Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  After four years, men of one’s year or one’s staircase or one’s college were strangers no more. His Oxford connections had certainly been as much of a factor in his employment in the Foreign Office as had been his fluency in Czech and Persian.

  And by marrying the granddaughter of a viscount, he had quadrupled the number of people to whom he could acquire an introduction on the grounds of casual proximity. Lord Halfdene’s four surviving sisters might look down their elegant noses at the mere New College lecturer their beautiful niece had married, but when push came to shove, one of them at least could be counted on to know the person whom Asher sought to meet.

  So it had proved in his quest to locate – and speak to – the Comte de Beaucailles, whose property in the Département du Nord had included the old convent of Cuvé Sainte-Bride. Once Josetta’s suffragette friend in the government purchasing office had found mention of the money Britain had lent to the French to refurbish the place as a research laboratory – after the French Army had acquired it in November – it had been easy to identify the former owner. Lydia’s Aunt Lavinnia, though she habitually referred to Asher as ‘that person poor Lydia married’, wasn’t immune to being taken out for a criminally expensive tea at the Northumberland (Lydia’s income deriving from American bonds and real estate in four major cities, and not farmland). In the course of consuming two cups of China tea and a single cucumber sandwich, Aunt Lavinnia had divulged the fact that the Comte de Beaucailles had come to England (as Asher had suspected: who in their right mind would remain in Flanders, or even in a Paris shorn of sugar, coffee and entertainment?) and was residing, with his family, as the guest of Lord Whitsedge at Whitsedge Court.

  Lydia’s Aunt Harriet, while deploring her niece’s education, current occupation and husband (her own was the younger son of a duke, and a well-regarded barrister), knew everyone in Debrett’s and was sufficiently good-natured as to write to Lord Whitsedge (whose Aunt Claire had married a Halfdene cousin) on Asher’s behalf (though she referred to him in the course of a single paragraph as Ashley, Ashford and Ashden). And Lydia’s Aunt Faith, who even now shed tears over the way in which her dear sister’s child had ‘thrown herself away’ after being ‘the most beautiful debutante of her year’ (Lydia still had nightmares about her single ‘season’), was so ecstatic at the idea of a weekend away from acting as companion to Aunt Louise down at Halfdene Hall that she had even agreed to accompany Asher (and Aunt Louise’s official companion, Mrs Flasket) down to Whitsedge Court and introduce her plebeian nephew-in-law to Lord Whitsedge and his guests.

  The Comte de Beaucailles proved to be an elderly, fragile man who took Asher to his bosom on the grounds of the perfection of his French. It was a joy, he said, to listen to after the tomcat squawking of ‘ces Anglais’, the gesture of his yellow-gloved hand dismissing the hosts without whose hospitality he would have been living on cabbage soup in Hoxton. He nursed a profound hatred of Germany and all Germans, as if the Battle of Sedan (in which he had fought) had been yesterday instead of forty-five years previously, and could still be reduced to shouting outrage over the Dreyfus Case. But he recalled with tender vividness the France of his childhood, the France of the days of empire, and every detail of the convent which had stood only miles from the family chateau.

  ‘The good sisters were still at Sainte-Bride when I was a boy,’ he reminisced, to Asher’s question after dinner. ‘It was much larger in the days before the Revolution – quite a substantial foundation – but my cousins and I were always welcome there. My great-grandfather provided the money for a new chapel in 1773, and many of our aunts and great-aunts had taken the veil there. Its cellars were famous—’ He chuckled softly, and made an ironic little half-salute with Lord Whitsedge’s indifferent sherry – ‘and there had been a healing well there, oh, centuries ago. Standing as it does on a ridge of hills, there is a veritable labyrinth of catacombs beneath it, far exceeding the present size of the convent.’

