James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (8 page)

“Hire one for the journey, then.”

“So that you can kill her when the journey is done? And kill me, too, for that matter?” she added, her mind making a tardy leap to the ultimate danger of traveling with the dead. She knew too much already—even her admission of knowing where his lairs lay had violated the lines so carefully drawn when James and Ysidro had parted a year ago in the burning house on Harley Street.

He needs a human companion, she thought, in his search for Ernchester, someone who could deal with such problems as might overtake him when daylight was near; and he needs someone who knows James well enough to track him, to guess his movements, and through him, Karolyi and Ernchester.

She’d told Ellen and Mrs. Grimes she was visiting her cousins in Maida Vale. It would be weeks before she was even missed.

She kept her eyes on his, positive she resembled nothing so much as a myopic rabbit attempting to stare down a dragon.

Slowly, the vampire said, “You need have no fear of me, mistress. Nor will your woman, so long as she keeps from asking about that which does not concern her.”

“No.”

James had told her of the vampire ability to touch living minds, a cold grip, the dreadful sensation of steely will. But his power extended to blanking and smothering thought, to diverting attention… not to changing resolve. It was a predator’s power, a spy’s and a fugitive’s, not that of one who must negotiate with humankind. She saw that realization dawn in his eyes, and his mouth tightened with annoyance.

“If we are to be companions in this enterprise, I will not have you traveling alone abroad like a jauntering slut,” he said. “I think your husband would agree with me in that.”

“What my husband thinks is my husband’s business, and neither yours nor mine,” said Lydia. “And I would rather be taken for a jauntering slut than betray a woman who’s dependent on me. And if it doesn’t suit you, I’ll travel by myself.”

Ysidro bent and kissed her hand, his lips like silk left outside on a dry night of hard frost. “Bon voyage, then, mistress. And bonne chance in your dealings with the Undead.”

With a sensation like waking up, Lydia found herself alone.

It was not, in fact, terribly late to be abandoned in a completely unfamiliar part of London. Though the fog had thickened and the night was growing colder, the streets were still populous, albeit with foreign laborers from the sweatshops that abounded in the neighborhood and with sailors who seemed to accept Ysidro’s outdated presumption that a woman on her own was a jauntering slut, at least as far as Lydia could understand their idiomatic references to Master John Thursday and pintle jigs. Evidently, Josetta’s suffragist doctrines had yet to penetrate this far. Lydia made a mental note to let her know.

As she had guessed, she wasn’t far from the river, and on the broad, electric lit thoroughfare of the Embankment, she had no trouble in finding a cab to take her back to the small hotel near the museum where she had left her luggage.

Taken in the balance, she thought—removing her gloves and unpinning cook’s nondescript hat—she was more glad than sorry that Ysidro would not be accompanying her to Vienna. People did travel alone, of course, and there was no reason why she shouldn’t, Ysidro’s antiquated notions notwithstanding: The world abounded with policemen to be appealed to, porters to be tipped, cabs, guides, travel bureaus, quality hotels with obliging managers, and shops in which to purchase anything she might forget to pack. The lack of a maid would engender certain difficulties, of course, but that was what hotel chambermaids were for.

It was unlikely she would catch up with James before he reached Vienna, but with luck, his cautious nature might keep him out of immediate peril until she could arrive and apprise him of the fact that he was dealing with a double agent—if worse came to worst, she could inform whoever was in charge of the Vienna Department that Dr. Fairport’s sanitarium in the Vienna Woods was the likeliest place to search for a clue to James’ whereabouts.

If whoever was in charge wasn’t taking money from the Austrians as well.

From what James had told her, that was at least a possibility, and Lydia wondered how on earth she’d be able to tell.

Forcing down her sense of panic again, she reviewed such of her luggage as she had unpacked for the night: peignoir, two pairs of slippers—the prettier but far less comfortable ones in case any of the hotel staff came in—rose water and glycerine for her hands, distilled water of green pineapples to alleviate the incipient wrinkles Aunt Harriet had always assured her excessive reading would bring on, silver-backed hairbrush, comb, toothbrush, nail file, curling irons, frizzing irons, hairpins, several sets of underwear, corsetry, petticoats, an array of silver table knives whetted to as deadly an edge as silver would take, and a .38 caliber revolver containing the silver bullets she had had made last year.

