James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (31 page)

“If there is a challenge to the Bey’s power, chances are good that it is because the Bey himself may be growing… tired. Brittle. Losing his grip. A thing one seldom considers of the Bey,” added Ysidro, “but a possibility. It happens, in time, even to the Undead. When this chances, vampires suffer cold and joint ache. Winter is coming on. This city will be under snow. A master fighting for his position, refusing to admit the drag of darkness in his soul, might well heat one or more of his bolt-holes for his own comfort, particularly if it has been his custom to use the living as servants.”

He had been watching the darkness of the street. Now he turned his attention fully toward her again, a ghost-shape in the gloom. “You understand,” he said, “that though clues of this kind may lead us to Ernchester or to the heart of this affair with Karolyi, you may not find your husband, mistress.”

She looked down at where the moonlight lay on the shawl over her arms. “I understand. I’d been hoping,” she went on after long silence, her voice low, as if speaking to herself, “that when I went to the embassy yesterday afternoon—Saturday afternoon—that Sir Burnwell would say something like, ‘Oh, of course, he’s staying right across the way at the Pera
Palace.’ And the day would finish with Italian ices on the terrace and telling stories in bed half the night.”

She drew the shawl’s long fringes through her fingers, to keep them from trembling.

“You have never been alone, then.”

It wasn’t what she had expected him to say—if anything at all—but it was true. She nodded without looking up.

“Well, I felt I’d been alone for years and years, before I knew him. But I expect most children feel that way. And I knew him—I mean, he was in and out of Uncle Ambrose’s house— when I was fifteen, sixteen. I don’t remember a moment of falling in love with him, but I remember knowing there was no one else I’d rather live with. I remember crying because I knew they’d never let me marry him. I was underage. And he wouldn’t ask. He didn’t want me to be hurt in a family row. He didn’t want me to lose my inheritance over him.”

“I daresay your father put his own interpretation to that.” The soft voice was like the wind flowing down an empty hall. “What happened?”

“Father disinherited me over my studies. Jamie was away in Africa. That was during the war. Someone… someone said he was dead. I was terrified because I didn’t know if I could succeed in an actual practice. Most women have a terrible time. My research is sound, but pure research would be out of the question, and I… I didn’t know if Jamie was coming back. But without him I didn’t care, really, what became of me. When he came back he asked me to marry him because I hadn’t any money, and Father permitted it. Then later he changed his will again.”

“But you never thought of giving up your study?” The vampire sounded amused.

Lydia
raised her head, shocked. “Of course not!” He was regarding her, she found, with a curious, unreadable intentness in his sulfurous eyes. For a moment she thought he would speak, but then like a ghost he seemed to withdraw a little from her.

“In truth,” he said, “we can only do what we can. I spoke not to crush your hope, mistress, but only to warn you that not all grails are found intact. Nor, indeed, found at all.”

“No,” Lydia said softly, “I understand. Thank you.”

He rose. She held out her hand to him, as she would have to a brother if she’d had one, or a friend. After a moment he took it, his thin hand emerging from the dark folds of his lap robe like Death’s, oddly bereft of its native scythe, fleshless knuckles and fragile bones dry as bleached bamboo under her touch. She’d taken down her hair while drinking her tea; its natural straight-ness had almost destroyed the remains of earlier curls, so that it lay in unswagged cinnabar heaps on her shoulders and back, like seaweed on a beach after a storm.

With her free hand she propped her spectacles again, a schoolgirl’s gesture.

Remembering it later she had the impression that he’d said something else to her—or maybe just spoken her name—and that his cold hand had brushed her face, pushing back the flame of her hair from her cheek. But that wasn’t clear to her, as if she’d dreamed it. Perhaps, she thought, she had.

It did occur to her that it was not at all like Ysidro to be concerned whether her hopes were crushed or not.

The street of the brass sellers lay four or five aisles in from the main entrance of the Grand Bazaar, according to the dealer in attar of roses of whom Lydia made her inquiry… “Or more or less,” added the man in excellent French; the beaming smile that split his dark face reminded her forcibly of a discolored and incomplete set of piano keys. “But for what does la belle mademoiselle want brass? Pfui, brass! It is attar of roses, the incomparable essences of Damascus and Baghdad, which delight the heart and offer the gift of sweetness to God. Only thirty piastres… That wretched cheating son of an Armenian camel driver is going to charge you more than fifty for a brass thimble that won’t be brass at all, but cheap tin with a brass wash no more substantial than a Greek’s sworn word… Thirty piastres? Fifteen!”

