Traveling with the Dead (James Asher #2)

Traveling with the Dead (James Asher #2) Page 6

"We knew each other in a former lifetime, you see." Miss Margaret Potton looked up from picking at a loose thread on the button of her left sleeve, and behind lenses as massive as Lydia 's own-had Lydia been wearing them in so public a forum as the Hotel St. Petersbourg's dining room-her blue eyes had a look of wary defiance. "Many lifetimes. It's as if I always knew, all my life. All my life I must have been having those dreams, only to forget them absolutely, completely, in the morning."

" 'Must have'?" quoted Lydia, trying to keep her fury at Ysidro out of her voice. "When? If you forgot them that completely, how do you know you had them 'all your life'? Do you honestly remember any prior to last night?"

The small mouth set stubbornly. "Yes. Yes, I do. Now."

Lydia said nothing. That cad! was all that came to her mind, and she thought, Surely there's a more descriptive word than that. James is a linguist. I must ask him about it.

Miss Potton looked up again and set her shallow chin. "That is, I knew I had dreamed something important. I always had the knowledge that I was dreaming about something-something beautiful, something critical, something that would change my life. Only I never remembered, until last night."

"I've never heard anything so idiotic in my life!" All the lurid dreams returned to her, love, rescue, waltzing on moonlit terraces, she witty and he laying his reluctant heart at her feet. "Last night he wanted you to think you remembered. Because it was convenient for him..."

"No." A beetroot stain blotched thin cheeks. "Yes. In a way. Because he needed me." She returned to picking at her sleeve button. "When he came to me last night- when I woke in the moonlight and saw him standing there at the foot of the bed- he said he would never have crossed my life again, would have forced himself to stay away from me, for my own good, except that he needed me. Needed my help. You don't understand him."

"And you do?"

"Yes." She didn't look up.

Lydia drew in her breath, but she felt obliquely that if she came anywhere close to her true feelings, she would probably scream, and that obviously wouldn't do in the dining room of the Hotel St. Petersbourg. Rage at Ysidro drowned her fear- her fear of him, of Ernchester, of the vast uncharted ocean of the world outside university research.

The word she wanted, she realized, was vampire.

Miss Potton raised her head and went on, "I understand that his kind need people they can trust. He told me they will seek for years for a human being large enough of spirit to accept them for what they are, in whose hands they dare to lay their lives. I was... he and I were... This was how it was between us for... for many lifetimes in the past. He said he always knew where I was, but deliberately never contacted me in this lifetime, because in a former life I... I was killed in his service."

"That's the most ridiculous-"

"That's all you can say." Miss Potton regarded her with a steady, pale, fanatic gaze. "But I remember it. I've remembered it all my life in dreams. I just- didn't recall it until last night. And he needed me again, he needed someone, to journey to Vienna..."

"He needed a duenna for me at half a day's notice!" cried Lydia, appalled. "I don't know which is worse, that kind of old-fashioned absurdity or what he's done..."

"He is an antique gentleman," Miss Potton said calmly.

"He is a killer! Not to mention a bigoted Catholic and the most unconscionable snob in shoe leather, and you're a fool if You believe-"

"He isn't bigoted!" The waiter came, bringing a cup of cafe au lait the size of a soup bowl. Miss Potton looked up at him anxiously, as if fearing he would demand payment of her on the spot. Only when he left again without a word did she turn back to Lydia, an eager intensity illuminating her face. "During the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, in the wars of religion in France, Don Simon had a Huguenot servant who sacrificed his life to keep him from being burned by the Inquisition. Later he and I saved that servant's family, got them on a boat for the Americas..."

Lydia stared at her, unable even to reply. Even at the distance of the table's width, Miss Potton was a blurred figure, in her brown wool frock made for someone else and badly altered. Her squashy black velvet hat-startlingly similar to the one Lydia had borrowed from her book-was years out of date. The spectacles hadn't made it into the dreams.

