Seven for a Secret (6 page)

As Jason slid into the front seat and behind the wheel, adjusting his cap and the mirrors, Sebastien thought he would like to learn to manipulate this arcane machine with its levers and lights and dials, the rumbling motor under its long domed bonnet. Perhaps he was not quite ready for the knacker yet, if gleaming technology could still enthrall. He remembered with clarity the first time he had seen a water-clock, a horse-drawn coach, a steam locomotive. It took mortals to invent such things. Wampyr, in growing their experience, became too attached to it.

Yes, he thought. He would learn to drive the car.

“Where to, Dr. Chaisty?” Jason was playing the role. He, like Mrs. Moyer, was perfectly aware of Sebastien’s nature. There was no hiding such things from servants, and so the wise wampyr hired staff who were already well-informed of the needs and preferences of his kind. There were social organizations that made such things possible.

Those organizations had other justifications as well. Sebastien purposed to visit one now.

“My club, please. The underground one.”

In the dark, he would have walked the short three miles, but there was too much risk in changeable weather. So instead he sat back and folded his arms over his chest while Jason navigated expertly through crowded, spring-rattling streets. A car was still a great luxury in the Americas, but in England and on the Continent, the Prussian Empire’s resources made petrol cheap and plentiful. So the Mercedes was far from the only vehicle on the road, which was also clogged with pedestrians—most of them brandishing still more black umbrellas—carriages, lorries, cabs, traps, and the last of the morning’s delivery wagons, drawn by steaming, miserable-wet yellow Suffolk Punches and slate-colored Percherons.

The drive required only twenty minutes, a significant improvement upon walking. “Shall I wait, sir?” Jason asked.

“Please. I may be a little while.”

“I shall take the opportunity to enrich myself with literature, sir.” Jason turned, to grin over his shoulder, distracting Sebastien with the tendoned arch of his throat and the sweet-salt tang of blood under his flesh. It was time, past time, for Sebastien to refresh himself.

And yet the reluctance grew. He would see to it today. Once he was done in the club. Jason or Phoebe should be able to oblige him; it had not been too recent a thing for either.

It was up to him—the wampyr—to behave responsibly, to distribute his attentions where they would comprise no undue burden. Because the court could not always be trusted to make those decisions for themselves.

Jason opened the curb-side door and Sebastien stepped out, pausing to murmur in Jason’s ear as he passed. “Tonight?”

Jason’s face split with a grin. “Very good, sir,” he said, shutting the door crisply. “I’ll just bring the car around out of the thoroughfare and wait for the doorman, then.”

Courtesy of cloak and umbrella, the wampyr remained almost entirely dry up the long walk to the door, which swung open in anticipation to receive him. He stepped through, handed his accoutrements and a tip to the doorman, and breathed a quiet sigh as the silence of the club’s interior settled over him.

Here there was no smell of cooking food, of cigarettes, of perfumes or whiskey as one might find in any human-frequented establishment. There were courtiers in attendance, of course—one could hardly expect one of the blood to play porter on the dayshift—but out of deference to their employers, the humans who worked in an underground club indulged their needs and vices elsewhere.

The wampyr entered a calm softly-lit room, the windows obscured with tortoiseshell mosaics that would admit light but not the burning sun. The curtains hung over them were drawn back, golden-brown translucence giving the effect of soft summer light rather than the gray winter beyond. The legs of deep chairs and low tables dented opulent rugs, and behind the bookcases the walls were dressed in figured velvet. This was merely the visitor’s room, the antechamber, and the wampyr passed through and down a hall between sets of doors, to find the arched entryway at the end.

In a gentleman’s club, this would be the smoking room, with its tall windows open on the back garden to permit light and air within. In this place, the exterior wall was ringed with a broad verandah with louvered sides, through which Sebastien could make out glimpses of rain-beaten green. Though it was December, the windows and the louvers stood open, and the scent of rain and grass and bruised earth filled the chamber.

There was another manner in which an underground club was different from a gentleman’s club. As he entered, someone rose to greet him, and her skirts swung as she turned. The style was slightly archaic but flattering, long enough to brush the arches of her heeled boots, and she wore a prim nipped-waist jacket over a white linen blouse. Her hair hung in scarlet corkscrews on either side of her stone-white face, which was round and pleasant and remarkable chiefly for its air of extreme youth, an air reinforced by fine, arched brows and a childish upturned nose. She was adorable, cherubic, as she had always been.

“Paolo,” she said, breaking into a wide and startled grin that showcased the gap in her teeth. “Though I suppose you cannot be Paolo anymore, can you?”

She still had a faint Scottish accent. And as for him, he remembered the name more easily this time. “James,” he said. “James Chaisty. And you—?”

“Alice, still. Alice Marjorie. No one remembers a woman for twenty years.” She winked, and came to embrace him. “You look like the light would shine through you,
James.”

“I feel it, too.” He wondered what she felt when she put her arms around him. She was sculpted, flesh over bone, firm and cool. He imagined he might crackle like papier-mâché. “I’ve gotten old.”

She stepped back. “You are the eldest, now. Or the eldest I have heard of. After Evie…”

“It was a long time ago,” he said, though forty years was not so long as that. “You can say she burned.”

She tipped her hand and cocked her head to one side, a birdlike gesture he knew well. “How is it, getting old? I hear it’s made you political.”

He shrugged. “Perhaps someday I’ll have a sensible
answer. Are you here merely as a traveler?”

A delicate query, delicately phrased. Alice thought about it. “Are you asking if I’ve grown political too?”

“A pretty euphemism.”

