Seven for a Secret (11 page)

The wampyr fought a rising chill, and kept his frown from his face as much as possible. “And if we offered to extract you?”

“None of the girls will go with you willingly.”

“We can protect them. We can protect their families. Young King Phillip has been welcomed in his exile by the government of the Americas, and we have the means to extract all of you from England and make you safe. You would be welcomed in the fight against the Prussians, you know.”

“I am in the fight against the Prussians,” she hissed.

He blinked. And wondered how he could have been so blind.
The Chancellor’s private guard,
she’d said.

Ruth turned away. Her crossed arms crept higher, tighter against her chest. “You’d better go.”

“Ruth—”

“Devil,” she said. “Do not tempt me. You can make us safe. Very well. Do you think we’re the only ones? Do you think the Chancellor will fail to campaign against Russia, when he has consolidated his hold on Europe? When he has Russia, will he be content? Or will he find other uses for his Ulfhethinn, wampyr?”

When she stared at him, it was clear she expected him to look down. She could not know how little shame he still had in him, or how little investment in nationalism. “It seems,” he said, “unlikely.”

She nodded. “I also think not.” She was so young, a child in a nightgown and robe, who should have been clutching a lop-eared velvet rabbit. But as she raised her chin in the darkness, her youth made no difference to the terrible sternness of her face.

Children. It was always children who believed so deeply, who risked so much.

Was it futile, the wampyr wondered? Or were they necessary after all? When he’d first glimpsed her, he’d thought she was like Phoebe, with her pale hair and careful demeanor. It proved that appearances meant nothing, yet again.

“Your oath to the Chancellor?” the wampyr asked.

“Oaths under duress….”

“A blood Wyrd? Your death to break it?”

“I have sworn a prior oath. Maimonides spoke of the immutability of the Torah as God’s law. I became bat mitzvah at twelve. Before I came to this…school.” Her lips curved in the dark. “My tribe before myself, wampyr. What’s death to those stakes? And if I should somehow live long enough to need forgiveness, my religion provides for a day of atonement.”

“How many in your class do you think will be assigned directly to the Chancellor?” That’s what it would take, if assassination was what she intended.

She shrugged. “I shall have to excel. I am already among the best in my class. And that is why I cannot leave, your namelessness.”

Children. Warriors. Of course her family knew, and approved. It was a choice of desperation. The wampyr said, “Even if you succeed—”

“I know.”

Just as Jack would have spoken it.

Unmoving, the wampyr said, “What can I do to help?”

Ruth swung her arms. “Help me impress the Chancellor.”

The wampyr reached into his breast pocket. He pinched the soft small pouch between his fingers and pulled it out. “Take this.”

She did, without hesitation, and weighed it in her hand. “What is it?”

“A potion,” he said. “It may change your lover’s mind, if she will take a drink from your hand.”

Ruth’s eyes widened. Her fingers twitched, as if her hand wanted to close around the bag, and then a moment later her fist clenched on it.

“Oh,” she said. She swallowed. “Thank you.”

When Ruth came back to bed, alone, Adele was sitting up in the darkness. „I dreamed someone was in the room.”

„I went to the library,” Ruth answered, and leaned over to kiss Adele’s forehead between her brows.

When Ruth leaned back, Adele raised her eyes. „Your hair is wet.”

„I leaned out the window,” Ruth said, hoping no one would find the damn carpets in the library before morning. Chances were good; there wouldn’t be much time for reading before the ceremony. „Where it was cold. Your sheets are soaked with sweat. We should change them before you catch your death.”

„That explains the puddles on the floor, then.” Adele drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them.

Ruth walked to the armoire, so Adele would not be
able to see her face. She opened the doors, and while her back was turned, she slipped the pouch into her underthings. She could ask Adele right now if she wanted a cup of water—

Was she that unworthy of Adele’s love? Would she resort to—not love spells. Brain-washing. Exactly like a Prussian?

Even to save Adele’s soul and maybe keep her alive? Certainly, to keep her love.

Ruth brought down clean sheets, dusting aside lavender sachets that raised a scent of old ladies. „Come on,” she said. „Strip the bed. We need some sleep; we have to go to St Paul’s in the morning.”

Abby Irene raised her head from the crossword puzzle in the
Times
of London when Sebastien entered the living room. It was still two hours before dawn—not that you could tell without a glance at the clock, because clouds still sealed the sky like a lid—and he was wet to the skin.

“Is Jason awake? I need a message taken.”

“I don’t think so. But the bell would wake him.”

Sebastien crossed the room to the pull, unspeaking.

Abby Irene said, “Your potential rescues?”

She knew the answer by how his lips pressed thin. But he shook it off—along with the rain from the shoulders of his black caped overcoat—and sat down across the table. “Your plan,” Sebastien said. “The Jewish girl had already adopted it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

His smile split his face like a knife. “She means to assassinate the Chancellor. And Alice and I am to assist her in wining his confidence. So, my darling,” he said, and she believed him. “Somewhere in that enormous library of yours, is there a plate of the nave of St Paul’s?”

Judiciously, she folded the crossword and set it aside. “In fact, I think I can do better than that. When we moved the library in, I’m pretty sure I catalogued a folio of architect’s plans and drawings of the great cathedrals of Europe. Do you suppose St Paul’s is still a great cathedral of Europe, in this benighted age?”

6.

