Traveling With The Dead(11)

Lydia checked her watch again as they passed through a downstairs hall: peeling silk wall covering, doors blackly ajar. “I suppose this close to Christmas there’d be one open…”

“If one has money, mistress, one always finds those willing to sell their sleep and their leisure. I have visited my bootmaker at midnight and never found him but that he was consumed with delight.”

“What do you tell him?” She couldn’t imagine her aunt Harriet’s modiste keeping open past seven for Queen Alexandra herself.

Ysidro regarded her with eyes turned amber by the ruddy light. “That I will have none of this foolishness of two-colored shoes, nor buttons up the side.” He turned to the room at the top of the stair. “So.”

Like Ysidro’s house, the chamber held little furniture, and that furniture old. A tester bed with a curving footboard stood against the rotted wall panels, the counterpane as faded as the silk paper downstairs; on the other wall, a blackwood armoire, stained, chipped, thick with dust-choked carving and mottled with water damage. Its doors stood open. Petticoats, corsets, stockings lay across the bed, and with them—separated by the length of space that would have accounted for a large portmanteau—two dresses Lydia immediately recognized as unsuitable for travel, one because of its now-unfashionable leg-o‘-mutton sleeves, the other because it was white, a color no sane woman, dead or Undead, would wear on a train.

“She’s gone after him,” Lydia said, opening the armoire doors. The only dresses there in the current fashion were the decollete silks and sumptuous velvets of evening wear. No waists, no skirts—Lydia peered shortsightedly into the lower drawer, and Ysidro handed her eyeglasses back—and no walking shoes. “She packed in a hurry…”

She halted, frowning, as her eyes adjusted to the sudden clarity and she realized that the tops of the dressers were in disorder: scarves, sleeves, kerchiefs caught in drawers that had been hastily closed.

“The place has been searched.” Ysidro, who had passed swiftly into the other room, returned, moving his head as if scenting the air. “Living men, days ago, before she packed, I think. The air still whispers of their tobacco and their blood.” He crossed to the bed, studied the garments lying there. All the colors, as far as Lydia could tell in the low amber radiance of candlelight, that a dark woman would wear; everything of the highest quality— Swiss cotton, Melton wool, Italian silk. They were cut for a woman of Lydia’s height, with a waist like a stem and breasts like blown roses.

“Her clothing.” Ysidro turned a chemise over in one gray-gloved hand. “None of his. I like this not, Mistress Asher.” He let the silk slither away. “For many years now it has only been love of her that has kept him on this earth. She is the strong one. He hunts in her shadow, brittle, like antique glass.”

“Might that be reason in itself?” Lydia turned from the dresser, where an ivory hair receiver and ivory-handled scissors spoke of other pieces of a matched toilet set now vanished: brush, comb, mirror. A glove box lay open, gloves of all colors lying like dried and flaccid spiders where they had been spilled.

Ysidro lifted a brow.

Lydia went on hesitantly, “Might he be fleeing her?”

“To such sanctuary as the Austrian Empire would afford?” He moved around the corner of the bed, touched the imprint on the dusty counterpane where the portmanteau had rested, and his nostrils flared again, seeking clues from the alien scents of the air. “I would not have said so. She loves him, guards him; she is all in all to him.”

He paused for a long time, his face half turned from her, inexpressive as the level softness of his voice. “But it is true that one may hate one’s all in all at the same time that one loves. This was something…” Another pause, debating; then he went on, “This was something I never understood as a living man.”

He met her eyes, expressionless, and she could not reply.

After a time he said, “The Calais Mail departs Charing Cross at nine. I doubt we can prepare swiftly enough to make tonight’s. Meet me tomorrow night at eight on the platform, you and your maid. I shall wire my own arrangements to Paris beforehand; I can—”

“I’m not taking a maid!” Lydia said, shocked.

Ysidro’s brows lifted again, colorless against his colorless face. “Naturally, she shall know nothing of me, save as a chance-met companion on the train.”

“No.”