  The remaining servants had pulled shut the draperies of slightly faded mustard velvet over the Regency drawing room’s long windows. One of Lord Whitsedge’s other guests was playing the piano, a Mozart dance whose effervescent serenity echoed bittersweet in the quiet room. Whitsedge Court was an old-fashioned country seat in which gas had never been installed, let alone electricity; Lady Whitsedge’s booming voice could be heard from the card table, bemoaning the absence of the footmen, and the butler’s replacement by his venerable and stone-deaf predecessor. In London Asher had been conscious of the number of women hurrying along the sidewalks at the close of factories and shops, and of the hoary heads of bus conductors and ticket clerks on the Underground. Here in the depth of Essex, with the cold spring wind blowing spits of rain from the Channel, the sense of loss, of men missing who would never return, was more poignant, despite Her Ladyship’s evident belief that the entire war had been concocted by God to inconvenience her daughter’s coming-out.

  ‘Honestly, if the fighting goes on for another six months – and what those generals are thinking, I can’t imagine – Alice will be nineteen. Nineteen! I could flay Mother for talking me into delaying her debut last spring …’

  ‘When was the convent abandoned?’ Asher inquired.

  ‘Oh, heavens, when I was ten or eleven, I think.’ The Comte seemed to bask in the belief that the most casual of acquaintances found his childhood in the long-vanished France of Empire as fascinating as he did himself. ‘Yes, because that year I was enrolled in the Lycée Notre-Dame in Lille—’

  ‘I remember there was a sort of ruin across the field from my father’s rectory,’ reminisced Asher mendaciously. (He’d been packed off to school in Scotland at the age of seven and his father hadn’t been a believer in bringing young James home for those few summers before his own death in 1874.) ‘I have no idea what the place was – monastery or a small castle or just an ancient inn – but my sister and I found a way into it from the crypt of a sort of little chapel in what had been its grounds …’

  The old nobleman laughed. ‘Nothing nearly so romantic, I’m afraid! The convent at Cuvé Sainte-Bride had in a manner of speaking died by inches, so there was a huge zone of deserted farms, chapels, bathhouses and storage-buildings all round the cloister, even in the days when the good sisters were still in occupation. My cousins and I played hide-and-seek – risking our lives, I’m sure, for some of those old crypts were none too stable, and the roofs were always falling in! – in the unused portions, so as not to disturb the nuns. But after they were removed we ran about them underground like wild Indians.’

  The old man’s eyes sparkled at the recollection, and he leaned forward, decades melting from his lined face. ‘After my cousin Etienne was caught in a cave-in and nearly drowned – because, of course, the deeper crypts flooded in the wintertimes – my grandfather had most of the outbuildings torn down and the ways into the crypt sealed. But still we’d get in. There was a well by one of the old barns, on the hillside behind the convent, and if one of your friends would lower you by bucket to just above the level of the water, there was a little door leading into what I think used to be a drain from the old baths … Ah, the smell of that tunnel, all green and damp! And our girl cousins used to stand at the top and cry because none of us boys would let them go down with us. And one of the young men of the district, Henri Clerc his name was, unblocked the entrance that led into what had been the nuns’ old wine cellar, and would use the place to tryst with the village girls …’

  A young footman, walking carefully on a wood-and-metal leg encased in the livery’s old-fashioned silk stockings, brought them a tray of drinkables and a soda siphon. At the other end of the too-long, lamp-lit room Aunt Faith meekly nodded while Lady Whitsedge continued her monologue on the shortcomings of maids who would quit and go to work in factories, and Mrs Flasket listened in intelligent silence to Lord Whitsedge’s account of his spaniel bitch’s latest confinement.

  Asher kept the old Comte talking, and, when he finally retired to his small chamber
(which looked down on an inner courtyard of the rambling old Court: Aunt Faith, though regarded throughout her family as little better than a paid companion to Aunt Louise, still rated a room in the main part of the house), was able to put together a rough description of five different ways to enter the crypts of Cuvé Sainte-Bride undetected. He spent the remainder of the night encoding a letter to Lydia, which ended with a further admonition not to investigate anything herself. If Don Simon is there, and willing, he is far more likely to enter and leave in safety than you are. I will put in train arrangements to come there myself to follow up on his reconnaissance.

