Magistrates of Hell

Asher, could ask no better protector for her than that yellow-eyed Spanish nobleman who had died before Queen Elizabeth came to the throne.

Died and become Undead.

The bedroom was arctic. Ellen had warmed the bed with a stone water-bottle, and it, too, had gone icy. By candlelight Lydia pulled off her tea gown and corset in record time and, night-gowned to the chin, scrambled beneath the feather bed, then immediately proceeded to use Asher’s legs as a foot-warmer.

Later, as they were drifting off to sleep, she asked, ‘Are you really going to look into things and question Sir Grant’s servants?’

‘It isn’t my business,’ said Asher sleepily. ‘And, I have doubts about what I’m going to find. But yes. It’s only his word that will shield me from suspicion, and there are several people who might very well recognize me from my previous visit. I can’t really refuse.’

Silence, and the scent of sandalwood and vanilla, as she rested her head on his shoulder and stroked his mustache into tidiness with her forefinger.

‘Did Ysidro say how long he’d been in Peking?’ A trace of hesitation tinged her voice as she spoke the vampire’s name. There had been a time when she had refused to do so – a time when she had turned her face from Ysidro completely. You defend him, too? Karlebach had asked, and she had had no answer.

‘We were interrupted.’ Asher spoke with deliberate matter-of-factness.

‘Or whether there were vampires in Peking?’

‘No,’ said Asher softly. ‘I wondered about that myself.’

THREE

From the Wagons-Lits Hotel it was a straight walk of a few hundred yards along the decaying banks of the old canal, to the gray walls of the British Legation, massive in the morning sunlight. Rickshaw men followed Asher and Lydia like persistent horseflies, with cries of, ‘Anywhere Peking twen’y cent! Chop-chop, feipao—’

Asher stifled the urge to shout, ‘Li k’ai!’ at them – go away! But it was always better when abroad – as His Majesty’s Secret Servants would euphemistically say when they were poking around in countries where they had no business being – to pretend total ignorance of the local tongue. One heard far more interesting things that way. And in any case, he, James Asher, had supposedly never set foot in China before. He laid a gloved hand over Lydia’s, where it rested in the crook of his arm, and looked about him with the fatuous smile of an Englishman surveying a country that didn’t come up to British standards of government, hygiene, morals, cooking, or anything else.

But he murmured to her from time to time. ‘This canal used to be better kept up . . . Behind that wall, where the Japanese Legation is now, was Prince Su’s palace . . . There was a lane over there that led to what they called the Mongol Market. The vegetable-sellers would arrive before dawn on market days with trains of camels, and the noise would drive anybody out of bed . . .’

Lydia, for her part, turned her head with a gaze which appeared regal but was in fact an ingrained battle not to squint at a world which was nothing to her but blobs of dazzling color in the brittle bright Peking sunlight. The sewagy pong of the canal water mixed with flurries of charcoal smoke from the dumpling man’s cart, then sharp sweetness as they passed the vendor of sugared bean-cakes. She was longing to put on her spectacles, Asher knew, with a head-shake of regret. There were times when he wanted to go back and thrash the stepmother and aunts who’d told her she was ugly.

‘The Chinese say that when people first arrive in Peking they weep with disappointment,’ he remarked, ‘and when they leave, they weep with regret.’

She smiled. ‘Did you?’ She had, Asher knew, been disconcerted at her first glimpse of it, from the windows of the train from Tientsin yesterday afternoon: stagnant pools around scattered congeries of pigsties, chicken runs, and clumps of low-built houses in the Chinese City. Even here within the towering walls of the Tatar City, and of the walled Legation Quarter tucked away in one corner of it, the impression was of dirt and desolation, gray walls, blind alleyways, and grinding poverty.

‘I was hidden in a corner of a boxcar filled with raw cowhides,’ returned Asher, ‘with a price on my head and fifteen German soldiers on my trail. So – no.’

Lydia laughed.

At the rambling old palace where His Majesty’s Ambassador still had his headquarters, Asher sent in his card and gave Sir John Jordan the same story he’d given Hobart the previous evening: that he was here to look into a remarkable piece of ancient folklore which had resurfaced, for purposes of incorporation into a book he was writing on the transmission of rodent motifs in Central European legend. ‘While I’m here,’ he went on, after Sir John had inquired in a friendly manner about the book, ‘might I visit Richard Hobart at the stockade?’

The ambassador paused in the act of signing an order for an armed detail to escort Asher to the hills on the following morning, his eyebrows quirked.

‘I’m a cousin of his mother’s –’ this was another fiction, though Asher had met Julia Hobart on the occasion of her son’s matriculation from Caius College – ‘and I’m a bit concerned that poor Hobart might be . . . Well, that any letter he sends her now might paint a picture affected by his own feelings. As is quite natural.’

And, his eyes on the ambassador’s face, he saw it: the flare of the nostrils and the way the lips compressed over words that the man would not say to an outsider.

He not only thinks Richard did it . . . but he also isn’t surprised at the crime. He saw it coming.

No wonder Hobart wants to shove the blame off on to that unprovable mass of aliens outside the Legation walls.

‘Of course, Professor Asher. Mr P’ei—?’ Jordan’s touch on the desk bell brought the dapper Chinese clerk in again. ‘Would you take Professor Asher over to the stockade and tell Captain Morris he’s to be given every accommodation in seeing Hobart?’

Lydia remained behind, for tea: everyone in the Legation Quarter was delighted with any new face, and even the married men would flock around an intelligent, well-spoken lady like pigeons to corn. Asher left Sir John showing her around the courtyard – this part of the original Legation still retained its scarlet pillars, green-tiled roofs and the gold dragons on its ceilings – and followed the helpful Mr P’ei down the bare yellow dust of the central mall to the newly-built barracks and the stockade.

‘I swear I would never have harmed a hair of her head.’ Richard Hobart raised his face from his hands, blue eyes sick with dread. ‘No, I hadn’t the slightest desire to marry Holly – Miss Eddington – but for God’s sake, I wouldn’t have murdered her to get out of it! If I was fool enough to propose to her, the least I could do was go through with it, even if I was . . . was too stupid with drink to know what I was saying.’

Tears swam in his eyes. His face was longer than his father’s and narrow. At Cambridge, Asher had been struck by the boy’s resemblance to his lanky American mother. His cheeks glittered with stubble of the same bronze-gold color as his dirty hair, but his clothes were clean, and not those he’d had on last night. His father, Asher guessed, had brought them earlier that morning: the neat gray suit of a young embassy clerk, its starched, spotless collar adorned with a subdued green tie. Young Hobart’s hands trembled convulsively where they lay on the scuffed table of the interview room, and under a wash of sweat his face was chalky. He must have the hangover of the century, if not worse. Asher wondered how much opium the young man smoked and how frequently.

‘Do you recall anything of the night you proposed?’ He had learned that a matter-of-fact tone would often steady someone on the verge of hysterics.

‘Not a damn thing.’ The young man shook his head in despair. ‘Father was having some kind of ghastly whist-club over that night, so Gil and Hans and I made ourselves scarce. The Eddingtons would be there, you see, and I – well, I was rather avoiding Holly. I know it sounds frightful, Professor Asher, but she did cling so, and she was always going on about how much she loved me . . . A bit sick- making, really.’

A shudder went through him, and he pressed his hand to his lips. ‘We stayed down in the Chinese City long