“Miss Potton,” she said at last, in a voice kept level only by years of deportment lessons, “please thank Don Simon for me, but tell him that I’m a grown-up woman and quite prepared to travel by myself. I don’t need a lady-in-waiting, as he seems to think. And I don’t need him. But if you’ll take my advice—”
She saw Miss Potton grow rigid at the word and realized despairingly that she must have said the wrong thing. But she couldn’t think of anything else to say. “If you’ll take my advice, go back to London.” It only made her sound patronizing, she thought in despair. “Have nothing further to do with Don Simon. If you dream about him again, pay no attention. If you see him in the flesh—”
“I can’t go back.” Her small, stiff mouth wore a smirk of triumph. “I gave Mrs. Wendell my notice yesterday morning at breakfast. I’d been up, packing, since three, since Don Simon came to me in my room, spoke to me, woke me from all those years of dreaming. I told her to find someone else to look after her nasty children, for I was done with such things forever.”
Lydia could just image how her aunt Harriet would have greeted such an announcement from Nana over her lightly buttered toast and China tea some rainy morning… Not that Nana would ever have done anything so irregular. The poor girl would never get another job. Done with such things forever indeed!
“I have no family,” Miss Potton went on, with that same oblique pride. “I have put myself, my fate, into Don Simon’s hands, as he has put himself into mine. And it feels… right. True. Good.”
“Anything would,” Lydia argued, startled, “after spending— how many years were you with Mrs. Wendell?—looking after someone else’s children.”
The young woman’s mouth flinched, and as she averted her eyes, Lydia caught the quick shine of tears. Her first anger was subsiding, and Lydia could see that this awkward girl was only a few years younger than she, and as homely. But Miss Potton had never learned to use fashion and artifice to conceal that fact—or had never had the money to do so.
No wonder Ysidro had found her an easy target when he’d gone questing through London that night, looking for someone whose dreams to invade.
“I’m sorry…” Lydia fumbled at the words. But of course once words are said, there is no I’m sorry.
Miss Potton shook her head. “No,” she said, and took a sip of coffee to steady herself. Her voice lost some of its melodramatic ring. “No, you’re right. I’ve been wanting for years to get out of there, to find something else. David and Julia really are the most horrid brats. But that doesn’t mean that what Don Simon told me is any the less true. I think I was looking for a way out because I knew there was another possibility. As if the memories of those other times, those other lives, though I couldn’t recall them, were alive within me, telling me there was something more.”
“They were not.” Lydia felt like a monster, wresting a cherished new doll from a child’s hand on Christmas morning, breaking it with a hammer before those disbelieving blue eyes.
But there was a scorpion in that doll. A white mantis, thin and stalky and preternaturally still, watching from the shadows with terrible eyes.
“A year ago, Ysidro told my husband that vampires can read the dreams of the living,” Lydia went on slowly. “Ysidro is a very old vampire, a very skilled vampire—one of the oldest still in existence, in Europe at any rate. Obviously, he can do more than just read dreams. The—The task I need to perform in Vienna requires his help, and what’s at stake is sufficiently important to him that he wants to go with me, but he refuses to do so unless I conform to his medieval standard of womanly conduct. I’m surprised he didn’t insist that I bring a chaplain and an embroiderer as well. He picked you because he thought he could get you to leave everything behind and go with him—go with me—at a day’s notice.”
Miss Potton said nothing but looked down again, picking at a small mend in the finger of her glove.
“Go back to London,” Lydia said. “Tell Mrs. Wendell that you had to deal with the affairs of a wastrel brother or a drunken father, and even if she’s found another governess, she’ll probably relent enough to give you a character for your next post. Don’t do this. Don’t let Ysidro do this to you.”
Miss Potton still said nothing. A motorcar went past on the Boulevard de la Madeleine, popping and sputtering like a company of American cowboys on the rampage. Somewhere a tram horn blatted.
“This isn’t any concern of yours. Tell Ysidro that he’s… he’s welcome to join me in my journey, but that I will not bring a third party into it, either of his choosing or my own… Though you probably don’t even know where he’s staying, do you?”
“No.” She had to guess at the word from the movement of Miss Potton’s lips.
