A derisive pin-scratch appeared at the corner of Ysidro’s mouth at the mention of the old vampire-hunter. If he had not long ago lost the capacity to breathe, he would have sniffed.
‘He suddenly decided he’d go to the conference after all.’
‘Ah.’
When Ysidro had been some minutes silent, thought running behind his eyes like the movement of water under ice, Lydia went on, ‘The doctors say he can’t be moved. I think they’re right, but every hour we stay here …’ She shivered. ‘The doctors keep saying that if the Germans do declare war, they’ll never get anywhere near Paris. But Jamie’s always told me the Germans and the French are going to attack each other simultaneously, hundreds of miles apart. I don’t know anything about war or international relations and my friend Josetta is always telling me what an idiot I am about politics, but that sounds completely daft even to me. Are the Germans going to invade?’
‘Beyond doubt, lady.’
‘Will you help me get him out?’
‘When it becomes possible, of course.’
She took a shallow breath, let it out, feeling infinitely better. She had known what he was from the moment they’d met, seven years ago; knew, too, that because he had helped her – saved both her life and Jamie’s – it did not alter what he was. Because he was what he was, she knew she shouldn’t trust him, let alone like him, let alone …
She shook the thought away.
He’s here. He’ll help me. He came …
As she had known he would come.
She turned from him, her thoughts going back to Jamie, the man whose love and strength had been the sheet anchor of her life since the age of fifteen, and again for a moment had the sense that Ysidro was going to speak; but he didn’t. ‘I think Rebbe Karlebach must have heard something that concerned an offer by the Germans to the vampires of Paris,’ she said at last. ‘It’s the only thing that would have brought Jamie to Paris now. But in another way it makes no sense. Why would the Paris vampires work for Germany? Why would vampires care who wins the war?
‘My Aunt Louise’s companion, Mrs Flasket, tells me Jamie was going about Paris looking at hôtels particuliers. When they found him he had these—’ she produced from her handbag the silver wrist-chains – ‘wrapped around his hands.’
The vampire considered them for a moment, not touching the silver, then mimed the path of a strike, with a hand so wrapped, at the face of an assailant. Silver would burn vampire flesh like red-hot iron.
‘He had this in his pocket.’ From her handbag Lydia produced a card, one of her husband’s – or at least one printed with one of the names her husband went by when he was, as they’d said when he’d worked for the Department, abroad. It said ‘Sergius Donner’, with addresses in Southampton and Prague.
On the back, in an unknown hand, was an address in the Rue Lagrange.
‘I went there this afternoon. It’s an antiquarian bookshop. The old man there said yes, Jamie had come in, asking about sixteenth-century religious tracts by someone named Constantine Angelus.’
Don Simon Ysidro said nothing – was silent for so long that Lydia wondered if he had heard some sound outside, some intimation of danger far off. He seemed to be listening, his cold yellow eyes unfocused and filled, she thought, with the echo of agonizing pain.
‘Is Constantine Angelus one of the Paris vampires?’
‘He was,’ he replied at long last – at very long last.
And fell silent again, as if hearing the echo of distant voices.
Then his brows drew together with a puzzlement that pushed aside whatever it was he heard in his heart. ‘The Paris vampires may care very much if German troops enter Paris, as they did in 1871. On that occasion, most of the Paris nest were so ill-advised as to remain in the city during the siege – I’m told the hunting was spectacularly good. With so many dying of cold and malnutrition, and such authorities as there were having other matters to think upon, there were none to inquire about the dead. But the citizens of Paris were sufficiently alert to the possibility of German spies that one morning all of the Paris nest was trapped and wiped out, with the exception of Elysée de Montadour, wife of the Master of Paris.’
‘You think that’s why the Paris vampires might seek the protection of the Germans?’
He took the card and ran a corner of it very gently along his lower lip, as if seeking some elusive scent or vibration in the pasteboard. ‘Mayhap.’
‘Can’t they just leave?’
‘They can,’ he agreed. ‘I would, in their place. Elysée now being Master of Paris in her husband’s stead …’
His frown deepened.
