EIGHTEEN
And there it was.
Lydia thumbed the tightly-folded packet of counterfoils for the third time, seeking a note of explanation, but found none. Jamie must have parceled this up in a terrible hurry, not even to have enclosed word of where he’d found all these things. Knowing Jamie, she guessed he’d burgled Petronilla Ehrenberg’s house . . .
She wondered if he’d burned it down afterwards, to cover his tracks. It would be like him.
It appeared that Petronilla Ehrenberg owned property on the north bank of the Neva across from Elaghinskoy Island: the former monastery of St Job. Lydia’s sense of St Petersburg geography was good enough by this time to place it, on the outer edge of the grimy ring of factories that surrounded the city, within walking distance of the Vyborg-side slums. There was also a town house on the Sadovaia Oulitza in the Smolny district, as well as the ‘small factory building’ at the familiar address on Samsonievsky Prospect.
And she’s clearly found a woman willing to serve her, to BE Petronilla Ehrenberg by daylight. That must have been what Rasputin saw.
She shuffled the stiff law-hand documents into chronological order, noting names, dates, bank-account numbers.
Juggling identities was nothing new for a vampire. Petra Ehrenberg – the real Petra Ehrenberg, who had become Undead in 1848 – had taken over the name and identity of her ‘niece’ Paulina, and then made a new identity as Petronilla years later. Did the woman she had spoken to at the clinic – this green-eyed woman in the Doucet suit and sables who flirted by daylight with Benedict Theiss in Petronilla Ehrenberg’s name . . . Did she realize that it was the custom of vampires to murder their servants when they were done with them? Or does she think she’ll be the exception to that rule?
For a moment, the recollection of Margaret Potton lying dead on their bed in Constantinople overwhelmed her: the waxen face, the blue eyes staring, the mouth agape, as if she’d died gasping for the oxygen her lungs were no longer getting . . .
If I pound on her door and tell her, thought Lydia, she’ll only turn that information over to the REAL Petronilla, hiding in her dark crypt somewhere . . .
She knew from her dealings with Margaret and Ysidro how intransigent the victim of that seduction could be, when asked to consider any explanation other than the one that the vampire had planted in the victim’s dreams.
Besides, I promised Jamie that I wouldn’t.
Lydia took some deep breaths. It was a few minutes before Margaret’s image retreated.
But what I CAN do is have a look at the place.
Unlike many so-called ‘country dachas’ on the properties of the rich, the cottage behind Razumovsky’s palace really was a cottage. True, its four rooms were furnished more like a rustic stage-set for a pantomime fairy-tale than the dwelling of actual peasants, but at least it didn’t have its own ballroom and marble-tubbed baths, like the ‘cottage’ owned by the Baroness Sashenka’s husband. Lydia sought out Rina – the sturdy little cook – in the cellar, a gloomy rabbit-hole beneath the kitchen, which was, like every cellar in St Petersburg, as damp as a well; she’d never gotten used to the high-handed way the Petersburg ladies had of leaving the servants to guess whether they’d be in for dinner or not. Rina’s French was limited to ‘coq au vin’ and ‘Joyeaux Noël’, but Lydia had made notes for herself of important phrases in Russian, such as, ‘I will not be here for dinner,’ and, ‘Please ask Sergei to draw me a bath.’ (A European bath was also different from a Russian bath, which was what was known in England as a Turkish bath, more or less. Even in Turkey, Lydia had not had a Turkish bath, and she was not sure – despite the languorous urging of Razumovsky’s sister Natalia – that she felt up to utilizing the log-built banya at the end of the graveled path near the river.)
