Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  Am I the same person?

  The parlor of their suite was crowded already. Uncle Richard had brought his daughter Emily, in stylish black mourning (Poiret …) for her husband, dead in the trenches at the Somme. ‘I have told her,’ observed Aunt Isobel, ‘that one isn’t supposed to wear mourning anymore, and I can quite see why. It’s such a terrible reminder—’

  ‘Not to speak of being so depressing.’ Aunt Louise scrutinized her sister-in-law through her lorgnette, though whether her expression of disapproval concerned the exiguous traces of black at collar and cuffs – all the recognition Isobel accorded not only her son-in-law’s bloody death but that of her son Charlie as well – or simply her accustomed scorn for Isobel’s plebeian (though extremely wealthy) ancestry, Lydia could not have said.

  But just as Mortling – Aunt Louise’s butler, called from retirement at the age of seventy-seven when his successor to the post had joined the Leicester Infantry – tottered unsteadily in with the tea-tray, two more of Aunt Louise’s sisters, Aunts Faith and Harriet, knocked at the door, with Harriet’s barrister husband and two daughters in tow, and the entire party had to move down to the ship’s First Class café. As they emerged onto the private promenade their way was blocked by the four sweating porters and that enormous chest – a cabinet, Lydia now saw, of heavily carved black wood, with locks of silver – which was being maneuvered into the suite next door to Aunt Louise’s.

  Oh, you’re joking. They all backed up to the wall to let the enormous thing pass. Don’t tell me it’s going to be this easy …

  ‘I do hope Lavinnia plans to bring Maria to town for the season,’ commented Aunt Isobel, as they descended the steps to the regular – as opposed to the private – First Class Promenade on C Deck. ‘You were just up at Peasehall, Lydia dear, did she happen to mention it?’

  Lydia forced her attention away from the Princess Gromyko’s party, entering the Willow Grove Café (as it was called) immediately before them, and blinked at her aunt.

  ‘I certainly hope she plans to,’ put in Aunt Louise. ‘It’s the girl’s third season and she’s twenty. Lavinnia will never get her off her hands at this rate.’ She didn’t even bother to sound distressed about this. Demonstrating herself superior to her older sister had been Louise’s raison d’être since their mutual nursery days.

  A black headwaiter in a white linen coat shiny with starch led them to a table among the potted palm trees. (There wasn’t a willow in sight.) As the other party were seated just behind them, separated only by the green fronds, Lydia clearly heard the Princess Gromyko whisper to her bearded physician in French: ‘Is the room secured, Dr Yakunin?’

  Honestly, even in novels it’s not this easy …

  He held up a key. ‘None can enter, Madame,’ he whispered. ‘And not the smallest shred of light can penetrate.’

  THREE

  ‘And in any case,’ trumpeted Aunt Louise, completely drowning out the princess’s next quiet words, ‘I should say it’s Maria’s upbringing – or non-upbringing – that has more to do with it than the War.’

  If I jump up and put my hand over her mouth it will only call attention to myself …

  ‘And, I am heartily tired of every conversation turning on the War, even on this ship. The girl should have been disciplined from the first and kept to proper behavior, instead of being left to her crochets and fusses. Dresses like flour-sacks – or like pajamas! Cut all the way up to the calf, with her ankles flashing about for all the world to see, not that Maria’s ankles are anything to look at …’

  Dr Yakunin murmured – Lydia could only just make out the words – ‘The authorities seemed to find your douceur … acceptable. Not a question was asked.’

  ‘… and Peasehall can’t be worth more than seven thousand a year these days …’

  ‘Well, he could sell off the Gainsboroughs. I’m told Americans will pay practically anything for portraits …’

  A chime sounded, and a steward’s voice called politely, ‘This is the last call, ladies and gentlemen. All ashore that are going ashore,’ first in English, and then in French. Lydia suspected that a few years ago the announcement would have been made in German as well.

