Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Forty years,’ he murmured. ‘Forty years I’ve waited. I always wondered what it would be like. She made me wait … Just so that I would be hers, and not someone else’s.’

  ‘And now you’re mine.’ She nodded toward Lydia, without taking her eyes from Crowell’s. ‘Are you hungry? Will you play for a bit? Unchain her and blow out the lantern? They’re still out with the Others, we have a little time. They won’t be back till just before—’

  ‘Whore—’ The word came out of the darkness of the stairway like an animal’s bleat, hoarse and bestial, as if formed with difficulty and pain. ‘Swill-bellied stinking whore—’

  Meagher and Crowell swung around like guilty lovers, staring into the darkness.

  A white blur shimmered beyond the lantern-light. A huge clawed hand grasped the lintel of the narrow door as Francesca Gheric lurched into the glow.

  ‘You dared. You dared—’

  Crowell rolled off the cot and darted away into the darkness; Meagher sprang in the opposite direction, as Francesca lunged at her, snatching with her claws. And now Crowell can get up the stair and away …

  It’s what Jamie would have done …

  If the woman he was leaving behind wasn’t me.

  A flicker near the stair – Yes, that’s him, all right …

  Crowell froze with his foot on the lowest step, light and thin and active, a young man again. In the dark of the stair above him, eyes gleamed. Stench rolled into the room like the black exhalation of Hell.

  In the darkness Meagher shrieked, and Lydia had to shut her jaw hard to keep from screaming, too. She flattened back against the pillar, watched in terror as the revenants piled into the room. Six of them, mouths stretched open, howling and reaching—

  —and running right past her as Francesca shouted, ‘Kill them! Kill them!’

  Water splashed, dashing about in the blackness as Meagher had moments ago suggested as a game. Meagher screamed again—

  The next instant another pair of eyes flashed in the stairway and Simon and Jamie were beside her. Lydia choked back her husband’s name as Simon made short work of the chain with a pair of bolt cutters. Behind them Crowell and Meagher screamed, but the two men ran her to the stair and scrambled up the slippery, crooked steps. If I say anything Francesca will hear me—

  Will she care if we get away?

  Probably not – she seemed MUCH more interested in making sure the revenants chomped up Meagher and Crowell – but let’s not take chances …

  She clung to the arms that held her in the darkness, Jamie’s lanky with muscle, Simon’s like a dancer’s, leading the way through the abysses. She was aware of it when Jamie stumbled – Good Heavens, he shouldn’t be running around breaking into vampire lairs anyway …

  Through a doorway and into the storeroom with the drain in the floor, and the electric light of the laboratory pouring from the corridor. Jamie – as sheet-white as a vampire but looking far less healthy – rushed her along that hallway toward the stair and Lydia straightened her glasses and gasped, ‘What about the guards?’

  ‘Gone,’ he panted. ‘The prisoners, too. The Twelfth Field Artillery Battery is going to start shelling this place in eight minutes— Sunrise—’

  Lydia looked back in panic, but Simon was gone. Stumbling, Jamie dragged her up the stair, through an old stone room and then through a modern wooden one, and out into a courtyard gray with misty dawnlight. If they shell it as they did the chapel by the lilacs even the deepest vault will be laid bare. The light will consume Francesca, destroy the revenants …

  Burn Simon to ashes …

  NO …

  There was a motorcycle in the middle of the courtyard and Jamie flung himself onto it, Lydia straddling the carrier à l’Amazone and clinging around her husband’s waist. The morning air was freezing and she barely felt it. Rooster tails of liquescent mud splattered up around them in all directions as they roared toward the open gate, between the lines of barbed wire and the defensive trench, past the empty guardhouse and along the rutted track toward the Arras road.

  Simon, she thought. Simon can get to the tunnel that leads to the well, hidden in the darkness …

  Will that be protection enough?

  She knew she shouldn’t hope that it would be. Pressed her cheek to Jamie’s back, and hung on tight.

