‘Well, thank God Jerry’s taking a breather anyway.’ Captain Niles Calvert dunked his hands in the tepid wash water and chivalrously handed Lydia the only dry towel in the wash corner behind the surgical tent. ‘We can get some of this lot mopped up … God, I hate doing surgery under lights.’
‘I keep wondering what we’d do if the generator went out.’ Lydia carefully removed her spectacles to wipe the bridge of her nose. Rice-powder was another thing she’d given up when she’d signed her contract with the Army, and without it she felt like a schoolgirl: a blinky-blind, goggle-eyed golliwog (as the other girls at Madame Chappedelaine’s had called her), a carrot-topped skinnybones with a nose like a parrot. On the other hand, it was very nice to see the faces of the men she worked with, to say nothing of not falling into shell-holes.
‘And what I keep wonderin’,’ put in Captain Horatio Burke, straightening his own glasses, ‘is how I can be sweatin’ when I’m freezin’ half to death.’ Like Lydia, prior to the war the lumbering, grizzle-haired surgeon had had far more experience with the academic side of medicine, and after a long day of work on men deemed critical – but not violently urgent as yesterday’s had been – his features sagged with fatigue.
‘Different set of glands,’ Lydia replied promptly. ‘It’s part of the fight or flight reaction.’
‘You mean it’s to do wi’ why I don’t run outen here screamin’? Aye?’ he added, as a tall figure appeared in the darkness of the tent doorway.
‘Message for Dr Asher.’ The young man carried a hooded lantern, and by its upside-down glow, and the reflected glare from the surgical tent where the orderlies were cleaning up, Lydia automatically noted the square-jawed earnestness of his features, the brilliantined sleekness of his dark hair and the freshness of his uniform. From Headquarters …
Her heart turned over in her chest.
Oh God, Jamie …
Or Miranda …
Her hand shook as she took the note.
It was Don Simon Ysidro’s handwriting. I have found those who have seen the woman.
She raised her eyes in startled alarm to the face of the messenger – he was taller even than Jamie’s six-foot height – and he merely said in the plumiest of aristocratic accents, ‘If you’d come with me, please, Doctor Asher.’
Don Simon was sitting in a staff-car some twenty feet from the lights of the camp. The young officer – he wore a captain’s uniform but God only knew if he was entitled to it – helped Lydia into the vehicle, saluted the vampire and retreated. Lydia could see his broad-shouldered, slim-hipped figure silhouetted between the car and the soft glow within the nearest tents.
It was a still night. The only shelling was miles away, around Vimy, Captain Calvert had said. Shadows moved within the tents as the nursing sisters saw to their charges. When the night wind stirred it brought the stink from the incinerators where the orderlies were burning amputated limbs.
‘Is that young man actually in the Army at all?’ Lydia asked, and there was a whisper of amusement in Ysidro’s usually expressionless voice as he replied.
‘Dios, no. John – Captain Palfrey – resigned his commission in the First Dragoons last November, under the impression he was being recruited by a branch of the Secret Service so secret that not even the rest of the Department was aware of it – a hoax which has been embarrassingly easy to maintain. Spare me any expression of indignation on his behalf, Mistress: I have certainly saved that young man’s life thereby and most assuredly the lives of at least a quarter of the men who might have found themselves under his command. He is a deplorable soldier. Will you come with me, and speak to those who have had converse with this seeker of the Undead among the Dead?’
‘Converse?’
‘After a fashion.’ The glimmer of lights from the camp had lit the cloud of Lydia’s breath when she spoke; no such vapor proceeded from the vampire’s lips. ‘Seeing them, she called out to them, but any vampire in his senses is wary of overtures from the living. They seldom end well. Will you come?’
‘It will take me about half an hour to finish with the fluoroscope room. And I’ll need to find something to tell the matron—’
‘John will deal with that. Get a stouter cloak. ’Tis cold where we’re going, and wet.’
Lydia guessed what he meant, and shivered. Under Captain Palfrey’s respectful escort, she swabbed and tidied the x-ray table and made sure the fluoroscope was disconnected and that her own protective garb was laid out where she could find it on the morrow. The lecturers at Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary had been fairly blithe when demonstrating this new miracle equipment, but Lydia’s own researches – including at least one article in an American medical journal – had prompted her to encumber her machine with lead shielding (which made it difficult to maneuver and maddening to move) and herself with a lead apron and gloves. Major Overstreet – who handled the most serious cases – would snarl at her for taking too long, when a soldier’s life was at risk on his table, but Lydia was convinced that the dangers of exposure to Röntgen rays were not imaginary.
It was nearly eight o’clock, and pitch-dark, when she finally returned to the staff-car. It made a lurching turn and set off eastward; a moment later the hooded headlamps splashed across the stones of the bridge that crossed the Lys River. After that Lydia could see nothing beyond the ruts of the road, water gleaming in potholes, and the occasional gleam in the eyes of a rat.
