Gravemould and Ectoplasm

 

 

“Are ghosts real?” asked Lydia Asher of her companion.

“It depends upon what you mean by ‘real’, Mistress,” the vampire replied. He leaned from the step-ladder to take from her hands the small stack of books she offered him, packing-straw whisping down from them like the leaves of a rather disappointing autumn. Arranging the volumes on the library shelf, his long pale fingers moved deftly, tipped with claws like a dragon’s that most people only saw as ordinary nails. “I have seen the shadows of the dead, that men call ‘ghosts.’ But in my experience ‘twas all they were. Shadows.”

The house on Pearl Street had been built, Lydia guessed, sometime before the American Revolution, and had never even been piped for gas, let alone wired for electricity. The high-ceilinged, dark-paneled rooms reminded her of her father’s rambling, pseudo-Gothic country seat at Willoughby Close. But the gloom at the Close had been carefully planned: her grandfather had built the place when he’d come into his fortune in the wake of the Crimean War in the ‘fifties. This small town-house, at the end of an inconspicuous court somewhere in the maze of little streets at the toe of Manhattan Island, was well over a hundred years older. Its walls had the fusty smell of vast age. The darkness that lurked beyond the weak glow of the oil-lamps on the mantelpiece had accumulated with time in the corners, like the exhaled breaths of those who had lived here and died here without ever finding a way out.

Lydia wondered if it was haunted. And if it was, would Don Simon Ysidro care?

“One would think—” Don Simon’s colorless brows tugged together over the slight aquiline of his nose, “—that the spirits of those I myself had killed would have returned to torment me. Yet in three hundred years of living on the blood, and the lives, of my victims, not a single one of them ever disturbed my rest. Only now, when I have ceased to kill—”

He paused, and turned his attention to his newly-acquired books – the beginning, Lydia suspected, of a library as vast and untidy as the one he had left behind him in London, early that spring. She wondered where he’d bought them. Nothing was being shipped over from Britain or Europe, on account of the danger from German submarines. Yet some of those that she unpacked, and handed up to him, were frighteningly old, crumbling tomes in Latin and Hebrew and languages still more obscure, things she hadn’t thought would have been available in America.

She asked, as she passed a dark-bound copy of von Junzst’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten up to him, and his death-cold fingers brushed hers, “Do you dream of them now?”

“’Tis odd.” He dropped off the portable steps, a young man’s movement, light and restless – and he did indeed look as he had when he’d been taken by a vampire back in London in 1555, in his mid-twenties. “When the poisons that changed my flesh – that fixed in me the mental powers of the vampire state without need to fuel them with human deaths – were tearing me to pieces, the voices, the thoughts, of my victims were ever with me, a torment worse than the agony of the flesh.* Now I am aware of them still, but like…”

His eyes narrowed – pale sulfur-yellow with pleats of gray and a dark ring around the iris. Of a piece with the colorless silk of his long hair, the fine-grained alabaster of his skin which had only resumed its human coloration after a kill… in the days when he had made kills. He had told her once that only a few vampires “bleached” in this fashion: in three hundred years of studying the vampire state, he had never yet learned why.

“’Tis as if I lived every one of their lives, from earliest childhood until the moment I took them,” he went on in that dry, whisper-soft voice. “As if they are near to me – at my very elbow… Closer. As if I can step through a door and become them, each of them, every fiber of flesh and memory down to the marrow of my bones.” He turned his hands, looking at the long fingers, the pale, glassy claws, as if for a moment he didn’t recognize them. As if he saw instead the rough hands of some London laborer of Shakespeare’s day, the callused fingers of a drunken sailor wandering lost from Nelson’s Victory…

“As if they watch me.”

He stooped to select another handful of books from the packing-crate on the floor by the steps, his yellow eyes turned from hers. “Why do you ask?”

“Well,” said Lydia, “I’ve been asked to go to a séance.”

Don Simon straightened up, and his eyebrows ascended a polite quarter-inch. Beyond the end of the narrow passway that led from Pearl Street to the house – muffled by the solid blocks of soot-blackened brown brick tenement buildings – the rattle of the elevated train punctuated the darkness. It was early yet in the spring night – not long after full dark – and Lydia had come to her friend’s home through an odiferous bustle of dark-coated peddlers hawking mousetraps and old shoes under the train-tracks’ metal girders, of men clumped on the flagways smoking outside the harsh glare of countless saloons. Newsboys had been waving the day’s banner headlines: CONGRESS DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY.

The windows of those four- and five-storey buildings glowed dimly with oil-lamps no brighter than those in this quiet chamber, muzzy with the river’s April fog.

“I had thought,” Don Simon said, “that you had had a sufficiency of séances on the voyage from England, Lady.” One of the passengers on the liner that had brought Don Simon – an unwilling prisoner – and Lydia, his deeply worried prospective rescuer, to America had been a renowned “medium” with an astonishing assortment of spirit cabinets, hidden wires, and self-playing tambourines. “Wish you for further conversations with the deceased?”

Lydia forbore to mention that she was at the moment having a conversation with someone who had been deceased for three hundred and sixty-two years, and, removing her spectacles, polished the thick lenses with her handkerchief, against the books’ powdery dust. “I don’t exactly wish it,” she explained after a moment. “Although I was very much interested in how Madame Izora, on the ship, achieved her effects… though of course it would have been rude to ask. But Mrs. Cochran has asked me to go with her to see this Professor Fontaine, since the Princess Gromyko is refusing to go. She – the Princess – says that Madame Izora forbids it.”

Both the Russian Princess Natalia Nikolaievna Gromyko – the spiritualist Madame Izora’s patroness and devoted client – and the extremely wealthy widow Belle Cochran had been Lydia’s fellow-passengers on that submarine-haunted voyage to New York. It had been, in fact, on the ill-fated voyage that Mrs. Cochran had become a widow. And though she had detested the late Spenser Cochran, and had feared his ruthlessness and his power, Lydia felt a twinge of pity for the widow. Not, so far as she could observe, that Mrs. Cochran seemed to feel the slightest regret for the man who had left her (according to the New York Herald) thirty million dollars. (Thirty- two, Madame Gromyko had reported. “These newspapers never get anything right, darling.”)

Or perhaps, Lydia reflected, it was just her early training. Her governess and her aunts had taught her that one had to make a special effort to help and support widows through the days of their bereavement. Though she had fought vampires in Constantinople and the un-dead revenants in the mountains of China with relatively few qualms (to say nothing of performing battlefield surgery under shell-fire in the trenches of the Western Front for two years), Lydia shrank from saying “Oh, PLEASE, you don’t really BELIEVE that nonsense, do you?” to a woman who had asked for her company on an occasion when she believed she might encounter her late husband.

A little hesitantly, she went on, “The thing is, Madame Izora – who seems like a perfectly nice person, in spite of all those little stories she’s always telling about having had tea with Cleopatra – says that this Professor Fontaine is evil.”

“’Tis what I would myself say,” remarked the vampire, “were I a seer in danger of having my wealthiest client consult a rival prophet. Evil,” he added thoughtfully. “Not fake, nor dishonest. Though a seer who runs bell-wires beneath the carpet to ring chimes on a table across the room must needs be circumspect about accusations of trickery, I suppose.”

“Is that how she did it?” Lydia carried another emptied box to the hall door, for one of Don Simon’s day-servants to clear away come morning. “I wondered about those bells. But I… Mrs. Cochran deeply believes in this sort of thing. In hauntings, and portents, and the… the presence of the dead in our world. She asked me specially – Well, she asked me after Natalia turned her down – would I go with her. I think she rather expects to receive a communication of some kind from her late husband—”

“A request for a patent fire-extinguisher, I daresay.”

“Beast.” She nudged him sharply in the arm. “It is the first such séance that she’s gone to, since his death. Whatever her awful husband did, she herself has never been anything but kind to me… and Madame Izora does seem to have an instinct about people. And Mrs. Cochran has just inherited a tremendous amount of money.” Lydia frowned across into the vampire’s eyes, for he was her own height – five-foot-seven – and built slight, despite the preternatural strength of the Undead. “I’d just rather she didn’t go by herself, that’s all. And I wondered if I could talk you into being so good as to come with us?”

“Letting the dead bury – or at least call upon – their own dead, as Scripture admonishes?” He inclined his head. “’Twill give me greatest pleasure, Mistress.”

*

Upon her arrival in New York at the end of March, Lydia – aware that if the United States did join in the war between Britain, France, Germany and Russia that had been going on since 1914, it was unlikely that it would be safe to cross back to England until the fighting was over – had purchased a rather tumbledown mansion on Charles Street in Greenwich Village. The wealthy American matrons she had met on the voyage had informed her that only les nouveaux riches were seen puttering around the city streets in automobiles (“As well be carting turnips in from New Jersey, child,” had declaimed Mrs. Harold Tilcott, before returning to Philadelphia with her love-struck son in tow. “It may be 1917 but it’s no reason to abandon the good sense and tradition of keeping one’s carriage, in order to contribute to the noise and the stink of an already noisy and stinking world.” Her son, she had proudly added, was a participant in the fine old art of coaching, and could drive a four-in-hand better than any man in Society.)

But though the house on Charles Street had stabling for eight horses, Lydia reflected that not only the horses themselves, but such gentlemen as coachman, grooms, and stable-boy, were likely to be in short supply if indeed war was declared. Thus she had hired a Pierce-Arrow town car and – male servants being already scarce – a chauffeur (or should that be chauffeuse?) named Dolores Rickman, on a six-month contract, room, board, and livery included. It was Dolores who drove Lydia and Don Simon Ysidro to the Cochran mansion on Fifth Avenue the following evening. Mist hung over the city again, and the asphalt pavement glistened with moisture. In the glow of the electric street-lamps, Lydia observed a sleek, varnished town brougham standing before the high steps of the house, and in this Belle Cochran – with Lydia and Ysidro in tow – made the journey farther up-town and eastwards to the modest brownstone of Professor Fontaine on 91^st Street.

