went to bed more would be lost than gained—unless Ash thought of himself, and only himself entirely.
Not in Ash’s nature.
“Not in my nature to be alone, either,” he thought. There was a leather portmanteau beside Samuel’s glass. Leaving.
Ash pushed very gently past those entering and exiting, giving a little nod and a point of the finger to Samuel to let the harried doorman know he was expected.
The cold died away at once, and with the loud crash of voices and pots and pans, dishes and shuffling feet, there came the warm air like a fluid oozing around him. Inevitably heads turned, but the marvelous thing about any restaurant crowd in New York was that table partners were twice as animated as anywhere else, and always so seriously focused on each other. All meetings seemed crucial; courses devoured in a rush; faces evincing infatuation, if not with one’s partner, then certainly with the evening’s ever-quickening momentum.
Surely they saw the tall man in the outrageous violet silk take the chair opposite the smallest man in the place, a chunky little fellow in heavy clothes, but they saw it out of the corner of the eye, or with a movement of the neck swift enough to injure the spinal cord, and they did not miss a beat of their own conversations. The table was right before the front glass, but then people on the streets were even more skilled at secret observation than the people in the warm safety zone of the restaurant.
“Go ahead and say it,” said Ash under his breath. “You are leaving, you are going back to England.”
“You knew I would, I don’t want to be over here. I always think it’s going to be wonderful and then I get tired, and I have, to go home. I have to go back to the glen, before those fools from the Talamasca start invading it.”
“They won’t do that,” Ash said. “I hoped you’d stay for a little while.” He marveled at the control he managed to maintain over his own voice. “That we’d talk about things …”
“You cried when you said goodbye to your human friends, didn’t you?”
“Now, why do you ask me that?” said Ash. “You are determined that we part with cross words?”
“Why did you trust them, the two witches? Here, the waiter’s talking to you. Eat something.”
Ash pointed to something on the menu, the standard pasta he always ordered in such places, and waited for the man to disappear before resuming.
“If you hadn’t been drunk, Samuel, if you hadn’t seen everything through a tiresome haze, you would know the answer to that question.”
“Mayfair witches. I know what they are. Yuri told me all about them. Yuri talked in a fever a lot of the time. Ash, don’t be stupid again. Don’t expect these people to love you.”
“Your words don’t make sense,” said Ash. “They never did. They’re just a sort of noise I’ve grown used to hearing when I’m in your presence.”
The waiter set down the mineral water, the milk, the glasses.
“You’re out of sorts, Ash,” said Samuel, gesturing for another glass of whiskey, and it was pure whiskey, Ash could tell by the smell. “And it’s not my fault.” Samuel slumped back in the chair. “Look, my friend, I’m only trying to warn you. Let me put it this way, if you prefer. Don’t love those two.”
“You know, if you insist upon this lecture, I just may lose my temper.”
The little man laughed outright. It was a low, nimbly laugh, but the folds over his eyes even showed his sudden bemusement.
“Now that might keep me in New York another hour or two,” he said, “if I thought I was really going to see that.”
Ash didn’t respond. It was too terribly important not to say anything he didn’t mean, not now, not to Samuel, not to anyone. He had believed that all his long life, but periodically he was brutally reminded of it.
After a moment, he said:
“And who should I love?” It was said with only the softest note of reproach. “I’ll be glad when you’re gone. I mean … I mean I’ll be glad when this unpleasant conversation is over.”
“Ash, you should never have drawn so close to them, never told them all you did. And then the gypsy, letting him just go back to the Talamasca.”
“Yuri? And what did you want me to do? How could I stop Yuri from going back to the Talamasca?”
“You could have lured him to New York, put him to work