He is a murderer, too. A vampire. Jamie is completely, absolutely right. That he saved your life – and Jamie’s, and Miranda’s – does not excuse what he is. What he does.
You mustn’t feel what you feel.
SLEEP, she commanded herself. You’re going to need your wits about you.
But all she saw was the pale scrape of boot-scratches through the crust of moss and slate on the church roof where Jamie had skidded, scrambled, bled white and too weak to catch himself as he slithered toward a twenty-foot drop.
Monsters. All of them.
Simon among the rest …
A floorboard creaked.
In the silence it was like a gunshot. She knew by the sound exactly what floorboard it was. When one walked across Aunt Louise’s large salon on the way to the hall there was one board that made that particular noise, like a sighing half-note on the clarinet.
Lydia grabbed for her glasses and her movement must have made enough noise for her visitor to hear, for the footfalls suddenly pounded in the hallway and she flung herself toward the window. We’re on the fourth floor …
The embassy yesterday morning. Someone saw me there and realized I hadn’t left Paris with Aunt Louise.
Ellen screamed, ‘Ma’am!’
If Lydia had dashed to the window then (she estimated later) she probably could have gotten away.
But Ellen, by the sound of it, was grappling with the intruder in the hall – thumping, crashing, Ellen’s scream, and a man shouting ‘Schlampe!’ Lydia grabbed an elegant (and very heavy) bronze vase from the mantelpiece – cursing herself for having abandoned Aunt Louise’s cane on the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois – and dashed into the hall in time to see a small black-haired man in spectacles slash open Ellen’s arms with a knife and, when she fell back screaming and clutching the streaming wounds, grab her by the back of the neck to pull her into a stab.
The maid twisted, stumbled, her height – she was taller than her assailant – making his blow clumsy. Lydia stepped in and swung the bronze vase hard, but in the melee of struggling bodies only caught the man a glancing blow on the back. He threw Ellen violently against the corner of the open doorway into the kitchen and grabbed Lydia by the throat – it always surprised and terrified her how much stronger men were than they looked. She smote him on the side of the head, knocking his glasses spinning.
He yelled, ‘Hure!’ and cut at her, and at that moment another man – taller, younger, and dazzlingly handsome – kicked through the hall doorway like the hero of a penny dreadful, gun in hand. Lydia didn’t even see the gun until he fired it, and her dark-haired assailant buckled, staggered, dropped his knife, and fled through the kitchen doorway (tripping over Ellen, motionless in a pool of blood). Lydia realized she’d dropped her vase and dove to pick up the knife, and the newcomer grabbed her around the waist and put the gun behind the corner of her jaw.
Not the hero, anyway …
‘Stand still,’ he said ‘Don’t make a sound. There’s nobody in the building to hear you.’
‘Nonsense, there’s the concierge – ow!’
He’d twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her against the wall, and taken the gun away for long enough to grab her other arm. Lydia writhed in his grip and he wrenched harder, her knees buckling as she sobbed in pain. ‘Don’t get cheeky with me, young lady. You be a good girl, and nothing will harm you.’
What felt like strips of surgical plaster were wound tight around her wrists, another one slapped over her mouth. Lydia twisted again in his grip, trying to see Ellen, but he jerked her to her feet and thrust her ahead of him into the kitchen, toward the open door of the back stairs.
‘Your friend Herr Schaumm may be waiting downstairs,’ added her captor, ‘and I promise you, you don’t want to meet him. All we want to do is talk to you. So if he tries to attack us at the bottom of the stairs, you’d better sit quiet and hope that I prevail. All right?’
She’s hurt … She may be dying …
That was a lot of blood.
If I kick him he’ll only stun me, and maybe do something to keep me from getting away later. Lydia twisted her head around one last time to see Ellen lying in the doorway behind her, bleeding, as Lydia was thrust down the dark of the back stairs.
At the bottom he pulled off her glasses and blindfolded her with his handkerchief (Thank goodness it’s clean!), hustled her ahead of him into the alley and into a motor car. ‘You’re lucky I’ve been keeping an eye on Schaumm,’ the young man went on as the car rocked and jolted over the uneven pavement, then cornered on to what Lydia guessed had to be the Avenue Kléber. He spoke French like an educated Parisian.
