Shadow Conspiracy (38 page)

“Oh, look! Souvenirs!” Exotically dressed Chinese attendants were coming forward with wide baskets. Eager hands reached for the gifts.

“For free? Huh.” Mr. Bucket snagged one for his companion. “A paper toy. What’s that in aid of, I wonder—they could easily charge halfpence.”

“It’s cute! Look, the little stick makes it stand up!” A bamboo skewer served as a handle, to support a red and black paper copy of the steam-powered giant dragon.

“Come along then, let’s get closer.” They edged forward through the crowd. Bucket had brought a pair of gilt opera glasses, through which he pretended to examine the gears and wooden joints of the construction towering above him. The wooden neck alone was as thick as a man’s body, and the bamboo torso the size of a railway car. Overlapping slabs of bamboo plated the neck which tapered away into yards of sinuous wooden tail. “Now, Mrs. S., ears sharp. What’s that johnny saying? He’s no coolie. From his robe, he’s a magician, right?”

“Yes, that’s what the tassels on his cap mean. Three gold ones mean he’s a wizard at the Imperial Court.” Grace gazed fixedly at the Chinese stokers shovelling coal into the furnace that heated the dragon’s boiler. “He says English people are very quiet. So true! In Nanjing the cacophony would be immense.”

“Don’t waste energy on commentary, Mrs. S.,” Mr. Bucket reproved her. “Quick–-what’s his pal saying?”

Ruffled, Grace said, “He’s agreeing, that’s all. Says Englishmen are like zombies.”

The glasses slipped from Bucket’s plump upraised hand, rescued from disaster only by the cord around his wrist. “You’re sure of that?”

“My Mandarin is excellent, Inspector.”

“Now don’t you take my manner wrong, Mrs. S.,” Mr. Bucket said. “You’re doing the British Empire a vital service here...Is that the Princess?”

“Lady Mei,” Grace corrected him. “She’s not really a princess. She’s the grand-daughter of the last Emperor and a concubine.” Along with everyone else they gaped at the splendid figure clad in green silk within the gold sedan chair. Carried in full panoply through the Exposition, the exotic lady drew even more crowds to view the dragon. Half the rag-tag and bobtail of London seemed to be following her, all the poorer people who had bought the cheap end-of-season tickets into the Exposition. The servants filtered through the press, distributing paper dragons hand over fist.

The foreman in charge of the stokers shouted in Chinese, “Back, all of you! He’s going to go!”

Suddenly the Chinese were in retreat, scurrying past them. Grace grabbed Mr. Bucket’s tweed arm. “Inspector, let us step back. I think there are problems with the boiler.”

“The way they were stoking it, the pressure must be terrible. Look nonchalant, now. Talk to me about your husband’s mission work.”

“Our plan is to start a school in Nanjing—” Grace felt the tug on her skirt instantly. A lady has to be aware of her surroundings—in addition to pickpockets and purse-snatchers there were always unsavoury men who tried to get too close to women in public. And then even a street-length skirt was always getting caught in things or picking up dirt. Pulling surreptitiously with one hand had no effect. She shot a quick glance back. “Oh, sweet Jesus!”

An enormous brass-tipped claw had speared down, pinning the flounce of her skirt to the earth. Hot humid steam puffed around her, and a huge hissing voice huffed in Chinese, “Little foreign-devil lady. You understand me. Do you not?”

Grace gaped up at the tremendous bamboo head, big as her own body, swaying above her. The red eyes, which she had taken for panes of tinted mica, were lit not with flame but with life. White steam shot from the carven nostrils. “You’re alive!” she blurted in Mandarin.

“Behold me, the new Prometheus,” the dragon hissed, low. “It’s a poor magic that can only reanimate dead flesh, eh?”

“By Jove, the clockwork’s amazing clever.” Mr. Bucket, trapped in monolingual ignorance, let go her arm and stepped back to stare upward.

With another huge hiss of steam the dragon lumbered forward. Suddenly Grace was divided from the Inspector and the rest of the crowd by the coil of an enormous hot bamboo tail. It occurred to her that if the dragon encircled her completely, she would boil like a Christmas pudding. “Inspector!” she called in English, before he was shoved out of hearing. “It talks!”

