Darkness on His Bones Read online

  Pigeons circled in the gray sky, and from all directions bells chimed for early Mass. It would probably be the best attended morning service of the twentieth century, Lydia reflected. Wives, mothers, sweethearts, flocking to pray for the men who were even now packing their clothes, reporting to their areas of deployment, receiving from quartermasters and clerks rifles, ammunition, sturdy boots, and the bright blue-and-scarlet uniforms of which the French were so proud. (‘Idiots!’ Aunt Louise had harrumphed. ‘They’ll stand out a mile! As well stick a dartboard on their bottoms!’)

  The Métro still seemed to be open, though last night one of the visitors to the ward had spoken of a rumor that it would be shut down. In any case Lydia had no desire to descend to the darkness underground, even at the threshold of dawn. Vampires, she knew, had ways of remaining awake into the hours of daylight, as long as they were protected from the sun’s killing rays. And she had learned also how common it was for vampires to have human servants.

  As Jamie was their servant, she thought, back in London.

  In view of the patriotic hysteria that seemed to have electrified the brain of every waiter, bus conductor, hospital orderly, and newsboy Lydia had talked to for the past three days, it was unlikely that anyone would even inquire were she to be ‘accidentally’ run down in the street or pushed off a church tower.

  So she climbed into the red-and-yellow taxicab that pulled up before the hospital’s steps, gave Aunt Louise’s address, and apologized to the dark-browed Neanderthal at the wheel for the inconvenience of a journey across the center of Paris. ‘Ce n’est rien, madame,’ he returned in a voice like a friendly gravel-bucket. ‘They’ve started requisitioning vehicles – trucks, automobiles, they even tried to get the horse from my cousin’s coal-cart – so at least the journey will be swift. And just as well,’ he added grimly. ‘The men in this city all started drinking last night, poor saps, as soon as they heard the news. Celebrating! Damned fools. Every café has been open all night, and stands open still. Me at least no man will find pounding the door of their damn recruiting office.’ He flipped a card from his pocket. ‘The telephone number there is the café opposite the cab-stand, the Ax and Bow on the Avenue du Maine in Montparnasse. Ask for Stanislas Greuze.’

  He walked her to the wide bronze doors of number forty-eight – possibly his willingness to be of service was related to the address on that most fashionable of streets, or to the exquisite quality of Lydia’s jade-and-violet silk walking suit. Aunt Louise’s companion, Mrs Flasket, was already awake and taking a cup of tea in the shadowy cavern of the apartment’s salon when Lydia unlocked the door. ‘How is he?’ She set aside her newspapers and poured another cup of tea for Lydia. Mrs Flasket habitually read the Times, Le Figaro, and the Berliner Tageblatt before breakfast. Aunt Louise seldom gave her the time to do anything once she herself wakened at six with querulous demands for tea, toast, and company.

  ‘Still unconscious.’ They both spoke almost in whispers. Even asleep, Aunt Louise had sharp ears.

  ‘Did you manage to speak to this Mr Streatham at the embassy yesterday, dear? I didn’t think so – heaven knows who’d have time for a mere civilian attempt at murder. Did you hear that Germany’s now declared war on Russia? The Germans are evidently claiming that French dirigibles bombed Nürnberg last night, so using German logic they’re going to invade Belgium in order to defend themselves. I had no opportunity to say so yesterday—’ she offered Lydia a small plate of toast, at which Lydia shook her head – ‘but I am extremely sorry to hear of Professor Asher’s injury.’ Aunt Louise’s harangue on the subject of Lydia’s rashness had, on the previous morning, prevented any other discourse. ‘Have they any idea yet what happened? The fourth arrondissement can be a dicey neighborhood.’

  ‘Only that he was found in the old churchyard of St Clare’s.’ Lydia wondered if she could wake sufficiently early this afternoon to have a look at the place by daylight, before returning to the hospital. It might be safer to telephone the cab-driver Stanislas Greuze as a paid escort, rather than risk taking Aunt Louise’s chauffeur Malraux, always supposing that Malraux hadn’t volunteered for the army by teatime. ‘Aunt Louise mentioned yesterday that Professor Asher called here when he arrived in town.’

