Blood Maidens Read online

Chapter Fourteen

  FOURTEEN

  The woman kept repeating something that Lydia knew could only be, ‘Will he be all right? Will he be all right?’ but since she was speaking Russian it actually could have been anything. It didn’t matter. The tears of anxiety running down her face, the way her stooped thin body trembled in the awkward circle of Lydia’s arm, made translation supererogatory. Annushka Vyrubova, on the woman’s other side, murmured softly in Russian, comforting words, while at the battered table of the clinic’s curtained-in consulting-room, Dr Benedict Theiss unwrapped the gory wad of torn pillowcases from around the young man’s hand and examined the fingers that were left.

  Lydia whispered in French, ‘What happened?’

  ‘An accident in the factory,’ Madame Vyrubova whispered back. ‘They’ve stepped up the production quotas because of the new battleships, and the poor boy had been working since eight last night. No wonder he didn’t get his hand out of the press quickly enough . . . ’

  Despite the morphia – the first thing Theiss had administered when the young man had been half-carried into the clinic by his mother and brothers – the patient screamed, and on the bench between Lydia and Madame Vyrubova the mother cried out in anguish, like an echo. The bleached canvas curtains of the consulting ‘room,’ only slightly higher than a man’s head, hung partly open, and past them the clinic – which had the appearance, in the thin clear sunlight of the first springlike day, of having begun life as a small factory itself – was filled with a commingled reek of blood, carbolic soap, and unwashed clothing and bodies, a combination of stinks that, despite herself, Lydia hated.

  In her years as a medical student she had worked at hospitals, sustained through clinic duty only by her stepmother’s smirking assurances that, ‘You’ll hate it, dear, you know . . . ’

  Well, of course someone has to see to the poor things, but I don’t see why it has to be you . . . That had been her Aunt Faith. And, Darling, I know it’s bien à la mode to take an interest in the poor, but surely one day a month at a settlement house – Andromache Brightwell knows a PERFECTLY clean and decent one – would do . . .

  After which, of course, Lydia had been completely unable to protest that she, too, disliked the stinks and the wastefulness and the sense of speechless futility that filled her in the face of poverty. It had been impossible to admit that she did not share the usual womanly motives of her stepmother’s friends who went in for nursing the ‘less fortunate’, as they were politely called . . .

  She couldn’t tell them – the aunts who had raised her, the exquisite slender woman that her father had married the year Lydia was sent away to school – that what she sought was knowledge of the human body, of those squeamish fascinating details that women weren’t supposed to know about or want to know about. A thing of miracles, Benedict Theiss had called the human body . . . Tubes and nodules, nooks and crannies, nerves and bones and the secrets hidden in the marrow . . . Blood and spit and semen, why and how. Working in the clinics was a stepping stone to the end that she sought, which was research for its own sake – knowledge for its own sake – the pursuit of goals far beyond the tying up of a drunkard’s bruises or the Sisyphean labor of primary care for the poor.

  The big clinic room had recently been painted a dreary shade of beige, and there were about two dozen people on the benches at one end, men and women – several with children clustered around them and babies slung in shawls at their bosoms – in the faded, mended, ill-fitting and unwashed garments that people make do with when every available penny is being spent on rent and fuel and food if it could be afforded. They were thin, in the way that even the poorest of the London denizens of settlement houses and clinics were not: thin and wary, like animals that have been frightfully abused. Lydia recalled the streets she and Madame Vyrubova had been driven through, to come to this dingy yellow-brick building on the Samsonievsky Prospect. Even through the comforting blur of myopia, it was clear to her that these slums were worse than anything she’d ever seen in London, grown up like oozing sores around the factories.

  ‘Please forgive us for interrupting you,’ said Lydia, when Dr Theiss had finished his task and washed his hands – he was reaching for his frock coat, hung on its peg, as if to get himself ready to welcome his visitors. She held up her hand. ‘Don’t. I shouldn’t have asked to come. ’ Though it had been, in fact, Madame Vyrubova who’d suggested it. Of course dear Dr Theiss will be delighted to receive us. He always is . . .

  He probably always was for this dumpy little woman who was said to be the best friend of the Empress and almost a member of the imperial family.

  ‘I see now you have many more important matters to attend to. ’

  Madame Vyrubova looked surprised at her words – it had probably been a long time since anyone had professed matters more important than her warm-hearted desire to make the world a better place – but the physician’s hazel eyes thanked Lydia’s understanding. ‘It’s kind of you to think of me, Dr Asher. Yet I know you spoke, when last we met, of my research, and one could not be other than delighted to take a moment’s rest when our Annushka has come all this way to visit. ’ He took Madame Vyrubova’s hand and bowed deeply.

