Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘E’en so.’ He folded up the paper. ‘Though if they exist in any substantial number, how they are to be destroyed, with the French Army and, it seems, the War Department of England shielding them, ’tis another matter.’

  He picked up Lydia’s cold hand and kissed it. ‘As for James’s coming, if I have learned one thing since last September, lady, ’tis the oriental leisure of official conduct with regards to these “military clearances” of which he speaks. I should refer them all to the forgers who work in Montparnasse and Pigalle: ’tis a wonderment to me that none has ever questioned “Colonel Simon”, on how speedily he seems to acquire documents.’

  And taking up her candle, he followed her up the crumbling stone steps to the ground above.

  On the following day the British First Army made a determined probe at the German lines, principally (Captain Calvert opined, spattered bicep-high in blood and cursing like a very quiet and well-bred Australian sailor) to pull potential German attacks from the French around Arras. From first light Wednesday, when the casualties began coming in, until midnight Thursday night, Lydia took x-ray photographs, administered chloroform, held retractors and sponges, and irrigated wounds, in between taking tea out to the men queued up on stretchers outside the pre-op tent where Matron was grimly sorting them into those who would live and those who wouldn’t. Lydia saw not so much as the glint of reflective eyes in the darkness on either night, but knew they were watching. She didn’t know whether she was more furious at them or General Haig.

  Colonel St-Vire finally sent the last members of the surgical crews to bed at three o’clock Friday morning with orders not to stir until teatime.

  ‘Captain Palfrey’s been to see you twice,’ reported Nurse Brickwood worriedly, coming into the nurses’ tent Friday evening while Lydia was sponging down with a flannel. Lydia felt her stomach sink, at the thought of what Don Simon might have found. Nevertheless she finished washing, brushed her hair, dressed and went to the mess tent (Does this headache have anything to do with not having dinner last night?), and was picking at a rock-hard biscuit soaked in a bowl of lukewarm Maconochie when Palfrey’s voice exclaimed ‘Dr Asher!’ from the twilight of the doorway.

  He dodged between the tables to her, and Captain Burke – with whom she’d been eating and commiserating about the upcoming evening’s work – heaved his bulk from the bench and shook a facetious finger at her. ‘Any more meetin’s wi’ that captain, lass, and I’ll be writin’ Professor Asher of you.’ Everyone in the clearing station knew by this time that Lydia was involved in ‘something for the brass’ – presumably concerning x-ray photography – and had come to recognize Captain Palfrey as the liaison.

  She thankfully abandoned the tinned swill before her and rose to meet the young captain, who guided her swiftly from the tent.

  But instead of handing her a note – and enough light lingered in the sky that she knew Don Simon hadn’t come himself – Palfrey inquired worriedly, ‘Have you heard anything of Colonel Simon, Dr Asher? I’m dreadfully sorry to interrupt you, as I know you’ve had a rough time of it these past two nights – everyone has, all the way up to Festubert … But Colonel Simon didn’t meet me last night.’

  ‘He is very much a law unto himself …’

  ‘I know.’ The young man grimaced at his own concern. ‘And he’ll joke me sometimes about being a mother hen. But … Wednesday we drove down as far as Haut-le-Bois, and he ordered me to wait for him, with the car, in a lane a few miles beyond the village. I had orders, if he didn’t return by sunrise, to go back to Aubigny and wait. Aubigny is where we’re staying. Where I’m staying,’ he corrected himself. ‘I honestly have no idea where Colonel Simon stays. He had me rent a sort of accommodation address for him there, but he doesn’t seem to use it.’

  The young man’s brisk calm cracked then, and for a moment his mouth tightened, and distress pulled the flesh around his eyes. ‘But he … He never came to my lodgings last night. I sat up nearly all night for him, and I – in my heart I feel something terrible has happened to him, M’am. Dr Asher. Every time I fell asleep – and I did nod off three or four times – I thought I heard him calling for me. I must have gotten up and gone to the door a dozen times! And I wondered—’

  And I was so tired when I finally lay down last night I wouldn’t have waked if Miranda had stood next to my cot and screamed. Her heart turned chill inside her. He went to investigate the crypts under Sainte-Bride.

