‘This is Don Simon’s house?’
‘He talks as if it’s his, though I haven’t seen him here. Rue Lepic. Montmartre. Back during the Commune a pal of my father’s owned the place; they hid ammunition in the basement. Some of the boys hereabouts know it. I doubt our presence here will be a secret long. There’s a way through from the cellar into the old mines.’
I’ll bet there is. ‘These boys of yours in Montparnasse – can they be trusted?’
‘Not all of them.’ Greuze shrugged. ‘Trusted for what, eh? To kill the cabbage-eaters? Probably. To obey orders? Depends on who’s giving them. To destroy this thing that you seek, this weapon that isn’t really a weapon … this thing that tricks the mind, that whispers crazy things to you … I think yes. Not to ask questions …’ He raised his heavy brow. ‘Well, if we weren’t bad boys asking questions we wouldn’t be socialists, would we?’
‘Think of those you can trust,’ said Asher, as a wave of weakness, of exhaustion, passed over him. Like Ysidro’s description of the vampire sleep in the daytime: We sleep and we do not waken … ‘Trust to take orders. And thank you.’ Asher glanced again at Lydia. ‘Thank you for helping her. For serving her … and Don Simon.’
‘Who is he?’ Greuze’s voice was hoarse. ‘What is he?’ And then, when Asher said nothing, ‘Never mind. You’ll just tell me a lie, won’t you?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
He slept again, like a candle going out.
TWENTY-FIVE
‘Did you know a woman named Corsina Manotti?’
Ysidro paused in the doorway at the sound of the name. Lydia looked up from her welter of old maps of Paris and carefully wrapped pamphlets printed in the Low Countries in the fifteen eighties and nineties, and set down her French dictionary. Somewhere in the deeps of the house the clock struck the half hour, between three and four.
‘She sang at San Benedetto,’ said the vampire at last; Asher recognized the name of the eighteenth-century Venice opera house. ‘If ’tis she you mean. A coloratura. ’Twas her only beauty; she had a face like a bad turnip. Has still, for aught I know. A pleasure to see you again in your senses,’ he added, coming into the chamber and settling himself on the foot of Asher’s bed. ‘Two days ago I feared that we were too late in delivering you – completely aside from the issue of Mistress Hyacinthe.’
‘She was there, wasn’t she?’ Asher struggled to bring back the recollection of the prison infirmary. ‘That wasn’t just a dream?’
‘No, she was there. I thought she would dissolve into steam with pure vexation when my minions and I entered with orders for your removal – for which a man named Kryzwiki, whose name I obtained from your rooms on the Île Saint-Louis, charged me two thousand francs. I wonder that your Department was in the habit of using him, at those rates …’
‘He would give me a discount.’
‘He gave none to me. Madame Hyacinthe retreated to the shadows and could of course say nothing. The door was locked behind us when we departed; ’twould have taken the guard at least two hours to fall asleep again, ere she could engineer an escape from the room, and by then ’twould be on the very heels of dawn. As I recall Orlando Dandolo, the Master of Venice, made Corsina Manotti vampire sometime in the seventeen fifties. She took refuge in London during Napoleon’s wars, and drove Lionel’ – he named the Master of London – ‘near insane with her gossip and talebearing, her tantrums and superstitions.’
‘Superstitions?’
‘The dead can be fools as easily as the living, Mistress.’ Ysidro answered Lydia’s tone of surprise with a slight inclination of his head. ‘As I have lately described to you, I was myself prey to a shocking number of them, for the first fifty years of my present … condition. Corsina traveled a good deal, as I recall,’ he added, turning back to Asher. ‘She is one of those vampires – as I am, it shames me to say – who enjoys the company of the living, though for her the goal is always malice and the small dominations of making mischief. She always does end up killing them. Possibly because the others among the Undead find her so annoying, she is one of the few vampires who travel for pleasure. I should not be greatly surprised if one day it is the death of her, if it has not been so already.’
