Traveling With The Dead(47)

“I understand,” Lydia said. “But it will give us a starting place, and if we find out what we can find out, clues lead to other clues. About Anthea or Ernchester, or… or Jamie.”

“Always provided Jamie is not lying with a cut throat at the bottom of the harbor.”

“If I were willing to accept that without further investigation,” retorted Lydia, “I might as well go back to London.”

He inclined his head, though whether in mockery or apology she did not know.

“Anyway,” she went on after a moment, “I obviously don’t have Jamie’s training in questioning storytellers, aside from not speaking any… is it Turkish they speak here?”

“Turkish and Greek in the streets. Arabic among the scholars, Osmanli at the Sultan’s court.”

“Since there doesn’t seem to be any central depot of records, I think I’m going to have to have tea with German businessmen and ask them about native clients, and try to spot some kind of oddity in payment. My German isn’t wonderful, but last night most of them seemed to speak very good French. I wonder if I can get on the good side of someone at the Banque Ottomane? Or the German Orient Bank?”

She straightened her shoulders, the words themselves giving her courage; she spoke as if sorting a hand of cards, seeing what she had and what she needed. “Extensive use of middlemen and corporations that don’t seem to have any raison d’etre beyond paying the bills of one or two households; payment in gold or credit rather than silver; clients who either never appear at all or only appear after dark. That sort of thing. The purchase of housing that has some kind of multilevel cellars or that’s built over old crypts, like that cistern we passed through. Maybe corporate credit funneled through the palace with instructions not to check too closely into bona fides?”

She fell silent, watching his face, which was without expression. His silence lay on her heart like plates of lead.

Then he said, “Did we but find one of his bolt-holes, it could be watched. Not a safe occupation, even with the illusion which veils this city, but as you say, clues lead to other clues, and it is clear to me that more than finding Charles, more than finding Anthea, it is necessary to learn what is happening in this city. If Karolyi is here, there is still bargaining going on.”

Behind them the mantelpiece clock chimed four; seagulls cried in the darkness outside. Ysidro went on, “You have catalogued already those things I will alter in my own arrangements, when I gain London once more. Quest among your German businessmen for word of purchase of either a great quantity of silver bars or silver-plated bars. If there is war among the vampires of this city—if the master of the city seeks to summon and imprison Ernchester—he will need a place to put him. And seek also,” he added, “for someone using the roundabout financial methods of which you speak to purchase and install modern central heating in one or more old houses.”

“Central heating?” The absurd picture rose to her mind of the cloaked and sinister West End stage Dracula deep in conversation with Herr Hindi about soft-coal hummers and double-heating, self-feeding base-burner anthracite models, only ninety-seven marks plus shipping costs…

“If there is a challenge to the Bey’s power, chances are good that it is because the Bey himself may be growing… tired. Brittle. Losing his grip. A thing one seldom considers of the Bey,” added Ysidro, “but a possibility. It happens, in time, even to the Undead. When this chances, vampires suffer cold and joint ache. Winter is coming on. This city will be under snow. A master fighting for his position, refusing to admit the drag of darkness in his soul, might well heat one or more of his bolt-holes for his own comfort, particularly if it has been his custom to use the living as servants.”

He had been watching the darkness of the street. Now he turned his attention fully toward her again, a ghost-shape in the gloom. “You understand,” he said, “that though clues of this kind may lead us to Ernchester or to the heart of this affair with Karolyi, you may not find your husband, mistress.”

She looked down at where the moonlight lay on the shawl over her arms. “I understand. I’d been hoping,” she went on after long silence, her voice low, as if speaking to herself, “that when I went to the embassy yesterday afternoon—Saturday afternoon—that Sir Burnwell would say something like, ‘Oh, of course, he’s staying right across the way at the Pera Palace.’ And the day would finish with Italian ices on the terrace and telling stories in bed half the night.”

She drew the shawl’s long fringes through her fingers, to keep them from trembling.

“You have never been alone, then.”

