Traveling With The Dead(42)

It hadn’t been, in terms of higher fashion, reflected Lydia, putting on her spectacles to turn and look over her shoulder at the girl. Mile. Ursule had expertly graded ranks of gowns for all occasions, and the fawn and white silk, however pretty, was designed to be no competition whatsoever for Lydia’s point lace and baby ribbons. But to a girl without a family, who had spent any number of years in the dreary confines of the typical governess’ quarters, it must seem like Cinderella’s ball dress.

“I can’t…” Margaret stammered. “I can’t repay you…”

“Good heavens, no!” Lydia said. There was a silence, Margaret undoubtedly remembering—as Lydia remembered—the hysterics in Sofia, the furious outburst upon their arrival the night before last. A little awkwardly, she explained, “It’s nothing, really. I mean… what’s the point of being an heiress, and putting up with uncles and aunts telling you how to live and who you have to marry, if you can’t… can’t buy someone a present now and then? And I know it helps to have the right thing to wear.”

“I thought if you were an heiress, it meant you could do what you wanted,” said Margaret as Lydia barely touched the eiderdown puff to her cheeks, then leaned forward until her nose nearly touched the glass to inspect the results in the mirror.

Lydia shook her head. “Well, I don’t know about other heiresses. My father and his two sisters had a terror of fortune hunters, and my life was… rather restricted at times.”

I’ll not have you turning my money over to a scoundrel, had been her father’s exact—and oft-repeated—words.

Not, A man who only marries you for money will make you wretched.

Not, How do you expect such a man to fit into the life you want to make for yourself?

I’ll not have you turning my money over to a scoundrel.

His money, even should he die.

She rubbed the rouge on her fingertips, smoothed the tiniest hint of a blush along cheekbones and temples, seeking the perfection that had been her only protection against everything they could do.

“It couldn’t have been that restricted, if they let you go to Oxford,” said Margaret. She picked up the powder puff, turned it cautiously over in one square, disapproving hand. “Do all heiresses learn to use cosmetics like this?”

“Only if they have a nose like mine.” Lydia squinted at the effect of the rouge, then licked the end of her eye pencil and began careful shading along the upper lashes. “James—he was a friend of my uncle Ambrose, the dean of All Souls—arranged with one of the pathology professors to help me borrow money under another name. I begged Uncle Ambrose not to tell Father, and I’m not sure he would have agreed if he’d known I was studying medicine. It was exhausting, going back and forth by train and concealing sessions when my tutor came down to town. Fortunately, our place was near Oxford—Willoughby Close—and Father spent weeks at a time down in London. If my mother had been alive, I could never have done it.”

“What did they do when they found out?” Margaret asked, blue eyes wide with alarm.

“There was a row,” Lydia said evasively. Why, after eight years, did her father’s cold fury still hurt? “Would you like to try this?” she added, seeing the other woman’s hand stray to touch the rouge pot, the lip rouge, the several types of powder and skin food indispensable to the artifice that Lydia regarded as her armor against the world.

“C-could I?” Margaret stammered, turning pink again. “I know I shouldn’t—the sisters at the orphanage all said that ladies don’t use such things…”

“Well, I never met a lady who didn’t,” Lydia said with a smile. “It’s just that there’s a trick to doing it so that nobody notices. Here.”

The transformation was not a startling one, but having spent years compensating for what she considered her own shortcomings—a slightly aquiline nose, too-thin cheeks, and unfashionably shaped lips, to say nothing of a preference for knowledge above society gossip—Lydia knew how to apply rouge and powder to reduce the impact of the other woman’s shallow chin and snub nose, and to give her better cheekbones than she’d been born with. At the end, staring mto the lamplit glass, Margaret breathed, “Oh…” in a kind of wonderment, the blue eyes widened and deepened, the pale, pretty face surrounded by raven masses of curls as it had been, Lydia knew well, in her dreams. “Oh, thank you!”

She fumbled for her eyeglasses.

Lydia laughed. “You aren’t going to wear them to the reception, are you?”