  She and Aunt Louise walked their well-wishers to the head of the First Class gangway. The crowd of First Class passengers surged around them, and lined the rail for final goodbyes; Lydia caught a glimpse, through the press, of Captain Palfrey, like Sir Galahad in mufti, staring down into the waving mass of color on the pier. She wondered for a moment if his beloved Miss Aemilia Gillingham was down there somewhere, seeing him off. Or did he look beyond the crowd, to the lines of horses being loaded in the transport for France? Or to the men being taken off the hospital ship in the next berth, carried quietly across to the ambulance-vans, to be taken to the nearby Netley Hospital.

  Maybe he was just gazing at England, green beyond the gray buildings of Southampton, under a silver afternoon sky.

  The green finality of the Southampton Water widened between them and the dock. Between them – Palfrey, the Princess Gromyko, the commanding Mrs Tilcott and that golden-haired young girl in Third Class with her siblings and their mother – and whatever lives they’d had before the War. Between them and whatever they’d hoped for, or planned for, or thought they’d be doing, prior to the summer of 1914.

  Between them and a past that was gone. A world that would never be the same again.

  And no guarantee whatsoever, thought Lydia, her heart thumping hard, that we’re even going to make it to America. The night without sleep, the journey yesterday afternoon down from London, weighted her bones like the leaden apron she’d insisted on wearing at the casualty clearing station, when she’d operated the fluoroscope machine. She felt light-headed, and separate from herself.

  Jamie, I’m sorry.

  Miranda, I’m so sorry.

  Salt wind flicked her face. Gulls cried somewhere above the piers. The cheering on the docks faded as the great vessel slid into the main channel. Tug boats whistled, and an answering blast came from the overcrowded ferry-boat, crossing the Water far below where Lydia stood.

  She thought about the hawthorn stakes, the garlic and wolfbane, the silver-bladed surgical knives in her locked satchel back in her stateroom.

  Simon, I’m sorry.

  If I cry Aunt Louise will ask me why, and tell me not to be silly …

  The overpowering scent of frangipani retreated, and she heard Aunt Louise call out imperiously to the deck steward.

  Now if only Aunt Louise – and Ellen – will let me alone this evening so that I can see what this cabinet is, that the Princess Gromyko has hidden in her suite …

  She pushed grief aside, focused her mind on the problem at hand as if she were in a dissecting room.

  I wonder if the princess knew Prince Razumovsky in St Petersburg? In spite of herself, Lydia smiled at the recollection of the big nobleman – one of Jamie’s mysterious ‘friends’ – who had befriended her in the Russian capital some years ago. Surely I can scrape acquaintance somehow. All the Russian nobles are each other’s cousins …

  She drew a deep breath, as if steadying herself to walk across a narrow and railless bridge. You can do this …

  But for a long time she only remained where she was, watching England slide away. Tugs and pilots steered troop-transports away from the other piers, guided colliers and small freighters in. Fishing-smacks and coast-wise sloops dotted the water, fry too small to interest submarines in the Channel. Isle of Wight ferries paused to let them pass, and the small freighters that had braved the danger of torpedoes, with their bright flags, Danish and Swedish and the American stars and stripes. Still those gentle green hills were visible beyond, thin trails of smoke from villas and farmsteads. Memories nearly unbearable.

  Jamie …

  Flat American accents approached and faded behind her, as the emerald slopes and chalk cliffs of the Isle of Wight approached and faded: ‘Nonsense! Jazz is no more music than it’s music when Stella bangs on
the kitchen pans …’ ‘Did you see The Rink? I thought I’d make myself sick, laughing …’ ‘I like Arbuckle better …’ ‘He absolutely took one look at her on the wedding-night and ran out of the room – and went back to his mother’s …’ Jamie would take such delight in those accents. ‘Pure-bred Persian, darling, with the cutest little face …’

  Not a word about the War.

  Palfrey had told her last night (this morning …) that the Germans had a new type of submarine. Long-range subs that could operate mid-ocean …

  Despite Aunt Louise’s blithe reassurances, she’d been looking forward to getting far enough from England’s shores to be out of range of German subs.

  And now there was no ‘out of range’.

