She bustled off again, toward a small door that opened into the rear courtyard beyond; Paola had returned to her contemplation of the Kuan Yin. Quickly, Lydia sneaked her spectacles from their silver case and put them on, to consider the ten fearsome gentlemen ranged along the wall in the gloom: staring eyes, bared fangs, draperies that swirled and curled in the hot winds of the afterlife. The Magistrates of Hell. A couple of them were depicted with damned souls crouched around them, or crushed beneath their feet.
The rustle of crêpe and the sweetness of Rigaud’s Un Air Embaumé beside her made her whip the spectacles off as she turned. ‘Do they divide sinners up by sin, the way Dante did?’ she asked.
A trace of frown appeared between Paola’s delicate brows. ‘I don’t know. The Baroness would. She is fascinated by these awful things.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Impulsively, Lydia grasped the Italian girl’s hand. ‘When the Baroness suggested that she take me around, I asked Sir John if he might arrange for someone else to join us, because the Baroness is a little – a little overpowering sometimes . . .’
‘Sometimes?’ Paola’s Madonna face brightened with schoolgirl mischief. ‘Dio mio, she would seize away the scepter of her tsar and beat him over the head with it!’ Her voice was low, and she glanced toward the lighted courtyard door, to make sure there was no possibility of the lady hearing. ‘She is like my Aunt Aemilia: so good and kind, yet so bossy!’
‘Perhaps Sir John had his own motives in hinting to her to take me about today.’ Lydia also lowered her voice conspiratorially.
‘É verra! To spare poor Lady Eddington . . .’ Paola shook her head. ‘You and I perform the poor lady a great service, Madame Asher. A diversion, as the soldiers say. For whenever anyone is ill or out of sorts, the Baroness appears on their doorstep, with her own servants and her own soap and her own brooms, and a tub of boiling vinegar, and food in crocks – her cook should be shot, Madame! He is Georgian and truly one of the plagues of this earth!’
‘How did you happen to be in the garden?’ asked Lydia, ‘If you don’t mind me asking . . .’
Distress clouded Paola’s eyes. ‘Holly Eddington and I were of an age, Madame. There are not many so young, among the Legations. Poor Holly. She was very lonely, and anxious, as women are who reach the age of twenty-four unwed and unasked. Bitter, too, I think, that women like that poisonous Madame Schrenk – the wife of the Austrian Minister’s First Secretary – would say of her, Poor thing . . .’
The young woman sighed as she moved off along the line of those fearsome other-worldly magistrates who glared and scowled in the shadows. ‘We both of us loved music, and birds, though we had in truth little else in common. At her invitation I would come to play on her mother’s piano, for Tonio and I have none in our little house. Like her mother she saw the Chinese only as devils, whom she seemed to think chose their own condition in this world. And she was so – so pleased with herself, that Mr Hobart asked her to be his wife. And her mother practically gloated. But in a place like this, one makes friends where one can.’
‘How did you happen go out to the garden Wednesday night?’ asked Lydia. ‘You must have been freezing . . .’
‘It was only to be for a moment, I thought. Holly and I were arranging for the cake to be laid out, when one of the servants came in and told her that Signor Hobart had come to the garden gate and was asking to see her.’
‘Asking to see her?’
‘Even so, Madame. Since eight o’clock she was almost in tears, that Mr Hobart would have not come to the reception for their own engagement. She said, “If he is drunk, I will kill him!” and went out – though of course she knew and I knew that he would be drunk. I finished with the cake plates and the champagne. Then I realized it had been fifteen minutes, perhaps more, and Holly had not returned. I looked out into the garden and didn’t see her – her dress was white, you remember, and would show up in the dark. I went out the French door of the drawing room and a little way down the path, before I saw something white on the ground.’
She turned her face aside, stared for a time at the statue of what seemed to be a disheveled poet with huge fangs and a scroll in his hand, and sinners screaming in torment beneath his feet.
‘Did you hear anything?’ asked Lydia softly. ‘Or see any movement?’
Paola shook her head. ‘I thought at first that she might have fainted. Then when I came near and saw Richard lying near her, and smelled the liquor and the opium smoke in his clothing—’
Even without her spectacles, Lydia heard the mingling of distress and guilt in her companion’s voice.
‘I’m sure she wouldn’t have wanted a third party present . . .’
‘I know she didn’t.’ The young woman turned back to her. ‘Yet I should have at least gone out on to the step, to watch them from afar. Richard has always been a perfect gentleman, even when he is drunk; he would not hurt even a flea.’ She sighed and folded her arms, as if against the Temple’s bone-deep chill. And sadly, added, ‘Yet everyone in the Legations knows about his father.’
‘Please to get down from your horses. Be of no trouble.’ The tall man in the gray-green uniform – the only one of the bandits mounted on a full-sized European horse rather than a shaggy Chinese pony – gestured with his revolver. His face was heavily scarred with smallpox, eyebrow-less and thin-lipped, his hair cut short. The men around him – some in peasant ch’i-p’aos and ku, others in Western-style uniforms – pointed their German and Russian rifles at the little party.
Sergeant Willard, hands raised, said quietly, ‘Kuo Min-tang.’
‘Can we run for it?’ Karlebach’s curling gray eyebrows had pulled into a solid shelf over the jut of his nose, and beneath them his dark eyes glinted. ‘It will be dark in an hour.’
‘We wouldn’t make it twenty feet.’ Asher – who had raised his hands like the others the moment the men had emerged, on foot and on horseback, from the tangle of rhododendron brush along the trail – dismounted and stood quiet while one of the Chinese stripped him of his greatcoat, then dug through the pockets of his jacket beneath. He added, ‘Get down, Rebbe, please,’ in a level voice when the old man hesitated. ‘Or they will shoot you.’ And when Karlebach obeyed and was, for his cooperation, relieved of his old-fashioned shooting-coat, his scarf, his watch (Asher had taken the precaution of leaving his own watch and money back at the hotel – he’d travelled in the Chinese countryside before), and his shotgun, he went on, still in the Czech that he knew no one around them would understand, ‘They don’t want trouble with the British authorities if they can help it. What they want is the horses and the guns.’
Personally, he was grateful that the Republican revolutionaries showed no signs of taking their boots as well.
‘Ask them, please,’ said Karlebach, ‘please, to give me at least the medicines from the pockets of my coat . . .’
Asher relayed this request, in his hesitant Chinese, to their captors. The men opened one of the little bottles, sniffed the contents in turn, tasted it, and all grimaced. ‘What?’ demanded one of them, and Asher replied: