exploded into a puffy mountain of household accounts and pathology notes. Lydia regarded the mess blankly, as if the entire desk were not awash with dissection diagrams, notes on the endocrine system, correspondence from other researchers on the subject of ductless glands, milliners' bills, menus, silk samples, copies of Lancet, and the first draft of her article on pancreatic secretions for the January issue of British Medical Journal, on which she'd been working when Ellen had made her entrance. She shook back the cloud of lace from around her hand and determinedly stuffed the contents back into the drawer, which she then forced shut. She opened two more drawers with similar results, finally poking the telegram down into the side among a sheaf of notes concerning electrostimulation's effect on the production of adrenaline. Her friend Josetta Beyerly was forever joking her about not reading the newspapers even enough to know who the Prime Minister was, as if prime ministers-and in fact Balkan kings- didn't come and go at the drop of a constituency. Reading newspapers only caused Lydia to wonder whether people like Lord Balfour and the Kaiser suffered from hyperthyroidism or vitamin deficiency and how she could find out, and she'd found that the speculation distracted her from her work.
"He says he'll be back today." It was unreasonable of her, she knew, to feel relief. Jamie was perfectly able to look after himself, as she had known last night, lying awake and fingering the heavy links of the silver chain around her neck. When she had dreamed, it had been of a corpse-white face upturned in the distant gaslights of a London alleyway, strangely reflective eyes, and a mouth snarling to show the glint of outsize fangs. She'd awakened then and lain listening to the ram on the ivy until morning. There had been no reason for her to be afraid. Handing off the telegram said. There was no reason to be afraid now.
What was it in the telegram, she wondered, that snagged at the back of her mind like a hangnail on silk?
"Though it would be a shame," she went on thoughtfully, "if he didn't spend at least a little time in Paris, long enough anyway to buy himself a clean shirt and a box of bonbons. He'd only his overnight things with him, you know, for his cousin's funeral."
Handing off.
Why did she think she'd heard the name Ignace Karolyi before? And how on earth was he going to explain the Earl of Ernchester to the Foreign Office men in Paris?
"I wonder if you could get me some of the toast I didn't eat at breakfast?" Lydia asked after a moment.
"Right away, ma'am." She heard the beaming smile in the housemaid's voice, saw it in the way her shoulders relaxed as she turned from the door. Ellen and Mrs. Grimes both considered her too thin, though she had confounded their earlier threats- when she was in school, a gawky and bespectacled fledgling bluestocking-that no girl who went around with her nose in a book and not eating enough to keep a canary alive was ever going to catch a husband. In spite of daily reminders of her undesirableness, Lydia had always been aware that as the sole heiress to the Willoughby fortune, she would be inundated with proposals of marriage the moment she put up her hair.
Jamie told her she was beautiful, the only man she had ever truly believed. Had Jamie ever mentioned Ignace Karolyi to her?
She didn't think so. She cast her mind back to the tall, self-effacing don who sat on the sidelines of her father's garden parties with her, talking of cabbages and kings-telling her about medicine in China and how best to go about studying for responsions without letting her father know. The gentle, competent man who never made demands on her, who guessed that a completely different person hid beneath her careful facade and accepted her exactly as she was. He'd always been close-mouthed, though even as a schoolgirl she'd suspected there was more to him than that almost invisible "brown" mien of his. Reticence was still his habit; after seven years of marriage his stories, like Mark Twain's, usually concerned men and women all named Fergusson.
That was what troubled her now. She'd heard, or read, Karolyi's name in some other context. Read, she thought... She couldn't put a pronunciation to the closing yi. Which meant she'd never heard Jamie say it.
She slipped her eyeglasses out from behind a pile of papers-