26-3
Jamie
Cuvé Sainte-Bride x Former nunnery x Nord x nr Haut-le-Bois x Dr Jules Lemoine infecting German POWs x Others x work w vampire Francesca Gheric of Strasbourg x How ?? x Tuathla (not real name) Meagher x heavily fortified x how get in? x any information x promise I will be careful x you be careful too
All my love
The letter was postmarked Paris, Friday 26 March, at the Gare St Lazare. The hand was undoubtedly Lydia’s, though Asher guessed Ysidro had posted it. It was topped and tailed by addresses and names not Lydia’s own, encoded as a rambling complaint about the difficulties in obtaining sugar and decent coffee in Paris, and the cipher it contained raised the hair on his scalp.
He was still working on an innocuous missive whose coded text read Don’t you DARE investigate ANYTHING until you hear from me (knowing full well that this wouldn’t reach her for three days at least) when a brisk rap sounded at his door, which he recognized as belonging to Josetta Beyerly.
Late-afternoon sunlight lay across the foot of his bed from the room’s single window. He knew Lydia’s friend had pupils, most mornings – French language, or piano – and on those she didn’t, she drove an ambulance-wagon from the docks to First London General Hospital. This was just as well, for through the past three nights he had hunted with Lionel Grippen, following Regent’s Canal and its ramifications into Hackney Marshes and Hampstead Heath. They sought as much for the places where a revenant might be hiding, as for sight of the thing itself, and so far had found little. Most of those evenings had been foggy, as well as pitch-dark from the blackout, and Asher could feel his energy seeping away from night to night, never returning, after sleep, to quite what it had been before. Hoggett would flay him alive if he knew.
Josetta wouldn’t have come to Faraday’s Private Hotel like this unless it was important.
‘There’s something very, very queer happening over in Brabazon Street.’
‘His daughter won’t call the police,’ the teacher explained, when she and Asher stepped from the overcrowded bus at the junction of East and West India Docks Roads. Men – women, too, now – crowded the flagways at this hour, and the bus had been jammed, for the docks, the chemical works and the gasworks all lay nearby. The raw air was rank with coal smoke and the sewery smell of outhouses. The flat-fronted brick rows of two-up two-downs were nearly black with years’ accumulation of soot, and Asher had to stop beside a lamppost and cough for some minutes. Josetta took his arm worriedly, and he waved her off.
‘I’ll be fine.’ This was a lie. ‘Is there some reason he doesn’t want the police searching the house?’
‘The neighbors think he receives stolen goods,’ she replied matter-of-factly. ‘He may well – he owns a pawnshop in the Limehouse Road. But I think the main reason is that he’s involved with buying guns for the Irish Volunteers.’
Asher’s jaw tightened grimly. On the omnibus from Kensington he’d picked out, as was his habit, the different accents of his fellow-passengers, and ever since they’d crossed the Regent’s Canal he’d been swimming in a sea of elongated vowels and dentalized t’s. In the shabby jacket and down-at-heels shoes he’d changed into when Josetta had spoken of their destination, he guessed he wouldn’t stand out, and the VAD uniform of his companion would pass pretty much anywhere in London. Depending on how deeply the Mayo family was involved with those willing to use violence to obtain independence for Ireland, this probably wasn’t a neighborhood in which to be heard asking questions.
Josetta climbed two steps – washed two or three days ago, by the look of the grime accumulated since – and rapped at the door, her sharp one-and-two characteristic knock. The house smelled of cooked cabbage and poverty, the areaway below, of decaying vegetables and piss. No alley behind. Areaways usually meant back-to-backs. In this neighborhood, probably a yard …
The woman who opened the door a crack looked as if she hadn’t slept in several nights.
‘I’ve brought someone to see Bert,’ said Josetta simply.
The woman closed the door a few inches, her eyes like shuttered windows. ‘Nuttin’ wrong with Da.’
‘There is,’ said Josetta. ‘You know there is, Katie. This man can be trusted.’
Tears flooded the woman’s eyes and she clamped her lips hard.
Grieved, thought Asher. And scared for her life.
‘His mouth?’ he asked softly, and hardened the final ‘th’ just slightly, a whisper of the accents of Katie’s own land. You can trust me … I’m one of your own … If the danger hadn’t been so desperate he’d have been ashamed of himself. ‘His teeth? Bruisin’ here—’ His fingers traced on his own head where he knew the sutures of the skull would be deforming – ‘an’ here?’
Katie began to cry, and opened the door.
