The Hidden Blade (11 page)

Mother and Marland left the next morning. Marland cried and struggled. It took both Mother and his nursemaid to force him into his carriage.

Leighton did not wave good-bye. He gazed somewhere above his brother’s red, bawling face. They had gone to Father’s grave at the crack of dawn and made a honeysuckle wreath together. He would remember that instead, and Marland’s plump little hands gently patting the mound of earth on which they had placed the wreath.

Sleep tight
, Marland had said to Father.
Sleep tight
.

Deep in the big trunk that held many of Mother’s books, Leighton had hidden a package that contained everything he could not bear for Sir Curtis to get his hands on: hundreds of photographs, just as many letters from Herb, and, of course, the beautiful jade tablet that had been wretchedly difficult for him to let go of.

He had tried to write a letter, to explain and to apologize. In the end he had burned all his drafts. Better for Mother to believe that he was as monstrous and callous as Sir Curtis. She would be safer that way, and Marland too.

The carriage clattered along the drive, becoming smaller and smaller. Then it was gone.

And he was all alone.

Chapter 7

The Apprentice

Mother studied the finely textured
shuen
paper spread on her desk. She had finished the background of a new ink painting, a mountain with ridges sharp as swords.

Ying-ying had been grinding ink for her. Now she picked up the massage roller made of polished agate and applied it to just beneath Mother’s shoulders.

Mother glanced back, astonished. “When did you become such an example of filial piety?”

Ying-ying didn’t say anything. When she looked upon Mother now, the sensation in her heart was very nearly one of pain. Several times alone in her room she’d broken down in tears as she imagined what Mother must have gone through in those darkest days of her life.

She was at once beyond happy for her—that she had found peace, quiet, and security at last—and beyond frightened that it wouldn’t last.

“Does Da-ren like paintings?” she asked.

She had always been curious about Da-ren, but she could not remember the last time she’d posed a question about him directly to Mother.

Mother picked up a smaller brush and dipped it in the ink Ying-ying had freshly made. “I suppose he would, if he had time for such things.”

Ying-ying set down the roller and returned to her station beside the ink stone. “Why is he so busy?”

“Well, he is an important adviser at court. And he has many ideas for…reforms.” Her tone turned slightly grim as she uttered the last word.

“Are reforms not good?”

Mother looked out the window at the caged songbirds that hung beneath the eaves—and the blue sky beyond. “The dowager empress was in favor of sweeping changes when the emperor first ascended the throne. But her appetite for reform has grown less and less, while Da-ren aims for more and more. He wants to make Western sciences part of the civil-service examination and reduce the importance of the classics, and that is…that is not…”

She rested the brush against the side of the ink stone and turned to face Ying-ying, the jade beads that dangled from her hairpins clinking softly. “You don’t worry about such things,” she said gently. “You be a good girl and I will ask Da-ren to find you a kind husband.”

She probably still has hope of a respectable marriage for you.

Ying-ying felt a stab of guilt. Mother would be thunderstruck if she knew of Ying-ying’s training behind her back—certainly not the kind of training undertaken by “good” girls.

“Yes, Mother.”

Mother smiled at her. “Now go find Little Plum—she’ll know how to put everything back. I had better lie down for a bit.”

Ying-ying gazed at her as she walked toward her bedchamber, this frail woman who somehow made her difficult progress elegant—and who had carved out a corner of beauty and serenity for herself and her child in an otherwise bleak world.

“No, no, no,” Amah snapped, her patience waning. “Quieter, slower, softer.”

Ying-ying gritted her teeth. Breathing, which she had performed successfully since birth, had lately become an impossible feat. No matter how diligently she worked at it, she couldn’t get it right. According to Amah she was always breathing too hard, too fast, too loud. To make things worse, her legs screamed from sitting cross-legged for the duration of a whole incense stick, her back ached because she had to hold her spine rod-straight all the while, and her neck sorely resented the weight of her head.

“I can’t do it.”

Whack
came the rap against her shoulder blade. It stung. Amah the master, unlike Amah the nanny, possessed no tender heart. “You can’t do it because you are not trying hard enough. Such things take years of practice. Stop whining.”

Normally a rap would make Ying-ying hold her tongue for a little while. But today, against all the other pains she was suffering, the smack hardly registered. “Why don’t you teach me something useful instead?” she retorted. “Like how to thrash robbers—or leap walls?”

Or just to jump down from a high place without hurting herself, as Amah had the night she’d returned home injured. And then maybe she could ask Amah where exactly she had gone, what had she been doing, who had been the martial-arts expert powerful enough to injure her—and maybe even who were the men she had killed years ago without a backward glance.

Questions that Ying-ying didn’t dare ask without a really good opening.

Amah looked down at Ying-ying in disbelief. “And how do you expect to thrash robbers or leap walls without first learning to control your breathing?”

“I can already control my breathing,” Ying-ying said. “I know when I’m inhaling and when I’m exhaling, and I can hold my breath too.”

“I am not talking about things any imbecile can do, so don’t you play stupid with me,” Amah replied, handing Ying-ying another knock on her shoulder. “I’ve already explained to you: The goal of merging your consciousness with your breath is to access your chi. Without mastery over your chi, you won’t jump higher than a pig, and you, a girl, will be no match for the strength of a man.”

Ying-ying rolled her eyes. She had heard all this before. She knew what chi was. It was what doctors droned on and on about when anyone fell ill: The chi was weak; the chi was too diffuse; the chi was pooling in wrong places. To her, chi was like blood, just there in the body everywhere. She could no more control it than circulate blood backward.

