Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

How much intelligence do they have? Enough to know me by sight? To follow me?

To learn that there are those here I love?

Fear twisted somewhere behind his breastbone. His one failing, in his days as a field agent, had been his imagination. An agent’s greatest gift, but a weapon that could turn in its wielder’s hand, as it had turned in his.

And what about the vampires of Peking? He remembered Ysidro’s nervousness – remembered his own sensation, walking along the canal’s high banks two nights ago, of something watching him, following him . . .

Months before Miranda’s birth, Lydia had sewed lengths of silver chain into the linings of the curtains of their daughter’s tiny bed, even into the bindings around Miranda’s blankets. The thought that she had to do this – the thought that the Master of London, only seventy miles from Oxford, knew where he and Lydia lived – still filled him with rage, terror, and guilt.

And though he had quit the Department before he’d asked Lydia – at that time a penniless student disinherited by her disgruntled father – to be his wife, he had done so with trepidation. Spying was a bachelor’s game, and even ex-spies spent the rest of their lives glancing over their shoulders. In Asher’s eyes, perhaps the greatest of Ysidro’s many sins was that, in dragging Asher into the affairs of the London vampires seven years previously, he had brought Lydia to the attention of those who hunted in the night.

Lydia, and now the child she had borne.

She came back in, coiling up her stethoscope in her hands. ‘He’s still sleeping,’ she said. ‘Poor old gentleman . . . And I must say, Jamie, that it was infamous of you to include poor old Karlebach on yesterday’s expedition and tell me I had to stay back and try to get gossip out of the Baroness. Not to speak of the fact that by the time I get out to Mingliang to have a look at those bones they’ll be crumbled to dust.’

‘ Mea culpa !’ Asher raised his hands in surrender. ‘But as long as you did suffer an afternoon of the Baroness’s company—?’

‘Did you know in advance that she was like that?’

‘I am innocent, Lords of the Court, of the charges directed against me . . . though I had heard rumors.’ He swiped his coffee with a corner of his napkin, poured out the remainder of the coffee pot’s contents into Lydia’s cup, and set a saucer over it. ‘And speaking of rumors . . .’

‘Yes,’ Lydia said with a sigh. ‘Speaking of rumors . . .’

And she proceeded to give an account of her own afternoon’s expedition to Silk Lane.

‘I’m sorry to say,’ said Asher when she had finished, ‘that your friend Madame Giannini wasn’t wrong about Richard Hobart’s father. Grant Hobart had a smelly reputation even at Oxford. Of course, few of us were so green as to get ourselves entangled with the town girls, if all we wanted was a lark—’

‘And here I thought you spent your college years in monkish seclusion with a Slovak lexicon!’

‘Persian,’ corrected Asher with a grin. ‘And I’m afraid you’re mostly right.’ He removed the protective saucer from over his own cup, took a sip, and replaced it. ‘Even before the Department recruited me I never saw the point of getting castaway five nights out of seven, like the other men on my staircase. And you can thank my parsonical upbringing for keeping me out of the clutches of those girls the others pursued when they went down to London. It would be hard to imagine behavior too gross for drunken undergraduates to stomach, but Hobart managed it. He’d excuse himself – usually say the girls asked for it. There was a rumor back then – this was in eighty-two – that he’d killed a girl, at some place in London.’

‘Deliberately?’ Lydia’s voice was steady, but he could see she was genuinely appalled.

Asher thought about it. Remembered one spring afternoon in the Junior Common Room, and the silence that fell when Grant Hobart came through the door. Shortly after that, Hobart had come to him asking to be tutored in Chinese, a language Asher had been studying for two years. His father had given him three months, Hobart had said, meeting Asher’s eye with steely defiance in his own, to get a hand on the language and set forth to make his career in the Far East.

Unwillingly, he replied to her, ‘I think so, yes.’

She was silent, expressionlessly drawing tiny patterns with her coffee spoon in the dust that filmed the white tablecloth.

‘I attended a lecture last year,’ she said at length, ‘by a Dr Beaconsfield, who claimed that such behavior is traceable to atavistic malformations in the nervous system. To my mind he didn’t make a very good case for it. I’d be curious about Sir Grant’s father.’

‘Hobart spoke to me of his father exactly once, in all the time we were at Oxford together. I know Lady Hobart was a horror. And the fact remains that it doesn’t matter whether the need for violence to achieve satisfaction with a woman is hereditary or not. Richard was set up. We did that kind of thing in the Department all the time, to get a grip on someone we needed, though I never heard of a case where we used murder. The victim of this scheme isn’t Richard, or even the poor Eddington girl. It’s Hobart.’

Lydia thought about that for a moment. ‘Then he’s right. It really is the Chinese.’

‘I think so. But for reasons that aren’t inscrutable in the least.’

She added a neat series of boxes around her drawing.

He wondered if she were thinking about Ysidro, who had killed far more women than one or two.

‘While we’re in Peking I’ll take you to the opera, Lydia,’ he said after a time. ‘There aren’t any wings or flies, and when the scenery needs to be changed – or the hero needs to grab a sword – stagehands run out and do whatever is necessary in full view of the audience. But since they’re dressed all in black, the audience simply pretends they’re not there: agrees not to see them.’

‘Like the servants in the Legation.’ Her voice was sad. She understood who had had access to Richard Hobart’s tie drawer. Who would know all about Holly Eddington’s determination to wed him, and the fact that if someone – someone she must already have known – said, He’s asking for you at the garden gate , she would go. ‘Or the servants anywhere, for that matter.’

‘Except that we don’t know a thing about the servants in the Legations. Who they’re related to or where they go on their days off. Nothing. They come recommended – but when they step through the gates they disappear. But I do know that here, family is everything. Cousins owe favors to great-uncles; second-cousins carry messages for aunts they’ve never met. Whole clans of people who earn in a week what we pay for a rickshaw ride will club together every copper cash they make for years, so that grand-nephew Shen, who shows such promise, can get a tutor and go to school and take the government examinations – with the understanding that if Shen does make good and ends up Inspector of Customs, he’s going to let second-cousin Yao’s boxes go through unexamined, even though he’s never met Yao in his life.’

‘Not so terribly different,’ she observed softly, ‘from home.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Except that Shen will almost kill himself to pass those exams, not for the sake of his own future, but because of what he owes his family. And we don’t see them at all.’

She wiped her spoon clean of dust, used it to stir her coffee, replaced the protective saucer. ‘So you think this girl that Sir Grant is rumored to have killed at this . . . this house he goes to on Big Tiger Lane is related to some of the Legation servants?’