A younger woman, still dressed for factory work, put her head out of the kitchen door at the back (and yes, by the window behind her there was a yard). From the other door on the narrow hall two tow-headed boys peeked, in their early teens and also, Asher noted, still in the grimed overalls of dockhands. None of them looked like they’d slept.
Katie led them up the stair without a word.
Asher had seen before what greeted him in the tiny rear bedroom. The figure huddled in the room’s darkest corner was a man in his sixties, balled together with his arms around his knees and his body leaned against the wall. Sheets and blankets had been stripped from the bed and draped over the single window, packed tight in every cranny in a desperate attempt to shut out all light. He winced and made a sound of protesting pain as Katie lit the old-fashioned gas: ‘Da, there’s a man come to see you. We’ll be needin’ a bit of light.’
He made a strangled sound, as if clearing something out of his throat. Then, ‘Don’t want to see nobody, Kate.’
‘He knows what’s wrong wit’ you, Da.’
Looking at the bruises on the face where the skull was elongating, the bloody smears on the old man’s hands and mouth where his teeth were starting to grow, Asher knew exactly what was wrong with him, and his heart turned sick inside him. Sick with pity and dread.
Damn it, he thought. Damn it.
And damn whoever brought the first of those things over here. Damn them to the bottommost smoking crevice of Hell.
Gently he took Katie’s arm, led her back into the hall and shut the door.
‘Does this door lock?’ he asked softly. She shook her head. She looked to be in her forties, though hard work and childbearing had aged her face. She stood no higher than his shoulder, thin as a twig-doll. Her hair was streaked with gray and she’d lost several of her teeth.
‘You need to get a bolt and lock it,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back—’ He calculated times, and of course there wouldn’t be a shop in town open at this hour … ‘I’ll come back tomorrow, wit’ your permission, and put it on, if you’ve no one else—’
‘Terry’ll do it.’ Katie seemed to pull herself together a little. ‘Kerr. Next door. He’s a foreman at Lavender Wharf.’
‘Do it tonight, if you can.’ He kept his accent the one she’d unconsciously connect with home, South Ireland: those predominantly Catholic counties where resentment burned strong against the Empire which for centuries had shut the Irish themselves out of owning or ruling their own land. ‘An’ get your boys – them two I saw downstairs? – out of the house, find somewheres else for ’em to sleep. Your da’s ill,’ he went on, seeing her shake her head, as if disbelieving that such a thing could be happening to them. ‘And he’s not gonna get better. I’m sorry to be the one tellin’ you this, I’m so sorry, but there’s nuttin’ to be done. He’s gonna go off his head soon, an’ try to harm anyone he sees. Katie—’ He tightened his grip, gently, on her shoulders as her face convulsed with tears, and he glanced quickly at Josetta.
‘Reilley,’ she mouthed back at him, knowing what he sought.
‘Mrs Reilley … I’m sorry, but I need to know this. When did this happen, and where? Somethin’ attacked him, didn’t it? Tom the Ogre? Bit him? Tore him up?’
The woman nodded, clinging now to his arms and shaking with her effort to control her sobs. ‘Comin’ home. Last Tuesday night. He’d been at the Green King over in Tildey Street—’
On the other side of the Limehouse Cut. He’d have had to cross it, coming back, late and in the fog …
‘Will he eat? Drink?’
‘He ain’t all day. He did, up to yesterday—’
‘Do you have laudanum in the house? Good—’
‘I’ll ask Polly for it downstairs.’ Josetta clattered off, to return a few moments later with a substantial square black bottle in one hand, a smaller green one in the other labeled ‘Infants Quietness Elixir’.
Quietness indeed, reflected Asher grimly. Will opiates work on one of Them? They certainly didn’t on vampires, not unless they were mixed with some of those ingredients inimical to vampire flesh: silver, aconite, tincture of Christmas rose. He’d seen nothing concerning the Others in the medieval text which seemed the most accurate, the notorious Book of the Kindred of Darkness. From what Don Simon Ysidro had told him, that volume had supposedly been written in Spain only a few years after the first of the Others had appeared in Bohemia. As little as anyone knew about vampires, the knowledge was vast compared with what anyone knew about these filthy cousins of theirs.
‘We’re goin’ to try to sedate him.’ He turned back to the terrified woman beside the shut bedroom door. ‘Put him to sleep. He’ll be a danger to you, Mrs Reilley, an’ soon. I’m sorry, but that’s what this is, this sickness that he caught from the thing that tore him up. It spreads by blood, so don’t let him bite you or tear you, don’t let one drop of his blood mix with yours. That’s why I’m tellin’ you, get your family outen this house. I wish I could make it different—’
She was weeping again, his hands strong on her arms.