“Allow me to tell you how deeply grateful I am for your company, my dear Mrs. Asher.” Belle Cochran laid a long, thin hand on Lydia’s kid-gloved wrist. “Oliver – my dear husband’s secretary, you know – wanted to accompany me, but I know that no spirit will manifest itself in the presence of an unbeliever.” She sighed, and shook her head, a tall, rather rangy woman of fifty, her graying, sandy hair braided and piled in the fashion of the ‘nineties and decorated with a medium-sized and extremely ugly diamond tiara. The diamonds were interspersed with dark amethysts, presumably to go with her evening-gown of black gauze and sable crepe. Lydia had never seen the American lady unencrusted with as many diamonds as she could fit onto wrists, throat, belt-buckle, fingers, ears, and corsage. Shoe-buckles, too, her maid Ellen had informed her on the strength of gossip with the Cochran servants.

“I trust,” continued Mrs. Cochran in her treacly Georgia drawl, “that Don Simon is a believer in communications from the Blessed Land as well?” She looked across at the vampire in the curtained gloom of the coach, and Don Simon inclined his head.

“Can one be otherwise?” It was part of the vampire’s ‘glamour,’ as the old legends called it, that nobody ever noticed Don Simon’s fangs, the way they never noticed his claw-like nails (on those occasions when he did not wear gloves) or the fact that he didn’t breathe. “Nothing else makes sense.”

Lydia glanced sidelong at the pale aquiline profile as he helped first Mrs. Cochran, then Lydia from the carriage. So far as she could tell, Don Simon had centuries ago settled into the stillness that she had seen in other vampires: gesture, expression, tone of voice leaching gradually away until only a predator’s motionless calm remained. Even so, he managed to sound as if he believed what he said, and Mrs. Cochran fairly glowed with content.

That was another aspect of the vampire ‘glamour.’ Had he not relinquished hunting in the wake of his poisoning and cure, Lydia was certain that the older woman would have cheerfully gone down a dark alley with him, no questions asked.

Professor Albertus Fontaine welcomed them in a small parlor on the brownstone’s ground floor, a room decorated in the lush, dark hues of Queen Victoria’s reign. Half a dozen paraffin lamps provided illumination, as well as gas-jets, each glittering in its aura of dangling crystals and beads. The Professor himself was tall and thin, his dark hair streaked with silver and his aristocratic features embellished with a grizzled Vandyke beard. A single, blood-red rose-bud accented the soft cinder-gray of his clothing. Lydia had the impression that this was precisely how an actor would look once he got a little past playing romantic leads, but chided herself for her cynicism. Mrs. Cochran, and her friend the Princess Gromyko – and the other people assembled in the parlor in evening-dress (not to speak of a number of Lydia’s own nieces and cousins back in England) believed whole-heartedly in communications from beyond the grave and, she was aware, took great comfort in them.

And if such things DO exist, she reflected uneasily, will I prevent them getting that comfort by giving off the wrong sort of ‘vibrations’ this evening?

She still thought Professor Fontaine looked like an actor. And that the giant, carven “spirit cabinet” of ebony which dominated the upstairs salon to which Fontaine led them looked like a prop.

She found that she knew two of her fellow “Seekers,” as Professor Fontaine described them, with a graceful gesture of his white-gloved hands. She had met Mrs. Albany Prewitt (née Schuyler, her Aunt Louise had made sure to tell her) at Aunt Louise’s palatial apartment in the Apthorp Building, a widow as deeply wedded to the requirements of Good Society as Aunt Louise was but far less intelligent. As Mrs. Prewitt was also far less ruthless, Lydia rather liked her, and her own training – under the aegis of four rigidly correct aunts and a nanny who could have made Queen Boadicea cower – had given her great skill in maintaining conversations with people whose views she found ridiculous. She spoke with friendly re-assurance in answer to the lady’s long account of symptoms and the patent-medicines she took for them, and – being a physician herself – tried to warn her off the worst of them. She asked a trifle diffidently about Mrs. Prewitt’s daughter Violet. Violet – Vinny, she called herself – was eighteen, smoked cigarettes, and had recently been sent home from the Hall School for kissing the piano teacher.

“Worse than smoking,” Mrs. Prewitt added darkly. “I suspect she uses dope…”

Lydia didn’t say, because it was actually none of her business, What do you think is in all those Female Elixirs you’re taking? She could not help noticing that the young woman accompanying Mrs. Prewitt wasn’t Vinny, but a shy blonde dumpling named Sophie.

Evidently Vinny was still in disgrace… or perhaps she had expressed “skepticism” about her mother’s “search for truth,” as Mrs. Prewitt described the evening’s projected activities.

Lydia’s other acquaintance in the parlor that evening was Count Dmitri Trubeskoy, one of the growing group of so-called “White” Russians who gathered around the Princess Natalia Gromyko: nobles and well-off professionals who had fled the growing chaos in Russia which had culminated, only three weeks previously, by the overthrow of the tsar and the establishment of a Republic. Whenever Lydia took tea with the Princess, the talk was of schemes to re-instate the fallen autocrat – who was apparently living quietly outside St. Petersburg and waiting to be given asylum in Britain – or to raise money for troops (How are they going to do that if they can’t even keep soldiers on the battle-front against invading Germans? Lydia had the good sense not to ask), or to obtain assistance from one Western power or another. She had learned, only peripherally and in passing, that the reason for the hawk-faced, white-haired old gentleman’s silence at such gatherings was fear for the safety of his daughter and grand-children, who had been in St. Petersburg when the final round of rioting had broken out. Everyone else had been too preoccupied complaining of the iniquities of the new government.

She took his hand and inquired, in the French that was the language of the Russian court, whether he had had any news “from Russia—“ She wasn’t about to mention the word “family” or “your grand-children,” – and he shook his head, thanking her with his eyes.

“Myself, I think my family must have gone to our estate in the Urals,” he said quietly, and introduced her to the woman with him, who turned out to be his sister.

By that time the party had ascended the dark staircase – illuminated only by the branch of candles borne by Professor Fontaine – and entered the upstairs salon, which ran the whole length of the house, front to back. The windows which would have looked out onto the rear yard were heavily curtained with dark velvet – it was impossible to determine colors in the shadows, which the vague, somber pattern of the wallpaper seemed to render thicker. Between the windows the Spirit Cabinet stood, like an enormous armoire carved of black wood and curtained in dark velvet. Professor Fontaine opened the cabinet’s curtains and invited all seven “seekers” to inspect its interior – which was also curtained, though he quite willingly parted those drapes to display ebon walls, nearly invisible due to the dense darkness at that end of the room.

“You can see,” he said, thumping on the woodwork, “that there are no secret panels or hidden doors.”

Lydia could see nothing of the kind – nor practically anything else – and doubted that anyone in the room could have told the difference between a “hollow” thump and an ordinary one. But again, she held her peace, reminding herself that the young man at her side was, technically, the stuff of the same sort of legends.

Or had been, anyway. If vampires were blood-drinking ghosts, what did one call one who had seemingly passed beyond the need to drink blood to maintain his psychic powers? Merely a ghost? The shadow of the dead, as he had said? The shadow of a shadow?

The hand that guided her to the chair indicated by Professor Fontaine – at a round table in the center of the room – was, even through his glove, cold as a dead man’s, but perfectly solid and real.

The candelabra was set on a sideboard, where two others already burned. “When the spirits come, the table sometimes moves,” explained the Professor, casually, as if this was a commonplace event. Since it was a marble-topped pedestal table Lydia didn’t imagine there would be much difficulty in installing some kind of hydraulic piston under its supporting center-post. Everybody else nodded their acceptance of this explanation. Only the girl Sophie gazed around her with frightened eyes, and clung close to Mrs. Prewitt, like a child.

The “seekers” joined hands, palms and fingers resting on the table-top. Mrs. Prewitt, and Mrs. Cochran, were on either side of the Professor; Lydia and Don Simon were separated, with Sophie and the Countess Dologoruki (old Count Dmitri’s sister) between them. Lydia glanced from face to face, glad that she’d kept her glasses on, despite her Aunt Louise’s repeated admonitions never to wear such things in public. By the way Sophie moved her head, Lydia guessed she was as nearsighted as Lydia was herself. For a long time there was silence, with only the dim flicker of candle-flame, and the asthmatic hiss of Mrs. Prewitt’s breath. This far uptown there wasn’t even the faint occasional rattle of traffic, and what there was, was presumably muffled by all that velvet on the windows…

Then Lydia heard the faint strains of a violin. Genuine music, she thought. Though not musical herself, she had a good ear, and could tell the difference between the sound of a gramophone and that of a real instrument. She felt Sophie’s hand twitch violently under hers. Heard the whisper, all around the table, of indrawn breath.

Cold wind touched her face. The candles nearest the spirit cabinet blinked out.

And, yes, the table was vibrating, shuddering (the music had grown louder, enough to cover, Lydia thought, the faint scrape of machinery under the table – I’ll have to ask Simon about it on the way home…). Slowly it rose, tilted slightly one way and then another, and Professor Fontaine asked in his deep, velvet voice, “Octavia, are you here?” Octavia, Mrs. Cochran had explained in the carriage on the way over, was the Professor’s spirit “control,” a young Roman slave-girl who had been put to death in the reign of Tiberius for refusing the importunities of her master’s son.

Sophie gasped, and everyone turned their heads towards the spirit cabinet.

The dark curtain had parted a little, and in front of it Lydia could make out an indistinct, glowing form.

The table lowered itself back into position. Beside her, Mrs. Prewitt whispered sharply, “Don’t break the circle!” though whether this instruction was to Lydia – whom she clearly presumed to be a newcomer – or to Sophie, wasn’t clear.

Lydia’s eyes went to Simon’s. Caught, briefly, their enigmatic mirror-gleam.

“I am here.” The soft, feminine alto came definitely from Professor Fontaine’s lips. “We are all here.”

Lydia wondered if she should address Octavia in Latin, but put the thought away. She hoped that the same idea had not occurred to Don Simon. She – and he – were after all here as Belle Cochran’s guests, not as skeptics.

The glowing form moved, rippled a little, as if an arm outstretched, and – through Fontaine – “Octavia” said, “Belka…”

Count Trubeskoy made a noise in his throat, of joy and grief painfully mixed. “Margarite…”

“So glad,” came the womanly voice from the Professor’s lips, speaking now in French. “So glad you are here, Belka, not back in Petersburg. Mama is here, and prays for you, daily, here in the land where it is always summer.”

