‘Good heavens, Lydia, what are you doing still here?’
‘I’ve been waiting. I wanted to ask you something, Headmaster.’
Theo chuckled to himself. He’d noticed before that pupils were very free with his courtesy title when they wanted something from him. Nevertheless he smiled encouragingly. ‘What is it?’
‘You know all about China and Chinese ways, so…’
He snorted a derisive laugh. ‘I’ve only been here ten years. It would take a lifetime of study to know China, and even then you’d only have scratched the surface.’
‘But you speak Mandarin and you know a lot.’ Her eyes held his and there was an urgency in them that intrigued him.
‘Yes,’ he agreed quietly. ‘I do know a lot.’
‘So can you tell me the name of something, please?’
‘That depends on what this something is.’
‘It’s the Chinese way of fighting. The one where they fly through the air and use their feet. I need to know what it’s called.’
‘Ah, yes, the Chinese are famous for their martial arts. There are numerous kinds, each one with a different style and philosophy behind it. My own favourite is tai chi chuan. That’s difficult to translate because it carries many meanings, but roughly it is the Yin Yang Fist.’ He noticed the girl was listening with a level of attention he wished she would apply to her ordinary school lessons. ‘But it sounds as if you’re talking about kung fu.’
‘Kung fu,’ Lydia repeated carefully.
‘That’s right. It translates literally as Merit Master. The Japanese call it karate. That means empty hand. In other words, it’s unarmed combat.’
She smiled to herself, a soft smile of delight that warmed her slender face. ‘Yes. That’s it.’
‘But why on earth do you need to know about unarmed combat?’
She gave him a bold, mischievous grin. ‘Because I want to learn more about Chinese ways, so that I can decide for myself whether they are relevant or irrelevant, sir.’
‘Well, I am pleased that you are so eager to learn more about the land you’re living in, whatever the reason. Now off with you, young lady, as I have other things to do.’
For a split second Lydia let her eyes slide to the upstairs window, and then without even a good-bye, she was gone.
Theo sighed. Lydia Ivanova was never going to make life easy for him. Only today he’d had to take the ruler to her knuckles because she was late for afternoon classes yet again. The girl had scant respect for rules. Not insolent exactly. But there was something about her, the way she walked into class, the independent way she held her head and in the way she raised her gaze to his slowly when he asked her a question. It was there in the back of her eyes. As if she knew something he didn’t. It irritated him.
But not as much as Mr Christopher Mason irritated him. He reached up and locked the heavy gates, shutting out the world. Only then did he allow himself the exquisite pleasure of looking up at the window.
‘It is not wise to tweak tail of tiger, my love.’
‘What do you mean?’ Theo kissed the delicious hollow at the base of Li Mei’s throat and felt the pulse of her blood under his lips.
‘I mean Mr Mason.’
‘To hell with Mason.’
They were lying naked on the bed, the shutters half-closed against the heat, allowing only a narrow shaft of light to steal into the room. It lay like a dusty sash of gold across Li Mei’s body, as if it couldn’t keep its fingers from her breasts any more than he could.
‘Tiyo, my love, I am serious.’
Theo raised his head and kissed the point of her chin. ‘Well, I’m not. I’ve been serious all day long with a whole school full of monkeys and now I want to be very unserious.’
She laughed, a delighted sound that was so soft and low it made the soles of his feet tingle. Her skin smelled of hyacinths and tasted of honey, but infinitely more addictive. He brushed his lips down her sleek body, over the curve of her hip, and rested his cheek against her slender thigh with a sigh of pleasure.
‘So you go see Mr Mason tomorrow?’
‘No. The man’s a menace.’
‘Please, Tiyo.’
She reached down and caressed his head, the tips of her fingers beginning a gentle massage of his scalp, until he could feel all the tension melting from his brain. He adored her touch. It was like no other woman’s. He shut his eyes to block out everything else but that one swirling, emptying sensation.
‘Tomorrow is Saturday,’ he murmured, ‘so I shall take you out on the river. There the air is cooler and in the evening we shall stop off at Hwang’s and eat phoenix tail prawns and kuo tieh until we burst.’ He rolled over onto his side and smiled at her. ‘Would you like that?’
Her dark eyes were solemn. Gracefully she removed the cream orchid and the mother-of-pearl comb from her hair, placed them on the bedside table, and looked at him very seriously. ‘I very much like that, Tiyo,’ she said. ‘But not tomorrow.’
‘Why not tomorrow?’
‘Because you see Mr Mason tomorrow.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Li Mei, I refuse to go running over there like a puppy every time he crooks his finger in my direction.’
‘You want lose school?’
Theo pulled away. Without a word he left the bed and went over to the open window where he stood staring out, his naked back rigid. After a long silence, he said, ‘You know I couldn’t bear to lose my school.’
A rustle of sheets and she was there with him. Her slight body pressed tight against his back, her arms clasped around his chest, her cheek on his shoulder blade. He could feel her long lashes whisper over his skin. Neither spoke.
From this high up on the hill Theo looked down at the tiled roofs of the town that had been his home for the last ten years, a home he loved, and a refuge from the whisperings he’d left behind in England. He gazed out over the sweep of the whole International Settlement, a little speck of China that seemed to have mutated into a part of Europe. It possessed a curious mix of architectural styles, with solid Victorian mansions sitting cheek by jowl with the more ornate French avenues and long Italian terraces with wrought-iron balconies and exuberant window boxes.
The Europeans had stolen this parcel of land from the Chinese as part of the reparations treaty after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. They had elbowed the ancient walled town to one side and set about constructing their own much larger town right next to it, seizing control of the waterway with gunboats that nosed their way like grey crocodiles up the Peiho River. The International Settlement, they termed it, a bustling centre of Western trade and commerce that delighted the masters back home in Britain but stuck in the craw of the Chinese government.
Theo shook his head. The British were too damn good at it, this whole controlling-the-world thing. Because though the settlement was international, there was no question that it was the British who controlled the place, Sir Edward Carlisle who set his signature with a flourish on every new document, just as he stamped his stern character on the International Council.
Officially the town was divided into four quarters – British, Italian, French, and Russian – lined up neatly next to each other like old friends, but it didn’t work out like that, not in practice. They bickered constantly. Argued over land distribution. Theo had heard them at it in the Ulysses Club. And somehow the British ended up owning nearly half the town while small areas were taken from the Russians and ceded to the Japanese and Americans in exchange for very large payments of gold. But then money always talked. Money and gunboats.