My Beautiful Enemy (11 page)

He handed over what little remained of his supply of tea as well, wrapped in pages from a Parsi-language newspaper published in India.

She filliped the package. “I haven’t forgotten our deal—you can come and watch, just give me a few minutes to get the girls ready.”

“Of course, make sure you get my money’s worth,” he said.

“I’d better get inside. Don’t want the ladies to become impatient.”

“Should we meet here again, this day next year?”

“This day next year by whose calendar?”

He grimaced inwardly. He had forgotten that for the Islamic calendar, which relied on lunar observation to determine the beginning of the months, a different locality might have a different set of dates.

“Let’s just say three hundred fifty-four days from today.”

By then he should have accrued enough home leave to make the trip to Kashgar.

“And what? Will you bring more gold for me to steal?”

With that, she slapped him on the chest and left, disappearing through a curtained doorway.

Almost immediately he went out to the courtyard, but her horse was already gone. He ran out of the courtyard, but there was no sign of the horse on the street outside. He stood in place, his hand on the support column of an arch. It was completely unsurprising, her departure. She had always given every indication that she would go her own way, but for some reason, he had not wanted to see the inevitable.

Now the inevitable was a void in his chest.

His head lifted. He felt inside his robe. The velvet pouch of gems that he always carried on his person, in order to pass for a diamond dealer—it was gone. He remembered her slap across his chest. He remembered her warning that she would rob him blind.

You are a fool, too
, she had told him.

Yes, I know.

He didn’t know. He didn’t know at all.

“Sir?”

He turned. It was the serving girl she had taken to “bed.”

“Your friend asked that this be returned to you, sir.”

This was the package of tea, as evidenced by the Parsi newspaper from four months ago.

“Thank you,” he managed to say. “How much do I owe for your . . . hospitality?”

“Your friend has already paid very handsomely for the wine and the sweets.”

Of course she would have, the beautiful bastard.

But something felt different about the tea package. He made sure he was alone before he peeked inside. The velvet pouch. And it did not feel lighter in his hand, but slightly heavier than he remembered.

Nestled among the uncut gems he had brought, a round bead of green jade, from the tassel of her sword. And next to it, several dried flowers—snow chrysanthemum from the Kunlun Mountains, grown at an altitude of ten thousand feet above sea level.

She had not robbed him after all.

Except of his heart.

London

1891

M
r. Lochby, the private investigator, had excellent news. He had easily found information on Master Gordon, who, he informed Catherine, had indeed been a gentleman, a member of an old landowning family of Devonshire—the cadet branch, but all the same, very, very respectable stock.

Young Herbert Gordon had been educated at Harrow and Cambridge—Trinity College, to be exact. After that, he had lived the life of a man about town. He displayed an interest in the Far East, since his father had spent some time there, but it was the interest of a dilettante, nothing terribly serious. Most of his time was spent doing what pleased himself.

And then, in October of 1873, he left England abruptly, never to return except upon his death.

Some of this Catherine knew, some she had guessed, but still, there was so much more she did not know. As a child, she had defined the adults in her life by their roles and never sought to learn about them as individuals until it was too late: She had no knowledge of her mother’s upbringing in a
scholarly household, just as little of her amah’s girlhood under the eaves of the legendary Abode of the Shadowless Goddesses, and only slightly more of Master Gordon’s youth, for all her eagerness to hear of everything there was to know about the outside world.

Before she left England, she would rectify her ignorance about Master Gordon. But for now, despite her hunger for every last detail of his life, she must remember her purpose: She needed to find out what happened to the jade tablet that had been in his possession.

“This is investigative work of very fine caliber, Mr. Lochby,” she said.

Mr. Lochby preened a little, stroking his mustache. “My pleasure to provide the services I have promised.”

“Would you mind telling me if you were able to locate any of his surviving family members?”

“Unfortunately, no. He did have a sister elder to him, but she passed away two years ago.”

This was not what Catherine wanted to hear. “Did his will name any particularly close friends?”

“Mr. Gordon never made a will.”

“What?” Her exclamation hung in the air, a half octave too loud.

“I inquired at the Principal Probate Registry and was told that there is none on record,” said Mr. Lochby.

“I see.” She did her best to keep the dismay out of her voice. In an almost casual tone, she asked, “Out of curiosity, to whom does a man’s possession go when he leaves no will?”

“I am no solicitor, but I would say his closest of kin, which in this case would be his sister.”

“Who is also dead.”

“True, but I do have the address of Mr. Cromwell, the Gordons’ solicitor, if you should care to speak to him about Mr. Gordon’s and Miss Gordon’s estates.”

Catherine’s heart leaped, all her earlier distress gone. The solicitor would have far more information to offer her. But more important, he must have known Master Gordon in the old days—the first such person she would come across in all her years.

“Yes, thank you,” she said, again trying to keep her voice even. “I would very much like to speak to the solicitor.”

She left Mr. Lochby’s office with Mr. Cromwell’s address in hand. The latter’s office was not very far away. She would have walked to conserve her limited funds, but rain came down quite insistently, and she had learned from bitter experience that even one as nimble as she could not keep the hem of her dress completely safe from all the splashes caused by horses, carriage wheels, and other pedestrians.

She had not seen a clear sky since she’d disembarked in Southampton. Rain, always rain, pausing only to let a round of fog roll in and out, before coming down again, a state of permanent sogginess. Such weather was common enough in the south of China—reams of poetry celebrated the beauty of spring rain—but for a city as northerly as the uppermost reaches of Manchuria, it felt all wrong.

