‘My dear Madame Asher!’ Lamplight bobbed on the stone of the walls. On the other side of the archway – filled in with bars which gleamed with tarnishing silver plate – the revenants muttered and jerked at their chains, their eyes catching the light. Lydia’s cell had been, she guessed, a burial chapel built off the long catacomb that had been adapted for the revenants. One archway – the one barred with silver – opened into it. Another, also barred, led back into the main round chapel that served as a storeroom.
When the Lady Francesca had dragged her back up out of the tunnel to the well and had thrown her in here, she’d left the cover off the tunnel. In the ten or fifteen minutes that Lydia had been in the cell, with only one of her pocket candles for light, she’d seen half a dozen rats emerge, either from the tunnel, or from the hall which led to Lemoine’s laboratory, and trot straight into the catacomb where the revenants were chained.
There they were torn to pieces, and devoured raw.
So thirteen revenants constitutes a community large enough to have a hive-mind capable of controlling rats.
Lydia was fascinated, despite her horror of the rats and her fear that the next person who entered the storeroom would throw her into the catacomb as well.
I am wearing silver but how long would I be able to stay awake even if three chains’ worth is enough to get them to back off?
Palfrey, bleeding to death back in the tunnel …
Unless Francesca went back and finished him?
Poor Palfrey—
Colonel Dr Jules Lemoine strode into the chapel, his left arm in a sling (Palfrey’s aim, Lydia now saw, left a great deal to be desired), pale in the light of the lantern he carried in his good hand. This he set down, and drew a key from his pocket.
‘What are you doing?’ Nurse Meagher appeared from the shadowy hallway at his heels. ‘You can’t mean to let her out, sir! She tried to kill you!’
‘Nonsense.’ Lemoine held up Lydia’s Webley. ‘This weapon hasn’t been fired. It was her companion – like her,’ he added gravely, ‘under the delusion that the vampire we took was their friend.’
‘She is the pale vampire’s mignonne.’ Lydia didn’t see her enter, but Francesca Gheric now stood beside the chapel door.
Seen closer, and in the lantern-light that was marginally better than the shreddy moonlight of no man’s land, she was indeed beautiful. But maybe that was only a vampire’s illusion. Like Meagher, she was dressed as a nurse – In case any of the guards sees her?
Any Matron on the Front would tell her to put her hair up …
Facing the three of them, with the revenants stirring and growling on the far side of the silver bars, Lydia had to struggle to keep her breathing steady.
She clutched at the bars of the smaller archway that separated her from Lemoine, made her expression as earnest as if she were trying to convince her Nanna that she’d only been seeking a book of sermons in her father’s library, and cried, ‘He is indeed my friend, sir! He has long ago given up preying upon humankind, and has pledged his loyalty to the British crown!’ Which I’m sure was precisely what he told poor Palfrey …
The colonel’s gaze melted from sternness to pity. ‘Madame, Madame, do you truly believe that?’ and Lydia let her eyes fill with tears.
‘Who told you about the passageway that you used?’ Meagher walked up to the bars, planted herself at Lemoine’s side.
‘Colonel Simon.’ Lydia took off her spectacles, wiped her eyes and tried to sound as if she were struggling against the inner suspicion that she had indeed been betrayed. ‘He said the fate of Britain depends on his mission here—’
Meagher rolled her eyes impatiently. ‘Of course that’s what he told her! And probably his driver as well.’
Lydia reached timidly to clutch Lemoine’s sleeve, and threw a glance of terror toward the darkness beyond the silver barrier. ‘Colonel, what are those … those things? Captain Palfrey wouldn’t tell me anything, only said things like, “Dark forces are at work …”’
‘Why did he bring you?’ demanded Meagher.
‘He said he might need a second person to drive the motorcar, if he were injured.’ She sobbed, and bit her lip in what she hoped was a touching display of wan and ignorant courage. ‘I wanted to help—’
‘It’s all right.’ Lemoine put a strong hand over hers. ‘You’ve gotten mixed up in things that are no business of yours, Madame. Deeply secret things. And you can help.’
Meagher’s blue eyes flared wide and she grabbed the edge of Lemoine’s sling, dragged him from the bars to the far side of the little storeroom chapel. Francesca watched them for a moment with cynical cerulean eyes. Probably telling him he can’t trust me and that Don Simon’s going to read my mind first thing, if they let me go …
Then the vampire turned her mocking gaze back to Lydia.
Lydia hastily looked away, and fumbled in her pocket for a handkerchief. But she felt the tug on her mind of cold power, power from outside herself. James had told her that picturing a door shutting, or a blank brick wall, worked, but she remembered also that both Antonio and the Master of Prague had described Francesca Gheric as overwhelmingly powerful – Can she see through that brick wall?
What will she see if she does?
And will thinking of it tip her off that I’m not as ignorant as I pretend?