  She shivered, thanking a God she didn’t quite believe in that she’d been adamant about leaving Miranda at Aunt Lavinnia’s. The little girl’s stoic sadness at bidding her mother goodbye once again had torn at her heart. But at least I won’t have to lie awake nights in terror at the thought of seeing that freezing dark water close over her head …

  Yarmouth. A huddle of roofs, a smudge of distant smoke. Then, a little while later, the bizarre white shapes of the Needles, and the south coast of England retreating into shimmery haze to the north. The crowd was dispersing. Captain Palfrey strode to her side, hand extended, cerulean eyes anxious. ‘Did you see anything?’ His voice crackled with suppressed excitement. ‘Someone brought in an enormous box …’

  ‘I saw.’ Lydia took his arm. Maybe I’ll be able to get a nice cup of tea before I have to don my secret disguise as Mrs James Asher, Respectable Lady and Vampire Hunter. ‘Its owner has the suite next to Aunt Louise.’

  ‘Surely,’ argued Palfrey, ‘they needn’t be so … so draconian about all this. Might not the Germans have simply drugged Colonel Simon and brought him aboard … I don’t know, disguised? In a bath-chair and wrapped up in blankets?’

  ‘I doubt they’d have been able to get him past the health inspector.’ (Particularly not if he happened to burst into flames with the first touch of sunlight.) Resolutely, as he linked his arm through hers, she put the ghosts of Jamie and Miranda aside, and coaxed into her voice the lilt of a humor she didn’t feel. She wondered what this staunch young hero was going to do when he learned that her aim was not to rescue ‘Colonel Simon’, but kill him.

  ‘I can almost certainly get up a conversation with this Princess Gromyko by admiring her dogs,’ she went on, when they sat over coffee and biscuits at the Willow Grove. ‘We probably have mutual acquaintances in Petersburg – Petrograd,’ she corrected herself, the name of the Russian capital having been changed at the start of the war because ‘St Petersburg’ sounded ‘too German’. ‘And with the rioting going on there, we certainly won’t run out of things to talk about. If worst comes to worst I can corrupt her maid. We have six days,’ she pointed out, and cast a quick glance through the ferns to the table where the princess and her somber-eyed physician had earlier sat.

  ‘For six days, we know approximately where Don Simon – Colonel Simon – is.’ Her voice grew quiet. ‘In those six days we have to find him. Once we reach New York, they could take him … anywhere.’

  And do anything.

  The café was quiet. It must, Lydia guessed, be past five o’clock. Behind her, she heard a little girl declare scornfully to her weeping brother, ‘Only babies are scared of submarines.’

  In spite of the coffee her head ached, and she rubbed at her eyes. Meeting Palfrey’s troubled expression, she managed a smile. ‘Are you prepared to romance the princess’s maid if necessary?’

  When they emerged from the café, she saw that the Channel had widened around them. Some miles off she descried a destroyer, patrolling for submarines in the relatively confined waters. Something that could have been the troop transport, and the horse-boat, made dark specks in the silvery distance. Something that might have been Guernsey floated still farther away in the green-black sea.

  But England was gone.

  I’m going to America, she thought, as she parted from Palfrey and turned her steps back toward the stair that led up to the Promenade Suites.

  If I get there alive …

  Her thoughts ducked quickly away from that fear. Like the artillery shells that had burst over the little hospital at the Front, there was nothing she could do about the situation.

  I wonder if Ellen is done with unpacking? I can tell Aunt Louise I’m seasick, and need to lie down …

  Though her aunt’s response to that would probably be, ‘Don’t be silly, girl. It’s all in your mind.’

  ‘Lydia, dearest!’

  She turned as her aunt came striding along the deck. ‘I’ve been looking all over the ship for you! I must say –’ the older woman’s pouchy face fairly beamed – ‘that this is everything that the advertisement promised. I have had the most interesting conversation with Mrs Cochran – such vulgar jewelry! And that frightful accent! And Mrs Tilcott is very knowledgeable about New York, though she claims that the society in Philadelphia has much better ton. I’m almost sorry now that I signed a lease on that apartment, though Mrs Tilcott assures me that it’s in one of the best – ah!’

  She stopped, fairly glowing with smug pride.