  Because I asked him to.

  And he didn’t come out.

  Asher told himself, as his train pulled out from Saffron Walden on Saturday afternoon, that the man on the bicycle couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the glimpse of what might or might not have been a half-familiar shadow in Brabazon Street Tuesday evening. Nevertheless he changed his own jacket in his second-class compartment and stepped off the train on the last foot or so of platform as it was leaving Epping, and after a considerable hunt for a cab, found one and took it to Pembridge Place. There he paid his bill, changed his jacket and hat yet again, and sought new lodgings in Kensington, after two more cabs and an excursion to Holborn on the Underground, just to make sure that he wasn’t being followed. Descending to the Underground troubled him, for its tunnels were the logical place for the Others – two of them, now – to hide.

  How long before they added a third to their number?

  Does Teague the gunrunner have the slightest idea of the danger of blood contact? Did the man or men employing him?

  Tomorrow, he told himself, he’d need to consult both Millward and Josetta, Sabbath or no Sabbath.

  After a slender tea at a café, which he was far too exhausted to eat, he composed a telegram to Josetta, another to Miranda (care of Ellen and Mrs Grimes) and a Personals message to ‘Dr Graves’, then retired to bed, where he lay, shivering with fever, for the next four days. Between bouts of coughing he hoped Mr Fair Isle had been struck on his bicycle by a lorry and squashed flat.

  On Thursday he felt sufficiently recovered to venture forth to the British Museum.

  Osric Millward was precisely where Asher had found him first, at the end of one of the long desks beneath the great rotunda of the Reading Room. The shabbily-dressed Donnie was still helping him, assisted by another – stooped, a little rat-like, wearing no tie at all, but a kerchief knotted around his throat under a battered frieze jacket – whose intense eyes remained on Millward’s face with every word he spoke.

  Millward’s ‘network’. Asher wondered if they had had brothers, sisters, sweethearts, friends who had become victims of a vampire. In their unprepossessing faces he read not only hunger for revenge, but a kind of eager gratitude to have someone who believed them.

  The posters Asher had passed in the hallway leading to the great room – garish colors, looming figures – seemed aimed at those two young men, the only men under the age of forty-five in the room: Come Along, Boys, Before It’s Too Late! Will You Answer the Call? YOU are the MAN we want …

  How much courage did it take to say No, I need to stay in London and hunt for vampires?

  Millward sprang to his feet as Asher approached, seized him by the hand. ‘When I didn’t hear from you I feared they’d gotten you.’

  He meant the vampires of London, not their own government departments, but Asher shook his head. ‘I had to go down to the country to see a man about a dog.’

  The older man studied his face, his brows drawn together in concern. Asher reflected that he probably looked more like someone who’d been attacked by vampires than like one who had an appointment to meet the Master of London in Piccadilly at midnight for a chat. Millward steered him into a chair, murmured to his two acolytes, ‘Would you excuse us …?’ and sat down himself. When the young men had gone he whispered, ‘I’ve found where they’re hiding.’

  SIXTEEN

  ‘Shouldn’t we wait until it gets dark?’ Captain Palfrey braked the staff-car to a halt. ‘Colonel Simon always does.’

  Scanning the description and i
nstructions she had recopied from Jamie’s original letter, Lydia wondered how complicated it would be to explain to this young man that ‘Colonel Simon’ only appeared at night, Palfrey’s convictions to the contrary. ‘It’ll be dark soon,’ she said instead. Indeed, sufficient twilight had gathered to make reading difficult, in the shadows of the leafless trees. ‘And if anything goes wrong and we get separated and have to run for it, I’d feel much safer trying to do so with at least a little daylight.’ She added, ‘I don’t have Colonel Simon’s night-eyes,’ and Palfrey, turning in the front seat, grinned understandingly.

  ‘Lord, isn’t that the truth! I don’t think any man living does.’

  You’re quite right about that. She went back to studying the paper. Their visit to Cuvé Sainte-Bride two weeks previously had revealed nothing about picket guards, and Lydia wondered how great a staff the French Army was willing to pay for.

