TWENTY-FOUR
As a general rule, the Department didn’t go in for disguises. Most of its employees were long-timers like McAliester and Bickern, permanently part of the local landscape. Their disguise was simply that they were the Germans they would have been, had they been born and brought up in Germany rather than Britain. If an alteration in appearance was rendered necessary by circumstances, it was usually effected by simple change – standing differently, a different mode of speech and behavior: I know I look a little like the person you’re looking for, but as you can see I’m really not anything like him . . .
Nevertheless, a great deal could be accomplished in an emergency with a change of raiment and accent, and one of Bickern’s jobs was to provide the wherewithal, if needed, for quick exits. This could extend to hair dye, eyeglasses, spirit gum, and what Shakespeare referred to as ‘an usurpéd beard.’
Resplendent in the most nondescript of German suits – and no German’s suit ever fit him the way a Frenchman’s or Englishman’s did – and a close-cropped beard reminiscent of the Tsar’s, Asher took a public tram out to Potsdam and walked to the Charlottenstrasse at about the time when the maidservants in those handsome houses – behind the sandstone porters’-lodges, the sweeping brick driveways – were ‘doing’ the bedrooms and their smooth-haired mistresses were embarking on the third cup of after-breakfast coffee. An occasional Palladian facade or Mansard roof spoke of landed wealth, of Junkers who controlled the peasants on their land exactly as if those peasants were still the medieval serfs they had been up until the days of Napoleon. But, for the most part, these were the houses of the wealthy industrialists whose factories worked day and night to provide weapons and munitions for Germany’s armies, and the marketable goods for the colonial empire that Germany intended to enlarge with victory.
Carriage horses, matched down to the height of their white stockings, drew shiny victorias under the new-leafed trees: young ladies in stylish furs, rigidly guarded by chaperones, on their way for an ‘airing’. No vulgar motor cars here. Nannies in black marched well-mannered toddlers firmly along the paths. Asher heard one admonish her charges not to dawdle, though what was the point of taking children for a walk if not to let them linger over tadpoles in the ditches or unfamiliar flowers by the wayside? Nevertheless, he recalled his own nanny had had precisely the same attitude about walks. We must step out quickly if we are to reach the park in time to turn around and come home for lunch.
Kleinerschloss was an ostentatious brick villa set back from the road among elm trees. Through ornamental metal railings, Asher glimpsed stables in the back. There was no porter in the lodge, however, and Asher, finding the gate closed but not locked, pushed it open and ascended the graveled drive to the door. As he neared it, the porter, uniformed in dark blue livery, emerged from around the corner of the house and begged his pardon with polite suspicion: could he be of assistance to the gnädiger Herr?
‘My name is Filaret,’ said Asher – that was the name on his new set of identity papers, at any rate – ‘and I have a message for Colonel von Brühlsbuttel.’ The man wasn’t in mourning, he observed, so at least Ysidro hadn’t murdered the head of the house.
‘You may give the message to me, Honored Sir.’ The porter bowed with military precision. Ex-cavalry, Asher guessed. And not long out of the service, either. ‘I will see that he gets it.’
‘A thousand pardons.’ Asher, who had taken the precaution of actually writing out and sealing a completely meaningless message in the back room of the Golden Inkstand, returned the bow. ‘I have been commissioned to place it into the hand of Colonel von Brühlsbuttel only.’
The front door opened; the butler came out, who was likewise ex-cavalry, and the porter’s height to an inch. Someone must have matched them like the carriage horses, except that the butler was adorned with a moderate-sized paunch and an enormous fair mustache. ‘I am afraid this is not possible, Herr Filaret. The Herr Colonel has gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘This morning.’ A look of concern clouded the man’s blue eyes. ‘He had a telegram, which he showed to no one, but which upset him very much. He packed a few things and left by the early train.’
‘Left for where?’ asked Asher, and he managed to radiate the air of a man vexed by additional difficulties in delivering his letter, instead of confronted by potential disaster.
The butler shook his head, baffled, and replied, ‘St Petersburg.’
