Scarlet, page 13
“My lord,” the housekeeper said, dipping a curtsey, and Eleanor quickly followed suit. “The young lady is here to serve your needs.”
Eleanor’s nerves vibrated like a fiddle’s strings. She’d bled for the Baroness before, more than once, but that was when she was younger; she hadn’t needed to open a vein for a year now. What was more, there was a significant difference between doing it for a mistress for whom she felt admiration and respect—well, to be more precise, whom she was paid to obey—and for this complete stranger. It made her wonder if the Revolution had the right idea about aristocratic vampires after all. Most of all, this wasn’t why Charles had brought her here. And he couldn’t have known this would happen . . .
. . . could he?
“You may leave, Cecile,” the Marquis said. He advanced another step; the light caught on the gilt buttons of his coat, the gold embroidery, the sudden whiteness at his mouth as his lips, too thin and dry to be healthy, drew back from his teeth. “Return . . . in an hour’s time.”
Eleanor couldn’t look away from the old vampire, but she heard the door close behind her very distinctly.
She gritted her teeth. This was something she’d done before; she could do it again. It was only a little blood, after all. Better to take the initiative than cower like a trembling rabbit. “I am at your service, monsieur,” she said. “Where is the cup and knife, please?”
He had to remember to breathe before he could laugh. Air wheezed out of him in a cackle. “Knife? Cup? What do you take me for, girl?” He addressed her as tu; clearly he didn’t consider her worthy of the polite vous.
“But your housekeeper—” Eleanor began.
“I permit Cecile certain small liberties. She has earned them through loyal service. You, on the other hand, are nothing more than some English peasant.” Eleanor could smell him now as he drew closer, an additional odor of decay underneath the stink of dust. “From you I will drink in the proper style.”
Were all French vampires like this? Or all vampires? Had Eleanor just been lucky in being born on Lady Sophie’s estate, rather than elsewhere?
“Please, monsieur,” she said, backing away, “the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel can help you escape this place. They can assist you to England or across the border to another country, where you won’t have to hide . . .”
The Marquis drew himself up to his full height, and he was tall now that he wasn’t hunched over; his hands hung by his side, long-nailed and bony, like sheaves of knives. “Little girl,” he said, his voice overflowing with malice, “you are too young and too common to understand such a thing, but one of my blood does not leave the land of their birth. I may temporarily shelter from this abominable Revolution, but I will not be forced to flee. I rule in my lands; and soon I will rule again. Your League means as little to me as the maggots which wriggle in the cemetery. Come.” He beckoned. “Curtsey and offer your neck.”
The candlelight flared in his eyes, and in them Eleanor saw herself as a doll—fragile, easily broken, and ultimately a thing rather than a living person. With sudden, unquestionable certainty, she knew that if she stayed and let him sink those ragged teeth into her neck, then she wouldn’t live through the night. If Charles returned, the League would get nothing but empty apologies. She was just one peasant girl, messieurs . . .
No, more than that—even if she believed she’d live, she didn’t want to have to give him blood in that way. And what she wanted . . . mattered.
She ran.
There was no sound behind her as she fled down the corridor. Moonlight shone through the windows to light her way. Outside the surrounding lawns were studded with flowers and weeds, neglected and returning to nature. If I can find a door and get outside, then the further I run the safer I am—he can’t leave the house for fear of being discovered. I’m dressed like a normal woman; I can find a village and make up a story. All that history about the Revolution which Charles had drilled into her would come in useful. She could curse the King and sing the Carmagnole as well as anyone else. And then—then I’ll think of something . . .
A hand fell on her shoulder. She shrieked, spun round and tripped over her own feet, sprawling on the ground in a billow of skirts.
The Marquis loomed above her, a white-and-black woodcut from some diabolist’s guide to monstrosities. His mouth was very wide and seemed to be all teeth. “Giving up already?” he asked.
Eleanor pulled away from him, groping blindly for something, anything, to use as a weapon. Her fingers closed round the leg of a stool. Wood. She swung it at him.
He slapped it out of the air, and it crashed to the ground in a shower of splinters.
Eleanor scrambled to her feet. “Milord, this won’t work,” she tried again. “You can’t hide here forever. If the League knows, then sooner or later other people will know too. The National Guard are already searching the district for Charles and me.”
“But if the rabble find your body, they won’t need to search any longer, will they?” he mused aloud.
“If my blood is drained, they’ll know there’s a vampire here!” She felt the door handle poke into her back. An escape!
The Marquis shrugged. “Not if there’s nothing left of your neck, child . . .”
Eleanor realized grimly that she’d just talked herself into a corner where all acceptable outcomes—for the Marquis, not her—ended up with her drained of blood and dead. Desperately she tried to think of anything that might stop him. Garlic, a cross, a stake . . . none of which were going to be anywhere in this wretched chateau.
She’d never thought that she’d need to kill a vampire, any more than she’d thought about trying to kill . . . well, anyone.
But she didn’t want to die.
She twisted the door handle behind her and dashed through in a desperate sprint. It bought her precious seconds. But then the Marquis was behind her as she ran, his claws reaching for her. They were so sharp that she didn’t realize she’d been cut until she felt hot blood trickle down the nape of her neck.