  ‘Texel—’ At the lifting of Theiss’s voice, the man Jamie had identified as an agent of German Intelligence came through the door of the wooden partition that divided the great whitewashed brick room. ‘Is there tea? Thank you. Would you please let my friends know –’ his gesture took in the men and women waiting on the benches – ‘that I must perform the offices of society for ten short minutes, and then I will return?’

  ‘Bien sûr, doctor. ’

  Lydia struggled with the impulse to slip her spectacles from her beaded handbag and sneak a better look at the man, who at that distance was little more than an impression of stooping height, arms that seemed slightly too long, skimpy mutton chops hanging on his jaws like socks on a clothesline, and thin fairish hair slicked unappetizingly to a dolichocephalic skull. Even his voice was thin, with a nasal quality to it and – though Lydia’s ear for accents was not nearly as good as her husband’s, especially not when everyone was speaking French – an inflection that differed from Theiss’s. As Theiss led them through the doorway into a laboratory – and thence to a chamber beyond it, barely wider than its window, which served as a sitting room – she inquired, ‘Mr Texel also a physician, I think you said?’

  ‘A medical student. ’ And, with a humorous half-smile: ‘And one, I suspect, who blotted his copybook a little with the Kaiser’s police. He’s an Alsatian, from Strasbourg; he came to me at first only because he needed the work. Yet he has found – as I have – the profound ease of heart that comes from working towards the good of one’s fellow man. ’

  Or he says he has. Anyone else might have doubted James Asher’s ability to remember the face of a man he’d seen on three brief occasions seventeen years previously, but Lydia knew her husband’s memory for faces and details was as extraordinary as his ear for accents and did not doubt for a moment that it was the same man. For Dr Theiss, with his dislike of the new German Reich, a detail about ‘blotting one’s copybook with the Kaiser’s police’ – if worked artfully into the conversation – would be an infallible Open Sesame to trust . . . Was Alsace one of those places that Germany had taken away from France? Lydia recalled her friend Josetta had mentioned something about it, and she tried to remember what.

  ‘I beg you will excuse me for intruding on your work,’ said Lydia, as the scientist poured out tea for the three of them, where the window’s sunlight made small lace patterns on tablecloth and dishes. ‘It truly is unforgivable of me. But I read your article on serums in the blood, and I’m afraid I allowed my own enthusiasms get away with me. How on earth do you manage to continue your researches, with the volume of work you do here?’

  And who is giving you the money to do it?

  ‘There was a time when it was impossible. ’ Theiss smiled at her. ‘But now,
thanks to Madame –’ he nodded at Madame Vyrubova and saluted her with his cup – ‘who put me in contact with some most generous patrons . . . That was how it was that I was able to hire my good Texel in the first place; and, of course the donation of this building – and of another excellent laboratory facility not far from here – was of inestimable assistance. And I must admit,’ he added ruefully, ‘that my soul is so insufficiently evolved that I did grudge not being able to pursue my own researches, for so many years . . . ’

  ‘Oh, Professor—’ simpered Madame Vyrubova.

  ‘It was the profession’s loss,’ said Lydia. ‘Yet this most recent article of yours . . . I thought it showed signs of a completely new direction in your researches . . . ’

  It was a shot in the dark, because Lydia had barely skimmed Theiss’s latest work – published eighteen months previously in the Journal des Medicins – but Theiss beamed like an author whose more subtle themes had been applauded. Lydia put on her spectacles, and with Madame Vyrubova tagging politely on their heels, was taken on a tour of the laboratory next door, which was obviously – to her trained eyes – set up for experiments involving the meticulous testing, filtering, distillation and chemical analysis of the various components of blood.

  ‘Oh, I covet your microscope,’ she cried jestingly, and Theiss responded with a gallant little bow, hand over heart, as if he, like she, found relief in being able to talk with someone else who understood the quest for knowledge for its own sake. It was a relief, Lydia reflected, only to talk with another physician. Much as she enjoyed the stylish social rounds she’d been taken on by Razumovsky’s sister (‘Call me Natalia Illyanova, darling, Madame Korova sounds so formal . . . ’) in her quest for information about people who were never seen by daylight, she found the constant attempts of the young Army officers and members of the Court to get her into bed wearing in the extreme. The upper social circle of St Petersburg was just as gossipy as that of her London relations, but far more heated: everyone – with the exception of Madame Vyrubova, who seemed to be oblivious to it all – appeared to be engaged in adultery with everyone else.

  And as Jamie had said, NONE of them seemed to go to bed before dawn or to rise before dusk. If it weren’t for their bank accounts she would suspect them all of sleeping in coffins.

