Magistrates of Hell

FOURTEEN

Wu Tan Shun – a little fatter and a little more gray than he’d been in 1898 – welcomed Asher, took his money, and guided him through a maze of courtyards strung with washing and crammed with pigsties and pigeon cages, barely visible by the faint orange lamp-glow that leaked through shuttered windows, to a siheyuan in a far corner of the rambling compound, its buildings drifted with dust and littered with broken roof-tiles. He was given a couple of US Army blankets, and the following morning a young man – possibly an inhabitant of one of the other courtyards – came in and left a pail of water, a bowl of rice and vegetables, Chinese trousers and shoes, and hurried away without even looking around. In the course of the day Asher investigated the other buildings around his own particular courtyard and of those nearby and collected a brazier, two buckets of coal balls – coal dust mixed with hardened mud – and a couple of straw mats. In the process he found that Wu had guaranteed his concealment simply by paying everyone in the other courtyards to give him what he asked while ignoring him completely.

It wasn’t the Hotel Wagons-Lits, but Asher had no complaints.

On the second evening, as he was consuming the supper that had been brought to him – still without a word or a glance – by another man who looked like an impoverished farmer, a Chinese girl came around the screen wall into the courtyard, glanced around at the ruined buildings, then crossed to the doorway where Asher sat.

‘Honorable sir cold?’ she inquired when she reached him. ‘Extra blanket?’ she added and started to remove her ch’i-p’ao.

Asher got to his feet – he’d been expecting something along these lines, knowing Wu – and took the girl’s hands, halting the disrobing process. ‘Pu yao, hsieh-hsieh,’ he said and inclined his head in thanks. ‘I most grateful, but honorable father of my wife forbidden me have congress other ladies during hiding. Can not dishonor his request.’

The girl – Asher guessed her age at seventeen or eighteen – smiled dazzlingly to hear him speak Chinese and bowed. ‘Is there another service that I can do for the honorable gentleman?’ Her voice was startlingly deep for a girl’s, her Chinese the Peking dialect and somewhat removed from Mandarin, but at least, Asher reflected, intelligible. ‘If I do nothing and go straight home,’ she explained when he shook his head, ‘my husband’s mother will be displeased, because Mr Wu has paid her already and she’ll have to give him the money back. May I say I spread for you?’

Asher smiled. ‘What tell husband honorable mother not my business,’ he replied, and her answering smile widened. ‘Tea?’ And he gestured toward the extremely pretty celadon pot – which he suspected had been stolen – that had arrived a few minutes previously with the noodles and the soup.

Her eyes brightened as she knelt on the straw mat in the doorway and poured out the first cup: ‘This is Grandpa Wu’s good p’o lai,’ she exclaimed. ‘He must really like you! You’re sure there’s nothing I can do for you?’

‘Tell me story,’ he said and sat cross-legged again on the other mat. ‘Tell me about yao-kuei by Golden Sea.’

It was a bow drawn at a venture, but he saw dread darken her eyes. ‘The Golden Sea? Is that true, then?’ she asked worriedly. ‘My younger sister’s husband says there are devils in the Western Hills – horrible things that stink, which you cannot kill with guns . . . My younger sister’s husband is in the Kuo Min-tang, you understand. The leader of his unit says there is no such thing as these devils because we now have science and are breaking free of the imperialist superstitions of the past . . . Are they indeed now in the city?’

‘Don’t know.’ Asher accepted the tea, Green Snail Spring from Tong T’ing. ‘You learn for me? Learn, not tell them—’ He gestured to the courtyards beyond the wall, then touched his finger to his lips. ‘I am not here.’

‘I’ll ask my brothers. We live only over in Crooked Hair Family Alley. That is, my family lives – my husband’s brothers also. Why does the Tso Family want to kill you?’

Asher rubbed his shoulder. ‘Tso Family, eh? And what is your honorable name?’

