My Beautiful Enemy (33 page)

For a long second, she was capable of neither thought nor movement. Then her hand was on his shoulder, her other hand curved around his cheek. But he stopped her when she would have kissed him.

“Let’s wait a day,” he said, his eyes again that impossible clarity she remembered so well. “I am still engaged. And I would like to come to you only when I am a free man.”

She smoothed his brow, her hand shaking only a little. Sometimes hopeless hopes did come true. He had returned to her, just as she had dreamed in her bleakest hours. “Yes, I can wait.”

What was a few more hours after all these years?

He took her hand in his and kissed her on her forehead. “I will look after you, for as long as we both live. And there will never be anyone else but you.”

L
eighton woke up early, went down to the library, and pulled a half dozen dictionaries and treatises of the Pali language from the shelves. The presence of the jade tablet in his life had instilled in him a deep interest in the history and the propagation of the teachings of the Buddha. And during his years in India, he had learned both Sanskrit and Pali to better educate himself on the subject.

With the dictionaries open before him, he kept trying to pronounce the sequence of sounds that he’d recorded the night before in a more fluid manner, all the while wondering whether the language the Chinese characters were approximating was actually Sanskrit or Parsi.

A knock came on the door. Ponds, his butler, entered with a cup of tea and the early post. Leighton looked through the letters absently, until his attention was caught by one from Professor Wade of Cambridge University. He had sent the rubbings he had made of the spirit plaques to the sinologist for translation. The professor had returned the rubbings, along with his detailed annotations.

The first three plaques each had a heading—
Compassionate Mother
,
Beneficent Master
,
Noble Friend
—followed by a name. The fourth plaque, the one he had found in her trunk, read only,
The Nameless Beloved
.

He traced his fingers over the beautiful pictograms that he could not yet read but whose shapes would now forever be imprinted on his mind.
The Nameless Beloved.

It was only as an afterthought that he went on to the next sheet, the annotation for the fifth spirit plaque, the one he couldn’t quite guess whom for.

Immediately he reeled.
Cherished Daughter
, it read.

Cherished Daughter Bai Yuan-jiang. Bai
, wrote Professor Wade,
is the family name. Yuan-jiang together means “far territory,” most likely referencing Sinkiang, also known as Chinese Turkestan.

The words shook before his eyes. Or were those his hands shaking?

A child. He’d had a child. A child he had never seen and would never meet.

He was the father of a girl who had drawn her last breath before he’d even learned of her existence.

T
he mother of his child, still in her nightgown, was already up, a cup of hot cocoa in her hand. She smiled at him. “You sounded like a herd of water buffalo coming down the passage.”

Her smile disappeared the moment she perceived his distress. “What’s the matter?” she asked as he shut the door.

He almost couldn’t speak for his grief—and hers. How long had she carried this loss? How many years had she mourned, with no one to share her sorrow? “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me that we had a child?”

The cup of hot cocoa clattered on its saucer. Slowly she set it aside, her expression a careful blankness. “How did you know?”

“The words on your spirit plaques. I had them translated. The translations came this morning.”

She was silent for several seconds. Then she shrugged. “What would have been the point of saying anything? She is no more.”

He gripped the door handle behind him. “I know she is no more. But she was my child and I want to know everything about her.”

Her face seemed to have turned to stone. “She lived for all of two weeks. There is hardly anything to tell.”

Two weeks. So little time. His throat constricted. “Was she happy?”

A tear rolled down her exquisite face, shattering her stoic façade. “Yes, she was a happy baby. Very beautiful.” Her voice caught and she swallowed. “She nursed well and slept well and loved the sound of the stone mill in the courtyard, grinding fresh flour for Chinese New Year.”

A premonition chilled him. She had described a healthy, vigorous child. One who’d had no reason to perish at two weeks of age. “How did she die?”

The mother of his child closed her hand into a fist. Her eyes turned hard. “Why? Why do you need to know? Can you bring her back?”

He crossed the room and set his hands on her arms, his premonition becoming darker with each passing second. “Please, tell me. I need to know.”

“Very well, then,” she said calmly. Too calmly. “The Centipede killed her.”

The words pierced him like arrows. “No,” he said numbly. “
No
.”

He could not even comprehend it, his beautiful daughter, murdered in cold blood.

She hit him, hard. Not the kind of punches that would send a man flying backward with cracked ribs, but those of a woman who had too long borne her grief all alone. “She could
have been safe in India. But you left me. You left me and he found me. And I could not defend her. I trained my entire life and I could never save anyone I loved.”

Her face was wet and splotchy. His own tears fell, stinging his eyes as they left. He stood rooted in place and let her hit him again and again, wishing only that she would unleash the sort of violence that did true damage. Broken bones and punctured organs, that was what he wanted—the pain of the body always, always preferable to the despair of the soul.

All at once, without even thinking about it, he kissed her. She was stunned into stillness. Then she was kissing him back, with fury and something that was almost brutality.

Then, just as suddenly, the kiss was no longer fueled with anger, but with longing, the kind that had driven him to scale the Himalayas repeatedly, in the hope of finding her again. So much had happened—too much—but he had never, not for a moment, stopped loving her.

And he never would.

He kissed her face and her throat. Lifting off her nightgown, he kissed her shoulder and her collarbone. She cupped his face and gazed upon him, tears still in her eyes, but amazement and tenderness, too.

