Magistrates of Hell

SEVENTEEN

Two notes awaited Lydia when she returned to her suite. One – from Sir Grant Hobart – she simply put into the fireplace, as she had done two others he had sent her, behavior completely to be expected from a new-made widow, she thought. Anger at him still flushed heat behind her breastbone. If Jamie HAD died, it would have been his fault.

Whatever excuse he’ll offer, I don’t want to hear it.

The other – accompanied by a gaudy bouquet which must have come by rail from the south of China at considerable expense – was from Edmund Woodreave. Under Mrs Pilley’s accusing gaze Lydia didn’t feel she could very well dispose of the note, much less the flowers, as she’d disposed of Hobart’s. And Woodreave’s courtship, much as it exasperated Lydia, also amused her in its way: does he really think ANY woman whose husband was murdered last week is going to find this attractive?

Evidently he did.

Or is he so desperate to further his career that he’s willing to try anything?

‘He’s such a very nice gentleman,’ said Mrs Pilley, watching Lydia’s face anxiously, ‘and so devoted to you.’

‘He barely knows me.’ Lydia removed her hat and gloves and gathered Miranda into her arms. ‘He met me exactly once, before I—’ She bit off the words came on to the market, gave her head a little shake, and in her best imitation of Aunt Faith’s die-away voice said, ‘I find his importunities in the very worst of taste.’

Mrs Pilley sighed deeply, the expression on her face making it clear to Lydia that the little widow had what schoolgirls called a ‘crush’ on Mr Woodreave herself, though of course he would have no use for a woman who had no money of her own. A bleak and unfair world, reflected Lydia sadly, that condemned a young mother to looking after someone else’s child (and in China, no less!) so that she could scrape enough money to keep her own son in school in England, simply because no man of her own class would take a woman without a ‘portion’ to sweeten the bargain.

She carried Miranda into the bedroom, to keep her company while Ellen helped her out of her dress and brushed her hair; put on her glasses and played little games with her daughter, cheered as always by the infant’s curiosity and love. But when Mrs Pilley came in to carry Miranda off to bed, Lydia felt an uneasy qualm as she said, ‘Professor Karlebach and I are going out to the Western Hills first thing tomorrow morning. We probably won’t be back until after dark.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ The nurse’s large blue eyes were both puzzled and accusing: how can you possibly do anything at all, with poor Professor Asher dead and in so terrible a fashion . . .?

If Jamie were really dead, WOULD I be able to do nothing but stay in my room and wail?

Lydia didn’t know.

She lifted her chin, made her voice tremble a little as she added, ‘This is something Professor Asher would have wanted me to do.’

Instantly, the nurse’s eyes flooded with tears. Ellen, coming in with a cup of cocoa and an extra scuttle of coal, gazed upon her mistress with such pity and sympathy that Lydia writhed inwardly. It was shame, not grief bravely borne, that filled her own eyes with tears as her two loving handmaidens made their exit with the sleeping Miranda in their arms.

Jamie, thought Lydia, I know this is all to keep you from being hunted down and murdered, but as soon as you’re home safe I’m going to shake you till your teeth rattle, for doing this to me.

She had already spent an exhausting evening – after returning from the bank – arguing with Karlebach over how trustworthy Count Mizukami actually was, and then about whether she was really sure she was ‘able for’ tomorrow’s reconnaissance expedition to the Western Hills, to locate all the lesser entrances to the Shi’h Liu mine. The Count had sent three soldiers out to Men T’ou Kuo by train that afternoon, to arrange horses for the party. God knew what the Baroness, and Madame Hautecoeur, and that poisonous beldame Madame Schrenk at the Austrian Legation, would have to say about that.

Jamie, wherever you are, I hope you appreciate what I’m doing.

But the thought was like a child’s cry in the darkness. And as she sat at the dressing table, and let the stillness of the night finally close around her, the thoughts returned that all her activity that day, and all her researches into bank records and police reports and maps of the Western Hills, had been designed to hide: that it had been six days since Ysidro had come to give her the news that Jamie was safe.

Six days is a long time.

Jamie . . .

Lydia pressed her hands to her face, trying to still her sudden trembling.

And the worst of it was that she didn’t know exactly for whom it was that her breath came short and tears suddenly poured down her cheeks.

For her daughter’s father, for unbending strength and wry humor, for the warmth of his arms around her?

Or for the expressionless whisper and cool yellow eyes of a man who’d been dead since 1555?

Her mind returned to the bank vault she had entered that afternoon. To the tan leather trunk with its brass corners and elaborate locks.

Empty.

Keep walking forward.

