She smiled warmly upon Lydia, then turned her great dark eyes to the captain beside her, and to the Cochrans, the moment Mrs Tilcott paused for breath. ‘Perhaps the spirits will have seen with greater accuracy than did your good Kimball, M’sieu Cochran, the face of the man who dropped those sandbags on you this afternoon? For the spirits see.’
Her smile faded, and the glow of faith illumined her dark eyes. ‘The spirits see everything. Evil most of all.’
‘Nonsense,’ declared Mrs Tilcott. ‘Superstitious fol-de-rol. I must say I’m surprised at you, Mr Cochran.’
‘Well,’ modified her son, ‘my man of business tells me that all those old documents you were telling us about over lunch make a fine investment, Mr Cochran! No doubt about that! Thank you,’ he added to the waiter, who brought in the boeuf marchand de vin and squabs, and helped himself to ample portions of both. ‘But actually going to sit in a darkened room hoping you’ll get to chat with George Washington … Not –’ he added quickly, with a glance across at Madame Izora – ‘that under the right circumstances the Father of Our Country wouldn’t be delighted to attend …’
Mrs Cochran turned bleak eyes upon him and said, ‘You would think differently, sir, had you ever hungered for the sight of one lost to this world before their time.’
And Madame Izora laughed gently. ‘My dear Mrs Cochran, pray don’t concern yourself with my feelings! A man doesn’t believe until the light comes into his heart. Pity, rather, any who keep their minds shut, and trust that they will come to understand in time!’
Mrs Tilcott and her son traded speaking glances. Turning her head, Lydia caught the narrowed, querying look the handsome Dr Barvell directed at Mr Cochran, while Mrs Cochran commenced to tell Captain Winstanley all about the spiritualist she habitually consulted in Lake Forest, and Madame Izora detailed, to the princess and Aunt Louise, the occasion upon which she had had tea with St. Francis of Assisi. As they all rose from their chairs following the last creamy fragments of mignardises, Princess Natalia laid a bejeweled hand on Lydia’s arm and urged, ‘We will see you at the séance, no? It will begin at eleven – there will surely be those there who long to see you!’
‘I’ll come as soon as I can,’ Lydia excused herself quietly. ‘I’m afraid Miranda isn’t taking this journey as well as I’d hoped, and sometimes she wakes in the night crying.’ This was a complete lie – between the princess’s dogs, the salt wind, and being with her mother, Miranda’s only complaint so far was that she couldn’t go down and play Blind Bock with all the little Russian and Slovenian urchins in the aft deck well. ‘If that happens, I’ll be a bit late.’
And she hurried to catch up with Captain Winstanley, to make sure that he did, in fact, order the release of Georg Heller from the ship’s brig.
No light shone at the Hotel de Montadour. No one opened the door when Asher rapped its heavy bronze knocker; nor yet again, when he’d made his cautious way into the next street, where its graceful mansard roofs were visible from the back, and then returned to knock once more. It was past ten, and the Rue de Passy pitch-dark and silent as the grave.
Even had there been sufficient electricity to keep the street lamps burning through the night, Paris, the City of Lights, lay too near the German lines to be safe from air raids. Heart hammering, Asher walked for a distance up the street and down it again, ‘promenading himself’, as the vampires said.
Tomorrow, then, she had smiled. But when he knocked again, the house remained silent and dark. Asher had gained the impression that in life, Elysée de Montadour had been a flighty piece, as apt to forget appointments as she was to mislay her keys. He had learned that death – or at least Un-death – didn’t change people.
Better you go home now. An attempt to enter the house – Asher’s picklocks jingled faintly in his pocket – might bring some of the fledglings of the Paris nest, if they were in Paris and not gorging themselves at the Front. Those beautiful young men whom Elysée made vampires – made her servants – for their good looks, Augustin and Serge and Evrard.
Or did she make fledglings anymore? Did she dare? She had never been – Asher recalled Don Simon Ysidro saying – a particularly strong master vampire, and the frightful events during the first month of the war1 had robbed her of much of the power over them that she’d had. And if she didn’t make them, could she now control the ones she had made?