‘Your friend Herr Schaumm …’ We were right. No wonder Jürgen Schaumm came in and out of Jamie’s dreams. The vile little man with the spectacles, Simon called him …
‘He’ll stop at nothing, you know,’ her captor’s voice went on. ‘And the creature who’s in league with him. If Madame hadn’t thought to set a watch on the British Embassy for you, we might never have been able to save you. He’s taking no chance that anyone but he – and that nigger cocotte – will lay hands on the Facinum.’
The FACINUM??? Lydia was so surprised she almost forgot to struggle. Is THAT what this is all about? Constantine Angelus’s magic talisman of mastery really EXISTS?
‘Madame’ would be Elysée … Have you ever created a homely fledgling? Ysidro had asked mockingly. This young Prince Charming certainly looked like her ‘type’.
And ‘nigger cocotte’. Asher had spoken of one of Elysée’s fledglings, a dusky, beautiful American girl – what was her name? Hyacinthe … Ysidro had mentioned her as well. Had spoken of Elysée’s fledglings being rebellious, making fledglings of their own. Elysée had been livid at the suggestion.
They must have heard somehow about the talisman that what’s-his-name – Cauchemar? One of the early members of the Paris nest? – believed Constantine Angelus possessed …
But why kidnap ME? And can I get to my picklocks before he stops the car?
As far as she could tell the vehicle was a saloon model, with a softly humming electric engine. She’d been shoved down on to the back seat while her captor drove, and going by his silence she was almost certain that he was alone. Cautiously, Lydia began to gather up the back of her kimono and petticoat where her fingers could reach them behind her. The sheer awkwardness of lacing and unlacing her corset had taught her long ago simply to sleep in it when it was only a matter of a few hours’ nap. At Madame Chappedelaine’s all the girls had been forced to do so all night, for the sake of their posture.
The car had turned right on to Avenue Kléber, but since that meant they were headed for the Place de l’Étoile she knew it would be useless to try to figure out the probable destination by counting turns. Even in the reduced traffic, she guessed her captor was going to be too occupied with driving to glance into the back seat.
The Facinum was nonsense, Ysidro had said. And while Lydia felt more inclined to trust Ysidro’s knowledge than that of Elysée de Montadour, it didn’t necessarily mean he was right. But a talisman of power sounded an awful lot like something out of one of those occult books that Jamie periodically had thrust upon him by members of theosophist covens in Oxford. Constantine’s brother fledgling had believed in it … but he, too, could have been as credulous as the average table-tapper.
The picklocks were still in their discreet little packet, buttoned to the lower edge of her corset. After a great deal of squirming and twisting she got her fingers to the button that closed the roll, and selected – with the very tips of her fingers, which were all that she could maneuver into the packet – the two that she guessed would do her the most good: a hook pick and a diamond pick. The thin triangle of metal at the end of the latter would, she guessed, prove useful for sliding under the wretched surgical plaster around her wrists, if she were ever left alone.
She dropped the hook pick into one kimono sleeve, the diamond pick into the other (clinking in the pocket at
the end of the sleeve would give the game away … ). Gingerly she used her toes to tug her petticoat, then the kimono hem, back down.
Ellen, she thought desperately. Ellen, I’m sorry.
I should have sent you home. I should have insisted …
There’s nothing you can do. Grief welled in her throat, and terror. You may not even be able to save yourself.
But I can make this awful man and Madame de Montadour very, VERY sorry they tangled with Jamie and me.
TWELVE
The car slowed and took a number of awkward little turns (old neighborhood, narrow streets) before coming to a stop at a slight angle, as if making a turn into a gate. Yes – the driver got out, and Lydia heard the muted clang of sheet metal. Drove in, stopped the car, got out (closing the gate behind us).
Hôtel particulier. Courtyard walls, muffled street noise beyond.
Not the Hôtel Batoux. No guards greeted them. Only stillness. Somewhere else.
She was sobbing and trembling by the time he stopped the car again and helped her out of the back seat. Arabella Howard at Madame Chappedelaine’s school had used such techniques to deal with the instructors and Lydia had always despised them, but she’d observed that they did put assailants off their guard. The first thing her captor did was unhook and remove the silver chains around her throat.