This was what her friend Anne had told her – that steady and pragmatic Fellow of Somerville College – back in the days when Lydia’s father had disowned her, when Jamie had disappeared into the wilds of Africa and at seventeen Lydia had been tutoring medical students in order to pay her board bill. Keep walking forward. You don’t know what’s beyond the next rise of the ground.

She dreamed that night that she was looking for Pig-Dragon Lane. Darkness was falling, and something was terribly wrong about the rickshaw-puller: she kept trying to lean forward, to see his face. He was naked save for a white loincloth such as the bodyguard Ito had been wearing when she’d seen him at Mizukami’s house, and like Ito he had bandages on his left arm and side. In the twilight she thought the man’s thinning hair was falling out in patches, the way Ito’s had been.

She abandoned the rickshaw in terror, but found herself afoot in lanes that all looked alike, with silk shops and paper lanterns and jostling crowds of Chinese. She asked the candy-maker at the corner of Silk Lane if he had seen Ysidro, and he answered her – in perfect English – ‘He apologizes for being detained, ma’am, but he’s left a message for you at the Temple of Everlasting Harmony.’ He gave her some candy and pointed her the way through the crowd. As she made her way toward the Temple, she kept half-recognizing someone in the crowd, someone who wasn’t there every time she turned around. Someone whose face she knew.

Jamie?

Simon?

The rickshaw-puller Ito?

A single lamp had been kindled in the Temple. By its glow, the eyes of the statues were reflective, vampire eyes. They followed her as she stepped into its darkness.

Whoever she’d seen behind her in the crowds of the street, she thought, was in the Temple somewhere. She could see him move. She knew she should be mortally afraid of him, and she wasn’t.

The knowledge that she should have felt fear and didn’t was what remained with her when she woke, heart pounding, to the sound of the hotel chambermaid laying the fire in the parlor and the voices in the street of a couple of American soldiers coming off patrol.

‘Tell about Stone Relics of the Sea.’

Wu Tan Shun bowed deeply and signed to Ling to bring the bamboo tray of dim sum – small tidbits of shrimp rolls, ‘phoenix claws’ (which bore a suspicious resemblance to chicken feet), egg tarts, and dumplings big and small, steamed and fried – to the small table beside Asher’s makeshift brazier on its section of matting. Four tiny pots of tea were already lined up. Since everyone in the surrounding courtyards continued to ignore him – including the doctor who had arrived that morning to strap up his cracked ribs – Ling had stepped in as cook and housekeeper, occasionally assisted by her three-year-old daughter Mei-Mei.

Mei-Mei was with her today, gravely bearing a smaller tray with a single plate of bao on it, her black eyes sparkling at the honor of serving both Grandpa Wu and Yin Hsing Jên: Mr Invisible.

‘A city must have water,’ said Wu, when Ling and her daughter withdrew. ‘The lakes themselves are very ancient, dug by the first of China’s emperors. The presence of water mitigates the influences of wind and dryness here, and provides a barrier over which demons cannot cross. This is, of course, of paramount importance, in a place where the Son of Heaven himself resides.’

Asher said, ‘Of course.’ As a folklorist he’d been long familiar with the legend that vampires cannot cross running water, and Ysidro had revealed the more complex truth of the matter last year as the first-class railway carriage they’d shared had sped across the Elbe. I assume ’tis a sort of tidal magnetism, the vampire had said in his whispering voice, his long fingers shuffling the deck in one of their endless games of cards. Its effect on our abilities slacks for brief periods at midnight. Yet in fact none of us knows why: only that it is so.

Asher guessed that the sluggish movement of the water from the Jade Fountain outside the city and through the lakes was too slight to discommode a vampire much, but it interested him that the principle remained. ‘What there now,’ he asked in his clumsy Chinese, ‘Stone Relics of the Sea?’

From pouches of fat, the dark gaze rested speculatively on his face. ‘It is not a good place these days, Mr Invisible. Not a safe place, once night has come.’

‘When start? People—’ He fished for a moment, trying to recall the word for disappear. ‘When yao-kuei under bridges?’

‘Ah.’ Wu managed to look sad and thoughtful while tucking into egg tarts and ‘chicken-velvet’ with the relentlessness of a machine. ‘You have heard those tales? They began only this year, a few weeks after the riots. It may be that while the Emperor reigned, some order was retained and the kuei kept their distance in fear. The Tso family lives by the side of the Sea, and what they think of it, they do not say, though I admit to being most curious about it. But people disappearing—’

He paused, a cup of mild-scented chrysanthemum tea suspended in his chubby fingers, and in that stillness anger glinted suddenly in his piggy eyes. ‘That is a story that goes back twenty years. Everyone knows the Tso pimps and child-merchants buy more girls and young boys than any other family in the city. People say Madame Tso set up some kind of arrangement with brothels in other cities – that that’s where these young people disappear to. But why would a madam in Shanghai send all the way to Peking for her stock? There are poor men with daughters in the south as well as in the north. And many that the Tso buy are not pretty; the daughters of beggars and laborers, with big, ugly feet. These they can procure very cheap.’

