He wrapped the girl in the dense velvet weight of his cloak as they stood alone in winter-locked woodlands, moonlight shiny on a meringue of snow beyond the barred shadows of the copse in which they stood. The girl's hair was disheveled, her gown torn, and Lydia knew that Ysidro had rescued her from some peril, and that the bodies of dead men lay out of sight in the gully by a winter-silent stream. Lydia 's own feet were cold in shoes wet with slush as she stood behind a tree with the wet weight of her skirt sticking to her ankles. "Do you not remember?" The girl in brown-it was the same brown dress as before, with the puffed sleeves and wide collar ten years behind current mode-whispered, "I remember, Simon. I remember... everything," and their mouths met in the zebra moonlight.
No! cried Lydia, and though her breath swirled in a diamond cloud, she could produce no sound. He's lying to you! He's going to kill you! Horrified, she fought to run toward them, but black thorns caught her skirts, held her back. She tried to pull free, and the branches cracked beneath her fingers like dried insects. She woke to find herself clutching the bony fragments of hawthorn twig that lay on her pillow.
Lydia took the two o'clock tram for Paris. Even after that strange farrago of romantic interludes by moonlight faded from her dreams, she kept waking with the icy sense that a slender shadow with yellow eyes waited just outside her door. By the time she was awake, bathed, laced, dressed, packed, powdered, perfumed, made-up, and had fixed her hair-no small accomplishment without a maid-and considered herself fit to be viewed by the public, she had missed both the morning trains. Never again, she thought, will I stay at an inconspicuous hotel just to avoid questions from my family. She reached Paris shortly after nine that night, missing the train to Vienna by an hour and a half-it left from another station in any case-and registered, travel-weary and aching, at the Hotel St. Petersbourg that Thomas Cook and Sons had obligingly contacted on her behalf the day before.
Paris, at least, she knew from her days of debutante shopping and educational sightseeing, and later from medical conferences. Her French was good, and she understood how to handle herself in this milieu. Perhaps, she reflected, the journey would be easier than she feared, as long as she took everything methodically, one step at a time, like a complicated dissection or a series of analyses of unknown secretions.
Again she slept badly, her dreams filled with the dark-haired girl in brown and Don Simon Ysidro rescuing each other from the cardinal's guards and trading kisses on the sands of moon-soaked Moroccan deserts. Waking in the darkness, comforter drawn up to her chin, she stared at the slits of reflected streetlamp outlining the shutters and listened to the voices of the cafe down in the street below, wondering where James was and if he was all right. Milk wagons were creaking in the streets when she finally slept.
The Vienna Express didn't leave until seven-thirty that evening, so there was plenty of time, not only to pack and dress properly and have the hotel maid fix her hair, but to do a little shopping at the Magasins du Printemps, which lay just down the street.
She was buttering a croissant in the almost empty dining room and speculating about the pathology of Don Simon Ysidro's fingernails-clearly there had been an organic change of some kind, so the physical side of the vampire syndrome did not involve complete cellular stasis-when she heard the solitary waiter murmur, "B'njour, m'mselle," and glanced up to see another woman enter the room. Even at this distance and without her spectacles, Lydia deduced this woman to be harmless: tallish and slightly stooped, she moved with the uncertainty of one who feels herself to be half a foreigner even in her own country, let alone in a land where she doesn't speak the language.
The next second she frowned, wondering why she thought she recognized her. There was something familiar about her, and as the woman drew near and came a little more into focus, Lydia realized what it was.
She was wearing a brown dress with the puffed sleeves and wide collar fashionable in the nineties.
Lydia set down her coffee cup.
"Mrs. Asher?" The woman stopped beside her table, fidgeting her hands in mended gloves, a look of anxiety in her blue