The Shadow and the Star (20 page)

Slowly, Samuel gathered himself from his position mashed against the corner and stood straight. He put his palms against one another and copied Dojun's obeisance, only he made his twice as deep, to say he was ashamed of himself, and sorry, and would do better, and believed Dojun's promise with every fiber of his being.

Not quite every fiber believed, because when Dojun's knee came up into Samuel's face in the midst of the bow, his eyes squeezed shut automatically and his body started back in self-protection. But he caught the move halfway, just as Dojun stopped the motion of his leg precisely short of impact. Samuel straightened up and stood waiting, trying to pretend the tears of relief and reprieve that were coursing down his face didn't exist.

Dojun ignored them also. He seated himself again and went back to work on his chair leg. "No like boys down school,
so
," he said, as if all the intervening crisis had never occurred.

Samuel picked up a piece of sandpaper and fiddled with it, testing the rough edge against his finger. "It's not so bad, I guess," he said—and it truly didn't seem so terrible, compared to how close he'd just come to utter annihilation.

"School-time, lotta fight boy. Fight bad thing, Samua-san. Dojun no like fight. OK, yeah, but boy don't fight, only know two thing make for why. Boy scare. One thing. Boy too damn good never lose, two thing. You scare?"

"I'm not scared."

"You say scare, no wanna go back down school."

Samuel busied himself with sanding the planed side of the
tansu
chest. His cheek still ached from Dojun's slap.

"You no scare. You good fight, eh?"

The sandpaper swished in a faster rhythm. Samuel bent over his work. "I've never had a fight."

"Hey, I gonna teach fight, OK? Dojun damn good fight. Tiger-song, Samua-san. Remember tiger-song?"

"I remember."

The strike flashed out of nowhere; Samuel saw it as Dojun's fist rushed up under his chin. He jerked, freezing with Dojun's hand just touching his jaw. He hadn't even heard the Japanese man come up behind him.

Dojun moved back slowly. "Time here now. Listen good." He held up his hand, and Samuel saw that it was closed in a fist, with only the little finger extended. Dojun opened his hand and made a fanning motion, as if scaring away a fly.

"Only one thing bad, Samua-san. You fight, somebody gonna hit. Me no hit, make
chikai
, got honor, no hit you. Dojun teach all day good fight, work, work, work. Samua-san learn how number-one fight,
so
. Then you go out, one time get hit—
kotsun
!" He slapped the heels of his hands together with a sharp sound. "You hurt, you stop fight, you one dead duck."

Samuel didn't have an answer to that. He put his head down and went back to sanding the
tansu
, and thought of taking the air all the way down into his body when he breathed, to calm himself.

"OK," Dojun said. "OK. Sometime me, you, go down Chinatown, find somebody hit you."

The maid who arrived in the morning with tea and fruit
informed Leda that m'lady wished Miss Etoile to know the family would be attending the second service, and if it was convenient for miss to join them, the victoria would be ready at half-past nine, but if she wished to rest herself this morning, she was most welcome to do so.

The maid with hot tea and the simple, thoughtful message added to the dreamlike sensation Leda had felt upon awakening beneath a gold-and-blue canopy to fresh sunlight and creamy flowers. If she had thought about it at all, she would have assumed she would attend church quietly, slipping out of the house alone—or perhaps, just this once, neglect going in order to lie in bed and imbibe the amazing luxury of her surroundings. But declining Lady Ashland's invitation was unthinkable: she hastily assured the maid that she would be honored to accompany the family to service.

Leda had never eaten pineapple, bananas, and oranges for breakfast before. Miss Myrtle had sometimes peeled an orange for dessert after dinner, but she had not much cared for any item which was not readily subdued with knife and fork. Pineapple was not something that heretofore had formed part of Leda's experience. After the maid showed her how to remove the presliced crown and extract the sections that had already been cut inside the tough, prickly shell, Leda wasn't entirely certain that the fruit was worth the trouble. It had a tangy, sourish taste that did not appeal. However, there was excellent toast, still warm and soaked in butter, and the tea tasted divine as she sat next the open window and sipped it just as she had been used to do in her own bedroom at Miss Myrtle's.

Her black silk appeared, pressed and freshened. Leda was well-used to dressing herself and made certain that she was prompt to meet the family in the front hall. They were just as friendly and indulgent as they had been the night before, and by the time the carriage reached Hanover Square, Lady Catherine had managed to give a full account of last night's dinner party. She particularly wished Leda to tell her if she had done the proper thing by declining the decanter of wine which the host had passed to her at dessert, because he had looked a little perplexed when she had done so.

After a more detailed inquiry, Leda made the conjecture that the host had meant to pass the wine decanter to the gentleman just beyond Lady Catherine, since a second glass of wine at dessert was something a lady was not supposed to require, and even if she did, by no means should she help herself to it, but the gentleman seated next to her would fill her glass.

