By Lydia’s later estimate, it was two days before the next stage of the ‘project’, as Lemoine called it, could be undertaken. Both Meagher and Lemoine saw her daily, Meagher tense – screwed, as Lady Macbeth would have it, to the sticking-place with frustration and dread that something would go wrong – Lemoine dreading likewise but quiet and calm. Lydia saw no one else, and gathered by degrees that, as Lemoine had said, none of the fifteen guards aboveground knew what the project was nor why a dozen or so German prisoners were being kept in the upper area of the compound … nor what had happened to the further dozen who had disappeared into the catacomb.
In the face of Meagher’s sharp-tongued impatience, Lemoine increasingly turned to Lydia, vastly to the Irish nurse’s irritation. Lydia bit her tongue and pretended that she was her Aunt Faith – book-learned intelligent but absolutely uncritical and accepting – and by nodding and unconditionally agreeing with whatever the Colonel said, gathered that no one in the French High Command knew the exact nature of the means by which the hemato-bacteriologist (for such was Lemoine’s area of study) proposed to ‘convert’ German prisoners of war to men who would fight for France. ‘Most of them assume I’m using a combination of drugs and hypnosis,’ he confided, one afternoon while Lydia was helping him sweep the laboratory. ‘I cannot reveal the true nature of my work until I have something to show for it – until the Lady Francesca is actually able to demonstrate her control over the revenants. The British government paid for much of this.’ He gestured around him with his good arm at the whitewashed crypt, with its line of electric bulbs hanging from the ceiling and the grinning, horrible apparatus of the burning-grille to which Don Simon had been lashed.
Lydia plied her broom and looked fascinated.
‘I understand they’ve been putting pressure on Commander Joffre for information,’ Lemoine went on. ‘I am curious as to how much our High Command will disclose, even as we prepare to mobilize our new weapon. It is one reason for my concern about this Colonel Simon of yours, provided he was telling you even a little of the truth: the British do not even yet appreciate how desperate things are here in France.’
‘Is that why you’re keeping me here?’ Lydia paused in sweeping, and straightened up. Lemoine was always careful to keep the door of the laboratory locked, and even with his injured shoulder she wasn’t at all certain she’d be able to overpower him and take the key. And if she did, if she’d be able to find her way out. But in the meantime her body craved exercise, and she swept and washed tables and – with the hot water Lemoine brought her – washed her own chemise and linen when he, rather shyly, presented her with a second set, almost certainly borrowed from the grudging Meagher. Anything to keep moving.
‘It isn’t that I mistrust your intentions,’ the Colonel assured her. ‘But Nurse Meagher is right. At this point we cannot afford even the smallest whisper of rumor regarding what we do here.’
In addition to food and hot water, in those two days Colonel Lemoine brought her reading material: issues of the Lancet, containing his own articles on disorders of the blood and their effect on the brain and other tissues, volumes of several Russian occult publications which contained his articles on the nature of vampires, the Ossian Poems (Meagher’s – her name was in the front cover), Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (from the same source) and four numbers of the Irish Literary Review. Between reading all of these works cover to cover, Lydia paced her cell, back and forth, aching with inaction, and when she slept, her dreams were broken and troubled.
Once, waking, she saw Francesca looking in through the judas at her, a speculative smile in her heaven-blue eyes. And once, jerked from sleep by some noise in the laboratory outside, she went to the judas and saw two revenants there, slimed and filthy and smelling of sewage and rats. The laboratory door stood open. By the stillness outside, it was clearly deep in the night.
Some of them have got away, and are hiding in the crypts.
Lydia withdrew to the farthest corner of her cell, almost ill with terror. They came to the door of her cell but drew back in pain from the silver lock. The incident expanded, horribly, the possibilities of what might have become of Captain Palfrey in the tunnel. Dear God, poor Palfrey …
If something went wrong – if Lemoine and all his men were arrested or killed or pulled out of their barbed-wire fortress of Cuvé Sainte-Bride – would the revenants in the catacomb break free in hunger and find some way of tearing through the door? The thought returned to her in nightmares.
Escape – if and when the opportunity presented itself – would be horribly dangerous, and the chances that Don Simon would come back for her – if he had managed to get away at all – dwindled to almost nothing.
