Traveling With The Dead(16)
There were backcountry Jews in black caftans, tallis, and side curls being resolutely ignored by their frock-coated Germanic Reform co-religionists, Hungarian csikos in high boots and baggy trousers, a tattered rainbow of Gypsies. There were the Viennese themselves, ladies bundled in linen traveling coats and veils to guard against smuts, brilliantly uniformed men who might have been Lancers or postmen, children clinging to black-clothed governesses, and students in bright-colored caps. French, Italian, singsong Viennese German as unlike as possible from the tongue of Berlin blended with Czech, Romanian, Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian…
The air was redolent with coffee.
Vienna .
Illogically, as he made for the stand where the fiacres would be ranked—where Ernchester and Karolyi would head the moment the customs officials were through with their luggage—Asher found himself holding his breath, fearing that somehow, impossibly, he would meet Francoise.
He had dreamed about her, in his uneasy sleep that afternoon; a dream threaded with waltzes. She was walking along the Schottenring, past the marble and stucco and gilt of the great blocks of flats, through the crystal light of a spring evening. She looked not as she had looked thirteen years ago, but as she must look now, her hair almost completely gray, and lean as certain cats get as they age; rather like a cat in a gray walking suit tabbied with black lace.
I’m sorry, Francoise.
As he watched her, he had been piercingly aware of the ornate bronze gratings in the walls at sidewalk level, brushed by the gunmetal taffeta of her skirt. There was movement in the darkness, he realized, movement beneath the pavement under her feet; whispering in the shadows, eyes in the dark. Waiting only for the coming of night.
They were in Vienna as well.
Francoise, get out of there! he tried to shout. Go to your home, light the lamps, don’t let them in. Don’t speak to them, when they meet you on the pavement…
But because of what he had done, thirteen years ago, she could not hear him or would not heed. She walked on, and it seemed to him that gray mist drifted up through those bronze gratings and breathed after her down the street.
He shook the recollection away. It was not likely that he would meet her—she might not even live in Vienna anymore— and in any case, the love between them was past and done. And there was nothing for which he would trade the prospect of living the rest of his life with Lydia, that copper-haired, bespectacled nymph.
But still there was that ache in his heart whenever he heard the “Waltz of the Flowers.”
“Herr Professor Doktor Asher?”
He turned, startled, halfway to the cab stand, his first thought, Not now! Karolyi and Ernchester would be along in minutes . . -
Two brown-uniformed Viennese policemen stood behind him. Both bowed.
“You are the Herr Professor Doktor Asher who has just come from the Paris-Vienna Express?”
“I am, Herr Oberhaupt.” The old Viennese custom of bestowing titles on everyone dropped immediately back into place, along with the lilting, slightly Italianate Viennese accent. “Is there a problem? I presented my passport…”
“No, no problem with the passport,” said the policeman. “We regret extremely that you are wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of a man in Paris, a Herr Edmund Cramer. Will you be so good as to accompany us to the Rathaus?”
Shocked, for a moment Asher could only stare. Then a string of Czech curses caught his ear, and he looked around in time to see a couple of porters loading an enormous, brass-cornered trunk onto a goods wagon, observed by Karolyi and the Earl of Ernchester. Karolyi happened to turn his head and for a moment met Asher’s eyes.
He tipped his wide-brimmed hat and smiled. The last Asher saw of them as he was escorted out of the station, spy and vampire were making their leisurely way to the rank of cabs.
Chapter Five
“We knew each other in a former lifetime, you see.” Miss Margaret Potton looked up from picking at a loose thread on the button of her left sleeve, and behind lenses as massive as Lydia’s own—had Lydia been wearing them in so public a forum as the Hotel St. Petersbourg’s dining room—her blue eyes had a look of wary defiance. “Many lifetimes. It’s as if I always knew, all my life. All my life I must have been having those dreams, only to forget them absolutely, completely, in the morning.”
“ ‘Must have’?” quoted Lydia, trying to keep her fury at Ysidro out of her voice. “When? If you forgot them that completely, how do you know you had them ‘all your life’? Do you honestly remember any prior to last night?”