  Distantly – five miles at least – heavy guns began to sound, and in moments she heard the shattering freight-train roar of shells overhead. The road beneath them lurched, making the motorcycle jerk like a terrified horse, and even at this distance Lydia felt the shock wave of the first explosions, and the vicious spray of rocks and hot dirt pelting her back.

  By the time they stopped to breathe, four or five miles down the road toward Pont-Sainte-Félicité, Lydia had stopped crying.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Lydia got two weeks’ leave, to go back to England.

  Jamie didn’t.

  ‘This is what I traded to Stewart,’ he said, ‘for that “at his sole discretion” and “any and all assistance” on my papers.’

  Against the glowing lights of the clearing station’s tents shadows moved, preparing men for surgery, ascertaining how much damage had been done, writing tickets for the next stage of care. Now and then, in one of the wooden buildings – or the additions built onto the charred ruins of Pont Sainte-Félicité – a door would open, and men’s voices would be heard. Storeman Pratt walked by the bench where they sat, outside the officer’s mess, with what looked like an entire crate of cigarettes casually tucked under his arm.

  The wet, grievous stink of mud and smoke and decaying flesh mingled with the smell of the river, and the April green of a few ruined trees.

  ‘The understanding was that I’d have a free hand – a completely free hand – in gathering information, even if it meant shelling a French Army research project on the grounds that it was actually being used by Germans. I had to commit myself to gathering information.’

  He coughed, deeply and painfully. He’d spent forty-eight hours in the Isolation Ward with a low fever and Lydia thought he still looked haggard and shaky. It was good only to sit beside him, to hold his hand.

  Near the makeshift bridge, ambulance-wagons rumbled in and bearers clustered around with their lanterns, and from the corner of her eye Lydia thought she saw two shadows – the dark woman with the big nose, and a gray-haired man like a Slavic god – flit in the direction of the Moribund Ward.

  Far off, the guns boomed like thunder.

  ‘Is that what you told them? That it was really the Germans behind that project?’

  Jamie had spent most of the afternoon – when he should have been sleeping – writing up a report about why he’d instructed the men of Field Artillery Battery Twelve to shell Cuvé Sainte-Bride into a crater of sunbathed dust.

  ‘With Colonel Lemoine dead I could say anything I wanted. I said that the whole project was a German plan to spread plague among our troops. I wasn’t that far from the truth.’

  ‘He meant well.’ Lydia shook her head. ‘So did poor Meagher. I wish I could feel towards them something other than horror at the means they proposed to use. At their blindness to the devastation it would cause.’

  ‘They meant well,’ agreed Jamie quietly. ‘And too often, people who mean well find it hard to believe that the thing that will win them their victory is too dangerous to use, or might have consequences that they don’t foresee. And don’t want to hear arguments to the contrary.’

  He lifted his hand to return Captain Palfrey’s salute as that young man walked past in hospital blues. It was Palfrey’s first day on his feet; the young man had asked Lydia, daily, when she’d gone in to visit him, if she had heard word of ‘Colonel Simon’. He clearly had not the smallest recollection of the scene in the laboratory. Or he recalled it quite differently.

  Jamie had surmised – when he and Lydia had talked it over – that it was Don Simon bringing Palfrey out of the well that Johanna of Berlin had seen and told Elysée about. Wi
th the woman’s bad French it was not surprising that Elysée had mistaken the sex of the reported ‘minion’. He had also filled in for her his recollections of Pritchard Crowell: ‘Had I still been working with him, once I came to know the London nest, I think I would have spotted at once that he had a vampire partner. At least I like to think I would.’

  ‘And your Mr Langham covered for him, when he faked his own death … What was it, twenty years ago?’

  Jamie had nodded. ‘I suspect if I’d continued much longer in the service I’d have been obliged to do the same,’ he said. ‘It isn’t uncommon in the Department. You go into hiding, you make a new life, where those you’ve wronged and those you’ve betrayed and those whose loved ones you’ve killed won’t find you. But the Department knows. And the Department can always come calling, if they need you.’

  As Simon had, thought Lydia, eight years ago, when the London nest found itself in need of a day man.

  ‘Or members of the Department,’ he’d added, ‘who have some little scheme of their own going, in hopes of a promotion or a knighthood.’

