little to add. Into the discussion of railway travel, the finer points of picquet, the mathematical odds involved in card play and the structure of music- which Ysidro understood on a level very different from Lydia 's superficial acquaintance-Margaret had interjected periodic observations that she hadn't been out of England before or that she had read of this or that monument or notable sight in a travel book or Lord Byron's memoirs.
She had tried two or three times to deflect the talk from the physical state of vampirism, but when she spoke now, her voice was low, as if she wanted to register a complaint that she didn't actually want the others to hear. Silly, thought Lydia, considering the fact that Ysidro could tell people apart by their breathing.
The vampire moved two cards in his hand, removed three and laid them facedown near the stock, replacing them in his hand with three others. "It may sound odd, but to this day I do not understand what happened to my flesh the night I was taken, in a churchyard near the river, as I was coming home from my mistress... I always had mistresses in those days. Girls south of the river, who cared not that I was a Spaniard of the consort's entourage."
He lifted the corners of two other cards and replaced them in the stock without change of expression.
"I believe that this condition is two separate matters: the matter of the flesh, which preserves the body, not as it is at the moment of death, but as it is in the mind, molding even those who are taken old back into the shape of their living prime; and the matter of the mind, which sharpens and strengthens both the will and the senses, and gives us power over the wills, and the senses, of the living."
Lydia discarded her club and two diamonds, drew another club-the eight-the ace of spades, and the queen of hearts. After four or five games in which Ysidro had systematically bested her, she was beginning to get the hang of the game, a complicated manipulation of points in which she could almost always deduce more or less what Ysidro had in his hand, though as yet the information did her little good. As a teacher, he had endless patience, gentle without being in the slightest bit kind. He had dealt with Margaret's total absence of card sense and her inability to follow or remember rules with a matter-of-factness that had, oddly enough, almost driven the governess to tears. "It is the blood that feeds the flesh," Ysidro said. "We can- and do, at need-live upon the blood of animals, or blood taken from the living without need of their death. But it is the death that feeds the powers of our minds. Without the kill, we find our abilities fading, the cloak of our illusion wearing threadbare, our skill at turning aside the minds of the living shredding away. Without those skills we cannot send the living mind to sleep or make others see what they do not see, or bring them walking up streets they would not ordinarily tread in moments of what feels, to them, to be absentmindedness." Margaret said nothing, but her needle jabbed fast among the flowery lacework in her hands.
He gathered his cards. "Those, by the by, are our only powers, Mr. Stoker's interesting speculations aside. Personally, I have always wondered how one could transform oneself into a bat or a rat. Though lighter in weight than a living man, I am still of far greater bulk than such a creature. But in the speculations of this man Einstein I have found considerable food for thought." "Do you cast a reflection in mirrors?" Lydia had noticed upon coming into the compartment that a scarf-one of Margaret's, presumably, blue with enormous red and yellow roses printed on it-had been draped over the small mirror, and the curtains drawn tightly over the dark window glass.
She recalled her own ghostly image in Ysidro's huge Venetian mirror draped with black lace.
"We do." Ysidro made his discard. "The laws of physics do not alter themselves for either our help or our confusion. Many of us avoid mirrors simply because of the concentration of silver upon their backs. Even at a distance, in some it causes an itch. But chiefly, mirrors show us as we truly are, naked of the illusions that we wear in the eyes of all the living. Thus we avoid them, for