TWELVE
They
left St Petersburg at just before midnight. First light showed
Asher the trackless, boggy forests of the Baltic plain through the
window of the first-class compartment. Ysidro had vanished some
time before that, and Asher slept for a few hours in the very
handsome wagon-lit provided by the Russian Imperial Rail Service,
then woke to a view substantially the same. Gray-trunked pines with
sodden snow still around their feet; the far-off glint of lakes;
sometimes the blunt gray walls of ancient fortresses that spoke of
terrible medieval wars that English schoolchildren never heard of.
Then more trees.
‘I take it,’ Ysidro
inquired on the following night, when at last the northern twilight
had shimmered out of existence, ‘that the Polish tongue is not one
of your accomplishments?’
‘You are correct.
But, even more so than in Russia, the Polish aristocracy are more
fluent in French and German than in the language their own peasants
speak. At least in some circles in Russia, it’s fashionable to know
a little Russian.’
Ysidro dismissed the
entire Slavic race with a single movement of fine-cut nostrils. ‘It
were best, then, that you do not see the Warsaw vampires at all.
Molchanov and Golenischev spoke of them with contempt, but that may
have been because they were Russians, speaking of a conquered
people. Will you be in danger on your own account, in that
city?’
‘I have a good book,’
replied Asher, ‘and a secure room to read it in. Much as it would
interest me to view the city again, I have learned to take no
chances whilst Abroad.’
As in Moscow and St
Petersburg, Ysidro had arranged for his own lodging in an antique
but well-kept town house in the Old City and for Asher’s in a
pension not far away. Asher saw their
considerable luggage, including Ysidro’s enormous coffin-trunk,
brought to the town house, and he remained there through the long
spring day, reading Les Miserables,
napping, playing the piano in the parlor – old tunes from
childhood, a practice he found soothing on the occasions that his
motorcycle was unavailable to him – and watching the street below.
At eight – the sun westering in the high northern sky – he
departed, got himself a café dinner in the Ulica Senatorska, and
was in his own pension room while
twilight lingered yet over the red-and-gold steeples of the
town.
Abroad, he had
learned long ago to see cities in terms of danger and safety –
zones marked clearly on a mental map – and in terms of the
likelihood of encountering an enemy, or the occasional necessity of
a quick escape. There wasn’t a city from Petersburg to Lisbon that
he could not traverse unseen by the local police, if need be. As a
young man he had loved the cities of Europe for their beauty and
their age, for palaces and parks, for the astonishing variety of
passers-by and peddlers’ cries and the many-colored torrents of
languages that flowed like streams along the cobbled ways. He had
been sorry – more profoundly sorry than he had realized at the time
– when he’d become aware that this love for these places was fading
into the instinctive wariness of the Job.
Perhaps that loss had
let him fully comprehend the regret in Ysidro’s voice, when the
vampire had spoken of those for whom all things had become matters
of indifference, except for the Hunt and the Kill.
He had not known, he
realized now, when he was well off, with only that loss to
mourn.
Since knowing the
vampires – knowing that they were real – the cities of Europe had
changed for him once again. They had become places where the danger
was not only real, but unfathomable. He found he could not pass an
ancient church without wondering what might be sleeping in its
crypts – what would wake with fall of dark; could not cross the old
stone pavements without seeing them as only a brittle crust above
an abyss of demons.
Demons who now
threatened to emerge and become part of the politics of blood and
iron.
How could I have left Lydia alone in such a
place?
Yet he knew that she
was no safer in Oxford, if one of the London vampires should decide
to run the risk of Ysidro’s formidable wrath and put her out of the
way. The journey up from London was a short one.
Don’t think of it. He closed his eyes, rested his
forehead on the window’s dark glass. The sword
was offered you one more time, and you grasped it, of your own free
will. You accepted the Job, yet
again . . .
Because he knew in
his heart that he could not have done otherwise.
Somewhere, there is a German scientist working with a
vampire. And you need a vampire to help you destroy the threat of
what that scientist will unleash on the world.
But he had to sit for
some time, hearing the clacking of traffic in the darkness below,
before the red-hot knot of fear loosened a little in his chest and
he could go back to the long-ago sorrows of Jean
Valjean.
When full daylight
was back to the sky, he returned to the town house and found on the
piano seat two tickets for the 11:52 express that night to
Berlin.
