Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  Lydia hastily looked away, and fumbled in her pocket for a handkerchief. But she felt the tug on her mind of cold power, power from outside herself. James had told her that picturing a door shutting, or a blank brick wall, worked, but she remembered also that both Antonio and the Master of Prague had described Francesca Gheric as overwhelmingly powerful – Can she see through that brick wall?

  What will she see if she does?

  And will thinking of it tip her off that I’m not as ignorant as I pretend?

  Lydia called up images to her mind of what it would feel like to be swept into Simon’s arms, passionately kissed (What about those teeth? Never mind …), overwhelmed by a torrent of ecstasy (Was that Mr Stoker who’d said that? Or Mrs Radcliffe in Romance of the Forest? Or was that someone else …?). Hoping for the best, she yielded meekly to that terrible cold grip on her will, and raised her eyes timidly to the vampire’s. (And I hope this works …)

  (Oh, wait, if I were passionately in love with Don Simon why would I be wearing all this silver …?)

  Francesca’s lip curled again at whatever she saw in Lydia’s thoughts, and she put her hand through the bars to pat her cheek, patronizing as a duchess handing a farthing to an orphan while her friends are watching.

  Lemoine jerked from his conversation with Meagher and reached the bars in a stride. ‘You will not touch her!’

  Francesca raised her brows – YOU’RE saying this to ME? – and the physician hurriedly collected himself.

  ‘It’s clear she’s only this Colonel Simon’s dupe,’ he amended. ‘She has nothing to do with either the Germans or the British government, or my own.’ He turned back to Lydia. ‘I’m very sorry, Madame,’ he said, ‘but you’re going to have to stay here for a time. And I’m afraid you’ll have to remain underground—’

  Drat it, Simon won’t be able to speak with me in my dreams—

  ‘—since the men on guard in the compound know only as much as they need to know, to accomplish their duties.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say a word to anyone.’ Lydia gazed up at him with brimming eyes. ‘It’s just that—’ She glanced at the revenants in their long, niche-lined cell. ‘Those things … And … And the rats—’

  ‘The rats won’t bother you.’ Lemoine thought hard for a moment. ‘I’ll have you moved as soon as a place can be readied for you. You have nothing to fear, Madame. Our work here – our work with these … these men—’ He nodded toward the catacomb – ‘is nearing its conclusion. In a day or two I may ask you to help us—’

  Meagher’s nostrils flared, like a horse about to kick.

  ‘We need trained personnel, and I can promise you, Madame Asher, that whatever this Colonel Simon told you, the work we’re doing here will indeed make the difference between victory over the Germans, and defeat.’

  Behind her, Lydia heard one of the revenants speak, in a dazed mumble yet completely comprehensible: ‘Wo bin ich? Welcher Ort ist das?’

  Where am I? What is this place?

  Her heart clenched in rage and grief, Dear God …

  ‘He could have escaped,’ Rhinehardt had said of his cousin. ‘Fled when the remainder of our unit did … but he would not let go of my hand …’

  Without waiting to hear what Lemoine had to say next, or plan her own strategy, she pulled away from him, stumbled to the farthest corner of the cell, curled up on the floor and wept as if her heart would break.

  Lemoine put her in a storeroom off the laboratory, formerly the cell of some anchoress, Lydia assumed, since it had a judas window in the door. The bars of that little window had been wrapped in silver wire, and a hasp and padlock hastily screwed onto the door. Both, Lydia saw, were plated with silver.

  ‘I am truly sorry for the crude amenities, Madame,’ said Lemoine as he led her in, past boxes of laboratory glassware and light bulbs, spools of wire and packets of silver chain now stacked up in the hall. ‘Please understand that my hesitation to release you stems from the desperate importance of what we do here.’

  There was a cot in the cell, an empty box for a table, a tin pitcher of water and a chamber pot behind a screen. When he’d locked her in and crossed the lab, Lydia heard Meagher say, ‘That’s all very well, Colonel, but the fact remains that thanks to that girl, we’ve lost the vampire. God only knows how long it’ll be before we trap another! That puts our work back two days, three days, maybe a week—’

  What Lemoine replied Lydia didn’t hear, but after his footsteps had died away down the hall, Francesca’s voice said, very softly, ‘Don’t trouble yourself, my sugarplum. He’ll come back for her.’

