My Beautiful Enemy (16 page)

As he turned the jade tablet in his hand, however, the markings on the edges came into view, and they were nothing of what he remembered.

The tablet was a substitute; she had taken the original.

The hand of fate was at work after all.

R
ain fell steadily on Leighton’s umbrella. He barely noticed, his mind far away.

A cave. Firelight flickering on the walls. A beautiful girl standing with her back to him, admiring the details of an ancient Buddha mural.

The night they had spoken of the jade tablets.

The night he had promised her that he would look after her, for as long as they both lived—the only promise he had ever broken in his life.

Was that why he still wanted to look after her?

There had been no other reason for him to bring up the topic of Mrs. Chase’s assailant: He’d wanted to know whether the man she had sent overboard had been her old nemesis and whether he ought to worry about her injury. But her reaction—he could still feel the impossible speed of his walking stick, hurtling past an inch from his face, still hear the angry clamor as the stick landed in the umbrella stand.

Her fury had stayed with him as he stood guard outside the house on Victoria Street last night. It simmered in him even now, fueling an almost unbearable frustration.

He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, prompting a mild exclamation from the man behind him.

Mrs. Chase’s assailant had a name. And according to Mrs.
Reynolds, Monsieur Dubois had business in England. Leighton was inclined to believe that—Mrs. Chase was not an ugly woman, but not exactly one a man would get on a steamer for, if he wasn’t already headed in the same direction.

Which meant he probably had luggage with him, luggage that was sitting in Southampton unclaimed, because its owner had fallen into the Atlantic.

Leighton raised his hand and hailed the nearest hansom cab.

T
he
Maria Augusta
’s passenger manifest indeed showed a man by the name of Dubois. With that information, Leighton, pretending to act on behalf of Dubois’s estate, managed to retrieve the latter’s luggage from a warehouse in Southampton with little hassle.

From there he proceeded to Starling Manor, his estate in Sussex. To the lavender house, specifically, which hadn’t been used in years. With all the windows open, a clear, bright afternoon light flooded in—Sussex was a much sunnier place than the rest of England. Leighton put on a fencing mask and a pair of falconer’s gloves and set to work on the portmanteau’s lock.

The Centipede’s reputation as a master of poison and hidden weapons preceded him. If Monsieur Dubois was indeed the Centipede, then Leighton had no reason to suppose he would be careless with his possessions. The thick gloves made it more difficult to maneuver, but Leighton would rather lose a few hours than a few fingers.

Twenty minutes later, he was beginning to feel that his precautions had been ridiculously excessive, when the locking mechanism disengaged and two tiny, barbed balls shot out from the keyhole and embedded themselves in his gloves. He dropped the balls into a glass of water; the water immediately turned black.

Leighton exhaled. The fencing mask and the falconer’s
gloves now felt insufficient as protective measures. But this was why he had chosen the lavender house in the first place.

He closed all the windows except one and went outside. After making sure that his person was shielded by the wall, he inserted a pole that had been fitted with a hook at the end through the remaining open window and pried apart the portmanteau. The sound the portmanteau made as it opened was that of a minor battlefield, the air hissing with flying objects that struck windows and walls.

When he peeked into the lavender house to inspect the damage, a dozen small, black-tipped arrows littered the floor. In all directions. So even if he had been standing behind the trunk, or to the side, he would still have been hit.

One would expect such a highly secured portmanteau to contain state secrets. But one side of the portmanteau was given over entirely to the Centipede’s wardrobe. Half of the other side was also taken up by clothes and haberdashery. And then items that firmly marked the Centipede as human, rather than a well-dressed ghost: packages of tea, candied plums, and slender, hard-cured sausages.

The last and most interesting item was also one that required the most careful handling: a box. But it was unlocked and no projectile or noxious fume met Leighton. The inside of the box was thickly padded, the items the padding protected shrouded in additional layers of batting and cloth. Under all the wrapping he discovered half a dozen small porcelain jars, each filled with a paste of a different color and odor.

The jars reminded him of the ones the girl from Chinese Turkestan had used for her ointments—the woman who lived in a parlor flat in Kensington he thought of as Miss Blade, but he could not attach that name to his lover from another life.

He put the jars back into the box and turned to the satchel. It was nowhere as dangerous as the trunk, since it was meant to be carried by Monsieur Dubois on his own person, rather than
entrusted to strangers. Unfortunately it contained only some toiletries, a scarf, a map of London, and a few calling cards.

Leighton was unsatisfied. He wanted answers. Did Miss Blade know Monsieur Dubois? Was he her old nemesis? And why had she been so furious when he had inquired into the matter?

And that was when he saw the envelope peeking out from underneath the packages of candied plums. When he opened the envelope, he held a stack of precisely trimmed papers, each bearing a brush-and-ink painting of a centipede.

Well, here was one answer, at least.

T
here were several safes at Starling Manor, one in the study, another in Leighton’s bedroom, and a third in the mistress’s dressing room.

The safe in the mistress’s dressing room seemed empty, until one removed the false bottom to reveal yet another locked compartment. Inside the compartment was a steel case. And inside the steel case was everything Leighton had of the girl from Chinese Turkestan.

The black tassel with a bead of jade that she had cut from the handle of her sword. The few heads of dried chrysanthemum blossoms, quietly crumbling into powder in a tightly sealed glass jar. The small, white porcelain pot that she had given him upon their parting, which still contained a bit of the once rose-colored salve, now dried into several brown, brittle clumps.