‘Not as of this spring, it hasn’t.’ Propped on half a dozen pillows, Asher still felt as if he were rationing very tiny quantities of strength. The single candle beside the bed shed only a dim and wavering light. Beyond tight-closed shutters, the sound of ambulance vehicles coming and going along the Boulevard de Rochechouart, the clanging din of the train stations to the south, came faintly through the uncustomary stillness of the night.
‘She was in Prague. The Master of Prague spoke of it to Rebbe Karlebach—’
‘I thought Professor Karlebach would have nothing to do with the Undead!’ Lydia exclaimed. ‘Certainly that he’d never believe what they told him.’
‘He wrote to me that he didn’t know what to believe or whether to believe,’ said Asher. ‘Nevertheless, he felt he had to write. It seems that Corsina Manotti established a friendship with Jürgen Schaumm – whom Karlebach knew was in Prague this past spring – and she told him that Elysée de Montadour’s power over her fledglings in Paris wasn’t genuine. She, Elysée, of herself, did not have the strength to hold them. Rather, Corsina said, there is something in her lair that gives her power, not only over the Paris nest but over those of Liège, Brussels, and Bordeaux as well.’
‘Constantine Angelus’s Facinum,’ said Lydia. ‘Which Don Simon says doesn’t exist.’
But she glanced at the vampire’s face as she said it, and Asher saw the question in her eyes.
‘Did he say what this was?’ Ysidro’s voice was barely a whisper.
Asher shook his head. ‘This she learned – said the Master of Prague – when she was in Paris before the Revolution. From things Schaumm had said to Karlebach, Karlebach guessed that Schaumm had established a connection of some kind with the Paris nest, and because the Archduke of Austria had just been murdered and everyone started talking of going to war – and even complete ignoramuses like my cousins knew that the German armies were going to come through Belgium – Karlebach wrote to me. The story sounded absurd to me,’ he went on after Ysidro had begun to speak, then fallen silent again. ‘Yet when I reached Paris and started tracing the ownership of houses and guessing at the history of the Paris nest, I began to wonder. It was clear to me that the Hôtel Batoux was a vampire nest, and that it was probably the central nest of Paris – the place where Elysée’s power, real or imaginary, was centered. I took a chance’ – he grinned wryly at himself; not the first chance he’d ever taken, nor in fact the most dangerous – ‘and paid a call on her.’
Even now, the memory was patchy. He’d entered the church in the daytime, and presumed he had concealed himself from Father Martin – he had no recollection of how or where, but the building abounded in hidey-holes – and made his way to the catacombs. Nor did he remember clearly how he’d traversed the sunlit vestibule at the bottom of the tower up into the house itself. He must, he thought, have hidden for a time in the bone chapel, timing the appearances and the pattern of Elysée’s paid guards on the gallery above. He recalled nothing of this, nor of picking the lock on the grille.
He did remember lighting the candles in her salon upstairs. Recalled sitting on the carved and surprisingly uncomfortable Louis Quatorze armchair, watching the last of the evening twilight fade through the slits in the shutters. Watching the night come. He’d heard the guards lock up the rooms downstairs as they left. It was part of their contract – for which, he had ascertained a few days earlier, they were extremely well paid – that they were completely away from the premises before dark.
‘We gathered that much,’ said Lydia.
‘I warned her that German agents would probably approach one of her nest to try to get hold of this Facinum. She brought up Hyacinthe’s name pretty quickly in the discussion, so she can’t have had much doubt about who it would be. Nor, it wa
s clear to me, was this the first time the notion of the Facinum, or something like it, had crossed her mind.’
Don Simon said you were a man of courage …
The cold grip of her hand on his, crushing the bone. Candle flame reflecting the green of her emeralds in the green of her eyes. Those stupid cabbage-eaters aren’t going to get within a hundred miles of Paris …
‘There is no such object!’ She’d tossed her head a little, an imperious coquette. ‘My husband needed no object to rule this city like an emperor! There was no vampire, and precious few living men, who would deny him what he asked. He made his fledglings here in this house because it was the safest place in the city to do so. Certainly safer than those filthy mines! He knew how to claim the hearts as well as the souls of those whom he admitted into our world, into le Royaume des Morts.’
‘And how did he do that?’ Asher had asked. ‘Always in the same place in the house?’
