Feast of Stephen (2 page)

“Well, there
were points I didn’t think we’d make it to the end of the year, but
merry Christmas, one and all.” Crane headed the large chair near
the fire, kicking over a footstool, and leaving the settle for
Merrick and Saint. Stephen hesitated. He liked to curl up, and was
most comfortable perched on a footstool leaning against Crane’s
legs, but it was a position of far more intimacy than he would
generally allow himself to be seen in by anyone but Crane and
Merrick.

Too bad. Crane
reached out a long arm for his sleeve and dragged him down.
“Hither, page, and sit by me.”

“You’re in the
Yuletide spirit,” Stephen muttered, seating himself. “Isn’t it
‘stand by me’?”

“What is?”
Saint asked.

“Carol,”
Merrick said. “Good King Wenceslas.”

Saint shrugged
awkwardly. Most of the practitioners Crane had met seemed to be
thorough-going pagans; it was one of the few things he liked about
them. Still one ought to have carols at Christmas.

“I’m sure you
know it,” he said, and launched into the first line:

“Good King
Wenceslas looked out, on the feast of Stephen—”

Merrick added
his deep and surprisingly tuneful baritone to Crane’s tenor.

“When the snow
lay round about

Deep and crisp
and even.”

Unexpectedly,
Stephen joined in. Crane had never heard him sing before. He had a
somewhat thin countertenor that didn’t suggest much range, but
Crane was charmed nevertheless.

“Brightly shone
the moon that night

Though the
frost was cruel

When a poor man
came in sight—”

And then Saint,
a sharp and slightly off key soprano on the dramatic end line as
the tune rose and fell:

“Gath’ring
winter fu-u-el.”

They all
laughed, Saint among them, a little red. “I know that bit.”

“Hard not to,”
Crane said. “As for me, I am unlikely to forget that carol as long
as I live. Do you remember—”

“Fuck, yes.”
Merrick stood. “And if you’re telling this story, I’m getting the
bottle.”

Stephen
shifted, just a little, so his shoulder moved from resting against
Crane’s chair to against his leg. “If this is one of your Shanghai
stories, I imagine we’ll need it.”

Crane tipped
his glass to Saint, who looked intrigued. Good. “This was in our
time in China, Miss Saint. China is not a Christian country and we
are not religious men, but still, the expatriates there tended to
celebrate.”

“Any excuse for
a party,” Merrick put in, slinging his arm over the back of the
settle, behind Saint’s head.

“On this
occasion it was very much a party,” Crane said. “Leonora Hart, whom
you met in summer, had eloped with Tom Hart that year. They’d had
to flee Shanghai for a while because her father put a bounty on
Tom’s head, so they hadn’t celebrated the wedding with friends yet.
I was not very much older than you then, and in the throes of an
affair with a mandarin, which is to say a very rich and powerful
man.” He spoke without pause or particular emphasis. Saint fixed
her eyes on her brandy.

“Our party met
the Harts at Moganshan, which is a mountain of quite remarkable
beauty a few days’ journey from Shanghai. December is damned cold
and wet out there, but we had a most luxurious caravan thanks to my
lover. Tom Hart was in funds too, and we camped there for Christmas
in great style. We drank more or less continually, ate superbly.
There were Tom and Leo, Lord Shen and I, Merrick, a Dutch trader
named Hendricks, several Chinese merchants, and half a dozen
dancing girls and boys to add to the cheer.” Merrick had
monopolised two of the dancing girls, who worked as a team. Crane
recalled him having a particularly festive time of it.

“The weather
was very much on our side, by which I mean it stopped raining for
at least two days. We had Christmas day out there, eating quail
roasted over the fire, drinking rice wine. Merrick taught the lute
players to pluck out a couple of carols. Leo taught a dancing boy
to waltz.” They had all waltzed, after a while, he in his mandarin
lover’s confused arms, Merrick first alternating his girls then
just whirling them round together, tripping over their own feet as
they shrieked with merriment, slippers soaked by the damp
grass.

“That was a
hell of a night,” Merrick agreed. “Next morning I woke up early,
went out and sat on the hillside. You could see… I mean, I ain’t
much for looking at views, but you seen nothing till you see China
mountains. Not anything.” He tightened his arm around Saint.