  Lydia followed her gaze down the promenade.

  And her breath seemed to congeal in her lungs.

  Two figures coming toward them.

  One of them unmistakable.

  No …

  It couldn’t be.

  No …

  She wanted to put her glasses on to be sure but she knew it was true. Instead she turned, trembling, blazing, upon her aunt and whispered, ‘How dare you? How dare you—’

  ‘Now, dearest,’ admonished Aunt Louise serenely, ‘you can’t tell me it isn’t for the best.’

  ‘Mummy!’ cried Miranda, and breaking free of the repressive nanny who followed her, ran down the deck to throw herself into Lydia’s arms.

  FOUR

  James Asher had first come to the house on the Rue de Passy in the autumn of 1907. He still bore the scars of it, on his throat and wrists, but at least he’d got to know by sight most of the vampires of the Paris nest. They’d be at the Front now, he guessed, along with nearly every other vampire in Europe.

  For two and a half years, all the vampires in Europe had been in Flanders. Feeding to their hearts’ content, three and four and five kills a night. No one had noticed.

  Vampires lived, not merely on blood, but on the energies released by the soul at death. Only thus could they maintain their power to deceive, their fearful gift of illusion, their ability to tamper with human thought and perception. That, as much as their terrible strength and preternatural speed, made them deadly.

  They walked among the trenches in the darkness. Clustered around the casualty clearing stations just behind the front lines, thick as moths around lamp-chimneys. Flitted in and out of the moribund wards in dead of night, whenever the exhausted orderlies turned their backs. They drifted ahead of the ambulance-wagons into No Man’s Land when the artillery fell silent and the machine-gunners dropped asleep on their weapons. To the older ones, the stronger ones, the psychic charge of human death gave the ability to walk in human dreams, to make people think they’d had conversations they’d never had, seen things they’d never seen. Or dismiss things they had seen as, I must have been dreaming …

  All these things increased with feeding.

  It was a drunkard’s dream of the Big Rock Candy Mountain, he thought. Of wandering through lakes of gin and rivers of booze: all the blood, all the deaths, all the stolen lives and stolen strength they could devour.

  And no one was even aware of them. What were a few drops of blood – or a pint, or a gallon – in an ocean?

  Looking up at the beautiful seventeenth-century façade before him, Asher didn’t know whether Elysée de Montadour would be in Paris now. Some of the masters of some of Europe’s nests – London’s, he knew, and almost certainly others – stayed closer to home, sensing
the danger of being away from their own territory too long. Those that’re masters’ll find their error, the Master of London had said to him once, when they come back and find some upstart’s moved in an’ set up housekeepin’. Though Elysée had never impressed Asher as being particularly intelligent, she might well have developed a concern about being supplanted, as the war progressed.

  One thing he had learned of vampires over the past ten years was that most of them were savagely territorial.

  The handsome maison particulière on the Rue de Passy hadn’t changed. In fact its long windows looked cleaner, and the whole building better-maintained, than the dwellings nearby, which for the most part had the decrepit appearance of structures which these days lacked the staff to scrub factory-soot from their doorsteps or mud from their walls. No lights were visible in the windows, but only those on the ground floor were shuttered. The Undead – Asher knew – though they often preferred the illumination they’d known in life, were indifferent to total darkness.

  Senses keyed to the pitch that harked back to his years of spying in Russia, in Austria, in Berlin, he crossed in front of the house. Then, after a few moments, crossed back.

  Elysée, at least, would know his footsteps. Would recognize the sound of his heart.

  Some of her fledglings would as well. The thought frightened him badly. One or more of them might be in residence, and the beautiful Master of Paris might be away. In that case he was a dead man. Fledgling vampires, on the whole, mistrusted it when their masters formed bonds with the living.

  Still, there was no other way to learn what he needed to know in time to get the information to Lydia. So he walked back and forth before the house twice more, keeping his distance from anything that looked like cover for an attack. But he was scaldingly aware that a vampire – and particularly one who’d been gorging on four or five kills a night for two and a half years – could be on top of him before he so much as heard the whisper of its passage.