Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  Precisely the sort of thing, Jamie had told her, that he – Jamie – had done in his spying days, when he was setting up a network somewhere abroad: German shopkeepers or Syrian peasants or Russian factory workers, who would provide him with information about their country’s roads or local rebellions or how many of what supplies were being ordered. Who would cheerfully do so under the impression that they were actually helping their country rather than giving that information to enemies.

  If anything went wrong, it was the dupes who would be punished, not the spymaster.

  ‘And here we are!’ Captain Palfrey guided the long-nosed vehicle carefully off the main road again, and toward a cluster of tents. ‘According to my map, that should be Haut-le-Bois.’

  Lydia had been provided not only with papers requesting her presence ostensibly in Arras, several hours further down the Amiens road, but with a convincing story of why they were stopping in Haut-le-Bois (a faulty map and a can of petrol so badly watered that, once Palfrey had poured it into the gas tank, the staff-car barely ran at all). As this portion of the line was fairly quiet at the moment, while Palfrey and the dark-faced, cheerful Algerians of the motor pool drained the tank and replenished the jerrycans, Lydia had sufficient time to walk around the whole of the camp and ascertain that there were no German prisoners anywhere in it, walking wounded or otherwise.

  Colonel Lemoine invited her to join him for lunch in the officer’s mess, and entertained her – over appalling coffee – with accounts of his various postings in the farther corners of France’s overseas empire: Indochina, Algeria, West Africa and the ‘concessions’ in Shanghai and Peking.

  ‘We were there in October … three years ago?’ said Lydia. ‘Nineteen twelve …’

  ‘I had left by then,’ said the physician. ‘I came up the previous year during the uprising, and left when peace was restored to the city. It must have been in August or September of ’12.’

  ‘What was your impression of the hospitals?’ asked Lydia, to deflect the man’s attention from any possibility that she herself might know that at that time the little hive of revenants had been festering in the coal mines in the arid hills west of the city. She longed to mention Dr Krista Bauer – the German missionary whose account of finding the body of one such ‘hill demon’ had brought Jamie and herself (and Don Simon) to Peking – to see what Lemoine’s reaction would be.

  But caution closed her lips.

  Only when Lemoine had walked her out to the motor pool, where Palfrey waited for her with the car, did she glimpse, among the other vehicles, a long-bodied ambulance, clearly a converted truck, though even wearing her spectacles she couldn’t have told a Sunbeam from a governess cart. She let the colonel help her into the staff-car, and as he walked away turned casually to one of the several motor mechanics still loitering nearby and said, ‘Do you think Colonel Lemoine might be here when I come back this way? I had ever such a delightful time.’

  ‘Alas, Madame, that is very much the luck of the day,’ replied the man in his singsong French. Lydia had observed that the cook in the officer’s tent had been African, and recalled what Captain Calvert had commented some days ago: that the government of France was bringing in more and more men from its overseas empire, both in the Army and in the factories and farms, to free native Frenchmen to join the fight. ‘He comes and he goes, the colonel, and now that this section of the Front is quiet he is gone more than he is here. Myself—’ He tapped the side of his enormous nose and looked wise – ‘I think he is employed by the government on some other matter that he does not tell us. The other Big Ones—’ he nodded toward the officers’ tents – ‘make no comment when he disappears.’

  Lydia turned the matter over in her mind as the staff-car made its slow, lurching return journey north to Pont-Sainte-Félicité, with the rain falling again, and the desultory spatter of machine-gun fire like the clatter of Death’s bones in the gathering darkness.

  Everything innocuous and clear.

  Reaching the clearing station, she had to help Dermott clean up the fluoroscope room and develop films for nearly two hours before she was finally able to return to her tent.

  A letter lay on her pillow, addressed in James’s firm, jagged black writing. Three straggly hearts on the envelope were from Miranda. A fourth, more firmly drawn, could only have been from James.

  Her eyes filled with tears so it was a moment before she could read the small news of familiar things – of the sweet stillness of Oxford during vacation, of rain pattering on the Isis, of her maid Ellen’s shy suitor, Mr Hurley, from down the King’s Arms.

