in and won, and battles that she had unaccountably lost in spite of her careful plans.
The alarms rang day and night, each one a different, carefully chosen song. Gerbert had particularly objected to the alarm that blasted “Chant de Guerre pour l’Armée du Rhin” at 5:30 P.M.—the precise moment when the revolutionary mob swept through the gates of the Bastille in 1789. But these tunes served as aide-mémoire, conjuring up faces and places that might otherwise have faded away over time.
Ysabeau read the rest of Gallowglass’s message. To anyone else it would have appeared nothing more than a garbled combination of shipping forecast, aeronautical distress signal, and horoscope, with its references to shadows, the moon, Gemini, Libra, and a series of longitude and latitude coordinates.
Ysabeau reread the message twice: once to make sure she had correctly ascertained its meaning and a second time to memorize Gallowglass’s instructions. Then she typed her reply.
Je Viens
“I am afraid it is time for me to go, Gerbert,” Ysabeau said without a trace of regret. She looked across the faux-Gothic horror of a room to where her jailer sat before a computer at the foot of an ornate carved table. At the opposite end, a heavy Bible rested on a raised stand flanked by thick white candles, as though Gerbert’s work space were an altar. Ysabeau’s lip curled at the pretension, which was matched by the room’s heavy nineteenth-century woodwork, pews converted to settees, and garish green-and blue silk wallpaper ornamented with chivalric shields. The only authentic items in the room were the enormous stone fireplace and the monumental chess set before it.
Gerbert peered at his computer screen and hit a key on the keyboard. He groaned.
“Jean-Luc will come from Saint-Lucien and help if you are still having trouble with your computer,” Ysabeau said.
Gerbert had hired the nice young man to set up a home computer network after Ysabeau had shared two morsels of Sept-Tours gossip gleaned from conversations around the dinner table: Nathaniel Wilson’s belief that future wars would be fought on the Internet and Marcus’s plan to handle a majority of the Knights of Lazarus’s banking through online channels. Baldwin and Hamish had overruled her grandson’s extraordinary idea, but Gerbert didn’t need to know that.
While installing the components of Gerbert’s hastily purchased system, Jean-Luc had needed to call back to the office several times for advice. Marcus’s dear friend Nathaniel had set up the small business in Saint-Lucien to bring the villagers into the modern age, and though he was now in Australia, he was happy to help his former employee whenever his greater experience was required. On this occasion Nathaniel had walked Jean-Luc through the various security configurations that Gerbert requested.
Nathaniel added a few modifications of his own, too.
The end result was that Ysabeau and Nathaniel knew more about Gerbert of Aurillac than she had dreamed was possible, or indeed had ever wanted, to know. It was astonishing how much a person’s online shopping habits revealed about his character and activities.
Ysabeau had made sure Jean-Luc signed Gerbert up for various social-media services to keep the vampire occupied and out of her way. She could not imagine why these companies all chose shades of blue for their logos. Blue had always struck her as such a serene, soothing color, yet all social media offered was endless agitation and posturing. It was worse than the court of Versailles. Come to think of it, Ysabeau reflected, Louis-Dieudonné had quite liked blue as well.
Gerbert’s only complaint about his new virtual existence was that he had been unable to secure “Pontifex Maximus” as a user name. Ysabeau told him that it was probably for the best, since it might constitute a violation of the covenant in the eyes of some creatures.
Sadly for Gerbert—though happily for Ysabeau—an addiction to the Internet and an understanding of how best to use it did not always go hand in hand. Because of the sites he frequented, Gerbert was plagued by computer viruses. He also tended to pick overly complex passwords and lose track of which sites he’d visited and how he had found them. This led to many phone calls with Jean-Luc, who unfailingly bailed Gerbert out of his difficulties and thereby kept up to date on how to access all Gerbert’s online information. With Gerbert thus engaged, Ysabeau was free to wander around his castle, going through his belongings and copying down the surprising entries in the vampire’s many address books.
Life as Gerbert’s hostage had been most illuminating.