‘Is the offer still open,’ inquired Lydia, ‘for me to pay a call on the Master of Prague?’
Don Simon regarded her for a moment with raised brows. Had he been like any of the men she worked with – both here in Pont-Sainte-Félicité and in fact back in Oxford – he would probably have greeted this volte-face with And this is the woman who thinks we’re monsters? and similar chaffering, but this was evidently another of the things he’d outgrown (or gotten tired of) in three-plus centuries of being Undead. He merely inclined his head and replied, ‘Graf Szgedny will be honored and flattered, lady. Am I correct in my guess that this concerns the Lady Francesca and her bargain – whatever it may be – with Dr Lemoine? Then might I suggest that the visit itself be kept secret?
‘E’en in the best of times,’ he added, when Lydia almost protested that she’d never in any case mention to Captain Calvert that she was going to tea with a vampire, ‘the Undead are frightful gossips. With eternity before us and little enough of each night required for hunting, I do not see how it could be otherwise, given the human material of which the vampire is formed. Caution warns me against bringing your inquiries to the Lady Francesca’s attention.’
‘I think that’s wise.’ Lydia glanced back over her shoulder at the lights of the clearing station. The purposeful bustle among the tents would soon die down. Another day was done. A few dozen men had been brought in – even when there was no ‘push’ on, constant sniperfire took its toll. Shells were always falling, sometimes close enough to the front-line trenches to blow men into fragments on their way back from the latrines. Trench foot, pneumonia, hideous and fast-spreading sepsis from the smallest of cuts …
When things grew quiet, did poor Brodie’s bean sí still walk among the tents? (And is there a German equivalent, over on the other side of no man’s land? I’m sure Jamie would know …)
‘What about Antonio and Basilio?’ she asked worriedly. ‘They know I’m asking questions. And they’re friends – or at least neighbors – of Lady Francesca.’
‘I spoke to them when we parted Thursday evening. Antonio at least shares my alarm at the Lady’s meddling in human affairs: such involvements never end well. Then again, merely the suggestion that someone is experimenting with the Others – let alone producing them – is enough to incline them to my will. The Others shock and repel us as much as they do you, lady. Perhaps more so, for those of us who are aware of them at all recognize a kinship … and fear the further connections that may exist. Do not look to them for aid in this matter, but at least they will keep their silence.’
Shouting near the bridge, and the rumble of engines. ‘Bother,’ said Lydia. ‘I’d hoped it would be a quiet night …’ Not noisy enough for a push. A local attack …
‘I must go.’
He bowed over her hand. ‘Until tomorrow, then, Mistress. ’Twere best we pay our call early, while the rest are out. I shall send John in the afternoon with papers, and come for you when darkness falls. ’Tis a dozen miles.’
‘I’ll be ready. You haven’t heard—’ She paused, half-turning back from the lights of the camp. ‘You haven’t heard anything concerning Jamie, have you? Mrs Grimes wrote that he’d gone down to London. The last I heard from him was that one of these … these things … is in London itself.’
The startled widening of his eyes was the greatest display of shock she’d ever seen from him. But all he said was, ‘Is it so, indeed?’
‘That means that either someone was infected here – one of Lemoine’s assistants, perhaps, or one of those poor prisoners who escaped – and developed the condition when he got to London. Or else someone shipped or carried one of Lemoine’s subjects to Britain, and it escaped.’
‘Or that the vector of the infection is asymptomatic, and does not manifest the physical changes of the condition himself.’ Don Simon folded his arms, and leaned one slender shoulder against the corner of the smashed-in wooden hut that stood between the last of the disused German trenches and the first houses of the village. From its shadow Lydia knew they were nearly invisible to the hurrying figures in the camp. ‘Rather like that woman Mary Mallon, who spread typhoid a few years ago in America …’
Lydia shivered, and pulled her greatcoat more tightly around her body. ‘I’ve asked Jamie to send me whatever information he has. If I know Jamie …’
She looked aside, unable to go on.
‘I do indeed know James,’ returned the vampire. ‘Thus I feel sure that when you do receive a reply to your reports of these creatures – and recall that any letter of yours to him must be forwarded from Oxford – ’twill contain the words Do NOT pursue this matter. Lionel is in London still.’ He named the Master vampire of London. ‘But to attempt to touch his dreams in quest of what he may know of this is like playing the lute before a rooting pig. If you will it, Mistress, I shall seek out James’s dreams in the depths of the night, and at least endeavor to learn if he is well.’
Then he was gone, as if he could – as the legends said – dislimn into mist, and melt away.
Feeling rather like the corpse at a funeral in morning dress better suited to London than to Wendens Ambo, James Asher stepped from the first-class railway carriage and handed his companions out, reflecting for the hundredth time on the usefulness of ‘connection’ with the aristocracy. The son of a Church of England rector, he’d always been aware that the folk up at the ‘big house’ at Wychford had the power to make life easy or difficult for his parents and sister – interference which Sir Boniface’s family seemed to regard as part of ‘keeping them in their place’. Four years at Oxford in close proximity to the scions of nobility hadn’t much improved his opinion of the breed. But he had discovered at Oxford that the purpose of Oxford was as much to meet people as to actually learn anything. One could learn as much or as little as one chose, depending on the ability of one’s parents to keep one there. (Or, in Asher’s case, one’s diligence at any number of tutoring jobs.) But being in Balliol or Merton or King’s would be, ever after, a passport to a degree of acquaintance, rather like sharing a seat in a lifeboat with total strangers.