Drat you, Elysée …
It’s still daylight. I still have time …
‘Don’t scream.’ He guided her indoors. ‘There’s no one in the house to hear you. I promise you, you won’t be hurt.’
She shook her head and looked in the direction where she guessed his face was, with as pleading an expression as was possible behind a blindfold and a rectangle of surgical bandage. She knew the adhesive was going to hurt like the devil when he pulled it off – slowly, and what he probably thought was gently – and she was right.
‘Don’t hurt me,’ she sobbed, and wilted against his grip on her arm as he led her over waxed parquet, up a flight of steps (long but unenclosed; they must rise up from a central hall with a gallery around it, like Lady Wycliffe’s town-house in London), then into a room with good-quality carpet on the floor. He sat her down in a chair. Behind her back she could feel slick brocade under her fingers, hard upholstery … Louis Quinze or Seize?
No other footsteps, no doors closing, but no smell of mold or dampness. Her impressions – and the style of the chair – were confirmed when he took off the blindfold a moment later. He was, as she’d seen before, a few years younger than herself: like the Apollo Belvedere in an expensive suit.
‘Please,’ she whimpered (am I laying it on too thick?), ‘please give me my glasses back.’ She was prepared with more tears and a tale of how it terrified her not to see anything, but she didn’t need them. He produced the glasses from his jacket pocket and put them carefully (and annoyingly askew) on her face.
‘My husband told me nothing,’ she added tremulously. ‘Nothing.’
‘You never heard him speak of the Facinum? The talisman of mastery?’
She shook her head and made her mouth quiver, an expression Arabella had particularly recommended. ‘Nothing …’
It worked this time, because his intent eagerness softened a little, and he asked more gently, ‘Or the chapel of bones?’
‘No.’ She blinked, to release two perfectly timed tears that trickled down her cheeks.
‘Did he ever speak of Constantine Angelus?’
‘Who?’
He sank into another chair beside hers and put his hands on her shoulders, looking into her eyes. ‘Madame tells me your husband has recovered consciousness,’ he said, which clinched it: ‘Madame’ was definitely Elysée. ‘She says you’ve sat at his bedside all these nights. Did he say anything? Whisper anything in his sleep?’
‘Nothing.’ How much has Elysée told him about me? How much of an idiot can I get him to think I am?
‘He didn’t speak of the Hôtel Batoux?’ The hungry glow reappeared in the young man’s eyes and his grip tightened. ‘Of what lies hidden there?’
She shook her head and tried to look terrified – not difficult, when she recalled what she’d seen in Tante Camille’s flat. ‘He tells me nothing,’ she whispered. ‘I saw your Lady only once, and did not understand a quarter of what she and my husband said to one another! You aren’t – this Faci-whatever – she didn’t enslave you …’
‘It is my privilege and my honor to serve her.’ The cerulean eyes shone with the ardent love which, Lydia was too well aware, vampires were able to create in their servants. ‘I do my Lady’s bidding in the daylight hours, when they sleep. In the nights she lets me follow their hunt, like running with leopards as they prey on the rabbits and rats of this world. They aren’t what you think.’ His voice sank to a reverent hush. ‘They feed on the weak and the corrupt. They winnow out the fools who will only degrade the race, harvest those who don’t understand love or creation. As Nietzsche says, the apes who think themselves happy, who look at the stars and blink stupidly. That scrawny degenerate Schaumm wants to use them – can see no more in them than something that he can trick or bribe or buy into service for one country in conquering another.’
‘Schaumm …’ Lydia stammered, as if she barely knew the name. ‘He was the man who tried to kill me. Was he the man who tried to kill Jamie – my husband? Does he work for the – the vampires?’ She hesitated over the word, as if still barely able to believe. ‘Like you?’
‘Not like me!’ As she’d hoped, her captor drew himself up, insulted at the thought of being compared to Jürgen Schaumm. ‘Nothing like me! Listen, Madame Asher.’ The afternoon light that filtered through the room’s long windows past curtains of dull golden velvet gleamed on his golden hair as he leaned forward again.