‘Nothing.’ The
vampire slid shut the door of the first-class compartment as the
lights of Warsaw were swallowed behind them in darkness and mist.
‘No fledgling has left this nest. Nor, they say, have they heard of
any such in Gdansk, a city whose master spawned the Master of
Warsaw. They are blockheads,’ he added, in the tone of an
entomologist identifying a common species of bug. ‘Arrogant and
intolerant.’ Considering Ysidro’s heritage of Reconquista and
Inquisition, Asher did not think the Spanish vampire had a great
deal of room to talk.
As he had when they
had passed through Berlin on the way to St Petersburg, Asher found
himself prey to the conviction that all the men who’d associated
with him as the Herr Professor Leyden in the various cities of
Germany during the early nineties had foregathered in the Empire’s
capital and were all looking for him – a conviction upon which he
was hard put to close his mental door so that he could behave
normally. From long experience – his own, and the observed behavior
of others – he knew how difficult it was to act ‘naturally,’
whatever ‘naturally’ might be; how fine a line separates an
ordinary American accent from an assumed drawl that practically
shouts to the observant ear, Ah-all am a
fake!
He had seen more than
one Department novice stopped by the police, essentially, for
overdoing a disguise to the point where it was obvious that it was
a disguise.
It was difficult not
to keep checking the shaven skin of his head, to make sure that
he’d gotten every last millimeter of stubble. Even after decades of
the Job, he felt the impulse to reassure himself of his appearance
at every reflective surface he passed, though this behavior was
among the first things he looked for in men he suspected of playing
for the Opposition. It was like not scratching an
itch.
He remained indoors
at Ysidro’s elegant rented apartment through the daylight hours,
and at his own hotel from sunset on, jotting notes in a personal
code as to the addresses of these temporary nests. One never knew
when the smallest trifles of information would become critical to
one’s survival: like Lydia’s artless queries over tea and shopping,
about who might be a ‘special friend’ of whom. It was from
addresses and street names that recurred, names or even initials
that repeated, as much as from property that changed hands
suspiciously or not at all, that Lydia was able to put together the
location of possible nests.
He slept for a few
hours and dreamed of bombs falling on London, though the man who
stood in the doorway of the lightless house by the lake of blood
wasn’t Ysidro, but Benedict Theiss.
When the sun rose at
six he returned to Ysidro’s apartment with two porters and a cab,
to load up the luggage there and make his way to the Anhalter
Bahnhof. By two that afternoon they were in Prague.
‘Princess Stana –’
Prince Razumovsky bowed deeply as their hostess crossed the tiled
conservatory vestibule – ‘might I present Madame Asher of England,
the wife of an old friend? Madame Asher, Her Royal Highness
Princess Stana Petrovich Njegosh of Montenegro.’
‘Enchanted.’ The dark lady wearing – even to Lydia’s
short-sighted gaze – rather more jewelry than Englishwomen would
have donned in the afternoon, over rather less bodice, held out a
lace-mitted hand and, when Lydia would have curtseyed, laughed and
tugged her up again. ‘Silly miss! Here we are all just women who
share a passion for the spiritual evolution of the Soul of
Humankind.’ She pressed Lydia’s hands between her own. ‘And its
physical well-being,’ she added, with a smile at Razumovsky. ‘How
mysterious is the bond that binds the flesh with the spirit, the
physical heart with the soul that dwells within! Dearest Andrei –’
she put her arm through the Prince’s – ‘tells me you are a
physician yourself, Madame . . . Such a formal
title, Madame! Might I call you Lydia?
So much more natural! And please do
call me Stana! Andrei tells me you research the blood, the way
dearest Benedict does . . . Madame
Asher—’
While she had chatted
in her soft alto voice she had been leading them deeper into the
jungles of fern and orchids, towards the men and women gathered
around three small tables of white wickerwork in a sort of
crystalline rotunda of foliage and glass.
‘—please allow me to
present Dr Benedict Theiss.’
