Though Marcus had seen a few news sheets roll off the presses in Philadelphia, Paris’s booksellers operated on an entirely different scale. Books in French, Latin, Greek, English, and languages Marcus couldn’t recognize were typeset in wooden racks. Sometimes the metal letters were still glistening with ink from their previous jobs. Then it was off to the press to be aligned, inked, and imprinted. Reluctantly, Marcus handed over his copy of Common Sense to a bookbinder so that it could be kept from falling apart. He watched the man select the stiff backing for the new leather cover and paste fresh paper down to protect the worn contents. When the bookbinder returned it, now wrapped securely in brown leather stamped with gold, Marcus held in his hands a volume that would not be out of place in the finest of libraries.
Marcus was so entranced by the world of books that Fanny paid a beefy printer with a daughter in need of a dowry half a year’s earnings so that he could drink his blood and imbibe a truer sense of what it was to be involved in the book trade.
“Alors. It was an experiment,” Madame de Genlis said with a tinge of disappointment after Marcus confessed that most of what he’d seen in the man’s blood concerned his wife—a real harridan, if he were to be brutally honest—and his futile efforts to get out of debt.
“We shall try again,” Fanny said, unfazed by failure.
Nothing was off-limits to him so far as Fanny and Madame de Genlis were concerned—even though Marcus’s keen sense of smell led him around by the nose, as Gallowglass had feared. He found the scent of young women irresistible.
“I know just the place to go,” Fanny confided to Madame de Genlis. “A brothel where the women are young and enthusiastic.”
Then Marcus smelled something even more enticing than a woman.
“Stop. What is that?” Marcus discovered he could slow Fanny’s progress by planting his feet so firmly on the street that his shinbone cracked under the stress.
“The H?tel-Dieu.” Madame de Genlis pointed to a vast, fire-scarred building stretched along the banks of the Seine in the shadow of Notre-Dame cathedral. Parts of it had collapsed. The rest of it looked like it might tumble into the river at any moment.
“Hotel?” Marcus asked.
“The hospital,” she replied.
“I want to go inside,” Marcus said.
“Just like his father.” Fanny looked disappointed at Marcus’s decision to leave off his pursuit of women in favor of death and disease, but then her face brightened. “Perhaps there is something to be learned from the similarity? What do you think, Stéphanie?”
Aromas of camphor, lint, coffee, and spices assaulted Marcus’s nose when he entered, followed by the sweet smell of decay and darker notes of opium and death. He drank it in, along with layers of copper and iron scent.
So much blood, he realized, each person’s subtly different.
Marcus trailed through the wards, using his nose—that powerful part of the vampire body—rather than a manual examination to diagnose illnesses and patients’ conditions.
The hospital was enormous—larger even than Philadelphia’s Bettering House, or the hospital the army had occupied in Williamsburg—and night had fallen before he was through exploring. By then, Marcus’s coat was stained with blood and vomit—he hadn’t been able to ignore the patients’ pleas for water and care. He was also ravenous, and wanted to go to a tavern and order a pint of beer and a piece of well-seasoned beef, even though he knew it would no longer satisfy his hunger.
He got Josette instead.
* * *
—
MARCUS WAS IN THE LIBRARY the next morning, conjugating Latin verbs, when there was a commotion in the front hall.
A petite woman burst into the room, followed by Fanny’s footman, a strange-looking fellow named Ulf whose arms were too long for the rest of his body. Trailing behind was another small, elegant female.
A wearh.
“You see! There he is!” the woman cried, clasping a folded piece of paper to her breast. She was draped in yards of red-and-white-striped silk and wore a redingcote along with a ridiculously tiny cocked hat set on her powdered wig at a jaunty angle. The woman was childlike in her appearance, with small features. “He is just as my Gilbert described, is he not? I knew him the moment I spotted him from my carriage, entering the H?tel-Dieu.”
The female wearh inspected Marcus through a filmy veil that floated from the brim of her hat and covered her piercing green eyes.
“Madame de Clermont, Madame la Marquise, let me call—” Ulf said, flapping his large hands in consternation.