Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  The guns went quiet around five. Only the splat of rifle-fire echoed across the desolate wet acres of blood-soaked ground, where sentries shot at wire-cutting parties or at the orderlies who’d sneaked out in the hopes of rescuing the wounded. Sometimes the hard rattle of machine-gun fire swept the ground where a bored gunner wanted to make sure of a prey he couldn’t quite see. At about that time, Asher sensed that the vampires vanished, either to seek their holes – in dugouts or abandoned farm cellars, or the vaults of ruined churches or chateaux – or to have one last kill, out on No Man’s Land itself, while the sentries drowsed.

  Night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast, Puck warns Oberon – words that even before he had known their truth, had always stirred Asher’s heart.

  At whose approach ghosts, wandering here and there,

  Troop home to churchyards: damned spirits all,

  That in cross-ways and floods have burial,

  Already to their wormy beds are gone,

  For fear lest day should look their shames upon

  Or for fear, reflected Asher, lest day should ignite their transmuted flesh to unquenchable flame …

  He continued to pace the orchard, not daring to sit down between fear of falling asleep and awareness of the constant, stealthy scurry of rats in the dead leaves underfoot.

  By six thirty, he guessed that Elysée had gotten distracted by either a kill or a chat, and would not be returning for him.

  Annoyed, weary, and chilled to the bone, he turned his steps towards where he guessed the road lay – yes, this was old Vouliers’s farm, all right. He recognized the line of the smashed hedges and the shape of the square-built roof. Quietly, from the bottom of his heart, he damned the war and the men who made it. The orderlies moving about among the rough shelters and tents emerged when they saw him come up the road, but didn’t raise the fuss they would have, had he approached through the orchard. He asked where he was, was taken to the camp commander, presented his credentials, and explained that he had become lost and that the engine of his car had failed.

  ‘Didn’t sound like fuel lines or the carburetor, but there was no sense in trying to sort it out in the dark.’

  Given the iffy state of most motor-pool engines at the Front, not to speak of the quality of the available petrol, Asher doubted that anyone would find it odd that the Peugeot would start up just fine for whoever Major Briscoe sent out to fetch it in. And at a guess, the commander had other things to think about than telegraphing wherever the hell Joël had stolen the Peugeot from, or checking Asher’s bona fides.

  Major Briscoe sympathized, offered him breakfast and a drink of far-from-contemptible Scotch, and assigned him a cot in the tent reserved for visiting officers. ‘We’ll have you on your way in no time, sir.’

  NINETEEN

  ‘The freighter Cumberland was torpedoed last night,’ Ellen whispered to Lydia, as she tiptoed into the stateroom at what Lydia – normally an early riser – felt to be an embarrassingly late hour Saturday morning: Ten thirty! Poor Miranda, to have breakfast only with that horrid Mrs Frush.

  She put on her glasses, and sat up in bed. Rain had been falling by the time she’d climbed to B Deck after leaving Heller, and only grayness showed through the porthole when Ellen put back the curtains. Lydia was conscious of the heavier chop of the sea, and of the wind screaming along the half-deserted promenades.

  Through the connecting door came the welcome odors of bath soap and the faint, dry-leaves scent of clean towels heating on an electric rack.

  ‘Two-hundred-fifty miles south of here,’ the maid continued. ‘A hundred men lost. The E.C. Baldwin picked up the survivors an hour ago, and Mr Travis – our cabin steward – says Captain Winstanley refused to change course to help, even though we were closer. He says the sub that did it will still be in the area, waiting for just that. Mr Travis says in the crew lounge the bets are four to one against the Baldwin making it a hundred miles before they’re torpedoed, too.’

  She fetched Lydia’s robe, and gathered up the shabby coat that Lydia had left draped over the back of the chair, and brushed lightly at the coal dust on its skirts. In a voice more quiet still, she added, ‘Mr Travis tells me there was a riot below decks last night, over a little Arab boy being found dead. They’re keeping it quiet, he says, but he says the immigrants are in an uproar over it, and no surprise, I say.’

  And she looked inquiringly from the black smudges on the coat, to Lydia, who murmured, ‘Another time.’ She didn’t feel up to explaining that the Bosniak Muslims were no more Arabic than Aunt Louise was.

  Above the racing of her heart, she thought, Two more days.

