Blood Maidens (33 page)

Or does Petronilla want to speak to Ysidro first?

The thought occurred to her that if Don Simon proved recalcitrant – and Recalcitrant, not to say Ornery, was the Spanish vampire’s middle name – it was herself, Lydia, who would be used to convince him to cooperate.

When the second lock came off, Lydia’s hands were shaking so badly that she had to sink to the floor, lean against the trestle, and rest, before she was capable of tying the ends of the chains together with knots of thread, with the closed padlocks bound into the knots to give the appearance – from a distance, to someone not paying much attention – that the locks were still in place.
Please, God, keep them both busy with something else until dark
 . . .

The outer door of the chapel was bolted from the outside. Lydia almost wept with gratitude that it wasn’t possible to go rescue Evgenia, a task she knew herself utterly incapable of. Amid their clouds of gold-and-crimson splendor, the saints and angels watched impassively as she crawled the length of the chapel again, back to her cell. She opened an inch of seam at a corner of her pillow – Jamie had taught her to be thorough – and slipped the picklocks inside, before she laid her head down.

God, please don’t let this start me bleeding. Don’t let this hurt my child.

Because she knew there would be a child. The certainty of it was the last thought that went through her mind before she passed out as if she had been drugged.

TWENTY-THREE

Lydia dreamed of twilight. Somewhere near at hand men argued drunkenly, children cried. She smelled smoke, sewage, dirty clothing. All the stinks of the clinic. People weary, with the blind weariness of frustration and exhaustion, shouting at one another . . . in Russian, which she thought was most curious, since she didn’t know any Russian except,
I will not be back for dinner
.

She dreamed about a grandmother. Evgenia’s grandmother? Somebody’s – and certainly nothing like the well-starched matriarch of the Willoughby family. A tiny bent woman with white hair, moving painfully about the filthy streets of the slum with a basket of scarves to sell. She had a tall staff, like a mast with five crosspieces, also decorated with scarves: red, purple, blue, pink, like a gaudy tree with all its leaves fluttering in the wind. This she used to support her steps, and Lydia felt the pain in her legs and her back as if it were her own.

For some reason Lydia knew her name was Ekaterina, and that she’d been beautiful when she was young.

Ekaterina had a regular route, like the peddlers in Oxford and London – up the Samsonievsky Prospect, along the Putilov railroad spur (
how do I know all this?
), back by way of the canal. Other vendors, pushing carts of old shoes or carrying trays of hot pies, greeted her:
Zdravstvooytye, babushka
. She’d had four sons, two of whom were in the Tsar’s army and the other two were dead, killed in accidents at the Navy Yard, but their widows – and her many grandchildren – called to her outside the tenements where they lived. One of her daughters had saved a little bread for her.

Only on this day – and it was daylight now, Lydia saw, the gorgeous golds of the long arctic dawn and not the deepening twilight of evening – Ekaterina followed the tracks past the steelworks, moving like a small gray fish against the jostling groups of men who passed wearily through the gates for another day’s toil. Before her, the walls of an old monastery rose, soot black and somber among the wooden tenements. Somehow the old woman knew that she must walk a circuit around its walls and along the path of the old Putilov canal, and on the side that faced the waste ground – the side overlooked by the broken windows of the old chapel – something pale fluttered among the new little weeds; something pale that, as it moved, revealed the gleam of gold.

Ekaterina crossed herself and kissed her knuckle for luck. Witches and demons haunted St Job’s these days. Her daughter’s friend Tonya had seen one, flitting about the ruins of the stables on that side . . .

Yet an angel stood beside that fluttering scrap of paper; an angel with a thin scarred face like a skull, framed by long colorless spiderweb hair.

God wishes you to send a telegram, Grandmother
, said the angel to Ekaterina.

The old woman crossed herself again. ‘I cannot read, Master Angel; I cannot write. I am an old poor woman . . .’