Most days, one could smell the trenches from the ruins of Pont-Sainte-Félicité, no mean feat, Lydia was aware, considering the olfactory competition from the camp itself. In time the car stopped, and Don Simon stepped down, helping Lydia after him with a gray-gloved hand. Through a break in the clouds the gibbous moon showed her a tortured landscape of what had been, up until last year, some of the most fertile farmland in Europe. Now it was a wasteland of mud, standing water and shell-holes, slashed across and across with trenches, deadly with tangles of barbed wire. Cold as it was, the stench was terrible. From the muffled sounds around them, Lydia guessed these former German trenches were in use now as Allied reserve trenches, with the front-line trenches and no man’s land a few hundred yards further to the east. Ysidro steadied her down a ladder into the maze of communication trenches that connected the reserves with the firing trench: far safer, but hideous with icy water just beneath the half-submerged duckboards. The hands of corpses projected from the mud walls. Once she saw a skull face, flesh entirely eaten away by rats. The rats themselves were a constant scuttering movement, amid a broken debris of battered helmets (both German and British), rusting tins and broken entrenching tools that littered the shadows.
Her companion, with his courtly manners, was a vampire. A creature from horror tales.
This was nightmare.
‘Ah.’ A deep voice spoke from the darkness ‘C’est la belle rousse qui patrouille dans le camp.’ A lantern-slide was cracked. Lydia made out, in the black angle of the communication trench, the two men she’d seen last night who’d been talking in the ruined village to the woman in black. The taller, fairer man bent and kissed her hand, and even through her glove his lips were warm on her frozen fingers. He’s fed. Lydia knew it had been on some poor soldier who was dying in any case – quite possibly a German, whom she knew she was supposed to want dead (Or why else are you here?).
I shouldn’t have anything to do with these people. Any of them …
With the preternatural quickness of perception that many vampires possessed, the fair man must have read her thoughts in her face, because when she looked back up she saw understanding in his dark eyes, and pity for the dilemma in her heart.
‘We have asked ourselves, my friends and I, what it is that you seek with your lantern each night.’ His French lilted with an Italian intonation – Jamie would tell me exactly what part of Italy he comes from. ‘It is this woman, then? This dark-haired nurse—’
‘She’s a nurse?’
His nose wrinkled in half-comic distaste. ‘She smells of carbolic and vinegar, Madame. Her dark cloak covered her dress, but the greatcoat she had underneath it was brown.’
‘She could have borrowed it,’ put in the slim dark youth behind his shoulder, whose face reminded Lydia of the statue of the degenerate Roman Emperor Heliogabalus in the Capitoline Museum of Rome. ‘Or stolen it. Or bought it from that slippery English clerk at Pont-Sainte-Félicité …’
‘And in fact,’ agreed Lydia, taking a deep breath to steady her nerves, ‘I can’t see what other woman would be wandering about so close to the front lines.’
‘Ten thousand pardons.’ Ysidro bowed. ‘Madame Doctor Asher, may I beg the favor of presenting to you Antonio Pentangeli, of the Most Serene Republic of Venice? And this is Basilio Occhipinti.’
‘Madama,’ murmured the dark vampire, and Antonio bowed again.
‘I kiss your hands and feet, beautiful lady. As for this dark-haired nurse, wherever she acquired her greatcoat, she called out to me in French, saying, I would speak to you. And when we said nothing – Basilio and I – she called again, You have nothing to fear. But I need to speak with those who hunt the night. I have a proposition, a partnership, to offer you.’
Lydia said, ‘Drat it.’
‘Do not distress yourself, dear lady. Neither Basilio nor I – nor, I think, any of us who hunt the night in this appalling place – are so foolish as to think that such an offer from the living means anything but their desire to lure us into imprisonment and servitude. Don Simon will have spoken to you of the game of fox and geese that children play – and at which he himself cheats like a Greek – and it is true that it resembles the relations between the Living and the Dead. We – like the fox – have the power to easily kill any goose. But let the geese organize themselves to surround us, and it is we who die.’
‘Not all of your brethren,’ returned Lydia, ‘have the wisdom to realize it.’
‘What can the living offer us?’ Antonio Pentangeli spread his hands. Like most vampires he extended his mental powers of illusion so that Lydia had to look very carefully in order to notice his claws and fangs, and the fact that he did not breathe. ‘The moment the shooting began, both sides lost their power over us: the power to give us what we crave. They are like nursemaids trying to bribe a child with a peppermint, when that child stands knee-deep in a pile of sweets.’
‘Was that all she said?’ asked Lydia after a moment. ‘Just that? A proposition – a partnership?’
‘’Twas all we lingered to hear.’
‘Where was this? And what time?’
