In the evenings he’d sat in Professor Bergen’s lamplit tent while that gentle, gray-haired elephant of a man had reassembled pottery from the broken bits sifted out of the trench-dirt. What had at first appeared to be only random snippets of blue and yellow slowly came together as pictures: kings slaying lions, battles between dragons and griffins fought beneath the cold eyes of goddesses who hovered on vulture wings.
So the fragments of his dreams returned to him while Ysidro spoke. Of Simon, still a believer and the sword in the hand of Christ, slipping into the ransacked house of Emeric Jambicque on the Rue de la Fontaine. Dogs and cats fled, at his footstep, from the corpse of a man lying in what had been the shop downstairs. By the smell, the blood was fresh. The floor of the small shed behind had been hacked up, and from the black pit below where Emeric had kept his coffin – hidden, he had thought – rose the stink of ashes.
Beyond that, in the thin starlight of the tiny yard, only a vampire’s eyes could have picked out the heap of ash and half-burned pages where a bonfire had been made of books.
Simon turned his head, listening; then climbed the narrow stair to the workroom above. The vats in which Emeric had dissolved the flesh from the bones of rats – and larger animals as well, to judge by the strings of them hanging near the windows to air the stink of the acid away – were lined up on the table now, and the dark form of a man moved about, gathering bottles and pots from hidden cupboards, retrieving scalpels, cleavers, fine-ground Flemish lenses from beneath the boards of the floor.
Sooty moonlight flashed on his fangs as he turned. ‘Simon!’
It was Raimund Cauchemar.
‘Simon, thank God!’
Even in the fragment of the dream, Asher recalled, it had been impossible to see the vampire move.
‘I feared he’d find you.’
Even in the fragment of the dream, Asher also recalled, he had found himself thinking, Feared so much you took time off to loot Emeric’s alchemical equipment? But obviously Simon hadn’t thought that way, at least not at the time.
‘Who would find me?’
‘Angelus.’
‘I’ve spoken to him.’ Simon sounded dazed, distracted, and Cauchemar gripped his shoulders in those powerful white hands.
‘Did he bid you come to him later tonight?’
Simon nodded; the grip tightened on his arms.
‘He will kill you,’ said Cauchemar. ‘What he said to you earlier, it was a lie. ’Twas he who murdered your servant—’
‘I knew that. He told me.’
‘I’ll bet he didn’t tell you,’ returned the older vampire grimly, ‘how the boy died.’
‘He told me.’ Ysidro’s whisper was barely audible in the stillness of the candlelit room. ‘Only later did I consider how clever was his tale. The tortures he described were all such as would not show marks on the outside of the body. And Tim’s body had already been taken away by the daytime servants of our house.
‘I loved Constantine. I would, as I have already said, have gone unshriven into Hell for the sake of his beliefs – for the sake of his friendship – even, I think, in the face of Tim’s death, when I believed his killing had been quick, and of necessity. But the man that Cauchemar described to me – the man who would play so hideous a game of cat-and-mouse as he related – that man I felt I did not know. Cauchemar told me likewise that Constantine intended to kill me later that night, and had asked me to come to his house so that he could deny having done so, should others – like Cauchemar, Cauchemar said – ask after me. I was a fool, of course.’
Simon briefly put his hand to his lips, as if he feared some involuntary contraction of the muscles of his face might show something of what went on within.
‘He gave me a bodkin, steeped in poison – the same poison Esdras de Colle had poured down my throat when they’d left me on this hill, only a few hundred feet from where we sit tonight, to burn up with the rising of the sun. Cauchemar had long wanted possession of Emeric’s alchemical equipment, of his supplies – which Cauchemar had no idea how to procure – and of his books. He had managed to salvage a good part of them, though the men Tim got to break in and kill Emeric had burned many. I think ’twas even in my mind at that time that Cauchemar meant to take over the Paris nest, though I doubted he had the strength to command Constantine’s fledglings.