  Tuesday at the latest, we’ll be safe.

  ‘Well, it’s no more than is to be expected,’ Aunt Louise declared an hour later when Lydia – bathed, powdered, creamed, coiffed, manicured, clothed in tobacco-colored Vionnet and embellished with delicately undetectable whispers of rouge and mascaro – finally emerged into the parlor. ‘Peasants straight out of the Middle Ages, as Her Highness said at dinner Wednesday night. Of course they’ll turn a perfectly straightforward case of lunacy into a vampire tale. And it does cause me to wonder whether Mr Cochran actually believes it’s a vampire doing this, or whether he’s just using that term because it’s what Madame Izora believes is happening. It’s shocking,’ she added, her plucked gray brows clouding with self-righteous disapproval, ‘that a woman of her spiritual insight doesn’t have the judgment to realize the difference between genuine communication from the Astral Plane, and these silly fairy tales that the ignorant make up.’ She placidly turned a page of The Passing of the Great Race.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Lydia, her voice held steady with an effort, ‘the danger of being torpedoed magnifies—’

  ‘Nonsense.’ Aunt Louise folded up her book. ‘We’re in no more danger of torpedoes than we would be lunching at the Café Metropole. I’m surprised at you, Lydia. That freighter, whatever it was called, that Malkin was blithering about this morning – it’s astonishing how the lower orders can work themselves into a panic over nothing! – was simply asking for what it got. They were taking munitions to a belligerent country in wartime: what on earth did they expect? Take those frightful spectacles off, child, if we’re going to luncheon! Honestly, your husband should never have permitted you to go to the Front, if it’s caused you to forget … I suppose the crew of the Cumberland were being paid by the British Crown. All those American freighters are, these days. Of course one cannot countenance blowhard bullies like the Germans, but they aren’t stupid, you know.’

  At luncheon, this opinion was heartily seconded by Mr Cochran, to a degree that would have gotten him called out – in Lydia’s opinion – had not Captain Winstanley absented himself from the meal. ‘Cowardice!’ stormed the millionaire. ‘Submarines – bunk! Like any German captain in his right mind is going to run the risk of sinking an American boat! Why, the Huns are shaking in their boots at the thought that Wilson’s going to join the Allies! They wouldn’t blow a spitball at us for fear we’ll come over there and slap them into submission.’

  ‘Do you think they will?’ Dr Yakunin cocked his head, fish fork poised delicately above an artistically-curled pair of shrimp. ‘Enter the war?’

  ‘Wilson’ll be a fool if he does.’ Tilcott mopped with a roll at the hollandaise that was all that was left of his second helping of deviled lobster. ‘Americans’ll never stand for it, after all that campaign ballyhoo last year: “America First” and “He kept us out of War”. He’ll look a damn fool if he turns around and gets us into a war. Let the kings and the kaisers and the emperors and the sultans fight it out among themselves, that’s what I say. It’s no affair of ours.’

  ‘It’ll be our affair if we get torpedoed on account of it,’ ventured Lydia, and Mrs Cochran patted her hand.

  ‘That’s simply not going to happen, sugar.’ She was wearing pink diamonds this morning, to match her frock, and by the look of her pupils had clearly gotten Dr Barvell to administer a
n injection ‘for her nerves’.

  ‘Damn right it’s not going to happen,’ sniffed Cochran. ‘But it’ll damn well be our affair if the kaiser starves Britain into submission and takes it over, given all the money we’ve lent the Brits. You can bet we’ll never see a dime of it if they lose.’

  ‘My dear Mr Cochran.’ Aunt Louise looked down her nose at him. ‘What have you been reading? The Germans are no closer to starving Britain into submission than they are to flying to the Moon. It is we who control the seas.’

  ‘Just what I’m saying.’ He stabbed at her with his fish fork. ‘Only Winstanley’s an old woman who’s so afraid of his own shadow that he’ll let people freeze out on the open ocean, rather than turn aside to go get ’em. But people are in such a frenzy to make it to New York the day after tomorrow he’ll let ordinary folks go hang.’