“Keep running, girl!” he called after her. “Maybe if you run fast enough, I’ll let you go!”
Eleanor had seen cats play with mice before; she could guess how much his offer was worth. But survival was a hard habit to break. Ideas sprouted in her brain as she ran, but came crashing down again seconds later. If I go to the kitchen to look for garlic—no, the housekeeper’s loyal to him, she wouldn’t have any there. Or if I kneel and pray—no, that only works in old stories and with people who are too good to be true anyway. Or if I break some wooden furniture for a stake—but how am I going to break furniture with my bare hands?
She rounded a corner. Impossibly, he was already standing there. He lashed out again, and this time his nails sliced across her forearm. Blood spattered onto the floor as she turned and fled. His laughter pursued her.
If I can lock myself in a room and barricade the door till dawn . . .
This was a chateau, and aristocratic houses were basically all the same, weren’t they? The ground floor would be dining rooms and receiving rooms and parlors—large and with multiple entrances, so she’d never be able to keep him out. Upstairs would be the bedrooms for the Marquis and his guests, with servants’ rooms in the attics above that, like the one where she’d woken up. Those might work. If she barricaded the door with furniture, then perhaps she could keep herself safe until dawn. And by then, God willing, Charles would return.
Although she didn’t know the chateau’s exact layout, she knew roughly where to find the servants’ stairs. Perhaps, she allowed herself to hope, the Marquis might not even be familiar with the servants’ quarters? Maybe he was the sort of aristocrat who never ventured into his own attics?
Eleanor was halfway to the next corridor when she realized the chateau had fallen silent. She slowed her frantic run to a tiptoe—then slipped off her sandals to be even quieter in her bare feet. The cuts which the Marquis had inflicted ached, seeping blood. She crept through the chateau, dodging around the long rectangles of moonlight which fell through occasional windows. She paused at each door to listen in panicky silence in case someone was waiting for her on the other side.
Relief seized her as she recognized the corridor which led to the servants’ stairs. Her pulse echoed in her head, horribly loud in the awful hush.
Five steps, four, three, two, one, and the narrow wooden stairwell which curled up to the attics and down to the cellars was directly ahead of her . . .
The Marquis dropped from the ceiling as swiftly as a spider descending on its victim. Fragments of plaster trickled down in his wake. “You creatures always try to run,” he said, bored. “Why do you bother? Animals should know their place, just as surely as we vampires do.”
“You’re insane!” Eleanor screamed, driven past fear and into fury. “Other vampires don’t do this!”
“And how would you know?” The dim light transformed his face into a skull.
“Because I’ve served one all my life!” Eleanor spat. “She was an aristocrat too, but she took care of her servants. She was a good mistress.”
“You poor, pathetic, whining child. She was clearly a good stockkeeper who ensured that her pets were healthy, all the better to feed from you. But I doubt you know what she did in private, when there was nobody else to see. Are there bones underneath her rosebushes, girl? I assure you that there are cemeteries beneath mine.”
His blow came without warning, a vicious slap that knocked her to the ground and left her head spinning. He prodded her with his foot. “Get up. Run some more. Entertain me. I’m working up a splendid appetite.”
Eleanor looked up at him, blinking tears out of her eyes. Behind him, the stairs upward were a forlorn hope, an impossible dream. She’d never make it past him—and he’d just demonstrated how pointless it would be to try to escape.
The anger she’d felt earlier burned inside her, hot and sullen. If she couldn’t go up . . . then there was only one way left to go.
Reflex had kept Eleanor’s hand locked on her shoes. She threw them in his face, and as he recoiled, she dived toward the stairs leading into the chateau’s cellars.
She rolled down and landed with a thump at the bottom of the curved stairwell, bruised and shaken. The stone flooring was icy beneath her bare feet, and pitch darkness surrounded her on all sides. She pulled herself to her feet and groped for a wall.
Steps slowly descended the stairs.
A spark of hope woke in Eleanor’s mind. She’d been in Lady Sophie’s wine cellars before, to fetch and carry for the butler. Wine racks and crates of bottles were breakable and might yield pointed pieces of wood. With renewed determination, she stumbled into the darkness, one hand on the wall, eyes straining as though pure effort could somehow help her see. Cobwebs brushed her face as she passed through an archway and made a sharp right turn; she flinched but didn’t stop.
“Come out now!” the Marquis called from behind her.
Eleanor hurried forwards, turned another corner—and walked directly into a pile of heavy crates. The clatter of wood was terrifyingly loud. She bit back a whimper of pain, brushing dust and cobwebs from her face.
If the Marquis didn’t know where she was before, he’d have no doubt now.
The silence in the cellar was far more frightening than the Marquis’s calculating footsteps. Eleanor felt her way round the stack of crates, desperately searching for a weapon. One of the crates had splintered, leaving a long, jagged board that pricked her hands. It would have to do. She’d managed to blunder into an area of the cellars which blocked her off from further escape. Still, if she could injure the Marquis and slip past him . . .