Asher didn’t know. But he guessed, as he made his way back towards his hotel – three long and bitterly cold miles, for the Metro had ceased to run hours ago – if Elysée had gotten distracted by some promising hunt, and any of her fledglings were about, they would kill him out of hand if they found him waiting. All the way along the river, unseen in the overcast darkness, he listened behind him, and through what remained of the night in his hotel room he woke in sickened panic half a dozen times, dreaming of cold eyes that gleamed like the cats in Cyril Britten’s attic office, of cold hands stronger than the grip of devils. Lay listening, knowing that even if they were there, he wouldn’t hear.
Knowing he’d have to go back.
He had four days, before he’d have to start for the Eastern Front again.
Emerging from the dining room, Lydia tracked down Captain Palfrey in the First Class lounge, where the City of Gold’s dance band was just beginning its evening ration of foxtrots and decorous versions of the waltz from amid a forest of potted palms. ‘It’s infamous of me to send you about like an errand boy,’ she whispered, under cover of the music. ‘But I need you to locate all five of Mr Cochran’s private detectives, and let me know where they are. Now, tonight – at once.’
The young man nodded earnestly, and when Lydia continued, ‘I can’t – I daren’t – tell you the why and wherefore …’ He raised a hand to cut off her words.
‘You don’t need to. You don’t think Mr Cochran …?’ He sounded shocked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Lydia, and again he nodded his understanding, and put a finger to his lips. Lydia had early found it unnecessary to explain anything to Palfrey. Having accepted that ‘Colonel Simon’ was engaged in counter-espionage so deep that even the Foreign Office didn’t know about it, the young officer was perfectly willing to do anything he was told, either by Don Simon or by Lydia. At times in the past this purblind acceptance had maddened Lydia, but she completely understood why Simon had picked on Captain Palfrey as his servant.
He was a perfect dupe.
She gave him the Second Class cabin numbers of the ‘boys’ – acquired by Ellen in the servants’ dining room – and within thirty minutes Palfrey had returned with the assurance that Mssrs Kimball, Boland, Sweetser, Rand, and Jukes were all playing poker in the Second Class smoking room. Moreover, Cochran’s manservant (Mr Oakley, whom Mrs Cochran referred to as a ‘boy’ or a ‘houseboy’, despite the fact that he was Jamie’s age) was in his own cramped ‘servants’ quarters’ room on C Deck, confirming Lydia’s suspicion that, if indeed Mr Cochran had Don Simon imprisoned in one of the tiny, windowless servants’ quarters rooms within the Promenade Suite itself, no one but Dr Barvell shared the suite with him.
‘Captain Palfrey, you’re a marvel,’ she whispered, clasping his hands, and then hastened back to a shadowed corner of the Private Promenade, to watch the door of the Princess Gromyko’s suite as her séance guests arrived.
‘I have no idea where the girl can have gotten to,’ complained Aunt Louise as she emerged from her own suite. ‘Given the opportunity to actually experience the nearness of the astral plane …’
‘Beyond a doubt, M’am,’ said Mr Mortling’s voice. ‘I shall send her along when she arrives.’
‘See that you do.’ The dowager walked the thirty-some feet down the covered way to the princess’s door, to be greeted by the soft voice of the Persian butler. Lydia withdrew a little further into the shadows of the stanchions which, in fairer weather, held canvas sunshades over the stairs which led down to C Deck. Mrs Cochran, ascending a few moments later in another expensive but obviously American en
semble and far too many diamonds, passed within a few feet of her without seeing her. Even so, Lydia withdrew down the stairway when she heard Mr Cochran’s voice around the corner of the promenade.
She watched him pass, gesticulating savagely (he had dispensed with the sling and his left arm seemed entirely recovered) as he spoke with Dr Barvell. Heard the door of the princess’s suite open again, and the murmured words of greeting from the princess’s butler. Then, swiftly, she tiptoed up the steps, around the corner, and along the promenade to Cochran’s door.
