She took his hand with fingers that felt cold.
Later that afternoon he forced himself out of bed, standing with the help of Greuze and Lydia, sweating and shaking with the effort, knowing that the time for rest was over. I can rest when we’re in England, he told himself, clinging to his helpers with hands that felt like jelly. I can rest when we’re safe.
But he knew that England would not be safe either.
He rose again in the night, with Lydia dozing by the bedside, and, dragging himself from one piece of furniture to another, made his way to the window. Only the faintest glimmer of the waxing moonlight came through the louvers. When he pushed open the shutter he saw above the black rooflines of Montmartre the arch of the sky soaked in starlight, all the lights of the city below quenched.
In the street below, the vaguest movement of a dark figure, the momentary flash of vampire eyes.
He closed the shutter and turned back, and saw in the door of the room the slim shape of a woman whose eyes also reflected the moonlight like the eyes of an animal. Even with the distance of the room between them he could smell blood, and Quelques Fleurs.
‘You said to come to you if I had anything else to tell you about the Hôtel Batoux.’
Asher let himself slip into the chair he’d been gripping by the back. His legs already shook with fatigue.
‘You certainly didn’t make yourself easy to find.’
‘What’s there?’
Lydia, he thought. Lydia was asleep beside the bed. Elysée could lift her like a child and be gone before he could stagger that far. Keep her talking …
‘I don’t know.’ Elysée’s silk dress whispered as she came toward him into the moonlight, passing Lydia without a glance. ‘I don’t think François knew, either. But he knew there was something about the house that … that gave him strength in controlling his fledglings. That empowered him to make fledglings – a sort of place, or thing, where he placed the fledgling’s – soul, I suppose you’d call it. He’d pass it through himself, through his own mind, and on into this other thing or place. He said those he’d make outside the house would never obey him properly.’
Her silvery voice was for once free of its affected tones, and her movements without artifice. When she came close he saw the genuine worry in her eyes.
‘With Gabrielle it was the same, he said: Gabrielle was the master who begot him. She always made them in the chapel. I don’t know why. And I don’t know whether she passed the souls of her fledglings through her, into this … this place that François described, but I think she must have. She never would leave that house. In the end she was killed because the mob knew where to find her.
‘Her family lived in the house for years. If there were children in the household Gabrielle would give them nightmares about going into the locked part of the house. But it didn’t always work. And François was never very good at all that silliness with dreams. He told me Gabrielle brought him into the house through the old catacomb from St Clare’s, when the night came for her to make him vampire. She took him on the altar, the way he later took me. For the first two or three nights – while my body was changing – he laid me in a coffin in the chapel, as Gabrielle had done with him. I felt the power then, the power that he held over me and over all the others. This … this thing, this place, the place where his power over the fledglings came from. I’ve never known whether that was because it was where I was made, or … or for some other reason. I still sleep there, in the chapel, many nights.’
She stood close before him in the alabaster moonlight, her long straight hobble-skirt touching his knees. He’d seen her there, he recalled. Seen her lying in her coffin in the chapel, clothed in white, her hair spread around her on the pillow. It must have been when I was waiting for the guards to pass. He’d gone to the drawing-room to wait for her, fearing to be trapped in the chapel by others of the nest.
‘What do you know?’
‘Do you have any command over the Belgian vampires who’ve come to Paris now?’
She nodded, her green eyes troubled. ‘They stay clear of me now, but when they first came into the city two weeks ago I commanded them to keep clear of the neighborhoods where I hunt – Montparnasse, and along the waterfront, and the railway stations. They didn’t like it.’ She grimaced. ‘But I – I concentrated on that power – that place, or thing – that I feel when I make fledglings – called it to me with my heart. And I made them kneel to me. Even Cornelius, who was Master of Liège, and that stuck-up bitch of his, Marielle.’ Her lips tightened for a moment with spiteful triumph, but the expression was fleeting. The haunted dread returned to her eyes.