“No.” Lydia remembered the hidden trapdoors, the new locks, the house, the square that was no longer on any London map. She picked up her handbag and brought out a slim roll of notes. “Take this and go back to England this afternoon.”
Miss Potton stood up, straightening the back that had long ago acquired the mousy stoop of the downtrodden. “I don’t need your money,” she said quietly. “I trust Don Simon will take care of me.”
And she walked from the room in a dignified rustle of skirts.
Lydia reached the Gare de l’Est at seven. Too sick at heart to visit the magasins for which Paris was famous, she had nevertheless forced herself to walk down the Rue St. Denis to the Halles Centrales—the great central produce market of the city—and purchase garlic, wolfsbane, and wild rose. As she walked along the platform toward the Vienna Express, trailed by two porters with her hatboxes and trunks, she reflected that it must have taken astonishing courage for Margaret Potton to resign her post as governess, pack her few possessions, and cross the Channel to a land where she’d probably never been and had only an academic acquaintance with the language; to walk into the dining room of a foreign hotel and up to a complete stranger and announce, “I know all about the journey you’re making, and a vampire has sent me to accompany you.”
She wasn’t sure she could have done it.
To save Jamie?
It was, more or less, what she was doing now.
Lydia drew a deep breath.
Under ordinary circumstances her reaction to Miss Potton’s revelation would have been bemused incredulity. People did and believed the most extraordinary things, which was one reason why Lydia had always been far more comfortable as a researcher.
But she felt responsible for Miss Potton, for Ysidro’s deadly lures, and it was depressing to realize that she could describe in detail the workings of that child’s thymus without having the slightest idea of how to bring her to her senses.
It occurred to Lydia, belatedly, that her most effective course of action would have been a blank look and a cold “I beg your pardon?”
She could only hope, now, that Miss Potton would return to London…
To what?
Would Ysidro even let her return?
Damn him , she thought, renewed fury wiping out her sense of helplessness. If he harms her, if he dares to harm her…
But again, the inner voice whispered, What?
Miss Potton had made her choice.
And she had made hers. She was going to Vienna to deal with the vampire earl—and goodness knew what other vampires, not to mention the slippery intrigues of the Foreign Office—alone.
One step at a time, she thought.
If Jamie had wired her Monday from Munich, he must have reached Vienna Monday night. Today was Friday. Last night she had telephoned Mrs. Grimes from Charing Cross Station and ascertained that nothing further had been heard from him. Four days, she thought, with Dr. Fairport, potential traitor and seeker after immortality; four days with the hazards of Ernchester and Ignace Karolyi, and who knew what besides.
The porters loaded her luggage into the van, to be sealed for the journey to Vienna, and carried the smaller portmanteau and two hatboxes and an overnight case to the compartment Mr. Cook and Company had booked for her, whose number she could probably have ascertained for herself had she been willing to squint a little. After her interview with Miss Potton, she had checked the hotel’s copy of Bradshaw, seeking a train to Vienna that left before sundown, but though there were plenty of trains that would eventually take her there, via Zurich or Lyons or Strasbourg, none was faster than the Vienna Express. And speed was of the essence. James was in danger, trying to work with a flawed tool that could turn on him at any moment.
Or a prisoner already.
Or…
She put the thought from her.
The compartment was a comfortable one, embellished with rosewood paneling, velvet upholstery, and electrical light fixtures shaped like frosted lilies. Alone, Lydia unpinned the jade-and-eggplant fantasia of her hat and settled into her seat, gazing out the window at the impressionistic flower bed of color, shadow, and light that was the station platform, seeking, she realized, for the sturdy brown blob, the clumsy stride that would be Margaret Potton. After a moment she opened her handbag and fished forth her spectacles, a little startled, as always, at the sudden sharpness of people’s faces, the lettering on the signs. According to the booklet on the little table before her, dinner would be served in the salon car at eight-thirty, but between anxiety about James and the obscure fear that even yet she would encounter Ysidro, she doubted she would feel much hunger. Her head ached, and she realized she hadn’t eaten anything since the three-quarters of a croissant she’d consumed before Margaret Potton had entered the dining room at the hotel.