My Beautiful Enemy (25 page)

She resumed walking. “My task is my own concern.”

He glanced at her and said nothing. Outside Hyde Park Corner he stopped. “I take my leave of you, Miss Blade. Do please let me know if you need anything.”

She snorted. “And then what? You will drop everything and come to my aid?”

He bowed. “I will do what I can.”

A
s it turned out, Mrs. Reynolds took Annabel’s invitation to Miss Blade quite seriously. And when the latter protested that she did not have a ball gown suitable for the occasion, Mrs. Reynolds booked an appointment with her modiste to alter a ball gown of her own to fit Miss Blade.

This development pleased neither Annabel nor Mrs. Chase, but did give Leighton an opening: a time when he could be certain that Miss Blade would be out of her flat. He bypassed the landlady—no place that purported to provide respectable lodging for ladies would easily allow a man past the front door. Instead he knocked on the service door and greased the palm of a maid who was all too happy to look the other way.

Before Miss Blade’s flat he first knocked. When no answer came, he picked the lock and let himself in.

On one side of the vestibule was a console table with slender, curved legs supporting a pot of orchids; on the other side,
a coat tree and the umbrella stand that had borne the brunt of her anger when he’d last called. He stood before the curtain for a moment, sliding his palm along a few strands of cool, heavy beads, imagining her doing the same thing—and had to remind himself that it could not possibly be the same curtain she had spoken of, because that one had been cut up and used for her training.

The furniture in the parlor, four straight-backed chairs and a square tea table, had no upholstery or any hollow place to hide a secret cache. The fireplace did not have bricks that had been pried loose or shelves inside the flue where items could be concealed. Nor did the artwork she had hung mask any openings that had been cut into the walls.

He gazed around at the room. Had he made a different decision that long-ago morning in Chinese Turkestan, had he brought her back to India with him, would their home have looked like this, spare to the point of austerity? Or would the more high-spirited girl of yesteryear have settled on a more exuberant style?

More than once he’d dreamed of coming back to his quarters at the British garrison to find that it resembled exactly the interior of the Kashgar brothel, with her, in her dirty Kazakh tunic, lolling upon a sea of brilliantly colored pillows, grinning cheekily at him. In the dream he’d been completely flustered. Did she not know that his superiors were coming to dinner that night? They needed to present a respectable front for at least a few hours.

Bah, the dream-girl had waved a nonchalant hand. That most English of dinners—a boiled leg of lamb—had already been prepared. She would change in plenty of time to a prim-and-proper dress. And his superiors would enjoy dining in a slightly different set of surroundings for a change. Now, had he ever wondered what they would have done at the brothel if she had not left so precipitously?

He dreamed of her often, but this was the only dream in
which she’d come to India with him. He had loved it—if one could love something that broke the heart every time—for the glimpse of what could have been: a life with her.

Her mantel clock chimed the quarter hour. He shook his head and moved on.

The pantry had some baked goods, some tins, her supply of tea and chrysanthemum blossoms, a few bowls, a few spoons, and two pairs of chopsticks. If she cooked, there was no evidence of it.

He still remembered the savor of her fish stew—the broth, almost white, was one of the most delicious things he had ever tasted—and his astonishment that a woman deadly with a sword could be equally adept with a kitchen knife.

Her bedroom was almost as spare as her parlor. No mattress on the bed, only a few blankets acting as padding on the planks—almost as hard as sleeping on the floor.

On the wall opposite the bed were three paintings, colored ink on absorbent paper, which had been mounted on heavy silk. All three had for their subject the same lovely young woman: She fished from a dainty pavilion, read at a stone table by a peach tree in blossom, and stood on a garden path, her delicate, wistful face upturned to a rain of flower petals.

For a moment he wondered whether the young woman wasn’t Miss Blade, until he remembered her mother.

You could look upon her all day long and there would not be a moment when she was less than perfect.

Sometimes events of a week ago were already blurred in his memory. But her, sitting on a pair of saddles in their cave, telling him about her beautiful but helpless mother—that was etched upon his mind.

He turned away and opened the wardrobe. On the lower levels were her clothes, in neatly folded stacks and containing no particular secrets. On the highest level were four vertical plaques, black with intaglio characters that had been painted with golden ink.

He could guess what those were: spirit plaques, dedicated to ancestors and other loved ones who had departed this realm of existence. One for her mother, one for the nanny who had been her master in martial arts, and a third for her great friend who had loved Darjeeling tea. But who was the fourth person?

Him?

The sensation in his heart was bittersweet.

He moved on to her trunk, which acted as something of a low table. He carefully removed the toiletries on top, arranging them on the floor in the same way as they had been on the trunk, before picking the lock of the trunk. There was also a single strand of hair wound around the opening, which he untangled and set aside.

Inside there were clothes meant for a night burglar, some Chinese garments, finely embroidered and smelling faintly of jasmine, and another spirit plaque—
this
one probably his, now no longer needed as he had proved himself still alive. Whose was the other one, then?

At the bottom of the trunk lay her sword, exactly as he remembered it. The cross guard, with its fish-scale pattern. The scabbard, plain except for a bas-relief carving of a branch of plum blossom, the golden ink that had once been painted on the petals worn off long ago, before he’d even met her, except in the deepest nooks and crannies. And, of course, the black tassels that dangled from the pommel of the sword, with the one missing strand that she had cut off and given to him, the strand with its decorative jade bead that was locked out of sight in the safest, most secret location that was still wholly his.

The sword had not changed, only everything else.

