Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘How large a network do you command in London these days?’ asked Asher after a moment. ‘How many observers can you call on?’

  ‘Pah.’ The vampire scowled, a horrible sight. ‘Damnéd war. Run by a damnéd crew of rabbit-sucking pimps. Half the men in London have turned their backs on their families and homes, to go slaughter cabbage-eaters in Flanders muck, and for why? Because of lies these pribbling whoresons have conjured about country and King, making a man ashamed to tell ’em he’d rather not go die so England can keep its grip on a passle of colonies oversea!’

  ‘Instead of sending them dreams in their sleep about how worthy of trust you are? And how they owe you their lives …’

  Grippen jabbed a clawed finger at him. ‘None o’ your backchat! You whored for ’em yourself, by what Simon tells me. And pimped others to give you what help you sought.’

  ‘I did,’ replied Asher quietly. ‘I did indeed. I apologize for my words.’

  ‘Hmph. What help d’you seek? ’Tis mostly women and street brats I command these days, and Papist Irish who refuse to sign up ’cause they’re too busy runnin’ guns from the Germans to the Irish Volunteers. Scum.’ The vampire shrugged, as if he spoke of roaches on the wall.

  ‘I’m surprised to see you here,’ remarked Asher, changing the subject, rubbing his wrist where the vampire’s grip, however fleeting, had driven the silver links hard into the flesh. ‘I thought all the vampires were at the Front.’

  ‘And so they be.’ Grippen seated himself again on the edge of the bed. Nearby in the darkness the bells of St Pancras chimed two, and even with the shutters and curtains tightly closed the night smelled of dank fog and the soot of trains. ‘The more fools they and bad cess to the lot of ’em, swillin’ like piggins at a trough. Those that’re masters of the cities they rule’ll find their error, when they come back to find some upstart’s moved in on Paris or Munich or Rome and set up housekeepin’ … I thought I’d stay here and watch my patch. And a damn good thing, with this clammy wight that should be in its grave prowlin’ about spreadin’ its contagion. Fine homecomin’ that’d be, to get back and find London eye-deep in the things. Has that sneaking Papist whoreson—’

  Meaning, Asher knew, Don Simon Ysidro.

  ‘—got anythin’ to say of it?’

  Asher shook his head, and the vampire’s eyes glinted, as if he guessed where Ysidro was and why.

  But Grippen kept his peace, and after a moment Asher said, ‘Find out if you can where this thing has been sighted or smelled, where rumor has placed it. If it’s staying by the canal it can come and go through fog, and through the sewer outfalls. You say you learned of it first six weeks ago – find if there’s any word of sightings before that. And keep your ear cocked for word that anyone else is seeking it, or that any who’ve seen it have disappeared.’

  ‘There’s enough disappear in this city without help of revenants, or them as seeks ’em. Christ, you think vampires could dwell anyplace where the poor was kept track of? Where’ll I find you?’

  ‘I’m going up to Oxford in the morning.’ The thought of the train journey made his bones creak like an overladen bridge, but if he were to stay in London for any time there were things he wanted to fetch, to say nothing of seeing Miranda. ‘I should be back Sunday, I’ll be staying—’

  He paused on the words, as Langham’s jowly face and watery, penetrant eyes flashed across his thoughts and he remembered what his old master Pritchard Crowell had taught him, about making things look like accidents. The wicked flee where none pursueth, Holy Writ (and Asher’s pious and long-deceased father) declared … and, frequently, Asher had found, the same could be said of the deranged. Yet it was a truism in the Department, particularly ‘abroad’, that in some circumstances it was better to flee and be thought deranged (or wicked) than to stop and be picked up by the opposition and shot as a spy.

  In other circumstances, of course, flight could be just what the opposition was waiting for you to do.

  ‘I’ll put an advert in The Times,’ he said. ‘You still go by the name of Graves?’

  The vampire’s smile widened unpleasantly. ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Mine’ll be under the name of Scragger.’