  She read these innocent tidings first, like a forbidden sweet, having seen immediately the dots beneath certain letters that told her of coded matters. Only when she’d pretended to herself for a few moments that the price of sugar was all anyone had to worry about did she get out a pencil and decipher what couldn’t be shown to the censors.

  One revenant at least in London.

  Asher took the train up to Oxford on Friday afternoon, the 19th of March. He ached in every joint when he woke, and by the time he reached Oxford his chest burned and his skull buzzed with fever. Ellen and Mrs Grimes put him to bed, and Mrs Grimes – in between making blancmange and gruel – told him in no uncertain terms that this was his own fault for gallivanting off to London when Dr Hoggett had told him to rest, and that if he came down with pneumonia again she was going to throw him out into the road to die and would tell Miss Lydia that he’d run off with a drover’s widow from Dorset.

  Dr Hoggett – one of Asher’s very small circle of intimate friends – when he came to see him on Saturday, added to this that he himself would then marry Mrs Asher, and it would serve Asher right. Hoggett returned Sunday evening, by which time Asher was well enough to beat him in two games (out of four) of chess after dinner: ‘But if I hear you speak again of going back up to London tomorrow I’m going to break out my grandfather’s phlebotomy knives and bleed you to keep you in bed.’

  So Asher remained in the old brick house on Holyrood Street, rereading Bleak House and Lydia’s letters and reflecting upon how ridiculous it was for a man approaching fifty, with gray in his hair and mustache, to feel moved to sing silly songs (‘Tho’ the road between us stretches/Many a weary mile/I forget that you’re not with me yet/When I think I see you smile …’) at the sight of his wife’s handwriting.

  He checked the Personals column of The Times daily, but saw no message from Dr Graves. The revenant was lying low.

  On Tuesday he was well enough to play hide-and-seek in the garden with Miranda – who was still of an age to believe that if she put her head in a cupboard in the potting shed that she was concealed – and to have tea with the Warden of his college. It was good to talk philosophy and ancient history with the old man, and to forget for a time what they both knew was happening in Europe: when Professor Spooner digressed indignantly on an undergraduate who had ‘missed every one of my mystery lectures and was actually caught fighting a liar in the quad!’. Asher, long used to his conversation, merely inquired as to why the young man in question had chosen so public a place to light a fire.

  Dr Spooner’s kindly and erudite hospitality was a welcome contrast to dinner Wednesday evening with Lydia’s Uncle Ambrose, the Dean of New College, who spent the evening complaining about the price of bread (Who does he think is growing crops, with twenty thousand men a day being slaughtered in Flanders?) and the influx of female servants at the colleges – ‘They’ve actually hired a woman as a cook in the college kitchens! A woman! And I must say the quality of the men they’re getting in these days is nearly as bad …’ remarks which immediately segued into a fussy diatribe about how more men – ‘decent, skilled, intelligent men’ – should be volunteering for the Army instead of staying home.

  ‘Honestly, between you and me, Asher, I’m ashamed to see who they’re getting into the Army these days! I don’t mind the Canadians so much, but the Australians …! And as for the idea of bringing in a lot of Ind
ian wogs and niggers from Africa … How on earth are we going to keep a proper attitude back in the colonies when this is all over, I ask you, when they’ve been encouraged to kill white men? And for God’s sake, when I see them fraternizing with white women here …!’ He shuddered. ‘And as for the officers …’

  What the hell did you think is going to happen? Where do you think those men are coming from? You spill them like sand into the wind – send them with rifles in their hands against German machine-gun nests – and you think there will always be more?

  His one attempt to divert the conversation onto Lydia resulted only in an angry speech about how hospitals were no place for a woman and how Asher should never have permitted Lydia to become a doctor in the first place. ‘What’s a woman know about medicine, anyway? All that suffragist nonsense … God made them women, and they should be content to be so!’