‘Ling.’ The name meant Good Reputation. ‘Ch’iu P’ing Ling. My husband’s honored mother is Grandpa Wu’s niece.’

‘Ling. Not know –’ which wasn’t quite true, Asher reflected as pieces began to fall into place – ‘why Tso want to kill.’

‘It isn’t like the Tso,’ Ling said thoughtfully, ‘to go after a Long-Nosed Devil. Even though they’re the enemies of the Republic and plot with the vile reactionary Yuan, nobody wants your armies back shooting everyone in sight. So you must have done something.’

She was, Asher guessed, very much a child of the hutongs – only an extremely lower-class girl would have escaped having her feet mutilated – and by Chinese standards not particularly pretty, with her long, horse-like face and wiry build. ‘But why hide with Grandpa Wu?’

‘Fear Tso family has sons, has cousins, work servants in Legation?’ suggested Asher. ‘Servants kill while sleep?’ He made a throat-cutting gesture.

‘No, you don’t need to worry about that – are you going to eat that dumpling?’ She pointed her chin at the one he’d left on his plate. ‘The Tso don’t have family in the Legations. It’s mostly the Wei, the Hsiang, and the K’ung – the old families that have run things for hundreds of years here in Peking – or the families that work for them, like the Shen and the Shen –’ there was a different tonal dip there: the one spoken high meant gentleman, the other on a descending tone meant cautious – ‘and the Miao and the P’ei. And the Hsiang all hate the Tso, and the Wei owe too many favors to the Hsiang to go against them, if the Tso tried to sneak anyone in. The Tso only started making themselves a big family twenty years ago, my mother-in-law says: upstarts. Madame Tso gives herself airs now, my mother-in-law says, but her father was only a night-soil collector in the Nine Turns Alley, after all. My mother-in-law says the Tso are paying Yuan Shi-k’ai to try to get their people in, but it hasn’t happened yet. You can make a lot of squeeze, working in the Legations.’

‘Not during Uprising?’ He lifted an eyebrow with a quizzical look, and Ling grinned.

‘Not in the Uprising, no. I was only little then, but I remember Grandpa Wu had six or seven whole families of the P’ei hiding in this very courtyard, because the Boxers would have killed them. But of course now Grandpa says that never happened. A lot more hid in the coal mines in the Western Hills,’ she added. ‘And I never heard any of them say there were devils out there.’

‘What about girl Ugly English Devil kill in Madame Tso house?’ asked Asher casually. ‘She was Miao? Or Shen?’

‘Shen,’ Ling corrected, using a different tone, and her long face clouded. ‘You mean Mi Ching? Bi Hsu tells me – my husband’s younger brother, who works over in Big Shrimp Alley – Bi Hsu tells me her brothers were nearly distracted with anger when they heard about it. But the family’s really poor. When An Lu T’ang offered money for Ching, their father would never have sold her if he’d known what An wanted her for. But An Lu T’ang works for the Tso, so you can’t really say no to him, any more than you can bring an English Devil to justice, no matter what he does. This is the kind of exploitation that the Kuo Min-tang seeks to rectify, but as long as Yuan Shi-k’ai continues to enslave China to the foreign economic interests, nothing will get done.’

‘Shen Mi Ching brothers, servants in Legation?’

‘No, but all their cousins are.’ Ling licked a final morsel of dumpling from her fingers. ‘Bi Hsu said to my husband that Mi Ching’s brothers should just wait outside Mrs Tso’s house for the next time Ugly English Devil comes for a girl. He goes about once a week, though usually he just hits them or cuts them. But Bi Wang – my husband – told him not to be stupid. As long as our nation is enslaved to Western imperial interests, no justice will be possible for the people of China, and you can’t just kill an English Devil in the street.’

Well, not unless he’s a traitor selling information to the Germans, reflected Asher. Though Ling was clearly parroting the harangues she’d heard from her sister’s husband and his friends, he saw the sparkle of genuine anger in her face: anger at the lines of men who’d marched along the Chien Men Ta Chieh in 1901, at the German soldiers who now occupied Shantung, and at the Japanese who’d taken over Formosa and had their eyes on Manchuria, with its coal and iron, as well.