After four years, men of one’s year or one’s staircase or one’s college were strangers no more. His Oxford connections had certainly been as much of a factor in his employment in the Foreign Office as had been his fluency in Czech and Persian.
And by marrying the granddaughter of a viscount, he had quadrupled the number of people to whom he could acquire an introduction on the grounds of casual proximity. Lord Halfdene’s four surviving sisters might look down their elegant noses at the mere New College lecturer their beautiful niece had married, but when push came to shove, one of them at least could be counted on to know the person whom Asher sought to meet.
So it had proved in his quest to locate – and speak to – the Comte de Beaucailles, whose property in the Département du Nord had included the old convent of Cuvé Sainte-Bride. Once Josetta’s suffragette friend in the government purchasing office had found mention of the money Britain had lent to the French to refurbish the place as a research laboratory – after the French Army had acquired it in November – it had been easy to identify the former owner. Lydia’s Aunt Lavinnia, though she habitually referred to Asher as ‘that person poor Lydia married’, wasn’t immune to being taken out for a criminally expensive tea at the Northumberland (Lydia’s income deriving from American bonds and real estate in four major cities, and not farmland). In the course of consuming two cups of China tea and a single cucumber sandwich, Aunt Lavinnia had divulged the fact that the Comte de Beaucailles had come to England (as Asher had suspected: who in their right mind would remain in Flanders, or even in a Paris shorn of sugar, coffee and entertainment?) and was residing, with his family, as the guest of Lord Whitsedge at Whitsedge Court.
Lydia’s Aunt Harriet, while deploring her niece’s education, current occupation and husband (her own was the younger son of a duke, and a well-regarded barrister), knew everyone in Debrett’s and was sufficiently good-natured as to write to Lord Whitsedge (whose Aunt Claire had married a Halfdene cousin) on Asher’s behalf (though she referred to him in the course of a single paragraph as Ashley, Ashford and Ashden). And Lydia’s Aunt Faith, who even now shed tears over the way in which her dear sister’s child had ‘thrown herself away’ after being ‘the most beautiful debutante of her year’ (Lydia still had nightmares about her single ‘season’), was so ecstatic at the idea of a weekend away from acting as companion to Aunt Louise down at Halfdene Hall that she had even agreed to accompany Asher (and Aunt Louise’s official companion, Mrs Flasket) down to Whitsedge Court and introduce her plebeian nephew-in-law to Lord Whitsedge and his guests.
The Comte de Beaucailles proved to be an elderly, fragile man who took Asher to his bosom on the grounds of the perfection of his French. It was a joy, he said, to listen to after the tomcat squawking of ‘ces Anglais’, the gesture of his yellow-gloved hand dismissing the hosts without whose hospitality he would have been living on cabbage soup in Hoxton. He nursed a profound hatred of Germany and all Germans, as if the Battle of Sedan (in which he had fought) had been yesterday instead of forty-five years previously, and could still be reduced to shouting outrage over the Dreyfus Case. But he recalled with tender vividness the France of his childhood, the France of the days of empire, and every detail of the convent which had stood only miles from the family chateau.
‘The good sisters were still at Sainte-Bride when I was a boy,’ he reminisced, to Asher’s question after dinner. ‘It was much larger in the days before the Revolution – quite a substantial foundation – but my cousins and I were always welcome there. My great-grandfather provided the money for a new chapel in 1773, and many of our aunts and great-aunts had taken the veil there. Its cellars were famous—’ He chuckled softly, and made an ironic little half-salute with Lord Whitsedge’s indifferent sherry – ‘and there had been a healing well there, oh, centuries ago. Standing as it does on a ridge of hills, there is a veritable labyrinth of catacombs beneath it, far exceeding the present size of the convent.’
The remaining servants had pulled shut the draperies of slightly faded mustard velvet over the Regency drawing room’s long windows. One of Lord Whitsedge’s other guests was playing the piano, a Mozart dance whose effervescent serenity echoed bittersweet in the quiet room. Whitsedge Court was an old-fashioned country seat in which gas had never been installed, let alone electricity; Lady Whitsedge’s booming voice could be heard from the card table, bemoaning the absence of the footmen, and the butler’s replacement by his venerable and stone-deaf predecessor. In London Asher had been conscious of the number of women hurrying along the sidewalks at the close of factories and shops, and of the hoary heads of bus conductors and ticket clerks on the Underground. Here in the depth of Essex, with the cold spring wind blowing spits of rain from the Channel, the sense of loss, of men missing who would never return, was more poignant, despite Her Ladyship’s evident belief that the entire war had been concocted by God to inconvenience her daughter’s coming-out.