Under the porcelain pot was a letter, from the man in charge of the best chemical analysis laboratory in all of England. As soon as Leighton had safely returned to Rawalpindi, he had sent in a sample of the salve for testing. But the report that should have been posted at the beginning of 1884 had come to him only this past December, when an ownership change at the laboratory had brought about a thorough examination of all the accumulated paperwork.

He could recite the relevant paragraph word for word.
The laboratory has not been able to determine the chemical structure of all the substances found in the salve. But after consulting with several eminent botanists and biologists at Cambridge University, I am confident in the conclusion that the salve as a whole is indeed highly toxic. Fatally so in sufficient quantities.

Leighton had strongly suspected it, of course, or he wouldn’t have arranged for the analysis in the first place. But during the intervening years, he had managed to convince himself that it didn’t matter whether she had poisoned him: He was still alive and that was enough.

Yet when the long-lost report had at last arrived, ten days before Christmas, his first at Starling Manor in many, many years, he had been fragmented by the blow.

It had been, objectively speaking, a perfect day, snow falling softly outside the windows, a fire roaring in the grate, the garlands of fir and spruce draped over the mantel smelling green and resinous, a lovely fragrance that recalled some of his earliest memories of Christmas.

And then the bitter, scientific summary of her murderous intentions.

Two days later he had forced himself to attend a house party in the next county. Annabel had also been invited. She had proposed to him at the end of the Season, the previous August, and he had turned her down as gently as he could—she deserved better than a man who still dreamed of another.

But when she brought up the subject again during the house party, an hour after the agony in his limb had returned, he had answered in the affirmative. That bridge had been burned long ago; it was past time for him to stop standing on the bank, wishing that the girl from Chinese Turkestan would somehow punt, row, or swim her way across.

At the very corner of the steel case from the safe’s secret compartment was the pouch of gems in the rough that he had carried with him on each trip to Chinese Turkestan. The gems
that she had briefly stolen. The ones that she had refused, in the end, because she had wanted nothing more to do with him. Because she had already decided that he must die.

But when she had stood behind him in his bedroom . . . When he had walked back into her parlor twenty-four hours ago, before his questions had rankled her . . .

Sometimes things that did not possess shape or substance nevertheless had weight and impact—thoughts of a thousand sleepless nights, prayers uttered in the darkest hours, regrets that never lessened, despite the passage of time.

Her task had brought her ten thousand miles to England. But who was to say that what had led her to
him
had not been the exact same flickering hope that he knew all too well?

He pushed away that useless thought, put everything back, and locked the safe.

Would that everything could be stowed away so neatly and safely, never coming to light except with his permission.

L
eighton returned to London late, left Victoria station on foot, and walked until he was exactly where he should not be.

Beneath Miss Blade’s window.

He stood in the dark, beyond the light of the street lamps, bitter tendrils of cigarette smoke curling about him.

Her reappearance had been a seismic event, the aftershocks of which he felt daily. But it was not because she symbolized everything about a certain moment of his past. No, her presence jarred because he had thought the question of his future settled, only to realize that he had been lying to himself.

That, in his heart, he had never left the foothills of the Heavenly Mountains.

Chinese Turkestan

1883

H
is heart pounding madly, Leighton reined to a full stop and aimed.

He didn’t know if he could keep his fear under control—the slightest tremor in the wrist, the least excess of tension in his shoulders, and the shot would go wide. He exhaled and let his mind go blank.

The two bandits closest to her fell. He reloaded and took out two more. One bandit aimed a rifle at him. Leighton fired his revolver and the bandit went down. The last two bandits still on their feet looked at each other and sprinted for their horses.

He galloped down the slope, leaped off his horse, and ran to her. She was bloody, limp, and completely unconscious. She was also unreasonably lucky. The two gunshot wounds were grazes; there were no bullets in her. With shaking hands, he tore strips of cloth from her trousers and stemmed the bleeding of her arm and her head.

Something cold and metallic seared into his left thigh. He looked down; the knife was an inch and a half into his flesh. He
pulled it out and hurled it back at the bandit who had thrown it. The bandit fell sideways, the knife sticking into his chest.

Somehow he shoved her up on her horse. She lay on her stomach, her head and feet hanging down the horse’s flanks.

He forced himself up on the saddle and took up the reins.

She was alive. It was all that mattered.

Y
ing-ying was crawling through the desert at high noon, sand scalding every inch of her body. Then the sun disappeared and she could not stop shivering; so cold, she would never be warm again. Abruptly the heat returned, scorching her from the inside out, drying her until she shriveled.

She cried for Amah.
Help me. Water.

Someone did help her. Water trickled down her throat until she turned aside, too exhausted to swallow. When she burned, a cool, damp cloth wiped her down, bringing her relief. And when she shuddered, blankets came around her; warm hands rubbed her icy feet.

Sometimes the person hurt her, too, pouring a cool liquid on her that made her groan from the fiery pain. A low, reassuring voice came then, telling her that it was all right, her wounds must be kept clean.

At last the temperature stopped swinging between extremes. Warm and cozy, with the scent of wood smoke in her nostrils, she slept, long, solid, dreamless hours.

She awoke to the chirping of birds and the falling of water in the distance. A ceiling of rock greeted her sight. She was in a cave, but not the nasty kind, cramped and full of animal smells. Rather, the cave was quite decent as caves went, dry, large, and almost airy.