Magistrates of Hell

added, with a trace of bitterness. ‘Some – like Colonel von Mehren and Herr Knoller in the German Legation – even keep native mistresses! Others just go to the Chinese City, or make arrangements with the Chinese – er . . . go-betweens –’ she fumbled again for the polite term – ‘to have women brought to houses that they agree upon. This is what Sir Grant does.’

Ahead of them in the throng of Chinese – shopkeepers, soldiers, strollers and vendors of mousetraps and hats – the Baroness marched from counter to counter of the small shops that opened into the Lane, fingering lengths of silk and shouting at the merchants in pidgin or Russian, and discoursing on the various grades of the fabric and the descriptive nomenclature of its hues. Menchikov – or perhaps it was Korsikov – hovered no more than a foot from her elbow, but the Chinese around them did no more than stare, as if at an elephant or a funeral parade. Lydia was aware, too, that three times as many children, peasant women, and porters were following her – keeping a respectful distance from Korsikov (or Menchikov) – but pointing (a gesture done with the chin in China, rather than the fingers) and exclaiming, no doubt, that Westerners really were descended from devils because, like devils, this one had red hair.

Madame Drosdrova ignored them as if they were merely flies buzzing around her hat.

‘I’m quite shocked to hear it,’ exclaimed Lydia, who wasn’t. ‘But it’s really a far cry from debauchery with Chinese – er – ladies, to murder . . .’

Paola shook her head violently. ‘It is not just debauchery, Madame. It is . . .’ She looked like she wanted to lower her voice, but the general noise of chatter in the street all around them put this discretion out of the question. ‘I understand – I have heard – that Sir Grant likes to . . . to hurt the women he . . . he consorts with. Badly, sometimes. There are men like this,’ she added earnestly, as if certain that this was something a respectable woman like Lydia had never heard of before. ‘Not just slapping one’s wife when one is drunk, you understand, such as all men do—’

Lydia opened her mouth to protest that all men did nothing of the kind.

‘—but deliberately. And there are men in China who buy women – girls – from their families, to hire them out to men who . . . who take pleasure in this.’

Behind her hat veils, Paola’s face suffused with a flush of embarrassment. Lydia recalled the relevant chapters in Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis – which she had read with a combination of clinical interest and baffled amazement at one point in the three years she had spent attending medical lectures and dissections at the Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford – but forbore to mention this, to request more specific information, or to reflect on the information she had just received, not only about Sir Grant Hobart but also about the home life of the Italian Assistant Diplomatic Attache.

She also stifled her next comment: that, given the extremes of poverty in China and the general Chinese attitude that anything and everything was marketable, the sale of these services didn’t surprise her. That was also the sort of remark that would have sent her stepmother and aunts into an advanced case of the vapors . . . whatever ‘vapors’ actually were. (Dr Charcot in France – or was it Dr Freud in Vienna? – would undoubtedly have an opinion on nervous causes of the vapors . . . I shall have to look that up . . .)

She settled on, ‘Sir Grant? I would never have thought it!’

Though according to Krafft-Ebing, a great many men did precisely that, and not all of them in Peking, either. Nor did it appear to be possible to tell who was a likely candidate for such behavior simply by looking at them.

‘If I’d only heard it from Madame Drosdrova, or Annette Hautecoeur –’ Paola named the wife of the French Legation’s Assistant Trade secretary – ‘I would think, this is gossip . . . You have no idea the frightful gossip that one encounters here, ma’am, at every turn! But this my husband told me.’

‘I have reason to believe,’ put in Lydia tactfully, ‘that men gossip among themselves every bit as badly as women do.’

The Italian girl shook her head again, ‘No! Only women gossip, and even if men did, Tonio – Signor Giannini – is not that sort of man.’

They stopped outside the largest silk-shop in the street, before which a very old Chinese gentleman was stirring and mixing what looked like dough in a basin filled with white powder; he would lift it out, draw it between his hands to make it thinner and thinner, then double it on itself and drop it back for a quick roll in the powder again . . .

‘My husband warned me,’ Paola went on, ‘in my first month that I was here, not to be friendly with Sir Grant, and when I asked him why, he told me about the Chinese girls and the house of Mrs Tso that Sir Grant visits in Big Tiger Lane. My mother would not have said that this was a proper thing for a man to tell his wife, but because we are all so much together in the Legations I am glad that I know this, so that I may keep a proper distance. Later I heard from Madame Hautecoeur that there had been a terrible scandal, and a girl was said to have died in that house.’

By this time the dough had been separated into bundles of individual strands no larger than stout sewing- thread, and the crowd around the old gentleman’s wheeled bin had thickened until it nearly blocked the street. ‘What is it?’ asked Lydia in fascination, and Paola shook her head.

Lydia repeated the question to a man next to her, pointing, but his reply – ‘Ah, t’ang kuo!’ – conveyed little. When the dough had been reduced to a fibrous skein of powdery threads, the old man dropped it in a dusty whoof of whiteness on to the nearest shop counter and hacked it into short lengths with the razor-sharp cleaver at his belt, and seemed not to understand Lydia’s questions as to its nature or price. When she finally offered him a copper cash he gave her four pieces, gathered his basin and its portable stand, and moved off to put on his show in the next alley.

‘Don’t you dare eat that!’ Madame Drosdrova emerged from the silk shop and snatched the glutinous morsel from Lydia’s fingers. ‘It might be poison!’

‘Nonsense, people bought them for their children,’ retorted Lydia – and in fact four or five urchins in the street were devouring the t’ang kuo with enthusiasm. But Madame wouldn’t have it. She wadded the paper around the t’ang kuo and flung it to the gutter, from which the children promptly snatched it up and ran away.

‘What is it?’

‘Good heavens, child, how should I know?’ Madame herded the two girls back toward the rickshaws. ‘It’s probably opium!’

Menchikov (or Korsikov) trailed behind them, both laden with so huge an armload of paper-wrapped parcels from every shop in the lane that a fourth vehicle had to be hired to transport it all back to the Russian Legation.

‘So you see,’ concluded Paola as she climbed up into the high-wheeled wicker chair, ‘though Richard Hobart seemed indeed to be a most polite young man – and was, I understand, coveted by all the ladies of the Legations who had daughters to dispose of suitably – when I heard that he had arrived at Sir Allyn’s reception Wednesday night, late and probably drunk, I should never have permitted Holly to go down to meet him alone. He is Sir Grant’s son.’

Lydia reflected that if her own conduct were assumed to reflect her father’s, no man in his right mind would have sought her hand in marriage. As she put her foot on the step of the rickshaw a voice behind her whispered, ‘Missy—’

The old rickshaw-puller held out to her a little white square of t’ang kuo wrapped in a bit of paper, with a conspiratorial grin.

It was candy, the white powder sugar, like Turkish delight. It covered Lydia’s hands, and Paola’s, with telltale evidence as they headed back toward the Legations at a breakneck trot through the blue evening streets.

‘What is it?’ Willard held up his hand for caution.

Asher had already stopped, listening to the deathly silence that had followed the chill keening of the wind.

Beside him, Karlebach’s breath hissed sharply.

Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it . . .

‘Bloody rotten luck if it’s robbers, after that lot nicked the horses,’ Barclay muttered.

‘Can’t be robbers,’ returned Gibbs. ‘They’ll have seen somebody’s already had a touch at us.’

‘Well, I bloody well ain’t givin’ up my boots without a fight.’ The younger trooper brandished his stout bamboo spear.