‘Are you feeling better, Madame?’ Dr Theiss took her wrist gently in one hand, angled his little mirror to the window light to peer into her eye. ‘Very good – how many fingers do you see?’
Though she was, in fact, feeling considerably better, Lydia made a show of flinching from the light, whispered, ‘I don’t know – three? Four? My head . . .’
‘It’s all right. Can you not eat?’ He looked at the untouched porridge, then poured her out a glass of the weak lemonade that had been left with it.
Lydia shook her head. Though profoundly queasy, she could have done with the lemonade, but feared it might be drugged. Or worse, she thought, remembering the vicious glint in Petronilla Ehrenberg’s eyes.
Theiss, she thought, was remembering it as well, to judge by the hushed tone of his deep voice and the way he kept glancing back at the door, which he had, she noticed, shut carefully behind him.
‘Do you feel strong enough to speak with me a little?’ he asked. ‘Tell me, please . . . This vampire who was with you in the cottage – who is he? Why did he come to you there? Genia Greb tells me that the izba was attacked by the other vampires of St Petersburg, three others, she says, and that this one – your friend—’
‘He isn’t my friend.’ Lydia turned restlessly under the light blanket. She saw that she now wore a man’s loose nightshirt, and that her hair had been taken down and brushed. She wondered if Theiss had done that, and she shuddered at the thought that it might have been pale fishy-eyed Texel.
‘She said that he bore you down the stairs to the cellar when you were hurt. That he spoke to you – behaved towards you – with great tenderness. Is this man English? Did he come here with you? How is it, that you know one of the Undead? It is imperative that I know these things,’ he added urgently, taking her hands. ‘Imperative that we bring him in. Petra –’ he hesitated on her name, then corrected himself – ‘Madame Ehrenberg mistrusts him – fears him. I think she must be shown that his intentions are as good, that his heart is as pure as her own. Otherwise—’
‘Otherwise she’ll kill him,’ Lydia murmured weakly. ‘The way she killed Lady Eaton?’
The physician’s face hardened. ‘Lady Eaton, as you call her,’ he said, ‘was a murderess. A common vampire, who has killed her way down through the years—’
‘And Madame Ehrenberg has not?’
For an instant shock and anger made him draw back; when he leaned forward again, his voice was pitying. ‘Ach, how should you know, Madame?’ he said. ‘She has turned her back on all that. It has been twenty years since she has drunk human blood—’
‘Is that what she’s told you?’ demanded Lydia, struggling a little to sit up. ‘And have you known her through that twenty years? Have you been with her every minute of that time?’
‘I know her as I know myself,’ replied Theiss gently. ‘No, I have only known her these two years. Yet I feel that we have known one another for decades. She is not an untruthful woman – she has grown past that. I know what she is capable of, and I would trust her with my life.’
‘You do,’ said Lydia. ‘Every time you are together.’
‘As you do your vampire . . . acquaintance?’ He gave her a quizzical look. ‘Perhaps we should not have killed Lady Eaton. Perhaps if we’d had the serum in its completed form then, we could have injected her with it, and after a time her own cravings for the kill would have subsided, as Petra’s have. But she was intransigent. Like a wild beast, Petra said. She broke free of her restraints, attacked Petra – Madame Ehrenberg . . .’
‘Were you there?’ asked Lydia. ‘Or is this only something Madame told you?’ And, when Theiss stammered a little, she laid a hand on his wrist and went on: ‘What has she told you she wants, Dr Theiss? Is it only to be able to walk about in the daytime? Can she still affect the minds of the living? That’s something vampires can only do if they’re feeding on human blood – on human deaths.’
His eyebrows dived down over his nose; even without her spectacles she could see that. ‘Who told you that?’
‘Who told you it was otherwise?’ she returned. ‘Go down to the canal some night, by the old watergate, before the tide scours it, and drag in the shallows, if you think she isn’t still killing . . .’
He was shaking his head, the same look in his eyes that she remembered had been in Margaret Potton’s, when the little governess had been under Simon’s spell.