Traveling With The Dead(62)

The air stirred with vampire laughter.

Do you think his favor is now off this man, and he is ours?

The voice slipped into the dimming scenes of his dream, as if the wind had said it, but he knew what it was. He fought, panicked, to wake, struggling back out of the abyss.

“Did he want him dead, he’d be dead, not here,” grumbled the voice that he recognized as one-eyed Haralpos.

“Wake him,” the Baykus Kadine giggled. “Wake him up and ask.”

Wake up ! he screamed at himself. Wake up, they’re all around your bed! Sleep was a black velvet pillow over his face. Maybe his body realized that if he woke, he’d hurt.

“Maybe he should be kissed,” Pelageya said in her deep voice, “like the damsel in tower?” Something that might have been fingernails trailed across the bare skin of his chest.

The whispering blurred, blended. He thought he saw the dim golden outline of the open door to the corridor outside, the subaqueous flicker of the pierced brass lamps, but he could not see the vampires around him at all. Only the red glint of their eyes.

“Maybe he knows where the Bey has gone?”

“What makes you think he might?”

“Someone had to bring him here…”

“We have to find him…”

“And tell him what?” Zardalu demanded scornfully. “That some worthless Armenian dog has been found with his throat slit?”

“Bled…”

“In a church…”

“The man was a priest…”

“Then he deserved it, whoever did it to him.”

“He wasn’t the only one. There was the old fig seller in the Koum Kapou…”

“He is getting insolent, our Shadow Wolf.” Zardalu spoke the name in Turkish, Golge Kurt, the words harsh and guttural in the flow of his court Osmanli. “Now our Bey must come out of this foolish hiding, must walk the nights again and stop crouching here with his dastgah and his almanya infidels…”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“That kind of murder is stupid, senseless, leaving his kills to be fallen over. No wonder the Bey has told us to find this intruder Golge Kurt, to kill him…”

“What do you expect of a peasant who thinks he’s a soldier because some other jumped-up peasant has put a gun in his hands?”

“We must find the Bey…”

“… find him…”

He didn’t know if they’d ever really been there. It seemed to him that he woke with a kind of start to find the chamber empty. The door still stood open, outlined in gold, and against the plastered walls the patterned spots of the lamp still wavered like an insubstantial scarf.

You know nothing of this matter, Olumsiz Bey had said.

And Charles, I love her unto death, and beyond.

He thought he knew where Olumsiz Bey could be found, and his heart turned over, sickened with shock and pity.

“There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Prophet of God.” The voice of the muezzin echoed dimly through the window lattices, as the ridiculously overdone grandeur of the Constantinople sunset bled to death in the west.

She could barely keep her hands steady, so it wasn’t easy to achieve a proper symmetry of her coiffure. And in any case, thought Lydia, keeping her mind on what she was doing as if it were a dissection—with a kind of cool, inquiring deliberation—in any case her hair had never taken the fashionable curls necessary for a coiffure a la grecque. In her current mental state she’d be lucky if she didn’t singe half of it off with the curling irons.

She was trying not to look at the envelope marked with the Hapsburg crest, lying on the table beside her.

Not that she needed to. She knew every word of the few lines written inside.

If you would save your husband’s life, meet me at the Burned Column at 3:00 today. One close to you is a servant of the Bey—tell no one, but do not fail or your husband will be dead before dawn. Trust me. Karolyi.

Trust me.

Lydia had seen the Burned Column two days ago, when Razumovsky had detoured past it after the excursion to the bazaar. It stood—a massive monument of Byzantine porphyry, its bronze horseman blackened by ancient smoke—in the center of the old market district, a labyrinth of courtyards, alleys, warehouses, and crumbling, disused baths in the most ancient part of the city.

It was exactly the place she would choose for a kidnapping, if the victim were to be snatched up and quietly chloroformed. When the note arrived that morning, her immediate thought had been, What on earth does he take me for? He must have realized, she thought, that she would be of no use to him, and was in a position to interfere with his plans.

The certainty that she was right hadn’t made it any easier, during tea with Lady Clapham, to listen to the embassy clock strike three.