He recalled the pockmarked militia commander in the hills, the ragged men who’d helped themselves to his second-best greatcoat and the British Army’s scrawny Australian horses: farmers driven from their land by taxes and starvation. Recalled, too, the sleek young aide Huang Da-feng at Eddington’s reception, hobnobbing with the Western officers, with that elegant madame on his arm. Runs half the brothels in Peking . . .

No wonder this girl was angry.

Shen Mi Ching. Hobart probably didn’t even know her name. Asher felt rage at the man pass through him, a slow red wave, and thought about what he’d arrange for any man who harmed Miranda, or Lydia – or even his obnoxious, whining, spoiled nieces and cousins, for God’s sake! – if by some happenstance or turn of events he was unable to prove such a crime on the perpetrator . . .

And he shivered at the first thought that went through his mind: I’d speak to Ysidro.

He’d do it. And he wouldn’t care.

And that, Asher thought, after Ling took her departure and he retreated from the bitter cold of the courtyard to the nearly as cold corner of the cheng-fang where he’d installed the brazier and his blankets, is the true reason Karlebach seeks to destroy the vampire, wherever and however they exist.

For the sake of the souls of the living whom they do NOT kill.

For the sake of every soul in the world, if the living begin to use the Undead for their own ends outside the law.

Was that the reason Ysidro himself had undertaken the perilous journey to China, when he’d learned of the spread of the Others? It was difficult to tell with Ysidro, for whom the game of mirror and shadow went far deeper than the mere hunt. Was it simply that, as a chess player, the vampire saw ahead to what the governments of the living might do to acquire control of such creatures? Or was there something else?

Don Quixote, Asher found himself remembering, had been a Spaniard, too.

He had hoped Ysidro would visit that night, with word from Lydia, if not word about the Others, or the vampires of Peking. For a long time he lay awake, watching the moonlight where it came through the broken roof; then slid into unremembered dreams.

The hardest thing, Lydia found, was not telling Karlebach and Ellen.

The police found Jamie’s blood-soaked coat and jacket in the north-western district of the so-called Tatar City, not far from the shallow lakes locally known as the ‘Stone Relics of the Sea’, late in the afternoon of Thursday, the thirty-first of October. On the following morning the nude body of a man was found in a nearby canal, so shockingly mutilated that it was impossible to determine even if he had been Oriental or European, though he was of Jamie’s six-foot height. Lydia locked herself in her hotel bedroom in a simulated paroxysm of grief and refused to see either the old Professor or her maid for almost twenty-four hours.

She knew they would comfort one another. She couldn’t face either one.

Nor could she face the question that kept recurring to her mind: was the man they’d found already dead, by coincidence and of some other cause? Or did Simon kill him for the purpose, only because, whoever he was, he was six feet tall?

And would Simon tell me the truth if I asked him?

Miranda she kept with her for a good deal of that time. She read to her quietly, played little games with her, and while the child slept, she continued to work her way through notes from the Peking Police Department. The last thing her baby needed was Mrs Pilley’s lamentations and tears.

At breakfast the following morning – Saturday – she quietly requested that Miranda be spared as much of the displays of grief as possible. ‘I’ll tell her myself, when she’s able to understand,’ she said, firmly, to the old man and the two women of her shattered household. ‘But I beg of you, don’t burden her with this now.’

Ellen and Mrs Pilley both hugged her, something Lydia hated. An hour later the Baroness Drosdrova appeared on the doorstep with a complete mourning costume – donated by the very fashionable Madame Hautecoeur, the French Trade Minister’s wife – a platter of blinis (Paola had been right about the Drosdrov cook), two hours of unsolicited legal advice about dealing with the affairs of a spouse unexpectedly deceased, another forty-five minutes of anecdotes concerning the various bereavements of everyone in the Drosdrov family including Aunt Eirena whose husband had fallen into a reaping-combine on a visit to the United States, and an invitation (although it sounded more like a command) to accompany herself, Madame Hautecoeur, and Paola Giannini to her dressmaker’s to be fitted for still more mourning clothes.

