Rivals in the City (15 page)

The road was narrow and crammed with ramshackle buildings in the way of east London streets, and populated by a diverse mixture of steadily moving men, women and children, beasts of burden and languid beggars. What set it apart from other streets in the vicinity was the sudden preponderance of Chinese faces. This was not unusual, especially in Limehouse, but its reality startled Mary nonetheless. Her London, these days, was almost entirely Caucasian, and it was always a jolt to arrive in a place where the people looked like the other half of her.

Towards the middle of the street, she saw a thick knot of dark-haired children intent upon some spectacle. Mary drifted closer and was not entirely surprised to see a slim, young man walking upon his hands, much to the urchins’ delight. “Like so,” he said, without a hint of breathlessness. “Careful, slow, balance. You must control the movement.” With the precision of a lever, his legs folded downwards and his boots touched the muddy road. “If you rush, you will fall.” He straightened up and grinned at his young audience, and then at Mary, standing a few yards behind them. “Now, you practise,” he said to the children, and came towards her. “Cousin,” he said, with another gleaming smile. “It is good to see you.”

Mary beamed back. “I didn’t know you were an acrobat, as well.”

Lang brushed off his hands and Mary noticed for the first time the wooden blocks he had been holding to keep his hands from being caked in mud. “I do not perform for money.”

“Only for children?”

“It keeps them from trouble. And it is good to learn care and control with the body.”

Mary gave him a questioning look.

“Control the body, control the mind.”

She’d never thought of it in quite that way.

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere in particular. For now, at least.”

“May I come with you?”

“Yes. I’d like that.”

Neither of them were dawdlers and they set off at a pleasant clip westwards along Cable Street. This was a deliberate choice for Mary, who wanted to steer him away from George Villas, the site of the newly rebuilt Lascars’ Home. One day, she would show Lang the place where her father had come to deposit his secrets for safekeeping before his journey back to Fujian province. The manager of the home, a frail and dignified Chinese man named Chen, had diligently preserved the cigar box of secrets for over a decade – in fact, until just three years ago, when Mrs Thorold had murdered him and attempted to burn down the home. Mary had been a day too late to reclaim her father’s cigar box from the wreckage, and she still tasted bitterness when she thought of its loss.

“Did you live in this area as a child?” asked Lang.

Mary nodded. “The Chinese in London tend to stay together. As you did,” she added. It was only logical: in a foreign and hostile country, the bonds of language and experience took the place of family.

“Then you left.”

Mary wondered how much of her history to offer. Her instinct was always to remain silent on the subject, but Lang deserved at least the outline. “Not long after my father disappeared, my mother died. I was still a child. I lived on the street, stealing food, picking pockets. I later turned to housebreaking.” She paused, still unwilling, or perhaps unable, to reveal the agony of prison, her criminal trial, the sentence of death that now seemed like a particularly grotesque nightmare. “Some time after that, I was taken to a boarding school in north-west London. St John’s Wood. The women who run it took me in and educated me.”

“You were extremely fortunate.”

“Yes.”

It was clear that Lang wished to ask more. Instead, after a short pause, he said, “Do you still know the house where you lived, with your father and mother?”

Of course she did. She’d gone back to it for months after her mother’s death, standing quietly on the street corner, imagining herself coming home after a day’s play or school. Her mother would be in the garden, her quick needle flashing through silk, or perhaps weeding the vegetable bed. Her father, newly returned from a sea voyage, would be waiting to tell her a story, another instalment in the adventures of a gang of wandering Chinese demi-gods. Mary caught Lang’s eye and managed to speak around the lump in her throat. “This way,” she said. They reversed their steps, walking eastwards again, deeper into Limehouse. It was perhaps a quarter-hour’s walk, and they made the strange pilgrimage in silence.

They picked their way through twisting streets that squeezed ever narrower, their boots squelching deep in a claggy mire no crossing-sweep had ever attempted to clear. The tang of the river was pungent, its noises sharp and clear. Mary wondered if this was at all wise. She’d not been back since she lived at the Academy. Her dramatic rescue and strange rebirth had opened such a different world to her. She’d had difficulty imagining that the old one still stood.