‘Shall I show you?’ Her hands slipped up over his shoulders as if to draw his mouth to hers. ‘Species of pig!’ She drew back sharply as the bare flesh touched the back of his shirt-collar, feeling through it the silver he wore. He was watching for her to slap at him and stepped back in time for only her long nails to graze his face.
‘Why was that, Elysée?’ he asked quickly, urgently, drawing her mind aside from her anger. ‘Was it just his fancy? Did he always tell you the truth?’
That stopped her, and she stood looking at him with hatred in her narrowed eyes.
Hatred that was not for him.
But hate, he knew, was a tricky weapon, easy to turn from a distant target to whatever is present before the hater’s eyes. ‘Have you ever made a fledgling outside of these walls? Is this the same of other masters, in other cities? That they must beget their followers in a single place? I don’t think so.’
Grudgingly, she admitted, ‘I don’t know. I never thought of it.’ She shrugged, as if the matter had nothing to do with her. In a hundred and ten years of immortality, she’d never asked.
Asher understood then why Ysidro considered her stupid.
‘And just because this thing doesn’t exist,’ he had persisted, ‘doesn’t mean agents of Germany won’t come looking for it. This house was built by Gabrielle Batoux, with money from property left her by a man named Raimund Cauchemar. Since that time it’s always been guarded by members of the Batoux family, always been rumored about as a place of ill omen …’
Elysée made a motion as if shooing flies.
‘… and according to the Master of Prague, it was of old the headquarters of the Master of Paris, who also ruled the nests of the Low Countries. That’s what the Germans want, Elysée. The Paris nest, yes – but what they really want is to control the vampires of Belgium and Flanders. To use them when they strike at France, so the Belgians won’t slow down their armies. They want the vampires of Paris to do their bidding, so they won’t have little armies of Parisians holing themselves up on Montmartre hill or in the old mines below the city. Did your husband command the vampires of Belgium?’
‘I don’t know,’ she replied sullenly. ‘None of them ever came here. What are Belgians, anyway? Chocolate soldiers, cake-eaters …’
‘They’re what’s going to stand in the way of the German army,’ said Asher, ‘while the French are hauling back their troops from the Rhine to meet a juggernaut like the Day of Judgment. Just because you don’t know what your husband did or planned or accomplished in the years before you knew him … how long was he vampire before he brought you into his world?’
‘Seventy years.’
‘That’s a lifetime. Two, if they’re short. All the time women wed men who have a decade or two they don’t speak of, and get surprises …’
Like Lydia finding out I knew half the gangsters in Peking …
Or other surprises less benign …
‘Just because you don’t know doesn’t mean the Germans won’t tear this house to pieces. It doesn’t mean they won’t kill you to get at whatever they think is hidden here. It doesn’t mean they won’t get one of your fledglings to work for them in the hopes of coming out of the war as Master of Paris.’
‘I think she honestly wasn’t sure if there was a power of some kind in the house until I spoke of the Facinum.’ Recounting the interview had exhausted him. Though his mind was clear – Ysidro and Lydia didn’t seem to change their size or distance from him, as those around him had appeared to during the worst of his fever – Asher had the sensation of sinking down into the pillows of the bed, that nothing he could do would keep him from falling asleep from sheer weariness. ‘I told her to come to me if she remembered anything, if she changed her mind … Is there power there?’ He met Ysidro’s eyes.
When the vampire didn’t reply, Lydia asked, ‘Have you ever been in the house, Don Simon?’
Ysidro moved his eyes a little: No … ‘I was never persona grata with the Paris nest.’
‘You’re the only one of us who’s actually been in the house, Jamie.’ Lydia turned to him. ‘I saw relics in the bone chapel, locked up behind silver grilles. Elysée’s minion said she makes her fledglings there. Do you think there’s something there?’
Asher thought for a long time, the dreams of his delirium returning to him. Descending the stair to the catacomb with Elysée going before him, a branch of candles upheld in her hand. Being seized in the dark of the church, Schaumm pulling the silver chain from his throat … Hyacinthe and her fledglings closing in.
