James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (27 page)

“It is probably well,” Olumsiz Bey said to him in the flowery Osmanli of the court, “that you return to your chamber now, Scheherazade, and remain there for the balance of the night. The tales we will tell tonight are not for the ears of the living.”

Asher’s eyes went past him to the fledglings, grouped closely now around a husky young man with a prominent nose and dark, thickly curling hair. The young man was staring around him, growing horror struggling against wine and whatever glamours Pelageya had laid upon his mind, taking in the rich garden of blue and yellow tiles in the hall and the way darkness waited in every corner. Asher took it in, too, printing it in his mind…Habib, a coarse and powerful vampire who seemed to be special friends with Haralpos, carried, as Asher had deduced, a sleeping beggar girl of twelve or so, holding her against his shoulder as if she were an infant.

“Sayyed has already taken food thither for you,” the Master of Constantinople went on. “And books—if you will pardon my presumption in choosing them for you—to beguile with old legends the passing of the night. There will be… a little sport here.” His smile had a flex, a curve to it, like a reflex that his eyes had long ago forgotten or had never known. He gestured with his right hand, for his left never loosened its hold on his silver-bladed weapon, which glittered whitely in the many-hued glow of the bronze lamps overhead.

The eyes of the fledglings threw back that glow, cats waiting to be fed.

The Armenian boy made a little noise of terror and tried to pull his arms free of Pelageya’s grip and Haralpos‘, but he could not. Asher smelled urine as the boy pissed himself. He would give them the run they wanted, Asher thought bitterly, through all the dark galleries of that accursed house.

And all the while he repeated silently to himself, A cobbled courtyard beyond this place, smaller cobbles, right through a door, across a hall, down a narrow stair and then another twice as deep…

The place of silver bars, where Zardalu said the dastgah was, smelling of chemicals…

And a voice that screamed its despair to the dark.

There was only one person he could think of whom the Bey would hold prisoner behind silver bars.

“My children forget themselves sometimes in their chase.”

He jerked his mind back—the Bey must not guess his abstraction.

“Yes, I really think it best if you remain in your chamber, and if any call out to you, save me alone, I suggest that you do not answer. My darling…”

The Bey’s jeweled right hand caressed Zardalu’s cheek.

There was an impassive flicker behind the sapphire eyes, nothing more.

“I will take this one back to his chamber. Have Habib bring the child to my own room.” He held up the scarf that had covered Asher’s eyes, extended it to his fledgling once more. “Be so good as to conduct my other guest of this evening back to the usual meeting place. Remember, I will know it if the slightest ill befalls him. Indeed, I shall know it if you so much as speak to him, as you did to this one, and he to you.” The smile again, cold as his grip. “And I will not be pleased. Is this understood?”

Zardalu bowed again, bending his long boneless form so that his black curls fell forward over his shoulder and swept the wooden planks of the floor. “This is understood, Lord.”

“Come.” Olumsiz Bey beckoned to someone who had stood all this time in the gloom of the room’s inner doorway, and switched to German, perfectly contemporary and without accent or inflection. “This man will take you outside. I guarantee that you need not fear him.”

“I have no fear within your house, or anywhere that I walk, under your protection, my lord.” Ignace Karolyi stepped from the darkness, his light brown Saville Row suit as incongruous in that setting as a khaki-uniformed Tommy with an Enfield would have been at Marathon. He stopped before Asher for a moment, regarding him with sudden, narrowed speculation in his wide-set brown eyes. Then he turned back to Olumsiz Bey and bowed.

“I trust that I am forgiven, my lord, and that terms between us can still be reached?”

The Bey regarded him with strange eyes, holding his silver weapon before him, the edge glittering in the light. “This remains to be seen. As all things do, it rests in the hand of God.”

“I don’t see why he can’t come with us.” Margaret Potton stepped down from the embassy carriage at Lydia’s heels, and, trailed by a Greek footman, hurried in the wake of the formidable Lady Clapham, a tall, thin, horse-faced individual whom Lydia had guessed at once to be the headwoman of the British diplomatic community in Pera. “You could introduce him as your cousin. When you told Sir Burnwell that you had a cousin here in Constantinople, I thought it was a good idea.”