And if Herr Jacob Zeittelstein wasn’t at the reception of Herr Hindi’s Turkish partner tonight—if he hadn’t returned from Berlin as expected that afternoon—she didn’t know what she would do.

It was Wednesday night. James had been missing for a week.

She closed her eyes, her hands trembling so much that she had to lower them, the iron cooling in her grip. Dear God, let me find him, she prayed. Dear God, show me another clue if this one fails…

Ice, she thought immediately. She seemed to hear Razumovsky saying, above the clamor of the Grand Bazaar, Someone always knows…

If Herr Zeittelstein had gone to Berlin to fetch a piece for the refrigeration plant, it stood to reason Olumsiz Bey would be buying ice. It might take a few days to trace…

I can’t afford a few days! she thought despairingly. Jamie can’t afford a few days!

There was a noise behind her. She opened her eyes with a start, the distorted panic of too little sleep flooding her…

Margaret stood reflected in the mirror, hesitating in the doorway behind her, blinking in the latticed sunset light.

Lydia ’s stomach contracted in rage and dread. Not before a party, she thought despairingly. I don’t think I can take another scene…

She pushed up her glasses and turned in her chair. Her red hair spilled, an untidy river, down her milky shoulders. She knew she should say something neutral, unargumentative: Hello, Margaret, or, Did you find what you were shopping for this morning? The governess had been gone when Lydia woke up. But she felt too tired to frame the words. She only looked, and Margaret occupied herself for a few minutes straightening the lace on the edge of her house mitt as if it were the most important task of the day.

Then Margaret looked up. “Mrs. Asher—Lydia—I’m… I’m sorry.”

From the time she was five years old, Lydia had been trained to smile and say, It’s all right. Her upper arms were crisscrossed with sticking plaster and dressings. She’d told Dr. Manzetti—and Lady Clapham, who’d recommended the physician and gone to him with her that morning—that she’d been attacked by dogs. Against the sharp points of her collarbone, the knobs of her wrists, the silver chains that had saved her life felt heavy and cold.

She couldn’t even ask, Why?

The sonnet she’d found had told her that.

She had lain awake thinking for a good part of the night, and found that the memory of those lines still made her heart beat swift and heavy with an emotion she couldn’t define. Nothing at all like she felt for James. All her fear of Ysidro had returned, in strangely transmuted waves. Nothing at all like what she knew, or had ever known.

Grief-stricken, silent, Margaret gazed at her with tears in her blue eyes. Lydia felt the anger within her ease.

“You’re afraid for him,” she said carefully, “and you want to help him. You’re afraid that he will die because of the promises he made to me.”

Margaret turned brilliant, blotchy red, and looked down at her gloves again; tears crawled slowly from beneath her heavy eyeglasses. This woman had tried to kill her, thought Lydia wearily. Why was she sparing her?

She knew the answer to that, too. Because Margaret had locked the door behind her, not only for the sake of the sonnet, but because she was Lydia Willoughby, heiress; because of all the sonnets no one ever wrote to the Margaret Pottons of the world.

“I’m so sorry,” Margaret whispered. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me…” She turned to flee, but stopped and turned back, standing, head down, to take punishment.

For a moment Lydia wondered if the interloper—that animal face, grinning and grinning at her upon those few occasions last night when she had shut her eyes—had engineered Margaret’s jealousy, as he’d cast upon her the languor that had stifled her own screams.

She didn’t think so. But she guessed it was something Ysidro would do in like circumstance.

And she shivered. She didn’t want to think about Ysidro: playing picquet in the train, or bare white feet ascending the damp stone of the staircase before her…

“It’s all right,” she said.

Margaret looked away and began to cry.

Lydia thought, Damn; bitterly, wearily, knowing that she must give comfort while she herself was exhausted, aching, wondering if she’d whistled Jamie’s life to the wind that afternoon by assuming Karolyi’s note to be lies, wondering what she was going to do if Zeittelstein wasn’t at the reception, wondering how best to charm him if he was… And underlying it all, against her will, aware that she was as drawn to the faded ghost trapped within the vampire immortality—like a mantis in amber—as Don Simon was to her.