Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

They must have cleared everything off after Jamie snooped through .

She took the candle from the chafing dish, hunted in the table drawer and found a box of matches. Whispered another prayer of relief. It was hard to guess how much daylight was left, but the thought of being in this place after full dark fell – completely blind – sickened her. She had Jamie’s word that the poor wretches in the cellar were locked up in some fashion, but anything could have changed in the past two days. She lit the candle, descended the stair – also not locked nor even equipped with a lock. Mrs Tso can’t have had the scheme to use them for very long. She must have counted on keeping the pavilion itself under lock and key .

From what she’d heard of Mrs Tso, it was hard to imagine any member of the woman’s household would dare go poking around in a place where they weren’t supposed to be.

The stench at the bottom of the stairs was horrific, but still not worse than the yard behind the surgical theater of the charity hospital on a hot day after they’d been doing amputations. Lydia held the candle high up, squinting to see and not daring to go closer to the two men whose sleeping forms she could just make out.

They were chained to the walls at opposite ends of the little brick strongroom. There were buckets for drinking water and waste, but it was clear that both prisoners were beginning to forget that earliest of civilized behaviors. It was also clear, as far as Lydia could see, that the room was cleaned on a regular basis. They had blankets and quilts. Rats darted in the dense shadows, chewed on the half-eaten carcasses that lay on the floor nearby: what looked like part of a chicken and the half-picked leg of a goat.

She did this to them. Lydia backed carefully up the stairs, trembling and, despite herself, slightly faint. Deliberately infected them, in the hopes of controlling the rest . For a moment her mind flashed to Miranda, to what it felt like to hold her child in her arms.

What woman could do that to her own flesh ?

Not someone whose power I want to be in .

She turned and climbed the remaining steps swiftly.

Grant Hobart was at the top.

Lydia gasped with shock and nearly fell back down the stair, but when he reached to steady her, she jerked sharply away. ‘Don’t you touch me!’

His face convulsed with anger, as if he would have shouted at her, and his hand flinched to strike. Then he stopped himself, panting. In the candlelight she saw his eyes glitter with fever.

And am I REALLY going to run back down into that room below?

‘Don’t blame me, Mrs Asher,’ he gasped. ‘I beg of you, don’t think hard of me.’

‘Don’t think hard of you?’ She knew she should pretend whatever he wanted, and couldn’t.

‘I couldn’t help it! They forced my hand—’

‘They didn’t force you to get mixed up with them in the first place!’

He turned his face away. His breath had stunk of blood and decaying flesh, and she could see where his teeth had begun to sprout and deform, even since that morning when he’d seized her at the hotel. The telltale swollen bruising of his face showed where the frontal sutures of his skull had begun to loosen, to re-form in the characteristic shape of the yao-kuei . ‘You don’t understand.’ He moved aside to let her step off the stair and into the room.

‘I understand –’ she kept her voice steady with an effort – ‘that you brought me here so Mrs Tso and her minions can get hold of my husband, to keep him from interfering with Mrs Tso’s efforts to control those things in the mines so she can sell them to President Yuan.’

‘He’s not going to be harmed! Good God, woman, you don’t think I’d let Chinese harm a white man! They only want him out of the country!’

‘They were waiting for him the night he fled,’ Lydia pointed out. ‘And what did you think the Crown was going to do with your accusation of treason when he got back to England? Say, Oh, that’s all right, what you do in China doesn’t really count ?’

‘Look, they – they’ve found a man who’ll confess to the Eddington girl’s murder.’ He passed his hand over his face, like a man trying to scrub away sleep that is nearly overwhelming. ‘Five hundred pounds – a Chinese, he’s ill, dying, he needs it for his family.’

‘And you believed that?’ Lydia stared at him in appalled incredulity.

‘I—’ Hobart stammered. ‘An told me . . .’

‘And what a pillar of rectitude he is. All it means is that they found some man who’d confess, in order to keep his wife, or some member of his family, from being killed. That five hundred pounds is going straight into Mrs Tso’s pocket . . . And did Mr An also tell you that the girls he’d bring to you liked being beaten up?’

The big man’s distorted features contracted, and he looked away from her again. ‘You don’t understand.’ He rubbed his face once more. Lydia could see where his nails were thickening, his hands deforming, bruised and swollen. They must hurt like the very devil . ‘I’m not the only one in the Legations to use An’s services, you know.’

Lydia forced herself not to shout at him, And that makes it all right? Instead she asked, in a quieter voice, ‘What happened to you?’

‘I came here Thursday night to give An the money. Your husband had fled; I prayed that would be enough for them. An was late, so I waited for him in . . . in one of the smaller courtyards . . .’

He shied away there from speaking of something – a lifetime of myopia and participation in the London social seasons had made Lydia very good at reading the inflections of peoples’ voices when they were lying. The pavilion Jamie saw, with the pornographic paintings? How does one go about ordering pornographic paintings when one is in China, anyway? Annette Hautecoeur would know . . .

‘I heard some kind of commotion and went out into the courtyard. This . . . this thing, this creature came out of the dark at me. I have a sword-cane, I cut it – one of Mrs Tso’s nephews came running, and I didn’t see – good God, what happened to them? I didn’t see his – its ! – face until it was close. T’uan and Yi – that’s Madame’s oldest boy – and their bully boys came and dragged them both away, and Yi told me I was not to speak of what I’d seen, of what had happened. As I valued my own life and my son’s , they said . . . They can get a man into the Legation stockade, you know, to kill a prisoner there. But I could see T’uan’s face was changing, too.’

‘And you came back,’ she said softly, ‘when you started getting sick yourself?’

‘I had to! I could see T’uan was all right, you see. I mean, he looked frightful, but he seemed to be in his right mind. He didn’t have these – these terrible blank spaces, these horrible urges that come over me . . . When I came here on Friday night, the night of the riot at the Empress Garden, Mrs Tso told me, yes, they have Chinese medicine, Chinese herbs, that will control this sickness. They’d give them to me, she said, if I brought you here. They only want to talk to you, she said. She swore to me you wouldn’t be harmed . . .’

‘What did she swear on?’ inquired Lydia, genuinely curious. ‘The Bible? Is Mrs Tso a Christian? Does one swear on the Sayings of Confucius? I suppose one could—’

His hand jerked back again, and his mouth gaped suddenly, as if he not only would strike, but also bite. ‘Shut up, you wittering bitch!’ Lydia sprang back, got the corner of the table between them. ‘I’m telling you you won’t be hurt—’