“Mistress Asher—”

“This is not a matter for discussion, Don Simon.” Frightened as she was at the thought of traveling to Vienna—of dealing with one or possibly several vampires—the thought of journeying in company with one unnerved her still more. And as for putting Ellen or anyone else in similar danger…

“I came to you for advice in dealing with vampires, specifically with Lord Ernchester. There isn’t a great deal of reliable information on the subject, you know.” She saw the flare of genuine exasperation in his eyes behind the vampire stillness, and rather to her own surprise it didn’t frighten her as it had.

“But I would not take anyone—certainly not a woman who’s been my friend and servant for nearly fifteen years—into that situation without telling her what kind of danger she may be facing, which, on the face of it, is impossible.”

“A woman of your station does not travel alone.”

“Nonsense. My friend Josetta Beyerly travels by herself all the time. So does—”

“You will not.” Ysidro’s voice did not grow louder, nor his expression change, but she felt his irritation like a wave of cold off a block of ice. “In my day no woman traveled alone, save peasants and women of the streets.”

“Well, when I encounter a roving band of paid-off mercenary soldiers between here and Calais, I’ll certainly wish I’d taken your advice.”

“Don’t talk foolishness. You might trace Karolyi but you would never get near Ernchester, and it is Ernchester to whom I must speak on this matter.”

“You’re the one who’s talking foolishness,” retorted Lydia, though she knew he was right. “This is the twentieth century, not the sixteenth. I will certainly appreciate whatever advice you can give me…”

“Advice will gain you little against either Karolyi or Ernchester. If you wish to warn your husband of his danger, you must travel with me—and travel I will, to prevent Charles from doing this thing, whatever his motives.”

Lydia was silent for a moment, unnerved beyond words at the thought of such a journey but remembering how utterly unprepared she had been to encounter him in the crypt. “If you must,” she said slowly, her dream of fanged white faces returning to her. “Thank you… but I am not taking my maid into the situation she’d face if we meet Ernchester, and I’m not exposing her to the chance of finding out inconvenient things about you. Which she’d do,” added Lydia. “Ellen’s got an inquisitive streak, and she’s smarter than she appears. I won’t do that to her.”

“Hire one for the journey, then.”

“So that you can kill her when the journey is done? And kill me, too, for that matter?” she added, her mind making a tardy leap to the ultimate danger of traveling with the dead. She knew too much already—even her admission of knowing where his lairs lay had violated the lines so carefully drawn when James and Ysidro had parted a year ago in the burning house on Harley Street.

He needs a human companion, she thought, in his search for Ernchester, someone who could deal with such problems as might overtake him when daylight was near; and he needs someone who knows James well enough to track him, to guess his movements, and through him, Karolyi and Ernchester.

She’d told Ellen and Mrs. Grimes she was visiting her cousins in Maida Vale. It would be weeks before she was even missed.

She kept her eyes on his, positive she resembled nothing so much as a myopic rabbit attempting to stare down a dragon.

Slowly, the vampire said, “You need have no fear of me, mistress. Nor will your woman, so long as she keeps from asking about that which does not concern her.”

“No.”

James had told her of the vampire ability to touch living minds, a cold grip, the dreadful sensation of steely will. But his power extended to blanking and smothering thought, to diverting attention… not to changing resolve. It was a predator’s power, a spy’s and a fugitive’s, not that of one who must negotiate with humankind. She saw that realization dawn in his eyes, and his mouth tightened with annoyance.

“If we are to be companions in this enterprise, I will not have you traveling alone abroad like a jauntering slut,” he said. “I think your husband would agree with me in that.”

“What my husband thinks is my husband’s business, and neither yours nor mine,” said Lydia. “And I would rather be taken for a jauntering slut than betray a woman who’s dependent on me. And if it doesn’t suit you, I’ll travel by myself.”

Ysidro bent and kissed her hand, his lips like silk left outside on a dry night of hard frost. “Bon voyage, then, mistress. And bonne chance in your dealings with the Undead.”