‘Mistress …’
Lydia jerked awake, as the voice whispered, like a thread of pale mist, at the edge of her dreams.
She immediately checked her watch. Four thirty. The first threads of light would not yet have begun to stain the sky outside. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep that early and, given the events of the night, hadn’t thought she would. But the fact that Simon’s mind could touch her dreams meant that he was somewhere close by, underground as she was and near enough that he could read her dreams.
Damn it, she thought. Damn it, revenants or no revenants, I have to sleep …
Her heart was hammering and she debated about getting changed for sleep – she had fallen asleep again fully dressed – and then decided against it. If he’s down here it may be that he has a plan to escape now, before sunrise, and she wasn’t about to undertake it in a pair of French Army pajamas.
She lay down again, closed her eyes, tried hard not to see the laboratory door opening, the circle of revenants closing around her. Tried not to see the tickled delight in Francesca’s eyes, like a child at the cinema waiting to watch Ben Turpin get a custard pie in his face. ‘There was a kind of spite to her,’ Szgedny had said …
Fall asleep! Simon will have to retreat, will fall asleep himself soon …
Miranda sleeping in her tiny cot back on Holyrood Street, silk-fine red hair spread over her pillow. Princess, the nursery cat, sleeping at Miranda’s feet. Jamie asleep … Jamie … the recollection of waking somewhere in the deeps of her wedding night and lying there looking at the shape of his shoulders in the moonlight, the way slumber smoothed the lines of his face and left it like a young boy’s …
‘Mistress …’
In her dream (Do NOT wake up …!) she sat up (Aunt Lavinnia would FAINT if she knew I dreamed about Simon standing at the foot of my bed …) and caught him against her as he perched on the cot’s edge, cold and skeletal in uniform trousers and braces, the sleeves of his shirt wet with dirty water: ‘Simon, where are you?’
‘Hush – near. Near enough to see what happened tonight. Forgive me, lady – I would have come from hiding had things gone any further. But I heard Lemoine coming and gambled that he’d be able to stop her. Had I shown myself—’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Lydia. ‘We would both have been killed, and you at least have to get out of here and warn somebody – Jamie, if you can do it—’
‘Hush,’ he said quickly, and the cold, clawed fingers pressed her lips. ‘I’ll sleep soon. Have you still your picklocks?’
She nodded. ‘I can’t use them on the padlock …’
‘Do you still aid this Lemoine in the cleaning of his workroom? Good. Leave them behind the storage boxes where the rats came from tonight. The Irishwoman has a key to the laboratory but regards it little now that she has ceased helping him with his work. I can take it from her room when all have gone out to this test of theirs tomorrow. Revenants—’
His head nodded suddenly, and the thin white brows buckled over his nose.
‘Revenants haunt the crypts.’
‘Simon—’ Good Heavens, don’t fall asleep before you can get yourself hidden—!
She was sitting up in bed, alone.
His voice whispered, like an ectoplasmic scratching at a dark windowpane: ‘Can’t get out …’
True waking came then, and the clammy stuffiness of the underground. The smell of the revenants, and of greasy smoke, absorbed into blankets and walls.
It was late afternoon when Asher reached Army Headquarters at Amiens. The road south of Pont-Sainte-Félicité had been shelled Monday night, and was blocked with supply-trains waiting for the digging parties to get duckboards on the surface. Beyond Haut-le-Bois it was impassable, necessitating Asher’s driver to backtrack half a dozen miles and take a muddy track over a shallow range of hills, to a more protected route.
Before they reached that point, Asher was able to get a glimpse of the old nunnery of Cuvé Sainte-Bride.
He didn’t dare stop, but the state of the road and the heavy traffic of mule-drawn wagons allowed him ample time to train his field glasses on the square gray buildings on the slope above the road, the dense snarls of barbed wire that rimmed the trenches around it, the lone sentry at its gate. According to the records unearthed by Josetta’s friend at the War Ministry (Who could easily have been interred under the Official Secrets Act for her trouble, he reflected), there were five French soldiers and five British assigned to the place, as well as Lemoine and five members of ‘staff’, some of whom were almost certainly local cleaners and a cook. But the requisitions for rations were too high, and even without Lydia’s messages Asher would have deduced its use as a prison of some kind by this time. Presumably Lemoine had the French equivalent of ‘at his sole discretion’ and ‘please render all and any assistance’.
I wonder what he told them back in Paris?
The truth?
Or just, I have a plan to win the war.
He wondered how far Lydia and Ysidro had gotten into the place before they’d slipped out again, and what they had discovered. Was a coded letter even now lying on his desk in Holyrood Street?
Two miles down the wider road after crossing the hills, the car broke down.