‘—but I can’t. You got to be strong, M’am. There’s nuttin’ can be done for him now but keep him asleep if we can. You got to be strong.’
Shuddering, she wiped her nose and her eyes. ‘I’ll be strong.’
‘Good lass.’
He glanced at Josetta again.
‘I got the rest of the family out of the house.’
‘Wait for us—’ he turned back to Mrs Reilley – ‘down the foot of the stair. I swear to you we’ll do him no harm, but by the saints, there’s nuttin’ to be done for him. And I swear,’ he added, turning to Josetta as the little woman slowly descended the stair to the darkness which had now gathered thick in the house below, ‘I wouldn’t ask this of you, Miss Beyerly, if I had any choice in the world about it.’
‘That’s a pip of a brogue you’ve got there, Professor,’ she returned, unruffled. ‘Better than the halls.’ Then her expression darkened, and she said softly, ‘What’s happening to him? What you were asking about – looking for … How did you know?’
‘Don’t ask.’
For a moment the young woman stared at him in the dimness of the narrow hallway, as if she couldn’t believe what she saw in his eyes.
‘We have to get him to hospital. I can get an ambulance-wagon—’
‘Let’s get him sedated first.’ Asher’s mind was racing, Langham’s complicit smile returning to him: The matter is in hand …
You bastard. You know that thing is in London and you’re watching the hospitals, aren’t you? And if you get hold of this poor sod … What? ‘Infecting German POWs …’
Use them against the Germans? And then later against the Irish who demand rule of their own lands, or riot against the threat of conscription for England’s war?
Use them against Indians who want independence?
Sick cold went through him, like the onset of fever. (And maybe it IS the onset of fever …)
First things first.
He signed to Josetta to remain in the hall, stepped into the bedroom.
The gas was out. There was no smell of it in the room, so presumably Bert Mayo retained enough recollection of who and what he was to have turned the gas off rather than just dousing the minimal flame. A weak reflection of light from the hall picked up a red glint from the corner where the man had been huddled earlier, and, near him, the tiny, vicious sparks of the eyes of rats.
Four or five rats, all within a few feet of him.
Damn it …
Asher struck a match. Mayo hid his eyes. The rats fled.
So far, so good.
‘Get out of it,’ whispered the stricken man, the words dribbling from his lips like the mutter of delirium. ‘Put out the bloody light. Make ’em shut up. Katie …’
‘Make who shut up, Bert?’ Asher lit the gas and turned it down as far as he safely could.
Bert covered his face with his arms, then scrabbled to the bed and grabbed the pillow to further block the light from his eyes. The walls around him were smeared with blood where his mouth had touched; the mattress, and the bedclothes hung over the window, streaked with it.
DO NOT let that blood touch you …
‘Rats,’ whispered Bert Mayo hoarsely. ‘Chatterin’. Voices in me conk. Make ’em shut up!’ He lurched to his feet. Seen full-on for the first time his face was a horror, the flesh a mass of bruises where the mouth and jaw had lengthened out like an ape’s, blood from his bitten lips stringing into the gray stubble of his chin. Behind him in the doorway Asher heard Josetta gasp, and he reached back and took the laudanum bottle from her hand.
‘This’ll make the voices shut up, Bert,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll make the rats go away.’
‘Rats’ll never go away.’ Slowly, Bert began to circle toward the door. ‘Crawl in an’ out o’ me skull-bones whilst I sleep. I hear their squeakin’ an’ it sounds like words.’
‘This’ll shut ’em up. Guaranteed.’ How many revenants constitute a hive mind? Is he controlled by the colony – good God! – that this Lemoine is growing in France, or by Hungry Tom out in the fog of the canal? Or – Jesus! – is his mind controlled by the rats, rather than the other way around, given that they outnumber him?
He held out the bottle. ‘Drink it,’ he offered. ‘You’ll be the better for it.’
Bert’s lips pulled back from the bloodied mess of fangs and he lunged at Asher, clawed hands outstretched. Asher yelled ‘Door!’ and, thank God, Josetta had the wits to slam it without any wailed vacillation about I can’t shut you in there with it …! If he knew Josetta she had one sturdy shoulder braced against its panels, not that that would do any good—
He flung himself at the window, ripped down the wadded blankets, and hurled them over Bert’s head as Bert reached him. The stricken man was strong, but it was still human strength, the strength of a man of sixty who’s worked hard all his life, not the hideous abnatural strength of mutated cell tissue and altered muscle. Asher rolled him in the blankets, shouted ‘Josetta!’ and she was in the room, striding to help him—
‘Asher, there’s—’
Feet thundered in the stairwell. Men slammed into the room, half a dozen of them, as Asher grappled with the blanket-wrapped thing that had been Bert Mayo. Three of the men – laborers smelling of sweat and beer and very cheap tobacco – grabbed Bert and wrapped him still tighter in the blankets, and in the same instant one of the men seized Asher’s arms from behind, pulled him out of the fray, and held him while another whipped from his pocket a weighted rubber sap.
