Blood Maidens (20 page)

And myself
.

‘Do you think the only kind of seduction is the sort that warms the loins? That is the simplest – the most basic . . . Else why did Dante place the Circle of the Lustful at the top of Hell, just within its gates? Everyone stumbles into that circle sooner or later. It’s big. But, as well, they seduce through the intellect, which thinks
it
can best judge the circumstances of whatever the particular instance is that the vampire presents. They cause you to think that you’re doing your duty – to country, to love, to a friend, even to God – when in fact you are only doing exactly what the vampire wants you to do. Am I right?’

For a long while Asher did not reply, thinking of the ribbon of blood flowing down the streets of Mafeking in his dream. Of the slim shadow of Ysidro by lantern light, on the other side of a lake of blood. Of the pearl ring Ysidro had given to the woman he had loved. Then he said, ‘You are right.’

‘It is
all
seduction. For all their strength they are fragile creatures, brittle as handfuls of poisoned glass. You
have
become the servant to one of them, haven’t you? His day man – like the shabbas goy my granddaughter employs to light the fires in the stoves here on the Seventh Day, so that her husband will remain holy and yet have warm feet.’ The luxuriant mustache moved again in a wry smile.

Asher sat silent, knowing that what his teacher said was right. A whisper out of shadow:
James, we must speak
 . . .

He knew what the old man was about to say.

‘They kill those who serve them.’

‘I know that.’

‘And those to whom they speak.’

‘Which is why –’ Asher glanced at the window, aware that the room was now almost dark – ‘I should go.’

‘Not for my sake.’ Dr Karlebach waved dismissively. ‘They know all about me . . . But, yes, for your own. Where do you stay?’

‘Across the river. In the Leteriská . . .’

‘Be careful when you cross the bridge. It’s early enough . . . You’re not going to kill him, are you? Your vampire.’

‘Not now,’ said Asher. ‘No.’

‘Because he’s made you think you can’t.’

The old man shook his head, got to his feet, and, when Asher did so, too, gripped his arm briefly, as a man will touch a friend whom he knows to be making a tragic mistake. Then he crossed to a cabinet – a towering marvel of black carving and hidden drawers looming in the shadows – and unlocked one of its compartments, bringing out a small tin of what looked like American snuff and a leather band studded with tiny silver disks. He took Asher’s hand – even stooped with age he was nearly Asher’s height, still bulky and strong – and slapped the tin into his palm. ‘I misspoke myself when I said that the first circle of Hell is Lust, Jamie. Wider still is the outermost circle, the most deadly, the circle of indifference. That state when you are not thinking of anything in particular . . . perhaps you are a little sleepy – I can see that you are short of sleep, traveling with this creature – and off your guard. This will keep you alert. Rub it on your gums, like the Americans so disgustingly do. But only a very little.
Vehrstehe
?’

Asher opened the tin and sniffed: the smell was sharply unpleasant and nothing like tobacco. The tin had once actually contained American snuff:
Leidersdorf’s Nic Nac Fine Cut Chewing
, it said.

‘And put this on.’ Karlebach unbuckled the band. Near where it fastened, Asher saw there was a small turn-screw that operated a tiny pair of hidden jaws – like a miniature instrument of torture on the inside of the leather. When twisted, the jaws would extend and bite into the flesh of the wrist. ‘If you need more than my little powder to keep yourself awake. Pain will usually serve against the vampire, though not always. The best remedy against the vampire is distance – the more of it, the better.’

Silently, Asher held out his wrist and helped the crooked fingers affix the buckle tight.

‘Thank you. More than I can say. If there is anything I can do to repay—’

‘There is.’ Karlebach put both hands on Asher’s shoulders, looked hard into his face. ‘Don’t let this thing live. Kill it. Else you take his sins upon yourself. Every kill he makes henceforth will be upon your head as well as his. God has put this opportunity into your hand, James. Tomorrow morning if you can—’

‘I can’t.’

