Magistrates of Hell

Peking had been visited by a disgusted God upon an unregenerate population of idolaters. ‘We had other things to worry about.’

The dust storm had overtaken them within sight of the lights of Men T’ou Kuo, after a stumbling race along the trail by moonlight, with no thought of anything but haste.

‘Ito – Mizukami’s bodyguard – was wounded, more seriously than he’d admit, I think. Mizukami had to help him most of the way back. And Karlebach was at the end of his strength.’ Asher flexed his wrists, which ached 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 windows, seen those slumped shadows following him again along the stagnant waters of the canal.

How much intelligence do they have? Enough to know me by sight? To follow me?

To learn that there are those here I love?

Fear twisted somewhere behind his breastbone. His one failing, in his days as a field agent, had been his imagination. An agent’s greatest gift, but a weapon that could turn in its wielder’s hand, as it had turned in his.

And what about the vampires of Peking? He remembered Ysidro’s nervousness – remembered his own sensation, walking along the canal’s high banks two nights ago, of something watching him, following him . . .

Months before Miranda’s birth, Lydia had sewed lengths of silver chain into the linings of the curtains of their daughter’s tiny bed, even into the bindings around Miranda’s blankets. The thought that she had to do this – the thought that the Master of London, only seventy miles from Oxford, knew where he and Lydia lived – still filled him with rage, terror, and guilt.

And though he had quit the Department before he’d asked Lydia – at that time a penniless student disinherited by her disgruntled father – to be his wife, he had done so with trepidation. Spying was a bachelor’s game, and even ex-spies spent the rest of their lives glancing over their shoulders. In Asher’s eyes, perhaps the greatest of Ysidro’s many sins was that, in dragging Asher into the affairs of the London vampires seven years previously, he had brought Lydia to the attention of those who hunted in the night.

Lydia, and now the child she had borne.

She came back in, coiling up her stethoscope in her hands. ‘He’s still sleeping,’ she said. ‘Poor old gentleman . . . And I must say, Jamie, that it was infamous of you to include poor old Karlebach on yesterday’s expedition and tell me I had to stay back and try to get gossip out of the Baroness. Not to speak of the fact that by the time I get out to Mingliang to have a look at those bones they’ll be crumbled to dust.’

‘Mea culpa!’ Asher raised his hands in surrender. ‘But as long as you did suffer an afternoon of the Baroness’s company—?’

‘Did you know in advance that she was like that?’

‘I am innocent, Lords of the Court, of the charges directed against me . . . though I had heard rumors.’ He swiped his coffee with a corner of his napkin, poured out the remainder of the coffee pot’s contents into Lydia’s cup, and set a saucer over it. ‘And speaking of rumors . . .’

‘Yes,’ Lydia said with a sigh. ‘Speaking of rumors . . .’

And she proceeded to give an account of her own afternoon’s expedition to Silk Lane.

‘I’m sorry to say,’ said Asher when she had finished, ‘that your friend Madame Giannini wasn’t wrong about Richard Hobart’s father. Grant Hobart had a smelly reputation even at Oxford. Of course, few of us were so green as to get ourselves entangled with the town girls, if all we wanted was a lark—’

‘And here I thought you spent your college years in monkish seclusion with a Slovak lexicon!’

‘Persian,’ corrected Asher with a grin. ‘And I’m afraid you’re mostly right.’ He removed the protective saucer from over his own cup, took a sip, and replaced it. ‘Even before the Department recruited me I never saw the point of getting castaway five nights out of seven, like the other men on my staircase. And you can thank my parsonical upbringing for keeping me out of the clutches of those girls the others pursued when they went down to London. It would be hard to imagine behavior too gross for drunken undergraduates to stomach, but Hobart managed it. He’d excuse himself – usually say the girls asked for it. There was a rumor back then – this was in eighty-two – that he’d killed a girl, at some place in London.’

‘Deliberately?’ Lydia’s voice was steady, but he could see she was genuinely appalled.

Asher thought about it. Remembered one spring afternoon in the Junior Common Room, and the silence that fell when Grant Hobart came through the door. Shortly after that, Hobart had come to him asking to be tutored in Chinese, a language Asher had been studying for two years. His father had given him three months, Hobart had said, meeting Asher’s eye with steely defiance in his own, to get a hand on the language and set forth to make his career in the Far East.

Unwillingly, he replied to her, ‘I think so, yes.’