‘It may be that this letter James received from Karlebach concerned some plan by the Germans to back one of Elysée’s fledglings, the moment Elysée does flee. The Masters of cities grow deeply protective of their home soil, and the Paris nest has always been an unruly one, rebellious and resentful. Elysée may fear that in departing she would surrender her territory, and have to fight to get it back. She has never impressed me as a particularly strong vampire.’
He sat for a time, head bowed, Jamie’s faked calling card held between two fingers. In the opposite bed, old M’sieu Potric muttered in his sleep.
‘I shall speak to whoever it is out there,’ he promised at last. ‘They may merely be hunting, of course, and know nothing of these matters. Elysée is ever careful to tell her fledglings as little as she can. Immortality has never conferred intelligence upon those who seize it. And I shall seek Elysée – I assume she still has that shocking bourgeois hôtel out in Passy. I trust you’ve searched James’s lodgings?’
‘I’m trying to find out where they were. He had a key in his pocket, which means a rented room rather than a hotel – but he never writes things down. I mean, only things like slang words in foreign languages, or superstitions, like seeing two people in a café and one of them won’t hand the other a knife to butter the bread but sets it down for the other to pick up, that sort of thing. I suppose that comes of being a spy. Might that be the sort of thing he was looking for in these religious tracts by Constantine Angelus?’
Ysidro made the small movement which was for him a head shake, barely the flicker of his eyes. ‘When Constantine wrote of superstitions he was more likely to be referring to the veneration of the saints.’ Something – the reminiscence of a smile – for a moment touched the corner of his mouth.
‘That’s an odd thing for a vampire to write about … isn’t it? Did you know him?’
‘He was Master of Paris,’ said Ysidro, ‘when first I returned to this city as a vampire, in 1602. He was – dear to me.’
‘Is that usual?’ she asked, after considering these words. ‘At least, you just said the master vampires are very … very territorial. What were you doing in Paris?’
‘Trying to save my soul from Hell,’ said the vampire at length, his eyes suddenly inhuman, and very old. ‘Constantine Angelus was the only one among the vampires genuinely willing to help me do it.’
FOUR
‘I’ve never been inside it, you understand.’ La Belle Nicolette (as she was called in the Guide Rose) laid a lace-gloved hand on Asher’s arm, and with him considered the soot-black facade of the old hôtel particulier across the cobbled street. ‘You can’t see it from here, but according to my Tante Camille, who grew up there, it takes up most of the block behind the other houses. My cousins – on the respectable side of the family – are forever petitioning Uncle Evrard to sell the place, because you could probably get three blocks of flats on the land and they could all have a fortune.’
‘Is Uncle Evrard so sentimentally attached to the place?’ Asher covered the little hand with his own and gave her a humorous twinkle. The beautifully matched horses attached to her open carriage would cost, he guessed, in the neighborhood of fifteen thousand francs, not even taking into account the salary of the liveried coachman on his high box, seemingly deaf to the conversation behind him. The gossip columns of Le Figaro specu
lated that La Belle Nicolette had so many lovers among the bankers and stockbrokers at the Bourse because no one man by himself could pay for her dresses, but Asher guessed that at the moment most of those wealthy gentlemen had other matters on their minds. And indeed, La Belle had been perfectly willing to be taken to an exclusive little café off the Jardin des Plantes in exchange for an hour’s conversation about whatever her escort wished to discuss.
She made a gesture of throwing up her hands, rolled her eyes theatrically, and smiled back. Asher guessed her age at nineteen.
‘Uncle Evrard! Nobody on my side of the family has seen Uncle Evrard for decades. He lives in Perpignan – heaven only knows where he gets his money from! – and does good deeds for the Church. He writes Mama and Tante Camille endless letters about their way of life, as if Mama hasn’t been settled down with her M’sieu Hofstein for fifteen years and Tante Camille were walking the streets instead of living respectably on the dividends of American railway stock. Are you truly writing a book about old houses and old families of Paris?’