‘Get him outta here,’ commanded the sixth man, who held Josetta’s arms behind her – Asher automatically placed his accent within a few miles of Cork, like his round Celtic face and the thick shoulders in their meal-colored jumper. ‘These two—’
That was as far as he got. Josetta stomped hard on the man’s instep, dropped her weight, twisted in his shock-loosened grip and gouged for his eyes. In the same moment Asher kicked the man with the sap in front of him, performed the same classic stomp-drop-twist on his own captor before smashing him across the face with the laudanum bottle, grabbed Josetta’s wrist – it did not appear to be the time to ask questions – and used the pillow round his fist to smash open the window. There was a shed outside – there was always a shed, in tiny houses like this one – and he swung Josetta out the window and dropped out after her himself, into a yard the size of a dining-room table and choked with rubbish. He pulled Josetta into the outhouse and closed the door. Through its tiny judas he saw two of the men drop through the window, dash to the rear fence of the yard and scramble over it: the logical direction of pursuit.
They stood together, in black and stinking darkness, for nearly ten minutes, long after the house itself grew silent and still.
No light returned to the windows of its kitchen. No one opened its rear door.
Josetta made not a sound, though he could hear her breathing fast and hard and could feel her trembling where her body pressed his.
He himself was shaking, as if his legs would crumple if he tried to walk.
Hirelings of whoever it was – that flickering shadow that he’d thought he’d glimpsed in Charlotte Street? The bewhiskered and bespectacled ‘rat in an overcoat’ that Grippen had seen? Bert Mayo’s pals in the Irish Brotherhood, concerned that Katie had taken a stranger into the house? (And God knows what was hidden up in the attic …) The local Brotherhood of Light Fingers, if the enterprising Bert was in fact a fence as well as a gunrunner?
Dear God, what were they going to do if Bert tore into them with those bloodied teeth?
The matter is in hand, Langham had said, with a twinkle and a smile.
In time Asher slipped out of the outhouse, crept shakily across the yard – it was now pitch-black – and listened at the back door of the house.
Nothing.
The yard of the house behind the Mayos was tidier, when Asher clambered over its fence. By the feel of the dirt underfoot, and the way plants brushed his groping hands, he guessed the neighbors had a garden (and wouldn’t thank his pursuers for trampling it). He went back and fetched Josetta, offered her help (which she turned down indignantly) over the fence, and over three more, moving laterally parallel to (he calculated) Ellesmere Street, the next street over from Brabazon, before finding a house that sounded vacant. With a mental apology to its tenants he broke the kitchen window, and let himself and Josetta through kitchen and hallway and out at last into Ellesmere Street indeed.
Since no cabs ever cruised anywhere near the grimy purlieus of Brabazon Street – and the busses had long since ceased running – they had a walk of nearly a mile to the cluster of pubs around the East India Docks where such a thing could finally, by chance, be obtained.
Lying awake in the darkness, Lydia thought about blood.
She’d dreamed about it, as she often did, especially since her expedition – nearly a week ago now – to Cuvé Sainte-Bride. In her dream she’d seen the vampire Francesca Gheric attempting to flee from the convent of Cuvé Sainte-Bride, getting caught on the barbed wire that half-filled the trenches which surrounded it like a toothed steel moat, trying to tear herself loose from the barbs. (These were longer and far more thickly wound on military wire, Captain Calvert had told her, than they were on the mere stuff that Americans used to pen their cattle.) ‘We are flesh and bone, lady,’ Don Simon had said, and in Lydia’s dream Francesca had struggled, tearing both flesh and bone in an attempt to get out of the trench before the heaving gray tide of rats reached her.
Blood had glistened on the steel barbs and, standing on the brink of the trench, Lydia had tried to figure out how she was going to obtain a sample of that blood.
She’d eventually decided that the best way was to have Don Simon transform himself into a bat and go fetch some for her, and they were in the midst of a rather convoluted argument about whether or not this was possible (‘Were it possible for a vampire to transform into a bat, Mistress, the Lady Francesca would not now be in the difficult situation that she is …’) when she woke.
Why did I want her blood? She frowned over the question.
I’ve already SEEN vampire blood under a microscope. Simon had donated some a few years ago, and had been as curious as she herself, to compare it with the blood of the living.