“It was
stunning,” Crane agreed softly. “Mist dropping off the peaks and
rising off the ground, eagles overhead. Air so fresh and clean, it
took away the hangover, almost. I didn’t bother to dress, just
crawled out of the tent huddled under this great fur robe of Lord
Shen’s.” He remembered its weight, slippery on his bare skin, the
warmth as his breath steamed in crisp air, cold mud on his feet.
“Tom Hart was up, and Merrick and I. Everyone else was still
sleeping it off. We stood in the stillness, and I asked Merrick
what day it was, and you said, St Stephen’s Day. And we started
singing, the three of us.
Good King Wenceslas looked out, on the
feast of Stephen
…”

“And then the
mist lifted,” Merrick said, “and there was maybe forty bandits
standing there with guns.”

“Oh my God,”
Stephen said from Crane’s side.

“Quite.” Crane
smiled mirthlessly. “That was a bad moment.”

“Nothing good
about bandits in that part of the world,” Merrick said. “Vicious
bastards, they are, and all the guards, if you could call ’em that,
still passed out.”

“We didn’t
stand a chance. They woke the camp, fairly brutally, started
dividing us up,” Crane said. “The valuable people who could be
ransomed, the awkward characters who would need to be killed, and
the ones they could use. It is not a pleasant fate to be a young
woman in bandit hands.”

“Or a young
man,” Merrick added, as Saint blanched. He indicated Crane with his
glass. “Should have seen him. Pretty as a girl, he was. Course,
that was a while ago now.”

“Whereas you’ve
barely changed, except for the effects of alcohol and low living,”
Crane returned. “But then, if you start by looking like the
southbound end of a northbound horse—”

“Shut up!”
Saint said, to Crane’s satisfaction. “I mean, sorry, my—your
lordship, whatever, but I want to know what
happened
.”

“Well, they
dragged everyone out from the tents. There was a great deal of
threatening and waving of weaponry, and Hendricks, the merchant,
panicked.”

Merrick exhaled
through his teeth. “Didn’t he just. Went down on his knees and gave
it up like he was paid for it. Told them Cha Li-Lin was poor as a
church mouse for all his finery so not to bother ransoming him, and
Mr Galt would get back every penny they took in skin so they’d be
better off killing him now, but that Mrs Galt’s father would give
good money to have her back—”

“It took two
bandits to get her off him,” Crane said reminiscently. “I’ve never
heard such language.”

“And
then
the stupid prick blurts out the one thing we’re all
praying he won’t, which is, hey, that bloke over there is Lord
Shen, the boss man of the Shanghai secret police. And that chucks
the cat among the pigeons and no mistake, because Lord Shen’s put a
lot of heads on stakes in his time—”

“Whoa, whoa,
stop,” Stephen said from Crane’s side. “Didn’t you say Lord Shen
was your, uh, your—?”

“Lover. That’s
right.”

Stephen
spluttered. “But you were a smuggler!”

“We was, yeah,”
Merrick said. “But what you have to remember, sir is, smuggler or
no smuggler, his lordship here is a fucking arsehole and always has
been. Lord Shen.” He shook his head despairingly. “Not the
stupidest thing you ever did, what with the warlord and all, but
not far off it, either.”

“Lovely eyes,”
Crane said soulfully.

“Lovely way
with an execution order,” Merrick returned. “You like ’em
dangerous, that’s your trouble. If they ain’t leaving a trail of
dead, you ain’t interested. No offence, Mr. Day.”

“So where we
are,” Crane went on, while Stephen was momentarily speechless, “is
on a mountainside, days from any law, grossly outnumbered, with one
of the most hated officials in the whole province identified as
part of our party, the bandit chief enumerating the many and varied
tortures he could expect, of which crucifixion would be merely a
highlight…and then that shitweasel Hendricks felt it needful to
throw in that I was Shen’s foreign devil lover.”

“Dutch fucker,”
Merrick growled.

“Quite. ‘Start
with him, show Shen what will happen,’ the bandit chief said, and a
couple of them grabbed me and pulled off the furs and shoved me
onto the ground—”

Stephen was
rigid by his side. Saint had her hand to her mouth.

“Now,” Crane
said. “I don’t know if you know, Miss Saint, but I have a fairly
sizeable tattoo on my back. A magpie.” Stephen and Saint made
noises of strong protest at the digression. Crane grinned. “Merrick
and I had both had tattoos, my magpie and his elephant and castle,
imposed on us as…it’s a long story. A reward, or apology, or both,
from the Dragon Head, or grand master, of one of the larger
criminal organisations in China after we accidentally saved his
son’s life.”