  He returned to the dining room after seeing Uncle Ambrose off, to find that Ellen – who took over a footman’s job of serving when they had company, now that Mick had joined the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry – just setting a cup of cocoa at his place: ‘I thought you might need it, sir. And this came for you this afternoon while you were resting.’

  It was a letter from Lydia.

  The letter was long, and merely glancing at it, he knew there was something greatly wrong. A moment’s mental calculation told him it had been sent before his own letter could have reached her, telling her of the revenant – or revenants – in London. But there were three times the usual number of little code-dots sprinkled over and around the text: some in ink, some pricked with a pin, some looking like flecks of the mud in which the Flanders trenches were drowning.

  He carried the letter and the cocoa into his study, put on his reading glasses, turned up the gas and began to decrypt with a cold weight on his heart.

  P-S-F – A (The simplest of the code: still at Pont-Sainte-Félicité, and well. Sometimes the coded portions of her letters consisted only of that)

  Other in N-M-L x volunteer nurse seeks vampires x says has proposition a partnership to offer x seen here CCS 16-3 x same nurse sought found body of Other, did ?? then destroyed it x alias Tuathla Smith no such person x German prisoner says Fr officer taking prisoners away not to HQ x Sunbeam ? ambulance no markings

  DSY here

  The following morning he took breakfast in the nursery. (‘Grown-ups don’t eat in the nursery, Papa!’ objected Miranda, though delighted with his presence; she was at this time much invested in everything being in its proper place. ‘It’s my house, best beloved, and I can eat wherever I want.’)

  He had spent yesterday morning in the garden with her, listening to her explanations of where fairies hid when it rained (which it had, on and off, for several days), and now produced Lydia’s letter, of which he read to her the plain text: expurgated of Lydia’s weariness, her anger at the war, and some of her more ironic comments, even those she’d deemed mild enough to go through the censors. Miranda, a grave little copper-haired princess, was aware of such things as the war and that Mummy was away taking care of the men who were fighting it. She asked for clarification of things like x-rays and trenches, and made sure in her own mind that Mummy wasn’t going to be hurt and would be back for Christmas.

  After that he kissed her goodbye and returned to the railway station, stopping at Blackwell’s for a large-scale Ordnance Survey map of London. He reached London shortly after noon, took rooms under the name of Edmund Hocking in Pembridge Place, Bayswater – he’d had papers made up for Hocking when last he’d been in Paris and the Department knew nothing of them – and put an advertisement in the papers asking for a meeting the following night with Mr Graves.

  The advert was signed ‘Scragger’ – the old name for the public hangman.

  Then he went to the British Museum, where at this time of day he was almost certain to find Osric Millward.

  Osric Millward was a vampire-hunter.

  Entering the vast, hushed space of the Reading Room’s dome, Asher spotted him without trouble. He sat at his usual place at the end of one of the long desks, amid a welter of catalogs, manuscripts and ancient black-letter books on the occult: a tall, thin man whose raven hair was shot now with silver and whose dark eyes peered at the pages before him like those of an Inquisitor probing a heretic’s lies.

  When Asher had first met him, back in the eighties, Millward already had a reputation of being something of a crackpot, a profound believer in the beings whom Asher at that time had regarded as mere creations of folklore, like broom-riding witches and Miranda’s fairies at the bottom of the garden. By the time Asher had returned from his first excursion ‘abroad’ on the business of the Department, Millward’s study and belief had turned to obsession. A respected scholar of proto-Judaic Middle Eastern religious texts, Millward had gradually ceased to publish, and his lectures at King’s College were more and more frequently cancelled because he could not be found. He’d be off on unexplained trips to London or Cornwall or Edinburgh, following up clues about vampire nests or suspected vampire kills. Eventually he lost his stipend from King’s. In despair, his wife had returned to the home of her parents.

  Watching him from the Reading Room’s doorway, Asher reflected that Millward was everything that he himself dreaded to become. ‘To hunt us would be to hunt smoke,’ Don Simon Ysidro had said to him once. ‘You could hunt us down eventually, were you willing to put the time into it, to give your soul to it, to become obsessed, as all vampire-hunters must be obsessed with their prey … Are you willing to give it years?’