But they rounded yet another corner and there it was, shrunken and shabbier than she had remembered. The houses huddled close together, heads bowed, shoulders hunched. The whole street seemed tinged with grief, although it was impossible to think that the Lang family’s specific disaster mattered more than others. Perhaps it was only the daily tragedy of poverty without hope that Mary saw today. “It was the third house from the left,” she said. The small plot of garden at the front was overgrown and strewn with rubbish; the window was boarded up.

Lang was still and silent for a minute, and then he nodded to Mary. “Thank you.”

She wondered just what he had seen.

Mary and Lang walked in silence for some time. She wondered if Lang might prefer to be elsewhere, but decided that such anxiety was needless: if he wanted to leave her company, he would. Their journey took them westward again. They wound through east London until, quite suddenly, mud and slime became cobblestones and squat wooden tenements gave way to large stone buildings. They were in the City.

Lang’s usual expression was of calm indifference, but now he appeared guarded. He kept his chin tilted down. He hunched slightly, compressing his frame. His gaze flicked about rapidly, as though suspicious of every person whose path they crossed. It was true that they drew an unusual amount of attention, but at least part of that was due to their sartorial contrast: Lang was again dressed like a labourer, in fustian, while she wore the garb of a shabby–genteel lady.

Mary glanced at him sideways. “Would you rather walk elsewhere?”

He shook his head. “I am still unused to seeing so many
gweilo
.”

Mary smiled. “You’re walking with a half-
gweilo
.”

“Gweimei,”
he corrected automatically. “The term for a young woman. And still, I do not understand how you can live amongst them. Do you not miss your people?”

Mary’s mouth twisted. “I’m neither Chinese nor Irish. Certainly not English. In any case, I don’t have a people.”

He thought about that. “The Chinese, as a whole, disapprove of racial mixture. Are the English so different?”

“No,” said Mary. “They have that in common with the Chinese.”

“Then I understand your bitterness.”

“There is no need to pity me. My parents were remarkable people. They must have been, because they saw beyond racial prejudice and loved each other. I am evidence of that.”

Lang accepted the reproof with a small nod.

“And perhaps if you spent more time amongst the English, you might grow accustomed to their faces. They are, after all, no better and no worse than the Chinese.”

“They seem to be very often drunken and violent.”

“And how else do you earn your living?”

A faint smile hovered on Lang’s lips. “True. And that brings me to a question I have been meaning to ask you, cousin. Are you willing to come and see me fight again, this Saturday night?”

“Certainly. But why?”

“Have you noticed that whatever the question, the answer is usually ‘money’?” he asked. “I have a manager whose tasks are to book a boxing ring, to negotiate my payment, to advertise the matches and to ensure that I am paid what is owed. I suspect that he is cheating me: maybe on purpose, or maybe because he is neglectful and lazy. I need to know if this is true.”

“And how could I confirm all those things?”

“I would ask you to start by counting the number of men who come to see the match. I am paid according to their numbers, so that is one simple way to judge if my manager is being honest.”

That was interesting; Mary hadn’t realized that prizefighters also received a share of the admission charge. “Do you also set the door-fee?”

“No; the pub sets it and pays me a portion.”

“So you want to compare my head count with your manager’s.”

“Yes. To start with.”

It was a small, simple favour. He was the only cousin she’d ever known. How could she possibly refuse? “I am happy to help you as best I can,” she said. “But, Cousin, my time is not my own right now. If I am able to come on Saturday, I will certainly be there. If I am not, it is because I have already made a promise to somebody else that cannot be delayed or neglected. I will do everything I can to help at your next match, in that case.”

Lang nodded. “Thank you. That is good of you.”

“We ought to meet before the match so you can point out your manager to me. I will also watch him discreetly to see if he does anything unusual.”

Lang held her gaze for a moment, intrigued. “You sound confident and experienced at this sort of thing.”

“I am.”

“Very well, then. Let us meet at seven o’clock at Leicester Square.”

“If I am not there by ten minutes past the hour, it is because I have been detained by this prior commitment, in which case you must not expect me at all that night.”

