The Hidden Blade (34 page)

“Are you not well?” his guide asked in French.

“I may need a physician,” he answered, grimacing.

Night had fallen. The city was dark—what street lamps there were seemed no more than candles in latticework boxes backed with paper, the light they emitted so faint as to be nearly useless. In the nearly unbroken shadows, his awareness reduced to only the sway of his horse, the painful numbness of his fingers, and relentless heat parching his throat from the inside.

They stopped. Vaguely Leighton perceived an impressive gate. The guide explained that they had arrived at the British Legation. He didn’t know Peking very well, but he was sure Leighton should be able to find a qualified physician within.

Leighton slid off his horse. He barely managed to pay the guide the second half of his money before he dropped to his knees, too weak to remain standing anymore. Then he slumped sideways into a bank of snow.

Voices cried out in alarm. He felt himself lifted and carried. He drifted in and out of consciousness until he was violently shaken.

“Young man, have you been having periodic fevers that recur every other day or so?” asked a gray-haired, stern-looking man, peering down at him.

He nodded weakly.

“You’ve passed through or near the tropics recently?”

He nodded again.

“Lack of appetite, nausea, body ache?”

He dipped his chin an infinitesimal distance.

“Well, we had better get you started on quinine immediately. You have malaria.”

The medicine was thrust at him. He swallowed obediently, even though it was extraordinarily bitter.

And when he was allowed to lie down again, he said to the doctor, “Please, sir, can you have someone send a note to Mr. Herbert Gordon? He said I can find him by asking at the British Legation and I have come a long, long way.”

“You rest,” the doctor said gruffly. “I will see what I can do.”

Quinine was almost worse than malaria.

Leighton vomited. A sharp pain skewered his abdomen. He couldn’t lift his head without being overcome by waves of dizziness. And his ears rang: He was sure the room was quiet and the night still, yet from time to time, for stretches of a half hour or longer, he would be plagued with a noise inside his head like that of steam whistle, until he was sure he would go deaf from its needle-thin and relentless pitch.

But the doctor assured him that those were fairly common symptoms in reaction to quinine. “You are young and strong. The reactions will go away as soon as you finish your course of treatment.”

Toward dawn Leighton fell into an exhausted sleep. For the first time in years, he dreamed of the day of Father’s death. Except this time, as he entered the room, it was Sir Curtis slumped over the desk, a hole in his head.

He woke up with his ears ringing. Staying completely still, his eyes shut tight, he waited for the noise to cease, afraid that the least light or movement would cause it to prolong—or grow even louder.

At times he thought he heard the rustling of the pages of a book, the swish of fabric, and even the slight creaking of a chair as a sitter’s weight shifted. There could be another person in the room, or the sounds could simply be further manifestations of his tinnitus.

Finally, after enough time had passed for the Deluge to have receded, the inside of his head quieted. Slowly he opened his eyes and looked up at a ceiling of green and gold tiles set in a delicate latticework. It was hard to judge exactly what time of the day it might be: The dim gray light of the room could be that of near dusk, or the middle of the day under a leaden sky.

The chair creaked again. Very carefully Leighton turned his face toward the sound, expecting to see the doctor or a nurse. But it was a bearded man in a dark blue-gray tunic in the Chinese style—though he was clearly a European, judging by his blond hair.

Herb! Leighton had only ever seen him clean shaven, but there could be no doubt about it.

“It’s you,” he croaked. “It’s
you
.”

Suddenly the room was as bright as his memories of Starling Manor, of poppy fields under a cloudless sky.

Herb came forward hesitantly, almost as if he were sleepwalking. Then he closed all the remaining distance, knelt by the bed, and took Leighton’s hands in his. His hands shook just perceptibly.

“My dear boy. My dear, dear boy.” Tears rolled down his face. “This morning, when the message from the legation came, I…You have no idea…”

Leighton squeezed his hands. “I have every idea. You came back to us once, remember?”

Herb wiped his eyes with the heel of one hand. “That was only three months.”

“That was forever—or so I believed. This was always just a matter of time. You knew I would come and find you as soon as I could.”

Herb’s face shone. “Yes, I did. I always did.”

“So, what does one do around here for fun?”

Herb laughed, even as more tears splashed onto his cheeks—those were the first words he had ever spoken to Leighton. “Well, it goes without saying that you must visit the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs, and the Temple of Heaven. You should experience a teahouse-theater. And you must try candied haws—this is the season for them, and they are sold on skewers on every street corner.

“I might be able obtain permission for you to call on my employer’s residence; then you can see where I live, a very elegant little courtyard with a bamboo grove inside. And if I arrange it really carefully, I might even be able to present you to one of my pupils—more a friend, actually—a beautiful young lady of mixed blood who has been studying English with me and teaching me Chinese.”

What a fortunate girl, to have had Herb’s company all these years.

Fear returned to Herb’s eyes. He gripped Leighton’s hands tighter. “But are you sure you are safe here? What if—”

He forgot he had yet to tell Herb the news. “Sir Curtis is dead.”

Herb shot to his feet. “My God. My
God
.”

“I know. You can go home now. We can go home together.”

