The Hidden Blade (40 page)

Ying-ying gripped a nearby table.

Da-ren covered his face with his hand. “Give her a good burial. Compensate the family accordingly. And disturb me no more with such news.”

He rose and left, taking the jade tablet and the rest of Amah’s cache with him.

Ying-ying expected the majordomo to follow. Instead he remained behind and checked at the door to make sure Da-ren had gone far enough. She steeled herself. The majordomo was entitled to scold her: He was the one who had to set everything right again.

When he came back to her, he pulled a silver ingot of at least ten taels out of his robe and pressed it into her hands. “It’s a shame what happened to your amah,” he said in a hushed voice. “Maybe she was a flying thief and maybe not, but she was a good woman. You buy her a decent coffin.”

“I can’t, Master Keeper.” The silver was solidly heavy in her hand, and still warm from his body heat. She couldn’t believe it. The majordomo, of all people, the man who had always seemed so supercilious and impatient. “It’s too generous.”

He sighed, his pointed face softening with pity. “Keep it. Things are worse than you think, Bai Gu-niang. Da-ren is the best man there is. I would scale of a mountain of knives and swim a sea of fire for him. But Young Master…”

He shook his head. “Young Master returned to his rooms last night in a rage. He screamed at everyone. And when the rest of his lackeys had left, he beat the girl. The marks on her face when we took her down just now, you don’t want to know.”

The beating had been the last straw for the already desperately unhappy girl.

“Mark my word, Bai Gu-niang,” the majordomo warned her. “Young Master will not make things easy for you. I know you are handy with a sword but a sword does not defend against everything. For as long as you remain here, he will try to take his revenge on you. And now that your amah is no more…”

Ying-ying nodded slowly. She should have known it would be impossible for her to stay on after the events of last night. But to actually hear it, to have Master Keeper Ju’s silver in her hand for when she must survive on her own—she could not think. She could not think.

“Bai Gu-niang use care,” the majordomo said. “I take my leave.”

Ying-ying walked him to the gate of the courtyard. And then she stood in the cold, paralyzed. There was Amah’s funeral to attend to and Master Gordon to accompany to the British Legation, but beyond that the future was a dark abyss. Where would she live? And how would she feed herself when the majordomo’s silver had run out?

Someone threw her down and gripped her neck. Little Dragon, strangling her with his bare hands. The guards’ ropes must have been no match for his wiles.

She hit him on the head with the silver ingot. But his chokehold only became tighter.

“I can’t find him, so I’ll kill you first,” he said, his teeth gritted. “If you hadn’t been so uppish, Little Orchid would still be alive—and the baby too. That baby was mine. Mine!”

She hit him even harder with the silver ingot. She wasn’t a helpless girl like Little Orchid: She fought back. Finally, on the third hit, Little Dragon cried out and let go.

Loud footsteps ran toward the courtyard, dozens of men. Little Dragon leaped up. Ying-ying, too, scrambled to her feet. Where was the shovel with which she’d been digging half the night? She would bash his head in yet. But he rushed out and leaped on top of the wall that penned in the alley leading toward the courtyard.

“You get down here, Little Dragon!” shouted Bao-shun’s voice.

“That’s Master Keeper Lin to you,” Little Dragon shot back.

He jumped onto the roof of the house in the next courtyard.

The men rushed to follow him, but Ying-ying knew they wouldn’t catch him. She rubbed her neck, her hand icy against the probably sorely bruised skin of her throat.

A huge commotion erupted in the direction of the front gate of the residence. Horses, definitely horses. Had Little Dragon stolen a mount from the stables for his escape? No, the horses were coming toward Da-ren’s residence, not away.

Checking all around to make sure that Little Dragon was really gone and not about to ambush her again, she made for the front gate. Already she could hear the horses being reined to a stop. Now footsteps came pounding.

Several lackeys sprinted past her.

“Master Keepers, what is going on?” she shouted.

One of the young men turned around to answer even as he kept running. “Imperial messenger—with imperial directive for Da-ren.”

No imperial messenger had come to the residence during all her years here. And so early in the morning—the sky was gray under clouds that promised more snow, but the sun wouldn’t rise for at least another incense stick’s time.

Da-ren himself came running, a sight she had never seen. After a moment of hesitation, she followed him, trailing some distance behind. By the time she reached the front court of the compound, Da-ren was down on one knee, and the imperial messenger had nearly finished reading his scroll.

“…appointed the governor of Ili. Out of our tender compassion, his womenfolk and offspring may remain behind. We expect our loyal servant to uphold the trust of his sovereign and to sacrifice everything for the good of the country.”

Da-ren dropped his head. “This servant’s unending gratitude to the Son of Heaven, and to the Old Buddha. May ten thousand times ten thousand blessings rain on them.”

Ili? Ili was in Chinese Turkestan, at the edge of the world. Da-ren had been exiled. The dowager empress must have at last had enough of his relentless calls for modernization.

Da-ren stayed on his knee as the imperial messenger and his two escorts remounted and left. He seemed stuck, unable to get up. The majordomo ran out and knelt before him. “Da-ren! Da-ren! What are we to do?”

Da-ren placed a hand on the majordomo’s shoulder and slowly straightened. “We are to depart as soon as possible. I leave the details to you.”