‘So it would have you think. So
he
would have you think – for they are as human as we are, and as mortal . . .’

The dark eyes held his for a long moment more, under polar-bear brows. Distantly, the clock in the bell house was striking nine. ‘Go with God, my old friend. Because you’re going to need His help. And Him, too, you should think perhaps to repay.’

As Asher passed beneath the gothic tower that guarded the Old City end of the bridge he thought he saw movement beyond its shadow, but when he reached the spot, beside the stone railing past the first of its aisle of statues, there was nothing there. He leaned over the lichened rail, saw dark water gleam below him in the gaslight. A thug, a pickpocket, lurking out of sight now that the day’s traffic of omnibuses and peddlers’ carts was gone?

Or something else?

A kinship with rats
, Karlebach had said.
I have never heard mention of them anywhere else; only in Prague.

They kill. Sometimes they will kill a vampire
 . . .

. . . 
summon rats by the thousands
 . . .

A species of vampire?
Asher drew back from the rail, continued across the bridge. Found himself holding to the center of the way as much as he could.

A variant form of the bacillus by which, Lydia had theorized, human flesh was altered, one cell at a time, into cells that did not decay with age, but combusted with the touch of the sun’s light?

He thought about the envelope in his luggage, containing snippets of the Lady Irene’s bedroom carpet, stiff with dried vampire blood.
Marya’s and Ippo’s
 . . . He could still see their faces, distorted with hatred, for him and for their master. For years, Lydia had spoken of getting her hands on vampire blood to study, though not – Asher was acutely aware – since the death of Margaret Potton in Constantinople. He wondered now if she would welcome the sample.
One would have to handle it very carefully, of course, lest there be an accident and you infect yourself
, she had said . . .

And then what?
If your body was infected with the tainted blood – if indeed it was a bacillus – but you had no master vampire to gather your mind and soul into his own, to preserve it during the death of the body . . . would you simply die? Was that what had happened to those poor children in Petersburg?

Or had it been something else?

He was acutely grateful for the dim lights of the Lesser Town’s cafés, for the presence of street vendors, students, flower sellers and knife grinders who set up shop in the angles of those cobblestoned ways, as he climbed the stairs of his
pension
and locked himself in.

He left the lamp burning beside the bed as he slept.

FOURTEEN

The woman kept repeating something that Lydia knew could only be, ‘Will he be all right? Will he be all right?’ but since she was speaking Russian it actually could have been anything. It didn’t matter. The tears of anxiety running down her face, the way her stooped thin body trembled in the awkward circle of Lydia’s arm, made translation supererogatory. Annushka Vyrubova, on the woman’s other side, murmured softly in Russian, comforting words, while at the battered table of the clinic’s curtained-in consulting-room, Dr Benedict Theiss unwrapped the gory wad of torn pillowcases from around the young man’s hand and examined the fingers that were left.

Lydia whispered in French, ‘What happened?’

‘An accident in the factory,’ Madame Vyrubova whispered back. ‘They’ve stepped up the production quotas because of the new battleships, and the poor boy had been working since eight last night. No wonder he didn’t get his hand out of the press quickly enough . . .’

Despite the morphia – the first thing Theiss had administered when the young man had been half-carried into the clinic by his mother and brothers – the patient screamed, and on the bench between Lydia and Madame Vyrubova the mother cried out in anguish, like an echo. The bleached canvas curtains of the consulting ‘room,’ only slightly higher than a man’s head, hung partly open, and past them the clinic – which had the appearance, in the thin clear sunlight of the first springlike day, of having begun life as a small factory itself – was filled with a commingled reek of blood, carbolic soap, and unwashed clothing and bodies, a combination of stinks that, despite herself, Lydia hated.

In her years as a medical student she had worked at hospitals, sustained through clinic duty only by her stepmother’s smirking assurances that, ‘You’ll hate it, dear, you know . . .’