  It was a long time before Lydia could sleep. The electric bulb burned permanently in the laboratory: dragging the lightweight screen from the chamber pot to cover the judas in the door only dimmed the glare. For many hours (specifically, from 3:10 until 6:25 by her watch) she could think of little but poor Captain Palfrey, lying in the tunnel on the lip of the well in the darkness: deluded, dying, dreaming perhaps of Don Simon’s lies about aiding King and country. I’ll have to write to Aemilia Bellingham, she thought at one point … But say what? That he was chosen because he was stupid, and died because he tried to do his duty to a hoax?

  And what makes me think I’ll live to see daylight again?

  She wondered if Francesca had gone back through the tunnel to finish him, before Don Simon could return.

  She wondered if the man who’d cried out in German – whether it was Gleb Rhinehardt or some other poor soldier – had done so because he actually had some dying flicker of his own mind left, or whether it had been merely a spasmodic firing of the nerves in the brain, the equivalent of the galvanic twitching of a frog’s severed legs in the laboratory.

  She wondered if Tuathla Meagher was planning to kill her the moment Lemoine’s back was turned, and what would happen to her if Lemoine’s gunshot wound – which seemed to be in his shoulder – turned septic.

  Not as long as Francesca thinks she can lure Don Simon back here, using me as bait.

  Cold comfort.

  One thing Dr Lemoine was right about was that there were no rats. Presumably all were lured into the catacomb of the revenants – a frightful thought, considering how many rats swarmed every shell-crater and trench in no man’s land.

  ‘As you’ve seen, they’re not mistreated in the least,’ Lemoine told her, when he returned later in the day (10:15, by Lydia’s watch) with a tin mess kit top holding a quarter-cup of bully beef, two rock-hard biscuits and a sloshy quantity of Maconochie, the ubiquitous tinned stew of the field kitchens. ‘Nor are the other German subjects we’re still keeping above ground. Those who have been—’ he seemed to hesitate over a euphemism for infected ‘—converted are fed quite well, but half of them refuse real food and kill and eat rats instead.’ (Lydia felt inclined to take issue at his definition of Maconochie as ‘real food’, but didn’t.) He had locked the door of the laboratory behind him, and opened that of Lydia’s cell, to allow her to eat at one of the laboratory tables. He had gained some of his color back, and the slight difference of his tone told her he’d injected a little morphia for the pain.

  ‘They’re only kept chained because I’m afraid they’ll attack one another.’

  ‘But what are they?’ asked Lydia again, guessing that such a question – whose answer she already knew – would not only add to the impression of ignorant harmlessness she was trying to give, but tell her how many people above Lemoine in the French Army and government were in on the secret.

  ??? home side screening, Jamie had written.

  So at least someone in the British government might know of this hideous scheme as well.

  And probably – like Colonel Lemoine – thought it was going to be perfectly safe.

  And that it was perfectly acceptable to mind-strip, enslave and kill German soldiers for the purpose. They had, after all, asked for it.

  She widened her eyes and kept her mouth shut. Men, she had learned back in her days as a debutante, loved to explain things
to women. And Lemoine especially wanted to make sure she understood how right he – and the French Army – was in undertaking this terrible project.

  ‘Hundreds of thousands of men have died.’ Lemoine leaned across the corner of the table, the tea he had made for them both on a Bunsen burner forgotten before him. He hadn’t taken enough morphia to be dopey, but the impression Lydia had was of a man after two glasses of wine.

  ‘Hundreds of thousands more are dying daily in a bloody stalemate that cannot be broken. Already France struggles to fill its ranks. You’ve seen the colonials, the native troops of Algeria and Senegal and Indochina, fighting white men whom they should be taught to respect. You’ve seen them in Paris, learning to treat white women as they treat the whores of their own countries. And they have not the courage, the élan, of the white race! The men of France – yes, and of Britain, too! – bleed away their lives in the mud, and what kind of world will we win, if this goes on? What sort of world can we bequeath to our children? There must be some other solution.’

