Magistrates of Hell

black . . .) The stone kongs where goldfish had swum only last week were frozen. The wind that had whipped and wailed over the hills all day sobbed around the temple’s upturned eaves and filled the air with the smell of dust.

From the dark of the temple, eyes gleamed like a line of terrible dragons: the ten Magistrates of Hell, surrounded by the writhing damned. Movement in the shadow – a pale flicker near the back of the long hall, where a door opened into a narrow garden. Lydia advanced a step to the threshold, her every instinct telling her: Don’t . . .

But not afraid.

‘Simon?’

Not a sound from within, save the moan of wind in the rafters. It was all exactly as she recalled it from her excursion with Paola and the Baroness, down to the yellow dog, curled up asleep in the corner by the God of War’s altar, and the tattered banners of cut paper that swayed and groped like spirit hands overhead. Lydia walked forward over the worn flagstones, caught the heel of her shoe in a crack – drat it, I really do need a lantern . . .

And, as she often was able to do in dreams, told herself: there’s one over by the altar of that Fifth Magistrate, the one in charge of the people-chopper-upper machine . . .

And so there was. And a box of matches on the corner of the altar.

She lit the wick, closed the glass slide, achingly grateful for the warmth of the small flame on her frozen fingers . . .

Turned back to the dark of the temple, raising the lantern high.

But there was nothing there. No one, where she had been ready to swear that someone had stood, just moments before, just to the right of the God of War’s altar, in the moving seaweed shadows of the hanging scrolls. Someone thin and old, who had watched her patiently. Who had known her name.

There was no one there now. Determined not to let the dream go, Lydia proceeded to search the Temple with her lantern, probing every dark corner and startling spiders and crickets.

She found nothing. The Temple of Everlasting Harmony was as empty as Ysidro’s brass-bound trunk had been, in the rented safety of the bank vault next door.

TWENTY

As the following day – Friday – required the presence of the Japanese military attache at one of the regular meetings of the Legations Council, Lydia had accepted an invitation for coffee and elevenses with the Baroness. For all her overbearing ways (she was widely rumored to beat her servants with a riding whip), the Baroness Drosdrova was capable of both kindness and sensitivity, so the only other company that morning was Paola Giannini. Lydia had had a headache planned, should she have walked into the Russian Minister’s conservatory and found Madame Schrenk there.

There was a good deal of talk of opera, over an assortment of too-sweet jelly-cakes and rubbery blini. Madame Drosdrova had newspapers sent to her from every European capital and could chatter knowledgeably of what was on at La Scala and the Paris Opera. And there was a good deal more said about the Eddington murder, which would be arraigned the following week.

‘Has nothing further been discovered?’ asked Paola. ‘Poor Sir Grant must be distracted!’

‘Poor Sir Grant my foot.’ Madame dusted powdered sugar from her fingers. ‘I hear he goes in and shouts at Sir John and tears his hair and weeps, yet it doesn’t seem to have stopped his visits to that house of accommodation he goes to, in the native city.’

‘Surely, he wouldn’t . . .’

‘Ma chere,’ said the Baroness, ‘the innocence of your heart gives me the greatest admiration for your husband’s character . . . or his tact. Only yesterday, when one would think Sir Grant Hobart would have nothing on his thoughts but conferring with the Legation solicitor – though anyone who would trust that slick little piece of Hibernian canaille is simply asking for what he’ll get! – Hobart took a rickshaw out of the Quarter, all muffled up in a fur coat and scarves, as if everyone in the Quarter doesn’t know those frightful yellow shoes of his at sight . . . And didn’t return until the small hours of the morning, flaming drunk and shouting at the gate guards to let him in, Hans Erlich tells me. Is he still sending you notes, my dear?’ She turned her lorgnette in Lydia’s direction. ‘Considering everything the man has to feel guilt about . . . And what’s this, that nasty cat Hilda Schrenk was telling me about you going riding with Count Mizukami, of all people?’

‘And did Madame Schrenk think to mention that I was accompanied not only by the Count, but also by Professor Karlebach and about half a regiment of Japanese soldiers as chaperones? I didn’t think so.’ Lydia caught herself up, set down the thumb-sized fragment of rock-dry toast on which she’d been spreading and re-spreading caviar for the past five minutes, and added, with a little quaver in her voice, ‘I hope Madame Schrenk will never have the occasion to discover what it’s like to . . . to feel trapped, and closed-in, so that anything will be preferable to staying in the hotel.’

She had heard her school friend Mary Teasborough say something of the kind, shortly after her brother had died, and hoped it would serve. But the memory of the rats in the mines, of the voice in her head whispering, Mistress, returned to her with such sudden force then that her hands shook and she pushed the toast-point aside. At least new widowhood excuses one from eating the productions of the Drosdrov cook . . .

‘Darling—’ Paola took her hand. ‘You know you could have called upon either one of us.’

Lydia nodded, struggling to put that whisper from her mind. With what she hoped was a convincing-sounding catch to her voice, she murmured, ‘As Professor Karlebach has been employed by the University of Tokyo to continue the Oriental portion of . . . of Jamie’s work, he very kindly asked me to go along. I felt it was for the best . . .’

‘And so it is!’ The Baroness leaned across the table to grip her other hand. ‘Hilda Schrenk is a spiteful old cat, particularly since you turned down that imbecile Alois Blucher’s offer to go walking with you – he’s her cousin, you know, and frantically in need of an heiress to marry. And Mr Woodreave was saying to me only yesterday—’

‘If you speak of Edmund Woodreave to me,’ said Lydia, ‘I shall scream. But on the subject of taking the air – and I am much better today, thank you – I wondered if perhaps we might return to the Temple of Everlasting Harmony near Silk Lane this morning? I had a dream about it,’ she added as the Baroness opened her mouth to point out that the Temple of Heaven, with its nine terraces and its curious round structure, was greatly superior architecturally to some forgotten shrine lost in the middle of the hutongs.

‘What did you dream?’ asked Paola, but the Baroness interrupted her.

‘Dreams are nonsense. I’m forever searching the maids’ rooms to get rid of those idiotic horoscope charts and dream books they all pore over, as if there weren’t far more elevating literature in the world. I try to educate them, but the stubbornness of the Lower Orders is quite astonishing.’

Nevertheless, she rang the bell, ordered the servant to send for the rickshaw-pullers, and for Menchikov and Korsikov, and proceeded to take charge of the expedition.

Lydia wasn’t certain what she hoped or expected to encounter at the Temple, but through the morning her anxiety had grown, both for Don Simon and for Asher. She wasn’t a fanciful woman, but she was, in her own way, an imaginative one. It wasn’t difficult to picture a situation in which Ysidro could have become trapped in the Shi’h Liu mine, where the weight of the earth would prevent him from making any kind of clear contact – as she knew he could – in her dreams.

And though she knew that he could not be other than what he was, she’d seen the effects of chlorine gas on human tissue. The thought of him being still in the mines when hundreds of liters of chlorine were dumped down to form gas there, and the mine sealed, was a hideous one. It took no fancy or imagination to nauseate her with dread, and to send her to a place where she was fairly certain she wouldn’t have dreamed about – much less twice! – on her own.

But when they reached the Temple, all things were very much as she had seen them in her dream, except that now the hall was filled with gray, prosaic daylight, and there was not the slightest trace of anyone untoward