“Margarite…” He was weeping. His sister, beside him, tightened her fingers around his and Lydia saw tears in her eyes, too.

“We are well,” said the voice. “We are all well.”

“And Masha?” he asked, his voice trembling. “Tashka? Innushka?”

“Well, well… all of them are well…” The words faded as they were spoken. “So happy…”

Then the voice changed, as it switched back to English (How did a first-century Roman slave-girl learn English?) – “Is there someone here named Allie?”

And Mrs. Prewitt, half-turned in her chair to face the cabinet and the glowing apparition, gasped, “I’m Allie! I’m – Oh, good God, nobody’s called me Allie since… Frank! Frank, is that you? Are you there?”

“He is here,” said “Octavia” softly. “A man stands beside you, behind your shoulder. A small man with a mustache. His face is lined, but his eyes are full of love.”

Sophie gasped, and she stared at her aunt as if she expected to see “Frank” glimmering in the darkness at her elbow. Mrs. Prewitt turned in her chair and on Fontaine’s other side, Mrs. Cochran whispered sharply, “Don’t break the circle, Albany!” even though Mrs. Prewitt had actually released Lydia’s fingers. Mrs. Prewitt grabbed them again and evidently this made no difference to “Frank,” because “Octavia” said, “He says his heart is filled with grief, Madame. He says, only you can help him.”

“Oh, Frank…”

“He says,” went on “Octavia,” “that he has been betrayed. That you have been betrayed. He cries out, How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, to have a thankless child!”

Young Sophie gasped, “Oh!” and would have put her hand to her rosebud lips had Lydia not tightened her grip on the soft little fingers again.

Mrs. Prewitt cried, “I knew it!” and both anger and triumph sparkled in her eyes.

“A name…” Octavia’s voice wavered to a whisper again – The man must have taken voice lessons, reflected Lydia, watching Fontaine’s tense face curiously. “Deceiving you… both of them… A name…”

“What name?” By the sharp note in her voice – by the tension in her shoulders, and in the grip which she tightened on Lydia’s left hand – Lydia guessed Mrs. Prewitt already had a candidate in mind.

“He says, he wanted it all for you.” Octavia sounded now as if she were miles away. “He toiled the whole of his life, that you would have it. That it would go to one worthy of help. He sees her, now, this minute, sweaty and laughing in the back-seat of a red car. He says, I did not work for you – work for your care – that the harlot that breaks your heart should sniff cocaine from the crease of a hundred-dollar bill. She is not worthy… she is not worthy…”

“I knew it! That scoundrel Della Robbia—”

“For one who cares for you.” The sweet alto voice had faded to a thread. “For one who will care for you in your illness… He says, I can no longer be there at your side, my honeybee. But I beg of you, reward the one who can. Ah!”

Professor Fontaine’s head dropped back, and with a shattering sigh, his body went limp. He lay back in his chair like a beautiful martyr, and Lydia saw that the blood-red rose-bud in his buttonhole had opened, miraculously (when nobody was looking), into an exquisite bloom. The ghostly shape of “Octavia” had vanished: Count Trubeskoy cried, “What is that?” and Lydia was able to make out – dimly – a small white patch on the carpet just about where the specter had seemed to be standing.

Since the séance appeared to be over, Mrs. Cochran sprang to her feet and went to pick it up. Mrs. Prewitt gasped, “Sophie! Oh, dearest, my medicine! I feel one of my spasms coming on!” And while everyone clustered around one or the other – Countess Dologoruki fetched the only candelabra from the sideboard which had remained alight – Don Simon walked over to the spirit cabinet and peered behind its curtains.

Lydia took off her glove and felt Professor Fontaine’s pulse, which appeared to be perfectly normal (Though how SHOULD a pulse feel, when one faints from excess of ectoplasmic exposure?). In the dim jumble of shadow and candle-light, she thought she saw his eyes move beneath the lids.

“Professor?” she said. “Is there water anywhere here?”

“This might help him—“ Mrs. Prewitt thrust a little bottle into her hand: Metcalf’s Coca Wine, For fatigue of mind and body…

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Mrs. Cochran assured Lydia. “It isn’t at all uncommon for a medium to lose consciousness from the stress of contact with those in the Blessed Land.”

Mrs. Prewitt had snatched the paper from Mrs. Cochran’s hand. She held it out to Lydia, her own fingers shaking. “I knew it,” she whispered again. “Look at it…”

The letters, BUNT had been dimly daubed onto the thin, crinkling surface in some kind of greenish-brown pigment. Like a moss-stain, or a dirt-stain… Lydia’s nose wrinkled at the sour smell, decay and earth…

“Bunty Della Robbia,” panted Mrs. Prewitt. “I knew it. I knew it! A vile young man! Vinny said she had a headache tonight – I knew she was lying. But to throw herself into the arms of that disgusting, dope-taking, immoral foreigner—!” She clutched the paper to her chest, then took a quick slug from the little bottle of Metcalf’s Coca “wine”. “Oh, Frank! Oh, that he would come from Beyond, to warn me of what that… that ungrateful hussy is doing—!”

“Smell it,” whispered Mrs. Cochran. “The mould of the grave.”

Well, reasoned Lydia, accepting from Don Simon’s hand a glass of water and wetting her handkerchief in it to daub Fontaine’s cheeks, at least it wasn’t written in blood…

*

“According to the Princess Gromyko,” reported Lydia, three evenings later, when Don Simon called on her to take her to the opera (Carmen – “I am devoured with curiosity as to what the Metropolitan Opera Company thinks Spain is like,” the vampire remarked), “this Bunty Della Robbia is a thoroughly bad hat. He’s purportedly the son of an Italian count, Oxford educated, and here in the United States as the result of an ill-timed visit just before the Lusitania was torpedoed. He’s also devastatingly handsome, and supposedly one of those people who not only lives a life of debauchery, but likes to draw others into his pastimes. My guess is that he has been courting – if the word can be used these days among that set – Miss Prewitt for the sake of her father’s fortune, which Aunt Louise informs me derives from railroads, banking, New York real estate, and runs to about forty million dollars.”

She frowned at her reflection in the mirror, with her slightly old-fashioned chignon of thick, cinnamon-red hair already losing its laborious curls and the tiny cornet of emeralds which, these days, slightly embarrassed her. The fighting was going on, worse than ever, in France, in Russia, everywhere in Southern Europe. The men with whom she’d worked elbow-to-elbow at the casualty clearing stations only a few miles from the front-line trenches were still there, uniforms stiff with muck and dried blood and creeping with lice – those of them who weren’t dead. Jamie was there, somewhere – her husband, whom she hadn’t seen in…

She pushed the thought away, of how long it had been. Even the thought of him filled her eyes with tears.

There was something, to her, faintly disturbing about the stylish green silk she wore, the soft masses of chinchilla that her maid, Ellen, held ready to wrap her in. He could be freezing to death, wherever he is…

He could have frozen to death weeks ago, and I not know…

Stop it.

Her glance went to Don Simon. He would know.

It was a thing that very old vampires could do, in addition to casting the illusion of life, the illusion of urgent and absolute desirableness, on the minds of the living. Old vampires, skilled vampires, could step through into the dreams of those whose eyes they met. It was one of those psychic powers which Don Simon seemed to have retained – though not reliably or consistently – when he had passed through the poisoned ordeal of change.

He would have told me…

In his evening clothes he had a remote beauty, like an angel – or a demon who wanted you to walk down a dark alley with him. He asked, “And to whom does the late Mr. Prewitt’s fortune go, should his widow choose to disinherit his daughter, on the word of six yards of phosphorus-impregnated cheesecloth and a ventriloquist?”

“Is that what it was?” The matter-of-fact question about the hoax made her feel better at once. “Cheesecloth?”

“They must have rinsed it a half-dozen times, yet still a faint odor lingered. The trap-door was in the back of the cabinet, which was I daresay too dark for most eyes—“ His own cold yellow gaze slipped sidelong to Ellen and he clearly omitted saying, the eyes of the living, “—to make out—”

“But the cabinet stands between windows on an outside wall—”

“The cabinet stands between windows,” he corrected. “I am sure, did one put back those curtains, one would see simply the false wall which screens the rear eighteen inches of the original room. ‘Tis a very long chamber, and dark. All of which would add up to the mere entertainment of an evening, were it not—”

In the hallway beyond the parlor, the door-bell rang sharply. Ellen said, “If you’ll excuse me, Miss—M’am. Sir.” At Lydia’s assenting sign the tall, dark-haired serving-woman laid the furs tenderly on the couch, and a moment later Lydia heard her voice in the hall asking whom she should tell Mrs. Asher was calling?

A moment later the hall door opened and Vinny Prewitt swept tempestuously into the parlor. “Oh, Mrs. A, thank God I caught you!” She was a tall girl – as tall as Lydia – but much more voluptuously built. The straight lines of the newest fashion sat awkwardly on her Rubenesque curves. Her dark hair, bobbed short under a cloche hat, contrasted startlingly with eyes of a bright tourmaline blue, heavily painted round with mascaro and filled with frustration, rage, and hurt.

She grasped Lydia’s hand, went on, “Anna – the Countess Dologoruki – tells me you were part of that… that comedy on Friday night. What really happened? She says my father—“ Her voice stuck, just slightly, on the words, but she went on, her eyes very bright and hard. “That fraud told Mummy that my father had come back from the grave to tell her that I was sleeping with Bunty Della Robbia, of all the disgusting cake-eaters! And—Oh,” she added, seeing Don Simon for the first time. She colored under her rouge as she took in the soft straight folds of Lydia’s evening dress, the delicate necklace of emeralds and diamonds and the glitter of jewels in her hair.

“I’m sorry. You’re just going out.”

“I think we can do without the first act.” Lydia glanced at Don Simon, who inclined his head and asked,

“Would you prefer me to wait in the other parlor, Miss – Prewitt, I assume?”

