Heart and Soul (34 page)

“Is that we’re locked within a paper cage, and that no one is paying any attention at all to what we say,” Wen said. “Yes. And those figures out there, our illustrious guards, they don’t seem very intelligent.”

“If I understand what Yu said,” Third Lady said, quietly, “they are not that complex a construction. They are not, in fact, in any way, sentient. Just machines, of a sort, magically animated with certain precepts, and on those precepts they’ll live and die.”

“But then we are at the mercy of nonintelligent machines,” Wen said. “And that means we could spend the rest of eternity locked behind these paper bars.” He looked at her. “How long can our bodies subsist without sustenance, in that cave?”

Third Lady’s eyes widened. “Well, milord,” she said, “I told the lady, your sister—and it is true—that the time down here need have no correlation to the time up there, and that I could contrive to be gone no more than a few hours. While I think this is still true, one needs to get permission for this, by talking to a guardian of the underworld. Judge Bao or another might, in fact, as part of his verdict, be able to send us back to shortly after we left, but…”

“But if we’re locked in a cell and forgotten, we will never return to the world of the living, and meanwhile our bodies, in their unnatural sleep, will wither and die.”

Third Lady nodded once, acknowledging what her husband said. In the back of her mind, something was struggling, trying to find its way to the surface. There had to be a way out of this—a way that would make it possible for them to defeat the bars.

Things came together in her mind, even as Wen said, “Precious Lotus, this will never do. I cannot leave my sister alone and at the mercy of Zhang or his accomplices. For one, now that she knows he is a traitor, he’s more likely to kill her than marry her. Not that I’m sure, at all, which one Red Jade would prefer.”

Third Lady almost told him to be quiet, because his words interfered with the solution assembling itself in her mind. But she couldn’t be quite so disrespectful to the noble husband she loved. So, instead, she merely made a gesture with her hand, as though waving away his objections. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We will not leave her.”

She remembered the figures she had burned—the gentlemen, the ladies and the monkey. The monkey. In the novel
Journey to the West,
a monkey that had achieved sentience and therefore been able to enter Feng Du had in fact wreaked havoc. His exploits were well celebrated. This underworld which ran on laws and regulations—no matter how contradictory those were—had been plunged into chaos.

She should be able to conjure her monkey. He should be able to come even into this prison. Didn’t monkeys penetrate the tightest of spaces?

But she had to
demand
his presence. She stood very still and looked up and spoke to what seemed like the vast emptiness of the cell. “Monkey that I sent before me, I command you: come and get us out of this cell.”

MORNING IN BRITAIN

It was a brisk morning in Derbyshire, with the sun
just coming in over the peaks, when Peter Farewell, Lord St. Maur, joined his young wife in the dining room.

He looked windblown and in quite a good humor, though his clothes were in perfect order, and, in fact, lent his lean, muscular frame quite an air of distinction. Just married, St. Maur was a fine figure of a man, as everyone kept telling Sofie Farewell, nee Warington, Lady St. Maur. And if some ventured to say it was a pity he’d lost his left eye in some unspecified accident in foreign parts, most would agree that the patch that hid the deformity fit his classical profile quite well and lent a certain hint of mystery to his romantically dark and tumbled curls.

Lady St. Maur certainly thought so as she lifted her gaze from her plate of sliced ham to grace her husband with a radiant smile. “Good morning, my dear,” she said. And then with a sparkle of humor infecting her voice, “I see you have been for an early-morning excursion.”

She was very well aware that the servant in the room, shifting platters on the serving table, preparing to present his master with a choice of viands upon which to break his fast, prevented Peter from answering openly. And it amused her to play this game with her husband, who was a were-dragon and had only recently become reconciled to this aspect of his nature. Peter didn’t now change shapes often. Having come back to his ancestral home and settled into the traditional mode of life of his ancestors, he was loath to jeopardize it all and have to take to the wing again, to the four corners of the world, to hide the fact that he’d been born a were—a creature proscribed under English law and facing the death penalty on discovery, for the simple crime of existing.

But Sofie knew for an absolute fact that he’d become a dragon that morning, and gone flying through the calm morning sky. She’d glimpsed him from her window—the only in the house that looked out in the direction of their little wilderness, over which he’d gone disporting.

Peter gave her an amused look, understanding her game very well. “The morning air was particularly fine and very brisk,” he said. “And I noted that we need to bring in the hay from the north fields in the home farm, else it will all get ruined when the first rains come.”

She smiled fondly at him, because Peter had been getting quite interested in the home farm, in the lives of his tenants and in his buildings and properties. It wasn’t how they met, and it wasn’t what one might have expected from life with a dangerous were-dragon, who had traveled the world over and had all kinds of adventures. And yet, Sofie gathered, all of Peter’s tenants and farmers were delighted that at last a Farewell was looking to the administration of the estate and even buying back many of the lands the previous generations had lost.