“I see you don’t believe me,” Amah said. She looked Ying-ying up and down. “You think you walk softly, right?”

Ying-ying nodded.

“And you think you breathe softly too?”

Ying-ying nodded again. She had been breathing so softly she not only could not hear herself, she could barely feel any flutter of air in her nostrils.

“Fine. Where is that handkerchief your mother gave you last Spring Festival?”

“In my top trunk.”

“Get up and go get it.”

When Ying-ying returned with the large square of embroidered green silk, Amah had seated herself on the cushion on the floor. “Blindfold me, and bring me that bowl of fried soybeans from the table.”

Ying-ying did as she was told.

“Now go somewhere in the room. Go quietly.”

It was a hot, windy day. The leaves of the willow tree rustled. Some distance away, the stove of an itinerant rice popper emitted an explosive bang as the grains fluffed up. Ying-ying made her move in the wake of the noise.

No sooner had she approached the washstand than she yowled in pain. Something small and hard had hit her squarely in the temple. A fried soybean fell to the floor beside her. She looked at it in disbelief, then looked back at Amah, who sat tranquilly, the handkerchief completely covering the upper half of her face, her fingers rolling the next soybean.

“I told you to be quiet,” she said.

Ying-ying tried again, this time holding her breath and walking on the very tips of her toes.

The fried soybean found her at the back of her neck.

After four more hits, two on her cheeks, one on her forehead, and one between her shoulder blades, she was told to exchange places with Amah.

“You don’t need to hit me. Just tell me where I am.”

Ying-ying strained her ears. She could hear all the cicadas on the pomegranate trees, the scratching of Cook’s iron spatula against her wok in the next courtyard, the lilting, melodious notes of Mother playing on the zither in her rooms, but nothing of Amah’s movement, nothing at all. Yet when she was finally directed to loosen her blindfold, the first thing she saw was a perfect circle of fried soybeans placed right around the cushion on which she sat.

She was speechless.

“No, it’s not witchcraft,” Amah said. “It’s nearly thirty years of diligent practice. You are gifted, but your sinews are lax and your mind is undisciplined. You have a long way to go.”

Ying-ying bit her lip. She crossed her legs and laced her fingers together before her abdomen. “Give me the directions one more time, Master. Please.”

Chapter 8

Rose Priory

Leighton had never been to Sir Curtis’s house on Dartmoor. He expected something dark and sinister, with gargoyles and bats that emerged from the belfry like a dark cloud at the close of the day. But Rose Priory itself was completely charming.

The house, situated atop a small incline, was built of a light gray, dense-grained stone, which was barely visible beneath the luxuriant ivy that climbed nearly to the roof. The land surrounding the house had been terraced into several levels of gardens, with pebble paths that crunched underfoot and the last of the summer flowers still in bloom. And beyond a wall that came up only to his waist stretched the moors, green, mysterious, and beautiful.

The interior of the house was decorated with a great many Japanese motifs: wallpapers with patterns of stylized waves, cherry blossom screens, and dinner and tea services painted with misty mountains and slender pagodas. The room given to Leighton was plain but clean and serviceable, and from its window he could see the winding progress of a sparkling stream, the banks of which were studded with many small boulders.

There was no governess or tutor at Rose Priory. Furthermore, most of the staff were away in London, at Sir Curtis’s town house: Sir Curtis, who held the charge of all the prisons under the purview of the Home Office, did not personally escort Leighton to Dartmoor. And his absence was like the slightly misty air of the moors, every breath a sharp, sweet reprieve.

Leighton walked for hours every day, exploring the countryside in all directions. In the evenings he read. Rose Priory’s collection of books was not as large or as interesting as that at Starling Manor—more than half were sermons or missionary reports. But there were a good many histories, and he started on the first volume of Gibbon’s
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
.

Once a week he wrote to Mother at her temporary address in London, reporting truthfully that all was well at Rose Priory, that he had the run of the house and all the freedom anyone could desire. She, in her replies, assured him that she was well, Marland was well, and that preparations for their departure to America proceeded apace.

Very civil letters—no one would guess that he had accused her of gross immorality and that she had believed him. He always felt like crying after reading one of her letters, and sometimes he did.

There were no letters from Herb. Leighton hoped this meant he had already left the country and was now far from Sir Curtis’s reach. He had brought all the books Herb had given to him, but only once did he tried to reread one. The moment he opened the book, it was as if he were back where he had last read it, on the bank of the trout stream at Starling Manor, sitting next to Father, both happily anticipating Herb’s arrival the next afternoon.

He even remembered what they’d had for lunch that day: sandwiches made with braised slices of ham and a robust mustard studded with tiny brown-and-black mustard seeds. And over that picnic lunch, Father, a quiet man by nature, had talked about his first time on a railway journey, going to the seaside.

Leighton had closed the book immediately. But he could not stop the emptiness in his chest from furiously expanding. He missed Father desperately. He missed Herb desperately. He wished…

He calculated the exact number of days that remained until he reached his twenty-first birthday, when he would be a man in full in the eyes of the law. When he would be free from Sir Curtis at last.

Too many days, thousands and thousands, but one fewer with each sunrise. And when he turned thirteen, he would be sent off to school and not have to return to Rose Priory except during holidays.

He could live with that.

He could wait.

For now.