"So you did very well to decline," she assured Lady Catherine, "but perhaps he was concerned that the decanter didn't go round the table then. Next time you may decline, and indicate to the gentleman next to you that he should fill his glass if he likes, and then things will proceed the way the gentlemen prefer. But I daresay they won't be any the worse for not having had a second glass with dessert for one night."

Lord Ashland and his son denounced that sentiment with good-humored jeers. "We need all the brain anesthetic we can get at these flings," Lord Ashland said.

"Why, whatever do you
mean
, sir?" his wife inquired archly, sitting up straight and fanning herself. "I'm sure it's the very
best
society, and the conversation is
most
uplifting, and the sooner one finds oneself falling asleep, the more select one may assume the company to be."

"Well, I like it," Lady Catherine said cheerfully. "Some people are a little dull, it's true, but they try so hard to make us welcome, and get so fluttery and anxious about something going wrong, that I can't help but feel a little sorry for them."

"When you ruined their party by not passing the wine, you silly cluck!" Her brother reached over and patted her knee. "Wait'll Mother brings one of her pet jaguars to a ball because the poor thing's too sick to be left alone. They'll forget all about the wine."

"I never brought Vicky to a
ball
, Robert. It was a charity luncheon. And I could not cancel because I was to speak." Lady Ashland looked at Leda with a self-conscious dip of her chin, for all the world like a green girl caught with a spot of jam on her nose. "No one minded in the least, I assure you. She was never off the leash."

Leda found herself nodding in spite of her bemusement; she couldn't have helped herself from it, even if she hadn't caught Lord Ashland's teasing wink.

"This is Victoria the Fifth who attended the luncheon," he said soberly to Leda. "She's presently returned to hold court in her country seat. We find we've supported quite an ancient lineage of jaguars in Sussex from afar."

"Taken over Westpark, the artful devils," Lord Robert complained. "Fine thing, when a fellow finally gets a first look at his ancestral acres and can't walk around the garden without some jaguar leaping through the bushes and scaring the wits out of him."

"And we won't even
discuss
the boa constrictor," Lady Catherine added.

"Keeps the riffraff out," their father said blandly.

Their mother cleared her throat, plied her fan, and maintained a dignified silence until they reached the church.

In the late-afternoon light, the drawing room of Morrow House seemed very airy, in spite of the massively carved marble hearth and majestic plasterwork ceiling. Against a background of faded gold damask walls, the furnishings were a strangely pleasant mixture of gilt-and-needlepoint love seats, bamboo chairs of the japonaiserie style, a plump sofa covered in multi-flowered chintz, and several lovely, simple tables of shining wood and alien design.

As Leda looked about her, she finally realized that the effect of lightness arose from the fact that, instead of the endless collections of picture frames and figurines and albums and antimacassars that made most drawing rooms she knew into cozy, cluttered nests, the tables and mantelpiece of Morrow House were bare of anything but more living orchids. Out in the conservatory that opened off the drawing room over Park Lane, the exotic blooms made spots of rich pink and purple color among the more mundane potted kentia palms and aspidistras.

Lady Ashland would not allow gas to be lit in the house, for it killed her flowers. The family were very particular in their requirements, the housekeeper had advised Leda in that manner that a good servant had: communicating with deferential loftiness that they were as strange as Chinamen. In order to safeguard the orchids and yet avoid a return to tallow and torches, Mr. Gerard himself had caused the house to be electrified on an earlier trip to London last year, among other prearrangements for the whole family's first return to England in two decades-including having a closed cooking range, refrigerator, and ice cream freezer installed in the kitchen, the conservatory added along the entire front of the house overlooking Park Lane, filling the whole place with the rare tropical plants, and hiring a greenhouseman to care for them full time until the family arrived.

Her hosts really were quite endearingly outlandish, Leda thought. Lady Catherine, having returned with her mother from a Sunday garden tea, had knocked on Leda's door in person, given her a piece of seedcake the girl had brought home in a lace "hanky," as she called it, and begged Leda to come down and join everyone for cold supper in the drawing room. The girl was now busily plumping pillows around Mr. Gerard in his place by the front windows. Leda wasn't quite certain what his feelings were about the attention; she thought Lady Catherine was perhaps not aware of how much it must hurt his leg to be padded and adjusted in that enthusiastic way, but he bore it with heroic calm. No doubt the new plaster dressing helped to protect him, but Leda saw the strain in his smile.

Lady Ashland must have seen it, too, for she lifted her head from the notebook in which she'd been writing and said, "For goodness sakes, Kai, you're all but killing him."

Her daughter straightened up, looking stricken. "Oh, no! Have I been hurting you, Mano? You should have told me!"

"It doesn't hurt," he said.

Leda wondered if the man ever admitted that he felt any sort of bodily distress at all.