Peter answered a discrete question from their attending servant with, “Coffee only, and some dry toast. I am not very hungry this morning.”

“Oh,” Sofie said, unable to resist teasing him. “Had a snack of broiled mutton, did you?”

Peter’s eye sparkled a warning. She knew that were it not for the presence of the servant, he would be calling her
baggage
in that soft, choked voice he used when he wanted to be particularly tender. “Indeed, no,” he said. “There is nothing worse than mutton in the morning. You know my digestion could not bear it.”

He looked like he would say something else but, at that moment, one of their footmen, Wilkins, came in, bearing a letter upon a small silver salver. He stopped by Peter’s seat and bowed and proffered the letter.

Peter took a look at the address and frowned.
Joseph Gilbert.
“Joseph Gilbert,” he said aloud, in the tone of voice of a man trying to jog his memory.

“Someone you know?” Sofie asked, alarmed by his frown.

“No. Or at least…” He frowned harder. “When I was very young, and while my mother was still alive, we sometimes had someone to stay who had been one of my father’s friends when he was single. I’m sure that was the name. Joseph Gilbert. Second son of the Earl of Marshlake.”

“Perhaps this is he,” Sofie suggested.

“I…it hardly seems likely. I have some notion, though I cannot tell you how I came by it, that the entire family is gone. The father died, and shortly thereafter the older son died. The younger son, I seem to remember, had disappeared some years before. Not sure what he did, but he must have blotted his copybook very badly, because my father said that the earl would not allow Joseph’s name to be pronounced in his presence.”

“Well, my dear,” Sofie said, softly, not daring to say anything more, “you disappeared from the ancestral estates for some years also, and I’m sure the relationship subsisting between you and your late esteemed father was far from perfect.”

Peter looked up, his frown taking a different tone altogether. In that expression, she saw that he understood her meaning. Many were proscribed from English society. It didn’t mean they were dead, however much their families might like to pretend so.

“If I may, milord,” Wilkins said. “The letter arrived express, via carpetship from Cape Town, in South Africa.”

“South Africa!” Peter said, in a tone in which astonishment mingled with alarm. Doubtless the mention of that continent brought remembrance that Nigel Oldhall would now be there, or very soon would be, delivering the rubies to their ancestral homeland.

Peter unfolded the letter, while saying absently, “Thank you, Wilkins. That will be all.”

He didn’t dismiss the other servant, the one who’d brought him coffee and a plate with dry toast, but the man must have sensed his master’s uneasiness, because he coughed once and stepped out as well.

Peter read the letter, once through, it seemed, then frowned at the paper. “The devil,” he said, softly, and passed the letter to his wife.

Sofie read what was still a very distinguished hand, even though the paper and pen seemed to be cheap:
Dear Lord St. Maur, you’ll forgive me addressing you like this, since I have not seen you from when you were about five or so. And that was a fleeting enough visit, since your father’s and my acquaintance had begun to be frayed at the edges. I have recently housed in my home a carpetship flight magician, by the name of Enoch Jones. From his speech while delirious I deduced some things. You might have read in international papers about his heroic actions, which kept the carpetship flying and saved many lives.

I cared for him while he was recovering, and I happened to see the one artifact he had remaining, of the two he’d sheltered. I also heard your name—and his real name—quite a lot, in that time, while he raved with fever.

I would not dream of bothering you, milord, but now Mr. Jones is gone, as is a Chinese princess he is sheltering and helping. And meanwhile, my daughter, Hettie, has been kidnapped by a member of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, who is demanding the objects in question, as well as the denunciation of anyone connected with what he calls an international conspiracy, before he will return Hettie to us.

I wouldn’t write, but she is our only child and my Charlotte is beside herself. Humbly, Joseph (Gilbert) Perigord.

“Dear me,” Sofie said, feeling puzzled. “What is this? A threat? Blackmail?”

Peter shook his head and sighed. “What it sounds like to me is a man out of his mind with worry for his daughter, one who is grasping at straws.”

“Does he know you are—”

“If Mr. Jones was who I think he was and he was raving with fever, what do you think? I’d say undoubtedly he does know.”

Sofie found herself biting her lower lip, in confusion. “But…what’s to be done?”

Peter swallowed his coffee and got up, unfolding his body from the chair gracefully, like a dancing master. “I think, my dear, I will have to go to Cape Town and ascertain that.”

“Are you quite sure?” Sofie asked. “After all, we don’t know what they want from you, precisely.”

“No, but the very fact that their child is in danger must call for our sympathy and our help.”

Sofie rose from the table as well. “I’ll go change my dress,” she said. “And pack some clothes for both of us.”

“Lady St. Maur,” he said, his voice attempting to be severe. “Am I to understand you intend to accompany me?”

“Certainly,” she said, and allowed her eyes to dance with mischief. “It’s been much too long since I’ve had a good flight.”

“But it might be dangerous.”

“Precisely. And since when do I allow you to face danger alone?”