The gentleman into
whose affairs Lydia had come to St Petersburg to inquire was, so
far as she could tell, almost exactly Jamie’s six-foot height, with
thinning dark hair and a close-clipped, square-cut beard that made
a rectangular frame for his rectangular features. He wore a
camel-colored tweed suit and a gentleman’s cologne scented with
sandalwood and lemon; his big hand within its worn glove was firm
and strong. After disowning any true knowledge of blood chemistry:
‘It’s the glandular secretions that are my specialty, but I was
fascinated by the similarity of some of your theories about
proteins . . .’ Lydia steered the conversation to
his clinic in the Vyborg-side slums with the hope of learning
something of its funding, and was quickly, and rather
disconcertingly, struck with the man’s compassionate anger when he
spoke of the lives of the poor.
‘By and large, the
rich don’t care,’ he said, in a deep, quiet voice that Lydia
guessed would have won him his fortune as a nerve doctor to wealthy
female clients. ‘So long as their factories and their tenement
properties turn a profit – present company of course excepted,’ he
added, with a bow in the direction of Her Royal Highness and Her
Royal Highness’s equally dark, bejeweled, and Royal sister, ‘it
doesn’t concern the Semyanikovs and the Putilovs and the other
owners of property how they live – these people who work for
sixteen hours out of twenty-four making boots or guns or lace;
these people who sleep two families to a room in chambers I
wouldn’t house a dog in. They don’t see them. I don’t think most
women who buy lace think that someone had to make that lace, much
less that that someone might have a sweetheart or a mother or a
younger brother whom that someone loves as dearly as the Madame
getting into her motor car in the Bolshaya Morskaya loves her
own sweetheart or mother or
brother.’
At one of the other
little tables – an extravagant Lenten tea had been spread in the
fashion of a bistro, among the banks of hothouse aspidistra and
tubbed orange-trees – a man spoke in Russian, and turning her head,
despite her lack of spectacles Lydia saw at the other table the man
who could only be the one Asher had described to her from the
Theosophists’ Ball, the silk-clothed peasant who had seen Ysidro
when Ysidro did not want to be seen. He was among a group of ladies
– an impression of gorgeous colors and the susurration of costly
silk – and she could tell by the way they jockeyed each other for
position close to him that they hung on this bearded man’s every
word.
One of them – a stout
little woman in garish pink who was sitting on the peasant’s knee –
looked over at Lydia and translated, ‘Father Gregory says, you get
these same rich people out into the country, and suddenly the
peasants on their estates are their friends.’
Lydia was close
enough to Theiss to see by his wry sidelong smile that he had no
great opinion of Father Gregory. But he replied with a sigh,
‘Father Gregory is quite right, alas, Annushka. It is fashionable
in certain circles to know the names of your coachman’s children
and to toss the cook’s little girl candy . . . to
show how close one is to the soil, I suppose.’
But when Annushka in
pink translated, the Father shook his head – Lydia could almost
hear the greasy locks of his hair rattle – and
objected:
‘No, Father Gregory
says that it is the city itself that blinds men to the joys and
griefs of their fellows.’
So earnest was the
translator’s voice that Dr Theiss said gently, ‘Perhaps the good
father is right, Annushka. I am not a countryman
myself.’
As the other ladies
of the Circle of Astral Light came over to be introduced, Lydia
found, rather to her surprise, that Razumovsky – at a fern-bowered
table a little distance away, deep in a flirtation with his hostess
– had been absolutely right when he’d said that her staying
unchaperoned at the izba on his
property wouldn’t make the slightest difference to St Petersburg
society. In London she would have been looked at askance, if she
was admitted to the house at all. Here, under the aegis of
Razumovsky and his equally tall, equally golden-haired sister
Natalia – who greeted her with kisses like a long-lost sister – she
found herself accepted, sympathized with (‘That GHASTLY long journey from Paris, my dear, I can’t
IMAGINE how Irina Muremsky DOES it every year for dress
fittings . . .’), invited to a dozen soirées,
dinners, and teas (‘No dancing, I’m afraid,
dearest, it IS Lent . . .’), and introduced
to Father Gregory Rasputin (‘My dear, a most
extraordinary man . . . a genuine
saint . . .’), though the look Father Gregory
gave her when he kissed her, peasant-fashion, on both cheeks was
one of the least saintly Lydia had ever encountered.
‘He does that to
everyone,’ giggled plump Annushka.
