Magistrates of Hell by Barbara Hambly Page B

from holding off eleven stone of homicidal impaled killer who should have been dead. ‘Mizukami drove us back in his motor car – Karlebach, Ito, and myself – because there wouldn’t be a train until morning. Even after the worst of the dust passed it was all he could do to hold the car on the road. He didn’t explain his own presence, but I’m guessing that he and Ito had been following us most of the day. Mizukami must have recognized me and may still think I’m a German agent. I assume he will arrive shortly after we finish breakfast, to ask everything he had not the opportunity to query last night.’
    Lydia glanced over her shoulder at the door of their bedroom, where the old professor had spent what had remained of the night. Though Karlebach had revived a little on the drive under the influence of the Count’s French brandy, he had still barely been able to get up the stairs, and even allowing for the ghastly things electric lighting did to peoples’ appearance, neither Asher nor Lydia had liked the chalky grayness of his face.
    Since Lydia invariably traveled with both stethoscope and sphygmomanometer tucked into one of the dozen steamer-trunks of Worth and Poiret dresses, she’d made sure his blood pressure and heartbeat were normal, if weak, before mixing him a sedative. She’d spent the night in Miranda’s little cubicle with Mrs Pilley, while Asher had dossed down on the parlor sofa.
    Now, even with the windows shuttered, the drawn curtains bellied restlessly in the cold, dust-laden wind and the air was blurred with a gauze of suspended gray-yellow silt. In the nursery, Asher could hear Miranda crying fretfully at the dust in her eyes, nose, and porridge.
    ‘You’ve heard nothing of Ysidro?’
    Lydia shook her head.
    Ellen appeared, starched and friendly, like a good-natured draft-horse in the spotless print cotton dress appropriate for maidservants before noon, to take away the tray, and through the open door into the ‘service’ half of the suite, Asher heard Mrs Pilley exclaim, ‘Now,
there’s
my good girl!’
    ‘Miranda doesn’t sound like she approves of her first dust storm,’ he remarked, and Ellen chuckled.
    ‘Oh, she’s kept trying to scrape the dust off the porridge with her little fingers, and the Pilley –’ Ellen had little use for the nurse, whose opinions on the rights of working men to picket (‘They should be arrested!’) and women to vote (‘They should be sent home to their husbands, who should have kept them there to begin with!’) she decried as barbaric – ‘has been half-mad wiping her hands every two seconds. And it itches her eyes, poor sweet. How we’re to bath her with this dust turning the water to mud I
don’t
know. And how is poor Professor Karlebach?’
    ‘I’m just going in to check.’ Lydia rose, unobtrusively collected her glasses – which she’d whipped off at the first creak of the door hinges heralding Ellen’s entry – and moved softly toward the bedroom: ‘No, you sit there and finish your coffee, Jamie. I heard you get up and check on him in the night when you should have been resting yourself.’
    Asher sat back and gazed consideringly at the half-open door of the bedroom after Ellen left, his coffee cup still cradled in his hands.
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune
, Francis Bacon had written.
They are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief
. . .
    When he glanced down at the cup he saw that a microscopic film lay on the surface of the coffee.
    He was deeply glad that Lydia and Miranda were with him – were where he could protect them, or at least know what kind of danger they were in. But his dreams last night had been troubled by the reflective eyes, the deformed faces seen in starlight. The stink of rotting filth. Exhausted as he had been, he had waked half a dozen times, less from concern for his old friend than from the nightmare that he’d heard clawed hands scratching at the