She and Madame Hautecoeur had evidently gone to Silk Lane yesterday afternoon and purchased sufficient black silk for all necessary costumes. ‘We wanted to spare you that.’ They were already being cut and basted by Madame’s Chinese seamstress.

Lydia returned from the fitting (and a late lunch at the French Legation) on Saturday evening to find that Karlebach’s grief had taken the form of plans for an expedition to the Shi’h Liu mines on the following day.

‘It is only the excursion of an afternoon, little bird.’ The old scholar patted Lydia’s hands, made his haggard face into the rictus of cheer. ‘I will hire me a couple of soldiers from the American barracks, and I will follow this so-excellent map.’ He gestured to the one Jamie and the Legation clerk P’ei had been working on. ‘I will see for myself the entrances to these mines, to know how many must be sapped with explosives and what each looks like. Then we will be out of the hills before the sun is out of the sky—’

‘It’s what you thought was going to happen last time!’ Lydia objected. ‘You were nearly killed . . .’

His face grew grave. ‘These things must be hunted in their nests, Madame. Hunted to their destruction.’ And, when Lydia began to protest again: ‘It is my fault – the stupidity of my weakness – that loosed these things into this country, these things that killed him. I owe him a debt. Mine must be the hand that atones.’

How on EARTH would you come to the conclusion that the Others killed him? She had to put her hand over her lips to silence the words that rose to them. If the Chinese killed a Westerner they’d have made sure to mutilate the corpse to prevent identification . . . Definitely not the sort of thing a genuine widow would say.

Instead she blurted, ‘You can’t go out there by yourself! You don’t speak any Chinese!’

‘I shall hire this man P’ei as well, this clerk whom . . . This clerk who helped with these maps.’ Karlebach brandished the scribbled papers in his crooked fingers, and he avoided her eyes just as he avoided speaking James Asher’s name. ‘As for not knowing . . . little bird, I know my enemies. You have found solace for your heart in searching for them in your way.’ His wave took in the fresh stack of police reports which had arrived, care of the Japanese Legation, while Lydia was away being fitted for six black walking-suits, four day-costumes, and an evening dress. ‘Let me seek mine.’

Lydia felt a pang of regret that she’d let Karlebach see her note to Mizukami: I find the exercise relieves my mind of the repetitious circling of grief, and I would like to think myself still able to help in my husband’s quest for the truth behind this shocking affair.

Did that sound too much like the intrepid heroine of a novel? she wondered.

Would a Real Woman – her Aunt Lavinnia was extremely fond of the expression, as if the possession of a womb and breasts was not quite sufficient to qualify Lydia for the title – be so prostrate with grief at the murder of her husband that all she could do would be to lie upon the bed and howl?

Lydia didn’t know.

When her mother had died, she’d been so confused by her family’s efforts to ‘soften the blow’ by lying to her that she found it, even now, difficult to think clearly about that time or to recall exactly how it had felt. Her father had died suddenly, of a stroke, about eighteen months after she had married Jamie: at that time she had not seen the old man for almost three years. He had disowned her when she’d entered Somerville College – terrifying at the time, but miraculous in its way, for the removal of her father’s fortune had opened the way for Jamie to marry her. Her first letter to her father after her expulsion from Willoughby Court had been answered by one of the most spiteful documents she had ever read; subsequent communications, including the announcement of her marriage, had received no answer at all. She had been shocked and startled to hear of his death, but those feelings, too, had been whirled up together in bemusement over the fact that to her own astonishment – and to the howling chagrin of her stepmother – her father had in fact never changed his will, and Lydia had gone from being an impoverished outcast to being an extremely wealthy young woman.

