My Beautiful Enemy (20 page)

Catherine kept her eyes demurely downcast—a necessity, as he was directly opposite. Her gaze fell instead on his walking stick, the crutch of a man who never knew when he would become crippled by pain. “How fortunate for me that you happened to be passing this way.”

“We were at a shop only two streets north—Captain Atwood bought me this most beautiful music box and had it restored.” Miss Chase smiled at her fiancé. “You don’t mind if I show off a bit, do you, Captain?”

“Of course not,” he answered quietly.

Miss Chase opened the case on her lap. Inside was a music box of considerable size and complexity. Miss Chase wound it up, and half a dozen figurines atop the music box came to life, dancing, singing, playing trumpets, their eyes, mouths, and limbs moving in rhythm to the cheery tune.

“Adorable, isn’t it?” Miss Chase laughed. “Captain Atwood gives the most delectable presents.”

“Absolutely charming,” Catherine managed.

When the music ended, Miss Chase put the music box away and indicated the package Catherine carried with her. “And did you also find something interesting, Miss Blade?”

“Not quite,” said Catherine, unwrapping layers of cloth and oil cloth and then opening the box for Miss Chase to see. “I was rather hoping to purchase something that would go well with this, but I haven’t had much luck so far.”

“This” was a small, three-frame decorative screen that she always brought with her when she visited an antique shop. Each frame held a rectangle of mutton-fat jade of nearly identical density and creaminess to the
Heart Sutra
jade tablets, except the triptych depicted not a devotional theme, but scenes from a Chinese folktale.

She would show the screen to the antique dealers and ask whether they had anything that would function as companion pieces to the screen. In response, she had been presented with everything from a pair of stylized ebony African heads made in Vienna, to Delft chinoiserie plates, to a quartet of carved seals purporting to be imperial seals of the Ch’ing Court, when they were at best those of a midlevel provincial official.

Miss Chase laid a hand over her heart. “Oh, how beautiful. What does the scene depict?”

“A Chinese story named ‘The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl.’ The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl are lovers who cannot be together, so they spend their lives on opposite banks of the Silver River, which is what the Chinese call the Milky Way.” Was that Leighton Atwood’s gaze she felt on her? She slid the pad of her thumb across the mahogany latticework at the bottom of the panels. “But on the seventh day of the seventh moon of the year, a flock of magpies form a bridge across the river, and they are briefly reunited, before they must each return to their own bank for the long wait to begin again.”

“My, but that is both so romantic and so sad.” Miss Chase examined the screen more carefully. “I can’t decide whether this bridge of magpies is in the process of forming or unforming.”

“It is up to the beholder to decide whether the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl are about to reunite, or about to part again,” said Catherine.

“They must be on the verge of a reunion,” declared Miss Chase. “What do you think, Captain?”

He accepted the miniature screen and studied it. Fiercely, it seemed to Catherine.

“Well,” prompted Miss Chase. “What is your verdict, Captain? Joyous reunion or more heartrending separation?”

Catherine didn’t know why, but she held her breath.

Another two seconds passed before he spoke. “I cannot tell.”

He handed the miniature screen to Catherine. Their eyes met. An almost blank look on his part, yet Catherine felt as if all the air in her lungs had been forced out.

Miss Chase laughed. “Leave it to a man to demand rock-solid evidence for something as silly as this.”

Catherine busied herself putting the miniature screen away. Leighton Atwood should probably have said something, but he did not. Miss Chase tapped her fingers rather self-consciously on the seat—did she sense how out of place her laughter had sounded?

For some time no one said anything. Then Miss Chase turned to Catherine and announced brightly, “Captain Atwood and I have settled on a date. We will be married exactly four weeks from today.”

A betrothal was a formal agreement to marry. Leighton Atwood and Miss Chase were betrothed. Therefore, it should not surprise Catherine at all that they had moved that much closer to the altar.

Yet she felt splintered by the shock.

I will look after you, for as long as we both live. And there will never be anyone else but you.

Her eyes strayed to him. Their gaze locked in a moment of wretched intensity. Yet as brief as it was, it did not pass unobserved. The tension between them was like a scent on the air, little noticeable in larger, more diffuse gatherings, but almost an assault to the senses in such close confines.

A shadow of disquiet crossed Miss Chase’s sugar-and-spice features.

“Many congratulations,” Catherine said, perhaps a beat too late. “What an exciting time this must be.”

“Yes, quite—and busy, too!” Miss Chase said with great
cheer. “I have just been to my first fitting for the wedding gown yesterday. The invitations are due to come back from the printer’s tomorrow. And according to my mother, we must produce a wedding breakfast menu no later than this afternoon.”

The interlocking gears of a wedding, like those of a war machine, ground on inexorably.

It was another moment before Catherine realized a further reply was expected. Just as she was about speak, however, Leighton Atwood said, “Your generalship would put Napoleon’s to shame, my dear.”

A very nice compliment. Except to Catherine’s ear, it sounded like an attempt to distract Miss Chase from the odd rhythm of Catherine’s replies.

Miss Chase smiled at her future husband, a smile that was not entirely unclouded. Then she looked back at Catherine. “We are thinking of a big wedding, Miss Blade. Won’t you honor us with your presence?”

A nearly inaudible crunch of fabric—Leighton Atwood had shifted in place. Had he been caught as much off guard as Catherine?

Miss Chase’s gaze stayed on Catherine. Her cheeks had become more rigid, her shoulders taut. The girl might be young, but she was perceptive. And she did not hesitate to go on the offensive at the urging of her instinct.

The carriage stopped: They had arrived at Catherine’s address.

She took a deep breath. “I will be delighted.”

