“My dear Mrs. Asher,” she cried. “May I present to you Herr Franz Hindi? Herr Hindi, Mrs. Asher. Now if you’ll please excuse us, Herr Hindi, I promised to introduce Mrs. Asher to Herr Dettmars… You’re a godsend, my dear!” she added in a low voice as the stout, fair-haired gentleman who had shaken Lydia’s hand was left behind with considerable celerity. “Such a bore.” She steered her into one of the smaller rear chambers of the pavilion, just as crowded and if possible more airless than the long front room. “Do I have the appearance of a woman who will perish if she does not receive accurate information concerning the differences between soft-coal hummer furnaces and hard-coal base burners?”
Lydia paused to study her with mock gravity. “Turn ‘round,” she instructed, and with a straight face the attache’s wife did so.
“Only a little in the back,” Lydia replied after due consideration.
“I’ll wear a shawl over it, then,” promised Lady Clapham. “I am suffocating. Was Prince Razumovsky able to give you any information about your husband, dear?”
Lydia nodded slowly. “He told me my husband was doing some kind of research, talking to storytellers in the markets. Did he—Dr. Asher, I mean—mention this to you?”
“That isn’t what brought him to Constantinople, surely?”
“No,” Lydia said. “But he does research in such things wherever he is. He’s a folklorist as well as a linguist.”
Lady Clapham sighed resignedly and poked at her untidy, graying coiffure. “Well, better than one of those lunatics like my brother, who goes about taking rubbings off tombs. Not even in heathen parts but in places like Wensley Parva and Bath Cathedral. And in hunting season!” She shook her head wonderingly and picked a cracker of caviar from a servant’s tray as if the man had been a table. “Yes, he did ask about storytellers. Burnie told him about the old fellow who sits in the street of the brass sellers in the Great Bazaar. Did His Highness offer you his help? I thought so. Just make sure you have Miss Potton with you at all times and you should be quite all right. Where has Miss Potton got to?”
Lydia gazed around the small chamber. Though without her eyeglasses most men in crowds looked alike—except James, of course, whom she would know anywhere under any circumstances, and human Christmas trees like Prince Razumovsky— she could generally spot women by the colors and shapes of their dresses. But there was no sign of the fawn-and-white silk among the crowd, no ink blot of black curls glistening in the sharp yellowish light. She remembered Ysidro remarking last night, I may be somewhere thereabouts, and Margaret’s desire to see him at the reception… And the more so now, to show him her newfound beauty.
“She may have gone into the gardens.” The image of Margaret, in improbable Georgian panniers and wig, waltzing with Ysidro on the terrace of some dream mansion, floating through her mind.
“She’ll freeze,” Lady Clapham predicted. “Oh, my dear, there’s someone I do want to introduce you to… absolutely charming, and such a cut-up…” She was already starting to lead her toward a man who had just entered the smaller room. Another uniform, this one scarlet, heavily braided with silver and ornamented with, of all things, a leopard skin over the shoulder, set off dark hair and a stance that told her at once, without being near enough to see his face, that he was as handsome as Apollo and knew it. All Adonises, she reflected—or was that Adoni?— seemed to stand in the same way. She wondered if anyone had done a study on the subject. Not that anyone but a woman would notice, of course… “… member of the diplomatic community here and an absolute charmer, even if he’s never going to rock the world with his intellect. Baron Ignace Karolyi…”
“Excuse me,” Lydia said hastily. “I think I see Miss Potton and I really do need to… I’ll be back in one moment…”
“Really? Where… ?”
But she dodged away into the crowd.
Fortunately, a doorway connected that room and the other rear chamber of the suite. Lydia ducked through, wove her way to the door leading back into the main salon, and worked back with what speed she could—given a visual range of less than a yard, though the brilliance of the man’s uniform helped in avoiding him—to the double door leading into the colonnade. The cold was sharp. Wishing she’d had time to fetch her cloak, Lydia hurried along the black and white cobbled pavement to the stairway passage in which she’d taken refuge with the prince, and gathered her point-lace train in hand to descend the sloping tunnel to the terrace beyond.
Once certain she was out of sight, she pulled her spectacles from her handbag and settled them on her nose.
