My Beautiful Enemy (15 page)

“Put down your sword!” the bandit demanded. He was the one who had lost some distant ancestors.

He didn’t shoot. Why didn’t he shoot?

“Drop the sword or I’ll shoot!”

He didn’t want her dead. He only wanted her helpless at her own butchering. Sweat was dripping down the back of her neck, cold and clammy. Slowly she opened her left hand and let drop her scabbard.

“The sword.”

She lifted her sword, bringing it across the front of her body. Could she do it? Could she be that quick? Her left hand darted up the sleeve of her right arm, yanked out the knife sheathed in her vambrace, and hurled it at him.

The bandit ducked, then aimed at her again.

She threw herself down and rolled away. A shot exploded, echoing in the valley. It missed her by a hair.

Machetes came at her, forcing her to stand up and fight. Between ducking and parrying, she looked back at the bandit with the rifle. He had the rifle between his thighs, busy doing something to it.

With a few wild swings, she forced back those attacking her and rushed past them. If she could stop the rifle from being reloaded, then perhaps she might be safe from it.

But she wasn’t fast enough. He set the rifle against his shoulder and fired. She swerved—and screamed as her upper right arm burned, a streak of agony.

Another shot rang out. Something scalded just above her ear, ripping off a long strip of scalp. Too stunned to scream this time, she slapped a palm to the side of her head. Her hand came away bright red, slick with blood.

The machetes came again. The broadswords, too. She parried, dimly surprised that she was still capable of motion and reaction. But the air had become thicker, viscous. Her arm felt as if it were parting water. She had barely pushed back one machete when another one was at her throat.

A bandit kicked her in the back. She stumbled. A blade slanted down, a harsh glare in the sun. She met it with her own blade. Her arm hurt as if she had cleaved into a mountainside.

The air behind her sizzled. She sprang forward. But not far enough. An angry welt of pain clawed into her lower back. A lacerating pain in her thigh. She fell to her knees. Before she could get up, someone kicked her in the head.

As she collapsed, another shot blasted.

Blackness came over her.

England

1891

T
he fog was a pea-souper.

The first time Catherine had heard the term from Master Gordon, it had befuddled her. Soup, to her, meant a base of clear broth—therefore, transparency. He’d had to explain that certain European soups contained ingredients that had been pureed, resulting in something that was almost a slurry.

This slurry of a fog, the color and density of phosphorous smoke, but cold and damp, with a smell at once industrial and faintly rotted, had dismayed her when it had first spread. But now she was glad of its all-obscuring powers: It enabled her to stand outside a house and fiddle with the lock of its front door without fearing detection.

Well, she couldn’t be completely careless: There was a night guard on duty—she’d heard his movement from outside the service door that led to the basement. But as long as she was reasonably quiet, the guard’s tea drinking and newspaper rattling, plus the muffled grinding of carriages that rolled by unseen, would be enough to mask any sounds she made with her lock picks.

She stopped: Footsteps approached, those of someone ungainly and possibly drunk. The vague outline of a man, smelling heavily of gin, tottered toward her. She flattened herself against the door and waited until he and his personal fog of liquor had disappeared again into the murkiness of the pea-souper.

She had not sat around for Mrs. Reynolds to find her copy of the guide to the British Museum’s exhibits. As soon as she was sure Leighton Atwood had truly left, she had gone to the museum to buy her own copy. The fog had been an unpleasant medium for moving through, but not an impossible one, and, to her at least, preferable to a Peking dust storm.

The guide, purchased at a cost of sixpence, produced the address of a house on Victoria Street that held a significant store of oriental artifacts. Now if she could only persuade this stubborn lock to cooperate.

She gritted her teeth. It wasn’t the lock, it was her: She was too agitated for the delicate and precise work of lock picking. For eight years she’d been filled with remorse, certain in the belief that she had killed the man she loved. But now, with her initial and overwhelming relief behind her, anger surged again in her heart.

He had taken everything, everything she’d had to give, and left her to face all the consequences alone.

When the lock yielded at last, she listened at the door for a full minute before slipping inside. It had been dark outside, but there had still been a stray particle or two of light from the street lamps. Inside the house, with the shutters drawn, the blackness was almost absolute.

She gave her eyes some time to adjust as she listened for the night guard. The latter seemed content to remain in the basement. She moved about slowly and quietly, mapping out the room in her head. Thankfully, the furnishings were sparse: a desk with a chair behind it, an additional trio of chairs by the windows, and a plant stand in a corner.

An antechamber of some sort, then. Two doors led out
from the antechamber, both locked. One seemed to have no particular features; the other bore a plaque. Her fingers, tracing over the letters of the plaque, told her that it was the office of a keeper of the British Museum by the name of G. Baker.

It seemed reasonable to assume that the accession catalogues would be found inside the keeper’s office. This lock gave much faster, and when she had closed herself inside the office, she finally dared to light the tiny lantern she had brought.

Mr. Baker’s shelves were indeed full of records. She pulled out one marked
Victoria Street Accession Catalogue 1877.
That year marked the last time she had seen the jade tablet in Master Gordon’s possession and the earliest it could have made its way to the museum.

Each entry in the catalogue recorded the date an object was received at the Victoria Street storage site, the catalogue number of the object, its description, the name of the donor, the person responsible for its reception, its current location, and, if applicable, the date it left Victoria Street for either some other off-site location or the British Museum itself.

Tonight itself she could find out the jade tablet’s exact whereabouts. Tonight itself she could look upon it and be transported back to the sweetest hours of her childhood.