  The thought of going to Colonel Stewart for the necessary papers – and of the concessions he’d have to make to get himself assigned to that area of Flanders – made him groan, not to speak of the hazards of crossing the submarine-haunted Channel and making his way from Calais to Pont-Sainte-Félicité and Haut-le-Bois. Then there was the issue of leaving his ill-assorted ‘network’ of information-gatherers on their own in London, seeking for word of this second revenant, and for the Irish gunrunner Teague. I’ll have to brief Grippen, he thought, without telling him who’s collecting the information. Josetta and Millward could communicate with the master vampire via newspaper. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d run a network in which no member was aware of the identities of the others.

  And God knows what Grippen will do with the information when he gets it.

  Damn. He leaned back in the leather armchair beside the tiny grate, and drew his dressing-gown – and a paisley cashmere shawl – tightly around his shoulders. Despite the fire, the room was freezing cold and there was no coal left in the scuttle: guest rooms at Whitsedge Court were not supplied with fuel to burn all night. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed a tiny silver reminder that it was quarter to three. Around him the house was silent, with the darkness of centuries.

  For eight years I’ve tried to keep the governments of both sides from employing vampires. He closed his eyes. And I might as well have saved myself the trouble, since once the fighting started, both sides are giving the vampires, gratis, the only thing they’d have accepted as payment.

  And after swearing to kill them I’m working on their side.

  He thought about going back to Oxford. Or taking Lydia and Miranda and emigrating to America, which was quite sensibly keeping out of the war while selling ammunition and supplies to both sides. But he knew there was no question of doing so. If one side or the other – Or both, God help us! – found a way to control the revenants, to use them as soldiers, God alone knew where that would end.

  Not well.

  He made a move to rise to compose a note to be placed in the Personals column to Grippen for a meeting – and the next thing he knew it was broad daylight and a maid was coming quietly into the room to open the curtains.

  FOURTEEN

  ‘We who hunt the night have long memories.’ Don Simon Ysidro’s gloved fingers, grasping Lydia’s, were cold as they steadied her over the broken ground; cold as the iron of the unlit bull’s-eye lantern she bore. The moon, four days past full, hid behind its bank of clouds, though the rain had stopped half an hour ago. The darkness smelled of wet trees and farmland. Somewhere an owl hooted. ‘Yet being human, we are no more comfortable looking back on the road we have travelled than are other men. Among us it is held to be a sign of weakness and advancing age. Most look neither forward nor back.’

  They had left the car with Captain Palfrey, in blackness so thick Lydia could only form the vaguest ideas where she might be. Having been taken to vampire lairs before, she had half-expected to be blindfolded – or at least have her glasses taken away, which would have amounted to the same thing – and had formed her protest ready: What if something happens to you and I’m left out all alone in the dark?

  But the cloud-smothered blackness of the night had made any sort of blindfold supererogatory. Don Simon had taken the wheel (‘He’s a marvel, isn’t he?’ had enthused Captain Palfrey, in the back seat beside her), and in addition to driving the staff-car, Lydia suspected her guardian of using his mental influence on both her and her living companion in the back seat. Even now, barely sixty feet from the car, she found she had only the dimmest recollection of the drive: of how long it had been, or of any feature of sound or smell, or of the number of turnings or the condition of the road surface, that might have identified where they were. She remembered chatting with Captain Palfrey, but couldn’t call to mind a single word. Had he been likewise beglamored? she wondered. And if so, was he even aware of it?

  Damn Simon …

  ‘Graf Aloyïs Szgedny, like the Lady Francesca, became vampire in the days of the great Wars of Religion,’ the vampire’s whispering voice continued, as they walked on through what smelled, and felt, like woods. ‘The master who made him – Odo Magnus Matilorum – was a very old vampire, who recalled clearly when first the revenants were seen in the days when plague made its terrible harvest through Christendom. The city of Prague was not hit so hard as other regions, yet it is a pious lie to say that ’twas spared through a vision of the Christ Child. Szgedny does not speak of this matter often. Indeed I am surprised that he has consented to do so to you. Remember when you speak to him that he is a very great nobleman, of ancient lineage, long used to deference.’

