be.
The wind rested, then flung handfuls of rain at the window again.
Don Simon . . .
Not that, either.
It is only fascination.
He said so himself.
She pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose.
Vampires hunt by making you trust them. Why else would someone go down a dark alley with a complete stranger in the middle of the night?
The sensation she had of breathlessness – of piercing grief – at the recollection of those calm yellow eyes, that soft voice and the cold touch of his hand, were no more than the reaction to a period of excitement and danger that had ended in tragedy.
Like Jamie, she would not be drawn back.
For Jamie, it was different. He had sickened at the Department’s deceit, at its demand that he hold himself ready to harm anyone who came between himself and his duty, but she knew he was very good at what he did. She had never felt sure of her footing in the vampire’s presence, never known whether what she was doing was right or wrong.
In the Department, Jamie said, it was always very clear. You had to keep yourself alive by whatever means you could, until whatever information you were seeking had been safely turned over to your chiefs. You didn’t look past that. It was why so many men, though they might hate what they did, could not imagine living in any other fashion.
‘You always have to be seen to be going where you’re going for a reason,’ he had explained to her once: the reason that she had surrounded her list of German blood-doctors with made-up persiflage about Uncle William’s fictitious Russian railway investments. In Russia, everyone’s letters were opened by the Secret Police, and no one thought anything about it. ‘Nine people out of ten aren’t going to ask themselves, What’s a Dutch philologist doing receiving letters from London? Or, Where does Herr Professor Leyden go when he disappears like that . . .? But that tenth person – or whoever he or she talks to – is the one who can get you killed.’
Get you killed .
Jamie .
That had been back in the days when she’d been a schoolgirl, visiting her uncle in Oxford and playing croquet with a small army of young gentlemen waiting with barely-concealed impatience for the heiress to the Willoughby Fortune to be brought ‘out’ so one or another of them could marry her and it . . .
And with one of her uncle’s scholastic colleagues, who turned out not to be nearly the dry middle-aged academic he appeared to be.
After her second meeting with him, she’d started making notes of his journeys and destinations, and comparing them with places mentioned in the newspapers. She had finally gotten up the nerve to ask him, as they’d hunted for a lost ball in the long grass by the river, ‘Professor Asher . . . are you a spy?’
His eyes, when he’d looked swiftly sidelong at her – such surprisingly bright brown eyes – had registered no surprise.
It was then – or maybe she’d known it already – that she’d understood that she loved him. Not as a schoolgirl, but as the woman she only just realized she would one day become.
Don Simon . . .
‘Ma’am?’ Ellen stood in the study doorway, a tray in her hands. ‘I’ve brought you a cup of tea, ma’am. You didn’t so much as touch your lunch.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ Lydia smiled, put her spectacles back on, and looked around rather vaguely for space on the desk.
Ellen carried the tray to the occasional table by the fireplace, permitting herself a tiny sidelong grin of her own. She’d been the nursery maid at Willoughby Court and had spent a good portion of her life since that time wading after her mistress through a morass of books, papers, journals, discarded social invitations and milliners’ silk samples, trying to get her to remember to eat regular meals or go to bed on time.
‘Now, don’t you worry, ma’am.’ Ellen knelt to stir up the blaze – which, Lydia became aware, had sunk almost to ashes while she’d been
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