Blood Maidens (28 page)

There was no more reason to think God would grant that one than He’d granted her desperate plea of six months ago, that by some miracle her bleeding would stop, and her baby would live.

The blackness beyond that door in her mind was worse than the crypts of St Job’s, and as she had yesterday, she mentally backed from the thought of that lost child, mentally closed the door.
Stay out of there
 . . .

Even as she had backed away already, a dozen times, from the whispered suspicion that had begun to cross her mind, that she had conceived again and might be carrying a child.
Stay away from hope, if you would stay away from despair . . .

‘
Pardonnez-moi,
Madame.’

Lydia almost jumped, as the maid Alyssa came in with a lamp.

‘
Ce ne’est rien
.’ Thanks to the government’s sincere and widespread education program over the past few decades, large numbers of young Russians could speak French, an accomplishment particularly valued among the girls who hoped for employment as maids. One might have to put up with the Madame Muremskys of the world, Lydia reflected, but having seen the St Petersburg slums – having heard from Ivan, and Razumovsky, about the conditions a young girl would encounter in the average factory – Lydia could understand the attraction of picking up someone else’s stockings and cleaning someone else’s chamber pots if it meant a decent meal every night.

‘I’m sorry.’ Lydia stood up, realizing she had a headache from missing the supper that Rina had said she’d set out for her . . . Good heavens, when was that?

The windows were inky dark. Drat these endless afternoons, one never had the slightest idea of what time it really was . . .

‘Time got away from me. Please apologize to Rina for me.’

The maid grinned quickly, ‘Oh, Rina knows not to put food on the table until Madame is actually sitting down . . . It is not that. There is a young lady to see you. It is urgent, she says.’

‘A young lady?’ Lydia gathered her spectacles inconspicuously into one hand, followed the maid into the long front room. Tried to think of which members of the Circle of Astral Light Alyssa wouldn’t already know . . .

The girl in the lamplit parlor dipped a curtsey as Lydia came through the bedroom door. Nothing about the heart-shaped face or thick mass of dark hair seemed familiar, so Lydia put on her spectacles again for a better look: dark eyes, full lips, delicate features that spoke of some southern strain in the blood . . .

‘May I help you?’ Lydia asked, in French. ‘I am Madame Asher . . .’

‘Yes, ma’am, I know.’ The girl looked up at her, and with the motion of her head the lamplight flashed in her eyes, like yellow mirrors.

Lydia felt for a moment that she’d stepped from the warmth of the room back into winter. Cold and disoriented . . .

‘I heard you say so in the crypt at the monastery,’ the girl went on, ‘when you called out to Kolya. And they said in the street that your coachman’s livery was that of Prince Razumovsky. Someone said, there was an English lady staying with him . . .’

For all their sweet fullness – even in the warmth of the oil lamp’s golden glow – the girl’s lips were not so much as a half shade darker than her marble-white face. When she spoke, Lydia could see her fangs.

Oh, dear God
 . . .

‘Madame, please . . .’ The girl held out her hand. ‘My name is Evgenia,’ she added quickly, seeming to remember her manners. ‘Evgenia Greb. I live on Politov Court, near the railway works – that is, I did, I used to . . . That is . . .’ Grief twisted her face for a moment, grief and terror that it took her the space of a few breaths to master. But Lydia could see already that this girl did not breathe.

‘Madame, what’s happened to me? What’s happened to us? You said to Kolya that you could help him. I . . . I know we’re not supposed to leave the monastery, I know God will strike us down, but Kolya . . .’

‘Kolya was the boy at the door of the crypt?’

Evgenia nodded. She was trembling; her dark eyes, with their eerie reflectiveness, swam with tears. Lydia swiftly assessed the girl’s clothing: faded hand-me-downs spruced up with cheap ribbon, itself already starting to discolor and fray. She’d seen the same on hundreds of girls as the carriage had passed through the slums, in Petersburg, in Paris, in London.

