you traveling alone abroad like a jauntering slut," he said. "I think your husband would agree with me in that."
"What my husband thinks is my husband's business, and neither yours nor mine," said Lydia. "And I would rather be taken for a jauntering slut than betray a woman who's dependent on me. And if it doesn't suit you, I'll travel by myself."
Ysidro bent and kissed her hand, his lips like silk left outside on a dry night of hard frost. "Bon voyage, then, mistress. And bonne chance in your dealings with the Undead."
With a sensation like waking up, Lydia found herself alone.
It was not, in fact, terribly late to be abandoned in a completely unfamiliar part of London. Though the fog had thickened and the night was growing colder, the streets were still populous, albeit with foreign laborers from the sweatshops that abounded in the neighborhood and with sailors who seemed to accept Ysidro's outdated presumption that a woman on her own was a jauntering slut, at least as far as Lydia could understand their idiomatic references to Master John Thursday and pintle jigs. Evidently, Josetta's suffragist doctrines had yet to penetrate this far. Lydia made a mental note to let her know.
As she had guessed, she wasn't far from the river, and on the broad, electric lit thoroughfare of the Embankment, she had no trouble in finding a cab to take her back to the small hotel near the museum where she had left her luggage.
Taken in the balance, she thought-removing her gloves and unpinning cook's nondescript hat-she was more glad than sorry that Ysidro would not be accompanying her to Vienna. People did travel alone, of course, and there was no reason why she shouldn't, Ysidro's antiquated notions notwithstanding: The world abounded with policemen to be appealed to, porters to be tipped, cabs, guides, travel bureaus, quality hotels with obliging managers, and shops in which to purchase anything she might forget to pack. The lack of a maid would engender certain difficulties, of course, but that was what hotel chambermaids were for.
It was unlikely she would catch up with James before he reached Vienna, but with luck, his cautious nature might keep him out of immediate peril until she could arrive and apprise him of the fact that he was dealing with a double agent-if worse came to worst, she could inform whoever was in charge of the Vienna Department that Dr. Fairport's sanitarium in the Vienna Woods was the likeliest place to search for a clue to James' whereabouts.
If whoever was in charge wasn't taking money from the Austrians as well.
From what James had told her, that was at least a possibility, and Lydia wondered how on earth she'd be able to tell.
Forcing down her sense of panic again, she reviewed such of her luggage as she had unpacked for the night: peignoir, two pairs of slippers-the prettier but far less comfortable ones in case any of the hotel staff came in-rose water and glycerine for her hands, distilled water of green pineapples to alleviate the incipient wrinkles Aunt Harriet had always assured her excessive reading would bring on, silver-backed hairbrush, comb, toothbrush, nail file, curling irons, frizzing irons, hairpins, several sets of underwear, corsetry, petticoats, an array of silver table knives whetted to as deadly an edge as silver would take, and a.38 caliber revolver containing the silver bullets she had had made last year.
Lydia had felt like the heroine of a penny dreadful, packing that along with the talcum, rice powder, rouge, lotions, and perfumes.
There was also the market basket that she'd bought in Covent Garden that afternoon, containing thick braids of garlic bulbs, packets of aconite and whitethorn, branches of wild rose. She wreathed her pillow with them and hung them in the single window of the unheated little back bedroom, and as she undressed and unlaced herself-there were disadvantages to staying in hotels where she was unlikely to meet anyone she or her family knew- she turned over in her mind her other options.
Confide in one of her friends and take her as a companion? Josetta understood politics and feared nothing but, Lydia knew from experience, wasn't particularly practical: she always seemed outraged at being arrested for suffragist activities which, though certainly necessary for the overall strategy of that movement, flagrantly violated the law. Her other close friend, Anne Gresholm, wiser and more intelligent, had lectures and students of her own to tend to, and her health was not good. In any case,