“Accidentally?”

“It’s a
very
long story. The point is that the tattoos were done by
Dragon Head’s personal tattooist, and their origin was unmistakable
to anyone who knew of the Three Tiger Claw society. At the time, I
just regarded them as an unwanted and extremely painful gift. But
in fact, what Dragon Head had done was to mark us with his name. So
when the bandits kicked me to the ground with the intention of
rapine and murder, what they saw was the brand of a man so powerful
and deadly that half a dozen of them actually dropped to their
knees there and then, and the bandit chief was left
speechless.”

“Fucking
confusing, that was,” Merrick said. “One minute they’re yelling all
this stuff they’re going to do to him, then dead silence, then a
bunch of ’em start kowtowing, and the boss looks like he’s about to
have an apoplexy. He says, where’d you get that tattoo? Vaudrey
says it was off Dragon Head of the Three Tiger Claw, and I swear to
God one of the bandit blokes starts crying.”

“I think
several of us felt like that,” Crane murmured.

“They don’t
know what to do. Some of ’em are like, what if we just kill
everyone and pretend this never happened. Some of ’em are backing
away, like, we can’t cross the Three Tiger Claw—”

“And Tom Hart
stepped forward and began to laugh like the Spirit of Christmas
Past,” Crane said. “Great jolly booming laugh, echoing off the
rocks. And he shouted, ‘Friends! Now we are friends here! Come,
share our drink and celebrate our feast!’”

“…he offered
them drink?” Stephen echoed.

“Yeah, well, I
wouldn’t’ve either,” Merrick said. “But Mr Hart knew his stuff.
Their boss didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t just take his men
and bugger off without losing face, but he knew if he killed
magpie-boy here he was probably dead. He was stuck, and Mr Hart was
showing him a way out. So, he says all that, Vaudrey picks himself
up, arse naked and covered in mud—” Saint spluttered into her
brandy “—goes over, pours drinks all ceremonial like it’s the
Emperor’s court, and hands the chief a cup.” He shook his head,
grinning at Crane. “Give you credit, my lord, you’ve got
balls.”

“Given how cold
it was—” Crane began, with feeling. Stephen made a noise of strong
objection. Saint cackled.

“So my lord
here and Mr Hart toast the bugger, with sixty people stood there
wondering if we’re all going to die,” Merrick went on. “Chief looks
at them, looks at the drink, looks around. Total silence. Then he
takes a deep breath, and roars out, ‘Welcome to our mountain,
friends!’ And then we sit on this bastard stretch of rock all
morning, getting blind drunk with a mob of bandits.”

“They wanted to
know what feast it was and how we celebrated, so we taught them
Good King Wenceslas,” Crane said. “Sang it till it echoed round the
mountain and we were all best friends. We drank everything we had,
and then they brought out their own home-distilled plum
spirit.”

“Don’t bloody
remind me,” Merrick said. “We drank some shit in our time, but
that—”

“My head still
hurts in bad weather.”

“Merry fucking
Christmas. Year after that, we went to the seaside.”

“Cor. What
about the Dutch geezer?” Saint asked. “The one who grassed you
up?”

“We felt
obliged to take him out of bandit country. Leo and Lord Shen gave
him a kicking in the back of the caravan, and then we dumped him a
hundred miles from Shanghai and told him he could walk home.” Crane
frowned. “Actually, now I think of it…
did
he ever come
back?”

Merrick
shrugged. “No idea.”

“Cor.” Saint
was curled on the sofa now, leaning into Merrick’s side, eyes
bright. “So what was the story about the tattoo, then?”

“Uh-uh,” Crane
said. “Your turn first.”

“My turn?”

“Christmastide
by the fire. It’s a time for storytelling, and I’m sure you can cap
that tale, one way or another.” Crane saluted her with his brandy
glass and the smile that had got him out of almost as much trouble
as it had got him into. “Let’s hear it, Miss Saint.”

Saint’s chin
went up. She glanced at Merrick, then at Stephen. “All right then,
your highness. Hey, Mr. D, you remember that business on North
Audley Street?”

Merrick’s evil
grin and Stephen’s appalled expression suggested that Saint was
bringing out the big guns. Crane settled back in his chair and
gestured for the bottle. “Go on. I’m all ears.”