‘I don’t blame you for wanting to get a shift on, sir,’ confided the young captain in charge of Field Artillery Battery Twelve, while Asher waited in the makeshift hut for horse-drawn transport to be arranged. Asher had given him a cigarette and expressed his genuine admiration for the battery – four BL-60s that dated back to the Boer War and a number of Woolwich Mk-IX naval guns mounted on railway carriages. Beneath a careful public-school English, the glottalized t’s and disappearing l’s of the West Country still lurked through. ‘There’s weird stories going about this countryside at night – things people see in the woods just lately, or things they’ve found. It’s not some form of shell shock, sir, or nerves. There’s not a man in the battery’ll venture past the perimeter when the light goes.’
‘An’ I don’t care what Colonel St-Vire says,’ added Asher’s driver, ‘beggin’ your pardon, sir, I’m sure, an’ no disrespec’ an’ all … But it’s Jerry. It’s got to be. Nick Frampton – my mate back at Félicité – ’e swears the thing ’e saw shamblin’ about the old trenches one night, wi’ a face on it like God’s nightmare, ’ad on a Jerry uniform, an’ eyes glowin’ like a cat’s. The men are spooked, sir.’ He drew on the Woodbine Asher had given him. ‘I’m glad that axle went out ’ere, an’ not further on down the road where we might be stuck when it was growin’ dark.’
‘Have you reported this?’ asked Asher. ‘How long has this been going on?’
‘A week?’ The driver glanced inquiringly at the captain. ‘Ten days?’
‘A week,’ said the captain. ‘And I think it’s growing worse. As for reporting, what can we say, really? Things somebody says he saw – the state bodies are found in, or that poor horse the lads found in the woods, torn to pieces by God knows what …’
‘Me dad’s a gamekeeper,’ put in the driver. ‘An’ I never seen an animal what could do that. But beyond that …’ He spread his hands.
‘You write a report, you send it to your colonel,’ went on the captain, ‘who’s got his own plate full of grief just keeping shells coming for the guns and food for the men, and he sees it an’ thinks, Hrm, well, somebody going a bit shell-shocked, this’ll wait. But if you were to know anyone, sir …’ His casual finger brushed the War Ministry papers, which, Asher was well aware, had ‘Spook’ written all over them.
‘I might have a friend or two who’d be interested in this.’
‘I’d appreciate it, sir.’ The captain touched his hat brim. ‘Because God’s honest truth, sir, it’s giving me the jim-jams.’
A corporal came in then, with word that transport had been found, and Asher did the last ten miles to Amiens in a wagon-load of wounded drawn by two of the beautiful copper-bay Shire horses that a year ago – like their owner, Asher reflected – had been peacefully plowing some Shropshire rye field. Conscripts who would lay their faithful bones in foreign earth. As they jogged toward the great cathedral city Asher turned the problem over in his mind, reflecting that the young captain of Battery Twelve was right. ‘You write a report, you send it to your colonel …’ and the revenants slipped from the crypt beneath Sainte-Bride, a danger not because of who they killed, but because of those that survived an encounter.
And say Lydia and Ysidro did find something, some proof utterly damning, in their visit to the half-ruined convent – proof that presumably had sent them hotfoot to Amiens … What then? What if he himself added to the report the contention that the Irish Brotherhood – and who could tell what other groups within the Empire, or what other groups they’d talked to – once means of controlling them was found – were seeking to breed up their own? Would that stand up against Langham’s bland assurances that ‘everything is in hand’?
Would everything lock up in some committee or other until it was too late? Until some wounded survivor of an attack was simply sent home to Britain with the infection in his veins?
No, thought Asher.
Simply, No.
No one at Headquarters in Amiens had seen or heard anything of Lydia, with or without a companion whom Asher was fairly certain was masquerading as a British officer. (If the Undead can tamper with human perception he can probably make them believe he’s Sir John French and none of them would think to question the impression …) As a major rail hub and supply depot immediately behind the front lines, the ancient cathedral town was swollen with troops and short on everything: coal, food, petrol, transport and most especially housing. Nevertheless, Asher’s papers got him a somewhat elderly Silver Ghost (plus driver) for the following day, and a garret room on the Rue des Tanneurs near the cathedral, to which he repaired after a sketchy dinner of bread, charcuterie and what he privately suspected was mule meat in the officer’s mess.
Coming down the steps of the mess, he was just reaching for the handle of its outer door when the door was opened and Pritchard Crowell came in.
Asher was in the act of putting on his cap and didn’t pause or turn his head, simply brushed past the man who was a legend in the Department – the man who had supposedly died in 1895 – the man who had instructed him in the finer points of running networks ‘abroad’ – stepped out into Rue des Trois Cailloux, and ducked into the blackness of a shop doorway where he waited for ten minutes. When he was fairly certain that Crowell wasn’t going to emerge and follow him, he made his way – cautiously – to his lodgings, but wasn’t terribly surprised, an hour later, to move his blackout curtain aside and, after long waiting, glimpse against the darkness on the far side of the canal a flicker of movement, a suspicion of moon-glint on uniform buttons.
