of them fair-skinned and all of them speaking French-and servants in old-fashioned turbans, slippers, and pantaloons bearing silver trays of refreshments. Lydia noticed Miss Potton craning her neck, looking around her, presumably in the hopes that Ysidro would have followed them here after all. "Andrei!" Lady Clapham called out and moved into the crowd, returning a moment later with a hunter-green colossus on her arm. "Prmce Andrei Illlyich Razumovsky, of the Russian Embassy; Mrs. James Asher. His Highness is an acquaintance of your husband, my dear. He was the last one to see him after that affair with the Sultan's guards Wednesday, weren't you, Andrei?"
"The Sultan's guards?" Lydia raised her eyes to the man who towered over her, the impressionistic glitter of bullion, buttons, epaulets, fringe, and a beard of still- brighter gold resolving themselves into a good-humored, handsome face and bright blue eyes as the prince bent to kiss her hand. Slavic facial angle, Lydia thought automatically. Brachycephalic. Cranial index about 82. I %. I really must stop seeing people in terms of their internal structure...
"There was little harm done," the prince said in beautiful Oxonian English and offered her his arm. Lydia followed him back out into the colonnade, where electric lights had been incongruously strung from pillar to pillar. A few men stood at one end of the arcade smoking-Lydia caught the acrid whiff of tobacco, but at that distance they were little more than a clump of black forms spatchcocked with the white of shirtfronts.
The day had been a cold one, and few ladies, bare-shouldered as she was herself, ventured into the sea-chilled darkness.
"Your husband had lodgings here in Stamboul," the prince went on when they were out of earshot of the smokers. "Most Europeans prefer to stay in Pera, of course, particularly since the coup. There haven't been riots among the Armenians in the past week or two, but fighting in the streets between the Greeks and the Turks can't be stopped. Your husband..."
He gazed down at her for a moment from his great height, and Lydia could see him asking himself what he could, in discretion, ask her. The look in Lady Clapham's eyes when she'd said, An acquaintance of your husband, had told her exactly what this "junior attache" did in the Czar's service.
"I know that my husband came to Constantinople to ask the advice of... certain friends." She laid the same emphasis on the last words and met his eyes. The corners of them crinkled in a little smile. Yes, I know my husband was a spy and you still are. Presumably, she thought, Lady Clapham wouldn't have introduced them that way if Russia was an ally of Austria. Whose side was the Ottoman Empire on?
"Ah," he said. "As you say, Madame Asher." His smile widened. "Then you know that he probably had his reasons. You wouldn't happen to know what those were?" She shook her head. "I only knew that he might be in trouble. Sir Burnwell told me he arrived in Constantinople a week ago yesterday, and that nobody's seen him since Wednesday afternoon."
"And what sort of help did you believe you could be?" He spoke kindly, but she could see something else in his gaze. Just because we're allies, Jamie often said, doesn't mean we're on the same side. She felt panicky again, as she had in Vienna, panicky and unable to make a correct choice.
Forcibly, she put the panic aside. "I thought I could recognize the man who might betray him," Lydia lied, with what she hoped was calm. "I don't know his name," she added, and went on at once, "But what happened Wednesday afternoon?" Razumovsky looked as if he might say something else, but changed his mind. Probably, thought Lydia, because he thought it likelier he'd get more information later if he gave a little himself. He might even actually like Jamie- he looked like the sort of person Jamie, and in fact she, would and could like.
"As I said, he had lodgings on the Stamboul side of the Horn." The prince lowered his voice and glanced along the colonnade to the group of smokers again. None looked in their direction, but the prince guided her down the short flight of marble steps that led to an arched tunnel beneath the pavilion, and so through to the dark gardens beyond. "He told no one where they were, and when I saw him, he had the look of one watching over his shoulder. On Wednesday men from