When she told Lemoine of the revenants’ incursion the next day he looked shocked and troubled – though the outer door actually hadn’t been locked properly – and asked her several times if it might not have been a dream. ‘Because we’ve been very thoroughly over the crypts below the convent, right down to the foundation vaults, and haven’t found any evidence whatsoever that any of them have gotten away …’
Lydia knew it hadn’t been a dream.
She felt safer sleeping during the day, and that evening was just finishing cleaning the laboratory after supper and tea with Lemoine, when the lab door rattled on its hinges, and Meagher’s face appeared in the judas window that led to the corridor. ‘Colonel!’ she shouted, her voice jubilant, ‘Colonel, we’ve got him! Lock that bitch up, Colonel, and open the door—’
Lydia lunged for the door and Lemoine caught her arm. She whispered, ‘Simon—’ as Meagher called out again, triumphant,
‘Francesca got him! Get the gridiron ready—’
Lydia tried to pull free of his grip but as she’d guessed, even one-handed, Lemoine was strong. ‘I’m sorry, Madame – but you do understand that he was deceiving you? He was deceiving you all along—’ he insisted, as he pulled her, as gently as he could, to the door of her storeroom, thrust her inside and slammed it.
If I call out his name I’ll give myself away …
She threw herself against the door, face pressed to the silver bars of the judas, as Lemoine unlocked the door of the laboratory and both Meagher and Francesca entered, their prisoner borne slung over Francesca’s shoulder.
Lemoine gasped, ‘Good God! What did you do to him?’
‘Broke every bone in his body,’ returned the vampire calmly, and flung her prisoner down on the grille above the gas cylinders. ‘This time there’ll be no running away.’
The captive vampire sobbed in agony as Meagher and Francesca dragged his limbs straight, and screamed as they buckled the straps over his arms, his ankles, his forehead. When Francesca stepped aside, Lydia saw that the man’s hair was black, not white.
It wasn’t Don Simon.
It was the beautiful Basilio.
She rapidly calculated the number of people that the handsome vampire must have killed – between thirty and sixty thousand, not counting the dying whose lives he had devoured since the start of the war – but it didn’t make what she watched less horrible. Francesca bent over him, held the left hand that was fastened away from his body, at a ninety-degree angle to his side, gripped his chin in her other hand, forcing his eyes to meet hers. Basilio began to sob, ‘Prego, prego, per favore—’ and Francesca smiled, and kissed his mouth, like a lover, murmuring in whatever Renaissance form of Latin or Italian that both had learned, centuries ago. On the other side of the grille, Lemoine stepped close, and cut Basilio’s throat with a scalpel, catching the blood – which oozed slowly rather than spurted, Lydia observed (of course it would, if his heart doesn’t beat) – in a glass laboratory jar.
He had no pity on any of his own victims …
Her eyes still locked on Basilio’s, Francesca stepped back, gripping his hand, and with her free hand signed to Meagher. Lemoine turned a switch and the roar of jerry-built fans in the old air-passages filled the room.
Basilio screamed, ‘Antonio!’ as flame engulfed him.
Francesca’s head snapped back, her face convulsed with ecstasy. Greasy black smoke rolled up under the low vaults of the crypt, but the fans could make little headway against the hideous stench.
Basilio screamed for ten minutes and thirty-five seconds (Lydia timed him). It was another eight minutes before Francesca released his hand – still jutting from the flame and still, as far as Lydia could see, attached to the bone of the arm – and stepped back. Her eyes were shut, her face transformed, like Bernini’s statue of St Teresa in the Vatican. Across the flame that still swathed the blackening corpse (If it IS a corpse – how long WOULD it take a vampire to die in flame?), Meagher and Lemoine watched the White Lady with shocked and fascinated eyes.
Then – and this interested Lydia almost more than all the rest – she saw both colonel and nurse lose the focus of their gaze, and stand as if in trance as Francesca walked to the door and left. She knew this was what vampires did – put people in that half-dreaming state of inattention, so they couldn’t see the vampire move – but it was the first time she’d seen it done, Francesca obviously having forgotten that Lydia was present on the other side of the storeroom door.
