Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

And Trooper Barclay muttered, ‘We’ll all need a bleedin’ hand ’fore this night’s done! Christ Almighty, I’m cold as a nun’s knickers! We’ll be frozen stiff by the time we get back to town.’

Asher said nothing, though he too had started to shiver. He guessed what would be moving in these hills, once darkness fell, and knew that cold was going to be the least of their troubles.

SEVEN

‘Please understand that Sir Grant has never been anything but a perfect gentleman to me.’

Lydia recognized the earnestness in Paola’s voice and the expression in those enormous brown eyes, almost of desperation that Lydia should understand that what Paola was about to say wasn’t to be taken as the malicious backstairs gossip that it would be if someone else were to say it. Lydia reflected, a little sadly, on the number of scandalous secrets communicated to her by cousins, by her beautiful stepmother, by the daughters of her aunts’ friends and by the other young ladies at her very expensive Swiss boarding-school, prefaced by that devastating disclaimer.

She tucked the Italian girl’s hand into the crook of her arm and bent her head to listen as they strolled along the shopfronts of Silk Lane.

‘I think you know that only a very few men in the diplomatic corps bring their wives to China,’ explained Paola, in a slightly constricted voice. ‘The young clerks – and some that are not so young – er . . . consort with Chinese women . . . Yes, and some who have their wives here as well,’ she added, with a trace of bitterness. ‘Some – like Colonel von Mehren and Herr Knoller in the German Legation – even keep native mistresses! Others just go to the Chinese City, or make arrangements with the Chinese – er . . . go-betweens –’ she fumbled again for the polite term – ‘to have women brought to houses that they agree upon. This is what Sir Grant does.’

Ahead of them in the throng of Chinese – shopkeepers, soldiers, strollers and vendors of mousetraps and hats – the Baroness marched from counter to counter of the small shops that opened into the Lane, fingering lengths of silk and shouting at the merchants in pidgin or Russian, and discoursing on the various grades of the fabric and the descriptive nomenclature of its hues. Menchikov – or perhaps it was Korsikov – hovered no more than a foot from her elbow, but the Chinese around them did no more than stare, as if at an elephant or a funeral parade. Lydia was aware, too, that three times as many children, peasant women, and porters were following her – keeping a respectful distance from Korsikov (or Menchikov) – but pointing (a gesture done with the chin in China, rather than the fingers) and exclaiming, no doubt, that Westerners really were descended from devils because, like devils, this one had red hair.

Madame Drosdrova ignored them as if they were merely flies buzzing around her hat.

‘I’m quite shocked to hear it,’ exclaimed Lydia, who wasn’t. ‘But it’s really a far cry from debauchery with Chinese – er – ladies, to murder . . .’

Paola shook her head violently. ‘It is not just debauchery, Madame. It is . . .’ She looked like she wanted to lower her voice, but the general noise of chatter in the street all around them put this discretion out of the question. ‘I understand – I have heard – that Sir Grant likes to . . . to hurt the women he . . . he consorts with. Badly, sometimes. There are men like this,’ she added earnestly, as if certain that this was something a respectable woman like Lydia had never heard of before. ‘Not just slapping one’s wife when one is drunk, you understand, such as all men do—’

Lydia opened her mouth to protest that all men did nothing of the kind.

‘—but deliberately. And there are men in China who buy women – girls – from their families, to hire them out to men who . . . who take pleasure in this.’

Behind her hat veils, Paola’s face suffused with a flush of embarrassment. Lydia recalled the relevant chapters in Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis – which she had read with a combination of clinical interest and baffled amazement at one point in the three years she had spent attending medical lectures and dissections at the Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford – but forbore to mention this, to request more specific information, or to reflect on the information she had just received, not only about Sir Grant Hobart but also about the home life of the Italian Assistant Diplomatic Attaché.

She also stifled her next comment: that, given the extremes of poverty in China and the general Chinese attitude that anything and everything was marketable, the sale of these services didn’t surprise her. That was also the sort of remark that would have sent her stepmother and aunts into an advanced case of the vapors . . . whatever ‘vapors’ actually were. ( Dr Charcot in France – or was it Dr Freud in Vienna? – would undoubtedly have an opinion on nervous causes of the vapors . . . I shall have to look that up . . .)

She settled on, ‘Sir Grant ? I would never have thought it!’

Though according to Krafft-Ebing, a great many men did precisely that, and not all of them in Peking, either. Nor did it appear to be possible to tell who was a likely candidate for such behavior simply by looking at them.

‘If I’d only heard it from Madame Drosdrova, or Annette Hautecoeur –’ Paola named the wife of the French Legation’s Assistant Trade secretary – ‘I would think, this is gossip . . . You have no idea the frightful gossip that one encounters here, ma’am, at every turn! But this my husband told me.’

‘I have reason to believe,’ put in Lydia tactfully, ‘that men gossip among themselves every bit as badly as women do.’

The Italian girl shook her head again, ‘No! Only women gossip, and even if men did, Tonio – Signor Giannini – is not that sort of man.’

They stopped outside the largest silk-shop in the street, before which a very old Chinese gentleman was stirring and mixing what looked like dough in a basin filled with white powder; he would lift it out, draw it between his hands to make it thinner and thinner, then double it on itself and drop it back for a quick roll in the powder again . . .

‘My husband warned me,’ Paola went on, ‘in my first month that I was here, not to be friendly with Sir Grant, and when I asked him why, he told me about the Chinese girls and the house of Mrs Tso that Sir Grant visits in Big Tiger Lane. My mother would not have said that this was a proper thing for a man to tell his wife, but because we are all so much together in the Legations I am glad that I know this, so that I may keep a proper distance. Later I heard from Madame Hautecoeur that there had been a terrible scandal, and a girl was said to have died in that house.’

By this time the dough had been separated into bundles of individual strands no larger than stout sewing-thread, and the crowd around the old gentleman’s wheeled bin had thickened until it nearly blocked the street. ‘What is it?’ asked Lydia in fascination, and Paola shook her head.

Lydia repeated the question to a man next to her, pointing, but his reply – ‘Ah, t’ang kuo !’ – conveyed little. When the dough had been reduced to a fibrous skein of powdery threads, the old man dropped it in a dusty whoof of whiteness on to the nearest shop counter and hacked it into short lengths with the razor-sharp cleaver at his belt, and seemed not to understand Lydia’s questions as to its nature or price. When she finally offered him a copper cash he gave her four pieces, gathered his basin and its portable stand, and moved off to put on his show in the next alley.

‘Don’t you dare eat that!’ Madame Drosdrova emerged from the silk shop and snatched the glutinous morsel from Lydia’s fingers. ‘It might be poison!’