"But I... I know I've dreamed about it before. All of it. Running along the beach, minutes before the first, fatal gleam of dawn; Don Simon turning back, sword drawn to hold the cardinal's men at bay while I got Pascalou's children into the rowboat. The way the sea smelled, and the mewing of the gulls."

Straight out of Dumas. And unforgivable. Lydia tried to stir her coffee and gave it up, for her hand was shaking too badly. For all her careful training in the social niceties, in fashionable flirtation and dinner conversation, she had always regarded the majority of humanity as a slightly alien species, possessors of fascinating circulatory and endocrine systems but, with a few exceptions like James and Josetta and Anne and Ellen, detached from herself and her concerns and largely incomprehensible. She had, literally, not the slightest idea of how to go about warning this poor silly child, talking to her, reaching her through the vampire glamour of dreams.

"Miss Potton," she said at last, in a voice kept level only by years of deportment lessons, "please thank Don Simon for me, but tell him that I'm a grown- up woman and quite prepared to travel by myself. I don't need a lady- in-waiting, as he seems to think. And I don't need him. But if you'll take my advice-"

She saw Miss Potton grow rigid at the word and realized despairingly that she must have said the wrong thing. But she couldn't think of anything else to say. "If you'll take my advice, go back to London." It only made her sound patronizing, she thought in despair. "Have nothing further to do with Don Simon. If you dream about him again, pay no attention. If you see him in the flesh-" "I can't go back." Her small, stiff mouth wore a smirk of triumph. "I gave Mrs. Wendell my notice yesterday morning at breakfast. I'd been up, packing, since three, since Don Simon came to me in my room, spoke to me, woke me from all those years of dreaming. I told her to find someone else to look after her nasty children, for I was done with such things forever."

Lydia could just image how her aunt Harriet would have greeted such an announcement from Nana over her lightly buttered toast and China tea some rainy morning... Not that Nana would ever have done anything so irregular. The poor girl would never get another job. Done with such things forever indeed!

"I have no family," Miss Potton went on, with that same oblique pride. "I have put myself, my fate, into Don Simon's hands, as he has put himself into mine. And it feels... right. True. Good."

"Anything would," Lydia argued, startled, "after spending- how many years were you with Mrs. Wendell?-looking after someone else's children."

The young woman's mouth flinched, and as she averted her eyes, Lydia caught the quick shine of tears. Her first anger was subsiding, and Lydia could see that this awkward girl was only a few years younger than she, and as homely. But Miss Potton had never learned to use fashion and artifice to conceal that fact-or had never had the money to do so.

No wonder Ysidro had found her an easy target when he'd gone questing through London that night, looking for someone whose dreams to invade.

"I'm sorry..." Lydia fumbled at the words. But of course once words are said, there is no I'm sorry.

Miss Potton shook her head. "No," she said, and took a sip of coffee to steady herself. Her voice lost some of its melodramatic ring. "No, you're right. I've been wanting for years to get out of there, to find something else. David and Julia really are the most horrid brats. But that doesn't mean that what Don Simon told me is any the less true. I think I was looking for a way out because I knew there was another possibility. As if the memories of those other times, those other lives, though I couldn't recall them, were alive within me, telling me there was something more."

"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.

"You behold it." He stepped inside and his small gesture took in the rosewood, the velvet, the frosted lily lamps.

He had fed. She could see the faint color that stained his white face and close mouth, so that he appeared more nearly human in the staring light.

Sickness filled her that she had ever felt relief. That she had ever asked help or advice of such a thing.

"Miss Potton has taken a compartment at the other end of the carriage," Ysidro went on. "It would be our pleasure, would you join us there for cards."

Lydia stood up, slender and straight in her traveling dress of carnation faille, jet and amber glittering. "Send her home."

"I've already told you I don't have-" began Miss Potton, and Ysidro raised a finger.

"This is not possible."

"Will it not be possible after we return from Vienna?" Lydia 's face was almost as chalky as the vampire's. "Are you going to kill her when you're safe in London again? And me, and James, to secure the secrets you hope to stop Ernchester from telling the Austrians?"