‘Jürgen Schaumm is seeking the Facinum, the talisman that gives one vampire mastery over the others. He’s seeking the chapel of bones, the place where the Master vampire of Paris must bring those whom she would translate into the vampire state.’ She could hear in his voice that this was a scene dreamed and daydreamed in his heart.
‘He’ll kill to get it – and he’ll kill to keep others from finding it first. He has allied himself with this … this mongrel trollop who should never have been raised to immortality in the first place. She tricked my Lady into making her vampire, and by deceit she’s learned of the Facinum. Now she seeks to use Schaumm to seize it for herself, this shallow, silly woman of a degenerate race—’ definitely Hyacinthe – ‘who’s jealous of my Lady’s beauty and power.’
‘I …’ Lydia whispered. ‘M’sieu, I—’
‘Modeste,’ he said. ‘Modeste Saint-Vrain. You can help us,’ he continued. ‘Your husband can help us – must help us. You must help us convince him that we’re not evil, that we’re not demons.’
In other words, I’m a hostage …
‘What he’s heard about my Lady is lies, concocted by those who are jealous of her power.’
‘Monsieur Saint-Vrain,’ pleaded Lydia, ‘this is – I have heard nothing about this from my poor husband. Not before he went to Paris, not since I have sat at his bedside listening to his whispered ravings, for four nights now. The doctors say that he has brain fever—’ an ailment beloved of novelists, which Lydia had never encountered in her medical experience – ‘and that he may well remember nothing of the circumstances which brought him to Paris. I beg of you, let me go! You’ve killed Schaumm …’
Actually, since we didn’t trip over him on the back stairs he probably has only a flesh wound. But he’s out of action for a while anyway.
‘… and whatever my husband may have learned is gone, wiped away. Please let me go back to my aunt’s! My maid – a woman I’ve known all my life – was hurt, she may be dying! Let me go to her side, let me go to my husband’s side …’
He looked uncertain at that, like an actor miscued. ‘I’m sure – that is, Madame will have to …’ Having claimed he wasn’t a demon he looked disconcerted at having to live up to the assertion.
‘I – well – Madame will … You’ll have to speak with my Lady. But I’m sure you’ll come to no harm.’
Lydia bit back the words, Oh, really? As a hostage, she was well aware of what her chances of survival would be, particularly if others of the Paris nest came upon her when Elysée wasn’t around. They want to learn what Jamie knows … But knows about WHAT? If they know about the Facinum already …
‘Then please—’ Lydia blinked forth another pair of tears. ‘Please, would you telephone the police and tell them to go to my aunt’s flat? Tell them there’s been a burglary, that a woman is badly hurt. The address is forty-eight, Avenue Kléber – please! Ellen has been my friend nearly all my life! She saved my life; if she hadn’t stopped Schaumm he would certainly have killed me! They may yet get there in time to save her!’
He hesitated, laboriously calculating times and distances.
No telephone in the house.
‘Or send a note to the nearest police station.’
His brow cleared. ‘That’s a good idea,’ he agreed and, rising, hurried from the room.
Lydia heard the key turn in the lock. Good, he won’t be back in a hurry.
And thank heavens Madame picks her servants for looks and not brains.
She probed down into her kimono sleeve and drew out the hook pick that she’d dropped there.
It took a good deal of twisting and fiddling with the pick to get it under a corner of the adhesive dressing that bound her wrists, but once that was done she was able to stick that corner on the wood of the chair in which she sat, and pull the bandage loose. While she worked her mind raced, calculating the time Modeste Saint-Vrain would need to write a note, carry it to the nearest police-station …
The lock on the door of the small salon where she’d sat was old, and she thought she could probably have picked it with a couple of hairpins, the way Jamie did, if she hadn’t had her picklocks. The whole chamber – and the gallery beyond, above the stair-hall, on to which the door opened – had an old-fashioned air, the boiseries on the walls unpainted, the curtains clean and dusted but faded, as if they’d been hanging there by the long windows since long before 1871 when, presumably, Saint-Vrain’s Lady had taken possession of this place.
Darkness on His Bones Page 11