  Or was it the day before? The exhaustion of travel, the long night sitting at Jamie’s side before she even came to her aunt’s apartment, blurred events and times … and Aunt Louise regarded a mere lecturer at New College (and one who’d had the temerity to wed into the family of Lord Halfdene without Aunt Louise’s permission, at that) as so far beneath her notice that she might well have neglected to mention Jamie’s visit for forty-eight hours after the arrival of Jamie’s terrified wife.

  ‘To borrow your aunt’s architecture guidebooks.’

  Lydia’s brows shot up, and she regarded the pleasant conglomeration of blurred pinks and blacks – all that she could readily distinguish of Mrs Flasket – with surprise.

  ‘Architecture guidebooks?’

  ‘She wouldn’t lend them.’ Mrs Flasket’s soft contralto flexed with an unspoken comment on her employer. ‘Fortunately, I had my own copies of several … I dare say they’ll be in his rooms. You haven’t yet found where he was staying?’ Her breath blew out in a tiny, resigned sigh. ‘I expect that’s what he was doing at St Clare’s. It was part of an old convent, you know, and quite the oldest church in the arrondissement. He asked me about the old hôtels particuliers in that district as well – it was the most fashionable part of town in the seventeenth century – and was I believe making inquiries about those who owned them these days.’

  Lydia guessed what Jamie had been looking for, and her heart lurched in her chest. How he’d traced the Paris vampires to the fourth arrondissement she wasn’t sure, but coming and going from the hospital she had seen any number of extremely old-looking buildings on the side-streets, baroque town palaces now surrounded by the cruder brick shops and houses of a working-men’s suburb.

  He has to have been looking for a vampire nest.

  Oh, Jamie, no …!

  Beyond the long windows, open already to the receding cool of the sticky morning, a boy’s voice shouted the news against the church bells: ‘France mobilizes! French armies to report to their staging points …’

  From the bedroom came the silvery complaint of Aunt Louise’s bell, followed by the old woman’s harsh voice: ‘Honoria!’

  Mrs Flasket rose. ‘Tell her I’ve gone to bed already,’ said Lydia quickly.

  ‘Of course, madam. I expect she’ll want to go to the bank,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘You probably should, too. The government will almost certainly close them, to prevent a run …’

  ‘Honoria!’

  The door of the kitchen quarters opened and Aunt Louise’s maid Marie hurried through. The young woman – whose name was actually Imèlde; Aunt Louise called all her maids Marie – carried the mahogany tray of breakfast: cocoa, crumpets, a few spoonfuls of clotted cream in one crystal dish and of marmalade in another. Aunt Louise considered silver inappropriate for early mornings.

  ‘This came for you, Madame Asher.’ Imèlde took an envelope from a corner of the tray. ‘Have you heard? Germany invaded Luxembourg this morning.’

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Flasket said. ‘That tears it.’

  The handwriting on the envelope was the same as the one that had come for Lydia yesterday – she had to hold it almost to the end of her nose to read it.

  The message inside was almost the same.

  My dear Mrs Asher,

  Might I beg the favor of a meeting with you? Information regarding your husband I have, which may mean the difference between life and death for him. At the base of the July Column, opposite the Rue de Lyon, at six this evening, in a cab I will be waiting. Forgive me these precautions: they are necessary. Please come alone, and tell no one of our rendezvous. Upon our meeting tonight all depends.

  Sincerely,

  William Johnson

  Lydia’s hand shook, and she turned aw
ay lest the maid see the tears that filled her eyes.

  Information regarding your husband … the difference between life and death …

  A lie? The truth? An unexpected ally or a trap? The sun would still be in the sky at six but even as there were vampires who could remain wakeful into the mornings – and longer, with the use of drugs – there were those who wakened a little before sunset from their impenetrable sleep.

  And a living man in their pay would of course suffer no such peril.

  This was the precise reason that the vampires of London had forced Jamie to work for them, seven years before.

  Precautions … are necessary. Upon our meeting tonight all depends.

  If it’s a trap, Jamie will die. We’ll both die.

  If it’s the truth, and I tear this up as I did yesterday’s …

  ‘Madam?’

  She turned sharply, to see – albeit rather blurred, between myopia and tears – Mrs Flasket’s worried face.

  ‘May I be of help?’

