holding to the doorway as if afraid of rebuke. She'd dispensed with her deplorable hat. Her hair, tightly prisoned in pins on the top of her head, was the one thing about her that was truly as it had been in the dreams, thick, heavy, silky, and black as night.
I did call her a fool, thought Lydia, seeing the hesitation in the other woman's eyes.
But she is a fool!
But telling her so again would not break Ysidro's hold on her.
Lydia took a deep breath, rose to her feet and held out her hand. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't trust him, but that's no reason to... to be angry with you."
Miss Potton smiled tremulously in return. She had envisaged, Lydia realized, a journey in company with a frozenly hostile traveling companion, reason enough to look wretched. "You can trust him, you know," she said, her blue eyes widening with earnestness. "He is a true gentleman."
And a multiple murderer who hasn't been human for at least four hundred years.
"I never doubted that," Lydia said. "Is he there?" She nodded down the corridor.
When Margaret bobbed her head, she went on, "Would you wait here for me? There's something I need to say to him in private."
He was playing solitaire. An abacus, a small calculating machine, and a notebook lay on the table beside the spread of the cards. Four decks. The corridor lights made wan mirrors of his eyes. No light burned above the little table where he sat.
"You summoned her for me, because no lady travels alone, is this correct?"
The pale head inclined. In the near dark she had the impression of a skull surrounded by the spider strands of his long hair.
"Then the corollary would be that no lady travels with a known killer?"
"You've lain with one every night for seven years, mistress," replied the nearly soundless voice. "In my time ladies traveled with them regularly, quite sensibly, I might add, for protection." A white hand, almost disembodied in shadow, laid card upon card and shifted a column; flicked a bead in the abacus; made a note.
"In your time," Lydia persisted, "was it not customary for gentlemen to respect the wishes of the ladies with whom they traveled?"
"If they were not foolish." He turned a card, made another note.
"I won't have you killing while we're traveling together."
Another card, colors indistinguishable in the cinder-colored gloom. He did not look at her. "Unless it be for your convenience?"
Lydia stood for a time, her breath coming fast. Then she turned and strode down the corridor to the restaurant car, leaving him alone turning cards in the dark.
Chapter Six
"My dear Asher, a terrible mistake... a terrible mistake." Dr. Bedford Fairport fidgeted with the cuffs of his gray cotton gloves and flinched away from a stout blond policeman who came through the station-house duty room with a musically inclined drunk in tow. Much was made of Vienna 's reputation as "The City of Music." Asher wondered whether this was what its enthusiasts had in mind. The drunks with whom he had shared his cell the previous night had both sung, though not always the same songs. One was a Wagnerian, the other a disciple of Richard Strauss. It had been a long night.
"Mistake, hell." Asher closed his valise, having satisfied himself that its contents- including the key waxes and counterfeit baggage-room seals in the secret pocket-were untouched. A uniformed clerk offered him a release to sign, then a paper for Fairport. "Karolyi must have seen me when I got off to telegraph Streatham in Munich. I suppose I should be glad it isn't worse."
"The honorable Herr will be staying with Herr Professor Doktor Fairport?"
Asher hesitated; Fairport said, "Yes, yes, of course. Not an imposition at all, my dear Asher," he added, as the two crossed the worn black marble floor and emerged into the chill, misty sunlight of the Ring. "In fact, since I've agreed to be responsible for your conduct, I'm sure the police wouldn't have it any other way. It will be quite like old times."
Asher grinned a little wryly, recalling the clean, small bedroom above what had been the old stables at Fruhlingzeit, the sanitarium tucked away in the quiet slopes of the Vienna Woods.
"You must have spent an appalling night!" Fairport twittered.
"Hideously irresponsible-I shall write to the Newe Freie Presse about the ghastly misconduct of the police in putting simple witnesses wanted for questioning in the general cells! You could have caught anything in that cell, anything from tuberculosis to