Lydia hesitated, wondering if she should lie. Although her initial fears had subsided, she realized she was still in a great deal of danger. She supposed that if Ysidro didn't have the ability to make people stop fearing him, he would have starved to death centuries ago.
The greater fears still lay ahead of her, a vast uncharted territory of deeds she had no concept how to perform.
At last she said, "I knew about this house a year ago. In theory. I hadn't sought it out. But I looked up all the possibilities of vampire lairs for James while he was... working for you."
A small line printed itself briefly near the fanged mouth, and the smallest flare of annoyance moved Ysidro's nostrils. But he only said, "Then this Fairport is thought by the Department in Vienna to be their man-they, too, having missed the articles which speak of Karolyi's contributions to Fairport's research. No matter of surprise, given the fewness of agents and the troubles in the Balkans in that year, and in France. Afterward, one presumes Fairport would have known not to publish his patron's name."
"What it means," Lydia said quietly, "is that James is walking into a trap." Ysidro remained still for some time, the telegram unmoving in his fingers, but Lydia could see thought and memory like swift-shuffled cards in the back of the jeweled yellow eyes. Remembering, she guessed, Fairport's articles on Hungarian and Romanian centenarians, his preoccupation with extending life, his work in a part of the world that James had described as a hotbed of vampire lore. Then he raised his head and said, "Await me."
And without seeing him leave, Lydia found herself alone.
She checked her watch, wondering how long "Await me" meant. If she herself were in a tremendous hurry, she could wash, dress, curl, frizz and put up her hair, and apply a judiciously minuscule quantity of rice powder, kohl, rouge, and cologne in just under two hours and a half, which her husband, manlike, seemed to consider an unreasonable length of time. At least, Lydia thought, she knew how long it took her to make herself presentable and allowed for it, unlike dandies of her acquaintance who lived in the fond delusion that they could assemble the component parts of their facade in "only a moment, my dearest Mrs. Asher." She remembered the clothing in the dressing room upstairs, by the finest tailors in Saville Row. James had warned her, and now she knew from terrifying experience, how fast vampires could move, but she also knew that males as a species tended to potter, fidgeting endlessly with cravats and shifting coins, notebooks, and theater tickets from pocket to pocket as if fearing they would capsize if not properly trimmed. She wondered if death altered this. Twenty- five minutes, she made a mental wager with herself, and was within three of it when she turned her head to find Ysidro at her side again. In his cinder- gray suit, his flesh white as the linen of his shirt, he seemed more ghostlike than he had in the white robe, as if the clothing were a barrier, a shadow of distance.
"Come."
The alleys and back streets through which he led her were unlit and stinking, full of furtive movement. She guessed their route was not a direct one, but could not be sure, for as soon as they descended the front steps of his house, he took her spectacles from her. Moreover, she was aware that three or four times in the fifteen minutes of their walk, he touched her mind with the blankness, the empty reverie, that vampires apparently could extend. She had the sensation of waking repeatedly from dreams to find herself each time in a new street or court, blinking at ten shades of blurred darkness all spangled with the colored embers of reflected pub lights, with Yiddish or German or Russian yammering on all sides from the little knots of seedy, bearded men clustered in doorways or around chestnut vendors' braziers. The men would step aside unconsciously to let Ysidro pass, not looking at him, as if they, too, partook of his dream of invisibility; their clothes smelled of hard work and poor diet and not enough hot water for washing.
Every other week Lydia took the train down to London to work in the dissecting rooms of St. Luke's. Men like these, with their brown, broken teeth and their flea bites and their dirty, callused hands would be delivered by the workhouse vans, smelling of carbolic and formalin, dead of tumors that had burst untreated, of pneumonia, of consumption or the other ills of poverty, so that she and others like her could study the intricate beauty of muscle and nerve beneath the knife.
It was the first time in her scholarly life that Lydia had been among them living, and her mind swarmed with questions she wished to ask them about the food and working conditions that had contributed to their pathologies. On the other hand, she felt very glad of Ysidro's protection.
They crossed a plank bridge over water nearly invisible beneath low-lying fog, passed the wry, dark roofline of some very ancient church. In time they traversed a sordid alley behind a pub near the river and descended an areaway thick with garbage and the smell of cats. Though her eyes had grown used to darkness, Lydia saw only the moth flicker of pale hands before she heard the snick of a lock going over. Hinges creaked. Ysidro said "Come" again and stepped into absolute dark.
A match scratched. Ysidro's narrow face appeared, outlined in saffron. "You need not concern yourself over rats."
He touched the flame to a pair of guttered candles in a double branch. The plaster of the walls was black with mildew, falling away to reveal underlying brick. "Like cats, they are aware of what we are and know that though it is the human death we need to feed our minds, we can derive sustenance from the blood of any living thing."
He lifted the branch. Twin lights called twin ghosts of shadow, merging and circling in a strange cotillion as he led her toward the back stair. "Anthea and Ernchester sleep seldom at the house on Savoy Walk these days. It is best to let memories lie. She scarce ever hunts this early in the night, but it may be that she has gone to her dressmaker."
Lydia checked her watch again as they passed through a downstairs halclass="underline" peeling silk wall covering, doors blackly ajar. "I suppose this close to Christmas there'd be one open..."
"If one has money, mistress, one always finds those willing to sell their sleep and their leisure. I have visited my bootmaker at midnight and never found him but that he was consumed with delight."
"What do you tell him?" She couldn't imagine her aunt Harriet's modiste keeping open past seven for Queen Alexandra herself.
Ysidro regarded her with eyes turned amber by the ruddy light. "That I will have none of this foolishness of two-colored shoes, nor buttons up the side." He turned to the room at the top of the stair. "So."
Like Ysidro's house, the chamber held little furniture, and that furniture old. A tester bed with a curving footboard stood against the rotted wall panels, the counterpane as faded as the silk paper downstairs; on the other wall, a blackwood armoire, stained, chipped, thick with dust-choked carving and mottled with water damage. Its doors stood open. Petticoats, corsets, stockings lay across the bed, and with them-separated by the length of space that would have accounted for a large portmanteau-two dresses Lydia immediately recognized as unsuitable for travel, one because of its now-unfashionable leg-o'-mutton sleeves, the other because it was white, a color no sane woman, dead or Undead, would wear on a train.
"She's gone after him," Lydia said, opening the armoire doors. The only dresses there in the current fashion were the decollete silks and sumptuous velvets of evening wear. No waists, no skirts- Lydia peered shortsightedly into the lower drawer, and Ysidro handed her eyeglasses back-and no walking shoes. "She packed in a hurry..."
She halted, frowning, as her eyes adjusted to the sudden clarity and she realized that the tops of the dressers were in disorder: scarves, sleeves, kerchiefs caught in drawers that had been hastily closed.