that lived in the half-deserted shrubberies stared at her for a moment, then poured itself away into the darkness.
What am I doing? wondered Lydia, half in disgust, as she descended the marble steps. Two minutes after the handsome Russian prince warns me "Don't investigate alone," I'm off like the heroine of a cheap thriller...
But something about the shadowy darkness of the palace, deserted once the activity around the kiosks had been left behind, filled her with fear for the sake of the younger woman. The sight of Karolyi had shaken her, and she did not think she dared either wait or go back.
The red light of the lamp caught in the curves of an iron lion posted in what had been flower beds. On a tangle of overgrown rosebush, Lydia glimpsed white threads where a petticoat hem had caught and been pulled free.
There was a door, hidden in the shadows of the three high vaults of ancient brick. It stood open. For a long time Lydia hesitated in the narrow aperture, one hand pressed to the stone jamb, the red-glowing lamp raised to look within.
The stagnant pool a few yards behind her seemed to breathe cold over her bare shoulders, an echo of the damp chill that lay before her in the dark.
Little did she know, quoted Lydia from the aforesaid cheap thriller, in an effort to push back the dread whispering at her heart, what horrors lay crouched in wait for her.
But it was only a stone stairway-used, she thought, but not recently, save for the wet tracks vaguely outlined on the upper step or two.
A woman's slippers.
Idiot, idiot, idiot. She wasn't sure if it was Miss Potton or herself to whom she referred.
At the bottom of the stairs, another open door, and a cavern vast and lost in shadows, where the ruby stain of her lamp smudged pillars, incredibly old, rising out of obsidian water to the brick vaulting of the ceiling low overhead. Of course, Lydia thought. All those pools in the gardens had to be watered from somewhere.
A walkway stretched along one side of the cistern, vanishing very quickly into darkness. Heart beating hard, hoping she'd find Margaret soon, she started along it.
"This is not a wise thing, mistress."
Ysidro's voice was barely louder than a cat's tread in the dark behind her, but somehow it didn't startle her. It was as if, for the second or two before he spoke, she knew he was there. Turning, she saw him on the walkway, dressed, as the men at the palace reception had been dressed, in black morning coat and gray- striped trousers, colorless hair framing a dead man's face.
Her breath escaped in a shaky sigh. "Coming to Constantinople was not a wise thing," she said. "I wondered what you had in that trunk of yours. Did you bring a top hat as well?"
"It is where I can reach it, should I choose to enter the pavilion."
He stepped closer and took her hand, guiding her along the path above the sable pool. The light seemed to follow, like a fish in the depths. Cold as she was, his hand on her waist was colder.
"The sultans used to bring the ladies of the harem up this way, when they watched polo or archery from the kiosks on the terrace."
"Have you found any trace of her?"
"She did not pass you, then?" In the evenness of his voice she read his irritation. He knew whom she meant and what had happened. Then, "My concentration has been on other matters. It is difficult..."
The uninflected words might have been a complete sentence instead of a broken beginning, but Lydia knew what he stopped himself from saying to her. They stood for a moment face-to-face in the open door of another stair, with the lamp between them, as they had stood in the stairway of his London crypt. The blood- hued light made him more alien still, and she had the curious sensation that if she closed her eyes his features would shift and be no longer the face he was always so careful to show the living, but the face he turned away from mirrors in order not to see himself.
'"It's my doing." She wondered what else she could say. I'm sorry I asked you not to kill innocent strangers on the streets, in the train, in the corners of this palace?
In time he said, "No. My own, for supposing I could have my way without price. I will survive it."