  Lydia hoped that in time Captain Palfrey would return to his grandfather’s estate and ‘wait for orders’ that would never come. That he’d marry his lovely Miss Bellingham and live happily ever after without ever returning to Europe again.

  Now she asked softly, ‘Will you be all right?’

  Jamie nodded, and coughed again. ‘Mostly what I’ll be doing is listening,’ he said. ‘Dressing up in German uniform and sitting with prisoners. Finding out about troop movements, and conditions in the Fatherland. Looking at pictures and newspaper articles, deducing the conditions of their economy from toffee wrappers. Letting the boffins back in England guess where we need to apply pressure, and what kind of inducements to hold out if they ever get round to negotiating for truce.’

  ‘Will they make you go to Germany?’

  He was a long while silent. Then: ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’m committed to another year here,’ she said after a time. ‘Ellen writes me that Miranda is well and happy with Aunt Lavinnia, but asks after us. I think when my year is up I’ll ask for my papers, depending on where you are in your work. It must have been hard for you,’ she added, ‘signing up …’

  Another silence. James, Lydia had learned, was a man who didn’t speak easily of could-be’s or might-have-been’s. Like herself, he dealt with the world as it came at him. At length he said, ‘They had to be stopped.’

  He’d spoken to her of getting help from the vampire-hunter Osric Millward. In times past they’d made the man a figure of fun, but she knew that in his heart Jamie understood him. And understood that he was right.

  ‘It’s all very well to talk about doing evil that good may come, best beloved,’ he went on. ‘But the problem about evil is that the line is seldom clear, how evil is evil. And how much evil will bleed into the good you’re trying to do – like the virus of the revenants, spreading in one’s veins.’

  ‘Not to speak,’ added Don Simon Ysidro’s soft voice, ‘of the difficulty one can have in distinguishing when evil is masquerading as good.’

  He stepped from the darkness, his uniform new and trim and looking as if he’d never gone crawling through old drains or cut his way through barbed wire, or done whatever he’d done to get himself to safety. He took Lydia’s hand in his own gloved one, and bent over it.

  ‘I am glad to see you well, Mistress. And yourself, James.’

  With an ironic twist to his mouth, Jamie saluted him, which the vampire calmly returned.

  ‘You will be pleased to hear that the matter of the shelling of Cuvé Sainte-Bride is being hushed up under the Official Secrets Act,’ he reported. ‘And that those of us who hunt the night have passed across no man’s land for two days now, and have encountered no sign of revenants. I understand Colonel Lemoine’s body was recovered after the destruction of Cuvé Sainte-Bride, and returned to his family, with no stain on his record.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Jamie said quietly. ‘That means a great deal, to families.’

  ‘It did to mine.’

  The vampire turned to Lydia, and again took her hand. ‘And you are returning to England, lady?’

  ‘For two weeks.’ She spoke around a sudden tightness in her throat. ‘I’m taking the evening train from St-Omer Thursday. I’ll return to finish out my year—’ She fought back the grief she felt, the concern about all those young men in the surgical tent, the hundreds – thousands – who had passed beneath her hands since November. ‘But I don’t want you watching over me when I return. Nor ever again.’

  He said nothing, and there was neither grief, nor question, nor surprise in his yellow eyes.

  Beside her, Jamie was silent also, though she felt his eyes touch her.

  ‘I don’t care how much trouble I get in,’ she made herself go on. ‘Or what’s happening around me, or whether I need help or not. I can’t …’

  He inclined his head. ‘As you will, lady.’

  ‘And I release you,’ added Jamie quietly, ‘from whatever promise you made to me, Don Simon.’

  ‘I understand.’ His glance returned to Lydia, and she knew that he did.

  She turned her hand in his, and holding it, drew off his silk-fine, gray kid glove, and felt his fingers, clawed like a dragon’s. They were warm. He’d fed.

  Probably over in the Moribund Ward …

  With the others of his kind.

  Fed on young men dying, men she’d cared for that afternoon. She remembered their faces. Their wounds. The names they’d whispered in delirium, friends and sweethearts and children they’d never see again.

