that woman, that child.
‘Tim could not bear it, that I should suffer damnation for the sake of such a friend. So he took it on himself to raise a group of men and to use the knowledge he’d gleaned from me of the mine tunnels that ran beneath the house of Emeric the alchemist, near the foot of Montparnasse. Without my knowledge they tore Emeric from his coffin and dragged him, stupefied in the dead sleep of daytime, up into the daylight to burn.’
Asher saw him running, soundless as shadow, through the night streets of Paris. If those who slept in their tight-shuttered rooms in those soot-black houses on the Rue des Tournelles and the Rue de la Bûcherie heard his passing in their dreams they dreamed he was a bat or a gigantic mantis whose wings clattered drily over their roofs or against their walls. Candles burned in the house he had rented in the Rue de la Harpe and he went from room to room, still silent as a ghost: the study where the books he’d brought from London had been added to fourfold, the table and the cupboard of pewter and plate, purchased lest those who entered the house wonder at a man who had no use for food.
Likewise he had purchased a bed, and on the bed Tim lay, the room in a blaze of waxlight. Tim’s eyes were closed, his rosary of ivory and gold clenched tight in his hands as if he’d hoped at the end that it would protect him. His face was no darker than the wax of the candles all around him, dripping in pools from window-sill and chest edge to the floor. His shirt and doublet had been torn away. Claw marks showed where his wrists had been held, and his own bloodied and torn-out nails spoke of a desperate fight. His limbs had been carefully arranged on the bed and his face at least looked at peace. Wounds gaped in his throat, his elbows, and along his forearms to his wrists – wounds, but little blood.
Simon sank to his knees and wrapped his hands around those of his servant, enclosing fingerbones and holy beads alike, and laid his forehead on Tim’s arm. He remained thus for a long time, not weeping – as he had wept before Jeffrey Sampson – but unmoving, while the candles burned down into the hollow pillars of their winding-sheets and dwindled out one by one. It must have been nearly dawn when the vampire finally got to his feet, bent over Tim’s body and kissed his lips. Then he leaned to the last candle and blew it out, and in the darkness that meant nothing to vampire eyes descended all the stairs to the vaults below the house and lay down to sleep in his coffin alone.
At two o’clock Sunday morning Asher’s fever broke. He opened his eyes many hours later to see broad slits of light lying across Lydia’s red hair; she’d brought a divan over beside his bed, and lay there asleep. A man whom Asher vaguely recognized – was he one of the guards who came into the prison infirmary? – sat in a chair nearby reading a newspaper whose headlines shrieked, ‘BRITISH, FRENCH FORCES IN RETREAT’. Newspapers lay all over the foot of the bed. Lydia was obviously sitting up with me …
Someone had said something about taking him to Fresnes prison. He recalled that much.
He was clearly not there.
He felt far weaker than he’d felt after the vampire attack, but his mind was clear.
He also felt extremely surprised to be alive.
‘Where am I?’
The craggy-faced man lowered his newspaper and said, ‘Eh bien, mon brave!’ Asher switched to French.
‘How did I come here? I was in prison …’
With Hyacinthe’s cold hand on his wrist. He gla
nced at it. Bandaged, but that could have been from the earlier attack.
‘How is it the Americans say? We sprung you.’
‘We being …?’
‘Your beautiful wife, your tricky Spanish friend, and two guards who I swear were drunk or drugged or …’ His single bar of brow gathered like a stormcloud. ‘Or I don’t know what. Is that what it does, this thing that you’re trying to get at the Hôtel Batoux? Is that what it lets men do? Command the mind? Destroy it, my friend.’ He shook his head. ‘I know boys in Montparnasse, in Les Halles, anarchists. I can get gelignite—’
‘It’s underground.’ Even the effort of speaking made him dizzy. ‘Twenty, maybe thirty feet. You’d never get to it. They thought of that.’
‘Son of a whore.’
‘And there are guards.’
‘So your lady tells me.’ The man growled, then held out a thick brown working-man’s hand. ‘Stanislas Greuze, at your service.’
‘Alex Prior.’ Greuze raised his brows – Asher’s Paris workname evidently hadn’t been the one on his prison papers, but Asher was too tired to try to sort it out. La Santé, he thought it had to be, if they’d been talking about transferring him to Fresnes. ‘What day is it?’ He remembered, or thought he remembered, at least two nights in the prison, probably more …
‘It is Sunday,’ said Greuze, ‘the twenty-third of August. There was fighting at Charleroi yesterday, and at Mons, on the frontier …’ He gestured with the newspaper that still lay on his knee. ‘Today again, and worse; your countrymen and mine. The Boche are coming across the Meuse as well. All morning the wounded have been pouring into Paris. The hospitals are full, they’re putting them up at the hotels, at the Invalides, everywhere. It will be bad, my friend.’ He glanced sidelong at Lydia, who looked worn down to her bones.
Elysée. Hyacinthe. Propped on his pillows, Asher reflected that even greater than his surprise at still being alive was his gratitude that Lydia, too, had survived. He could see, where the collar of her simple white blouse fell away from her throat, the glint of silver chains. At her wrist, too, where her hand pillowed her cheek. He stretched his own hand toward her, but drew it back, not wanting to waken her. If she’d been keeping company with Ysidro for – good God, has it been three weeks? – she’d be exhausted. Bruises of sleeplessness marked the thin flesh of her eyes. Greuze brought over a cup of broth from a table near the door, propped Asher while he drank.
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