  Lydia nodded, with an expression of shaken horror. ‘But where does the Lady Francesca come into this?’ she asked timidly. ‘And what were you going to do with … with Colonel Simon? He said you were going to kill him …’

  Gravely, Lemoine asked, ‘You know what Colonel Simon is, do you not, Madame?’

  She turned her eyes away as if distressed, and rotated her tin cup of now-cold tea in her hands. ‘He – I – It isn’t how it is in all those silly books,’ she stammered. ‘He told me that … that people like him … They only need to drink a little bit of blood to survive. Just a sip … mostly those they … they take from aren’t even aware of it …’

  She had no idea whether this was something Francesca had told Lemoine, and if it was, whether Lemoine had believed it or wanted to believe. But he looked troubled, and nodded. ‘But the fact remains that many of the Undead do in fact kill their victims,’ he replied gently. ‘I have made a study of them for some years, Madame. At first – like yourself, I daresay – I was unwilling even to believe in their existence. Later, as I studied them further, I came to realize that these revenants, these Half-Dead, are, as it were, cousins of the true vampire, and that like the vampire they have a psychic – a mental – component of their state.’

  Lydia nodded. ‘I know that Colonel Simon can … can communicate with me in my dreams.’

  ‘Even so, Madame.’ Lemoine would have grasped her hands, she thought, in his eagerness that she should believe and agree, had she not been married. ‘I believe – and I shall very shortly accomplish it, I hope – that vampires can learn to control the minds of these revenants.’

  Lydia forcibly stopped herself from protesting Not according to the Master of Prague, they can’t, and only exclaimed, ‘Oh, my goodness, how?’

  ‘By absorbing the mind – the life – the soul – of one of the revenants, before his mind entirely dissolves into the group-mind of their kind. Once she – the Lady Francesca – can control the mind of one of them, she can participate in, and guide, as it were, the whole of the group.’

  ‘And she’s agreed to do this?’ Lydia hoped she sounded wondering rather than totally disbelieving, or completely aghast. ‘Isn’t it terribly dangerous?’

  ‘Not if there is no blood exchanged. The disease – the state of the revenants – is in the blood,’ the Frenchman assured her. ‘The control is in the mind.’

  ‘And she’ll do this for you?’ Lydia gave an exaggerated shiver. ‘She seems so … so sinister …’

  ‘She will do this,’ agreed Lemoine. ‘For a consideration.’

  TWENTY

  By Lydia’s later estimate, it was two days before the next stage of the ‘project’, as Lemoine called it, could be undertaken. Both Meagher and Lemoine saw her daily, Meagher tense – screwed, as Lady Macbeth would have it, to the sticking-place with frustration and dread that something would go wrong – Lemoine dreading likewise but quiet and calm. Lydia saw no one else, and gathered by degrees that, as Lemoine had said, none of the fifteen guards aboveground knew what the project was nor why a dozen or so German prisoners were being kept in the upper area of the compound … nor what had happened to the further dozen who had disappeared into the catacomb.

  In the face of Meagher’s sharp-tongued impatience, Lemoine increasingly turned to Lydia, vastly to the Irish nurse’s irritation. Lydia bit her tongue and pretended that she was her Aunt Faith – book-learned intelligent but absolutely uncritical and accepting – and by nodding and unconditionally agreeing with whatever the Colonel said, gathered that no one in the French High Command knew the exact nature of the means by which the hemato-bacteriologist (for such was Lemoine’s area of study) proposed to ‘convert’ German prisoners of war to men who would fight for France. ‘Most of them assume I’m using a combination of drugs and hypnosis,’ he confided, one afternoon while Lydia was helping him sweep the laboratory. ‘I cannot reveal the true nature of my work until I have something to show for it – until the Lady Francesca is actually able to demonstrate her control over the revenants. The British government paid for much of this.’ He gestured around him with his good arm at the whitewashed crypt, with its line of electric bulbs hanging from the ceiling and the grinning, horrible apparatus of the burning-grille to which Don Simon had been lashed.

  Lydia plied her broom and looked fascinated.