Lydia performed a hasty introduction, and Vinny Prewitt said, “Oh, you were there too, weren’t you, Mr. – Don Simon. What happened?” She looked from the vampire to Lydia, who had whipped her glasses off when the doorbell had rung and now gestured the girl to sit down. “The first I heard of it was this afternoon, when I got a letter from Mummy’s lawyer saying she’s changed her will… and a rotten note from Mummy’s secretary, informing me of the same thing and saying that Mummy spent the week-end in bed having spasms because of my betrayal—which I notice didn’t keep her from calling her mouthpiece.”

She clenched her fist and turned her face quickly aside. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’m just – It isn’t true. Mummy—”

She shook her head. She was less beautiful than handsome, with a square jaw and wide, mobile lips, and big hands like a man, crusted with flashy rings. Lydia had met her twice at the Princess Gromyko’s – briefly, for both times she’d taken her leave when her mother (with the mousy Sophie dutifully in tow) had entered the room. From Mrs. Prewitt Lydia had heard volumes concerning her daughter’s dissolute way of life and how she had, shockingly, only a few months before, gotten her own apartment somewhere in Greenwich Village. (“Over a dope den, I daresay!”)

More quietly, the girl continued, “My mother thinks that because I don’t want to live the way she was brought up, with chaperones and lemonade and coming-out dances, and never meeting anybody but her friends’ sons because God forbid I should get to know somebody who actually works for his living! – that I’m some kind of booze-hound alley-cat. And the way she goes on about me drinking champagne and pink gin, you’d think all those Soothing Elixirs and Rejuvenating Pills she takes were just… Well.” Again she stopped herself, putting the words aside. She was silent a moment, allowing the angry flush to fade from her cheeks. Then she went on,

“And I don’t even really mind her stopping my allowance, which was the other thing her note said… Well, I do mind, because I’ll have a hell of a time making ends meet, now. But I’ll do it. I won’t go back to her. It’s just that it isn’t true! And for God’s sake not with Bunty Della Robbia, of all the scummy little weasels! So I just… I just want to know what happened.” She fumbled in her beaded bag, her hands shaking a little as she brought out a cigarette. She seemed to concentrate all her attention on getting the flame of her match to the end of the little tube of tobacco. “What was said.”

“And I should like to know,” remarked the vampire, lighting another match and holding it for the girl when the first one went out, “who would go to the trouble to push your mother into disinheriting you. When one considers how much the medium would have to be paid, and the effort it would take to learn the pet-name by which your father addressed your mother, it argues for a good deal of trouble. This young lady Sophie—”

“Shit, Sophie wouldn’t do a thing like that!” the girl protested immediately.

“Who, then?”

“Sophie is your mother’s… companion?” Lydia asked.

“More or less.” Vinny blew a long thread of smoke. “Sophie’s my second-cousin. Her grandmother was Grandpa Prewitt’s sister. Her father – Gerry Allard – went bust in some kind of market scheme in California just before the War started, and… well, the newspapers said it was an accident, but his car went over a cliff about a week later. Her mom died last year. She was sixteen then, and couldn’t really do anything to make a living. She’d just had governesses, like I did, not real school or anything. I sure don’t count the Hall School as real school,” she added with a sniff, and picked a fragment of tobacco from her lip.

“Mummy sort of took her in, to be the daughter I sure wasn’t turning out to be. Fetch things for her, rub her feet, remind her to take her medicines, carry her prayer-book to Church when they go, give her manicures, read to her when she can’t go to sleep at night… One day I came in and found Sophie putting on Mummy’s stockings for her. And Mummy lecturing her about how she just didn’t show enough gratitude, and how she didn’t like her tone of voice and the way she looked at her, and how the Allards weren’t really quality people – poor Soph!”

Vinny’s straight, dark brows bunched together, and she glanced at Lydia through the drift of smoke. “You know, I didn’t think about someone doing that deliberately – bribing that shyster Professor Fontaine. It would have to be somebody who knows Mummy hates her own brother and wouldn’t leave him or his a dime if it killed her. But Sophie… just wouldn’t do a thing like that. She’s no ball of fire and can’t count past five, but she’s a sweet kid.”

“Has she a fiancée?” asked Lydia.

“Are you kidding? An unpaid companion without a nickel to her name?”

“If your mother did indeed alter her will in the girl’s favor,” murmured Don Simon thoughtfully, “I daresay that situation will change.”

*

Don Simon’s prediction turned out to be correct, not that Lydia had the slightest doubt that it would not be. In the three days which followed, whenever she encountered the Princess Natalia, the lovely little Russian woman had news of how wonderful, how marvelous, was the effect that Mrs. Prewitt’s generosity was having on her little protégée’s life. “Not that one would wish ill, precisely, to poor Vinny,” Natalia Nikolaievna added, nibbling the tiniest fragment of charlotte russe (“Not a single thing ‘Russe’ about it, dearest…”) at the Ladies’ Dining Room of the Marlborough the following Friday. “And I will say it would serve Allie right, if after cutting off the poor girl’s allowance as well as disinheriting her, she finds herself the mother of an artist’s model, or a street-walker…”

Lydia, who had spent part of the morning at Barnard College arranging an interview for Vinny with the Dean of Science whose secretary had just left to join the Army, was inclined to bridle. She was very fond of her diminutive and elegant friend, but there were times when Natalia, a Russian aristocrat to her polished fingertips, would say things that made Lydia want to slap her. “My understanding,” she said, “is that Vinny’s quarrels with her mother stemmed from her belief that trading on one’s femininity was demeaning.”

“Pff.” The Princess dismissed the argument with a wave, and leaned down to share a morsel of ladyfinger with the two little black French bulldogs, who sat on the marble floor at her feet. “I think that Vinny would say anything, to annoy her mother… and I daresay Allie will relent when it is put to her, just how a girl should make her living when she finds herself penniless. I shall do that, when I see them at the theater tonight. And as for Sophie Allard…!”

Beyond the dull-gold velvet curtains, and the shining plate-glass of the dining-room’s windows, Herald Square bustled with traffic, the noise penetrating faintly to these hallowed precincts of respectability. Lydia, at first slightly at sea in this crowded and very noisy metropolis, had found the journey uptown to Morningside Park exhilarating. The Dean – thanks to a telegram from a mutual friend in the Suffragettes in London – had welcomed Lydia warmly and had finished the interview with not only a promise to speak to Vinny (“She’ll have to take a typewriting course, certainly, but I think I can find work to keep her busy until she’s up to speed,”) but an offer to arrange research facilities for Lydia herself in the Columbia medical library.

Rattling north on the subway – and again south, to rendezvous with Princess Gromyko for tea at the Marlborough – Lydia had felt not only exhilaration at being able, for the first time since 1914, to return to the medical research that had always been her deepest love, but understanding for Vinny Prewitt. Like the younger girl, she had herself been an heiress. Like Vinny, she had known that all those young men who’d courted her were doing so for her father’s money, rather than her gawky, myopic, and bookish self. Vinny, like herself, had struggled against the things to which ‘girls of good society’ were expected to limit themselves: fittings and balls and which corner of the visiting-card one turned down to indicate that one had called oneself but didn’t expect a returned call.

Vinny’s way of dealing with the situation was different than her own had been, that was all.

She had the feeling that Vinny, for all her party-girl posing, would make a good job of being the Dean’s secretary.

“Well!” cooed Natalia, straightening up. “And speak of the Devil… Now tell me, if the poor Sophie, at least, has not benefitted from this disaster.”

Following her gaze, Lydia saw Mrs. Prewitt and Sophie enter the restaurant, its white-coated maitre d’ hastening up to seat them. Lydia estimated that they’d been to Worth’s: Sophie was elegantly clad in a walking-suit of rust-colored challis whose wide collar and subdued shape could only have come from that extremely expensive house of fashion. The girl’s movements were hesitant, even to Lydia’s myopic un-bespectacled glance: as if she were still slightly dazzled by her good fortune. The young man who rose from the white-draped table at their approach bowed, courtly, well-dressed (Lydia could guess the cost of his suit even without her glasses), and – by the smooth way he kissed Mrs. Prewitt’s hand and then Sophie’s – just a little smug.

But when the Princess added, “Poor child!” Lydia glanced across at her in surprise.

“Very rich child, I gather…”

Natalia sighed. “One cannot, of course, grudge her such good fortune. But that is Schuyler Pelham – Oh, of the first respectability! Allie Prewit has been trying for two years – she told me this only last week! – to bring her ungrateful daughter to an arrangement with him, for the Pelhams are… well, what passes in America for good family.”

She shrugged, with the disdain of one whose ancestors had been ennobled by Peter the Great. “I daresay it was that, as much as whatever her husband said from beyond his grave, that caused her to change her will last Sunday. But of course now all must be at an end between poor Sophie and Nicolai Syomin.”

“Nicolai Syomin?” Lydia raised her brows.

The Princess sighed again, a deep gust of sentimentality. “It is so sad – though of course even had this not happened, Allie Prewitt would never have consented to such an alliance. I fear Sophie would have run away to be with him… Even run away to Russia—”

“To Russia?” The name was Russian, but most of the Russians Lydia had met in the Princess’s lavish apartment in the Belcourt were the aristocracy, or the wealthy professional classes of Moscow and St. Petersburg. All the talk about restoring the Romanovs to their rightful throne frequently sounded to Lydia like schemes straight out of the pages of a Ruritanian novel: nobles rallying around the banner of the tsars, first to drive off the greasy plebeians currently making up the new Republic’s Duma, then to chase the Germans from Mother Russia’s soil.

“He is a third cousin of the Obolenskys, and his mother was a Trubeskoy,” explained Natalia, as if the establishment of his pedigree was of more important than the mere tragedy of star-crossed desire. “He hasn’t a bean himself, of course. He was a Captain in the Preobrazhensky Guard – the personal guard of the tsar – and came to this country to try to further the Romanovs’ cause.” (Instead of going into the Army? Lydia wanted to ask.) “They are passionately in love, poor children—”

She looked across the dining-room again, and Lydia, putting on her glasses quickly, saw Mrs. Prewitt rise from the table with a clearly concocted excuse to leave Sophie alone with young Schuyler Pelham – who immediately seized her hand and began to declare himself in a voice inaudible at this distance. Sophie didn’t look happy. She turned her face aside in confusion, raised a hand in protest – a hand which young Mr. Pelham immediately seized…

Then Lydia saw that Mrs. Prewitt was heading in her own direction, and whipped off her glasses before either Mrs. Prewitt, or the Princess (who was just turning her head back) could see them. She greeted Mrs. Prewitt warmly, but watched, past her plump mauve silk shoulder, the couple she had left at the table. While Mrs. Prewitt chatted on to the Princess about the events of the preceding Friday night – the séance, the mysterious pale figure, the spiritual vibrations of Professor Fontaine and how Natalia really should have been there! – Lydia could not keep her mind from drifting.

