Traveling With The Dead(48)

“My dear Miss Potton,” the prince smiled through the Colchian fleeces of his beard, “twenty feet from this spot you can buy a flask that size for two piastres, if you look sufficiently indifferent. It requires practice. Hold in your mind the image of a room—a building!—filled with such flasks… or, rather, think of having to carry a veddras of the stuff—about three of your gallons—up a steep hill, and then go back for another, and another, and another…”

Margaret giggled and blushed, and someone else cried out in awful Greek-accented French, “Madame, Madame, here all the perfume, all best roses of land of nightingales… !”

The light that suffused the bewildering mazes of the Grand Bazaar was never direct, falling as it did through windows high in the vaulted ceiling, and in the pale green archways the voices of every nation from the North Sea to the Indian Ocean swirled like soup. There were no genuine spots of light, nor actual shadows, but a dizzy kaleidoscope of color that shifted too quickly for Lydia to guess at distant things—the contents of the shops they passed, the faces or nationalities of men who seemed, at a distance, to be only swirls of white or dark or colored robes. As they passed close they came into focus: swarthy Turkish men in pantaloons sitting on floors to bargain, talk, drink glasses of scalding tea; Greek men in wide white skirts and bright caps or women in close-fitting, dowdy black, arguing with shopkeepers at the top of their lungs; porters bent matter-of-factly under superhuman loads; Armenians in baggy trousers, Orthodox priests and thick-bearded Jews in black gabardine and prayer shawls. Young boys shouted offers of shoe shines or guides to the city, or dashed importantly through the jostling shoppers bearing brass trays on which rested single glasses of tea. The air was redolent of sweaty wool, garlic, carpets, dog, and sewage.

Down the aisles that branched from side to side, Lydia glimpsed wares at which she could only guess: coats of karakul and astrakhan, carpets of blue and crimson, shawls, bright-flashing glass, hanging racks of silver earrings, bolts of prosaic wool alternating with gauzy rainbows of veils. Every time a beggar came whining up to them—hideously disfigured, some of them, freaks who would have been confined to fairs anywhere in Europe—every time they passed strolling groups of soldiers who whistled and rolled their eyes, Lydia was heartily glad she’d asked the prince to act as their protector and guide.

He’d been right. This wasn’t England. It would have been madness to investigate alone.

She’d slept uneasily for the few hours after Ysidro’s departure, prey to troubling dreams. Part had concerned the harem, with its smelly little cells, its cramped windows blocking out all view of the city, of the sea, of the sunlight had it been day: The walls sweat with their pettiness, their boredom, and their tears. She’d dreamed of wandering in that darkness, looking for someone, the rooms growing smaller and smaller around her while she felt the waiting presence of something lying very still on a burst and stinking divan, listening for her footfalls with a smile on what had long ago been its face.

Once, very briefly, she’d had a fragmentary image of a Gothic tower in a thunderstorm, the lightning lurid as a carbon-arc flare over seas of churning heather, the rain poundmg in a deserted courtyard—rain that somehow only barely dampened the white dress, the raven curls of the woman who stood at the tower’s gate, gazing with expectation across the wilderness of the heath. Lydia, in the shelter of a broken shed on the other side of the court, had not been wet at all by the rain, though she smelled the soaked earth. She thought the woman was waiting for a horseman. Turning her head, she saw Ysidro nearby, almost invisible in the shadows, dressed as he had been on the balcony, in morning coat and striped trousers with the lap robe held close about his shoulders. His head was bowed, his colorless eyes closed as if deep in concentration, his face the face of a skull.

The dream image snuffed like a guttering candle, and waking, Lydia had heard Margaret crying, muffled, angry, and hurt. Margaret had had very little to say to her that morning and would not meet her eyes. Since their meeting with Razumovsky over a late breakfast, she had addressed all her remarks to the prince, giggling at his flirtations and responding cheerfully to his effort to draw her out.

There seemed to be storytellers everywhere. They sat on dirty rugs and blankets, swaying with the rhythm of their tales, spreading their arms, using their voices to conjure thunder, rage, love, and wonder. Children and teenage boys sat around them, listening eagerly, and even grown men and a very few black-veiled women stood with the air of those in no hurry to leave. Lydia moved toward one and peered shortsightedly at the wares in the surrounding booths. Lady Clapham had told her that each man had his regular pitch, and the man who worked the street of the coffee merchants would no more dream of shifting to the street of the slipper vendors than she herself would have considered walking uninvited into her neighbor’s house in Oxford and appropriating her neighbor’s nightgown and bed.

