‘I’m glad you’re getting my point at last. I am pulling myself together. No more night trips out on the river. No more black paste for me. It’s over. It’s a filthy trade.’

‘God damn you, Willoughby. We both know that the Chinese bastard won’t deal with me without you in the middle of it.’

‘Too bad.’

‘Don’t threaten me.’

‘I’m not threatening. I’m telling.’

‘You bloody fool, I’ll go straight to the police and you’ll be inside a filthy prison cell before you even start your next bout of the shakes.’

‘Mason, I’m telling you to let this go. You’ve made more than a good profit from our deal so far. Now it’s finished. Just let it go. Find yourself a new enterprise and let us end this now like English gentlemen.’ He held out his hand and made certain it did not shake.

Mason took his time. He looked from Theo’s face to his outstretched hand and back again. ‘Go to hell,’ he sneered and walked out through the French windows to the terrace. ‘Polly, Anthea,’ he shouted. ‘Time to go. I want to see what this horse of mine can do.’ He turned and stared back at Theo through the glass, his grey eyes flat and hard. ‘I might even have to use the whip on him.’

Theo wanted to kill him. There and then. His hand even slid to the short ivory-handled knife he kept up his sleeve, and he had to remind himself that it was the opium talking, warping his thoughts. But if he could only take a few breaths on the pipe, it would still the infernal racket in his head, just this once, just one more time. He swung away in a jerky movement and stepped into the hall but stopped in the doorway when he saw Lydia Ivanova sitting on the bottom step of the stairs. She was watching him. He didn’t like the look in her eyes. The concern.

It meant she had heard.


‘Please, Lyd. Go on.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Your father is waiting.’

‘Just a quick look, that’s all.’

‘No. Another day.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, Lydia, for heaven’s sake, I’m only asking for a look at your new bedroom, not at the inside of Mr Parker’s safe or anything like that. Why not?’

‘Sorry, Polly, but it’s not tidy.’

‘Don’t be silly. You’ve only been in it twenty-four hours.’

‘No, Polly. Not today. Please.’

‘What’s the matter with you, Lyd? You look…’

‘I’m fine. Did you like holding Sun Yat-sen?’

‘Oh yes, he’s utterly gorgeous. Papa liked him too.’

‘Your father is calling you to the car.’

Leaning in the doorway, Theo waited while the girls parted, a slight awkwardness between them. Little chickens. Fluffy and new. No idea how life has a habit of slicing your head off when you’re not looking.

36

His face. It was all brittle cheekbones. Skin stretched so tight it looked as if it would split. White as the pillow. Dirty purple hollows around his eyes. But it was his mouth that upset Lydia most. Before, when he leaped into her life that first day in the alleyway or later in the burned-out house when he talked of why only the Communists could drag China out of the tyranny of its feudal past, his mouth had been full and curved and brimming with vital energy. Not just energy, she thought, but a kind of inner power. A certainty. That was gone. His lips, more than any other part of him, looked dead.

Quickly she reached out and touched him. Warm. Alive. Not dead.

But too warm. Hot. Too hot.

He was lying in her bed. Again she squeezed out the cloth in the bowl of cool water. It smelled funny. That was the Chinese herbs. To soothe a fever, that’s what Mr Theo said they were for, to cool the blood. Tenderly she bathed Chang An Lo’s brow, his temples, his throat, and even the black stubble on his bony scalp. She felt a sense of achievement to see it clear of lice and all the other things that had been crawling around up there, and it pleased her to stroke it. Reassured her.

She sat on a chair beside the bed all day. As the light from the window changed from grey to greyer, she listened to the rain dripping outside. Sudden gusts of it against the glass panes. The colours drained from the room as it grew darker and still she kept bathing his limbs, his chest, and his sharp pelvic bones till she knew his body almost as completely as she knew her own. The texture of his skin and the shape of his toenails. She anointed the infected wounds with strange Chinese unguents, changed bandages, and dripped restorative herbal teas through his cracked lips. All the time talking to him. She talked and she talked. Once she even managed to laugh as she fought to drench his ears with sounds of life and happiness, to give back to him the lost energy.