Mr. Bucket cast a sharp glance up at the dragon, which winked a glowing red orb at him. As he vanished from view Grace saw Bucket’s eyes bug out with astonishment.

The bearers set the sedan chair down and the lady within took effortless charge. “You say she speaks properly, Lung? In this barbarous land—amazing! Who are you, woman? What do you seek here? Let her go, Lung.”

Slowly the enormous claw pulled up and away, and the hot humid bamboo coil widened its compass. Drawing a grateful breath of cooler air, Grace no longer felt like a dumpling in a bamboo steamer. “Thank you,” she said in Mandarin, and twitched her skirt free. A good Christian woman told the truth—Mr. Bucket surely knew she could not lie. “My parents are Presbyterian missionaries, and I have lived fifteen years in Nanjing. There were rumours of Chinese magic at the Exposition, and I see they are fully true!”

“They do not believe, these English,” the Chinese wizard said to his mistress. “Their own New Prometheus was hushed up, and there are no magicians among their common folk. Either the peasantry here are lazy, or fools. It’s taking them too long. We should have concentrated our efforts in India.”

Surely this beast was what Scotland Yard had sent Grace to find. “You need not think that Britain is going to stand by while magically animated monsters invade!”

Lady Mei giggled, and Grace saw that under the brocade and headdress she was very young, perhaps sixteen years old. From the height her chair lent her Lady Mei reached over and patted the hot bamboo neck with a tiny pale hand. “Lung here? He’s nothing but a worm-boy, my favourite bug.”

“More,” the dragon muttered very softly, huffing steam between each syllable. “More. Feed me, slaves!” The sweating stokers leaped to the work again.

Grace kept in mind Mr. Bucket’s earlier musings. “Then what is it for?”

“Why, for this.” Imperious but girlish, Lady Mei flicked her fan around. “To attract many English people.” She snapped her fingers. “More paper dragons! I want every one of the foreigners to have one. And let some tea be brought, and my maid, to mend our guest’s garment.”

Servants hurried out with more overflowing baskets. A wooden stool was set for Grace, and traditional handle-less porcelain tea cups were offered. A young maid with needle and thread knelt shyly by her seat to cobble together the hole in her flounce. It all seemed quite hospitable and innocuous; no English host could do better. Constitutionally inclined to believe the best of everybody, Grace took a careful sip of the hot tea.

“I know what to do,” Lady Mei declared. “They have eyes but they don’t see. Tell this one the story—the one about the water.”

The wizard stared at his mistress, pondering, and then nodded. To Grace he said, “Were you in Nanjing during the last war?”

“The Opium War? No, I was at school here in Britain.”

The wizard smiled at her with an unpleasant glint of teeth. “Perhaps you will be there for the next one. Or the one after that. The end of the 19
^th
century in China will be full of incident.”

“Don’t frighten her, wizard,” Lady Mei said. “Scaring British people makes them angry. These big scary magics, like Lung here, do not win wars.”

“Better to be like water, seeping through the earth, penetrating everywhere but impossible to grasp.” The wizard glared at Grace as if it were her fault. “Some small simple magic. Perhaps like the one in the children’s story—it is in your books. The one about the spell that turns bullets aside.”

“I have heard that fairy tale,” Grace said uneasily. “If it were true it would be destructive for all empires, everywhere.” Soldiers and armies kept the world in order; without the suasion of guns, how would governments stay in power, or kings on their thrones?

“I don’t care.” Lady Mei shrugged a green silk shoulder. “Another Opium War will destroy us. In a hundred years there will be no more Chinese Empire. It would be only fair, if there were no British Empire either. Look, here the fat one comes back again.” To the stokers she added, “Give over!”

“Mrs. S.!” Mr. Bucket came pushing through the throng, a short plump figure with a couple of tall bobbies in his wake. “Mrs. S., you’re safe now!”

In justice Grace felt she had to say, “Inspector, nothing bad has happened to me.”

“Tea,” the Chinese wizard said in tinny English, bowing to Mr. Bucket. “The maid, to mend accidental damage.”

“Unauthorized magic use within a Royal Park,” Bucket retorted. “A dangerous magical animal on the rampage.”

“Would it were so,” the wizard said with another bow. “Our dragon is difficult to maintain.”

