the danger remained the same. Lydia was also aware that she had a certain amount of sufferance from Ysidro as long as she told no one of the existence of vampires. If she violated that secret, or if Josetta or Anne guessed-which they surely would-she could not answer for their safety or her own on their return.
Go to Ysidro, then, and ask him to accompany her after all? It would only resurrect the issue of a maid. She wouldn't endanger Ellen, and a chance-hired stranger would be in the same peril and might be more inquisitive and less reliable to boot.
Lydia sighed, slipped the revolver under her single, paltry pillow, and at length drifted into sleep among blankets strewed with wolfsbane, railway timetables, and guidebooks to the eastern reaches of the Austrian lands. It must be the smell of the garlic, she thought, aware that she was dreaming and that the dream was far more vivid-lurid, even- than anything she had dreamed at home. The garlic, or that house in the fog...
She stood on the terrace of a tall mansion, a glory of half-timbering and ornamental stone, with a moon-drenched garden maze on one hand and lighted windows of many-paned glass on the other. Looking in, she saw courtiers in the stiff velvets, the soft-glowing pearls of Elizabeth 's reign. They were dancing, and she could hear the swift and complex run of the music: hands linking, farthingales flouncing, the men all wearing little Shakespearean chin beards and looking silly beyond description in tights and trunk hose and bulging peasecod doublets, the women in skirts hooped out like kitchen tables and in collars of upstanding, wired lace.
A woman stood near the windows, whom Lydia noticed because she was wearing modern garments, a plain brown serge that didn't fit her particularly well and certainly didn't become her. She was plain-faced, with a slightly receding chin, of medium height, and rather pear-shaped without being fat; a wealth of curly black hair lay loose upon her narrow shoulders. Sometimes when Lydia 's eyes left her and returned, she'd be wearing Elizabethan clothing, dull-colored and worked
high to the neck. A servant's gown, or a poor relation's. Her small hands fussed with the jet buttons of her sleeves. Then, very softly, Ysidro spoke.
"You would think, the way they danced, they'd wear something more suited to the exercise, would you not?"
His voice was so quiet Lydia wondered that she could hear it through the glass and over the music. She saw him then, standing at the brown woman's side. His black velvet doublet, his knee-length breeches, his high, supple boots, harked just enough to a later period to avoid the inherent ridiculousness of male Elizabethan garb without appearing anachronistic, and his hueless hair seemed warmer in the torchlight, darkened almost to honey. The girl replied, maudibly, but it made Ysidro laugh, as if he were playing the part of someone else. Can't she see it? wondered Lydia, terrified. Can't she see what he is? For a time they stood shoulder to shoulder watching the dancers in their fairy-tale costumes, the vampire and the girl.
Lydia 's dreams changed, fleeted. She saw them again, this time in another garden, wide parterres of topiary and tapis verte, when he taught the dark-haired girl to waltz in the moonlight under the blank eyes of marble gods. Saw them later kiss beneath the gargoyles of an archway, among crowded houses built on a bridge, torchlight and lamplight from the windows above them red as jewels in Ysidro's eyes. Through another window-two windows, for Lydia herself was in a dark room across an alley that plunged sixty feet down into a canyon of night-she saw Ysidro lying wounded on the girl's sparse bed, the girl bending over him in some kind of old-fashioned garb, knotting dressings over a sword cut in his chest that would have killed a living man. Ysidro moved his hand a little, and the girl bent down to press her lips to his.
"You are different from all these others," she heard him say, in the curtained embrasure of a palace window, the sound of violins like fragile perfume amid the talk and laughter of dancers. Palace of Versailles, Lydia guessed vaguely from the cut of Ysidro's plum-colored silk coat. "How sick I have grown of them, through all eternity. I had not thought to find a woman like you." He raised the girl's hand to his lips.
"We have known one another, loved one another, down through endless time."