Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Thank you.’ Lydia put as much warmth as she could into her voice, though she wanted to stamp her foot at him. The petrol and cigarettes were of course being stolen from motor pools that were to take the wounded to hospital, and the slender rations of comfort that were supposedly being sent to the men. But her mother, and the fearsome Nanna who had reigned over the nursery in her childhood, had drilled her in the art of sounding friendly no matter what she thought or actually felt, and this training served her in good stead now. As she was turning to leave a thought came to her, and she turned back. ‘And does Corporal Clinkers have a list of all motorcars on this portion of the Front?’

  ‘Lor’ bless you, M’am, we all of us got those. What might you be interested in?’

  She had the impression that if she’d pulled thirty pounds from her pocket he’d have sold her Commander-in-Chief Sir John French’s personal vehicle.

  ‘A long-chassis Sunbeam lorry ambulance. Can you find who has them, and where?’

  ‘Nuthin’ simpler, M’am. Just gi’ me ’arf a day.’

  The warmth in her voice was genuine when she said again, ‘Thank you.’ Technically she supposed that getting information from – and fraternizing willingly with – Storeman Pratt was probably less dreadful than getting information from vampires … Unless you counted Pratt as a vampire himself.

  ‘Am I on this Corporal Clinkers’ list?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely, Mrs A.’ Pratt saluted her. ‘Right up there with Matron and seventy-eight percent of the nuns at Calais. Under ‘D’, for Don’t Waste Your Time On It, Boy-O.’ He screwed the jar shut, and stashed it under the counter. ‘And if you should ’appen to be sent any other little thing you might want to spare – or if there’s anythin’ you’ll be wantin’ in the way of sweets or smokes or silk stockin’s …’

  ‘You are a disgrace.’ Lydia did her best to sound severe but couldn’t keep from laughing, and his own grin widened.

  ‘I do me best, M’am.’

  ‘No luck, Mistress?’

  Without a sound, Don Simon Ysidro had materialized at her side.

  The night was now pitch-dark, the tent-canvas once again dimly aglow with lanterns, though owing to a failed delivery (or perhaps, Lydia speculated darkly, theft by Storeman Pratt and his spiritual kin) there were fewer of these than there had been five nights ago. Someone had tried to rig barriers of twine and fragments of bandage, to mark the new shell-holes, and the trees blown out of the ground by the German bombardment now lay strewn about the camp, half sawn-up to fuel the extra furnace that was being constructed (In the bearers’ abundant spare time!) for the amputated limbs. The air was gritty with smoke, and reeked of spoiling meat.

  The smell of someone’s cigarette, momentary in the darkness. In one of the tents, someone with a beautiful Welsh tenor was singing ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, against a thready harmonica and a soft chorus of bass.

  Jamie …

  She pushed the thought of her husband aside.

  Miranda …

  ‘You heard all that?’ She nodded back in the direction of the stores hut.

  ‘I know you have been seeking word of this woman we saw in the trenches, as I have been, among those who hunt the night. So far as I have learned, these revenants do not wander at large in the German lines. Nor yet have any seen any such thing in the wasted lands between the lines, nor wandering in the abandoned trenches on either side.’

  ‘They might have.’ Lydia removed her spectacles, and polished them with her handkerchief. Her head ached, from an afternoon of concentration in both the x-ray room and the surgical tent. ‘If a man had taken a head wound, and was wandering about in confusion; or a wounded man in no man’s land trying to make his way back to the lines …’

  ‘We are cowards at heart,’ said Don Simon. ‘Seldom do we actually venture into no man’s land. Aside from the issue of shelling, too many men on both sides use cocaine to stay awake at their posts, and there is greater chance that we will be seen and shot at. If any saw such a man, either in the wasteland or in a bombed-out trench, we – my kindred and I – would take him, for such men seldom reach safety in any case. None that I know of have said to me – nor to any to whom I have spoken – “I saw a man whom I thought merely wounded, and when I went to take him, found he was such a creature instead.” Personally,’ he added, tilting his head in a gesture curiously mantis-like, ‘I find this very odd.’

  ‘That means there aren’t a great many of the Others about—’

  ‘Yet.’