To Vinny, just readying herself to learn to walk on her own. To her own experience of being suddenly deprived of her father’s support, when he’d learned she’d been accepted to Somerville College (to which he had expressly forbidden her to apply. Jamie had coached her for her exams, in between what she had later learned had been some extremely dangerous work for the Foreign Office in South Africa…).

And that worked out, she reflected. Being thrown out of Papa’s house and cut off without a penny meant that I could, actually, marry a penniless Lecturer at New College, as soon as he got back from Africa and told the Foreign Office they could run away and chase themselves…

Sophie was looking desperately across the dining-room towards her aunt. Lydia wondered if it would be appropriate for her to go over and interrupt the unwanted tête-à-tête, and glanced at Mrs. Prewitt. In tones of hushed excitement, she was describing “visitations” by her husband Frank’s spirit: “He comes to me in my dreams, Natalia! I see him, glowing with the ineffable light of the Other World…”

Lydia wondered how much Female Elixir the impressionable woman was sipping at night to achieve these “visitations.” Or what’s in all those so-called medications that she takes—

And indeed, when Mrs. Prewitt plucked a small silver box from her handbag and opened it, Lydia saw that it was filled with a score of pills of various sizes and colors. The widow selected three, as if she were choosing chocolates, and gulped them down with sips of the Princess’s champagne. Her manner was restless, strung-up and exultant – Lydia wanted to take her pulse and if possible send those pills someplace for analysis…

“When I woke, on my desk – written on my own stationery! – in his hand… His hand, Natalia! Just one word… Beloved. It faded away. Faded away to nothing by the afternoon. I put it in the drawer but the word was gone by evening, as if nothing had ever been written there. Only the smudge of churchyard mould on the edge, such as had been on the paper the spirit brought at Professor Fontaine’s séance last Friday! Oh, Natalia…!”

She clasped her hands before her heart, her face radiant with joy and nerve-pills.

“If you would just come with me to meet the Professor! To experience the depth of his contact with the Other World! I have gone to so many, seen and heard such wonderful things from Beyond the Veil, but never such… such direct contact! Such unquestionable answers!”

On the other side of the dining-room, Sophie pulled her hands from her suitor’s grasp, and springing to her feet, rushed from the restaurant in tears.

*

“It isn’t as if it’s any of my business,” said Lydia quietly, that night, to Don Simon, in the lush lobby of the Cohan and Harris Theater, where she had been dragged by her Aunt Louise. “I think it’s rather cold-blooded – and I must say I’m rather surprised, because Sophie Allard impresses me as a very sweet girl. And Vinny seems to think she’s stupid as a brick. But who else could get hold of her aunt’s personal stationery? Disappearing ink itself is fairly simple to make, and once poor Auntie had cached the message in her drawer, Sophie could switch it for a completely clean piece of paper which wouldn’t even hold a residue—”

“If you think Mistress Sophie’s intelligence would run to putting graveyard earth in the same place on the edge of the new paper.” The vampire lifted is head a little, and following his gaze, Lydia saw Sophie Allard, plump and uncomfortable in exquisite teal-blue silk (Worth again, she calculated) descending the stair from the first tier of boxes, peering with anxious myopia down at the lobby below.

When a man disengaged himself from the milling kaleidoscope around the bar and darted up the steps towards her – young, Lydia judged by his movements, even before she whipped her glasses from their silver case and put them on for a quick look – Sophie’s whole demeanor changed. The young man caught her hand – Good-looking, too, Lydia now saw – and drew her quickly down into the lobby crowd: tall, blonde, with the lithe musculature that would have told her even had she not guessed, that this was a former member of the tsar’s bodyguard. Where the staircase curved there was a sort of sheltered back-water among the eddying motion of intermission. The man who had to be Nicolai Syomin caught Sophie’s two hands in his, and pressed them to his breast. Lydia knew they would have kissed, had they dared.

“How old is she?” inquired the vampire.

“Seventeen.”

“I daresay she will have overshot her mark, if she thinks her Aunt will permit her to wed a penniless émigré.” Don Simon’s cool yellow eyes rested on the couple, picking out – Lydia was certain – the frayed and faded places on the young man’s evening suit. Vampires tracked and chose their prey, he had told her once, by a thousand tiny clues that most of the living missed. The cut of clothing – last year’s, or the year before – the scent of cologne (Lanvin or Woolworth’s?), the quality of gloves – were markers: would this person would be missed by anyone of consequence?

For three and a half centuries, she thought, he’s survived by observing, and inferring from what he observes.

“Or he will have overshot his mark,” he added. “Which I think likelier. And from what I have seen of Madame Prewitt,” he went on, his glance flicking to the top of the staircase, where that lady had made her appearance, “should Romeo and Juliet wed in her aunt’s despite, she will find her mistake.”

His voice as usual was without inflection, but there was in the cold touch of his hand on Lydia’s elbow the implication that he agreed with her. He spoke only a thing he observed, as he had observed the tragedies of the living, as an outsider, for hundreds of years. And I suppose, reflected Lydia, that when one has come through the Great Plague of London, the problems of a pair of young lovers – whichever one of them was the brains behind the hoax – amount to very little.

Schuyler Pelham, in a much newer and better-cut tuxedo than the one on Nicolai’s back, appeared at Mrs. Prewitt’s elbow. He was chatting with Lydia’s Aunt Louise, who came out just behind them.

Lydia laid a hand on Don Simon’s arm. “Thank you for meeting me here,” she said simply, and removed her glasses before Aunt Louise could descend upon her. “I must get back to Aunt… I knew the play would be ghastly and I hope you’re not bored to distraction—”

The slight gesture of two fingers took in the teeming humanity now jostling back toward its seats. “The human condition has ever been a source of entertainment to me,” he returned, and brushed her hand with his lips. “Thought you that I have been watching the play?” Then he was gone, as vampires go: that slight sense of disorientation, of distracted attention. The sensation a little like waking from a daydream, to find him no longer at her side.

He probably attended the premier of Macbeth, reflected Lydia, mounting the stairs to re-join Aunt Louise, who had, in their box, kept up a running commentary on the shortcomings of Captain Kidd, Junior, to the detriment of whatever chance Lydia might have had to hear the dialog. And goodness knows how much other frightful tripe opened in London the same week.

*

She dreamed of them that night. Sophie Allard, a pretty little partridge decked out in the plumage of a bird of paradise, looking up into Nicolai Syomin’s face. “Sophie wouldn’t do a thing like that!” had cried Vinny, immediately and unquestioningly, Vinny who would now have to tread the hard and complicated road of Making One’s Own Living…

Forty million dollars… Lydia tried to calculate that in pounds, but in the dim fog of sleep the effort was like trying to sing a five-part round of “Row, Row, Row your Boat” after too many glasses of champagne. “Enough, anyway, that she’ll never have to rub anyone else’s feet again,” she said to Jamie, her husband – Jamie, who was standing beside her now, in the Princess Natalia’s enormous salon in the Belcourt, her dream reproducing every gilt curliqueue and Fragonard cherub in the room. They were standing beside the buffet that the Princess always had spread on her “at home” days – brined herring and pirozhki, caviar and deviled eggs – and Jamie was as she guessed he was now, though nobody in the room seemed to notice.

She knew that he was somewhere on the Eastern Front – she knew that he was masquerading as a German officer, a Major von Rabewasser. His gray-green uniform was mud-stained and blood-stained and had been mended many times; it hung slack on shoulders wasted to bone. He had shaved, however (“I couldn’t come to your Princess’s soirée the way my men see me,” he explained), and his brown eyes, scholarly and kind, were bright. There was more gray in his mustache and hair than she remembered. (“I left my pickelhaube back in my tent,” he said. “They might not notice the uniform in a dream like this, but they’d certainly notice a spiked helmet.” It was good beyond speaking, to hear his voice.)

Sophie and Nicolai were on the other side of the room, talking quietly, she still in her pink and golden theater dress and he in his shabby tuxedo. Mrs. Prewitt was telling young Mr. Pelham all about her latest nervous condition and what her doctor had prescribed, but every other word was, Sophie says… or, I’m sure dear Sophie could tell you…

Lydia added thoughtfully, “If Mrs. Prewitt doesn’t disinherit her next year and leave her money to somebody else. The Princess tells me that Mrs. Prewitt gives shocking sums to every charlatan and quack physician in town, so if Nicolai is the brains behind this—“ She turned her gaze towards the young couple again, that handsome face with its crinkly gold mustache bent so attentively over the girl’s, “—he may be in for a disappointment, a year into the marriage.”

Jamie’s gray-shot brows pulled down sharply. “He’s going to kill her,” he said, as if a little surprised that Lydia hadn’t known that already.

Lydia stared up at him. “What?”

“Don’t you see?” He gestured at the men and women gathered in that radiant salon, the soft Babel of conversation, like moving clouds of light. It was all in French, but when Lydia turned her attention to it she heard fragments: “…garrison at Hanbei is loyal…” “Razuvayev was in the Semyonovsky Guards, he’s loyal…” “…march on Petersburg, seize the Duma…” “…loan from Rothschild…” “…loan from Belgium…” “…forty million francs…” “…loan from the Swiss…”

“Everything in their lives is wrapped up in putting the Romanovs back on the throne of Russia,” he said. “But they know it will have to be quick. Feeling in Russia is high, and bitter. The Mensheviks – the Social Democrats who hold power now – aren’t the only faction in St. Petersburg. The Bolsheviks – Lenin’s hard-line communists – are growing daily stronger. In a revolution, everyone fears the counter-revolution – the old monarch riding back to power at the head of foreign troops. And completely aside from how many times Mrs. Prewitt might take it into her head to change her will… the best way to stop a counter-revolution is to make sure the old ways – the old king – is in no position to return. Ever.”