  She shook her head. ‘I just don’t know what to do. Whoever attacked him …’

  She held out the note, and the widow re-donned her reading-glasses to scan it. ‘I expect precautions are necessary,’ Mrs Flasket remarked, ‘given the mood of the people. Whatever this Mr “Johnson” says his name is, his handwriting is German. Look at the way he makes the capital “J” on “July Column”; only a German puts that slash to the side of it. And those “h”s in “husband” and “have” are characteristic, completely aside from that business of Information … I have, and Upon our meeting … all depends. I wasn’t a governess in Potsdam for eighteen months for nothing.’

  She frowned as she handed the letter back. ‘This is not to say,’ she went on carefully, ‘that a German gentleman would not mean Professor Asher well as much as a Frenchman or Englishman might …’

  The bell tinged even more insistently.

  ‘You’d best go to her.’ For a moment Lydia thought Mrs Flasket would linger for an answer, but after a troubled nod the older woman smoothed her dark-gray skirt and retreated in the direction of the bedroom.

  Putting Aunt Louise in one of her passions wouldn’t help Jamie – or anyone.

  For a long time Lydia stood in the light of the wide windows, listening to the bells and the shouts of the paperboys below, staring sightlessly at the note in her hand. The German armies were on the march. They’d be attacking through Belgium … even as the French armies would be haring madly away to the Rhine, a hundred miles or more to the south.

  They’ll be in Paris inside a week, Jamie had often said.

  And there would be men with the German army who would recognize James Asher, even unconscious and unshaven in a hospital bed.

  Recognize him as a man who’d asked a lot of questions around Berlin in the past, though he hadn’t been calling himself Asher then.

  And the worst of it was, she suspected, those Germans wouldn’t be the greatest danger.

  She crumpled the paper in her hand and poked it into the heart of the cold hearth.

  THREE

  Dreaming, he remembered the taste of tea.

  Old Mama Karlebach, in that tall narrow house near the Spanish synagogue in Prague – a formidable scholar in her own right – made the most extraordinary tea for her husband’s students, smoke-flavored and steeped with herbs and drunk, in the local fashion, from small engraved glasses held in cup-shaped silver holders, after one had tucked a cube of sugar in one’s cheek.

  Asher’s fellow student Jürgen Schaumm wanted to know why one couldn’t simply dissolve the sugar in the hot tea and sip it that way, as the English did. But Asher – always curious about different customs and moreover wanting to keep in Mama Karlebach’s good graces – obediently popped the sugar-cube in and slurped through it. ‘You’re doing it wrong,’ old Rebbe Karlebach had grumbled through the wilderness of his beard.

  Drifting in darkness – knowing he lay on the wave-shore of death, waiting for the tide to rise and cover him – Asher found himself again in that musty parlor, crowded with books and curiosities and bunches of drying herbs. Looking back, he realized that old Solomon Karlebach – old already in 1884 when Asher had first come to him during the summer vacs from Oxford – knew perfectly well that the vampires that he spoke of to his students were real. That they watched the old house on Bilkova Ulice, and knew that some at least of its inhabitants were aware of their existence. Yet neither the old man nor his wife ever showed the least concern about walking abroad at night. Karlebach’s sons and grandchildren lived in the house with them, noisy and lively and unaware that those who hunted the nights were any more genuine than the rusalkas in the rivers or Baba Yaga in the woods with her house that ran about on chicken legs, fables Mama Karlebach would tell them at bedtime.

  Nor was I any more aware than they.

  Asher saw himself in those days, tall and solemn with his thick brown hair falling into one eye and the long side-whiskers fashionable just then, sipping his tea in the parlor. Jürgen Schaumm, like a plump little gnome from some Black Forest tale, studiously jotted in his little green notebook every verb form usage that fell from the old woman’s lips in Czech or Yiddish. Asher knew he should be making such notes as well – Czech and Central European Yiddish were what he’d come to Prague to study – but he was much too interested in whether Prince Vassili would succeed in answering the riddles of the old man by the stream …

  And in his dream there was a sound at the window, the faint tapping of long claws on the distorted old glass. Rebbe Karlebach’s dark gaze lifted for a moment from his book, as if to pierce the darkness outside. But when Asher looked, there was nothing.