  I should have been willing, Asher thought. And I wasn’t.

  In the eight years since that night in Harley Street, Ysidro, and Grippen, and those fledglings that Grippen had begotten, had killed who knew how many men and women, the poor whom no one would miss or avenge. Asher didn’t know whether, in that eight years, if he’d given his heart and his time and all of his attention to hunting vampires – instead of the hours of his mortal happiness with Lydia and Miranda, with the students he guided and the research into languages that gave him such joy – whether he’d have been able to find and destroy them or not.

  And if he had, he reflected despairingly, there would only have been more.

  ‘We have what you do not have,’ Ysidro had said. ‘We have time.’

  Looking at that shabby, graying figure, with his threadbare jacket and his unshined shoes, Asher could not keep the thought from his mind: At least he has tried to rid the world of evil. While I, like the vampires, have traded the lives of all those unavenged innocents in the London slums for the peace and the joy and the happiness of these past eight years. Knowing they existed, and turning my face away.

  So far as Asher knew, Millward had never destroyed a single vampire.

  As Asher circled the space between the shelves and the desks a young man emerged from the shelves carrying a couple of very fat, yellowing volumes that Asher recognized as the 1867 reprints of a Georgian collection of Scots witchcraft lore: there was mention in them, he recalled, of the ‘Cauld Lad’ that used to walk Graykirk Close in Edinburgh, whom it was considered death to meet. The young man, though shabbily dressed, wore a blue-, brown-and-red school tie from Winchester, much faded, and he bent over Millward with the same fanatic eagerness that the vampire-hunter himself had shown towards his books. His face glowed when Millward showed him something in the pages, and he dove away into the shelves again with the air of Sir Percival on the track of the Grail.

  When he was out of earshot Asher approached the desk. ‘Millward?’

  The scholar turned in his chair. At the sight of Asher his eyes widened for a moment – their most recent meeting had involved Millward breaking Asher’s ankle with a rifle butt and leaving him as bait for a vampire in the buried crypt of a Roman temple under Covent Garden – and then slitted in suspicion.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Information.’ Beneath Millward’s frayed shirt-cuff Asher could see the other man also wore chains o
f silver around his wrists. ‘What do you know about the Regent’s Canal vampire?’

  ‘Have you seen it?’ Millward seized his sleeve, as if afraid that being questioned, Asher might run away.

  ‘I’ve smelt it. And I saw the man it killed in Chalton Street, on the night of the sixteenth. I’m trying to track its appearances, to find where it’s centered. And most specifically, who’s protecting it.’

  TEN

  Millward had a room in Bethnal Green, near the goods yard. The threadbare curtains on its single window were dingy with soot and even the dried ropes of star-like white garlic blossoms that festooned them couldn’t counteract either the stink of the gasworks nearby, nor the smell of mildew that took Asher by the throat.

  Cardboard boxes stacked every wall head-high, protruded from beneath the bed and ranged under the cheap deal table. A hob the size of a shoebox accommodated a kettle, and tins of crackers shared the shelf over the table with yet more, smaller, cardboard boxes; the table itself was stacked with newspapers, as was one of the room’s two wooden chairs. Millward moved the papers aside onto the bed, poured water from the jar by the door into the kettle, and fetched a handful of newspaper from what was evidently the discard box to kindle beneath a couple of knobs of coal. ‘My true work’s in the library,’ he said as he scratched a lucifer match on the box. ‘This place is no more than a pied-à-terre, so to speak.’

  His breezy tone made it sound as if he still had his oak-lined study back at King’s College, and the comfortable little house on Star Street that he’d shared with his long-suffering wife. Asher said nothing. He’d inhabited far worse, for months at a time, in the course of what the Department called ‘cover’. But it had always been with the knowledge that his own rooms at New College were his true home.

  To hunt us is to hunt smoke … to become obsessed, as all vampire hunters must be obsessed …