The great Gothic cathedral of St Paul’s was longer than Canterbury Cathedral by some forty-five feet—585 feet long through the portico, nave, and choir—with a spire more than twice as tall. It loomed over the skyline of central London as it had since the wampyr first viewed that cramped medieval city. The centuries had altered its facade, its spire, and the architecture of its towers and approaches, but the essential church was the same.

The fourth Christian church on Ludgate Hill, it was begun by Normans in 1087 in the wake of a fire that destroyed much of London. Some of its blocks were salvage—from the earlier, smaller Saxon cathedral whose footprints it obliterated; from the Palatine Tower of the Conqueror, also lost in the conflagration—and there were places in the oldest parts of the church where you could still see black
carbon on the stones. It had taken over two hundred years in the building, having burned again—incomplete—in the London fires of the 1130s, though it had been spared the fire of 1212. The cathedral was consecrated and reconsecrated in 1240 and 1300, even before the completion of final construction in 1314. Since then, it had survived political upheaval, the stripping of its fixtures for gold or expediency, use as a stable, lightning—the hand of God demolishing one of the tallest spires in Europe at the height of the English Renaissance—a bizarrely classical western facade added by Inigo Jones, the Sorcerer’s Fire, Christopher Wren’s Baroque additions, 18th century restoration of the central tower to a wedding-cake standard, and the bombs rained from Prussian zeppelins and flying dreadnaughts.

If the cathedral had been built to the glory of God, well. God had not made the building of it easy.

The wampyr had years on this eight-hundred-and-fifty-one-year-old church, but only a century or two. Of all the products of artifice in Europe, he felt most kinship to cathedrals.

They grew and crumbled and endured through fat times and lean. They fell prey to fashion, to famine, and also to the whims of kings. Architects restored—or defaced—them. Conquerors appropriated them.

They endured war and revolution and the rare idylls between—but the essential outline never changed. The nave and choir and transept and crossing. The tower at the heart. The crypts beneath. The flying buttresses, transferring the thrust of the fan vaults to the foundations.

They were not living things, but they mocked living things. And in outlasting them, were changed by them, and became the rememberers of history.

St Paul’s Cathedral housed the tombs of Aethelred the Unready, John of Gaunt, and John Donne. It seemed only fitting that the Prussians, with their fascination for appropriating myths and histories—and offspring—should consecrate their wolf-children there.

The wampyr came to St Paul’s before even an ecclesiastical rising-time, traveling along in darkness and the cold continuing rain. Whatever legendry made of his kind, he had no allergy to holy ground. Though a church was the house of God, God did not see fit to demand the wampyr respect it as a dwelling. And so he made his way within.

Truly, the gates of heaven stood wide to any who would enter.

Paul’s Walk, they called the mighty nave, for its length and the height of the vaulting. Now it clung with shadows, only the rainy light of the city beyond casting shimmers across the clerestory windows that could not penetrate them to illuminate the space within. That did not matter to the wampyr; the darkness was transparent to him. For a moment he paused to consider the echoing belly of the cathedral, said by some to have no rival for beauty among the medieval churches of Europe.

The wampyr, who had seen the cathedrals of Santiago de Compostela and Notre-Dame de Reims both in their youth and in their age, found the comparison overstated. Still, he wished he could have observed the windows in sunlight. Another sight he had never witnessed in all his long existence, and one of the ones he most regretted. He was of an age with the art of the stained glass window, and he had not seen its first incarnations when he was a mortal man.

This cathedral bore more resemblance to Reims or
Canterbury than the famous Galician cathedral, which was of an older, barrel- and groin-vaulted design. Here in London, rib-vaults bore the weight of stone, overhead. The original lead-sheathed wooden roof was long since replaced, which had helped the great structure survive the fires of London and Prussian incendiaries as well.

A medieval cathedral had a different sense to it than a Renaissance—the wampyr stopped himself before he could think
modern
—one. Fan-vaults, the Renaissance standard, gave a sense that the stone was levitating, as if its weight had somehow been placed in abeyance for a time. Or as if it had, by some magic, been made weightless. As if granite and slate could fly.

In a nave such as this, however…
all
one felt was the heft of the rock suspended overhead, the thrust through the vaults and into the buttresses and walls, the stress and mass and pressure. The sheer massy bulk of it, and the muscle and wit it had taken to engineer those walls, that roof, those vaults and pillars. For the glory of God, of a certainty. But when confronted with a cathedral, the wampyr found himself always marveling instead at the ingenuity and will of tiny, fragile men, to so overcome the hard obdurate laws of God’s creation.

He would have liked to pad the length of that chill silent corridor, for symbolism’s sake, but he had not grown to be older than churches by foolishness. Or at least, he allowed with an element of self-amusement, not by too much foolishness.

He ascended to the lovely Norman triforium, which would bring him the length of the nave in relative privacy. At the crossing, he paused, with Abby Irene’s plan of the cathedral sharp before his mind’s eye. There seemed no doubt that the oath would take place before the altar.

He made himself comfortable in the shadows, there to bide the hours until dawn. Another fine thing about England; he could be fairly sure the rain would hold.

An hour before sunrise, a figure appeared beside him, silent as a ghost, slender in her black opera cloak and gloves. When she looked up at him, he saw he top part of her face obscured by a black domino mask and smiled. “Alice,” he whispered. “So glad you’ve come.”