This is why God asks this of you and no other
, replied the angel.
Take – obey
. And he pointed with a long thin forefinger to the paper lying on the ground. His nail was as long as a claw and gleamed like polished glass.
You see that he will pay you, for he has heard your prayers and given you this way to earn your due reward
.

Then the angel smiled, warm and gentle as spring sunlight after bone-racking cold – a smile that would lead anyone to do anything for him, even perhaps go down a dark alleyway with him in the night, believing that they would come to no harm.

Ekaterina hobbled forward, steadying herself on her staff of bright scarves, and the angel seemed to drift off a little distance in his garments of light. She saw that the paper did indeed contain several lines of writing in some foreign tongue, (
it’s German
, thought Lydia,
why am I dreaming about telegrams in German?
), and that the paper was rolled up and thrust through a fire-blackened gold ring, which bore in its bezel a heat-cracked pearl.

‘Where is he?’

Lydia plunged from the dream as if falling from a height into a vat of pain. Hands crushed her shoulders, jerked her upright – she had never felt pain like the pain that ripped through her skull, and she cried out as she was shaken like a doll in the grip of a demented child.

‘Madame, stop—!’ Lamplight tumbled into the room from the open chapel door, making all the frowning saints on the walls seem to fling up their hands in alarm. Behind silver-barred windows the night was not black, but royal blue.

Petronilla struck her, brute viciousness in the blows; shook her again as her consciousness reeled. ‘Little slut! Carrot-headed whore! Where—?’

‘Madame—’ Theiss caught the vampire’s wrist, and Petronilla threw Lydia to the floor, turned upon the physician like a mad beast.

‘You helped her!’ Her voice shrilled into the thin wild registers of madness. Gold hair fell undone around her shoulders, and her eyes threw back the lamplight like a rat’s. ‘You came back, unlocked the door . . . You hoped she would come to you!’

‘My darling—’ He retreated before her, his whole body stooped, silhouetted against the lamplight from the door, ready to dodge or flee—

Does he REALLY think he can outrun her
?

Lydia wondered with a sense of detached calm whether Dr Theiss had ever considered wearing silver around his throat and wrists. With that many vampires under the same roof, maidens or not, it might be something to consider.
If I live through this I’ll have to suggest it to him
 . . .

‘Don’t speak words of love to me!’ She almost spit the words at him. ‘Not when you’ve been making eyes at that skinny red-haired bitch – I’ve seen you! And that tramp Genia as well!’

‘You know that’s not true.’ Theiss’s voice was completely steady. Floating like a grass blade on top of a blood-lake of pain, Lydia didn’t know how he faced her . . . except that he must really love her.

‘Liar!’ Her hands flexed open into claws. Her back was to Lydia – what her face must be like, Lydia could barely imagine.

Theiss walked forward calmly, his eyes – Lydia thought – holding those of the vampire. When he came near enough, he took Petronilla’s hands.

‘My beautiful one, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. The man cannot escape. Every window is barred with silver, as are the grilles over the outer doors. We have Madame Asher—’

‘Kill her!’

‘He will come out, if we have her.’

‘Kill her!’ Petronilla jerked her hands from his. ‘Or do you think you’ll keep her for yourself?’ She swung back around to where Lydia lay, half-propped against the wall like a broken rag-doll, and her fangs glinted in her drawn-back lips. ‘Show me how much you love me, Benedict—’

‘I am showing you.’ He took her hand again, turned her to face him, hazel eyes calm and filled with love. Suddenly, the tension went out of Petronilla’s body, as if her soul had been hamstrung. She almost staggered against him, put her hand to her head—

‘Petronilla,’ he whispered in that deep strong voice. ‘You know you don’t mean it.’

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No. You’re quite right, Benedict – forgive me . . .’

She stepped back a little, so that the lamplight fell on her, face veiled in hair like a shimmering cloud. A beautiful face, vulnerable and delicate as a young girl’s. Theiss brought up her hand to kiss, frowned, and asked, ‘What’s this?’ and she drew her hand from him. But he turned it, so that the palm faced the lighted door. ‘Did you burn it?’