He took rubbings of all the spirit plaques, stowed the rubbings in an inside pocket of his coat, then restored the bedroom to the way it had been when he first stepped inside. It would seem he had checked everything in the flat, but the object of his search remained unseen.

He had not come for the jade tablet she had taken from the
house on Victoria Street, which he would wager was on her person, rather than in the flat—it was too important to be left behind in an unsecured location, with the Centipede on the prowl.

Instead his goal was something he had only inferred to exist: a second counterfeit copy, exactly like the one she used to swap out item 1880.18.06.05. It made sense for her to have brought two such copies, since she needed to steal two originals. And it also made sense that she would not cart around the copy with her all the time.

Ah, of course. The orchid in the vestibule: The pot was of a rectangular shape, perfect for the concealment of something like that. He walked back into the vestibule and, very carefully, felt inside the orchid pot. There it was, near the very bottom, a flat, hard package wrapped in paper.

He had brought a copy of the
Times
with him—one never knew when it might come in handy. Now he spread the paper open on the floor—to catch any smudge of soil—and set the entire pot of orchids on the newspaper before attempting to lift the package out.

Inside the paper wrapping was a silk pouch, and then another, and only then the imitation jade tablet, counterfeit but beautifully pristine. He took rubbings of all the sides, and made sure to do each edge three times.

When he had replaced everything, and was tipping the small smattering of dirt on the newspaper back into the orchid pot, he heard voices one floor down—an exchange of neighborly greetings—and one of the voices belonged to her.

The flat was too high up for him to leap out from a window. He could climb to the roof, but he could not be confident that he could leave the roof before she caught up with him. And in any case, she was now close enough to hear the movement of the bead curtain.

He passed through the bead curtain again, sat down in the parlor, and opened the
Times
to a piece on the latest parliamentary debates.

The door opened decisively. The bead curtain was swept aside with the tip of a dagger. She scowled as she saw him. The dagger in her hand changed directions. Her eyes, however, remained wary. “Captain Atwood, what an unexpected pleasure.”

He rose and neatly folded his paper. “Likewise, Miss Blade. Are you already quite done at the modiste’s?”

“Hardly. I have been sent back to fetch the pair of slippers I plan to wear with the ball gown.” She crossed the parlor into her bedroom and re-emerged half a minute later with a cloth bag that presumably contained the intended footgear. “And dare I take it you have been guarding my flat while I’m out?”

There was no mistaking the sarcasm in her tone.

“No, indeed not. I have been searching through your belongings.”

“There is nothing here that isn’t rightfully mine.”

Her lips slanted, as if she had belatedly understood the implication of her own words. He was here. Was he also rightfully hers?

“You will have no disputes from me on that account,” he said.

Her gaze swept over him. “What exactly are you looking for?”

A place for me, but I do not see one here.

He brushed aside the answer that had arisen from nowhere. “I thought you had disavowed any further dealings with the Tang Dynasty jade tablets.”

Her expression hardened. “You of all people should know, Captain, that what people say often has little bearing on what they do.”

He had not looked after her, as he had promised, but in his heart there had never been anyone else.

“Does the Centipede know why you are here?” he asked.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“He is a wanted man in England—he once left his sigil on Her Majesty’s nightstand, with the queen sleeping in the same room. Such a man does not advertise his presence simply in
the hope of intimidating an adversary. He knew that agents of the crown would be alerted, that they will hunt down any clues as to his whereabouts or his intentions.”

“And?”

“And that could lead them to you.”

If the enmity between the Centipede and Miss Blade was indeed as profound as Leighton suspected, then he must consider the possibility that the Centipede’s action had been undertaken with vengeance in mind.

“How?”

“I am not sure yet. But if the Centipede has any inkling as to your intentions . . . I would not leave anything lying about that might cast suspicion on you in the eyes of the authorities. Such as, for example, a copy of a jade tablet.”

To her credit she did not glance toward the pot of orchids. “As I have said before, everything here is mine.”

“All the same, remove everything that would put the lie to your story of being a simple expatriate,” he said. He had already issued his warning; at the moment there was little else he could do. “I will see myself out.”

She had been on the other side of the room, standing before the door to her bedroom. All at once she was next to him, her dagger against his neck. “So you were the drunk in the fog.”

She wore a narrow-brimmed hat of grey felt trimmed with a dark blue ribbon. Beneath the hat, her eyes were as cold as her blade. His gaze lowered to her lips, wine-red lips that he had wished to kiss from the very beginning.

The pressure on the dagger increased, almost to the point of brutality. “Have you been following me about?”

He looked back into her eyes. Somehow, having her dagger at his throat made it possible to reconcile memories of the girl from Chinese Turkestan with the woman before him. They had been two related but separate entities; now they were one. “I lack the necessary skills for such a pursuit,” he said.

She considered his answer. “Of course, I should have realized sooner: You know where the other jade tablet is.”

He issued neither denial nor confirmation.

“If I tell you I will leave England as soon as I have it, will you tell me where it is? You do want me gone, don’t you?”

His gaze dropped to her lips again—the only thing worse than making love to her for only one night was making love to her for only two nights and day. He should want her gone, but he had no idea anymore how to want the things he should. “You won’t leave England, not while the Centipede roams free.”

The dagger wedged even harder against his jugular. “I can force the answer from you.”

Her hand remained as steady as ever. But the pulse at the base of her throat was quick and irregular—their prolonged proximity affected her, too. “You could,” he told her, “but you won’t. You are not the kind to hurt anyone, unless absolutely necessary.”