‘Is all well, M’am?’
Lydia looked up quickly from the corner of the makeshift table, which, in daytime (and through more nights than she cared to think about) served Eamon Dermott as a workbench. The tiny root cellar beneath the ruins behind the fluoroscope room was barely large enough for both it and the tin basin he used as a developing bath, its rafters so low that during the daytimes (and through more nights than Lydia cared to think about) she and her assistant had to duck and weave about, to avoid the films hanging as they dried.
It was the only place in the clearing station where she knew she could work undisturbed.
She turned Jamie’s letter face down beside her candle, and crossed to the door.
VAD Violet Brickwood stood on the stair. Listening, Lydia heard no clamor of voices and motors in the camp, no rattle of the fluoroscope being moved in the building above.
Only the guns.
She propped her glasses on her nose. ‘I’m well. I just—’
The young volunteer’s glance went past her shoulder, to the papers that strewed the table. ‘I couldn’t help seeing, M’am, that that nice Captain Palfrey brought you that letter today. I hope it’s nothing amiss with your husband, or your little girl?’ The earnest brown eyes returned to Lydia’s face in the lantern-light, seeking – Lydia realized – the marks of grief. ‘I’ll sometimes go read my letters in the stores tent,’ the girl added. ‘If they’re from my sister, about Mama, I mean. I just … Please don’t think I’m meaning to pry, but you’ve been down here a long while. I just hoped you were all right.’
Lydia smiled, and gave the younger girl an impulsive hug. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘All is well. There’s nothing amiss.’
Except for a MONSTROUS scheme to dissolve the souls from out of men’s brains, that their bodies may be enslaved because the governments find they’re running out of good Frenchmen or good Englishmen or good Russians to kill.
Lydia returned to Dermott’s worktable as Violet’s shoes patted gently up the stair again, and stared at the letter.
It was on the stationery of Whitsedge Court (What on EARTH is Jamie doing there?) and ran to many pages – It must have taken him HOURS to write it all! – so that the minuscule dots, blots and pinpricks wouldn’t be obvious as a code. Even though the letter had been sent to Don Simon’s accommodation address in Paris, Jamie didn’t trust anyone. The letter before this one, which she’d received through regular (censored) Army channels, had contained the terse warning ??? home team screening, after the alarming information that there was a second revenant at large in London.
??? home team screening.
Monsters. She closed her eyes, leaned her forehead on her knuckles. The King’s own government – or at least the Department that worked for them – was hiding the existence of those things she had encountered in China. Protecting them.
How that was worse than simply killing those poor Germans she wasn’t sure, but it turned her stomach.
And chilled the blood in her veins.
A quick scratch on the door behind her. A whispered voice. ‘Mistress?’
She turned in her chair and managed a half-smile. ‘Well, you were right,’ she said, as Don Simon slipped into the tiny cellar, closed the door without a sound. ‘Jamie does indeed say Do NOT investigate this yourself.’ She held out the decryption to him, her hand shaking with exhaustion. ‘He suggests you do it.’
‘Does he?’
The vampire scanned it. Four possible entrances to the sub-crypts and drains beneath the convent of Cuvé Sainte-Bride. Heaven only knew where Jamie had acquired the rough map, which according to the plain text of the letter was her Aunt Faith’s house in Little Bookham (Aunt Faith had no such thing and had been Aunt Louise’s pensioner for decades). One entrance was in the ruins of a chapel near lilac trees; another, thirty feet down the side of a well in a farmyard a mile from the Amiens road. And Heaven only knew if any of the four would still be usable.
‘He says he’s coming here himself, as soon as he can get the military clearances he needs.’ She tried to keep her voice calm and decisive. The labored shakiness of Jamie’s handwriting had told its own story. Don’t do it. You’ll kill yourself …
‘Does he?’ The vampire’s pale brows lifted.