Lydia smiled, curtseyed, murmured, “Merci… merci,” and with Slavonic clairvoyance Prince Razumovsky, enormous in exquisite London-cut mufti, appeared at her side and said, “Come along, come along,” steering both women—Margaret hanging back for one more sniff of a painted ointment pot—into the crowd.

“Can we go back there?” Margaret asked diffidently of His Highness. “When we’ve found the storyteller, I mean? True attar of roses costs ten or twelve shillings for a flask that size back home.”

She craned her neck, trying to look back between a jostling pair of German businessmen and several drab-uniformed soldiers at the tiny stall with its magic rows of twinkling glass. The shopkeeper gave her another demolished smile and a wink as bright as his wares.

“My dear Miss Potton,” the prince smiled through the Colchian fleeces of his beard, “twenty feet from this spot you can buy a flask that size for two piastres, if you look sufficiently indifferent. It requires practice. Hold in your mind the image of a room—a building!—filled with such flasks… or, rather, think of having to carry a veddras of the stuff—about three of your gallons—up a steep hill, and then go back for another, and another, and another…”

Margaret giggled and blushed, and someone else cried out in awful Greek-accented French, “Madame, Madame, here all the perfume, all best roses of land of nightingales… !”

The light that suffused the bewildering mazes of the Grand Bazaar was never direct, falling as it did through windows high in the vaulted ceiling, and in the pale green archways the voices of every nation from the North Sea to the Indian Ocean swirled like soup. There were no genuine spots of light, nor actual shadows, but a dizzy kaleidoscope of color that shifted too quickly for Lydia to guess at distant things—the contents of the shops they passed, the faces or nationalities of men who seemed, at a distance, to be only swirls of white or dark or colored robes. As they passed close they came into focus: swarthy Turkish men in pantaloons sitting on floors to bargain, talk, drink glasses of scalding tea; Greek men in wide white skirts and bright caps or women in close-fitting, dowdy black, arguing with shopkeepers at the top of their lungs; porters bent matter-of-factly under superhuman loads; Armenians in baggy trousers, Orthodox priests and thick-bearded Jews in black gabardine and prayer shawls. Young boys shouted offers of shoe shines or guides to the city, or dashed importantly through the jostling shoppers bearing brass trays on which rested single glasses of tea. The air was redolent of sweaty wool, garlic, carpets, dog, and sewage.

Down the aisles that branched from side to side, Lydia glimpsed wares at which she could only guess: coats of karakul and astrakhan, carpets of blue and crimson, shawls, bright-flashing glass, hanging racks of silver earrings, bolts of prosaic wool alternating with gauzy rainbows of veils. Every time a beggar came whining up to them—hideously disfigured, some of them, freaks who would have been confined to fairs anywhere in Europe—every time they passed strolling groups of soldiers who whistled and rolled their eyes, Lydia was heartily glad she’d asked the prince to act as their protector and guide.

He’d been right. This wasn’t England. It would have been madness to investigate alone.

She’d slept uneasily for the few hours after Ysidro’s departure, prey to troubling dreams. Part had concerned the harem, with its smelly little cells, its cramped windows blocking out all view of the city, of the sea, of the sunlight had it been day: The walls sweat with their pettiness, their boredom, and their tears. She’d dreamed of wandering in that darkness, looking for someone, the rooms growing smaller and smaller around her while she felt the waiting presence of something lying very still on a burst and stinking divan, listening for her footfalls with a smile on what had long ago been its face.

Once, very briefly, she’d had a fragmentary image of a Gothic tower in a thunderstorm, the lightning lurid as a carbon-arc flare over seas of churning heather, the rain poundmg in a deserted courtyard—rain that somehow only barely dampened the white dress, the raven curls of the woman who stood at the tower’s gate, gazing with expectation across the wilderness of the heath. Lydia, in the shelter of a broken shed on the other side of the court, had not been wet at all by the rain, though she smelled the soaked earth. She thought the woman was waiting for a horseman. Turning her head, she saw Ysidro nearby, almost invisible in the shadows, dressed as he had been on the balcony, in morning coat and striped trousers with the lap robe held close about his shoulders. His head was bowed, his colorless eyes closed as if deep in concentration, his face the face of a skull.

