Magistrates of Hell

taken Rick back to the cells emerge with young Hobart’s fouled gray jacket rolled up into a bundle with the shirt and green silk tie. In a carefully neutral voice, the soldier said, ‘You’d best let Sir Grant know that his son will be needing fresh clothing, sir.’

Dempsy waved as if to dispel the reek. ‘Jesus! And after all the fuss he made about getting his suits tailored, and his hankies to match.’

‘Did he?’ Asher signed the soldier to remain. Folded on top of the gray suit and green tie were the tweeds Rick had been wearing in the garden the previous night, including, grotesquely, the red-and-blue necktie with which Holly Eddington had been strangled.

‘Oh, hell, yes.’ The clerk made the whisper of a chuckle. ‘I guess I’m an American, sir, and the others are always ribbing me, how I look like I got dressed in a high wind . . .’

Which wasn’t true: Dempsy’s jacket was old and the cut of his trousers far from fashionable, but he had the well-scrubbed look common to many Americans. Despite his queasy pallor, he was freshly shaved, with a clean shirt and his tie done in a neat four-in-hand.

‘Is Rick fussy about his clothes?’

‘Not as bad as Hans Erlich.’ Dempsy grinned. ‘The two of them – Hans and Rick – will go on about what shade of tie goes with which socks like a couple of my mama’s friends back home. But please don’t think there’s anything sissy—’

Asher’s gesture disclaimed any such interpretation, and he took from the folded clothes the red-and-blue silk necktie – which the daylight showed to be entirely inappropriate for the muted mauves and greens of the tweed that Rick had worn the previous night. ‘Was this the tie Rick was wearing last night?’

Dempsy studied it for a moment. ‘No. The one he had on last night had spots, not stripes. The light wasn’t real good, but I think it was sort of greens and grays.’

‘That’s what I thought.’ Asher folded the tie up and tucked it into his pocket.

FOUR

‘Twenty-four hours?’ Professor Karlebach growled like a very old lion troubled by flies. ‘Ach, and for what? These creatures multiply, Jamie! Each night’s delay puts other victims in peril.’

Laughter from the party at the next table: the Austrian ambassador and two of his aides, chattering in Viennese French.

With a sidelong glance at them, Karlebach continued, ‘And it increases the chances that these things – these Others – will come to the attention of some one of the powers here.’ He gestured with the most recent issues of the Journal of Oriental Medicine and Etudes Physiologiques, pulled from the crammed pockets of his rusty, old-fashioned frock-coat. ‘Dr Bohren from Berlin, and that cretin Lemaitre from the Sorbonne, have written letters decrying this Bauer woman as a hoax, but you know it’s only a matter of time before someone in some War Department is going to start asking themselves how they might use these things. Surely we can reach this village this afternoon by motor car?’

‘We can. Provided nothing goes wrong.’ Asher sat back as the white-jacketed Chinese waiter brought green turtle soup and petite sole aux tomates to their table. The dining room of the Wagons-Lits Hotel was justly famous throughout the diplomatic community for the excellence of its lunches, and Asher had taken great care to obtain a table in the most inconspicuous corner of that elegant salon.

‘Have you ever ridden in a motor car, sir?’ Asher asked. ‘The tires are rubber: on a good macadam road you can go twenty or thirty miles between punctures. But here?’ He made an eloquent gesture with his eyebrows. ‘The road ends at Men T’ou Kuo. We’d have to procure horses there – or donkeys, more likely – to ride on to Mingliang. Given the presence of bandit groups in the hills – and Kuo Min-tang militia – personally, I would rather wait till we have an armed escort.’

‘I bow to your greater experience, Jamie.’ The old man rumbled his discontent. ‘It’s just, when I think of those who will be placed in danger—’

‘If someone will inevitably be placed in danger,’ said Lydia, ‘I would much rather that it not be you, sir, or Jamie.’ And she laid a hand over Asher’s wrist.

For this reason, with the conclusion of lunch, Asher passed the afternoon in giving his companions a Cook’s Tour of the Legation Quarter, with its odd mix of modern European structures and antique gateways left over from the days before the Uprising. Parade grounds, barracks, and soldiers in the uniforms of most of the armies of Europe served to remind them that they were intruders in that ancient land, and unwelcome ones at that.

‘Half this area was a regular Chinese neighborhood up till the Boxers shelled it into rubble,’ Asher explained as they paused to marvel over the Gothic absurdity of the French Post Office. ‘A maze of hutongs – those high-walled alleyways – and siheyuan, courtyard houses—’

‘Like the Legation this morning?’ asked Lydia.

‘They make up most of Peking. Sometimes one courtyard per house, sometimes two or three or five or ten, all leading out of one another. You never knew what was in some of those compounds. What the Boxers didn’t demolish was burned by Chinese mobs, or destroyed by the Expeditionary Force when they came through.’

Karlebach listened, nodded, and growled, but made the observation that it wasn’t to play Sherlock Holmes that they had come to China. When they reached the end of Legation Street, and looked out through the gate across the open glacis that surrounded the Quarter’s wall, he rumbled, ‘So he could be anywhere out there, could he not? Your vampire.’ He surveyed the sea of upturned tile roofs, the line of gaudy shops on the other side of Hatamen Street. Rickshaws, laden donkeys, and lines of thick-bodied, two-humped shaggy camels passed them, and endless streams of blue-clad Chinese.

‘He might.’ Asher felt Lydia’s silence beside him. Her anger at Ysidro over the death of a traveling companion – three years ago in Constantinople – had left her, and she would speak of the vampire perfectly readily if the subject arose. Yet he noticed she never brought up his name herself.

Except now and again, in her sleep.

As generally happened in any open space in Peking, the portion of the glacis from the gate to the polo ground – some two hundred feet – had been taken over by Chinese vendors of dumplings and caged birds, cloth shoes and horoscopes, fried scorpions and paper toys, as well as by the occasional acrobat, storyteller, juggler or newspaper seller, and a long rank of rickshaws, the pullers of which shouted their readiness to transport passers-by to anywhere in the Republic for twenty cents. Thronging together, they smelled different from English crowds. As he had on his previous visit to China, Asher felt as if he had disembarked, not on another corner of the planet, but on another world altogether, as different from England as H.G. Wells’s description of the civilization on the Moon.

You can’t tell what’s going on in their minds, Hobart had protested – loudly. How would I know how they’re connected?

He isn’t far wrong, reflected Asher, listening to the babble of voices, the curious sing-song effect of a language in which changing tone is as much a part of the meaning of the word as its consonants and vowels. Watching the gestures of hands, the slight cues of clothing and demeanor that communicated nothing to an observer who didn’t understand the culture or the city.

But, in fact, Hobart is lying.

And I wish I knew about what.

That night, after supper, and after Miranda had been put to bed – impatient with parents who had been largely at her beck and call throughout the six weeks on the ship and who now left her with Mrs Pilley and Ellen – Asher returned to the Quarter’s eastern gate. He’d left Lydia and Professor Karlebach poring over issues of the various medical journals which had appeared subsequent to Dr Christina Bauer’s article about the creature whose body she had dissected – journals which contained derisive letters speculating on everything from the missionary’s attempts to claim undeserved credit in the scientific community by a fraudulent ‘discovery’, to the degenerate nature of Oriental races in general. The night was still, and the cold piercing. He traded a cigarette with the guards on the gate – Russians, tonight – and talked with them a little in their own language before moving on.

Beyond the gate – across the open glacis – he could see the massive towers of the Hatamen Gate, shut and barred now for the night and guarded by a prosaic brace of blue-uniformed policemen. The wide avenue was growing quiet.