And now, because of the rain, her moldy-smelling hansom cab was stuck in a traffic logjam. She stared out of the water-blurred window, imagining this Mr. Cromwell, hoping he would have something to tell her about Master Gordon beyond what the latter’s signature looked like.

Her heart seized: A stylish couple came down the sidewalk, the woman in a violet mantle and the man in a black cloak with upturned collars. But they turned out to be strangers Catherine had never seen before, not Leighton Atwood and his fiancée.

Catherine had been good. She had not gone back to his house or tried in any other way to insinuate herself into his presence. Instead she had been busy looking for a serviceable
flat at a respectable address that catered to single women—and then busy fitting out the flat so that it would be presentable when Mrs. Reynolds came to call.

But what she really wanted was for
him
to see her place.

For years she’d assumed that he’d left her because all his promises had been lies. Now she wondered whether his decision hadn’t been in part prompted by his belief that it would be impossible for a nomad girl to fit into the life of an English man of property. But there were entire swaths of her life that he could not have remotely guessed at, the long years confined behind high walls, the sea of etiquette through which she swam daily, the elaborate pretense she was capable of putting on, to appear the most docile and ladylike of creatures.

She would have had not a bit of trouble negotiating the relatively uncomplicated English rules of politesse.

And she wanted him to understand this and regret his choice.

She sighed. Why did she persist in assuming that their unexpected reunion was a matter of earth-shattering significance to him, simply because it was the case for her? He had left her years ago. Without a backward glance. Her reappearance was an inconvenience, probably a minor irritant—nothing else.

Rain fell and fell. The hansom cab barely moved. With another sigh, Catherine got out, paid the cabbie, and sloshed in the direction of the sidewalk.

M
r. Cromwell was a small man with almost entirely white hair and a warm twinkle to his eyes—Catherine liked him instantly. Once she explained who she was and her purpose for visiting him, he tasked his secretary to hang her coat near the fire, and welcomed her into his dark-paneled, thickly carpeted office.

“Miserable weather, is it not?” he asked cheerfully.

“Indeed it is. I am beginning to believe that it never stops raining in England.”

It was Master Gordon who had first told her that whereas Chinese chitchat often led with mealtimes, English small talk tended to revolve around precipitation.

“Ah, but you must have greater faith, Miss Blade,” the solicitor admonished her gently. “The sky
will
eventually clear. And our summers are all the more glorious for how much we must yearn for them.”

Catherine smiled a little. “I see you are a philosopher as well, sir.”

This quite pleased Mr. Cromwell. “Oh, I imagine any old lawyer must have done a fair bit of pondering upon the nature of life and humanity. But do let us proceed now to the purpose of your visit. You said you would like to know more about Mr. Herbert Gordon.”

“He was a beloved friend and I was looking forward to reading his will. Not because I expected there to be anything for me but because I hoped the will would tell me the names of those he held dear, people I could call on to reminisce about him.”

Mr. Cromwell nodded sympathetically. “And you found that he left no will.”

“Is that not a bit rare?”

“Not as rare as you’d think, given how easy it is to make and execute wills in this country. For a relatively young man like Mr. Gordon, with no dependents, no complicated holdings, and no expectations that he would come into a great fortune, not having a will might be more common.”

“So whatever belongings of his would simply have gone to his sister, his closest of kin.”

“Not very much of what belonged to him came back from China: a trunk of books and letters and a trunk of clothing.”

“And his remains, of course.”

“His ashes have been scattered, according to the late Miss Gordon.”

“He was
cremated
?” She had seen his body delivered to the British Legation, but she herself had left Peking the following day, for the long journey to Chinese Turkestan. “But cremations are not performed in China.”

“Except by Buddhist monks,” said Mr. Cromwell. “The legation staff took his remains to a Buddhist temple, from what I understand.”

This was most unexpected. But she was only surprised, not dismayed. There was something dramatic and final about cremations—the soul had already departed, no need for the body to remain behind. “You wouldn’t happen to know where his ashes were scattered, would you, Mr. Cromwell?”

“I’m afraid I do not. Miss Jane Gordon mentioned it in passing and I did not inquire in detail.”

And there went Catherine’s nascent hope of perhaps taking a handful of that soil to keep as a memento.

She had to think for a moment before she could remember where they were before the conversation veered off to cremations: Master Gordon’s belongings, which she had packed in a daze the morning after he died, trying desperately to hold herself together.

“You mentioned a trunk of books and letters and a trunk of clothes, sir. But surely those could not be the entirety of his worldly possessions.”

“He did have a house in London. But about two years after he left England, I received instructions from him to transfer the house and its contents into the possession of one Mrs. Robert Delany.”

At last, the name of someone Master Gordon had treasured and esteemed above all others. Catherine forced herself to remain still, to not leap up from her chair in sheer excitement. “Would you happen to know how Master Gordon knew this Mrs. Delany and where I can find her?”

Mr. Cromwell shook his head. “I’m afraid all I can tell you is that she is an Englishwoman who married an American and lives in San Francisco.”

San Francisco was an ocean and a continent away. But with steamers and trains, an ocean and a continent could be crossed in a matter of weeks. In no time at all, she could be sitting in Mrs. Delany’s sitting room, listening to the latter tell her all about Master Gordon.