I’ll have to write all this down for Jamie.
Under the grille the gas cylinders still spouted flame, the vampire’s singularly tough tissues slowly dissolving into ash. Smoke choked the whole of the room, as if the underground chamber were in fact Hell. Lydia realized she was trembling.
If I get out of this alive …
The train from Calais to St-Omer was vile. Even the corridors were crowded with men coming off their leave or shipping in from their training, tense, harried, half-drunk or dog-tired, and all of them, it seemed to Asher – in a first-class compartment with a dozen officers – smoking like chimneys. He’d acquired the uniform of a major in the Second Army as a matter of convenience – everyone would look askance at civilian mufti – and dozed most of the way, wrapped in his army greatcoat. But his dreams were troubled.
He had, after all, taken passage yesterday, as Stewart had originally wished. He’d turned in the names of the Irish Brotherhood clique who had been in on the revenant scheme, and that of Butler, the German agent who’d bankrolled them; had wired both Josetta and Millward to watch for further sign of new revenants. So far as he could tell, British participation in Lemoine’s project was financial – at a guess the French Army hadn’t told them where they were getting their ‘special troops’ and possibly didn’t know themselves. But with a man like Langham sniffing for a way to take over the project ‘for the good of the Empire’ – and given the agent he was using – that situation could alter in less than a day to something far more deadly.
How many times, Asher wondered wearily, had he heard men say, ‘It’s perfectly safe,’ or, ‘It’s actually much safer than it looks,’ preparatory to destroying themselves and everyone around them? Including the idiots who’d gotten Britain mixed up in the war to begin with. It’s perfectly safe, in Asher’s mind, ranked right up there with I don’t really see what else we can do, and It will all be over by Christmas.
His own experience of serving the Queen had been that most things were a great deal more dangerous than people wanted to think – or say – they were, and that anything could go wrong.
Even in twilight, the streets of the medieval town of St-Omer teemed with men in uniform. VAD nurses in blue and white brushed shoulders with British khaki, French blue, men in the darker ‘hospital blues’. Horse-drawn ambulance wagons and drays of supplies rattled from the train station: tinned beef, crates of biscuits, box after box of ammunition, rumbling field guns. Asher had the horrible sensation of seeing goods going in at one end of some nightmare factory – men, food, weapons – and coming out at the other, discreetly bundled in bandages and dribbling blood. Did vampires haunt the railway station, he wondered, silent in the shadows behind the volunteers who brought hot tea to the men on stretchers being loaded for Calais?
Or are they all at the Front?
At Divisional HQ Asher presented his papers, pointed out the ‘at his sole discretion’ and ‘please render all and any assistance requested’ clauses to a harassed clerk and then to an equally exhausted colonel. The colonel ran a jaundiced eye over the letter and said drily, ‘You’re another one of them, then, are you?’ and Asher raised his brows.
‘Has he come through, then?’ he asked. ‘I heard he would.’
The colonel’s mustache bristled irritably and he rubbed a tired hand over his eyes. ‘Don’t ask me. Didn’t see him – didn’t read his papers – don’t know a thing about him …’
‘Small chap?’ Asher put a note of sympathy into his voice. ‘Silver hair, though of course he may have dyed it … beaky nose. Face like a raisin and a voice you can’t hear across the room. Hands like a schoolgirl.’
The officer’s grimace answered his question and Asher thought, He always did get across men in authority …
And he wondered at himself that he wasn’t surprised to have his suspicion confirmed.
‘And I suppose,’ Asher went on, ‘he bagged the best of the motorcars in the pool, didn’t he? Always does.’
‘Not my business.’ The colonel sniffed. ‘Good as told me so. And where’ll you be off to, with your precious “at his own discretion”? I suppose you’ll want it first thing in the morning? And a driver?’
‘If you’d be so kind.’ Asher inclined his head, and took the requisition the colonel shoved at him across his desk. ‘I’ll be going to Pont-Sainte-Félicité.’
Because of the weight of the earth that surrounded the crypts of Cuvé Sainte-Bride, Lydia guessed that whatever psychic outcry had poured from Basilio’s mind at his death had gone no further than the stone walls of the laboratory.
The following night they took Antonio Pentangeli as well.