  Wet leaves rustled in the stirring of breeze, and droplets pattered on Lydia’s cloak and hair. She had the dim impression of looming walls ahead, and her feet gritted on what felt like gravel. Then her thought slipped away, to the memory – tiny and perfect, like something in those miniature Austrian snow globes – of walking up to the garden door of her house in Holyrood Street in Oxford, with her shoes crunching on the gravel of the path and James and Miranda standing in the lighted doorway …

  She found herself, with a sensation of waking up, in a damp-smelling corridor, candlelight ahead of her outlining a partly-opened door. DAMN you, Simon …

  She was aware that her heart was pounding. She was in the house of the vampire, and, for the sake of good manners, had left her silver wrist and neck chains back at the clearing station. If anything goes wrong …

  She caught his sleeve. ‘Goodness, I didn’t think … does the Graf speak English?’

  ‘German, Latin, French and Polish, as well as his native Czech … which in his time one only used to address one’s servants or one’s horses.’

  I work and eat and sleep, daily, in a place within range of German guns. They’ve shelled the clearing station more than once. Why should I worry about paying a call on a deathless multiple murderer?

  Her knees were still shaking.

  He led her up a short flight of stone steps, and pushed open the lighted door.

  ‘I trust Madame was not chilled on her journey here?’

  Like most vampires Lydia had seen, the Graf seemed to be in the prime of life, though his long hair and his abundant mustaches were silvery-gray. His face was heavily lined, and beneath grizzled brows his gray eyes were level and cold, catching the firelight like mirrors as he rose from his seat beside the hearth. When Lydia sank into a curtsey (thanking her governess and the instructors at Madame Chappedelaine’s School for the ability to do it properly and with grace) he took, and kissed, her hand.

  ‘Thank you, my lord, I was most comfortable. It’s kind of you to ask.’

  He conducted her to a chair, and Don Simon took Lydia’s cloak (and the lantern), and fetched tea from the small spirit kettle on a marquetry table nearby. Lydia could not help noticing that only one cup stood ready, and beside it, a small plate of chocolate biscuits (and I’ll bet he got THOSE from Storeman Pratt!)

  She was infinitely glad of Don Simon’s presence.

  ‘And I’m most grateful to you, sir, for consenting to see me. I appreciate it very much.’

  Beyond the reach of the firelight Lydia made out the dim shapes of a long salon: card tables, a harp, the flicker of gold leaf on an elaborate clock. Deep-set windows opened uncurtained to the night. Closer, flame-glow outlined th
e carving of the hearthside chairs, the marble angels, lizards, lilies and foxes that twined the fireplace itself.

  ‘Simon informs me you seek information about the Lady Francesca Brucioram.’

  Lydia took a sip of tea, and nibbled on a biscuit. After a full day in the fluoroscope tent and the surgical theater she felt she could have devoured the entire plateful without denting either her exhaustion or her hunger. ‘In a manner of speaking, my lord. About her, and also about the revenants, the Others, to which I understand you can attest at first hand. Don Simon will have told you what we believe is happening at the old convent of Cuvé Sainte-Bride?’

  ‘He has told me.’ The wrinkled lids lowered over eyes devoid of expression: intelligent, cynical, and cruel. His powerful fingers rearranged themselves on his lap.

  ‘Francesca the White is a woman with a great store of anger inside her,’ he said at last. ‘From what cause I know not.’

  The slight movement of his head caused the fire-glow to pick momentarily at the strings of the distant harp: Lydia wondered if it was in tune, and if any of the vampires played.

  ‘In most lamia – as you doubtless know, Madame – the capacity for feeling dwindles quickly. Loyalty, and the affection for one’s family, become as the recollection of sugarplums loved in childhood: an objective awareness that such a craving once existed, coupled with a mild distaste at the thought of gorging oneself now. Given the opportunity to slay one’s enemies with near-impunity, one finds no real desire to put oneself to the trouble. They will die … and we will not.’