“Of course.” Margaret settled them firmly on her nose, even as Lydia was removing her own to be helped into her gown by the maid. “If people don’t like me in my eyeglasses, that’s just too bad.” She blinked mildly at Lydia as the Greek maid laced her expertly up the back. “Thank you,” Margaret said simply. “Thank you so much for doing this for me. I’ve never been beautiful before.”

Lydia smiled a little and shook her head. “I’ll teach you how to do it, if you’d like,” she said, stowing her spectacles in a silver-mounted leather case and making a final inspection of herself in the mirror. Stefame’s sister Helena had come to the door twenty minutes ago with word that Sir Burnwell and Lady Clapham were waiting downstairs with the carriage; they should, Lydia guessed, arrive at the palace in fashionable good time.

She worked her tight kid gloves onto her hands and surveyed Margaret once more, pleased with the results in spite of the glasses. She had done her best—the fact that Miss Potton was her companion was no reason not to make her as beautiful as she could be, though she knew girls of her own year as a debutante who would dispute that—and she suspected that her companion’s raven hair and tourmaline eyes made her prettier than herself.

“Margaret,” she asked, as they collected reticules, fans, shawls and keys, “what are you going to do when you return? To London, I mean? I could help you…”

“Oh, I’ll leave that to Don Simon,” Margaret said. “My fate is in his hands.”

She smiled happily and followed Lydia down the stairs.

The reception was held in a medium-sized pavilion in the inner garden court of the old palace of the sultans, flanked by plane trees and surrounded by a colonnade of shallow, green-tiled domes. The Sultan himself had not occupied the Topkapi Palace for a good fifty years, but the new government—the Committee of union   and Progress—used it for state functions, and this three-room suite, though a little small for a reception and rather stuffy with its low, coffered ceilings and Western-style crystal chandeliers, was at least unhallowed by any sort of Imperial tradition.

“Ambassador Lowther hardly knows whom to speak to these days,” Sir Burnwell confided to Lydia as gorgeously caparisoned palace servants divested them of coats and cloaks in the doorway of the kiosk’s small service room. “It’s like the old story about the seer who was right half the time, but one never knew which half. The C.U.P. holds power in patches, but nobody knows which patches they are.”

“At least under the old Sultan one knew whom to bribe.” Lady Clapham brushed straight the folds of her periwinkle and gold chiffon dress, and nodded approvingly at both the younger members of the party. “Don’t worry, my dear,” she added more quietly to Lydia. “If there’s anything to be found about your husband, we’ll find it here. I know at least someone who saw him Wednesday afternoon. I hope he’s here… Russians have such an Oriental idea of time.”

She led the way into the main hall, where the reception line moved slowly past the bearlike Talaat Bey, the new lord of this place where the sultans had reigned for five centuries, and the Romeo of the new army, the beautiful Enver Bey. The room was crowded with men and women dressed in the height of European fashion—most of them fair-skinned and all of them speaking French—and servants in old-fashioned turbans, slippers, and pantaloons bearing silver trays of refreshments. Lydia noticed Miss Potton craning her neck, looking around her, presumably in the hopes that Ysidro would have followed them here after all.

“Andrei!” Lady Clapham called out and moved into the crowd, returning a moment later with a hunter-green colossus on her arm. “Prmce Andrei Illlyich Razumovsky, of the Russian Embassy; Mrs. James Asher. His Highness is an acquaintance of your husband, my dear. He was the last one to see him after that affair with the Sultan’s guards Wednesday, weren’t you, Andrei?”

“The Sultan’s guards?” Lydia raised her eyes to the man who towered over her, the impressionistic glitter of bullion, buttons, epaulets, fringe, and a beard of still-brighter gold resolving themselves into a good-humored, handsome face and bright blue eyes as the prince bent to kiss her hand. Slavic facial angle, Lydia thought automatically. Brachycephalic. Cranial index about 82. I %. I really must stop seeing people in terms of their internal structure…

“There was little harm done,” the prince said in beautiful Oxonian English and offered her his arm. Lydia followed him back out into the colonnade, where electric lights had been incongruously strung from pillar to pillar. A few men stood at one end of the arcade smoking—Lydia caught the acrid whiff of tobacco, but at that distance they were little more than a clump of black forms spatchcocked with the white of shirtfronts.