“I told him that in case we have to produce Ysidro in an emergency,” Lydia replied, patient and somewhat bemused, but without anger. “I don’t think a diplomatic reception at the palace qualifies.” Ahead of them, half glimpsed between strolling ladies in tulip-skirted ensembles and coal-scuttle hats that would not have been out of place in Paris or Vienna, Lady Clapham paused in the doorway of Mademoiselle Ursule’s and looked back for her two charges. Lydia almost expected her to snap, Step along, girls, spit-spot…

“I don’t know,” Margaret said. “I think it would be nice for him.”

Lydia shook her head but was spared further discussion by conjunction, in the doorway of the boutique, with her guide and hostess for the shopping trip and the modiste herself, a middle-aged and firmly corseted Belgian woman who apprehended instantly the difference between Lydia’s two-hundred-guinea, Alice-blue raw silk and Margaret’s outdated brown wool, but varied not a whit the warmth of her smiles of greeting to both. It did cross Lydia’s mind, as Lady Clapham explained to Mile. Ursule what they’d come for, that Ysidro might have some difficulty these days in passing himself off as a living man.

Margaret was staggered at the news that it was for her benefit, not for Lydia’s, that they had made the excursion to the fashionable European shopping quarter along the Grand Rue. “Silly goose,” Lady Clapham declared, not unkindly, as the governess turned pink with pleasure. “Of course you’ll accompany Mrs. Asher tonight, and you certainly can’t wear what you have on.”

Lydia
felt slightly relieved at this confirmation that other people—older and in positions of social authority—were far more tactless than she.

Much as it annoyed Lydia to admit it, Ysidro had been quite right. In Constantinople as in Vienna, Margaret Potton was her mantle of respectability, her mere presence making it entirely unnecessary for Lydia to say to anyone, As you see, I am not a jauntering slut. Her presence had certainly worked its intended magic at the embassy yesterday afternoon. Without Margaret, Lydia guessed she would still have been admitted, would still have had her queries answered… would still have spoken to Sir Burnwell, stooped and gray and with the slightly puffy face of an intermittent sufferer of kidney problems…

But only the presence and respectability of a companion had brought Lady Clapham into the office, holding out her hands and saying, My dear, I’m so sorry…

So sorry.

Cold closed around her again, dimming the voices of Mile. Ursule, Lady Clapham, Miss Potton, as if the small, neat, and extremely Parisian room with its powder-blue satin wallpapers and gilt mirrors was at the end of a very long corridor.

Wednesday. James had been missing since Wednesday afternoon.

“Which one do you like, my dear?”

Lady Clapham’s voice pulled her back to the present. The dressmaker had spread out on the table two gowns, one straw-yellow with an overgown of white georgette, the other fawn-and-white-striped mousselme de soie trimmed with pink silk. “I think that’s up to Miss Potton,” Lydia said, manufacturing a smile with an effort and stepping close to get some idea of how the dresses actually looked. Miss Potton turned red and pale and pink, and blotchy combinations of all three, and finally settled on the mousseline de soie, for which Lydia then bought a pair of white satin slippers, kid gloves, and a thin gold chain with a pendant of rose quartz and earrings to match.

“You really shouldn’t have,” Margaret said softly when, later in their bedroom, Stefama Potoneros was lacing her into the gown. “I mean I… it must be terribly expensive.”

It hadn’t been, in terms of higher fashion, reflected Lydia, putting on her spectacles to turn and look over her shoulder at the girl. Mile. Ursule had expertly graded ranks of gowns for all occasions, and the fawn and white silk, however pretty, was designed to be no competition whatsoever for Lydia’s point lace and baby ribbons. But to a girl without a family, who had spent any number of years in the dreary confines of the typical governess’ quarters, it must seem like Cinderella’s ball dress.

“I can’t…” Margaret stammered. “I can’t repay you…”

“Good heavens, no!” Lydia said. There was a silence, Margaret undoubtedly remembering—as Lydia remembered—the hysterics in Sofia, the furious outburst upon their arrival the night before last. A little awkwardly, she explained, “It’s nothing, really. I mean… what’s the point of being an heiress, and putting up with uncles and aunts telling you how to live and who you have to marry, if you can’t… can’t buy someone a present now and then? And I know it helps to have the right thing to wear.”