‘I don’t know how I was able do that. But whatever it is, that place, that strength … is it this Facinum you talked about, when you came to me in July? Or is it the house itself? I know I’m stronger when I sleep in the chapel, as François used to do.’ She shivered. ‘It’s a nasty place. The whole house is drafty and dirty. I’ve kept up a few rooms, but I hate the place. And the neighborhood is impossible. But he’d sleep there, once or twice a week. After he was killed I … I did what he did. Sometimes I’ll dream …’
She passed her hand over her forehead, even in her upset state not mussing her hair, and seated herself with a kind of intimate, offhand casualness on Asher’s knee. ‘Is it one of the relics? I tried taking them over to our hôtel, the Hôtel Montadour in Saint-Germain, one at a time, and then all four of them – which took four trips and most of one night! – and sleeping with them in the vault where my coffin is. They’re almost impossible to get through that curtained hallway that guards the bone chapel, and when one or another was out at the Passy house I was always terrified it would be stolen. And then I had to be careful. My lovely boys – and that bitch Hyacinthe – would whisper so, and watch me … so I’ve never dared give up sleeping at Batoux. Not for long enough to see if it was the relics or not. And as long as I could get them to obey me, I didn’t really care how.’
‘But now you need to know.’ Ysidro should be back soon. While Elysée had been speaking Asher had heard the downstairs clock chime midnight. Lydia had said that the vampire prowled the streets in the early hours of the night, patrolling for other vampires, and latterly making arrangements to cache the small truck ‘purchased’ by Greuze’s Montparnasse friends (which Asher suspected had been ‘purchased’ from men who’d stolen it from the French army), and – Asher was certain – hunting. And while he didn’t exactly fear that Elysée had come here to kill either him or Lydia, he was very conscious of things that could too easily happen to hostages.
There was nothing he could do to prevent it.
‘Now I need to know.’ She laid an arm over his shoulders, the gesture that of a living woman. ‘If the Germans get any closer … and every single one of the High Command should be flayed alive for the idiots they are! What in God’s name were they thinking, sending all those men to Lorraine and leaving the high road to Paris wide open?’
Asher made no reference to her earlier remarks about the armies of France cutting off those of Germany from behind and leaving them lying in their blood, though he was tempted to do so.
‘I hear that the government’s been advised to leave Paris. Supposedly they’re going to Bordeaux, the cowards. Old Henriette – the only one of Gabrielle’s get besides François to survive the Terror – once told me that Gabrielle was also Master of Bordeaux, that she had “inherited” that position, though I don’t see how she could have. She’d never been out of Paris in her life! And Henriette implied that François also would be Master of that city, though like Gabrielle he’d never set foot there. There!’ she added, straightening. ‘I have told you what I know! Now tell me what it is! This Facinum … I cannot carry off more than one relic, you understand. We simply have not the room in our transport. And I cannot carry away the house itself.’
‘Have you ever sometimes …’
Asher hesitated, knowing that even in terms of the world of the Undead his thought was mad.
Yet the visions of a hundred dreams came back to him, whispers of delirium, memories not his own …
‘Have you ever sometimes wondered if there were another vampire living in that house? A vampire you never saw?’
Just for an instant he saw it, before her exaggerated expression of startled affront. That small, telltale flinch.
‘Why on earth would someone do that? It’s insane – how do the Americans say? Loony!’ She sprang to her feet, flung up her hands like a ballerina miming exasperation on stage.
But the flinch had been genuine.
‘You’ve never heard anything there?’ he persisted quietly. ‘Seen anything there? Dreamed anything there that made you wonder …?’
‘Don’t be absurd! If that’s what you thought was going on, what you came to warn me about—’
‘It wasn’t,’ said Asher. ‘I came, as I said at the time, because I had heard that there was something in the house that the Germans were seeking to get hold of. Only recently I’ve begun to wonder if it was not something, but someone. It’s a huge house, large enough to hold an extended family and a vampire nest as well. What if someone did with Gabrielle what she did with her family? Used her – and your husband – and you – as blinds?’