His expression did not change, but she was aware of thoughts passing through the sulfur- crystal mazes of his eyes. Thinking about options? she wondered. Or only about what kind of story she was likely to believe?

"You have admirably guarded the secrets you learned a year ago," he said after a time. "They are no more believable now than they were then. And I believe Miss Potton as capable of keeping them as yourself."

The tram lurched a little, going over the points; lights cascaded past the window. In the corridor a small dog barked furiously and a woman crooned, "La, tais- toi, p'tit malin!"

"I understand that dinner will be served at half past eight." Ysidro's fingers moved toward the folder on the table but did not touch it. Like everything about him, the gesture was minimal, as though long years had wearied him of all but the smallest symbols of what had been human mannerism, human expression, human speech. Lydia was suddenly reminded of the worn stones of a field circle in a pasture near Willoughby Close, her childhood home, like the white stumps of teeth protruding from olive turf.

"I suggest you ladies partake, if so be your wish, and return after to Miss Potton's compartment. Do you play picquet, mistress? The most excellent of games, and the representation in little of all human affairs. I assure you," he added, saffron gaze meeting the brown, "that neither you nor she has aught to fear of me."

"I never did," Margaret said from the doorway. Ysidro did not so much as shift his eyes.

Lydia said, "I don't believe you."

The vampire bowed. "This news breaks my heart."

And he was gone. Margaret, who no more than Lydia had seen him go, looked startled, then hastened away down the corridor without so much as an excuse, leaving Lydia standing alone.

Miss Potton returned half an hour later, tapping gently on the curtained glass. Lydia, who in the intervening time had neither resumed her spectacles nor taken from her portmanteau the issue of Journal des Etudes Physiochemiques she had brought for entertainment, turned from a somewhat blank contemplation of the lights fleeing by in the darkness and said, "Come."

The governess stepped inside, holding to the doorway as if afraid of rebuke. She'd dispensed with her deplorable hat. Her hair, tightly prisoned in pins on the top of her head, was the one thing about her that was truly as it had been in the dreams, thick, heavy, silky, and black as night.

I did call her a fool, thought Lydia, seeing the hesitation in the other woman's eyes.

But she is a fool!

But telling her so again would not break Ysidro's hold on her.

Lydia took a deep breath, rose to her feet and held out her hand. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't trust him, but that's no reason to... to be angry with you."

Miss Potton smiled tremulously in return. She had envisaged, Lydia realized, a journey in company with a frozenly hostile traveling companion, reason enough to look wretched. "You can trust him, you know," she said, her blue eyes widening with earnestness. "He is a true gentleman."

And a multiple murderer who hasn't been human for at least four hundred years.

"I never doubted that," Lydia said. "Is he there?" She nodded down the corridor.

When Margaret bobbed her head, she went on, "Would you wait here for me? There's something I need to say to him in private."

He was playing solitaire. An abacus, a small calculating machine, and a notebook lay on the table beside the spread of the cards. Four decks. The corridor lights made wan mirrors of his eyes. No light burned above the little table where he sat.

"You summoned her for me, because no lady travels alone, is this correct?"

The pale head inclined. In the near dark she had the impression of a skull surrounded by the spider strands of his long hair.

"Then the corollary would be that no lady travels with a known killer?"

"You've lain with one every night for seven years, mistress," replied the nearly soundless voice. "In my time ladies traveled with them regularly, quite sensibly, I might add, for protection." A white hand, almost disembodied in shadow, laid card upon card and shifted a column; flicked a bead in the abacus; made a note.

"In your time," Lydia persisted, "was it not customary for gentlemen to respect the wishes of the ladies with whom they traveled?"

"If they were not foolish." He turned a card, made another note.

"I won't have you killing while we're traveling together."

Another card, colors indistinguishable in the cinder-colored gloom. He did not look at her. "Unless it be for your convenience?"

Lydia stood for a time, her breath coming fast. Then she turned and strode down the corridor to the restaurant car, leaving him alone turning cards in the dark.