Magistrates of Hell

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 . . . consort with Chinese women . . . Yes, and some who have their wives here as well,’ she 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 Attaché.

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.

Asher – the only man of the party who’d had a hideout knife in his boot – had, at the sight of a rare stand of bamboo in the gorge below them, scrambled down to gather makeshift weapons. It had been nearly dark even then. He’d cut five lengths of six feet apiece and carried them up to the road again to sharpen. The process had taken roughly half an hour, but he knew that even an extra half-hour wouldn’t get them to Men T’ou Kuo or anywhere near it. It had been almost full dark when he’d finished, the moon not yet risen.

Now they stood straining their ears, each wondering if that actually had been movement they’d heard in the brush-choked gorge far below the track, or only some trick of the icy wind.

‘How far is it until the trail turns off over the ridge, Jamie?’ Karlebach murmured. ‘We’ll be farther from the stream then.’

‘Do they stay close to water?’ he returned. ‘Or can they come on to drier ground if they want?’

‘That I don’t know. I’ve only seen them on a few occasions, you understand. Matthias—’ His voice hesitated over the name of his latest protégé, the young man whose departure for some other cause had, Asher guessed, finally cut the old man loose from his accustomed ways.

‘Phew! God!’ Barclay gagged as the wind shifted, and for a moment the stenchy reek – like rotting flesh rolled in filthy garments – flickered in the air. ‘Where the bloody ’ell ’ave them bandits been hidin’?’

‘In the mine, you dumb berk,’ retorted Willard. ‘Didn’t you smell ’em back there?’

Barclay took a few steps to the edge of the gorge, raised his voice to a shout. ‘Hey! Chink-chink! We got nuthin’, savvy? Mei ch’iên! Flat broke, y’hear . . . How’d you say “we ain’t got a pot to piss in” in Chinese, Professor?’ Starlight made smoke of his breath; the wind whipped it away.

So much, reflected Asher, for discretion about letting people know he spoke Chinese . . .

‘Shut yer ’ole,’ whispered Gibbs. ‘See ’em there, against the sky?’

‘There’s boulders by the trail,’ said Asher quietly, ‘about a hundred yards back.’ He had spent the past hour’s walking identifying every scrap of cover or defensive terrain they’d passed. ‘If we can cover our backs—’

‘Too late.’ Willard pointed. It was nearly impossible to see in the starlight, but behind them on the trail Asher thought he glimpsed the reflective glitter of eyes. ‘What the hell—?’

‘Keep in the open!’ said Asher, and the five men set themselves back-to-back, spears pointing outward, as all the underbrush on the slope down to the stream crashed in the darkness with the sudden onslaught.

‘How the hell many of ’em—?’ Gibbs began, and then the scrambling forms sprang up on to the trail.

Asher struck with his bamboo, felt it sink into something that screamed, a hoarse awful noise, like an injured camel. The stink was nauseating. He heard Willard swear. Asher shouted into the crowding darkness, ‘Na shih shei? Ni yao shê mo?’ but doubted he’d get an answer; he felt the thing he’d impaled still thrashing on the end of the spear, fighting to get at him. It lurched closer, and he felt its clawed nails flick his face.

Other screams. Barclay yelled, ‘What the—?’ and Asher heard the crunch of something – a rock? – impacting with flesh.

The darkness all around them seemed filled with shoving shapes – Christ Jesus, how many of them are there? Then a rifle fired from somewhere down the trail, and the thing on the end of his spear thrust at him again, its weight jerking at his grip, as if it cared nothing for the shot . . .

He saw its face then, and yes, it was yao-kuei, it could be nothing else: a dim impression in darkness of deformed features, a fanged mouth snapping at him, eyes gleaming.

Another shot. Then running feet and the screams of the Others – the yao-kuei – and a flash in the starlight of what looked, impossibly, like the blade of a sword. And an instant later on the round lenses of spectacles.

A man shouted, the bellowing bark of a Japanese war-cry, and yes, thought Asher, that was a sword . . .

The yao-kuei jerked, and where its face had been – pale and hairless and almost canine in its deformation – there was nothing. He smelled the blood that fountained from the severed neck. The pale glimmer of a man’s white coat or jacket in the darkness, splattered with gore; another flash of sword-steel and spectacle-lenses. Colonel Count Mizukami. He’s the one who followed us.

It’s too dark to shoot without danger of hitting one of us.

He wrenched the bamboo free, drove it hard at another one of those dark, slumped forms, pinning it for the Japanese to slash. He’d seen men torn apart in South Africa by shellfire, and had once had occasion to dismember the corpse of a man he’d killed with an ax in order to dispose of it discreetly – in the service of the Department, which was supposed to make it all right, though it had given him frightful dreams for years. But there was something horrifyingly fascinating about the archaic art of slaughter with cold steel.

He heard the yao-kuei shrieking and the crash of foliage below. So they at least have some sense of self-preservation . . .

‘’Ere, you watch where you’re swingin’ that chopper!’ gasped Gibbs’s voice.

Barclay only said, ‘Gor blimey, it’s the fucken mikado!’

Asher stepped forward, tripped over something that rolled slightly under this foot, and Karlebach gasped. ‘Are you all right, Jamie?’ He grasped his arm with his twisted hand. ‘You are not injured—?’

‘I’m fine. Is everyone all right? Is anyone hurt?’

‘What the hell were they?’ demanded Willard, and two pale forms emerged from the darkness and bowed.

‘Ashu Sensei—’

Asher bowed in return, deeply. ‘Mizukami-san? Are you well? Ten thousand thanks—’

‘What were those things?’ demanded the deep voice that he well recalled from his earlier days in the Shantung Peninsula. Behind the bespectacled little Japanese, his bodyguard – a broad-shouldered young man in his twenties – held a hand pressed to his side, his light-colored military jacket darkening with blood.

‘We will speak as we walk, if this suits you, Mizukami-san? They will likely return. Is your man able to walk?’

Mizukami asked something in Japanese; the bodyguard straightened his shoulders and replied. Almost certainly, reflected Asher, he said that it was only a scratch . . .

‘Colonel the Count Mizukami, may I present the Rebbe Dr Solomon Karlebach of Prague?’

More bows, but instants later they were moving off, the darkness in the gorge so intense that Asher was barely able to make out the dark notch in the land to the right where the trail veered and began to climb the ridge. The wind shifted, blowing colder from the north, and Asher smelled on it the unmistakable dry whisper of a coming dust-storm . . . Please, he thought wearily, not until we get back to town . . .

Willard swore. ‘Just what we bloody need.’

Bringing up the rear of the party, Asher turned and looked back as the first light of the moon appeared over the hills. It was nearly full and showed clearly the slumped shapes of their erstwhile attackers clustered around the hacked pieces of the yao-kuei that Mizukami and his bodyguard had killed.

At that distance he couldn’t be sure, but he thought that an arm lay on the pathway a few yards from the main scene of the carnage. The arm was moving, pulling itself along by its fingers, as if in dogged pursuit.

Beside him he heard a hiss of indrawn breath, and Count Mizukami whispered again, ‘What are they, Ashu Sensei? And why are you not surprised to find them here?’

One of the Others scrambled up from the shadows below the trail, caught up the arm, and trotted back towards its companions, tearing chunks from the flesh with its teeth, like an American devouring a turkey leg.