Lydia
had felt like the heroine of a penny dreadful, packing that along with the talcum, rice powder, rouge, lotions, and perfumes.

There was also the market basket that she’d bought in Covent Garden that afternoon, containing thick braids of garlic bulbs, packets of aconite and whitethorn, branches of wild rose. She wreathed her pillow with them and hung them in the single window of the unheated little back bedroom, and as she undressed and unlaced herself—there were disadvantages to staying in hotels where she was unlikely to meet anyone she or her family knew— she turned over in her mind her other options.

Confide in one of her friends and take her as a companion? Josetta understood politics and feared nothing but, Lydia knew from experience, wasn’t particularly practical: she always seemed outraged at being arrested for suffragist activities which, though certainly necessary for the overall strategy of that movement, flagrantly violated the law. Her other close friend, Anne Gresholm, wiser and more intelligent, had lectures and students of her own to tend to, and her health was not good. In any case, the danger remained the same. Lydia was also aware that she had a certain amount of sufferance from Ysidro as long as she told no one of the existence of vampires. If she violated that secret, or if Josetta or Anne guessed—which they surely would—she could not answer for their safety or her own on their return.

Go to Ysidro, then, and ask him to accompany her after all? It would only resurrect the issue of a maid. She wouldn’t endanger Ellen, and a chance-hired stranger would be in the same peril and might be more inquisitive and less reliable to boot.

Lydia
sighed, slipped the revolver under her single, paltry pillow, and at length drifted into sleep among blankets strewed with wolfsbane, railway timetables, and guidebooks to the eastern reaches of the Austrian lands.

It must be the smell of the garlic
, she thought, aware that she was dreaming and that the dream was far more vivid—lurid, even— than anything she had dreamed at home. The garlic, or that house in the fog…

She stood on the terrace of a tall mansion, a glory of half-timbering and ornamental stone, with a moon-drenched garden maze on one hand and lighted windows of many-paned glass on the other. Looking in, she saw courtiers in the stiff velvets, the soft-glowing pearls of Elizabeth’s reign. They were dancing, and she could hear the swift and complex run of the music: hands linking, farthingales flouncing, the men all wearing little Shakespearean chin beards and looking silly beyond description in tights and trunk hose and bulging peasecod doublets, the women in skirts hooped out like kitchen tables and in collars of upstanding, wired lace.

A woman stood near the windows, whom Lydia noticed because she was wearing modern garments, a plain brown serge that didn’t fit her particularly well and certainly didn’t become her. She was plain-faced, with a slightly receding chin, of medium height, and rather pear-shaped without being fat; a wealth of curly black hair lay loose upon her narrow shoulders. Sometimes when Lydia’s eyes left her and returned, she’d be wearing Elizabethan clothing, dull-colored and worked high to the neck. A servant’s gown, or a poor relation’s. Her small hands fussed with the jet buttons of her sleeves.

Then, very softly, Ysidro spoke.

“You would think, the way they danced, they’d wear something more suited to the exercise, would you not?”

His voice was so quiet Lydia wondered that she could hear it through the glass and over the music. She saw him then, standing at the brown woman’s side. His black velvet doublet, his knee-length breeches, his high, supple boots, harked just enough to a later period to avoid the inherent ridiculousness of male Elizabethan garb without appearing anachronistic, and his hueless hair seemed warmer in the torchlight, darkened almost to honey. The girl replied, maudibly, but it made Ysidro laugh, as if he were playing the part of someone else. Can’t she see it? wondered Lydia, terrified. Can’t she see what he is?

For a time they stood shoulder to shoulder watching the dancers in their fairy-tale costumes, the vampire and the girl.

Lydia
’s dreams changed, fleeted. She saw them again, this time in another garden, wide parterres of topiary and tapis verte, when he taught the dark-haired girl to waltz in the moonlight under the blank eyes of marble gods. Saw them later kiss beneath the gargoyles of an archway, among crowded houses built on a bridge, torchlight and lamplight from the windows above them red as jewels in Ysidro’s eyes. Through another window—two windows, for Lydia herself was in a dark room across an alley that plunged sixty feet down into a canyon of night—she saw Ysidro lying wounded on the girl’s sparse bed, the girl bending over him in some kind of old-fashioned garb, knotting dressings over a sword cut in his chest that would have killed a living man. Ysidro moved his hand a little, and the girl bent down to press her lips to his.