  How many men could be trusted not to blab about what was going on inside, either from horror and outrage or simply in their cups in the estaminets of Haut-le-Bois? Lemoine had a couple of soldiers to help manage the prisoners when they were selected, and certainly at least one man on the gate, but how many more? And how many was too many?

  Three people can keep a secret only if two of them are dead. Wasn’t that how the old proverb ran?

  Lydia propped her glasses on her nose, and took a deep breath. ‘Old farm near Amiens road,’ she read aloud. ‘Well. Is there rope in the car?’

  ‘Yes, M’am. I had some Wednesday night, also. Colonel Simon took it with him.’

  ‘Sub-crypt of chapel …’ She lowered the paper, scanned the silent woods around them. They stood a little above the lacerated road, where a lane led to the bullet-riddled shell of what had been a farm. ‘Near lilac trees—’

  ‘There are lilacs two miles down the main road from here, and up the ridge a little. I noticed them because there are lilacs at Deepmere. They’re Aemilia’s favorite.’ Palfrey looked shy at the mention of his sweetheart’s name. ‘They won’t be in bloom for two months yet …’

  Lydia smiled. And you probably keep them pressed in your book of the King’s Regulations …

  ‘We’ll go through the woods.’ She turned back to judge how well concealed the staff-car was behind them. ‘If we keep the road on our left we shouldn’t get too lost. You don’t happen to have anything like a tarpaulin or a gun-cover in the boot?’

  He shook his head. ‘I have a billhook, though. It won’t take but a few minutes to cut brush.’

  Lydia strained her ears for the sound of another vehicle on the road as she helped her escort pile cut saplings and shrubs of hawthorn over the vehicle (‘You might want to not cut them all from one area …’ ‘Oh, right! Excellent thought, M’am!’). They were still, by her calculation, several miles from the old convent, and though the vehicle couldn’t be seen from the main road, anyone who did see the rough camouflage-job would be bound to guess that somebody was up to something.

  Of course, simply the sight of a staff motorcar sitting out here would cause them to guess that.

  It was quite clear that fighting had passed over these woods the previous autumn. As they trudged through the shredded rags of undergrowth, the shrapnel-blasted trees, Lydia caught occasional glimpses of weather-faded khaki or gray under the winter’s dead beech leaves, and the brown of exposed bone.

  Wednesday night. Lydia shifted her grip on the unlit lantern she carried, her heart beating hard. Did he get in? Was he trapped below ground? The earth would block most of a vampire’s psychic connection with the living. Even had Simon tried to make mental contact with her Wednesday night, she’d been awake, concentrating on taking x-ray photographs and administering anesthetics. Last night she’d slept so deeply she doubted anything could have waked her. Oh, Simon, I’m sorry …

  If he were underground she suspected she’d have to be standing at one of the entrances to the crypts to hear his voice whisper in her mind. Even then it mightn’t reach her.

  Or will I reach the chapel and find only a heap of ash and bone?

  The chapel lay in the center of a zone of shell-craters and scratched-out, makeshift shelters, scrabbled with entrenching-tools by men who had no time to do more than scrape gouges in the earth to lie in and pray. All around the pulverized walls, branches, trunks, shrubs and earth bore the appearance of having passed beneath the teeth of some frightful harrow that had stripped everything in its path. The lilacs of which Palfrey – and Jamie’s informant – had spoken had survived only because they lay far enough from the chapel itself to be on the edge of the death zone.

  This near the road, any building that could have given shelter would have been bombed out of existence by the other side. She didn’t need to slip and scramble into the chapel itself to guess what she’d find there, though she had to check: a pit some twenty feet deep, where bombs had repeatedly fallen on the sub-crypt, caving it out of existence. The graveyard smell of incompletely buried bodies lingered over the ruined earth.

  She whispered, ‘Drat it,’ though it was just as well. The fewer holes for stray revenants to get through the better. ‘How far are we from the Amiens road?’

  Hiking over the ridge took the remainder of the fading daylight, though there was very little (Thank Heavens!) barbed wire in the shell-torn underbrush of the woods. Palfrey led the way, with a map of the area and a compass; full darkness was closer than Lydia cared for, when they finally glimpsed the charred stones of the farmhouse. There had been fighting here as well, but it didn’t look as though the shattered cottage had been shelled.