Dinner having been arranged for, Lydia changed her lacy ‘at-home’ gown for a very dashing carriage-dress, a Paquin medley of dark and pale greens that Natalia had supervised the purchase of (‘Those English things make you look like someone’s virgin sister, darling . . .’), made sure she had her little packet of picklocks buttoned to the lower edge of her corset, then walked the fifty yards or so through the woods to the stables, which rose, like a minor Versailles of gold-and-cream-colored stucco, before one reached the Razumovsky palace itself. Ivan – the only member of the stable staff who spoke French – chided her like a good-natured father for not having sent one of the maids with an order to get the carriage ready and bring it to the izba’s door, but let her sit on the bench in the yard to watch the harnessing-up. ‘I should send you back to the izba, to wait like a respectable lady, Gospozha,’ said the coachman with a grin, as he re-emerged from his private door a few moments later, very trim and un-Ivan-like in his conservative ‘day’ livery of maroon piped with pale blue. ‘What would His Excellency say, eh? Now, where is it that you have the wish to go?’
It was clear to Lydia that the Monastery of St Job had originally been built in the countryside, a mile or two back from the Neva, at some point early in the preceding century, when St Petersburg had been much smaller and the world much cleaner; Lydia was not in the slightest surprised that the monks had moved out. A factory producing rolling stock for Russia’s railways stood a hundred yards away, drearily excreting smoke that yellowed the air and made Lydia’s eyes burn as Ivan steered the team among the oozing ruts of the unpaved street. From the gates of the factory, from the doorways of grubby taverns or the steps of those endless, rickety wooden tenements, bearded, filthy men in faded clothing watched the gleaming vehicle pass with eyes that smoldered with resentment. As the brougham approached the dreary wasteland of railroad spur-lines and factory sheds that covered what had once been the monastery’s orchards, a child ran from an alley and flung a handful of horse dung at its shining side.
‘Are you sure of your directions, Gospozha?’ asked Ivan doubtfully, leaning back to the communicating window.
Though considerably intimidated at the thought of getting out of the carriage, Lydia replied firmly, ‘I’m sure that it’s the Monastery of St Job that I was asked to inquire at.’ I have walked into vampire nests and survived rioting Turks in the back alleys of Constantinople, she told herself. Each of those men has a liver, a spleen, two kidneys, two lungs . . . I’ve taken apart the corpses of men like them and they all look the same inside . . .
The coachman shook his head and said something in Russian. Ahead of them, in the midst of a rut-creased field of waste ground, the old monastery’s walls rose, soot black and leprous with lichen and decay. A couple of men – bearded bundles of rags – crouched beside a fire built on the other side of a muddy lane nearby, but no one and nothing seemed willing to go anywhere near the walls themselves. There had apparently been a lane leading to the gates at one time, but it was barely visible, as a series of gravel patches and potholes in the gluey muck. The gate itself – old wrought-iron in a strange severe pattern – was backed with sheet iron, both forbidding and unspeakably desolate.
‘Gospozha—’ Ivan protested, as at Lydia’s signal he reined to a halt.
‘It’s quite all right,’ said Lydia firmly. She removed her spectacles and stepped down, gingerly holding up her skirt hem. ‘I’m just going to have a look round.’
‘There is no one here, Gospozha.’ The coachman flung his arms wide in exasperation. ‘You can see, the place has been deserted many years.’
‘I was told there was a man living here that my husband wished me to find.’ Lydia had found – she did not know why – that the fabrication of a mission undertaken at a husband’s behest made more sense to most men than a woman undertaking action on her own. ‘I may have been misled, but I do need to at least knock on the gates.’ Across the unpaved lane, and beyond the corner of the walls, stretched several more acres of waste ground, in places fenced with boards, the torn-out sections of which showed a gaggle of makeshift huts at the far side – apparently deserted – and sheets of water and mud. In the grimy light – it was seven in the evening, but the sun stood disorientingly high in the sky – it looked ghastly beyond description, but not actively menacing. ‘Stay here with the carriage, if you will, please.’ She turned her back on Ivan’s arguments – and he couldn’t really follow her if he ever expected to see horse or carriage again, in this neighborhood – and, holding up her elegant skirts, she approached the squat arch of the gate.
It was, as she had expected, locked. What surprised her a little was that the lock was new – she put on her spectacles again once she was close – the steel bright and unrusted. There was little rust on the iron backing-sheet, either, and the welds that held it to the older ironwork looked recent as well.
Petronilla Ehrenberg – according to Jamie’s pilfered counterfoils – had arranged for the purchase of this place two years ago, in the spring of 1909.