  She couldn’t speak.

  ‘I chose to be as I am,’ said Simon quietly. ‘Not the best decision in my life, but one from which there is no going back. No more than these men—’ He nodded towards the soft glow of the tents – ‘can go back from the choice they made. I can be nothing but what I am, lady: a killer who devours the lives of others. I do not ask you to forgive me either my choice, or my current state.’

  She couldn’t look at him, either. Only sat, looking down at the long, slim hand in hers.

  A demon’s hand.

  He saved my life at the risk of his own. And … She shut her mind on the further thought: And I care for him …

  How can I go on accepting that he kills people, regularly, for his own benefit?

  There could be no condoning what he was – what he did, and the side of his existence that he hid from her – no matter how convenient it was for her.

  Gently he withdrew his hand, and she was desolate at the thought of never hearing his voice again.

  Asher and Lydia got a ride on an ambulance-wagon to St-Omer the following afternoon. They had dinner in a small auberge near the cathedral, then walked to the station in the damp cold of the spring night: Lydia had some twenty minutes to wait for her train to Calais; Asher’s, to Amiens, would leave in an hour. They were standing together, handfast, marveling in one another’s presence, speaking softly of Oxford and Miranda and what codes they’d use to defeat the censors, when shouting started around the telegraph offices at the end of the platform: Asher heard someone yell, ‘Ypres!’

  Another Jerry push, he thought. The one everybody had been expecting.

  People crowded in that direction. Military police and railway officials began to work their way along the platform, stopping people from getting on the trains.

  ‘’Strewth!’ exclaimed a young man in a sapper’s uniform close by, to a friend on a stretcher. ‘They fookin’ better not be confiscatin’ these trains—’

  Lydia’s eyes widened in protesting dismay, and yes, the officials were getting on the trains, herding people off, soldiers mostly bound for leave, a few civilians complaining vociferously that they had their papers, by God …

  The crowd mobbed tighter around the telegraph office, and Asher heard someone shout, ‘Poison gas—’

  He caught the arm of one of the military police as the man moved to
ward Lydia’s train. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Jerry’s hit Ypres. Chlorine gas – four miles of line – thousands of the French dead in minutes—’ The man’s voice shook a little. ‘Most of ’em drowned in the fluid in their own lungs. Or had their eyes burned out. We’re gonna need every train.’

  The shouting was growing louder, as crowds of soldiers jostled on the platforms. Bearers were already coming to carry the wounded back to waiting rooms. People called questions, cursed, groaned. A delicate little VAD, bringing tea to the waiting men on the stretchers, swore like a sergeant of the Marines.

  ‘—still fighting – Canadians holdin’ the line, some of the Frenchies as well. Damn bloody bastards—’

  Asher didn’t mention that the French had also experimented with poison gas.

  Behind her thick spectacles, Lydia’s eyes filled with tears.

  She said quietly, ‘I have to go back.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Please …’ She stayed the sergeant, as he would have gone on. ‘Transport back to the Front … I’m an expert at fluoroscope. I should get back to my unit …’

  ‘Bless you, M’am.’ The man saluted her. ‘Where’ll that be?’

  ‘The clearing station at Pont-Sainte-Félicité.’

  ‘There’ll be a convoy of ambulance-wagons outside the City Hall at ten. But they may take you on up to Ypres instead …’

  ‘That’s all right. Thank you …’

  She turned back to Asher. ‘If they cancel your train—’

  ‘I’ll find another.’ He took her in his arms, kissed her gently. ‘And I’ll wire Ellen, and your aunt—’

  Her arms tightened hard around him, pulling back only a moment to remove her spectacles before pressing her face to his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry—’

  ‘Go.’ He kissed her temple, then, when she raised her face to his, her lips. ‘I’ll write to you there, and let you know where I am.’

  It was ten minutes to ten. He watched her walk away along the platform, tallish, skinny, her gray nurse’s cloak billowing slightly around the carpetbag she carried, her red hair screwed tightly up under her nurse’s cap and already working itself loose from its pins …