Its locks and those on Aunt Louise’s suite were identical. Lydia made short work of them, having practiced several times that afternoon. She lit the candle-stub from her pocket by the light of the promenade lamps and slipped inside. The furnishings were identical as well: sleek American-style chairs and sofa of black enamel and glistening chromium. She dared not switch on the lights, though black linen curtains blocked the glow of the windows. The place was spotlessly – almost forbiddingly – neat in the dim candle-gleam, even the newspapers re-folded to their pristine state, telegrams tucked back in their envelopes. (All concerned the activities of the New York and London stockmarkets. Lydia looked.)
The two bedrooms were similarly immaculate: men’s pajamas laid out across the feet of both beds, nary a book or a magazine in sight. The contrast with Aunt Louise’s jumble of extra cushions, magazines, photographs and Dresden figurines to the décor of the suite was startling. The only way she could guess which bedroom belonged to the millionaire, and which to his physician, was that the pajamas in his room were silk and the hairbrushes on the bureau solid silver. In that room, also, an almost staggering array of vegetable pills, cathartic mixtures, laxatives (‘Epsonade – tastes like lemonade!’), butterfat bath salts, and phials of extracts of monkey glands and rhinoceros horn ranged before the mirror.
Both small, windowless ‘servants’ chambers’ were locked.
One contained what appeared to be a small chemical laboratory: beakers, a Bunsen burner, a glass retort, a small rack of flasks. Lydia wondered whether Dr Barvell was employed to produce rejuvenative potions for Mr Cochran, as well as to tame vampires, and if so, how much he was paid. None of this looked cheap.
The second room held a large black trunk, laid on one of the chamber’s narrow beds.
It was what Lydia had hoped to see, but at the sight of it pain gripped her heart. The smallness of it – it looked scarcely large enough to contain the body of a man – brought back to her the memory of the vampire’s slight frame, barely her own five-foot-seven-inch height, and narrow-built, like a very old cat. I should go back to my room and get my satchel, she thought. If there’s silver mesh inside the coffin he may be helpless. I can do it now …
If he’s there at all, and not moving somewhere around E Deck looking for some other poor Slovene or Russian girl …
Deliberately, her hands shaking, she removed the chains of silver from around her throat and wrists and set them aside. The soft scratching, the faint stirring, within the coffin nearly brought her heart up into her throat. In her mind – she was certain the word was not actually whispered aloud – she heard a murmured voice.
Mistress …
The whisper of a dying man.
There were four locks, all plated with silver. It took her only minutes to pick them all, and raise the heavy lid.
A white hand like a skeleton’s reached up from within, and caught her wrist in a grip like steel.
TEN
Just as if he hadn’t killed thousands of people over the course of three centuries – just as if she hadn’t looked on the torn throat and bloodless body of a nineteen-year-old Slovenian girl not quite ten hours before – Lydia helped him sit up. He felt light as a half-grown boy – she had long suspected that human tissue itself underwent some kind of transformation in its change to the vampire state. As she’d suspected, the inside of the coffin was lined with a basket-weave mesh of flat slips of silver, a quarter-inch wide and roughly an inch apart. She winced to think how much that quantity of metal would have cost, even as she observed the places where contact with the metal had burned the vampire’s wrists, hands, and face.
But as she thought all this, she wrapped an arm around Don Simon’s ribcage, drew him up out of that toxic casket, and helped him sit on the end of the opposite bed. He shivered violently, and his hands, clawed like a demon’s and cold as death, clung to her, as if to hope of salvation.
‘Thank you,’ he whispered, his face pressed to her shoulder. ‘I never thought you would come.’
His clothing was crumpled and dirty, the ivory gossamer of his long hair in tangles around a face ghastly, naked of the illusion that conceals the nature of the Undead. Dark bruising marked his sunken eyes and the scars he’d taken, years ago, in Constantinople, defending her, stood out like sword cuts in wax.
She knew then she couldn’t kill him. She wrapped both arms around him, held him tight. His own crushed her against the bones that were all that she could feel within his clothes.