‘He’s changed,’ the girl whispered. ‘And now
I’m
starting to change. Look.’ She pulled off her mended gloves, held out her fingers to show the claw-like thickening and lengthening of the nails, shiny as glass and harder than steel.

‘Madame said—’

‘Madame who?’

‘Ehrenberg. Madame said that we were chosen, we would be transformed through our faith, that we would be fitted by God to battle demons.’ She put her hands momentarily to her mouth, to still the shaking of her lips – maybe to cover what she’d seen already in a mirror. If Madame Ehrenberg let them have mirrors . . . ‘But Kolya . . . and Kolya isn’t the only one. I’ve been there three weeks, and Madame and Dr Theiss swear that all will be well, that we are in God’s hands, but some of us . . .’

The girl’s voice sank lower, as if to hide from the very shadows of the room. ‘She says that we will be able to fight demons. That we will be able to save our families and make the world whole again. But, Madame, I think that some of us are becoming demons ourselves. Do you know what has happened to us? What we have become?’

‘You don’t know?’

Tears running down her face, Evgenia shook her head.

They took the night train for Bebra, where they would arrive at two thirty in the morning, Asher and the vampire woman Jacoba. She had been a moneylender’s wife and a scholar in her own right in the days when Köln had been a Free City under the Empire. From the jail they’d taken him to a tall half-timbered town house, where they’d left him chained in a sub cellar; among the boxes and barrels around the walls there, before they’d taken away the lamp, he’d seen wall niches, as in a catacomb. They were empty, but he’d wondered how many vampires used the place as a nest. Sitting with his back to the wall in the darkness, he had not dared to sleep, which was just as well. Had he dozed off, he knew he would quite likely have seen the dead Frenchman lying in the jail cell, with a slashed throat in a pool of not quite enough blood, and the knife that did it left curled in the sleeping German’s hand.

I couldn’t have saved them
 . . .

He knew this to the marrow of his bones, but the fact remained that if he hadn’t been in the cell with them, they would both have lived.

‘Is that part of the hunt?’ he asked, when she took her seat on the hard bench in the third-class railway carriage at his side. ‘Part of the game?’

Jacoba raised her eyebrows, surprised that the matter still troubled him. ‘Bread without salt will keep you from dying,’ she said, in a marvelous alto that was like an intimate caress. ‘One savors chocolate, and French cheeses, and good wine.’ Her smile was sleepy and amused. She’d woken up the gray-haired French prisoner before she’d killed him and had made sure he’d known that he was about to die. He had not died well.

The way her eyes rested on Asher in the rattling dimness of the smelly train-car, he guessed she was looking forward to killing someone she had come to know.

‘I hope I come up to your expectations, when the time arrives,’ he said politely, and she was surprised into laughing, which changed her whole stern face. ‘One would hate to find oneself no more than a
vin ordinaire
. Tell me about Petronilla Ehrenberg.’

And, because he had amused her, she complied. ‘A little bitch,’ she said, ‘as Brom – Todesfall – called her. Always her eye was upon the main chance.’ Her German was old-fashioned and echoed, more than a little, the native Kolensh that the workmen had spoken on the tram three – or was it four? – days ago. The words she used for simple things like salt and wine were not German at all, but a Gothic Rhineland French. ‘Had I known he was going to bring her into our circle, I would have killed her myself. Shallow as a donkey’s hoof print, but very good with money and credit – her husband was high in the Deutsches Bank – and with a mind for investments. Brom respects that. And pretty, in that pink-and-golden candy-box fashion . . . something, alas, Brom is also a trifle too taken by.’

She folded her hands, square and short-fingered in soiled and mended gloves. At Asher’s insistence, they had disguised themselves in the shabby garments of the poor. ‘Why take the trouble to avoid the German police by a ruse, when I can turn their eyes away with a thought?’ she had asked him, when after his deliverance from the Köln jail he’d asked for workman’s clothes and boots, and a razor and basin to trim the whole of his head down to the stubble that now fuzzed his crown.