“You are different from all these others,” she heard him say, in the curtained embrasure of a palace window, the sound of violins like fragile perfume amid the talk and laughter of dancers. Palace of Versailles, Lydia guessed vaguely from the cut of Ysidro’s plum-colored silk coat. “How sick I have grown of them, through all eternity. I had not thought to find a woman like you.” He raised the girl’s hand to his lips.

“We have known one another, loved one another, down through endless time.” He wrapped the girl in the dense velvet weight of his cloak as they stood alone in winter-locked woodlands, moonlight shiny on a meringue of snow beyond the barred shadows of the copse in which they stood. The girl’s hair was disheveled, her gown torn, and Lydia knew that Ysidro had rescued her from some peril, and that the bodies of dead men lay out of sight in the gully by a winter-silent stream. Lydia’s own feet were cold in shoes wet with slush as she stood behind a tree with the wet weight of her skirt sticking to her ankles. “Do you not remember?”

The girl in brown—it was the same brown dress as before, with the puffed sleeves and wide collar ten years behind current mode—whispered, “I remember, Simon. I remember… everything,” and their mouths met in the zebra moonlight.

No
! cried Lydia, and though her breath swirled in a diamond cloud, she could produce no sound. He’s lying to you! He’s going to kill you! Horrified, she fought to run toward them, but black thorns caught her skirts, held her back. She tried to pull free, and the branches cracked beneath her fingers like dried insects. She woke to find herself clutching the bony fragments of hawthorn twig that lay on her pillow.

Lydia
took the two o’clock tram for Paris. Even after that strange farrago of romantic interludes by moonlight faded from her dreams, she kept waking with the icy sense that a slender shadow with yellow eyes waited just outside her door. By the time she was awake, bathed, laced, dressed, packed, powdered, perfumed, made-up, and had fixed her hair—no small accomplishment without a maid—and considered herself fit to be viewed by the public, she had missed both the morning trains. Never again, she thought, will I stay at an inconspicuous hotel just to avoid questions from my family. She reached Paris shortly after nine that night, missing the train to Vienna by an hour and a half—it left from another station in any case—and registered, travel-weary and aching, at the Hotel St. Petersbourg that Thomas Cook and Sons had obligingly contacted on her behalf the day before.

Paris
, at least, she knew from her days of debutante shopping and educational sightseeing, and later from medical conferences. Her French was good, and she understood how to handle herself in this milieu. Perhaps, she reflected, the journey would be easier than she feared, as long as she took everything methodically, one step at a time, like a complicated dissection or a series of analyses of unknown secretions.

Again she slept badly, her dreams filled with the dark-haired girl in brown and Don Simon Ysidro rescuing each other from the cardinal’s guards and trading kisses on the sands of moon-soaked Moroccan deserts. Waking in the darkness, comforter drawn up to her chin, she stared at the slits of reflected streetlamp outlining the shutters and listened to the voices of the cafe down in the street below, wondering where James was and if he was all right. Milk wagons were creaking in the streets when she finally slept.

The Vienna Express didn’t leave until seven-thirty that evening, so there was plenty of time, not only to pack and dress properly and have the hotel maid fix her hair, but to do a little shopping at the Magasins du Printemps, which lay just down the street.

She was buttering a croissant in the almost empty dining room and speculating about the pathology of Don Simon Ysidro’s fingernails—clearly there had been an organic change of some kind, so the physical side of the vampire syndrome did not involve complete cellular stasis—when she heard the solitary waiter murmur, “B’njour, m’mselle,” and glanced up to see another woman enter the room. Even at this distance and without her spectacles, Lydia deduced this woman to be harmless: tallish and slightly stooped, she moved with the uncertainty of one who feels herself to be half a foreigner even in her own country, let alone in a land where she doesn’t speak the language.

The next second she frowned, wondering why she thought she recognized her. There was something familiar about her, and as the woman drew near and came a little more into focus, Lydia realized what it was.