It wasn’t what she had expected him to say—if anything at all—but it was true. She nodded without looking up.

“Well, I felt I’d been alone for years and years, before I knew him. But I expect most children feel that way. And I knew him—I mean, he was in and out of Uncle Ambrose’s house— when I was fifteen, sixteen. I don’t remember a moment of falling in love with him, but I remember knowing there was no one else I’d rather live with. I remember crying because I knew they’d never let me marry him. I was underage. And he wouldn’t ask. He didn’t want me to be hurt in a family row. He didn’t want me to lose my inheritance over him.”

“I daresay your father put his own interpretation to that.” The soft voice was like the wind flowing down an empty hall. “What happened?”

“Father disinherited me over my studies. Jamie was away in Africa. That was during the war. Someone… someone said he was dead. I was terrified because I didn’t know if I could succeed in an actual practice. Most women have a terrible time. My research is sound, but pure research would be out of the question, and I… I didn’t know if Jamie was coming back. But without him I didn’t care, really, what became of me. When he came back he asked me to marry him because I hadn’t any money, and Father permitted it. Then later he changed his will again.”

“But you never thought of giving up your study?” The vampire sounded amused.

Lydia raised her head, shocked. “Of course not!” He was regarding her, she found, with a curious, unreadable intentness in his sulfurous eyes. For a moment she thought he would speak, but then like a ghost he seemed to withdraw a little from her.

“In truth,” he said, “we can only do what we can. I spoke not to crush your hope, mistress, but only to warn you that not all grails are found intact. Nor, indeed, found at all.”

“No,” Lydia said softly, “I understand. Thank you.”

He rose. She held out her hand to him, as she would have to a brother if she’d had one, or a friend. After a moment he took it, his thin hand emerging from the dark folds of his lap robe like Death’s, oddly bereft of its native scythe, fleshless knuckles and fragile bones dry as bleached bamboo under her touch. She’d taken down her hair while drinking her tea; its natural straight-ness had almost destroyed the remains of earlier curls, so that it lay in unswagged cinnabar heaps on her shoulders and back, like seaweed on a beach after a storm.

With her free hand she propped her spectacles again, a schoolgirl’s gesture.

Remembering it later she had the impression that he’d said something else to her—or maybe just spoken her name—and that his cold hand had brushed her face, pushing back the flame of her hair from her cheek. But that wasn’t clear to her, as if she’d dreamed it. Perhaps, she thought, she had.

It did occur to her that it was not at all like Ysidro to be concerned whether her hopes were crushed or not.

The street of the brass sellers lay four or five aisles in from the main entrance of the Grand Bazaar, according to the dealer in attar of roses of whom Lydia made her inquiry… “Or more or less,” added the man in excellent French; the beaming smile that split his dark face reminded her forcibly of a discolored and incomplete set of piano keys. “But for what does la belle mademoiselle want brass? Pfui, brass! It is attar of roses, the incomparable essences of Damascus and Baghdad, which delight the heart and offer the gift of sweetness to God. Only thirty piastres… That wretched cheating son of an Armenian camel driver is going to charge you more than fifty for a brass thimble that won’t be brass at all, but cheap tin with a brass wash no more substantial than a Greek’s sworn word… Thirty piastres? Fifteen!”

Lydia smiled, curtseyed, murmured, “Merci… merci,” and with Slavonic clairvoyance Prince Razumovsky, enormous in exquisite London-cut mufti, appeared at her side and said, “Come along, come along,” steering both women—Margaret hanging back for one more sniff of a painted ointment pot—into the crowd.

“Can we go back there?” Margaret asked diffidently of His Highness. “When we’ve found the storyteller, I mean? True attar of roses costs ten or twelve shillings for a flask that size back home.”

She craned her neck, trying to look back between a jostling pair of German businessmen and several drab-uniformed soldiers at the tiny stall with its magic rows of twinkling glass. The shopkeeper gave her another demolished smile and a wink as bright as his wares.