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not that she knows Enrico Caruso from Robinson Crusoe – and she’ll be sure to recognize it at her Venetian breakfast Monday night …’)
    Lydia wondered if she could invent a headache to get out of the inevitable supper afterwards at the Savoy. If nothing else, she reflected as she washed off powder, rouge, mascaro, kohl and then settled before the fly-specked hotel mirror to reapply them afresh, the information the detective agencies had sent her would give her names.
    Vampires changed identities, if they lived long enough. They willed their property to themselves, when the authorities might have grown suspicious about Mr Brown being a hundred and fifty years old. Or they willed their property to the Master who made them, who held over them a sway which could barely be comprehended by the living.
    My darling, I’ll find you
…
    Rattling to Aunt Lavinnia’s in a cab, Lydia recalled her own first (and only) ‘season’ in 1899, before her father had melodramatically cast her out of his house upon the discovery that she had applied – and been accepted – to Somerville College, Oxford, to train in medicine. Dressed in the height of Mr Worth’s elegance and rigid with anxiety, she had been borne through the still-bright daylight of the streets of London toward Berkeley Square.
    Only on the present occasion at least she had the quiet and privacy of the cab – odiferous as it was – instead of the chaperonage of her stepmother and her Aunt Faith, neither of whom ever shut up for so much as a moment.
    You have dealt with vampires before this, and you survived
.
    Jamie, where are you?
    Dakers – Aunt Lavinnia’s butler – bowed as he took her (borrowed) coat and said, with the liberty of one who had known her from earliest childhood, ‘You never came in that vehicle, Mrs Asher? Her Ladyship will be most shocked.’
    â€˜Only if someone tattles,’ Lydia replied, and slipped him a half-crown.
    Without change of expression he led the way up the curving oval of stairs, and opened the drawing-room doors at the top. ‘Mrs Asher,’ he announced.
    â€˜Well, here you are at last, dear.’ With brittle graciousness, her tiny, perfect stepmother turned from speaking to a man in evening dress whose looming outline – a Stonehenge menhir wrapped in black and white – Lydia did not recognize. Hands outstretched in welcome, exquisite in midnight-blue crêpe de chine which set off her delicate blonde prettiness, Valentina Willoughby rustled over to her late husband’s only child. As usual in her presence, Lydia felt six feet tall and all elbows and knees as she leaned down to kiss the powdered cheek. The broad diamond ‘dog-collar’ necklace that plastered her stepmother’s white throat had belonged to Lydia’s mother: her father’s second wife had undoubtedly worn it to annoy the stepdaughter whom she had – erroneously – thought still disinherited upon her late husband’s death … and also to enrage that stepdaughter’s aunts.
    But, as Isobel had pointed out over luncheon,
Valentina knows everybody
, and had to be kept sweet for the sake of Emily’s chances of meeting the right gentlemen.
    â€˜Mrs Asher –’ Valentina’s voice handled the name exactly as her fingers would have dealt with a dead mouse – ‘allow me to introduce Mr Armistead, of Denver, Colorado. Mr Armistead, my
dearest
daughter. And I’m
sure
I have no need to tell you, Lydia, darling, of his lovely daughter’s engagement to Lord Colwich. Their love story is the talk of the town!’
    â€˜Long as Cece’s happy,’ grunted the big man, in a voice like gravel being stirred at the bottom of a well. ‘Beats me why every gal in the country’s on fire to marry some Englishman or other just ’cause he’s got Sir this or Lord that on his name.’ Up close, Lydia had an impression