Turkish not being an easy language to speak under the best of circumstances, Asher could only repeat, "Bilmiyorum... bilmiyorum," and shake his head, while the captain and his men gazed at Lydia's unveiled face, bare shoulders, and uncovered hair with puritan disapproval.
Since Asher was, however, clearly injured, a shutter was brought from the half- burned ruins of the Byzantine house, and two of them carried him on it through the twisting streets to the prefecture of police opposite Aya Sofia as the muezzins began to cry the rising of the sun. Lydia, by holding up her wedding ring and refusing to let go of his hand, managed to convince them that she was his wife and, once at the station, persuaded the sergeant in charge to allow her to telephone the British Embassy. In the wake of the rioting, the telephone exchange was inoperative.
They were relegated, not to a cell, but to a stuffy room on an upper floor, while a messenger was sought who could take a note across to Pera. A Turkish doctor came in around noon, rebandaged Asher's torn right arm and reset his shoulder, strapped up his ribs with sticking plaster, dusted everything in sight with basilicum powder and gave him veronal and novocaine, muttering all the while. On his way out he paused, studied Lydia's face intently, and opened his bag again to mix her a mild sedative as well. She accepted gratefully, knowing that the odd sense of separateness she felt from the events of the night was only the result of shock.
I've done it, she thought, looking down at the face of the man who slept beside her- unshaven, bruised, his neck mottled with sticking plaster and dried blood, his flesh horribly white under the beard stubble.
I saved him. Well, more or less.
I found him. He's not dead.
She realized she hadn't really expected to succeed, to be able to do anything right, especially not that which was most important to her happiness. Not when it involved something as unpredictable as living people.
The happiness filling her had a soap-bubble quality, as if it could be taken from her at an unwary breath, but he was here with her... breathing. She checked the gashes on his neck. So deeply asleep was he, on the thin mattress on the floor, that he didn't wake. Like the older, red scars, they seemed like the marks of claws, but lacked the mangled puffiness of a wound from which a vampire would have drawn blood.
Relieved, she touched his hair, the white streaks in his mustache, then leaned back against the wall and, for no reason she could discern, burst into tears.
From this she passed very quickly into sleep.
An hour or so later one of the army corporals brought them bread, honey, white goat cheese, and tea. He brought a set of Turkish army fatigues for Asher, who was still deeply asleep-the pile of his clothing in the corner was torn and bloodied and stank even to Lydia's dissecting-room-toughened sensibilities-and a lady's trousers, tunic, vest, yashmak, veils, and slippers.
"Wife's," he explained, with a shy grin. "Wife she say-" He gestured to Lydia's torn and blood-crusted gown. "-not good. Better." He held up the veils, grinned quickly again-he didn't look old enough to have a wife, thought Lydia-and took a hasty departure.
She hung one of the veils over the judas in the door and another over the window, and changed clothes, glad to be out of the gown with its dried blood and the smell of charred flesh caught in its folds. The horror she had experienced made her want never to see the green gown again, but she knew that feeling would pass and she'd be glad of the copious samples of vampire blood. She wondered, as she settled back in the corner by Asher's head-the room was innocent of furniture other than one chair and the mattress on the floor-whether there was any way she could talk the authorities into letting her see the remains of the burned bodies.
Probably not, she thought. She felt better for having slept and eaten, and despite the nightmare of her memories-blue fire, charred flesh, screams like nothing human-she found herself wishing she'd had a notebook with her, and a watch.
Ysidro...
Cold tightened in her chest. Had he gotten to safety? The rioters had been gone by dawn, but he'd been unable to stand. And where in the city could he go? Golge Kurt's words returned to her, about the taste of death bringing healing.
In the riot-torn streets a victim wouldn't have been far to seek. She closed her eyes, not wanting to admit to herself how close she stood to condoning an innocent person's murder.
Looking back-remembering how Ysidro had torn like a mad wolf into Golge Kurt on the stairway-she felt a vast astonishment that he had refrained from hunting at all, upon her bare word.
Their compact was done.
Ernchester was dead. Karolyi had taken the secret of the vampires with him to the Constantinople morgue.
Jamie was alive.
Like an echo, she heard the whisper of a voice in her mind: There's a brightness dwells not in the veins...
Had he really been drawn to her, as to a flame of warmth? Or had that only been a literary conceit to compare the red warmth of fire and blood to the auburn of her hair?
She didn't know. She didn't know if she wanted to know. There was a strange hurt inside when she thought of him, a dark wanting that she didn't know what to do with. It felt nothing like the love, the need, that had made it impossible for her to contemplate a life that did not include James' arms around her when she woke up in the night.
When Ysidro had carried her inside after Golge Kurt's attack on her...
She did not finish the thought. She curled up close to her husband, and taking his hand as for protection, let herself drift into sleep.
At sunset Asher woke to the cries of the muezzins of Aya Sofia, calling the Faithful to prayer. His startle of panic woke Lydia; for a moment his grip closed hard enough around her fingers to bruise the bones.
"I never thought I'd find you."
"Find me?" Asher said. His voice was raw and hoarse. "If I'd known you were looking, I'd have white hair by now!"
Lydia laughed a little shakily, and touched the silver glints in the brown. "I'm sorry." She pushed aside her own heavy red coils, groped for her spectacles as if to satisfy herself that they lay on the floor beside her, but did not put them on. "I was afraid I wasn't doing it right, but I was as careful as I could be. I always wore silver and carried a gun and made sure someone knew where I was- well, mostly. Not that that would have done me much good some of the time. But I did try."
"You did well." He cupped the side of her face in his good hand. "But then I never thought it would be otherwise, in anything you set out to do."
Lydia started to protest, and he covered her mouth with his own.
Someone knocked at the door, and a man called out in bad French, "Monsieur Ash? Madame? Here we have of the British Embassy Sir Burnwell Clapham, and a lady, for to fetch you away."
The house on Rue Abydos was absolutely dark when the embassy carriage left Asher and Lydia at its door. "I expect poor Miss Potton's still out looking for you," Lady Clapham said as Lydia unlocked the gate. "We didn't get back ourselves until nearly dawn, what with looking for you and making a detour and our carriage being attacked by rioters. We sent a man over at about nine, and he said the house was locked up and silent, so we knew she must be doing what we proceeded to do: check all the hospitals in the city. It was only toward evening we started checking police stations."
"Then you didn't get the message?" Lydia asked. In her all-encompassing black garments, with her red hair piled on her head again and the mud washed from her face, she felt like a schoolgirl playing dress-up; Asher, beside her in his khaki uniform, with his arm in a sling, appeared some casualty of a war.
"Heavens, did you send one?" The attache's wife shook her head. "We haven't been back to the villa all day, child. We'll probably find it under the door-if those villains at the prefecture bothered to send one at all."
The carriage rattled off into the dark. Lydia shivered. The house had a cold, unused feeling. She thought at first that Madame Potoneros and her daughter had departed that morning as soon as Margaret would let them, but found the kitchen fires unlit. They must have left sometime the night before. Lydia wondered uneasily, as she fished a match from the drawer in the hall to kindle the lamp on the little table, whether the housekeeper lived in Pera or across the Horn in Stamboul. The riot had spread to Galata, where the army had killed almost a dozen Armenians. Soldiers had been posted on the street corners as they'd come up the hill.