  ‘Dr Asher, M’am.’ Eamon Dermott laid aside the film plate and turned to Lydia as she came into the fluoroscope tent, still puzzling over Matron’s notes and the absence of Nurse Smith. The murmur of voices and clink of metal on china drifted faintly through the wall from the surgical tent, but held nothing of the frantic note of the ‘big push’ of yesterday and the day before. Down by the river, the Engineers were nearly finished clearing debris to start properly repairing the bridge. This evening, Lydia guessed, would be what Captain Calvert called ‘cleanup’.

  Men whose wounds could wait a little. Men who wouldn’t die from not being seen to at once.

  Outside, vehicles of all sorts were still leaving for the base hospital at Calais with wounded. Constant in the distance, the thunder of the guns continued.

  ‘These orders you had from Captain Palfrey Thursday night …’

  Oh, drat it! Lydia pushed her spectacles up more firmly onto the bridge of her nose and tried to look like Miranda did when questioned about the disappearance of sugar from the sugar bowl … Oh, that? They merely wanted to consult me about training in the use of the fluoroscope …

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did it have anythin’ to do with taking German prisoners away?’

  ‘German prisoners?’

  Dermott nodded. He was a stocky young man a few years Lydia’s junior, a Quaker who’d worked in his father’s photography studio and assisted the local doctor in his North Wales village. ‘Yes, M’am. I know ’tis not my place to be askin’ questions, but some of the prisoners— That is, I speak a bit of German. And one of the prisoners said this mornin’ as how both here and at the Front when they was captured, there was an officer separatin’ out some of the men, puttin’ ’em in a truck and away they’d go. He said he was captured with his cousin, and looked to see him here, but instead it was this same thing. A half-dozen men separated out from the rest and took away, M’am. And he asked me, was this usual, and how would he get in touch with his cousin again? He was a lawyer, see, this German, and had spent some time in England. He said it wasn’t anything the British would do.’

  ‘It’s certainly nothing I’ve ever heard about.’ Lydia frowned. ‘Not with the wounded, at any rate. Seriously wounded?’

  ‘No, M’am. Mostly walking wounded, he said. I did ask Captain Calvert about it, M’am, and he said he’d never heard of it neither, not here nor anywhere else, but if the officer had papers for it – which he did – it must be pukka. But it didn’t seem quite right to me still, and I thought about this Captain Palfrey that came the other night with papers for you, and you going off as you did … Well, there might be other things going on that even gentlemen like Captain Calvert aren’t told about. But I was only asking, and I wouldn’t wish to cause trouble.’

  ‘No,’ said Lydia thoughtfully. ‘No, it’s nothing I’ve heard of, Mr Dermott. Captain Palfrey was simply relaying a request for me to consult about training in the use of the fluoroscope.’

  The vampires Antonio and Basilio, driving their ambulance-wagon all along the trench lines? A shiver went through her: anger, helplessness, frustration. Had some other enterprising ghouls, braver than the rest, started a delivery service for the convenience of those Undead who didn’t want to risk getting that close to the Front?

  How easy it was, to prey on the helpless. The wounded, and prisoners …

  She closed her eyes for a moment, sickened. Every vampire in Europe is here. Feeding at will. Killing at will.

  And nobody notices.

  In the momentary silence, the crashing of the guns sounded very loud.

  And why would they notice?

  She looked at Dermott again. ‘Could I speak with this man?’

  EIGHT

  ‘Rhinehardt?’ Nurse Danvers checked the notebook
she carried, close-scribbled with hundreds of names dashed off in a hurry between cleaning, bandaging and the endless ancillary chores of making beds and ironing sheets. Lydia was burningly aware that she herself should be in the fluoroscope tent at that moment, sorting through films of the men waiting for surgery, instead of snooping around the prisoners’ compound …

  ‘A fair-haired man.’ Lydia repeated the description Dermott had given her. ‘Broken nose and shrapnel wounds in the face.’

  Across the small tent where the wounded prisoners had been kept under guard last night, Matron called, ‘Danvers—’

  Danvers peered at her notes, turned the book sideways, pale brows crumpling together.

  ‘Danvers—’

  ‘Just coming, M’am! Oh, aye, he’s been taken on to Calais. A whole lot of them went this afternoon.’

