Blood Maidens (27 page)

‘His name?’

Asher shook his head. ‘I need to talk to him.’

It might have been the reflected gleam of gaslight in the corridor; it was as if fire flickered in the deeps of those dark, reflective eyes. Though the vampire’s face was a young man’s face, it was wrinkled all around the eyes and eyelids. His mouth was nearly lipless, curiously puckish, with an evil sidelong smile.

‘We’ll talk to him.’

‘After I do.’

Close by his ear the woman said, ‘T’cha,’ and he felt her nail trace the skin of his throat, but the man sniffed with laughter.

‘You’re going to
bargain
with me?’ He sounded incredulous.
As well he might
, Asher reflected.

‘It can’t hurt to try.’

The man’s grip tightened on his shoulder, in his hair, drawing him closer. Fangs glinted in that little smile. ‘Oh, but it can. You have no idea how much it can hurt, Herr . . . And whom have I the honor of addressing?’

‘James Asher.’ Night after night of incomplete sleep, of exhaustion, had put a dreamlike haze on everything, as if he were short of oxygen. ‘And you are—?’

‘You may call me Todesfall. And where is your Spanish friend?’

‘I don’t know. I hope he reached Berlin safely—’

‘If he did it was two days ago, and he has not troubled to return for you.’

‘I think he would have done – one way or the other – had he found the man we sought.’ This was in fact a lie, since Asher hoped – and guessed – that Ysidro had gone straight on to St Petersburg to protect Lydia, possibly without even lingering in Berlin long enough to look for Colonel von Brühlsbuttel. He could feel his heart hammering and knew that the vampires could as well; was acutely, overwhelmingly conscious of the woman standing at his shoulder, watching the beat of the pulse in his throat.

Todesfall said softly, ‘We can make you tell.’

‘Could you trust what I said?’ And he saw the dark eyes flicker, gauging that thought.

‘More importantly, could you trust what
he
will say . . .
if
you find him. Do you know enough about the workings of the Auswärtiges Amt to be able to distinguish lies from truth? Do you really want to have the Kaiser recruiting fledglings—’ He gritted his teeth against the angry clench of the vampire’s fists, and kept his voice steady with an effort. ‘Or have Petra Ehrenberg running those fledglings as her own?’

‘Bitch.’ Todesfall rammed him back against the bars with a violence that knocked the breath from his lungs. ‘Sly whore. I never trusted her—’

Asher had the good sense not to wonder aloud why, in that case, Todesfall had made her vampire, if in fact he had. He rubbed his shoulder and held his peace.

The vampire woman stepped around to the other’s side, and the two of them traded a glance; it was like feeling the cold wing of Death’s shadow cross his face. Then Todesfall grinned his sidelong grin again and nodded towards Asher’s two sleeping cell-mates: ‘Which one of these two do you want me to kill? Don’t look away like that,’ he added, catching Asher’s jaw in his hand and turning his face back, so that their eyes met again. ‘If you don’t choose one I’ll take both: two widows, how many orphans . . .? How many children do you think that one has?’ He poked the German with his knee; the man didn’t even move. ‘Five? Six? Maybe a widowed mother and a couple of ugly sisters depending on his support? What about our skinny friend over there on the other bunk? He’s older . . . Maybe his wife is in poor health? Or perhaps she minds her grandchildren . . . Little babies crying for the supper he brings—’

‘Stop it.’

‘Which one?’

Their only crime was sharing a cell with him. And keeping him awake.

He could tell Todesfall would really kill them both if he didn’t choose.

‘The older one,’ he said, and he turned his face to the wall.

NINETEEN

Lydia spent the following morning writing up a report of what she had seen at St Job’s. She made neat sketches – as if she were illustrating a dissection – of the layout of the monastery, insofar as she had seen it, and of the thing – the boy – she had encountered in the crypt. To these she appended an account of the meeting between the unfortunate youth and ‘Petronilla’ in the sun-drenched hall of the clinic.

Obviously, Horace Blaydon wasn’t the only man in the world who had had the idea of producing artificial vampires. And, by the look of it, Benedict Theiss had had the advantage – which Blaydon had not had – of finding a true vampire willing to work with him . . .

But if Theiss had a vampire working with him, why go to the clumsy expedient of producing them by artificial means? Especially when the result – or one of the results – was so disastrous?

She sat turning her teacup for a time, gazing out into the light-filled woods beyond the veranda.

To prevent Madame Ehrenberg from holding over them the power that a master held over her fledglings?

But, in that case, why would La Ehrenberg go along with it? In Lydia’s experience, no vampire – not even Ysidro, in so many ways atypical, (
no, he isn’t!
she told herself) – yielded a finger-breadth more control than he or she had to . . .

Or was there something amiss with the vampires that La Ehrenberg made? Like the late Master of Constantinople, who had been incapable of getting fledglings? Were they all turning out as monsters? Had she come to Theiss to be
cured
? Lydia’s mind toyed with the idea even as she rejected it. No matter how badly Benedict Theiss needed money for his researches, she
could not
see that gentle, kindly man agreeing to help a vampire produce better fledglings.

What, then?

