that he was nodding his acceptance before my preposterous explanations had even begun.
(And this lesson about mortal peace of mind I never forgot. Even if a ghost is ripping a house to pieces, throwing tin pans all over, pouring water on pillows, making clocks chime at all hours, mortals will accept almost any "natural explanation" offered, no matter how absurd, rather than the obvious supernatural one, for what is going on.)
Also it became clear almost at once that he believed Gabrielle and I had slipped out of the flat by the servants' door to the bedroom, a nice possibility I hadn't considered before. So all I did about the twisted-up candelabra was mumble something about having been mad with grief when I saw my mother, which he understood right off.
As for the reason for our leaving, well, Gabrielle insisted upon being removed from everyone and taken to a convent, and there she was right now.
"Ah, Monsieur, it's a miracle, her improvement," I said. "If you could only see her -- but never mind. We're going on to Italy immediately with Nicolas de Lenfent, and we need currency, letters of credit, whatever, and a traveling coach, a huge traveling coach, and a good team of six. You take care of it. Have it all ready by Friday evening early. And write to my father and tell him we're taking my mother to Italy. My father is all right, I presume?"
"Yes, yes, of course, I didn't tell him anything but the most reassuring -- "
"How clever of you. I knew I could trust you. What would I do without you? And what about these rubies, can you turn them into money for me immediately? And I have here some Spanish coins to sell, quite old, I think."
He scribbled like a madman, his doubts and suspicions fading in the heat of my smiles. He was so glad to have something to do!
"Hold my property in the boulevard du Temple vacant," I said. "And of course, you'll manage everything for me. And so forth and so on."
My property in the boulevard de Temple, the hiding place of a ragged and desperate band of vampires unless Armand had already found them and burnt them up like old costumes. I should find the answer to that question soon enough.
I came down the steps whistling to myself in strictly human fashion, overjoyed that this odious task had been accomplished. And then I realized that Nicki and Gabrielle were nowhere in sight.
I stopped and turned around in the street.
I saw Gabrielle just at the moment I heard her voice, a young boyish figure emerging full blown from an alleyway as if she had just made herself material on the spot.
"Lestat, he's gone -- vanished," she said.
I couldn't answer her. I said something foolish, like "What do you mean, vanished!" But my thoughts were more or less drowning out the words in my own head. If I had doubted up until this moment that I loved him, I had been lying to myself.
"I turned my back, and it was that quick, I tell you," she said. She was half aggrieved, half angry.
"Did you hear any other..."
"No. Nothing. He was simply too quick."
"Yes, if he moved on his own, if he wasn't taken..."
"I would have heard his fear if Armand had taken him," she insisted.
"But does he feel fear? Does he feel anything at all?" I was utterly terrified and utterly exasperated. He'd vanished in a darkness that spread out all around us like a giant wheel from its axis. I think I clenched my fist. I must have made some uncertain little gesture of panic.
"Listen to me," she said. "There are only two things that go round and round in his mind..."
"Tell me!"
"One is the pyre under les Innocents where he was almost burned. And the other is a small theater-footlights, a stage."
"Renaud's," I said.
She and I were archangels together. It didn't take us a quarter of an hour to reach the noisy boulevard and to move through its raucous crowd past the neglected facade of Renaud's and back to the stage door.
The boards had all been ripped down and the locks broken. But I heard no sound of Eleni or the others as we slipped quietly into the hallway that went round the back of the stage. No one here.
Perhaps Armand had gathered his children home after all, and that was my doing because I would not take them in.
Nothing but the jungle of props, the great painted