called twin ghosts of shadow, merging and circling in a strange cotillion as he led her toward the back stair. "Anthea and Ernchester sleep seldom at the house on Savoy Walk these days. It is best to let memories lie. She scarce ever hunts this early in the night, but it may be that she has gone to her dressmaker."
Lydia checked her watch again as they passed through a downstairs hall: peeling silk wall covering, doors blackly ajar. "I suppose this close to Christmas there'd be one open..."
"If one has money, mistress, one always finds those willing to sell their sleep and their leisure. I have visited my bootmaker at midnight and never found him but that he was consumed with delight."
"What do you tell him?" She couldn't imagine her aunt Harriet's modiste keeping open past seven for Queen Alexandra herself.
Ysidro regarded her with eyes turned amber by the ruddy light. "That I will have none of this foolishness of two-colored shoes, nor buttons up the side." He turned to the room at the top of the stair. "So."
Like Ysidro's house, the chamber held little furniture, and that furniture old. A tester bed with a curving footboard stood against the rotted wall panels, the counterpane as faded as the silk paper downstairs; on the other wall, a blackwood armoire, stained, chipped, thick with dust-choked carving and mottled with water damage. Its doors stood open. Petticoats, corsets, stockings lay across the bed, and with them-separated by the length of space that would have accounted for a large portmanteau-two dresses Lydia immediately recognized as unsuitable for travel, one because of its now-unfashionable leg-o'-mutton sleeves, the other because it was white, a color no sane woman, dead or Undead, would wear on a train.
"She's gone after him," Lydia said, opening the armoire doors. The only dresses there in the current fashion were the decollete silks and sumptuous velvets of evening wear. No waists, no skirts- Lydia peered shortsightedly into the lower drawer, and Ysidro handed her eyeglasses back-and no walking shoes. "She packed in a hurry..."
She halted, frowning, as her eyes adjusted to the sudden clarity and she realized that the tops of the dressers were in disorder: scarves, sleeves, kerchiefs caught in drawers that had been hastily closed.
"The place has been searched." Ysidro, who had passed swiftly into the other room, returned, moving his head as if scenting the air. "Living men, days ago, before she packed, I think. The air still whispers of their tobacco and their blood." He crossed to the bed, studied the garments lying there. All the colors, as far as Lydia could tell in the low amber radiance of candlelight, that a dark woman would wear; everything of the highest quality- Swiss cotton, Melton wool, Italian silk. They were cut for a woman of Lydia 's height, with a waist like a stem and breasts like blown roses.
"Her clothing." Ysidro turned a chemise over in one gray-gloved hand. "None of his. I like this not, Mistress Asher." He let the silk slither away. "For many years now it has only been love of her that has kept him on this earth. She is the strong one. He hunts in her shadow, brittle, like antique glass."
"Might that be reason in itself?" Lydia turned from the dresser, where an ivory hair receiver and ivory-handled scissors spoke of other pieces of a matched toilet set now vanished: brush, comb, mirror. A glove box lay open, gloves of all colors lying like dried and flaccid spiders where they had been spilled. Ysidro lifted a brow.
Lydia went on hesitantly, "Might he be fleeing her?"
"To such sanctuary as the Austrian Empire would afford?" He moved around the corner of the bed, touched the imprint on the dusty counterpane where the portmanteau had rested, and his nostrils flared again, seeking clues from the alien scents of the air. "I would not have said so. She loves him, guards him; she is all in all to him."
He paused for a long time, his face half turned from her, inexpressive as the level softness of his voice. "But it is true that one may hate one's all in all at the same time that one loves. This was something..." Another pause, debating; then he went on, "This was something I never understood as a living man." He met her eyes, expressionless, and she could not reply.
After a time he said, "The Calais Mail departs Charing Cross at nine. I doubt we can prepare swiftly enough to