‘Why would anyone do such a thing?’ She strode from him, turned back, gestured again like an actress. ‘If he were a fledgling of Gabrielle’s, why would Gabrielle have hidden him? And if not, why then the need to hide? Particularly if he held power over the Paris nest … And if he were afraid of Gabrielle’s power, and then that of François, why not simply go and try his luck in Liège or Brussels or Bordeaux? You’re delusional, my poor boy.’
Coming to his side again she ran her fingers through his hair and suddenly gripped tight, tilting his head back. Asher raised one wrist warningly so that she could see the silver around it, though he guessed that, without the ability to make it out of the room, he would be buying himself at most a second or two before she broke his neck.
‘Or are you just trying to get me to let you into the house, so you can look around for it yourself? You and that white snake Simon? Lionel Grippen pushed him out of London and now he’s looking for a way to take over Paris? You tell him for me that I won’t have him play such monkey tricks. Now that I’ve found this place, don’t think my minions here in town can’t stir up this whole district and burn this house over his head. And yours, and that of your pretty girl over there.’ She glanced across at the sleeping Lydia. ‘With everyone in a panic and the newspapers closing down and rumors flying faster than the smallpox, even that idiot Saint-Vrain could get a gang to tear this place to pieces—’
‘It can just as easily be done to the Hôtel Batoux, corazón,’ murmured Ysidro’s soft voice, and Elysée let go of Asher’s hair and turned, with a startled speed that spoke volumes for the older vampire’s stealth. ‘Then if you choose to come to an arrangement with whatever government this city finds itself serving a month from now, you will have nothing to come back to.’
‘Species of snake!’
‘The serpent is in many ways an admirable creature, Elysée. It comes and goes without a sound and can kill its enemies before they are aware of its presence. Did you arrange for your fledglings to wait for James in the church of Sainte-Clare, by the way, after he visited you in the Hôtel Batoux?’
‘No. I didn’t even know that bitch Hyacinthe was aware of the back way in. I haven’t seen the slut in weeks – another reason—’ she turned back to Asher, who was cold and sweating with the effort of sitting upright in his chair – ‘why I need to know: what is this thing in the house? Which of the relics is it?’ She added sulkily, ‘And you tell me now you don’t know.’
‘I never told you I did. If I could get a better look at the chapel—’
‘You? You couldn’t walk from here to the door.’
And she was gone – vexingly, vampire-fashion, like the vision in a dream.
TWENTY-EIGHT
‘Were you indeed in the bone chapel, James?’
Ysidro had moved too. Vampires came and went, Asher had long ago learned, by creating blind spots in the human perception, periods of reverie which lasted up to several minutes in which one looked into space and thought nothing in particular, only to wake with a start and find the vampire either gone or standing at one’s elbow.
Hence, he supposed, the tales of the Undead materializing and dematerializing in the form of mist, or flittering away as bats.
Ysidro put a hand under Asher’s arm, drew him to his feet without appearance of effort and steered him toward the bed. Lydia stirred, brushed the back of her wrist across her eyes and said, ‘Jamie?’, then sat up and fumbled on her glasses. ‘What—?’
‘Elysée de Montadour has discovered this place,’ Ysidro informed her. ‘Cagafuego putada. It means I shall have to make arrangements for another refuge, and as things stand in this city at the moment this will be difficult, particularly if certain members of my household precipitate themselves back into fever and unconsciousness by rising too early from their beds.’
‘I’m not a member of your household,’ grumbled Asher. ‘And yes, I think I must have hidden there, waiting for the chance to pick the lock on the grille and get past the guards and into the main house. I remember …’
What do I remember?
What is it that I’m forgetting?
A man standing in the doorway of the bone chapel.
A clawed hand held out to him, ink stains on the fingers …
Did that really happen? Or was it like the jumbled dreams, of Jürgen Schaumm in his father’s church at Wychford, or meeting his Uncle Theobald in the railway station in Shantung?
‘What was the house like inside?’ asked Lydia. ‘Did you look around?’