‘I am, ma belle.’ Asher kissed the girl’s hand. A dozen feet up the narrow street the iron-backed carriage gate blocked the view of anything but a steep Renaissance roofline and the conical cap of what looked like a round tower, perhaps fifty feet back from the gate itself. So large a forecourt would be mirrored in a sizeable stable block. No wonder the respectable cousins want Uncle Evrard to sell the place. The Rue des Trois Anges was barely wider than an alley and the hôtel itself wasn’t mentioned in any of the guidebooks to this once-fashionable quarter. Neither was the street.
This was one of the things that had drawn his attention to it.
‘Does no one live there now? A caretaker …?’
‘Guards.’ She rolled the word on her tongue like an expensive marchand de vin.
‘Guards?’ Asher rewarded the melodramatic revelation with an expression of astonishment.
‘Truly! The family all fled to Limoges when the Germans took Paris in seventy-one, and when they returned they found a letter from a solicitor, telling them they were to find somewhere else to live. Tante Camille tells me that money has continued to appear in Uncle Evrard’s bank account ever since, though of course by that time Tante Camille had her own flat near the Bois …’
Paid for, Asher guessed, by a gentleman friend.
‘The family weren’t even permitted to get their clothing and dishes – and I must say it served them right! That was all shipped to them later. Uncle never would explain whose solicitor it was and why he let himself be turned out of his own house, and of course both sides of the family were agog with guesses.’
She nodded toward the lodge beside the porte-cochère, even its little window shut tight.
‘Some of my friends – boys I wasn’t even supposed to speak to! – used to walk past the place, and they said they’d seen guards in uniform come in and out; commissionaire’s uniforms, you understand, not military. But big men, they said, and not from this neighborhood. They buy their cigarettes at the tabac.’
Her graceful gesture indicated something in the direction of the Rue Vieille du Temple. ‘And sometimes they have a beer at the café. But you understand, I do not come to this district often. It is not what it was.’ She wrinkled her nose in comic distaste. ‘I’m sure they would be amenable—’ her wink was a discreet reminder of the little token of esteem that he’d purchased for her at Tiffany’s on the Rue de Rivoli after coffee – ‘perhaps to an interview?’
‘At some future date.’ Asher had stuck his head into enough vampire nests to know that, even in daytime, even in sleep, the Undead did not really sleep. And even through the thickness of earth they could distinguish differences in the footsteps of passers-by, enough to recognize a stranger’s.
Particularly if a paid guard later commented, Someone was here asking questions …
‘You wouldn’t know who pays these guards, would you? Not the same solicitor, surely, after all this time?’
She shook her head. Framed in a chignon of coffee-black curls – and shaded by a particularly hideous fringed hat reminiscent of a lampshade, which Asher recognized as being the dernier cri of fashion – her face was a symphony of ovals, the earrings he’d bought her at Tiffany’s twinkling like the ocean. ‘Well, not Uncle Evrard, at any rate. But every family has its oddities, has it not?’
Recalling the audience he’d had two days previously with Lydia’s Aunt Louise in that great Versailles of a flat on the Avenue Kléber, Asher grinned. ‘I understand that you must have other engagements this afternoon—’ by the line of roof-shadow on the old walls around them he guessed it must be after four – ‘but may I beg of you the final indulgence of an introduction to your Tante Camille? This is the most impressive example of Renaissance domestic architecture I have yet seen in Paris, and the most untouched. If I cannot see its interior for myself, I must and will have a description of it! May I count on your mercy for this plea?’
‘But of course, m’sieu! It will be my pleasure. Jacques,’ she called out to the driver. ‘Tante Camille’s …’
As the matched pair of chestnut geldings drew away from that locked carriage gate Asher glanced back at it, noting the ship under full sail carved on the keystone of the opening. For a moment – he frowned, troubled, knowing that his dream was starting to drift from the actual events of that July afternoon and back into the realm of what could have been fantasy – he thought that the gates stood open. Thought that a dark-haired man stood within them, watching him drive away. A man he had seen before, but could not remember where.
Is this only a fantasy, or were they following me, even then?
