the plagues of this earth!’
‘How did you happen to be in the garden?’ asked Lydia, ‘If you don’t mind me asking . . .’
Distress clouded Paola’s eyes. ‘Holly Eddington and I were of an age, Madame. There are not many so young, among the Legations. Poor Holly. She was very lonely, and anxious, as women are who reach the age of twenty-four unwed and unasked. Bitter, too, I think, that women like that poisonous Madame Schrenk – the wife of the Austrian Minister’s First Secretary – would say of her,
The young woman sighed as she moved off along the line of those fearsome other-worldly magistrates who glared and scowled in the shadows. ‘We both of us loved music, and birds, though we had in truth little else in common. At her invitation I would come to play on her mother’s piano, for Tonio and I have none in our little house. Like her mother she saw the Chinese only as devils, whom she seemed to think chose their own condition in this world. And she was so – so
‘How did you happen go out to the garden Wednesday night?’ asked Lydia. ‘You must have been freezing . . .’
‘It was only to be for a moment, I thought. Holly and I were arranging for the cake to be laid out, when one of the servants came in and told her that Signor Hobart had come to the garden gate and was asking to see her.’
‘Asking to see her?’
‘Even so, Madame. Since eight o’clock she was almost in tears, that Mr Hobart would have not come to the reception for their own engagement. She said, “If he is drunk, I will kill him!” and went out – though of course she knew and I knew that he would be drunk. I finished with the cake plates and the champagne. Then I realized it had been fifteen minutes, perhaps more, and Holly had not returned. I looked out into the garden and didn’t see her – her dress was white, you remember, and would show up in the dark. I went out the French door of the drawing room and a little way down the path, before I saw something white on the ground.’
She turned her face aside, stared for a time at the statue of what seemed to be a disheveled poet with huge fangs and a scroll in his hand, and sinners screaming in torment beneath his feet.
‘Did you hear anything?’ asked Lydia softly. ‘Or see any movement?’
Paola shook her head. ‘I thought at first that she might have fainted. Then when I came near and saw Richard lying near her, and smelled the liquor and the opium smoke in his clothing—’
Even without her spectacles, Lydia heard the mingling of distress and guilt in her companion’s voice.
‘I’m sure she wouldn’t have wanted a third party present . . .’
‘I know she didn’t.’ The young woman turned back to her. ‘Yet I should have at least gone out on to the step, to watch them from afar. Richard has always been a perfect gentleman, even when he is drunk; he would not hurt even a flea.’ She sighed and folded her arms, as if against the Temple’s bone-deep chill. And sadly, added, ‘Yet everyone in the Legations knows about his father.’
‘Please to get down from your horses. Be of no trouble.’ The tall man in the gray-green uniform – the only one of the bandits mounted on a full-sized European horse rather than a shaggy Chinese pony – gestured with his revolver. His face was heavily scarred with smallpox, eyebrow-less and thin-lipped, his hair cut short. The men around him – some in peasant
Sergeant Willard, hands raised, said quietly, ‘Kuo Min-tang.’
‘Can we run for it?’ Karlebach’s curling gray eyebrows had pulled into a solid shelf over the jut of his nose, and beneath them his dark eyes glinted. ‘It will be dark in an hour.’
‘We wouldn’t make it twenty feet.’ Asher – who had raised his hands like the others the moment the men had emerged, on foot and on horseback, from the tangle of rhododendron brush along the trail – dismounted and stood quiet while one of the Chinese stripped him of his greatcoat, then dug through the pockets of his jacket beneath. He added, ‘Get down, Rebbe, please,’ in a level voice when the old man hesitated. ‘Or they will shoot you.’ And when Karlebach obeyed and was, for his cooperation, relieved of his old-fashioned shooting-coat, his scarf, his watch (Asher had taken the precaution of leaving his own watch and money back at the hotel – he’d travelled in the Chinese countryside before), and his shotgun, he went on, still in the Czech that he knew no one around them would understand, ‘They don’t want trouble with the British authorities if they can help it. What they want is the horses and the guns.’
Personally, he was grateful that the Republican revolutionaries showed no signs of taking their boots as well.
‘Ask them, please,’ said Karlebach, ‘
Asher relayed this request, in his hesitant Chinese, to their captors. The men opened one of the little bottles, sniffed the contents in turn, tasted it, and all grimaced. ‘What?’ demanded one of them, and Asher replied:
‘
Evidently satisfied that the stuff wasn’t liquor or anything remotely like it, they returned the opened bottle with bows.
Sergeant Willard muttered, ‘It’s them who been followin’ us all day, my next pay-packet to a copper cash.’
Asher made no reply. Someone had certainly been following them. But it made more sense for the rebels to have taken them in this place – on the bare ridge halfway between the railway town and Mingliang – outbound and in the daylight, to give themselves more time to get farther. Why wait till now when it was dusk, unless they had only recently picked up their trail?
The gorge was already filled with shadow. He heard one of the men snap in Chinese, ‘Hurry up!’ as the others shoved the rest of the tiny bottles into Karlebach’s crippled hands. ‘It’ll be dark before we camp.’ And he caught the words, ‘
The commander himself remained mounted, but did not speak again. Dr Bauer had warned them, when they’d returned from the mine to the village to collect the horses and start back to Men T’ou Kuo, ‘Ride quickly, but if you’re stopped, remember that they don’t want trouble. Give them the horses and the guns, and they’ll let you walk back to the railroad in peace . . .’
Which would have been all right with him, Asher reflected as he watched the robbers move off up the trail into the thickening darkness, if he hadn’t seen the skull in the box at Dr Bauer’s mission.
Sergeant Willard muttered, ‘Cheesus wept. We’ll be till midnight, hoofin’ it back to the railroad, lads – you be all right, Professor K? Need a hand, sir?’
And Trooper Barclay muttered, ‘We’ll all need a bleedin’ hand ’fore this night’s done! Christ Almighty, I’m cold as a nun’s knickers! We’ll be frozen stiff by the time we get back to town.’
Asher said nothing, though he too had started to shiver. He guessed what would be moving in these hills, once darkness fell, and knew that cold was going to be the least of their troubles.
SEVEN
‘Please understand that Sir Grant has never been anything but a perfect gentleman to me.’
Lydia recognized the earnestness in Paola’s voice and the expression in those enormous brown eyes, almost of desperation that Lydia should understand that what Paola was about to say wasn’t to be taken as the malicious backstairs gossip that it would be if someone else were to say it. Lydia reflected, a little sadly, on the number of scandalous secrets communicated to her by cousins, by her beautiful stepmother, by the daughters of her aunts’ friends and by the other young ladies at her very expensive Swiss boarding-school, prefaced by that devastating disclaimer.
She tucked the Italian girl’s hand into the crook of her arm and bent her head to listen as they strolled along the shopfronts of Silk Lane.
‘I think you know that only a very few men in the diplomatic corps bring their wives to China,’ explained Paola, in a slightly constricted voice. ‘The young clerks – and some that are not so young – er . . .