She waited, her heart in her mouth. Oddly, there was no smell of damp here; but equally there were no odors of spices or herbs or anything else that might have been laid in a dry environment to preserve them. She wondered what their contents were. Silverware? China? Perhaps this was why the Marquis refused to leave the chateau—there was something down here too valuable to him to abandon. She recalled Charles’s lamentations about a library, even though a cellar was hardly the place to store books.
Her pulse was hammering so loudly that she felt sure the Marquis must hear it. She imagined him on the other side of the crates, closer with each step, her blood already on his nails. Closer . . . closer . . .
A breath tickled against her ear.
Armed, Eleanor threw herself in the direction of the Marquis, bringing the piece of plank round and up; she felt impact, but she didn’t know if the makeshift stake had gone in. The crates toppled over with a crash that filled the cellar with echoes.
For a moment, standing there in the dark, she thought that she’d done it.
Something hit her on the side of the head with a sickening crack. She stumbled into a pile of hard scattered objects which dug painfully into her ribs.
It didn’t work. That was my last chance, and I failed.
Hopeless and despairing, still she scrabbled for something she could use as a weapon. Blood ran down her hand from the cut on her wrist, making her grip slippery. She reached for her makeshift stake, but instead her fingers closed on the hard spine of a book. Pointless.
“Stand up,” he commanded. “Come forward.”
Something stirred at the back of her head. It was . . . wrong. It wasn’t a thought or feeling of her own. It was like a new plant rising out of dark leaf mold, out of place and obvious.
And it hated. It didn’t speak any language that Eleanor recognized, but it knew there was a vampire in the darkness with her, and it loathed with such absolute venom and white-hot fury that it seemed to sear itself into Eleanor’s mind. Her hands tightened on the book with an instinct that wasn’t hers.
“Put that down!” the Marquis snarled, his voice inches away from her.
The presence in her mind spread, forking like lightning, tying itself to her fear. It seized control of Eleanor’s limbs. It . . . moved.
Eleanor reached out with her free hand as though she were dreaming. Lightning crackled along her nerves. The cellar shook as a light flared with blinding brilliance. Wood tore. Stone broke. The Marquis screamed and then was silent.
The darkness closed in again. But it no longer held terror—at least, not to the foreign will commanding Eleanor’s actions. It was furious. It was free. Eleanor trudged across splinters and shattered paving, the air trembling around her. With each step the air hummed around her, as close and thick as the oppression of a thunderstorm just before the heavens broke open. Almost, almost, a voice spoke at the back of her mind, but not quite yet.
The stairs upward seemed to go on forever. Moonlight was strange to her eyes, a wonder and a joy after what felt like years of pitch darkness. And perhaps she had been down there for several hundred years; she could remember the moments of terror upstairs in the chateau—and yet at the same time, her thoughts filled with weeks, months, of a lightless existence. She broke one of the windows with a chair, moving like a jointed toy.
The grass outside was kind to her feet; the night air was gentle against her skin.
She walked into the forest, mechanically placing one foot after another. Behind her the twisted string of power finally snapped, and lightning exploded from the earth, casting her shadow in front of her in the fury of its light. The chateau fell, collapsing in on itself in a thunder of smashed stone and rising dust. She didn’t look back. The whiteness possessed her mind, looking at the world around her with eyes that found everything new and strange.
By the time she reached the road, she could go no further. She fell by the wayside, unaware of the dawn or the approaching horses.
10
THERE WAS SUNLIGHT. She was safe.
Eleanor wasn’t sure where she was or what was going on, and she hadn’t tried to open her eyes yet, but even with them closed she could tell that the sun was shining on her. This was enough to make her consider dropping back into the trackless depths of sleep. As long as the sun was shining, the vampires couldn’t get her . . .
“She’s awake, corporal,” a man said in French. “I saw her move.”
“Is she now.” There was a pause, then the cot Eleanor was lying on tipped to one side, and she was dumped on the floor. She curled up with a moan, hands flying to her head at the sudden ache ripping through it. There was cloth under her fingers; someone had bandaged her head while she slept.
“Wake up, citizen!” the second voice said loudly. “We have questions for you to answer.”
Unwillingly Eleanor opened her eyes and sat up, tugging her skirts into place. Four men were standing around her and the upturned cot, in the same uniform that she’d been wearing just last night . . . no, it must be the night before last.
Where was everyone? Where was she? She barely remembered the night before, beyond that first terrifying dash through the chateau as she tried to escape the Marquis. How could Charles find her now? Was she trapped on her own in France?
She bit her lip and pulled herself together, forcing the whirl of questions down into a state of simple panic. At least she hadn’t said anything in English—she’d never have been able to explain that. Now, what would a normal French girl say in a situation like this, surrounded by four soldiers under dangerous circumstances . . .
“Please don’t hurt me,” she whimpered.
“We’re not going to hurt you, citizen,” the first man said. He didn’t have any obvious marks of rank, but his tricolor rosette was gaudier than the ones worn by the others. “Not if you’re sensible and answer a few questions for us.”
“Where am I?” She looked around at the room. It was sparse, with only a window, desk and a few chairs. “What town is this?”