‘Between midnight and morning. The moon was on the wane, and rose late – two nights before the battle started at Neuve Chapelle. This was south of here, near – what is the name of that village, Basilio? Haut-le-Bois?’
The slender vampire nodded, and after a moment, added, in a much thicker accent than his friend’s, ‘She spoke good French, nearly as good as your own, Madama. Yet with some accent.’
‘Could you tell what sort?’
He shook his head. And indeed, reflected Lydia, one had to be very fluent indeed in a language to be able to tell whether a speaker had an accent, and where it might be from. (Damn Jamie … HE could probably do it …)
‘Would you do this for me?’ Lydia raised her eyes to Antonio Pentangeli’s face. A predator, she thought, her heart pounding. Who knows how many people he killed in Venice, since he himself was killed by its Master, and brought into the world of the Undead? ‘If you hear of this woman again – if you meet others who have been propositioned by her – might I beg it as a favor, that you tell Don Simon about it?’
By Basilio Occhipinti’s grimace he found the idea of taking such trouble grotesque – like her Aunt Lavinnia would look, if one of the scullery maids asked her to pass along love notes to the butcher’s boy. But Antonio nodded, his dark eyes grave. ‘I will, bella donna.’
‘Antonio!’
‘Think, dear heart.’ The taller vampire laid his palm to Basilio’s cheek, but his eyes, Lydia observed in the lantern-light, were flat and cold, doll-like as a shark’s. ‘Whoever she is, the little nurse, she has some scheme in mind and we know not what it is. Whoever she finds to help her, it will be someone who wants something that isn’t blood. We don’t know what sort of bargain will be made.’
He bent again over Lydia’s hand. ‘We shall keep our ears to the ground, Madame, like cowboys in an American dime novel, and will send you word of what we hear.’
Then they were gone.
They seemed to melt into the shadows, but Lydia was prosaically aware that in fact one or the other of them had simply used the same psychic aura that older vampires developed, to make her not notice them walking off down the communications trench, or scrambling inelegantly up its wall. Jamie practiced, diligently, keeping his mind focused when he was in the presence of the Undead, and could sometimes see them move. Lydia knew she should have done so also but had been simply too exhausted. In any case she knew Don Simon would not permit harm to befall her.
Nevertheless she trembled as the Spanish vampire led her back along the trench in the direction of the motorcar, her head aching and her heart beating fast. They were vampires. Charming and polite and well-dressed …
She recalled again the warmth of Antonio’s lips on her hand. Stolen warmth. Stolen life.
Creatures of evil …
Yesterday she’d received a letter from her Uncle Richard, which had mentioned in passing (after lamentations about the difficulty in obtaining coffee and petrol) that two of the footmen who had enlisted last September – men whom Lydia had known since childhood – had been killed at Festubert. A third – Ned – had been returned, blind and crippled, to his family, who would have to support him for the remainder of his life.
So where lies the greater evil? She didn’t know.
A thousand tales and warnings about supping with the Devil flooded to her tired mind, but she honestly couldn’t think of any way of quickly tracking this other night-prowling nurse who had a proposition, a partnership, to offer the Undead …
And when she stumbled, there was Simon’s hand – cold as marble through his glove and the sleeves of her coat and frock – supporting her arm.
Simon, whom Jamie had sworn he would kill, along with every other vampire who crossed his path …
He stopped, swung around. ‘What’s—’
A man flung himself down on them from the top of the trench. Lydia had an impression of uniform, but his head was bare. He was without rifle or pack, clutching a bayonet like a dagger. He slashed at her, seized her arm to drag her into the blow. She saw the gleam of reflective eyes, gasped at the fishy stench of him as Simon yanked the man away from her, tried to twist the weapon from his hand. Instead the soldier pulled his arm free of the vampire’s grip – the grip that Lydia had seen bend steel – and flung Simon against the wall of the trench as if he’d been a child.
Lydia ran, stumbling in icy water and broken duckboards – There has to be a ladder somewhere …
But the soldier was fast. Hands gripped her waist, the reek of him clogged her throat; as she tried to wrench free she glimpsed the slimy glister of a fanged, deformed mouth gaping to bite. Then the man jerked, head falling forward, and Lydia yanked free as the filthy stink of her attacker’s flesh was drowned in the sharp stench of splattering blood. Ysidro raised the entrenching-tool with which he’d struck the soldier’s neck for another blow.
She sprang clear as Simon chopped down again with the metal blade, but soldier was still trying to rise, still trying to come at her. The third blow severed the head.
The body continued to crawl.
Methodically, Simon chopped with the pointed end of the tool into the spine – with all the horrific force of a vampire’s preternatural strength – severing it, Lydia estimated, just below the first thoracic, and again below the first lumbar, vertebrae. The arms and legs were still moving as Simon caught her hand and dragged her along the trench. He kept firm hold of the bloodied entrenching-tool.
There might be others.
She knew from experience that they hunted in packs.