just as well. A double check showed her that he used orangutans to repeat experiments done on pigs, refusing to take what were, to her eye, quite clear failures as anything more than individual variations in data. Toward the end he'd taken to rerunning additional tests on everything, insistently investigating smaller and smaller points, like a man clutching at straws. Even if Fairport had private funds, he'd have to be staggeringly wealthy to continue such work as long as he had.
And she knew that if he had family money-if he'd been connected to one of the wealthier families in England-her aunt Lavinia would have steered her toward him at some point in her own Oxford days as a potential reference, partner, or colleague.
He'd betrayed James. Taken him prisoner. They haven't even finished digging out the building where the kerosene blew up... If Asher were a prisoner, it would have been down there...
James might have gotten out of town, she told herself defiantly. The police were looking for him. He could have taken a tram, as he always said was best, or a ferry.
Bled almost completely dry of blood...
Tears fought their way to her throat, and grimly she forced them back. We don't know anything yet. We don't know.
"An entire notebook of the historical and folkloric."
The soft voice nearly startled her out of her chair. Looking up, she saw Ysidro sitting opposite, a green cloth-bound ledger open before him. Past the vampire's shoulder the mantel clock was visible, and Lydia was mildly surprised to see that it was now close to three in the morning.
"I hadn't got that far." She reached back to twist her heavy braid into a less schoolgirlish knot. The cook-an excellent woman of broad smiles and a completely incomprehensible language-had left Sacher torte, bread and butter, and a succulent bunch of Italian grapes, should either dziewczyna suddenly find herself in peril of starvation before morning light, and the smell of the coffee warming on the little primus stove was heavy in the room. "And folklore would only be speculative. Even so-called 'historical' personalities-rumors about Ninon de l'Enclos and Cagliostro and Count What's-his-name in Paris..."
"Scarcely speculative at the end." Ysidro turned the ledger, slid it across the table to her, hands like old ivory in the lamplight.
Old man who lived to be a thousand, related the wandering script. Brzchek Village. Woman who lived to be five hundred (wove moonlight). Okurka Village.
Woman who used moonlight to make herself beautiful forever. Salek Village. Man who made a pact with devil, lived forever. Bily Hora Village. Woman who bathed in blood, lived five hundred years. Brusa, Bily Hora, Salek.
She looked up, puzzled. "It sounds like the sort of thing James does-talking to storytellers and grannies and old duffers at country inns."
"I expect Fairport observed the way James went about his questioning and turned it to his own usages." He tilted his head, moved the pile of invoices so he could read the top sheet. His pale eyebrows flexed. "One can, in any case, see the trend of his mind. But orangutans? I have spoken to those who saw James leave this city."
Her breath drew sharply; Ysidro watched her in stillness for a moment, his head a little to one side, like a white mantis, and again his eyebrows flexed, though it was impossible to read the expression in his eyes.
"Walk with me, lady." He rose and held out to her his hand. "The Master of Vienna has given me leave to hunt in this city, if so be that I am circumspect. Should he see us in company, he will know you as a sojourner, and think us chance- met and you harmless prey."
Lydia glanced back at Margaret's snoring form as Ysidro handed her her coat.
Even through the gloves he drew on, and the kid that covered her own hands, his flesh was icy. Automatically, though no one would see her, she removed her spectacles, slipped them in her pocket. The card games had broken her of the habit of hiding her eyeglasses in Ysidro's presence; he had seen her, she reflected, at her four-eyed ugliest and did not appear to mind. Perhaps it was only that he had seen many others worse than she.
He led her down the gilt and marble staircase and through the bossed bronze of the inconspicuous door to the pavement outside.
"You saw the Master of Vienna, then?"
"Count Batthyany Nikolai Alessandro August-and his wives. He has ruled Vienna, and indeed the greater part of the Danube Valley,