Magistrates of Hell (9 page)

‘Thus the bodyguards, you understand,’ the Italian girl had added, with a wave at the third rickshaw behind them, which contained Korsikov and Menchikov, immense mustachioed Cossacks who seemed to have stepped straight out of The Ballad of Ivan Skavinsky Skavar. ‘In truth, I have never had the slightest trouble since I came here – the President of the Republic is most careful to keep friends with the powers of Europe. Even so, I should not wish to be set afoot in the city alone.’ Like the Baroness – and everyone else in the Legation Quarter except the Americans, who in Lydia’s opinion could barely cope with English – Paola spoke French.

Lydia had peered around her at the gray walls of the
hutongs
, the gates opening into courtyards full of children and laundry, trying to orient herself and failing. Now and then a particularly handsome roof would be seen over the walls, tiled in bright red or green and touched up with gold, but these were hidden almost at once by the next turning of whatever lane they were in. Both Paola and the Baroness had warned Lydia about the smell, but it wasn’t as bad as Constantinople.

As far as Lydia was concerned,
nothing
smelled as bad as Constantinople.

The Temple courtyard was cramped and tiny, cluttered with pigeon coops and stone fish-tanks. Yet there was a curious calm to it, as if it lay silent miles from the din of the street outside. A couple of very old elm trees grew there, and in front of one of its side buildings a hulking young priest in a brown robe swept the packed earth with a twig broom. Beneath the weed-grown mass of a double roof, the main building was dark and rather grimy-looking. A yellow dog slept on the shallow steps. Inside, a ferocious image glared from a niche on the far wall, resplendent among embroidered banners, paper lanterns, and plates of offerings: candy, fruit, sugared watermelon seeds, sesame balls, rice. ‘That’s Kuan Yu, the God of War,’ explained the Baroness. ‘According to Sir John, he was an actual person at one time – fancy making a real general a deity! Like building a temple to Napoleon and preaching sermons in his name. Not that there aren’t imbeciles who actually do that, over in the French Legation . . .’

‘He must have made quite an impression.’ Lydia considered the crimson-painted face, the huge eyes staring into hers under starkly black eyebrows. The smell of incense was suffocating.

‘This is Kuan Yin, goddess of Mercy.’ Paola gestured toward a niche on the eastern wall, where a tall lady in billowy draperies was depicted standing on what Lydia assumed was a lotus. Even at this distance, the sculpted lady’s features had a serene beauty, as if she saw far into the distance of time and knew that everything would work out all right. ‘They say she was a princess who achieved Nirvana through meditation and goodness, yet turned back from the Gates of Heaven when she heard a child crying in the darkness of the world behind her.’

Paola crossed herself. In the dim shadows of the Temple, the sable of her collar set off her creamy brunette complexion, her Madonna face. She was, Lydia guessed, a few years younger than herself, and quiet-spoken, though that might merely have been the effect of the Baroness’s company. ‘I like to think that through her, they honor the Blessed Virgin . . .’

‘Yes, and who else they honor shows you how they think.’ The Baroness returned to the two younger women, stout and frumpy in her seedy furs. She gestured toward the images ranged along the other wall, each in its niche: ‘Behold the King of Hell and the magistrates that govern each of its ten levels, keep records, assign punishments, maintain order, supervise the workers and direct traffic, I dare say. It sounds just like Russia – except, of course, in Russia it would be totally disorganized – and
just
like China,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘Imagine a people who conceive of the afterlife as being divided into departments and operated by bureaucrats. They have separate administrative divisions in Heaven as well.’

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:

‘
Yi-yao
.’
Medicine
. ‘For my father,’ he added, laying a hand on Karlebach’s shoulder.

Evidently satisfied that the stuff wasn’t liquor or anything remotely like it, they returned the opened bottle with bows.

Sergeant Willard muttered, ‘It’s them who been followin’ us all day, my next pay-packet to a copper cash.’

Asher made no reply. Someone had certainly been following them. But it made more sense for the rebels to have taken them in this place – on the bare ridge halfway between the railway town and Mingliang – outbound and in the daylight, to give themselves more time to get farther. Why wait till now when it was dusk, unless they had only recently picked up their trail?

The gorge was already filled with shadow. He heard one of the men snap in Chinese, ‘Hurry up!’ as the others shoved the rest of the tiny bottles into Karlebach’s crippled hands. ‘It’ll be dark before we camp.’ And he caught the words, ‘
Yao-kuei
. . .’ spoken too quietly for the pockmarked commander to hear.

The commander himself remained mounted, but did not speak again. Dr Bauer had warned them, when they’d returned from the mine to the village to collect the horses and start back to Men T’ou Kuo, ‘Ride quickly, but if you’re stopped, remember that they don’t want trouble. Give them the horses and the guns, and they’ll let you walk back to the railroad in peace . . .’

Which would have been all right with him, Asher reflected as he watched the robbers move off up the trail into the thickening darkness, if he hadn’t seen the skull in the box at Dr Bauer’s mission.

Sergeant Willard muttered, ‘Cheesus wept. We’ll be till midnight, hoofin’ it back to the railroad, lads – you be all right, Professor K? Need a hand, sir?’

And Trooper Barclay muttered, ‘We’ll all need a bleedin’ hand ’fore this night’s done! Christ Almighty, I’m cold as a nun’s knickers! We’ll be frozen stiff by the time we get back to town.’

Asher said nothing, though he too had started to shiver. He guessed what would be moving in these hills, once darkness fell, and knew that cold was going to be the least of their troubles.

‘P
lease understand that Sir Grant has never been anything but a perfect gentleman to me.’

Lydia recognized the earnestness in Paola’s voice and the expression in those enormous brown eyes, almost of desperation that Lydia should understand that what Paola was about to say wasn’t to be taken as the malicious backstairs gossip that it would be if someone else were to say it. Lydia reflected, a little sadly, on the number of scandalous secrets communicated to her by cousins, by her beautiful stepmother, by the daughters of her aunts’ friends and by the other young ladies at her very expensive Swiss boarding-school, prefaced by that devastating disclaimer.

She tucked the Italian girl’s hand into the crook of her arm and bent her head to listen as they strolled along the shopfronts of Silk Lane.

‘I think you know that only a very few men in the diplomatic corps bring their wives to China,’ explained Paola, in a slightly constricted voice. ‘The young clerks – and some that are not so young – er . . .
consort
with Chinese women . . . Yes, and some who have their wives here as well,’ she added, with a trace of bitterness. ‘Some – like Colonel von Mehren and Herr Knoller in the German Legation – even keep native mistresses! Others just go to the Chinese City, or make arrangements with the Chinese – er . . .
go-betweens
–’ she fumbled again for the polite term – ‘to have women brought to houses that they agree upon. This is what Sir Grant does.’