Seven for a Secret (12 page)

She winked, her eyelid pale in the almond-shaped aperture, and extended a hand. From it dangled a second black domino. “I thought we should match.”

Ruth would have wakened Adele with a kiss, but when Herr Professor’s footsteps again made the old wood of the corridors creak, the door to their room was still standing open. Behind their own doors, Ruth could hear the other girls stirring.

So Ruth merely rose, slid her feet into her slippers, and pulled her dressing gown from the head of the bed. She lit the gas lamps over the bed-heads. Then with deliberate motions she squared the sheet-corners and made her bed up taut, as if she would ever be returning to it. She was tucking the top sheet under fluffed pillows when a heavy tread along the hall runner alerted her, long before Herr Professor’s knuckles sounded sharp on the doorframe. „Rise and shine,” he barked, though Adele was already swinging her feet over the edge of her mattress. Who could sleep through all that tromping?

„Good morning, Herr Professor,” Ruth said, Adele mumbling the formula along with her. Ruth’s bed finished, she turned to help Adele pull her own sheets taut.

While Adele scrubbed in the washbasin, Ruth laid out pressed blouses, stockings, the shoes they had polished the previous day. Adele brought their ironed uniforms from the wardrobe and laid them on the bed beside the blouses. Ruth hid the soft tan leather pouch inside her palm, hoping her own scent would conceal its very faint one.

Hands emptied, Adele glanced at the door, touched Ruth’s shoulder, and leaned forward. Ruth, expecting a furtive kiss, turned into the embrace, but Adele’s mouth came inside the camber of her braid, instead, pressed close to her ear. „You’re going to take the oath, right?”

Her eyebrows were drawn tight over the bridge of her
little-girl nose. Ruth’s mouth parched. She could not look down, because if she looked down, Adele would know she wasn’t telling the truth. A rose bush by the door, a pair of white-painted chairs.

The pouch in her sweating palm.

We could live together. We could be safe and happy and privileged. Sturmwölfe.

Are the Prussians any worse than any other conqueror?

She thought of the Jews who hadn’t been able to pass. She thought of her own family.

They were bad enough, she decided.

„I’m going to take the oath,” she said. „Pass me my hairbrush, Adele.”

When Ruth and Adele trooped outside with the other girls, the long drive was lined not only with the usual bus, but with a half-dozen staff cars. Ruth began to walk toward the long gray bus, only to feel Herr Professor come up
beside her. She felt him begin to reach for her shoulder, but he stopped himself, and let his hand fall to his side. „That is for the younger girls,” he said. „The graduates ride in cars this morning.”

She frowned at him, surprised. He smiled. He carried no umbrella, and the rain dripped from the brim of his uniform cap. Not the gray school uniform, tonight, but the polished black of the secret police, with the snarling wolf’s-head on its shoulder. They weren’t supposed to know that Herr Professor was also Colonel, but of course all the girls had whispered it behind their hands. And now, to see him so dressed—

„You will be officers in an hour,” he said. He touched the wolf head. „You must be accorded dignity as officers.”

For the first time in her memory, she saw him smile. He had a good smile, warming his plain rugged face, and an expectant expression. When she looked down, she saw his hand extended, for a formal clasp.

Hesitant, she took it.

„Congratulations, Miss Grell,” he said, and gave her a squeeze that creaked his leather gloves. „Welcome to a glorious service.”

The rain dripping down the clerestory windows across the nave, one level above the triforium, resolved into transparent streaks as gray light grew behind. Although the clouds would protect him from direct sun—as long as they held—the wampyr was careful to keep to the shadows. As much visual impact as he might have, leaping from above the arcade in flames, it was an experience he could as soon do without.

Alice skulked beside him, the cloak drawn close about her shoulders so she vanished into the shadows of the pillars. She settled into herself, silent as the grave, breathless as a corpse, and made herself vanish.

She was growing up.

Ruth had said the cadets would arrive with the dawn the gray light heralded, so the wampyr was unsurprised when he heard footsteps below. Many footsteps, purposeful, and following them a swell of light.

The interior of the cathedral had been fitted with electric lights, many-branched chandeliers on their creaking chains. Alice drifted behind him like a ghost, at the ready. “Crypt,” he murmured, and she departed as if the wind from the opening door had guttered her out.