  BOTHER! ‘Thank you!’ As Lydia hurried from the prisoners’ tent – jammed with men last night, nearly vacant now save for a handful of the worst cases down at the far end – she cursed herself for not waking earlier. Yet she was aware she needed the sleep, and by what Dermott had said of this man Rhinehardt’s wounds, she doubted whether the man she sought would have been able to talk to her much earlier. A dozen finger-sized fragments of shell-casing and wood from the trench re-enforcements had been taken out of his face, throat and chest last night. That morning, Dermott had said, he’d still have been under morphia.

  To her left, by the road that led westward to Calais, a line of soldiers caught her eye, rifles ready, and before them, men in gray-green uniforms, seated on the ground. A big wagon, drawn by two exhausted-looking farm horses, was being loaded under guard.

  This afternoon, she said … but these things always take forever …

  Lydia caught up her skirts and nearly ran. ‘Excuse me, Sergeant Waller, but is there any chance I might speak to one of the prisoners? There are some details about his injury I didn’t get last night before he was operated on …’

  ‘Well …’ The sergeant frowned. A friendly soul, he had several times traded encomia with Lydia about the perfections of their respective children. ‘We’re not supposed to, M’am. But if it’s in the way of medical information …’

  Sure enough, Captain Rhinehardt lay on a stretcher, waiting for a place on the next wagon or (Lydia did a hasty calculation) probably the next but one …

  Now if I can just remember enough German …

  ‘Bitte …’ she said hesitantly, and the young man turned his head, blinking up at her with his one undamaged eye.

  ‘Gnädige Frau Doktor …’ His voice sounded like dry mud being scraped off tin.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ If he’s visited England …

  He was haggard with pain and still sleepy from the morphia, but answered her in that language. ‘Please forgive me for not rising, Madame …’

  ‘Good Heavens, Captain, it’s I who should be asking your forgiveness, for troubling you at such a time.’ She knelt at his side. ‘My assistant, Mr Dermott, said you were seeking your cousin, who had been … taken away from the other prisoners. Things were so confused for the last few days we’re still not certain what happened, but I will try to trace him. Was his name Rhinehardt also?’

  An infinitesimal nod. ‘Oberleutnant Gleb Rhinehardt.’

  ‘And he was also wounded?’

  ‘Not so badly as I, Madame. How do you say it? Walking wounded. A bullet had broken his arm.’

  Lydia flinched. Flanders soil, manured for croplands for centuries, was incredibly virulent in cuts. Even the smallest wounds went septic within hours.

  ‘And men were being taken away from the main group of the wounded?’ A glance along the line of the prisoners showed her at once that over a dozen of them were on their feet and able to help their comrades.

  ‘So they were, Madame. A French officer – a surgeon – with two British soldiers, and a nurse, or a nursing sister – dressed as you are, in light blue with a white apron. Gleb was sitting with me – he could have escaped, fled when the remainder of our unit did, but he was captured when he saw that I could not walk. I heard our officer calling to him to do so and he would not let go of my hand. At the dressing station he asked the sergeant in charge of guarding us, could he fetch me some water, and the sergeant permitted him to do so; there was a water butt nearby. Gleb walked over to it with his cup and this French officer saw him and pointed to him, the two soldiers stopped him and took him away with five others, in a big ambulance-wagon. A long chassis Sunbeam, I think it was. Gleb was a motor mechanic in Dresden, Madame. There was no vehicle in our lines that he did not point out to me and tell me about, inch by inch.’

  Something that might have been a smile twitched one corner of his mouth at the memory of his friend, then quickly faded.

  ‘I saw Gleb trying to talk the soldiers into letting him come back to me but they put all six of those men into the ambulance truck. He got one of the regular guards to bring his cup to me with the water. I asked this man, where had they been taken, and he said he didn’t know. No one I have spoken to knows anything about it. But one of the other prisoners here told me the same thing: that this French surgeon and his nurse took away ten men, only lightly wounded, from the dressing station where he, and they, had been held before coming here. The French surgeon looked at him – the man who told me this, a sergeant in the Uhlans – but said he was too badly injured and would not do.’

  Lydia frowned. This didn’t sound like anything Don Simon had told her, but of course considering the other vampires abroad along no man’s land, there was no way of telling. However, if this young man had been able to identify the make of an ambulance …

  ‘What time of day was this?’