What had been an impression of leafy blackness and swimming spots of color resolved itself suddenly into a sable wonderland of cypress and willow that sloped down to the indigo shimmer of the sea. Bare boughs or somber leaves were illuminated from below by a rainbow lace of colored lamps, which outlined paths and terraces like dim-burning jewels dropped on velvet.
To her left the lights traced terraces, stairways, the eaves of pale shut-windowed pavilions in a flickering web of ruby, azure, honey stars… and at the top of a flight of marble steps she saw one star was missing. A lamp had been taken.
Margaret . She didn’t know why she was so sure. Gathering her train more firmly, she hastened along the terrace and up those pale steps to the gap in the line of lights.
A gem-latticed darkness of marble pavements and low box hedges spread out before her at the top, rimming deep stands of lawn and trees. The pavement led her around to the locked doors of the two pavilions overlooking the lower gardens. Past the second pavilion’s door a low arch of very old bricks pierced the wall, marble steps leading down again, through a vaulted tunnel, to the terraces below.
Had Margaret seen Ysidro in the gardens? Or only a shape she thought might be his?
She turned back to scan the colonnades, the elaborate pavilions above and behind her, but saw no movement there; neither was there any sight of the pale mousseline de soie dress in the semiwilderness of trees and long grass that lay between her and the sea. She pulled a handkerchief from her bag to shield her fingers from the heat, then picked up another lamp, the brass base beneath the bowl of ruby glass hot through both cloth and glove. One of the innumerable wild cats that lived in the half-deserted shrubberies stared at her for a moment, then poured itself away into the darkness.
What am I doing? wondered Lydia, half in disgust, as she descended the marble steps. Two minutes after the handsome Russian prince warns me “Don’t investigate alone,” I’m off like the heroine of a cheap thriller…
But something about the shadowy darkness of the palace, deserted once the activity around the kiosks had been left behind, filled her with fear for the sake of the younger woman. The sight of Karolyi had shaken her, and she did not think she dared either wait or go back.
The red light of the lamp caught in the curves of an iron lion posted in what had been flower beds. On a tangle of overgrown rosebush, Lydia glimpsed white threads where a petticoat hem had caught and been pulled free.
There was a door, hidden in the shadows of the three high vaults of ancient brick. It stood open. For a long time Lydia hesitated in the narrow aperture, one hand pressed to the stone jamb, the red-glowing lamp raised to look within. The stagnant pool a few yards behind her seemed to breathe cold over her bare shoulders, an echo of the damp chill that lay before her in the dark.
Little did she know , quoted Lydia from the aforesaid cheap thriller, in an effort to push back the dread whispering at her heart, what horrors lay crouched in wait for her.
But it was only a stone stairway—used, she thought, but not recently, save for the wet tracks vaguely outlined on the upper step or two.
A woman’s slippers.
Idiot, idiot, idiot . She wasn’t sure if it was Miss Potton or herself to whom she referred.
At the bottom of the stairs, another open door, and a cavern vast and lost in shadows, where the ruby stain of her lamp smudged pillars, incredibly old, rising out of obsidian water to the brick vaulting of the ceiling low overhead.
Of course, Lydia thought. All those pools in the gardens had to be watered from somewhere.
A walkway stretched along one side of the cistern, vanishing very quickly into darkness. Heart beating hard, hoping she’d find Margaret soon, she started along it.
“This is not a wise thing, mistress.”
Ysidro’s voice was barely louder than a cat’s tread in the dark behind her, but somehow it didn’t startle her. It was as if, for the second or two before he spoke, she knew he was there. Turning, she saw him on the walkway, dressed, as the men at the palace reception had been dressed, in black morning coat and gray-striped trousers, colorless hair framing a dead man’s face.
Her breath escaped in a shaky sigh. “Coming to Constantinople was not a wise thing,” she said. “I wondered what you had in that trunk of yours. Did you bring a top hat as well?”
“It is where I can reach it, should I choose to enter the pavilion.”
He stepped closer and took her hand, guiding her along the path above the sable pool. The light seemed to follow, like a fish in the depths. Cold as she was, his hand on her waist was colder.