‘But in my shock and my horror – for I knew I had been the cause of Tim’s death, and that he had died for love of me – I did not care, and thought only of revenge. In my horror, I believed him: that Constantine would kill me, that Constantine had tortured Tim before he died, and laughed at his terror and his pain. And I knew if I simply fled Paris I would lose not only my vengeance but my last chance of salvation. In killing Constantine, I would save my soul. Jeffrey had said so. Cardinal Montevierde had promised.
‘And so I killed him.’
For a time, in silence, he studied his folded hands.
‘I think perhaps I was the only one of the vampires to whom Constantine would have stood that close. He was ever watchful of his fledglings, even of those most dear to him, and Cauchemar of course he trusted not at all. But he explained to me, there in his study at the top of his house where we had talked all those nights of what we were and why men were given souls, where we had played chess, and observed the stars … He told me how sorry he had been to kill Tim, how he knew it would grieve me. But, he said, he had had no choice. And when I feigned to weep – or perhaps my tears were genuine, I no longer recall – and he bent over to comfort me, I pulled the bodkin from the bosom of my doublet and drove it into his body up to the knuckles of my hand. He seized me by the neck and would have snapped my spine – he was hideously strong, and fast as a striking snake – so that we would both have lain there immobile, and would both have died when the first blades of morning light pierced the shutters.
‘But the poison was fast. His hands slipped from my throat and he fell to the floor, staring at me with his living eyes as I staggered back. He tried to speak and I saw his fingers twitch a little as he reached for me. I went around the study opening every shutter and window while he followed me with his eyes, knowing what I was doing. Maybe knowing that Cauchemar had put me up to it. I heard him try to speak. A small sound, but most terrible.
‘I fled from the study and I knew he listened to my every footfall as I raced down the stair, followed them through the stillness as I retreated along the street. Even in those days I would lie waking a little while in the blackness of my coffin, after the coming of first light. That morning in its safety I felt the sun come up, and knew that he was gone.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
The flood of wounded coming into Paris became an avalanche. When in the course of the next two weeks Lydia went out in the daytime – under Stanislas Greuze’s watchful care – she saw lines of ambulances and wagons, carts, and private carriages rattling and jerking from the Gare du Nord, the Gare de l’Est, to a dozen makeshift hospitals. The stench of wounds, of gangrene, of filth, and of death hung in the hot summer air along with the steady, desperate clamor of men in thirst, exhaustion, and unspeakable pain.
Into the city also came refugees, Belgians fleeing with whatever they could carry, on their backs or loaded into barrows or carts. Most of those who’d had trucks or motor cars when they’d fled had left them, emptied of petrol, along the roads from Brussels or Liège. Some sheltered in abandoned buildings or set up squalid camps for a night or two in the Bois or the Luxembourg Gardens. Mostly they didn’t stay. Parisians, similarly laden, swelled their ranks as they moved on toward the south.
On Tuesday the Germans burned Louvain in Belgium with its university and library, and killed hundreds of civilians – men, women, and children – for the crime of resisting the German invasion of their country. On the twenty-sixth, Wednesday, the retreating French army blew up the railroad bridges over the Mons canal behind them. Word was that the Kaiser himself had arrived in the Rhineland to oversee the German forces there.
Duri
ng all this Lydia observed her husband with a doctor’s eye, read the newspapers, and tried to calculate when the risk of a relapse from being moved would drop low enough to allow them to flee, and whether that would happen before the Germans reached Paris. Lying awake in the early hours of the morning she tried not to wonder about her aunts, frantically seeking news of whether she’d gotten out of the city after Aunt Louise had (she could just hear the words rolling off Aunt Lavinnia’s tongue) ‘abandoned her to her fate’. About her friends in Oxford and London, telegraphing her family for word and getting nothing. When this is all over and it’s 1920 or something, will Aunt Isobel gently tell Miranda, ‘As far as anyone knows, your mummy and daddy were in Paris when the Germans shelled it …’?
‘I can’t say it to Jamie,’ she whispered, late one night, when Don Simon came in and found her weeping in the corridor outside Jamie’s room so she wouldn’t wake him. ‘He has enough to do, to rest and get himself better.’