  Rhinehardt shook his head. ‘The assault started just after sunrise. I was hit before we reached the English lines, and I was unconscious when Gleb found me. I know it was daylight when we were at the English dressing station – an hour, two hours, before dusk began to fall, perhaps? It is hard to judge, Madame …’

  ‘Of course,’ said Lydia quickly. Not vampires, anyway. Unless they’ve got the living working for them – like poor Captain Palfrey – but why on earth would they want the walking wounded? ‘Thank you,’ she added. ‘I’ll do everything I can to see if I can locate your friend …’

  ‘Danke,’ he whispered, and closed his eye.

  ‘Is there anything I can get for you? Do you need more morphia? Or cigarettes?’

  ‘Danke, Madame, but I am well for the moment.’

  Lydia started to rise, then knelt again and asked, ‘One more thing, if I may ask, sir. How did you know the French officer was a surgeon?’

  The young captain blinked up at her, his brow tightening as if the pain were returning, and his voice was a little slurred with weariness. ‘He was here,’ he said. ‘I saw him pass through the tent last night, before I was taken to surgery. I was afraid … He and his nurse were both there. I was afraid they had come to search for others.’

  ‘Was it Nurse Smith?’ asked Lydia. ‘Short and young, with black hair and a heart-shaped face, a …’ What was the German word for a widow’s peak? She sketched a downward-pointing arrowhead from her hairline, hoping he understood, and he nodded.

  ‘Yes, this was her,’ he murmured. ‘The one who loved the Irishman.’ His eye slipped closed again, and after a moment, he said, ‘If it would not be a trouble to you, Frau Doktor, yes, I think I would like some morphia, if I am to go in the ambulance.’

  Lydia stopped at the ward tent, and made arrangements with Matron for a syrette of morphine to be sent to Rhinehardt, on her way to the fluoroscope room. Subsequent inquiry however, that night in the mess tent and at intervals the following day, yielded nothing out of the ordinary about Colonel Lemoine. As far as anyone knew, Captain Calvert told her, Lemoine was with the Second French Army somewhere near Nesle. He’d only happened to be at Haut-le-Bois down the line when word came of the German attack. Further queries over bully beef and stale biscuits the following evening elicited
only the information that no Nurse Smith was assigned to the nearest clearing station south of Haut-le-Bois, at Orchies-le-Petit, at least as far as Captain Calvert knew.

  Before bed that night Lydia took a jar of Aunt Lavinnia’s marmalade to the stores hut, and ascertained that Storeman Pratt had never heard of her there, either – and due to his wide-flung network of graft and trade, Pratt knew pretty much everyone on the Front.

  ‘Tell you what, though, Mrs A—’ The rangy, curiously angular-looking storeman unscrewed the jar lid, and without breaking the bleached white wax of the seal inhaled the faint scent of oranges and sugar with the half-shut eyes of a connoisseur – ‘I’ll hold onto this ’ere jar, and ask about a bit, y’know? Tiny Clinkers, what looks after the motors at Headquarters, got a list of just about every woman on the Front, how old they are and if they’re pretty and will they or won’t they, if you’ll excuse my French, M’am. Pretty, you say?’

  ‘I think so. Black hair, widow’s peak, short, retroussé nose. What my nephews call a pocket Venus. I heard that young Irishman with the freckles call her Tuathla …’

  ‘That’s just one of them Irish fairy-tale names.’ Pratt shook his head at the entire heritage of Celtic civilization. ‘Readin’ too much Yeats an’ seein’ leprechauns, an’ handloom weavin’ their own skirts. Last couple years, every coal-’eaver’s daughter in Holborn been changing ’er name from Nancy and Mary to Eibhlhin and Nuala. I’ve never heard of a nurse looks like that in this part of the Front, much less one that’d be at Headquarters t’other night when the balloon went up. Home-made, this is—’ He gestured with the jar – ‘There’s men at Headquarters – them as don’t have relatives that could afford to stock up on sugar before the war – would trade me any amount of petrol and cigarettes for this, and I’ll see you get the worth of it, M’am.’