Lang nodded and they walked on. After a few minutes’ silence, he pointed to an imposing building, balanced on Grecian columns and adorned with frescoes: a proud island in a sea of chaotic traffic. “Is that a church, or perhaps a palace?”

Mary smiled. “A little of both. It is the Royal Exchange, a centre for trade and commerce.” They stopped by unspoken consent, the better to admire the secular cathedral. It was most impressive: the sort of architecture that demanded confidence in its institution – or perhaps hoped to inspire the sort of unquestioning awe its occupants desired of the world. They watched streams of top-hatted gentlemen flow in and out of the building, alone or in pairs. Mary wondered what sorts of schemes and ventures were being nurtured in their private thoughts, their confidential conversations. And she could not help but ask herself who might gain and who would suffer from the consequences thereof.

She was deep in her dark musings when another pair caught her notice, at the very corner of her eye. They emerged from the building behind them, a wide mass of stone that turned blind eyes to the city: the Bank of England, she realized, an institution that had no need to advertise its presence. Against that bland façade, her attention was snagged because one of the couple was a woman. Or rather, a lady. The gentleman was in his sixties, bearded and top-hatted, a perfect banker in his dull black wool. The lady’s age was more difficult to judge. She wore a deep bonnet, its brim tilted down against the wind, but the set of her mouth and jawline suggested middle age. Sober black silks, upright bearing, a confident step. They were an unremarkable pair, and yet Mary’s attention was arrested.

She watched as the gentleman handed his companion up the steps of a waiting hackney cab. A moment before the driver closed the carriage door, the lady glanced up and addressed a final sentence to the banker. For just a fraction of a moment, her face was visible, and what Mary saw made her catch her breath. The gentleman bowed and remained on the kerb, watching the four-wheeler pull aggressively into the main stream of traffic. Swerving and hollering greeted this sharp manoeuvre, but a moment later the carriage was away, flowing with the steady westward current of the other vehicles.

In that ever-shifting landscape, the only perfectly still figure was of Mary herself, gaping slightly after the cab – or, rather, where it had been. A moment later, she came unfrozen. “I must go,” she said to Lang, already suiting movement to words. There was an insupportable delay in dodging through traffic to the other side of the road so that she could follow the cab.

Lang had watched Mary’s transformation with keen interest. “Shall I come with you?” She was already walking, and he with her. The question seemed purely a courtesy.

“You can’t,” she said, and it was true. A Chinese man made far too memorable a shadow. But there was no need for apology between them; they were close enough to each other’s true selves now, the prizefighter and the spy, the foreigner and the misfit.

“I’ll go, then,” said Lang, turning his steps. He sounded entirely agreeable. “Until Saturday.”

“Until then.”

In the treacly, late-afternoon flow of traffic, it was easy to keep the hackney in sight. It sat high in the snarl of vehicles; there was no possibility of its slipping rapidly away down a side street. Mary’s main concern was to remain unnoticed, and this too was straightforward enough as a pedestrian clad in dark colours. She tacked back and forth in a leisurely fashion, lengthened and shortened the distance between herself and the cab, all without losing sight of the vehicle. It was a slow walk by her usual standards, but about an hour later they drew up to the kerb of a building that made her catch her breath: the British Museum.

Mary thought instantly of Angelica, and their visit earlier in the day. Angelica had suggested it; had even led her there with a sense of confidence. How could such a return be explained by mere coincidence? Yet if it had been by design, what was Angelica’s intention? Was it an obscure warning of some kind? Or a teasing, arrogant sort of provocation? Nothing made sense.

Mary waited, pulse racing, skin prickling, as the cabman climbed down from his bench. She had been so certain, for the last hour. Had even permitted herself a small taste of triumph at having successfully spotted Mrs Thorold in all the chancy hurly-burly of London. As the cabman stretched stiff joints and prepared to unfold the steps, Mary had a moment of anxiety: suppose it wasn’t her at all? It might well be another lady of middle years, intending to poke around the museum for half an hour before going home to family, dinner and conventional obscurity.