‘Honestly, if the fighting goes on for another six months – and what those generals are thinking, I can’t imagine – Alice will be nineteen. Nineteen! I could flay Mother for talking me into delaying her debut last spring …’
‘When was the convent abandoned?’ Asher inquired.
‘Oh, heavens, when I was ten or eleven, I think.’ The Comte seemed to bask in the belief that the most casual of acquaintances found his childhood in the long-vanished France of Empire as fascinating as he did himself. ‘Yes, because that year I was enrolled in the Lycée Notre-Dame in Lille—’
‘I remember there was a sort of ruin across the field from my father’s rectory,’ reminisced Asher mendaciously. (He’d been packed off to school in Scotland at the age of seven and his father hadn’t been a believer in bringing young James home for those few summers before his own death in 1874.) ‘I have no idea what the place was – monastery or a small castle or just an ancient inn – but my sister and I found a way into it from the crypt of a sort of little chapel in what had been its grounds …’
The old nobleman laughed. ‘Nothing nearly so romantic, I’m afraid! The convent at Cuvé Sainte-Bride had in a manner of speaking died by inches, so there was a huge zone of deserted farms, chapels, bathhouses and storage-buildings all round the cloister, even in the days when the good sisters were still in occupation. My cousins and I played hide-and-seek – risking our lives, I’m sure, for some of those old crypts were none too stable, and the roofs were always falling in! – in the unused portions, so as not to disturb the nuns. But after they were removed we ran about them underground like wild Indians.’
The old man’s eyes sparkled at the recollection, and he leaned forward, decades melting from his lined face. ‘After my cousin Etienne was caught in a cave-in and nearly drowned – because, of course, the deeper crypts flooded in the wintertimes – my grandfather had most of the outbuildings torn down and the ways into the crypt sealed. But still we’d get in. There was a well by one of the old barns, on the hillside behind the convent, and if one of your friends would lower you by bucket to just above the level of the water, there was a little door leading into what I think used to be a drain from the old baths … Ah, the smell of that tunnel, all green and damp! And our girl cousins used to stand at the top and cry because none of us boys would let them go down with us. And one of the young men of the district, Henri Clerc his name was, unblocked the entrance that led into what had been the nuns’ old wine cellar, and would use the place to tryst with the village girls …’
A young footman, walking carefully on a wood-and-metal leg encased in the livery’s old-fashioned silk stockings, brought them a tray of drinkables and a soda siphon. At the other end of the too-long, lamp-lit room Aunt Faith meekly nodded while Lady Whitsedge continued her monologue on the shortcomings of maids who would quit and go to work in factories, and Mrs Flasket listened in intelligent silence to Lord Whitsedge’s account of his spaniel bitch’s latest confinement.
Asher kept the old Comte talking, and, when he finally retired to his small chamber (which looked down on an inner courtyard of the rambling old Court: Aunt Faith, though regarded throughout her family as little better than a paid companion to Aunt Louise, still rated a room in the main part of the house), was able to put together a rough description of five different ways to enter the crypts of Cuvé Sainte-Bride undetected. He spent the remainder of the night encoding a letter to Lydia, which ended with a further admonition not to investigate anything herself. If Don Simon is there, and willing, he is far more likely to enter and leave in safety than you are. I will put in train arrangements to come there myself to follow up on his reconnaissance.
The thought of going to Colonel Stewart for the necessary papers – and of the concessions he’d have to make to get himself assigned to that area of Flanders – made him groan, not to speak of the hazards of crossing the submarine-haunted Channel and making his way from Calais to Pont-Sainte-Félicité and Haut-le-Bois. Then there was the issue of leaving his ill-assorted ‘network’ of information-gatherers on their own in London, seeking for word of this second revenant, and for the Irish gunrunner Teague. I’ll have to brief Grippen, he thought, without telling him who’s collecting the information. Josetta and Millward could communicate with the master vampire via newspaper. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d run a network in which no member was aware of the identities of the others.
And God knows what Grippen will do with the information when he gets it.
Damn. He leaned back in the leather armchair beside the tiny grate, and drew his dressing-gown – and a paisley cashmere shawl – tightly around his shoulders. Despite the fire, the room was freezing cold and there was no coal left in the scuttle: guest rooms at Whitsedge Court were not supplied with fuel to burn all night. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed a tiny silver reminder that it was quarter to three. Around him the house was silent, with the darkness of centuries.
For eight years I’ve tried to keep the governments of both sides from employing vampires. He closed his eyes. And I might as well have saved myself the trouble, since once the fighting started, both sides are giving the vampires, gratis, the only thing they’d have accepted as payment.
And after swearing to kill them I’m working on their side.
He thought about going back to Oxford. Or taking Lydia and Miranda and emigrating to America, which was quite sensibly keeping out of the war while selling ammunition and supplies to both sides. But he knew there was no question of doing so. If one side or the other – Or both, God help us! – found a way to control the revenants, to use them as soldiers, God alone knew where that would end.
Not well.
He made a move to rise to compose a note to be placed in the Personals column to Grippen for a meeting – and the next thing he knew it was broad daylight and a maid was coming quietly into the room to open the curtains.