The vampire made no effort to tell her things would be all right but wrapped her in his thin arms and held her, like the cold, strong grip of a ghost. ‘There is time and plenty to flee, Mistress,’ he reminded her. ‘In the worst case, we can retreat underground into the mines.’
‘Won’t the other vampires be down there too?’
‘Once von Kluck’s forces close in I misdoubt that Elysée and her fledglings will remain,’ said Ysidro reasonably. ‘And in any case, there are many miles of mines. I have put James’s friend Kryzwiki the forger to work producing travel papers that bear not the name of Asher – these should be ready within days. As for James, we will contrive. At the worst, succumbing to pneumonia will not be worse than being dragged to a military prison and shot as a spy. Know you how to fire a pistol, Mistress? Then ’tis time you learned.’
He set up a target in the longest of the mine galleries and ordered Greuze to instruct her in the early hours of the morning, when both the vampires and the local apaches – who used the mines for their own purposes sometimes – would probably have gone to their rest. The shots echoed hideously in the confined space and both muffled their ears with scarves, but Lydia also guessed the branching galleries would diffuse the sound and make it almost impossible to guess its direction. It was hard to aim by lantern-light, but at least she learned how to handle Greuze’s Webley revolver.
That was the day the German army came across the border into France, eighty miles from Paris.
‘Stay out of the mines entirely once darkness falls, Mistress,’ Ysidro warned her that night. ‘I have observed more and more loiterers in this neighborhood, despite the number of people leaving. Hyacinthe – and Schaumm – have men in their pay.’
‘I know.’ Lydia looked up from sorting through the grubby envelope of forged travel documents. Greuze had told her that day that some Parisians were managing to stow away on outgoing trains that had brought food into the city. He had said, too, that some rather surprising individuals were being given ‘military’ passes. Penniless Belgians were camped all around the walls of the waiting-rooms and on the platforms of every station, trying to beg enough money to continue their journey south. ‘I’ve dreamed more than once that there was something down there that I had to find. The dreams feel very … very clumsy, you know. Unconvincing. Is that because Hyacinthe is still recovering from whatever she took that enabled her to try to lure me in the daytime? Or is it that she’s just not very good at it?’
‘She isn’t.’ Ysidro turned a British passport for ‘William Stephenson and wife’ over in fastidious fingers. ‘This is too clean to be genuine, and the stamp isn’t correct. What did you pay for it? Hmph. I shall have a word with this Kryzwiki … But the danger stems not solely from Mistress Hyacinthe, I fear. Nor yet from Elysée, who is, I suspect, also seeking this place. Vampires from Liège, from Brussels and Antwerp, have taken refuge in the mines. Among the refugees camped in the Bois de Boulogne this night I encountered two from Strasbourg, two from Milan, three of the Venice nest, and a like number from Munich—’
‘Munich? Venice? But that’s – those aren’t anywhere near the fighting!’
‘And more coming in. They feed every night, two and three kills a night sometimes: refugees, wounded, men coming into the train stations who never make it to hospital. Once the Germans take the city and settle in to rule it the Undead would be fools to remain, for then people will be on the watch for strangers and the anger of the people will vent itself on them. But for now, with the city in chaos and no one taking note of what is about them, they may feed as they please, like black-flies in their season. And like black-flies, more will come, lady, and no one – none – shall even notice their depredations among the hosts of the anonymous dead.’
On Friday the Allied armies were driven back again and General Gallieni, commander of the city, declared Paris a military zone. Preparations were put in train for siege. Cattle grazed in the Bois de Boulougne. Huge depots of arms and ammunition were established in public buildings. The southern train stations – Saint-Lazare, Montparnasse, Austerlitz – crowded already with refugees, saw the sudden influx of flocks of sheep, to supply the armies should they be thrown back on to the city itself. Men of every suburb were conscripted to dig trenches and ‘wolf-pits’, in Clichy, Vincennes, Saint-Denis. Even the outlets to the sewers were barricaded and put under guard. Military observers – and any civilian possessed of binoculars – appeared daily on the Eiffel Tower and the dome of the Sacré-Coeur, watching the roads north.