It was nearly midnight before Dr Théodule came into the ward. He looked exhausted; Lydia snatched off her glasses, sprang to her feet, and hurried the length of the room to meet him. ‘Don’t tell me you’re still on duty, doctor!’
‘I’m the only one still on duty.’ Bitterness edged the old man’s voice. ‘Moflet’s volunteered. The orderlies are all on their way to Lille with the army—’
‘As they should be, doctor.’ The nurse Thérèse Sabatier came into the ward behind him. ‘It is the duty of a man, and a Frenchman, to spring into action when the trumpet sounds. You,’ she added brusquely to the cleaning-woman who had followed her in, ‘start changing these sheets as soon as you’ve mopped. It will be up to all of us to work harder, in honor of the heroes who’ve gone.’ Her cold eyes scanned the sleeping men in the beds along the walls, as if suspecting each of malingering in the hour of La Belle France’s need. ‘And don’t take all night about it.’
‘No, madame,’ murmured the woman meekly.
‘And these men can simply take care of themselves?’ Dr Théodule leaned over the first of the beds, listened to the patient’s heart, checked the notes written on the chart at the bed’s foot, and clicked his tongue. Glancing back Lydia saw that Ysidro was gone.
‘A true man,’ returned the nurse, ‘will think his life well ended if the physician who could not be in two places at once chose the defense of his country over the care of men who may already be dying.’
‘Did you write these notes, Dr Asher?’ The old man gestured a little with the stiff paper. Lydia nodded. The evening, before Ysidro’s appearance, had been long.
‘When the orderlies didn’t come in I thought the least I might do was check their heart rates and blood pressure.’ She followed the doctor to the next bed, with Sister Sabatier glaring at her behind the physician’s back. ‘I can administer saline injections, if—’
‘The saline will be needed for the men at the battle-front.’
‘We are not at war yet, Sister,’ retorted Théodule. ‘Pray God they’ll avert it, even now …’
‘Fools.’ The nurse sniffed. ‘To hamper us in our best chance of victory by waiting for our enemies to choose the time and place of battle.’
Dr Théodule looked at Asher’s notes, moved aside his pyjama-coat to listen to his heart, pushed up its sleeve to administer the salin
e injection that for five days now, Lydia knew, was the only thing that had been keeping him alive.
Her knees still ached from an hour of standing in the angry, anxious crowd at the bank that morning. She was grateful she’d done it for, as Mrs Flasket had predicted, that afternoon the government had closed the banks to keep gold from being sapped from the country in the time of emergency. If fighting starts it won’t be possible to purchase sodium, chloride, potassium. The thought of combing Paris pharmacies for supplies of such things – if I can find a pharmacy open tomorrow! – made her heartsick, but she knew it would need to be done. If the army doesn’t commandeer those things I wouldn’t put it past Sister Sabatier to steal them from the hospital stores and hand them over …
‘No change?’
Lydia shook her head. A few beds over M’sieu Lecoq began coughing again, and in the murky heat the ward was filled with the acrid smell of urine from sheets too long unchanged. At the far end of the room a man groaned as the cleaning-woman rolled him aside to pull the soiled linen free.
‘Sometimes I think he’s coming out of it,’ she said. ‘He’ll move a little and whisper, as if he’s dreaming. And then – nothing.’
Movement caught her attention, close by: a reflection on the black glass of one of the open windows. But she saw nothing in the ward itself that could have cast it. If it wasn’t my imagination …
‘Stay by him.’ Already on his way to M’sieu Arnoux in the next bed, Théodule paused and took Lydia’s hand between his own. ‘You are a brave and faithful wife, madame.’
‘They’re not … You don’t think the Germans are going to shell Paris or anything, do you?’
‘Shell it from where?’ Sister Sabatier, already three-quarters of the way down the ward, turned back to speak to them, heedless of the men asleep in between. ‘What sort of guns do you think the Germans have, that can bombard a city more than a hundred miles away? This one’s dead,’ she added, and yanked the sheet over old M’sieu Potric.
Darkness on His Bones Page 3
