of the bed- he said he would never have crossed my life again, would have forced himself to stay away from me, for my own good, except that he needed me. Needed my help. You don't understand him."
"And you do?"
"Yes." She didn't look up.
Lydia drew in her breath, but she felt obliquely that if she came anywhere close to her true feelings, she would probably scream, and that obviously wouldn't do in the dining room of the Hotel St. Petersbourg. Rage at Ysidro drowned her fear- her fear of him, of Ernchester, of the vast uncharted ocean of the world outside university research.
The word she wanted, she realized, was vampire.
Miss Potton raised her head and went on, "I understand that his kind need people they can trust. He told me they will seek for years for a human being large enough of spirit to accept them for what they are, in whose hands they dare to lay their lives. I was... he and I were... This was how it was between us for... for many lifetimes in the past. He said he always knew where I was, but deliberately never contacted me in this lifetime, because in a former life I... I was killed in his service."
"That's the most ridiculous-"
"That's all you can say." Miss Potton regarded her with a steady, pale, fanatic gaze. "But I remember it. I've remembered it all my life in dreams. I just- didn't recall it until last night. And he needed me again, he needed someone, to journey to Vienna..."
"He needed a duenna for me at half a day's notice!" cried Lydia, appalled. "I don't know which is worse, that kind of old-fashioned absurdity or what he's done..."
"He is an antique gentleman," Miss Potton said calmly.
"He is a killer! Not to mention a bigoted Catholic and the most unconscionable snob in shoe leather, and you're a fool if You believe-"
"He isn't bigoted!" The waiter came, bringing a cup of cafe au lait the size of a soup bowl. Miss Potton looked up at him anxiously, as if fearing he would demand payment of her on the spot. Only when he left again without a word did she turn back to Lydia, an eager intensity illuminating her face. "During the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, in the wars of religion in France, Don Simon had a Huguenot servant who sacrificed his life to keep him from being burned by the Inquisition. Later he and I saved that servant's family, got them on a boat for the Americas..."
Lydia stared at her, unable even to reply. Even at the distance of the table's width, Miss Potton was a blurred figure, in her brown wool frock made for someone else and badly altered. Her squashy black velvet hat-startlingly similar to the one Lydia had borrowed from her book-was years out of date. The spectacles hadn't made it into the dreams.
"But I... I know I've dreamed about it before. All of it. Running along the beach, minutes before the first, fatal gleam of dawn; Don Simon turning back, sword drawn to hold the cardinal's men at bay while I got Pascalou's children into the rowboat. The way the sea smelled, and the mewing of the gulls."
Straight out of Dumas. And unforgivable. Lydia tried to stir her coffee and gave it up, for her hand was shaking too badly. For all her careful training in the social niceties, in fashionable flirtation and dinner conversation, she had always regarded the majority of humanity as a slightly alien species, possessors of fascinating circulatory and endocrine systems but, with a few exceptions like James and Josetta and Anne and Ellen, detached from herself and her concerns and largely incomprehensible. She had, literally, not the slightest idea of how to go about warning this poor silly child, talking to her, reaching her through the vampire glamour of dreams.
"Miss Potton," she said at last, in a voice kept level only by years of deportment lessons, "please thank Don Simon for me, but tell him that I'm a grown- up woman and quite prepared to travel by myself. I don't need a lady- in-waiting, as he seems to think. And I don't need him. But if you'll take my advice-"
She saw Miss Potton grow rigid at the word and realized despairingly that she must have said the wrong thing. But she couldn't think of anything else to say. "If you'll take my advice, go back to London." It only made her sound patronizing, she thought in