"They were not." Lydia felt like a monster, wresting a cherished new doll from a child's hand on Christmas morning, breaking it with a hammer before those disbelieving blue eyes.
But there was a scorpion in that doll. A white mantis, thin and stalky and preternaturally still, watching from the shadows with terrible eyes.
"A year ago, Ysidro told my husband that vampires can read the dreams of the living," Lydia went on slowly. "Ysidro is a very old vampire, a very skilled vampire- one of the oldest still in existence, in Europe at any rate. Obviously, he can do more than just read dreams. The-The task I need to perform in Vienna requires his help, and what's at stake is sufficiently important to him that he wants to go with me, but he refuses to do so unless I conform to his medieval standard of womanly conduct. I'm surprised he didn't insist that I bring a chaplain and an embroiderer as well. He picked you because he thought he could get you to leave everything behind and go with him-go with me-at a day's notice."
Miss Potton said nothing but looked down again, picking at a small mend in the finger of her glove.
"Go back to London," Lydia said. "Tell Mrs. Wendell that you had to deal with the affairs of a wastrel brother or a drunken father, and even if she's found another governess, she'll probably relent enough to give you a character for your next post. Don't do this. Don't let Ysidro do this to you."
Miss Potton still said nothing. A motorcar went past on the Boulevard de la Madeleine, popping and sputtering like a company of American cowboys on the rampage. Somewhere a tram horn blatted.
"This isn't any concern of yours. Tell Ysidro that he's... he's welcome to join me in my journey, but that I will not bring a third party into it, either of his choosing or my own... Though you probably don't even know where he's staying, do you?"
"No." She had to guess at the word from the movement of Miss Potton's lips.
"No." Lydia remembered the hidden trapdoors, the new locks, the house, the square that was no longer on any London map. She picked up her handbag and brought out a slim roll of notes. "Take this and go back to England this afternoon."
Miss Potton stood up, straightening the back that had long ago acquired the mousy stoop of the downtrodden. "I don't need your money," she said quietly. "I trust Don Simon will take care of me."
And she walked from the room in a dignified rustle of skirts.
Lydia reached the Gare de l'Est at seven. Too sick at heart to visit the magasins for which Paris was famous, she had nevertheless forced herself to walk down the Rue St. Denis to the Halles Centrales-the great central produce market of the city-and purchase garlic, wolfsbane, and wild rose. As she walked along the platform toward the Vienna Express, trailed by two porters with her hatboxes and trunks, she reflected that it must have taken astonishing courage for Margaret Potton to resign her post as governess, pack her few possessions, and cross the Channel to a land where she'd probably never been and had only an academic acquaintance with the language; to walk into the dining room of a foreign hotel and up to a complete stranger and announce, "I know all about the journey you're making, and a vampire has sent me to accompany you."
She wasn't sure she could have done it.
To save Jamie?
It was, more or less, what she was doing now.
Lydia drew a deep breath.
Under ordinary circumstances her reaction to Miss Potton's revelation would have been bemused incredulity. People did and believed the most extraordinary things, which was one reason why Lydia had always been far more comfortable as a researcher.
But she felt responsible for Miss Potton, for Ysidro's deadly lures, and it was depressing to realize that she could describe in detail the workings of that child's thymus without having the slightest idea of how to bring her to her senses.
It occurred to Lydia, belatedly, that her most effective course of action would have been a blank look and a cold "I beg your pardon?"
She could only hope, now, that Miss Potton would return to London...
To what?
Would Ysidro even let her return?
Damn him, she thought, renewed fury wiping out her sense of helplessness. If he harms her, if he dares to harm her...
But again, the inner voice whispered, What?
Miss Potton had made her choice.
And she had made hers. She was going to Vienna to deal with the vampire earl-and goodness knew what other vampires, not to mention the slippery intrigues of the Foreign Office-alone.
One step at a time, she thought.
If Jamie had wired her Monday from Munich, he must have reached Vienna Monday night. Today was Friday. Last night she had telephoned Mrs. Grimes from Charing Cross Station and ascertained that nothing further had been heard from him. Four days, she thought, with Dr. Fairport, potential traitor and seeker after immortality; four days with the hazards of Ernchester and Ignace Karolyi, and who knew what besides.
The porters loaded her luggage into the van, to be sealed for the journey to Vienna, and carried the smaller portmanteau and two hatboxes and an overnight case to the compartment Mr. Cook and Company had booked for her, whose number she could probably have ascertained for herself had she been willing to squint a little. After her interview with Miss Potton, she had checked the hotel's copy of Bradshaw, seeking a train to Vienna that left before sundown, but though there were plenty of trains that would eventually take her there, via Zurich or Lyons or Strasbourg, none was faster than the Vienna Express. And speed was of the essence. James was in danger, trying to work with a flawed tool that could turn on him at any moment.
Or a prisoner already.
Or...
She put the thought from her.
The compartment was a comfortable one, embellished with rosewood paneling, velvet upholstery, and electrical light fixtures shaped like frosted lilies.
Alone, Lydia unpinned the jade-and-eggplant fantasia of her hat and settled into her seat, gazing out the window at the impressionistic flower bed of color, shadow, and light that was the station platform, seeking, she realized, for the sturdy brown blob, the clumsy stride that would be Margaret Potton. After a moment she opened her handbag and fished forth her spectacles, a little startled, as always, at the sudden sharpness of people's faces, the lettering on the signs. According to the booklet on the little table before her, dinner would be served in the salon car at eight-thirty, but between anxiety about James and the obscure fear that even yet she would encounter Ysidro, she doubted she would feel much hunger. Her head ached, and she realized she hadn't eaten anything since the three-quarters of a croissant she'd consumed before Margaret Potton had entered the dining room at the hotel.
She watched through the window until the train began to move. Then she settled back and closed her eyes, and breathed a sigh.
Jamie...
"If I may say so, mistress," murmured a voice like the sudden slide of silk over unexpecting bare skin, "you make yourself difficult to look after. Were I your husband, I would school you."
Lydia whipped around in her seat, stomach lurching-anger, fear, and, against her will, a deep flash of relief that she'd have some kind of help and advice. Her relief angered her still more, and she replied tartly, "Were you my husband, I would demand a separate establishment." She pulled off her eyeglasses and slipped them behind her hat.
He stood in the doorway, ivory and shadow. As in his tomb, only the slender hands, the gold ring, caught the light. Behind him, spectacle lenses flashed in the corridor.