The dream image snuffed like a guttering candle, and waking, Lydia had heard Margaret crying, muffled, angry, and hurt. Margaret had had very little to say to her that morning and would not meet her eyes. Since their meeting with Razumovsky over a late breakfast, she had addressed all her remarks to the prince, giggling at his flirtations and responding cheerfully to his effort to draw her out.

There seemed to be storytellers everywhere. They sat on dirty rugs and blankets, swaying with the rhythm of their tales, spreading their arms, using their voices to conjure thunder, rage, love, and wonder. Children and teenage boys sat around them, listening eagerly, and even grown men and a very few black-veiled women stood with the air of those in no hurry to leave. Lydia moved toward one and peered shortsightedly at the wares in the surrounding booths. Lady Clapham had told her that each man had his regular pitch, and the man who worked the street of the coffee merchants would no more dream of shifting to the street of the slipper vendors than she herself would have considered walking uninvited into her neighbor’s house in Oxford and appropriating her neighbor’s nightgown and bed.

It was simply Not Done.

As she edged her way a little into the crowd, trying to see past the dark backs of the Greek ladies, a man put his hand on her shoulder and said, “Madame Asher?”

She turned, looking up slightly at the Adonis face, the beautiful dark eyes, of a tall man who moved like an athlete within his tobacco-colored suit. At this distance she could see the close-clipped mustache, the long eyelashes, the pearl buttons of his gloves as he bowed to kiss her hand. He wore a gold stickpin in his cravat, a winged griffin that seemed to regard her with a single, baleful ruby eye.

“I’ve seen your husband,” he said quietly, and, while her breath was still stopped with shock, he added, “Permit me to introduce myself. I am the Baron Ignace Karolyi, of the Imperial Diplomatic Service. May we talk?”

He led her out of the crowd, into the dimness before a shop front where an elderly Greek sewed slippers of colored leather and gave them—most uncharacteristically for a merchant of the Grand Bazaar—not so much as a glance. It occurred to Lydia that Karolyi must have paid him in advance for his disregard.

“Is he alive?”

Karolyi nodded. Although she knew he must be at least thirty-five, he seemed younger and radiated a kind of earnest intensity, like a youthful charmer who has put his charm aside to speak of important things.

“Though I cannot guarantee how much longer that will last. He is in the hands of…” He hesitated artistically, studying her face, like one who debates with himself how much of what he says will be believed. And yet, she realized, he was actually watching her, trying to guess how much she knew.

Like Ysidro playing picquet, she thought, peeking at the stock cards and wondering what to appropriate and what would do him no good.

Her heart beat harder and she thought, Jamie will die if you botch this up.

“He is in the hands of a man called Olumsiz Bey,” he went on after a moment. “A Turk. A truly evil person. Tell no one,” he added quickly, as Lydia pressed her hands to her mouth and widened her eyes as Aunt Lavinia generally did before crying out in horror at the presence of death-dealing spiders or the perfidy of the children of her neighbors. “What exactly did he tell you, Mrs. Asher, that brought you to Constantinople to search?”

He must have been talking to Lady Clapham
. She wondered how much that redoubtable woman had seen fit to tell him—how much she would have considered not worth the trouble of hiding.

“Oh, where, when?” She didn’t expect a truthful answer to the questions and asked them to buy herself time to think, but she had no need to manufacture the panic, the desperation that she threw into her voice. She had never considered herself to be an actress, but any young lady of good society knew how to exaggerate delight or terror, or whatever other emotion was called for. A number of conversations with Margaret over the past week certainly helped her performance.

She clasped her hands to her breastbone. “Did you speak with him? Did he look well?” Has he been in touch with his own department? Do they know I had dinner with Mr. Halliwell? Why would I have come to Constantinople if I didn’t know the kind of danger he was in?

“We did not have the opportunity to speak.” Karolyi’s voice was soothing, a beautifully modulated tenor with the barest trace of a Middle European accent. An eminently believable voice. “He appeared unharmed, though as I said, there is no way of knowing how long that will last. That is why you and I must talk. When you fled from me last night, I feared some rumor or calumny had reached you. I assure you, Madame…” He made his voice earnest, deeply concerned. “I assure you, such rumors are exaggerations, fed by the enmity of our two countries and the suspicions of men who see only threats wherever they look.”