Magistrates of Hell (4 page)

‘It’s all because of Julia’s money, of course,’ he continued after a brief struggle with his anger. ‘Julia and her damn money-grubbing father. I’ll have to write to Julia of this in the morning. God knows what I’ll say to her.’

He rubbed his face, as if trying to wake from nightmare. ‘It’s why I’m here, Asher. I have to be able to tell my wife
something
. She dotes on Ricky. I have to tell her that things are in hand, that someone’s looking into it. You speak Chinese. You aren’t a part of the Legation, a part of the whole Eddington set, which goes on tiptoe at the mere mention that something might disturb Yuan Shi-k’ai or upset their precious election – as if Yuan’s going to let there
be
an election . . .’

‘Chinese?’ Asher raised a finger, and Hobart waved impatiently, as if even the question were obtuse.

‘It was the Chinese that did it. Surely that’s obvious.’

‘Why would they do that?’ protested Lydia.

‘How the he— How the dickens would I know that?’ Hobart retorted. ‘You can’t tell what’s going on in their minds. I’ve served here nearly thirty years, and I’ve still never managed to figure out why the P’ei will only work for the Huang, and why a man who’s sworn allegiance to the Tian Di Hui for half his life will suddenly turn around and kill the leader of the local lodge. Trust me, I see the hand of the Chinese in this.’

Lydia started to speak again, and Asher caught her eye, slightly shook his head.

‘Any particular Chinese?’ he asked mildly. ‘Servants in your house—?’

‘Good God!’ cried Hobart. ‘How should I know? They’re all in it together – how would I know how they’re connected?’

‘May I speak to them? Your servants, I mean . . .’

Hobart hesitated, and his glance shifted at some afterthought. Then he said, ‘Of course. I’d ask ’em myself, but they’re too damn frightened for their own jobs to say
boo
to me.’

His hands shook a little as he lifted the delicate blue-and-gold china, and his powerful shoulders slumped, as if suddenly the only thing that was keeping him going was the comforting heat of the drink. ‘Thank you for going over to the stockade with us earlier tonight, Asher,’ he added quietly. ‘I won’t forget this, I swear.’

‘Was your son friends with the girl? Before he proposed,’ Asher amended, his voice wry.

‘Well, you know how it is in the diplomatic. There’s damn few single women out here, and even a shrill man-hunter like Miss Eddington starts to look good when all you’ve seen for a year is the local sing-song girls.’ Hobart’s face twitched again, as if at some memory. ‘Ricky was friendly enough, but he certainly had no intention of proposing. The girl’s four years older than he –
was
four years older,’ he corrected himself, with a slight flush of shame at his own callous tone. ‘Not an ill-looking piece, but at twenty-four she hadn’t had an offer in her life and wasn’t likely to get one. The Eddingtons have a fine family name, but they don’t have a pot to . . . they don’t have a penny to bless themselves with.’ Another apologetic glance at Lydia. ‘God knows why they brought the girl out here. A man’s got to have four hundred a year guaranteed private income to get promoted to attaché, and Sir Allyn’s estate won’t run to that. Not once he gets his son settled.’

‘You said your son went down to the Chinese city—’

‘Eight Lanes.’ He named a portion of the town notorious for its taverns and brothels.

‘Surely he didn’t go alone.’

‘Good God, no! I imagine he went with his usual gang of good-for-nothings: Cromwell Hall, Gil Dempsy from the American Legation, and Hans Erlich, von Mehren’s clerk . . . and yes,’ he added wearily, ‘I told the boy a thousand times not to go about with Erlich, because Ricky could not keep his mouth shut when he’d had a few
shao-chiu
. . . But since Erlich was generally three drinks ahead of Rick, and too stupid to tell horse artillery from a governess cart, I wasn’t worried, even if Rick
had
known anything of military importance, which he didn’t. For God’s sake, Asher, this is China, not France. There’s nothing
to
know out here.’

He set the cup down, sat with his elbows resting on his knees, his great head bowed.
Like a soldier when the heat of fighting passes out of him
, thought Asher, who knew the sensation well.
When there’s nothing left but cold, weariness and pain
. . .

At length Hobart said, ‘Thank you. Oh, I know you’ll never find the Chinese who did it, but at least establish that it
was
the Chinese. That it wasn’t Richard who did this – this frightful thing. Do that, and I’ll see to it that you get whatever you need for your own little expedition to look for
shu-jen
. . . and whatever else you need,’ he added, meeting Asher’s eyes significantly. ‘Just clear Richard of this charge. We don’t need to know anything beyond that.’

‘For a man who’s lived in China for nearly thirty years,’ objected Lydia as Asher returned from seeing Hobart out of the suite, ‘Mr Hobart doesn’t seem to have made the slightest attempt to learn about the Chinese.’ She dug behind the chair pillows and extracted her silver spectacle-case, unfolded the eyeglasses with her usual deliberation and blinked gratefully up at him, the final reflections of the dying hearth catching in the round lenses. ‘
They’re all in it together
, and
you can’t tell what’s going on in their minds
. . . I’d expect that kind of thing from Mrs Pilley, but not from a Senior Translator who’s been in China thirty years.’

‘True, o Best Beloved.’ Asher knelt with poker in hand and made sure that the fire was well and truly out, while Lydia got to her feet and made a circuit of the room switching off lamps. Their house in Oxford was an old-fashioned one, still lit by gas and, in some rooms, by paraffin lamps, though as a result of the journey Lydia had begun planning how electricity could be installed in her workroom. At least gas, Asher reflected, would have kept a parlor this size relatively warm. Away from the hearth it was cold as a tomb, and the bedroom would be ten times worse.

‘The odd thing is –’ he stowed the poker in its rack – ‘Hobart
does
know about the Chinese. At least, when I was here fourteen years ago, he read the
Peking Gazette
regularly and had dozens of contacts in the city. And if you’ll notice, he seems to be up on who the local bosses are and who they deal with. Living through the Uprising might have changed him.’ He took a bedroom candle from the little stand beside the door, scratched a match from the box that he always carried in his pocket as Lydia pressed the final switch to plunge the room into darkness. ‘But if it brought about that much of a revulsion against the Chinese, he could have gone home.’

‘Perhaps he doesn’t get on with Mrs Hobart?’ Lydia gathered an enormous cashmere shawl from the back of the chesterfield and draped it around her shoulders, something she would have frozen to death rather than do in the presence of anyone but her husband, for fear of appearing less than perfect in her lacy gown. ‘Though I suppose in that case he could have transferred to India. I wonder how much of the Foreign Service is actually based on marital incompatibility? Though it would be very pleasant, I suppose, to have a nice house in England and be able to do as one pleased without having a husband cluttering things up—’

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.’

F
rom 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?’