  ‘Yet.’ Lydia resumed her spectacles and frowned. ‘How are they created, Don Simon? I mean, the ones Jamie told me about, in Prague …’

  ‘I know not, Mistress. Nor does the Master of Prague … Who is, I think, vexed and distressed at the news that one such creature has unquestionably appeared here. With all of no man’s land a labyrinth of old trenches and buried dugouts and sapper’s tunnels, ’twere too easy for these Others to move about. They can cover themselves from the awareness of the Undead, and find us where we sleep, in the crypts and cellars of ruined churches and manors, devouring us in our coffins. And if, like the revenants of Prague and Peking, those breeding here can control rats, the situation is more dangerous still.’

  Lydia flinched in disgust. In the mines northwest of Peking she had seen men swarmed by rats, when they’d attempted to invade the yao-kuei hive there.

  ‘As I once told James – and as it is also written in the Book of the Kindred of Darkness – the Others first appeared in Prague just after the Great Plague, five and a half centuries ago. But whether it is a virus that transforms their flesh – or if such virus is a mutation, as de Vries calls such changes, of the virus that transforms the flesh of a man into that of a vampire – if that be a virus – I know no more than do the messenger dogs in their kennels.’

  ‘Has any vampire ever … ever killed one? A revenant, I mean. And not just trying to get away from it.’

  ‘Never that I have heard of. Would you drink the blood of such a thing, knowing that to mix its blood with your own might pass its condition along to yourself? How much less would one try to drink its life, the energies of its death? The mere thought appalls.’ He put his hand beneath her elbow, and helped her across rough and squishy debris around a shell-crater. It had rained that day, and cloud still veiled the moon.

  ‘But you drink the blood of syphilitics, and consumptives, and drug-takers,’ pointed out Lydia, a little diffidently. ‘The blood and … and the life …’ She glanced across at him, wondering at the same time why on earth she felt she needed to be tactful: He’s certainly aware of what he is …

  ‘’Tis not the same.’

  Lydia stumbled on a flooded wagon-rut, and became aware that they were leaving the tents and huts behind them. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To meet Antonio and Basilio once more. They have seen this ambulance-truck with the walking wounded, and know now where it went.’

  Antonio Pentangeli and Basilio Occhipinti were, as before, in a dugout in what had been a German reserve trench before the English had retaken Pont-Sainte-Félicité, playing picquet – an antique card-game much favored among the older vampires – at a broken-down table to the music of a gramophone with a cracked horn. A couple of candles burned on shelves – Lydia saw the lights flare up as she and Don Simon came around the last corner of the revetment – and, of all things, a small pot of tea sat keeping warm on the makeshift stove: ‘’Tis a cold night, bella donna.’ Antonio poured some out for her into a teacup that had to have been looted from the village. ‘You seek a long-chassis Sunbeam ambulance with a French officer, who visits the dressing stations in search of the walking wounded?’ He brought up a chair for her, cushioned with a folded blanket.

  He was dressed, Lydia observed, in an officer’s uniform as before; the beautiful Basilio was costumed as a driver, with the armband of the Red Cross. She tried not to think of Uncle Richard’s footmen – Charles and William – bleeding in some shell-hole watching the approa
ch of their ambulance-wagon with hope.

  ‘Have you seen him?’

  ‘Twice. Most recently the night before last, when all the German prisoners were brought from their attack. But again before that, three weeks ago, just after the fighting at Neuve Chapelle. This same officer, with the brow of Saturn and the little black mustache—’

  ‘Colonel Lemoine,’ said Lydia at once. ‘That’s what the German prisoners said, too.’

  ‘I know not.’ Antonio shook his head. ‘But he had papers which he showed to the guards. He selected from among the prisoners, men not badly hurt. I am not, you understand, much concerned about such men, nor do I understand how prisoners are dealt with in this war. In my day the captains simply ransomed them back to one another, if they were gentlemen, or killed them if they were very angry, or hadn’t enough food, or if the prisoners were Protestants.’ He shrugged. ‘And I thought perhaps this was an ordinary thing.’