Well, of course someone has to see to the poor things, but I don’t see why it has to be you
 . . . That had been her Aunt Faith. And,
Darling, I know it’s
bien à la mode
to take an interest in the poor, but surely one day a month at a settlement house – Andromache Brightwell knows a PERFECTLY clean and decent one – would do
 . . .

After which, of course, Lydia had been completely unable to protest that she, too, disliked the stinks and the wastefulness and the sense of speechless futility that filled her in the face of poverty. It had been impossible to admit that she did not share the usual womanly motives of her stepmother’s friends who went in for nursing the ‘less fortunate’, as they were politely called . . .

She couldn’t tell them – the aunts who had raised her, the exquisite slender woman that her father had married the year Lydia was sent away to school – that what she sought was knowledge of the human body, of those squeamish fascinating details that women weren’t supposed to know about or want to know about.
A thing of miracles
, Benedict Theiss had called the human body . . . Tubes and nodules, nooks and crannies, nerves and bones and the secrets hidden in the marrow . . . Blood and spit and semen, why and how. Working in the clinics was a stepping stone to the end that she sought, which was research for its own sake – knowledge for its own sake – the pursuit of goals far beyond the tying up of a drunkard’s bruises or the Sisyphean labor of primary care for the poor.

The big clinic room had recently been painted a dreary shade of beige, and there were about two dozen people on the benches at one end, men and women – several with children clustered around them and babies slung in shawls at their bosoms – in the faded, mended, ill-fitting and unwashed garments that people make do with when every available penny is being spent on rent and fuel and food if it could be afforded. They were thin, in the way that even the poorest of the London denizens of settlement houses and clinics were not: thin and wary, like animals that have been frightfully abused. Lydia recalled the streets she and Madame Vyrubova had been driven through, to come to this dingy yellow-brick building on the Samsonievsky Prospect. Even through the comforting blur of myopia, it was clear to her that these slums were worse than anything she’d ever seen in London, grown up like oozing sores around the factories.

‘Please forgive us for interrupting you,’ said Lydia, when Dr Theiss had finished his task and washed his hands – he was reaching for his frock coat, hung on its peg, as if to get himself ready to welcome his visitors. She held up her hand. ‘Don’t. I shouldn’t have asked to come.’ Though it had been, in fact, Madame Vyrubova who’d suggested it.
Of course dear Dr Theiss will be delighted to receive us. He always is
 . . .

He probably always was for this dumpy little woman who was said to be the best friend of the Empress and almost a member of the imperial family.

‘I see now you have many more important matters to attend to.’

Madame Vyrubova looked surprised at her words – it had probably been a long time since anyone had professed matters more important than her warm-hearted desire to make the world a better place – but the physician’s hazel eyes thanked Lydia’s understanding. ‘It’s kind of you to think of me, Dr Asher. Yet I know you spoke, when last we met, of my research, and one could not be other than delighted to take a moment’s rest when our Annushka has come all this way to visit.’ He took Madame Vyrubova’s hand and bowed deeply.

‘Texel—’ At the lifting of Theiss’s voice, the man Jamie had identified as an agent of German Intelligence came through the door of the wooden partition that divided the great whitewashed brick room. ‘Is there tea? Thank you. Would you please let my friends know –’ his gesture took in the men and women waiting on the benches – ‘that I must perform the offices of society for ten short minutes, and then I will return?’

‘
Bien sûr
, doctor.’

Lydia struggled with the impulse to slip her spectacles from her beaded handbag and sneak a better look at the man, who at that distance was little more than an impression of stooping height, arms that seemed slightly too long, skimpy mutton chops hanging on his jaws like socks on a clothesline, and thin fairish hair slicked unappetizingly to a dolichocephalic skull. Even his voice was thin, with a nasal quality to it and – though Lydia’s ear for accents was not nearly as good as her husband’s, especially not when everyone was speaking French – an inflection that differed from Theiss’s. As Theiss led them through the doorway into a laboratory – and thence to a chamber beyond it, barely wider than its window, which served as a sitting room – she inquired, ‘Mr Texel also a physician, I think you said?’