‘I have to get you out of here,’ said Lydia. ‘It’s eleven thirty, there’ll be no one on the promenade deck. They’re all at the séance—’
‘No good, Lady.’ He released his hold on her at last, raised his head to look her in the face. He really did look as if he’d been dead for three hundred years. ‘They’ve injected me with something – I don’t know what. Barvell gives me antivenin, in the daytime, when I sleep.’ He pushed up the unbuttoned sleeve of his pale linen shirt. The silk-white flesh of his arm bore a line of colorless little puncture marks, tracking the vein. ‘I feel it in me, death like smoke in the wind, then turned back for a time. ’Tis worse than the silver, as if ants crawled and bit within the tunnel of the vein, eating as they crawl. Séance, you say?’
His eyebrows went up, his yellow eyes nearly transparent in the candle-gleam.
Lydia nodded. ‘His detectives are all down in the Second Class smoking room, waiting for him to ring for them when he’s done. Did he—’ She hesitated, studying that impassive face. ‘Has he brought you … prey?’ She almost couldn’t speak the word, and saw his pale brows pinch, very slightly, above the aquiline of his nose. ‘Or have you gotten out, at any time?’
‘Prey?’ he repeated. ‘Here? On a ship, where every passenger must be accounted for? The man’s a lunatic but he’s not stupid. And no,’ he added, the absolute abyss of his despair like a whispered echo of brimstone in his voice. ‘No, I have not gotten free.’ The quirk of his brows deepened as he sought an answer in her eyes.
‘There’s a vampire on the ship,’ said Lydia. ‘Not you – another one. A girl was killed last night.’
‘Dios.’ He was silent then, turning the implications over in his mind. ‘Are you sure of this, Mistress? For a vampire to kill here, on shipboard, ’twere madness.’
‘Heller – one of the Third Class passengers – is convinced it’s someone counterfeiting a vampire kill, but that’s lunacy also. Most of Third Class is in an uproar. They’re ignorant people, country folk, Italians or Russians or Slovenes. The Captain is putting it about that the girl was killed by her fiancé, but I saw her body. Two gashes, small but very deep, like some of the shrapnel wounds I’d see at the clearing station.’ She touched the flesh of her throat. ‘She was nearly drained of blood, and … and there was no sign of struggle.’
She turned her face aside, wanting to weep – as she had wanted to weep hundreds of times, in the moribund ward or the clearing station for the men dying under her hands. Men killed, not by pale monsters like this blood-drinking ghost beside her, but by other men. But he is a monster, she thought. And I cannot let him go free.
‘We need to get you out of here,’ she said, looking around her quickly. ‘We can go into all this later …’
‘’Twere no good, Lady, if we cannot lay hands on the antivenin. Within hours I will be incapacitated by pain. How long ’twould take me to die, an I did not have the next injection, I know not. Days, the good Dr Barvell –’ his voi
ce slipped with chilly hatred over the name – ‘hath assured me.’ Rising, he took her hand, led her into the narrow interior passage which separated the servants’ rooms from the elegant portion of the suite, and so through to the physician’s workroom again.
‘Cagafuego,’ he added, as Lydia switched on the electric light. The harsh illumination shone on laboratory flasks and fittings, on locked cabinets which, when opened, proved to contain phials of assorted sizes, only two of which – silver nitrate and pyrrolidine – were labeled. ‘And no notes, either.’ His long, thin fingers flicked open drawers, sorted through the several small boxes and cases as swiftly as Lydia unlocked them.
‘He can probably tell which is what by their smell,’ Lydia guessed, checking the two other cases. ‘Or by the shape of the bottles. Drat the man, there’s no way of telling whether these things are the antivenin or the poison, or ingredients of one or the other … phew,’ she added, stoppering a large bottle. ‘And that one is liquor. So much for his pontifications on pure bodies and pure health. Captain Calvert at the clearing station used to hide cognac in his laboratory things …’
‘He was not the only one.’ And, when Lydia turned to him in surprise, Don Simon added, ‘Think you that I was not ever somewhere near, when you were at the Front, Lady? I know the men of your clearing station well.’
Killing men in the moribund ward …
Her eyes met his, and blurred with tears.
Men who would die anyway. She had known their condition, and had never had the smallest doubt. She felt that there was something she must say to him, but words wouldn’t come. It was she who turned away first, and went back to picking the simple locks on satchels and chests. Most of these had been silver-plated. Don Simon moved behind her, checking through their contents.
Prisoner of Midnight Page 9