It would, if nothing else, cure her of false hopes. As the Chinese said,
All excellent remedies are bitter to swallow.

The door opened. She thanked Miss Chase and Leighton Atwood again for their kindness. A footman, holding a large umbrella, escorted her to her front door.

The brougham rolled away and with every turn of the wheels, carried the pair inside closer to their wedded destiny.

F
or the first time since they’d become engaged, Leighton considered the possibility that perhaps he did not know his fiancée as well as he had believed.

The Annabel he thought he knew, the one who had charmed him with her frankness and transparency, would have asked if there was something the matter between himself and Miss Blade.

A thorny question for him, but one that would have been well within her rights to pose.

Instead she told him about her friend Miss Featherstone, who, unable to decide between her two suitors, had decided to entrust her fate to table-turning, that silly diversion whereby one spun around a table with letters on it until a letter had been picked, then another.

“And guess what the table’s answer was?
The frog in the grass!
” Annabel cried triumphantly.

He obliged with a smile. “Not the answer she was looking for?”

“No, not when the suitors’ names are Bloomsbury and Wellington. Now the poor girl doesn’t know what to do, which goes to show that you should never leave important decisions to parlor games.”

Her amiable chatter sounded scarcely any different from usual. It would be all too easy to suppose that she had noticed nothing, except he could not dismiss her abrupt invitation to Miss Blade to witness their exchange of vows: It had been a declaration of ownership.

A saber rattling, almost. A shot across the bow.

He observed her closely and listened not so much to her words as to her tone as she maintained an amusing, agreeable, if somewhat one-sided conversation.

Never a moment of awkward silence between the two of them—and certainly not now.

He walked her to the front door of her house and handed
her the music box. “Is there anything that bothers you, my dear?”

He was not at liberty to divulge the covert mission to Chinese Turkestan while he had been stationed in India, but he could truthfully say that he had met Miss Blade when he had traveled to China many years ago. And if Annabel pressed, he was prepared to admit having, at one point, harbored strong sentiments for Miss Blade.

The unease in Annabel’s eyes barely existed before it was replaced by a look of seamless surprise—if he hadn’t been looking for it, he would have noticed nothing unusual.

She rapped him on the arm. “No, silly, nothing bothers me. Well, except the prospect of Mother insisting on having pigeon pie at the wedding breakfast—you know how I feel about those dastardly birds.”

He kissed her on the cheek. “Then tell her that I detest pigeon pie and would not stand for it to be served at my wedding.”

They parted with every appearance of warmth and affection—and he walked away more than a little troubled.

T
he clerk at the window shook his head.

Still nothing from Mrs. Robert Delany of San Francisco, then. Catherine hoped it was only because the woman had decided to reply via letter, which would take weeks to make its way across a continent and an ocean, and not because anything had happened to her.

The antique dealers of London could not help Catherine—of course not, if the other jade tablet remained in private hands. But Mrs. Delany could. Catherine had decided that Mrs. Delany must be Master Gordon’s beloved’s sister, and had acted as a liaison and facilitator of their forbidden affair. And he, in turn, had given her almost the entirety of his worldly possessions in a grand gesture of gratitude.

Catherine had a wishful notion, that of Mrs. Delany’s eventual response containing not just the exact detail Catherine wanted—
the jade tablet he had once given my brother
—but a warm invitation to visit San Francisco at her earliest convenience. And of course this miraculous letter or cable would come in the nick of time, so that before her steamer sailed, she could reasonably send in her regrets for missing Leighton Atwood’s wedding to Miss Chase.

“Thank you,” she said to the clerk, and yielded her place at the window.

Outside the poste restante office, an unfamiliar sight greeted her: sunlight. When she had arrived at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, it had still been overcast, and she’d had every expectation of yet another wet, grey day. But now suddenly London was in the fullness of spring, the sun shining, the sky blue, and the trees so green their leaves glistened.

London as Master Gordon would have wanted her to see it. So she took herself to the green lungs of the city, the vast expanse that was the combined acreage of St. James’s Park, Green Park, Hyde Park, and Kensington Gardens.

There were fine gardens and pleasure grounds in Peking, but those that did not belong to the emperor belonged to the nobility and the very rich—and they were always surrounded by high walls. There were no great parks allotted, free of charge, to the enjoyment of the commoner.

And such great parks, with broad lawns, wide avenues, fountains, and a fine lake. She would never love London as Master Gordon had, but for today at least, she saw it through his eyes and she was glad for it.

“Miss Blade! Miss Blade!”

She turned to see Mrs. Reynolds. “Why, hullo. How nice to run into you, ma’am.”

“I had just called on you. I should have guessed that you would be out and about on a day like this.”

“Like the rest of London.”

Fashionable London was out in force: Rotten Row all but choked with smart, open carriages conveying sumptuously dressed women. Ordinary London was out, too—elderly ladies seeking the warmth of the sun on their creaky joints, men pale from months of overcast skies, and, of course, scores of rowdy, rambunctious children who had been too long cooped up inside.

Catherine’s gaze lingered on two dark-haired little girls of about seven playing with a toy sailboat at the edge of the water. If her baby had lived, she would be the same age. Would she be more like the girl on the left, energetic and obviously in charge, or the one on the right, good-natured and happy to be led?

“Oh, how nice it is to look at trees and flowers for a change,” said Mrs. Reynolds fervently, bringing Catherine’s attention back her way. “Yesterday we spent five hours examining dozens of different kinds of lace for Annabel’s bridal veil—my head quite spun at the end of it.”

The color of an English wedding was that of a Chinese funeral. Catherine would be digging graves on that day, graves for dreams old and new. “Was Miss Chase able to make a choice?” she asked tightly.