Crowell had been in uniform at the mess.
Pritchard Crowell.
Why did it never occur to me years ago that the man had to be working with a vampire partner?
Probably because I’m not insane, he reflected after a moment’s thought. It’s the sort of conclusion Millward would have leapt to immediately. When I knew the man – extricating himself from impossible situations, slipping past sentries and guards like a combination of Leatherstocking and Bulldog Drummond – I disbelieved in vampires, though I had studied their lore for years. And by the time I came to understand that the Undead were more than legends, Pritchard Crowell was – supposedly – dead.
And I had rebuilt my life in Oxford.
Is Crowell a vampire himself?
A flicker of dark mackintosh in the corner of his eye, a shadow seen from the railway embankment on Stratford Marsh … A half-glimpsed figure on a bicycle on an Essex lane. Grippen would know.
Or is that why Grippen tried to recruit me?
He recalled the night Ysidro had recruited him, to search for the day-killer that was slaying the vampires of London in their coffins – after first drinking their blood – eight years ago: We need a man who can move about in the daylight. Twice since then, he’d encountered attempts by governments to recruit vampires, back in the days of that intricate chess game of information and preparation, before war had shattered all schemes.
Crowell was working with a vampire. He’s been hiding, for twenty years, waiting … for what?
Yet it’s HE who’s watching ME. It’s he who tried to kill me back in London. Not his vampire partner.
What does that mean?
Is he waiting, tonight, for a vampire partner to appear at his side, so that he can direct him or her up here to make sure of me?
Or is he waiting for me to come out, so he can follow me to Lydia?
Lydia, who’s the one who knows … whatever it was she and Ysidro had found out about Cuvé Sainte-Bride.
Damn it …
And of course, rooms in Amiens being scarce as hen’s teeth, he had been forced to take one in a building that had only one way out – a room that had only one window, so he couldn’t even take the expedient of leaving over the roof. Not that that was anything he wanted to try at the moment. Exhaustion made him feel as if he were wearing the lead-imbued apron Lydia had rigged up to protect her from the supposed danger of invisible rays from her fluoroscope; his lungs felt on fire and all he truly wanted was to lie down and sleep.
Not possible, he told himself. He simply hadn’t the strength. Think of something else.
A fingernail scratched at the door of his chamber. Like the gnawing of a mouse, barely to be heard.
He slipped up the shade on his lantern the tiniest fraction, and crossed to the door.
‘Simon?’
‘A friend of his.’
Asher unhooked the silver chain from around his wrist, wrapped it round the fingers of his right hand. Opened the door and stepped to the side, fast – though that, he knew, would make no difference against a vampire’s attack.
The vampire standing in the dark of the attic corridor had the curious appearance of an old man. A seamed face framed with long gray hair; eyes that had probably once been dark gleamed on either side of a broken hook of a nose. Like most vampires at the Front (according to Lydia, anyway) he wore a uniform, this one French. But his face, like Ysidro’s, was not a twentieth-century face. Pale gloves hid the clawed hands, one of which he extended to Asher.
‘Permit me.’ His French was eighteenth-century, but kept slipping back to an older form. ‘I am the Graf Szgedny Aloyïs, of Prague.’ He stepped into the garret, like a Slavic god, and handed Asher a card. The address lay near the Charles Bridge in the Bohemian city, almost certainly an accommodation. ‘And you are the Anglus – the English – whom Simon has made his friend? From him I understand that you and I have another acquaintance in common, Solomon Karlebach, the Jew of Prague.’
‘Did Simon send you?’
‘I have not seen Simon since he escorted the most charming Madame Asher to visit me for the purpose of learning about the woman Francesca Gheric, who has now taken employment with this French madman, Lemoine. It is on that subject that I have sought you out, Anglus – that we must speak.’
At Asher’s gesture he took the room’s single chair, and Asher seated himself on the end of the narrow bed, and unapologetically refastened the silver chain on his wrist. Szgedny’s odd, dust-gray eyes followed his movements, and one corner of the long gray mustaches lifted in an ironic half-smile. ‘Elysée de Montadour tells me you seek to destroy the things that breed in Cuvé Sainte-Bride. Evil is being done there – I see you try not to smile, to hear me say such a thing … An evil I do not fully understand. But Hieronymus, Master of Venice, tells me that three nights ago his fledgling Basilio Occhipinti perished, in horror and in flame – this he felt, he knew, as masters sometimes do feel the deaths of their get. Yet afterwards he said he felt the young man’s mind, his awareness, still stirring, in a way that he had never encountered before. As if thought and brain had been pulped, Hieronymus said, and yet the soul were trying to speak out of the bleeding mush.’