How would a Real Woman react to grief, she wondered, if she came from a Real Family and not a grotesque circus fueled by money, social climbing, and a self-centered autocrat who wanted to control his daughter’s every breath?

The poor old Queen had gone into complete seclusion at her husband’s death and had worn deep mourning for the remaining forty years of her life. The eight-year-old Lydia’s observation that this sounded like the most boring existence she’d ever heard of had earned her a smart slap from her Nanna.

In the end, after nearly an hour of arguing, Lydia managed to talk Karlebach down to a daylight expedition to the Golden Seas – the enclosed pleasure-grounds around the three large lakes immediately west of the Forbidden City’s high pink walls – as soon as Count Mizukami could arrange passes through the gates. To his grumbles about the Japanese attaché’s ‘perfidy’, Lydia had asked if he really thought he could answer for the discretion of ‘a couple of soldiers from the American barracks’ when they got in their cups. ‘At least German spies won’t know any Japanese,’ she pointed out. So far as she could tell, nobody in the compound knew any Japanese.

Along with the day’s police reports, Mizukami had sent her a note. She unfolded it and read it that night, when she finally settled into bed, with a splitting headache from the effort of remembering to periodically burst into tears throughout the afternoon and a deep feeling of sickened weariness and guilt.

Guilt for Ellen’s reddened nose and bowed shoulders, and for the driven glitter in Karlebach’s eye. Guilt for that unknown tall Chinese. Her whole skin had prickled when Karlebach had spoken of atonement: if his grief drives him into doing something stupid, Jamie will never forgive himself. And neither will I.

The note said:

Dr Asher,

Please accept the expression of my deepest feelings of sorrow for you at this time.

Your strength to pursue these inquiries is a sword blade that will, I hope, cut grief. Might I ask of you, to communicate with me of what you find?

Please consider me at your service.

Mizukami

Black shadow, black ice.

Shadow warrior pursuing shadow,

Unto shadow returns.

And Karlebach was right. There would have to be another expedition to the Shi’h Liu mines, and soon. And she knew Karlebach could not be kept away.

In addition to Mizukami’s plump envelope of reports, Lydia had picked up at the desk four other notes, all of them from bachelor diplomats at the Legations, begging her to permit them to be of service to her. Given what Hobart had told Jamie about most of the men in the diplomatic corps needing to marry money, she wasn’t precisely surprised, but she groaned inwardly at the thought of the scramble that would ensue when word got around that her fortune was her own and not in any way entangled in Jamie’s affairs, alive or dead. She wanted to kick herself for having slipped that information into the conversation over lunch with Madame Hautecoeur and the Baroness, in reply to tactfully worded queries as to whether she would need financial assistance: both women, she did not doubt, had too-ample experience with women who came out to the East with husbands and then lost them there.

She leaned back against the pillows, closed her eyes, and wondered if fainting when the subject of her widowhood was brought up would discourage the likes of Mr Edmund Woodreave, the Trade Minister’s Chief Clerk: ‘If at any time you need the solace of a loyal friend . . .’

Indeed! From a man I met precisely ONCE at the Peking Club . . .

He was the man who had also referred, rather tactlessly, to ‘your poor husband’s appalling death’. Lydia wondered again about the man who had actually suffered that ‘appalling death’.

If I asked Simon he would say, ‘Nothing of the kind, Mistress. The man was dead when I found his body.’ Or perhaps, ‘He was a wicked man, and I killed him as he was cutting the throat of an innocent child . . .’

She slipped from beneath the coverlets, hurried – shivering – to the window, and opened one side of the curtain. Peking lay dark beyond the glimmer of lights on Rue Meiji, a mass of upturned roofs against distant stars. She lay long awake, reading in the neat, rather German handwriting of Count Mizukami’s clerk all about disappearances, deaths, and strange things seen around the Stone Relics of the Sea.

But Ysidro did not come.