She had written up her findings, and had handled the sample with the greatest of care, well aware that if the vampire state were in fact connected with some unknown virus – and were related to the hideous pathology of the Others – no chances could be risked of contamination. When finished with her study (which had taken place by gaslight) she had set the sample outdoors, and had been queasily disturbed to see it spontaneously catch fire, and burn up at the first touch of morning sun.
So why did I want HER blood?
A thought, like the echo of her now-fading dream, came at once: Because the blood is the answer.
But she had no idea what that meant.
By the sound of the camp it was three or four in the morning. The guns were stilled; there wasn’t even the grind of motors from the road, or the hollow rumble of lorries on the makeshift wooden bridge. No sound had yet begun from the camp kitchen, nor was there smell of smoke. In the pitch-dark tent Lydia heard the stealthy scrabble of rats, and bit her lips to keep from screaming: in four months of living daily with the vermin she had never lost her terror of them. She should, by all rights, be sunk in the sleep of exhaustion – keeping company with vampires, on top of her duties in the fluoroscope tent (And if we have another quiet day tomorrow I’ll take the apparatus apart and give it the cleaning it needs …), meant she was constantly short of sleep. Thank goodness Colonel St-Vire insists on the surgical crews getting all the sleep they need during the quiet times …
When she closed her eyes she felt as far from sleep as she was from a hot bath or Mrs Grimes’s batter-cakes. But she saw, as if it were printed on her eyelids, the dreamworld moonlight glistening on Francesca Gheric’s blood, dripping from the twisted spikes.
Saw Don Simon’s blood under her microscope, the altered, queerly elongated corpuscles motionless and cold.
Her favorite sport was to kill her lover in the act, said Antonio’s beautiful, velvety whisper.
And her own hesitant voice, Some vampires do retain a capacity for love …
She was still awake when first daylight outlined the tent-seams, and above the wasteland of blood-soaked mud and tangled wire, the guns began to pound.
‘What happened to that man?’ Josetta’s whisper barely carried over the rattle of the cab’s iron tires on the brick streets of the Limehouse. ‘His face …’
‘Don’t speak of it.’ Now that Asher was sitting down and more or less warm and in no immediate danger of being killed or worse, waves of exhaustion threatened to drown him. ‘Not to anyone. For your life, Miss Beyerly; I’m not joking …’
‘For my life?’ At least she didn’t laugh. The moon had set, and the blackness of the blacked-out streets was absolute. God alone knew how the cab driver – the only one to be found in the Wise Child, and arguably not sober – saw to steer … Maybe he has a sober horse …
‘I don’t know who is behind this,’ he said wearily. ‘It may be that our government brought those things – that infection – to England as a plan to win the war … as a cheap alternative to conscription. To get men to fight who won’t ask questions, who won’t even know what they’re doing or why.’
He heard the harsh draw of her breath. At least, he reflected, having battled Parliament for years over votes for women, she wouldn’t automatically assume that the government a) was always right, or b) knew what it was doing.
‘Or it may be someone who wants to spread chaos and panic here, so that we can’t produce enough food or munitions to effectively keep an army in the field. And I suspect we’d do it to the Germans quick enough. It may be someone who wants to raise a private army, for their own purposes. Someone who knows they’ll be outnumbered and outgunned by the police …’
‘I know one of the men,’ said Josetta quietly. ‘One of those who took the thing away, I mean. I’ve seen him at the settlement house. His name’s Teague, he’s part of the Irish Volunteers. Someone told me he’s one of the men who’s buying guns from the Germans and smuggling them into Ireland.’
Asher heard the hesitant note in her voice, the admission of the secret she was breaking, and shut his mouth hard on his first, embittered exclamation. With Irish independence tabled ‘until the war is over’, – and, worse, used like a hostage to lever Ireland into accepting forced conscription – he could understand the anger of those who had waited for years for a political solution to Ireland’s self-rule. The fact that armed militias had formed among the Protestants, who didn’t want to be governed by the Catholic majority – and were also smuggling guns in from Germany to arm themselves – and the Catholics, who in the face of violence in the countryside, were responding in kind, did not help the situation any.
‘Thank you,’ he said quietly. ‘Whoever is behind this – and there’s no reason to think this Teague is working for one side or the other in particular – please remember that we have no idea who is passing along information to whom. If you value your life, tell no one about what happened tonight. The last man who was a witness to the existence of these things vanished without a trace on the sixteenth of March. Promise me.’
She gripped his hand as if to emphasize what she was about to say, but he was unconscious before her words were spoken.