Like Ysidro, the vampire showed little expression or change of tone in his deep voice, yet his eyes burned somberly. ‘Basilio and his lover, Antonio, slept in the crypt of a ruined church, ten miles from Cuvé Sainte-Bride.’
‘Mrs Asher wrote me of these two.’
‘But ere Hieronymus reached me with this tale, Antonio had come to me in great consternation saying Basilio had not returned to the crypt the night before. Yet, he said, he knew his friend was alive – if you will excuse my use of the term. After Hieronymus’s visit I sought for Antonio, for whom I cherish great respect, but could not find him. He had not taken the ambulance-wagon in which he usually hunts. Then, on this Wednesday past, Hieronymus came to me again saying he had experienced, the previous night, the same sensations concerning Antonio: first the horror of death by fire – only it was not death, exactly. Fragmented dribbles of his thought, his self, remained somewhere, weeping and screaming …’
He shook his head, deeply troubled. ‘It is Sainte-Bride,’ he said at last. ‘The evil there. It is breeding these things, these revenants … And in my bones I feel that it has taken both Basilio and Antonio. This Lemoine – or rather his minion, the Irishwoman Tuathla – has sought for many weeks to find a vampire willing to work with him, willing to become his partner in some enterprise. It can be nothing but to give him a way to control the revenants whose numbers have grown so quickly of late.’
Asher said, ‘I agree.’
The vampire considered him beneath the long gray brows, as if waiting for him to add, But what has this to do with me?
When he did not, Szgedny went on, ‘’Twas the White Lady who came forward at last and entered this man’s service. When your beautiful lady spoke of her to me, she surmised that the White Lady was incapable of getting fledglings. The reward, she surmised, that La Dame Blanche asked of Lemoine was that he find some way to alter her condition. To permit her to pass along her own condition to others: to beget fledglings of her blood.’
‘Slaves, you mean.’
‘Children are – or should be – slaves to their begetters. E’en the Commandments so order it.’ The gray vampire inclined his head. ‘But this … This is an abomination. I am convinced she has drunk the lives of Basilio and Antonio – and indeed used those bleeding fragments of Basilio’s thought to call Antonio to her. Whether this will give her what she seeks—’
Asher thought, Ah, with the sensation of seeing the pieces of a puzzle drop into place. No great cry of triumph, but an awareness of what had been before him, like a half-filled-in decryption of a cipher, all along.
‘Can she control the revenants?’
‘As I told your lady, I have never found it possible. But who knows what means this Lemoine has found?’
‘According to Mrs Asher, who has read his work, he has studied the vampire state for many years,’ said Asher thoughtfully. ‘And he had the chance to observe them in China, where for a short time a hive of them flourished near Peking.’
‘They must be stopped,’ said the vampire. ‘This Lemoine must be stopped. Say what you will, Anglus, of me and of my kindred – and yes, I know you have made a vow to destroy us, as your master Karlebach has vowed. But though the revenants hunt us in our crypts, through the brains of the rats that seek out our scent, in this you must aid us. For the sake of all the living, as well as the sake of the Undead, these things cannot be permitted to spread. Though they would kill us all, yet the harm that would come of making them your slaves – if you can do it – would be an ocean, a cataclysm, compared to what little harm we do when we hunt the night.’
Asher closed his lips on the observation that ‘little harm’ was a generous way of looking at the matter. But he remembered that small band of furious Irishmen, who thought they had found an unstoppable weapon to make their land free. And Lemoine, who similarly believed that he had found a way to defeat the Germans before the war could shred away the willing manhood that had – in his eyes – made France great. And Langham who doubtless believed the same, when Crowell went to him with the information that such a useful creature had gotten itself loose and could be captured and put in British hands …
In exchange for what?
Protection? Another ‘letter of instruction’ like his own, to carry him here to France?
And meanwhile each night brought closer the moment when a wounded man would be sent home from the Front, with the infection in his veins.
He left the lantern on the corner of the dresser, and walked back to the window to peep out.
Cloud had shifted across the moon, but even had the light been a little better, he doubted that he could have seen anything in the blackness below. ‘Is there anyone there?’
Behind his shoulder, close enough to the back of his neck to make his flesh creep, Szgedny’s deep voice replied. ‘I see none.’
Which doesn’t mean he isn’t somewhere near. And doesn’t mean that he won’t dog me tomorrow, if he thinks I’ll lead him to Lydia …
‘Aid us.’ The vampire’s hands rested on his shoulders. ‘Simon speaks of you as a man capable of such a feat.’
‘I hope I am,’ said Asher slowly. ‘But I will need your help.’