A Sharpness On The Neck (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 9) by Fred Saberhagen (book suggestions TXT) 📕

trench had been, had moved on for a considerable serpentine distance. Again Melanie and her cousin Marie were at the raw end of this mound, where the latest burials were to be found. And they were hard at work, but now equipped with a smaller, better focused version of the Argand lamp.

      When I came upon them, Melanie was absorbed in the grisly task of looking for one particular head, while Marie held another in her lap, painstakingly coating the features with wet plaster. Now that I understood the point of the work, it seemed almost commonplace. The actual pouring of the wax, and the many remaining steps in creating the replica which was the object of all this labor, would of course take place back at Curtius’s workshop, behind the museum.

      Tonight the rats seemed bigger and bolder, more willing to interfere, than they had been on the occasion of my last visit.

      The women took turns in interrupting their work, to try to drive away the annoying and dangerous rats by throwing pebbles. But mostly the beasts—arrogantly well-fed, confident clients of the Revolutionary state—ignored the ineffective bombardment and continued to pursue their own agenda.

      With a slight bow and a polite murmur, I did the ladies a favor, or at least saved them some time, by driving off a whole swarm of the rodents with a great silent shout.

      “I think they will not bother you for a while.”

      In response the two women gave me a strange look.

      I wondered, aloud, if they ever had trouble finding the head they had been sent to model, and decide to use a substitute instead? They could at least hope that no one would be able to tell the difference. If so, they would not confess the dereliction to me now, but only laughed at the idea.

* * *

      To Melanie I said: Your son told me where I could find you.”

      She paused in her work, and looked vaguely alarmed.

      I hastened to be reassuring. “Pray do not be concerned; he was quite safe when I saw him, at the museum. He seemed a charming lad.”

      “Thank you, m’sieu.”

      “Who is his father? Excuse me, you may be sure that I do not ask such a question out of idle curiosity.”

      “Then why do you ask it, sir?” Marie Grosholtz demanded.

      Melanie shot her cousin an anguished look. “Oh, what does it matter now? The gentleman is a friend of Philip’s, and has his reasons, I am sure.”

      While Marie, who had known about her cousin’s troubles for ten years and more, looked on sympathetically, Melanie told me the story of how she had given birth to this child about ten years ago, a few months after the kindly (in this instance, anyway) Dr. Curtius, at the urging of his niece Marie, had taken in a pregnant fourteen-year-old, and set her to work at easy tasks in his establishment.

      The father of Melanie’s baby was, or rather had been, a careless aristocratic youth named Charles Dupin, the scion of a well-to-do family, who at first had declined to acknowledge his paternity of the child. Later, she thought, he might have been inclined to do so, but before he had taken any definite steps in that direction he had allied himself with the wrong political faction and been beheaded.

      “I had thought it possible,” I observed, “that young Auguste’s father was Philip Radcliffe.”

      “No.”

      Her fists clenched, and she stared at me. “Oh God, do you bring me any news of Philip?”

      I shook my head and gestured soothingly. “All I know with certainty is that he has been arrested. I was hoping you could tell me in what prison he can be found.”

      “He is in La Conciergerie. We have been able to find out that much.”

      “Ah. That gives me a place to start. He is a foreigner, and I think that will give us a few days’ grace at least, before they turn him over to Sanson.”

* * *

      Meanwhile, Marie worked on steadily, wiping dried blood and bits of bran from her subject’s face. The baskets on Sanson’s platform usually contained four or five inches of either bran or sawdust, intended to absorb blood. Having cleaned her subject as well as was practical, she then smeared it with a mixture of Linseed oil and lead oxide, in preparation for the plaster of Paris, which when dry would make the mold.

      With the rats held in abeyance for the time being, the three of us were soon chatting with something like a natural freedom. When I asked the two women why they had chosen this spot to do this work, they were ready with a simple explanation. If an impression of the face was made at graveside, there was no need to carry the head away. It could be tossed back into the pit.

      The young women explained to me that if they did not make the molds at the cemetery, then, after finding the heads they wanted, it would be necessary for them to change their clothes, or put on clean garments over the bloodstained ones, and wrap the heads somehow or put them away in hatboxes. There would be nothing particularly conspicuous about the pair of women as, riding in a wagon or light carriage, they carried their finds back to the wax museum in the Boulevard du Temple.

      But then, when they were through with the heads, they would be faced with the messy problem of getting rid of them.

      “We might be able to bury one or two in our backyard, and no one the wiser. But with the numbers that we must handle … already there have been dozens, and there is no end in sight to what the Committee wants…”

      As we conversed, Melanie had gone on crouching, digging, peering, up to her knees in muddy earth and decaying humanity, enduring the pervasive smell while going about her ghastly but (as I now realized) relatively innocent business. Meanwhile Marie, the more skillful modeler, went on using oil and plaster of Paris to make a mold