  ‘Well, really, Mr Cochran,’ his wife said with a frown. ‘Common humanity is one thing, but as you yourself said Wednesday night, the American Line does have a responsibility to the business community, to provide the swiftest transportation. We need to get to New York, and have a right—’

  ‘I said nothing of the kind,’ snapped Cochran, from which Lydia deduced that his burst of common humanity probably stemmed less from concern about the Cumberland’s passengers than fear that he wasn’t going to find the City of Gold’s vampire in time to work out a strategy of entrapment before the ship docked.

  Once in New York, he was well aware – and Lydia was even more conscious – the unknown vampire would vanish for good.

  At eight hundred feet by ninety, the City of Gold was one of the largest ships afloat: ten decks deep, mazes within mazes of corridors, staterooms, coal bunkers, storage holds, refrigerated lockers, smoking rooms and squash courts (squash courts?), but that still only came to five hundred thousand or so cubic yards. As Lydia excused herself from her un-eaten lunch and made her way across the dining room to the table where she recognized Dr Liggatt, a part of her mind was tortuously aware that the moment the liner drew up at the New York docks, her own options as to what she could do and what she should do would change, irrevocably.

  I can’t let a vampire go ashore in America.

  And her heart pounded at the knowledge that it wasn’t the second unknown vampire that she meant. Or that she should mean, anyway.

  I have to kill him. I have to kill them both.

  I can’t let a man like Cochran have one – let alone two – vampire slaves.

  Freeing Don Simon from his coffin was not a solution to either problem.

  There was only one solution.

  The ship’s surgeon, Mr Allen and Mr Bowdoin (to whose opinions about bi-metallism Dr Liggatt had been politely listening), rose from their places and bowed as Lydia approached. ‘Please,’ she smiled, the portion of her mind not taken with grief and anxiety grateful that at least Dr Liggatt, with his flax-pale hair and sunburned complexion, was readily identifiable at a distance without glasses.

  When the other men sat, the surgeon retreated with her to the side of the room. ‘You’ll be wanting to have a look at the little Adamic boy? It was all I could do, to get him away from his mother.’ He shook his head, face tightening with concern and dread. ‘Just like the others. Two short incisions in the throat, most of the blood drained from the body. No blood on the clothing or in the hair. Poor tyke. He couldn’t have been eight years old.’

  Later, reading to Miranda in the shelter of the Promenade while gray rain sluiced into the gray sea, Lydia couldn’t erase from her mind the mother’s despairing screams: Kemal! Kemal! She remembered Aunt Louise’s casual remark, I’ll wager she can’t remember all their names, while looking down at the children crossing the gangplank, and tears blurred the print before her. Kemal had been his mother’s eighth child. The despair in her voice had been no less.

  Dr Liggatt had been perfectly correct in his report. There had been no blood on the wax-white little face, under the cold electric lights in the meat room; none in the rumpled black hair. The cupid-bow mouth had been slightly ajar. The child’s mother had placed a rolled-up fragment of writing – presumably Koranic scripture – on the boy’s tongue, and a string of prayer beads encircled his chubby neck.

  A boy who would never see America. Brothers and sisters who would one day say, We had a little brother but he died on the voyage over.

  His short, stubby fingers had been sticky. The smell of peppermint lingered, very faintly, on his lips.

  Lydia’s rendition of the account of the intrepid Dorothy’s conversation with the King of the Winged Monkeys faltered, and Miranda’s small hand closed around her thumb.

  ‘Mummy, don’t be afraid.’

  She set the book quickly on the deck beside her, and dug in her pocket for a handkerchief. Miranda, on the child-sized chair beside her, set Mrs Marigold aside and leaned closer to Lydia, and whispered, ‘Mrs Marigold is scared, too. But I told her it’s all right.’

  ‘Of course it’s all right.’ Lydia deftly dabbed away the incipient tears – from long practice managing not to disarray her mascaro – and smiled.

  ‘The mermaids got to the submarines,’ explained Miranda. ‘They rub them all over with blue lotus, while the crew are sleeping, so sea monsters will come and swallow them whole. Sea monsters love blue lotus.’ She looked up into her mother’s face, serenely certain and at the same time concerned for Lydia’s distress. ‘They like the blue best, but they’ll eat the yellow, too, if they can’t get blue.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ Lydia agreed. ‘I’d never heard that.’