Lydia’s eyes widened. She looked around quickly for Mrs. Prewitt – in her dreams she always saw perfectly clearly without glasses – and there she was, telling Mrs. Cochran about the marvelous new doctor she’d found who did such wonders for her nerves.

Beside her, Jamie continued quietly, “So they have to get their hands on that money quickly. Mrs. Prewitt isn’t that old, you know. Even though that hair is probably gray underneath the dye and I’m sure she’s had her face lifted, I wouldn’t put her age at more than fifty-five. If she stayed enamored of Miss Allard for the remainder of her life, that would still be, what? Twenty-five years?”

“I have to warn her—“ Lydia took a step in the direction of the two widows, then hesitated, turning back to her husband. “But you’re here,” she said, and held out her hand to him. His grip, through the delicate kid of her glove, was warm and strong. A living man’s warmth, not the ethereal chill of Don Simon Ysidro’s.

She was, and knew she would always be, deeply fond of the vampire.

But it wasn’t like this.

“I don’t want to run off…”

“I’ll wait for you.” He tilted his head a little, half-smiling. “You know how they’d do it?”

“Of course,” said Lydia promptly. “Exactly the same way I’d murder someone who takes pills the way Mrs. Prewitt does. I’d have something like atropine made up to look like one of her nerve pills, then slip it into that silver pill-case she carries.”

(Even in her sleep she thought, My goodness, that’s clever!)

“Which Syomin is in a position to do, easily.”

Lydia nodded. “Particularly if Sophie let me into the house after midnight some night, to drape myself in phosphorescent cheese-cloth and put love-letters from beyond the grave onto Mrs. Prewitt’s desk. There’d be no telling when she’d take it, so I could be miles away having tea with the vicar. I must—”

She started to turn away again, then turned back, and, heedless of a salon-full of disgruntled Russian aristocrats all around them (and the fact that Jamie was wearing a German uniform), put her arms around him, felt the scrape of his mustache as he kissed her, the strength of his arms and passionate warm hunger of his lips.

She wept, and the weeping broke her from sleep.

*

Getting hold of the pills themselves posed little problem. Lydia wrote herself a prescription for a mild sedative, and another for an amalgam of caffeine and milk sugar, and had a pharmacist on Fourth Street make up a dozen pills of each: white for the sedative, pink for the tonic. These she put in two little silver cases, donned her newest and most stylish pink-and-fawn walking-dress, and had Dolores drive her to the Prewitt mansion up on Park Lane at the time when she knew – according to Princess Gromyko – that Mrs. Prewitt would be “at home” to visitors. She calculated her time carefully, arriving at three-thirty when (she was assured) the really top-drawer visitors didn’t begin to call until four.

“I’ve spoken to you so many times at the Princess’s,” she said, when the butler ushered her into a drawing-room cluttered with marble-topped tables, beaded lamps, a Whistler portrait of the deceased Frank Prewitt and at least ten photographs of the same subject, and enough shockingly expensive bric-a-brac to fill several box-cars. “But since last Saturday night – turning over in my mind all the things I saw, and heard, and felt in the presence of the Unknown—“ She verbally capitalized the word with a slight inflection of her voice, “—that I’ve felt… I’ve felt I needed to speak to someone…”

Thrilled with the role of guide and confidante, Mrs. Prewitt proceeded to pour forth opinions, feelings, and experiences with Spirits from the Other Side as if Lydia had turned on a tap. Her beliefs made Aunt Louise – a firm believer in the secret messages encoded in the passageways of the Pyramids, and in subterranean realms within the hollow earth illuminated by an interior sun – seem like a hardened skeptic. After forty-five minutes, Lydia – now a trusted friend (In another thirty she’ll have disinherited Sophie in MY favor…) – nudged the conversation to rumors that she’d heard about adulterated nerve-medicines. She named several of the best-known pharmacies and nerve-doctors in the city, and produced a list of potential symptoms so horrifying that Mrs. Prewitt sent Sophie scurrying up to her room for all of her pills.

“It was only a few bad batches from the manufacturers, you see,” explained Lydia. “And the test for the tainted pills is very simple. I’m a medical doctor, you know – I specialize in gland research—”

Mrs. Prewitt stared at her in awe and wonderment, as if she’d suddenly sprouted feathers.

“–I can take these and test them this evening, and have them back to you tomorrow.”

“Would you?” The older woman’s smile of simple trust and delight made Lydia feel like a fraud, since she had no intention of returning the pills – Good heavens, how many of them does she HAVE? Sophie had re-entered the salon carrying a well-filled basket. “Lydia – I may call you Lydia, mayn’t I? – I am so glad you called… so glad we’ve become friends. Just let me take out a few, in case I have one of my spells this evening. We’re dining at the Pelhams…”

Lydia produced her own two little boxes. “Let me give you a few of mine,” she offered. “I’ve tested these already…”

How am I ever going to explain to the New York Police Department what I want done?

And if some of them DO turn out to be poisoned, how am I going to convince anyone that it’s Nicolai who put them there – if Nicolai DID put them there?

Or will they hang Sophie?

Or – she shivered suddenly – Vinny?

The person who would know how to approach the police, she reasoned, as Dolores threaded the Pierce-Arrow through the confusion of wagons, busses, taxis and push-carts along Third Avenue, would be Oliver Cochran. He was the nephew – and legal advisor – of the late Spenser Cochran, a stout, sleek-haired young man whom his uncle had put through law-school and who had been extremely grateful to Lydia for the tactful report she’d given the police (and the reporters of every newspaper in New York) of the death of his uncle on the crossing from England.*

Returning to the house on Charles Street, before she even took off her hat Lydia descended to the house’s sub-cellar, a couple of damp little crypts which seemed to her straight out of an Edgar Allen Poe story, and cached the basket of pill-bottles in one of the boxes of books stored there. The doors of both crypts had stout – and surprisingly new – locks on them (making her wonder what on earth the former owners had kept there – mad aunts? Former wives? Elder brothers in iron masks?). Only when she’d turned the key did she go up to the nursery, where her daughter Miranda was absorbed in writing out the alphabet under the guidance of Marie-Josèphe, a slim octoroon from New Orleans who had come with the highest recommendations from various of the Princess’s White Russian cronies.

Lydia was fairly certain that at five, Miranda had more sense than to play with – or certainly to put into her mouth – anything that she might find around the house. But many of Mrs. Prewitt’s pills looked a good deal like candy pastilles (which is what the more benign of them probably ARE…), and Lydia was not a believer in taking chances. (Except about making friends with a vampire, she admitted to herself. And running off to Constantinople when Jamie stumbled onto a plot there by the Austrian foreign intelligence service. Oh, and that time I went vampire-hunting down in that crypt in St. Petersburg…)

She admired Miranda’s grasp of the alphabet, listened to the little girl’s account of her lesson that morning about all the parts of flowers, and the birds building their nests in the back garden, and happily accepted her daughter’s invitation to have lunch with her, Mademoiselle L’Esperance, and Mrs. Marigold the doll. (The spiders in the attic are teaching her how to spin webs, Miranda confided.) It was after one o’clock before Lydia telephoned the offices of Columbia Consolidated Land and Railway Corporation.

Mr. Cochran had meetings for the remainder of the afternoon, she was told. Would she leave her name and number?

She wrote two notes – one to Oliver Cochran, another to his widowed Aunt Belle – explaining that she needed only a few minutes of Mr. Cochran’s time and advice, and put them out for the afternoon post. Then, leaving instructions with her housekeeper, Mrs. Pugh, in case Cochran did return her call that day, she took Miranda (and Mrs. Marigold) for a walk along Charles Street to the park, and did her best to put the whole problem of star-crossed lovers and poisoned pills, of grave-mould and ectoplasm, from her mind.

There may be nothing in it, she told herself.

Last night’s dream may only have been a dream.

Yet that night she lay awake, thinking of Jamie. Thinking of him standing there in his tattered German uniform, in the soft glow of Princess Gromyko’s salon – Was that really him there? Were their dreams somehow linked, through Simon’s mind, Simon’s ability to walk in dreams, to see into the dreams of those whose eyes he’d met?

She tried to calculate the difference in time, between New York City and wherever Jamie was on the Eastern Front… remembered the constant setting and re-setting of her watch, on the voyage over. Would he actually have been asleep at the same time? And what time did I have that dream?

She was still trying to calculate the time difference between the Eastern Front (would that be the same as Berlin? Is Jamie IN Berlin?) when she heard – or more precisely felt, like a vibration or a change of air pressure – a door open somewhere in the house below.

Mrs. Pugh, she thought. Or Mrs. Parton the cook. They both sleep downstairs. Or Dolores… Why would Dolores be coming into the house at—she dug her watch from beneath her pillow, angled it to the glow of the street-lamp, reflected from Seventh Avenue—three in the morning?

And she remembered Jamie saying, Everything in their lives is wrapped up in putting the Romanovs back on the throne…

Was that the creak of someone’s weight on the stair? She couldn’t tell. The old house always creaked and shifted like an arthritic grandmother trying to get comfortable on a cushion.

Don’t be silly, she told herself. You don’t even know whether that young man is trying to murder Mrs. Prewitt or not.

I would, if I were him.

She put on her glasses, found her robe on the end of the bed, slipped it on. The one time she’d hit someone with a vase it had had no effect whatsoever. She didn’t think she had the knowledge of leverage or the strength to knock someone out by hitting them with a chair, and the only chair in her bedroom was a carven oak monstrosity that she doubted even Jamie could have lifted, much less wielded as a weapon. Heroines in books frequently had guns under their pillows or trophies of arms – like those silly things her father had kept on the walls at Willoughby Close – fortuitously positioned on the walls of the hall just outside their rooms… battle-axes, claymores, and spears.

Poker from the fireplace?

Shovel?

Shovel.

She was halfway to the fireplace when he came into the room.

She had just been reflecting how silly she’d feel if she sat up until dawn, shovel at the ready, because of a creaking floor-board – and in any case that end of the bedroom was in pitch-black shadow. She only heard the door open, the floor-board creak, but she smelled the tobacco-smoke in the man’s clothing. He must have seen her, standing between the bed and the fireplace, because he rushed her, a big dark shape with, she thought, a mask or a stocking over his face, a monstrous shadow, hands outstretched. She grabbed up the nearest fireplace implement – the brush, as it happened – and screamed, in the instant before he caught her by the throat.