  ‘Mills bombs, it looks like.’ Palfrey lowered his map, and frowned through the gloom at the ruin. ‘Look how much of the roof is undamaged.’

  The well stood halfway between the house and what remained of the barn. The windlass was gone, as was most of the well-curb. Palfrey found an unburnt section of beam, lit the lantern and laying the beam across the hole, stretched himself out on it to lower the light on his rope. ‘We’re still fairly high above the local water table here,’ he reported, and Lydia, kneeling to peer down, saw the yellow reflection of the light some fifty or sixty feet below.

  ‘Is that a hole, or a door, in the side of the well shaft?’ she asked. ‘Or just a trick of the shadows?’

  The young captain lowered the light as far down as he could, the shadow clearly outlining a roughly rectangular mouth of shadow in the wall.

  ‘Look,’ she added, pointing, ‘those are iron staples in the wall leading down to it.’

  ‘Good,’ returned Palfrey grimly. ‘Because there isn’t anything to tie this line to closer than twenty feet from the well. It should just get us down to the first of the staples.’ He pulled up the rope, untied the lantern and carried the coil to the remains of the barn door. Lydia undid her belt – she wore a holstered Webley service revolver at her waist – and kilted up her stout linen skirt above her knees.

  I really should get a man’s trousers, to do things like this. They can’t be less modest than a pair of bicycle bloomers. She checked the safety and the cylinder of the Webley, actions she’d performed half a dozen times in the car already. Though it would be impossible to sneak out of the camp unnoticed in them. I wonder if Storeman Pratt would sell me a pair? Captain Palfrey, returning with the end of the rope in his hands, halted in startled alarm at the sight of her calves and ankles: ‘Oh, come, it can’t be worse than a bathing costume, surely?’ she answered his blush.

  ‘No, of course—’ He looked away from her as he dropped the end of the rope down over the edge. ‘That’ll reach,’ he said. ‘I’ll go first.’ He threaded his belt through the lantern’s handle, wrapped the rope firmly around his forearms (Lydia watched carefully and hoped she remembered from her schooldays how it was done), and climbed down, leaning out on the rope and bracing his feet on the wall.

  I think I can do that …

  She wondered breathlessly how deep the water was in the well, and if there would be rats in the tunnel.

&nbs
p; If there were people at Cuvé Sainte-Bride, there would be rats.

  And revenants, of course …

  The rope ended a few feet below the first of the iron staples. She saw Palfrey shift over to the staples, and continue the descent, testing each before he put his full weight on it. She saw three of them jar and shift, and heard the patter of bits of stone as they fell into the water below. With the disturbance of the surface the smell of it came up to her, a sickening whiff of rotting meat. What’ll I do if a staple breaks and he falls in? I’ll never be able to get him out.

  When he drew near the entry hole she saw that the last few staples had been broken off – Did they rust quicker because they’re closer to the water? – and Palfrey had to wedge his boot-toe on the tiny stubs that remained. One of these broke, and he swung himself deftly into the narrow slot. Lantern-light outlined the doorway’s edges, then dimmed as he moved a little into the passageway beyond. For an outraged moment Lydia thought he was going to go in alone (‘This is no task for a fragile little woman …’) but an instant later he put his head out again, and signed for her to descend.

  I have Josetta’s word for it that there’s scientific proof that women are just as strong and enduring as men …

  And Simon got himself into this because I asked him.

  She took a deep breath, wrapped the rope around her forearms and began her descent.

  Jamie … Miranda … if I get killed I’m so sorry …

  Oh, dear, which staples were the weak ones …?

  Rope to staples. Staples – there were nineteen of them – into the blackness, with barely a feather-brush of yellow light on the wet stone against which she pressed her face and body as she descended. The horrible suggestion of the charnel reek below her, like a kitchen garbage pail too long neglected.

  Nineteen. Her groping toe extended down, found nothing. Shifting a little sideways, she found the nubbin of the broken staple, but Palfrey whispered, ‘I’ll get you, with your permission,’ and his hand – with that male gripping power that always surprised her – closed firmly around her calf. ‘Lower yourself down …’