“I’ve seen enough border wars to last me a millennium, James.” She evidenced no hesitation over the name, as if she had known him by it for a lifetime. But her face had always been revealing, the hazel eyes transparent to her emotions.

He already suspected her answer, and he took no pains to conceal that suspicion from her. “Then you do support the Chancellor?”

Her laugh almost knocked him backwards. “Damn you. You know I don’t. And I’d hazard there’s not a chance you support him either.”

“See?” He took her arm to lead her to a pair of chairs by the open window, where the clean scent of rain could wash over them, and he seated her there with a little ceremony. “I always said you were clever. You’ve come to talk to Ian, then.”

She nodded. “I’ve come to see how I can help.”

That inflow of cold air concealed any scent, but Sebastien heard the creak of boards under the hall rug, and by the quirk of Alice’s head, she heard it too.

“Speak of the devil,” she said, as the ancient and stolid Ian MacGregor turned the corner into the doorway and paused there, arms folded under his gray patriarch’s beard, tweed jacket rumpled over the sleeves of his sweater and gnarled horny fingers poking from fingerless mitts.

“Oh,” he said. “No devil, lass. Just an old troublemaker. It’s been a long time since I saw you two together on my couch.”

“Uncommon circumstances,” Alice said. “Hello, Mr. MacGregor. You’re missed in Edinburgh.”

“Edinburgh is missed in me.” MacGregor came to them, one foot dragging, and settled in a third chair opposite. “But I’m needed in London. What brings you out by daylight, Dr. Chaisty?”

Sebastien glanced at Alice. “Forgive me….”

“No trust even for old times’ sake?” But she smiled,
already standing. “That’s wise of you.”

As she stood, MacGregor would have risen again if she had not pressed him into the chair with a hand against his shoulder. “
Your
knees are not immortal,” she said kindly. “Stay sat, old man.”

He turned, anyway, and watched her from the room. Then he turned back to Sebastien. “You’re a damned fool.”

Sebastien smiled thinly. “That is not a revelation. I’ve brought you something that may be important.”

MacGregor looked up. “Well, don’t draw out the suspense, Doctor.”

“Wolves,” Sebastien said. “I think—and Lady Abigail Irene thinks, which should impress you more—that the Prussians are trying to recreate the Ulfhethnar shock troops of yore.”

“By God,” MacGregor said, eyes all but disappearing into his squint. “Those Huns. What an excitable lot of cunts.”

When Miss Krupps released Ruth and Adele from duty in the kitchen, there was barely time to make their morning lessons. After morning lessons followed the missed lunch, and an hour in the basement range, firing their revolvers against targets tacked to a wall built of damp sandbags. Beatrice Jane Small smuggled them bread from lunch wrapped in her handkerchief, which they wolfed while scrubbing the gunpowder residue from their fingers before Deportment and then German Conversation—though their entire day was German Conversation, as all classes were taught in it. Neither Adele nor Ruth of them had a chance to rest or share more than a hurried word until the hour before dinner.

They were meant to bathe and dress, but it was all Ruth could do to fall into the yellow chintz chair beside their window and let her head drop back upon the upholstery. „I die!” she cried, and plastered the back of her hand to her forehead like a talking-picture heroine.

Adele toed out of her shoes (a demerit, if Miss Krupps saw the scuffmarks) and flopped over backwards on her bed, waving her striped stockings in the air. Her uniform skirt rucked up her thighs, but Ruth was too tired even to properly appreciate the view. She closed her eyes and turned her feigning palm over to cover them.

Adele said—in English, five demerits—“Let’s never get caught again.”

That was good enough for a laugh. But not quite good enough to uncover her eyes. „We must dress. Or it will be more of the same tomorrow. And there is practice after dinner. Don’t count on any more sleep than we got last night.”

Adele groaned, heartfelt. She said, „At least it’s nearly graduation. And then, glorious service to a United Aryan Homeland!”

Ruth winced behind her hand, hoping Adele thought it was just exhaustion. When she found the strength to raise her head, she saw that Adele had pulled one foot up like an inverted bug and was pressing her thumbs to the sole. „Dress shoes. And we are meant to believe in a just and loving God.”

„God may be just and loving.” Ruth pushed herself up on the arms of the chair and wobbled to Adele’s bed, where she made the springs creak as she flopped down. „But the Chancellor rules by blood and steel. Come on, give me that.”

Adele barely protested as Ruth pulled her foot into her lap and took over the work of massaging the arch. After a moment, she relaxed into it and purred. „I will not survive dinner.”

„You will.” Ruth patted Adele’s ankle and stood. „Now come on. Braid my hair for me first, and I’ll brush off your uniform while you do yours.”

Bathed and dressed, Abby Irene spent the afternoon in the front parlor with Phoebe, adrift again on a sea of books. The two women mumbled over pages in a range of languages, at intervals pushing passages under one another’s noses for confirmation or a second opinion. The research led them to speculations, yes. But those deductions came at the expense of encroaching apprehension.

When Sebastien returned around tea-time, deductions and apprehension had solidified into a hypothesis. Abby Irene watched through the archway to the hall as Mrs. Moyer met him upon his entrance. Rain dripped from his weather gear and the brim of his hat until she divested him of that armor. Beyond the front windows, all she could glimpse of pedestrians passing beneath the street
lamps was bobbing black fabric stretched over articulated armatures, obese raindrops obliterating themselves in cascades of spray. The street beyond the pavement ran an inch deep with rain-embossed water, each complex of ripples imbricate over the others until the interference pattern broke into chop and chaos. It became impossible to pick one event from among thousands.