It was simply Not Done.

As she edged her way a little into the crowd, trying to see past the dark backs of the Greek ladies, a man put his hand on her shoulder and said, “Madame Asher?”

She turned, looking up slightly at the Adonis face, the beautiful dark eyes, of a tall man who moved like an athlete within his tobacco-colored suit. At this distance she could see the close-clipped mustache, the long eyelashes, the pearl buttons of his gloves as he bowed to kiss her hand. He wore a gold stickpin in his cravat, a winged griffin that seemed to regard her with a single, baleful ruby eye.

“I’ve seen your husband,” he said quietly, and, while her breath was still stopped with shock, he added, “Permit me to introduce myself. I am the Baron Ignace Karolyi, of the Imperial Diplomatic Service. May we talk?”

He led her out of the crowd, into the dimness before a shop front where an elderly Greek sewed slippers of colored leather and gave them—most uncharacteristically for a merchant of the Grand Bazaar—not so much as a glance. It occurred to Lydia that Karolyi must have paid him in advance for his disregard.

“Is he alive?”

Karolyi nodded. Although she knew he must be at least thirty-five, he seemed younger and radiated a kind of earnest intensity, like a youthful charmer who has put his charm aside to speak of important things.

“Though I cannot guarantee how much longer that will last. He is in the hands of…” He hesitated artistically, studying her face, like one who debates with himself how much of what he says will be believed. And yet, she realized, he was actually watching her, trying to guess how much she knew.

Like Ysidro playing picquet, she thought, peeking at the stock cards and wondering what to appropriate and what would do him no good.

Her heart beat harder and she thought, Jamie will die if you botch this up.

“He is in the hands of a man called Olumsiz Bey,” he went on after a moment. “A Turk. A truly evil person. Tell no one,” he added quickly, as Lydia pressed her hands to her mouth and widened her eyes as Aunt Lavinia generally did before crying out in horror at the presence of death-dealing spiders or the perfidy of the children of her neighbors. “What exactly did he tell you, Mrs. Asher, that brought you to Constantinople to search?”

He must have been talking to Lady Clapham . She wondered how much that redoubtable woman had seen fit to tell him—how much she would have considered not worth the trouble of hiding.

“Oh, where, when?” She didn’t expect a truthful answer to the questions and asked them to buy herself time to think, but she had no need to manufacture the panic, the desperation that she threw into her voice. She had never considered herself to be an actress, but any young lady of good society knew how to exaggerate delight or terror, or whatever other emotion was called for. A number of conversations with Margaret over the past week certainly helped her performance.

She clasped her hands to her breastbone. “Did you speak with him? Did he look well?” Has he been in touch with his own department? Do they know I had dinner with Mr. Halliwell? Why would I have come to Constantinople if I didn’t know the kind of danger he was in?

“We did not have the opportunity to speak.” Karolyi’s voice was soothing, a beautifully modulated tenor with the barest trace of a Middle European accent. An eminently believable voice. “He appeared unharmed, though as I said, there is no way of knowing how long that will last. That is why you and I must talk. When you fled from me last night, I feared some rumor or calumny had reached you. I assure you, Madame…” He made his voice earnest, deeply concerned. “I assure you, such rumors are exaggerations, fed by the enmity of our two countries and the suspicions of men who see only threats wherever they look.”

“Fled from you?” Lydia steeled herself, produced her eyeglasses from her handbag and put them on to peer at him. “Last night? Were you at the palace reception last night?”

Under the fine traces of mustache his mouth quirked, disarmed for a moment. With two quick gestures of his forefinger he smoothed the mustache, and Lydia noted the fine cut of the pale tan gloves, French kid at six shillings the pair.

“Baron!” Razumovsky’s gray and golden bulk appeared from around the corner of a stall and pushed through the crowd, Margaret scuttling in his wake. Lydia’s glasses immediately disappeared from her face and into the folds of her skirt. “Back from your flying visit to London, I see.”