Lydia knew that a man will protect his groin and knew, too, that with a two-handed grip on her carotids she’d go unconscious in seconds; she jammed the long handle of the brush up between his arms so that the finial at the tip drove into the soft underside of his chin. At the same time she pushed in at him, rather than pulling back, and, when his grip broke (he yelled “Suka!” a word she knew from her brief visit to Russia) she screamed again, and tried to leap away.

He grabbed her, struck her a back-handed blow that knocked her sprawling and drove the breath from her – it always astonished her how strong men were – and she saw the knife he drew flash in the street-light gleam. She tried to roll out of the way – she’d lost her grip on the brush – and in the split-second before that black hugeness of him descended on her she heard the running creak of other feet, saw other shadows…

There was a whoosh of some heavy object being swung in the air and the intruder cried out and collapsed sideways; Lydia heard the brutal crunch of iron smashing bone. When one of the shadows passed briefly through the glow from the window, even without her glasses she knew it was Dolores the chauffeur, in striped men’s pajamas, with a pipe-wrench the size of a child’s leg in one meaty hand. The intruder tried to get up and Dolores struck him again, dropping her weight into it the way Lydia had seen men at the Front bash each other when they seriously meant business in a fight. Mrs. Parton the cook was right behind her, armed with a cast-iron skillet which she wielded like a sledge-hammer.

Lydia fought the urge to cry, Don’t hurt him… He jolly well deserved to be hurt.

The housekeeper Mrs. Pugh, quite sensibly, lit the gas, so the room was dimly illuminated by the time Ellen and Mademoiselle L’Esperance appeared.

Ellen kicked him. He didn’t move.

The nurserymaid knelt at his side and pulled the stocking mask from his head. It was soaked with blood. The smell of it brought back all Lydia’s memories of the Casualty Clearing Station at the Front.

“You know this man, Madame?” Mademoiselle asked in her soft French accent.

Ellen handed Lydia her glasses. Putting them on, Lydia said, “Oh, yes.” It was, indeed, Nicolai Syomin. “Ellen, could you please telephone the police? And tell them to bring a doctor—“ She knelt on the other side of the would-be killer, took the knife from his resistless fingers and very gently touched the horribly soft portion at the back of his skull.

*

“Nicolai wouldn’t do such a thing,” whispered Sophie. “He—He wouldn’t.”

Lydia said nothing. She had loosened the scarf of green silk gauze that she’d worn all day over the bruises on her throat – it amazed her that her attacker’s grip could have left such marks in so short a moment – but the girl had simply looked aside from them, repeating, It wasn’t him. It wasn’t him.

“I know him,” said Sophie. “Yes, his life is dedicated to recovering the inheritance of the Romanovs, but he wouldn’t stoop to something like that.”

Her tear-soaked blue gaze went from Lydia to Don Simon, who’d been in the parlor at Charles Street when she’d come bursting into the house. In the garden beyond the French windows the evening’s rain had just ceased, drips now and then from the new-budded elm-trees there audible in the quiet, as if the house had been in the countryside. A few streets away the bell of the old St. Joseph’s church rang for evening services.

“How long have you known him, Sophie?” asked Lydia gently.

“When you love someone, you can’t measure it in terms of time. Haven’t you ever met someone, and you know them, right down to their soul, in… in just hours? Or days?” And as if she read the glance that passed between Lydia and the vampire – she went on quickly, “The police detective told me he was still unconscious. Don’t you see? It isn’t Nicolai at all! It’s someone – a thief, a burglar, who looks a great deal like him, and you… you just assumed it was him! Because like Aunt Allie, you don’t like him because he’s poor—”

“Then where is he?” inquired the vampire politely, and raised a finger from the head of the kitten – Mrs. Pugh had adopted four of them – that slept in his lap. “If as you say the police descended upon your aunt’s house this morning and questioned you, would not a friend have called this afternoon to make certain of your well-being? I take it you have already visited his rooms.”

“That doesn’t prove anything. He’s probably in hiding, because he’s afraid he’ll be accused… because we… because he and I…”

“How so, when the man who undoubtedly attempted to murder Madame Asher is at this moment lying unconscious in the police infirmary?”

“He’ll know they searched his rooms. They left them in a terrible mess, of course poor Nicky would go into hiding, if he came home and found—”

“They searched his rooms,” pointed out Lydia, “and found a small jar of graveyard earth, of the kind that was smeared on the edges of the notes your aunt received from ‘beyond the grave.’ And another jar of a coal-tar alkaline solution that disappears after a few hours’ exposure to air. Exactly as the writing did, on the paper supposedly—”

“That doesn’t prove anything!” Sophie sprang from the chair into which Lydia had with difficulty coaxed her. “None of it proves anything!” Tears choked her. “You say ‘supposedly’! You’ve made up your mind beforehand, that you’re not going to believe.”

“Well—”Lydia tried to keep exasperation out of her voice – She’s only seventeen, after all… “—I do admit that my judgment is affected by the fact that when the police analyzed all those pills I got from your aunt yesterday, four of each type were found to be strychnine. Did you tell Nicolai that I’d taken away all her pills, to have them analyzed?”

Struggle wrung the girl’s face. She sank into the chair again, and began to cry in earnest. Lydia groped in her skirt pocket for a clean handkerchief and found none. More practical, Don Simon set the kitten aside, rose, and crossed the parlor with the soundlessness of a ghost, to fetch a whiskey-and-soda.

“He knew he’d have to get rid of me before I could have that done,” Lydia went on reasonably, giving up on the hanky. “He may have guessed that I’d hide them in the house somewhere, but it wouldn’t matter, because—”

“Nicolai wouldn’t do that!” Sophie shoved the proffered glass away from her, pushed past Don Simon to stagger to her feet again. “I won’t believe it! I won’t!”

Blundering first against the chair, then against the side of the parlor door, she fled from the room, and before Lydia could get to her feet she heard the front door bang loudly. Her heart twisted with concern and pity, Lydia made a move to follow her, but Don Simon put a hand on her shoulder (which still hurt like the devil – she ached as if she’d fallen down a flight of stairs) and pushed her gently into her chair again. “I shall go after her,” he said, “and see she comes to no harm on her way home.”

He was gone before Lydia could reply.

She sat for a time, looking at the parlor door (typically, she thought, she had not heard Don Simon close the front door, nor in fact had she been conscious of his leaving the room… vampires were like that. Evidently even recovered ones…)

Haven’t you ever met someone, and you KNOW them, right down to their soul, in… in just hours?

Yes, she thought. But then, she could barely even recall the first time she’d met Jamie. From a child, she’d known him as one of her Uncle Ambrose’s scholastic colleagues. And she’d never refuse to believe that he’d murder someone because from the age of fourteen she’d suspected that the quiet, scholarly don who listened to everything anyone said – even schoolgirls of fourteen – and could tell by looking at your shoes or your glove-buttons what you’d been doing that day, and why, was not what he seemed.

She remembered her dream. I couldn’t come to your Princess’s soirée the way my men see me…

That deep, slightly rough-edged baritone… The softness of his mustache on her lip…

That was him. He was there. It wasn’t my imagination.

But even as Don Simon could come and go in Jamie’s dreams, and hers – and could evidently sometimes open the door between them – she was well aware that the vampire could enter peoples’ dreams and convince them of what he wanted them to believe. She’d seen him do it: convince a London governess that she should drop everything and accompany Lydia to Constantinople, because she believed that she and Don Simon had been lovers in previous lives.² Convince a bank-clerk to give Lydia access to private banking records because he had had a dream that Lydia was in fact a spirit who would save his soul. ³

Both of them – and how many others? – would have sworn, weeping, that what they believed was true.

She wrapped her green silk scarf over the bruises on her neck, glanced at the ebony mantle-clock (which was as usual ten minutes slow), and reached for the handbell (since she hadn’t yet got the bell system working in the house… Something else to take care of next week…)

When Ellen came in, she said, “Could you ask Dolores to get the car ready, please? There’s something I need to do tonight.”

*

Don Simon returned in time to ride with Lydia up Third Avenue, to the modest brownstone on 91^st Street. Two very handsome motorcars and a closed town brougham with two dozing horses still lingered on the street when they arrived. Shortly after ten-thirty, however, Lydia saw the door open, and Professor Fontaine bowed his clients down the lighted steps. She and the vampire slipped quietly out of the car, and though Don Simon murmured, “I know not for certain if I am yet able to do this…” as they crossed the street, neither Professor Fontaine, nor any of the five women on the stoop with him, seemed to notice either Lydia or Ysidro as they climbed past them and entered the house.

Like the dreams, thought Lydia. Vampire glamour…

A branch of candles still burned in the dark upstairs parlor. The two candelabra closest to the giant ebony “spirit cabinet” had been snuffed out – precisely as they had been during the séance a week ago – and the smell of smoke and wax mingled with the over-strong scents of the clients’ perfumes.

Don Simon crossed to the window to the left of the cabinet, and swept the dark velvet curtains aside. Behind the curtain, the window was shuttered. When the vampire opened the casement, and tried to open the shutter, they would not budge. Lydia, meanwhile, put back the curtain on the cabinet itself and, stepping inside, pushed aside the inner curtain. The back of the cabinet seemed solid, but when Don Simon joined her – carrying a lit branch of candles – she could see, with difficulty, along the corner of the inner wall, the black-painted edge of a hinge.

“Here.” Don Simon fished in his breast pocket for a slip of steel – Lydia had a similar one in the tiny packet of pick-locks that never left her. He inserted this in a nearly-invisible crack in the wall, and had just flipped open the hidden catch when brightened gas-light streamed in from the hall, and behind them Professor Fontaine’s beautiful tones commanded,

“Hands up! I have you covered.”

Lydia turned, and stepped out of the cabinet, the candelabra in her hand. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Everybody at home knows I was coming here tonight and my chauffeur’s just outside in the car.” There was a woman with Fontaine, of medium height and dark, wearing a dressing-gown over what looked like a form-fitting princess slip. The acrid smell of phosphorous hung faintly but clearly about her. “Did Nicolai Syomin pay you to deliver that ‘message’ from Frank Prewitt to his widow last Saturday night? About being betrayed, and how she should leave her money to one who truly cared about her, and all the rest of that extremely unethical farrago?”

