My Beautiful Enemy (26 page)

At times he had been furious with her for the murder she had intended. But he had ever only blamed himself for the agony that could be directly attributed to her salve. Perhaps it was warped of him to think so, but he had always regarded the pain as just punishment for breaking his repeated promises to her.

Slowly she lowered the dagger, but the pulse at her throat grew ever more agitated. Her gaze landed on his lips. He held his breath, his heartbeat wild. He remembered the taste of her skin, the texture of her hair, the lithe shape of her body pressed into his. He remembered the whimpers of pleasure that escaped her, the glazed look in her eyes, the way she writhed and clung and took him ever deeper inside herself.

The parlor echoed with the sounds of their breaths.

She pivoted and walked out.

Behind her, the bead curtain shook and swayed, as restless as the desires of his heart.

W
hat do you make of it, gentlemen?” Windham glanced at Leighton and Edwin Madison.

Forty-eight hours after Leighton had sent a note to Windham, alerting him to the Centipede’s surfacing, the kite had at last been found and brought back. The credit for locating the kite, however, could not go to Windham’s runners. A boy had spotted it in the branches of a tree two miles north of Hampstead Heath. As it had been intact and looked impressive from the ground, the boy had climbed up the tree with the hope of retrieving the kite, only to prick his fingers on the needles that had been embedded.

His parents had found him at the foot of the tree, unconscious, his hand swollen to ridiculous proportions. After they had fetched a physician, the boy’s father did not hesitate in bringing the matter to the attention of the local constable. And that was how Windham had learned of the matter, with the story spreading among members of the metropolitan police.

“Will the child be all right?” asked Leighton.

“That seems to be the consensus,” said Windham. “Took
my men half an hour to extract all the needles from the body of the kite.”

There had been four helium balloons attached to the top of the kite—that had been the reason it had been able to soar aloft on a day of little wind. The balloons were now flaccid white shreds, long since burst.

The needles, which had been gathered in a metal jar, had a blackish look to them. Madison picked one up with a pair of tweezers and turned it in the light. “Poisoned?”

When Leighton had dispatched the note to Windham, he had also sent one to Madison’s house, confessing that when he had viewed the kite from a different angle, he realized he had made a mistake concerning the design.

“I believe so,” said Windham. “They were stuck into a mound—a pincushion, if you will—made of strips of silk. And when we removed all the needles and unwound the cloth, this is what we found.”

He slid over a glass plate on which rested a claim ticket.

“But this is for luggage claim, at Paddington station.” Madison looked up, a gleam of excitement in his eyes. “Any chance the Centipede is trying to contact someone?”

This was exactly the conclusion Leighton had not wanted anyone to draw.

“You read my mind, sir,” said Windham.

“The Centipede had penetrated into the queen’s bedroom and left his sigil on her nightstand,” said Leighton. “What can anyone do for him that he cannot do better himself?”

“But what if he has a task that requires help?” asked Madison.

What if he is only using his notoriety among a select set to catch your attention?

Leighton turned to Windham. “Did your men see anyone loitering about when they retrieved the kite?”

Windham grimaced. “No, I do not believe they observed
their surroundings with as much care as perhaps they ought to have.”

“You think the one the Centipede was trying to contact was on the scene?” asked Madison.

Leighton was more worried about the Centipede himself having been on the scene. “How did your men come here?”

“They did not,” answered Windham. “I met them at the house in Lambeth, which they reached via tunnel. And I did not come here directly, either, but from the tunnel underneath the Hopkins house.”

“Why the concern, Captain?” asked Madison.

“I do not believe the Centipede has friends in England. So I wonder whether he means to strike at those who have been looking for him—who else would take the trouble of cutting down his kite and bringing it back but us?”

Both Windham and Madison were taken aback. But it was a plausible enough theory that they did not dismiss it out of hand.

Windham tapped at the edge of the plate that contained the claim ticket. “In that case, we will be sure to be very careful while retrieving the luggage.”

Good, as Leighton did not want the Centipede to be able to easily identify—and follow—Windham’s men.

“Indeed,” said Leighton. “Take all the care in the world.”

C
atherine moved slowly, deliberately, imagining the fireplace poker in her hand as an extension of her arm, so that her energy flowed through into the cold iron, imbuing it with a power that mere metal could not hope to possess.

This was what Amah had always emphasized. A woman was unlikely to rival a man in brute strength. But her inner force, the energy generated by the skillful harnessing and amplification of chi through the pathways of her body, needed not be inferior to a man’s.

That was what allowed a woman to defeat a man—that and the dexterity and cleverness to turn his strength against him.

But had she really defeated Lin aboard the
Maria Augusta
, or had there simply been a confluence of factors in her favor, a stroke of pure luck? And would she be as lucky the next time?

At the thought of her nemesis, her injury throbbed, a cold, dark pain. It had always struck her as strange, twisted almost, that she and Lin had ended up such bitter foes, when they had so much in common. The European fathers that neither had known, the Chinese upbringing, the secret martial arts training, the long years in Da-ren’s household, and their mutual loathing of Shao-ye, Da-ren’s eldest son.

Yet there it was, an enmity sown by fate and nurtured by spilled blood and ruined lives.