‘It would help things,’ said Lydia hesitantly. ‘Speed things, if we knew at least whether those entrances are still open or not, or how dangerous they are. Obviously they’re difficult of access, since none of the other Undead have spoken of revenants wandering about the back roads and battlefields—’
‘Yet one at least got through.’ Don Simon refolded the decryption, drew it thoughtfully through his long fingers. ‘Whether that was one of ten, or one of fifty, we know not – nor yet why our Nurse Smith would have risked her life getting a sample of its blood or its flesh, when she has access to ample at Sainte-Bride. Curious.’ His glance shifted sidelong to her. ‘If I read this description aright – and the map also, though ’tis clearly not to scale – the crypts and catacombs beneath the convent at its height extend far beyond the walls as they currently stand, and presumably beneath the trenches that surround it. And given the habit which the living have, of judging situations to be “under control” when they very much desire them to be, ’twould little surprise me if one or more of these things is hiding in the far corners of these crypts, unbeknownst to this Lemoine.’
‘Which would mean—’ Lydia regarded him somberly by the candle’s flickering light – ‘that it’s only a matter of time before they start to multiply beyond the convent walls. And once they start to spread …’
‘E’en so.’ He folded up the paper. ‘Though if they exist in any substantial number, how they are to be destroyed, with the French Army and, it seems, the War Department of England shielding them, ’tis another matter.’
He picked up Lydia’s cold hand and kissed it. ‘As for James’s coming, if I have learned one thing since last September, lady, ’tis the oriental leisure of official conduct with regards to these “military clearances” of which he speaks. I should refer them all to the forgers who work in Montparnasse and Pigalle: ’tis a wonderment to me that none has ever questioned “Colonel Simon”, on how speedily he seems to acquire documents.’
And taking up her candle, he followed her up the crumbling stone steps to the ground above.
On the following day the British First Army made a determined probe at the German lines, principally (Captain Calvert opined, spattered bicep-high in blood and cursing like a very quiet and well-bred Australian sailor) to pull potential German attacks from the French around Arras. From first light Wednesday, when the casualties began coming in, until midnight Thursday night, Lydia took x-ray photographs, administered chloroform, held retractors and sponges, and irrigated wounds, in between taking tea out to the men queued up on stretchers outside the pre-op tent where Matron was grimly sorting them into those who would live and those who wouldn’t. Lydia saw not so much as the glint of reflective eyes in the darkness on either night, but knew they were watching. She didn’t know whether she was more furious at them or General Haig.
Colonel St-Vire finally sent the last members of the surgical crews to bed at three o’clock Friday morning with orders not to stir until teatime.
‘Captain Palfrey’s been to see you twice,’ reported Nurse Brickwood worriedly, coming into the nurses’ tent Friday evening while Lydia was sponging down with a flannel. Lydia felt her stomach sink, at the thought of what Don Simon might have found. Nevertheless she finished washing, brushed her hair, dressed and went to the mess tent (Does this headache have anything to do with not having dinner last night?), and was picking at a rock-hard biscuit soaked in a bowl of lukewarm Maconochie when Palfrey’s voice exclaimed ‘Dr Asher!’ from the twilight of the doorway.
He dodged between the tables to her, and Captain Burke – with whom she’d been eating and commiserating about the upcoming evening’s work – heaved his bulk from the bench and shook a facetious finger at her. ‘Any more meetin’s wi’ that captain, lass, and I’ll be writin’ Professor Asher of you.’ Everyone in the clearing station knew by this time that Lydia was involved in ‘something for the brass’ – presumably concerning x-ray photography – and had come to recognize Captain Palfrey as the liaison.
She thankfully abandoned the tinned swill before her and rose to meet the young captain, who guided her swiftly from the tent.
But instead of handing her a note – and enough light lingered in the sky that she knew Don Simon hadn’t come himself – Palfrey inquired worriedly, ‘Have you heard anything of Colonel Simon, Dr Asher? I’m dreadfully sorry to interrupt you, as I know you’ve had a rough time of it these past two nights – everyone has, all the way up to Festubert … But Colonel Simon didn’t meet me last night.’