  ‘I understand they’ve been putting pressure on Commander Joffre for information,’ Lemoine went on. ‘I am curious as to how much our High Command will disclose, even as we prepare to mobilize our new weapon. It is one reason for my concern about this Colonel Simon of yours, provided he was telling you even a little of the truth: the British do not even yet appreciate how desperate things are here in France.’

  ‘Is that why you’re keeping me here?’ Lydia paused in sweeping, and straightened up. Lemoine was always careful to keep the door of the laboratory locked, and even with his injured shoulder she wasn’t at all certain she’d be able to overpower him and take the key. And if she did, if she’d be able to find her way out. But in the meantime her body craved exercise, and she swept and washed tables and – with the hot water Lemoine brought her – washed her own chemise and linen when he, rather shyly, presented her with a second set, almost certainly borrowed from the grudging Meagher. Anything to keep moving.

  ‘It isn’t that I mistrust your intentions,’ the Colonel assured her. ‘But Nurse Meagher is right. At this point we cannot afford even the smallest whisper of rumor regarding what we do here.’

  In addition to food and hot water, in those two days Colonel Lemoine brought her reading material: issues of the Lancet, containing his own articles on disorders of the blood and their effect on the brain and other tissues, volumes of several Russian occult publications which contained his articles on the nature of vampires, the Ossian Poems (Meagher’s – her name was in the front cover), Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (from the same source) and four numbers of the Irish Literary Review. Between reading all of these works cover to cover, Lydia paced her cell, back and forth, aching with inaction, and when she slept, her dreams were broken and troubled.

  Once, waking, she saw Francesca looking in through the judas at her, a speculative smile in her heaven-blue eyes. And once, jerked from sleep by some noise in the laboratory outside, she went to the judas and saw two revenants there, slimed and filthy and smelling of sewage and rats. The laboratory door stood open. By the stillness outside, it was clearly deep in the night.

  Some of them have got away, and are hiding in the crypts.

  Lydia withdrew to the farthest corner of her cell, almost ill with terror. They came to the door of her cell but drew back in pain from the silver lock. The incident expanded, horribly, the possibilities of what might have become of Captain Palfrey in the tunnel. Dear God, poor Palfrey …

  If something went wrong – if Lemoine and all his men were arrested or killed or pulled out of their barbed-wire fortress of Cuvé Sainte-Bride – wou
ld the revenants in the catacomb break free in hunger and find some way of tearing through the door? The thought returned to her in nightmares.

  Escape – if and when the opportunity presented itself – would be horribly dangerous, and the chances that Don Simon would come back for her – if he had managed to get away at all – dwindled to almost nothing.

  When she told Lemoine of the revenants’ incursion the next day he looked shocked and troubled – though the outer door actually hadn’t been locked properly – and asked her several times if it might not have been a dream. ‘Because we’ve been very thoroughly over the crypts below the convent, right down to the foundation vaults, and haven’t found any evidence whatsoever that any of them have gotten away …’

  Lydia knew it hadn’t been a dream.

  She felt safer sleeping during the day, and that evening was just finishing cleaning the laboratory after supper and tea with Lemoine, when the lab door rattled on its hinges, and Meagher’s face appeared in the judas window that led to the corridor. ‘Colonel!’ she shouted, her voice jubilant, ‘Colonel, we’ve got him! Lock that bitch up, Colonel, and open the door—’

  Lydia lunged for the door and Lemoine caught her arm. She whispered, ‘Simon—’ as Meagher called out again, triumphant,

  ‘Francesca got him! Get the gridiron ready—’

  Lydia tried to pull free of his grip but as she’d guessed, even one-handed, Lemoine was strong. ‘I’m sorry, Madame – but you do understand that he was deceiving you? He was deceiving you all along—’ he insisted, as he pulled her, as gently as he could, to the door of her storeroom, thrust her inside and slammed it.

  If I call out his name I’ll give myself away …

  She threw herself against the door, face pressed to the silver bars of the judas, as Lemoine unlocked the door of the laboratory and both Meagher and Francesca entered, their prisoner borne slung over Francesca’s shoulder.

  Lemoine gasped, ‘Good God! What did you do to him?’