James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (24 page)

“You mean there isn’t a Sultan anymore?” Margaret sounded like a child who has been told on the twenty-fourth of December that Father Christmas has been pensioned off to a villa in the south of France.

“July…” Lydia said thoughtfully. “The printer’s deadline for my monograph on the effects of ultraviolet light on the hypothalamus was August fifteenth… And I never can remember whether they’re on our side or Germany’s. So it couldn’t have been the Sultan who sent for Ernchester?”

“It may well be,” Ysidro said. “He is not without power, even yet. But if he thinks to regain it by bringing in a vampire whom he hopes to control, he reckons without the Master of Constantinople.”

The train lurched and began its slow, rocking progress again, the city growing above them in thick accretions of shadow, lamps, and ancient walls shrouded in vine.

“Who is the Master of Constantinople?” Lydia asked quietly.

They were all three clustered by the windows of the compartment, looking out over the inky water toward the lights of Seraglio Point and the dim hills of Asia beyond.

“In my day it was not considered a wise thing to speak his name.” Ysidro turned back to the table and gathered the cards. He fumbled, dropping them; Margaret sprang at once to help him but he’d retrieved them already, slipped them into the paper band that usually encircled the pack, secreted them in a pocket of his mouse-gray coat.

“He was a sorcerer in life, a title which could mean anything from a theoretical alchemist to a student of the properties of herbs. Certainly he was a poisoner, possibly an astronomer, though one does not always keep these things up. He wielded tremendous power, before and after his death, with the Viziers of the Sublime Porte. Legends said that certain of the sultans gifted him with prisoners, that he might feast upon their deaths, though considering the size of the beggar population of Constantinople, I do not find this at all likely or necessary. And as Juvenal says, ‘Foolish is he who puts his trust in princes.’ Personally, I wouldn’t touch any edible offered me by any of the sultans.”

Ysidro put out a hand again, to steady himself on the wall as the train swung around the rocky slope of a hill and lurched into another suburban station. There were electric lights here, too, and soldiers armed with businesslike Enfields.

“It is probably best,” he said, “that the master of this city not be spoken of in any terms until we are in Pera.”

Another of Ysidro’s gruff local henchmen awaited them in the square before the main Gare of Stamboul, this one a Greek— whom Ysidro addressed in Spanish—with the usual wagon and horses. Lydia had removed her glasses before leaving the train compartment, but the moment they were settled on the high seat and moving off through the tangle of drays, donkey carts, and foot passengers, she sneaked them back on, gazing around her in wonderment. At the foot of the square the dark waters of the Golden Horn flashed with the lights of ships moored there, and even at nearly two in the morning the lights of small boats could be seen plying between the Stamboul shore and the lamp-flecked hills of Pera on the other side.

Black streets swallowed them, and for a few minutes Lydia could no more than guess at the houses crowding above, balconies—sometimes entire upper stories—-jutting overhead as if grabbing for airspace, here and there the low glimmer of lamps behind thick latticework. Cats’ eyes flashed everywhere, and the smell of goats and dogs and human waste was like a curtain thick enough to be touched with the hand. Lamps in iron cages showed her the somber glory of a mosque half veiled in Stygian gloom as they passed through a square, a note of great age on the lighted threshold of a modern iron bridge.

On the bridges other side the houses were European—or Greek, with white walls like clotted cream in the moonlight. They wound their way uphill to a tree-grown public square lying beneath a splendid Italianate palace of pale golden stone.

“The British Embassy,” came Ysidro’s soft voice. “I trust you ladies will present yourselves to the Right Honorable Mr. Lowther in the morning. For many years the embassies have been the true power here.”

As usual, Ysidro had wired ahead for lodgings, this time a pink-washed Greek-style house whose stone-flagged arch led into a court shaded by a massive pomegranate tree, staffed by three thickset Greek women, evidently a mother and two daughters, who smiled and replied “Parakalo—parakalo …” to everything Lydia said.

As at Belgrade, Sofia, and Adrianople, once Lydia’s trunks and portmanteaus and hatboxes and baskets of herbs were carried upstairs, Ysidro climbed into the wagon once more and disappeared to some secret lodging of his own.

“You can’t ask him to continue what he’s doing.”