  ‘It may be.’ Lydia propped her spectacles, and sipped the tea. Basilio offered her sugar in a Limoges dish, and, of all things, fresh milk. ‘But I’ve never heard of such procedure. There are several very queer things happening hereabouts: between the revenant we saw, and this nurse whose name isn’t Smith offering deals to the Undead … and people disappearing whom everyone is too busy and too tired to look for. You told me once—’ she looked back at Don Simon, who had resumed his seat, hands folded, on a sort of earthen bench that had once been a bunk, his yellow eyes narrowed – ‘that the Undead feed primarily on the poor: on people whom no one will trace and no one cares about. Like that song in The Mikado, about, “They’ll none of them be missed”. And that sounds like a description of those poor prisoners. As if someone wants the living – in reasonably good shape – rather than the dying.’

  ‘Doing in fact with human beings,’ remarked Don Simon, ‘what the despicable Storeman Pratt does with petrol and cigarettes and morphia, I daresay. As war is waged now, things get mixed up and lost and mislaid all the time, and nobody thinks a thing of it. Where is this Lemoine posted, know you, lady?’

  ‘Nesle, Captain Calvert says. But he’s often in the camp at Haut-le-Bois.’

  ‘I think a journey thence might profit us all. I shall arrange for the proper papers to be made out to release you from your duties for a time, and the good Captain Palfrey will call for you in the morning.’

  NINE

  The casualty clearing station at Haut-le-Bois lay some twenty miles south of Pont-Sainte-Félicité, where an outcrop of the Artois Hills made a long promontory above the farm country around it. In Sussex it would have been considered ‘a bit of a rise’, but in Flanders it amounted to ‘heights.’ Rain began just before sunup, and ‘Colonel Simon’s’ staff-car jolted cautiously over roads deeply rutted by military traffic and cratered with shell-holes. ‘It reminds me of the fen country, when the floods are out,’ said Captain Palfrey, with affection rather than annoyance in his voice which made Lydia inquire, ‘Are you from there?’

  Rain streamed off the brim of his hat as he looked up – he’d climbed from the car to mend their second puncture of the trip. His smile alone answered her query. ‘Can you tell?’

  ‘Well, my husband probably could spot you from the way you pronounce your words – he’s an expert at that. But my uncle always says that the only people who really love the fens are those who’re born there.’

  The young man lifted one hand, ruefully owning his guilt. ‘Wisbach. Actually Deepmere, about ten miles from Wisbach; my grandfather’s place, really, but I was born there. My grandfather is Viscount Deepmere.’

  Lydia said, ‘Good Heavens!’ having danced in her brief debutant days with several young men who had probably been Palfrey’s older brothers or cousins – ‘good society’ in England being actually rather small. (And the ‘good society’ admissible to parties in the home of her own grandfather, Viscount Halfdene, smaller yet.)

  As they resumed their careful progress, Lydia learned from him, by degrees, the difficult but not surprising tale of the younger son of a younger son, raised on the fringes of ‘good society’ with no prospects and no greater ambition than to return to Norfolk and raise cattle, horses and sugar beets – a niche already solidly occupied by his elder cousins. ‘And Father was in the Twenty-Fourth Bengal Cavalry, so it was the Done Thing that I’d follow in his footsteps. Grandmother put up the money for me to get into the Guards rather than an India regiment. Father was her favorite. When he died Grandmother got it into her head that India’s a horribly unhealthy climate – he and Mother both died of cholera – and wouldn’t hear of me going there. It’s where he met Colonel Simon,’ he added, a little hesitantly, and a frown puckered his brow. ‘At least I think …’

  ‘Tell me about Colonel Simon.’

  ‘Well, a great deal about him falls under the Official Secrets Act, you know,’ Palfrey warned her. Shy pride glimmered in his blue eyes, and a trace of hero worship. ‘But I think – I know – my father knew him in India. I remember his name in letters father wrote me …’

  Or he’s put it into one of your dreams that you remember …

  ‘Father died when I was just six, but … I remember the name. Mother, too.’ He sounded uncertain, as if sorting clear memories from things he felt he knew from somewhere without being able to quote specifics.

  ‘Wouldn’t he be a much older man,’ probed Lydia, ‘if he knew your father?’

  ‘He is … older than he looks, he says. But he must have known Father, because he knew my name when he met me. And he spoke of Father like one who knew him.’

