Asher put a hand over his heart. ‘I shall take up rooms at the College again the moment we get home—’
Lydia looked startled, then flipped the fringes of the shawl like a whip against his arm. ‘I don’t mean you, silly. Sir Grant doesn’t look like he can make tea nearly as well as you do. But if Richard Hobart didn’t want to have Holly Eddington as his wife, all he had to do was send her home once they were married and stay out here in Peking. If he’s going to inherit that much money, he could afford not to live with her.’
‘True also,’ agreed Asher. ‘Which makes the whole thing doubly odd.’
Together by the light of the single candle they tiptoed down the glacial servants’ hall to the door of the nursery. Mrs Pilley, a nameless mound of blankets, was a great believer in ‘cold room, warm bed’, but Miranda at least was tucked up under a number of eiderdowns with a warm cap tied over her soft fluff of red hair.
After ten years of marriage to Lydia – and two miscarriages which had devastated that matter-of-fact, curiously fragile woman who had been everything to him from the moment he first laid eyes on her – the birth of their daughter seemed to Asher a miracle. When Professor Karlebach had telegraphed him in August, asking him to accompany him to China, Asher had refused. Even when the old man had crossed to England, arriving on Asher’s doorstep with the Journal of Oriental Medicine in his fist, Asher had had misgivings.
Asher had read the article himself when it had appeared, and had recognized the description of the creatures he’d glimpsed in Prague.
But it was Lydia who had said, Of course we have to go.
He slipped his arm around her waist now, gently closed the door.
Miranda. Tiny, red-haired, beautiful beyond belief . . .
And as safe here, he reflected, as she – or Lydia – would be back in Oxford.
Possibly safer. Since the Boxer Uprising in ’01, the King’s representatives kept a sharp eye on everyone who came and went in the high-walled Legation Quarter.
And curiously, he found his meeting with Ysidro that evening at Eddington’s reassuring.
Deny it though Ysidro would, Asher knew that the vampire, in his curious way, loved Lydia. And he, James Asher, could ask no better protector for her than that yellow-eyed Spanish nobleman who had died before Queen Elizabeth came to the throne.
Died and become Undead.
The bedroom was arctic. Ellen had warmed the bed with a stone water-bottle, and it, too, had gone icy. By candlelight Lydia pulled off her tea gown and corset in record time and, night-gowned to the chin, scrambled beneath the feather bed, then immediately proceeded to use Asher’s legs as a foot-warmer.
Later, as they were drifting off to sleep, she asked, ‘Are you really going to look into things and question Sir Grant’s servants?’
‘It isn’t my business,’ said Asher sleepily. ‘And, I have doubts about what I’m going to find. But yes. It’s only his word that will shield me from suspicion, and there are several people who might very well recognize me from my previous visit. I can’t really refuse.’
Silence, and the scent of sandalwood and vanilla, as she rested her head on his shoulder and stroked his mustache into tidiness with her forefinger.
‘Did Ysidro say how long he’d been in Peking?’ A trace of hesitation tinged her voice as she spoke the vampire’s name. There had been a time when she had refused to do so – a time when she had turned her face from Ysidro completely. You defend him, too? Karlebach had asked, and she had had no answer.
‘We were interrupted.’ Asher spoke with deliberate matter-of-factness.
‘Or whether there were vampires in Peking?’
‘No,’ said Asher softly. ‘I wondered about that myself.’
THREE
From the Wagons-Lits Hotel it was a straight walk of a few hundred yards along the decaying banks of the old canal, to the gray walls of the British Legation, massive in the morning sunlight. Rickshaw men followed Asher and Lydia like persistent horseflies, with cries of, ‘Anywhere Peking twen’y cent! Chop-chop, feipao—’
Asher stifled the urge to shout, ‘Li k’ai!’ at them – go away! But it was always better when abroad – as His Majesty’s Secret Servants would euphemistically say when they were poking around in countries where they had no business being – to pretend total ignorance of the local tongue. One heard far more interesting things that way. And in any case, he, James Asher, had supposedly never set foot in China before. He laid a gloved hand over Lydia’s, where it rested in the crook of his arm, and looked about him with the fatuous smile of an Englishman surveying a country that didn’t come up to British standards of government, hygiene, morals, cooking, or anything else.
But he murmured to her from time to time. ‘This canal used to be better kept up . . . Behind that wall, where the Japanese Legation is now, was Prince Su’s palace . . . There was a lane over there that led to what they called the Mongol Market. The vegetable-sellers would arrive before dawn on market days with trains of camels, and the noise would drive anybody out of bed . . .’
Lydia, for her part, turned her head with a gaze which appeared regal but was in fact an ingrained battle not to squint at a world which was nothing to her but blobs of dazzling color in the brittle bright Peking sunlight. The sewagy pong of the canal water mixed with flurries of charcoal smoke from the dumpling man’s cart, then sharp sweetness as they passed the vendor of sugared bean-cakes. She was longing to put on her spectacles, Asher knew, with a head-shake of regret. There were times when he wanted to go back and thrash the stepmother and aunts who’d told her she was ugly.
‘The Chinese say that when people first arrive in Peking they weep with disappointment,’ he remarked, ‘and when they leave, they weep with regret.’
She smiled. ‘Did you?’ She had, Asher knew, been disconcerted at her first glimpse of it, from the windows of the train from Tientsin yesterday afternoon: stagnant pools around scattered congeries of pigsties, chicken runs, and clumps of low-built houses in the Chinese City. Even here within the towering walls of the Tatar City, and of the walled Legation Quarter tucked away in one corner of it, the impression was of dirt and desolation, gray walls, blind alleyways, and grinding poverty.
‘I was hidden in a corner of a boxcar filled with raw cowhides,’ returned Asher, ‘with a price on my head and fifteen German soldiers on my trail. So – no.’
Lydia laughed.
At the rambling old palace where His Majesty’s Ambassador still had his headquarters, Asher sent in his card and gave Sir John Jordan the same story he’d given Hobart the previous evening: that he was here to look into a remarkable piece of ancient folklore which had resurfaced, for purposes of incorporation into a book he was writing on the transmission of rodent motifs in Central European legend. ‘While I’m here,’ he went on, after Sir John had inquired in a friendly manner about the book, ‘might I visit Richard Hobart at the stockade?’
The ambassador paused in the act of signing an order for an armed detail to escort Asher to the hills on the following morning, his eyebrows quirked.
‘I’m a cousin of his mother’s –’ this was another fiction, though Asher had met Julia Hobart on the occasion of her son’s matriculation from Caius College – ‘and I’m a bit concerned that poor Hobart might be . . . Well, that any letter he sends her now might paint a picture affected by his own feelings. As is quite natural.’