  By contrast, like herself, Benedict Theiss was a researcher in his heart. Perhaps, reflected Lydia, it was why she found the man so enormously sympathetic – had it not been for the presence of Texel in his household, and the monk Rasputin’s disconcerting reaction to the lady in the red touring-car, she would have concluded that there was nothing to investigate. When Theiss spoke of working far into the nights, of the limitations of working with very small sample-groups (how small? Lydia wondered), of the difficulties in obtaining the absolutely most up-to-date journals – which were censored, like everything else in Russia – she found herself in danger of forgetting all that Jamie had told her about the scheme to ally a vampire with the German Reich.

  Even now she found herself wondering, Was Jamie wrong?

  ‘Ach—’ Theiss looked at his watch. ‘Please, please excuse me, dear ladies . . . It is just that my unfortunates out there, they wait so long and so patiently, and there are so few to succor them . . . Texel!’ He raised his voice only slightly, but the younger man appeared at once in the doorway. ‘Texel, would you please continue to give Dr Asher a tour of my experiments, and explain to her whatever she wishes to know? Texel has been of invaluable help . . . Thank you, Texel . . . ’

  He clasped his assistant’s hand as he hurried out to his patients once more.

  ‘I’m fascinated by the filtration process that Dr Theiss is using. ’ Lydia smiled across at the glowering Alsatian. ‘Is that a dilute alcohol solution across plaster of Paris, as Pasteur did?’ The addition of spectacles to her perception hadn’t altered it: there was still an air of meagerness about the assistant, far deeper than form or face or hair. As if everything about him were begrudged and produced as cheaply as the market would bear. His replies to her questions were short and uninformative – on two occasions going so far as outright lies, when she asked him, with an expression of naïveté, about processes that she herself already knew about.

  What would Jamie make of the man’s accent? Was it really from Strasbourg? Jamie could place anyone in Oxford – scholar, servant, or shopkeeper – within ten miles of his or her birthplace after five minutes’ conversation, and according to him, regional dialects in German were far more pronounced than in England, almost separate languages. Would that show up in the French they were speaking? Evasions aside, it didn’t take someone of Jamie’s talents at observation to notice that the equipment in the laboratory was all new, and all of the same degree of newness: bought within the last year and a half.

  And none of it cheap. Had that been one of the wealthy patrons Madame Vyrubova had introduced Dr Theiss to? Princess Stana, or that frightful Madame Muremsky, who would go on and on about the Slavic Race’s unique position in the History of the Cosmos?

  Or someone a little less disinterested?

  And how might she ask, without word of it getting back to the vampire in question, that someone was on his trail?

  ‘I’m sure I have bored you ladies long enough,’ Texel concluded, with his tight manufactured smile, and herded them towards the door. ‘Poor Madame Vyrubova, I can see you yawning . . . ’

  ‘Not at all!’ lied the little lady gallantly. ‘Indeed,’ she confided to Lydia, ‘I have frequently thought that dear Dr Theiss should make a scientific examination of Father Gregory’s brain. Such genius! Such God-given ability must surely have refined and altered the very substance of his tissues . . . Many and many a time he has cured my terrible headaches, and the dear Empress’s, too, with just a touch . . . And sometimes with only a few words over the telephone . . . ’

  Lydia was just removing her spectacles as they stepped through the door into the clinic – even if these people were factory workers and stevedores, she wasn’t going to exhibit herself to them looking like a goggled stork – when she saw Dr Theiss deep in conversation with the woman in the stole of black-and-red sables who had picked him up in her red touring car at the Princess Stana’s less than a week ago.

  Lydia quickly put her spectacles back on. There was no mistaking that fur – it must have cost hundreds of guineas – nor the woman’s height and bearing. Dark light, Rasputin had said . . .

  These demons who wear darkness like a garment, to walk among men . . .

  She is another of them . . .

  Who is this man that you love? The man with the dark halo . . .

  Lydia drew a shaky breath. Whoever she was, today she was wearing a Doucet suit of sage-green and gold, which set off her honey coloring without shouting, I cost more than this building! Which, of course, M’sieu Doucet’s suits did . . .

  What was it Don Simon had said to her, one of those evenings on that long, frightening journey to Constantinople? That even fairly modest investments could accrue a phenomenal amount of interest in two centuries?

  Theiss led the lady in the sables to one of the benches, where a young man got to his feet. He was clearly a boy from the countryside, recently come in, like so many, for work in the factories: thin, dark-haired, and shy in his faded peasant trousers, his countrified boots and striped red-and-blue shirt. The boy started to bow awkwardly, but the woman in green took his hands, shook her head, said something that made the youth look quickly around him, as if fearing they had been overheard.

  ‘Who is that?’

  Interrupted in her encomiums of Father Gregory’s holiness and healing skills, Madame Vyrubova looked. ‘Oh, that’s Petronilla Ehrenberg. ’ By her tone, it was someone she had met in society at least once or twice. ‘One of dear Dr Theiss’s most generous patrons. I cannot imagine why dear Father Gregory spoke of her as he did the other day. He is a visionary . . . though she is a little outré,’ she added, her brow puckering like a g
ossipy schoolgirl’s. ‘I understand she does not go into society much – a widow, I believe. One seldom sees her, but I know that she does great good for the poor. It was she who paid for this building, you know, and I believe for the other laboratory facility dear Dr Theiss spoke of. ’

  ‘A compatriot of Dr Theiss?’

  ‘Now, I hope you’re not going to be like so many people and think all Germans are like those terrible Prussians! She is perfectly civilized. Just don’t let her talk to you alone—’ Madame Vyrubova dropped her voice as Dr Theiss came towards them, followed by the lovely Madame Ehrenberg. The Russian boy, still standing beside his bench, gazed after her like one struck by a vision. ‘She has a positive mania about St Michael and St George, and will talk your ear off about them if you let her. She has spoken about founding a nunnery devoted to their veneration—’

  ‘Rather like my cousin Bertie’s fixation with Joan of Arc, I suppose. ’

  ‘Oh, you poor dear! My Aunt Catherine had a fixation or an obsession or whatever it is that they call them, about . . . Dear Dr Theiss!’ She held out her hands to their host. ‘We came to bid you farewell – that is, if dear Madame Asher has seen all that she wishes—?’

  ‘Thank you. ’ Lydia clasped the scientist’s hand.

  ‘It has been my pleasure . . . So much so that I have entirely forgotten my manners. ’ He smiled again, his shy, self-deprecating smile. ‘First I neglect my visitors, then . . . Madame Ehrenberg, may I present Dr Asher, a fellow scientist and physician from England?’

  ‘Scarcely a scientist,’ denied Lydia quickly, seeing the flicker of steely wariness in the other woman’s green eyes. ‘That is, I do medical research at the Radcliffe Infirmary. On glands, you know. ’

  ‘How wonderful!’ Madame Ehrenberg had a deep voice for a woman, soft and velvety; tall like Lydia, in her neat subdued symphony of green and gold – her hands, even, were gloved in green kid. ‘A thousand times I’ve read of such things in the newspapers – of women studying medicine, or the law, or some such thing, in England . . . I’m afraid you may find even St Petersburg very behind the times, so far as the rights of half the human race are concerned . . . Or,’ she added, with a glance around her, ‘considerably more than half. I read, only the other day, how it is research into the glands that will, one day, open the doors of immortality to the human race. ’

  Lydia had read that, too – half-cocked articles in the penny newspapers, extolling mysterious ‘distillations’ and ‘infusions’ taken from the glands of monkeys and pigs, to ‘rejuvenate’ the aged indefinitely. But only the aged who were wealthy, as far as she could ascertain.

  ‘At the moment,’ she said tactfully, ‘I’m afraid I pursue far more pedestrian goals, like working out the relationship of the various elements of the glandular system . . . One can’t perceive much until one knows what one is looking at, and at the moment we know so little. ’

  Thus, chatting of commonplaces (‘IS that a Doucet?’), the three ladies were conducted to the doors of the clinic, which opened into a grimy little court off Samsonievsky Prospect. Smoke from the Putilov armaments works turned the chilly sunlight a sickly yellow, burning Lydia’s throat and lungs. Other stinks mingled with it, as bad as the clinic they had just left: choked sewers, overflowing latrines in every tenement yard, a dead horse somewhere nearby. As Madame Vyrubova’s car was brought up, M’sieu Texel opened the clinic doors for them; turning back to clasp her host’s hand once more, Lydia – still wearing her spectacles – saw that the young Russian boy to whom Madame Ehrenberg had been speaking had followed them to the door, his young heart in his eyes.

  He will dream of her tonight, thought Lydia as she got into the car.

  As it pulled away – and Madame Vyrubova returned to her earlier topic of Father Gregory’s miracles and the dozens of other miracle workers (‘Many of them quite dishonest, I’m afraid . . . ’), who moved through St Petersburg society, it occurred to Lydia what it was about Madame Ehrenberg that had troubled her so.

  It was something she would not have noticed, she realized – turning in her seat for one last look at Dr Theiss and Madame Ehrenberg in the grimy sunlight before the clinic doors – had she not spent many weeks in the company of Don Simon Ysidro.

  She couldn’t have sworn to it, but she was almost certain that Madame Ehrenberg had not been breathing.