The small mouth set stubbornly. “Yes. Yes, I do. Now.”
Lydia said nothing. That cad! was all that came to her mind, and she thought, Surely there’s a more descriptive word than that. James is a linguist. I must ask him about it.
Miss Potton looked up again and set her shallow chin. “That is, I knew I had dreamed something important. I always had the knowledge that I was dreaming about something—something beautiful, something critical, something that would change my life. Only I never remembered, until last night.”
“I’ve never heard anything so idiotic in my life!” All the lurid dreams returned to her, love, rescue, waltzing on moonlit terraces, she witty and he laying his reluctant heart at her feet. “Last night he wanted you to think you remembered. Because it was convenient for him…”
“No.” A beetroot stain blotched thin cheeks. “Yes. In a way. Because he needed me.” She returned to picking at her sleeve button. “When he came to me last night—when I woke in the moonlight and saw him standing there at the foot of the bed—he said he would never have crossed my life again, would have forced himself to stay away from me, for my own good, except that he needed me. Needed my help. You don’t understand him.”
“And you do?”
“Yes.” She didn’t look up.
Lydia drew in her breath, but she felt obliquely that if she came anywhere close to her true feelings, she would probably scream, and that obviously wouldn’t do in the dining room of the Hotel St. Petersbourg. Rage at Ysidro drowned her fear—her fear of him, of Ernchester, of the vast uncharted ocean of the world outside university research.
The word she wanted, she realized, was vampire.
Miss Potton raised her head and went on, “I understand that his kind need people they can trust. He told me they will seek for years for a human being large enough of spirit to accept them for what they are, in whose hands they dare to lay their lives. I was… he and I were… This was how it was between us for… for many lifetimes in the past. He said he always knew where I was, but deliberately never contacted me in this lifetime, because in a former life I… I was killed in his service.”
“That’s the most ridiculous—”
“That’s all you can say.” Miss Potton regarded her with a steady, pale, fanatic gaze. “But I remember it. I’ve remembered it all my life in dreams. I just—didn’t recall it until last night. And he needed me again, he needed someone, to journey to Vienna…”
“He needed a duenna for me at half a day’s notice!” cried Lydia, appalled. “I don’t know which is worse, that kind of old-fashioned absurdity or what he’s done…”
“He is an antique gentleman,” Miss Potton said calmly.
“He is a killer! Not to mention a bigoted Catholic and the most unconscionable snob in shoe leather, and you’re a fool if You believe—”
“He isn’t bigoted!” The waiter came, bringing a cup of cafe au lait the size of a soup bowl. Miss Potton looked up at him anxiously, as if fearing he would demand payment of her on the spot. Only when he left again without a word did she turn back to Lydia, an eager intensity illuminating her face. “During the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, in the wars of religion in France, Don Simon had a Huguenot servant who sacrificed his life to keep him from being burned by the Inquisition. Later he and I saved that servant’s family, got them on a boat for the Americas…”
Lydia stared at her, unable even to reply. Even at the distance of the table’s width, Miss Potton was a blurred figure, in her brown wool frock made for someone else and badly altered. Her squashy black velvet hat—startlingly similar to the one Lydia had borrowed from her book—was years out of date. The spectacles hadn’t made it into the dreams.
“But I… I know I’ve dreamed about it before. All of it. Running along the beach, minutes before the first, fatal gleam of dawn; Don Simon turning back, sword drawn to hold the cardinal’s men at bay while I got Pascalou’s children into the rowboat. The way the sea smelled, and the mewing of the gulls.”
Straight out of Dumas. And unforgivable . Lydia tried to stir her coffee and gave it up, for her hand was shaking too badly. For all her careful training in the social niceties, in fashionable flirtation and dinner conversation, she had always regarded the majority of humanity as a slightly alien species, possessors of fascinating circulatory and endocrine systems but, with a few exceptions like James and Josetta and Anne and Ellen, detached from herself and her concerns and largely incomprehensible. She had, literally, not the slightest idea of how to go about warning this poor silly child, talking to her, reaching her through the vampire glamour of dreams.