‘He is very much a law unto himself …’
‘I know.’ The young man grimaced at his own concern. ‘And he’ll joke me sometimes about being a mother hen. But … Wednesday we drove down as far as Haut-le-Bois, and he ordered me to wait for him, with the car, in a lane a few miles beyond the village. I had orders, if he didn’t return by sunrise, to go back to Aubigny and wait. Aubigny is where we’re staying. Where I’m staying,’ he corrected himself. ‘I honestly have no idea where Colonel Simon stays. He had me rent a sort of accommodation address for him there, but he doesn’t seem to use it.’
The young man’s brisk calm cracked then, and for a moment his mouth tightened, and distress pulled the flesh around his eyes. ‘But he … He never came to my lodgings last night. I sat up nearly all night for him, and I – in my heart I feel something terrible has happened to him, M’am. Dr Asher. Every time I fell asleep – and I did nod off three or four times – I thought I heard him calling for me. I must have gotten up and gone to the door a dozen times! And I wondered—’
And I was so tired when I finally lay down last night I wouldn’t have waked if Miranda had stood next to my cot and screamed. Her heart turned chill inside her. He went to investigate the crypts under Sainte-Bride.
Because I asked him to.
And he didn’t come out.
Asher told himself, as his train pulled out from Saffron Walden on Saturday afternoon, that the man on the bicycle couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the glimpse of what might or might not have been a half-familiar shadow in Brabazon Street Tuesday evening. Nevertheless he changed his own jacket in his second-class compartment and stepped off the train on the last foot or so of platform as it was leaving Epping, and after a considerable hunt for a cab, found one and took it to Pembridge Place. There he paid his bill, changed his jacket and hat yet again, and sought new lodgings in Kensington, after two more cabs and an excursion to Holborn on the Underground, just to make sure that he wasn’t being followed. Descending to the Underground troubled him, for its tunnels were the logical place for the Others – two of them, now – to hide.
How long before they added a third to their number?
Does Teague the gunrunner have the slightest idea of the danger of blood contact? Did the man or men employing him?
Tomorrow, he told himself, he’d need to consult both Millward and Josetta, Sabbath or no Sabbath.
After a slender tea at a café, which he was far too exhausted to eat, he composed a telegram to Josetta, another to Miranda (care of Ellen and Mrs Grimes) and a Personals message to ‘Dr Graves’, then retired to bed, where he lay, shivering with fever, for the next four days. Between bouts of coughing he hoped Mr Fair Isle had been struck on his bicycle by a lorry and squashed flat.
On Thursday he felt sufficiently recovered to venture forth to the British Museum.
Osric Millward was precisely where Asher had found him first, at the end of one of the long desks beneath the great rotunda of the Reading Room. The shabbily-dressed Donnie was still helping him, assisted by another – stooped, a little rat-like, wearing no tie at all, but a kerchief knotted around his throat under a battered frieze jacket – whose intense eyes remained on Millward’s face with every word he spoke.
Millward’s ‘network’. Asher wondered if they had had brothers, sisters, sweethearts, friends who had become victims of a vampire. In their unprepossessing faces he read not only hunger for revenge, but a kind of eager gratitude to have someone who believed them.
The posters Asher had passed in the hallway leading to the great room – garish colors, looming figures – seemed aimed at those two young men, the only men under the age of forty-five in the room: Come Along, Boys, Before It’s Too Late! Will You Answer the Call? YOU are the MAN we want …
How much courage did it take to say No, I need to stay in London and hunt for vampires?
Millward sprang to his feet as Asher approached, seized him by the hand. ‘When I didn’t hear from you I feared they’d gotten you.’
He meant the vampires of London, not their own government departments, but Asher shook his head. ‘I had to go down to the country to see a man about a dog.’
The older man studied his face, his brows drawn together in concern. Asher reflected that he probably looked more like someone who’d been attacked by vampires than like one who had an appointment to meet the Master of London in Piccadilly at midnight for a chat. Millward steered him into a chair, murmured to his two acolytes, ‘Would you excuse us …?’ and sat down himself. When the young men had gone he whispered, ‘I’ve found where they’re hiding.’