Evidently, Father
Gregory was on his best behavior, for beyond that, for the most
part, he sat listening to the conversation – the bulk of which was
in French – or trading remarks with his own little cluster of
devotees in Russian and consuming caviar with his hands. But when
Theiss drew Lydia into speculation about the crossing-over point
between the psychic and the physical, the Princess Stana said,
‘Perhaps we might ask Father Gregory, since he has within his flesh
the power to heal,’ and the peasant considered for a time the
questions Lydia asked.
At length he shook
his head and replied – Annushka Vyrubova translating: ‘You look in
the wrong place for answers, beautiful lady. I know not whether God
sends His healing through my soul or through my flesh, and it
doesn’t matter.’
‘It might,’ responded
Lydia, ‘if by knowing how it is done, you can learn to be a
stronger healer, or a better one.’
Father Gregory’s mad
gray eyes smiled gently into hers. ‘Always learning. Beautiful
lady, has learning given you that which you desire most in the
world?’
And Lydia knew, to
the core of her heart, that he meant, Has it
given you a child?
And felt her eyes
flood with tears. At the miscarriages, at the hopes raised and
hopes defeated. At the shamed suspicion that she was too flawed to
conceive, a suspicion she hid even from the man she
loved . . . and at showing it to this smelly
stranger with fish eggs in his beard.
As if they had been
alone, he laid a grubby hand to her cheek. ‘Matyushka,’ he said. ‘You learn, the way I sin,
because we cannot be other than we are. God knows what He needs you
to do . . . And you will have His gift, when the
hour is right.’ His brows pulled together, and he began to say
something else to her, but just then the Princess’s sister came
rustling over in a pearl-sewn cloud of aubergine-colored taffeta,
demanding something in voluble Russian, and Father Gregory turned
to her with hands outstretched.
‘If you indeed learn
the way Rasputin sins, Mrs Asher,’ remarked Dr Theiss drily, ‘your
store of knowledge must be formidable indeed,’ and Lydia,
remembering the insistent kisses the holy man had given her, burst
out laughing.
‘Tell me, Doctor,’
she asked him. ‘How did you come to St Petersburg? I believe His
Excellency said you were from Munich?’
Something changed in
Theiss’s eyes, their warm hazel brightness clouding. ‘I was born in
a city called Munich, yes,’ he said slowly. ‘A city which no longer
exists. In a country called Bavaria, which is
as . . . as gone from this world as any of those
Vedic kingdoms these ladies –’ he nodded slightly in the direction
of the group around Rasputin – ‘speak of as having once existed,
eons ago in lands now at the bottom of the sea. My country wed
herself to Prussia the way a young girl will throw herself into the
arms of a bad and violent man, and it is . . . just
as painful to watch, for those who love her. I see where Prussia is
leading this German Reich of theirs, and I shudder for my country.
I am sorry,’ he added at once, pressing her hand. ‘I did not
mean—’
Lydia shook her head.
‘You sound very homesick.’
‘Only a fool wants to
go back to the land of childhood . . . Or perhaps it
is the longing for the certainties of childhood that makes a man a
fool. I have work here – vital work . . .’ His face
saddened at some recollection.
‘His Excellency has
spoken of the good you do at your clinic.’
‘Ah – the clinic.’ He
smoothed the white streaks that marked his beard on either side of
his mouth. The note of regret did not leave his voice. ‘His
Excellency is too kind. At the clinic, I plow the sea. The work
there is endless – and soul-breaking. There was a time when I
thought I should never be able to return to my true
work.’
‘Have you been able
to, then, Doctor?’
‘Thanks to these
ladies—’ His small gesture took in his hostesses, mutually
enraptured in Annushka’s account of a seance at Madame Golovina’s.
‘One does what one can. I’m happy to say that now at least I can
afford an assistant, my good Texel, who is there now.’
‘Might I visit your
clinic? I must say,’ she added, following his gaze, ‘I would be
extremely curious to test our friend Father Gregory’s proteins, if
he is supposed to be a healer. It might be enlightening to see
whether such a talent is indeed embodied in the chemistry of flesh
or blood, since I find it difficult to believe it would be in his
soul . . .’
‘I think you would
find,’ smiled Theiss, ‘that his flesh is as base as his instincts,
and that the healing he does comes from the miraculous powers that
imbue the minds of his subjects, rather than his own. The human
mind is an astonishing thing, Mrs Asher, a thing of miracles – as
is the human flesh that the rich, and the rulers of this earth,
treat so casually. We are capable of astonishing things, without
any need of a fake holy man from Siberia.’ He lowered his voice
conspiratorially and glanced towards the two princesses. ‘But, I
beg of you, don’t tell Their Royal Highnesses I said
so.’