He gulped his tea, wiped his fingers fastidiously on a napkin which bore the monogram of the Peking Club.

‘Tell about Tso.’

‘Ah.’ Wu nipped up the last bean-paste sesame-ball from the plate. ‘Madame Tso . . .’ He gazed into the shadows of the half-ruined chamber, swept clean now and tidied despite the holes in the roof. ‘Tso Shao Hua. They say these days that her father was a night-soil collector, but that wasn’t all he did. He worked for Shui Ch’ia Chu, who used to be the kuan ye – the grandfather of money – in that quarter of the city. Shao Hua married Chen, who was the son of one of Shui’s toughest enforcers. But she was the real brains of the family, and beautiful as the sky with stars. They still call the family Tso, though her sons are all actually Chens of course.’

‘What happen Chen the enforcer?’

‘The rumor is that she ate him alive for breakfast one morning.’ Wu chuckled richly. ‘Chen Chi Yi is the Number One son. He runs the brothels and the gambling, and procures guns from the army for their enforcers to use. Madame Tso ousted old Shui twenty years ago, and men you’d think would have stayed loyal to the old man went over to work for her: afraid of her, everyone says. No one in that quarter will breathe a word against her. Her sons took over Shui’s house, his rickshaws, his gambling parlors and “chicken nests” . . . They opened into specialty houses, working with people like An Lu T’ang, but even during the worst of the Boxer troubles, nobody would touch the Tso property.

‘When one of her yin mei puts an offer on a girl – like An did with that poor child Shen Mi Ching – nobody dares say no, though they know what it means. It gives An an advantage, that’s for certain: they say the Ugly Englishman saw Mi Ching at her father’s shop and asked specifically that she be brought to the Tso house for him. Shen was very poor, but not that poor.’ Wu fell silent, heavy face creased with sorrow and distaste.

‘Power come quick,’ said Asher softly. ‘Shui weak? No sons?’

‘His sons were all killed.’ Wu poured him another cup of tea. ‘Yes, power came very quickly, once Tso came along. I’d like one day to hear the true story behind it. They say she’s a witch—’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe such a thing is true. The Hao used to run things in the north end of the city, across Kuo Tzu Shih Ta Street from Shui territory. All their enforcers and pimps went over to Madame Tso within the same month. The same story with the whole area west of the Imperial Enclosure. Rumor has it she and her sons have been invited into the Golden Lakes, to visit with the President himself.’

‘When?’

‘A month ago? Two months? With the election coming up, that isn’t a surprise. All the same—’ Wu grimaced and discreetly poked among the dishes with his chopsticks, to see if a scrap of anything had been missed. ‘She isn’t a woman I’d like to see with more power. And she isn’t a woman I’d like to see getting the same kind of power – whatever it is – over President Yuan Shi-k’ai that she has over the Hao and Shui’s old gang.’

Asher thought the matter over, turning his teacup in his fingers. Remembering the beautiful Chinese woman who had come to Sir Allyn’s on the arm of President Yuan’s aide Huang Da-feng: Yuan’s go-between with the criminal bosses of the town, Hobart had said, pointing them out. The woman runs half the brothels in Peking . . . ‘What look like? Still beautiful?’

‘Going to chance the displeasure of your wife’s father?’ The dark eyes sparkled grimly. ‘Ling’s a better bargain, Mr Invisible, for all she has ugly peasant feet and will talk you to death about the Republic. Yes, Madame’s still beautiful, though she’s getting on. She’s grown a little fat, and the daylight isn’t kind to her wrinkles no matter how much raw veal and strawberries she puts on her face. One story I hear is that all those girls she has An buy, and the beggar-children who disappear, she devours. I’ve heard the stories about evil women in the past bathing in blood to retain their youth – and I certainly wouldn’t have put it past the old Empress! But it’s not her youth or beauty she retains, but her energy. Her power.’

The fat man’s voice lowered, and he leaned across the table to whisper. ‘Sometimes I wonder if she drinks their chi – their life force – the way it’s said the chiang-shi do.’

Asher said quietly, ‘Indeed?’

The chiang-shi were the spirits of the Undead – the spirits that in the west were called vampires.