She wished she could come upon him without warning, as it had been on the steamer. There had been no time for fear or second-guessing of her abilities, only the intensity of battle that swept away any useless thoughts. Much better than this slow, simmering dread, this sensation of being meticulously stalked.

And yet for all that Lin had declared himself still very much alive and still very much a menace, life had been oddly normal since she’d sighted the kite. If one defined normal as having been pulled into the hurly-burly of getting ready for a ball.

Slowly she sank into a split. Just as slowly she pulled herself straight again, without using her hands to help. The poker she thrust toward an imaginary enemy, if the enemy moved with the speed of a glacier. A kick, executed with just as much leisure and control.

She had not wanted anything to do with the ball. She even told Mrs. Reynolds outright that she could not dance—Master Gordon had offered to teach her, but the idea of holding the hand of a man who was not related to her, or, in the case of
the waltz, standing in his arms, had quite scandalized her, and so she had never learned.

But Mrs. Reynolds would not be gainsaid. She saw the occasion as Catherine’s social debut, an occasion for her to meet all kinds of suitable men.

If only those poor men knew just what sort of unsuitable woman they would be meeting.

How impossibly complicated everything had become. She hadn’t anticipated that her mission would be easy, but she had supposed it would be more or less straightforward. But now she was caught in a tangled web, her lover on one side, her enemy on the other, her still unfinished task in the middle.

She lowered into a crouch, then leaped up atop the table, balanced upon an upside-down teacup. A twist of her torso and she was on the floor again, the landing silent, the poker and her other hand both pulling toward the middle, and then sinking to her abdomen.

She was done with this suite of exercises.

She returned the poker to its stand and walked into her bedroom—it was time to change for the ball. The ball gown that Mrs. Reynolds had more or less forced on her was already spread out on her bed, ready to be donned. But instead of getting on with her next task, she stopped to light a stick of incense before the spirit plaques of all those she had loved and lost.

Her fingers traced over the characters of her daughter’s name. Such a beautiful baby she had been, full of brightness and joy. Catherine had held her every moment of her life. And when she had slept, Catherine had gazed upon her sweet little face; the pink, chubby cheeks; the long, upcurled eyelashes; and those strong, winged brows that were exactly like her father’s.

Now all she had left of the child was a lock of soft, dark hair.

“Forgive me,” she said to the girl’s spirit. “I did not mean to fail you. Never again.”

L
eighton danced.

Herb had told him, ages ago, that a gentleman at a ball should dance every set, as there were always ladies in want of partners. So after he had accompanied Mrs. Reynolds for the quadrille to open the ball and spun around on a waltz with Annabel, he danced with young ladies who did not have sufficient gentlemen clamoring for their attention, so that they would not be wallflowers all night long.

But his attention, as always, was on Miss Blade, who looked quite extraordinary in her silver blue ball gown. People whispered about her, Mrs. Reynolds’s former-expatriate friend. Gentleman lined up to be introduced.

Put her in a proper frock and she would enslave legions
, he’d once thought. He had been right.

She was not the girl he had known in Chinese Turkestan, but neither was she the dowdy, faded woman who had reentered his life on the platform of Waterloo station. Something had changed—or revived—in her. She was beauty and mystery, her seeming fragility belied by a heart of blade.

Annabel, who had issued the invitation in the first place, was not pleased. Of course she was more than generous with her praise of Miss Blade’s appearance and related the story of Miss Blade’s rescue of Mrs. Chase with apparent relish. But Leighton could not help but feel her frustration: It was in the set of her jaw, the grip of her hand on her fan, and the way she seemed to show too many teeth when she smiled.

He tried to make up for the fact that she was at risk of being eclipsed at her own ball. It would have been better form had he not danced with her at all—it was frowned upon for an engaged couple to pay too much attention to each other at public functions—but that would have seemed like abandonment on his part.

Unfortunately he did not think his solicitude helped, or the fact that he spoke three times as much as was normal. Annabel was too clever; she understood that such a heaping serving of courtesy and consideration meant that a man was concealing a guilty conscience.

But they played along, he fetching her glasses of punch and champagne between sets, and she reacting with every ostensible pleasure, all the while the center of the storm stood fifteen feet away, a force of nature with black hair and beautiful shoulders who smiled and made small talk.

Leighton had just reached the punch table again when Madison took him by the arm. “Windham wants us.”

“Now?”

“He is outside.”

They found Windham inside a large brougham with all its drapes drawn. He looked quite grave.

“We have retrieved a traveling case from Paddington station.”

“Did you—” Leighton began.

“We took every care. Put out word that there was an Anarchist bomb. The station was closed. It swarmed with police. All kinds of baggage were carried out. Ten of the Centipede would not have seen us smuggling out the traveling case in question.”

Windham was good at what he did, but he did have the occasional tendency toward overconfidence.

“I take it you found something quite interesting in that traveling case,” said Madison.

“We did. We found the jeweled clock taken from Her Majesty’s nightstand.”

Madison whistled. Leighton felt as if he had been pushed off a bridge: This was exactly what he had feared.

“And we found a note. It was written in code, but Sanders was able to decipher it without too much trouble.”

The deciphered text read:

“And Tomlinson found this in the
Times
right before I left to come here.”

Windham handed them a copy of the paper, opened to a page of small advertisements, with one circled in red.
Blade, did you watch the sky? Did you find your present?