Ying-ying bowed her head when Da-ren passed before her. He stopped. “Bury your amah. Pack your things. You will come with me.”

Had he said this yesterday morning, she would have done everything in her power to persuade him that she should be included among his womenfolk, mercifully allowed to remain behind.

But everything had changed. Now he was the only person who could still protect her. He—and the sheer distance from Peking to Ili—would keep her safe from Shao-ye, from Little Dragon, from everyone and everything else that would descend upon a girl with no parents and no home.

She sank to her knees. “Yes, Da-ren. Thank you, Da-ren.”

Chapter 24

Journeys

The household was in chaos. As Ying-ying rushed back and forth between her own courtyard and Master Gordon’s rooms, everyone she encountered along the way seemed to be running, shouting, or weeping—Da-ren beating Shao-ye black and blue after the latter finally returned from his night of revelry only added to the pandemonium.

And yet preparations proceeded apace.

Riders had already been sent out to ready relay stages for the changing of horses along the endless road to Chinese Turkestan. Courtesy messages concerning Da-ren’s appointment and departure were delivered by the gross. Carriages and wagon carts were parked in the front courtyard, lackeys pushing and shoving crates and trunks inside.

In the midst of everything that required his attention, plus seeing to the visitors calling upon Da-ren to wish him well—too few visitors, as the appointment was a decisive sign of Da-ren’s ouster from the inner circles of the court—the majordomo somehow found the men and a spare donkey cart to take Amah to the cemetery. Ying-ying didn’t even need to go select a coffin; a handsome one, lacquered and shiny, had already been delivered, along with several changes of white mourning clothes.

At the cemetery she took part in the digging, no longer bothering to hide the fact that she could break through the frozen soil faster and more easily than the men who had accompanied her. When Amah was in the ground, a temporary wooden grave marker erected over the fresh mound of earth—the majordomo had promised he would see to a proper gravestone—Ying-ying set fire to a huge pile of special underworld currency. Then she laid out a bowl of rice and a pair of chopsticks, poured a cup of spirits onto the soil, knelt down, and kowtowed three times.

She remained on her knees a long time afterward. She had no idea whether she would ever return from the wilds of Ili. Whether she would ever again see the grave of the woman who had shaped her into who she was.

The servants who had come along had to remind her that they must all hurry back to continue with preparations for departure.

Back at the residence, she packed all Master Gordon’s belongings into two trunks: one of his clothes, the other of his books and letters. But no matter how she searched, she couldn’t find his jade tablet. A disappointment, but also a relief: Now she wouldn’t need to struggle between her desire to honor his wishes and her equally strong desire to please—perhaps thrill—Da-ren.

That afternoon, Master Haywood’s body, in a grand casket, was sent away, accompanied by Da-ren’s secretary, Da-ren’s younger son, and a number of the household guards. She slipped out of the residence—there was no one to keep track of her anymore—and followed the carriages as they made their way to the British Legation.

She had never been to this part of the Tartar City—she had seen so little of her hometown in all her years. The carriages drove along the frozen Grand Canal, their wheels clacking against paving stone. The British Legation was situated almost directly on the canal, hemmed in by the Han Lin Library to the north and the Imperial College to the west.

She did not go in with the carriages, but stood on the far side of the canal, some distance from the imposing gate—the site of the legation had once been the residence of a prince of the blood. About two incense sticks later, the same carriages came out and left. There had been no ruckus or tumult; the British inside must have accepted the explanation the majordomo had crafted with Ying-ying’s help: that Master Gordon, delighted from seeing his young friend, had taken several drinks too many at the Lantern Festival feast, then fallen down in a most unfortunate way.

She had been feeling strangely inanimate, as if she were made of plaster and sawdust. But as she watched the carriages drive away, the finality of his death—and Amah’s—at last sank in.

Overnight, she had lost everyone who loved her.

Her tears were stinging hot in her eyes, but ice-cold upon her cheeks. She let them fall. She wept for the wonderful future that Master Gordon would never know, the threshold of forty that Amah would never reach, and the bleak days that stretched out endlessly before herself.

For the first time in her life, she feared the future, as Mother and Amah—and perhaps Da-ren, too—had always feared it for her.

Leighton reacted particularly strongly to the dose of quinine at midday. Afterward exhaustion smothered him. He drifted in and out of sleep, seeming to grow more tired each time he opened his eyes.

At some point his throat became parched. He finished the glass of water that had been left on his nightstand, but that wasn’t enough. To reach the pitcher on the table, he must get up.

It took him quite a bit of time to manage the feat and stagger across the small room. When he lifted the pitcher, his arms felt as if they were made of wet clay. He had to lean against the door for several minutes before he could gather enough strength to edge his way back to bed.

At the window he stopped to rest again. He was in an upper-story room of the minister’s residence, high enough for him to see over the wall that surrounded the compound.

There was a river outside—or was it a canal?—that he hadn’t noticed on the night of his arrival. The day was fading. The frozen canal glinted dully in the scattered light. The road that ran alongside the canal was empty of both traffic and pedestrians.

Except for a beautiful Chinese girl dressed all in white.

She was crying. Not bawling, not sobbing, just…weeping, her face wet with tears, the rims of her eyes red, her nose and cheeks too.

Was he hallucinating?

He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the cold glass pane of the window. When he opened his eyes again, she was gone.