“I don’t know what you’re referring to,” retorted the woman – cutting off Professor Fontaine’s uncertain Uh… “But what you are implying is slander.”

“And what you are engaging in,” returned Lydia, stepping back into the cabinet (Don Simon had, as she had expected he would, disappeared) and pushing on the false back, “is fraud.” There was, as Don Simon had surmised, a narrow room behind the rear wall of the parlor, only a few feet deep but the width of the parlor itself, with the two genuine windows looking out over the brownstone’s little yard. A flight of steps led through a trap in the floor; yards of palely-glowing phosphorescent cheese-cloth hung draped over the backs of three chairs. On a small table – a touch that made Lydia smile – stood a small vase containing two blood-red rose-buds, and one fully blown red rose. To be traded in while everyone was looking at the glowing specter… Wife? Lady-friend? Possibly the brains of the operation…

Lydia returned her attention to Fontaine, who had lit the candles of the other two branches, the room being apparently genuinely without gas or electric illumination. “And I’m afraid,” she went on, “that given Nicolai’s attempt to murder Mrs. Prewitt – after she changed her will to leave her fortune to her niece Sophie… You remember Sophie? – as a result of ‘Frank’s revelations that evening, you may be facing charges of conspiracy as well.”

And, into their appalled silence, she added, “And I do hope, Miss – Madame – that you wear something more protective than a slip under those phosphorescent robes, if you impersonate a ghost very often. The stuff doesn’t just irritate the skin. It can cause headaches, and kidney damage as well.”

“I’m not stupid,” retorted the woman, with a slight German accent. “I wax myself all over with grease before I put the stuff on, and a hell of a mess it is, too.”

“Good,” said Lydia. “Excellent! Nicolai Syomin attempted to murder me last night,” she explained. “And I’m quite sure that by tomorrow the police will have traced the pharmacists who sold him the strychnine pills that he slipped into Mrs. Prewitt’s pill-cases, once she’d signed her new will making Sophie her heir. So if you can co-operate with the police about how he maneuvered Mrs. Prewitt into leaving her fortune to Sophie, I’m sure they’ll co-operate with you about not mentioning…” She gestured toward the spirit cabinet, “…all this.”

To do him credit, Professor Fontaine seemed genuinely horrified when the plot was explained to him, and his wife – for this was who the woman was – was simply disgusted. “I told you it was a stupid idea, Bert,” she said, when they, and Lydia, were in the downstairs parlor again (“Oh, put that gun away, you idiot – if it had bullets in it you’d shoot your toe off…”), working out how much could be told to the police.

“He told me,” replied the Professor, with dignity, “that he was trying to make his aunt – he said she was his aunt – see reason about a young relative of hers, for her own good. He said this was the only way he could save her from herself.”

“Good,” said Lydia. “That sounds well…”

“It’s true,” said the seer, slightly aggrieved. “He paid me two hundred dollars—”

Lydia bit back the urge to demand, And you didn’t check his bona fides?

“And that much money didn’t tip you off that there was something verkrummt about the whole thing?” demanded his wife. “You’re the one who needs saving from himself.” And to Lydia, she added with a sigh, “But you know, Frau Doktor Asher, you can’t save people from themselves. They will believe what they will believe. It is the story of humankind.”

Neither of them, apparently, was aware of Don Simon Ysidro sitting on the sofa on the opposite side of the room, gloved hands folded on his knee, watching the scene with enigmatic yellow eyes. Nor did they seem to see him when he passed behind them and followed Lydia down the front steps of the house, to where Dolores waited in the Pierce-Arrow. “I’m glad to see you’re still able to do that,” Lydia remarked, as the big car slid down the empty midnight streets.

“I, also,” said the vampire. He produced from his pocket a copy – in his strangely curliqueued sixteenth-century hand – of a page in the Fontaine household ledger, which did indeed record the receipt of two hundred dollars, cash, on the fifth of April, 1917. “These capacities come and go, and I should hesitate to place my life, or yours, on them at need. I beg of you your forgiveness, that I was not at hand to undertake your rescue last night—”

“Well,” she replied judiciously, “the hero of any decent novel would have been hanging about outside my house – or at least passing by…”

“The hero of any decent novel,” corrected the vampire quietly, “would at least have considered the possibility that young Mistress Sophie would blether to her lover that you had taken her aunt’s pills.” His pale brows twitched together, as bars of light from the electric street-lamps passed across his face, in alternation with the shadows of the El-Train’s girders. The pavement glistened still with moisture in the weak flicker of the head-lamps. “And t’will, I much fear, be for naught. Though Sophie’s young warrior live to stand his trial, though the police bring forth the apothecary who sold him the poison, and our suave Professor’s testimony, and the police and thy servants who found this man in the very act of strangling you… though God and his angels take the stand ‘gainst him… still she will say, ‘tis all but a plot to discredit him, and that he would not and did not do such a deed. ‘Tis not only those who hunt the night, Mistress, that cast glamour on their prey. Vampires walk this earth whose hearts pump red blood, and who dread not the sun. They drink the lives of others in full light of day.”

Lydia was silent. How many people had believed Jamie was actually a Colonel or a priest or an honest shopkeeper who could be trusted with pieces of important information, when all the while he was going to take that information and hand it to his Department?

“When I dreamed about Jamie Wednesday night,” she said after a time, “was that really him?” Though a glass pane separated them from Dolores Rickman’s dark head, she kept her voice low. The vampire could have heard a pin-scratch below the damp hiss of the tires. “Was that a vision you sent? Or a… a communication you facilitated?”

His gaze met hers, inhuman as a dragon’s. She wondered if he drank from her eyes the echo of that dream.

“I did nothing, Lady.”

But it was Jamie. I know it was really Jamie.

Don Simon has entered his dreams before, and mine. That might have opened a door, without his knowing it…

She caught herself, and shook her head. It’s what I want to believe.

And so Sophie will believe to the end in her Nicolai.

*

Two days later, the Princess Gromyko informed Lydia over tea that Sophie had, with her aunt’s permission and assistance, married Nicolai Syomin in the police infirmary. “I could shake them both!” declared Natalia Nikolaievna, and daubed caviar onto a toast-point barely the size of her thumbnail. “But Allie is as convinced as Sophie is of the young man’s innocence. I have no idea how she believes those poisoned pills got into her pill-boxes… nor what that fraud Fontaine told her, when she went to see him yesterday. Truquage! Tromperie!” Her dark eyes snapped with annoyance. “Madame Izora says one can see the cloud of his falsehood surrounding him like a dark halo. Your friend Vinny has done well, to get herself out of such a ménage.”

“But that’s just it.” Lydia smiled thanks to the Princess’s Persian butler as he materialized behind her, silent as any vampire, and offered her a plate of sugared shortbread. “If Mrs. Prewitt came to believe that Nicolai bribed Professor Fontaine, and wrote those notes in vanishing ink himself, it would mean that her husband didn’t reach out to her from beyond the grave. That it was all a hoax. It would mean that she was… truly alone.”

“Pff.” The Princess waved an airy hand. “I have been alone since Boris died – my husband, you understand – and what is that to me?” Lydia had already noticed that the spacious parlor of Madame Gromyko’s flat contained one picture of her children – or children that Lydia assumed were hers, for she had never heard Madame mention them – and three, in heavy silver Fabergé frames, of her dogs, but none of “Boris.” More quietly, Madame went on, “We are all of us alone, Lydia my dearest. Even here. Even with you.”

On the bandy-legged little table among the tea-things lay that morning’s Times. Beneath the headline FRENCH TROOPS CAPTURE COURCY – and considerably smaller – was the modest leader, England Withdraws Offer of Asylum to Tsar. Lydia recalled what Jamie had said to her about the best way to scotch counter-revolutions, and wondered if Nicolai’s failure to murder her Saturday night would end in the poor ex-despot – and his family – being shot by revolutionists.

Surely they wouldn’t…

Later, when she returned to the house on Pearl Street to assist Don Simon in further arranging his library, Lydia said, “And I think Natalia’s right, you know. She’s right about Vinny, anyway – who is rapidly making herself indispensible to Dean Gregory. And there’s no telling when Mrs. Prewitt may decide that she does believe the case against Nicolai Syomin, and throw Sophie out on her ear for betraying her…”

“The woman has been warned,” pointed out Don Simon. With cold tenderness, he lifted a volume with crumbling black leather covers from its box of straw. His long fingers stroked it as he settled it into its place on a shelf. “And time is long. ’Tis no more our affair, Mistress. This Nicolai Syomin will be spending the next fifteen years in prison, and having traded those years for the Tsar’s cause, who knows what world he will look upon when he emerges. I have seen men die in defense of things that are now scarce worth a letter to the editor of a newspaper. Have seen men kill over such matters, myself included, under the impression that God would applaud.”

He brought forth another book, and unwrapped it from its brown tissue-paper. The oil-lamp’s glow slid over the gilt stamped on its binding: The Dialog Concerning the Two World Systems. A book, Lydia recalled, that men had been burned to death for reading. “Sometimes a month will suffice, to transform Lancelot du Lac into Don Quixote de la Mancha,” the vampire went on, “or the golden apples of the sun into dead sea fruit. Sometimes—” He set the heretical tome between The Dynamics of an Asteroid and The Estates and Empires of the Moon and the Sun, “—’tis the work of but an hour.”

His yellow eyes were expressionless as he spoke, as if none of this had anything to do with anything that had ever happened to him… or to the dead whose dreams now he dreamed, whose lives he now remembered as his own.

“Can you lure someone,” asked Lydia curiously, “–walk into their dreams, convince them to obey you – if they don’t have something in their dreams that they want? Want desperately? The way poor Mrs. Prewitt wants messages from her husband, telling her he still loves her? The way Sophie wants to believe that she is loved for herself?”

“Most people want something desperately,” returned Don Simon. “‘Tis but the instinct of vampires, to know what those things are.”

 

______________

*See: Prisoner of Midnight

²See: Traveling With the Dead

³See: Kindred of Darkness