Herb’s lips moved. “I—I can’t make sense of it. Both my rational understanding and my imagination fail me.” He looked back at Leighton, his face full of wonder. “Do you think this is how a seed feels when it finally breaks through to the world above? That nothing will ever be the same again?”

“Yes,” Leighton answered. “It’s a whole new world.”

A knock came at the door and the same physician from the night before stuck in his head. “Mr. Gordon, I’m afraid I must ask you to leave very soon. It’s time for Mr. Atwood’s next dose of quinine, and he should not be disturbed afterward.”

“I promise you, Dr. Ross, I will be no trouble at all,” Herb pleaded his case. “I will sit and read my book and not speak a single word to my young friend here.”

“I am sure you are a man of your word, Mr. Gordon. But my assistant and I will both be in here at various times, and it’s too small a room for all of us to be cramped together,” said Dr. Ross firmly. “Besides, your young friend here is going to be good as new in a few days. Then you will be able to catch up without any deuced interference from dour old Scottish doctors.”

This made both Leighton and Herb smile.

“All right, then. I’ll make myself scarce,” said Herb. He set a hand on Leighton’s shoulder. “Have I told you yet how very extraordinarily glad I am to see you, my dear boy?”

Leighton didn’t know why, but the tears that he had been able to hold back until now were spilling unchecked down his face. “Yes, you have. You have from the very beginning.”

Herb wiped once more at his eyes, bent down, and kissed Leighton on the forehead. “I will be back tomorrow.”

“Yes, tomorrow,” said Leighton.

What a wonderful word, tomorrow. And now they had all the tomorrows in the world.

Leighton reacted no better to quinine this time. Afterward, he was so weak he could barely lift an eyelid. But Dr. Ross’s assistant, a young man named Miller, told Leighton that Herb had left behind some things for him—“A letter and a small package.” So now, with a mighty effort, he lifted his hand to feel for them on the nightstand.

He came across the letter first. It was from Mother.

My dearest son,

I fervently hope this letter finds you, and finds you well.

Mr. Gordon and I had exchanged letters early on in his exile. But my subsequent letters were returned, citing that they could not be forwarded. So it was quite remarkable that his somehow found me here in San Francisco, more than a year after it had been posted.

I replied to him right away, and I will include this letter with my reply, in the hope that should you find yourself in Peking before you find yourself in San Francisco, you will come across it.

And now I clutch my head, unsure how to proceed. So let me go back to the day I discovered the package you had secreted away in one of the trunks that I had brought from England. Until I married Mr. Delany and moved into his house with Marland, I opened that particular trunk only once, to retrieve a few of my favorite books. And your secret was buried a foot and half farther down.

There I was, supervising the moving and arrangement of several hundred books, when a maid came to me with a carefully wrapped bundle and asked what ought to be done with it. When I saw everything inside, I was overwhelmed. Your father was my first love, and I never felt anything but the greatest respect and affection for him, even after I realized he could never love me the way I loved him.

That afternoon I spent poring over the photographs, because it was the part of his life that I never saw—the part of
your
life that I never saw.

I wept and wept, partly because I thought you had shoved everything in my trunk in order to scrub Starling Manor of any reminders of your father and Mr. Gordon. That you had repudiated them as thoroughly as you had repudiated me. I am ashamed to tell you this, but not only did I believe every word of censure you spoke, I believed it more than I believed anything else in my whole life.

Your uncle played a part, of course. After what he had said to me, I had felt so unclean, so degenerate, that I quite despised myself—it was therefore not too difficult to imagine that everyone else must despise me too, if they only knew. But the other part—the far greater part, I must add—had been my own gross stupidity.

How could I, who had only ever known kindness and acceptance on your part, come to give credence to the idea that you were in fact a boy of unrelentingly harsh views? I do not know, and I will never forgive myself.

But there I was, sobbing away, when I came across a crumpled piece of paper: an unfinished letter from you. Most likely you never intended to include it, but it somehow found its way inside. In the letter you begged for my forgiveness, because you felt you had to do whatever was necessary to keep Marland and me safe.

I sat stunned at how wrong I had been—how unbearably foolish. The next morning I was on a train to the East Coast. I didn’t care what I had to do; if I had to hire thugs to abduct you, then so be it.

But when I arrived at my hotel in New York City, there was a telegram waiting for me from Mr. Delany. He had received a letter from you and wanted me to know that he believed you had run away—and very possibly left England, given that the letter was sent from Southampton.

We spent a fortune cabling back and forth, debating what to do. I decided to proceed to England anyway, in case your attempt had failed.

While in England, via various channels, I ascertained that you had not yet been located. I didn’t know whether it would help or hinder to send men out to find you, so I did the inverse. I hired men to keep an eye on Sir Curtis instead, as that would let me know with virtual certainty if and when you became recaptured.

(Knock on wood that would never be the case.)

Please, my son, stay safe. I pray constantly that you meet with only the kindest fellow travelers. That you will ever be in plentiful funds and abundant health. And that you will cable me at the first opportunity to let me know that you are well—or whether you are in need of assistance of any kind. Any kind at all.