At one in the afternoon, the Baroness Sashenka put in an appearance, dressed to the nines in lavender Poiret that made Lydia feel gawky and schoolgirlish, and carried her off for luncheon at the ultra-stylish restaurant Donon with assorted members of the Circle of Astral Light. (‘
My darling, you can’t abandon me, that frightful Muremsky woman is going to be there, going on about the instinctive wisdom of the Russian peasant, and I need to have someone there whose husband has actually
spoken
to peasants . . .
’)

While being waited on by the ubiquitous staff of Tatars (Sashenka was quite right about Madame Muremsky’s conversation), Lydia inquired about the monastery of St Job and received a torrent of conflicting information, involving spectral lights and noises, secret rituals of the Illuminati, corrupt medieval abbots, eighteenth-century scandals, and the plain financial mismanagement that had eventually closed the place down. It was very difficult to sort out useful facts which could apply to vampires from mere gossip – or even to ascertain which pieces of gossip might have a basis in truth.

‘There were supposed to be just miles of secret passageways, between it and its little priories—’

‘When the heretical sect was cleared out of there in the time of the Empress Elizabeth, I’m told all its adherents were bricked up in underground cells—’

‘They can’t have been terribly far underground, can they?’ Lydia looked up worriedly from her mushrooms and toast points. ‘I mean, it’s rather close to the river.’

‘That’s just it, darling.’ Madame Muremsky laid a delicate hand on Lydia’s wrist, gazed into her eyes. ‘They were bricked up
alive
, and when the tide came up the Neva, the cells would flood, drowning them—’

‘Honestly, dearest, the same could be said of my cellar,’ retorted the Baroness Sashenka, which got a general laugh.

‘Scoff if you will, darling.’ Madame sampled a dab of Donon’s extremely tasty kasha. ‘But the Common People, in their wisdom, avoid the place . . .’

‘The Common People avoid the place because someone is paying the police a truly startling sum every quarter to keep people away from it,’ returned a Commissioner’s pretty wife.

Not much more success attended Lydia’s efforts to pick up information about Madame Ehrenberg, aside from the fact that the woman was generally disliked. (‘
She’s so
intent,
you know, dearest – and the way she runs poor Dr Theiss’s life for him is positively obsessive! One used to see him everywhere – always
so
charming – and now that she’s taken to supporting him he’s always either at the clinic or his laboratory . . .
’).

So, obviously, reflected Lydia, the woman that the real Petronilla was using as a stalking horse had come to Petersburg with her . . . which meant it would probably be impossible to find out anything about her true identity by making enquiries here.

‘Are they lovers?’ The question would have been unthinkable in Oxford or even London, but was commonplace around the Petersburg tea-tables.

‘Oh, I should think so,’ replied Commissioner Tatischev’s wife, and she licked crème fraiche from her fingers. ‘At least, when I encountered her at the Kustov’s, where that
handsome
Burenin was reading some of his poetry . . . Burenin has invented a
totally
new language for his poetry, to free the heart from the
bondage
that old meanings and old ways of thought have imposed upon words . . . Well, she – La Ehrenberg, I mean – got up to leave, saying it was a waste of time. Why seek new meanings for Love, she said, when the old one works quite well, even in this day and age . . .
Quite
missed the point, of course . . .’

‘I thought she spoke like a woman who was in love,’ said Sashenka.

‘Or what we were taught to believe was love,’ threw in a very advanced young Countess, ‘by priests and parents and
men
.’

‘What does a German know of love?’ Madame Muremsky waved a scornful and heavily jeweled hand. ‘What can one expect, of such a people? They have no understanding of the Russian Soul.’ And she clasped her hands upon her heart, as if her Russian Soul were about to leap from her breast and manifest itself, in all its glory, to the assembled ladies.

Two hours’ discussion of the Russian Soul ensued, and Lydia hesitated to bring the conversation back to Petronilla Ehrenberg, lest word reach her that Lydia Asher had been asking about her.

Jamie
, thought Lydia, jotting a note in her memorandum book:
labyrinth, crypt, police protection
 . . .

Jamie needs to know about all this
 . . .

There was no note from Jamie when she returned to the
izba
for dinner. Nor had there been one yesterday, nor the day before. She tried to tell herself that this was only some disruption in the German postal system, though given the renowned efficiency of the Reich, she was aware that this little self-deception was whistling in the dark. Not that any of the notes he’d sent her, daily, from Warsaw, from Berlin, from Prague and all those German cities had contained a word of information: he’d written in the name of a fictitious Aunt Caroline and had clearly striven to come up with the most absurd trivialities imaginable about the weather, the accommodations, and the obstinate refusal of Polish and German shopkeepers to learn the English tongue.

The message was in their arrival. The message was that he was alive and in good enough spirits to invent Aunt Caroline’s petty diatribes in that rounded, schoolgirlish writing, studded with underlinings and ellipses so unlike his own dark, jagged hand, knowing that it would make her laugh.

He was traveling with a vampire, in quest of other vampires: creatures who would kill to preserve the secrecy in which they lived. Creatures who existed on death.

She sat motionless in the little study, gazing at the darkening twilight of the woods beyond the window.

He was traveling with Ysidro . . .

She thrust the ghost-white, elegant image of the vampire from her mind.

Any vampire. They are creatures who kill those who serve them, for learning too much . . . or because they grow bored
.

And though Ysidro had befriended and protected them so far, she knew nothing of the vampires of those cities whose brightly-colored stamps enlivened the one-way correspondence . . . except that they were vampires.
Dear God, don’t let him come to harm
 . . .

From the age of thirteen, Lydia had had a physician’s clinical and rather mechanistic view of God – awe at His works, but too deep an awareness of the physical limitations of flesh and fate to hold much belief in the efficacy of individual prayer. Lately – after Constantinople, and a deeper acquaintance with vampires – her views had changed, leaving her confused about who she was praying to or why.

Her prayer was a child’s prayer:

Don’t let him come to harm
 . . .

Make it be all right
 . . .

The prayer people prayed all over the world.