  Or like one who has practiced the art of ‘reading’ people and telling them what they want to hear, for three hundred and fifty years …

  ‘He introduced himself to me at the Guards’ Club, and said he had a proposition for me, if I were willing to do it. A few nights later we met, very late, and I was interviewed by the chief of his Department—’

  ‘And where was that?’ asked Lydia. ‘What Department?’

  ‘The Foreign Office.’ Palfrey frowned, concentrating on maneuvering the staff-car off the bombed-out road and around an enormous morass of shell-holes. This was an area which had been retaken, Lydia guessed, fairly recently – the whole length of the drive (it was now mid-morning) the booming of the guns sounded very close, and the crackle of rifle-fire. Two or three miles off, Lydia calculated. What had once been farmland lay all around them in a waste of shell-pitted mud, crisscrossed with abandoned trenches and entanglements of barbed wire still bright and sharp in the rain. Once the road had brought them close enough to the reserve trenches that Lydia could see the men piling sandbags along the lip of the cut, and the smoke that rose from the cooking-fires. Twice lines of men passed them, marching in from St-Omer. Stoic faces, empty and sunk into their own thoughts. Supply-wagons followed the men, mules slipping and straining against the sheer weight of the gray mud. Mostly the land was empty, desolate under the pattering rain.

  ‘Somewhere in Whitehall,’ the young captain continued, the uncertainty in his voice telling its own tale. ‘It was hideously late at night, as I said – I’d dozed off in my digs waiting for Colonel Simon to call for me. When I got back it was nearly morning and I fell straight to sleep when I came in, and woke up still dressed in my chair. And then, what with the black-out and Colonel Simon’s caution about letting me see where we were, I’m not sure I could find the place by daylight anyway.’ His eyes sparkled boyishly at being part of such a hush-hush operation. ‘I know the officer I spoke to told me the official name of the Department, but I’ve forgotten it. Mostly we just call it the Department.’

  As Jamie does …

  Only Jamie’s Department is REAL. Not something Don Simon caused this poor young man to dream about …

  Palfrey chuckled. ‘It’s all rather like a blood-and-thunder novel, really. My pay just magically appears in my bank account, so I think they must deposit it in cash. But the officer told me, at Whitehall that night, that what Colonel Simon is doing in France is of vit
al importance to the War. Without his work – and of course I have not the slightest idea what it actually is – our armies here might very well be overrun and wiped out by summer. Colonel Simon has a network of agents in France, and some in Germany. Mostly what he needs – what he needs me for – is as a bodyguard, a driver, a man to make arrangements for things when he’s called elsewhere. And I’ve tried to give satisfaction,’ he added shyly. ‘I realize I’m a complete fool about the brainy stuff – I was forever being caned at Harrow for not being able to learn Latin or history or how many x’s you need to make a y – but I can get things done. That’s done it,’ he added, pleased with himself, and nudged the car back up onto the crazy road again. ‘I’d feel a complete fool if we went through all that to avoid a puddle a few inches deep, but on the other hand, those craters could have been deeper than the top of this car and quicksand at the bottom, you know, and then where’d we be?’

  ‘And your grandmother wasn’t horrified that you quit the Guards?’

  ‘Well, she was,’ admitted Captain Palfrey. ‘I told her a little about Colonel Simon – though he’d warned me not to speak of his having known Father. She’s the only one I’ve told … she and Aemilia, of course.’

  ‘Aemilia?’

  ‘Aemilia Bellingham.’ His fair-skinned face actually blushed. ‘We hope – that is … I hope we’re to be married when the war ends.’

  Lydia closed her gloved hands, and looked out across the sodden wasteland toward the reserve trenches. Don Simon had come here, she thought, to watch over her; and because of the terrible fragility of vampire flesh, he had needed a living servant. Like a ‘shabbas goy’, Jamie had once said: the Gentile servant whom pious Jews would hire to open windows or start kitchen fires on the Sabbath, so that their own piety would remain unblemished. She wanted to shout at this young man, Have you ever seen him by daylight? He’s a vampire, Undead … he lives on the blood and the energies of the dying …

  Only he wouldn’t believe her. He’s warned me that all kinds of the most ridiculous stories are circulated about him … a combination of Count Dracula and Bluebeard …