Lydia
turned, startled, the moss-green velvet of her dressing gown weighting her arms. Tomorrow she’d present herself, not only to the Right Honorable G. A. Lowther, but, armed with Mr. Halliwell’s letters of introduction, to Sir Burnwell Clapham, the attache in charge of what were nebulously referred to as “affairs.” It was entirely possible, she thought, that Jamie would be there, or Jamie would be somewhere close. Oh, yes, Dr. Asher. He arrived last week…

Please
, she thought, shivering inside. Please…

Margaret stood awkwardly in the doorway of the single large bedroom the two women would share. As in Vienna, in Belgrade and Sofia, it was not by their choice—even had relations between them not been strained, Lydia would have preferred to be spared her companion’s nocturnal sighs and mutterings in dreams. But in no house had more than one bed been made up, nor could the servants anywhere be induced to do so. In the small connecting chamber, Lydia had already found the dismantled pieces of a massive four-poster that looked as if it had been ordered from Berlin at the height of the Gothic craze. Its sister ship filled most of this room, the bright pink-and-blue local work of its coverlet incongruously gay; the dressing table, mirrored armoire, and marble-topped washstand had clearly been ordered en suite, and though the room was large, with a bay projecting over the street, they gave it a cluttered feeling, jammed and awkward.

At least, thought Lydia, they weren’t strewn with the porcelain knickknacks featured in their Belgrade lodgings, and the whitewashed plaster walls were free of garish oleographs of Orthodox saints.

She turned from the armoire, the robe still in her hands. “What?”

“You forbade him…” Margaret hesitated, and her wide blue eyes shifted as she sought another word. “You forbade him to hunt,” she said at last. “As a condition of letting him travel with you, of letting him protect you.” Her voice stammered and she twisted at her black-gloved hands. “Now that we’ve reached our destination, you really don’t have any right to continue… to continue…”

Frozen in mid-motion, Lydia only stared at her, too shocked to speak.

Margaret, who had clearly hoped that she would say something and spare her the completion of her sentence—and in fact the completion of her own thought—trailed off uncertainly, and for a moment there was only the clutch and jerk of her breath. Then she burst out, “You don’t understand him!”

“You keep saying that.” Lydia crossed to the bed and dropped the robe beside the nightgown the maid had laid out, and began to unbutton her shirtwaist. The tiny pearl fastenings of the sleeves were awkward, but she’d dismissed the servant after she’d unpacked for them, and didn’t know enough modern Greek to summon her back. She wondered what the servants had made of the silver knives and silver-loaded gun among the masses of petticoats, skirts, shirtwaists, lingerie, and dinner dresses—wondered, too, if she could communicate to them a request to purchase garlic, whitethorn, and wild rose on the morrow. Or as Ysidro’s servants, would they refuse to obey such a request?

Margaret reached out and took her by the sleeve, her face bracketed with lines of distress deepened by the lamps’ heavy shadows. “You can’t forbid him to hunt!” she insisted desperately. “It isn’t as if he… as if the people he… he takes…”

“You mean ‘kills’?”

She flinched from the word but lashed back almost at once with, “It isn’t as if they didn’t deserve it!”

Lydia
only stood for a time, her fingers still on the pearl buttons but her task forgotten. When she spoke, her voice was very quiet. “Did he tell you that?”

“I know it!” The governess was on the brink of tears. “Yes, he told me! I mean, I know—I mean, in the past—in past life-times—in dreams I’ve had about our former lives together… And don’t tell me they’re all lies,” she veered away suddenly, “because I know they’re not! I know you think they are, but they’re really not! They’re not!”

She flung herself in front of Lydia when Lydia tried to turn away, her face red, blotchy as if with the approach of tears. “You see, if a vampire doesn’t… doesn’t hunt to completion…”

She was still avoiding the word “kill.”

“They feed on the energy, the life, the vital force!” she went on in a rush. “It’s the life they take that gives their minds the powers they need to protect themselves!”

“You mean to kill other people?”

“You’re starving him to death!” Margaret cried. “Robbing him of his powers to defend himself from danger, now, here, where the peril is the greatest! That’s why vampires take so long to hunt, or at least why he takes so long to hunt, he told me, because he’s hunting the streets of the city to find a thief, a murderer, a… a blackguard who deserves to die! You know the world is full of them. He’s hunted that way for hundreds and hundreds of years! It’s only from those kind of people that he takes the life he needs! And he’s too honorable to go against his given word to you…”

“Did he ask you to speak to me?” Lydia’s voice was as cold to her own ears as the silver on her neck.