Lydia called up images to her mind of what it would feel like to be swept into Simon’s arms, passionately kissed (What about those teeth? Never mind …), overwhelmed by a torrent of ecstasy (Was that Mr Stoker who’d said that? Or Mrs Radcliffe in Romance of the Forest? Or was that someone else …?). Hoping for the best, she yielded meekly to that terrible cold grip on her will, and raised her eyes timidly to the vampire’s. (And I hope this works …)
(Oh, wait, if I were passionately in love with Don Simon why would I be wearing all this silver …?)
Francesca’s lip curled again at whatever she saw in Lydia’s thoughts, and she put her hand through the bars to pat her cheek, patronizing as a duchess handing a farthing to an orphan while her friends are watching.
Lemoine jerked from his conversation with Meagher and reached the bars in a stride. ‘You will not touch her!’
Francesca raised her brows – YOU’RE saying this to ME? – and the physician hurriedly collected himself.
‘It’s clear she’s only this Colonel Simon’s dupe,’ he amended. ‘She has nothing to do with either the Germans or the British government, or my own.’ He turned back to Lydia. ‘I’m very sorry, Madame,’ he said, ‘but you’re going to have to stay here for a time. And I’m afraid you’ll have to remain underground—’
Drat it, Simon won’t be able to speak with me in my dreams—
‘—since the men on guard in the compound know only as much as they need to know, to accomplish their duties.’
‘I wouldn’t say a word to anyone.’ Lydia gazed up at him with brimming eyes. ‘It’s just that—’ She glanced at the revenants in their long, niche-lined cell. ‘Those things … And … And the rats—’
‘The rats won’t bother you.’ Lemoine thought hard for a moment. ‘I’ll have you moved as soon as a place can be readied for you. You have nothing to fear, Madame. Our work here – our work with these … these men—’ He nodded toward the catacomb – ‘is nearing its conclusion. In a day or two I may ask you to help us—’
Meagher’s nostrils flared, like a horse about to kick.
‘We need trained personnel, and I can promise you, Madame Asher, that whatever this Colonel Simon told you, the work we’re doing here will indeed make the difference between victory over the Germans, and defeat.’
Behind her, Lydia heard one of the revenants speak, in a dazed mumble yet completely comprehensible: ‘Wo bin ich? Welcher Ort ist das?’
Where am I? What is this place?
Her heart clenched in rage and grief, Dear God …
‘He could have escaped,’ Rhinehardt had said of his cousin. ‘Fled when the remainder of our unit did … but he would not let go of my hand …’
Without waiting to hear what Lemoine had to say next, or plan her own strategy, she pulled away from him, stumbled to the farthest corner of the cell, curled up on the floor and wept as if her heart would break.
Lemoine put her in a storeroom off the laboratory, formerly the cell of some anchoress, Lydia assumed, since it had a judas window in the door. The bars of that little window had been wrapped in silver wire, and a hasp and padlock hastily screwed onto the door. Both, Lydia saw, were plated with silver.
‘I am truly sorry for the crude amenities, Madame,’ said Lemoine as he led her in, past boxes of laboratory glassware and light bulbs, spools of wire and packets of silver chain now stacked up in the hall. ‘Please understand that my hesitation to release you stems from the desperate importance of what we do here.’
There was a cot in the cell, an empty box for a table, a tin pitcher of water and a chamber pot behind a screen. When he’d locked her in and crossed the lab, Lydia heard Meagher say, ‘That’s all very well, Colonel, but the fact remains that thanks to that girl, we’ve lost the vampire. God only knows how long it’ll be before we trap another! That puts our work back two days, three days, maybe a week—’
What Lemoine replied Lydia didn’t hear, but after his footsteps had died away down the hall, Francesca’s voice said, very softly, ‘Don’t trouble yourself, my sugarplum. He’ll come back for her.’
It was a long time before Lydia could sleep. The electric bulb burned permanently in the laboratory: dragging the lightweight screen from the chamber pot to cover the judas in the door only dimmed the glare. For many hours (specifically, from 3:10 until 6:25 by her watch) she could think of little but poor Captain Palfrey, lying in the tunnel on the lip of the well in the darkness: deluded, dying, dreaming perhaps of Don Simon’s lies about aiding King and country. I’ll have to write to Aemilia Bellingham, she thought at one point … But say what? That he was chosen because he was stupid, and died because he tried to do his duty to a hoax?
And what makes me think I’ll live to see daylight again?
She wondered if Francesca had gone back through the tunnel to finish him, before Don Simon could return.
She wondered if the man who’d cried out in German – whether it was Gleb Rhinehardt or some other poor soldier – had done so because he actually had some dying flicker of his own mind left, or whether it had been merely a spasmodic firing of the nerves in the brain, the equivalent of the galvanic twitching of a frog’s severed legs in the laboratory.
She wondered if Tuathla Meagher was planning to kill her the moment Lemoine’s back was turned, and what would happen to her if Lemoine’s gunshot wound – which seemed to be in his shoulder – turned septic.
Not as long as Francesca thinks she can lure Don Simon back here, using me as bait.
Cold comfort.
