Eugenia took his arm and they walked to the airship side-by-side with me following them and ten or so men of Chiang Tse’s retinue bringing up the rear. I turned and saw Kuan Yu over my shoulder; I smiled and he grinned back. So much for a humble fur trader, and I was glad to have him travel with us again.
We settled on the benches that were refreshingly padded and rounded. They felt more like cradles than the hard wooden benches of the train or other airship. This trip was promising to be altogether more comfortable, and I sighed and stretched.
Chiang Tse and Eugenia spoke softly. I sat behind them, and could only make out the animated bobbing of Chiang Tse’s head, agreeing with something Eugenia proposed.
Finally he turned around to face me. There was no recognition in his dark eyes, and I smiled.
He offered me his hand. “Chiang Tse,” he said. “I am the Governor-General of Gansu.”
I shook his hand. “Poruchik Menshov,” I said.
He smiled then. “My friend Lee Bo told me you were the one who brought the evidence of the treacheries planned by the English.”
I couldn’t contain myself any longer. “But I see he failed to remind you of our previous acquaintance.”
Chiang Tse smiled politely, and his eyes showed no recognition, which to me seemed the very height of hilarity. He squinted at me as I kept laughing, too overcome to say anything. Finally, I managed to pull my fake mustache off my lip, and his eyes lit with recognition — he forgot his dignified bearing and official position as he vaulted over the back of his bench to sit next to me and grasp my hands with a gesture so sincere that my reverse corset felt like a slab of rock, pressing on my chest and not letting me breathe.
“Sasha,” he said.
I do not know what his retinue thought after that — but I am sure they had been selected in part for an ability to not talk about things they witnessed. Whatever the case, I did not care whether anyone was watching as I embraced Chiang Tse with an ardor that was perhaps a mite excessive for mere camaraderie. He gasped and held me too, and his quick breaths told me that he was as overcome as I. A moment later a hot wet drop on my neck told me he was crying.
If Eugenia noticed anything, she was of course too well brought up and too mindful of my happiness to turn around, and instead busied herself with her knitting. She rarely knitted, and I suspected the shapeless, dingy brown thing she worked on was the same one she had started when I was a child.
“I thought I would never see you again,” Chiang Tse whispered and let go. His face was slightly reddened and more emotional than I had ever seen. “I worked so hard on letting go of the very thought of you, and yet I begged Hong to send me to St. Petersburg.”
“I missed you too,” I mumbled, the words a pale shadow of my protracted longing and the upsurge of happiness I experienced when I saw him again.
We traded further inarticulate expressions of our delight for a while, and Chiang Tse would not let go of my hands.
“I guess you’re not taking this separation of genders tenet too seriously then,” I said.
He laughed. “I think it is acceptable as long as you’re dressed as a man.”
I wasn’t sure but I thought I saw Eugenia’s shoulders shaking with laughter.
With Chiang Tse, it was easy to talk about Jack and what we should do about him. Chiang Tse remembered Jack as the one who — along with my own modest efforts — allowed for his and Lee Bo’s escape that night at the Crane Club. He was eager to return the favor.
I had favors to return as well. I felt overwhelming gratitude to Jack for all his help and self-sacrifice; yet, I felt burdened by my debt to him. I did not know if the same feeling motivated Chiang Tse, but for me helping Jack carried a two-fold purpose. I hoped that didn’t make me a bad person.
Chiang Tse mused. “They will have to change trains at St. Petersburg and Moscow. I think we can intercept them in either of those cities.”
“But what can we do to make them let Jack go? He is under English law, and I don’t think we have legal grounds to interfere.”
Chiang Tse pursed his lips. “Nothing the emperor could do?”
I shook my head. “I doubt he would intervene, especially now. We might have to rescue him ourselves — by force if necessary.”
“Or perhaps we could negotiate.”
Aunt Eugenia turned then. “With what are you planning to negotiate, Chiang Tse?”
“With whatever I can,” he said very earnestly. “The man saved my life, and he made sure that Sasha arrived in Beijing safely. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to see him to freedom and safety.”
I nodded that I agreed — and yet, every time I thought of Jack’s devotion, of the consideration and fondness he showed me, I became more and more concerned. It did not make sense, but I was starting to fear him — after all, he was superhumanly strong and agile, and he was not the man one would want to upset. I hoped that Chiang Tse’s diplomacy would be enough not only to save Jack, but to protect us from his displeasure if he ever were to be upset with us.
It was with no small amount of apprehension that I realized that some people made excellent allies but terrible enemies.
Travel by air was a lot less interesting than by train, once one got used to the idea of being up in the sky, as high as the birds flew. The windows revealed nothing but patches of sky and clouds. The usual rules of conduct felt irrelevant as well — at least, neither Aunt Eugenia nor Chiang Tse’s retinue offered any criticism of his propensity to hold my hand, and no one even batted an eye when we whispered and laughed like conspiratorial children. On solid ground, Chiang Tse was reserved and often cold; in the sky he seemed younger, as if relieved from the weight of his responsibility.
The engineer guiding the airship had agreed to follow the railroad tracks below. Every now and then we wandered over to the engine room where the furnaces — red-hot, hissing, and spitting — blazed like the pits of hell. The thick round panes of glass in the belly of the engine room allowed a distorted and bleak view of what was below, and we tried to guess the landmarks we were passing over. We named rivers as they shimmered below our feet, and we pointed the dark tracks of the railroad. At night, we pressed our cheeks against the windows and tried to see the stars above.
We saw the train below in the morning. We were mere hours away from Moscow, and I quickly counted on my fingers to make sure that the time worked out. I did it several times, until I had no doubt left the train below was the one likely to contain Jack and the Englishmen who captured him.
“I think Jack is on that train,” I told Chiang Tse.
He squinted through the thick, greenish glass on the floor of the engine room. “Very well,” he said. “We’ll intercept them in Moscow.”
“Can you land the airship there?”
“I don’t know. Let me talk to the engineer.”
I followed him into the metal passageway, a narrow vaulted tube that connected the engine room to the engineer’s cabin, where the brass levers that operated the airship’s wings and rudder bristled from the walls like quills of some metallic porcupine turned inside out by some great misfortune. The engineer, a stocky Taiping with thick hair all the way down to shoulders nodded at us.
“Tang Wei,” Chiang Tse addressed the engineer. “Do you see the train tracks below? Did you notice a train we passed a while back?”
Tang Wei nodded, and adjusted a knob to his left, making the airship tilt slightly right. “I saw it,” he said. “You want me to follow?”
“You do not have to follow,” Chiang Tse said. “But if we could meet the people on that train just as they disembark, and if we could do it discreetly… ”