‘I did.’ The memory returned to him, sudden and clear. Shut-up rooms, bolted doors, chambers filled with the furnishings of a family covered carefully in holland cloth: birdcages, baby cribs, shelves of dusty books. And on the other side of the door, the sparse furnishings of an earlier era, beds that had never been slept in, rooms housing harps and harpsichords, chess sets and card-tables, new fresh candles in silver holders set among mountains of dripped wax. Trunk after trunk of clothing: knee-smalls, panniered dresses, yellow linen brittle as autumn leaves.
Who cleans the place? He’d wondered at the time, and wondered still.
Corridors, salons, empty rooms upon empty rooms. Footfalls that echoed as the twilight deepened around him, after the guards had gone …
Attics above those, containing who knew what mazes of tiny servant-holes?
Would I know it if another vampire lay in a coffin in those attics? Could anyone tell, if some little chamber had been carved out between two bedrooms, windowless and curtained in layers of velvet like the passageway to the chapel, large enough for a coffin and nothing more?
The house was built so that a family could live there. Several families, indigent brothers and aunts and cousins who lived on the money that mysteriously showed up in their bank accounts under the condition that they never, ever try to open those doors that were bolted from the other side. Like living with Bluebeard, Camille Batoux had said …
His glance returned to Lydia, and to Ysidro as the vampire eased him back into bed.
‘It was like Bluebeard’s castle,’ he said, half-closing his eyes. Feeling as if he were sinking into darkness, weariness devouring his bones. ‘Haunted.’
‘By what?’
Another memory. Footsteps ascending a stair in the hour before dawn.
Help me …
‘I don’t know.’ But in the depths of his heart he knew that he did.
Grilling days. Stifling nights. The train stations still a chaos of reservists pouring out, wounded pouring in, refugees clustering on the benches, along the walls. Elsewhere in the city, closed shops, shuttered apartments, silence. The French and British forces fell back from Saint-Quentin, eighty miles from Paris, to Compiègne, barely forty. When Asher stubbornly dragged himself to the
window, he saw through the louvers men loitering in the Rue Lepic, watching the house.
‘They’ve come over the walls into the garden, too,’ reported Lydia, when he spoke of it. ‘Poking about, looking at the house. Toughs, they look like: apaches. They haven’t tried the door yet.’
She sounded matter-of-fact and cheerful, but Asher could see that she wasn’t eating – always a sign of stress – and when he’d wake in the night, or in the long hot still afternoons, it was sometimes to see her pacing from window to window or fretting over a growing pile of lists, books, newspapers around her.
The armies retreated to Chantilly, twenty miles away. Shortly after that they crossed the river Marne.
On September first Greuze reported quietly to Lydia – outside the door of the bedroom where Asher was supposed to be asleep – that he’d had to shift the hiding-place of the truck. ‘A man was in the street there, a man I’ve seen around here lately, one of the porters from the ammunition store, I think. Better safe than sorry, eh? They’re saying around the neighborhood that German spies are hiding in this house—’
‘Oh, please!’ Typically, Lydia sounded more annoyed than frightened.
‘I figured I had a choice: I tell them they’re crazy, and have people start saying I’m a spy and watching me, or I keep my mouth shut and my ears open. But I tell you, your Don Simon better find another place for you to stay until Professor Asher’s well enough to travel, and quick.’
That night Asher put his eye to the louvers of the shutter to watch the shadows move along the rooftops in the glimmer of the waxing moon.
‘There was one in the garden a little earlier.’ Lydia’s strong fingers wrapped around his. ‘A young girl, she looked like – wasn’t one of Hyacinthe’s fledglings a young girl, didn’t Simon say?’
‘We’ve made it out of worse places.’ His hand tightened on hers. ‘I want you to promise me: if the house is attacked, either by spy-hunters in the daytime or by the Undead at night, I want you to flee. Don’t try to stop and fetch me. Just run. Find a safe place.’
Darkness on His Bones Page 26