  Only the momentary gleam of eyes.

  ‘Mistress?’

  The word was barely the scratch of a dead leaf on pavement. Lydia jerked around with a gasp. The young man beside her was bleached as a ghost in the glare of the ward’s electric lamps, skin tailored like white silk over aquiline bones, long hair wispy and colorless as spider-web around a thin face horribly scarred, as if razors had slashed open cheek and throat and the cuts had never healed properly. His eyes had a crystalline quality, sulfur and champagne.

  The hands he held out to her were armed with inch-long claws, and when he said, ‘Hush—’ as she threw herself into his arms, she could see his fangs.

  ‘Mistress, hush.’

  Her arms locked around his waist and she pressed her cheek to his; they were of a height, five feet seven. His flesh, though without the limpness of the dead, was cold as that of a corpse, which was exactly what he was.

  A corpse whose life had been extinguished in 1555.

  A man who had become vampire. A vampire whom Jamie had vowed he would kill.

  ‘Thank you!’ she whispered. ‘Oh, Simon, thank you, thank you—’

  ‘Art well?’ Don Simon Ysidro put his palm to the side of her face, drew back to regard her. ‘Have they tried to come for you?’

  She shook her head. ‘But they must know I’m here. And I’ve had two notes, trying to get me alone—’

  ‘Did you keep them? Silly girl,’ he added when she shook her head again. He sat on the edge of Asher’s bed, felt his hands and forehead, economical of movement as a dancer and with no more expression than an ivory image. Above a Jermyn Street suit of ash-gray wool and a silk tie precisely two shades lighter, his features were indefinably not of the newborn twentieth century nor yet of the one that had preceded it. Rather, they always reminded Lydia of old portraits, close-lipped and withdrawn, as befitted those who had grown up in the shadow of the Inquisition.

  ‘Will he be all right?’ Everything she had learned about head trauma in four years at the Radcliffe Infirmary, and in nine years of study thereafter, flooded to mind. ‘Is he … is he himself, in there?’

  The yellow gaze touched her like a measuring rod, then turned aside. She thought for an instant that some expression passed across his face. Resignation? Grief? Understanding? Then Ysidro placed both hands on Asher’s f
ace, shut his eyes, cocked his head as if deeply listening. Seeing into his dreams, as vampires could. Probing his thoughts in unguarded sleep.

  When his eyes returned to hers she saw in them what she had never seen before, and it shocked her to her soul that he would feel pity, and terrified her too.

  ‘That I do not know, Mistress. Time only will tell.’ She didn’t see him do it – it was extremely difficult to see a vampire move any distance – but he was suddenly standing at her side (when did he get up?) holding another chair; he must have taken it from beside a bed further down the ward. He set it next to hers, sat in it, and took her hands.

  ‘Tell me what befell him. I sought you in dreams the night I had your letter, yet you were waking till it grew light.’

  ‘I didn’t dare sleep.’ She clenched her hands, aware that they were trembling and angered by this. The herbs had that effect sometimes, like cold and heat at once. ‘Not at night. They have to know he isn’t dead. Are they out there?’

  ‘One only.’ And he moved a finger slightly as she slewed around to glance at the long curtainless windows. ‘Vampires are ever to be found near hospitals, Mistress. It may have naught to do with James. Tell me now …’ Moth-light fingertips brushed eyelids and lips, and a line appeared between the vampire’s pale brows. ‘He cannot have run so mad as to hunt them? Surely he would not cross the Channel at such a time to do so?’

  ‘I don’t … I don’t think so. I know what he said a year ago …’ She shook her head. ‘He had a letter – he’d received an invitation to a linguistics conference. I’m sure it was a put-up job by the Foreign Office, because the invitation came the day after the Germans started poking their fingers into that whole uproar about whoever it was who got himself shot in the Balkans … the Prince of Serbia?’

  ‘The Archduke of the Austrian Empire.’

  ‘He did tell me.’ Lydia passed a tired hand over her forehead. ‘It seems years ago, now … In any case, he tucked the invitation away and didn’t even answer it. If it had been genuine – from a genuine linguistic society, I mean – he’d have written a refusal. Then about two weeks after that he got a letter from Rebbe Karlebach.’