  Miranda explained in detail about mermaids and the blue lotus that grew in Atlantis (where on earth did she get that?) then listened to the remainder of the chapter fourteen, sufficiently distracting Lydia’s thoughts from her sense of oncoming despair. But when she saw the Princess Gromyko at the far end of the Promenade with her dogs, she thought long and hard before tucking the book beneath her arm, removing her glasses, and following Miranda to greet them.

  I can’t let him go ashore. Not as Cochran’s slave – and not as a free man.

  ‘Darling …’ The princess greeted her with a kiss, and, with a glance before her at Miranda, handed the leashes to Mademoiselle Ossolinska and lowered her voice. ‘Tania says they know who the vampire is.’

  Lydia stared.

  ‘I think it’s nonsense, myself,’ the older woman continued. ‘Peasant rumor—’

  ‘Who?’ asked Lydia. ‘Not, where?’

  ‘In plain sight, under their very noses.’ Natalia Nikolaievna shook her head, a look of consideration on her exquisite face. ‘Which I suppose would make sense, if one were a vampire seeking to emigrate. Myself, my old nurse always said that the vampire cannot go about in the daylight, but Tania says no, that is not the case—’

  ‘They can’t,’ said Lydia. ‘I know this,’ she added, as her companion opened her mouth to argue. ‘Who is saying—?’

  ‘Everyone, evidently. Men from the villages of the Sudeten say they have seen them. And it is a fact, that the Jew can give no good account of himself at the time those poor children were killed.’

  ‘What Jew? Old Mr Goldhirsch?’

  The princess shrugged. ‘I don’t know what Jew. There’s a wicked old Jew in Third Class, Tania says, and she says that word is going about that he is the vampire … which I must say doesn’t surprise me. There is something … sinister … about the Jewish race, isn’t there? Something accursed. One hears frightful things …’

  ‘That’s nonsense.’ Lydia was almost too startled, for the moment, even to feel angry. ‘One hears frightful things about fortune tellers also, but that doesn’t mean that Madame Izora is a madwoman or a confidence trickster.’

  ‘That’s not the same thing at all!’

  Lydia opened her mouth to snap back that first, it was a good deal more likely that madame was a confidence trickster than that Mr Goldhirsch – however hard-fisted and unsympathetic he might be – was a vampire and second, there was no way of knowing wheth
er the old man could give a good account of his movements at the times of the murders or not because nobody knew what those times were. Then in the back of her mind she heard Jamie saying – following one of Aunt Isobel’s diatribes against the Irish – There isn’t much likelihood that anything I say is going to change her mind … and we need to pick our battles. (That was, Lydia recalled, on an occasion on which they needed Aunt Isobel to introduce them to a Member of Parliament regarding a right-of-way near Oxford.)

  In any case, between her stepmother and her Nanna, Lydia had grown up picking her battles.

  So she took a deep breath and said, ‘No, of course it isn’t – forgive me. That was a bad simile. One has only to look at Madame to see her honesty.’ Lowering her voice and laying a hand on her companion’s arm, she went on, ‘The thing is, Natalia Nikolaievna, I’ve come across something entirely different. And if it’s true, I don’t see how poor Mr Goldhirsch could have anything to do with anything. I’ve come across—’

  They’d reached the corner of the Promenade and she glanced around her, though in fact the covered way that fronted the Tilcott and Cochran suites was completely vacant.

  Almost in a whisper, she said, ‘I’ve come across evidence that Mr Cochran knows more about this vampire than he’s let on. Shh—’ she added, putting a quick finger to her lips.

  The princess, dark eyes wide, nodded her understanding, and steered the party back along the way they had come. Behind them, Lydia heard a door open, and a moment later the bulky Mr Kimball and another ‘detective’ – lanky and sallow, and clutching a Gladstone bag – passed them, muttering discontentedly.

  ‘The thing is,’ continued Lydia in a hushed undervoice, ‘Mr Cochran has had his men searching the ship – quietly, secretly – since the start of the voyage, even before the first killing. I heard him the first night giving them instructions: The silver crucifix should keep you safe, he said. Bring him to me, I need him. Then later he said, Remember, this is a business deal. I didn’t know what he meant, until last night. Mr Cochran knows he’s on board, and is trying to keep everyone else from finding him, until he’s met with him – and not to destroy him, as he’d have us believe. He’s protecting him. He wants to make a deal with him.’