of her younger, warm self. Only prettier. Kate would not be able to win him away from the other woman and make of him a docile informant. Her career as a Mata Hari was ended before it could begin.
'Why the interest in my personal arrangements? I thought you ran more to politics and matters of great moment?'
'Journalism needs the human touch. Tiny insights to illuminate dry facts.'
Edwin finished his drink. His blood would be warmed by the brandy, flavoured strongly. An envelope edge peeped out of his jacket. He demurely pushed it out of sight.
'Sealed orders?'
He grinned. 'I couldn't possibly say.'
'I would be prepared to make a wager with you,' she said. 'That I know where you are to be sent.'
'If you could do that, you would indeed be a sorceress. I've no idea what is in these orders.'
She knew from his heartbeat that he was lying but let it pass.
'What would you be prepared to wager?'
She shrugged.
'A kiss?' he suggested.
Her eyeteeth lengthened minutely. She felt little pains, not unpleasant, in the nerves of her fangs.
'Very well,' she said. 'You are recalled to London.'
He took out his envelope and opened it. He read his orders, keeping them close to his chest, chuckling.
'You have lost your wager.'
'Am I to take your word for it?'
'As an officer and something reasonably approaching a gentleman?'
'Officers and gentlemen make the best liars. Especially intelligence officers. Lying is their profession, just as the truth is mine.' l could name the odd journalist not unacquainted with mendacity.'
'You accept you have lost?'
'I suppose I shall have to.'
They stood, awkwardly, and looked at each other. He was not a tall man, within a few inches of her five foot four. He kissed her on the lips. His warmth shocked her, jolting fire through her veins. There was no blood but she had the contact she knew from feeding. It was not a long kiss. Bartlett's table cheered and jeered. She could not draw anything much from Edwin's mind. Just a drop of blood and she would know things. Edwin drew away. His hands opened and his orders drifted down past the table.
'That'd curl your hair,' he said, eyes wide.
With the swiftness of the undead, she bent down and picked up the paper, presenting it to Edwin. He was in a brief reverie, befuddled by the press of her lips. The paper passed only briefly through her glance but she knew Edwin was ordered to return to the airfield at Maranique and arrange another reconnaissance flight to the Chateau du Malinbois.
'Now that wasn't what you expected?' Kate said.
'I'll say not. You're electric, aren't you. Like an eel?'
Part Two: No Man's Land
15
The Vile, the Violent and the Vein
'This is absolutely intolerable,' ranted Ewers. 'We were to be met at the station. A car was to be provided for us. This delay was not to happen.'
Poe dumped his carpet-bag on the platform as gloomy soldiers clumped around him. It was just past sunset. His red thirst was roused, an exquisite torture.
'Stakes will be hoist,' Ewers vowed. 'Guts will be spitted for this!'
Small irritations were disproportionately infuriating to Hanns Heinz Ewers. As his sense of self-importance was sorely exaggerated, so was his wrath when others refused to credit him with the inflated position to which he laid claim. Were he a subscriber to the theories of Sigmund Freud, Poe would be forced to conclude that Ewers's phallus was remarkably tiny.
Actually, he felt the Viennese Jew said much of interest. Also, he deserved his place in history. Franz Joseph has been on the point of acceding to a petition underwritten by the House of Rothschild and rescinding the Edict of Graz when Freud published
'There should be no place for inefficiency in the German soul,' Ewers continued. 'It should be burned out with blood and iron.'
The station was Peronne, near Cappy. They were in France, only a few miles from the lines. This was the Somme. In Berlin, Poe had heard the bombardment as a tiny echo. The audibility grew as the train neared the war. Even Ewers heard it well before the French border. The noise wore on Poe's thin nerves; if he stayed too long near the front, he might go mad.
'Do they expect me to walk?'
In Ewers's tirade, 'us* had been replaced by 'me'. It was no feat of ratiocination to deduce that Ewers felt his was the important mission at Chateau du Malinbois, and Edgar Poe merely the hanger-on. If Ewers were such a magnificent wielder of the mighty pen, why had not he been engaged to create this marvellous book?
Ewers had two heavy trunks to Poe's one travelling bag and was unused to arriving at a station without exciting a swarm of gaudy-uniformed porters eager to serve his purpose to the death. Peronne was given over entirely to the military. Any Frenchmen normally employed as attendants were either dead or a few miles off, pointing rifles at the German lines.
Having borne its latest cargo of grey-clad bodies to the altar of war, the locomotive breathed angry dragon- steam. The huge, black engine had a smokestack to shame a paddle-steamer. The crest of Dracula was picked out in gilt on the boiler, somewhat obscured by mud and soot.
The Graf's first appointment in the Kaiser's service was as Director of Imperial Railways. Deviation from the timetable by more than five minutes was punishable by three strokes across the back with the flat of a heated sword. If a miscreant engineer committed a second offence, he was thrown alive into his own furnace. The Graf s foresight became evident in the first hours of the war: eleven thousand individual trains were diverted from civilian service to convey several million reservists from their homes to regimental depots and then to the front. The Schlieffen Plan, devised under the Graf s patronage, was less a campaign strategy in the nineteenth-century sense than a colossal railway timetable.
'Hoy,' Ewers shouted, 'my luggage.'
Vast wheels ground as the train readied to move on. Ewers ran up and down, coat-tails flapping in scalding steam. Brass-bound trunks were tossed out of a carriage on to the platform. Good German workmanship showed as the sturdy cases buckled but did not break. Ewers shouted threats at the departing train, promising numbers and names had been noted down and that steps would be taken to ensure swift dismissal and punitive treatment.
There was a bad smell in the air. Poe recognised it from his last war. The war for Southern Independence. The one they had lost. He had never really purged the taste from his spittle. Mud, gunpowder, human waste, fire and blood. There were new ingredients, petrol and cordite, but the underlying stench was the same on the Somme as at Antietam. For a moment, he was overcome. Death crowded in on his brain, a black flag wrapped around his head, suffocating, blinding, choking.
'What arc you standing there for?' Ewers snapped. 'You look like a scarecrow. *
Ewers did not feel anything. That said much about him.
'Pah,' Ewers spat, waving a dismissive arm.
Poe calmed. He must feed, soon. As always when at the lip of exhaustion and starvation, his senses were more acute. To feel too much is to be mad.