And yet, reflected
Lydia, if Father Gregory Rasputin was merely reading what he found
in the faces of those who believed in him, he was reading very
accurately indeed. For as she shivered in her gray furs on the
shallow steps above the courtyard, waiting for the Prince’s car to
be brought around, Annushka Vyrubova emerged from the palace doors
and rustled up to her side.
‘Please forgive me,
Madame Asher – and please, please understand I would not ask this,
except Father Gregory was so deeply troubled by
it . . .’
If he asks me for an assignation, what do I say?
Lydia blinked uncertainly at the chubby little blonde woman in the
dowdy pink gown. Two of the male members of the Circle of Astral
Light – young officers in the Tsar’s elite Guards regiments – had
already taken her aside and let her know that they were interested
in beginning affaires with her, on what
seemed to Lydia to be extremely short
acquaintance . . .
‘He asks, who is this
man that you love, who walks in the . . . in the
darkness.’ Annushka seemed to be fishing to translate the man’s
peasant Russian into proper French. ‘He said he’s seen him – the
man with the dark halo—’
While Lydia was still
staring at her in shock, the holy man himself ducked and slithered
through the group around the door and strode over to them in his
heavy boots. ‘Tyemno-svyet,’ he agreed,
and he made a gesture around his own head and shoulders, as if
trying to describe an invisible aura.
‘Dark light,’
Annushka Vyrubova corrected herself painstakingly. ‘He asks, who is
this? He has been here, he has seen him at the Winter
Palace . . .’
Lydia shook her head,
knowing that he meant Ysidro – for her husband had told her of
Rasputin’s words at the Theosophist Society
Ball . . . I can’t let him
connect me and Jamie through
Ysidro . . .
Who is this man that you love, who walks in the
darkness . . .?
. . . this man that
you love . . .
‘Smotritye!’ insisted Father Gregory, pointing.
‘Tam!’ And followed this with a flood
of Russian, soft-voiced and urgent, as Lydia turned in time to see
a woman get out of a motor car at the foot of the shallow steps: so
insistent was Father Gregory’s voice that, after a quick glance at
the group around Razumovsky and the princesses to make sure no one
was looking, Lydia whipped her spectacles from her handbag and put
them on—
‘There is another one
of them,’ translated Annushka, obviously tremendously worried about
either the vehemence – or the outrageousness – of her friend’s
contention. ‘He asks – Father Gregory asks – what are these things
that look like men and women, that walk in the dark light? I’m
so sorry,’ she added at once. ‘Father
Gregory is a visionary, he sees into the souls of
men . . . and women, too—’
‘Tyemno-svyet,’ insisted the holy man again,
pointing to the woman over whose hand, now, Benedict Theiss was
bending in a sort of affectionate punctiliousness.
A beautiful woman in
her mid-thirties, clothed in a sulfur-yellow Worth ensemble that
must have cost at least two hundred pounds. The thought flashed
through Lydia’s mind, Of course she’d wear a
veil if she’s a vampire . . . only to be
dismissed. It’s five in the afternoon, for
Heaven’s sake . . .! The sun stood high in
the Arctic sky.
‘He asks, do you not
see?’
The woman put back
her veil – champagne-colored point-lace that wouldn’t have stopped
a glance, let alone sunlight – and readjusted the stole of
red-and-black sables that hung over her shoulder to her heels. A
determined oval face, a firm chin, pale as new wax in the spring
sunlight.
‘She is another of
them,’ translated Madame Vyrubova, glancing worriedly from Father
Gregory’s face to Lydia’s, and back to the courtyard as Dr Theiss
helped the woman in yellow into the sleek red touring-car, removed
his hat to climb in after her. ‘What are they, these demons who
wear darkness like a garment, to walk among men?’
Lydia said,
breathless, ‘I don’t know. I have never seen that woman in my life.
I – I have no idea what Father Gregory is talking
about.’
And, thanking her
stars that Razumovsky’s motor car had drawn up into the place left
by the red touring-car as it drove away, she almost ran down the
steps, so swiftly that the chauffeur was hard put to open the door
for her in time.