As the wampyr peered through a pierced-stone grille that must have been worked by a master stonemason, he saw women enter the church and set about the homely tasks of keeping the house of the Lord. They brought green boughs and hothouse flowers for the altar, spread pressed linens so the crisp smells of sizing and lavender-water rose into the air. They brought bread and wine, set candles, laid out the liturgical tools. Before they were quite finished, just as they were squaring corners and effacing themselves, more busy footsteps joined them. The wampyr saw robed men moving briskly below, the military-tailored black-and-silver cassocks of German Christian clergy swinging from their shoulders. Among them, moving to the altar, was one whose black was relieved by masses of bullion, his white surplice flashing with crimson and gold embroidery and swinging tassels. A Bishop of the German Christian church, then—a high Christian magician in service to the Chancellor. Someone who might have rivals, but few betters among the ritualists of the Church.

Abby Irene, Sebastien thought, would have to have been restrained from spitting over the rail. If she could have kept herself from laughing savagely at the irony of a pagan ceremony freighted with Christian pomp. Of course, it was all pagan at the root, was it not? Layers and layers and layers of time, things changed under their weight until they became almost unrecognizable. Like the wampyr, like the cathedral itself.

The flurry of activity took only three-quarters of an hour. The wampyr wondered if the organist would attend, but no crashing, experimental chords told of his arrival. The wampyr would have felt the bass notes as a rumble under his breastbone he thought would make a human heart stutter. It was just as well; he pitied the wolf-girls the delicacy of their ears. There was something to be said for the hearing of the dead.

There was no sign of choristers either, and the lack of music gave the assembly a furtive air. The great portico doors swung open, washing the warm yellow glow of electric light watery and gray. Now a larger group approached, though not by any means enough to make the cavernous interior space of the cathedral seem less vast and empty. Rather, the way they huddled together—a score of girls and young women in their cadet uniforms walking with every appearance of calm decorum up the center aisle until all but six of them filed silently into the pews on either side—made the weight of that enormous vault seem all the more oppressive.

The wampyr would have known which of the cadets was Ruth, even if he did not know her by her hair and scent. She was the one who resolutely kept her eyes level rather than gazing up in wonder at the interior heights of the spire as the cadets took their places in a double line before the altar.

The oath was long and complicated, punctuated with a number of pauses for thaumaturgy and call and response.
Surely,
Ruth thought,
fifteen minutes of swearing your life away was enough for anyone.

She could not smell the wampyr in the cathedral, but she hoped that was because of the smell of lavender and human bodies and blazing candles and frankincense, and any care he might have taken to conceal himself, and not because he had not come.

She could still do it without him. She had always planned to go it alone. But one sharp distinguishment would make all the difference in her first assignment.

She could end it faster with his aid. And the sooner she did to the Chancellor what needed to be done, the sooner the youngest cadets could return to their homes.

The first row of cadets were moving forward single file, to lay their hands on the Bible and receive their benedictions. Just as Jessamyn was about to put her hand down, Ruth drew in a breath—

The wampyr vaulted from the triforium, cloak flapping and his face obscured behind a crimson velvet domino, and while the other cadets were scattering or scrambling aside, Ruth lunged forward. “For England and the king!” he bellowed, a voice that rang dust from the chandeliers like the great organ’s hum.

Ruth almost heard him laughing as Herr Professor cooly, mechanically, in his own turn opened fire. She heard the bark of another woman’s gun, and saw the bullets tatter the wampyr’s cloak and do him no real harm. Ruth’s revolver would not help her.

Something rose in her, sharp and vicious, a wildfire, a taste like metal on her tongue. The belt at her waist constricted, each of seven iron nail-heads cold-ice-hot against her skin. The wolf who had been Ruth leaped forward, cleared the altar steps in a bound, snatched up a silver-gilt candlestick and swung it like a mace. She did not want him dead, she remembered, and at the last instant pulled the blow somehow.

It was hard.

The wampyr raised his arm to block; she felt bone shatter. It discommoded him no more than the bullets. She heard her own snarl, a wolf-rising cry, and swung again—for the face this time. Wolf, wolf. A new thing. An old thing made new—

Someone beside her, someone now with a broken staff in her hand. A spear, improvised.

Adele, of course it would be Adele, who had killed the wolf with her, who someday Ruth might have to kill herself.

But not today, she thought, and moved forward with her spear-sister to destroy the intruder. He tore up a pew—the younger girls had scattered, screaming, to a corner of the nave, and now Herr Professor placed himself between them and the intruder, while the Bishop scrambled back off the altar, clutching his pectoral—and hurled it. Ruth met the thing in the air, clutched it in outreached hands and flipped it up and over, end over end, to splinter against the pillars of the far arcade. She touched down toe-tip, Adele beside her, and then the coward swung around a pillar and fled.