the corridors the tobacco fug still lay thick. Miss Potton, after her usual stubborn struggle to play a game in which she had neither aptitude nor interest, had fallen into a doze at Ysidro's side. For nearly an hour the only words exchanged had concerned the lay of the cards and the trading of points, but Lydia suspected that the governess was as jealous of those as she was of other conversations Lydia and Ysidro had.
The wheels clacked steadily, like mechanical ram. Ysidro finished his tally, the steel nib of his pen scratching softly on the cheap yellow pad, the friction of his cuff on the tabletop a dry whisper against Margaret's stertorous breath and the occasional bursts of laughter or speech audible through the compartment wall.
It was a long time before Ysidro replied.
At length he said, "As humans understand it?"
"How do humans understand it?" Lydia gathered the cards, turned them in her hands. Living half by night-half in the sunken silences of darkness-had given her a small degree of understanding of something Ysidro had mentioned early on, that vampires' senses were far more sensitive than those of humans. With blackness pressing the window and gloom thick beyond the circle of the gas burner's solitary light, every sound, every sight, seemed portentous, fraught with meaning beyond the simpler shapes of day.
"You said back in Vienna that Ernchester was a rarity among vampires, because he is capable of love. I wondered what that actually meant."
"As with the living, among the Undead love means different things to different individuals." He turned his head, champagne-colored eyes resting briefly on the woman who snored beside him in her muddle of yarns. After a moment her head lolled more heavily and her breathing deepened still further; she slumped against him, and with a fastidious care he leaned her into the other corner of the seat. In the five days it had taken them to work their way south via local trains- for the Orient Express only left Vienna on Thursdays-through Buda-Pesth, Belgrade, Sofia, Adrianople, waiting sometimes for most of a day for the next train that departed after sunset-Lydia had been occasionally aware of the highly colored romantic dreams that illuminated Margaret Potton's sleep. In all of them Ysidro had been a vampire, outrageously Byronic in black leather and pearls, with daggers sticking out of his boots.
In all of them, love had been implicit. His professed, passionate love for her, bonding them, drawing her like a silver rope into love for him.
Whatever love is, Lydia added to herself. It would hardly do, at this point, for Margaret to hear any true opinion of Ysidro's on the ability of vampires to love.
"It is not unlikely, or even infrequent," Ysidro said, "for those who have the capacity to love others more than themselves to also have the will to make the transition from the living state to that of the Undead." The train jostled around a curve sharper than those found in northerly or westerly Europe. Ysidro put a gloved hand on Margaret's shoulder to keep her steady-perhaps to keep her from waking. He touched her carefully, even with gloves. His hands, Lydia knew, were cold as bone these days. She could tell when he had fed, and she knew he had not hunted in Vienna.
"It is unusual, however, for such a one to survive long after the deaths of those for whom they care. In many cases, friends or relatives constitute the vampire's early victims or fall prey to them in the course of the years. For those vampires who do not avail themselves of the convenience-and the odd comfort- of this resolution to immortality's riddle, there is often a sense of disorientation when family and lovers age and begin to die. In my experience those capable of loving seldom make successful vampires."
In the juddering glare of the gaslight, his face had the appearance of a skull in the ashy frame of his long hair; Lydia wondered whether he had always looked so or whether he had thinned and wasted in the past five days. Margaret stirred in her sleep, and Ysidro turned his face to look at her again, unreadable indifference in his gaze. There was long silence before he spoke again.
"You understand that having become vampire myself at the age of five-and-twenty, my experience of human love is... incomplete," he went on, as if the matter were not one for his concern. "In this case, what love actually means is that someone- one of