And indeed, with the stokers at rest, the bamboo dragon sagged. Joint by steamy wooden joint it drooped down to earth, groaning and creaking. Coolies with iron rods supported its descent to prevent breakage. The vapour from the wooden nostrils thinned and died out.

The Exposition mob all around shouted in disappointment. “Get ‘im fixed!” “Pretty poor show, chinks!” It came to Grace that they were hugely outnumbered by commoners and the labouring class. The entire point of the Exposition was to entertain and distract a restive populace; poverty, stoked by petty disappointment and the hot August weather, could be as explosive as steam.

“More paper dragons,” Lady Mei ordered in Chinese. She smiled at the mob, apparently feeling no fear.

“False alarm,” one bobby said, inspecting the brass gears. “Sadly taken in!” And the larger one accepted a paper dragon as he murmured in reply, “Well, old Bucket is getting on in years.”

Grace jumped to her feet, to distract Mr. Bucket from that last hurtful remark. “I am so glad you came back, Inspector. I long to tour the rest of the Pavilion! Great lady, thank you for your kindness and hospitality.”

Their eyes were now nearly on a level. Lady Mei eyed her thoughtfully, while the little maid took her teacup. “The British are enemies,” she said, “but I do not believe missionaries are enemies.”

“You went to a mission school,” Grace deduced. A minor Imperial scion could do that, and Lady Mei had quoted Jeremiah. In return she admitted, “Well—I do not feel that the last war was a Christian one.”

“Indeed!” The two women stared, silently acknowledging that in some other time and place they might have been friends. “If ever you have a daughter,” Lady Mei said at last, “name her Pearl.”

“A beautiful name,” Grace said. Hermanus had already declared that their first daughter was to be named Caroline, after his mother. “Farewell!”

The bobbies went ahead, but Inspector Bucket tucked her arm through his. “You became mighty cosy, Mrs. S. What in thunder did they blab to you?”

“I’m not sure,” Grace confessed. “I think we were talking about children’s stories.” She repeated as best she could the gist of everything. “They can’t be trying to warn us. Why warn someone you plan to fight another war with?”

“And if it’s a warning, then why tell you? Why not deliver the threat through official diplomatic channels?” Mr. Bucket rubbed his chin with a fat finger. “Something cunning’s going on—those Chinese are always at it. The stories I could tell you! I’m sorry we can’t stay and see more of the Exhibition. There’s a quick way, right here in town, to find out about those children’s stories. We’ll go and consult the Steam Catalogue, that Lady Ada Lovelace invented. I’ll see you safe to the Presbyterian Mission after.” Under his guidance they made their way speedily to the cab stand at the edge of the park.

As one of the bobbies opened the door of a hansom for her Grace said, “Inspector, I told her that Britain was wrong to fight the war in China. I hope that wasn’t treasonous.”

A Chinese servant thrust yet another paper dragon at him, and Bucket stuffed it absently into his tweed pocket. “Right or wrong, the Opium War is over and done with, water under the bridge. Come along then, up you go.”

Obediently she climbed up into the hansom. The larger bobby and Mr. Bucket followed, sitting across from her. He slammed the door shut and tapped on the roof. Immediately the vehicle lurched into motion.

“Pardon me, ma’am.” The bobby, majestically broad in the shoulders, seemed to fill the hansom like a mountain. “Is this yours?”

“Oh dear, I must have trodden on it.” She took the paper dragon from him and smoothed it flat. Perhaps it could be refolded into shape? Then she peered more closely at the crudely printed red and black pattern. That was not a design of scales—it was English letters, oddly drawn as if with a brush, but easily readable. “An Infallible Spell,” she read aloud slowly, “To Make Him That Work It Invulnerable to Weapons.”

“Good lord!” Mr. Bucket’s round commonplace countenance suddenly seemed suety, slick with more than the summer heat. “You’re translating from the Chinese?” He took out his own dragon and flattened it.

“No, look at yours—it’s all in English.” She turned the paper over. The spell was closely printed on the underside in black. “The Exhibition opened in May—”

“And now it’s August.” They stared all three at each other in dawning horror. Thousands upon thousands of these paper dragons must have been distributed, water trickling unstoppably throughout England. No wonder there were rumours of perilous magic at Regents Park!