frowned down into the brown liquid within.
He wondered if it was still strange for her to sit at table with kings and queens and her former employer. She seemed at ease, if pensive, which led him to thinking of the change in perspective for one who had spent so many years as a servant, to become one of the blood, a social outcast—or a social entertainment—in a completely different fashion.
There were salons that gathered around his kind, after all, people who would meet with them for sheer exoticism. And Mary, a Negro American, was more exotic than most.
She caught him staring, and gave him a look that said she’d read his mind. He smiled.
They were blood together, and she was his grandchild.
She smiled back.
When the meal was over and Sebastien and his companions had been excused from the Presence, she came to him in the hall. Phoebe was pushing Abby Irene ahead: they would remain here until after the triumphant ceremony scheduled for that afternoon. Mary had already sent a footman to retrieve appropriate clothes from Mrs. Moyer, a kindness for which Sebastien, incapable as he was of dignified travel by daylight, was most grateful.
As they walked, he lowered his voice. She had a predator’s hearing; she would pick out words the mortal women a few steps ahead would not notice.
He cleared his throat and whispered, “It was your idea, wasn’t it, to have Phillip summon us? He wouldn’t have done that on his own.” Sebastien would have spat on those bare scarred flagstones to clear the bitterness, if he’d had the moisture to spare. Abby Irene’s loyalty and service to the Crown had never, in particular, been returned. And how different is that from the manner in which any Crown treats its servants?
She did not look at him. “If anybody can figure out what’s wrong with his wife, it would be you and your friends.”
“Wrong with his wife? She seems delightful to me—”
“Oh, for sure,” Mary said. “But her blood tastes of poison, and though the best doctors in America can find nothing wrong with her, despite all of their efforts, she does not conceive. And the king—” she sighed “—now that it matters, the king is under pressure to set her aside. And then there’s the matter of me—”
“Of course,” Sebastien said. “Who would want a king who seemed to be under the thrall of a wampyr?”
“Thrall,” she said. “If only it were so easy. I’d have him give Abby Irene her Enchancery back, with a big bow stuck to the slates.”
***
In addition to sending for clothes, Mary had requisitioned quarters in the half-assembled palace interior where Phoebe and Abby Irene might nap until they were required to dress for the gala. She had her own duties as the king’s advisor—and whatever other roles she served for both the royals.
But this left the wampyr himself at loose ends. Mary addressed this by showing him into a library whose shelves the Prussians had somehow not entirely stripped, and bid him make himself comfortable. He could have waited—a few hours was nothing for one whose experience stretched back before the Black Death—but there was no percentage in it. Especially in a room full of books, a few dozen of which he found he had not even read before.
But he had just settled himself—well back from the thankfully heavily-curtained window—when long-ago familiar footsteps paused in the hall, and a long-ago familiar scent filled the room as the pocket door slid open again. Sebastien laid his book—a collection of American ‘tall tales’—upon the table, allowing his fingers to stroke its rich leather binding in reluctance before he drew his hand away.
And then he smiled and turned and stood, to greet a man he had not seen since before the war.
Dyachenko was a decade or so younger than Abby Irene. When Sebastien had first met him, he’d thought him fiftyish. A closer acquaintanceship had taught Sebastien that the then-Imperial Inspector was barely forty, but the worry lines were evidence of a life lived hard. And here he was now, seventy-eight if he was a day, stooped and white and—judging by the row of medals pinned to his tailcoat breast—dressed in Ambassadorial finery.
He had been dressed by a valet. Sebastien had no doubt of this: Dyachenko was not in the least rumpled, and the creases in his handkerchief and trousers were knife-sharp. There was no way the old man could have managed that on his own. As a young man, he had been an