despair. "Have nothing further to do with Don Simon. If you dream about him again, pay no attention. If you see him in the flesh-" "I can't go back." Her small, stiff mouth wore a smirk of triumph. "I gave Mrs. Wendell my notice yesterday morning at breakfast. I'd been up, packing, since three, since Don Simon came to me in my room, spoke to me, woke me from all those years of dreaming. I told her to find someone else to look after her nasty children, for I was done with such things forever."
Lydia could just image how her aunt Harriet would have greeted such an announcement from Nana over her lightly buttered toast and China tea some rainy morning... Not that Nana would ever have done anything so irregular. The poor girl would never get another job. Done with such things forever indeed!
"I have no family," Miss Potton went on, with that same oblique pride. "I have put myself, my fate, into Don Simon's hands, as he has put himself into mine. And it feels... right. True. Good."
"Anything would," Lydia argued, startled, "after spending- how many years were you with Mrs. Wendell?-looking after someone else's children."
The young woman's mouth flinched, and as she averted her eyes, Lydia caught the quick shine of tears. Her first anger was subsiding, and Lydia could see that this awkward girl was only a few years younger than she, and as homely. But Miss Potton had never learned to use fashion and artifice to conceal that fact-or had never had the money to do so.
No wonder Ysidro had found her an easy target when he'd gone questing through London that night, looking for someone whose dreams to invade.
"I'm sorry..." Lydia fumbled at the words. But of course once words are said, there is no I'm sorry.
Miss Potton shook her head. "No," she said, and took a sip of coffee to steady herself. Her voice lost some of its melodramatic ring. "No, you're right. I've been wanting for years to get out of there, to find something else. David and Julia really are the most horrid brats. But that doesn't mean that what Don Simon told me is any the less true. I think I was looking for a way out because I knew there was another possibility. As if the memories of those other times, those other lives, though I couldn't recall them, were alive within me, telling me there was something more."
"They were not." Lydia felt like a monster, wresting a cherished new doll from a child's hand on Christmas morning, breaking it with a hammer before those disbelieving blue eyes.
But there was a scorpion in that doll. A white mantis, thin and stalky and preternaturally still, watching from the shadows with terrible eyes.
"A year ago, Ysidro told my husband that vampires can read the dreams of the living," Lydia went on slowly. "Ysidro is a very old vampire, a very skilled vampire- one of the oldest still in existence, in Europe at any rate. Obviously, he can do more than just read dreams. The-The task I need to perform in Vienna requires his help, and what's at stake is sufficiently important to him that he wants to go with me, but he refuses to do so unless I conform to his medieval standard of womanly conduct. I'm surprised he didn't insist that I bring a chaplain and an embroiderer as well. He picked you because he thought he could get you to leave everything behind and go with him-go with me-at a day's notice."
Miss Potton said nothing but looked down again, picking at a small mend in the finger of her glove.
"Go back to London," Lydia said. "Tell Mrs. Wendell that you had to deal with the affairs of a wastrel brother or a drunken father, and even if she's found another governess, she'll probably relent enough to give you a character for your next post. Don't do this. Don't let Ysidro do this to you."
Miss Potton still said nothing. A motorcar went past on the Boulevard de la Madeleine, popping and sputtering like a company of American cowboys on the rampage. Somewhere a tram horn blatted.
"This isn't any concern of yours. Tell Ysidro that he's... he's welcome to join me in my journey, but that I will not bring a third party into it, either of his choosing or my own... Though you probably don't even know where he's staying, do you?"