But his reply, ‘Because if the Kaiser is recruiting the Undead you may not be able to turn away all eyes,’ had brought results, and on the night train there were few enough to share the accommodations. In faded black, with a shawl over her head, Jacoba looked like any other Jewish matron, unless she smiled, or the flicker of station lamps through the windows happened to catch the unholy luminosity of her eyes.

‘Once she understood what Brom could do for her,’ she went on now, ‘of course she was a lover of Jews. But that was a lie, and she and I have never gotten along. I thought at the time, it was why she left Köln. That she sought only another city, where the master would allow her to hunt. I should have known there was something else afoot.’ The dark eyes narrowed to an ugly flicker.

‘What would she get from it?’ asked Asher, hoping that he could remember the way her speech wrapped around the words, somewhere between German and French. He wondered if, before they reached Berlin, he could get this woman to speak to him in the language of her long-ago childhood . . .

Or was that something else, as Ysidro had said, that had faded with the preoccupation with the hunt?

‘What could the Kaiser give her?’

‘Give her?’ The beautiful dark brows arched, barely glimpsed in the sickly wisp of moonlight that penetrated the unlighted carriage. ‘Power, of course. And Brom.’

‘Does she love Brom?’

Jacoba sniffed. ‘Brom has power,’ she said. ‘Power over her . . . which she cannot abide. So she convinced Brom that she loved him, in order to get him to make her vampire – I think she may have convinced herself at the same time. She is that sort of woman, who needs to think “love” exists. We – the Undead – we do not love one another, Herr Vin Ordinaire, but we do understand one another, better than the living could ever hope to do. As for that woman—’

Asher could almost hear the capital letters in her voice, more pronounced in German – That Woman – and was hard put not to smile.

‘—I suspect that even in her lifetime, for all her romantic moonshine, she loved nothing, and no one, that did not in the end somehow profit herself.’

TWENTY

Evgenia whispered, ‘It isn’t true.’

‘What did she tell you,’ asked Lydia, ‘that you would become? And what did she do to you, to make you this way?’

The servants had gone. Lydia had sent them up to the main house, not daring to let even a whisper be heard. Gossip in the streets had directed this girl here. Clearly, the woman she thought of as the Daytime Petronilla – the one everyone in Petersburg knew – knew enough people to eventually hear of it, if servants started whispering about a vampire visiting the English lady at Razumovsky’s
izba
.

The girl pressed her hands to her face, shook her head violently. ‘It isn’t true. I am not a
vampir
, I have killed no one—’

‘Have you drunk blood?’

She looked up, from the peasant bench where she sat, her dark eyes desperate. ‘The blood of rats and mice only, Madame. Madame would bring them in, show us how to slit their throats with our nails and drain the blood into a silver cup. Later, she said – when we had grown, nurtured in the darkness as God nurtures up seeds in the ground – she said we would be as the angels are, able to live upon nothing but air and God’s light.’ Her whole body trembled as she spoke, and she gazed at Lydia’s face as if seeking some clue there that what Lydia had told her was a lie, or a test of some kind.

God, please make it be all right
 . . .

Lydia closed her eyes, breathed for a moment, trying to find some tactful way of saying what she had to say and knowing, firstly, that there wasn’t one, and secondly, that if there had been, she, Lydia Asher, who for all her social adeptness was as tactless as the average house-pet, was the wrong person to entrust with the task.

She opened her eyes at the cold touch of those dead hands upon her own – cold as Ysidro’s were – and saw that Evgenia had sunk to her knees in front of Lydia’s chair, clasped her hands—

And flinched back in pain, rubbing her fingers even at the proximity of the silver chains Lydia wore on her wrists.

‘Madame Ehrenberg was lying to you,’ Lydia said, keeping her voice steady with an effort. ‘Madame Ehrenberg is a vampire. She lied to you – probably sent you dreams or visions in your sleep—’

The horrified widening of the girl’s eyes told her she’d guessed right about that.