“
When you lower me into my grave
,” he told her, again borrowing those words from the great Rumi, “
bid me not farewell, for beyond the grave lies paradise. And there is no end while the moon sets and the sun yet rises.
”

And as she had all those ago, she asked, “Do you believe in that?”

“I do,” he said, smoothing his finger over her brows. “I believe enough for the two of us.”

They made love with infinite care, because they were fragile. But they also made love with infinite ferocity, because they were indomitable.

And together they were stronger yet.

I
t snowed on the day she was born—we were in the last month of the Chinese calendar, so by the western calendar it was probably sometime in January,” said Catherine. She lay with her head on Leighton’s shoulder, their fingers laced. “I was really afraid of childbirth; both my mother and my amah had died too early to tell me anything about it. But I had a nice woman, Auntie Lu, and she had this round, generous face. She took one look at me and said I would be just fine, that I was young and strong and built for easy deliveries.

“And she was right. My pain started sometime in the middle of the night, and by dawn she was already born. Auntie Lu had a bowl of noodles ready for me, and I was so hungry, but I couldn’t bear to hand the baby to her long enough to eat—Yuan-jiang was so, so beautiful. And I thought, maybe, if I did everything right by her, your ghost would not be so angry with me in the afterworld.”

He caressed her arm. “I could never be angry with you. Not for long, in any case.”

“And I thought, when she was older, I would take her to Chinese Turkestan, so she could see where we had met—and been happy.”

“And maybe if you had gone,” he said wistfully, “you would have seen the letters I left behind for you. And perhaps even some very old chocolate and Darjeeling tea.”

She turned toward him. “That reminds me. Thank you for the refuge in London—and the tea and chocolate you left.”

He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear. “I like doing things for you. It makes me happy.”

“I will put my feet up and make you do everything for me then.”

“Ah, but then I might come to bed exhausted, without the strength to make love to you.”

She smiled. “Somehow I don’t think so.”

He pulled her closer, his expression turning serious. “Would you like to have more children someday?”

She had never thought of it before—she had believed him dead and she had never met another man who inspired any romantic yearning in her. “Another child can never replace Yuan-jiang.”

He laced their fingers together. “I know. All the same, would you like to have more children?”

She looked upon the face of the man who had waited long years for her, who had forgiven her long before she forgave herself. “With you, yes.”

Then she made love to him again, because there was no better way to tell him how much she had missed him and how much she loved him still.

H
e was helping her dress, afterward, when he stopped in mid-motion.

“What is it?” she asked. “Did you hear something?”

“No, I was having the greatest trouble earlier, trying to find a way to make sense of the Chinese characters on the jade tablet. But now suddenly it occurred to me that a certain series of sounds in there could mean ‘tranquil summer’ in Pali.”

“Tranquil summer,” she echoed, rather doubtfully. Then the realization dawned. She grabbed his arm in excitement. “Yes! There is a Chinese province the name of which could be translated as ‘tranquil summer.’ And it was part of the Tang Dynasty’s territory.”

He threw on his waistcoat and jacket. “Then we are on the right track after all.”

She stepped hurriedly into her shoes, eager to make more progress deciphering the meaning of the characters. “And it’s
a small province, relatively speaking. Smaller than Scotland, I think.”

“Scotland is still too big if you are looking for a single treasure cave. We had better narrow the area down much further.”

She shook her head in amazement. “Have I told you? Last night was the first time I considered that perhaps there is a treasure to be had after all.”

“Me, too. First time since I turned twelve, at least.”

They grinned at each other.

“I’ll leave first,” he said. “Come join me in the library in a few minutes.”

She watched him leave, glad he was only going downstairs. After making sure that her hair was properly coiffed and all the buttons and hooks on her clothes in place, she walked out herself. As she did so, she saw Mrs. Chase, at the other end of the corridor, peering out from her door.

Had she seen Leighton leaving earlier?

Catherine decided she didn’t care about Mrs. Chase’s suspicions. She nodded coolly and started for the stairs. On the bottom step, she stopped to orient herself. The day before she had been to the library with Leighton, but had done so walking from the direction of the study, which they had accessed via a secret tunnel. From where she stood, she wasn’t exactly sure where the library was.

To her left was the front door. A hansom cab was parked outside. Had Mrs. Reynolds arrived, or Marland Atwood, perhaps?

“Miss Blade.”

The voice belonged to Miss Chase. Catherine felt a stirring of guilt: It was far from the best form to make love to a man who was still another woman’s fiancé.

She turned. “Good morning, Miss Chase.”

She had expected to detect a measure of unhappiness beneath Miss Chase’s sugar-and-spice demeanor: The girl was clever;
she had to understand that her fiancé was slipping out of her grasp. But she could sense no particular dejection in Miss Chase’s features. In fact, Miss Chase’s eyes glittered.

“Would you mind coming here for a moment?” said Miss Chase.

Her voice gave Catherine the impression of being strenuously modulated, just on the edge of an excitement too strong to control.

What was going on? But Catherine had no reasonable cause to refuse her request. “Of course.”

Miss Chase indicated a set of double doors. Catherine walked through to a drawing room, its walls and curtains shades of light, minty green that were quite refreshing to the eyes.

There was a dark-haired man in the room, standing before a large seascape, his back to her—the guest who had arrived in the hansom cab?

But even before he turned around, alarm already raced along Catherine’s nerve endings. Then he did, and she looked into the face of her mortal enemy.