Only in some of his dreams it had not been like that. In some of his dreams he had descended the stair alone. The door of the twisting passageway that led to the bone chapel had been open …
A man had been standing in the doorway.
‘Are you sure,’ he asked at last, ‘that Constantine Angelus is dead?’
‘Constantine Angelus had been dead for nearly two centuries when I met him.’
Asher said nothing to this. Only held Ysidro’s gaze, and it was the vampire who looked aside.
‘I am sure.’
For some moments Ysidro stared into the darkness beyond the candle flame, the darkness of a world long gone, while the trains clanged in the distance beyond the foot of the hill, bringing the wounded in from the Front.
Then he said, ‘I was the one who killed him.’
TWENTY-SIX
‘Because of Tim?’ asked Lydia softly.
‘Not … entirely.’ Ysidro shut his eyes for a time, as if he could not bear what he saw in the darkness. ‘I understand why Constantine killed him. I understood it at the time. Tim was twenty-eight. I was seventy-two, and though at that time still a faithful son of the Church which called me demon, I had seen a great deal of the nightmare of the war between religions – not so much as Constantine had, I dare say. I thought that he was wrong, but I understood.’
He folded his hands, long and narrow and pale, with their glassy claws, sat with head bowed, as still as a stone upon a tomb.
‘I understood. But I remained a believer. And I clung to my hope of salvation. Constantine had turned from hope in any world but this one, but his hope in this world was like a white flame. This was why he had become a pamphleteer. Like Leibniz and Erasmus he wrote of the folly of religious war, the insanity of men murdering one another over the nature of one who was purported to be a God of love. Of the delusional dream that any of us knew anything about the intentions or wishes of that God. And yet he killed for sustenance, as we all do. Killed so that he could maintain his strength, his hold over the nest. He was not innocent.
‘When I went to Jeffrey the night after Tim’s death Cardinal Montevierde was there. They were both filled with holy triumph at the news of Emeric Jambicque’s death, and with promises that the Holy Father would look with favor on my service to the Faith. Jeffrey comforted me for Tim’s death, and assured me that in his way poor Tim was a martyr, slain for his act of selflessness and his loyalty to me as a weapon of the Church, a sword in the hand of Christ. I begged him instead to undertake arrange
ments to provide for Tim’s wife and their baby daughter – arrangements which were not made, incidentally, as I found out when I finally returned to England. After Montevierde took his leave I tried to explain to Jeffrey why Constantine had killed Tim, though Constantine was of the True Faith and Emeric a heretic. Jeffrey was horrified, and showed me by logical argument where I – and Constantine – were wrong. He begged me not to allow myself to be corrupted.
‘Corrupted.’ Ysidro smiled, a terrible echo of a human expression, all the crystallized bitterness that Asher had always assumed to have been washed away by time now surfacing in the wake of memories. ‘I. Corrupted. Because of course my next target, as Montevierde told me before he left – and, he implied, my last and greatest – was Constantine himself. I should have seen that coming, but I hadn’t.’
‘Because of the pamphlets?’ asked Lydia, and Ysidro nodded, barely a movement of his eyelids.
‘He was worse than a heretic, they said, because he corrupted others of the True Faith, and led them to damnation as well. Even, as Jeffrey said, as he was crippling me in my efforts to save my own soul through service to the Faith. Even as he had polluted the Low Countries, that hotbed of heresy where he was also Master, as he was Master of the heretic towns in the south, La Rochelle and Bordeaux. I had no argument against that. Only what I felt in my heart. Jeffrey told me my heart was wrong. I believed him.’
Dimly, Asher remembered it. Fragments of dreams, interleaved like the broken shards of vases at the archeological dig in Syria where he’d gone with Belleytre in 1887, one of his first field assignments. Four Cambridge lecturers bossing the inhabitants of two Arab villages as they transformed a canyon in the wastelands east of Palmyra into a maze of cross-cut trenches and sorting-sheds built of poles and brush while Asher and Belleytre pretended to take notes and actually made maps of all the countryside between Damascus and Baghdad and found out which local sheikhs would support a rising against the Turks if Britain happened to need such a thing.
Darkness on His Bones Page 24