But his eyes never opened, not a flicker, and his arms and legs lay lifeless, even when she changed the bandages on his hands, and she knew it must hurt horribly on some deeper plane where she couldn’t reach him. But sometimes sounds came from his mouth. Whispers. Low and urgent. She leaned over and put her ear close to his mouth, so close she could feel his faint breath hot on her skin, but she could make no sense of the sounds.

But once, when she was spreading a grainy yellow salve over his lips with her forefinger, his mouth suddenly opened just a fraction and his lips closed over her finger. It was an extraordinarily intimate act. The tip of her finger in the soft moist folds of his mouth. More intimate even than when she held his penis in her hand and washed it. She felt a surge of exhilaration and hugged it to herself. She rested her own lips on his forehead.

That moment was enough to carry her through the long night.


The Chinese medicines were not working.

Lydia’s throat was closing in a wave of panic. He’d want the Chinese medicines. Not fanqui concoctions, she was certain of that. But when would they start to work? When? As each hour crawled past, his skin burned more. Hot and dry as desert sand. In the cold and lonely darkness, she wrapped both her hands around his forearm, just above the bandages on his wrist and she held on tight.

She would not let him go.

Would not.


Dawn filtered through the curtains and a soft misty light slowly filled the room. It was cold. Lydia was wrapped in her coat and she kept the eiderdown, a pretty peach one that was glossy and new, tucked tight around the still figure on the bed. But she was appalled at her own ignorance. Should she light the gas fire that was in the room attached to one wall? Keep the air warm? And place the rubber hot-water bottle at his feet? Or was that all wrong? Maybe she should open the window to allow the icy air in to cool him from the outside.

Which?

She felt cold sweat on her own body and fought back the panic. She was tired, she told herself, too tired. That’s what the Chinese man had said to Mr Theo. The herbalist. He said she looked as if her chi had drained away, and he insisted that she buy a mixture of herbs he concocted for her to drink like tea, but she was far more interested in what he prepared for Chang An Lo. For fever, burns, and infected wounds, she told Mr Theo, that’s what she wanted, and he had translated her needs to the herbalist and then translated to her the instructions for use of the treatment.

Lydia had felt reassured the moment she walked into the herbalist’s little shop. It smelled wonderful. Its shelves were crammed with glass jars of all shapes and sizes, some blue, some green, some a muddy brown, all full of herbs and leaves and other things Lydia could not even guess at but she had a crazy feeling there might be something like lizards’ hearts or porcupine’s gallbladder and rhino horn. Great ceramic bowls of seeds and dried flowers and sheets of tree bark stood on the floor and scented the shop with enticing aromas. But best of all was the herbalist himself. He positively gleamed with good health, with teeth so white Lydia found she could not look away from them.

She had handed Alfred’s envelope of money over to Mr Theo for payment. It was more than enough, thank God. Or more accurately, thank Alfred. For this once she did genuinely thank him, a reluctant, grudging kind of thanks that surprised her. But she knew that without him, she wouldn’t have found Chang because she couldn’t have hired Liev.

Mr Theo said little. Just asked if it was all for that Chinese friend of hers.

‘I’d rather not discuss it, if you don’t mind.’

He shrugged, his tall frame loose and somehow disjointed, but he didn’t seem to mind. She noticed he bought some preparations for himself too and at any other time she’d have been curious, especially after what she’d overheard on the stairs between him and Mr Mason. But her fear for Chang An Lo was all she had room for right now. So she sat. Watched Chang’s face slowly materialise out of the darkness, each moment bringing another detail of it to her hungry gaze, and she was astonished at how familiar it was to her already. As if it were imprinted deep in her brain. The thickness of his eyelashes, the angle of his nose, the exact flare of his nostrils and curve of his ear. She could see them with her eyes shut.

Very gently while she sat in the chair she laid her head on the pillow next to his, her forehead resting against his hot cheekbone. Making a connection. She closed her eyes and asked herself why it was she cared so much, so much it hurt, but she couldn’t come up with an answer.


‘Tell me the symptoms.’

‘Fever. A really high fever. Unconsciousness. Infected wounds and burns.’

‘Overall health? I mean is the patient in good condition otherwise or one of the undernourished mass of the Chinese population of Junchow? It makes a big difference, you know.’ Mrs Yeoman was twisting her thick white hair into a bun at the back of her head and sticking clips in it. Lydia had never seen her hair loose before, it was like liquid snow, but then she had never come calling this early before.