“No.” Margaret sniffled and wiped furiously at her eyes, fighting not to break down in front of this slender auburn and white reed of a girl, this spoiled heiress-beauty with her waist unbuttoned to show the heavy links of silver chain, row upon row of them, around the stem of her throat.

“But I can see!” she sobbed. “Every day I can see. You beat him at cards all the time now…”

“I’ve had a week of continuous practice,” Lydia pointed out.

“You could never beat him if he weren’t fighting to keep the other powers of his mind intact! To preserve himself…”

“Thank you very much.” Head aching with weariness—for it was close to three in the morning—Lydia stepped around her. It was true that Ysidro had grown very gaunt—true, too, that a week ago he would never have dropped the cards, never would even have allowed the girls to see him gather them.

He could not mask things from them as he had. Or was he saving his strength for other matters?

“Margaret, do we need to talk about this now? I’m tired, you’re tired, I suspect you don’t mean everything you’re saying—”

“How can you be so blind!” Margaret went on frantically, unheeding, following her back to the bed. “Can’t you see? He can’t turn people’s minds aside in the train stations like he used to, or listen down the train cars, reading their dreams…”

Lydia
’s overwrought temper snapped. “Or put little scenes of dancing the waltz—which wasn’t even invented in the sixteenth century—into yours? I’m sorry,” she said immediately, as Margaret burst into a storm of tears at this brutally accurate accusation. “I shouldn’t have said that…”

“You don’t understand!” Margaret shouted wildly. “You don’t understand him! All you care about is finding your boring old stick of a husband and helping him play spies, and you can’t see the great-souled, noble, lonely, tragic hero you’re destroying!”

She blundered from the room like a bee trying to get out of a potting shed. Lydia heard the banister creak as she stumbled against it, heard the running judder of her footsteps descend the two long, C-shaped flights of stairs.

“Margaret!” She grabbed her spectacles from the dressing table and ran after her, catching handfuls of taffeta skirt to race down the steps, the tile of them cold under her stockinged feet. Below her she heard the door bang, and she followed, appalled, into the covered carriageway in time to see the heavy outer gate swing shut on its hinges.

“Margaret!” Through her concern she thought obliquely, Well, that does it for this pair of stockings—even in the relatively clean suburb of Pera the streets were nothing to explore unshod. Two small sconces illuminated the courtyard behind her, and the candle before a saint’s icon in a niche flecked the underside of the carriageway’s brick vault with wavering light. Past the gate the street was like a cave a thousand feet beneath the earth.

Lydia
stopped on the threshold, as if that abyssal dark were a chasm gaping before her feet.

Margaret gasped somewhere, and there was a suggestion of movement, pale in blackness. The shred of moonlight picked out a white face, like a skull’s, a scrap of spiderweb hair. A moment later Lydia’s eyes, adjusting, made out the white hands, holding Margaret by the wrists. Margaret threw herself wordlessly to his chest, clutching and weeping.

Ysidro must have spoken, so softly Lydia did not hear. Lydia herself had been exasperated to the slapping point with Margaret’s clinging, mooning, and silent reproaches, but she had never seen the vampire anything but patient and understanding with the woman he had made his slave. Of course he understood her, thought Lydia bitterly, watching as Ysidro bent his head to listen to some muffled, hysterical rant; watching Margaret’s skinny hands grab at his sleeves, his shoulders, the long folds of his cloak. If he hadn’t understood her, he couldn’t have baited the trap.

Illuminated only by the frail gleam from the window above, they seemed figures in a distant stage show, almost like a dream. Margaret flung back her head, gazing up into Ysidro’s face, then with a passionate gesture she ripped open her shirtwaist, baring her throat and her white, soft-fleshed bosom. “Take me!” Lydia heard her gasp. “Even unto death, if that is what you need!”

What Ysidro replied Lydia didn’t know. But she saw him draw the edges of Margaret’s shirtwaist together, put his hands on her shoulders, speaking quietly as she bowed her head. When he began to guide her back along the lane to the gate once more, Lydia retreated soundlessly into the courtyard, concealing herself in the dense shadows of the pomegranate tree, so that Margaret would be spared the embarrassment of knowing that the encounter had been observed. For a moment they stood framed in the carriageway’s arch. Ysidro must have said something else, for Lydia saw Margaret nod and push up her eyeglasses to mop her cheeks. Then the door shut behind her as she went in.