Lydia moved off to the left, trying to remember whether it was bad luck to walk around a church to the right or to the left – does a deconsecrated monastery count as a church? – towards a tower-like irregularity of the wall, hoping to find another gate or door. The place was much bigger than it appeared to be, sprawling away into what looked like it had been another orchard, the trees now mostly cut down for firewood. A stagnant canal bordered it on the north – Lydia recalled passing a disused watergate just beyond the big Naval stores factory – and, even at the distance of many yards, the stench was overpowering. On its bank, as in the field opposite, a couple of dirty camps had been set up, but the sheds seemed empty, trails of looted trash seeming to ooze from their grimy entrances. ‘The monks have to have kept farm animals,’ said Lydia to herself, ‘and that means . . . Ah, here we are.’
The remains of a ruined barn – picked nearly clean of its planking by the frozen poor in wintertime – backed against the monastery wall. Stepping cautiously into the dilapidated shadows, Lydia saw at once the smaller gate, which led through, presumably, from the kitchen quarters. It, too, was locked – the lock also new – but above it, where the loft floor had been, another door pierced the wall. A little searching revealed the remains of the steps that had once led to the loft, and Lydia climbed up and made her way – keeping warily to such flooring as remained over the huge beams, since the planks elsewhere looked rotted and treacherous – to that upper entrance.
It was closed, but the rusted lock had been broken. A hinge had been loosened as well, making the off-balance door hard to push, but the door of the bicycle shed at her Aunt Faith’s country place had been similarly crippled, and Lydia remembered the knack of lifting and pushing. Once she got it open enough to slither through, the smell inside was worse than the sewer stink of the streets, a miasma at once metallic and chemical. That much struck her instantly – that, and the fact that the single window which once had lighted the round, bare little chamber immediately within had been boarded over, rendering the room pitch dark.
Only the bleak light of the open doorway showed her a second door on the far side of the round room, leading into the monastery itself.
Beyond that door she heard the scuff and pat of footsteps, fleeing down stairs.
Lydia called, ‘Hello?’
You imbecile, whoever’s here probably doesn’t speak English . . .
‘Alors? Qui est lá?’
Would Russian monks speak French? Father Gregory certainly didn’t . . .
She fished in her handbag for the stub of a candle she’d formed the habit of carrying, lit it. By the dim yellow glow she saw that the inner door wasn’t locked or bolted. When she pushed it open, it was to find herself on a spiraling staircase, rising above into blackness, descending before her feet into an abyssal night.
Dark or light, vampires won’t even be awake at this hour . . .
Through her collar lace she quickly touched the heavy silver links of the chain she wore around her neck. The footfalls might, of course, be one of those horrible bearded factory-workers she’d seen in the streets outside. But if Petronilla Ehrenberg slept in the crypts here, even part-time, Lydia was willing to bet that the dispossessed of Petersburg gave the place wide berth. She descended the stair, left hand pressed to the central column of moist stone, candle held high in her right. ‘Qui est lá?’ she called out again, and her voice echoed in the low vaulting just over her head. Despite the relative warmth of the lengthening days, in here the damp cold was arctic. ‘Je m’appelle Madame Asher . . . Je cherche Madame Ehrenberg . . .’
Another small round room; a door firmly locked with a new American Yale. The walls here had been painted at one time, a hideous procession of peeling faces and boneless bodies in the stiff, unreal style of the old Russian icons. Only somber eyes and upraised hands remained. After a bare yard of landing, the stair continued down, and the smell that breathed from below was rank with the seepage of half a million slum cesspits.
Curiously, Lydia saw no rats.
The yellow light glinted on water below. An inch or so deep, she saw as she neared it, over a floor of broken brick. A door stood open to the blackness of deeper hell. She gathered her skirts, elevated the light.
I’m only going to have a look inside to tell Jamie . . .
Eyes flashed in the darkness. Reflective as a rat’s, human-high in the ghost-white blur of a human face.
Lydia’s breath froze in her lungs.
It must be later than I thought . . .