One thing Dr Lemoine was right about was that there were no rats. Presumably all were lured into the catacomb of the revenants – a frightful thought, considering how many rats swarmed every shell-crater and trench in no man’s land.
‘As you’ve seen, they’re not mistreated in the least,’ Lemoine told her, when he returned later in the day (10:15, by Lydia’s watch) with a tin mess kit top holding a quarter-cup of bully beef, two rock-hard biscuits and a sloshy quantity of Maconochie, the ubiquitous tinned stew of the field kitchens. ‘Nor are the other German subjects we’re still keeping above ground. Those who have been—’ he seemed to hesitate over a euphemism for infected ‘—converted are fed quite well, but half of them refuse real food and kill and eat rats instead.’ (Lydia felt inclined to take issue at his definition of Maconochie as ‘real food’, but didn’t.) He had locked the door of the laboratory behind him, and opened that of Lydia’s cell, to allow her to eat at one of the laboratory tables. He had gained some of his color back, and the slight difference of his tone told her he’d injected a little morphia for the pain.
‘They’re only kept chained because I’m afraid they’ll attack one another.’
‘But what are they?’ asked Lydia again, guessing that such a question – whose answer she already knew – would not only add to the impression of ignorant harmlessness she was trying to give, but tell her how many people above Lemoine in the French Army and government were in on the secret.
??? home side screening, Jamie had written.
So at least someone in the British government might know of this hideous scheme as well.
And probably – like Colonel Lemoine – thought it was going to be perfectly safe.
And that it was perfectly acceptable to mind-strip, enslave and kill German soldiers for the purpose. They had, after all, asked for it.
She widened her eyes and kept her mouth shut. Men, she had learned back in her days as a debutante, loved to explain things to women. And Lemoine especially wanted to make sure she understood how right he – and the French Army – was in undertaking this terrible project.
‘Hundreds of thousands of men have died.’ Lemoine leaned across the corner of the table, the tea he had made for them both on a Bunsen burner forgotten before him. He hadn’t taken enough morphia to be dopey, but the impression Lydia had was of a man after two glasses of wine.
‘Hundreds of thousands more are dying daily in a bloody stalemate that cannot be broken. Already France struggles to fill its ranks. You’ve seen the colonials, the native troops of Algeria and Senegal and Indochina, fighting white men whom they should be taught to respect. You’ve seen them in Paris, learning to treat white women as they treat the whores of their own countries. And they have not the courage, the élan, of the white race! The men of France – yes, and of Britain, too! – bleed away their lives in the mud, and what kind of world will we win, if this goes on? What sort of world can we bequeath to our children? There must be some other solution.’
Lydia nodded, with an expression of shaken horror. ‘But where does the Lady Francesca come into this?’ she asked timidly. ‘And what were you going to do with … with Colonel Simon? He said you were going to kill him …’
Gravely, Lemoine asked, ‘You know what Colonel Simon is, do you not, Madame?’
She turned her eyes away as if distressed, and rotated her tin cup of now-cold tea in her hands. ‘He – I – It isn’t how it is in all those silly books,’ she stammered. ‘He told me that … that people like him … They only need to drink a little bit of blood to survive. Just a sip … mostly those they … they take from aren’t even aware of it …’
She had no idea whether this was something Francesca had told Lemoine, and if it was, whether Lemoine had believed it or wanted to believe. But he looked troubled, and nodded. ‘But the fact remains that many of the Undead do in fact kill their victims,’ he replied gently. ‘I have made a study of them for some years, Madame. At first – like yourself, I daresay – I was unwilling even to believe in their existence. Later, as I studied them further, I came to realize that these revenants, these Half-Dead, are, as it were, cousins of the true vampire, and that like the vampire they have a psychic – a mental – component of their state.’
Lydia nodded. ‘I know that Colonel Simon can … can communicate with me in my dreams.’
‘Even so, Madame.’ Lemoine would have grasped her hands, she thought, in his eagerness that she should believe and agree, had she not been married. ‘I believe – and I shall very shortly accomplish it, I hope – that vampires can learn to control the minds of these revenants.’
Lydia forcibly stopped herself from protesting Not according to the Master of Prague, they can’t, and only exclaimed, ‘Oh, my goodness, how?’
‘By absorbing the mind – the life – the soul – of one of the revenants, before his mind entirely dissolves into the group-mind of their kind. Once she – the Lady Francesca – can control the mind of one of them, she can participate in, and guide, as it were, the whole of the group.’
‘And she’s agreed to do this?’ Lydia hoped she sounded wondering rather than totally disbelieving, or completely aghast. ‘Isn’t it terribly dangerous?’
‘Not if there is no blood exchanged. The disease – the state of the revenants – is in the blood,’ the Frenchman assured her. ‘The control is in the mind.’
‘And she’ll do this for you?’ Lydia gave an exaggerated shiver. ‘She seems so … so sinister …’
‘She will do this,’ agreed Lemoine. ‘For a consideration.’