‘I – yes, in the kitchen,’ she said, in a voice that told Lydia that she had no idea where or how she had burned her hand. ‘It was clumsy of me . . .’

But Lydia knew that no vampire is clumsy.

She’s having blackouts
.

And doesn’t want him to know
.

Theiss came over to Lydia, gently lifted her back onto the bed. ‘Are you all right, Madame?’ he asked, and Lydia thought it would be politic to burst into tears again – not difficult, considering how badly her head hurt.

‘I didn’t do anything,’ she sobbed, showing the very genuine terror she had felt a few moments ago. ‘I was asleep—’

‘Don’t lie, little bitch.’ Petronilla stepped forward, and Lydia cringed down behind Theiss, clinging to his arm.

He rather quickly disengaged her hand, turned to Petronilla. ‘Please—’ And to Lydia, ‘Who is he? The man we found you with.’

She almost said,
I don’t know
, then realized that anything she would say could be checked against Evgenia’s story, and she couldn’t recall enough of the attack on the
izba
to know what Simon might have told the Russian girl. She remembered only his hands, cold on her forehead, and how light his claws had felt.
He didn’t kill Margaret
 . . .

Did I dream that?

Did he tell me that because he thought I was dying?

Because he thought HE would die?

Did he tell me because it was a lie, or because it was the truth?

She stammered, ‘He is – he is a vampire—’ and wilted artistically back against the wall, her hands to her head, as if in a faint, which was not far from being the truth. She heard the violent rustle of Petronilla’s silk petticoats and braced herself for another blow.

But Theiss said, ‘No, Petra, please. She needs to rest. You can speak to her in the morning. You must forgive her,’ continued Theiss softly, as Petronilla’s shadow momentarily blotted the lighted doorway into the gaudy chapel beyond. ‘She isn’t like this as a rule. The strain of what she is going through, coming back from the darkness, learning once more to live in the daylight—’

Lydia whispered, ‘Is that possible?’ and put her hand over Theiss’s wrist. ‘How?’

‘It is a series of injections.’ The tone of his voice, full of grave joy, told her worlds about his love for research, his dedication to what he was doing. ‘Distilled from the blood of vampires whose systems have never been polluted with human blood. Who are in their pure state, as Nature made them. Madame Asher, you must rest—’

‘Please—’ She clung to the warm hands that tried to bring up blankets over her again. ‘What will happen to Evgenia? She said – she said Madame told her they would become angels.’

‘Not become angels,’ he corrected her gently. ‘What she said was probably that they are
helping
the angels – that their lives were saved so that they can help in the battle against evil. I’ll explain later,’ he said kindly, tugging the blankets into place. ‘But Petronilla Ehrenberg is engaged on one of the great crusades against evil in this world: a soul dragged halfway to Hell, she has turned her back on the world of the Undead, dedicated herself not to their eradication, but to their salvation. Please believe me, Madame Asher. If your friend should speak to you – should try to return to you – please assure him that he has nothing to fear from us. Nor have you,’ he added, and he pressed her hands.

Lydia, whose neck had almost been broken by the violence of Petronilla’s rage, widened her eyes and did her best to look as if she believed him. ‘Truly?’

‘Truly. She is . . . The injections have irritated her, made her short-tempered – as you must know, the Undead have a truly fearsome strength. But the effect is temporary. In time, I know, she will grow used to the daylight – will learn to come back to the world of the living. As will they all,’ he said softly. ‘As will they all.’

Bebra to Eichenberg, a journey of barely ninety minutes. Then nearly twenty-four hours, chained in the blackness of another cellar. Asher slept the sleep of exhaustion on the stone floor, but kept waking in panic, thinking he felt Jacoba’s cold hand on his face, the touch of her fangs on his throat. Then he would sleep again and dream of his old friend Horace Blaydon, bluff and arrogant and confident in his research and his skills, reduced to uneasy terror as he saw the fearful changes that a serum of vampire blood had made in his son.