‘I want you to get Lydia out of here,’ Asher whispered one night. He had wakened in the dead hours before dawn to see Lydia asleep, exhausted, on the daybed near the shuttered and curtained window; Ysidro had just moved a screen between her and the single candle, lest even that feeble glow disturb her. As he had in the hospital, the vampire stood looking down at her, his scarred face human and infinitely sad, like a man looking through a cell window at a country where he knows he will never set foot. With moth-wing gentleness he moved a strand of her hair from her eyes.
The floor around the daybed was littered, not only with travel documents, but with lists and steamship schedules and maps; Stanislas Greuze had promised to ‘obtain’ a small lorry and sufficient petrol to get them to Poitiers. This was far enough from the fighting, it was hoped, to ensure that more could be obtained there in order to continue to Bordeaux.
‘She will not leave you,’ the vampire pointed out.
‘That’s why I’m talking to you and not to her. There’s no way – none in hell – that I’ll be able to make the journey. I can arrange with Greuze to hide me. I have friends from my days with the Department who can—’
‘James,’ said Ysidro patiently. ‘Even supposing that you actually think that your Department will help you (which I doubt and I think you disbelieve as well), under the most favorable of circumstances it would take a hardy man indeed to abduct your wife. On a number of occasions in the past three years you have sworn that you will kill me because I am a vampire, so you cannot be ignorant of the fact that, as a vampire, I must go to ground at first light or perish.’
Asher said, ‘Hmn,’ and subsided back into his pillows.
‘As there is no passage through Flanders these days, an abduction must needs include several days’ travel to Bordeaux, even without the complication of yourself and Mistress Lydia being sought as German spies. I have no desire to find my coffin parked in the first place that your wife considers “safe” while she hies back to Paris to be at your side, an activity I will be powerless to prevent. ’Twill be much simpler for the three of us to remain together and await events.’
Lydia stirred then in her sleep, and Asher fell silent. Later, when he himself slept, the others’ voices slipped in and out of his dreams. Once he heard her say, ‘I think I saw Modeste Saint-Vrain – Elysée’s minion, you know – today in the Place du Tertre, walking about as if looking for something. And at all the cafés, and in the market, people are talking about German spies hiding in the old mines.’
&nb
sp; ‘Are they so?’ murmured Ysidro.
For centuries, Asher recalled, a mad vampire had haunted the mines, a vampire whom all the others had forgotten, whispering prayers as he sorted bones in the dark. But when he slid back into dreams it wasn’t that strange little withered ghost that he saw but the long upstairs chamber in the house of Constantine Angelus and the gleam of the master vampire’s eyes as he lay on the floor, paralysed by poison, listening as Simon fled down the stairs.
Leaving him alone to await the dawn.
And then, very soft – and it might only have been the creak of the sleeping house – the whisper of what could have been the footfalls of someone else ascending.
Then a great crashing broke into his dream, like terrible thunder, and he opened his eyes to daylight. Lydia knelt beside his bed, gripping his hand. Another explosion made the building shudder.
He guessed already what it was. ‘Less than a mile off.’
Church bells rang, frantically sounding an alarm. Shouts of terror came from the street below. Lydia went to open the window, the diffuse daylight blinding after weeks of twilight. ‘The hill’s blocking the view,’ she said. ‘They say it’s Zeppelins.’
‘Get down to the cellar.’
‘Don’t be silly. If the house is hit being in the cellar won’t save me, and if I go into the mine the chances are that horrible Schaumm person is lurking just on the other side of the door. They have to have figured out where we are by this time.’ She closed the curtains again, came back to the bedside. ‘The French have aeroplanes. I saw them a few days ago when I went up to Sacré-Coeur. All somebody would have to do is fly in close and shoot the gasbag with a pistol. Those things are full of hydrogen; it would go up like a barrel of gunpowder.’
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