The 1877 volume did not yield what she sought. She moved on to that for 1878. In the middle of a seemingly endless run of records on Japanese sword guards, she heard the night guard’s footsteps. She extinguished the lantern and slid behind the table. But he did not come into the antechamber or the keeper’s office, presumably since they didn’t have anything worth stealing.

When he retreated back to the basement, she went on with her task. 1879. 1880. And there it was, an entry in 1881, the transfer to Victoria Street of an item that had been accessioned into the British Museum in 1880.
Dancing Devi
, read the description,
white jade bas-relief carving, circa 900 A.D. Buddhist motifs with quotes in Chinese from the
Heart Sutra.

The donor was none other than one Mrs. Robert Delany of San Francisco.

Catherine didn’t know how she managed to go through all the remaining entries in all the remaining catalogues. But she did, methodically—she would feel terrifically stupid if both the jade tablets she sought were here and she missed that fact by being too impatient.

Alas, the other jade tablet did not seem to have been donated to the British Museum. Nor were there any other items attributed to the generosity of Mrs. Robert Delany. Catherine set all the catalogues back in their original places, extinguished her lantern, and left Mr. Baker’s office.

The lock of the other door leading out of the antechamber did not prove difficult to pick. She entered the dark corridor beyond and immediately located the door at the far end that led down to the basement, by the light coming from beneath. The other doors had small plaques beside them on the wall, and it was easy enough for her fingers to run over the letters and inform her that only rooms A–F were on this floor.

Up a flight of stairs and she immediately encountered room H. Unfortunately its lock proved stubborn. She was still on the last, elusive pin when the night guard began making his next round. She grimaced, trying to concentrate, trying not to let his footsteps distract her from her task.

The pin tumbled into place only as the guard started up the stairs. She hurried inside and locked the door behind herself. The room was full of dark, hulking outlines of laden shelves. She could discern no ceiling beam for her to get up on, and the door was too close to the wall to stand behind. But the shelves did start ten inches from the floor—to protect the artifacts on the lowest shelves from water damage, perhaps?

The guard, humming to himself, had his key in the door. She slid under a shelf and made herself as small as possible. The key turned; the door opened. The guard, still humming
tunelessly, shone the light of his lantern into the space between the shelves.

He approached the shelf Catherine was hiding under. She grimaced. It would be easy enough for her to temporarily overpower him. But at some point he would still come to and still have things to report to the police.

The man’s feet were now directly before her. She forced herself to breath slowly and with no sounds whatsoever. Now his knees were on the ground. She flexed her fingers. As soon as his head leaned down to look . . .

But he rose and left. Catherine clamped a hand over her heart, straining her ears to make sure that his footsteps receded all the way downstairs before slipping out and lighting her lantern.

A note had been left on the shelf she had been hiding under—the reason the bored guard had come close for a look:
Contents of Shelf J, Rung 5 to be delivered to Bloomsbury on Thursday.

The jade tablet was on Shelf J, Rung 5. It was Tuesday; she was just in time.

She was almost afraid to open the box that contained item 1880.18.06.05. But when she did, when she had pulled aside the protective tissue paper, nestled inside was the exact object she sought. At its center was a goddess, her eyes half closed in joy, her pliant back arched, and the ribbons on her flowing robe dancing all about her, as if lifted by a gentle breath. To her left and right were the famous words of the
Heart Sutra. Form is no other than emptiness; emptiness is no other than form. Form is exactly emptiness; emptiness exactly form.

Tears welled in Catherine’s eyes.

At long, long last.

L
eighton was half convinced that he still reeked of gin, though he’d bathed twice and changed into new clothes. But clerk at the Victoria Street house, the one that held a large portion of the British Museum’s oriental
collection, did not seem to find anything amiss with him. “May I help you, sir?”

“I would like to see an item in your keeping,” said Leighton, handing over his calling card and a slip of paper with the jade tablet’s accession number.

The clerk rose. “One moment, if you would, sir.”

He disappeared into the museum keeper’s office, and a minute later, Mr. Baker, a slight, balding man, emerged. He took a look at Leighton and handed the slip of paper back to the clerk. “Have Mr. Broadbent retrieve the item, Mr. Harris.”

The clerk named Harris nodded and left.

“May I inquire as to your specific interest in this piece, sir?” asked Mr. Baker.

“It belonged to a friend of mine. I promised him I would keep an eye on it.”

“Yes, of course.”

Was Leighton imagining things or could he still detect the faintest trace of Miss Blade’s incense in the air? The scent of incense that clung to her was how he had known, despite the fog that obscured everything, that it had been her standing outside the house last night.

The location housed thousands and thousands of interesting and beautiful objects. He had no evidence that it was the jade tablet she wanted. But they had spoken of it in Chinese Turkestan, and she had known that it was rumored to be a clue to the whereabouts of a legendary treasure.

Leighton and Mr. Baker had barely made a dent in their discussion on the weather when Harris returned with a box. Mr. Baker checked the accession number against the one marked on the box, set the box down on the clerk’s table, opened it, and gestured for Leighton to take a look.

With gloved hands, Leighton lifted the jade tablet out of its container. The carving of the goddess was familiar enough; the weight and texture of the white jade was also correct.

For a moment he could not tell whether the prickly sensation
in his rib cage was relief or disappointment. But of course it was a crushing disappointment, because he wanted to see the hand of fate at work. He wanted to know that even if she had not met Mrs. Reynolds and Mrs. Chase in Bombay, what she sought on this trip would still have eventually led her to him.