“I thought if you were an heiress, it meant you could do what you wanted,” said Margaret as Lydia barely touched the eiderdown puff to her cheeks, then leaned forward until her nose nearly touched the glass to inspect the results in the mirror.

Lydia
shook her head. “Well, I don’t know about other heiresses. My father and his two sisters had a terror of fortune hunters, and my life was… rather restricted at times.”

I’ll not have you turning my money over to a scoundrel, had been her father’s exact—and oft-repeated—words.

Not, A man who only marries you for money will make you wretched.

Not, How do you expect such a man to fit into the life you want to make for yourself?

I’ll not have you turning my money over to a scoundrel.

His
money, even should he die.

She rubbed the rouge on her fingertips, smoothed the tiniest hint of a blush along cheekbones and temples, seeking the perfection that had been her only protection against everything they could do.

“It couldn’t have been that restricted, if they let you go to Oxford,” said Margaret. She picked up the powder puff, turned it cautiously over in one square, disapproving hand. “Do all heiresses learn to use cosmetics like this?”

“Only if they have a nose like mine.” Lydia squinted at the effect of the rouge, then licked the end of her eye pencil and began careful shading along the upper lashes. “James—he was a friend of my uncle Ambrose, the dean of All Souls—arranged with one of the pathology professors to help me borrow money under another name. I begged Uncle Ambrose not to tell Father, and I’m not sure he would have agreed if he’d known I was studying medicine. It was exhausting, going back and forth by train and concealing sessions when my tutor came down to town. Fortunately, our place was near Oxford—Willoughby Close—and Father spent weeks at a time down in London. If my mother had been alive, I could never have done it.”

“What did they do when they found out?” Margaret asked, blue eyes wide with alarm.

“There was a row,” Lydia said evasively. Why, after eight years, did her father’s cold fury still hurt? “Would you like to try this?” she added, seeing the other woman’s hand stray to touch the rouge pot, the lip rouge, the several types of powder and skin food indispensable to the artifice that Lydia regarded as her armor against the world.

“C-could I?” Margaret stammered, turning pink again. “I know I shouldn’t—the sisters at the orphanage all said that ladies don’t use such things…”

“Well, I never met a lady who didn’t,” Lydia said with a smile. “It’s just that there’s a trick to doing it so that nobody notices. Here.”

The transformation was not a startling one, but having spent years compensating for what she considered her own shortcomings—a slightly aquiline nose, too-thin cheeks, and unfashionably shaped lips, to say nothing of a preference for knowledge above society gossip—Lydia knew how to apply rouge and powder to reduce the impact of the other woman’s shallow chin and snub nose, and to give her better cheekbones than she’d been born with. At the end, staring mto the lamplit glass, Margaret breathed, “Oh…” in a kind of wonderment, the blue eyes widened and deepened, the pale, pretty face surrounded by raven masses of curls as it had been, Lydia knew well, in her dreams. “Oh, thank you!”

She fumbled for her eyeglasses.

Lydia
laughed. “You aren’t going to wear them to the reception, are you?”

“Of course.” Margaret settled them firmly on her nose, even as Lydia was removing her own to be helped into her gown by the maid. “If people don’t like me in my eyeglasses, that’s just too bad.” She blinked mildly at Lydia as the Greek maid laced her expertly up the back. “Thank you,” Margaret said simply. “Thank you so much for doing this for me. I’ve never been beautiful before.”

Lydia
smiled a little and shook her head. “I’ll teach you how to do it, if you’d like,” she said, stowing her spectacles in a silver-mounted leather case and making a final inspection of herself in the mirror. Stefame’s sister Helena had come to the door twenty minutes ago with word that Sir Burnwell and Lady Clapham were waiting downstairs with the carriage; they should, Lydia guessed, arrive at the palace in fashionable good time.

She worked her tight kid gloves onto her hands and surveyed Margaret once more, pleased with the results in spite of the glasses. She had done her best—the fact that Miss Potton was her companion was no reason not to make her as beautiful as she could be, though she knew girls of her own year as a debutante who would dispute that—and she suspected that her companion’s raven hair and tourmaline eyes made her prettier than herself.

“Margaret,” she asked, as they collected reticules, fans, shawls and keys, “what are you going to do when you return? To London, I mean? I could help you…”

“Oh, I’ll leave that to Don Simon,” Margaret said. “My fate is in his hands.”